The Real Bottleneck Is Not The Technology

But we're going to go ahead and get our day started today. Thank you all so much for joining on July 3rd. We are very well aware that today is the observed 4th of July holiday. So we are going to have a much smaller group than usual, and we're going to go ahead and record our session, make it avAIlable at the end of our time today. Because we've got a smaller group than usual, we're going to go a little bit quicker than usual.

So we typically spend about 55 minutes together, we'll probably be done in about 35 or 40 minutes today. I'll stick on at the end, though, if anybody has questions or has any discussion points. But without further ado, we'll go ahead and get our day up and running and get started. And agAIn, thank you all for joining. If you're here, we love to see those cameras on.

Go ahead and use the chat. There's a few opportunities for you to participate in the chat today. And for those of you that are watching this on a recording, depending on when you watch it, I hope you had a happy 4th of July weekend. So if you've not been to Beyond Limitss before, this is your first time watching it, I'll give a quick preview of exactly what we're doing here. What we do with Beyond Limitss is this is a monthly session.

We do this on the first Friday of every month, even if that first Friday happens to fall on July 3rd. But it is designed for individuals and leaders who are trying to think differently about the work that they're doing on a day in and day out basis. So we're going to bring a new topic each and every time. We're going to try to keep it focused to a relevant subject, something that we know that you as leaders are experiencing day in and day out on a regular basis. We try to change and bring a different perspective to the table.

So we want to bring a point of view grounded in research, in our experience, in real-world application, and then we open that discussion for you. So we're going to use the chat a lot. My favorite part about these sessions is not what I pre-plan and not what I write on the slides, but it's the conversation and the discussion points that come from you. So hopefully this chat is open, and you've got an opportunity to provide some of your thoughts and feedback and feelings in there. Super high level about The Pacific Institute, we've got a belief that you and your team and your organization, you're absolutely perfectly designed for the results that you're getting right now.

You're following the recipe for the results that you're getting flawlessly. And if you're very, very happy with the results that you have and you're not looking to make any changes, go have a good weekend. This is not the right session for you. If you're like most of us and you're looking for positive changes, things that are going to be in the category of more, then you're probably in the right spot. And more means something different to everybody that we talk to.

More can mean more growth for yourself, for your team, for your organization. It can mean more alignment, having more people feel like they're, quote, "rowing in the same direction." This can be more energy. I usually say rAIse your hand if you would like to have more energy, but most people have so little energy they can't get the darn hand up. So innovation, new ideas. We all know that when we're thinking at our very, very best, we can be brilliant, and then there's other times when maybe we're not so sharp, and we want to try to create that.

And then if you're here and you lead others, chances are there's some sort of a return or a number that's attached to your name. Every single one of these involves an action, but every single one of them starts with the way that you think. And our belief here is that all action, all human behavior, all of it starts with the conversation that takes place between your right ear and your left. So the core of what we believe at The Pacific Institute goes back 55 years to what our founder, Lou Tice, sAId when he sAId, "All meaningful and lasting change starts on the inside, and then it works its way out." Meaning that before anybody anywhere did anything big and grandiose, they had that thought run through their head first, and that guided their actions that led them to reaching their potential and whatever level of success they experienced. A couple of guiding principles that go on in the background, kind of the spine or backbone of everything that we do, is we want to help people think differently.

We want to shift the mental models that derive all of the decisions and actions and behaviors that make up our day-to-day lives. With that, we're going to try to produce different behaviors naturally, automatically. So not just doing something different, but becoming the person that does that something differently automatically, the person who has those great habits. And we're doing that all by default. I'm sorry, by design, not by default.

Because many of us that have developed into whoever and whatever we are today have done so a lot by accident, and our goal is to try to be able to do that by intent. So the first thing we do with intent is something we always do. We've got a small group, so I hope I can get everybody to participate, but this is part of the session called Tell Me Something Good. And it's just as simple as it sounds. All I need you to do is write something in the chat that is going on

good. It can be anything at all. I'm going to go first. When I drove to my office this morning, there was practically no traffic because everybody's observing a holiday. I got here in 10 minutes less than usual, and I took that 10 minutes to sit outside on my patio and do nothing.

Who else has got something good? You can shout it out or you can put it in the chat, but let's turn on our awareness to anything personally or professionally that is good in your lives. I see folks typing away. I'm seeing who's going to come in first here. I sAId this yesterday, a lot of folks bringing in vacations, a lot of summer plans that were coming up.

I personally just came back from a trip with my family to the Caribbean. It was absolutely outstanding. Our other something good is my entire family that looks very much like me came home without anybody getting sunburned. Put that as our something great, I think. Ah, beautiful weather, sunny walk outside with a friend.

Mexico's going to win. I like all these World Cup ones. We're going to see a lot of those coming through. I live near the beach in San Diego, and there's a giant watch party just a couple of blocks away that AIrs all the games. So throughout the course of the last couple of weeks, I just get to hear the sounds of people erupting from a few blocks away, and there is an awful lot of something goods.

But World Cup is a really interesting thing for us to think about because, in a sport like soccer, or we should probably call it football, there is a lot of emotional swings that take place within our heads, and we all have a lot of self-talk. And World Cup is a really good example of what we mean when we talk about self-talk. There's this conversation that's going on in our head, and much like fans at World Cup events, that conversation's a little bit biased, isn't it? And we tend to believe everything that that voice says inside of our heads. And much like once we're all wearing the same colors and the same uniform, anything that is sAId agAInst those colors and uniforms suddenly seems like it's a problem.

And if somebody in the wrong colors were to say something negative, we would certAInly tell them to sit down and shut up, wouldn't we? So the goals of what we have and things that we work on here at The Pacific Institute are to try to be able to control that conversation the same way a good crowd can control the emotions of the audience. So we cover a lot of those types of topics. Those are some of the high-level things that we discuss, and those things certAInly show up a little bit more when we talk about things like World Cup soccer, and hopefully everybody's enjoying all the games that are taking place and so forth. Today's topic is not, unfortunately, going to be about football, but it is going to be about something that is on everybody's mind in a lot of ways, and that's a study that Microsoft just did.

They surveyed 20,000 users of AI across the globe. So not just the US, but across the planet, 20,000 of them. And what they were looking for is what some of the work trends were with regards to AI. And I have a hunch that just about everybody here live and everybody watching the recording has AI showing up in their day-to-day life. So we're going to focus in on why the AI conversation matters and what's missing from that discussion, and the layer that most organizations are accidentally skipping.

We're going to see where this shows up right now, so we can see if maybe you can recognize a pattern that's showing up with your organization or your team. And then we're going to give three super simple, practical tools that are going to be ways for you to put a belief level intervention that actually moves the needle when it comes to making changes within your organization. Here's what this session is not, just in case anybody's about to log out. We're not going to be talking about prompt engineering. I don't have any tips for how to get ChatGPT to stop giving you an em dash all the time, even though you ask it not to.

And we're not going to give productivity hacks. I'm not going to show you that there's some new AI agent that can help you brush your teeth and do everything for you. And we're not going to discuss whether ChatGPT is better than Claude or Gemini and which one you like and don't, because we all have our favorites, and there's about a million and a half other sessions for those. And if you'd like to find any of them, all you have to do is open social media, count to five, and you'll have at least 10 options in front of you. So that's not what we're talking about today.

What we're talking about is the operating engine that's behind the use of those tools. You, the human being with the beating heart and the blood flowing through your veins. But what we're talking about is the beliefs and the culture and the human dynamics

that actually determine whether or not those tools are actually going to be used, no matter how strong, how powerful, how useful those tools actually are. So here's the headline. This came out May 5th. It was a Cinco de Mayo release on this one, so my data is just about two months old here. And the headline was this.

They surveyed 20,000 human beings across the planet, 10 markets globally, spanning all different industries. So this wasn't just white collar, this wasn't just blue collar, this just wasn't the C-suite. This was 20,000 human beings from across the planet. Let's hear some guesses, or let's hear some answers. A couple of things popping in the chat here.

Where in your organization-- If you're watching this on recording, take a few seconds to jot it down. Where in your organization is AI working well? Or if not within your organization, where within your team? Or if you're a sole proprietor, where is it working for you? But where is it also stalling?

Let me give everybody a chance to answer that one. I'll play a bit of music for just a moment, and I'll keep an eye on the chat for any of those answers that come in. Where in your team organization is AI working well? Where is it stalling? All right, a couple of good ones coming in here.

Yeah, definitely speeds up the emAIl communication. Seeing a lot of folks adopting it with the use of their emAIls. A lot of answers coming in where folks are saying it's improving their efficiency. I'll be completely candid, the slides that you're looking at were very much AIded with AI in building them. Those of you that have been coming to Beyond Limitss for the last two years have seen the progression of AI in our slides.

A lot of folks using it as an AId. Jeff's got a good answer, though. It stalls when I use old habits to accomplish tasks that can be used faster solving AI. You accidentally go down the path of what you worked yesterday. A lot of folks share a little bit of fear, trepidation around knowing where it's actually going to be applied.

We do a lot of work with financial organizations, and a lot of them are fearful because they don't know exactly what the compliance rules are, whether or not they're breaking any rules around using AI. A lot of different areas of stall. Here's what their data found. So after 20,000 people were surveyed, not a small sample set, 10 different markets, also not a small sample set, they found the following. The biggest barrier isn't actually the technology itself or the employees or the workers themselves.

It's actually the culture behind it. It's the culture behind the organization where they work, supporting the use of that new technology. So they're actually starting to call it the Transformation Paradox, is that they're trying to make these changes. But when you stop and let it sit in for a second, this was Microsoft, one of the largest technology organizations in the world. They have every motivation, every incentive in the world to say the answer is more technology.

Use our stuff. Copilot is great. That's probably what they were hoping was going to happen when they started this report. They were hoping that people would say that the tools were what they needed. But what they found was 20,000 actual human beings determined that it wasn't technology.

Technology wasn't the problem. It wasn't the investment being made, it wasn't the trAIning being delivered. The productivity gAIns just simply weren't landing because the humans weren't ready to apply it. This is like giving a bicycle to a person that doesn't know how to ride a bike and then wondering why they didn't ride it. So when AI rolls out in your organization or your team, what's the first reaction that you're seeing in the folks around

you? When you first roll out a new tool or technology that's AI based, what's been the first reaction? How are folks responding to that initially? Those that are watching the recording, take a moment to jot that down, or here you can put that in the chat. Great answer from Lolly right away.

Resistance to learning a new way to work. It's an extremely honest answer. If you've had a career being successful doing work in a certAIn way, even though there's a new tool that shows up that is proven to be faster and more efficient, you've got a lot of ingrAIned habits doing it the way you did yesterday and the day before. And as strong as that new tool might be, your brAIn still is correct because I did it yesterday differently and it worked. If you've been to these sessions before, you've probably heard me say that the chAInsaw was a market improvement over the axe, but the chAInsaw was out for about 30 years before it evolved the logging industry.

It takes a long time for people to adopt new tools if they don't adopt a new belief structure behind it. Jeff puts another good answer in there as well, is sometimes folks have trepidation about, am I using the right tool? I think this is a task that I should be using AI for, but a couple different varieties. Am I using the right tool? Am I using the tool correctly?

There's a lot of different varieties of that question that come in that create the apprehension that says, "I guess I'll just do it the way I did it yesterday." And if you've been successful up to this point, your brAIn's going to feel very safe with that message that says, "Let's do it the same way as yesterday." But there's a bit of data that's going on in the background here, so let's pay attention to that. Right now, what's going on in the world, polled by Gallup here in 2026, global employee engagement is 20%, one in five. It means you look around in the average meeting that you're in with your employees and your coworkers, four out of five of them are not engaged in the work that they're doing. If you're the engaged one, that means you're the only one, right? We're down nine points on manager engagement, which is a pretty marked decline since 2022.

So we're going in the wrong direction as far as managers being engaged in the work that they're doing. 83% of the workforce is reporting burnout in their day-to-day work. 83%. It means only 17% of us get to the end of the day and are not completely exhausted, and 43% of the global workforce is worried that automation is going to replace them within just the next two years. It's hard to be engaged in your job when you're fearful that four out of 10 of you are worried that you're not going to have a job within the next couple of years, and when you're burnt out at the end of the day, and when your leadership is disengaged with you more than they've ever been disengaged before. So the tools got better month over month, year over year. At this point, it's day after day.

The tools keep getting better and smarter, but the humans keep getting more stuck. So there's a real question that we have to think about, because most of the AI conversations, I already teased this before, are the same. You need better prompts. If you just have better prompts, you'll get the better outputs, right? You just need better platforms.

Just upgrade to the pAId version of whatever AI tool you're using. Get more tokens, better integrations. Just figure out how to get an AI agent integrated into the work that you do, right? But Microsoft just told us something completely different. They sAId the bottleneck isn't the tools, it's the people behind the tools.

So the investment in the tools and the trAIning and the integration is running into a wall. So what do you think? Let's hear some feedback from the folks that are here.

This is a pondering one if you're watching the recording, but what do you think is actually underneath the resistance that you're seeing? If there was no resistance, all the organizations out there would be using AI the way the ones that are the most at the cutting edge are using it. 80%, 90% of their days are spent using AI tools, whereas a couple of years ago, 80% to 90% were spent in emAIl and Slack messages. So what do you think is actually causing the resistance or the stall that's underneath? First answer came in right away. Fear of not being successful or not being productive.

Fear of not understanding. Yeah. Great answer. Ah, yeah. Getting bogged down in the actual detAIls.

Getting so caught up on the detAIl of the next step. Ah, very good point, Jeff. It does go back to that. The bot innovations. Bell curve that we talked about a couple of months back.

So many tools. Yeah, it's absolutely in abundance right now, but trying to figure out what the right thing is, and the one that nobody's mentioned, so I'll point it out, which is, did anybody here the first time they rode a bike, rode it flawlessly and didn't fall? Me neither. And we seem to think that with AI, that we're just going to be able to hop right on and suddenly use AI to the equivalent of Lance Armstrong riding a bicycle. And we forget the fact that there's a learning curve, and that the first time we used the internet, and were trying to surf the internet, we didn't know what were doing then either, and we had to figure it out.

And now we're experts that use it on a day-to-day basis and laugh at people that say, "Well, what are you looking up?" That's not the right question to ask. But we have to give ourselves a little bit of grace when it comes to the use of AI as well, because it's a new tool. Remember the first time you tried to use your iPhone? First time you used a touch screen, those of you that went from flip phone to iPhone? It took a learning curve.

We weren't good at it yet. So we just have to keep in the back of our mind that this is a tool that we're going to need to get some practice with, and like riding a bike or driving a car or using our cell phone, AI is going to fall in that same category. We're going to have to get some practice. But there's some big beliefs that we really want to focus on that are going on in the background, and here's a couple of the common ones. I bet you can come up with some on your own.

But here's a little bit of what's going on in the background, what's underneath the surface, if you will. The root cause behind what's causing some of the lack of AI adoption, if you will. The first one is a value belief. It's a belief on if my value is tied to what I produce and a machine can do it, what good am I? Give you an example.

We work with a lot of financial advisors, and part of those financial advisors' job has been deep research and planning and building complicated plans that work within each person's platform, which takes a lot of knowledge, a lot of information, a lot of organizing. Sounds an awful lot like I'm describing an AI tool, doesn't it? So they have a lot of fear that says, "If this machine can do what I can do, then what good am I?" So there's a bit of a value belief. And when that belief becomes true, suddenly AI becomes the enemy instead of what could be an ally. There's the exposure belief that sounds like this: If I admit that I don't know how to use this, then I'm going to be exposed as dumb.

If I just tell everybody I'm using AI all the time, maybe I put a couple of fake em dashes in my emAIl so they think I do it, then I'm not exposed as not being the person who knows how to use AI. So there's a bit of a fear in not knowing how to do it. There's a little bit of a fear in saying, "I am late to the game, and now I don't know what everybody knows."

I'll help you put that one to fear. Nobody here knows how to use their phone as well as their children does, but it doesn't stop us from using our phone every day. We'll get good at it, but just not as good as our kids will. Or how about the replacement belief? The one that's going on between our ears that sounds like this.

It says, "If I lean into this, I'm going to be trAIning my own replacement." And folks have actually seen and heard about stories where that actually happens, where analysts are out there trAIning the machines to do the job that they'll do. So there's a lot of belief that's guiding these folks' actions. But these aren't trAIning problems. Me telling you how to use the AI, convincing you that it's the right tool, giving you a demonstration, and putting it in your hands doesn't do anything more than me putting dental floss in your hands. Only works if you use it.

So these are belief issues. Like anything else, they're just tools that require a fundamental different type of intervention, a different way of thinking, so that we can have a different way of behaving. So here's a question that actually changes the conversation, because the tactical fixes, they're real. Doing more trAIning will help. Getting people certified is going to help.

Creating deep and robust prompt libraries is a smart thing to do. Having AI champions in your organization, really, really smart. But you got to start with a simple question first, which is, what belief do these humans have about themselves that's making them feel unsafe or uncertAIn so that they're fully adopting these tools? What belief is taking place in the background about their efficacy in themselves and their ability to cause changes that's causing them to feel uncertAIn or unsafe, and therefore they don't want to fully adopt the tools? Because until you address that belief layer, you're just handing dental floss to a person over and over and over who has no belief that it's going to make a difference for them.

So here's where we end up finding the friction. When you think about your own team's adoption, your own organization's, maybe it's just your own adoption, what belief do you have that's sitting underneath the friction? Take a moment to just think about this one for yourself. This is one you don't have to put anything in the chat if you don't want to. But do you think it's one of these three beliefs that's underneath the surface, or do you think maybe it's something different?

Everybody, just a moment to ponder there. Do you have an example you can think of? Is there a person, a team within an organization, current or past, a particular moment when something was rolled out? And what was the real story underneath their surface behavior? Was it a value belief where you were worried about if I'm tied to my production, is a machine going to replace me?

Was it the exposure belief? If I admit to not knowing how to do this, I'm going to look like a dumb-dumb. Or is it the replacement belief? I can't, because if I do, I'm going to trAIn a machine to do my job for me. Good answers went in the chat there a bit ago.

Fear of the unknown, fear of making a mistake without being criticized, which is another way of saying psychological safety. Holly puts a very honest answer, is fear that this is going to require more effort than I'm willing to put out. The twilighting belief, which is not up there, which is I'm going to be retiring in the next five years. I don't need to make these changes. I've already reached a point in my career I don't need to make changes.

I'll let the millennials and Gen Z learn this stuff. All adoption beliefs that get in the way, all things that have nothing to do with the technology or the trAIning. The only technology that they have to do with is what we call mental technology, what's going on between your ears. So we talked about the problem for long enough. We're halfway through our time together.

Let's talk about some solutions. Here's a few tips that we have. AgAIn, these are not AI tips.

This is not something where I'm going to tell you to go use Claude and prompt this engineer and follow this four-step process. But here are three tips that we are going to recommend for you, and what these are designed to do is just things that can help you work every day with the design towards results, things that are really salient for what is going on right now in your world. And really, we want to design some tips that are for you, for leaders of individuals. So here's what we want to work with. Tip number one, address the belief layer before the skill layer, which means address what's going on in people's heads before they're empowered with the tools.

So behavior always follows belief. Always. So no amount of skill trAIning is going to override a belief that made the skill feel threatening. If I go back to my chAInsaws, no matter of trAIning on how to use the chAInsaw is going to change the belief that I swing this ax better than anybody in the world. Until that belief changes, the tool will continue to be ignored in favor of the belief.

You can trAIn the whole team and still get stalled adoption, right? If the belief layer isn't touched, the investment is going to underperform. So empowering everybody in the organization with the tool doesn't work, as well as empowering everybody with the belief that this is the tool that will make a difference. We have to name the belief first. We have to understand what is surfacing, what is the hidden commitment to doing things the way we used to What is the commitment that we're so locked into doing things the way that we did yesterday that says we're unwilling to try doing something new tomorrow?

So the question to ask yourself or your team is, what would have to be true about an AI tool for you to see it as something that you can use for your benefit instead of a threat? What would need to be true for you to say, "I see this as a tool, not as a threat to my wellbeing, to my employment, to my future"? So start at the belief layer before the skill layer, and you're going to see a lot more adoption of the skill when they first adopt the belief. Second, we talk about this one a lot. Reframe the things that you have to do into things that you get to or choose to or want to.

A little bit of science. Science has proven that when we have to do an activity, like if I tell you, "Jeff, you have to do the dishes today," or I say, "Manu, you have to take out the trash," when you do those actions, it'll take you as much as nine to 10 times the amount of energy to do that same action than if you'd taken the decision upon yourself and sAId, "I choose to" or, "I want to," or, "I get to." Meaning when we're forced to do things or told that we are doing things agAInst our own will, it takes more energy. And when we do things that we want to, it takes less. And I don't know about you, but I am way better when I have more energy. So a forced mindset of, "I have to learn this AI tool, or I'm going to fall behind.

If I don't learn it, we're going to go out of business," that's going to take a lot of energy to learn the tool. Now, side by side with that same activity is learning to use the tool. But if you change that mindset from, "I have to learn this or bad things will happen" to, "I get to learn this so I can focus on the work that matters. I choose to learn this so that I can develop my organization. I want to learn this because it's going to make me more profitable and more effective and more efficient." When the belief changes, that exact same action of learning how to use an AI tool can take as much as nine to 10 times less energy, meaning your bandwidth for learning it and using it is going to be much better.

Because if you're at anything at all like me, when you're low on energy, your ability to learn isn't so great, isn't so good. John's vigorously shaking his head. Same thing that happens when we're hungry, AKA hangry, right? Same task, different energy. So if you know that the task is going to be needed and we're going to have to take place the following, learn AI tool, practice prompting, get experience.

We can go into that being forced, where it takes a ton of energy, or we can go into it by choice, where we have a ton of energy left at the end. To me, the answer feels pretty simple. Number three, this one's real important. Take a good look at the person that makes eye contact with you when you brush your teeth every morning in the mirror because this is a you thing. You have to champion at the leadership level, or it is going to stall.

This cannot be a do as I say, say as I do kind of thing. It doesn't work like that. I quote James Baldwin often with the quote that goes like this, "Children have never been very good at listening to their elders but have never fAIled to imitate them." And the exact same thing is true of employees. Set the right type of model. Set the right behavior, demonstrate that, and folks will follow it.

Gallup poll that came out earlier this year, the strongest predictor of whether an employee adopts AI is whether or not their direct manager is actively championing it. So if you're in charge and you're standing on the platform and you're yelling, "Use the AI," and you go back to your office and you don't, do as I say, not as I do, does not work. They're going to follow the behavior. So an indifferent manager or leader, not even one that's just agAInst it, but indifferent, ends up silencing the ability to move forward. And that skepticism around the product is going to move so much faster because fear moves like an epidemic.

Excitement moves like an oil tanker. So we need to make sure that we don't fear our way out of it. And remember, manager engagement is as low as it's ever been. It's at 22% right now, which is nine points lower than it was just two years ago. So the people that you need in your organization to be able to be demonstrating this, 80% of them are disengaged.

So if you're looking for the secret sauce in who you're going to work with, work on the beliefs at the manager level to demonstrate these behaviors, because the champion gap is the real problem. Managers can't give what they don't have, so the belief has to start with them. If they don't have the belief that these tools are going to work, they're not going to manage and lead and demonstrate in a way that works for the employees. So a pondering question for you. One to think about as we head into our long weekend.

Who in your organization has shifted from a skeptic to a champion? These people are really, really valuable. Who are the people that have really leaned in? Who are the ones that are showing engagement that you can point at and use as the ones to demonstrate moving forward? Because that's what we do at The Pacific Institute.

We make sure that we find those individuals, we demonstrate what good looks like, and we help show you how to connect the dots between positive psychology and having a positive mindset and thinking about things and actually delivering high performance. So we don't teach people how to use AI better. That's not what we do. We're not a technology company. But we do help teams and organizations and individual humans change what they believe is possible.

And when people change what they believe is possible, everything shifts about how they're able to perform. The inner work starts to happen, the identity changes, people start feeling more safe and different about how they work. And with that, they start to adopt those behaviors. They get used to doing it on a day-to-day basis. It starts to feel like an opportunity and not a threat.

And when that happens, you become somebody different, somebody that's non-resistant to AI. You become a person that leans into the things that you want to have happen, instead of fighting agAInst the things that you don't want to have happen. And you end up being able to produce results, which I normally say, rAIse your hand if you're in charge of results, but we're about to go into a weekend. We're all too tired to rAIse our hand. Everybody cares about results.

And the thing that drives results is not the strategy. It's not the AI tool. That's just a strategy. Empowering everybody in your entire organization with a ChatGPT account is just a strategy. Just like me giving everybody in America dental floss is just a strategy, but it doesn't work.

The only thing that works is when we change the behavior to follow that strategy. And in order to get people to follow that behavior and to follow that strategy, we need to change what they believe, because humans don't take actions if they don't believe they're going to work. And our definition of beliefs and behavior is what we define as culture here. When you have beliefs and behavior about what is expected of the employees in the organization, what we do, how things are supposed to be, when that expectation changes and the status quo is we adopt new technology, we lean into learning, we accept making mistakes early on with this technology. When you change the behavior, the results are just going to follow, because the belief changes first, and everything else is going to take care of itself after that.

So the bigger pattern is this. AI didn't make this problem, it just exposed it.

Technology adoption has always been something that humans were afrAId of. Some of us are old enough to remember the executives that had their assistant print their emAIls for them every day so they could read them like old school letters. This isn't new, it's just being exposed in a different way. And much like it was a problem in the past when companies didn't adopt to using the technology, whether that was the typewriter, or whether that was the computer, or whether that was the internet, or whether it's now AI, the belief gaps and the engagement deficits and the culture compliance over ownership, this stuff has always been there. AI is just putting a different colored light on top of it.

And what we're seeing from the position that we're in as consultants, and we work behind the scenes and we get to look under the hoods of organizations, is there's basically two types of organizations. There's those that are pulling ahead because they invested in advance in how people thought about AI, and they continue to invest, or they saw the writing on the wall early on, and they pivoted the way that they think and behave, and they changed their culture. And then on the other side of the fence are the companies that are falling behind. They're either not using the tools or they just believe that buying the tools was the answer, and they're just wAIting for the return. Those are the same organizations that have the same mindset of the people that buy a gym membership every single year in January, but never set foot in the gym and recognize that buying a gym membership is not the same as taking the behavior of going and exercising, any more than buying access to an AI tool is going to make you somebody that uses it on a day-to-day basis.

So as we're nearing the end of our time, I promised we'd finish up a little bit early. I'm just curious to see a few things in the chat. We've covered a few topics today, covered a little ground. I'm curious for those of you that are here today, what did you find most useful? What stood out about our discussion today?

And did you learn anything you might be able to apply right away? Because the key is not just to learn something new, because learning something new and not using it is the same as having a piece of technology and not using it. So what do you think you might pick up that you can put to use on Monday when we come back from the long weekend? Give everybody a chance to put a few answers in there. I'll put a few final thoughts up before we wrap up, and we'll be out 15 minutes early today.

Thank you, Lolly, for breaking the seal with the first answer, and it's championing the technology that I want people to use. Mark, I appreciate coming in and saying, "Changing my belief." Yeah, start that at the leadership level. Humans love to emulate what other humans do. When were kids, we called it monkey see, monkey do. Now that we're adults, we just call it modeling.

Cynthia says, "Confirm beliefs, then behaviors, then results." I love that. Change the beliefs, change the behaviors. And as we do offer that additional trAIning, remember, participating in that trAIning yourself as the leader is one of the best ways that you can model that. If the CEO sends out a memo that says, "Everybody must use AI starting immediately," and they go back to their office not using AI, it's not a very effective message. Remember that culture change very infrequently happens through a megaphone or microphone.

It happens human to human to human. So we oftentimes here say that culture change is one to one to one to infinity. All right, folks. I appreciate everybody's time. I'm going to share one more screen with you as we close out our time, and that is a reminder that we always have our ongoing opportunities to continue the development journey with us here at The Pacific Institute.

In August, next month, we are starting our next open session of Invent Your Future. You can scan the QR code that is on your screen, or you can click the link that is in the chat. That is our next open program. Yours truly will be facilitating that session starting at the end of August. It is comprised of four 2-hour sessions delivered over two weeks.

So we have a total of eight hours spent together, and what we do during those sessions is a deep dive into topics like this. We're going to go over humans, how we make decisions, how

we formulate the paths that we take forward, deep dives into beliefs, habits, attitudes, and comfort zones. And every person ends with a clear-cut, defined path and a few actions that they plan on taking moving forward. If anybody would like to learn more about that, feel free to click that link. There's a link to my calendar in there. There's an opportunity to purchase directly through that.

That is our time for today. We are going to wrap up 15 minutes early, so I'm going to wish everybody a very happy, healthy, safe 4th of July weekend. We will be back agAIn in August for our following session. If you do happen to play with fireworks, be extra, extra careful because I hope that when we all clap our hands, we do so with all of our fingers and digits next time. So everybody have a healthy, safe 4th of July weekend, and we will see you next month on August 1st for our next sessions.