Worth’s Jim McCann interviews Shelly Palmer, CEO and founder of the Palmer Group, on the impact of artificial intelligence in business. Throughout this conversation, they delve into how AI’s agency will bring massive behavioral changes caused by productivity increases, what leaders need to do to keep up with these rapid technological advancements, and how to integrate them into the workforce.
I know you’ve been writing about and talking about AI for a dozen years. In general, how should we think about its impact?
Agency, in the context of AI, refers to the ability of a system to act independently, making decisions and performing tasks without direct human intervention. For instance, Apple’s introduction of iOS 18 with their new iPhone 16 line gives Siri, a voice assistant that has always been substandard, agency. You can now tell Siri, “Take this picture, enhance it, and text it to Jim.” Siri, courtesy of artificial intelligence, can now perform these tasks across apps, demonstrating its newfound agency.
We are on the brink of a monumental shift in behavior that is not yet fully understood. The power of AI will empower those who wield it, creating two distinct classes: those who master the toolset and those who do not.
Worth recently hosted a climate event during UN Climate Week, and in sidebar conversations, we discussed how we can’t compete directly with the big tech companies. We’ve realized we must choose our partners carefully because we can’t figure this out alone. Is it essential for a media company like ours to pick a partner when adopting AI technologies?
I think we’re not going to have choices because these very large tech companies are woven into the fabric of our lives in ways that we don’t even recognize or realize. You’ve been logged into Google for 20 years. Everybody, 24 hours a day, has been logged into Google for 20 years.
And it’s learning.
It’s been learning every day. While generative AI tools don’t learn when they are stacked together, these tools learn from your behaviors. Where the language model can’t know because it’s pre-trained, GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer, and the other neural networks can and do learn. So when you stack them together, you get “Apple Intelligence,” a holistic system that accomplishes goals for you instead of individual tasks.
Your council has been, ‘If you are not figuring out how to do the parts of your job that you can with artificial intelligence, be assured that someone above you is trying to figure that out today.’
There’s no doubt about it. To keep up with the pace of technological innovation, you must innovate your workflow and processes with the same intensity.
Like I said, I’ve never seen anything come this fast. There’s a way people have been doing stuff for years. And suddenly, you can build a couple of variables into a pre-prompt, press a button, and 75% of that work is done. There’s still 25% of the work that humans do, but 75% of the execution work is done. Most leaders don’t have a way to deal with that. What I found fascinating over the last couple of years as we’ve been teaching prompt crafting and prompt engineering and workflow and process innovation; what I find so intriguing is the unwillingness, the inability of leadership to completely go into the CFO’s office and say, “You know what? We are training our workforce in a new way. We have to build a new workflow and process. And now that we’re doing this, we have to rethink how we compensate.”
Some people want to go home, put their kids to bed, and have dinner with their spouse or significant other; others want to work like animals till midnight. It never mattered in the old days because people just did what they did. But now you get someone who wants to work like an animal, and they get a 500% productivity boost from these tools. And you get somebody who wants to get home at 4:30 so they can put the kids to bed and do dinner. They’re also getting 500% productivity increases from the tools, but they have a different life goal. As a leader, you must figure out how you will manage your organization that way because of these immense differences in productivity and time management.
Take Adam Donato, a young member of our team, for example. He’s experienced a life-changing increase in productivity due to AI. He proudly states, “I’m now 80% more productive than I was just 10 weeks ago.”
I write a lot of code on the weekends. Between football games on Sunday, I will forget. Now, I write something that doesn’t work. It’s like, “Hey, help me do this.” Rather than me taking three months to finish something on the weekend, we’re talking about it before one regulation football game is over; I have commented, wholly tested, documented, and finished code. I’m probably 50 to 60 times more productive as an engineer than I would be as a weekend warrior.
50 times?
50 times.
How’s it going to change the Palmer Group?
I can give you a very personal, up-close example that you will deeply understand. I write a newsletter every day. I’ve been doing this since April 1996, six days a week.
Three years ago, I spent an hour on weekdays and three hours on Saturdays. With the advent of AI tools, I now spend somewhere between 15 and 18 minutes during the week. I’m saving about 40 minutes a day, so I get two months of productive time.
So, how has it changed the Palmer Group? When I look at all the various functions throughout the organization and everybody’s picked up 2 minutes here, 5 minutes there, 15 minutes there, you take their annual salary, and you lop off what that is. They can do more work if you adequately compensate them—and we do because I understand the leadership issue here. So, everybody here is doing more; they’re getting more money or more remuneration and compensation in the way they want it. And in some cases, I’ve got one person doing the work of three or four people. So, it has changed the fundamental economics. The Palmer Group is entirely different.
Shelly, thank you for spending time with us today.
Thank you so much.
Check our Worth’s Power and Impact podcast with Jim McCann for an extended version of this conversation.
