194. Why Smart Teams With Big Budgets Still Fail at AI ft. Brian Evergreen (The Future Solving Company)

Is that the type of starting place that you would be at as a cco?

Brian Evergreen:
What I would want to, if we were working together, I’d say, hey, we need to take that a step further to make it visceral. So if you think about, like JFK sending people to the moon, saying by the end of this decade, he said, we’re going to put a man on the moon and return him safely home. And it’s interesting because it’s the same thing as successfully executing a moon mission. But the articulation is something you can, you can feel, you can, you can almost feel the feet just, you know, landing on the moon, right? So I think that in for, for chief customer officers, if it were, if it were put as, like, what would have to be true for all the other leaders across the company to say, oh, my gosh, please renew this subscription because this is so incredibly valuable for us? And then you get much more clarity on what would have to be true than if you say, directionally, we want to have, we want to have total value realization.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You’re listening to Unchurned, brought to you by the Gainsight podcast network. Most leaders, when asked about AI transformation, will tell you where they want to go. Very few can tell you exactly what has to be true to get there. Brian Evergreen spent years at Microsoft being shipped to C suite teams across the country, helping them figure out what to do with the AI they’d already purchased. What he found was that the old playbook, the one everybody still uses, was setting them up to fail. He’s built something different, a framework where you plan to flag in the future you want and then solve backward like a math equation. He calls it solving for the future. The answer, he says, changes everything you decide to invest in.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I’m Josh Schachter. This is Unchurned. Subscribe to our substack@ Unchurned.Gainsight.com where we go deep on every episode. Like how one post sales team at cloudbeds built over 150 AI agents. That story and more at unchurned.gainsight.com hey, everybody. Welcome to this episode of Unturned. I’m your host, Josh Schachter, senior vice president of strategy and go to market development at Gainsight, and I’m excited to be here today with a guest who knows a lot about the future stuff that we’re solving. He is the president, the CEO, founder of the Future Solving Company.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
He’s also a distinguished author, wrote the book Autonomous Transformation helping us think about how, how AI is coming into this next wave of the working world. And previous to that he was the global head of Autonomous AI Co innovation at Microsoft, Microsoft Research. That is so Brian. Brian Evergreen, I’d like to welcome you to the program.

Brian Evergreen:
Thanks Josh. I’m excited to be here.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
There’s a lot of cool stuff that you’ve worked on and are working on. So it was a little bit tough for me to pick which of the things. You’ve been a contributing author to a lot of really cool publications that everybody listening in is aware of and you’ve been considered one of the top thought leaders by Forbes for this world of AI in the future. So I didn’t know where to go. But, but you’ve done a lot of, you’re a thought leader in AI, we’ll leave it at that. How about that?

Brian Evergreen:
That sounds great. Yeah, no, I, I, I, I struggle to condense. I mean I think probably anybody who’s doing their best to put yourself too right, you, you’ve got some really amazing accolades and sometimes it’s hard to put into two sentences, right?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the reason I wanted to have you on the program is that I speak to customer success leaders, CCOs, other go to market leaders day in, day out. Some people are doing AI really well. When I say doing AI right. This AI transformation, um, and, and, and, and others not as much for, for good and bad reasons. Even the folks that are ahead of the curve still have imposter syndrome. And so I, I don’t think anybody is fully comfortable with, with, with how they are transforming their organization in this new agentic AI era. And it occurs to me in talking to you that to, to get to this future place of, of optimally using, you know, the art of the possible optimally using AI, you kind of have to know where you’re going and you have to have a framework and a system and that’s where I wanted to talk to you because that’s, that’s your expertise, right?

Brian Evergreen:
That’s exactly right. I mean it all started in for me. I’d been working as an AI practitioner for a number of years when I stepped into a leadership role at Microsoft US where I was the head of AI strategy, but from a customer facing perspective. So I wasn’t deciding where Microsoft was going to invest from an AI perspective. I was helping, I was being shipped out all over the US to C suite executive Teams to help them think through what they’d already committed. You know, from a soft, from a SaaS perspective, they’d made their commits in Azure, now they needed to consume, right? And so, but most of them didn’t have a strategy for it. The account directors, you know, who, who had grown up in, in selling, you know, the office suite, didn’t necessarily know to, how to have that conversation about what, what should you do with AI and how do you make that valuable? And so unlike in, in most consulting contexts where you deliver a strategy and then you, you know, submit an invoice, we, we weren’t being measured on that. We were measured on are they actually running workloads in Azure that they’re going to keep running because it’s valuable for them? So our strategy had to be extremely effective.

Brian Evergreen:
And so, and what I found was that the playbook that we were sort of taking, trying to take forward from the digital transformation era, the lift and shift, the modernize, the incrementalism kind of playbook that we’ve inherited from the industrial revolution, that worked well in the era digital transformation was not working for AI. And so that’s been the basis of my work. Through that rapid exposure to all these incredible leaders with tons of resources, some of the top experts in the world, very strong core competencies, I was able to sort of quickly and rapidly iterate and test what actually works today from a strategy perspective. So I built a new leadership system that is built for purpose for this era.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, so what was the previous way and how was it not working? Well, before we get to the new stuff. Yeah, yeah.

Brian Evergreen:
So the previous way, you can hear pretty much any conference you go to, even still. So number one, they’ll say, start with what problem you want to solve, which fundamentally breaks you down into an incrementalism because you’re only solving a problem is getting rid of something you don’t want. It doesn’t get you what you do want. Right. So it takes something that you already have and it might make it better, but solving a problem isn’t going to create new growth categories, Right. That’s a different function, that’s a different method. Steve Jobs wasn’t solving a problem when he introduced the iPhone, right? So that’s the first one. Start with what problems you want to solve.

Brian Evergreen:
The second is that people ask, they say, well, we need to be data driven. Which data driven, unfortunately, has become for most organizations in practice, unscientific. And by that I mean that the scientific method, of course, everyone knows it, but Repeating for the sake of illustration is that you ask a question and then you form a hypothesis, then you conduct an experiment, you analyze the results and then you draw a conclusion. Right? We all learn that in school. The data driven methodology is ask a question. Okay, that’s the same. Form a hypothesis, okay, that’s the same. But step three, instead of conducting experiment, we say, let’s go look at what data we can find out.

Brian Evergreen:
There’s a, that you know, from Gartner, idc, wherever. Let’s then draw a conclusion and at the end we’ll start the experiment. But it’s not experiment because we’ve already proven advanced how long it’s going to take, how much it’s going to cost, and we’re going to tie people’s performance to it. So it’s no wonder that these things just keep failing because we are taking a fundamentally unscientific approach to these, to AI and all these other kinds of new initiatives. So the truth is there’s no data about the future. There’s no data about whether or not that this AI implementation will work in your context at all, much less in that timeline, at that cost. So managing it that way is setting it up to fail and everyone to be frustrated, even if they have a great idea.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And then deterministic. Right? AI, AI by nature is non deterministic and our future is non deterministic with AI.

Brian Evergreen:
Yes, exactly, exactly. So that’s the second one is being data driven. And then, you know, there, there’s a number of other things, but I’d say from a, from a high level perspective, most people manage from a, from they, they look at things from an individualistic perspective within their organization. They, they think this is my scorecard. And so that’s what I need to double down on. I, I need to show green. But then when you zoom out to the exec level, they say, this is so crazy because everybody’s showing green. All the scorecards are green.

Brian Evergreen:
You know, market more impressions than ever. Sales team got more, you know, closed deals than ever. Customer success teams, you know, have the best, you know, survey results back than ever, et cetera, et cetera. It’s like, but why are we still losing market share, like year, you know, quarter over quarter? And it’s because the performance of the system as a whole isn’t a sum of the, of the performance of the parts. It’s actually the interaction between them. It’s the interaction between those departments that actually matters to and creates value for the customer. It, no one, no one says, oh, I really like working with Gainsight because of, you know, their marketing department. That’s the only part of it that matters to me is their marketing.

Brian Evergreen:
Right. It’s an entire system with all these subparts that all the interaction between them is what matters. But, but that’s not something really taught in schools. And so I could go on forever on all the things that, you know, are wrong. But, but what I found was that one of the biggest elements, when you think about any leader that’s done something incredible, almost inevitably, if I said, okay, and what was their vision like in my parlance, what future were they solving for? Right? And so if you think about, like Netflix, we just, there’s, you know, they just announced the CEO switchover, right? They were solving for the same future twice. And so the future being that anyone, anywhere could access entertainment on, you know, eventually on any device. But at first it was just so they could access entertainment and so you didn’t have to be near Blockbuster or Hollywood Video because you, they’ll just ship you a dvd. And then when later, when the form factors got to the level of maturity that they could then say, actually we’re going to stream directly to devices, even on smartphones.

Brian Evergreen:
Great, right? That’s the same future, solving for a different way. And so having a vision of what value you’re going to create is actually the first step. And so often leaders skip that and they. Because when you ask, when you ask most leaders today, hey, what’s your vision? So if you’re a customer success leader and you’re saying, we got to use AI, it’s like, okay, for what? Like what. What is the value that you want to create for your customers? If you don’t have the answer to that question, it’s not time to invest in AI yet. It’s time to come up with what value you want to first and then you can figure out if AI is the right, one of the right tools to help you create that value.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I mean, if I’m going to channel the voice of the CCO today, from what I hear from people, the vision is absolute customer value realization. That’s a lot of jargon. Oh my God, who am I must have worked in consulting in a past life. Making your product, making your business valuable to your customers and being able, and then, you know, within that, being able to measure that and expand on that time over time and so on and so forth. Is. Is that the type of starting place that you would be at as a cco? Because what you’re not saying as well, there’s There’s a current gap. The problem is that my team is overwhelmed or that the customer, you know, I don’t know what their value is. You’re starting from, like, you know, for me, it’s.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
The vision is, yeah, it’s like absolute value that our customers get from us.

Brian Evergreen:
I would say that’s directionally correct. But the thing that’s missing from it

Josh Schachter [Host]:
is that euphemism for wrong. But. Yeah, let’s keep going.

Brian Evergreen:
But I’d say the thing that I might. What I would want to, if we were working together, I’d say, hey, we need to take that a step further to make it visceral. So if you think about, like, JFK sending people to the moon, saying, by the end of this decade. He didn’t say, by the end of this decade, we’re going to successfully execute a moon mission. He said, we’re going to, you know, we’re going to. We’re going to put a man on the moon and return him safely home. And it’s interesting because it’s the same thing as successfully executing a moon mission. But the, but the articulation is something you can.

Brian Evergreen:
You can feel.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And so if you were to, say, close your eyes. Right. There’s detail behind it. It’s vivid. Yeah.

Brian Evergreen:
You can almost feel the feet just, you know, landing on the moon. Right. So I think that for chief customer officers, if it were. If it were put as that when our customers, you know, our buyers are asked, or let’s say your buyer is asked by other leaders across the company, should we renew this license? Let’s say that the answer is like almost a panicked, oh, my gosh, yes, of course we should, because it’s creating so much value. So it’s the same. I think it’s maybe the same outcome as what you’re talking about, but putting it in a way that feels like, okay, well, then what would have to be true, you know, along the lines of like, an unreasonable hospitality Will Gadara kind of thing. Right. Like, what would have to be true for all the other leaders across the company to say, oh, my gosh, please renew this subscription because this is so incredibly valuable for us.

Brian Evergreen:
And then you get much more clarity on what would have to be true than if you say, directionally, we want to have. We want to have total value realization with our implementation or our deployment of our product. Right.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
That.

Brian Evergreen:
It just doesn’t. It’s just a different filtering lens for developing the strategy to go achieve that,

Josh Schachter [Host]:
because then you can think about the workflows that lead up to that renewal. Okay, great. Well, then there’s this process six months beforehand where we’re feeling that out. And then prior to that, there’s the onboarding and then. And getting them to value.

Brian Evergreen:
And then even with onboarding, even with what would have to be true for us to blow through the onboarding target number? What would have to be true? Well, it’d have to actually be interesting. What would have to be true for it to be interesting? Well, we might have to actually film some kind of media to put in there. We might have to take some kind of creative campaign approach even within the organization, even once they’ve purchased the subscription in order for this to blow through the organization and people all to onboard and be excited about it. Right.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
It’s interesting. I did work in consulting. I worked for Boston Consulting Group and. But for like an innovation incubation division. And we would talk about the art of the possible and then what you need to believe to get to that art. It’s kind of very similar, right? It’s what’s the future vision and what has to be true. Yeah, that’s.

Brian Evergreen:
I mean, it’s definitely. There’s. Yes, it is very similar. And what I’d say is that vision is the only force that I’ve found with enough momentum to overcome organizational inertia. So especially something new like AI. If you’re saying we’re going to roll out AI and people say, well, what for? And it’s like, well, because it’s going to make us more efficient. That’s not a vision. And you’re going to be met with just all the inertia along the way.

Brian Evergreen:
But if it’s articulated as a vision that people can feel and that they can see themselves, that’s the other thing, is that a shared vision for the future is a foundation of trust. So the reason that people started switching who they were going to be buying

Josh Schachter [Host]:
AI from whether I want to reiterate that one more time, because that was a really powerful quote from my LinkedIn post. I have a half kid. Right. But that was really. A shared vision is a foundation of trust.

Brian Evergreen:
A shared vision of the future is a foundation.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
The shared vision of the future is a foundation of trust. I love that. I mean, a lot of my listeners know I’m writing a book right now on relationships and this to me is like right there. Like, how do you build that relationship with your co founder, with your early team? A shared vision of the future is a foundation of trust.

Brian Evergreen:
That’s right. Because if you think about it, when you’re voting in an election, you’re actually voting for. Which person do I think is going to move our country or our state or whatever toward a version of the future I want to live in? And when you’re, when you’re hoping somebody, when a new CEO comes in or when a new whatever is this, what future is this leader creating? And how’s that, what’s that going to look like for me and for my customers and my clients? And so the earlier, as a leader, your job is not just to have a great vision, but to articulate it and to help people see themselves in that version of the future you’re building toward. And then they’ll be all in, right? They’ll be excited about it because they’ll say, oh, I absolutely see how great that’s going to be and I see how that’s going to be great for me. And for, because you know, they’re showing up because they want to, yes, they want to do great work and they want to, they find mission and purpose in that, hopefully, but also to provide for their families. And so when we’re not creating clarity and you know, certainty in this era of AI where people are uncertain, that we’re doing a disservice from productivity, even on just a human level, but also a productivity level. And so having that, creating that vision in the first place and articulating it, which, you know, I have a framework for putting your strategy into a single page and making it visible that people can immediately grasp what the vision is and what everything is that you’d have to do to achieve that vision. And we found just that that completely changes the conversation with peers, with folks, you know, up and down the organization.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I love that. I want to run over to my team, one of my teams, and start working on our shared vision of the future as the foundation of our trust as we try to kind of level up in this year. What can you share about, about your framework? I know you’ve got IP and you work with customers and clients rather. But, but tell us like again, like put yourself in the, in the shoes of a, let’s say a post sales leader with that vision of, of making it a no brainer to renewal, renew, you know, on the customer’s end. Yeah. What, what, what do they do from there?

Brian Evergreen:
What I’d say is once you have that vision and let’s say that’s the vision, right. I have a whole framework for developing a vision together in a virtual or in person workshop. And, but, but let’s say in this Case we’re skipping past that. You know, you have a vision and, and you, you. It’s. Well, hopefully already, well, Artic. You have to do is put that at the top of a whiteboard or a Miro board and say, what would have to be true? Like, like we mentioned. But, but most people, when they ask that question, they don’t have a systematic framework for it.

Brian Evergreen:
And that’s, that’s part of the gap that I filled when I created my creative future solving. So, and what if you imagine, like, at the top of a Miro board or a whiteboard, that vision at the top, and then asking what would have to be true, and then you’re starting to draw lines and, and circles that kind of start creating a decision tree. So at the top level, what you might say is, okay, well, what would have to be true is our customers would have to have reached a certain level of adoption, right? That they’re not. Not really even just that, oh, x percent, but like, that they’re finding value in it. Right? And then they would also have to, you know, not have. They’d have a certain low level of customer support issues or when. And when they do have customer support issues, it’d have to be resolved quickly. And like, you know, the NPS of the experience would have to be really high or beating the industry for it to be a panic level of, please don’t unsubscribe.

Brian Evergreen:
Right? And so you, you at that top level, you might come up with, you know, seven, five things that. It’s like, okay, these, if these things were true, we would have reached this future. Okay. It’s usually the math is actually usually not that it’s not 15 things at that level. It’s like five to seven, usually. Then you say, and you, and before moving on, you say, okay, so if this were true, this were true, this were true, and this were true, would we have reached that future? The answer is yes. You can move on. If the answer is no, you need to ask again.

Brian Evergreen:
Well, what else would have to be true? Once. Once you, you agree, okay, yes, those are the five things. Those are the seven things. Then you isolate one of those bubbles or circles and say, okay, for this one to be true, what would have to be true? And then that one, there’s going to be four or five things that might have to be true. And you keep doing that for the entire, you know, all those seven or five things all the way down until you’re at the bottom where, okay, all the things down here, like, we’re at the point where these things are true. The things that would have to be true, you know, six layers or 10 layers down are already true. So now we know, okay, this is everything that would have to be true in a single kind of decision tree looking. I call it a reason tree because the tree of reasoning that you’ve done as leaders to say all these things are true.

Brian Evergreen:
And then once, once you have that, it’s on a single page so you can actually talk to other people and say, this is where we’re trying to go. These are all the things that we think would have to be true. Do you agree? Do you disagree? Okay, let’s start investing. And anything that doesn’t fit into this in one of these, that we’re considering investing unless it’s needed from an operations perspective, let’s cut it. Because it’s outside of the future we’re actually trying to solve for.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Can the vision be number driven? Can it be, you know, listen, I’ll pick on Replit for a minute. We had their CRO on the podcast a couple months ago. Greg Magazi and Replit’s vision for, you know, by the end of 2026 is to get to a billion dollars in revenue in ARR. That’s a very good, concrete, very aspirational vision. Totally. It’s different than landing a man on the moon. Can it be a numerical based vision? Can it be? It can.

Brian Evergreen:
I mean, I think the idea of saying, okay, we want to get to a billion in ARR, you know, by the end of the year is. I mean, people can generally see, okay, if we were to achieve that, I can imagine, you know, the bell we’d ring at, you know, in New York City. And I can imagine what that would mean for me and my, like, that means we’re growing. That means we’re not doing layoffs the same way. Like, so I think that that would still be motivating for people. I might couch it in something that’s based on customer value in terms of how you articulate that vision. So I would probably just pair it with something where it’s like we want to over a million because we do this or because we do that. And so, you know, almost along the lines of like the term raving friends, raving fans like Ken Blanchard, you know, if you’re familiar with his work.

Brian Evergreen:
Yeah, I mean he’s fantastic. Right? So something along those lines so that people can really viscerally feel, oh, this would, this is what it would be like to achieve that. And you know, how it would be so, so Much value would be creating that. It’d be consistent if not just continuing to go up.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I love the conversation. You know, we go through, we’re working through our V2MOM framework. It came from Salesforce, I believe. And your vision, your values, your method, your obstacles and whatever the last M is for measurement. Measurement. Thank you. But it gets to be a lot. Right.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And I think, you know, we’re going through this now for the year and for the, for the quarter coming up and you actually start to lose and think about like the methods like those five or six pillars. You actually, it is a good reminder like to then go back to what’s the overall vision that you’re driving towards. To always anchor it in that.

Brian Evergreen:
Right?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah.

Brian Evergreen:
And most of the time, even if you have a good vision, it gets lost, like you said, in the shuffle. Or the strategy becomes so abstract that is buried in layers of PowerPoint or what have you that it’s not actually a map from where you are to where you want to go. It’s more like context setting. Like a SWOT analysis is just defining the game board, so to speak, not what you’re actually going to do. Right. So. So you. A lot of strategy work is this is the game board, this is the context, this is the market.

Brian Evergreen:
Now here’s our three tactical things that we’re going to go do. And it’s like, okay, that’s not a strategy.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, I love it, man. I’m even thinking now for my personal book project. Can I. Can I do I have a vision that I put out there as well. Right. And then everything, whether it serves a vision or not, you can fit absolutely. Area of your life. Yeah.

Brian Evergreen:
You could be like my vision for this is anyone who picks it up and reads it cover to cover, then this is. This is the takeaway or this is how this possibly impacts their life.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, I love that. I love that so much. And if you’re a go to market, you know, sales or post sales leader, again listening to this, you don’t have to wait for the CEO and the board to have that vision. Of course it can cascade. They have a vision. Right. But you can do this within the word. But the silo within.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Within your remit for your group. Right.

Brian Evergreen:
And for your customers. Like, because like what we found when I was, you know, part of the US field for Microsoft was the, the fact that our customers didn’t have a vision for how they were going to use our product and how it was going to benefit them was a problem that it was our problem. Right. We needed to help them fix that because otherwise they weren’t going to. When, when renewals came, oh, we didn’t consume, even though we made that commit. And so we, you know, we’re not, we’re not going to make as big of a commit this year or this, you know, this time, this five year, you know, agreement or whatever.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So.

Brian Evergreen:
So not only for yourself and your department, but if you have a function for helping your customers come up with a vision of how they’re going to create value that has embedded into it the work that you do together and the software or whatever it is you sell, that’s going to make a big difference.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, I mean, that’s success planning right there. But coming from a collaborative type of standpoint, vision, setting together, future solving together. Brian, this has been great. Super helpful. How do people, you know, catch you for more information to learn more?

Brian Evergreen:
Yeah, they can, they can find me on Brian’s blog if they want to read stuff from me. I often announce stuff on there too. Or course I’m on LinkedIn.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Brian’s blog.

Brian Evergreen:
Brian’s blog. So B R I A N S blog. Or just search Brian Evergreen on LinkedIn and I hope I’m the first to come up.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Love it. Brian Evergreen, thank you so much. This has been great. Really appreciate you being on the program.

Brian Evergreen:
Yep, thanks for having me. Josh,

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Sam.