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On today’s “Women in Sales Leadership,” show, Center for Elevating Women in Sales Leadership President Gina Stracuzzi interviewed Dr. Kristen Johnson from AWS. She will be a presenter at the October 9 Women in Sales Elevation Conference. Register here to attend the event.
Watch the video of this podcast on YouTube here.
Find Kristen on LinkedIn.
KRISTEN’S TIP: “Women are uniquely positioned to help with this because we bring empathy, opportunity, and creativity to thrive in an environment where the shiver of sharks is coming so quickly. Our ability to step into leadership roles with AI is not only unprecedented, it’s essential.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Kristen Johnson: Thank you so much for the opportunity. So I started my journey with Amazon on the dot com side, leading strategy for digital comics in Kindle. And then I came over to AWS a couple years ago to help organizations to innovate like Amazon does, to use Amazon’s unique process of creating new things. And so I currently lead to teams. One is our public sector digital innovation team that literally uses Amazon’s working backwards process to help customers. And the other is the Data Driven Transformation Team, which helps public sector organizations to really get their data house in order.
Gina Stracuzzi: In the meantime, you and myself and a number of other, amazing women are all working hard to plan this upcoming Women in Sales Elevation conference for which I can’t wait. Honestly, I am super psyched about this. Me too. You know, it’s going to be all things AI and women in sales and that is everything from tools and tricks and tips to policy and ethics. And why it’s absolutely critical that women are at the table and not waiting for someone to hand you the AI policy for your company. You have to be part of the conversation. And I know you get that. And so talk to us a little bit about what you’re going to be doing at the conference for us.
Kristen Johnson: And so Gina, let me kind of just give a point of view and then tie it to what I’m going to cover when we all get together in person. I look at AI and back in. Whether you went to university or got an MBA or any sort of training in organization change management, you’ll remember Roger’s change management curve, which looks a little bit like a stegosaurus.
Like it’s got early adopters and then it’s got a big lump at the middle where most people come on with technology. And then there’s a trailing tale at the end, of people who were kind of late adopters to any sort of change. Well, in the era of AI, forget the stegosaurus. It’s more like a shiver of sharks. And by the way, that is what you call a group of sharks. It’s a shiver of sharks. So picture a group of sharks with each shark fin going sharply up one right after the other. And, and that’s how fast technological change is coming at us these days. So nobody has the luxury of, waiting for the stegosaurus adoption. We are all adopting on the go to everything that comes down the pike.
And I Have to say, Gina, women are uniquely positioned to help with this because historically women’s ability and still today, not just stegosaurus historically, but even today, women bring the empathy, women bring the opportunity, women bring the creativity to be able to thrive in that environment where the shiver of sharks just coming so quickly and our ability to step into leadership roles with AI is not only unprecedented, but what was the word for the largest thing that you can think of? Because bringing those qualities that all the research shows that women have to the table with AI can only make it better. Because AI is truly like, it’s like knowing lottery numbers in advance. So it’s got all the efficiencies and automation, but it’s really, truly predicting the future and being able to hyper personalize things and who’s better than women to be able to bring the creative prompts required to drive those kind of outcomes from AI.
So I am going to bring just like one of the teams that I lead, I am going to bring Amazon’s working backwards process to the conversation in terms of helping us all envision how AI can really take what your organization is doing, take your own sales and your sales leadership to the next level. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to start thinking about your customer. Everybody who is in attendance has a role in sales.
So we have a customer. That customer can look and feel very differently. I mean, sometimes, for example, if I’m, a pharmaceutical rep, you know, my customer might be a patient in a hospital, not necessarily the person buying it, it could be that patient. So we’re going to go to the end of the value chain and define who your customer is. And from that, from the customer, what is their biggest problem? What is the biggest benefit that we can provide them? By the way, as we think aspirationally about AI, how does AI as a customer experience then play directly into solving a problem back to your customer?
We’re going to do that entire virtuous cycle, Gina, from really looking into your customer’s shoes, what their problems are, and ultimately ideating around how AI can help solve that customer’s problem. Which coming back to our roles, of course we obsess about our customers, but a lot us in the room are not going to be representatives of nonprofits. And so being able to create that entire value chain from what the customer needs to how AI can actually support benefits for them is just a way to look aspirationally at what AI can do. Does that make sense?
Gina Stracuzzi: Oh my gosh. Yeah, I, I am, I’m thinking to myself as, as the organizer of the conference, I need to make sure that I’m in this room and not taking care of some problem or outside the door because it just sounds so fascinating. And you know, I know that there are concerns people have about AI taking over the world, but with every media that comes on, every medium that comes on to into our lives, I should say there is that fear factor. I mean, it all the way from even the written word was first scorned. As you know, we’re going to ruin oral history and then the printing press was going to be the demise of civilization. I mean, it’s just, that’s kind of human nature. Like, oh, whoa, that’s too much change all at once. I can’t handle it.
But I love how you approach not just the topic, but the beauty of what it can do. Like all of those fears and concerns aside, it can also do these amazing things, you know, and being able to come in front of your customer, your client, and say, I’ve got a solution, or we can find a solution using these tools, that’s a beautiful thing.
Kristen Johnson: I truly believe that. And you know, Gina, I don’t want to discount somebody’s fears. I mean, we all have emotions. In fact, I read a stat that said that we have emotions 80 to 90% of the day, so we cannot leave emotions out of the picture. And so, but I don’t want to discount those. But I will say approaching AI with a sense of, I want to say healthy optimism is going to help us all thrive because, you know, it is here and it is here to stay. And trying to literally put too many guardrails around it is just going to limit what we can do with it.
And I want us all to think, you know, one of the things that women do very well is to adapt to our audiences. And I mean that in a variety of ways. Not an audience of like, 200 people, but even that one on one. So the way that we communicate, we are very good at adapting that communication to the listener. To be able to put ourselves in a very empathic manner into their shoes. AI can even take that a step further. I mean, if you think about the hyper personalization that it can provide, I mean, okay, so 11 dogs. Clearly I’m a crazy dog lady. Although I’ve had cats in the past too. If I tie it to that, if I am trying to position a benefit for a Customer of mine who’s like me, who loves dogs. Well, if I can explain that using a metaphor associated with dog ownership, is that going to be better received by my audience?
Versus, Gina, if something that you love, and I’m making this up because I don’t know if this is something that you actually love, but, you know, if you, for example, loved fashion, let’s say that leather jackets were your favorite thing. If I could describe what I was trying to do for you in terms of either your ability to buy more leather jackets or to show them off more effectively, that’s only going to make you excited.
And so, you know, thinking about the power of our messaging as it relates to how AI can support us is just as important as things like being able to do customer Personas and profiles and to understand kind of the various segmentations that we can do.
Gina Stracuzzi: Great explanation. And, you know, it. That’s interesting, too. Even something, well, not as simple as a Persona, but as a starting point, thinking about who you’re selling to and what their needs are. And, you used to do these on whiteboards and in the conference room. Okay, let’s talk about our ideal client. You know, and you’re doing everything from, you know, she drives a Volvo station wagon, or, he coaches Little League, you know, all of those things. To have it so immediate and for you to be able to see, like, that’s 99%, right? The 1% is this. And to me, that is like the time, the energy.
And the variance that you can even get out of AI with those. With those Personas. Let’s just take that. Keep going with that example for a minute. You know, if they give you one where Bob has 2.5 kids and drives a Volvo. And then here’s one where he. He also has 11 dogs. And so, you know, he. And each one of the kids has to take care of two dogs, and so, like, the fact that you can discern a couple variances so rapidly and also fan out from there. You know what that means? Okay, so now you know that Tom spends a lot of money on dog food, which means, you know, he just. I mean, to me, just those little variances, right down to like threading a needle, so precise. It’s just staggering to me.
Kristen Johnson: That is a great word. It is staggering. And I think so. I am passionate about the intersection of machine and human. Maybe it comes from comic Books, maybe it comes from science fiction, which is my other big obsession, but that intersection of machine and human, not that we need to be combined as cyborgs, but if you think about AI and what it does, and even that staggering amount of hyper personalization, there still needs to be a layer of true human authenticity on top of that. Because it’s not enough just to give that example of Bob with your 2.5 and your 11 dogs to know that then bringing to bear what we all intuitively do as women, that layer of authenticity in the delivery.
So, you know, I think AI in and of itself is. It’ll never be standalone, I believe. I don’t think that it’s going to be ever standalone. Despite every science fiction movie out there that, that predicts doom and gloom. That intersection of machine and human is what is going to drive the future. It’s going to drive sales. And women are just so uniquely poised to take advantage of that because we already flex across so many contexts.
Gina Stracuzzi: Yes, yes, yes. And I, I, you know, live and breathe everything. Women in sales, I mean that’s, this is my, my baby and I love it. And I know how absolutely phenomenal women are in sales and management of sellers. And this is a tool that I really want them to feel empowered with. And to your point, someone share a guest on another podcast recording. I did shared a statistic that women are, I don’t know, 70 or 80% more proficient with AI because their prompts are so much richer. We tell a story when we’re asking AI to do something for us. Like here’s what you need to know and it’s, it’s, you know, the difference between, you know, men are very linear Thinkers.
We as women, we think all over the place. You know, this is connected to this is connected to this and it really shows up in how we feed instructions into AI. And that makes what it. The solutions that come out that much more encompassing, right. And multi dimensional versus you know, one or two dimensions.
So that’s why I really want this conference to just not diminish fears, you or minimize them, I should say, but hopefully diminish them a little bit and, and let the eagerness and the creativity and, and the cure. Curiosity, which is something women bring to the table, which is what makes us so good at sales to, to really be curious about like what are you going to do with that solution? What is, what is going to make you sleep better at night. Because this solution works exactly the way you. I mean, those kinds of things, we can, you know, we could take over the world without a doubt.
Kristen Johnson: And I’m looking forward to that. Gina, sign me up. No, I joke that, today is kind of the revenge of the liberal arts degrees. Those of us that got liberal arts degrees. Yes, that kind of creativity, that interconnectedness, that renaissance way of thinking, not to go too that far in history, but that kind of. That kind of approach is what is going to define those prompts. And, you know, just in case, I’m assuming everybody who might be listening to this is. But just to clarify that prompts are what you feed into AI that drives the answers from it. So it could be a question. It could be something like, summarize the following in 100 words, which is just one capability. It could be tell me about what a humane society is going to look like in the future based on the number of spay and neuter that exists today, the number of animals that are in already in homes.
Use data to tell me what is going to happen to humane societies in the future. Those are prompts. They’re things that you feed into AI And I’m not trying to be rudimentary. I’m just making sure that we’re.
Gina Stracuzzi: No, no, it’s. It’s good. It’s a good moment, of clarity in this conversation, because it’s easy to assume that everyone knows what a prompt is. And it’s interesting because one of the things that I asked AI last week was talk to me about some of the jobs that are going to be, you know, there in the future that aren’t here today. And, and one of them is that it came up with was a prompt engineer. Because the next level of this will be, you know, just being hyper proficient at prompting.
You know what I mean? Because the more proficient we get, the more proficient it will get. So I, too, am in that real excitement camp, and part of me wishes I was like, 30 years younger, because where it’s going, it’s like, oh, damn it, I want to see this.
I just, like, I keep thinking, like, the next leap, you know, and maybe I’VE read too much science fiction too.
Kristen Johnson: But you know, it is funny how much science fiction has, has has predicted. Although the fun fact that I usually share is the Jetsons got one thing wrong and my, my doorbell in my house is the Jetsons theme song. And one of the things that they got wrong is they still used a lot of paper and coin money. So other than that, I think that science fiction really has predicted a lot of. We see to there and, and you know what, you know, to the folks that join us for this conference, I hope that they get that excitement because it’s unprecedented. And if I were to give kind of a Monday morning call to anybody listening to this or who joins the conference, I think it could be see what’s going on in your organization and volunteer today.
So many organizations today are starting to stand up those AI steering committees, those AI leadership roles. You know, those AI kind of. I don’t want to use the term oversight too much because that makes it heavy handed and I don’t think, I think it’s a combination of oversight and acceleration of AI. But take that opportunity to step into those roles now because whether it is the hyper proficient in prompt engineering or it’s the next chief AI officer, which I firmly believe is going to exist. Oh yeah, to be seen in those circles because. And if your organization is not standing up in AI steering committee form it, create it, drive it, you know, use that as an opportunity to shape where your organization is taking it and how it will absolutely impact your roi.
Gina Stracuzzi: Wow, that’s like a mic drop moment right there. No, it is because that is really what I want women to take away from this conference. Like be part of this. It’s fun, it’s exciting, it doesn’t have to be, oh gosh, great, one more thing on my plate, I can’t handle it. But because really at the end of the day there are ways and there’s going to be women at the conference talking about this like it’s five minutes to five and you’re at the office and you haven’t figured out dinner. Just remember what’s in your refrigerator, throw it into AI and say come up with a meal plan and it will. And you know, then you don’t have to stop at the grocery store which saves you another half an hour or 40 minutes and, and then the pressure’s off. I mean that’s a beautiful, beautiful thing.
Kristen Johnson: It is, it automates so much. And I think of that, Gina, as not just the opportunity to have time for your home Things. It’s the opportunity to really think about higher level functions that leaders provide to their organizations. Because if you can automate the admin, if you can automate the bureaucracy, think about how much time we would have to spend with our mentees, to spend with our teams, to spend with our leaders, to spend with our customers, because those things are taken off your plate completely.
Although back, back to home things I do always think of. Do you remember that cheesy 90 movies, that 90s movie Clueless with Alicia Silverstone? And she had in her closet, she had that screen that she, that had mapped all of the pieces of clothing that she had and she could mix and match and choose what she was going to do. I’m convinced that’s what AI is going to give me tomorrow is it’s going to have a whole wardrobe view and mix and match exactly what I need on that day, that it’s a combination of the customers that I’m going to meet and the weather that’s out there and I’m not even going to have to think about it in the morning.
Gina Stracuzzi: But the, the real point is you got, let’s get you on board, let’s get you feeling comfortable and, and raising your hand for those committees and those, steering the steering committees and the, and the panels and the boards. Like, make sure your voice is part of the solution,
Kristen Johnson: Be part of it. And be comfortable saying, even in those forums, be comfortable saying. Everybody is in the same boat or the same boat. Just, just, it’s okay to say I don’t know, but let’s figure it out together. And so that automatically positions you in that leadership role, even at first, if you might not know the technological answer, you. It’s a way to get to know it. Yes, yes. And whatever you don’t know, you can just ask AI, you know, sneak off to the ladies room and just type it in your phone. Yes, yes. And, come back with brilliance. Oh, yes.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo