Why Strategic Partners Will Win the Next Era of Work

Welcome, dear listeners, to the Speak and Flow podcast, where we dive into unique strategies and stories to help you and your team achieve maximum potential and flow, even in this really

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Melinda Lee: chaotic, AI-disrupting era, I've got the perfect person to help us navigate that. His name is Cameron Nutter.

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Melinda Lee: He is the CEO, co-founder, CEO and managing partner of Goose Rocks Ventures. Hi, Cameron!

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Cameron Nutter: Hi, pleasure to be here, Melinda.

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Melinda Lee: I really like the name Grouse Rocks, and I believe there's more meaning behind that. Can you tell us what it's about?

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Cameron Nutter: Yes, well, spelled a little differently, Goose Rocks is actually a real place. It's a beach in Maine, and my wife is from Maine, and we got married in Maine, and after our wedding, we took pictures on that beach, so it holds a special place in our heart, and we try to visit every year.

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Melinda Lee: It's so pretty. And then, and then what about your logo?

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Cameron Nutter: Well, so actually, our logo, is representative not only of the place we love, but ties into our theme of giving wings to innovation, as a company that supports that and supports startups and entrepreneurs. And not many people know this, but, we… the three, kind of little rocks under the goose, represent and tie to the pillow

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Cameron Nutter: of what we try to do as a business. So, representing value, in innovation, equality, and sustainability. So, it is representative, of, you know, what we stand behind and believe.

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Melinda Lee: Oh, I really enjoy that you can look at it, you can look at the business, and it ties back to that moment that you met your wife and got married, and so it all has this really beautiful circle and energy around it, just like the meaning and everything that you do in the business.

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Cameron Nutter: Well, thank you.

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Melinda Lee: Yeah!

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Melinda Lee: And so I'm so glad that we're going to dive into AI today, because there's so much talk about it, and it's going to continue. AI's here to stay. But you're going to share some light about the debate around AI. Like, I think that a lot of people see that it's here, we know that it's here, and we see all the power and the tools that people are using, but there's also, you know, a lot of tools that don't work.

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Melinda Lee: So, can you, in terms of AI, can you share with us more about that?

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Cameron Nutter: Yeah, so I would say, you know, clearly, I think we're navigating the paradox of progress. Artificial intelligence is not a monolith.

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Cameron Nutter: It's a complex, dual-faced engine of progress and disruption, and so it is very much a two-sided coin. What I think, though, is that we need to move the conversation potentially beyond just a simple good versus bad dichotomy to a more nuanced exploration of how we can maximize the incredible benefits of AI,

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Cameron Nutter: While trying to proactively mitigate some of the significant and often painful externalities that we're seeing.

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Cameron Nutter: And I think…

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Cameron Nutter: one of the, you know, areas that's popping up are some of the key studies right now that represent a spectrum of the belief in AI. And on the one hand, you've got the MIT study, which is often cited that says, hey, you know, up to 95% of AI pilots are failing to deliver meaningful ROI. More recently, you've got the Wharton study.

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Cameron Nutter: that's saying, hey, in contrast, up to 75% of organizations are actually reporting a positive return from generative AI, and as much as 80% or more of enterprise leaders are using it weekly. Now, these studies represent a little bit different ways in how they were developed, but I think what's interesting is that

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Cameron Nutter: they're probably both correct in a way, but looking at different parts of what I would call the same elephant. You know, MIT, I think, is really highlighting kind of that brutal reality of if you initially implement, there could be a really high failure rate of early-stage projects.

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Cameron Nutter: while Wharton is capturing the value realized by companies that successfully navigate, kind of, that initial gauntlet.

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Cameron Nutter: You know, I think one of the key takeaways is that achieving AI success is hard, but for those that do, the rewards are very significant.

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Melinda Lee: Yeah, and how… what is hard about it, do you think, for people that are trying? You said 95% are failing.

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Cameron Nutter: So…

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Cameron Nutter: The challenges lie in a couple different areas. Initially, I think finding the right use cases that are applicable to each individual business, and not just jumping on the bandwagon, so to speak, and trying to be like everyone else. I think the second piece is that there are only finite resources, even within companies, financially and otherwise

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Cameron Nutter: And so, being able to

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Cameron Nutter: use that money when you're also making trade-offs between R&D, between funding actual humans now, versus now turning to AI and more machine-driven types of operations. So, these outlays that companies are making are not inexpensive. These are significant investments, and the MIT view was more sobering because

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Cameron Nutter: it looked at it, well, a little bit more harshly, and saying, is there a return within 6 months? Right. And if not, that's why the failure rate's looking a little bit, lower. On the other side, you've got Wharton, a little more self-reported.

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Cameron Nutter: a little more lenient, maybe, in how long some of the runway is for these AI investments to be successful. So I think the reality is most companies are going to be somewhere in that spectrum, maybe skewing a little lower now.

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Cameron Nutter: But like Jensen Huang and others have said, who are leaders in this space, AI is getting smarter every day. It is not slowing down. This is not a hype cycle. You may be seeing some of that fluctuation in the stock market based on the belief, but companies and countries are investing more and more every day, and user adoption continues to grow.

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Melinda Lee: Right, and I love what you said earlier. It's not about, is it good or bad, should I use it or should I not? It's, I mean, let's, like, move the conversation into how to use it and how to leverage it, effectively, because just because you use it doesn't mean you're using it effectively.

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Cameron Nutter: Exactly.

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Melinda Lee: Especially if you're a business owner.

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Cameron Nutter: And there could be some companies, too, that…

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Melinda Lee: Great.

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Cameron Nutter: are being a little short-sighted with some of the moves they're making, and there could be a backlash later. Nothing has had enough time to necessarily pan out and prove all of the different results, so I think the jury's still out in that sense.

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Melinda Lee: Yeah, I mean, I think, well, because I'm implementing a couple of things in my business, and I see it as a longer runway than 6 months, because this is something that I'm going to continue to work with it, to evolve with it, to see what my clients are doing with it.

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Cameron Nutter: Now, what I did like that MIT acknowledged, even though they were a little more stringent, was that they found that there was this thriving, what they called, shadow AI economy, where over 90% of employees are using personal AI tools like ChatGPT for work tasks, but while these, you know, tools enhance individual productivity.

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Cameron Nutter: This often doesn't translate into quantifiable.

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Cameron Nutter: organizational performance or ROI for the company at the highest level. So, I do think there is still some significant legwork for companies to more practically adopt this into the culture of how they're making decisions, and also maybe this could influence the incentive and motivation for executive pay structures, so that it's not just all

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Cameron Nutter: about stock price and things that may, create conflicting interests.

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Melinda Lee: Interesting.

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Melinda Lee: And so you mentioned about the, employees using it to increase their productivity.

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Melinda Lee: And how about,

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Melinda Lee: how about, like, is it going to help us with overall communication, connection, leadership skills? I know it's, like you mentioned, it's not, it's not rolling up into the highest level, but then I'm interested to learn how,

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Melinda Lee: it's affecting us as a human race, like, in terms of connection. Like, are we going to start having our AI start to communicate for us?

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Cameron Nutter: I'd say there's pros and cons, naturally, of what's going on. I think there is a sobering reality check of some of the negative externalities where we're seeing significant job displacement. Already, I think you could attribute millions of the workforce jobs that have been lost to AI, with companies now announcing, you know, tens of thousands of people at a time.

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Cameron Nutter: potentially being cut. And on that communication front, what's interesting is that in parallel, while some of these larger cuts have been made, there's been a lack of empathy in how that's been made. And so, I would say that's one of the negative areas

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Cameron Nutter: For example, another challenge, I think, is especially with younger individuals who are coming out of college.

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Cameron Nutter: who were trying to get their foot in the door, just like I did when I left Villanova and moved to New York City. You know, I was able to cut my teeth there because they allowed me to make mistakes, but they also entrusted me with responsibilities.

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Cameron Nutter: the younger generation is finding it hard in some cases to get that employment, and there could be a longer-term negative consequence here, where we have a leadership glut, because none of these young people are allowed to build their careers in significant ways, in significant numbers. And so…

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Cameron Nutter: You know, those are some of the negative areas. The last part I'd touch on, and maybe what's kind of an underlying factor, is sustainability.

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Cameron Nutter: and the amount of water use that's going into supporting data centers, making chips, even when you're doing a query on ChatGPT, you know, 100 words or more, you might be using an entire bottle of water. So I think there's a thoughtfulness of how we use AI, and not just because you can speak into the phone, and it is very convenient, but being more thoughtful about

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Cameron Nutter: what you can still read in a book, or find in the internet, now the old school ways, almost.

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Melinda Lee: blew away.

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Cameron Nutter: On the flip side, though, I would say, naturally, there's significant advantages to AI. I use it every day. It has significantly reduced the amount of time and effort that has to go into certain research, even though sometimes you have to be careful of hallucinations and other bad data, so there's always that quality check there, but you cannot argue that it can reduce the cycle

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Cameron Nutter: time for doing lots of different things. So just from research to building decks, it has almost completely revolutionized now the consulting industry and turned it on its head so much so that McKinsey's charging less by teams in the hour and more on outcome-based, types of things.

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Cameron Nutter: Now, AI also has the capability to help people spend less time working individually, so that they could bring that information back to the group and be able to share it. So I think whatever side you're looking at, you can see some of that. I think, though, beyond just communication and with people.

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Cameron Nutter: the ultimate value of AI is going to be when you can get that closer to the data. I know Agentic AI is very,

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Cameron Nutter: popular now in the news, in talking about how it's replaced, you know, a lot of people and customer support and admin and other areas. But, you know, there's a thought there that,

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Cameron Nutter: you have to get it with your structured and unstructured data. So, get it close to the data, be able to have it find insights, which it can do, because it's really smart like that, and then be able to make decisions faster. I think that's really the use case, and that's what I've been focusing on, is when I've been looking for innovation, not just the AI buzz, but trying to, you know.

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Cameron Nutter: cut through some of the noise and find those clear signals of crystallized use cases that are valuable for certain industries, like construction, or healthcare, or biotech. And so, you know, that's what we've been focusing on at GooseRocks in particular.

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Melinda Lee: So, you mean to… at GooseRocks, you're focused on getting the important, accurate data?

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Cameron Nutter: Well, I think the data piece actually ties back to experience that I've had working at different companies. So prior to GooseRocks, I can tell you that a decade ago, when I was at Dell Technologies, I was a director of corporate strategy, and we were looking into RPA at that time significantly, repeatable process automation. Okay.

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Cameron Nutter: one of the precursors of what has become a little bit more popularized through AI, even though there are differences and nuances. But we were already looking back then at ways that we could just automate processes through technology to be able to improve the business. What was also interesting at that time period was I was at Dell right after they merged with EMC.

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Cameron Nutter: in $67 billion deal. It was the largest deal in history at the time. And when the seven SABs, or Strategically Aligned Businesses, came together, one of my mandates was actually to help look across all of the different businesses and try to find, what the platforms of the future were going to be that could drive ecosystems, because there had already been a lot of success

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Cameron Nutter: at Amazon and Salesforce at creating platforms, that were doing well. And so.

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Cameron Nutter: we were looking, given that there's a certain capital allocation profile the company has, and you want to maximize ROI based on trends and other things, I can tell you we had identified 14 different areas, and one of those areas was infrastructure, hardware, and software for AI. And so Dell has had a long lead

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Cameron Nutter: maybe more popular now, given the relationship with NVIDIA. But, you know, that's something where understanding how AI and other things can be close

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Cameron Nutter: to data and be able to make those decisions, that's where there's real power. Now, though, in what I was describing, is as we're looking, as GooseRocks is an angel investment and advisory firm and startup studio, we're looking for different plays, including those that have AI capabilities across different industries.

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Melinda Lee: Yeah, yeah. So, so you're saying to get the… use it as a use case, get data to make better decisions.

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Cameron Nutter: I think that's where you're going to see the most value out of AI. A lot of the other things… Yeah, a lot of the other things we're talking about are communication and interaction, or people using it to personally improve their productivity. And all of those things are going to matter, but if it's not close to the data, using source of truth, or as close to what that is.

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Cameron Nutter: To really make decisions faster and better.

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Cameron Nutter: Right. You won't get as much value out of it. Right, right. And the agentic piece, I think, you know, is certainly helping in certain areas, maybe cut costs, but I don't know that the NPS scores for these companies are gonna go up based on interactions, as people are kind of having a backlash against continuing to talk to machines, more and more.

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Melinda Lee: I love that, I love that. I mean, because then you can use it to strategize, and it doesn't… you don't have to be the CEO of the company, but you could be a leader of a team in any part of the company, no matter where you're at, sitting organizationally, you use that information, like you said, to make strategic decisions.

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Cameron Nutter: Yeah, and I mean, a lot of… I think what companies need to also focus on, too, is their own culture, addressing perhaps the deterioration of culture, but making sure that

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Cameron Nutter: while AI is being implemented, it's not just something that they're doing for the street to be able… or their board to look better. You know, these investments, I think, really to drive concrete change, need to be incorporated into how long processes have traditionally taken, and even getting leadership more in the room and less about, hey, let's look at… even read the one-pager, or look

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Cameron Nutter: at the slides, why don't you use some of the tools that are now available live to be looking at AI? And I've seen some incredible examples working with startups and other companies at different stages of their life cycle that have these abilities now, and I think that it needs to force a rethinking of how some of these large companies are doing things and how they're interacting daily.

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Melinda Lee: So, are you saying that, these companies are needing to, incorporate more of this into the culture, in terms of when they get the information, how are they passing it along? How are they communicating? How are they…

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Cameron Nutter: I think a lot of them are already making mandates, like Accenture, that if you don't use AI, you're gonna be out the door. What I don't know, you know, with every company, though, is how much they're actually…

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Cameron Nutter: Adopting it for processes like long-term planning, or preparation…

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Cameron Nutter: where this could shorten the cycle time, and instead of having some expectation that people are going to come in with the answer in some kind of deck, and I can tell you, having been in so many of these meetings, the focus often shifts to the polish of the deck, the exact words.

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Melinda Lee: Yay.

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Cameron Nutter: They're being used semantics, I know they matter. Right, right.

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Cameron Nutter: what if you didn't come in with that, and you just came in with the AI tool, or we're all looking at it live, and looking at the answers live? There are capabilities like that now, which would move the needle, but are more revolutionary, and perhaps.

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Melinda Lee: I'm not.

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Cameron Nutter: comfortable to some of the ways that companies that are doing it, and because they've been so successful, they may not need to think they need to rethink that part of the business.

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Cameron Nutter: Right, no, adopting it, like, how do we leverage it? How do we, like, bring it in as a part of the meeting, and the part of how we make decisions? And having maybe some slow… maybe some ways to slowly adopting it? I don't know, some people are probably just gonna go full force, but other people, like you said, maybe more, are we sure we want to do this? Is it the right thing? Can it do it just as well as we do? And…

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Cameron Nutter: And the interesting part, too, is, you know, being in Silicon Valley, we're kind of at the epicenter, and a lot of the talk that you've seen is at the highest enterprise level for some of the biggest companies in the world.

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Melinda Lee: Yeah.

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Cameron Nutter: AI still has so much

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Cameron Nutter: room to go, particularly with SMBs, or small and medium-sized businesses, and with even the older generation, and some people who just kind of have, you know, are not necessarily as technology-focused. So there's a lot of opportunity, and I think the biggest untapped area, I would say, is SMBs.

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Melinda Lee: and so, if you were to forecast in 5 years, what do you think we would be in 5 years?

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Cameron Nutter: I think things are going to change dramatically. I think there's gonna be a lot of fallout. Right now, what I'm seeing, especially being in the VC community, is very large amounts of investments all going to AI and ignoring other industries, which is okay, because that's creating opportunity for us. But a lot of these companies may not be here in 5 years, and some

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Cameron Nutter: of these valuations right now, I'm already questioning. When companies are getting billions in investment, there's kind of a…

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Cameron Nutter: a feeling it with VCs of they don't want to be the person left out. So once a company gets a check or two from a big name, it's very easy for the others to jump on board, and then it almost feels like it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that the company is going to get a high valuation. I don't know that that's going to translate to success, though. So I think there's still going to be

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Cameron Nutter: a significant reduction in a lot of firms. However, I think there is opportunity for the companies that are going for carve-outs of specific use cases and specific applications. I think those might thrive more than some of the companies that we're seeing right now.

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Melinda Lee: Hmm, awesome, awesome.

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Melinda Lee: Wonderful, and I've learned so much, Cameron. This is such an exciting conversation. I've learned just with how, you know, the different ways that we're all using it, the different ways that people are viewing it, and, how we can lead the charge in shifting the conversation on, now that it's here, how can we best use it?

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Melinda Lee: Especially with, decision making and strategic decision-making for the companies.

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Melinda Lee: Right. And so, can you share with us one last golden takeaway? What is the one piece of takeaway you want the audience to remember?

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Cameron Nutter: I would just say, you know, the promise of AI is immense, its costs are real and immediate.

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Cameron Nutter: But the conversation, like I said, really has to go beyond, just good and bad, and address everything head-on, not as a distant, distant possibility, but a present-day challenge.

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Melinda Lee: Yeah, right. Stay focused, stay present.

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Melinda Lee: Yeah, because so much is changing, we cannot predict the future, and so.

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Melinda Lee: Why is it?

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Cameron Nutter: You cannot… 5 years ago, we were having COVID, so…

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Melinda Lee: I know!

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Cameron Nutter: And I don't think anyone predicted the AI fur that we've got now, so 5 more years, I think we're gonna be in an interesting place. But also one that has significantly more, ability to improve

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Cameron Nutter: The planet and improve life, but there's gonna be a lot of growing pains in between.

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Melinda Lee: Right, right.

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Melinda Lee: And so I love that frame of just, hey, it's just still the growing pains. If it's uncomfortable, it's normal.

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Melinda Lee: Ride the wave.

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Cameron Nutter: Ride the wave.

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Melinda Lee: Gets, go to Goose Rocks.

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Melinda Lee: In Maine, you'll probably feel a lot more calmer.

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Cameron Nutter: Well, I don't want everyone together, but… Feel free to visit.

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Melinda Lee: That's true, that's true. All right, Cameron, thank you so much for the engaging conversation. I had a great time.

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Cameron Nutter: Me as well, thank you so much for having me.

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Melinda Lee: Thank you, and thank you, audience. I trust that you got your golden takeaway, and if you need some additional support, any… can they reach out to you?

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Cameron Nutter: Yes, yeah, feel free to go to our website, and you can actually, fill out a contact, or you could DM me on LinkedIn.

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Melinda Lee: Wonderful. Thank you so much. And implement any of your golden takeaways, and don't forget, anytime you have a chance to connect with someone, communicate with someone, you're also influencing and making a bigger difference, a better difference in the world. Take care. Much love.

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Melinda Lee: Bye-bye.