Jack Shaw is a globally recognised futurist and innovation strategist, celebrated for his work at the intersection of technology, leadership, and business transformation. With more than 1,000 keynote presentations delivered across 26 countries, he has earned a reputation as one of the most influential technology speakers of our time.
Known for his expertise in artificial intelligence, blockchain and emerging digital trends, Jack regularly advises organisations on how to build resilience and competitive advantage in an era of rapid change. As a leadership speaker, he helps audiences understand not just where the future is heading—but how to lead it.
In this exclusive interview with The Champions Speakers Agency, Jack shares insights on how businesses can move beyond surface-level tech adoption, implement AI strategically, and embed continuous planning into the heart of their operations.
Q: In what ways can today’s businesses use emerging technologies—particularly AI—to gain a genuine competitive edge, beyond simply adopting the latest tools?
Jack Shaw: “Well, AI is like—in some respects, AI is like any other technology, and in some other respects, it’s nearly unique, extraordinarily different from other technologies. So, let me briefly address each of those.
“I’ve been working with emerging technologies my entire career, ever since the 1980s, and to some respect, actually even a little bit before that, back to when I was first in graduate school. And one of the things that’s important for businesses to understand is that it’s not about the technology.
“Utilising technology or saying that you have a particular kind of technology such as AI in use at your organisation is not immediately going to provide you with strategic benefits, competitive advantages and so forth. You have to think about how utilising any technology—or even better, combinations of technologies—can enable you to do business in different and better ways than what you’ve been doing before.
“So, it’s really, and I think the key point in this, is what’s called digital transformation. A lot of people are under the misimpression that digital transformation simply means we’re getting rid of paper. But all too often, their interpretation of that simply means if we take all of our processes and systems that used to use paper—or in some cases are still using paper—and we make the entry of the data and the information digital, on computers or smartphones or what have you, and then we store that information digitally and retrieve it that way, well, then we’ve accomplished digital transformation.
“And all you’ve really accomplished in that case is that you get some of the smaller marginal benefits of getting rid of paper—eliminating things like transcription errors, some of the delays of conveying information via paper—but you haven’t really rethought the way that your organisation works.
“I should comment too that when I refer to a business, I’m really talking about any type of organisation—whether it’s a private sector business in any industry: manufacturing, distribution, retail, energy, what have you, or whether it’s a public sector organisation like governmental agencies at the local or national level, or sort of quasi in-between organisations like healthcare. And of course, depending on which country you’re in, the government and healthcare may be more or less closely aligned with how they work with each other.
“But I will refer on occasion to organisations or enterprises and much more frequently to businesses in terms of how they use these technologies, but I’m really referring to all of those businesses. So, the opportunity for businesses to utilise AI is to help them think about how to leverage AI to dramatically improve their business processes.”
Q: Many organisations are experimenting with generative AI—but how can leaders move beyond isolated use cases and implement AI in a way that’s both strategic and transformational?
Jack Shaw: “There are a lot of people out there that are very good at explaining the technical details of how these tools work. Often, though, they aren’t looking at the big picture of how do you use these tools.
“Most of the usage of these generative AI tools—like ChatGPT and Claude and so forth—is tactical in nature. Now that’s not bad. By tactical, what I mean is it’s being used by individuals, such as yourself and myself, to improve the quality and productivity of the work they’re doing. That’s a great thing—I mean, we’d all like to be more productive. The organisations we work with would all like us to be more productive.
“Sometimes these tools can be used by small teams working together. One of the challenges in many organisations is, as you look across the organisation as a whole, they tend to use these tactical applications of AI—of generative AI—well, tactically.
“In other words, they don’t have a strategic plan for how are we going to adopt this across the organisation, and make sure that across all of our teams and people in the organisation, we’re maximising the quality and productivity of their work by taking advantage of these generative AI tools.
“All too often, the approach that they take is: here’s a few guidelines and rules as to how to use it. Like, “Please don’t take all the company’s detailed financial reports and upload them into the generative AI tool,” because some of that information could end up turning up in somebody else’s questions or research.
“But aside from those kinds of guidelines, all too often it’s, “Aside from that, you figure out whether you want to use it, how you want to use it, when you want to use it,” and you’re all on your own.
“So, the smarter organisations are taking a strategic approach to how they use tactical AI—that is, AI to maximise the quality and productivity of individuals’ work and the work of small teams coordinating together. And they put plans in place to train people and coordinate their utilisation of these tools and technologies across the enterprise as a whole.
“So that’s important. If organisations are going to be using these tools—and pretty much everyone has already started using them and will need to use them to compete—much the same way that, you know, 25 years ago people were saying, “Well, do I really have to get up to speed on this internet thing? I mean, I’m not a professional programmer, I’m not an IT professional, so isn’t that just something that they need to know about? Like, am I going to have to get one of these email address things?”
“And, you know, now we look back at that and laugh and just say, “Well, obviously, yes, of course we are.” And the same thing holds true with generative AI. Everybody’s going to be using these tools.
“So, it’s up to organisations to make sure that they are adopted in a well-thought-through, strategic way. Every single organisation out there—and you and I are talking here in December of 2024—no later than the end of the first half, and ideally by the end of the first quarter of 2025, needs to have a strategic plan in place for how are we going to adopt generative AI tools to maximise the productivity and quality of the work of people across our organisation as a whole.
“But having said that, even for those organisations that are using generative AI as a tactical tool to improve the quality and productivity of individuals and small teams, that’s not the same—and even if you’re using tactical AI, implementing it in a strategic way—that’s not the same as strategic AI.
“Strategic AI is when you are using AI to help you rethink the way that mission-critical processes and systems work across the organisation as a whole.
“So, for example, if you’re a large manufacturer, you might be using an enterprise resource planning system—or ERP system—such as SAP’s software or Oracle software. And there are numerous other similar products out there.
“If you’re managing cross-enterprise processes like customer service, supply chain management, procurement, operations—whether it’s the manufacturing operations in a factory at a manufacturing company, or whether it’s the hospital operations for operating rooms and treatment rooms at a healthcare provider, or various different kinds of governmental operations—literally maintaining streets or picking up trash and so forth, you can’t take those systems that you use to manage those enterprise-wide processes and simply say, “Okay SAP system, we bought you a subscription to ChatGPT, so now go, start doing stuff smart.”
“It doesn’t work like that. You’ve got to rethink the way these systems work. And while generative AI has a role in doing that, other forms of artificial intelligence that have been evolving for decades—and are actually, in many respects, precursors to generative AI—are in many cases equally important in terms of how you incorporate those into the systems and processes that you manage across the organisation as a whole.
“Examples of some of these kinds of AI are various forms of advanced data analytics—such as predictive analytics, machine learning, knowledge-based expert systems—and there’s a variety of others. And what these tools do is they enable you to restructure the way that your systems can work, so that you can rethink the way that your processes do work.
“And that is not something that can be done overnight or very quickly. If you simply want to train somebody how to use ChatGPT or another generative AI tool very well, you can send them to a day-long training class, or maybe three or four two- or three-hour-long training sessions, and that can all be done within a week. And suddenly, in a very short period of time, that person is much more productive and producing higher-quality output—and that’s a great thing.
“There’s nothing wrong with tactical AI. In fact, organisations should be doing it. But putting strategic AI in place is a much bigger task. That’s something that takes many quarters—or even years—of work and planning to put into place.
“Organisations need to be thinking down the road: how can we reconceptualise the way that these processes work? And what changes do we need to make to our existing enterprise systems and software in order to take advantage of AI and related emerging technologies?
“And this is where other emerging technologies can play a critical role, and they become much more powerful when you integrate them with each other—especially AI.
“These other technologies include things like Internet of Things, or sensor-based technologies. They include blockchain technologies for verifying the validity of data. They include technologies like virtual reality and augmented reality—together referred to sometimes as extended reality.
“They include—for manufacturers, and in many cases for other people who work with at least certain kinds of physical products—3D printing technology. And all of these organisations need to be putting a digital transformation strategy in place that they’re going to execute over the next one, two, three, five or more years to incorporate these technologies into a redesign of not only the way their existing processes work, but even what their fundamental business model is for delivering value in whatever way they do to the markets that they serve.”
