This exclusive interview with Jim Harris was conducted by Tabish Ali of the Motivational Speakers Agency.
AI is moving into boardrooms faster than many businesses can work out what to do with it. For Jim Harris, the bigger risk is not moving too slowly, but bolting new technology onto old ways of working and expecting transformational results.
A specialist in GenAI and disruptive innovation, Harris advises executive teams and has worked with organisations including American Express, Barclays, IBM, SAP, Walmart and the UK Cabinet Office. In 2024, he was named Speaker of the Year by TEC Canada for his work on AI.
In this exclusive interview with the AI Speakers Agency, Harris explains why companies need to redesign processes from scratch, how leaders can reduce employees’ fear of AI, and why keeping humans involved in the technology remains critical as adoption accelerates.
Question 1. What should business leaders do to introduce AI without triggering fear or resistance among employees?
Jim Harris: “First off, it’s important to create psychological safety. The majority of people in developed nations actually fear AI. They fear job loss. As adults, we tend to fear things or are uncomfortable with new ways of working.
“And so an organisation has to work really hard to say, “Your jobs are safe, number one, and number two, we’re going to provide you training. And three, this is going to enhance your skill set and your employability.”
“So those are a few things organisations have to do.”
Question 2. Why can applying AI to an existing business process limit the gains companies are able to achieve?
Jim Harris: “I was at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago, and I interviewed the head of AI for Ernst & Young in the US. EY has 400,000 employees and they’ve spent a billion dollars on AI.
“They had a 46-hour risk management process that they’d historically run for their clients and they thought, “Okay, let’s apply some AI to it.”
“With the people who designed the process, they got it down to 32 hours, which is a 20% gain, which is great.
“But then they said, “Let’s try something different. Let’s take people who’ve got no experience with the process, but who are technology-first, AI-first, chomping at the bit, new individuals in our organisation, and pair them with risk managers who’ve never been involved in this process.”
“They got the process down to 15 minutes.
“Then they said, “Well, we’re EY, we have to have data compliance and we have to verify everything.” So they added some steps back in and got it back to six hours.
“Look at this: 46 hours, 32 hours, 15 minutes, then back to six. It highlights a couple things for me.
Number one, you can’t just sprinkle some AI fairy dust on your existing processes and hope to get the “greatest gain.
“You really need to start with a blank sheet of paper and say, if we were designing this process today from first principles, what would we do? In other words, we’re not going to take a 2018 or before process and try and enhance it with AI. How do we redesign it?
“Secondly, the people who have been involved in designing the process, unconsciously or consciously, are wedded to it. We need to have fresh eyes to bring in.
“When you actually look at 46 hours down to six hours, that’s a more than 80% reduction. That is staggering. And now you can redeploy people for more important activities.”
Question 3. What example best demonstrates how far AI can move beyond tools such as ChatGPT and deliver transformational gains?
Jim Harris: “There’s so many, but I’ve had the pleasure, I’m a journalist, of being in interview sessions with Demis Hassabis, who’s the founder of Google DeepMind, and he won the Nobel Prize in 24.
“Why? PhD students used to spend an entire five-year career to map the exact structure of a single protein in the human body. AlphaFold did that work in two seconds.
“And so AlphaFold mapped all 200 million proteins in human and animal life on this planet. Now, why is that important?
“Would it be important to know what protein goes rogue and starts cancer at stage zero? Would that be worthwhile to know? Yes. No. Maybe.
“When you do the math on this example, five years of a PhD student’s time to two seconds is a billionfold increase in productivity, which is why Demis won the Nobel in 24. It was announced in 25.
“Now Demis is talking about ending some major diseases within a decade because the same AI is being applied to pharmacological products that can intervene and bind to just one part of a protein and stop cancer before it becomes an issue. In other words, stop it at stage zero.
“The reason you only want to bind to one place on the protein is if you bind to two places, or if you bind to three places, you get two side effects.
“This is critical for humanity. So many people think AI is ChatGPT, and it is, but that is so 2022. Really, there’s more than 100,000 AI applications for business today.”
Question 4. What principles should leaders follow to make sure AI strengthens human capability rather than replacing human judgement?
Jim Harris: “I treat AI like a super-bright intern. I would not have her write my new book, but she can do research.
“The answer she gives me can be somewhere between 50 and 80% of the way to the final answer of what I’m looking for. So you always have to have a human in the loop.
“AI is a tool. It doesn’t replace humanity.
“It’s not an either/or, it’s an and. Back to the first question about creating psychological safety for people, you need to train every single person in AI so that they understand it and what are the guard rails?”
Question 5. How do you make sure a keynote feels relevant to the specific industry and audience in the room?
Jim Harris: “For each audience it’s different. I spend an hour with the meeting planner and the key decision makers for that meeting in terms of what they want to achieve.
“We typically do an hour-long Zoom or Teams meeting. Then I’ll ask for the names of a dozen people who represent a broad cross-section of the audience: different geographies, different lengths of time with the organisation, different ages, different responsibilities.
“And I interview them, not for an hour, but for 20 minutes. Based on those dozen interviews and the hour-long objective-setting session, I create a custom engagement for that client.
“It’s different for every client. But the greatest praise I feel I can get is when somebody comes up to me afterwards and says, “How long have you been working in commercial real estate?”
“Because the terminology, the examples, are all so hyper-customised.”
