Rise of the Technical CxO

Uwan Mukbong:
Very good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Such a pleasure to have you here. My name is Uwan Mukbong, and as introduced, I lead the global services organization, sovereign cloud, and international expansion. Our team in this organization is responsible for helping customers get the most out of their AWS investment, through the teams who help drive that transformation on the AWS cloud. So teams of professional services, support, training, and certification.

Around the international expansion piece, the focus is around the investment decisions on where we build our next infrastructure region or data center. So that's that responsibility which I carry here today.

Around the topic we're going to be discussing on, it's really about the pace of innovation or the pace of technological advancement that's taking place today for us as an organization. And when we look at the C-suite, the level of digital fluency our C-suite leaders need to have is unprecedented, and them having to catch up and stay with the curve, or even ahead of the curve, at such a very fast pace.

We do know that through this digital fluency, through working with the teams, allowing them to be curious and open-minded, it gives them the opportunity or the teams the opportunity, to be creative, to be innovative, and help grow the business.

So within that context of that technical CIO or technical CXO in the organization, we're talking of CXOs who may not have come from a digital background and having to learn very fast and find ways to adapt to the changes that are coming to us.

So with that, I've got an esteemed group of panelists here. So I'm going to ask them to introduce themselves and talk about how they got here given that they come from, I would say, a non-digital, technical background or non-digital, non-technical background as the case may apply to you.

So, Ira?

Ira Rubenstein:
Thank you. Well first, thank you very much for having me here today. So my name is Ira Rubenstein. I'm the chief digital marketing officer for PBS. And what that means is I oversee all of our marketing, but also all broadcast operations, our digital products, our digital distribution and data and research and business development.

It's funny when you say I don't come from a digital background. I like to think I was kind of born into a digital background. I grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, and all my neighbors were control data engineers. And so I was on some of the earliest computer systems as a kid, a system called the PLATO system, for example. And so I've always had this interest and drawing to computers, and it kind of transformed into my first jobs in Hollywood and working in theatrical marketing where I was, by default, the IT guy helping people with their computers. But also I was just interested in figuring out how to bring Hollywood marketing to digital platforms.

So I was involved in the very first websites in Hollywood and I also built out some of the very first movie download services in Hollywood prior to the iPhone, putting movies on cell phones, and then later at Marvel figuring out digital comics. And it's just always been something where I have a passion for marketing and distribution, but a love for technology. And then figuring out how to take the products that I've been working with and leveraging the technology, whether in the marketing or distribution way.

Uwan Mukbong:
Thank you very much. Amanda?

Amanda McClerren:
Well, good morning, and almost afternoon. I'm Amanda McClerren and I'm the CIO of Bayer Crop Science.

This question makes me laugh a little bit, like we talked about before, Uwan, because I'm actually, I think of myself as a pretty deeply technical person. I have a PhD in biochemistry and I spent about two-thirds of my career in R&D. But it's absolutely true that I'm not an engineer, and I try not to pretend to be one.

I did a lot of roles in R&D where I helped develop technology platforms that enabled us to innovate and advance products in our pipeline differently. And over time, those platforms had a much larger digital component. So it kind of happened organically for me.

I started working a lot with digital thought leaders, creating strategies, deploying new technologies, learning about data science. And before long I ended up in IT, and I've been in this role for about a year now.

Uwan Mukbong:
Fantastic. I'm a petroleum engineer by background, and we had to use a lot of software technology to find oil and gas. And I complained so much about the way the software behaved that I was asked to go become a product manager and get involved in it. So we find our different paths into technology even though we don't start from that background itself.

KeyAnna, what about you?

KeyAnna Schmiedl:
Sure. Hello everyone. My name is KeyAnna Schmiedl and I'm the chief human experience officer at Workhuman. And so if you're going, "What does that mean?" It means that I'm the head of people or talent or HR or however you refer to that part of your organization.

And for me, in my background, I think I informally have a background in digital and technology. I am that person that anyone in my family or my husband's family calls when the tech isn't working. So I am tech support for all of our households.

But even from a young age, by procrastinating, I accidentally ended up with a TI-83 Silver Edition. And for those of you who are a little bit nerdy like me, you know that that was the edition of the calculator that had the entire periodic table on it that was clickable. And so in chemistry class, nailed it. But then also, that calculator allowed you to take notes and you could hack it to get a little bit more space. So when all of my peers were bringing in their note cards, just had my calculator full of pages and pages of notes. I was an excellent student.

And so I take this background of I love discovering tech. I love figuring out what it can do. I love hacking into it and playing around with it. I might be able to tell you how you can get Sonic to go faster on an original Sega Genesis. But from that background, it just means that I want to be able to integrate play and exploration into products as they're being developed.

And being able to do this work at Workhuman allows me to do just that, because we create HR solutions, and so my team gets to be customer zero.

Uwan Mukbong:
Fantastic. Thank you, KeyAnna.

Uwan Mukbong:
Now as we talk about the unprecedented change in technology and then that fast pace and that fast movement. And then comes generative AI here, the one thing is how do you learn and quickly grasp?

You're hearing about transformers, you're hearing about vectorization, you're hearing about RAG and so many things. How do you keep up to speed with this? How do you learn within this?

Ira, probably want to get your perspective there.

Ira Rubenstein:
Yeah, I mean, well, the pace of change in media right now is faster than any time in my entire career. But, of course, I read a lot. I read a lot of the blogs, I read a lot of postings from friends in the industry, but I also do a lot of listening. I do a lot of listening at events like this where I absolutely ask people, just did it backstage, "Did you see anything interesting? Do you see anything cool? Is there's something that I should make sure I check out?"

And then of course, through office Slack, we have special Slack channels at PBS. We have an AI Slack channel where everyone is just putting in examples of AI and then talking about how we think we might be able to apply that to PBS. But I think it all just comes down to having a mindset of being curious and having a mindset of not trying to think you might know at all, but just being able to ask those questions and being able to get out there and trying to see what is going on.

Uwan Mukbong:
That's very interesting. Last year with Gen AI getting really strong, we formed a Generative AI Innovation Center where we brought a team of about just over 300 people to really work with customers on proof of concepts and driving those to production. And I found out that, of course, my knowledge was quite low as it came to Gen AI.

And so what I did was I took the head of the Gen AI Innovation Center and set up a standing meeting with him every two weeks for 30 minutes. And that's where I would go to him and say, "This is my understanding of this concept. Prove me wrong or correct me here," and we would have that discussion for 30 minutes on a standing basis for one year until I got comfortable. So fully agree with you.

Amanda, what about you?

Amanda McClerren:
Well, I like to read a lot as well, but I think by far the most impactful thing for me is to connect and learn from the experts. So I like to meet with technology leaders across our company and also much more deeply within our organization and really kind of dig in.

I think it's probably a little bit the scientist in me, but I like to know how things work. And so I ask a lot of questions and really try and focus in on some specific use cases where I can really understand how the technology's being applied. And then, as Ira mentioned, events like this are great. Build your network, maybe find a mentor or a coach, and keep learning that way as well.

Uwan Mukbong:
Fantastic. KeyAnna, what's your perspective here?

KeyAnna Schmiedl:
Sure. So I think speaking specifically about our organization, one thing that I noticed is that we would have our senior exec team meetings, and then after the meeting we would all be asking each other, "What have you read on the latest advancement? What are you thinking about our head of product? How are you building this into the tool?"

And so I raised my hand in a meeting and said, "Could we make this a standing part of our agenda? It seems like we're all reading different things, we're talking to different people. Can we maximize the number of people we have around the table doing this and share knowledge with each other?"

And I think that's, one, a really important step. But two, selfishly, I am insatiably curious, and it says so on my LinkedIn profile. And so I want the permission to be able to ask as many questions as possible. And so coming out of those conversations and saying, "We should really start at the top down. How are we understanding this? How are we thinking about it as it impacts our company, our customers, our employees, our humans?" And then saying, "So then how do we want to involve those humans in the conversation?"

And really starting to reach out to them to understand where their understanding is. And me tapping my CTO to say, "You and I are going to start the AI Council together so that we can always have the people alongside the technology in every conversation that we're having."

Uwan Mukbong:
You're touching on something interesting, which lands to the cultural adaptation and a cultural change where you're beginning to talk about cross-functional teams needing to come together to start to think differently, to start to think about how we can get teams to innovate.

So what do you do on that aspect as it comes to that cultural change and adaptation there, where you're talking to your leader, but then how do you take that down below the permafrost layer that may block things as you move forward there?

KeyAnna Schmiedl:
Yeah, so listen. I do not pretend to believe that I know for sure exactly where our people are at at any given time. And so I insisted to our leaders that we just don't know. And so we sent out a survey. And we sent it out to everybody across the company and we asked questions as broad as, "What do you think about Gen AI?" To, "What's your level of understanding of it? As you think about your work, how do you think it might help or hinder you?"

And we got all of these responses back and we just looked at that information. And from that we took those themes and we arranged sub councils to the AI Council to then be able to tackle things like, okay, we should be thinking about ethics and governance. We should also be thinking about, well, how do we operationalize this? There are some opportunities for learning and development. But as we kind of went across all of these sub councils, what we really pulled out of that information and those data were that people had a little bit of a misunderstanding, or at least they were conflating the idea of Gen AI and the idea of just straight-up automation.

And so we were hearing things from folks that we were like, "Oh, that's just an automation solution. We could do that now and we probably should have done that a few years ago."

So it allowed us to also have a conversation about what is our level of understanding here? And that's where we started the benchmark for creating a series of, there are four courses that we have, where one is just generally how to understand AI at Workhuman. And then each course builds on itself so that, depending on where you are and your level of expertise or understanding, there's a course that makes sense for you to understand a little bit more and build on that next step.

But it really came from first hearing from our people. Because without that, we maybe could have landed in the same spot, but I guarantee you we would've had a lot more missteps along the way. And we also would've missed the opportunity to identify a person who responded to the survey and said, "Oh, I teach a master's level course in Generative AI Theory."

And I was like, "Come help us build the learning, maybe facilitate a course or two."

But getting people to showcase to us what their level of expertise was and how in some cases that exceeded our own, I think also allowed us as leaders to realize we really needed to partner with our people to generate the right solution.

Uwan Mukbong:
Just to clarify, this was someone in Workhuman who was-

KeyAnna Schmiedl:
That's right.

Uwan Mukbong:
... Teaching a class externally in the university on Gen AI.

KeyAnna Schmiedl:
That's right.

Uwan Mukbong:
Interesting. Amanda, what's your perspective?

Amanda McClerren:
Bayer is a very large company. We have three different business divisions. We've got over 150 years of history, and that can create an opportunity to get a little bit stodgy perhaps. So we're actually exploring a new system right now called "Dynamic Shared Ownership" at our company. And the idea is that we're going to have many fewer layers of leadership, we're going to have larger spans of control, and we're really going to push decision-making down into the organization. So kind of extreme peer-to-peer and team-to-team accountability. And it turns out when you do that and you give teams, empower teams, the right access to data and information, they really can make decisions more quickly.

But the other thing that we learned is that that radical transparency of information and insight is super important. So the role of digital becomes even more critical. We have to help the business have that transparency to understand how the business is performing and how the decisions that they're taking are impacting the P&L.

And so that's been a lot of the work that we're focused on right now, just really early days, but I think there's a lot of credence to the system and now it's about getting everything operating together.

Uwan Mukbong:
Absolutely. Very good. Ira?

Ira Rubenstein:
Yeah. So look, digital change is hard. It's not easy for companies that are historic like Bayer, or even a PBS, we've been around 50 years, a traditional broadcast entity and moving into this digital media streaming landscape, which has required us to completely shift. The way I've approached it is trying to help people stay focused because there's so much noise and so much distractions, and doing that by sharing a vision of, I call, my digital core beliefs, which really comes from actually my daughter who has anxiety.

And I learned that when you have anxiety, you have these core beliefs that drive it. And I realized I had digital anxiety at work. And that digital anxiety was when we weren't being consumer focused, we weren't building to scale, we weren't embracing change, we weren't embracing data. And so sharing that with the team definitely helps. But because there's so much work to be done in building our apps and doing our marketing and everything else just goes into the day-to-day, we're fortunate that we have what's called an innovation team.

And I've had that at other organizations I've worked at before. And that allows the team to deep dive, rapid prototype on whatever the shiny new object is. And that keeps the core team focused on the change you're driving without getting distracted. And this innovation team has worked very closely with AWS and we're thrilled with the work. We work closely with Bedrock. They did a rapid prototype over a year ago now, maybe two, on a recommendation engine that powers all the PBS platforms now. When you go in, it knows what you want to watch.

They're working right now with the AWS Gen AI innovation team on a project I'm super excited about. But that's the rapid prototype. And if it becomes a product, great. Then the rest of the team can embrace it. And that drives a change, but it keeps people focused on the day-to-day of what we need to do to move the organization forward.

Uwan Mukbong:
Now, that's fantastic. Now, I like the comments that you stress that point about really that leadership engagement and organizational curiosity.

So if we think about the cultural adaptation, we've solved the cultural adaptation, leaders get it, everybody's on board, you've got cross-functional teams beginning to work together. What have you seen? Give me an example of something that's come out of it based on what you've done so far.

Amanda, any perspectives there?

Amanda McClerren:
Sure. I think it's really important to have a good story around this. And so I'll tell you my story, my origin story, my first exposure to data science, which fundamentally changed how I think about problems ever since then.

In my story, we had many, many years of data in our seeds pipeline on the genetic information of each of our seed lineages. So think about the grandparents, the parents, the children, the progeny. And we also had a lot of information about how those seeds performed when they were planted in the field, data that we collect outside once a season.

And so our data scientists were able to develop an algorithm that could predict the performance of that next generation of seed based purely off the genetic information that we could collect in the lab. And that was an incredibly powerful innovation because it allowed us to shave a full year off of the product development life cycle.

And it also allowed us to sort of fundamentally change the scale of our pipeline because now we could perform that really important yield testing in the lab all year around versus once a year in the field. And so it's had an incredible impact on our ability to create better innovation faster for our farmer customers.

Uwan Mukbong:
Fantastic. Good example there. Ira?

Ira Rubenstein:
So trying to think of cross-collaboration among teams. So I guess the best example I have is when we were trying to figure out live linear streaming in the broadcast model. And that involved a lot of the lawyers, programming, et cetera to make sure we had the rights, but it also involved leveraging AWS and the elemental servers.

And within three months, we were able to bring all 300 stations up to live linear streaming. But it involved, not that we had to get the lawyers and then the technical, but they had to understand what we were trying to build and then making sure we had the rights and to configure all that.

Uwan Mukbong:
Interesting. KeyAnna?

KeyAnna Schmiedl:
Sure. So I'm going to give you three examples. One of them has a story. So I previously mentioned my team being customer zero. We're customer and we're prospect zero. We make HR tech that tries to make a better working experience for all humans. And so I have got to partner directly, and also via my team, with our product teams, with our engineering teams as they're brainstorming ideas for the next new launch, for the next new innovation to say, "Okay, I love it in theory. Let's try putting it into practice."

Because anytime you have a new technology, the most unpredictable thing is the human element. And so let's just get a few examples of the humans humaning around the technology and then figuring out what unanticipated something is going to happen. And in some cases, that's a discovery that's even better. Or you learn actually this whole section is unnecessary because people jump from point A to point Z.

And so those are really fun conversations and that's also where my team gets to get out of the day-to-day thinking about people work as more traditional and get into the experimentation, the exploration, and the play that makes it more fun.

The second example I had previously mentioned. We started this AI Council and we had these different lanes. So from a cross-functional standpoint, you have governance and ethics and sure, yes, you have legal involved, but we also have a Workhuman IQ team. And they were heavily involved hand-in-hand saying, "Here's how I think we should start crafting and thinking about this."

But for me it was until we understand how our folks are already using tools that exist out there, I don't want to box them in into what they can and can't do. I want to first understand what they're trying to do, to your point. And then say, "How do we ensure that they can keep doing those things?" And that's how we started crafting that policy.

Similar for PR. As we go across all of the different lanes. But also what we did was we identified the importance of tacking those culture ambassadors, those AI first ambassadors, identifying at least one person across every single department and saying, "You're going to get that exposure first. You're going to get access first, and you're going to be the one who then helps your teams along," so that they have somebody right there who's in the day-to-day with them that can help as soon as they have a question.

And then the last one is we started AI hackathons about two years ago. And so this last year, one of the ideas that were submitted came from our customer service team. So these are our call center operators. And they had this idea around how they thought AI could really help them deliver a better customer experience.

And so they submitted their idea. For all of the ideas, we paired up engineers, product developers, Workhuman IQ specialists, and they would vet the ideas, go talk to the teams, and then help them build a prototype. And with this team in particular, they built a prototype. And what it did was that, as soon as a phone number came in that the center recognized, it would then go into the history of every time that person is called, what was the most recent call that that person made, and then what's the summary of the issues that this person has? So it eliminated the call center operator from needing to say, "Can I put you on a brief hold while I review your customer notes?"

How many times have we heard that and gone, "I'm going to lose it."

And so now they don't have to do that anymore. And so the unintended consequences there was that that's a very high turnover role for us because it's a low paying job, it's a 24/7 center. And the turnover is high because you don't like having to deal with an angry person on the other end of the call. They're typically not calling to tell you you're doing a good job.

And so, because they implemented this, we're actually retaining more talent, they're having a better experience, but our customers are also having a better experience. And this technology has won awards, as well.

Uwan Mukbong:
Very good. And I like the culture ambassador piece there that you talked about.

Uwan Mukbong:
So my last question then is what advice would you give to leaders who feel they are lagging behind and need to find a way to catch up with this unprecedented pace of technological advancement that we're seeing here?

Ira, I'll start with you.

Ira Rubenstein:
Well, I think first and foremost, just recognize we're all feeling that pressure right now. I think things are changing so fast. But it's the ability to ask questions. It's the ability to listen. I mean, I can tell you first, what I like to do, is I honestly like walking the floor here. I walk the floor at CES or other events. I usually flip my badge over so they don't see my title or anything. And I try to listen in the background.

And then I'm just looking at the technology and I'm looking, what's the outcome? And then trying to think, how do I apply it to my business? How do I apply it to distribution? How would I apply it to marketing? How would I apply it for public media maybe in production or what have you? And it's just that, again, that ability to be curious and looking at things is I think the best advice I could give to any executive out there.

And don't be afraid to walk that floor and don't be afraid that... You might not understand everything, but just look at the outcome. Don't focus on the technology and how it's done. Just look at the outcome.

Uwan Mukbong:
And I would even add, make the time to. I knew it was tough finding that 30 minutes every two weeks to sit down with this fellow, but we just have to make the time.

KeyAnna?

KeyAnna Schmiedl:
Sure. So I would say my advice is grace and humility. I think, similar to Ira, it's that we're all in a very similar spot where we think we have a good idea of what this can be and what it can do for us, but we don't exactly know how it's going to go. And that's okay.

As leaders, we don't always need to have the answer. And that's something that I've learned along my leadership journey. But what we do need to do is be able to connect those dots of, I think this person might have a good idea and I think that this person has the skills to make that idea a reality. And so let me connect the two together.

And also not to think that because you are the leader, you have to be the owner of everything. You just have to help drive it forward. You have to ask the right questions and you have to continue to drive and to push your teams and to encourage them to keep going even when it seems like, I don't really know how this is going to go. You can definitely iterate and improve as you go.

Uwan Mukbong:
Thank you very much. Amanda?

Amanda McClerren:
Well, we're about to hear another common theme. I would say model vulnerability. And despite the fact that this is a panel about non-technical CIOs, my biggest opportunity in my new role is finance. So I'm part of our executive team now, and I need to learn a lot more about the financial aspects of our business.

So I actually have a formal coach, very similar to what you did. We're going through all those spreadsheets and all the numbers, and I am trying to get really, really good at understanding what I'm looking at. And I'm also really transparent about that with my organization. Because I think if you can model that for others, hopefully everyone will feel like it's okay to not know something and to ask for help.

Uwan Mukbong:
Absolutely. And look, I think you all are spot on, and I want to really thank you very much for all of that commentary here. There's nothing more for me to add besides making the time, as I added and mentioned earlier on, but we are at a point in time where technological advancement is unprecedented, and it's just for us to really keep up with the trends and drive that digital fluency as we continue to drive along.

So to my esteemed panelists, thank you very much. And thank you once again, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you.

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