Ep53. Iliana Oris Valiente: A.I. Chief of Staff

Iliana: Technology is becoming a lot more human by design. Historically, technology was clunky. You needed to have an advanced degree in order to be able to interact with it. But now technology is starting to mimic some of the characteristics of what makes us human.

Helen: Iliana Oris Valiente is not your average executive.

Helen: She’s a blockchain pioneer, an AI advocate, and a passionate voice for human potential. She’s also the youngest ever managing director in the history of Accenture. Iliana’s title also includes head of innovation and environmental, social, and governance at Accenture Canada. She works with senior executives and boards to support their strategic transformation journeys.

Helen: She also leads multidisciplinary teams across design, data, and technology, focusing on cross industry initiatives in emergent areas such as gen AI, metaverse, and sustainability. Not only is Iliana a certified Bitcoin professional, startup investor, respected board member, published author, and sought after global public speaker, but she also has a digital twin named Lila.

Helen: Iliana and I first met at South by Southwest this past March and became fast friends, especially since we both are in the clone club and have AI avatars. In our conversation, Iliana speaks about AI and its transformative impact on the future of work, creativity, and societal trends. She shares her vision of a human centered future where AI augments rather than replaces human creativity and how the democratization of powerful AI tools will raise the bar for innovation.

Helen: Iliana discusses the concept of digital humans and the emergence of a multi-agent workforce in which AI assistants, like her own digital twin, will interact and collaborate with their human counterparts, including as chiefs of staff. She highlights the shift towards generalist knowledge workers and the amplified role of creative directors in an AI powered world.

Helen: Iliana also emphasizes the importance of responsible AI and the principles guiding its development at Accenture. Today, get a glimpse into the future of AI, computer vision, and the tremendous opportunities that await those who dare to navigate change head on like Iliana. Enjoy.

Helen: Welcome to Creativity Squared. Discover how creatives are collaborating with artificial intelligence in your inbox, on YouTube, and on your preferred podcast platform. Hi, I’m Helen Todd, your host, and I’m so excited to have you join the weekly conversations I’m having with amazing pioneers in the space.

Helen: The intention of these conversations is to ignite our collective imagination at the intersection of AI and creativity to envision a world where artists thrive.

Helen: Iliana, welcome to Creativity Squared. It is so good to have you on the show.

Iliana: Thanks so much for having me!

Helen: I feel like we were bound to meet at some point because we were both at the same conferences and didn’t know it, but it was Rob Richardson who put us in touch and we finally met at South by Southwest this past year.

Helen: So big shout out to Rob for that cause it’s such a joy to know you and so excited to get the Creativity Squared community to meet you. And for those who are meeting you for the first time, can you share a bit about your origin story and your role as the managing director and innovation lead at Accenture Canada?

Iliana: Absolutely. So I wear a couple of different hats. Delighted to be here today. My primary role is with Accenture, where, as you said, I’m responsible for everything that we’re doing in our innovation file, and that means I work with some of our biggest corporate clients and government clients, essentially translating what’s happening in the world of technology, what are the various societal trends that matter to them, and how can we help them incorporate these trends and to future proof their businesses, as well as to play a role in building a future that humans actually want to live in.

Iliana: So I’ve been referred to as a blend between an innovation corporate executive and Bernie Brown because I spent so much of my time thinking about, you know, humans and how humans are going to live in this new world. So, in addition to that, I’m sitting on a couple of boards of directors also bringing in that diverse perspective to the table and spend a lot of time in the venture capital community, connecting with the startups and the entrepreneurs that are really at that bleeding edge to absorb what’s happening and once again, be able to translate it into all the other circles that I’m in.

Helen: And if I remember correctly, you’re like either the youngest or one of the youngest managing directors at Accenture Canada, is that correct?

Iliana: I’m the youngest ever managing director in the history of Accenture period. And we are a giant 700,000 person organization.
Helen: That is amazing. Well, congratulations. So tell us a bit about your origin story of how you came to be in your role and the youngest managing director ever at Accenture.

Iliana: So I have a very varied background.

Iliana: I am actually a trained chartered accountant by profession. And so I had started my career working in tax, in audit. I ended up in corporate finance doing valuations for M&A transactions. And I realized that my favorite clients were those working in technology because technology is ultimately what enables scale and those companies moved the fastest. And it was through my varied background and the fact that I have a super diverse network of personal contacts that I stumbled into the rabbit hole of blockchain technology and crypto and when I was first introduced to it, my thought was, “Wait a second, money that’s designed for internet native transactions and money that’s borderless?”

Iliana: Well, I happen to be by origin half Russian, half Cuban, and I’ve traveled the world extensively. I’ve been living this digital nomad slash citizen of the world type of lifestyle. So that to me just really was appealing and I started to explore this new technology space, which is still very nascent at the time and realized that not only did it have applicability in a financial transaction context.

Iliana: It also could be useful in other corporate and other industries. And so I ended up building the first ever blockchain advisory business within any of the large consulting firms. This is dating back to, you know, 2014, 2015. And so I had built that up for some time. We had spun some companies out. I was doing my own thing for a bit and the Accenture team had reached out and really wanted me to join to help them grow their blockchain footprint.

Iliana: So I did that for a bit. I was in a global leadership role and then I was, you know, asked if I would take on this Canadian business of essentially building an innovation practice from scratch. And so over the course of the last five years, I’ve done just that. And now we have teams that service all of our industry clients with industry expertise, all of the emerging technology experts and the connectivity into Accenture writ large between our R&D labs teams, our ventures teams.

Iliana: Accenture is fascinating because we invest the tune of 1 billion dollars. With a ‘B,’ in innovation each year. The number of patents that we own, we’re investing long before our clients ever get whiffed that, oh, this is an area that’s bubbling up because it’s part of our responsibility to ensure we’re always future proofing ourselves to then be able to support the future proofing of our clients.

Helen: I know we’re going to dive a little bit deeper into some of those insights. But before we do that, since we met at SXSW and something that Iliana and I have in common is that we have both cloned ourselves and Iliana’s clone Lila had a big activation and appearance at SXSW. So, I don’t want to steal your thunder and we’ll hand over the mic to tell us all about Lila and your clone.

Iliana: It sounds funny to say, and I’m still adjusting to it, but I have an AI powered digital human twin of myself that’s been built. And her name is Lila, she looks like me, she sounds like me, she’s been trained on the last five years worth of case studies of every single project that my teams have built, and she has that infinite memory, in addition to being trained on a number of Accenture pieces of research, and thought leadership, transcripts of talks that I’ve delivered on various conference stages, what I’ve published, my personality assessments.

Iliana: And so yes, it’s been this really fascinating experiment of what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to essentially have a clone of yourself? How could she be useful to me? And what do digital humans as a whole mean for society and for the future of work? And how do we really prepare for that future that’s [on the] not so distant horizon, if you will. This is technology that now exists today, and we are actively living and breathing it, day by day.

Helen: I love that you are so early on, on the blockchain and jumping early on, on the clone train as well. So tell us about the South by Southwest activation, because that was very specific and using Lila to help, almost like as a concierge, which is like a great use case now. So tell us what happened at SXSW.

Iliana: I love conferences and I attend lots of them. For anyone that attends a large conference, how much time do you think you’ve spent going through their agenda to figure out which sessions you should attend versus which ones don’t make sense?

Iliana: If you attend a festival the size of SXSW, they have 15 pages on their website of session descriptions. You could easily spend an hour or two hours just building an itinerary. And then not to mention the conflicts, everything overlaps, and they’re in various venues. So this is a perfect example where a digital human can do at scale what a regular human cannot possibly do.

Iliana: And so we built this activation at SXSW where Lila could help attendees build a curated agenda. You would talk to her for two minutes, maybe three minutes, you’d introduce yourself, what you’re interested in, what you’re not interested in, what’s your background, what are you hoping to accomplish and out of that insight, she would build you a customized itinerary.

Iliana: It would appear on the iPad in front of you with a little QR code. You scan your QR code and ta da! You’re done. You don’t need to spend the two hours of that interaction. And so at SXSW it was fascinating because it was the first time we had made Lila available at this scale to the general public.

Iliana: The general conference going public. And we wanted to test a couple of things. One was how receptive were conference goers to interacting with a digital human twin. Would they find it helpful? Would they find it weird? Uncanny? Was it better if I was standing right next to Lila, or if they were interacting with Lila on a stand alone basis?

Iliana: And then more importantly, could we train her on this data to be able to respond to the needs of the attendees. And the experiment… was very successful. And now we’re scaling this use case and are in discussions with a number of conference organizers globally, pretty much anywhere where an attendee might be spending 30 minutes or more, building their itinerary, being able to use one of these digital concierges in advance and during the event is super helpful.

Helen: I love that. And I know in our conversations I’ve mentioned, and it’s not surprising to me that it was successful because I’ve mentioned that Jill Scheifelbein, who’s been on the show, has done research on the efficacy of clone standing in for their human counterparts and hers was specifically hyper realistic clones and that they are effective in engaging audiences and retention of stuff.

Helen: But [our] clones are a little bit different. I would call mine hyper realistic and yours, I don’t know, how would you describe the aesthetic of your clone?

Iliana: It’s humanistic, yes, but it doesn’t fall into the realm of what people often think about when they think about deepfakes. So you can very clearly tell that she’s not human human, nor does Lila pretend to be human.

Iliana: Part of the principle that we subscribe to at Accenture is this idea of responsible AI, and one of the principles is the AI must clearly identify itself as such, so that people interacting with her are aware that they’re dealing with an AI and not with a human. So she looks like me because she has been designed and rendered by the same skills of someone who designs and builds video games.

Iliana: I’ve submitted all sorts of really awkward close up photos of myself and 3D body scans, including very awkward photos of my teeth, because who knew, but apparently your teeth are what give the rest of your face structure and keep it in place.

Iliana: So she very much so looks like me, styled after me, but when you interact with her, you know that it’s not a human human.
Helen: Yeah, I love that. And here in Cincinnati, we definitely are a city leading in responsible AI. So I’m a very big advocate for all things responsible and transparency, especially when you start talking about human likeness with deep fakes and all of the actors, concerns.

Helen: So I’m definitely right there with you. And for everyone just listening, we’ll be sure to put video and images of Lila on the blog post. So we’ll include that link in the description so you can get a feel for what Lila looks like. It was very cool because you got to see the lifelike version on screen at SXSW [and] I’ve only seen mine on, I guess the biggest screen at the UC digital futures building.

Helen: But how did you come up with the name? Cause some people name their clones, some don’t. Mine’s Helen 2.ODD. Cause you can never have like, there’s never going to be a better Helen 2.0 than the original. So I’m curious how you came to name yours, Lila.
Iliana: We definitely wanted a name for her and we wanted a name that seemed familiar enough to mine, but still distinct.

Iliana: So, for example, you couldn’t name her Victoria because Victoria and Iliana are just, you know, too far away from each other. And we also wanted the letters AI to appear somewhere in the name so that stylistically it would pop out at you. And so I engaged my team. This was actually a really fun little brainstorming exercise and we created a short list of names and Lila ended up winning out.

Helen: I love that. Well, and you’ve talked about seeing Lila as a chief of staff. So there’s like what the clones can do today and where they’re going. So I’d love to get your perspective. Cause I thought that was like, so cool. I was like, “Can Helen 2.ODD be my chief of staff?”

Helen: So I’d love to hear how you’re thinking about that.

Iliana: The way that I’m thinking about it is that AI is best positioned to augment what a human can do. And for as long as I can remember, I have joked that if I had a magical superpower, it would be the ability to teleport myself and to be in all the places that I need to be in simultaneously.

Iliana: And now with AI and with these digital humans, we’re finally getting closer and closer to that ultimate reality. Now, when it comes to my regular work week, there’s usually at least two or three times a week that somebody calls me and says, “Hi Iliana, we’re doing a project with a client in the XYZ industry and they’re experiencing pain point ABC. Have you done anything along these lines before?”

Iliana: And I have to stop, and I think about this, and I go through my rolodex of all the projects we’ve ever done, and I respond by saying, “Yes, actually, you should look at this case study, and this case study, and here’s your point of contact, and this is the report that you should read to get yourself up to speed.”

Iliana: And then they go off, and they do their thing, and they come back to me for a follow up conversation. But what if I’m not available for that initial call? What if I’m on holidays? What if I’m sick that day? What if I’m just not available and my calendar is blocked for the next two weeks. Does that conversation get delayed?

Iliana: And finally, and potentially most importantly, do I want to take that phone call to repeat that conversation again if I’ve essentially had a variation of that discussion? Last week, the week before, the week after, is that the highest and best use of my time? No. And I feel strongly that humans will be a lot happier if we allowed them to do what is in each individual’s highest and best use.

Iliana: And be in that zone of genius, not being distracted by everything else. Highest and best use, interestingly enough, though, is a term that comes from the real estate world of how do you want to develop a plot of land? But I think it’s very appropriate and apt when we think about humans in this AI powered world.

Iliana: And so the intention for Lila is for her to grow into my chief of staff. So instead of me having that preliminary discussion, it’s you talk to Lila. She’s been trained on all the case studies. She has that knowledge management base. She can point you in the right direction. You can go and have your exploratory conversations with the folks that she’s directing you to.

Iliana: And then you can book time on my calendar, the actual human human’s calendar, and we can dig right into the details, into the heart of the discussion, into what really matters, freeing up, call it four hours a week or eight hours a week for me, that I can now use to take a team member out for a lunch, sit down with them, understand what really matters to their life, what really matters to their career, how do we coach them so that they’re happy.

Iliana: I could use that time to meet with a client and to better understand their pain points. I could use that time back to read a research report on the latest and greatest coming out from the Accenture research and development labs, or I can go do an activity that only a human could do, a sauna, a cold plunge, a yoga class, a pilates class, painting, you know, the list goes on.

Helen: If my clone can help me do more time of sauna and spa activities, sign me up for sure. Oh, and one interesting thing as you describe your clone for chief of staff, it’s almost more like interacting with other people. One thing that really excites me about just AI and whether it’s clones or chatbots or interactive clone slash chatbots is the term ‘personal language models’ where you, not only will others interact with your corpus of data, but you can interact with your own corpus of data.

Helen: And I was thinking, I was building a deck the other day, pulling every event that we’ve ever done before from a social media optimization standpoint. I was like, this would be a great use case where if my whole corpus of data from my 14 years of my social media agency, which is loaded. And then I could just ask, “What are all my presentations on events that we’ve proposed before? Pull those out.”

Helen: So I could really see; I’m excited about interacting with my own corpus of data as like a personal person, in addition to maybe the outward facing interaction. So I’m curious, have you thought about that? Have you started playing with it in that way already too?

Iliana: Absolutely. One of the use cases I’m most excited about is actually related to a personal CRM system.

Iliana: Somebody asked me the other day, “Iliana, how many people do you think you’ve met in the last year?” And I stopped and I paused for a moment. “Like, I don’t know, maybe a thousand, maybe fifteen hundred,” and the person sitting across from me quite literally nearly fell out of their chair. They were like, “You’ve met how many people this year?”

Iliana: And to me, I was like, wait, is this not normal? Do other people not do this either? But I mean, with the number of dinner parties that I attend and cocktail receptions and you get off of a conference stage and you chat to people and you exchange contact details, but inevitably, the human brain has limited processing capacity and limited storage capacity.

Iliana: It would be fascinating if I could, in the future, train Lila and do almost a download for my brain into hers that would allow me to quickly index and catalog some of the folks that I met, because, and this is a real example, I was talking to a friend of mine. And she’s a creative, film director and she is experiencing burnout and she really needs to just go away to an artist retreat somewhere and be in a picturesque, scenic place where she can decompress and get her creative juices flowing again.

Iliana: And I said, you know, I sat next to someone at a dinner and I know exactly what dinner we were at. I remember exactly where he was seated and he was telling me that his wife owns a beautiful property somewhere in Italy and they were considering getting it renovated and specifically hosting artist retreats.

Iliana: And I really wish that in that moment, I could have easily found that person. So maybe if he’s listening to this podcast, he can reach out to me, but inevitably, I don’t know where I put that business card. And I couldn’t quite remember the name to be able to find him on LinkedIn. And that specific fact isn’t something I’m going to be able to easily query.

Iliana: But perhaps in the future, when we have our digital humans and if I can give her a download of some of the most interesting conversations I’ve had, I can then extend my human memory to give myself wings. I would love that scenario in the future.

Helen: I love that scenario too and pair that with computer vision where they can help you, because I’m really good with faces.

Helen: I’m working on being better at remembering people’s names and Drew who’s helping produce this show knows I mispronounce things all the time. I think my clone probably pronounces your name better than I pronounced your name up the gate. But if we could use computer vision to sync with LinkedIn to also help us identify people that we’re meeting who we might not [remember]. We’ve met once, but we remember their face and not their names.

Helen: So lots of exciting things. But I do wanna make sure that we talk about more than just clones. But I will say Iliana and I are so excited about being cloned. And I think the last stat that I had seen is that there’s less than a thousand known hyper realistic clones in the world.

Helen: So you’re you’re listening to two people who are at the very forefront of this but it’s just going to increase like wildfire. If you haven’t seen one already, you’ll start seeing them popping up. But we were in talks of starting a clone club to share experiences, best practices and whatnot.

Helen: So if you’re cloned already or want to be cloned and are interested in the clone club, definitely reach out to either Iliana or I about that. But since you’ve got such a great pulse on what’s coming in the future, especially with all the amazing 1 billion dollars of research at Accenture. And Accenture has an annual report on some of the trends. I’d love for you to share with our audience, kind of, what those trends are and help us all get a glimpse into the future and what’s coming at this very exciting and pivotal moment in time.

Iliana: So the overarching theme of this year’s Technology Vision that Accenture puts out is that technology is becoming a lot more human by design. Historically, technology was clunky, you needed to have an advanced degree in order to be able to interact with it. But now technology is starting to mimic some of the characteristics of what makes us human.

Iliana: And what makes us human? It’s the way we think, it’s the way we feel, it’s the way that we communicate, it’s the way that we process information, et cetera. And now, with advance of generative AI, it’s starting to mimic a lot of those aspects. You can interact with a chatbot, you can ask the questions, and it’s not just giving you back information.

Iliana: It’s giving you back advice. And so, that interaction model between human, interface and the data that’s available on the internet and the fact that these interfaces are changing is pretty transformative. So that’s one of the subtrends that we’re tracking closely. The other trend that we’re tracking is this idea of AI agents.

Iliana: And so Lila is a personification actually, of that trend and we’re showcasing that it’s no longer in the realm of the theoretical. It’s very much so here and available today. Now, if you take this idea of digital humans in the workforce and agents in the workforce and extend it one step forward, you end up with this idea of a multi-agent workforce.

Iliana: So what happens when my digital human starts to interact with Helen’s clone and if they can have a transaction between the two of them? What is the infrastructure that is required that’s not built for human to human interaction or agent to human interaction, but that’s built for agent to agent? And we’re slowly starting to see that moving forward.

Iliana: Right now we’re at the stage where we’re still determining what exactly is involved with humans training AI agents. So in my case, I have been training Lila on my personality traits, how I would look at certain topics. Morningstar created their own chatbot agent, Mo, to help their financial advisors better serve their end clientele.

Iliana: And Mo was trained by the top performers at Morningstar, right? So we’re seeing an entire new category of a job being created [from] these humans training AIs. So that’s two of the trends that we’re tracking in the report and the last trend that’s really notable is this idea that our body is becoming electric.

Iliana: So now I’m wearing my aura ring for those who can’t see the aura ring. I am literally obsessed with this thing because it’s a wearable device and I wake up in the morning and I look up my sleep score and it’s super accurate in the measurements that it gives. This is something that I’m wearing on me.

Iliana: But what happens when we have more and more implanted devices within us that help us better understand our own bodies and our own minds? Because yes, we have started to explore the frontier of outer space, and we’ve been exploring the bottoms of the oceans, or attempting to. There is still so much we do not know about our human bodies, and how they work, and how we optimize them, and even less than we know about the human brain.

Iliana: And so exploring these frontiers and brain computer interfaces, the implantable devices for those with limb mobility issues and impairments and amputees, this is going to be a fascinating frontier, and I happen to sit on the board of directors of one of the biggest hospitals in Canada, Sunnybrook Hospital, widely regarded as one of the top 25 hospitals globally, and it’s just fascinating to be paying attention to what’s in this frontier of startup land and the research labs, and how [we are] going to start applying this in healthcare of patients today to make our lives in the future better.

Helen: Thank you for giving us the high level rundown. And we actually, at the time of this recording an episode with Maddie Bell, who we discussed the rise of the AI agents as really like the next wave of AI that’s coming. So it’s really great to hear. And one thing that you mentioned before we started recording is Marriott is doing something really interesting with digital humans and as an AI agent, I was wondering if you could share that use case and example of like a real world example of this coming to life from a big brand.

Iliana: So according to Accenture research, 60 percent of travelers said that they were open to using a digital human or AI agent to help them find and book a trip. And 65 percent of respondents were open to having an AI agent playing a much more proactive role in helping them throughout the trip planning process to give proactive types of recommendations.

Iliana: And so for me, I travel a lot. I am a big proponent of this idea of digital nomads being a secular trend that is only going to increase as people realize that, wait a second, you can really work from anywhere so long as you have your phone, your computer, your brain, your notebook, depending on what type of work you are doing.

Iliana: And so it’s fascinating for me to pay attention to how AI and new technology trends are going to be shaping that travel experience. And so Marriott is leading the charge and they have been rolling out this new AI agent that they’re calling RENAI as a short form for renaissance, you know, the Renaissance hotel chain and RENAI is essentially, the employee at a hotel that has been augmented to be able to provide you with all the recommendations of where to go eat, where to go shop, all of the must visit tourist attractions, connected to any of the local happenings, festivals that are in town, and connected to your own personalized history of what are the things that you typically like.

Iliana: And having this agent available at your fingertips before you even leave for your trip, I think is just a really powerful way to illustrate that this technology is starting to come to life and digital humans have applicability in a number of different sectors from travel and hospitality, to retail, to public service, to making twins of executives to make the executives lives easier.

Helen: Just out of curiosity, do you know what data that their RENAI is trained on for their concierge services?

Iliana: So I know that it has been trained by the individuals who work for the company, in addition to everything that powers their current reservation systems and all the guidebooks that Marriott usually is able to put out on a certain destination plus connected to the wealth of resources available on the internet.

Helen: One thing that I was thinking as you were saying that and going back to an earlier comment of a new job role of training these chatbots, like I can see that travel influencers of the future, not only have their travel blogs, but licenses with certain chatbots. So like the, say the Marriott AI concierge has certain data that maybe the trip advisor travel concierge because it’s been trained on different data or more bespoke if it’s I don’t know, maybe one of the higher end hotels too.

Helen: So yeah. Very interesting how this could play out, but going into another report since the show is at the intersection of AI and creativity. You were also talking about a report, how CMOs, chief marketing officers are thinking about generative AI. So I was wondering if you could share some of your insights on that front.

Iliana: The big takeaway from that report is that creativity is going to be augmented by AI as opposed to replaced by AI. And what happens when everyone has tools at their disposal in order to be able to create content? The bar is going to increase and creativity is going to become even more of a differentiator.

Iliana: I mean, it’s a funny story. I was at a dinner in Berlin a couple of nights ago, and I was talking to a business executive business magnate who has been building art, AI powered art in his spare time. This is not someone that you would ever expect to be in that domain. But it’s just interesting to see how the AI is unleashing extensive creativity.

Iliana: So from the research, global CMOs that were surveyed suggested in the next three years, they’re going to be investing heavily in the use of gen-AI to augment their customer service function. 61 percent of respondents cited that this year, which is almost double the respondents from the last research report.

Iliana: And the other area is marketing, with 49 percent of respondents, which is much higher than the last report, which was only in the 30s. So it’s a great indication that executives are really rolling up their sleeves and embracing this idea that AI is there to augment their business and to operate in new frontiers.

Helen: It seems like from the general sense, cause people are starting to come to me for AI consulting and I’m working with a partner to do AI readiness reports if anyone needs that. But the general sense that I get is most companies realize that they need to embrace AI. But they’re not sure where to begin.

Helen: So the companies are the CMOs who come to you with that. What’s your initial advice of where to begin at whether a CMO or from an executive viewpoint?

Iliana: So there are a couple of different approaches available. One of the approaches is to look at the work that’s currently being done and to look at your workforce and look at where you are having a capacity crunch.

Iliana: I was talking to the head of marketing for a large organization and we were talking off the back of one of their board meetings where this executive was saying that they just didn’t have the person hours in order to be able to finish everything that was on their priority list. My question was, “Well, have you started to adopt any gen-AI practices?” And they looked at me and they said “No, actually we haven’t.”

Iliana: So my recommendation was, “Well if you were to look at all of the activities that are currently happening and ask the question of: is this activity something that should be done by a human human, or is this an activity that could be augmented with the AI tools out there? And if it could be augmented, why not incorporate it, giving up extra time for that human to then be able to invest in other tasks that have been on your task list?” So that’s a very practical, pragmatic approach.

Iliana: But the other approach is really a strategic one, which is, take five steps back from your business. And think about what happens if someone else were to rebuild a product or service that services the needs of your customers today, but using gen-AI. And is there a possibility that your entire business, as it exists today, is going to be leapfrogged in the not so distant future by an organization that doesn’t have the same amount of technical legacy debt and any of the blockers for innovation today and that’s why there’s been this big emphasis and Accenture is leading the way in something that we’re calling the Total Enterprise Reinvention which as the name implies is, rethinking the purpose of the organization, how they exist to meet the needs of their constituents and stakeholders, and what is all of the infrastructure and the underpinnings that they need in order to really accomplish those goals, as opposed to tinkering on the edges and, you know, optimizing for this system, implementing this new component over there, but missing the forest, for the trees.

Helen: I think that’s great advice. And I know one thing that you’ve said before and I’ve said on stage as well is that we don’t want anyone with their head stuck in the sand with what’s coming because it’s really the next digital transformation. So think about the first digital transformation where everything got on the web.

Helen: This is just the next digital transformation on that front.

Iliana: On that topic, fun little soundbite. In 2014, Accenture published one of the Tech Vision reports. And the theme was, every business is going to be a digital business. And in 2014, people laughed. And they said, “As if. That’s such a wonky prediction, not every business that makes sense for.”

Iliana: Fast forward to 2024 and suddenly, that prediction has come true, eerily so, I think we’re on that same frontier when it comes to gen-AI and some of these new tools being introduced.

Helen: It’s coming. And I’ve said this, it’s like the internet wasn’t a fad. Social media wasn’t a fad. AI is definitely not a fad. And it’s actually been around for a long time and powers pretty much everything.

Helen: It’s just with the ChatGPT moment, that’s now accessible to the regular person. One of the things like going back to the creativity angle that we were discussing before we started recording is personalization at scale. And then also kind of like the next wave of AI instead of going niche to more general, but I’ll let you kind of explain what you mean by both of these things and why you’re excited about them.

Iliana: Absolutely. So in the last few years when we had the rise of app based everything and the original shift towards digitization, there was this mantra of how do we present our customers with a personalized offer. Great. With gen-AI, you can now do that personalization at a scale that is completely unprecedented because you’re able to stitch together data from multiple components and assuming that the individual opts into it, give them a better service.

Iliana: And so this is very much so top of mind for CMOs. And when you think about creating ads or creating copy, you can now create really personalized bespoke offerings that you could not do because you could not ask your marketing departments to create 50 variations for one singular campaign. Now, whereas with gen-AI, it essentially gives you wings, if I could borrow that expression from Red Bull.

Iliana: Now, the other thing that I’m paying close attention to is the set of skills that are required to thrive in this gen-AI world and one trend in particular is the shift away from hyper is a shift away from hyper specialty niche domain knowledge to a slightly more generalist friendly model. What I mean by that is historically you need to have people who knew everything there was to know about one particular domain whereas now with gen-AI, I can easily find a lot of the facts and it’s like having a specialty advisor at my fingertips and so we need to encourage a new breed of skills of the generalist second hop between multiple disciplines and can stitch ideas together and say, well, if we don’t need to rely on just this one [00:40:55] niche expert, what happens when you have the marketing tools at your disposal? What happens when you can do some of that financial analysis and review thousands of investor reports?

Iliana: Okay, who is that creative person that’s finding the intersection and saying, “Hey, why don’t we launch this new product? Why don’t we launch this new service? Why don’t we ask these types of questions?” So we are moving into an era of more of the generalist knowledge worker having a much more dominant role to play. There’s a really cool book, it’s called Range, and it just talks about that distinction of niche skills versus generalist skills.

Helen: We’ll find that and include that in the dedicated blog post and link to it in the episode description. Yeah. I’ve heard that before. I think actually Tristan Harris and Aiza Raskin have said that in their, the AI dilemma presentation. It was a different context, but the same thing of like to create, you know, traditional film industry, you would specialize in lighting or cinematography or script writing and have like just niches within that art form.

Helen: But now, as long as you can communicate the idea, the text to video, you can do everything. But I do think that there’s a balance of subject matter expertise because the people who do know the ins and outs of lighting, the photography, whatever it is, know how to prompt it in a way that maybe a generalist who doesn’t have that deep expertise [can’t].

Helen: So it’s an interesting balance of the deep dive expertise and the generalist and the play between those.

Iliana: Absolutely. The role of the creative director is going to be amplified because I now, as a non visually inclined human, can quickly build a concept visual using the tools that exist today and take this concept visual to a creative director and say, I’m thinking of something along these lines and now they can take it and they can run with it.

Iliana: As opposed to before, I would work with my creative director, they’d come back to me with a draft. I’m like, “Oh, it didn’t quite fit the mark.” And they’re going back, five times over to try to see if they can capture the style and the tone of what I had in my brain, whereas now we can short circuit that entire exercise and I as a non visual graphics design person can build that mock up, can build that visual identity as a starting jumping off point, but that role of the creative director is going to become only more important and elevated.

Helen: I’m going to borrow that and give you credit for it, Iliana. So thank you. Well, I know we could go on and on but we’re coming to the close of the interview and I have a few last questions for you. One, since since you mentioned Accenture is sitting on 1 billion investments annually for research and development, what are some of the more out there things that you’re working on or playing with that you can share that are kind of more on the edges of like, wow, that’s really happening. Or this is like sci fi coming to life. I’d love to kind of get a glimpse into that.

Iliana: One of the areas that we’re investing in heavily is space. Outer space exploration, which we see as absolutely one of the upcoming frontiers.

Iliana: And it’s no longer in the realm of science fiction. One of the companies that we have invested in is Planet. And what they have are low orbit satellites that are essentially capturing images of the earth. And you can use that satellite power data at the intersection of AI to make more informed decisions if you are a farmer, to have better yields of food products.

Iliana: So think of the applicability from a food sustainability type of standpoint. You can use that information for insurance provider use cases. So if there happens to be a flood, the ability to get the payments to the affected parties faster as opposed to relying on the site visits or if there’s a humanitarian crisis as a result of a natural event that has occurred, the ability to get aid into those regions with very strong accuracy.

Iliana: Those are just some of the frontiers that are starting to be commercialized in space exploration today. But we’re investing and working on the space exploration technologies from multiple years out. Quantum is another area of focus for us as our advancements in material sciences that we interact with on a daily basis.

Helen: And I’ll be sure to link to the report so people can do a deep dive on that. And I know I’m super excited about space because it’s one of my goals to be a space tourist. In all of your travels, is that on your travel list as well?

Iliana: It’s actually not. I think that there’s so much to explore on planet Earth that we haven’t had a chance to do. Plus, I like people. I am endlessly fascinated and curious by people. And until somebody can tell me that there are some really friendly aliens out there that I can go and befriend and learn from, I think that I have enough going on here.

Helen: I would have put money that you would want to go to space. So that’s fun.

Helen: I want to make sure that we have time in the interview to talk about digital nomads. And you’re kind of philosophy on that front. Cause I’m a big traveler too. And I love that you travel all around the world as well. I feel like in a lot of ways, we have a very kindred spirit between conferences.

Helen: Futurism, travel, human centered future. But yeah, tell me a little bit more about your approach to your digital nomad life.

Iliana: The future of work is changing and suddenly people are realizing to this possibility of, wait a second. If you are working remotely from your home office in, let’s say, New York City, and you’re being very productive, what is the difference between working from that home office in New York City and, let’s say, a home office in the south of France?

Iliana: And in the middle of winter, perhaps the south of France sounds a lot more compelling. And so for a certain workforce demographic that has the ability to work in a hybrid or flexible way, we are going to start seeing more and more people opting to live this lifestyle that often goes underneath the label of the digital nomad.

Iliana: Even though the label itself sometimes is diminutive, and people have this image of, oh, a 22 year old sitting on a beach in Thailand as a freelance copy editor earning 15 US thousand dollars per year, the research now suggests that folks are much more likely to become digital nomads when they’re in their thirties, in their forties, and they are six figure earners.

Iliana: So that completely bucks the contrary, that is completely contrary to the current popular narrative out in the market. So that’s a trend that I’m paying very close attention to. And I’ve actually been building a community of global citizen types, professionals who are coming to the realization that perhaps there isn’t one city in the world that meets their needs 365 days of the year, and that they would be interested in having a couple of home bases.

Iliana: But right now it’s challenging enough to move countries once or twice. It’s a whole other story if you’re living in two countries simultaneously. And that’s one of the obstacles that I’m really excited to try to solve for in the future.

Helen: And if I’m not mistaken, you also are writing a book related to this too. So I’d love for you to share about that to our viewers and listeners as well.

Iliana: So I’m writing a book on the topic of the potted plant theory. It’s a new personality preferences theory that I’ve been developing over the course of the last couple of years. And it suggests that people exist on a spectrum with varying needs for certainty versus stability in their life and a varying amount of resources that they need in their life in order to feel secure, established, and to thrive.

Iliana: And I’ve drawn inspiration from nature and from forestry as an example. So imagine a sequoia tree. They’re giant, they’re wide, they have these extensive, extensive roots. They’re beautiful, majestic plants that have been in place for hundreds of years.

Iliana: And that tree thrives in certainty and stability. In fact, if you wanted to move that tree, you couldn’t. The tree defies transplantation, but on the flip side of the spectrum, you have an air plant. An air plant, by definition, is much smaller. You’ve seen them if you’ve walked into a plant shop and they’re hanging from the ceiling and a little rope and a little glass jar, and they don’t have traditional roots to speak of.

Iliana: If you give them too much water or soil or fertilizer, they don’t do well. They thrive in a low resource environment because they’re able to absorb moisture from the air and the environment that they’re in. And the human equivalent of an air plant thrives when they have a lot of novelty and adventure in their life.

Iliana: So they are high novelty, very low resource requirements. And so then you have in the middle of red maple trees and potted plants. And so I’m writing this book to help people understand what their archetype is, how to better relate to other people in their life, and what this means from a work standpoint, a geographic mobility standpoint and a personal relationships and dating perspective as well.

Helen: I love it. I’m so excited to read it when it comes out. And then one question that I like to ask all of my guests is if you want our viewers and listeners to remember one thing either from this conversation or in general, what’s that one thing that you want them to walk away with?

Iliana: We have the ability to use technology and to use the various societal trends that are afoot to our maximum benefit to design and build a life that actually makes sense for us, for who you are as a person. And we’ve never had this much flexibility and this much power to design that future lifestyle for us.

Iliana: And I think that we would be remiss if we didn’t take that opportunity because it’s easy and it’s [a] very natural tendency for us to say, ah, the world is changing. There’s too much happening. Let me go bury my head in the sand and pretend that nothing is happening because it’s easier to do than confronting the change in a head on way. But I think that there is tremendous opportunity to tackling that change and saying, well, winds are shifting in this direction, how do I want to use the sail, imagine the sail on a sailboat, to harness that, to propel me to where it is that I’m trying to get to.

Iliana: That is an important empowering message to counteract a lot of this scary doom and gloom scenarios that are out there. We have a lot more control and power and influence than we give ourselves credit for.

Helen: That is so well stated and a perfect note to end the interview on. And I am such a believer in everything you just said that we are co-creators and that we need to be active participants in co-creating the future that we want to live in, a human centered future.

Helen: So Iliana, thank you so much for sharing your time and all of your insights with us today. We’ll definitely have to have you back on the show to check in on some of these trends and reports and how the clone club is coming together down the line. So thank you again.

Iliana: I would love that. Thank you so much for having me.

Helen: Thank you for spending some time with us today. We’re just getting started and would love your support. Subscribe to Creativity Squared on your preferred podcast platform and leave a review. It really helps. And I’d love to hear your feedback. What topics are you thinking about and want to dive into more?

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Helen: This show is produced and made possible by the team at Play Audio Agency. Until next week, keep creating.