Ep 272 Monica Marquez - Why AI Adoption Is an Identity Problem

Transcript of Ep 272 Monica Marquez - Why AI Adoption Is an Identity Problem
Host Eric Wright, guest Monica Marquez
Timestamps match the published episode. This transcript and its speaker labels were generated automatically and may include small errors.

[00:00:14] Eric Wright: All right, welcome everybody to another amazing episode of the DiscoPosse Podcast. Surprisingly little to do with disco or posse, but it is something to do with amazing humans. One of- of the really interesting things about this industry is how tech-connected people are with very human purpose. And one of the things I've really enjoyed is being able to find people who share this goal of, that I like to keep as my ethos, which is we are a profoundly human existence that uses technology for good. And that's the hope. And how do we do that? Especially when we've got all this craziness with A.I. and it feels like every day we're getting closer. Instead of two minutes to midnight, it's eight months until code is written by machines and humans are no longer needed. All that aside, humans have great stories and I've got an amazing human with a great story with me today. So Monica, if you want to introduce yourself for folks that are brand new to you, and then we're going to talk about where you are today, what you and the team are doing, and also your background, because you've got a really cool storied background.

[00:01:27] Monica Marquez: Well, thanks so much, Eric. Thank you again for the opportunity to share your platform and have us here. My name is Monica Marquez, just by way of background. in corporate America for more than two and a half decades. I'm dating myself. But left the corporate world to launch a couple of companies. This is my fourth company, my co-founder, Nicky. And really wanting to, the through line for all of our businesses was was always, how do you help humans really move forward and really tap into their full potential in order to be successful in their careers and life? And so FlipWork is really focused on, a couple of years ago, we started seeing the writing on the wall with AI and we realized how disruptive AI was gonna be to people probably probably before they realized how disruptive it was gonna be. It was one of those things where understanding human behavior, how we can resist change and how quickly AI was changing the workplace. And it was changing it faster than people are wired to change. And so that was one of the things that we really wanted to focus on, on how do you help people gain what we like to say, the agentic human advantage? How do you help people become people squared by leveraging AI, taking human creativity and contextual wisdom and amplifying it with agentic scale or with AI tools opposed to fearing it? And the interesting thing we knew was gonna happen likely was that the technology isn't flawed, the technology is there, but people don't know how to leverage the technology in the right way. And there's a few things from a behavioral perspective that a lot of my peers who were still in the corporate space were reaching out to me saying, listen, we've rolled out all these AI tools. We've were giving them the green light to move forward but AI adoption is like atrocious, what's going on? And it was one of those things where we started digging in a little deeper and realizing that it's the human. It's various different behavioral things where the human is resisting AI, not because they don't understand the tool or don't have the capacity to use the tool. There are other identity and behavioral things going on that we started to really dig into to help people rewire their brain on AI can amplify them opposed to the fear-mongering that we're seeing everywhere that AI is gonna take your job. So all in a nutshell, FlipWork is helping people reinvent themselves in this post AI world and be able to amplify their impact and get more done.

[00:04:06] Eric Wright: I think you've highlighted one of the things that we forget about when we see sort of, and look, I'm a tech marketer by trade, literally. We always talk about this idea, like whatever you do, simplified, or whatever you do, made easy. Like we have these nifty little taglines and they look cool and you sign up for the platform, you connect it to a couple of things, whatever that tool of choice is. And all of a sudden it just tells you, we'll automate your world away. And then an error pops up and then, And oh, I'm not going to automate it just yet. And you realize that simple, you know, comma made easy. It's going to take you about three to four weeks to really get what it does, how to properly use it. Like that doesn't seem easy at all. And it's not even that I'm purposefully resisting. processes and flows communication flows of productivity and people don't realize there's very heuristic bound things that we do is as a community of humans in how we collaborate in like we've got stuff about Conway's law that like the idea that teams build systems that represent the physical way that they work together. And so there's all these things but just people just so they forgot that they're like oh just slap AI on the back end of it and it's it's an easy button you're like no no and that's not

[00:05:47] Monica Marquez: absolutely Eric and what you're mentioning is you know some of some of this it's like a catch-22 some of these people like you said think that AI is going to be this easy button I'm gonna take my workflow throw AI on it and it's going to be great. And then they start getting all these issues and errors, or if there was something flawed in the workflow, well, that flaw is going to get amplified 1,000 times. And so then they kind of shun it and say, it didn't work, and they put it aside, not understanding that they have to reinvent their workflow and put in all of these checks and balances and really think about, you know, where does AI need to be, and where does the human need to stay in the loop? And so those are the things like you were saying that for some people, there is a little bit of heavy lifting in the beginning. And for them, sometimes you get the, I don't have time for that. You know, our process isn't broke. Why are we going to try to fix it? But eventually they're going to get left behind because there's going to be a team who does leverage AI that is going to get ahead of them. And then that's when they start, they start having that conundrum of we're playing catch up and we, you know, are way, just way too behind now. And you're right. It's, it's a lot of these, you know, we are starting to see more and more with our FlipFactor diagnostic, which is really this psychometric diagnostic that measures across two dimensions. It measures the, what we call agentic velocity, which is how are you as a person leveraging AI or incorporating AI into your day-to-day workflows? Are you using it superficially to like Google, just asking it, prompting it, asking it a question and moving on? Or are you actually integrating it from an agentic perspective or using workflows or starting to use Claude to do some automated things for you? Or are you kind of just put it on the shelf because you tried it once and it didn't work? So really trying to understand for them how well are you using it? Are you truly, leveraging it the way that you should be and getting the ROI out of all of the millions of dollars your company or you have put into these tools. And then the other access is the enterprise symbiosis, meaning how supportive is your organization or your teammates or or your leaders around you or even your clients. Are they supportive of AI or are they asking you to use AI or they also themselves themselves a little bit skeptical and kind of behind on, you know, I don't want AI. And so it really helps people understand how AI ready are you, how AI ready is your team and how AI ready is your organization. And so that kind of starts giving them at least a benchmark to understand where are you in relation to everyone around you and in the organization to help you get a diagnosis to understand how do I start to become more agentic, become more of an orchestrator of AI so that I too can reap the benefits of, you know, everything that is happening around me. And more and more people are starting starting to understand that they're going to need to adopt somehow. And that's where the overwhelm comes in because as you and I both know, there's more than 30,000 AI tools out there that are bombarding you, telling you, I have an easy button for you, but you don't know where you should start. And so that's where, you know, we at FlipWork introduce the FlipFactor to get, you know, they get the tech side, but they need the human performance layer, really understanding where FlipFactor gives them real psychometric data on where they should start.

[00:09:25] Eric Wright: Well, this, this is the fundamental that we need to really evaluate agentic, so like success in my mind. And what I, I've, I work with this really, really cool community that just recently sort of spun up called the AI Crafts People Guild. And it's sort of like people that we were, We all come from particularly like the developer, you know, engineer background and really thinking like enterprise architecture level and how AI adoption is very good when done well, but we have to like heed the appropriate warnings. And what I just wrote a great little think essay on it, talking about how we're speed running all of the HR problems that we didn't know that we had. Like everybody just thinks, oh, I'm gonna be a solopreneur.

[00:10:11] Monica Marquez: I'm just gonna spin up this.

[00:10:13] Eric Wright: I've got a Claude bot, or whatever you're legally allowed to call it, OpenClaw, whatever, you know, whatever that thing is, everything is like, well just turn it on and it will just work. And then once you get in, you connect all the dots, and you think about how am I going to make use of this, well now you have to manage that thing as a resource. And it has certain inputs, it has certain outputs, it has certain things, it does stuff when you don't look. How do you check in on that? So we, what ends up happening is all these people are like, oh, I need some kind of a central system by which I can control, you know, when it works. And it's like, oh, okay, maybe a schedule, you know, like, oh, let's have it report what it does. Oh, we'll give it some, we'll give it Kanban. We'll give it a project management board. You're like, what, what, can you send it for compliance training once a year? Cause that's the only thing you're missing to you have just hired an employee that now you have to manage what is effectively version of a human because they're modeled after us like this is the whole idea the reason why these things work is because they're modeled after human behavior which is a non- we call it sycophantic but like the nice thing is like they're not truth seeking machines they're positive outcome seeking machines you have to you know act accordingly as the manager of these little agents, you know. So I find this is the thing that people quickly think they're solving a technology problem and they realize they're

[00:11:50] Monica Marquez: about to try to solve a very difficult organizational problem. Absolutely, I'm so glad you said that. I mean one of the things that we talk to with lots of organizations and leaders and, you know, business unit leaders who have other team leaders in teams and we tell them, you have to help your leaders understand that the agents are either an intern or a new team member that they are going to have to manage in this way. And just like with an intern, you would never give them a project or give them a task and then take what they spit out to you at face value. You kind of work with them and massage that and say, no, you did this wrong and I want it this way and all of these things where you're training it just like you would train any other human to start doing the work the way that you need it done and things like that and so sometimes when you kind of give them that analogy of you know you have to treat your you know your AI tools or the agents or you know the workflows that you create like a team member you know this is a digital team member and for some leaders they are like a little freaked out about it because they're not used to that. And it's like, you're more of an orchestrator and you're orchestrating all these agents. And it's like, you know, this agentic human as well. And people just starting to learn to you know, it becoming kind of their think partner or their coworker that never gets tired. Right. And so in some cases when leaders start working with, they're like, this is fantastic. Like I'm not getting any of the SAS or the talk back or the, I just tell them to go do it. And they're not telling me that they need to take a bio break or anything of the sort. It's great once they start to see the benefits of it, but it's getting over that initial hurdle of them relinquishing or delegating some of these tasks. But the scary part I think for many people is this, what I like to call the identity bottleneck. Most AI adoption fails because treated like a skills gap when it's really an identity challenge, right? People aren't afraid of the tool, they're afraid of who they become when the tool replaces them for the valuable things that they used to do, right? Many of us, like I'm dating myself, but for more than two or three decades, I was rewarded for all of the effort and the grit and the work that I did. And so effort equaled success to me. When I started using AI and it became effortless, there was like this big identity kind of challenge in my brain of like, wait a minute, effort equals success. If this is effortless, then I may not be successful or I'm not going to be rewarded anymore because I'm not putting in the effort that I'm used to having to put in to get rewarded. And so we have to rewire our brains that it's impact equals success. How much more impact could I have if I leverage AI so that I could be successful? And so it's a little bit of that. Where people are having this identity crisis of, well, what is my worth if AI is doing all this work for me? They're forgetting that many of us grumbled all the time saying, oh my God, this admin work, I have to do all of this nonsense before I can actually do the strategic work or the work that I really love doing. Now, you can delegate that administrative work and truly take the time gains that you have and really reallocate that new time that you have been able to identify into the higher more value strategic work that you've always been wanting to do. But it's getting people across that identity bottleneck part.

[00:15:39] Eric Wright: I think this is the thing that a lot of people are trapped in. You know, we, I mean, people we talk about this AI psychosis and all these things are going on, but at the very core level you hit something that was so foundational. I was just at an event recently and we were a bunch of nerds talking about the most nerdy thing,

[00:15:57] Monica Marquez: like building Linux distributions, you know,

[00:15:59] Eric Wright: like it's, we, and we're, we're cheering. Like it was the when someone can like change the background on a machine with a command line. That's the kind of nerd, Like this is the level of nerdness that we're doing and we're celebrating this thing. And then it ends in the most profoundly human way to me that we were talking about, how do we assign our value to ourselves anymore? And it's hard because like you said, I don't know if it's really a word, but like we heroicize, I'm a professional writer, you think I should know what words are, but like we celebrate the strangest things. I remember I worked at one company and people would win the employee of the month award or some like special recognition award. And it wasn't like, oh, they've been really good and they're friendly and they organize social events and they like, they're good for the cult, the community and people really enjoy them. They smile a lot, you know, it was no, it was, well, Pete's baby was being born, his wife was in labor but there was a brand new client onboarding going on and we needed. And so Pete worked from the hospital, you know, on his laptop, you know, during late. And it's like, here's a thing of flowers and a Best Buy gift certificate. And hey, you get your name on the wall for the month. And you're like, what the hell are we celebrating

[00:17:25] Monica Marquez: by doing this?

[00:17:26] Eric Wright: This is wild. And it just seemed so, like, I knew why it was important when I was saddened at the same time by watching this occur. I'm like, this is what are we celebrating? Like, how are we creating this reward culture that it creates, you know, apathy amongst the rest of the staff too, because they're like, A, I don't want to do that, and B, like this, so I don't have a lifestyle that can be interrupted by work, so therefore I can't be celebrated. Like there's just all of the reward structure that's wrapped around it just seems so misdirected to me.

[00:18:08] Monica Marquez: Exactly, and it needs to be rewired, and that's part of the, that is part of the, that whole kind of crisis of the AI adoption of failing, right? And that's what we tell a lot of people. And a lot of companies are now seeing that, you know, it's not an IT problem. You know, it used to be that IT teams are rolling out the AI, AI, and then they're looking to IT to say, able, you know, train these people or tell them how they're supposed to use it. And IT is like, like, you know, your point that you said earlier, teams create their workflows and all of that, that is kind of almost a fingerprint of how they work physically. And so IT is like, I can't tell you how to leverage the AI. Only you can tell the AI where you're supposed to. And so it's just an interesting, you know, people are kind of starting to learn now how to do that. But the idea of what is rewarded is that effort equals success. And we have to get even leaders to create a safe space for individuals to reinvent the workflows And to celebrate the, I'm no longer spending four hours doing this task, I'm getting it done in three minutes, can take the two hours and 57 minutes that I used to and really finesse it and really take this artificial intelligence and turn it into my authentic intelligence. I can layer in my genius and all of my learned experience and lived experience and make this a richer output. And that's what we're trying to get people to understand is that how do you take this artificial intelligence and really get some of your time back, so that you can bring in some of that authentic intelligence that only you as a human bring to the table that no AI tool is ever going to be able to replace. But it's really hard to get, people to step back and actually do that internal reflection and internalization to understand, what is my zone of genius? What am I if I'm not doing all the grunt work? What is that special sauce that I bring to the output and to the outcome? And that's where we're trying to get people to re-identify and reinvent who they are in this post-AI world.

[00:20:16] Eric Wright: So I'm a fan of Office Space, the movie, which is one of the best depictions of real society. No one realized it was, it's a comedy to be a documentary, but like they took that meme of him where he's yelling, he says, I take the requirements to the, from the engineers to the customer so that they like, and that's the sense that that was his value. And the new one was like, I take the, the complaints and I paste it into Claude Code And I feel like that's people feel like they're now becoming information movers between systems. And it's like, no, no, no, no, you are we are the system. We are the system. These are the the the scaffolds that we are wrapping around our system like that's what we should be thinking of it as and it's so difficult for people to have that level of abstraction, of thinking. And also the it's I just don't like that we have a percentage, there's no percentage of adoption. People say are you using AI? Well yes. That could mean that you've got somebody in the mail

[00:21:23] Monica Marquez: room is, is using ChatGPT to, you know, make good labels, you know, or it could

[00:21:31] Eric Wright: mean that we fired the executive team and they've been replaced by a Claude bot. Like you have no idea what the percentage and depth of adoption is of AI. So it becomes this stupid misnomer. They say like, Oh, you know, we're AI first. Yeah, this month. you have no idea what the percentage and depth of adoption is of AI, so it becomes this stupid misnomer. They, they say like, Oh yeah, we're AI first. and hard and to a like what what do you but what's the value and I think this is the AI needs to accelerate the ability to to achieve value for your customers yes and that could be any of a number of things optimizations internally optimizations externally but doing in a way

[00:22:18] Monica Marquez: that's repeatable explainable and ethical yes and I think you you nailed the whole ethical, I think that's another kind of like, word that kind of scares people because, you know, with our diagnostic, it, it creates four archetypes. There's the explorer, someone who is just building this foundational confidence of AI, not really they know about it, they're aware, but they haven't really, like you said, truly used it, you know, anything beyond making labels or something, right? Then you have the guardian who understands and wants to adopt AI, but they're afraid to break. They're afraid to break the rules or they're afraid that, you know, AI is going to like take over their computer and send all their clients the wrong, you know, information or something of the sort. So they're waiting for permission for somebody to tell them how to use it or what to do. Then we have the pioneers who have really high agentic velocity. And in some organizations that might be a little bit of a risk because they're using tools that may not be sanctioned by their tech stack or their IT because the organization hasn't created the guardrails or told them what they can and can't use and things like that. But those are individuals that you can quickly get into becoming your orchestrator, someone who is towing that line with making sure the risk reward, you're making sure that the guardrails are there and and things like that. And I find it interesting that, you know, for the number of people who've taken our FlipFactor, roughly 75% fall in the Explorer or Guardian and more in the Guardian where it's just like they realize it, they're using AI, but they're kind of stopping themselves because they're afraid that they're going to break something or they're waiting for permission from somebody else to move forward. And ironically, many those guardians are the middle managers that are holding things back for the rest of the organization where leadership is telling them, use AI. The junior folks are really excited and ready to use it, but it's these middle managers who are afraid to break something or their workflow is working already and it's going to slow them down if they rework it and all kinds of things. So it's just interesting to kind of understand where the bottleneck or where kind of the the friction is in the true AI adoption.

[00:24:40] Eric Wright: Well, I'll say that middle management is like MSG. We thought we got rid of it in the nineties and it just snuck back in in the two thousands. Like, remember that was the, like, so again, I'm an older.

[00:24:51] Monica Marquez: I totally remember this.

[00:24:53] Eric Wright: I've been through this before. I've seen outsourcing that became in sort of like, I literally built data centers in other countries and like development teams and help desks and all these things. And a year earlier was told like over our dead body, will we outsource? And all of a sudden you're outsourcing everything. And then two years later, you're insourcing everything because it didn't go well. And we eliminated middle management. And we realized like, you can't have 200 people reporting to a VP. Like, oh, okay. So we rebuilt these structures, but they were very human structures that we found out the hard way over a period of time. problem I think I think we face right now is that we're like we're literally speed running all of these lessons and it's like no one is looking back to say like how do we well I mean you're looking you're looking at this like we've seen history and this is how you can safely accelerate your adoption but people are just they're just get in the car and they're like okay I see a gas pedal and I that must be the break let's just go, you know, and like, no, no, no, no, no, this is not how we're going to do it. And they feel, but like we're behind. Like everybody I think has this pervasive sense that the world is moving faster than us. And it's like, no, it's like the news is telling you like the on like we're connected, we're hyper connected to this world being told that everybody's going all in on this and all in on that. And exactly, but then you walk out on the street and you're like, Oh, wait a second. What, you know, there's still barbers, there's still convenience stores. There's still project management teams. There's still tax people.

[00:26:40] Monica Marquez: I'm like, Oh, yeah. Yeah. You make a really good point. I remember, you know, when Excel first came out and they were like, Oh my God, that's the end of CPAs and you know, all of that. And it's like, actually, no, there's more CPAs now than there ever were. And they're just using, you know, the Excel, you know, as a tool kind of that help make their correct and easier. And so it's those types of things that I think people will start to see how they incorporate AI and become what we're just saying. You're going to become an agentic human. Work is just going to shift in that direction, and you've got to learn how to get comfortable with it. And so for many people, we roll out these kind of 30-day and 90-day live cohorts. So we kind of help professionals and people reinvent themselves for the AI age, right? Just real concrete in the trenches, real results. Cause I was like, you can watch as many videos or training manuals of how to use the AI, but until you actually like get in the lab, like you used to in college, you know, you'd go to the lecture and listen and fall asleep, but it wasn tools through APIs, or whatever it might be, but you're not going to learn until you actually get your hands dirty with it. And so that's what, you know, that's what we've built. And we built an, you know, what we call Flippy, the AI change agent that is really an agentic coach that helps you kind of step by step in your own safe space, you and Flippy kind of figuring things out on your own where you don't feel like you're being judged by somebody else that, you know, you don't know what you're doing and all these types of things. types of things. But it helps them understand how to do their work, putting judgment in the loop, and really getting them to learn how to work alongside AI. And it's humans providing the judgment context and the wisdom that AI can't, but also showing them the power of you might consider using this tool to do this piece for you. And we're starting to see people kind of really having these aha moments of like you said, um, Oh my God, like the world is still the same. We're all still doing the same things, but I'm just able to get this done faster and maybe enjoy more of what's out there.

[00:29:03] Eric Wright: Right. Yeah. When that's the, just like with everything, I mean, I always have like, as a marketer, one of the things I always have to remind people is that the taglines are meaningless until you get to the so that you can part of the statement. So that's the purpose of a one liner in describing your company is not to say like, GTM Delta does this. Okay, great. Now why, you know, like 1000 questions of like, oh, you know, so that you can like for this person so that they can like, Oh gotcha gotcha and we were stuck on the comma simplified comma made easy. But like we really need to get to the this thing does this thing for this person so that they can and that's that value. The actual value is further down the sentence and people don't often get there because they're afraid and they feel this kind of like natural resistance to change. And it's a very human thing. But you talked about a good, we use the term AI, or like, like human in the loop all the time. So H-I-T-L is quite literally a very thing about AI systems, and how we have it as like a check, you know, always circle back and eventually come back to the human. And now I, our platform and kind of the way I talk about what we do is we use AI in the loop for very human processes. So that we leverage AI at the right layers and we framed it in, describing it that way. And it really, it helped me to kind of get people to understand that AI in pockets with the human at the front and the human at the back. that yes give it the idea you know watch it work validate the idea is this achieving the result i want and leverage it truly as a as a toolkit rather than us becoming the tool for the system and it's like you know it's we've got a you've just got to frame it and when you i find that when you frame it that way it makes people more at ease with understanding why adoption is is not killing their job.

[00:31:20] Monica Marquez: Yes. I'm curious to hear from you because you probably know the various different tools but one thing that I'm trying to help some of my peers understand is that the tools aren't one size fits all. You can't just buy a license for ChatGPT and think that your entire organization is going to be able to solve their, you know, be able to use it for their work. And I keep trying to tell them that each platform has its own kind of special sauce or zone of genius. Be curious to hear from you, like, how would you would define the different, the different type of like, tools, like whether it was Anthropic, or, you know, Gemini, or Claude, or, you know, in different industries or different roles?

[00:32:04] Eric Wright: Yeah, I'd say it's, there's a couple of things that make something good.

[00:32:10] Monica Marquez: Yes.

[00:32:11] Eric Wright: And often it's just that, what's the initial experience you have with it based on assumption of what it could do, and what the effort was required for you to get to that place. And so I'll say like as a product set and I don't normally get super specific on names, but like let's just be, I use Codex. I talk all the time about Claude code and all these things and I know all the systems, but I don't use Claude. I know lots of people that do and people say like, you know, how do you find it? And like, I don't care to find it. I use a tool and that is my, I built my stack around it and well, and a few other things, but like as a developer harness that is my, that's my agentic harnesses using codex. And I actually was moving away from open AI for a lot of other different reasons leading up to me kind of moving towards codex as a platform to help me with some of the augmentation for development. And so for me, it was just like, Did it do what I needed it to do? I'm an optimal stopping problem solver. Like, like I'm done. I don't I don't need to keep going. I don't need to look at 300 other tools.

[00:33:27] Monica Marquez: Right.

[00:33:28] Eric Wright: And it becomes your whatever your first exposure and ChatGPT is like when people say AI, they almost always say ChatGPT like that it flows like the reason why we call these Kleenexes. It's actually Kleenex brand, But like, if it was whatever Kirkland signature or whatever it was gonna be, I'd call it a Kleenex. We've got Oh, is that your iPhone? Like we've, there's certain brands that became very centric to the ecosystem. So I just kind of think of it as like, this is a long way around towards the end. It's like, what are the tools that people are using? Whatever they get exposed to that gives them that aha moment first. And then they want to keep going. And so I'm stack agnostic, I'm product agnostic. It's really just like, what do you put in? expectation of what it would provide you? Did it provide that expectation? Did it meet or exceed that? Do you feel good about the situation? Can you repeat it? Sounds like you just adopted a product.

[00:34:40] Monica Marquez: Exactly, yes. No, and I appreciate that because it is a little bit of preference. ChatGPT will respond to you in a certain way and it's a little bit of you've got to kick the tires on whichever one on different ones but the one that works for you is the one that works for you. And it shouldn't be like one is better than the other or one size fits all, but you should probably give your people choice of which one of them is going to solve their issues a little bit more if it requires, you know, just reasoning or logic or any of those things. And so I thought, you know, I would ask you, and I love what you said. It's like what works for you and don't over engineer it.

[00:35:29] Eric Wright: People obviously, we always end up in this blazing battle of, you know, we want to get rid of vendor lock- in and this is always a big thing. We use it in marketing and sales all the time. Like you want to avoid vendor lock in. You're like, I think you're a vendor and I think most of the stuff I'm about to do with you to avoid vendor lock-in would lock me into a vendor. You're like, oh no, no, no, we're not locked in. We're not that kind of vendor. You're like, oh, I'm pretty sure you are. Like we use such a bizarre phrasing to describe it and it's, it is really just like at the core of first principles, does the effort I put in my expectation of result, does the expected value calculation line up with the result, that's it. I'm an expected value calculation kind of person. So everything I do, I'll be quick to abandon a stack or a product if it ceases to hit that expected value in practice. And some stuff becomes different in how you use it. The biggest thing for me is our AI tooling becomes a personification of the person who's using it. And people don't realize that. When you say, if you use Codex or Claude or whatever, or I use Codex or Claude, we will get very good results because we are different. I'm a musician, or hack musician, but I can tell you, I've been playing long enough that I could pick up any guitar with any amplifier and in three minutes, it will sound like every other guitar and every other amplifier I've played. Because I just, no matter what the system I'm working on, I can dial in my sound. And if I, you know, Eddie Van Halen, God rest his soul, if he came and picked up my guitar, it would sound like Eddie Van Halen's guitar because Eddie Van Halen is playing it. Cause there's a, it's a font, like Like we have a consciousness font that whatever we do, it's a set of characteristics that come out either visually, audibly, personality-wise. The tool doesn't define the person or the process. It's a collectivization of how it behaves in real life, how it behaves in the purest sort of sandbox of a system.

[00:38:00] Monica Marquez: Yeah. I love that you said that. I mean, it aligns to kind of the equation thatesides human creativity, plus your contextual wisdom and your knowledge that really is amplified by AI and it becomes your own authentic kind of output. I love that. It's exactly what we've been trying to tell people is that AI isn't going to replace you, but someone who leverages AI will replace you, but you have to learn how to take that artificial intelligence and make it your authentic intelligence and that's where I tell people that's where the authenticity is actually going to differentiate you from anybody else because we. We are running into the situation where some people are taking the outputs for what they are and we're starting to hear the, you know, oh, I'm getting a bunch of work flop for my team and for my people, because they're not layering on that level of creativity that only comes out if you apply it. The thing I would like to remind people is that,

[00:39:00] Eric Wright: You know when you use an AI tool and how it's like the thing that you do, it's not really good at, but the thing that you don't like to do, it's really good at that stuff. Oh, yeah, like if you remember, that's this is the opinion of result. And that's why I think there's always a lens. You know, it's like it's like saying something is beautiful or it's artistic or cinematic. You know, as a videographer, people say like, you know you're stuff is cinematic and like it's funny what makes it cinematic they're like I don't know it just like feels that way I'm like what does that mean you know and when we talk we joke among videographers all the time it's likeenegger just me usually means like good lighting you know like the way that the way that you've done a shot but there's no formula for like cinematic it's it's very much a feel yeah and all of these things like that, that consciousness font, that empathy that's human and real can never be systematized. It can be close enough to feel real, but when you test it and you put it under pressure, it acts differently. Human systems behave differently under the context of pressure. And that's also, we have, bizarrely, why AI is, you know, hurting its own adoption because of how aggressively it's creating pressure to replace human things. But meanwhile, if we were a little bit more gentle and guided with our onboarding, we may find that it's a lot less resistance comes when you're showing people, hey, just

[00:40:49] Monica Marquez: Right. And if it helps you, fantastic. Yeah. And that's what we're seeing is that more and more more and more people kind of test it out and have that aha moment of that like oh wow like I had no idea but part of it is getting past what you were sharing is the the fear-mongering some of the things that people heard early on that oh it hallucinates and it does this and so they tried had no idea. But part of it is getting past what you were sharing is the fear mongering, some of the things that people heard early on that, oh, it hallucinates and it does this. And so they tried the free version once and it didn't do what they wanted to do. So then free version once and it didn't do what they wanted to do. So then they just shunned it and put it away. And we're trying to get people to warm up to the idea that it has really evolved leaps and bounds in the last three years, that you're not even gonna recognize the tool if you try it again.

[00:41:34] Eric Wright: Yeah, and the cool thing is that what you and your team have done is really this idea, I'll say it's kind of like what Kahneman and Tversky did for behavioral economics. This is why I see more and more people that I'm really cheering success towards when you're understanding that heuristics from human behavior will affect how technology works with and even technology speaking with technology these LLMs like these they're based on neural networks which are modeled after We're not really that far along with understanding it. And we're systematizing it now. And then expecting that it's going to be like, we can totally control this. You're like, oh no, my good friend, that is not how it works. You know, as soon as you apply that pressure or take away the constraints, or like all of these things. And so understanding how it works, I think is the best way to kind of disarm that feeling of, oh, it's gonna just take over what I do. And look, it's a human thing. When someone says, hey, here's the annual company survey, you know that people are like, I'm gonna fill this are you in? What location you work in?" I'm like, this doesn't feel very anonymous at all. Like, there's only nine people in my department and I'm the only one in this location, so this is the least anonymous thing I could say.

[00:43:16] Monica Marquez: And so I will gauge my behavior to what I believe is being asked of me.

[00:43:23] Eric Wright: Who is it that said, oh sorry, this is Eli Goldratt. God, you think I remember. I'm such a big fan of the goal. It's idea like, show me how

[00:43:31] Monica Marquez: you measure me and I'll show you how I behave. Yes, exactly. Yeah. And the irony is though, is that I keep telling, we'll tell people, especially those who are extremely skeptical, especially some of these middle managers. And I was like, how many years have you probably heard yourself mutter, I wish I could clone myself? I can't be in two places at once. I wish I could just clone myself. You technically can now if you leverage the tools in the right way, your AI clone could be doing all of this administrative work that you don't want to be doing, the stuff that you hate. And you could be doing the things that you love because you could technically clone yourself if you would just embrace the AI and really understand how it works. And so that's where it's that little bit of this juxtaposition to get to people is like, you've been asking for this for I don't know how long, and now you're shunning it it, when it could really unlock you, and unlock potential of not just you, but your team and the organization.

[00:44:35] Eric Wright: Yeah, this is the hardest thing, too, I tell people of giving advice. I used to always sort of ask people, I'm like, what's the advice you would give 20-year-old you? And I'm like, I could give you what the advice would be, and I know what the answer be like, screw you, old man, I got this. Like, a 20-year-old me would not listen to current me. That's how I got here because I didn't listen to convention. I didn't follow the rules. So I have got no advice that I would take. I had to bump into a bunch of walls to get to be as jaded and as excited as I am about solving problems. But part of it, I think my approach to everything has always been understand the rules so you can get as close to them as possible. And barriers, like constraints are opportunity in my mind. And that's how I like to look at it is like set that constraint and then like you want to run right up against it like an F1 car taking a corner. Like I want millimeters of closeness to that thing. unfortunately, some people, the only way you find out the edge is by banging into it or going past it. But we have to do that. I think that culture of experimentation in a team allows for collective comfort in adopting new processes and styles and things. And I think that's what we have to give to more people and I mean, through your life, You've been a giver, you've taught, you know, literally you've taught people how to do things. And so I think that's what makes you so successful in my mind of this in what you and the FlipWork team are doing is that you're saying like, I've seen this class over and over. I can run the same syllabus against 100 classes and I can observe the behavior and then I can adjust as I go. And we need those teachers, the creators, the people that created the guidance and then stuck around and measure the results. I think that's, there's too many consultants out there who are like, if you're 18 and you're an enterprise consultant, I got bad news. You've never seen an enterprise unless you walked by it on the way to the Starbucks. Like there's, you don't have lived experience. You do, Monica. Like what, what about your early life made this so important to be a problem that you want to solve today?

[00:47:21] Monica Marquez: That's a great question. I think it is that lived experience. I think growing up in a really small West Texas town, oldest daughter of a traditional Mexican American family, I was a bit of a black sheep and I didn't know what I didn't know. And successfully was just becoming a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, because I lived in the West Texas Permian basin was a big oil country. so those were the successful people in our society. And then I went off to college and it was just this huge aha moment of, my God, there's so many other things that you can do, can be. And so I realized that we all have this limited frame of reference. And And if you don't have exposure or even proximity to other people that can help you understand another way to do things, you're going to kind of be limited. And so I was always thinking about, how do I democratize access to this knowledge that really will help people unlock their true potential and not be gated by this limited frame of reference wherever they came from? And so that's been the through line, I think, in all of my roles and everything that I always did was, how do I, democrat the only person who looked like me when I looked around and really didn't have proximity to the people who could kind of show me the way. And luckily I did find mentors and people, but I had to do a lot of, I had to skin my knees a lot, like fall down and pick myself back up. And it was like, how can I transfer the knowledge so the next person doesn't have to get as many, you know, doesn to scrape their knees as much. And so that's really been the core of, you know, who I am and what I try to do in every kind of organization that we've built is how do you democratize access? How do I make sure that the digital divide that AI could create for people doesn't get bigger? How do we make sure that we are at least helping handful of people start to realize how it can amplify them and really help them scale?

[00:49:44] Eric Wright: And the other thing that I want to focus people on more, you know, carefully, is that not every function can be replaced by this in the same way that not every function is something that somebody wants to do. You, you know, we often talk about you know where we grew the and and how it can affect things and what environment you grew up and no one is better or worse or you know we're different but there's no there's you know there is no system of like you grew up here and you did this thing as a job therefore you are classed you know it's separately or differently there are certain obviously economic classes that can move people around differently, but as far as like, your experience is not less than anybody else's because of where you live and lived a beautiful full life. I mean successful cobbler. I grew the largest shoe repair growth in the 90s. No reason why that needed to occur, but yet it was wildly successful. And I just took that and I said, whatever I do, I want to create success in that thing. And I want to create opportunity for others to find success in that thing. And there's a humility that I hope I've developed over of never being above or below, you know? And there's so many good people. There's that really talk about this idea of like leadership from behind your or the middle of the pack, whatever, however you want to depict it. But it really is this idea that like the New Zealand All Blacks, you know, in this famous sort of following of, of their culture and they said, winners sweep the sheds. You know when the game is over the guy who's the number one goal scorer stays around and sweeps the the shed sweeps the dressing room while the rest of them go to celebrate and that that ability to be a leader so that you can give to your community of employees, teammates, colleagues, whatever this is that I feel is like that's a purpose that that I would love to chase and teach people that everybody has that democratization. It's not commoditization, it's giving access to everybody so that they can take it if they want, but not treating them as lesser or more because they do.

[00:52:39] Monica Marquez: Yeah. No, I love that. That's beautiful. I couldn't have put that better, but it's exactly at the core of why we do what we do. Of just creating access.

[00:52:51] Eric Wright: And it's, it's beautiful to watch it when it happens, you know, and that's the like, you've, I, you probably have had a lot of these moments, you know, like, what, what did that first, like when you built this mission, and you said, Hey, I'm, we're building this team, this is what we want to do. What did that first aha moment, when you saw it work, like that must've felt pretty cool.

[00:53:21] Monica Marquez: Oh yeah. And I think we see a little bit of that every day with, you know, we do host, we keep the human in the loop. We host what we call these sprints and there'll be cohorts of individuals that will be leveraging Flippy and reinventing themselves and reinventing their workflows. And they, you know, have moments to reflect and they share in every one of these where they talk about how they would come in of thinking completely overwhelmed, like, I don't know if I'm ever gonna be able to get this AI thing or I'm gonna lose my job if I don't get this AI thing. And to see them come just like bright eyed of like, oh my God, like I built my own agent yesterday and to feel like it just changed their course, their trajectory of success is the most like, And that in of itself is like, I just need that one story and it'll carry me for the next decade. And so it is that really kind of special feeling of when you see it work and you feel like you're on to something, it makes you want to make it even more available to people. So now it's just like, how do we get on the rooftops and start screaming it out there saying, hey, if you want access to this, here's access to this. And so, you know, that's where we try to encourage of many people of like, hey, take our FlipFactor, the AI readiness score, get your AI readiness score, and then you have a benchmark and you can go somewhere from there. And at least you have a direction now. And hopefully this will help you on your journey to becoming more agentic. And that's ultimately what we're wanting to do is, like you said, just get people to try it out. No one is going to judge them if they don't, but they'll probably be pleasantly surprised on how much this is going to help them fast forward and move forward than standing in place.

[00:55:26] Eric Wright: And I think one of the best outcomes that we can get is building a profound respect for the things that we don't want to do.

[00:55:37] Monica Marquez: Yes. Oh, yeah. I think that the list of don't do instead of to do is more important than the to do list don't want to do. I think it really does help really unleash you in a way where you start focusing on the things that bring meaning and value.

[00:56:02] Eric Wright: Yeah. And as we have to like kind of build away those processes, I don't want this to be a easy button. Like I do like that people kind of got to get a little, they got to roll their sleeves up,

[00:56:15] Monica Marquez: they got to get a little dirty,

[00:56:16] Eric Wright: they got to give it a try. Because as they're doing that, they they're like, oh, you know, like I would tell people a time when we would do social events, in my teams, like I was always really big about crossing teams. Like don't just live in your little fish bowl

[00:56:31] Monica Marquez: in your core group.

[00:56:33] Eric Wright: You may sit at lunch every day, but it's like, really hang out and understand what other teams do and get that empathy, you know, for what they do that you don't want to do or that you're glad gets done that you don't have to think about.

[00:56:50] Monica Marquez: Yeah, exactly.

[00:56:52] Eric Wright: Building the respect for that, the rest of the machine, you know, and understanding their place in it, your place in it. I think that's, we need radical empathy more than anything else in the sort of radicalization of all the things that we're trying to do trying to land.

[00:57:09] Monica Marquez: Yeah, absolutely, no, and I love that. You have to appreciate all of those, you know, like you said, it's a very well-oiled machine and one little gasket or one little thing that you may overlook at one point is really what's gonna screw up the entire thing. So we have to appreciate every little piece for what it is.

[00:57:27] Eric Wright: Yeah, and it's, unfortunately we end up centering celebratory culture around sales, revenue, like, and we like, look, I'm a capitalist

[00:57:38] Monica Marquez: because my goal in life is,

[00:57:40] Eric Wright: my goal in life is to give away everything I have so that everyone can make use of it and to somehow be able to fund the ability to do so. Like, cause I can't, I have to do both.

[00:57:52] Monica Marquez: It's, it's a bit of a dichotomy,

[00:57:55] Eric Wright: but like I wanna just, I want everything to be available, but I know I've got a, I didn't come from money. So I gotta make it while I'm doing it. And there's, that's just what I want more people to be able to see is like, can we give back in these things? And then as you learn somebody else's thing and see it, you know, you move between communities. You listen more more about how those those worlds work when you escape your little bubble. because it's very easy, like I love user communities, whether it's healthcare or IT or business or whatever, just when you see them and they have this collectivization around like a thing that they love, you know, and it could be everything from like cycling to running to guitar to technology to, you know, knitting groups and reading groups. They are a collective group of people who share a love for a thing and they wanna learn together and explore together. And that's something that you, we can focus harder on that by using technology to get rid of some of the junk in the middle, you know?

[00:59:06] Monica Marquez: No, I love that. I love that idea of like, you know, we're all like a mosaic and all these little pieces, you know, form who I am and they all have their unique passion behind it, so.

[00:59:18] Eric Wright: Yeah, because somewhere out there, there's like a tax users group out there right now, You know, and they're in a Marriott hotel ballroom and somebody is making a joke about, then this guy filled out a T-28S. So you're like, what an idiot. You know, like, and there's people are like, like spitting out their breakfast laughing at some tax joke. Like, that's awesome.

[00:59:45] Monica Marquez: Good for you.

[00:59:46] Eric Wright: That's so cool. But people forget sometimes to get out of their space, you know, to get out of their view of the world, I do hope. Because I think that's just letting people see outside, get a periphery understanding of what is around them that can affect their world, and then maybe how can they affect it in a positive way?

[01:00:13] Monica Marquez: Yeah. No, I love that. And I think that's part of the goal with the AI adoption of helping normalize for people that they aren't the only ones who, we're finding that affinity in these cohorts of individuals who come into our program, they start to realize that they aren't the only ones who feel the overwhelm, or like you said, everybody has this sense of I'm so behind kind of thing but when they realize they're not the only ones and they get their benchmark and they look at the group score and they see that they're all kind of clustered in the same area, they start to feel like, okay, I'm okay. Like I can, you know, I can do this and I'm doing this with a group of like-minded people and it's all gonna be okay.

[01:00:55] Eric Wright: Yeah, hi, we need to create a new, I should create a new community and just call it whelmed community. I'm not overwhelmed, not under whelmed. I want like, we're just like, we're whelmed. We're like, we're riding the line. We got a little down, it works out in the wash. I'm even steven. because that's the funny thing. Like we, there is no such thing is whelm, you know, like there's no like normal, you know, this is, this is cool.

[01:01:26] Monica Marquez: It's gotta be awesome or it sucks.

[01:01:32] Eric Wright: We need to, we need to introduce whelm as a new scale. What's got seeing as people are ramping up more and more automation is hitting our world. But I think more and more opportunity is what do you see is your opportunity personally, as well as, you know, what's what's FlipWork looking to make 2026 the year of?

[01:02:01] Monica Marquez: I think we're looking, you know, if we think about 2026, you know, it's like we're seeing some of the writing on the wall where where we've been traditionally a B2B company helping lots of organizations move their people along. And we were starting to get a lot of inbound from individuals who are saying, hey, I see what you're doing for X company or a colleague who's working at this company. My company doesn't do that. Do you have something for me? And at first we were like, no, we don't really do B2C. And really at the, you know, it was in March that we were like, we're getting so much inbound. maybe we just do, we offer this up to democratize access to them. Cause ironically we were kind of creating this gate kind of thing that, you know, only if your organization was giving this to you. And so we've had such tremendous like feedback and, and you know, these people are super eager and they are in there and they're reinventing themselves. And it's some of these amazing stories that I just shared with you, where you're seeing the unlock for them that I think 2026 is, is where we're seriously going to think of, how do we democratize this and create access even more for the individual? So I think we've always been trying to put things out that were, I have a newsletter, a weekly newsletter that goes out, it's called Ay Ay Ay, AI, because in my, just a throw to my Latin culture, I remember going and explaining to my grandmother and my family the new company that we had launched last year. and I was like, it's all about AI. And I just remember my grandmother was like, I'm like, you know what, that's the perfect title for my newsletter. But it's a little bit of normalizing and helping you just in bite-sized chunks of how do you start incorporating AI into your life. And so that was kind of some of the work and knowledge and content we were putting out there. But I think for 2026, it's how do we reach the masses? How do we let those individual consumers who want to help themselves, who don't have have an organization giving this to them as a resource, how do we make it available

[01:04:33] Eric Wright: it's appreciated and part of why I was so glad when you reached out because I thought oh you know part of the problem we often end up to is like I just don't have a chance to dig around and get a chance to find amazing humans all the time to talk with and like oh it was it was a no-brainer you know when when we connected it was like oh yeah this is what we could start right now yeah like and we could do this for eight hours this is gonna be I'm looking forward to catching up again in future so for folks that do want to get connected and learn more about you, Monica, and what FlipWork is doing. Of course, we'll include links to the FlipWork AI site to get connected there into the the newsletter. What's the best way where they can find you and reach out to continue

[01:05:16] Monica Marquez: the conversation? Yeah. Well, I'm always on LinkedIn as well as Instagram and others, but LinkedIn is typically where I do. I try to respond to everybody who has questions, but it's just Monica Marquez on LinkedIn. It's technically the Monica Marquez. I think there was another. So Monica Marquez at LinkedIn and happy to connect with anyone. And like you said, you can easily go to my website, which is the Monica Marquez and join, subscribe to my newsletter and stay connected. I love feedback and we love to hear about what are the problems you want us to help you solve and we can try to put our heads together and help you.

[01:05:53] Eric Wright: And the beauty is that, you know, when you find people we're certainly not claiming to be experts, just that we've got a little bit more lived experience and we can impart some lessons. You know, there's muscle memory that we've created, and it's good to be able to do that. Also, just quickly to, your background was really interesting because people that really come from education and like move into that community and education early in life, I find they're the least likely to get trapped by the curse of knowledge, which is what we, as humans and as an, especially in the tech industry, get overwrought by. People like, the moment people figure it out, they're like, no one has this problem anymore. You're like, oh no, my friend, everybody's still got this problem. And no one, like you forgot what got you to this moment and you just assume that everyone else is just going to jump on board. And it's like, we've got to take everybody through the same steps that got you to the point where you're like, oh.

[01:06:59] Monica Marquez: Yes, we have to meet everyone where they're at. Yes, bring them along.

[01:07:04] Eric Wright: And you know, it's like when you, it's like when people ask me like, you've got advice for like new parents? I'm like, I've got four kids, I got lots of advice. My best advice, take every piece of advice, put it at the back here and keep it out of there. Forget about it. Like integrate it later, update your priors. I'm a Bayesian by nature, but don't suddenly like, oh, that's it. Like, you know, Dr. Spock told me to put my crying kid down for hours. So you're like, well, maybe Dr. Spock was not the person to ask about this stuff.

[01:07:34] Monica Marquez: Yeah.

[01:07:35] Eric Wright: Like, just like, slow down and appreciate that we can take this advice. But it is just that. Is it advisory to be included as you experience it yourself? But you've done, where you never assume anything going into a conversation. You don't assume that people don't need to be coached through these, and that's something that's beautiful to see, and I'm hoping, well, the success of what you and your team are doing is proving it out. So I hope that it continues to gain success and we get more people that are getting in there and go Flippy. I love it. Thank you so much.

[01:08:18] Monica Marquez: I appreciate it, Eric. And again, thank you for the opportunity and sharing your platform, because that in and of itself is very generous.

[01:08:27] Eric Wright: It's fun to do, it's a thank you so much. So Monica, it's been a blessing and for folks of course, do you make sure, you do genuinely check out what Monica is doing. I love the newsletter name as well. Those are my favorite things is, good wordplay is, there's a reason this stuff works, is kind of, it is funny, like if there's something so profoundly human about that experience. So thank you for that. All right.