Andrew Bontz was just living his life, toiling along for a $50-million marketing agency in Madison, Wisc., wearing seven hats, trying to keep his head above water while hounding the members of his strategy team for their work product.
Keeping up with all of that content creation was a maddening problem for him, until he saw an ad for “AI Content Creation” float across his Facebook page. As he started investigating it – downloading apps, working with AI – it became pretty clear to him AI could help. When ChatGPT debuted in November last year, Bontz was hooked. The app showed Bontz that he could do in a half-hour what his clients had been paying him to do in 8 or 1
“And it was better than what I put together myself with my couple of decades of sales and marketing experience,” Bontz said. “That’s when I truly saw the power of AI and its ability to not only create job descriptions and cheap recipes and impress your friends with a cheap party trick, (but) I saw it meeting a key strategic goal in businesses.
“I could continue my mission to create impact on a scale that can change the world,” he added, with a smile.
Bontz recounted his early beginnings with AI and ChatGPT at the 2023 Best and Brightest Programs National Summit at The Detroit Athletic Club. The summit brought together leaders from the country’s Best and Brightest Companies to Work For, representing a powerful community of the nation’s elite leaders who share ideas, practices, and have proven they are employers of choice.
Bontz, host of the ResistingBeta podcast and founder of Wisconsin-based ResistingBeta Consulting, is a national speaker on the benefits of AI and other marketing issues. He talked to the enthusiastic audience about “Navigating the AI Revolution: Strategies to Maximize Human-AI Collaboration” as the summit’s keynote speaker.
AI is one of the big topics being discussed in many quarters these days. It’s being used by businesses, writers, students and others. It was even part of the subject of the recent writers’ strike in Hollywood. Bontz says people need to start getting aboard the AI train, and carried advice from American marketing expert, engineer and entrepreneur Peter Diamondis.
“(Diamondis) said there will only be two kinds of companies at the end of this decade,” Bontz told the audience. “Those that will be fully utilizing AI and those that are out of business.”
Bontz spoke at the end of the two-day summit. With many visitors from outside Michigan in attendance, the first day featured a walking tour of Detroit, along with a social event. The second day included breakout roundtable sessions on talent and workplace culture, and a panel discussion featuring CEO’s of some of the Best and Brightest Companies To Work For sharing their actions and solutions to inspire and build a better workforce. The idea of the discussion was to help attendees gain instant implementable strategies, insights and best practices.
“Our goal was to create a memorable experience for the Best and Brightest executives, ensuring a new vast network of colleagues to rely upon throughout the year,” said Jennifer Kluge, the CEO of the Best and Brightest Programs. “We also shared best practices around talent and culture, which is critical, and found ways to implement AI into our operations. Not to mention we were able to show the Best and Brightest how bright the new city of Detroit is.”
During his talk, Bontz extolled the virtues of AI and ChatGPT. Productivity and efficiency, he said, were the main benefits of companies using it.
An economist at Stanford University, he pointed out, conducted a survey of some 5,000 customer service and call center representatives. The study showed some 14% of experienced call-center operators reported being more productive using AI, while some 30% of less-experienced operators said they’re more productive.
A separate survey conducted by MIT showed that some 56% of software developers surveyed found it faster. Document writing, they found, was 40% faster with generative AI.
“(The economist) said, ‘If the internet made the world flat, AI makes it faster,” Bontz said.
AI has its downsides, too. For instance, ChatGPT doesn’t source very well, so not everything it produces is necessarily accurate. Bontz said the “lazy use of it,” when people copy something from ChatGPT without even reviewing it, is a poor us of it. And, he said, because it doesn’t source well, it might not be the best thing for writing research papers.
While one concern is that AI will replace workers – that certainly was an argument in the writers’ strike – becoming familiar with it would prevent that. Bontz quoted Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, a New York-based management consulting firm.
“AI won’t come for your jobs,” Bremmer said, “but if you don’t become AI-adjacent in the next 2-3 years, you may be replaced by someone who has.”
One of the other highlights of the summit was the panel discussion featuring four C-Suite business leaders from Best and Brightest Companies winners.
The panel featured:
- Stacie Kwaiser, the CEO of Rehmann, an accounting firm with multiple offices in multiple states.
- Beth Wilson, president of Excelas, a Cleveland-based firm that provides medical legal solutions and performs medical analysis.
- Kathy Steele, CEO and president of Red Caffeine, a business marketing consultant based in Illinois.
- Kevin Schneiders, chief servant leader and CEO of EDSI, a workforce development and talent solutions consulting firm headquartered in Dearborn, Mich., with locations in nine states.
The conversation was led by Kluge, and included their authentic actions and solutions around building a better workforce and centered around a variety of issues facing business leaders these days. Some examples and responses from the panelists included:
Importance of communication
Kwaiser: “You communicate (the message) at least 7 times. What’s really important is leaders throughout the firm are familiar with the messaging. We do a lot and mix it up with in-person, video meetings, video messages if something important is coming up. One of the best things we did – sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good (draws a laugh from the audience) – was hire an internal communications specialist prior to Covid. She’s really helped us think about methods of communicating. You can never communicate enough. There are so many different methods of communication and they all get received differently. You have to take it to the teams in many different ways.”
Relationships between the C-Suite and HR teams
Schneiders: “Our chief talent officer and I have worked together for 26 years, so we’ve literally grown up together, and I can think of maybe one time we disagreed. We’re often on the same page. She’s always had a seat at the table. I think of her as the most important person in the company. I think the talent team and HR team … are trying to protect the company. They want to go at a certain pace, make intelligent, informed and logical decisions, and sometimes those of us who grew up in operations want things to go a little faster. It’s usually centered around the pace of that decision, and we try to balance that.”
Kwaiser: “We don’t always have the same opinion (referring to her HR chief) but we listen to each other. I’ve got key words … we work through it. He sits in a position where he attends our board meetings now. He’s elevated and respected and part of my leadership team. It comes to play more in the service side. One example is about non-performing associates. One department thinks we’re moving too slow and being too nice. The other department thinks we’re pushing to push people out the door. If you have opposing opinions, we must be right in the middle.”
How company culture is driven
Kluge pointed out that culture comes “top down and middle up. So what percentage of the CEO’s job revolves around culture?”
Wilson: “Having people you’re hiring fit the culture to begin with is helpful. Understand what the culture of the company is, then making sure during the recruiting and onboarding process that these are people who want to be part of that culture. I admit when I don’t know something, I don’t try to pretend I have all the answers, and I acknowledge each individual for their expertise, their experience, and invite the sharing of ideas. Our meeting structure … each week we’re celebrating successes. It’s an agenda item.”
Steele: “It really starts with the first experience with our organization, reenforcing the culture and the values in the interview process. It’s just spending one-on-one time with people throughout the organization, and having the other leaders spend one-on-one time with people. So much comes through in those one-on-one conversations as to what’s going on with them personally and professionally.”
Schneiders: “When I joined EDSI, we had nine people in one room, and now we have 900 people across 55 locations. So it’s changed a lot, and the challenge has been how do you maintain that culture as you grow and when you don’t have those connections with people? I still meet with the 900 people in the company at least once a year. That’s my commitment to them, that I’ll meet with them for at least 30 minutes. I’m trying to lead by example in having those contacts.”
Kwaiser: “I just became CEO in January (after 27 years with Rehmann). One of the things I’ve been known for is spending time with our team and really connecting. I spend a lot of time doing town halls, visiting offices, doing videos. We have a platform that sends out reminders to welcome somebody to the firm. The most important thing is we understand what drives the associates. You really have to know what each team member is inspired by.”
What pressures outside of talent issues are “keeping you up at night?”
Kwaiser: It’s economy-driven, but making sure we’re spending time with our clients and understanding where they’re at. We spend a lot of time — For 20-plus years, we’ve had a ‘Dale Carnegie-based purpose belief — so we really want to understand what clients need and be able to help them. We’re hybrid … we have to make sure to meet our clients where they are. Economic challenges are actually an opportunity to really help our clients. It’s more complex (than it was pre-pandemic) because, just like our associates like different work environments, our clients have different work environments.”
Wilson: “What’s keeping me up is AI and the impact it’s going to have on our company. I’m just a little anxious to make sure we’re proactive, that we’re learning and we’re figuring out the best way to apply the new technology.”
