In the Cloud....or on Device? Future trends in AI and FOW

Rachel Cossar: Hello everyone. And welcome to another conversation with future of work in mind. I’m your host, Rachel Cossar, and I am beyond excited to welcome today’s guest. This is a conversation that I have been wanting to share with you, our audience, for a while. Alex Thatcher and I have been chatting big picture future of work, like really hashing out the intersection between humans and technology and AI for a while. So without further ado, I would love to introduce Alex Thatcher. Hey. Good morning, Rachel. Good to see you again. Good to see you too.

Alex Thatcher: Welcome to the show.

Rachel Cossar: Please share a little bit about yourself, you know, what you’re excited about, what you’re spending your time on these days. Well, my team develops experiences for AI PCs.

Alex Thatcher: And what’s exciting about AI PCs is, you know, every year, PCs have gotten a little bit faster. They’ve gotten some new features. But now we have this technology that enables us to do things that you just couldn’t do before. And when we talk about AI, you hear about, oh, job replacement or, you know, efficiency. But when we talk about AI on our team, the words that we use is growth and fulfillment. And we think about AI in terms of how can we eliminate the tedious out of people’s lives. So first of all, they can do the work that really matters to them. But second, also, how can you use AI to make yourself better? How do you use AI to to help yourself grow?

Rachel Cossar: And, virtual sapiens has been a big part of that conversation.

Alex Thatcher: It it’s it’s definitely when, I talk to a lot of customers and I give them a lot of demos. I show them what, you know, this the new stuff can do. And virtual sapiens is almost always a part of that conversation, because it’s such a wonderful example of not just a tool, but, like, something that really helps you get better at at doing what you need to do every day. Love that. Well, I mean, couldn’t agree more.

Rachel Cossar: Right? Getting into our first questions here because what you, teed up just so beautifully, brings us here, but I’d love to hear your insights broadly or specifically in terms of, you know, how how are people being empowered? We we live in such a different world of work. Right? Hybrid, virtual, in person. It’s like everything. And how are people being empowered to work more efficiently or more humanly through technologies like the ones you’re developing at HP?

Alex Thatcher: Well, one of the things that I I think you’re very familiar is a is a a speaking coach is that people have bad habits they’ve lived with their entire lives. Yeah. And and their habits are developed out of necessity and you just assume, you know, you grow up in this box and, well, I I just assume that, that I’m always gonna start with writer’s block, or I assume that I’m always going to have to do this tedious level. I assume I’m going to have to read every 9 page email that comes into my box, and it’s just not that true. It just you don’t have to do that anymore. And the first thing is, how can you use AI to eliminate the tedious out of your life? My my dad used to say, hey, Alex. If if you’re working on a home improvement project and it feels like it’s really hard, like you’re really struggling with it, there’s probably a tool at Home Depot that makes that a a lot easier. And I think the same is true about the tools, for AI that that we use as well. I think one of the things though that we’ve seen that, I I I’d like to just take a minute talk about what’s new about an AIPC that enables the this growth in capability and what’s changed in the world, which is, I think everybody knows what a CPU is in a graphics processing unit. But but now what’s different about an AI PC is it has this new element called a neural processing unit. And why does that matter? It does a couple of things. It first of all, it’s power efficient. Like, any work that you can move to, it gives you great battery life. Great. Fantastic. But the the thing that’s really matters about it is that with a tool like that, you can start to move libraries to your PC that does amazing things. Like we think about AI, we think about chatbots, but AI is way more than that. It’s Yeah. We have tools that can recognize your face, learns your language, translates, can see how you use your hands and your gesture. And case in point with that, you now have a companion that’s private on your machine that you can trust that can give you real time feedback and help you do things better. Virtual Sapiens is a great example of that is it gives you feedback about touching your face like I just did my constant habit that I’m trying to break. But there’s other things as well about, for example, it’s incredible. They’re incredible tools for salespeople now that listen to the conversation with you and recognize objections and help you understand when you’ve lost the room. I I think it’s a struggle for every executive, for everybody who who works everywhere about reading the room and getting the most out of it. And tools that help you augment your perception and help keep you in the moment and see what’s going on are extremely powerful. These are things and and as it goes on, you get those reflections, you build that muscle. Right? You get stronger Yep. As you go. And so, definitely, as as we work with our salespeople and we think very much about how we change their jobs to be done every day, thinking about how they communicate, how they’re more efficient. This this is where our minds are in terms of how we’re trying to develop develop our teams. Right. Totally.

Rachel Cossar: That’s it’s it’s it’s, something you said earlier is interesting to me in that, you know, your your father is like, oh, like, you’re trying to do this project. These things that you’re doing manually or or laboriously, like, can be made more efficient by getting a tool. It’s always so interesting to me to think back to, like, recent years or even beyond that to those moments when people realize, oh, there’s something that exists that I can leverage that’s at my fingertips, that’s already on my device. Right? That can make my life easier, more seamless, more efficient. Right? And so that then I can spend the time doing the creative work or doing the stuff that I really love. Right? That that you can’t just, like, offload. Yeah. It’s it’s so true.

Alex Thatcher: I I I’ll give you a a classic example. Like, our our jobs have changed radically. I and when I say our jobs, I mean, very specifically, me and my team that that function as product managers has changed radically in in the last 18 months. And and I’ll give you a a couple of of quick examples on that. First of all, it used to be that we would have a review, right, with with our president and talk about our product road maps and our strategies. And these meetings are typically slides that can be, like, 80 pages long. Right? And and you get in and you spend the session and you slide whipping. We don’t work that way anymore, not even remotely. Because before we even get in that meeting, that whole deck has already been loaded into a a tool that we include on our AI PCs called AI companion. We know that our president has already asked and had a long conversation with everything that we’re gonna present. He’s already gotten a list of better questions. Likewise, on our side, we’ve loaded it into the same tool. They’re saying, given our earnings announcement, everything else that’s happened, what do we think we’re gonna get asked when when we step into the room? You know, it gives us both a chance to practice, and there’s two results that come of that. First of all, when we get into the room, it’s no longer a series of just whipping through slides. We get past the formalities really quickly to get to deep meaningful conversations, and we get to work the work the problems. The time is much more effective in how we’re spending that. But the second thing is that the work is more meaningful. Yeah. It is way more meaningful to come in and have those conversations and have that engagement with your leadership than whipping slides. And that just motivates and adds energy to to everybody in the squad, everywhere in the organization. Totally. Yeah. No.

Rachel Cossar: That’s such that’s, such a great visualization and and, like, applied concept of how some of these things can empower that, like, more human, more impactful dynamic at work. That’s awesome. So you you touched a little bit on this. Right? This this the difference between on device computing and and AI processing with those MPUs. Yeah. One thing one thing specific to this question that I’d like to go a little deeper on is, you know, I think maybe people have been hearing about the ability to, like, buy your own little piece of hardware, and then you can run an LLM on that. So how is this how is what HP is doing with MP is different from, like, having to buy a separate piece of hardware to do that? Like, what’s going on with that? Yeah.

Alex Thatcher: You know, when we look at at AI in the future, we we say that AI will be hybrid. And when we think of a hybrid, we think, like, oh, you sometimes work from the office, work from home. What we mean when we say hybrid is some AI is best done in the cloud. Yeah. But some AI is best done locally. And often with these large language models tools, it’s best done in the cloud where it can scale, where where you can do things with it. But some things are really best done locally on your PC when you can bring these models over. There are responses that you can use and and train to get onto it. And also there are models that aren’t just about language models that do other things like create images and co create with you. I think the number one thing that we hear from our customers and from our early adopters of these tools is privacy. There are industries like health care, finance, or even just people wanna protect this stuff where you don’t wanna load that stuff into the cloud. Yeah. It can be trade. So you you got a tool like AI Companion. You can use it in a protected way where you know your data is not gonna be trained on. Mhmm. You know that because you provided that tool to your teams, they’re not running off and pushing data someplace it shouldn’t go Yeah. Which is important. But the other benefit of having AI locally on on these new classes of PCs is that you really can do some things that you just couldn’t do before. AI can do a lot of amazing things. You can, ask it to create an image or or scope something for you, but but it can’t read your mind. And so you could say, I want to, here’s a way that we use it. This is really empower powerful with our product managers, which is, we storyboard all the time. When we’re thinking of the new product experience, we wanna make it visual to communicate how we’re working. Now the way we used to work is we would have to beg for resources. And, like, it was not uncommon when we’d interview, we’d say, oh, and by the way, just do you have any cartooning skills? Like, can you draw? Right? We we needed this, this talent. Now, we use AI to do a lot of that storyboarding and imaging. And the part of having it locally is that I can tell it what I want, but we have tools where I can actually sketch that image or a scene. And as I sketch it, I’m adding more context to the AI, which in real time keeps rerendering it very quickly to give me photo realistic or cartoon images of what I’m doing. So now we are very visual in how we communicate our experiences and how we explore ideas, and we’re doing it without, begging our ID teams and specialty resources or or hiring cartoonists to show it. Everybody has the ability to to be creative. Right. And and deliver this visual communication. Right. Yeah.

Rachel Cossar: And there’s, like, the the latency component, the speed of it is improved. And then there’s also and this was really important for us as you know at virtual Sapiens, but, like, the the savings in terms of cost and resources from, like, a processing perspective. Right? Like Yeah. It it’s it’s huge.

Alex Thatcher: And it in terms of something like your your guys’ story is is amazing. And the fact that you’re able to get off the ground without huge sums of venture capital that you’re giving to cloud providers. Yeah. Right. Experiences is incredible. We’re hearing that from a lot of other ISVs as well who want to deliver generative AI experiences either for image editing or text creation or just to to simplify, you know, the workflows and create you know, take the friction out of the process. But then they either have to charge their customers a huge amount of money, like Yeah.

Rachel Cossar: Try to do a service upgrade or, you know, they have to Yeah. They have the latency.

Alex Thatcher: Having it on the device, having libraries on the device that they can just call, enables them to deliver this and add more value without adding a lot of cost, and they can do it they can develop it faster. Because one of the things that’s coming with Copilot Plus PCs, which is a kind of a the the Microsoft standard next gen PC term, is there is a lot a set of libraries that’s on that device that ISVs, the software providers can call just to add AI in into their applications very quickly. And the reason that I raise that is for anyone who’s an IT manager or thinking about their technical strategy or how they develop their teams, it’s important to understand there is a very fast sea change in the software providers out there to add AI to their solutions Right. It’s gonna have an increasing dependency on this endpoint to to get the full benefit of it. Yep. And so as we say, this isn’t this is not 2025 is not the year where there’s the the 10% improvement. There is a step function difference in both performance, but also in thinking about how people get things done. Right. Right. Yeah. That’s so fascinating.

Rachel Cossar: That’s it’s so interesting to to think about how much that how much more power that provides to the user in terms of I love, like, the step change, you know, step change function visualization because it really is so compelling. And I think the other thing that’s been very daunting about AI for everyone, like innovators, entrepreneurs, founders, general professionals is, like, it has the perception of just being so resource intensive, so cost prohibitive, like, to do something really creative and whatever. It would cost a lot of money to, like, r and d that. You know? And I think technology has this, like, beautiful deflationary energy, and this is such a fantastic example of that. Yeah. I I I totally agree.

Alex Thatcher: And I I think the other thing that comes hand in hand with that again is trust. Yeah. And privacy. Right? Everybody wants to play in the sandbox and explore and figure out new experiences, but nobody wants to push their customers’ data to a cloud they they don’t know or don’t understand or or take those kinds of risk. And so having those local capabilities where you can give your customers trust and and build, you know, on this equity that we all want is incredibly important. Totally. Absolutely.

Rachel Cossar: So it’s all this is all, like, exciting and positive and, like, rah rah rah. But what do we have to be, like, wary of? Like, you know, you mentioned the privacy component. Like, on device can actually support that in many ways. Like, what what else do we need to be just thinking about and really keeping top of mind as as this positive momentum to move forward continues to accelerate?

Alex Thatcher: You know, one of the the key things that we’re very focused on at at HP is safety and digital equity, with folks. And when we think about the the rate that technology is accelerating, doing so in a in a way that, can be used safely that doesn’t get ahead of our skis in in terms of, you know, ensuring that there’s privacy, ensuring that we are transparent in what’s being done with people’s data, and being really careful in in that, you know, a big part of what we do is not just AI PCs, but also we provide tools like our AI studio and our our workstations that help people create and tune, their own AI. And one of the things that we’re very quick to do is we’re developing these tools is to integrate tools that integrate safety checks and Mhmm. Make sure that, you know, the responses that you that you get when you craft into your own tool isn’t, you know, providing an aid to do dangerous things or or leading, you know, workers or or young people down the road that that, you know, that they shouldn’t go down, you know, or pretty people in danger. That kind of safety has always been a first principle with with HP and and always will be. I think the other thing is I I I think just, aside from the safety in the nature, technology adoption is really hard. And we not only help our customers, but we help in internal and there’s, like, a very simple human problem. And that, technology moves so fast and nobody wants to look foolish about not knowing how to use it. Yeah. And so even in HP, we roll out new tools and then say, well, the adoption’s kinda slow Yeah. Because people don’t want to ask the question of how do I use this or how do I take advantage of it. Yep. And I think with the adoption of anything new showing people upfront, like, here’s how you take advantage of it and creating a safe space. Right? Like, a a buddy to to get that done completely changes the adoption scheme of how things, happen. I think one of the things that we love about virtual sapiens, we were talking earlier and and often when I I talk about your solutions and we show it to people, there’s always it’s a sense of amazement of, wow. I didn’t know you could do that. It’s an amazing I can’t believe the richness of the feedback it’s giving me. And then there’s the nervousness of I don’t I don’t know if I wanna be under that scrutiny, but it’s safe because Yep. It’s technology that’s giving you the feedback. It it enables you to get better in the this safe space. I think it’s it’s such a wonderful example that we love to give customers about how to help their team step into the new world. Totally. Yeah.

Rachel Cossar: It’s, the safe sandbox, the kind of approachable nonjudgmental element also is interesting. When we started virtual Sapiens, it was a big question for us whether people would take the AI generated feedback seriously. Mhmm. Right? Because as as a human coach, you know, part of me is like, no, it must be delivered by a human. And how did how did you deal with that?

Alex Thatcher: Like, how did you adapt your design to build that sense of authenticity with it? Yes.

Rachel Cossar: I mean, honestly, it took we still tweak the way the feedback is delivered. Right? But it took the better part of 2 years to get the feedback component to a point where we hit this really nice balance between personalized, but not prescriptive. Right? The difference is that people want feedback that’s personal and unique to them. Right? I don’t wanna get the same feedback that Alex is getting because we communicate differently, so we should get different feedback. But I don’t want the AI to tell me exactly what I should be doing. I want the AI to say, hey, Rachel. You know, put up that supercharged mirror. These are the behaviors you exhibited during that. Are you aware that you were touching your face? Are you aware that you were waving your hands around so aggressively that it was, like, really distracting? Right? We highlight these behavioral blind spots to the user, and then we tell the user how that might impact their audience’s perception of them. Right? And that’s all based on science. And then it’s always up to the user to decide, oh, interesting. Okay. No. I’d like, I didn’t want to be distracting. I do wanna be energized. I don’t wanna be distracting. I didn’t wanna come across as though I really didn’t care with my face because I didn’t express anything. Mhmm. Right? And so then the user becomes involved in the behavior changes that they make. Right? And then the AI tool comes back to reinforce the progress or reinforce the behavior change until the habit becomes rewired. Right? But that was a really important part for us, and I think it helped the user trust the feedback the AI was providing them. Right? Trust that there was accuracy there. And then also feel like the AI was there to, like, help support their learning journey without, again, telling them. Mhmm. Like, nobody wants AI to tell you how you should feel or how you should behave. Right? That’s right. And so as a right. Because a coach’s job, a human coach’s job is is also not to tell you what you should do and how how you should act. Right? It’s always to tell you that these are the things that you’re noticing and picking up on. Are those aligned with your intention? How might you think differently about this given that your goal is x? Right? Those are the types of questions a coach a coach asks. So the AI has to do something similar.

Alex Thatcher: And one of the one of the things that I I love about how you guys implemented it, I thought it was a a brilliant brilliant choices. So when you get done with your call and you get your call report Mhmm. It’s not like it’s not let’s say, oh, you had 5 face touches. You had Right. You actually talk about the meaning of it. This is the first impression you made.

Rachel Cossar: This is the authority you exhibited in a call.

Alex Thatcher: And I I I think that results oriented nature, like, the the getting to the conclusion, that’s what really adds the Yeah. The value to it. Yep. Totally. Like, why should someone care?

Rachel Cossar: Like, there’s so much data and noise around us. The last thing we wanna do is just, like, give you more noise. Right? We have to kind of give you, like, help you understand the ways you’re impacting your audience. Maybe you’re aware of them, maybe you’re not, but then, like, showing you why it matters so much. Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Thatcher: I we’re getting off a a little bit off the the bat. But but I, I’ll tell you about a little experience that I had this week. I’m I’m in a, an innovation development course, which we do nonstop, you know, here at HP. Mhmm. I have kept a journal that I have worked with every day for the last 4 years. And I never go to this journal and put in an entry when I’m having a great day. It’s always the place I go when I’m working a problem. I’m having a frustration. Yep. For the first time, I loaded that journal into AI and had it do an analysis of me. And I thought it was like, man, I don’t even know why they like, since this is the place I go for my frustrations, but the insight I got was incredible. Wow. Absolutely incredible. There’s no denying it because it’s me. Right?

Rachel Cossar: It’s like my my voice. Yeah.

Alex Thatcher: But what I what was great about it was that it highlighted first of all, it really highlighted my strengths, which I know were there, but it kind of, like, pointed out, like, you need to keep doing this. You’re building on it. And for the things that I needed to work on, what was great is that it moved it to from a place of, you know, you did that, and you know you’re gonna do it tomorrow to hey. This is this is an area where you are saying that you wanna develop it, and here’s a strategy to get after and attack it. And I even then came back and and asked it some questions to get out. Mhmm. And I did raise that, which is that, to say that this data that you collect, all of that was done privately. Yeah. It’s not something that I loaded into the cloud. This is all stuff that I kept Yeah.

Rachel Cossar: Personally.

Alex Thatcher: And the end result of that is it’s not just AI for task generation or doing these little discrete things. I just got this tremendous coaching guide that took me all about it took me, like, years to gather the data. Yeah.

Rachel Cossar: But in 5 minutes, I have probably one of the best development plans that I’ve ever had. Right. Just absolutely tailored for myself.

Alex Thatcher: And I would I would recommend everybody do that. It’s so powerful. It’s like now I I will journal twice as much knowing the best that I’m gonna get out of it. Right. Yeah. Oh, that’s so interesting.

Rachel Cossar: I never thought of that because, journals are are so tricky because they just pile up. Yes. You are writing.

Alex Thatcher: Know what to do with them. You never go back and and really, like, revisit it or it’s hard to synthesize it, but now you’ve got a tool that can, like, pull it together Yes. All the way through. Amazing.

Rachel Cossar: That that’s a nice segue into our final question because it it’s kind of more on that, like Yeah. Team dynamic leader kind of self management perspective, but I know that you’re known as as a as a leader who builds best in class teams. Right? Highly functioning teams, great culture. How do you do this? How do you do this?

Alex Thatcher: Well, for us, we are very mission driven. We’re we’re very purpose driven, not task driven. Mhmm.

Rachel Cossar: And we do the hard things, on our team. Right?

Alex Thatcher: It’s we’re not trying to figure out what the future is going to be. We’re really diving in deep to understand people and how they work, and understand how we can remove the fiction and how they can get better. And so the art of the deal for us is how do we empower every person on our team, to have the tools to be clear on the purpose to and also have the liberty and the the mission to to move forward and do what they need to do, to actually create innovation. I tell you, as a product manager, you you might think that the the cherry is getting a product reward or or doing the launch. Mhmm. And and having done this for 20 years, it’s not. The moment that is glorious is when you have the insight that makes the whole world look different in in a way that you’ve never seen before. Mhmm. And you get that inspiration, then the the produce sign, everything flows out of that. So for us, it’s really about how do we create the ability for people to get that insight Yeah. To have that vision. And also even to step back in our meetings and conversations. Again, another reason I love virtual sapiens, but not just to have the conversation, but to step back and to say, okay. What’s happening here in the room? What are the dynamics of the conversation that’s going on? Are we converging? Are we diverging? Who’s engaged? Who’s not engaged? Yeah. Are we getting towards our objective? Is everybody able to contribute? And thinking about the dynamics of how we work, not just the work itself, that is incredibly empowering for teams. I I think that’s something that that’s a lifelong journey that we all need to work on. Right. Yeah. That’s beautiful. Thank you for sharing it in that way.

Rachel Cossar: You know, I think, there’s a lot to be said for yeah. Like, not like, being able to take a step back from those deliverables. Right? Like, there’s such a focus understandably on, like, what are the OKRs? Like, what are the goals, deliverables? Like, how are you gonna get there? Why aren’t you there yet? And and so and and and I’ve also had a problem with that, like, just personally, like, super, super hyper goal oriented things, because then you do lose sight a little bit of the value of the journey itself.

Alex Thatcher: And I think to your point, you know, it’s it’s nice to be able to, like, understand when the insight was made or or or what it felt like and what the insight was and, you know And asking the the the question of always asking why and does it matter. Like, the the crap that I I see why we all fall into is, oh, we need an insight. So let’s find a statistic and throw it on the page, and we’ll get to where we wanna be. And it’s like, no. No. Let’s, like, really get into it. Yeah. It’s like, understand the the pain and the the emotion. And and again, I’ll I’ll bring it back to where we started, which is the word that we use here. The words that we use very frequently every day is about growth and fulfillment. And how do we help people feel better about the work that they do? How do we help people feel like they’re better today than they were Yeah. Yesterday? Not just about getting the job done faster.

Rachel Cossar: It’s about helping you be who you wanna become.

Alex Thatcher: And we all get satisfaction, from delivering to that mission. Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome.

Rachel Cossar: Real a real testament, you know, to everything that you’re doing on the day to day at HP with your teams. Thank you so much, Alex, for joining us and for really diving into the conversation. So many fascinating takeaways for our audience. Where can people get get in touch with you or follow more of your work?

Alex Thatcher: I should probably do better at my social media, but you can find me at at alexstatcher on on x and, Yeah.

Rachel Cossar: I I’m easy to find, but, always happy to have the conversation about innovation.

Alex Thatcher: Awesome. Great. Well, thank you again.

Rachel Cossar: And to our audience, as always, thank you for joining us, and we’ll see you next time. Take care, Rachel. Always a pleasure. Alright.