Coaching Elite Leaders, AI Productivity and the Need for Tech Diplomacy | Matt Oess, Ep 26

“Being a founder, being a CEO, being a C-suite executive—it's a lonely place. You have to be transparent to your board, but you can't be fully open because if you were fully open, they'd probably throw you out on your ear because they'd realize you don't actually know what the heck you're doing. That's not just them, that's humans.”

“I'm not your therapist, I'm not your counselor. Those people are doctors and professionally trained, and they help you with some wound in the past so you can be healthy and productive in the present. A coach is somebody who takes somebody that's perfectly healthy in the present and accelerates their journey to a better future that they want.”

“I think the LLMs are really important in this fight for supremacy or to be better faster or cheaper or however they're going to build these things. I think all that's important for the underlying foundation of the innovation and obviously the chips are important in order to make that stuff real but I don't even think we've started to scratch the surface on the value that this stuff is going to create because the value is all in the software side of this thing and these multi-agent types of things and custom agents.”

“I literally haven't written code for 30 years. Back in the day I worked in this Advanced Development Lab for General Motors and we incubated in the early '90s some of the stuff that's in cars today. Then I said I turned in my engineering card and 30 years later I'm writing code again and it's only because of AI that I could possibly do this.”

On the future of SaaS platforms like Salesforce

“If you're Salesforce and you're trying to figure out how to create an agent for a salesperson to be more productive, are you going to be able to take every single one of your clients and train the AI model to fully understand their solution set, their context, all of their emails, like everything that you're going to need in order to let AI do the intelligent things that you want it to do? I don't know if they're going to be able to do that and I don't know if they're motivated to do that because if they do that, can they still charge $1,500 a year or $700 a year or do they get relegated to being the database?”