Ken Huey 0:00

Welcome to the voice of hope, where bold leaders and healers share how they're building hope, not just talking about it. I'm Dr. Ken Huey. Let's meet the changemakers transforming lives from the therapy room to the boardroom. Hello and welcome to the voice of hope. Today's guest is Stephen Salakett, Chief Technology Officer at MailMatch AI and a technology executive who has spent more than two decades helping organizations across aerospace, defense, manufacturing, and software turn complex technology into real business impact. With a background in software engineering and industrial and organizational psychology, Steven is passionate about leading people through change, building responsible AI, and creating innovation that really truly serves people. Steven, thank you so much for being with us.

Stephen Salaka 0:49

Yeah, thanks for having me, Ken. Glad to be here.

Ken Huey 0:51

All right. I'm always fascinating to know how people land where they are. You know, what's your your why? Why this?

Stephen Salaka 0:58

Yeah, I've always been interested in technology. Ever since I was a little kid, I would go out and play with computers, programs, stuff. It was really my calling. I figured it out a long time ago. But it wasn't until I got to Japan that I really figured out that it's not just the technology, but it's really about the people behind the technology, the folks who are using it. How are folks actually leveraging these pieces? And so that's why I started down the path of getting my degree in industrial organizational psychology. All right. In Japan, how long were you there? I was there for almost 11 years. I had moved right after I got out of the university after I finished up my computer science degree, landed over there, knowing nothing about the language, and it was really important understanding the people, trying to figure out the language, figure out where to go and do things. And it was really the people there who helped me along the way. All right. How did you do with the language while you were there? I knew no Japanese going there. So it was interesting. The first couple weeks I was there, I actually went to a little bar. It was uh little Japanese is a isakaya, and there was a couple girls there, they spoke Portuguese, and I spoke Spanish. I took a lot of Spanish in high school, and it was one of my minors in university. And so we were able to get by and converse, and they actually taught me my first Japanese languages. So it was this this English to Spanish, to Portuguese, to Japanese, and going back and forth. It really laid the foundation of hey, making these connections and getting to know people out there is is super important.

Ken Huey 2:14

Oh, that's fantastic. I lived in Japan for a couple years myself and uh enjoyed my time there a great deal. It was a lot of fun.

Stephen Salaka 2:21

What part of Japan were you in?

Ken Huey 2:23

I was in Okayama and down near Hiroshima, a little at a teeny little city called Suyama for about a year. Fantastic time. And then got home and taught Japanese for a while and met my wife through that connection. She also speaks Japanese.

Stephen Salaka 2:37

Oh, great. Yeah, my wife is Japanese. We met while we were over there, proposed on top of Mount Fuji. Good time.

Ken Huey 2:44

All right. Well, you say often that technology means nothing without people. Speak to that a little bit.

Stephen Salaka 2:51

Yeah. It comes back to you you can create the best widget in the world. Let's say you're a widget manufacturer and it's the most awesome widget. But if you don't have people who actually want to buy the widget, you don't really have a product. And even if you can find people who buy the widget, you need folks to manufacture the widget, to build the widget, to research the widget, to market the widget. So there's all the people in the loop, whether it's someone you're selling to or someone who's building the product. And people are super integral in that entire step of the process. Everything from the janitor who's cleaning up the production floor all the way to the CEO who's running the ship. Each of these people play a unique part in the organization. No one person can do that all. And if we get rid of that, if we think, hey, we're just going to focus on the widget, you lose out. People don't want to buy it. There's no backstory, there's no humanity through the process. And as a result, the widget doesn't go anywhere.

Ken Huey 3:39

Yeah. You've led some pretty major digital transformations across multiple industries. What have those experiences taught you about the human side of change?

Stephen Salaka 3:50

The humans is really the key critical part. Back at in Japan, one of the companies that we added to business for was Ilai Lilly. They got a bunch of different drug lines, a bunch of different manufacturing lines in there. And one of the things that we are trying to do is really get them a digital platform that would allow them to do EMR, electronic medical representative with the pharmacies and with the doctors out there. And each of those silos, each of those groups, you had your CLS, you had your human growth hormone, you had all of these other parts of the division. And they all wanted their own little components, their own little pieces, because that's how they've did it for the longest time. And so even though the technology was easy to do, you know, you can go out there, you can build a centralized platform. It really was trying to go in there and get the folks aligned, sit them down in a room and say, hey, what are you all looking for? Let's get this together on a single platform that everybody's going to benefit for. Yeah, we can do some branding, we can do some customization, but we want to make sure that we're not doing 300 different things, 300 different ways, and it becomes impossible to manage. So it really became the process of earning the folks' trust, getting the truth more importantly to trust each other, and then understand yes, you're going to have your branding, you're going to have your marketing that you need, but we're going to do this in such a way that we'll we're able to roll this out within Japan. I mean, Japan is a unique market and they have no direct-to-consumer any DTC sales over there. And so they've got to go everything through the pharmacies, they've got to go everything through the doctors, and it becomes a much more regulated process than let's say here in the States, where, hey, we can have 600 different technologies and different platforms. So it really was critical for us to have that integration point because that allowed us to tech to connect to the Japanese pharmacy network, to actually make those single points of connected, to then connect to all the different healthcare systems, the national healthcare system over there, and allowed us to solve the problem. So again, it wasn't a technology piece, that was the straightforward part. It was getting the folks sitting down, organizing, and saying, hey, yeah, we all agree that this is the way to go.

Ken Huey 5:42

Your LinkedIn profile jokes about having a PhD in herding cats. And I'm wondering, you know, what have you taken from that is a real leadership lesson?

Stephen Salaka 5:52

Technology management and really leadership at all level is all about the herding cats. Because if you've ever had a bunch of cats before, you know that they're all going to go crazy and do their own do their own thing. As soon as you think you've got everything, another cat runs off and does something else. So you've got to entice them enough to get them in a centralized area and then just try and keep them wrangled up, build the fences around them. It's the same thing with people. If you've got a bunch of different executives that you're dealing with and they all want different pieces, they're going to go off and build their shadow IT. They're going to go off and do their own thing over here. So you're not trying to stop them from doing that because they've got a business around. But what you are trying to do is get them in a small enough area that it becomes manageable and we can control that and make sure that as an organization, we're appropriately moving things. I mean, you're always going to find the cat that's hiding up in the closet or sitting over there and playing the litter box all the time. And that's okay. That's just part of the game. But as long as you got most of the cats in a general area, you can generally manage that well.

Ken Huey 6:48

As you've worked with companies trying to make digital transformations, particularly in the AI space, what lessons have you learned? What would you tell us about what's important when you're trying to really and lean into and embrace AI?

Stephen Salaka 7:05

Yeah, and I I think AI, the biggest problem that we see out there is this mythology that AI is going to be this massive undertaking and it's going to change everything for everyone, and everyone's going to be out of a job. So there's a lot of fear in the market out there saying, What is AI going to do for me? And so when you go back to change management principles, is like you've got to sell the person. Like, what is that benefit? What are those things that are going to be beneficial to the person doing this? So there's a lot of that selling, but more importantly, getting over that fear. And for myself and a lot of people in my generation, Generation X, we grew up with change constantly. I mean, we started off not having any computers, and all of a sudden we had computers, and then we had the internet, we had cell phones. We've been changed, that's like our whole life. So for us, it's like in no problem. But then you've got some folks in the older generation where it's like change has always been hard. They've used been used to things for such a long time. And even with the younger generation, they're used to things changing all the time, but they're not really comfortable with the pace and the rapidity of it. And AI just accelerates that out of the room. And so you've really got to bring that in and say, all right, well, what do we need to do to make people feel comfortable with this? And more importantly, how can we get folks more comfortable with understanding change is going to happen, and you don't need to know everything and be able to do everything to be successful in the in the new world? I mean, in the past you knew everything about everything. Well, now with AI, that's changing. There's a lot more things to learn. Things are changing so rapidly. New software's coming out and turning off every six months. And for folks who aren't accustomed to that, it's absolutely terrifying. How am I going to keep up? How are we going to get there? And it's really just not trying to get in front of it, but just say, what do I need to do? And how can I do this tomorrow? And how can I do this tomorrow? Take those small steps bit by bit.

Ken Huey 8:55

Yeah. I hear you speaking essentially to the idea of fear in the face of change, not uncommon at all. I mean, you're working on technologies that affect thousands of people. What would you say to folks that are just that's what you see behind it all is fear.

Stephen Salaka 9:10

Yeah, and it is really understanding what is the providence of the fear. Is it a fear of like I'm gonna fall behind and I'm gonna lose my job? Is it a fear of I'm not good as much? I think a lot of it comes down to this perception of the story that we tell of ourselves. We maybe we've been in a role for 20 years or 15 years, very long time, and we're really good at what we do. Well, now AI comes along and maybe it can do what you can do, or it can do pieces of that job. And so now the fear is I'm gonna lose all that experience. That experience is no longer valuable. Well, no, that's not the case. That experience is super valuable. You look at companies like Facebook and Google, they went through the cycle of, hey, we're gonna try to do AI, but at the end of the day, they needed to go back and bring the people in who had that expertise. So that expertise that people have developed, it is hugely important because yeah, an AI can do parroting, it can do a lot of these cool things with searching, but it's not gonna know those little nuances that you picked up over the years. Hey, when I need to do uh a deployment, I gotta do these 10 steps, and then I always got to check this piece over here. AI is not gonna know that out of the box, even if you've got instructions written there. So it's that human loop, that human that really manages that is gonna be necessary and required. So it's that overcoming the fear of like uncertainty of what does this mean for me, and really understanding that things are changing, but the work that you're doing is transforming, it's not getting deleted, it's going from doing everything manually to doing everything with automation.

Ken Huey 10:37

Every leader faces moments where the transformation just doesn't go according to plan. So can you tell us of an example of something like that and what you did to overcome it, what you learned?

Stephen Salaka 10:50

Yeah, it's the age-old question of like, what do we do? And you get in there, you do your risk planning, and you plan for the unforeseen outages, but sometimes you can't plan for that. So, one of the things that we did with Eli Lilly after we had done some of their work on their ER is we helped them with the compliance tool, basically for people who are schizophrenic, people or schizoaffective disorder. They wanted to make sure that the caretakers could manage the individuals, in other words, compliance tracking for their medication. So we had developed a device with NTT Docomo to essentially allow them to track both their location so the caretakers could find them, but then also their compliance. Did you take a medication today? Are you hearing voices? Those sort of questions in there. So that way you could alert stuff out. Well, when we went to roll the process out, we had rollback positions set up, we had the capabilities of getting the stuff deployed. So we've done this test a hundred different times, but when we actually went to deploy it, there was a failure in the network switch that actually caused an outage to cascade throughout the entire NTT Docomo. So for about three minutes, we had the entire NTT Docomo system pulled down, it completely collapsed. So it definitely didn't go to plan, and it was something that we could not foresee, you know, something at the network layer cascading down uh down across the process. And at the end of the day, we did everything that we could for it, and we set ourselves up for as much success as we can, but there's gonna be problems that you're never gonna encounter, you're never gonna see. It's that one in a billion that that that gets hit, and you just roll with it, you learn with it, and you move on with the best that you can.

Ken Huey 12:23

You're also a science fiction author. Talk to us about that. What in writing stories in the science fiction genre has influenced your thought around AI and technology and innovation?

Stephen Salaka 12:37

Yeah, for sure. I've always been a fan of science fiction and cosmic war. It's been uh my my two greatest loves in life outside of my wife and my kid. But you know, it's that creative impetus of like, I've got all these ideas, how can I make that happen? Well, technology is an advance, it's not gonna get us there. So, how can I imagine what that will potentially look like? So, in my first trilogy, it was like, hey, what would happen if we had infinite computation and infinite energy and infinite memory? What would that provide us? And sort of does did that thought experiment out, played that out, saying, if we had all the ultimate technology in society today, what would that cause from a societal collapse? Would there be people who wouldn't want to accept it? What would that do over long periods? So, really writing that and saying, How is that going to happen? I mean, the great thing about science fiction is it's the art of the possible reimagined. When you talk about art or the possible in a technology sense, it's like, what can I do today with my technology and what can I do if it was a little bit better? But with science fiction, you throw all that out the window and say, What would happen a thousand years from now if we had all these different things? And so you get that capability of really far future projecting what could potentially be.

Ken Huey 13:44

Yeah. As AI becomes more capable, what qualities do you believe are going to be even more important for people to develop?

Stephen Salaka 13:54

I think the biggest quality right now, and I've talked about this before in a couple of my podcasts, is you know, you need to have that discernment because AI now makes production of things easy. You can create content, you can create material very easy. Click a button, you got a 200-page report. But that 200-page report, if it's not actionable, if it's not something that someone downstream can actually do something on, they're spending cycles doing the work. So let's say you know you send spend five minutes creating the best prompt, it creates a 10-page document, and you send that out to 20 people. Well, now those 20 people they're spending 40 hours trying to figure out what exactly you needed to do on that. So what needs to happen or where that skill is that discernment. What is that information that people need? What is the action I'm asking them to take out? And what do I need to make sure that they've got the information in order to make that decision and provide that action? And that's a human in the loop. AI will split out thousands and thousands of pages of documentation very quickly, but it's not going to say this is what we actually need to focus on, this is what we actually need to do. So having that discernment and understanding what is my impact of sending this out is huge going forward.

Ken Huey 15:03

Somebody listening today is going to hear some of this and just be frozen relative to AI and the pace of change. It's just, it is voluminous what we need to sort of learn now. What would you say to somebody that's just stuck? They're like, I don't even know where to begin. How to integrate? What encouragement would you give them?

Stephen Salaka 15:21

You got to take the little steps. Don't try to boil the ocean. There's so much out there that you can do. I mean, the world is your oyster, as it were. You can do anything, but it's that decision paralysis that you're going to get into. The more choices you have, the less likely you're going to make that choice because you're constantly weighing pros and cons. So pick one thing that you need to do or that you would like to do. Like, hey, this is a task that takes me eight hours a week I need to do, or I'm always emailing these folks, or I've always got to do this research. So find just one thing and then figure out how AI can help you. Just do that. Don't worry about the technology, don't worry about all the different learning all the different names and nomenclatures and pieces there, but just say, All right, how do we need to do that? And the best thing about a lot of these things like Claude and Chat GPT and Perplexity and Grok is you can just go in there and chat with them, say, Hey, I want to try and do this. Tell me what I need to do in order to get there. And that conversation that you that you speak with them, one gets you used to using the AI, but two, it helps you take that and create something meaningful, an AI agent that allows you to check your emails or even just doing research. So it's really just being familiar with the tools, familiar with what is out there, and then just slowly, step by step, picking stuff up. I mean, AI makes a lot of stuff very straightforward, very easy. And so if you can just get over that fear and do a little bit, you'll go to a chat GPT and ask a question. Hey, now you're using AI. So now evolve from there, see how you can use it even further as you go forward.

Ken Huey 16:53

You're the chief technology officer for meal match AI. Talk to us a little bit about what the value proposition is with that.

Stephen Salaka 17:02

So initially, we wanted to help with meal planning for low-income folks who are basically allowed them to provide healthy meals for folks who really didn't have that capability. We had tied into Instacart so they could order stuff if they wanted to, but we've we've shifted our focus pretty dramatically. And instead of just building meal plans, what we want to do is use food as healing. In other words, try and find out if I've got conditions, what are some things from a dietary perspective that I can do that are going to make me healthy? So we're working with registered dietitians across the 50 different states so that way we can provide end users not just the capability of finding healthy meals, but finding healthy meals that are going to help make them better, whether it's look supporting them in their weight loss journey, if they've got specific dietary restrictions to really help them heal with appropriate food. Fantastic.

Ken Huey 17:51

Steven, if somebody wants to know more about you or your writing, where should they go?

Stephen Salaka 17:55

I've got a website, does godexist.org. That's a little play on terminology there, but it's got everything from from my writing, access to some of my podcasts, and links to my LinkedIn profile as well.

Ken Huey 18:06

Oh, fantastic. Steven, really fun to have a wide ranging and very informative conversation. Thanks for spending some time with us.

Stephen Salaka 18:14

Yeah, thanks, Ken, for having me.

Ken Huey 18:16

Thanks for joining us on The Voice of Hope. If you were inspired, share the light. And remember, hope's not just a feeling, it's a force. We'll see you next time.