If you can pivot within a company to take advantage of new technology, you don’t have to get left behind now the crazy thing is is that you have the best possible tool known to human beings to expand your intelligence because unlike in times past,This, I think ends badly for all of us if everyone doesn’t put in the work to help.🎼This is the rational reminder podcast, a weekly reality check on sensible investing and financial decision making from two Canadians. We are hosted by me. Benjamin Felix chief investment officer and Cameron Passmore chief executive officer at P. W. L Capital. Welcome to a special episode of the pod.😊And this week, we welcome.🎼Two members of the Ex leadership team of one digital. We welcomed Mike Sullivan, whos co founder and the chief growth officer here at one digital and also a very dear friend of.You Ben and and myself. and also Vine Gwani, who is the chief product officer, a one digital and a fellow Canadian.So they joined us to talk about a book that was just released that they wrote called Workforce Intelligence, that people first playbook for leading your company through AI transformation.Now, while I know this isn’t a normal topic, podcast, I don’t know, man, I was worried about this. I was worried about, you know, this is.This is not a fit for sensible investing in financial decision making. But then we have this conversation with Mike and V. It’s like this stuff affects everyone. It affects employers, It affect employees. It affects financial markets. the book is about, it’s about.How.What is the best way for businesses to use AI to adopt AI, It’s like the world, the world is changing.Because AI is a new technology that has become ubiquitous very quickly. Everyone’s using it. We’re using it every day.Stuff is moving way faster, I mean, from from a technology perspective and a technology product perspective within PWL stuff is moving faster now, we couldn’t have even conceived of this five years ago.Two years ago, it’s incredible right right, but it’s such an expansive view of what’s possible that’s what’s so amazing about it We are better because of this our service is better.The clients are better served.Right advises are better trained. a better feedback loop. and and this is the question. So this is what this is what they’re talking about in the book is, okay, AI is a big deal. Like that’s, that’s a premise. I don’t think anyone will disagree with that. No, without premise. What should companies do. There are a couple of things that you can do. You can cut headcount and let AI replace people, which I think is a lot of the narrative out there in tech land.Or you can figure out how to make your people better with AI as a resource and how to create a positive feedback loop between AI and your employees and your people.And so they give sort of a playbook of how they are thinking keeping in mind that these are two executives managing a 6000 employee company that is largely in the employee benefits business, so their clients are also employers.So the idea of of.HowHow do employers best use humans is very important to them both for their own company, but also for how all of their clients are going to fare.Going forward from an employment perspective, it’s such a nice prohuman view of the world, which I find frankly refreshing. And as Vannay said, like, do you really think we’re going to run out of problems that need to be solved, yes, there will be dislocation, but every technological revolution has some sort of dislocation, But if this can help us do a better job of solving problems.😊And I agree I don’t necessarily think there’ll be an end to all problems. We need people to help solve this.Yeah, and what I I I get excited throughout the conversation a few times. I mean, quite a few times because the stuff that they’re talking about.With respect to how companies should be using AI is stuff that we are doing right now, we are finding ways to make our human financial planners and portfolio managers.Be able to work better, more, more strategically, work on better things that are a better use of their time, while giving better service to our.To our clients and some of that’s been retraining, some of that has been you know retraining, figuring out how to use these tools, some of it’s been creating tools that that our team can use.We’re like we’ve been I have historically been and relative to maybe the idea that AI is going to replace everybody, I’m still on a little bit of a skeptic, but I’m less and less skeptical, the more that I use AI and the more that I see the way that our team has been able to use it to create tools and systems and processes that are just going to make us and are making us so much better.So Mike Co founded one digital 26 years ago.Is currently the chief growth officer here. He holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Amherst College and an MB from George Mason University.And as we said, off the top, he and Bennet co authored the book Workforce Intelligence, the people first playbook for leading a company through AI.Transformation.And Vet is a.Technologist, he’s the chief product officer, but he’s got a long history.In, in tech, as, as an entrepreneur in, in various technology startups, he’s.He’s got deep knowledge of the technology portion of the AI stuff, but he’s also got a great business mind and as Mike and V they talk about, they’ve worked really, really well together to push one digital in the direction that it’s going and to write this book that they talk to us about.So I will say to your point, Cameron, this is, it’s not a typical episode. I think that it is.Relevant to anybody who’s thinking about how they fit into the future and how employment is going to look in the future.But we are releasing it on a non non standard day to align with the release of of the book. and and it is, it is a little different from from usual, but we still hope people.People enjoy it and if don’ you don’t have to listen.🎼All right, let’s go to our conversation with Mike and Fy.Mike Sullivan and Vane Gawani, welcome to therational Reder podcast.Hey, Ben, Ben, I see it.Good to have you guys on. Gu, can you, can you talk a little bit about how your working relationship has evolved over time.Well, yeah, I would say that in some ways, you know, V and I have been partners in the business for almost, I think five years now, but I would say since we started this journey of figuring out how we’re going to deploy AI inside of one digital,Honestly, Ben, it’s almost like it reminds me of when we started the company 25 plus years ago, there is a sense of urgency and a sense of a need to figure out what comes next that doesn’t feel that different than the relationship Adam and I had 25 years ago it is all day every day full on figure this out and there’s an energy and an excitement about it but.You know, it’s probably been about 25 years since I spent since I felt this way well.Yeah, I think I think Mike and I bring a certain mix to the table that is interesting and probably like I think what resulted in a lot of the great work that we’re doing here because we both bring different perspectives, you know I come from a technology background, think and breathe technology all day long, Mike comes from a people background and actually, you know, honestly in the end of the day, AI and its transformation on us is a combination of both those things and that’s what I,It’s been some of our secret sauce you dig into that a bit, talk more about the strengths that each of you bring to our at one digital’s AI landscape.Maybe I should answer it for Mike and then he can answer it for me and more an interesting I think Mike is a great visionary, he does I’m actually doing that Mike I think he brings this, you know what we sometimes refer to as like the founder mode thinking into this which is that you know we’re a big company we’re 6,000 people or all over the United States and Canada sometimes you can get stuck in the inertia of thinking about the business and what it can do and what it can’t do and when you realize,It’s just people and it’s people that you need to convince and people that you need to inspire to go for the hills and achieve a big vision and Mike’s got that that awesome sort of skill set to get people really excited about something.Look I appreciate K words, I think that Vna very much is a strategist as well and the thing that has been so interesting for me is that.It wasn’t until we really went deep on our this AI deployment that I.Started to understand what AI was going to be able to do I started understanding more about the technology and the more and literally there were days I would call an a five times going I don’t understand how this works and the more I was sort of brought up to speed on the potential the more you know my role’ has always been let’s look towards the horizon and see where we should be you know one three, five years out.Having that technology overlay and being able to go back and forth with this every single day, I think has been.Really interesting and opportunistic for us.Mike, can you talk about the radiating red dot that sent you down this path?So.This wasn’t one of those moments, then where I would say.Right at the beginning of 2026.There was this drumbeat, this narrative in the marketplace that was basically saying employment was going to get crushed by AI.And it was handful of companies and what I actuallyly referred to as the tech bros controlling this narrative that was.Very, very disconcerting to me. So I had been talking of an A, and he had set me up with everything I needed to research this issue, and he had also set me up on this technology called Replelet. So I had the ability to build software now as well. And I finally got to the point where one evening, I SAT down And from probably 8 o’clock at night till 8 o’clock in the morning.I explored this build of a software that was basically a disruption tool that took in all of the current thinking on employment from probably 15 of the leading think tanks and research facilities around the world.And.The software built, I asked for it in four quadrants from least likely to be disrupted to most likely to be disrupted and asked for a dot to show me where one digital, the only company I wanted to know about coming out of blocks was one digital and in the quadrant most susceptible to disruption was one digital, a blinking red dot or radiating red dot that said that potentially 25% of our workforce could be disrupted by AI.And it was.Honestly, my worst fears in terms of that and it’s sort of like any company that is in the information business will find themselves in that upper right quadrant of this software, so that was my radiating moment.So what decisions or goals emerged from that exercise mic?It was.Really when the time Vna logged in into his computer that morning where there was an entirely new sense of urgency on this issue, what are we going to do, how are we going to do it?And we have been talking for months, really about.A formulation or a plan that was, you know, you’re fully engaged in AI deployment, you’re trying to understand this issue of what what do people do best, what should AI do because it does it better.And that formulation was very important.But what we kept coming back to is that.The the raiate the software came up with a headcount and it basically said headcount is going to be impacted in this way and what we kept going back to is we don’t see headcount when it comes to our people we see faces and when you see the faces you basically say there has to be a means by which we can evolve as a company so that that does not happen and it started us on this journey of transformation right so.We we’ve come to the conclusion that if we amplify our people, we will amplify our firm and that started the journey that morning and it you know i’m not sure when it will stop earth that will stop but it’s it started in earnest that morning I think one of the other things that we.Sort of felt a real sense of purpose and urgency around was making sure that other corporate leaders, other people put in a position to either see the headcount or see the faces had a different way of thinking about this right because if we just listened to the drumbe that was coming out of Silicon Valley or even out of the mainstream press it’s always about jobs are going go away people are not going to have anything to do anymore AI is coming for everything and then the pendlen swings and like,Companies aren’t seeing the value of all that token spend, we don’t know this is a big bubble it’s going to burst like there is some middle ground here that’s more practical and more realistic about what’s going to happen and we felt that the message and voice that needed to be out there was one that put humans first.And gave corporate leaders a way to understand how to elevate their humans.through the use of AI, not replacing them, and so when we started to discover this for ourselves, there was a really strong sense of like, hey, we’ve got to get out there and make sure more and more people are talking about it in this way.Butam I’m curious how you experienced Mike’s revelation like Mike stays up all night coding this app and he sends you a message saying like you know one dig’s in trouble, what are we going do like describe your experience with that and where that conversation led to I probably probably had three thoughts that came to mind one was Mike I’ve been telling you this for a little while Thank you for finally realizing second was oh damn I’ve given Mike the most powerful tool that he can have and it’s like crack cocaine and he’s going be sending crack.which has definitely been the case since that morning and then I think the third thing is that yeah like we’ve got to do something about this right and I think it was a continued realization look.You take a big step back and you realize that every company is going through this transformation and what you realize is that AI is going to be ubiquitous, itr already mostly is, everybody’s going to have access to models, they’re going to be doing amazing things if everybody has access to all the information and intelligence in the world.It’s great because it levels the playing field, it raises the playing field, lots of organizations can do amazing things, but then where’s our competitive differentiation, where’s what we do is special, what makes us unique to our clients.Those are the humans and that was our thinking from the beginning that was like, okay.This is not about technology this is about elevating amplifying our own people so let’s look at it through the lens of that then it will make a lot more sense and we’ again put people at the center of this, which is sorely needed in this conversation right now and the thing I would say also is like so we’re in the middle of like we’re already years into this AI deployment so we’re starting from a point where we think we’re out of most and it is this partnership that.That we formed it basically said in some ways I was kid like Vne knew what to do and I was the hammer to get it done inside the company and that combination, sometimes you need to get things done, but in the middle of this deployment that was going extremely well we’re in the middle of writing this book that’s kind of like a how to of here’s everything we’ve learned over the past handful of years and what we think our best practices and then all of a sudden this radiating red dot shows up and we’re like.Our all of our businesses are tied to employment like we need to move faster than we’re moving and you know it was just an amazing sense of urgency that this is needed and and more than anything Ben it’s this alternative narrative that it just doesn’t have to play out the way a handful of people are saying it’s going to and.We we’ve sort of we feel responsibility that other narrative in getting more people on board with it Yeah, let me let me draw the contrast there that Mike said something very important is that our business is predicated on the number of humans that are employed in our society and a lot of businesses are predicated on the number of humans that are employed in our society, there are a very small number of businesses that are predicated on the token spend that happens in AI and the predominant value,been going to the token spend people and not to the people that actually depend on other people working and we just got to shift the conversation to what really matters here, which is not token spend and funding more data centers, very important, we should be doing those, but we should be prioritizing giving people the support to live successful lives and careers.While using AI and amplifying through AI.Yeah, I mean, I think that’s.The most realistic perspective, too, like I, I think AI is doing incredible things. I think the idea that AI will fully replace humans in the workforce, my opinion, and I can’t predict the future than anybody else.I don’t think that’s a realistic outlook. I think the way that you guys have described how things should go is far more realistic than the sort of doomed scenario of AI replacing.Replacing everybody, So I think you guys nailed nailed that aspect of it big time.Like, what did your first experience with an AI coworker teach you?You know, when I think back on that and it it almost was.I realized that it created endless possibilities when you, when you’re sort of wire the way I am.And I would just say I’ve always been intellectually curious, like, can we do this, is that possible, can we do this?And when all of a sudden you have at your fingertips, the ability to research probe.Requestion it’s, you know, my problem is these days, I can’t turn it off, I can’t turn my brain off like you know, Vi’s heard me kid, I don’t since I’ve got dialed in on this, I don’t think I’ve had a good night’s sleep and part of its worry and part of it is I can’t turn my mind off on the possibilities.Hopefully it’ll turn out to be a good thing for one digital in the long run because there is a lot we’re figuring out right now, but it I think it was the endless ability to explore then that for a guy like me, I love it and.Its is it is tapped into a level of like interest, curiosity and exploration that I’ve never experienced before.Vna, how do you think about the key differences between human and artificial intelligence?That’s a great question.The way I look at it is artificial intelligence, although we are very quickly realizing that it can do more things, sometimes scary things, dangerous things, but we’re realizing the power of AI is continuing to expand.But at the end of the day, it is the human intellect that is boundless, it’s the human intellect that doesn’t have a ceiling, it doesn’t have a compute limit to it, it doesn’t have a power consumption problem.What human brains are capable of, you know, I used to work in a neuroscience lab at MIT and the most shocking moment I’d ever had was opening up the skull of a mouse and looking at a brain firsthand and realizing it’s pretty complex and it’s just a little mouse.The ability for humans to do things that are we don’t even know yet is actually the more powerful part.And what’s really interesting is how AI can support that, not replace that and what I try to remind people all the time is that it’s not the answer that AI gives you if you treat AI that way, give me the answer to this question, it’s like a better Google or do this task for me just like throwing the task to somebody to go do for you instead if the AI is causing you to think differently.That’s the power.It’s the power to cause you to express your own unique qualities in a more amplified way. That’s really the beauty of AI and the difference between.Something that’s finite in AI and something that’s infinite in human brain power.OhB, do you want me to add to that with the liberal arts educated history nature yep, keep going Mike.I kind of think about it like human intelligence.Is.Always tied to our sensory experience.Right everything we think about create our entire intellect is tied to our sensor experience and that is very different than AI, which is much more, I don’t know how you would describe it, but formulaic and algorithmic and that kind of thing and that difference, I think is part of why humans will stay at the top of the stack in terms of orchestrating what is to come.Because of that sensory piece of it.Well and’ it’s kind of an interesting thought experiment because a lot of people when they, you know, especially educators, they think about kids using AI, we think we’re all getting dumber using AI right because the AI is doing all the smart work for us well another way to think about is that,Isn’t it interesting that mathematical models behind large language models, amazing amount of compute and technology that goes into that, but basically can fool us into thinking that we’re talking to another human.How dumb are we to be able to be fooled by this mathematical representation of language that fools us into thinking that we’re conversing with the human being, if you turn that thought experiment on its head,What we can do as humans is now boundless because we have the AI doing stuff that we thought we were really good at, but now we have more time to explore other things, to explore the boundaries of what we can do each individually and I think that’s the exciting view of this it’s a choice to view it that way it’s not to ignore the pitfalls and the dangerous elements of AI and what it means to our society in reality while we try to get to that utopia of human intellect and knowledge.It’s going to be a really rocky road and in that rocky road we need to make sure we’re making decisions that put humans first and not just accelerating the technology alone.嗯。So Mike, you had that the moment of sort of panic about the 25% workforce reduction, but you guys have thought about this a a lot since then and we didn’t tell you we were going to ask you this question, but I’m just curious and I know you’re not labor economists do you guys still worry about massive workforce decline because of AI Yeah I mean I my my concern Ben is that.The issue that Ve and I are literally immersed in right now is that the problem that everyone, everyone’s sort of looking at this with a lens of jobs, the issue is it’s really about the tasks that make up each job.And you really have to deconstruct work and reconstruct work. So if you think about it every single.Person that’s listening to your podcast today.If if they’re employed with an employer, they have a job description, they have a pre AI job description and I can almost guarantee you there are post AI job description there are tasks in that job that would better be done by AI so there’s this preAI to post AI mapping you know Vanette I’ve kind of called it this work genome we’ve got to map this genome that says it rotates over here with a different set of tasks.There is a there is a bunch of work we have, we’re just starting a pilot right now.Where we have four teams that were looking at this, free and post and deconstructing and reconstructing, we actually have brought in three different academic institutions to really put some academic rigor around what we’re doing, but you know what, it is hard and if we didn’t start out by saying we are a pro employment, see the faces not headcount firm, it’s easier to cut it’s just easier to say let’s just cut those jobs.And then we’ll figure out downstream what this looks like and I think and I worry that many, many firms will take the easy task and that’s going to challenge us and it’s going to challenge society, I think.Yeah in reality, I think it puts a greater emphasis on all of us to again, choose to believe that humans are capable of doing many different things, even if they didn’t have the initial training or education to do that because what this is going to come down to at a societal level is a reskilling exercise there will be more than enough value in the world or problems to solve in the world that we can apply human labor to I don’t think that there’s going to be an.No need for human labor at some point, but we are going to have a very very uneven way of doing that and it’s can be very uneven in how we apply it and that’s the key thing that we got to start to work on is where can we apply AI to make a difference, where can we apply humans to make a difference and let’s actually be surgical about that instead of these blunt instruments that many companies are undergoing right now.Yeah, so interesting so you’re saying like don’t focus on headcount on looking at can we reduce headcount, look at the tasks that people are actually doing, see where AI can add value and where humans are most valuable, So falling from that, do you think companies cutting headcount to save costs are putting themselves at a disadvantage long term as opposed to upskilling their employees 100%.Because again, realize what’s going on with these AI companies, which just two things to keep in mind, one is they’re very open about the fact that they want to make intelligence a utility, a utility that you have a tap and you just turn it on and off and you pay for the consumption of intelligence and it’s available to everybody like power and water is.If that’s going to happen, then everybody’s going to have access to the same intelligence and I go back to the same question what is your competitive differentiation, what is it that you are doing that’s unique Well if you look at an established company like ours been around for 26 years, we spent 26 years handpic 6000 people to work in our organization and we spend a lot of time and effort making sure that those people live our values, believe in what we’re trying to do are knowledgeable and have the expertise.Use used to serve our clients very well that’s a lot of value that is the actual competitive differentiation that is the thing that you need to hold on to it’ the last thing that you want to jettison is your humans.Because that’s what you spend all this time recruiting and managing and being successful with, you have to retrain them those human brains are so much more important and valuable to your organization than those tokens that you’re consuming with AI but I would add to that Ben like look, we’re not naive enough to say that the challenge that is going to that I think AI is going to accelerate as is everybody knows like there’s A and B and sea level talent out there right there just is and we’re not sitting there saying you know.C levelvel talent that’s in your company right now doing a C level job is somehow going to get reskilled into being an a player doing a things, there are going to be challenges and there’s going to be friction in sort of the next five to1 years as work evolves.But the thing we keep coming back to and we are living it again today as a company is that I think at times people are sort of thinking about this like I’m going take a snapshot of my company right now, here’s the work that’s being done and we sort of figure out how tasks get realigned and our view is.It’s a movie, it’s not a snapshot, it’s a movie and we’re sitting there saying two years from now, as we redeploy people and as we redefine and leverage AI in ways we never thought possible, we’re going to look back and go, I can’t believe that’s all we could do for our company from the people we serve.you know, two, three, five years ago, it’s amazing what we can do and it will be that reconfiguration of what people are doing and what AI is doing that’s going to transform the way we add value for our clients so you got to think about it like a never- ending movie where that reshaping and reformulating is going on all the time and and we’re only dealing with the models that are out there today’s going what is this going to look like downstream so you just have to understand that it’s going to be a jagged edge.For a long time, but just move, move in a direction.Figured out.Mike, what’s human capital management to you?We’ll look.What’s really interesting about this, we wrote a book about workforce intelligence.That the genesis of that was that Vanne and I were participants to.kind of a squabble that was going inside going on inside our four walls about with two different teams saying who owns human capital management and effectively it is that organizational structure that every employer has out there that says this is how we pay people, this is how we organize ourselves, these are the job descriptions, this is how we career path, everything to do with managing human capital.I are watching this email exchange.And I sent him a note and I’m going, am I missing something, we are fully engaged with deploying AI into our organization, we are developed when our 14th coworker that is a fully AI deployed coworker and we’re arguing exclusively about human capital management.So.Literally, it sort of helped us frame this.This concept of, yeah, there’s human capital management, there are all the things you need to do to have a great culture and a thriving workplace and pay people and take care of people the way so that they take care of your clients.But in addition to that, there is this intelligence layer that is growing inside your company, and you need a way, you need a discipline to manage and measure that intelligence layer, that is the combined intelligence of your human talent and your AI talent.And we have been involved in that exploration and the framing of that concept, but it came out of this kind of squabble about human capital management where’re like we need that there needs to be a layer above that that is probably the most important part of what is going to define success for companies in the future and you need to measure it, you need to manage it and you need to treat it like one of the most, if not the most important asset inside your foreign walls is t