Designing for the AI Future

So we have a very exciting session up next. Francois is leading a interactive session with Tim Brown, former CEO of IDEO. He is known as the godfather of design, looking at aspects of design thinking. He's looking into what is the next of next of AI. I had the privilege to open today's session and I actually have the privilege of closing it again and thinking about also building on the previous session where we thinking about the future, thinking about change and thinking about kind of the whole world really changing.

I think there's no better person than Tim Brown to join us on the session and Tim's joining us from Palo Alto. Morning Tim. Have you had your coffee? Good morning. Yeah.

Yeah. Morning, Francois. Yeah. Actually, I'm in Soma, California, which is even nicer than PaloAlto in my view. But yeah, we've got we've got like a heat wave going on here.

It was 90 degrees yesterday. Well, what I don't know what that is, what 32 33 or something. So, um so we're expecting the same today. So, we're we're in firmly out of out of winter time. Amazing.

So, um, Tim was for many years the CEO at, uh, the design firm IDO. And I think one of the things that for me has always stood out about the work that IDO has been doing is it's always about rethinking what the future is, rethinking what's next. And a lot of that happened under Tim's leadership. So maybe Tim just to kick us off um if we had to think about this idea of what's next when we in the world we've just been speaking about AI and all the aspects of change that we're going into. How should we be thinking about that going into kind of as we leave here?

We're closing out this day today. Well, you know, I mean, my I guess my approach to to to to thinking about about [clears throat] what's next is is is is really there's two there's two pieces that I always try and remember. One is um uh what's going to happen after the thing that everybody's already is f focused on right now, right? I mean, what's what's next after what everybody thinks is next? Um, and we can come back to that because everybody's talking about AI right now and a particular aspect of AI, but I think it's worth thinking about what comes beyond that.

And as I say, maybe we'll chat about that in a bit. The second thing is I always try and think about is like what's important to the people because if you really focus on what's important to people, you'll maybe have a better insight as to as to which way the world's going to end up uh going to end up end up going. I mean it's it's very easy to get excited about um about technology. It's very excited about business all kinds of things. But in the end all of this is driven by what people need or what people want or what people enjoy or what people are willing to pay for or any of these things.

So focusing on the people, which of course as a designer is what um is what we uh is is what we're trying to train to do really is is think about what needs people might have that aren't being haven't been articulated yet, haven't been thought about yet, that are latent that if we can figure out how to satisfy, we might uh either help society move forward or we help the economy move forward or we just have a great company, whatever whatever it is we might be focused on. So Tim, I guess you guys have gone through some various changes in the past with, you know, similar kind of changes with the technology, the dot boom. Uh, I would say there's been various changes that at IDO you guys have helped navigate from various perspectives. I think one of the things for me that stood out about your work has been always the idea of design thinking. Is are these kind of tools still relevant as we're going into the AI era and the revolution?

I think so. I think so. and in some ways maybe more relevant because AI is empowering some of those uh tools in a way that um that's that's quite exciting um because really you know all all design thinking is is a sort of a an articulation of what all creative people do what all designers do um but but uh kind of described in a way that you know this was always my intent described in a way such that those who haven't gone through any kind of formal design training can actually understand and maybe somehow practice. Um, and I uh and in the in the end they're they're really about uh the kind of [snorts] sort of relatively simple idea of where do you look for inspiration? Where do you look for ideas?

Where do ideas come from? How do you then um how do you then develop those ideas in a way that uh is both kind of as creative as possible but also as relevant as possible to the to the people that you might be trying to solve problems for. And then um and then you know and then finally how do you get that out into the world in a way that's um not just um kind of feasible from a from a kind of technological perspective but also viable from a from a kind of a sustainability business perspective. And so all of that's still relevant to the future still relevant now I think. But um as I said what uh uh what AI is doing interestingly enough is as as and in fact as [snorts] every generation of of of of information technology has done is it is empowering um that creative problem solving process in a way that we haven't seen before.

Uh you know we now have tools for gathering vastly more insight than we've ever had before about about users and about markets. We have tools for synthesizing and processing those insights in a way that helps us understand what the possibilities for the future might be. We have a way of we have new ways of kind of visualizing and exploring ideas. Um uh often now people who don't necessarily have have innate talent for drawing or building things can use these tools to create prototypes or create visualizations of their ideas in a way that we haven't been able to before. And we have tools for deploying new ideas in the forms of experiments um or in the in the forms of production code or even production um physical objects in a way that we've never had before.

So um so in every aspect uh that design thinking framework is now empowered and enabled and magnified and leveraged with some of these technologies that we're getting our hands on. The the one of the ideas we had with this uh chat with Tim was to actually have a bit of a Q&A and we've been collecting a bunch of questions throughout the day that people kind of came up with as we ran through these sessions. But if there are any other questions please just raise your hands. happy to kind of you know it's a great opportunity to ask uh one of the big thinkers in design about you know these topics like future facing topics. So just grab my grab my eye if you'd like to ask them a question.

But one of the ones that stood out to me Tim was uh on the questions there was a question around a lot of these offices a lot of family offices are small organizations and they let me just recruit again small organizations managing a lot of complexity and within this AI space there are actually a lot of topics that feel both uh important and urgent. So how you know if if it's kind of how do you kind of triage that uh if all this AI change that we need to design for hopefully using some of the design thinking frameworks uh feel so incredibly urgent and important. Yeah. Well that is one of those kind of million-dollar questions isn't it really? I mean, how do we make sense uh when the pace of change is uh is as it um as it seems to be?

Again, I would go for me, I I go back to some to try and understand what the kind of sustainable eternal truths might be and and use those to help guide what might what might be important. I um you know I I I think we can find ourselves getting uh overwhelmed with all of you know every new announcement about every new model and every new tool every new efficiency that's getting getting created. But I mean I would um you know I I I would encourage anybody whether they're running a family office with a small team or team inside a large company or a startup [clears throat and cough] to to try and take the time to step back a little bit and try and understand what some of these kind of um uh longer term themes might be. I mean, one one that I find myself thinking about quite a bit. You and I talked about it the other day [clears throat] is something that um uh my colleague and I, Joe, who's actually sat on the call listening here, um called the uh the AI dividend, which is right now we're all [snorts] totally fixated on AI as a as a an efficiency creating uh technology.

Uh and indeed it is. It's um it's remarkable how um the potential for disrupting costs particularly in knowledge work uh that that AI brings. I mean you know I mean you can you can look at whether it's coordination costs um which in in knowledge based businesses can be as much as 50 60% of the total corporate business. Um which is absolutely true even in a small team. You think of how much time you spend just sharing information, meeting, deciding things.

These are all coordination costs that um that that that AI can radically reduce u potentially. Um uh also execution costs when it comes to um taking an idea and doing something with it. Whether it's writing a report or whether it's whether it's marketing a new product um uh uh whether it's whether it's rolling out some new organizational change. All of these things can be radically sped up and uh and and use much less human resource uh again when we use AI technology. So this is all great and it's going to be available to everybody, right?

We're all going to have access to these tools of efficiency and indeed, you know, for those organizations that don't uh engage with that are are going to go extinct pretty fast because they'll be just too slow and too expensive to operate. So clearly we all need to embrace these um these uh AI enabled tools for efficiency but if we all have them then we all get the same benefit which is innately a commoditizing um force right so um and so all organizations will find themselves chasing efficiency um which will eventually you know have a diminishing returns eventually we'll all get to the same levels of e efficiency just like most organizations operate at basically a similar level of efficiency today. We will in the future it'll just be more efficient. So that in itself won't be enough to allow organizations to compete. That that in itself won't actually create winners.

Maybe in the very early days for the fast movers it might but eventually it won't because um and it and it for many kinds of organizations. This is going to be true for consulting organizations which is huge industry. It's going to be true in [clears throat] the legal world. It's going to be true in accounting. it's going to be true um uh potentially even in in manufacturing is is that that commoditizing effect will also depress prices.

So if anything these technologies will will actually cause us to be able to um um will actually cause us to lose pricing power ultimately eventually. Um so what I tend to think about what Joe and I have been talking about is well what do you do um to counter that? Well, um, interesting enough, we've seen this phenomenon before. Uh, back in the industrial revolution back in the late 1800s, suddenly we figured out how to manufacture everything. And there were vast quantities of things getting manufactured far more cheaply than ever before.

But most of it was pretty poor quality. And out of this sort of mass of kind of commoditized product arose a whole new industry. It was called the design industry which um um and certain companies realized that if they improved the quality of their product, if they made them more appealing, if they made them um more noticeable, if they made them uh better to use, then they were actually going to be they were going to they were going to increase their pricing power, they're going to be they were going to be more distinctive. So that's the whole design industry grew out of that in the early 20th century. So I think today when we look at the potential um kind of efficiency dividend the dividend we get of AI we need to think about how are we going to invest it invest that and and in our view at least some of that is going to need to be invested in creativity it's going to be need to be invested in our ability as organizations to adapt faster to change faster um and you know as I said earlier uh the good news is that this same AI technology that's going to commoditize a lot of what we do through efficiency, but also gives us the power to increase the pace in which we are creative and increase the pace in which we explore new possibilities and beyond anything we could do before.

I love this idea about the AI dividend. I think it's the first time that I heard it. I mentioned to you on our call as well and I think it's an interesting way to think about AI in what we're doing. Suddenly we have this extra dividend and what are we doing with that dividend? uh but I think the one thing that you just mentioned Tim also around efficiency and I think uh one of the questions we got earlier was around uh human- centered design and maybe if we thinking about AI optimizing for efficiency how could that potentially impact on human- centered design and the question is actually asking whether it's more of a narrative than a practice so this sounds quite philosophical I'm not sure if somebody yeah I'm not sure I quite get what the narrative practice bit is.

Um but again I think uh I have some I mean I have I have actual fa faith in in in us as human beings right that we um thing things um that are focused purely on efficiency uh and that become repetitive and the same we just get bored of right we just we we we uh we we can already see it I don't know how many of how many of these AI generated videos have you watched now the the first one was cool. The second one was interesting. By the time you got to the fifth one, it's like, "Oh, this is kind of they're all the same." Um, and things like taste and fashion and just a desire for difference and even pure creativity as people do new things remain remain important and that's all part of the kind of human world of human centered design and human- centered creativity. Um, and I'm I'm I don't see any thing that would indicate that that's all going to go away. Um and indeed organizations I believe companies will realize that there'll be more value based on the kind of human content of what we do.

Um it will again it will have to be built on top of efficient and effective platforms that allow us to do all the other stuff um really efficiently really efficiently so that we're not spending money on that. We're spending it on the stuff that matters. Um but I I I genuinely believe that the kind of human part of many of the kinds of experiences that we that that we have I mean uh across the spectrum not just the kind of consumer products we buy or the consumer experiences entertainment but I think it's going to remain true in healthcare it's going to remain true in education um it'll remain true in a lot of sectors that the kind of the human component because we are ultimately serving humans with whatever it is we do will remain uh will will remain important. That's uh pretty reassuring. Uh I'll pause at this.

I've got one question for you, Tom, but um anyone in the room with a specific question? Yes. The question was, if you were going to build IDO today with AI, how would you do it? I think uh well it's funny enough I've been reflecting on this quite a bit and and um uh much in terms of the way IDE was built I still think is relevant to uh the today to the world of AI because IDO was built around the idea of small pretty autonomous very flexible very interdicciplinary teams and I actually think that that is the the future of the way organizations need to be built in the in the age of AI what I wouldn't do is put any of the layers of management over the top of that that ended up evolving as the company got bigger. Um but I am I am very confident that uh that small autonomous or largely autonomous very well connected through through AI tools um but small and flexible highly interdicciplinary so that they can be very flexible in their thinking teams will be the way in which organizations are both um more creative in the future but also more adaptable and more agile and faster and um and we can already see these small teams I mean I I've had many many instances in my career of working with companies that have been amazed how much a team of three or four people can get done when they're when when they're talented and they've got they cover a lot of um a lot of expertise and with the right tools and move far faster than often large organizations can.

But that kind of pales into ins insignificance compared to what we can do today. um you know and uh you know we I I'm working with startups which are building huge code bases and delivering big services to companies with teams of four or five six people. Um and I think that's going to become the norm, not the exception. Uh and so that's how I I mean I would just do my best to keep any organization that I was building um uh uh organized around these small groups um with with whatever tools I needed to connect those groups together but without the layers of management on top. So maybe just in looking at the time I think I've got one more question for you Tim and I think a lot of officers here are in a space where they're thinking about going into a change.

We know that a lot of the AI technologies are able to help with, you know, researching these solutions or finding the right solutions, but we've seen also with AI tools that it's a lot about prompting and about prompting and asking the right questions. That's often a big thing. You're a master of asking the right questions. So, how do you is there any tips for, you know, officers going into a space of change? We know we need to solve a lot of things but we might not know what questions to ask to solve around our organizations.

Is there a way of thinking about that or you know any tips on that? Yeah. Yeah. This is this is one of this this is might this might get a little philosophical so apologize for that but we tend to think about asking questions like we think about wanting answers right we think there's a right question we need to know what the right question is and then ask it that's not the way I think about I think about questions as an explor a curio an exploration of curiosity right like that you're going on a journey of being curious about something that and then from that something occurs to you and you ask a question about that and then that then that causes you to be curious about something else you ask a question about that and so building up this practice if you like of of really of curiosity um uh and being willing to follow a path and not knowing where it's going to end up going. I mean this is one of the things about about creative people is that creative people have a lot of confidence in their ability to get somewhere interesting even if they've no idea what that destination is.

And that's often what scares people who come maybe from a more analytical point of view. Um uh or maybe from a more engineering point of view or whatever. Um it's it's it seems it seems just too mysterious to be to to to do that. But but I would encourage you to think about the practice of asking questions as being a creative practice, right? It's a it's about following the following the things that you learn and that make you curious and you go to the next thing you get curious about that and you go to the next thing you get curious about that and eventually you'll get to really interesting questions because again it's the same as what we were talking about before on the very surface everybody will have the same questions and we already can see this with these AI tools people ask the same questions I get the same answers we all get the same answers we're all doing the same thing what's the point right it'll it it'll it will be the the art of asking interesting creative questions.

Now, the way that I like to do it, um, and I mentioned Joe, who sat on this call listening today, Joe and I have a way of working, and we just get into a dialogue and we ask questions backwards and forwards and and we essentally use the results of that dialogue. It might be an hourong conversation exploring a question and we feed that into AI tools and we let that and we and we use we use that as the prompt. We use the dialogue as the prompt, not some simple question. And this is something something that I'm finding with my experience of these tools is the richer you can make the prompt. It could be a dialogue, it could be a it could be a just a long description of something, whatever it is, the richer you make the prompt, the more interesting the results and often the more appropriate the results are that you get back.

So I'm no expert on prompt engineering or prompting, but I but I I think I've spent a career trying to find interesting ways to ask questions. And I think maybe those two those two worlds are quite similar. Tom, any questions that you have for the people in this room? I'm I'm I'm super I mean I think that your world the world of family offices you're often involved in with people at the be very beginning of their um of their journey of building new company or or or making some new idea work in the world. And um I mean I'm I'm always interested in uh how how do you see the future of that?

What are you excited about? What do you what do you and you know I'm not expecting you all to be able to answer now but um I I I I think uh you know one of the things I've noticed is that you know institutional investing large scale investing even venture investing which you know have quite a lot of exposure to here in the Bay Area is getting to be such large scale and yet the future as I see it is one where small ideas can get big quite quickly with not necessarily at least at the beginning needing lots of funding to do that. That feels to me that's a world of relationships. That's a world of of of of people meeting people and getting excited about each other's ideas and then trying to help them build it. And I'm just wondering whether you all feel the same way or not.

I mean, I see a lot of head nodding. One question at the back there. Interesting. How can we beat the Americans? Ah, [laughter] do you need to I mean I know like just I mean just watch the news.

Do you actually need to help beat the Americans? I won't say any more than that. Um but uh um you know uh I've lived for most of my career here in in California and and partly that's because it's a it's a fairly attractive place and partly is because there's just so much uh and it's become this kind of huge critical mass of people with ideas which has always excited me but there are lots of other parts of the world uh where people have ideas. What there may not always be is the enthusiasm to support those ideas to help people along the way to give them you know provide funding that they need in order to in order to invest in those ideas. That's how it all started in Silicon Valley.

This is how it started in the US. It was people with a with optimism and passion for their ideas and other people that were willing to help. And that's really all it is, right? I mean whether that's the birth of venture capital here in Silicon Valley or even good old you know American entrepreneurialism that's been around for you know a couple hundred years it was very much people with passion people with ideas and other people prepared to help uh and I think that so it's for me then it's not a question of much of how do you beat the Americans it's how do we how do we have that be something that that that exists u worldwide um because it's not like we're running out of problems to solve, right? It's not like we're running out of opportunities to explore.

There's a vast ocean of them that we haven't even tapped into. Um, and I think it's a a kind of I think it's an an ocean with no limit. Um, there will always be interesting ideas and needs that we have as a species, but many of them of which to do with problems that we've caused for Um, so I would just I would focus on passion and being prepared to help. So just before I let Tim go, just one small announcement I guess. Uh we've been working together with Tim for the last couple of months, almost a year actually, on figuring out how we can collaborate in terms of you know bringing some of Tim's thinking to family offices.

So basically anybody in this room and a select few offices throughout the next year will have the opportunity to also work with Tim uh and explore some of the questions that you might be sitting and working with and in through this sort of collab with Tim get access to one of the best design thinkers in terms of solving some of these problems that we might be working with. So we'll send the followup after this but uh Tim we're very excited to work with you on this. Yeah. Well I'm very excited to too. As I said before, I think I think the world in which you all exist in and represent is incredibly important um for for the future.

I also think that there's a sort of a natural inclination towards uh views that I have around being human- centered that you have in your part of the world. Um uh I truly love uh Copenhagen and come whenever I can. I wish I could have made it there for this uh for your uh for your meeting today, but um uh yeah, I really hope that we can find some ways to work together. I would enjoy that very much and uh would would enjoy the dialogue. Thank you so much, son.

Thank you. Thanks. Thank [applause] Yeah. Thanks very much. It's been great.

Thank you all. Enjoy the rest of your afternoon.