Customerland
Customerland is a podcast about …. Customers. How to get more of them. How to keep them. What makes them tick. We talk to the experts, the technologies and occasionally, actual people – you know, customers – to find out what they’re all about.So if you’re a CX pro, a loyalty marketer, a brand owner, an agency planner … if you’re a CRM & personalization geek, if you’re a customer service / CSAT / NPS nerd – you finally have a home.
Customerland
The Tao of Leadership: Bridging Technology and Human Creativity in the AI Revolution
Jack Myers, founder of the Myers Report and Media Village Education Foundation, takes us beyond the typical AI conversation into the profound human implications of artificial intelligence. Drawing from his book "The Tao of Leadership," Myers explores how agentic AI—autonomous systems that interpret goals, make decisions, and evolve in real-time—will fundamentally transform business operations and leadership dynamics.
"Agentic AI is fast becoming the mirror of the modern executive," Myers explains, describing how these systems will reflect leadership qualities with unprecedented transparency. Rather than replacing humans, these agents free people to focus on what they do uniquely well: creating, empathizing, imagining, and leading. But organizations must act quickly. The traditional innovation approach of methodical "bridge building" no longer works in the rapidly evolving AI landscape. Instead, Myers advocates "building portals"—immediate entry points for experiencing and learning from AI technologies directly.
Recent developments like the Modern Contextual Protocol (MCP) are accelerating this transformation, enabling AI systems to develop deeper contextual understanding. As these technologies mature, the gap between organizations embracing AI and those hesitating will widen dramatically. This creates not just operational divides but potentially new categories of "haves and have-nots" in terms of technological access and capability. Myers's advice to emerging professionals is unambiguous: avoid companies that aren't investing in AI and integrating it into workflows.
The conversation raises crucial questions about ethics, governance, and human qualities in leadership. How do we ensure AI systems incorporate empathy and ethical considerations? How must leaders evolve to balance technological capabilities with distinctly human qualities like emotional intelligence and creativity? Myers challenges us to consider these questions not as distant concerns but as immediate imperatives for anyone hoping to thrive in the AI-transformed business landscape of today and tomorrow.
I just had it. I just had a whole conflict with AI where it was building a presentation and giving it feeds you back what it thinks you want to hear. Right, so you say, if you say I need a report or I need a presentation, it'll come back and say great, we'll build a presentation, but it doesn't build the presentation.
Speaker 2:I think you have the same agent. I do too. Mine kept coming back and saying, well, here's how you do it. And I said, no, no, no, you do it Today on Customer Land, jack Myers, who is founder of the Myers Report and Media Village Education Foundation, and since Customer Land operates across so many different spaces and disciplines, jack's name and his organization pop up multiple times throughout the course of a week, in various iterations and various different reasons. So for that and a whole lot more, jack, thanks for joining me. I really appreciate this.
Speaker 1:It's great to be with you. Mike, you know I love the name Customerland. In 1998, one of my earlier books was called Reconnecting with Customers Building Brands and Profits in the Relationship Age and it kind of anticipated the role of the Internet in changing customer loyalty, customer relationships. So I love that you still use that word customer. It's an important word.
Speaker 2:Apparently it still has relevance out there and in fact I may have read that book. Just a little context Jack and I, before we hit the record button, were just ruminating on the fact that we may actually know each other but can't remember it at this point.
Speaker 1:Where or how or what was the?
Speaker 2:occasion. So lots to talk about historically here, but I'd like to set a little context and then I'd like you to fill in some gaps for us, if you would. You can't do a podcast like this without mentioning AI. I think they'd drum me off the air if there was such a thing. You just have to be talking about it because it's so important right now. It's game-changing in so many ways and I think, just from my standpoint, there are so few people talking about it from a higher level kind of human standpoint.
Speaker 2:Everybody's kind of down deep in the weeds like, hey, this is a cool thing, look what it'll do. But, jack, from what I can tell, you're taking a much higher level perspective not 30,000 feet up, but much higher even and talking about its impact on humans and what business might be looking like and doing with it soon. So do I have that anywhere close to correct?
Speaker 1:Oh, you have that exactly right the Tao of Leadership, which is about harmonizing technological innovation with human creativity in the AI era, and I started working on the book a couple of years ago, before the pushback on what we call. You know what we refer to and we're proud of calling diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, and I took a different approach. But my background, my focus, my career over the last 20 years has been focused on building out the human relationships within companies and that companies have with their clients and customers and the human component, as technology was and data were really taking the forefront of leaders, priorities and investments and what are the implications on on the human side.
Speaker 1:And I began working on that two decades ago and then the dow leadership was really recognizing that, as ai is the single most profound transformation that any of us will experience in our lives and and mike, we've experienced a few uh especially, you know, as you look at media and, and you know the advance of the internet and the um and mobile and, and, I believe, the most profound transformation, not just for us but for the future, the next two, three generations, before the next huge wave of sentient AI comes along. And so, yeah, I believe that without focusing on the emotional impact of technology, leaders are actually not preparing for the biggest challenge they'll have in their businesses, which is navigating the human element and people.
Speaker 2:There's a lot rolled into that, but I think maybe just to set further context for this. I think maybe just to set further context for this, and I should have mentioned this earlier. But for those people who may not be familiar with you or your work can you do for a living and how you go about it you'll recognize, like so many people do, that Jack's opinion on this topic is really worth listening to.
Speaker 1:Well, obviously I appreciate the opportunity to do that, appreciate the opportunity to do that, like I think many of us are doing right now. I'm in a point of transformation, recognizing the impact of technology, ai and machine intelligence on where companies, organizations and leaders are heading. Going back, my early career was in network television, at CBS and ABC radio, in sales, marketing and business development, and as part of the business development work I looked at technology which was evolving in media then early days of cable and really became fascinated by the technological implications. Really became fascinated by the technological implications and I began trying to understand, all right, as technology evolves, what's the history and impact of new generations being born into those technologies. And I wrote a book called Hooked Up, a New Generation's Surprising Take on Sex Politics and Saving the world, which focused on the first generation to grow up with the internet, which we now know is Gen Z and we have today Gen Alpha. But we have a new generation that I call the Nexus generation that's being born right now into AI and will be growing up with AI as their partner and collaborator. So my whole career.
Speaker 1:I founded the Myers Report 40 years ago as a research program looking both at consumers but primarily at B2B relationships and understanding the dynamics of B2B relationships, both from the sell side and the buy side, and researching, understanding and then consulting for many years on relationships, on generational change, on technological change and how they were impacting on relationships, working heavily with what I fondly call the legacy media industry television radio out of home called the legacy media industry, television radio out of home, and of course that's an industry that's managing decline right now.
Speaker 1:So it's an interesting time to be working with them. 15 years ago I launched Media Village, which is a nonprofit educational foundation focused on really again understanding the impact of generational shifts and how we prepare, train, retain and acquire employees when we have to go outside of our comfort zone to more diverse communities that might not have the traditional access, and that led me to really build out the Advancing Diversity Hall of Honors which, mike, we both know what the realities are on the pushback, the budgets available for DEI have not just declined, they've dried up completely. Companies are afraid. I heard I spoke to one senior corporate leader at a public company and he privately said to me he's concerned about being Harvard Right, and it's actually worse than that.
Speaker 2:It's not just a drying up of funds, but the cultural political implications are such that it's not just a kind of zero effect fund-wise.
Speaker 1:It can be disastrous to a brand right now right now, and you know you work a lot, you talk a lot, you write a lot about customer loyalty and how you use data. Data has become such an important part of customer loyalty programs, but what you're really referring to are people's emotional connections to the brand and how easily they can be disrupted. No matter how much data you may have, it's worthless if you're not looking at the emotional connections that you have with those customers.
Speaker 2:Isn't that the truth? That right there is the subject for our next five or six get-togethers here, because there's so much to unpack there. But, um, I I wanted to, if I may, kind of jump into a couple of the, and I'm just going to admit to cherry picking some of this um, the the high level thoughts from the book, because, look one, everybody's talking about AI, the the biggest sites and content drivers on the internet right now are almost all have to do with AI in some way. But your take again is um, it's, it's looking around the next corner, over the next hill, to what may be happening and how businesses kind of need to be considering it.
Speaker 2:And the phrase that kept popping up for me was agentic AI, because we're, you know, we've got AI doing all kinds of neat little kind of one-off tasks right now, or sometimes in fairly complex one-off tasks. But once agentic AI becomes a thing, the game that we all witnessed change two years ago when ChatGPT showed up is going to change wholesale, very, very quickly. I know you've got some thoughts on that.
Speaker 1:Agentic AI. If you think about an agency, it's an agency, and when you hire an agency, you're hiring someone, a team, you're hiring a group to support your team, act as a part of your team, represent your team, help you interpret your goals, make strategic decisions, interact with others on your behalf and evolve in real time. And that's what agentic AI is. It's a new class of agents that are software agents. They're intelligent, they're autonomous, they're adaptable and they're systems that don't just support your team. They act as part of it and they interpret goals, make strategic decisions, interact with other systems and even other AI agents and evolve in real time. And they're not replacing your people, they're freeing them so your own teams can focus on what humans can do, and that's really the focus of the Tao of Leadership is what humans can do is create, they can empathize, they can imagine and they can lead.
Speaker 1:So when you think about agentic AI, it's really understanding that they are out there, they're available, they're ready, they're in early stage, as AI is in early stage, but they're already there, working with your clients, with companies that you're in business with, in their marketing, in their sales, in their operations, their customer experience and, frankly, they're transforming traditional workflows into adaptive, human-centric ecosystems. And that's what excites me about it, because, while we may be confused or concerned, it's a collaborative process and we have to jump in and we have to learn about it and we have to understand it. And I think so many leaders today are operating on fear, that they're resistant and they think let me wait and see how others use it and by that, no longer work in today's marketplace. You have to be actively engaged in AI and an understanding agentic AI. If you're a large organization, you have to have your agents and you have to have your agents working for you and collaborating with you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can't sit this one out. If you sit this one out, the market will escape you, and I don't see anybody really catching up to that. I talk to a lot of companies who are still cautious with AI and how they're deploying it internally, with a lot of checks and balances, and I talk to other companies who were just like what the heck? We know we're going to make mistakes. Let's just make sure we've got enough bandages in the closet in case something bad really happens here.
Speaker 1:And I'm not sure I advocate that approach, but no you know, in fact, there's a chapter in my book called Don't Build Bridges, build Portals. Bridges take time, they're from point A to point B, and innovation, or building bridges to the future, includes, you know, risk assessment, trial, experimentation, testing, analysis, research. By the time you build a bridge to, let's say, an agentic AI and having an investment in building out agentic AI or any part of machine intelligence, by the time you've built that traditional bridge or those traditional innovation processes, the destination's changed. So you're too late to the market. And so I say, build a portal which you walk right through. Just open the door, go in, learn, see what's on the other side and begin experiencing it.
Speaker 2:You know, a couple of things occur to me as I talk to people about agentic AI and what it could look like, and I've heard some really, really cool creative use cases come up that are kind of being developed already. But, like, personally I use AI and chat, gpt and the like a lot. I'm a heavy duty user there and even in my world, which is not highly sophisticated, it's just a heavy load, a heavy usage. These tools make serious mistakes with some frequency, and these are the most expensive tools out there. Certainly they're well-funded. There are billions behind them with all kinds of research trying to shore up the hallucinations and whatever else system. The chances for failure seem to me to increase exponentially, and maybe that's just because of where we are at the moment or my personal experience. But what do you think about that?
Speaker 1:Well, you know, in just the last few weeks, there's been a massive shift in in the ecosystem of ai. Uh, anthropic launched something called the modern contextual protocol, uh, and uh, mcp uh, it was in. It's now been embraced as the, as a contextual bridge. Uh, from just the content that you're putting in, which is what AI historically has been based on, to AI having the ability to develop context, and that's relatively new anthropic inputted into Claude, and then OpenAI embraced it and now every major AI system has MCP modern contextual protocol. That's a massive shift in the AI ecosystem and landscape and it is one AI system interoperating with other AI systems with the same protocols, and I think we're going to see more and more of that.
Speaker 1:The standardization and I think we're going to see more and more of that, the standardization across the different systems is an inevitability. What you're suggesting, I think, is more focused on the prompts that the humans are putting into the AI and that not understood, believing that the AI has a thought process of its own, which it increasingly does, but it's still feeding you back only a response to what you've put in. So, if you're putting different prompts in asking it to act in certain ways, it's going to be responding to what you ask for, and that's where I think you go down rabbit holes that are dangerous, and I agree with you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and you know. Part of that, admittedly, is just me trying to get past my own. You know, whatever they are, you know fears and biases.
Speaker 1:I do want to go back though, mike, to you're saying how much you use AI and chat GPT.
Speaker 1:I do as well, but there's an interesting story. The companion book to the Tao of Leadership is called Creativity Unleashed how AI can supercharge your ideas, and I did research asking creative leaders across many different industries and functions what are the biggest issues, what are the biggest pain points, what are the biggest challenges they confront? In the creative process, the creative development? I've developed over a hundred pain points, and then I went in and asked AI what is the AI solution to these pain points, to each of these pain points, and I created a 350-page book of exercises, tools, programs that individuals could implement when they run into one of those 100-plus pain points, and I found that AI had an incredibly knowledgeable understanding of its role and its capabilities. Now I expect and assume that the book will need to be updated in a few months, maybe even by the time this podcast airs, but nonetheless, I think creativity unleashed is something that should be on everyone's desk who's involved in any way in creating.
Speaker 2:Well, as a recovering creative director, I'm dying to see it, Um, you know, in in my own experience using, uh, GPTs or AI tools for creative work, what I find is the most challenging for me is to accept that I no longer am bound by the same frameworks I have been in the past. I can ask this thing to do things that I couldn't imagine back when, or even recently, and, um, you know, to kind of move outside of my own framing a little bit. Um, the few times that I've done that has produced really, really thought provoking results, things that you can take and really chew on and go places with.
Speaker 1:So I agree, and you said earlier in our conversation about looking into the future. Imagine that reality, Mike, for those who are just being born or, you know, in their children, who are growing up with Alexa and Siri, which are also in their infancy in terms of their evolution and development, who will be growing up with AI as a collaborative tool. And this is where the haves and the have-nots. I think it really becomes important to understand how do we get, first of all, ethics built into AI and governance in AI, and I do think that's up to corporate leaders versus regulatory government to make sure that we're thinking about the implications and the use and to make sure that we do make it available to as many people who might not typically have access to the highest-end technology that you and I have.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you put that in the context of haves and have-nots. The haves, in this case, will be accelerating. Whatever they're accelerating, they'll be accelerating at light speed and, like the companies who are deciding to sit out the AI transition right now, there's going to be a whole swath of humanity that, if you don't have access to these tools, it really will create a divide.
Speaker 1:I teach a class at the University of Arizona. I tell my students, when you look at the jobs that you're considering, if the company is not investing in AI and you're not being given the opportunity to include AI as part of your workflow, don't take that job. Don't work at that company, and if there's a leader who's recommending against significant investments in building out their team, their leadership qualities and their leadership capabilities with AI, that leader should be fired.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, good advice. Right now, I want to call on something that you mentioned in your book and I think it's instructive, but it's also another really thought provoking idea here, and I'm just going to read it, just so I don't I don't mess this up. Agentic AI is fast becoming the mirror of modern executive, amplifying not just data but the mindset and clarity, or lack thereof, of those who lead, which you know as a presents a a huge paradigm shift, because leaders corporate leaders for the most part have had the ability to kind of hide behind the brand or the corporate layering and, uh, you know, there's a buffer zone if you screw up, but what you seem to be saying is the personality, culture, decision-making all those things are going to be reflected in how a Gentic AI performs, which means it's probably a little more visible.
Speaker 1:Well, it sounds like you downloaded my white paper on a Gentic AI at the Myers Report, which I appreciate.
Speaker 1:You know leaders today do need a practical how-to and, when it comes to agentic AI, they really need an integration guide for business planning, and that needs to cover everything from agent job descriptions which you can build and develop, selecting the right AI stack for your own purposes and, as you point out, there are multiple AI tools Co-training agents with human mentors, and it's a dual mentorship, where the AI is teaching the humans and the humans are teaching and preparing the AI to understand what you impart knowledge, measuring success across different KPIs how do you unlock creativity? How do you develop employee engagement? How do you communicate successfully with your customers and clients? How do you build loyalty through AI, an agentic AI? How do you understand the changing role of loyalty points and loyalty tokens? These are all realistic needs that companies and leaders have today, and I do think it's a process of walking through that portal and saying, okay, let's do this now. What do we need? And I like to say if you're not sure what you need to do or how to do it, ask AI, it'll tell you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, usually with a fair degree of accuracy, Although I've had some pushback there. That's another conversation. But I actually got into an early argument, if you will, with ChatGPT at one point that refused to do the work for me.
Speaker 1:I just had it work for me. I just had it. I just had a whole conflict with AI where it was building a presentation and giving it feeds you back what it thinks you want to hear. Right. So you say, if you say I need a report or I need a presentation, it'll come back and say, great, we'll build a presentation, but it doesn't build the presentation.
Speaker 2:I think you have the same agent. I do too. Mine kept coming back and saying well, here's how you do it. And I said no, no, no, you do it. That's what I'm asking you do it.
Speaker 1:And it says, okay, I'll do it because that's what you told it you needed to do, but in the meantime you're waiting for it and it never comes. Amazing, there is a human component and and that's where leadership and understanding and that's where you also you know, we talked about the have and the have-nots and you mentioned it exactly right. It's not just economic have and have-nots, it's those who are making the investment, making the commitment, and those who are not, and there's going to be a huge nexus between them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Governance and trust are such a huge nexus between them. Yeah, governance and trust are such a huge thing right now, and I think you know people will talk about it, but governance and trust tend to be these things that are yeah. Yeah, that's a really good idea. We're all over it as soon as somebody else gets to it, you know, and I don't think those kinds of things can be secondary.
Speaker 1:It's. The biggest threat, I believe, to our future is that we build out AI programs in the long term that don't have ethics, fundamental empathy and understanding of empathy as an emotion, and that leaders fail to develop the human qualities of emotional intelligence, social intelligence, empathy, and reward ingenuity, human ingenuity, human intuition, as part of the collaborative reality, that depend too much on the technology and fail to recognize the changing transformative role of humans in the organization.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well said. Jack's new book is called the Tao of Leadership Harmonizing Technological Innovation and Human Creativity in the AI Era. Jack, I really appreciate this. This has been something I've been looking forward to for some time. Conversation did not disappoint. I really want this. This has been something I've been looking forward to for some time. Conversation did not disappoint. I really want to do more of it.
Speaker 1:I love this conversation and you mentioned perhaps some more in the future. I'm all in, so thanks, mike.
