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Gen AI in the Enterprise with Amir Elion

Another great episode this time featuring the CEO of Think Big Leaders and innovation enthusiast, Amir Elion. Amir has worked with clients of all sizes, from all industries, on many different sides of business. His bread and butter is helping teams hone strategy, transform processes, and expand perspectives to find success in the ever-changing technological landscape.

Now, at Think Big Leaders, Amir is using his expertise to help companies successfully adopt and innovate with Generatvie AI. He works with clients on how to leverage AI for their specific user base and product portfolios. As a part of Think Big Leaders, he has also developed more general workshops and courses that can be applied to a wide range of different business types and situations.

Amir’s perspective on Gen AI is exciting, and his breadth of experience provides valuable insight. What are you doing to leverage AI today?

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About Guest, Amir Elion

Amir Elion has a passion for innovation, and he implements and shares it with others whenever he can. He also helps leaders and organizations understand, think about, and enforce Generative AI solutions, tools, and strategies. Amir has led dozens of business, management, innovation, and transformation processes. He has a proven track record of leading successful project, product, and solution teams, change management, and business processes.

Amir’s specialties include Generative AI strategy, applications, and skills (ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and OpenAI on Azure, Midjourney, AWS Bedrock, and more), Digital Innovation, Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT) and Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Virtual and Augmented Reality, Product Management and Development, Learning Strategy and Technologies, Workshop facilitation, and more.

About The Generative AI In The Enterprise Series:

Welcome to Keyhole Software’s first-ever Podcast Series, Gen AI in the Enterprise. Chief Architect, Zach Gardner, talks with industry leaders, founders, tech evangelists, and GenAI specialists to find out how they utilize Gen AI in their businesses.

And we’re not talking about the surface-level stuff! We dive into how these bleeding-edge revolutionists use Gen AI to increase revenue and decrease operational costs. You’ll learn how they have woven Gen AI into the very fabric of their business to push themselves to new limits, beating out competition and exceeding expectations.

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Partial Generative AI In The Enterprise Episode Transcript

Note: this transcript section was created using generative AI tools like YouTube automated transcripts and ChatGPT. There may be typos, slight content changes, or character limits for brevity!

Zach Gardner: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the future. I’m Zach Gardner, the Chief Architect at Keyhole Software. Over the past six, seven, eight, nine, ten months, I’ve been diving into my journey on Gen AI. But I’m not doing it in private; I’m doing it out in public. I’m talking with people from all different walks of life, from all different backgrounds—some similar, some divergent from my own—to figure out where my blind spots are, what things I’m not thinking about, and where we might be going in this crazy journey that we’ve all gotten ourselves into.

Today with me is my boy Amir from Scandinavia, currently, as you can tell by the Aurora Borealis behind him. He’s the CEO of Think Big Leaders. Amir, how’s it going?

Amir Elion: It’s fine and lovely to be here and to join you on this mini journey.

Zach Gardner: Awesome. Well, for those in the audience that are curious, all the views and opinions expressed in this program are the views and opinions of the participants and don’t reflect their employers, any trade organizations they’re affiliated with, or any grocery stores they might have loyalty cards with. We’re just two people, just getting to know each other, just talking. So, could you give the audience a little bit of your background, just to kind of get to know you better? Better know your perspective? Where are some of the places that you’ve worked over your career? And then that’ll hopefully segue into the idea behind Think Big Leaders, and maybe even talk a little bit about the working backwards methodology.

Amir Elion: Yes, happy to do so. So, I would say I’ve had the pleasure of working in diverse types of organizations. I’ve worked at large international organizations such as Motorola and pharmaceuticals, and more recently, Amazon Web Services as well, which I’ll talk about in a minute. But I’ve also had the pleasure of working in smaller consulting companies or in innovation consulting in NOS. I was also director of products in a couple of startups—one around virtual and augmented reality, another in SaaS and learning technologies. So, I’ve had the chance to taste both the supplier side, the large corporate side, business development, product roles—quite an interesting journey, I would say.

Zach Gardner: Awesome. You know, Amazon is definitely on most people’s bucket list to work at least once in their lifetime. I’m curious if you could talk a little bit about some of the things that you shared with me—insights that people may not realize about the company that I might have used to order my Father’s Day present to make sure it got there on time.

Amir Elion: Yes, so I started out at Amazon leading the training team in Israel, which is my home country. But ever since I joined Amazon, I was curious about the innovation methodology that Amazon itself uses, right? So, any product or service that you see coming out of Amazon, and all the business units, go through this internal process of innovation. I was curious about it, I tried to learn about it because of my background in innovation. I also discovered this team that was helping customers understand this innovation methodology and helping them innovate for their customers using Amazon’s own methodology—building prototypes, services, and products on cloud technology, of course.

That meant I had the chance to move to Stockholm, where I am currently, and I led the innovation program for AWS, the cloud business of Amazon, in the Nordics. Working backwards is basically about thinking about the customer—not starting with your technology, your product, or your interests, but really clearing your mind and thinking about your customers. What are their needs? What are their problems? And working backwards from that. It’s meant to be a mechanism that enables innovation at scale and at the edge. To ensure that innovation leads to customer-focused products and services.

So, that is what I shared with customers. I took them through this methodology. It involves asking certain questions about the customer, then writing a fictional press release and a frequently asked questions document that envisions the kind of delight you deliver to customers—like same-day, next-day delivery if it’s the retail business, or all the AWS amazing features, and Prime Video. All kinds of features—how will customers feel if we deliver this? That keeps people on track, both in development and messaging and everything. That is Amazon’s own internal process, or mechanism as they call it. I used it to create and build amazing stuff with some Nordic customers, such as the large ones like Volvo Group and KONE, which does elevators, and many others.

Zach Gardner: Very cool. I think I actually learned about that maybe when I was in my second year out of college, but we didn’t refer to it as working backwards; we referred to it as fishing. Not the information security phishing—P-H-I-S-H—but literally like if you imagine you have a rod, you have to cast out—this is very topical because I was camping last week teaching my girls how to fish. So, you have to figure out where your target is, what these fish are going to want. You have to get into the mind of these… amphibians? No, they’re not amphibians—they’re sea creatures. But you have to figure out how to work backwards from that target to get them back to you. If you have rocks in your way or other impediments, you just have to get into—you have to become the fish in some way. It’s really interesting to see how different people have different… a lot of our ideas rhyme with each other.

Amir Elion: Yeah, and it sounds very straightforward or common sense, but I would constantly be surprised when I would talk to customers—very strong customers with great market success, with great products—but I would come to the teams and pose these challenging questions about the basic question: Who is your customer? You could have five, six, eight people in the room giving different answers. Then I’d say, how do you know what to build for them if you can’t even agree on that first basic question—or who is your fish, in your terms?

Zach Gardner: Yeah, or any fans of the movie Field of Dreams, you know, “If you build it, they will come.” If you don’t really know who you’re building it for, how are you even sure that you’re building the right thing? That then leads me into what you’re doing now. So, talk to the audience a little bit about Think Big Leaders. What are you doing in the generative AI space? What are you doing when it comes to using tools like ChatGPT and MidJourney for innovation?

Amir Elion: Yes, so roundabout when ChatGPT came out—I did AI before with customers in all kinds of constellations and contexts—but when ChatGPT came out, I was very curious about it. I love to try things myself, and then I was mostly curious about whether all my 25 years of innovation experience could serve as my innovation co-pilot or assistant. So I played around, and I discovered that it actually worked, at least with some of the methodology. I tried to make it as if these were the persons that I’m teaching the innovation methodologies, the same as I would be facilitating innovation processes in organizations. But then it would help me scale and challenge me as well.

Then I created some courses online to share what I’ve learned, right? The first course was how to use ChatGPT as your innovation co-pilot or your product innovation co-pilot. I kind of taught ChatGPT all kinds of innovation methodologies that I use, including working backwards, but also things like SCAMPER for ideation, and creative advertising, and TRIZ for technology solutions. I figured it came out pretty good.

Later, I was curious about MidJourney—I wanted to learn MidJourney. Again, I decided the best way to learn it is to try to build a course around it. I selected a topic—a specific use case around how can I do storytelling with MidJourney? I actually combined ChatGPT to help me think about the story, write that story, think about the characters, maybe even write some of the prompts for MidJourney. Then I used MidJourney to create those images that take people through those stories. Those could be stories for training, marketing, product design, visioning, and things like that.

That was my way deeper into the Gen AI tools. Now with Think Big Leaders, I’m helping customers think about that journey themselves. It starts with where they are now—what level of maturity, what kind of industry, what are their desired outcomes that they want to achieve? Is it internal productivity, building Gen AI into their products, or maybe even thinking about disruption of their market? Depending on what kind of help they need, I can either start with leadership, just help them envision a strategy, build a playbook on how to address it, obviously also thinking about all the responsible AI aspects and security and safety elements. Or in some cases, I would even be almost hands-on and build things for them with no-code tools, or maybe build content for their sales teams to use, go to market. In one case, I also even served as kind of an internal product manager for one internal efficiency booster that we built for their sales process. I kind of guided their IT development team as a product leader.

So, it really starts with what the customer needs—I adjust my level of help and try to guide them through it. The other thing that I’m doing is trying to scale this, because you know, this you can only do one-on-one with customers, and it’s very service-oriented, and that can be costly for customers to pay for my fee. So, I’m trying to create products that can scale. In that respect, I’m creating mostly courses, but also some other assets like chatbots and things like that, to help more customers think about the Gen AI journey in a way that they can take the lead, and I could just serve as a mentor, or they could take it to a level of a self-paced course.

So, that’s what I’ve been doing over the last, say, six to nine months.

Zach Gardner: Very interesting. You’ve touched on so many different ideas. I love the idea of building out your own co-pilot, especially as you build something like this from scratch. So much of what is going on in the space is new— Gen AI is something that’s only been around for maybe 20, 30 years, so maybe we’re just now getting the productization of it. But in the last six to nine months, the rate of speed in which it’s been adopted into organizations, it’s just gone at a tremendous pace. Are there things that have popped up in the last couple of months, maybe something like ChatGPT, that have just surprised you? Maybe things that have accelerated your customers’ ideas?

Amir Elion: Yes, I would say the rapid pace of change and development of new tools—new tools come out every day and can actually answer needs. Also, the pace of new plugins or features that are being added on top of these, right? The collaboration—I mean, I’ve been using Microsoft Co-Pilot, for example, on my own PC. So, it’s really been helping me increase productivity in documents, and tasks, and in work meetings. And even with Office365, or Microsoft 365, there’s constant improvement, and the experience becomes better and better. With each one, I learn more about what I can do. It’s almost like this new paradigm of working where you’re having conversations with the machine. You’re going from this traditional coding to no-code to almost conversation-code with these things. And that is something that’s almost enabling a leap in how we interact with computers.

I think many of these will just be, you know, a year from now, nobody will think about them; it’ll just be the way people do work. And then we’ll say, “How could we have worked differently?” Right? It’s almost like Excel sheets—when I grew up, we didn’t have Excel, we had all these different tools, and everything was on paper. Now, if you take away Excel from somebody, they wouldn’t know what to do.

Zach Gardner: Or like rotary phones, right?

Amir Elion: Exactly. Or dial-up internet, right? So, these things would just go so deep into the way people work.

Zach Gardner: Yeah, it’s like a natural progression from one thing to another. Well, you’ve kind of already answered this next question, but I was wondering what your typical day looks like now, and how it might differ from before when you were working in larger companies. What’s a day in the life of Amir now?

Amir Elion: Yeah, so it varies depending on what customer I’m working with. But usually, my day starts with a check-in—I kind of map out my activities for the day, which could be working on a specific project for a customer or some brainstorming sessions. I also do a lot of research and development, so part of my day might be spent researching new AI tools or developments in the market. I might also work on building or refining some of the courses I offer, trying to keep up with the rapid pace of change and make sure my material is up to date.

Sometimes, I’ll have client meetings, either virtually or in person, where we discuss their challenges and how we can use Gen AI to address them. And then, depending on the project, I might spend time hands-on with AI tools, developing prototypes, or even helping to implement solutions directly into their workflows. It’s a mix of strategic thinking, creative problem-solving, and practical application. I also make sure to carve out time for learning because things change so quickly in this field, and staying ahead of the curve is crucial.

Zach Gardner: It sounds like you’ve got a lot going on. I imagine it’s a big shift from working in a large corporate environment where you might have had more structure. Now it sounds like you’ve got a lot more variety in your day.

Amir Elion: Yes, definitely. In the corporate world, there was more structure, more routine, but now there’s a lot more variety, and I get to work on a wide range of projects. I have to be more disciplined in managing my time and making sure I’m staying on top of everything. But I also enjoy the freedom and the opportunity to work on things I’m passionate about, and to help shape the future of how companies use Gen AI. It’s exciting, and it keeps me on my toes.

Zach Gardner: That’s awesome. Well, Amir, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate your time and insights on Gen AI. I’m sure our listeners will find your experiences and perspectives valuable.

Amir Elion: Thank you, Zach. It’s been a pleasure.

Zach Gardner: And to our listeners, thanks for tuning in. Remember to keep exploring, keep innovating, and stay curious. Until next time, this is Zach Gardner signing off.


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