Reworked TV
In Brief
- Leadership Must Model AI Behavior First — Leaders need to actively use AI tools themselves before asking employees to adopt them. Without leadership demonstrating these behaviors, employees remain skeptical and adoption efforts will fail.
- Build Trust Through AI Responsibility Pledges -— Create explicit commitments that AI will augment, not replace employees. Mark's pledge at ezCater directly addressed job security fears by emphasizing their customer service culture and promising to make employees "awesome to two customers instead of one."
- Accept Short-Term Productivity Loss for Long-Term Gains — Organizations must be willing to slow down initially (80% productivity) to allow proper AI learning and adoption, which leads to significantly higher productivity (120%) in the long run. This requires defending learning time to leadership and boards.
Reworked editor in chief Siobhan Fagan welcomes ezCater's Mark Christianson to Three Dots. Mark is the senior manager, digital workplace and AI strategy at the corporate catering marketplace, and in that role leads the company's AI adoption. Adoption for Mark depends on a few elements: the time to experiment and learn, delivering micro-learning in the moment, leadership modeling the desired behavior and creating a level of trust around the company's commitment to its workers.
Mark and Siobhan discuss how his team removed the element of fear from AI adoption, the signs of early success he's seeing and how the ultimate goal is to set up the company to be "a playground for ideas." Tune in for more.
Table of Contents
- Building an AI Mindset
- AI Requires Behavior Change at Every Level
- The Rule of Sixes
- Reducing Friction Between Employees and AI Access
- You Have to Slow Down Before You Can Speed Up
- How Do We Make More Time?
- Operating in the Relentless Drip Drip Drip of Small Product Updates
- Digital Workplace and L&D Partnership for Micro-Learning
- The AI Responsibility Pledge and Removing AI Anxiety
- Keep Early AI Experimentation Internal
- Modeling the Experimentation Behavior
- What Is the Human Aspect I Bring?
- A Playground of Ideas
Building an AI Mindset
Siobhan Fagan: Hi everybody and welcome to today's episode of Three Dots. My name is Siobhan Fagan. I'm the editor in chief of Reworked and I am your host. Today I am happy to have Mark Christianson joining me. Mark has been working in enterprise technology since the late '90s. He's currently the senior manager, digital workplace and AI strategy at ezCater. Welcome, Mark.
Mark Christianson: It's great to be here. I love talking about this stuff. And yeah, it's probably mid '90s. That's dating me, but it's a long time.
Siobhan: Gen X, here we are! We brought you here today to talk a little bit about the work that you've been doing with AI. And we're not even necessarily talking about the technical work because when you and I spoke about this earlier, you were talking about how one of the most important things you see in this whole equation is building an AI mindset. And so I was hoping that you could just give us a little bit of background about what exactly you mean by AI mindset.
Mark: AI is giving us a really interesting look into what it is to be human, what we want to do, what we don't want to do and how we articulate. So there's a lot of fear. People don't know what to do with it yet or they don't know this powerful tool is available and either they swing for the fences or they shy away from it.
And so what we really want to do is just try to get rid of some of that fear and humanize the thing. So not to give it an anthropomorphize persona, but as much as just saying it's an assistant, it's there to help you and it's another tool in the tool chest. So for me, it's really about just teaching people.
What's the day-to-day usage? What is it that you could take off that lightens the load and helps you get your work done? So those are some of the entry points. And then how do we go about making sure that it's an augmentation to someone, not a replacement necessarily. I think that's one of the principal things that I'm really seeing, which is the reluctance there is that people feel like if they embrace this, then they're losing something.
We thought jobs were going to go away when the internet was created — and we ended up creating more jobs. So I think here too, we'll see new ways for that technology to be used.
AI Requires Behavior Change at Every Level
Siobhan: You're working at EZCater, AI strategy is part of your job title. So what does this look like in day to day?
And when you're thinking about building this AI mindset, do you have to approach it differently when you're at dealing with individual contributors who might be experiencing some of those fears versus your work with leaders? Do they have to build a slightly different mindset?
Mark: It runs the gamut and digital workplace is essentially just digital tools for digital tools and effectiveness for everyone. Really, it's about the tools themselves and how they can make employees better. And I include AI in that. And then the behaviors that users take that actually will take advantage of those tools. And so it's a delicate balance back and forth.
I work with somebody who just onboarded, to somebody who's answering a phone and right up to the CEO. And behaviors need to change with AI at every level. Leadership needs to understand it enough not to be afraid of it and understand what they're asking other people to do with it. And that means they need to model those behaviors.
So I find that leadership needs to get into a position where it's not a daunting thing. They have a decent grasp on that. It's an exceptional amount of work just to maintain an understanding of where AI is going and how fast it's going. So I don't expect that. I do expect that they stay curious and they use it.
And that is probably the one thing that I ask for globally is just use it. It's not going to judge you. Go ahead and just beat on it. Go do it. Try it, try the things and you'll learn what's there. But what you can't do is you can't sit on the sidelines. And so that's really the name of the game, is to get people to use it.
Then they say, well, this worked for me or this didn't work for me. And then I work with people to say, you're one line away from it or add this. I like to try to get somebody to that smile and an a–ha moment.
I've found that in personal life and in professional life that you just say: Did you know that it can create a graph? Did you know that you could format an article? And all of a sudden you see the wheel start turning.
The Rule of Sixes
Siobhan: How do you scale something like that, though? Because obviously, you're not doing one-on-one a-ha moments with everybody. So how do you build that as a muscle memory so that everybody is exploring?
Mark: Yeah, it's a mix of some of those one on ones and with teams. I've created an AI champions network. You can't feed everyone. And just like any other technology, you look for your top 18%, your early people, the people who love to test the thing. They like to have the new thing and be the early adopters. Feed those people, they go back, make them the hero of the story.
I call that my rule of the sixes. So I teach you, you're going to go back to your team. You're going to teach six people. You're going to have an impact on those six people. Those six people are going to probably, if you look at diminishing returns, teach maybe three people. And those three people are going to teach one person.
So really you're just trying to find enough people so you can get that two or three level cascade effect. They go in and it's much more effective for someone on the team to say, Hey, look what I learned.
And because the other people on your team know them, they like them, they know that they understand their particular problem and challenges. And typically I find somebody says, Well, if they can do it, and I know their technical level, then it's OK for me. And that makes it easier for adoption. If I go in and I say it's easy, then people will say, Yeah, you got a PhD in nerddom. It's easy for you.
So it's really about that human connection and how do we do that? And then I curate tips and tricks in our Slack channel and just say, the people who want to come in, that's organic. I don't force them. We just go ahead and try to feed them as as possible.
Reducing Friction Between Employees and AI Access
Siobhan: You just mentioned Slack, and I'm curious when we're talking about this ... we all have these enterprise tools that have a sprinkling of AI or in some cases a large layer of AI built in. When you're trying to get people to explore, is it within the context of these tools that already exist in their workflows or are you getting them to explore in a ChatGPT or an equivalent?
Mark: Some people are using tools outside to do sales and some of the marketing team, where it's very focused on the external. So I'm a big fan of, Let's talk about that, if you go into say Perplexity if you have to do research. Those are some huge tools and they're usually faster than the enterprise tool. I shouldn't say faster — more cutting edge.
And so if you learn it there in your personal life, or if you do something in the public space, you can translate that internally.
Internally, our biggest one is Glean. That's our search engine, and it's the gateway, I call it. It's our AI, which is back-ended by OpenAI. So it's the closest an internal employee is going to get to sayingThat's the company-mandated ChatGPT.
We have embedded that into our Slack so it's getting zero distance because these tools are already different and so you have to keep putting it into their space. [Editor's Note: This interview was recorded before Salesforce's announcement that it was cutting off API access to Slack for Glean and similar tools.] If you make it an extra leap until they get to that point where they realize the value ... you have to take away as many of the hurdles and say Hey! It's right here it's very easy, just ask your question.
Or when you're in Slack and it auto-answers a question, that's an a-ha moment. Like, I didn't realize I could do that.
So those are the types of things that we're just trying to do to sprinkle the experience around and try to make it not so daunting and scary. It's already a weird subject for a lot of people. So what we just try to do is just ... like I go into meetings with people I haven't met them before. I'll just go into Glean and say, Hey, give me a little bio. Who is this person? What are they responsible for? And it just helps calm me down from the anxiety. I can go into the meeting and I know something about that person.
You Have to Slow Down Before You Can Speed Up
Siobhan: One of the hurdles that comes up a lot when I'm talking to people about this AI adoption and any technology adoption, honestly, is the fact that it does take people out of their day-to-day work, out of their normal workflows. So having to make that argument for setting the time aside to learn this new tool, to be able to explore, to hit your head up again, to perfect your prompting, etc, etc, is a big challenge. And I think that's one that's not necessarily up to individuals to carve out. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Mark: Yeah, there's bit of a personal initiative and then there's a bit of a leadership initiative. In my book,"The Productivity Paradox," we talk about you have to slow down to speed up.
I tell people all the time: if you had a terrible desk and the company bought you a nice sit-stand desk from Ikea, some assembly required, and they said Here you go, this is going to make you more productive, this is going to fix your problem, but you can't stop doing what you're doing and Hey we value your time so you can't use your lunch break and you have to get off at this time, well then the box is going to sit over in the corner because I've got to read the instructions I've got to put it together I have to disassemble what I have.
So if you tell me that I don't have the time to absorb any of that information and I can't take advantage of the tool ...
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Somebody has to say, I'm gonna slow down — and have to defend that. And leadership needs to say, I'm OK having 80% productivity for a week or a month or a quarter if I'm gonna get 120% productivity in perpetuity.
That's the new mindset, especially with leadership, is to say, Is this defendable to the board? And then to say, I need my people to have some time to absorb this new technology and to implement it. It's going to be awkward for a while, but they're going to get there. But we are confident that once they do and they have this tool in their toolbox, they're going to be much more effective.
Do you want to limp through it for six months and kind of halfway? Or do you want to just take the pain, learn the thing, and then be able to take advantage of it?
How Do We Make More Time?
Siobhan: It's a leap of faith to a certain extent in that you're betting on future productivity by slowing down now. But you're saying it's a pretty good bet to make.
Mark: We did it years ago.
I mean, you would have Microsoft Office and that would stay stable for a couple of years and then a new version would come out and everybody would be discombobulated, right? You've got to learn the new thing.
Well, now we give it in little bites, we just get little updates here and there. So we forgot how to say, We're going to have to stop, all at the same time. So now that that's not a thing, it turns into How do we make learning part of the regular growth process?
The Catch-22 is ... One of the things I do is around automation and effectiveness — reducing the number of meetings, getting rid of emails, asynchronous stuff. If you do those things — again, you have to change and change is hard — but you free up time. And when you free up time, then we can have a discussion about what do you do with the time.
And that's when we get into the whole innovation piece and professional development. But you can't do any of that stuff without time. So the only thing that you really need to focus on is how do we make more time? That means get rid of the things that you don't have to do or you don't want to do that need to get done. If there's another way to get them done, then switch, give yourself more time. And when you give yourself the gift of time and everybody else the gift of time, you essentially create an R&D in every single department.
Operating in the Relentless Drip Drip Drip of Small Product Updates
Siobhan: There's a lot to unpack in your response there. I have three different areas that I want to touch on. One's a really fast one, which is honestly nostalgia on my part in that I miss the days when we actually knew when the release was coming out, like the exact day and you could plan in advance and you could actually schedule it out. And now it's every day, here we go, here we go, here we go.
Mark: Yes! And if they taught you how to use the tool in general, fine. But then whose job is it to say ... in our Google workspace, document tabs are a new thing. How do I use them? I didn't even know they were there. Building blocks, that's cool. Gemini is built in. So whose role is that? And then sometimes these things aren't big enough for an organized class or a one hour session for your learning and development team. It's just small bites.
That's where my digital workplace crew comes in. I just give them those things and say, this is a thing, it exists. This is kind of cool. Here's an example. And I might do a video. And then you just let that matriculate out with the people who are invested in that they they bring it up in the natural course of workplace behavior. It's really the only way otherwise, you know, tell me something and it's going to be immediately actionable in the next call.
Digital Workplace and L&D Partnership for Micro-Learning
Siobhan: So it sounds like you made it your role in that case. You're saying whose role is it? But do you you have like a strong feeling about who should own that?
Mark: I'm working really hard to partner with our learning and development. Micro-learning is probably where most of the things will come in. Learning and development in most of the companies I'm talking to is difficult. Again, if the employees don't have time and you don't have a strong mandate for development, then it becomes When I have time — and that's never. So how do you get that?
So micro-learning is probably the key that we're going to see. Things are just moving too fast. You're going to have to do them by size. You're going to have to be right-sized for when they make sense for people. So I think it's a collaboration between your learning and development and digital workplace, which I'm actively trying to embrace in the digital decks, digital employee experience, because I think it more accurately represents what I do and who I do it for.
And I think that may mean that a team under me has to have some development resources for automation and some change management, some learning around the micro-learning creations. Tthat's just going to be something that's perpetual, because that's the way things are changing now. A little bite size over time. You just keep learning. There isn't a stop and learn. It's just, What are you learning this week?
Siobhan: Exactly. You don't end up with your PhD in nerddom for this.
Mark: I've got people all the time who are like, how do you know all this stuff? And I said, well, it would be daunting if you said you have to learn all of these things. It's a matter of saying I learned a bunch of stuff and then I just kept learning the next thing.
That's where I think of micro-learning. There are things where you do a big leap, but I think in many cases, your real knowledge, the working knowledge is through experience and through those little tiny things where someone bumps into you and says, There's a better way to do that.
That's one of my buzzwords: What works can always work better. It's not that your work isn't good or it's slow. It can be better. And so what do we need to do? What do we need to change in order for the work that you do to be better?
The AI Responsibility Pledge and Removing AI Anxiety
Siobhan: Another thing you mentioned in your previous response was automation. At the start of this conversation, you were talking a little bit about getting over employee qualms about job loss, about am I training my own replacement, etc, etc. You took a very interesting tactic with that — could talk about that a little bit?
Mark: Yes, the AI Responsibility Pledge.
It was very interesting. I got in and I said, there's so much fear about this technology that it's going to make people change resistant. So I turned it around and I said, here's a responsibility pledge that I gave to the leadership and said I want you to embrace this. And I want you to put this out.
Basically, it just says that exCater is a customer-service based business. It's white glove, right? We pride ourselves on that service and engagement and making sure that you're not anxiety ridden over the food you're going to have delivered to your business. So it seems right to just make that the premier focus.
So we say, Look, what do we need to do with AI and for automation and all these kinds of tools to make it so that you can be awesome to two customers instead of one? The responsibility pledge just pointed out things in our company culture that we attach to. And it said that we were going to augment our people with the technology. We were not going to be impersonal and say we're going to replace you, because that's not how we got here. And that's not how we're going to get to where we need to go.
So far, it's been really interesting to see how that tool alleviates some of the tension and the anxiety, because when you go in there and you start with that conversation that says You're good, we just want to make you better, here's how we're going to do it and we're going to do that together. I think then it becomes a conversation where both parties are working towards a common goal, which is way stronger than if you're trying to convince one party, oh, well, we're going the way of AI. where leadership do this thing. And you'll see that, you know, it's still just silently kind of stymie the efforts. So you really have to win over people.
Siobhan: And it also speaks to what you said, which is the eventual goal, where you get to the innovation piece, where you get to these individual teams of R&D leaders. It's very hard to innovate, it's very hard to come up with new things when you're sitting there chewing your nails about if you're going to have a job the next week.
Mark: Planned innovation is very different than the innovation we see in lot of places, where it's look back on last quarter, what went well, do more of that. Planned innovation is sitting down and just thinking weird, like all things are on the table. It's those design thinking sessions. The only way that you get into the headspace is to relax and let your brain connect the dots. And that's why shower ideas are a thing.
You have to create that space for the relaxation so your brain can put that together. You can't be stressed and go on 100 miles an hour and then say, OK, for the next hour, we're all going to innovate and think differently. You're just going to be thinking, How do I get out of this room so I can go and do the things I have to get to because the end of the day is looming?
How do we get all the stuff done in order to make that relaxed space? For someone to say, I have some time, I can step back from what I do, take a look at that critically, and then maybe rethink how we do that. Everybody has an idea how their job would be better, or how they could improve something. And it typically comes down to, I just don't have time to explore this, or I'm too busy to articulate that or put it into a report. So ideas die on the vine.
How do we get those out of there? And again, it's about freeing up time and then say, If we could get a four day work week, I would make Friday innovation day. It's the day where you get together with your team and think differently. It's the day that you train on something new. It's your personal and professional development.
It's not just about, We're just getting rid of a bunch of work and you get a three day work week. It's about when you do the creative human stuff that in most roles, people really want, they don't like to pull the lever all week. They want to do something and they want to say, I have something to contribute. We both do the same job, but I had this idea. How do we get that? How do we pull that out of people and say, great. Tell me more. There's time for us to have discussion.
Keep Early AI Experimentation Internal
Siobhan: So this is obviously the ideal future state. Right now, can you point to any sort of successes that you've seen with the AI use in your workplace?
Mark: I'm seeing the excitement of AI in solving some of those base level challenges. Now what I'm trying to see is the critical thinking skill. Start working in the very beginning, think to yourself, I have an intern. What can the intern do? He can't do the whole job. What can he do for me?
I'm starting to see people come to me and say, If I wrote a prompt or can Glean do this or can AI do that? Because I think it would save me 30 minutes.
When I hear that, that gets me excited because now they're thinking in their time. And that's a commodity that people just throw away a lot of times. They're like, I'm trying to get rid of this. I know if I could get this 30 minutes back, I can do other things.
Those are the types of things I'm seeing that are encouraging, but it is still very new, especially in the enterprise.
I don't know what the statistic is, but most companies have a fairly large spend on AI, but they're so focused on trying to get AI into the product itself that they fail to realize that the early wins in AI, in my opinion, are internal.
Make your mistakes internal. You've got a lot of processes and waste and automation and things that AI could be really good at. If you could teach your people to save all that time, then they could dedicate more time to the front end. So really the test bed is internal. I don't see the big investments paying off, at least not for a while on the external. You do see them, but it's an immense lift.
At the same time, trying to get it right the first time, because we all know the mistakes of the AI saying something to a customer or placing something wrong. Coupled with users on the backside trying to service those customers and them not having a solid grasp of the technology as well.
And so for me, it's really about, How do we cultivate the employees to be your innovation driver, your R&D? And once they get a good grasp on it, then they can contribute and they can say, We could do this with the customer because I do this at home or I've done this and I built something with AI so now I understand the technology.
Modeling the Experimentation Behavior
Siobhan: So you talked a little bit about the success stories and I was wondering if there were any missteps or any kind of like, I wish I did that a little bit differently that you would share with other people who are earlier on in their journey?
Mark: I would say impressing it harder on leadership that they have to demonstrate the behavior — both of learning and discovery and a willingness to make mistakes and fumble through it. There's a lot of Do as I say, not as I do, or they don't have the time. There's a lot for senior leadership and mid-level leadership to learn. And once they do, they'll prize the people that work for them that use it because they'll know the capability and then they'll be able to say, Hey, great, cool.
You're going to start to see that these are the people who you're going to start to promote. You're going to see the people who are moving faster. So I probably would be a little more aggressive and not so much worried about the individual employees. But instead, going after and really getting with management and saying, Give them space, back it up a little bit, what would you do with it? And then you're in a better space. I think that's with anything.
When I was young in the business, you had a project manager that was just a manager and they didn't really understand coding. And so they'd overpromise and come in and feel like he doesn't have any clue what that takes. He said it was going to be a month. It's going to be six months. So it's very difficult. You get resentful.
I think it's the same thing here. If you see someone use AI effectively to write the reports, it pulls things together and they go, Hey, this is what I use, you're more apt to look at where you want to go the next one on the ladder for you. And you're going to model those behaviors.
It's the same reason why we're kind of stuck right now where there's this behavior of I know I'm winning as a leader if I'm in meetings all day and I have you know, my inbox is crammed and I don't have a moment to myself. I must be successful. We saw that in the early days of the internet. Well, if you're busy, then you're crushed in all these meetings and all these emails. That's where the paradigm shift has to happen.
What Is the Human Aspect I Bring?
Siobhan: I love these two factors that we keep coming back to, which is the time element and having to find the time. And that goes as much for the leaders as the individual — or more so for the leaders than the individual contributors. And then also modeling the behavior you want to see.
Mark, thank you so much. Is there anything that we did not cover that you wanted to raise?
Mark: No, thank you guys for putting this together. It's super important.
I know everything is the next big thing, but I think AI has the possibility to be the gateway to a significant shift. I don't mean the AGI thing, I just mean that we're going to get into an area here where things are going to move very fast for people.
They're going to have to understand what do they bring to the table creatively? AI is going to put us in a position where it's going to do the lever pulling. So then we really have to sit back and say, what do I do that's creative? What is the human aspect I bring to things?
If you do the same things AI does, you're going to compete with a system and you're going to lose, frankly.
So you have to look at what is your unique perspective, you know, how do you engage people or do whatever. That creative aspect is really where we have to start to look at it and say, once AI really takes hold, the human creative aspect is what we need to cultivate. And then you start looking at your people much differently and saying, great, well, who's my big thinker? Who's my doer? Who's the go-getter?
And what you bring there to the table is going to be your resume, really. It's not going to be the skill sets that AI can do or AI can give you the step by step because anyone could do that.
A Playground of Ideas
Siobhan: When I think about that — the kind of worker that you're saying we all are going to have to be in the face of AI — I don't think our current workplaces are set up for that for the most part in that it's very much Think this way and the outside of the box thinkers are not necessarily encouraged. So this is going to be a whole mental shift for everybody to realize this kind of behavior is now what we should be rewarding rather than tamping down.
Mark: I was on site this week in Boston and an idea came across and I usually would be in there just scrolling some notes and go back to it later. I realized I could hop into Grok on X and just say, This is what I'm thinking.
And over the course of a couple of breaks, I had a fully documented and articulated scenario, where I could actually say, Let's poke some holes and let's go back. I think the really fascinating piece is that there are so many people that know their job really well. And it's just a matter of, they have an idea, but they don't know how to articulate it, or they don't have the time to write up a full report that you would need to send it up to leadership.
What happens when all of those ideas just start flowing out? This is when the innovation chain starts to really go because then I think you start to say, All these suggestion boxes are full. Now you're really going to say, There's all these things. Well, then you need time to execute those and leadership is going to have to just ride the roller coaster.
It's like, let's go, because you can articulate this stuff in such a different way. And your 10, 15, 20, 30 year people are going to start spitting out ideas. And it's just going to be easy for them to present those and then you can actually start to flush them out, get to that minimal viable product so that you can just test ideas.
At that point, this is just going to be fun. I mean, it's a playground of ideas.
Siobhan: That's a great note to end on. So Mark, thank you again. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope to get a chance to talk to you again.
Mark: Thank you for taking the time.
Siobhan: Thank you so much for joining us today. If you enjoyed today's show, please share it with a friend. Word of mouth marketing is the best marketing that anyone can ask for. See you next month!
