As the AI landscape rapidly evolves, organizations are striving to balance a bold, long-term vision with agile, short-term actions that drive innovation and business transformation. But success does not just depend on strategy; it requires a fundamental shift in organizational behavior, mindset, and culture. What steps do technology leaders need to take to prepare today’s workforce for tomorrow’s AI-powered roles? Join this discussion on how organizations can enable employees to grow with AI, cultivating a culture of curiosity that drives business transformation and prepares the workforce for future challenges. Featured experts Borika Vucinic, President of the Board, North American Broadcasters Association
As the AI landscape rapidly evolves, organizations are striving to balance a bold, long-term vision with agile, short-term actions that drive innovation and business transformation. But success does not just depend on strategy; it requires a fundamental shift in organizational behavior, mindset, and culture. What steps do technology leaders need to take to prepare today’s workforce for tomorrow’s AI-powered roles?
Join this discussion on how organizations can enable employees to grow with AI, cultivating a culture of curiosity that drives business transformation and prepares the workforce for future challenges.
Featured experts
Borika Vucinic, President of the Board, North American Broadcasters Association
Tom Rourke 00:00
Welcome to the latest episode of The Progress Report. My name is Tom Rourke. I am the Vice President for Design, Insights and Innovation at Kyndryl. Clearly, the topic of AI and Gen AI are something we return to regularly here in the podcast. But each time we do, we uncover different levels of depth and complexity. And I'm delighted to be joined here today by Borika Vucinic, formerly Vice President at Bell Media and currently President of the Board of North America Broadcasters Association. So, let's just jump right in, and we're going to talk today about powering transformation through people. What inspired your journeys into the world of technology and innovation? Maybe give us a little bit about your journey into the whole world of technology and innovation.
Borika Vucinic 00:50
My innovation and drive to do innovation and technology in a business comes from a desire to learn, desire to do better, desire to enable things that haven't been enabled in the past. But through that journey, I had the opportunity to touch different businesses as well as different technology. And we live in a world where legacy technologies are coming very fast to be legacy, like the services, the technology become legacy very fast. 30 years ago, that that period might have been three or four years. Today, that's probably less than a year. And so what more happens in that kind of environment is that you have to go beyond the legacy. So technology in services are always moving away from legacy and how you can create growth. And then for me, that means that, we as a technology enablers, need to enable services to move on to those opportunities, where the customers are, where the new growth business opportunities are coming in, and where then technology enablers are taking us and innovation. So it's all about learning and getting there faster.
Tom Rourke 02:01
Borika, you did talk about that pace at which yesterday's innovation has become today's obsolescence, right? But I suspect there's also certain things that are kind of enduring truths that you need to hold on to as you navigate through that stuff. And I would be really interested in your personal approach to how you navigate through this process as there's continually new things coming out, how do you identify what are the things that are going to be important in adopting or adapting a particular technology into the context of your business? And maybe you could talk a little bit about your personal approach to that.
Borika Vucinic 02:34
The big consideration around us is that not everybody is open to curiosity, not everyone is open to change. We really have to be very selective in terms of which technologies are actually going to solve the business problems, which technologies are actually very well posed for the business we are in to create opportunities for operational efficiencies, growth, revenue, greater customer experience, right? In some cases, the organization wants to be first. When we want to be first, it's all about being in a place where it can deliver something new edge to customer. And then, you know, the focus is there. That is the sort of legacy. And then that becomes the burden over time, where you have this burden of legacy that you carry and carry, and you know, and then it becomes a technical debt you have to address. So the bottom line is, we want to be at the edge of technologies, but the business, the change of people's habits, the default mechanisms that people work in, are the things to consider here. Most of the time we are investing in real technology that will create that greater customer experience first, before going to those big back-end systems that need to make a bigger change as well.
Tom Rourke 03:59
It’s quite interesting, just before we joined here, I was speaking to a CEO of a bank and actually heard their philosophy is very research-led and design-led into experience, but obviously with your work with your own customers and with other organizations, where do you see those tensions between the pace of development in AI and Gen AI and that need to then reconcile it back with the fact that there are established organizational processes, legacy technologies and so on? And where and how that tension is being resolved by leaders today?
Borika Vucinic 04:29
I just want to give you a perspective of maybe three reasons why, from my personal opinion and coming from enterprise, why is this not happening? Number one reason is that people don't change their habits. They are so afraid of losing something, they are not thinking about gaining something. They're really, really afraid about losing something that they had, either for job security or for knowledge or for comfort, whatever you say. Number two is that I feel that enterprises are stuck at the tools available on hand, but it's not challenging what Gen AI can do. And the third aspect is security and privacy. I feel when you talk about what you can do in your personal world versus what you can do in enterprise world. In enterprise world, we're so careful about all we can share and what we cannot share, what is available into the public LLMs versus enterprise LLMs and that is limiting. I think it's limiting people, even people trying things, because I'm afraid to try. Is this possible, or is this following the security control rules?
Tom Rourke 05:47
Is there some sense that that acceleration, almost like the flow of the river now, is becoming so fast that people are nervous about stepping into it, because there's always this thing about being a translator between the benefit of technology could bring and the needs of a business, but there seems to be something much more profound now required of you in that like there are all these people who will have a voice and an interest about how this is going to apply. Do they look to you to be, you know, the guru or a translator, or is it that it's a little bit like how doctors found when everybody started googling things online about medicine, that everybody showed up in a doctor's surgery with an expert opinion on their own conditions? What has that done for the dynamic between you and the business?
Borika Vucinic 06:23
Oh, that's a great question. I wish they'd think of me as a guru, but they don't. But you are absolutely, absolutely right. I think we talk about this often, and I deal a lot with the product team and the business teams, about mostly like a product, how we shape the product and with technology that we have so we can offer a new service with new customers. So what happens with that is that the boundaries are removed, the developers and the team and the folks that do the work are asking, "How is this going to impact the customer, and how's the product going to look like, and what value are we going to deliver? Are we delivering the right value? Are we delivering it fast enough, and is it somewhat future-sustainable?" Where my head is these days, and where I'm helping my business and product team is to be able to use Gen AI to predict better. What impact it is going to have a on customer. What revenue we should expect in a certain time frame. And that should give us all an idea. Should we invest in this work now to make it happen or not? And so that's where we now are coming back to it. I'm using Gen AI as my data science points to predict the future.
Tom Rourke 07:42
I'm really interested in what the skills are that you see now emerging. Are there new skill profiles? Are there combinations of different disciplines that we're going to see become more important for the future?
Borika Vucinic 07:56
I think the number one thing is hiring individuals who are able to not hold onto things and really, really think about how you allow control to something else. And technology and Gen AI tools being one of those, so where we are looking in terms of skills is really about folks who are able to adopt to the changing environment, because to get to this new world, the environment needs to change. I feel in where we are is that it's not based on one individual or one organization. The whole environments are going to be changing. And so the skills of people that are a part of that environment are going to be different tomorrow. So, what we're looking for in people when we hire is the folks that can learn fast, the folks that can let go of comfortable things that you do day in, day out, and can kind of say, "Machine is going to run that, or AI tool is going to run that." And then be able to innovate in their job. So what we are really focusing on is to, again, hire people that that are willing to explore what they have learned from school, what they have learned in another organization, and then innovate in their jobs. Because that's the way for us to move forward the dial in terms of adoption and in terms of understanding where opportunities are. And how do you take the next steps in making those opportunities real, value driven activities? So, that’s where we are. And so far, it has been really successful because it did allow us to think about the change in a job, not just delivering on operational efficiencies, but adding additional value. And that’s where actually what every human wants to do, is add additional value to the work they do.
Tom Rourke 10:01
We usually get to a question at the at the end of The Progress Report, because it's The Progress Report, where we ask people to speculate about, you know, what would progress look like in the future. It feels like this entire conversation has been been pitched in that time zone. So I'm actually going to ask a slightly different question, actually. What is the best advice you could give to a leader for the actions they could take today to better prepare themselves? What would your recommendations be for those short-term actions people should be taking today?
Borika Vucinic 10:31
My piece of advice, if I may, is really about grounding yourself as a leader in some of this academia research about where the Gen AI is going in terms of agentic, enterprise implementations, and abilities of it. So that's one thing I would highly recommend. And then the last thing I'm going to say here as well is that organizations need to adopt this. There’s no question about it in my mind about this. What is wonderful about Gen AI, it can apply to any job, any type of work. There's implementation and work in media, there's implementation in editorial, there's an implementation in how we search for content. There's many places where Gen AI can be implemented and can be utilized. So, what needs to get done is that every single part of that job needs to be part of this movement so you can apply it anywhere
Tom Rourke 11:36
What's very clear about AI and Gen AI is the sheer pace of change and development. But I think, as you would have heard today, that irrespective of that pace, and irrespective of the uncertainties about where all this might lead, what's absolutely essential is that we all begin to immerse ourselves in these technologies, learn and apply the learnings from actually using them in the real world. But also as being useful to how you make your decisions about how you begin to apply AI in the context of your own business. Borika, thank you so much for your time this afternoon on The Progress Report. It's been a fascinating conversation. Thank you.
Borika Vucinic 12:08
Thank you.
Tom Rourke 12:13
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