Ken Huey 0:00

Hello and welcome to The Voice of Hope. I am super excited today to be with Ian Campbell. He is our guest, and he's a Wall Street Journal best-selling author of this The Value Sale, CEO of Nucleus Research, where he has spent more than 25 years helping organizations understand the measurable value of technology. He's also a longtime educator and recognized expert on ROI, technology adoption, and the human side of organizational change. Ian, thank you for being with us. How are you?

Ian Campbell 0:30

Ken, thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Ken Huey 0:32

Fantastic. Well, I'm always interested to hear how people landed in this profession. You know, we're kind of adjacent, but what brought you here? What's your why?

Ian Campbell 0:43

Yeah, it's interesting. If I end with sort of, I still do it every day. So the why I still do it is because I still get excited about it. But the why in the beginning is, I think, probably the classic answer where I'm working in another company and I looked and said, where could people use help? Where is there a hole in the market? And is there a way to fill that potential hole? So, you know, for us, it was a combination of research and value. How do we look at the tech world? But with sort of the attitude that not we like things, we have a ranking for things, but I like to say we hate everything. We don't like anything. We just look at whether it delivers value or not. So really take a more pragmatic approach. And that was exciting, combining finance and technology. And then from there, the great thing about tech is it changes on a regular basis. So there's nothing the same. And over the years of running the company, what I started doing, what I'm doing now, although my role has changed, but our company continues to follow tech in the same way. But it's all new, everything's changed, and that keeps it fresh and exciting on a day-to-day basis.

Ken Huey 1:46

Yeah. You've done this for a long time. You have studied the human barriers to technology adoption. People get scared, even when it could really accelerate their performance. So, what is the barrier? Why are people afraid of change?

Ian Campbell 2:01

Yeah, I mean, a lot of times it is just the fear of what is the technology going to do? How can it possibly help me? The fear of trying to learn it. So if we look back at the early days of Google, for instance, we were just trying to figure out how do we do a Boolean search? How do we ask a simple question to get an answer? And now we've got AI and we're trying to figure out to what depth can I ask questions? What kind of questions can I ask? What can I have it do for me? And we're still sort of exploring it. Folks are usually afraid of technology when they think it might replace them, or when they think it might be, I don't want to say smarter than they are, but where they feel as though they're not smart enough to use it. Often that's just nothing more than sort of taking measured steps to help them understand what's in it for them first, the typical what's in it for them, show them how to use the technology, show them so little things it can do, and then build from there.

Ken Huey 2:52

And so that covers a little bit of my second question. You know, people come in with this fear, you're trying to help an organization add technology. What should they be doing to reduce that fear besides what you just said?

Ian Campbell 3:04

Yeah, and a lot of reducing the fear is just small steps. Have people understand the little things that technology can do for them, the simple things they can do, and then take bigger steps from there. So, you know, if I think back to the early days of the iPhone, that very first version, it didn't do a lot. It really just made phone calls and had a calendar and had a few apps in it, but its potential was huge. But we could easily understand what it could do back then in those early days. It was changing the dynamic, the paradigm of what a phone is. Well, now we can pick up a phone and we already understand the interactions and how we would work with it. So our ability to adopt that becomes a lot easier. We're still figuring it out. I know that we all type in something and say, well, look, look what it's given me. We maybe use it as a glorified search engine, but also could ask it to build an email or do some changes. As we're taking those baby steps, we're getting more and more comfortable. When we look at technology, we often look at functionality and adoptability. How easy is something to adopt? And the easier it is to adopt initially, the more you can then build on that. So if you look at a browser, it's very easy to adopt, but because it's very easy to use, but yet an accounting system would be much more complicated. So small steps, but continue to take those steps, continue to explore, if you will, continue to encourage that exploration. And you'll see technology can be more easily adopted and internalized.

Ken Huey 4:26

Okay. Ian, just in the last little bit, there's been a highly placed researcher at Anthropic that said, look, we got at least a 10% chance that we're going to wipe out the human race in the next 10 years with AI. How do you respond to that? What's your prediction? And is this going in the toilet or is it going well?

Ian Campbell 4:44

Nothing's going to change. It's going to be fine. You know, AI is a fantastic tool that we can use. It's not going to go off and create its own armies. We're not going to be facing a Terminator kind of situation. This is complete just headline stuff. I wouldn't worry about that at all. What AI is a fantastic tool that makes individuals more productive. It's going to change. So let me give you two examples that I like to use with AI. First is when you think about, we've probably all seen that picture of all those draftsmen, draftspeople sitting at tables drawing out to build an airplane or whatever aircraft company that was. They were all replaced by a CAD system. It's okay. They weren't all put on the street. Everything moved on. The world continued to spin. That was fine. So nothing's going to change except we will become significantly more productive. That's the biggest thing. Second, think about AI as like the early days of the right flyer. And think back to that picture. It was either Orville or Wilbur was standing there, hat off, looking at the right flyer. It's going off. And look, we have an airplane. Isn't that great? But I am pretty sure that Orville and Wilbur didn't go back to their little bicycle shed and say, how do we figure out a frequent flyer program? What kind of credit cards should we use? And how do we hedge fuel prices? You, the idea of an airplane or an airline back then completely changed. All they did was get an airplane in the air. And that's where we are with AI. We just got it in the air. We don't realize that things are going to change dramatically, that most of the airlines make more money on credit cards than they do on actually flying airplanes. That's something that we'll figure out later. So let's look at this as it's day one. Everybody take a deep breath. The world isn't going to change. Nothing's going to change, except we're going to do a better job at writing, well, better emails. We're going to do a better job at summarizing and looking at contracts. And really, what we're going to do a better job of is taking unstructured data and putting some framework around it that then we have to interpret. AI is not taking over the world. That's just not going to happen.

Ken Huey 6:49

Love it. Okay. So you've suggested that AI could make some employees way more valuable because they're just better at adopting. How should leaders think about supporting those that could be the early adopters, those that could be that kind of a player?

Ian Campbell 7:04

Yeah, so I think AI is going to change a couple of things for employers. And it's going to be tougher as a manager. It's not going to make your life easier as a manager. And I've got two things. One, I'll have those early adopters that will really understand how to use AI to augment their job, to make themselves more productive and better. You'll have some that will use AI to replace their job, and those people are replaceable, but you'll be able to pick those folks out pretty quickly. The other thing is as we need fewer employees, as AI makes each employee more productive, each employee becomes that much more valuable. So where I might have needed 10 employees to do a job and now I only need three, losing any one of those or having any of them become not productive has a greater impact on the output of my company. So I need fewer people, but each person becomes more valuable. And it becomes more critical for me as a manager to, for lack of a better way of saying it, care and feed each one of those employees. Make sure that I'm paying attention, make sure that each one is being cultivated in the best way possible because each one has an even greater impact. So AI will make us more productive. But as managers, we're now going to have fewer people and each one will be that much more valuable.

Ken Huey 8:18

So there's a lot of excitement with what I AI can do for sure. There's the pessimism and the fear. We've addressed some of that. It's easy to get just excited about the new thing, vibe coding, and everybody's talking about that for a while. And AI in terms of summary of emails and let Claude take over my entire inbox. How do we evaluate what's really valuable for our organization and what to turn our employees just loose on?

Ian Campbell 8:42

Yeah. You know, sometimes it's as easy as going back to the basics and saying, does this make any sense to me? Am I getting value? We do that in our company all the time. We look at things and say, does it make sense? It's like NFTs. Remember when those were real popular and then they disappeared? Because ultimately I'm not so sure they're worth a whole lot until we have a real business case for that. So, you know, with AI, it's about can I use it? Can I deploy it in a way that is valuable to make my employers more productive or to get more done? Creating a lot of agents doesn't necessarily get me more value. It might give me more data, but can I make better decisions with that information? Is it helping me advance or is it just giving me more? I don't need more, I need better. So less and better is usually a better strategy than more. And so keep that in mind. Because I can do more doesn't mean it. I think I mentioned once in a conference a little while ago. More content isn't more better. And the thing is, AI can generate a lot of content. Well, that's great, but I don't want to weed through it because if I send more content, all the receiver is going to do is use AI to summarize it anyway. So doing a 20-page document that could be two makes no sense at all. So just because you can, don't use AI to just create more, create better.

Ken Huey 9:56

Yeah. All right. So AI is going to continue to change the workplace. What about that? What about AI adoption gives you hope in?

Ian Campbell 10:07

Well, I see it with my own employees. So our staff, they're they're all analysts, they're all very intelligent, they're all very focused on their market areas. They do an extremely good job. And they use AI to make themselves more productive day to day. So how can they take in more information so that they can come up with better ideas or better answers? And also it helps them cycle on hypotheses a lot easier. So if you have an idea, you can investigate that idea using AI a lot quicker than in the old days, if you will. So your ability to come out with the best answer because you can cycle through a lot of different answers using AI, is there and it makes it so much more efficient and better in the quality of the output we deliver. So AI is going to help us be better. AI is going to help us to summarize data that's unstructured. And AI will help us to explore areas that eventually turn out to be dead ends. But because I've explored them, I'm able to find areas that may not be something that I would have looked at before or could be suggested back by the AI tool that I'm using. So there's a lot still to learn. There's a lot for each of us to learn and how we use AI in our day-to-day activities and how it can best augment what we do. But we're day one and there's so much more in front of us.

Ken Huey 11:21

You've spent decades measuring ROI. How do you think about ROI when it comes to the human soft ROI injected into the mix? Talk about that.

Ian Campbell 11:34

Yeah. So, you know, there's only three things I can do as technology, really sort of anything. I can reduce cost, I can increase productivity, or as a byproduct of those, I can increase profitability. That's it. So I'm either reducing direct costs or I'm increasing productivity. AI and a lot of technology increases productivity. So I'm making an individual more productive. Now we look at that in two ways. Either I'm making you directly productive or sort of indirectly productive. Let me sort of explain. Your cell phone, your mobile phone, right? You hold that in your hand, it's you, you've got it. If I said to you how much more productive are you with your mobile phone, you would say, I don't know. If I asked you if you were more productive, you'd say, sure, it helps me every day. I do a lot with it. I sort of live with it, but you probably can't come up with a number. Now, in that case, we would look at and say, are you at least 5% more productive? Probably. Is it 10? Not so sure. Now, for every person, it's going to be different. It's just a bell curve. So each person will have a different number, if you will, and how much more productive they are. So they hold the phone in their hand. It directly helps them. And they can come up with some guess on how much more productive it is, at least enough to justify buying a mobile phone. And that's how we would look at technology or look at a soft benefit where it directly associated, directly is associated with you. Now there's an indirect benefit. We do advertising. The advertising helps people to better understand who we are. It's great advertising. It shows we're a great company and we're green or something. Well, that's a nice to have, but can I directly associate that kind of advertising with a direct increase in revenues? Probably not. And in that case, what you would say is sometimes decisions are made that are really just a gut feel. I believe it's there. I think we should do it. So we're going to spend X amount of money on that. As long as you know what that amount is, 10 million a year, for instance, on advertising that isn't directly related to sales, then you're making a marketing decision. But separate out marketing decisions, which you can't measure, from productivity gains, which you can measure. And as long as you keep those two separate, it's going to be a lot easier to consider what are you spending money on in one direction and where are you spending money and what is the ROI in the other? The biggest failure is when someone takes a look at those really distant benefits and say, well, how do we measure this? You know what the answer is, you don't. The answer is that's why you're the boss. You make the decision and you go forward. It's okay. That's the way you do it. So just sort of deciding that it's there's a relief sometimes when we talk to our customers where they go, oh, right, we don't have to calculate that because it's impossible to calculate. But you really can calculate productivity gains. And it really is just as much as how much more productive do you think they'll be? What's their value? Isn't this fantastic? And that's how you would look at a productivity or soft benefit. We like to say indirect benefits, but a soft benefit, if you will.

Ken Huey 14:31

In decades of researching technology, organizations, human behavior, what lesson has surprised you the most about people?

Ian Campbell 14:40

Yeah, I'm not sure it's surprisingly. I'm sort of happy to see it. You know, folks are pretty resilient. So I've watched the technology space move over the last, well, I want to say 30 plus years. I've been in tech forever and certainly running this company for more than 25 now. And when you look at where things were in the old days and where things are now, and how people can continue to adopt new technology and continue to grow, you know, we've seen massive changes in productivity. For instance, we've moved to the cloud. You know, if you think back in the old days, companies had their server rooms and you know, all these computers and air conditioning and tech people typing away, trying to make sure everything's going. Those people don't exist anymore. Everything's in the cloud. So companies don't hire those people anymore. But yet nothing bad happened. Every company continued to accelerate. So we continue to see productivity gains day in and day out. We continue to see people adopt, change, evolve. And it's nice to see that there's no tapering off of that. That will continue. And it's fantastic what will happen, I think, in the future, especially with AI. But if you look back at what's happened over the last 25 years, that evolution to the cloud, boy, and just mobile phones and everything else, everything we were doing 25 years ago, we're just not doing today. It's all different. But yet we're all just as comfortable today as we were back then. So yeah, it's the individual's ability to continue to adapt and continue to evolve. It's been fantastic. It's been consistent for years.

Ken Huey 16:10

We're about done. And I want to know what people do to find you. They're listening to this thinking, I want to know more about this Ian guy. Where do I go?

Ian Campbell 16:18

Hey, certainly follow us on LinkedIn, Nucleus Research. Go, you can come to nucleareseearch.com. We're an easy company to work with. So certainly anybody in tech, give us a call, send me an email, send any my analyst an email. Pretty straightforward to get a hold of us. Nuclearsresearch.com. You can follow me, of course, Ian Campbell, Nucleus Research. I'd really appreciate the followers. But yeah, our LinkedIn page has a lot of really great information. We don't spam, we don't put up a lot of stuff, we don't repeat anything. So it tends to be a pretty good stream. But please, yeah, follow us on LinkedIn. That'd be great.

Ken Huey 16:48

Boy, Ian Campbell. This has been a pleasure. Definitely a top five I've ever done. So thank you so much for spending some time with us.

Ian Campbell 16:55

Ken, I really appreciate the invite. Thank you very much.