I Just Quit My Job to Build GRAIL - A Reverse Episode Where I Become The Guest

\[00:00:00\] **Johan:** Welcome. I just quit my job and not really to take another job. Rather, I'm betting everything on a play that I've witnessed across the 15 years that I've had within strategy execution, the two and a half years of me experimenting with my own life as an augmented executive, and across the hundreds by this point, episodes that I've had on this podcast to explain what's going on.

I'm starting a company called Grail and to explore if this is a brilliant idea or a completely crazy idea, I'm inviting Hendrik Giles Cook, who's an ex guest and extreme inspiration in the field of AI to do a reverse episode. So I will be the guest and we welcome

Hendrik as the host.

Welcome.

\[00:00:40\] **Henrik:** Thank you very much, Yuan, and welcome to the Think Room podcast. This is where we slow down to think faster, and today we're gonna dig deeper into the world of future work, leadership tech. Specifically based on where you are in in your world? Yeah. What I bring into this perspective is my two decades of leading strategy and transformation to and for the Fortune 500 companies, either as management consultant or an executive.

Mm. And lately, these two years of really fast evolution in the AI space, I've also kind of grown my agents, my agentic work exactly like you.

\[00:01:23\] **Johan:** Yeah. And it's been fantastic having, honestly, you, during these years to kind of. Bounce ideas off of, we've had so much in common in terms of what we're trying to optimize for and so forth.

\[00:01:34\] **Henrik:** Yeah. So I'm super excited to be here again. Mm. Um, and I think this episode is for every CEO who wonders why their investments, pilots initiatives really haven't moved the needle yet. Exactly. So many companies are stuck and they can't really figure this situation out and they are in a analysis paralysis mode, right?

Mm-hmm.

So I think let's just dive into that exact problem and challenge Yes. Of being stuck as A-C-E-O-C-I-O-C-T-O-C-P-O, whatever you mentioned, because I have deep respect for their situations today.

\[00:02:17\] **Johan:** Yeah. I do as well. And, and maybe I, lemme tell my story. Mm-hmm. How come I ended up here in this place where I'm looking to start this business?

Yeah.

Everything kind of changed for me back in December of 22. So I thought I had my life pretty much figured out. So I was running a, a, uh, I was a management consultant for, for a decade, uh, specializing in strategy execution. We had pivoted that company into a software company and I was, uh, a senior executive running the engineering teams.

Right.

\[00:02:50\] **Henrik:** Big ambition, big ambitions, big wills.

\[00:02:53\] **Johan:** Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, I had 70% of our staff. Yeah. Like, it was, uh, I thought I was set and we were on the path to, you know, exit and all of that. Yeah. Um, and then the first LMS came out. Mm-hmm. And I'm a sucker for kind of pattern recognition. Yeah. And I started to think second order consequences of what will this technology probably enable.

Yeah. And I got two very conflicting feelings right off, off the top of my head. One was excitement. I, I love technology. I, I've been building computers since I was like eight years old. Yeah. I love technology. Uh, so I was really excited to start thinking about what could this fundamentally enable humans to do to excel.

But I also got really scared.

\[00:03:40\] **Henrik:** Yeah, of course.

\[00:03:41\] **Johan:** Yeah. Yeah. Like if I just roll it out, if we assume that this technology would kind of be what it is today Yeah. How am I even relevant as a senior executive if

I stay in the status quo?

\[00:03:53\] **Henrik:** Yeah, exactly. You know, drawing upon all of these surveys, reports coming out that junior hires have been freeze frozen.

\[00:04:00\] **Johan:** Yeah. And just extrapolate that forward. Right. It's coming for the middle managers and the senior managers as well. Yeah. Yeah.

\[00:04:06\] **Henrik:** Get that feeling. Yeah.

\[00:04:07\] **Johan:** Yeah. Exactly. So I made a choice. Mm-hmm. At that time, it wasn't slowly, it wasn't carefully, it was all in mm-hmm. In re-engineering my role. Right. Yeah. So, as I said, I, I was the chief, uh, product officer.

Mm. Um, I. I've always loved working. So I was working 120, 130, 140% doing that. Yeah. Pretty intensely. Over a six month period, I started building out what then became what we today talk about as agents, but specialized like working LLM specialists around my role to start to augment stuff.

\[00:04:45\] **Henrik:** Right. Uh, before moving on to that, I think it's, um, it's a good place to, um, to spend some, some minutes on actually.

Yeah. 'cause for the listeners of the pod, uh, many of them CEOs, um, they might wonder like, what do you mean with playing around?

\[00:05:04\] **Johan:** Yes. So there's this concept called a super worker.

Yeah.

Uh, I think it's an excellent mental model for what we're talking about. So in like. At the core of, of everything that you're trying to optimize for, you're trying to optimize for human performance.

Hmm. And you break a roll down into the individual tasks and you start visualizing, I have, um, hypothetical unlimited amount of, of support functions around me doing different things. These are. Then LLM agents mm-hmm. Specialized with like, this, this is your task. And an example might be in, in a scenario, sometimes I need legal advice.

Uh, can I sign this contract or, or compliance advice, or I need a, a strategy consultant, or I need somebody to, to, uh, summarize this management team meeting for me.

\[00:05:54\] **Henrik:** So, so just to clarify again, because um, I have respect for the listeners. Yeah. Um, uh, not everyone or as conversant in ai Mm. Uh, as you are, like an LLM.

Yeah. So what we're talking about is, uh, chatty Claude Claude and on Gemini from Philanthropic Gemini. Yeah. And probably the likes of, uh, notebook lm. Yeah. Um, from, um, from, uh, Google. Um, just to clarify for the listeners what it is, um, because you know, they are different, but they are failing the same function.

\[00:06:25\] **Johan:** Yeah. So you have the multiple different models that have their strength and weaknesses. Within a model you train like a specialist. Yeah. That has a specific role that whenever you speak to it, it knows that I'm the legal experts. Yeah. I don't, uh, answer advice on how you cook, but I, I'm really good at the legal stuff.

Right, right. So the idea of the super worker is that you deconstruct what does take my time today. Right. Where could I actually be better if I had better advice given to me? Yeah. And you start building out kinda a team of agents around you. So the core idea, at least for me is that when you buy an hour from U one, you actually get 20 hours as a consequence of I have all of, all of this big team around me.

Right. So that's what I started doing during that first six months. Mm-hmm. So I went from a role that encompassed more than full-time down to, it honestly took me like maybe 50%.

\[00:07:22\] **Henrik:** 50% of your original work. Uh. Disappeared Because of your agents Yes. And your agentic workflow.

\[00:07:30\] **Johan:** Exactly. And what's interesting, there's a moral argument there.

Like, what should I do in front of my employer with the time that I, I got free. Sure. But the interesting thing to me was that with that 50% of the time that I spent mm-hmm. I created better quality as well. Mm-hmm. So it's not just a, a speed or efficiency argument. It's also I can do fundamentally better things.

\[00:07:51\] **Henrik:** Right. So quality in sense of, uh, being more creative or,

\[00:07:56\] **Johan:** so an example of things that used to take me. A tremendous amount of time is keeping up with the feature releases of our competitors. Okay? So one of the agents was just doing that all of the time and every week served me up like, here's the release from that competitor, here's the release from that competitor.

And that fed into a, a UX designer agent that looked for, okay, how are they solving this problem that we probably are thinking about as well? Get it. So imagine Justin. Sheer volume of hours of me scanning through, has anybody done something cool? And then okay, how did they solve it? So all of that work just enabled me to get, well, here's the brief sir.

\[00:08:32\] **Henrik:** Right? So, um, uh, unpacking that a bit, it's easy to see the parallel. Yeah. So independent on which kind of company, uh, you work for. You know, your example, is it based, right? Yeah. Programming new releases, new features from programs. Yeah. Uh, I think the parallel is easy as well, uh, to my industry. For example, in the workplace industry or corporate real estate industry, it's also a game of keeping up with your competitors.

Yeah. But it's difficult to know because you need to read their press releases, their annual reports, their quarterly reports, uh, be there out in fair conferences and be listening in what happens. Exactly. So what you're saying right now is that you can have that on a daily, weekly basis. Automated, yeah.

Giving you input to become more creative on building the next thing. Exactly right.

\[00:09:21\] **Johan:** Exactly. So what ended up happening for me was that I had this big realization like, wow, world is really changing quite quickly. Uh, did a pivot and, and kind of lived at the positive experience, not just in the amount of time that I got freed up, but also the quality of work that I could produce.

All of a sudden that ended up for me becoming, first off, what, what I did with the free time, I wrote the book. I had worked almost 15 years, 10, 15 years on strategy execution. So I wrote the execution revolution and then I started the podcast. Um, and as I kind of continued to dive into this world of what will actually happen to.

Companies to society, to the future of work in the context of ai, but also having so much weight in kind of the world of strategy, understanding how does this impact business models or ways of serving customers and so forth. I started to realize that there are a. I mean, this is so new that there are very few experts that understand kind of both worlds.

Yeah. So you have the guys and girls that understand tech and we see, we saw that a lot when digitalization came. Mm-hmm. You delegate this project to, to the tech people. Right. We don't really get the business innovation that really moves the needle because they're more exploring it from what could we do rather than what should we do?

Right.

\[00:10:47\] **Henrik:** So what you did was that you actually lived that experience. You freed up time, you ca became better and more creative. Yeah. Which created room for you to write a, a book that actually got prize. It was you, your first book. Yeah. And you started a podcast. You still had the same amount of hours.

\[00:11:04\] **Johan:** Yeah, absolutely.

\[00:11:05\] **Henrik:** Right. Absolutely. It's a big re revelation. Yeah, it's fantastic. Probably a growth journey. Yeah, it is. Yeah. That it doesn't happen every day. No,

\[00:11:13\] **Johan:** no. It's, I've been, uh, fortunate, uh, it's been two or three of the most interesting years that I've ever had professionally.

\[00:11:21\] **Henrik:** So that revelation then, um, you know, you, you built probably quite early on the idea for, for Grail Yeah.

Your company Yeah. Alongside these things happening.

\[00:11:32\] **Johan:** Yeah. But it also grew, so I had this self lived experience that the impact is fundamental, but what, what's happening in, in the world, everybody seems to be kind of failing slowly in desperation mode with ai, we get these big MIT reports on 95% of AI pilots are failing.

And, and I had so many discussions with our clients on, uh, on the CEO and management team level mm-hmm. And realized that we don't really know how to, to kind of get the best out of this technology or, or how to approach it. And, and I spent some time actually speaking on the podcast and around the podcast with some of the most senior people at the typical advisors, right?

Mm-hmm. The McKinseys or or whatever you might have. And yeah, also saw that. They're kind of scrambling as well. They're, they're huge companies that are kind of in the middle of this, and it's an existential crisis on what's gonna happen with advisory services and professional services. Yeah, it's interesting.

Yeah, so, so there is a vacuum on the market to kind of fill this type of strategy consulting. Um, and to me, I want to continue working towards the kind of mid market that I've been working towards. I've, I've always enjoyed that size of company, a few hundred employees up to a few thousand. It's small enough where, where you can really drive a substantial transformation quite quickly.

It's also big enough to, to have an impact in the market. Right. Um, but they weren't getting good advice to, to my experience or, or really any advice at all.

\[00:13:03\] **Henrik:** You found a market, the mid-market companies. That are underserved in a way. Mm. They have fantastic potential.

Maybe they are in the cloud already. Mm. They haven't started moving on the AI topic.

\[00:13:18\] **Johan:** Yeah, exactly.

\[00:13:20\] **Henrik:** Right. Interesting. And I, I think specifically interesting for, for all the listeners of the pod, uh, to make that distinction because, um, as well as I see the experiences from Fortune 500 companies being stuck and the professional services companies being stuck because their business model is being transformed completely.

And they need to transform faster than the clients that they are serving. Yeah. They need to in order to serve their clients. So naturally, if you have a look in the mid-market size of companies, it's, you can do it faster.

\[00:13:56\] **Johan:** Yeah, exactly. And it's been fascinating to kind of design. The type of of services that would suit this new environment, being AI enabled from the, from the get go.

Mm-hmm. But before we go there, there's a couple of things that I think we should kind of establish as mental models. We've talked about the super worker. Mm-hmm. The second one is a framework that I call the triple threat.

\[00:14:24\] **Henrik:** The triple threat, yeah. Mm-hmm.

\[00:14:27\] **Johan:** So we used to be able to say whenever we designed, uh, service or product offerings mm-hmm.

That there's a triangle of competing capabilities, let's call them. Right. So you have speed, you have cost, and you have quality. Yeah. And the more you want out of something, the more you have to compromise on something else. Mm-hmm. So you could always have this argument that, ah, this competitor we lost against them.

They have a higher quality offer, but they also have a higher price. Right. Yeah. So it's fine. We're more for the, the lower price clients. Yeah. What's new with AI is. That you can be outcompeted on all three factors simultaneously, and that's so dangerous for companies.

So just let's roll this out.

One of the things that we actually do see in terms of implementation targets directly the cost side.

Mm-hmm. So we've already seen, and this doesn't necessarily even have to be AI automations, but we've seen, for example, how we make efficiency plays in customer success departments or the, the kind of customer acquisition department, something like that. We can have a chat bot in the bottom right hand corner of your website and instead of having 10 customer service people that are answering, I've forgot my password, or whatever it is, you have a bot that answers it.

Right? And maybe you have 20% of the time the bot can't answer and you get to a human. So you can decrease cost by. Firing eight out of the 10 customer service people, right? Mm-hmm. So that's one thing. It's becoming increasingly easy to do those types of automation, so you'll see more and more of them coming along.

\[00:16:01\] **Henrik:** So like a typical CFO business case?

\[00:16:04\] **Johan:** Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. For CFO. Yeah. Perfect. For CFO. They love it. And hence the reason why Intercom has grown so much, right? Yeah. It's a, it's a perfect business case. Yeah. Second one is speed. And it's a little bit impacted by cost because if you can run it in automation, like the, the single process can run quicker, like the, the time to resolution of a customer query, for example.

But speed is also interesting when it comes to innovation cycles. How fast can we bring products to market? Mm-hmm. And we see a lot around, uh, kind of vibe coding entering into the enterprise space now, which is like, how fast can you get the new functionality in a source business out? Or how fast can you do an r and d cycle in, in a, in a product development

department?

\[00:16:47\] **Henrik:** Right,

right. So you're thinking, uh, the likes of, uh, lovable, for example.

Exactly. Or miro. Um, yeah. Um, where you actually can brainstorm ideas. Yeah. Consensus mode can go from idea to, uh, sketch to product, to mockup in, in just dates. Yeah.

\[00:17:06\] **Johan:** And to market,

which is really interesting as well. And I don't think that you'd necessarily.

I have to think about it, that you're a software company to do this. It, it goes to any service offering. Like you can have a new website up with, with some new fancy self-diagnosis tools up over a weekend, right? Everything goes so much quicker. And the most interesting argument, which is quality. I think whenever we think about ai, the fundamental question is that we shouldn't just be able to replicate an existing process faster.

We have the opportunity to make it exceptional,

\[00:17:39\] **Henrik:** right?

\[00:17:40\] **Johan:** Yeah. The triple threat is that you can wake up tomorrow, you can have an competitor who's in kind of ghost mode, has started to develop a lot of ai, both working processes internally and processes externally. We wake up where your main competitor is.

All of a sudden they have a higher quality. That they increase the speed of which they can develop it and they sell it to a lower price. That's a massive competitive environment

\[00:18:11\] **Henrik:** that, that sink in for a while. Yeah, exactly. That can be scary and equally a fantastic opportunity. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. So I'm, so, I'm, I'm getting there mentally now, understanding the idea probably of.

Grail Yeah. And where you are heading.

\[00:18:32\] **Johan:** Yes. So that type of innovation to me is, it excites me tremendously, especially where we do the innovation from the point of view that we don't just automate stuff, like we slap AI onto some existing process. Mm-hmm. But we fundamentally try to augment what's humanly possible.

Mm-hmm. So I had this super interesting, a little bit of a story time, but I had this super interesting conversation, uh, with a friend of mine who's success and marketing director for, for quite a large company. He has a hundred plus, uh, fts under him. Mm-hmm. And they were discussing their AI strategy and after.

Uh, a week or two of of discussions, they, they ended up with, like, we have two paths that we can take. We can take an automation path, which fundamentally bets on, we want as little human to human contact as possible. Mm-hmm. So our whole kind of top funnel content and how we, um, kind of convert leads into prospects and all of that is, is very automated.

You can buy directly from the website and you have an automated onboarding package, and if you have a problem, you go to the chatbot down in the right hand corner. But fundamentally, a human never meets a human or. The bet on will there in an increasingly AI automated world actually be a price premium on humans?

Mm-hmm. Which I think is really interesting. So what if we, instead of, of going that path, we say that no, we actually want to maximize for our salespeople, FaceTime with our clients. Right. So the idea is how can we make our salespeople go from maybe spending 30, 40% of their time in front of customers

Yeah.

To spending 90, 95% of work, uh, of their time in front of customers.

\[00:20:13\] **Henrik:** Wow.

\[00:20:14\] **Johan:** And having increasingly qualitative Yeah. Uh, discussions because they have better prep work going in all of it AI automated, so they know exactly who you are mm-hmm. And exactly what's on top of your mind and all of the LinkedIn posts that you've posted last half year, and maybe a psychological profile and Yeah.

What's happening in your industry.

And all of that goes into the prep work automated. Yeah. So when we have a face-to-face discussion, it feels like I know you. Yeah.

Right. And then all of the follow up in terms of emails and contracts and all of that is automated. So to maximize the face time that we get to spend with customers.

So that's, to me, is, is an example though. Automate or augment. Right? And I'm really excited about the augment path. That's the type of business that I wanna do. How can we fundamentally, in delightfully and surprising new ways do business with customers that just feels like, wow, that was a good experience.

\[00:21:04\] **Henrik:** Right? So, um, my stomach feeling, uh, says to me that most CXOs out there, they, they see ai. From an automation perspective.

\[00:21:18\] **Johan:** Yeah, I think that's true.

\[00:21:19\] **Henrik:** Like dialogues, uh, with leaders or potentially investors or in private equity, for example, where you can discuss a company, uh, okay, what kind of process can we automate with ai?

\[00:21:32\] **Johan:** Exactly.

\[00:21:33\] **Henrik:** That's the natural way of looking at it. Mm. Or take, uh, recruitment for example. Um, specs for recruiting for role can be written by ai. Yeah. Uh, the respondent answers with an AI cv and there is a bot analyzing the CV that comes in. Mm. And the selection process is pretty much automated. Yeah. I think that's a good, um, automation example of what happens.

But I don't think most CXOs actually know what augmentation means and what kind of potential there is in, in augmentations or. The risks connected to not understanding what augmentation is.

\[00:22:18\] **Johan:** No. And, and again, coming back to almost the top of this episode, in terms of pattern recognition. So what I did quite intensely was to kind of roll out over time what would happen if you only chose to automation path.

Mm. So part of the problem is that it looks really good on paper because you can measure it in the short term and you can provide direct cost savings. Right. We fire those three

\[00:22:41\] **Henrik:** people. Easy business case. Yeah.

\[00:22:42\] **Johan:** It's super easy. Business case. Mm. The problem comes in in second order Consequences. So one of the first things that I think many companies will start to realize is that as we decrease kind of the cost of goods sold, we'll be able to decrease our prices or in the short term, increase our margins.

But this is gonna be expected from, from everybody. Yeah. So it's just a 12 month window perhaps, of you having slightly higher margins or slightly lower prices. But fundamentally, we're gonna converge towards a new price floor in, in that market. Mm-hmm. And like what's the sustainable competitive advantage that you got?

Yeah. Yeah. So, so that's one thing. The second thing is a, hypothetically, a little bit more philosophical, but if we look at what's happening in, you mentioned new hires. Yeah. For example. So the data seems to su to suggest that we're down 40%. On new hires, if you just roll it out, there's no succession in this company.

So it's not necessarily the best way of building a company. And that's actually one of the things that I realized with this podcast, uh, because I got to speak to, to a lot of really interesting founders and CEOs and the ones that I felt were like, wow, those are important figures in their industries.

Mm-hmm. Those are people that I actually want to follow.

\[00:23:58\] **Henrik:** Yeah.

\[00:23:59\] **Johan:** One of the surprising things that they had in common was that on top of their agenda was their ability to, to attract the right type of entry level hires.

\[00:24:06\] **Henrik:** Yeah.

\[00:24:07\] **Johan:** They think long term. Mm-hmm. The automation path is a short term game. Right. And the way that I wanna structure the business that I do in Grail Yeah.

Is you probably need to do the short term things in order to finance the transformation that you actually, where you actually see that you can build an unfair advantage in your industry. Yeah. So it's gonna be. At least this is the, the, the first level of packaging that we'll come out to market with.

First off, we need to upscale the specifically management team, and it's probably a good idea to, to talk about why that is, but that's the starting phase. But it's all about really understanding and seeing the opportunities that are actually ahead of you

\[00:24:51\] **Henrik:** What it means with starting with the management team is that a lot of the time this far leadership teams have delegated aI transformation to potentially the, uh, the IT department. Yeah, that's an IT project. Um, or the AI task force to handle it.

Yeah. Um, and then it stops, right? Because they aren't on board, on the management team.

\[00:25:13\] **Johan:** No. Maybe let's elaborate here because it's such an interesting point. So we see a lot of repeating behaviors from what we saw in, in the kind of digitalization waves of, of, uh, initiatives. Fundamentally, management teams don't really, or sometimes they fail to understand how cross-functional this type of transformation needs to be in order to unlock the capabilities within it.

Yeah. So they see it as a technical project and they delegate it. I think that's the preference for, for,

\[00:25:44\] **Henrik:** so it's like they're seeing them. The vertical of it, but not the horizontal of it.

\[00:25:49\] **Johan:** Exactly. Yeah. So in a simple, uh, example perhaps, so say that you're, you're a physical bookstore. Yeah. And, and you're gonna digitalize, so you come up with that.

We need a website in the year 2004, not realizing that the real potential in digitalization of a bookstore is Amazon, but that was built around a lot of other processes. How do we handle distribution differently? How do we, uh, handle checkout and online payments differently? How do we, like, we had to invent the rating system to get people to get, uh, comfortable not discussing with the, the semi librarian in the bookstore.

Right? Yeah. So there's a lot of like, kind of semi attached innovation that needs to happen. Mm-hmm. That most of these are not gonna be technical solutions or at least derived from an engineering brain. It needs to be business brains and, and the customer facing brains that, that are seeing these issues.

It's fundamentally similar here in the AI race, that if you only see the technology, what can we do with the technology? You're quite it. Quickly end up with some type of, well, we need a chatbot and call it good. Yeah, but that's not the potential of the technology.

\[00:26:52\] **Henrik:** No. Right?

\[00:26:53\] **Johan:** No. So in order to even have this discussion in terms of how do we, uh, handle business process innovation or, or business model innovation, and what could we do that would really delight our customers, you need a C-suite that's a little bit more fluent in understanding the opportunities at hand.

\[00:27:12\] **Henrik:** So in simple words, it's not about applying the technology to existing processes.

\[00:27:19\] **Johan:** It can be right, but it doesn't stop there,

\[00:27:21\] **Henrik:** right? Yeah.

\[00:27:22\] **Johan:** So the way that. I think this type of service should be structured is that you must start with a, a package that Upskills to C-Suite and in parallel delivers kind of an opportunity map.

Like we go in with our expertise and, and say, here are your kind of low hanging fruit, uh, AI place that you should do. You could do it yourself or you can continue with the second package, which is about making the CFO happy to spend money on the bigger transformation.

\[00:27:55\] **Henrik:** A ticket to ride.

\[00:27:55\] **Johan:** Ticket to ride.

Yes, exactly. Yeah. So a lot of any change is really dependent on the engagement from the, the organization and from the people funding the transformation. Mm. So getting those easy wins in that are making people's jobs easier, more delightful, less dreary, get rid of a lot of sucky administration that we do and stuff like that.

Yeah. But easy wins that are, are easily calculated into a clear return investment. Mm-hmm. Most of these are going to be for, for people that are kind of good at AI, are not gonna be very difficult to achieve. You can achieve it over a few months, maybe three months, and, and you can do quite a lot of cool stuff.

Mm-hmm. That will ultimately fuel the really valuable transformation. Mm-hmm. So it's like the core idea here is to create like a self-funding, uh, transformation program, uh, on ai. So the second stage funds the third stage, and that's all about augmentation and getting to a position where you have an unfair advantage across quality, speed, and costs on your competitive market.

\[00:29:01\] **Henrik:** Yeah. Um, so in my head when I hear this packaging, uh, where would. You know, you never know where these really groundbreaking new ideas come from. No. Uh, which person that may come up with a new idea. If that person sits anywhere in the organization, you don't know where. But the golden idea then probably comes in step three most of the time.

Right.

\[00:29:30\] **Johan:** I completely agree, uh, with the idea of like, the innovation is probably a culture that you also need to build capability to handle in Exactly.

Internally, which is so interesting. Yeah. Like where do you start this type of transformation. Yeah. Because I think there's an argument to start at both extremes, right? Mm-hmm. You have the one extreme, which is the management team. We've discussed it a little bit on why that's needed, but you also wanna start at the other extreme.

Mm-hmm. Uh, it's about culture of, of making cool things with ai, right? Yeah. And innovation. Uh. What's your experience? I, I'd be interested to, 'cause you've been equally kind of drenched in this world as well. Where do you feel it makes most sense starting this type of transformation?

\[00:30:11\] **Henrik:** So I think there is merit in gradually introducing the TE technology to remove the fear, to remove the skepticism, to have a management team actively and visibly. Working.

Yeah.

Working with different AI tools, um, experimenting with it to make the organization see that this is something we use. Yeah.

This is something we can get help of when it comes to efficiency or created creativity. Yeah. Um, equally important I think, is, I do think what you're saying with your three step rocket here with, with Grail is that you also gradually introduce and make people own. Their own operating system. Yeah. Of AI agent work.

Mm. Because it's not kind of delivering a down a, a done and ready product in the hands of a person. Now you've got this fantastic tech run with it. No, it's not. Not gonna work. Mm. They need to be gradually introduced, feel ownership. And also probably think it's fun.

\[00:31:24\] **Johan:** Yeah. I think the fun element is, is a huge one.

Uh, as with any transformation that's successful, I mean, we ultimately want to, to see in a positive light the future that we're trying to build towards. Yeah. And if it's only like what's the engagement that you can really achieve with a cost saving program? Yeah. Uh, I think it's fundamentally the same question here.

Yeah.

\[00:31:44\] **Henrik:** Yeah. And, and at the same time, you know, keeping that ticket to ride from the CFO business case. Yeah. Uh, so difficulty of getting that business case is probably getting more and more difficult, you know, if you compare to step one, step two, step step three. Yeah. Step one about automation. We are all used to as former consultants, like how do you build a business case?

You have the baseline, you have the two B situation. What are we going to do to achieve that?

\[00:32:14\] **Johan:** Yeah,

\[00:32:14\] **Henrik:** that's easy, number one. Number two. Becomes a bit more complex.

\[00:32:20\] **Johan:** It does. And, and I had a super interesting conversation with Eric Ols on it's the next week's episode.

\[00:32:26\] **Henrik:** Who is that?

\[00:32:27\] **Johan:** So, so he is, uh, one of the absolute biggest brains on the planet when it comes to technologies, uh, impact on productivity, and then kind of, uh, gross domestic product.

Mm-hmm. And, and how technology actually shapes

\[00:32:42\] **Henrik:** society.

Yes. I, I met him a few, uh, months ago as well. He's a professor at Stanford.

\[00:32:48\] **Johan:** He's a professor at Stanford. Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Um. And made some of the kind of foundational work that probably a lot of the audience has read about. Mm-hmm. And, and, but one of his mental model is what he calls the J curve, and he explores what happens when, when groundbreaking and transformative technology comes into society.

How long does it take until we actually see. Benefit of it. Mm-hmm. So as he explained it to me, when, uh, they were looking at what was the impact of electricity for productivity, for example, it actually took 30 years, 20, 30 years until we actually saw the big impact mm-hmm. Of electricity. So what you usually do is what we talked about here, you try to slap the new technology onto a legacy process.

So what that meant, like in, uh, in the, uh, industrial age is that you used to have a big steam or coal powered power plant in the middle of the factory. And from there everything else kind of was distributed. When we actually started getting the benefits of electricity was when we decentralized electricity in the industrial environments.

Yeah. So you had access to power tools at your working station, for example. Mm-hmm. But that was a lot of re-engineering processes in terms of how is the factory laid out? How, how do we train differently? How do we lead differently? And that takes time. As he said it, every time we go through one of these transformation, it goes quicker and quicker.

Both because of, of management. There's more of a science nowadays. Yep. You, you're trained to optimize and see patterns and so forth. Mm-hmm. But also there are more kind of adjacent technologies already available. Mm-hmm. So if you look at, again, we took the Amazon example before. One of the things why it took some time was because we had to invent online payments.

Yeah. So you couldn't really do Amazon back in 99 because we didn't have the infrastructure for it. Right. But what's interesting, at least to me now with AI, is the technology, the technology is already so much more advanced than we're currently implementing. So there's no bottleneck in the technology.

\[00:34:45\] **Henrik:** Wow.

Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Uh, so there is no bottleneck. So actually the technology is ahead of us. Yes.

\[00:34:51\] **Johan:** Yes. Which means, again, coming back to the triple threat, this is real. You can have a competitor tomorrow that where you wake up to, and they are fundamentally faster, cheaper, and have a higher quality of service.

\[00:35:03\] **Henrik:** So they just need to figure it out.

\[00:35:05\] **Johan:** Yeah.

\[00:35:06\] **Henrik:** So I wanna shift gears a bit here. Um, you are betting on the fact that augmentation actually is a bigger step than automation.

\[00:35:18\] **Johan:** Yeah. And it has a much higher potential top value to it.

\[00:35:22\] **Henrik:** Top value.

Yeah. So, applying that to your idea with Grail, um, how are you gonna take the steps to, to grow the business?

\[00:35:30\] **Johan:** Super interesting. So one of the, um, I know that you asked me this question also a few weeks back, but one of the questions that I've actually gotten from the people that I talked to this idea about is.

Does it fundamentally make sense to start an advisory business in late 25? Mm-hmm. Where you have all of the, what's gonna happen to the advisory model as intelligence kind of converge towards free?

\[00:35:53\] **Henrik:** Exactly.

Yeah. Um, will it become free? Yeah. I think it's a bit of a naive question. Yeah.

\[00:35:58\] **Johan:** But, uh, like, uh, intellectually stimulating question at least.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Um, and as I did with myself, it was kind of the same pattern of, of looking at this business problem. You deconstruct the role of a consultant into the component parts and look at what would benefit from automation. Could we do with the mental model of, I had unlimited support staff around the consultant.

Mm-hmm. Uh, doing different things and what fundamentally is probably a human to human experience. What's the essence of what we want to deliver as a human? Yeah. So what I want to do is, like, one of the things that might surprise a lot of people is that the first hires of Grail won't probably be more consultants, which would be the natural play.

When you start a consultancy, you hire another consultant and you hire another, the third one when you grow and so forth.

\[00:36:51\] **Henrik:** So you're talking like hire and fire, digital members.

\[00:36:55\] **Johan:** Uh, probably a lot of hiring of of, of extra agents. That's part of it. Yeah. But the core part of it is breaking down these components and developing re reusable assets across all of the delivery models that we have. Hmm. So this is true for like, how do we go to market? A typical consultancy model is built around outbound sales calls,

\[00:37:18\] **Henrik:** outbound sales. Yeah. Uh, free business development workshops.

\[00:37:22\] **Johan:** Yeah, exactly.

Mm-hmm. Um, so the podcast is part of it. How, and I've been investing in the podcasts for a year and a half by this point, uh, in terms of trying to generate more inbound leads by actually providing value on, on what should you think about as a CEO and, and developing that thought leader position in the market.

\[00:37:41\] **Henrik:** So what you're saying is that, uh, a podcast can be a growth engine?

\[00:37:46\] **Johan:** Yeah. Uh, it's a part of the go-to-market package.

Absolutely.

\[00:37:49\] **Henrik:** So it's more like, uh, media first. Yeah. Business development generating leads and making deals come to you.

\[00:37:58\] **Johan:** Yes.

And I think there are a few really interesting examples.

So exactly this. If you look at Steven Barlett, for example, with a diary, CEO, that's exactly his play. It's, it's a media company generating a bunch of business on the backside of it. Yeah. And I think that's really interesting. It also enables me, like, one of the problems with being a consultant is that you're the absolute.

Or you're at least expected to be the absolute expert within your field, but how do you maintain your own ability to be an expert? Well, for me at least, it's a combination of reading a lot, but also spending a lot of time with the top level brains on the planet. Yeah. So a, a podcast gives me access to that, right?

Mm-hmm. And that access and, and that insight is done, um, converted in into the client work that I do. Yeah. Yeah. Second to that is that if you look at the typical work, once you've landed a customer, for example, for a consultant, it typically starts with that. We need to understand your baseline. So we go in and we do a lot of interviews.

\[00:38:54\] **Henrik:** The classic model.

\[00:38:55\] **Johan:** Yeah, the classic model. Mm-hmm. Again, to me it's like, yeah, but we could do that with voice agents. And we can do that over the course. We can interview your whole company of, of 700 employees over the course of a day. Right. Uh, so, so, and I'm not saying that that's the way forward for consulting.

I'm just saying like, there are so many new tools available where we can do all of the things that you use to pay a lot of money for. Yeah. Having consultants charging a few hundred dollars a an hour. Yeah. Having an interview with your people, not really generating value by that point. So how can we do all of that stuff but deliver it fundamentally much faster and cheaper in order to, to really focus on where do we actually create value?

\[00:39:36\] **Henrik:** Yeah. Yeah. There has been some, uh, quite a few evil persons over the years that talk about management consultants as kind of a source that comes in and tells everyone what they already knew.

\[00:39:48\] **Johan:** Yeah, exactly.

\[00:39:49\] **Henrik:** ' cause of interviews. Yeah. And then they start, uh, charging money for it. Yeah. So, um, actually the value creation here can become faster.

\[00:39:59\] **Johan:** That's the idea. Absolutely. And I, and I do think it makes a ton of sense, having fundamentally the, the kind of core intellectual work that you need to do in terms of business innovation, being a very human to human process.

\[00:40:14\] **Henrik:** Yeah.

\[00:40:15\] **Johan:** Uh, supported and aided by a gazillion research agents and summarizing agents and brainstorming agents and innovation agents aided and augmented.

Yes. Yeah. But that's still a face-to-face or a digital face-to-face meeting. Yeah. And that goes into kind of the third part of what I'm trying to build here is actually a fully remote first consulting business.

\[00:40:39\] **Henrik:** Remote first. So not only remote first, right? It's media. Yeah. Sales first. Remote first delivery.

\[00:40:47\] **Johan:** Yeah, exactly.

\[00:40:48\] **Henrik:** Interesting. So what does that mean?

\[00:40:53\] **Johan:** The perhaps the question is why. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, and this goes into the kind of broader life design of, of me and my wife, where we wanna build business that makes us fundamentally more flexible. Mm-hmm. I also had a look at what's, where, where's the most interesting market for a company like this?

And I think the most interesting market is an international market. Mm. So if you build into your delivery model that it must be a physical delivery that would make it almost impossible for me to do business on a, not necessarily global due to time zones, but, but like a, a Europe plus, Saudi Arabia type of, of market.

\[00:41:34\] **Henrik:** Yeah. Um, I get it. So you're in a journey of, um, kind of your conviction of this idea.

Mm.

Is also related to creating a sustainable lifestyle. Yes. So I can resonate with that over the last couple of years. Um, I've been trying to do that as well as being part of a, one of the largest. Companies of this world that's sitting in the executive leadership team in Europe.

That means also, you know, the classic way of doing that leadership is that you jump around like a grasshopper with, uh, with airplane. Yeah. Um, and you spend a lot of time kind of logistics of yourself. Yeah. That's one part that you can probably take away with being remote first, but also whenever you get into that game on building a more sustainable, you, you need to find out what to do with the time that you save.

Hmm. Right. Hmm. So that also goes into being remote first, um, probably taking care of yourself. Um, more time spent on self-leadership, uh, to give room for family and kids, for example.

\[00:42:45\] **Johan:** Yeah. So I had a super interesting conversation that ran almost all through summer with my wife. Mm-hmm. So we both felt, and, and to my wife's credit, she's been talking about this for five years.

It's been me who's been slow in the uptake. Uh, but we discussed the idea of, of we're traditionally being sold. This idea of the energy that you spend in life is a zero sum game. So the more energy you spend at work, the less energy you spend with your wife or with your kids, or with your friends, or on your health or sleep or whatever it might be.

It's a zero sum game. And you have

\[00:43:20\] **Henrik:** to choose like the idea of work life balance, right? Exactly. If one becomes more heavy, the other ones go up or down.

\[00:43:26\] **Johan:** Exactly. Exactly. Zero sum game. Yeah. Yeah. So we sat down with, in the end of June, we started discussing this more, more intensely, was that what if we fundamentally disagree with that mathematical equation?

Mm-hmm. And look at it more as, can we engineer a system where the different, um, perspectives of life amplify across each other? And in a super simple example, I think anyone can resonate with this. Say that I have a fight in the morning with my wife. My ability to think boldly and decisively and with full focus at work goes down.

Mm. Because I'm in my fight or flight. Amygdala, uh, response.

\[00:44:07\] **Henrik:** Yeah.

\[00:44:08\] **Johan:** Yeah. So if I have a rock solid relationship that leads over to work, and it's the same at work. If I spend time with people that I fundamentally enjoy and, and have podcasts, I, I don't go out of podcasts being kind of drained of energy. I'm filled with energy that gives me energy.

Mm-hmm. And if that is my working environment, it bleeds over to my ability to be present with my wife, right? Mm-hmm. Or, or the same is true if, if I fundamentally take care of my body, I have more energy to, to give back to, to my friends or whoever it is. So we try to design, and gray is just one part of a much broader ecosystem.

Mm-hmm. How can we deliver a lifestyle where things start to amplify across the dimensions? Right. And the remote First Logic is, is part of that equation. So we don't know the timeline of it yet, but we're moving somewhere forward. Um, which isn't like part of what I feel steals a lot of my energy is just this time of year being cold and it's dark outside and, and there are a gazillion clothes to take on to, to the kids every morning.

And it's that, that just drains energy from me. I wanna live somewhere warmer. So we're probably gonna move from Sweden as well. Right. Um, and so, so this to us has been a really interesting mental exercise.

\[00:45:25\] **Henrik:** A couple of big bets going on. Yeah, exactly.

And I think it also resonates, you know, I spend a lot of my time in the future work movement really trying to understand and see what companies do and, uh, which are the ones that are most successful and what kind models do they do?

Of course, they differ everything between full-time and office. Hmm. Um, and fully flexible remote first companies. Hmm. What is. Happening though independently of these choices is that companies are starting to understand that whenever they meet, they make the meetings matter. Yeah. So they're redesigning their governance models and making sure that like every month, every second month or couple of times a quarter, whatever it is, they have great human to human interaction.

Yeah. Build relationships to build that cohesiveness to the brand that you chose to, to join. Yeah. Um, so that's one of the challenges with being remote first, right?

\[00:46:32\] **Johan:** Yeah, it is. And I feel that we, it was such an interesting time by the, by the end of COVID. 'cause we were starting to figure out much better digital experiences and then COVID kind of went away and we're all trying to, as quickly we as we can forget that.

Okay. Just spending time in teams meeting, isn't that enjoyable? Mm-hmm. I saw, I read a study just two, three weeks ago, which kind of blew my mind that the average employee of a big company spends 74% of their time in meetings. Mm-hmm. And most of these meetings since there's always gonna be somebody who's at a home.

Yeah. So not everybody's gonna be in, uh, that, that has come kind of become second nature. Yeah. So we're, we're in a digital meeting anyway. Yeah. And in this kind of awful hybrid of half of them being in the room and half of them being at home. Yeah. And, and

\[00:47:21\] **Henrik:** quite draining.

\[00:47:22\] **Johan:** Quite draining. Mm-hmm. And we spend all of our time like that.

We, I have like colleagues and customers that I see, they, they sit at the office because there's some office policy in a booth all day. Having digital meetings. Yeah. It's like how did we end up there? And I think, again, coming back to the idea of kind of refusing the status quo. Mm-hmm. I think digital experiences can be fantastic.

It's just that we are bad at creating digital experience. We don't treat it with the respect that we should 74% of the time. Yeah. Like that, that's, I had a, a really interesting, um, experience like that just, uh, in the beginning of the fall I was doing a personal development course. Mm-hmm. And a guy, David, who ran it.

It was a digital course, but it was like a retreat. And I don't know how many have been on retreats, but it, it's really important kind of the mental frame that you're in to be as open that you need to be in order to do the kind of heavy personal development.

\[00:48:18\] **Henrik:** Oh. And present.

\[00:48:19\] **Johan:** Open and present. And it was a fully digital digital course, but he was fantastic in how he opened up the room, how he did breakout sessions, how he introduced music, how he introduced all of these kind of interactive elements.

Mm-hmm. And, and that to me was part of like, you are able to design a fundamentally kinda transcendent experience in a digital format. Yeah. It's just that not that many people take the time and attention to do that. Mm-hmm. And that's part, again, of, of what I need to develop in Grail. Mm-hmm. Develop these really good interactive online experiences, then I'll probably fly from time to time as well when it's super important. And especially meeting people. I love meeting people sitting across to people, otherwise I wouldn't have the podcast. Right? No, but you can achieve so much more than, than you'd assume that you do over just a random, boring teams meeting.

\[00:49:10\] **Henrik:** Yeah, I agree on that. So independent, whether it's a digital experience or a physical one. Yeah. The way. We design meetings would matter more. Yeah. Going forward.

\[00:49:24\] **Johan:** Yeah. And back to, and this is super interesting, back to the idea of, of who are the first hires in Grail. I'm not necessarily even even thinking about it as full-time employees.

I think we'll get used to pulling in and out resources more as needed. But maybe one of the resources is a specialist in kind of behavior science and how to engineer fundamentally fantastic online experiences. Yeah. Maybe that's a great hire.

\[00:49:47\] **Henrik:** Yeah.

\[00:49:48\] **Johan:** Right. Yeah.

\[00:49:49\] **Henrik:** Yeah. That's, um, that's something to, to really consider I think going forward.

Um, 'cause people will vote with their feet if this is not happening.

\[00:50:03\] **Johan:** Yeah. '

\[00:50:03\] **Henrik:** cause they see and they hear, uh, that there are these types of experiences other places. Yeah. Yeah. Things like storytelling. Yeah. Huge will become more important. Right?

\[00:50:14\] **Johan:** Absolutely.

\[00:50:15\] **Henrik:** Really connecting that story to the purpose of the company.

If you have a clear purpose and you can tell the story, probably people will get interested.

Hmm.

Specifically if you have a governance model and kind of an organization as strategy that is compelling.

\[00:50:32\] **Johan:** Yeah, absolutely. I had this other podcast guest that, uh, got asked by his, uh, I think it was like a 12-year-old or something like that.

He, he runs, he's an entrepreneur, runs a pretty big business. What did you do during the digitalization wave? And he was like, yeah, I. Did recruiting, like, I missed that one. Yeah. And, and he was like, and I don't wanna miss the AI revolution. Yeah. And I've been having the same kind of feeling since I have this serendipitous moment of I really understand strategy, I understand technology and I understand ai, like, I'm so well positioned, I don't wanna miss this train, which is part of why I'm doing it now.

But I'm also thinking about what's the legacy in terms of what is the value that I want to create. And I, the, the primary value that I want to help create is not enabling corporations to fire 20,000 people over 50. Engagement. Like, that doesn't excite me. I wanna build things that we fundamentally couldn't do before, augment individuals, helping them to, to find more meaning at work, doing things that they didn't think was possible before.

That excites me.

\[00:51:35\] **Henrik:** Mm.

Wow.

And what, um, uh, it, I don't know, uh, Iwan to be honest. Um, if you're. If you are just brilliant or if you're a bit crazy here,

\[00:51:48\] **Johan:** maybe both.

\[00:51:49\] **Henrik:** I'm, I'm, I'm leaning towards, uh, towards Brilliant. Um, and again, thinking about the listeners of the podcast, um, they need to understand if they are one of the leaders that should reach out to you.

\[00:52:08\] **Johan:** Yeah, it's a, it's a great question and I, I think it comes down to a couple of things. One thing for me is I think value driven companies have an, not just for Grail, but for the AI revolution, such a wonderful position, uh, to play.

Mm-hmm. That we. Optimize not just for the quarter, but we optimize to be here in 10 years and 20 years and just thrive through that. So I think part of the mindset of, of the kind of ideal CEO that I want to, to get in contact with is having that vision that we want to build something that matters.

Mm-hmm. So it's almost like an individual character trait. Mm-hmm. Combine that almost like moral, philosophical way of, of doing business with, I wanna work with people that wanna create an unfair advantage to their company in their market. They wanna win. They don't want to, to kind of slowly move along with the status quo.

Mm-hmm. And it doesn't really matter here and now if you feel that we are stuck, because that's the gonna be the reality for from 98% of the customers that I'll work with, that they're stuck. They don't know what to do, but they need help. Mm-hmm. Well, great. That's the role that I feel, right? Yeah. So you don't have to have any feeling of that.

I understand AI or anything like that, but fundamentally you get a little bit excited about the opportunity at hand. Mm-hmm. That excites you. Mm-hmm. Um, then you could also look at the market in different ways. Pretty typically when you do segmentation in a, in a sales process, you look at verticals like hospitality or, or healthcare or something like that.

What we're trying to do is look at verticals that aren't shaped necessarily by industry, but are more shaped by opportunity types around ai. Yeah. So one opportunity type might be you have companies that are. Uh, about to, to make an IPO or they have some PE play or something like that where their EBITDA margin really correlates strongly with their, their company valuation.

Mm-hmm. So this is a, a win or lose situation. Mm-hmm. The urgency is higher. Mm-hmm. And where we can see that these type of automation augmentation plays really plays a big role. Or, or you can have other like, use case types where we can see that one part of the technology suits this type of problem really well.

So, so an example of that might be, we have a crazy amount of administration, for example, so anybody who deals with import export, uh, no matter the actual industry, but import export being the, the kind of active ingredient in the problem that we're solving. Mm-hmm. And going towards those. So we will have a couple of types of industries that will, or not types of industries, but types of, of business problems Yeah.

That we look to target. Mm-hmm. Then just on a personal mission, I, I think. One of the coolest things, not just with ai, but with the kind of tech waves that are upcoming is, and, and this might be, you know, quantum computing or robotics or new sources of energy or whatever. We have the ability to fundamentally combat some of the bigger macro problems that we have.

And like, one of the easiest to understand is we have an aging population.

\[00:55:16\] **Henrik:** Yeah, yeah, yeah.

\[00:55:17\] **Johan:** Uh, so just looking at like AI innovation for elderly care is kind of interesting.

\[00:55:24\] **Henrik:** Very important

\[00:55:25\] **Johan:** and very important. 'cause it, it's an economic model that won't really work unless we do some pretty intense innovation.

Mm-hmm. But it's also like the reality for, for a lot of of people that are currently sitting in homes is that it's not a very dignified experience because you have doctors and nurses that are mostly. Drawn into admin.

Yeah.

Right. They don't have the time to, to have hold their hands or listen to, and I think I, I read just three or four weeks ago about the company that finally did what I was talking about a year ago on the podcast. So they call up with voice agents and they interview the, the, the elderly person to create their memoirs. Mm-hmm. Like do something that feels beautiful. That's beautiful. Yeah. And I, I love that type of innovation. We can do that. And we can have, uh, when I was in San Francisco last I heard about a company where, uh, a hardware and software play that you had Little pin, the nurse had little pin that's a microphone that just follows down along with all the patients, all we agree on, on like, this is the prescription thing and this is the thing that we're planning for you to do on Tuesday that just gets transcribed.

So, so we. Yeah. With a lot of the admin away from the nurse or for the, for the doctor, so they actually can spend more face time. The exact same example that, that we had with the sales team before they actually get more face time with the patient.

\[00:56:39\] **Henrik:** So, so, uh, just to, to, uh, to break in there a bit because I, I know there are divided opinions on this.

Hmm. Um, I wholeheartedly think that care, um, and that's my opinion, uh, is done best by humans. Yes. But there are also people that would prefer, prefer to be treated by maybe a robot of some kind. Yeah. Um, because of the human element, um, there are different beliefs. Yeah. So probably then what you're explaining now, right now is that you can go in and create unfair competitive advantage to that, you know, more digital care company, but could also go in and create.

Unfair competitive advantage for a company that focuses on human to human care. Yeah. 'cause what you could do there instead is to remove the, the most dreadful parts of an everyday of administration and increase every care, um, caregivers time that actually spend, uh, with patients. Yes. So there are different ways of doing it in the same domain.

\[00:57:47\] **Johan:** Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And it depends on, on kind of who you want to become. And back to storytelling, I think we lack the fundamental storytelling of who do we want to become? So when I go to work in three years time, what do I actually do with my time? Yeah. And I wanna be in an environment where I optimize for human connection, sitting like this with people.

I wanna optimize for an environment where I'm. Fundamentally creative and most, almost every day, I have creative elements that gives me a lot of, of kind of meaning in my life. Mm. I want to optimize for an environment where I don't do stuff that I hate and emails, logistics, writing reports, writing summaries, stuff that used to take me a lot of time.

I'm already, I feel there where I don't do that much of a, of that.

\[00:58:36\] **Henrik:** Exactly. That was my actual reflection. It seems like you are there, uh, already. Yeah, quite a bit. But the rest of building the rest, you don't know actually because the bets you're, you know, taking now, uh, both on building this for yourself and your family and your children.

Um, and I'm not thinking from a revenue perspective whether you will be and knowing that you're successful. How will you know?

\[00:59:04\] **Johan:** Yeah. It's a, it's a great question and, and, and the truth is like, I'm not building grail to optimize for some VC metrics. Uh, so this is not a, a build and sell type of thing. This is something that I ideally want to do for, for quite some time, and I want to optimize for, for having impact.

Mm-hmm. I want to optimize for, for on a daily basis actually meeting interesting people.

\[00:59:28\] **Henrik:** Cool. Yeah.

\[00:59:29\] **Johan:** That, that's a value in itself. Like Yeah. It's a little bit like, I almost feel like I found a cheat code. Right. It's super interesting if you, if you stop just looking at the financial metrics of it. I don't, I I'm not saying that they won't matter, obviously they will.

Yeah. Uh, I need to support myself. I need to support my family. Um. But if you look just slightly beyond those and say, what is it that I'm trying to achieve with my personal AI play or with my AI play in in business? Mm, what is it that I actually want to achieve? Mm. And start optimize for, for values. And we talked about like the, the CFO type of of projects.

Yeah. That's the problem I feel with just looking at the financial numbers, you won't see the kind of second order, third order values that they actually want to optimize for. Uh, I want to build or help customers build companies where their workforce fundamentally love coming to work and doing really creative high value work with our time, having every hour being delivered X 20.

As I talked about, when you're in the, in the context of a super worker and I think, I think. In any innovation, we, we kind of overestimate what will be possible in the short term, but more importantly, we underestimate the, the possibility in the long term. And I think that's true for ai. And just play it out.

Say that you're a, a company of a hundred employees at this point. Mm. So just bringing five specialists agents to every employee means that you multiply the company size by 500 without increasing headcount to cost that much. Mm-hmm. And what if their agent starts getting agents? Mm. And we're, we're already here, so, so look at the engineering department that I used to run.

So one example is that the engineers started to getting individual vigil agents that they could, okay, help me de debug this code, for example. But when their agents start to talk to each other and start talking to the code base and start talking to all of the. Knowledge on the internet in designing great ux, for example, and, and one engineer can have a team of agent engineers underneath them.

That one may be a project manager and one front-end developer, one backend developer, one quality assurance, one ux, and they start working against each other. So what happens in my team at least, is that they spend way less time in actually coding, Debu, debugging, doing that, starting spending way more time together with the advisory services department, who meets the clients together with clients to, together with other stakeholders, much more human time to understand the problem that they're trying to solve.

Mm. The actual coding goes way quicker. Mm. So I had this fantastic, that was my first experience of truly energetic workflow. We had a development that would usually be like a three week cycle. So we had the sketches, the user experience, sketches, this is what we designed for. Usually it would take three weeks and we had installed this was cloud code, um, that understood like computer vision, reading, understood the sketch could compare that versus what we had in the production code come up with its own set of this is how I want to implement the change.

We got the sketches over lunch and at 1:30 PM we had functioning code in the product coming back to speed. So going from three weeks to one and a half hour.

\[01:02:50\] **Henrik:** Yeah.

\[01:02:51\] **Johan:** Yeah. That's insane. Yeah. And if I have all my engineers having that capability, what's our ability to, to develop to super impactful code and, and products.

\[01:03:01\] **Henrik:** Right. So this is not automation. No, this is a great example of augmentation. Yes. So independent whether you're leading a engineering team, marketing team, sales team, you name it. Yeah. Say that there are five persons and they have 20 agents just like you and I have today. Yeah. Then the team is actually 105.

Yeah. Automatically Exactly. Really delivering on the same topics, but the, the key is probably to, to move towards outcome based management.

\[01:03:36\] **Johan:** Yeah. I think there's a lot of assumptions in, in how do we measure productivity, uh, that needs to be fundamentally rethought, like the idea of. I don't know how many like customers on, like, when you speak to the lower level people that I hear No, I, I have to kind of move my mouse so my, uh, slack bubble don't go to inactive.

Like, that's how, how they are measured like that. That's horrible.

\[01:04:01\] **Henrik:** It's such a sad story. Yeah.

\[01:04:03\] **Johan:** It's such a sad story. Yeah. Because that's how we've kind of defaulted into measuring productivity and what we optimize for people moving their models.

\[01:04:10\] **Henrik:** Oh, I can see that you were late to three teams meetings this month.

Yeah. Um, or you were inactive. Yeah. 13.5 hours this month. Yeah. You know. What doesn't get you Exactly. It's nothing.

\[01:04:23\] **Johan:** And it's interesting. Uh, final point on that. I had also an episode upcoming with Jonathan Brill, um, who's by, uh, fortune Magazine named, uh, the, the world's leading futurist, so another one of these kind of awesome, cool brains to talk to.

And he had, and he just released a new book called AI and the Octopus Organization. And part of the research that he referenced in that book was looking at who were what, what type of manager was very impactful on in an outcome-based, uh, scenario during the last big transformation, which was the digitization race.

And he, one of the elements that they found was that these managers spend way more time asking for input from other peers, meaning probably outside the company.

\[01:05:12\] **Henrik:** Okay.

\[01:05:13\] **Johan:** And this is, I think, one of these things that's been really interesting with the podcast. Like I feel I've been kind of arrogant my whole life trying to invent everything in a vacuum, just leaning on whatever IQ power that I have.

Yeah. Getting to speak to people that, that has been in this situation exactly as me on podcasts or on networking events or on on, if you're on some type of panel discussion or something like that, that's so valuable. And that to most companies would be something that we hope that you do outside of work time.

It's not part of your work. And I think that's, again, a similar scenario that we measure productivity wrong.

\[01:05:52\] **Henrik:** I think that's, uh. Really strong leadership message, um, to everyone listening to the podcast. Um, I do recognize that pattern myself. Hmm. When I freed up time with my agentic workflow, I started attending a lot of more external events, gatherings, networking events, being on stage, talking about the most challenging topics also in the digital arena.

Mm. Uh, so say whatever you like, uh, LinkedIn or not. Mm. Uh, you have the same type of dialogues. Mm. If you move out of your usual network and start engaging with external people that may have different perspectives, you learn. Yeah. You get different type of inputs that may change or form and shape. Yeah.

Your own thoughts, uh, on the future work.

\[01:06:49\] **Johan:** I'll give a super quick anecdote on, on one of these like insights that will really shape the way that I look at Grail. It was such a serendipitous moment. I was at a conference speaking, and after the conference I was speaking on ai. After the conference, up comes a guy who says that I'm working at a another AI company.

Uh, we do simple kind of agentic work. We, we help companies develop these, these agents and we've deployed agents across a hundred companies by now, something like that. Um, we measure. Every week. How, how big a percent of these agents have actually been used as a, as a good proxy for, for like, do they generate value?

Mm-hmm. People actually use them. And he said that one, the most important thing that we found was reactive or proactive agents. So a reactive agent might look like, okay, I have this, um. Compliance agent. So whenever I, uh, want to update something, I check is this compliant with the latest, uh, new thing that the European Union came up with in terms of compliance?

Yeah. So, but I, as a user have to engage with the agent. Mm-hmm. So they had on average an activation rate, I think it was between 10 to 15% per week from their user base. Or they have proactive agents, meaning that they are fundamentally built into a natural workflow. So an example of this might be you're on a sales call, you have a transcriber, uh, in the sales call.

After the sales call is completed, you hang up, you have a web hook that picks up this transcripts and does a bunch of stuff with it. Maybe it puts an automated follow up email in your email outbox, but it also gives you, gives you feedback in terms of your performance in the sales call. Yeah. Actually, when the customer asked this, it was a, a, an objection that you didn't handle, or this was a buying signal that you completely missed.

So you get feedback all of the time in your Slack or Microsoft teams or something like that, but it's a proactive thing. It happens automatically. Mm. They had 80 to 85% activation rate on those. That's a such a small thing. Yeah. But it completely reshaped the way that I think about the types of agents that I want to deploy at companies.

\[01:09:04\] **Henrik:** It does, and it does remind me of a discussion I had last week. Um. Do you recognize, um, the old school leadership idea of a water cooler moment? Yes. Like that you meet cer, serendipitously with a peer or a colleague or someone that you don't regularly maybe meet in your organization over a coffee or in water, and then suddenly you get this fantastic idea and that has been used as one of the arguments for bringing people back to the office because this is not happening when people are working remote.

Yes. The idea that I heard about last week was that there is an AI thing developing, making proactive proposals for people to meet up internally. Yeah. So it actually understands and knows what teams are working on

\[01:10:01\] **Johan:** Hmm.

\[01:10:02\] **Henrik:** What individuals are working on. Hmm. So you can understand and see stuff like. Person in Amsterdam is working on a new way to change sustainability.

Channel. Yeah. Challenge. But it also sees that this another person doing it in Stockholm. Hmm. They don't know that they're working on the same topic.

\[01:10:22\] **Johan:** Exactly. Super interesting. I think it's a great example of what I speak about quality. So fundamentally it's. It's a legacy process. Like the watercolor moment.

Yeah. But you could actually increase the quality of that moment only exposing you for people that you probably have a high probabilistic chance of having a good Yeah. Kind of interaction with. Yeah. Super interesting.

\[01:10:41\] **Henrik:** So I, I, I like those proactive, uh, ways of thinking what AI can do. Yeah. Um, so I'm thinking that maybe it's time to summarize, uh, the episode.

Uh, we've been through a lot of topics, but first and foremost, it's about your big change, your big launch of, um, um, of grail. Yes. We're launching at right now as we speak now today. And it's based on a couple of big bets that you do personally, a conviction that I haven't seen many have. Um, after having had this discussion, this, this, um, um, talk today.

Leaning towards that. It's a brilliant move.

\[01:11:26\] **Johan:** Thank you.

\[01:11:27\] **Henrik:** Feel quite confident that you have kind of seen the stuckness, uh, the opportunity, the vision actually building as you live through these different stages yourself and experiencing how you can change your life from decreasing time spent on Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoints into building, writing a book, and building a podcast with, with the great following.

And get prices for the

\[01:11:53\] **Johan:** book by the way, as well. Um, at

\[01:11:56\] **Henrik:** the same time, you're looking at building more sustainable view, uh, where you, uh, are more active in, in self-leadership. Mm. Um, also family, wife, um, collaboration, where you build a future together for your children where they will probably grow up into a kind of a quite different world.

Yeah. Compared to what you, you and I did. Mm. Um, and at the same time, the evolution of AI proceeds, uh, quarter by quarter. You never know.

\[01:12:27\] **Johan:** No, you don't.

\[01:12:28\] **Henrik:** What will happen, uh, some weeks there are new drops. Uh, just a few weeks ago, Excel capability came into the picture, which has been on the, on the wishlist, at least for me, uh, for a long time.

So you never know actually what will happen. One of the biggest challenges going forward is to ke keep abreast of this evolution. Yes. 'cause it's easier, easier to get up to speed when it comes to AI and get moving. That is keeping Yes. It's keeping your abreast.

\[01:13:00\] **Johan:** Yeah. That's actually a really interesting point in itself.

I think many people. Look, if they're behind, I think they feel that they're almost hopelessly behind. Mm-hmm. I don't know if this was your experience, but the kind of entry level, uh, hurdle isn't that high. At least if you have like good guidance, uh, around it. I,

\[01:13:24\] **Henrik:** I think it's all about that J curve.

\[01:13:26\] **Johan:** Yeah.

\[01:13:27\] **Henrik:** You will have moments where you feel like I'm investing and I'm trying. Mm. I'm not getting more out. But you'll have to just kinda make that time until the J curve starts to accelerate. Yeah. As short as possible. Mm. I think that goes for an individuals and, and for companies. So having said that, um, I think this is exactly what the future of work is about, is about boldness.

It is about honesty. It is about clarity. And a conviction to make a difference not only for yourself and your family, but also for problem, any organization or company out there.

\[01:14:17\] **Johan:** Yeah. And, and one of the things that I'll do with Grail is, um, I'll try as much as I can to build this in public. Meaning there are so many unknowns to a business like this.

Mm-hmm. I wish during these past two years that more people shared not only the highs and the cool automation and at the end workflows, but also the lows of, of trying to build this out. Mm-hmm. And I'll be as transparent as I can. I hope to be a, some type of, you know, role model for this is what's possible.

Like, uh, this is fundamentally a more enjoyable work environment. Mm-hmm. We're trying to build towards, and this is one way of modeling it. Mm. Um. That will be exciting as well. I, I wish that I had more building public type of role models when trying to figure a lot of these things out. Hmm. It's been a lot of kind of heavy intellectual lifting by myself.

\[01:15:18\] **Henrik:** Yeah. I, I can see that. And I think, um, that brings me back to boldness and the future of work. Right? Hmm. Um, it is daunting sometimes to build in public. Hmm. Because what you also give is the approach for competitors to. To mimic.

\[01:15:39\] **Johan:** Yeah, you do. I'm not worried to be honest about competitors at this point. I think the, this change is gonna happen to each and every company in every industry.

Mm-hmm. At this point, the market is massive. So if anything, more competitors is just more people speaking to customers about the need.

\[01:16:00\] **Henrik:** Yeah.

\[01:16:00\] **Johan:** Uh, and I think, I honestly think almost the opposite. I, I'd love to collaborate, especially probably the, the coming two or three years with more innovators in terms of how do we deliver professional services in this space.

'cause I think there's so much to learn and the opportunity in the market is so big. Mm-hmm. That if we just help each other out in terms of, of, you know, what voice agent system are you using to get this whatever X working, or how can you scale this type of experience better? I think that's just good and, and maybe it's a contrarian opinion and maybe I'll, I'll eat my words later on.

But in terms of competition, I think, uh, it's more about like creating a, a, doing something that's fundamentally good for our society. And maybe contrary to popular opinion, I do think potentially what Europe is doing right now, even though we're completely losing the technology race. Hmm. There's a sustainability and a value driven approach that might actually be the real winning bet in the future.

So a super interesting example. I, I know that we're trying to kind of end the pod, but I can't help myself. I'm sorry. Super interesting example. I think it was Deutsche Telecom, um, who together with their unions mm-hmm. Wrote an AI manifesto, uh, that was slap dab in the middle of what we're talking about today.

We want to use AI to augment our workforce. So we don't want a single AI automated related layoff. We want to. From the union side of things mm-hmm. Approach the AI fundamentally as upskilling. Mm-hmm. And not resist. And they have one of the highest adoption rates on ai, uh, across Europe for the big companies.

Mm-hmm. And I think that's such a fundamentally like European way of solving, like how do we approach this as organizations? We collaborate with the different stakeholder interests and we try to build something that's fundamentally positive, not only in the short term, but in the long term.

\[01:18:10\] **Henrik:** Yeah. So what you're talking about is inertia.

Inertia has been criticized many times over the last couple of decades, but suddenly inertia may be a good thing.

\[01:18:23\] **Johan:** Yeah. Maybe for at, at least for, 'cause it, part of it gets invested.

\[01:18:26\] **Henrik:** Yeah. It's done in a responsible, ethical way. Yeah. It's a slower, you know, uh, slower burn. It's a slower burn until, or, or actually like a plane, uh, takes off.

\[01:18:40\] **Johan:** Yeah.

\[01:18:41\] **Henrik:** It takes longer time for that plane to take off, but it, when it does, it may actually fly better.

\[01:18:47\] **Johan:** Yeah. Potentially. Or, or you can just be very sad about the state of, of AI adoption in, in Europe and then probably both are true. And I, I wouldn't take this as an argument for all of the laggards to say, Hey, inertia is good.

I think inertia in general is bad, but just think thinking through second order consequences and getting clearer on the picture of what we're trying to optimize for. Yeah. Human excellence versus human redundance. Yeah.

That's probably a really good thing.

\[01:19:14\] **Henrik:** Yeah. So great. Um, I think it's time to round this off.

Yes. Um, by saying. Thank you Yuan, uh, for, you know, being a

\[01:19:25\] **Johan:** guest on this podcast episode.

\[01:19:28\] **Henrik:** And, uh, I'm wishing you luck with your new endeavor of, uh, of grail and, and the big bets of creating more sustainable view.

Thank you very much. My name is Hendrik. See you soon.

\[01:19:42\] **Johan:** And there, we're at the end of the episode. I think it's so amazing that almost 70% of you actually listened to the end of the episodes. Especially for a long format. I'm so thankful for that. The engagement numbers is fantastic. Before we leave each other, two things. First off... Den här avsnittet är sponsrad av Grail.

Och jag kommer inte att något sekret om att Grail är den företag jag börjar med. Så det är framtiden av AI och hur vi kan förlora värde som inte bara är automation. Men faktiskt bygga mot en framtid som vi vill leva i. Som en framtid där jag vill jobba. Augmentation. Så gå över till grail.works för att veta mer.

Tvånda, jag uppmärksammar så mycket att du lyssnar på den här podcasten Men även om 70% lyssnar till slut, så är nästan 70% inte prenumererade heller. Så om du kan ge en like-button prenumerera på alla mina kanaler, vi är på LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, vi har en fantastisk webbplats. Det finns så mycket mer innehåll, men vad jag verkligen vill pusha för är att varje vecka jag publicerar en långformat artikel, vilket är pinnaken i min tänkning.

Så det är det mest intressanta jag har kommit igenom den veckan, både i podcaster och andra utmaningar And I try to write about it towards you, a senior leader. Like what is the crucial takeaway from the most important part of my week, let's say. I published that on LinkedIn and on my webpage, thinkroompodcast.com.

Thank you so much and see you next time.