00:00:08 Sana: Welcome back, listeners to the podcast where we make business feel more human and more doable as well. I'm your host and listeners. Um, let me ask you something. Have you, have you noticed modern work, how it can feel like, um, drinking from a fire hose while someone keeps turning up the pressure? Today we are talking about building super teams with AI. Not by adding more noise or chaos, but by creating systems that protect attention and beat information overload. And let me share a bit about my guest with all of your listeners, Howard Kingston. He's a serial entrepreneur, growth mentor, a two time startup founder with twenty plus years launching and scaling tech ventures. He has worked with brands like Google, Nike, Nike and Unilever and build companies from zero to multi-million pound revenues, bootstrapped and backed. And today, he's a CEO of frontier AI building eleven call signals copilot currently associated with frontier X dot AI. And the brand may evolve. So with that, let's begin this interesting conversation, listeners on this blend. And Howard, welcome to the show.

00:01:42 Howard Kingston: Hey, it's so great to be here. Thank you.

00:01:45 Sana: Thank you, thank you, Howard. And it's really an honor. I'm really, really looking forward to this conversation. Um, I mean, you know, I, I mean, of course it building super teams, it can sound like, um, slogan or maybe sometimes a bit of too much, you know, romanticization of AI. But then in plain terms, uh, Howard, uh, what does a super team look like and what does it not look like?

00:02:14 Howard Kingston: well, where we are, we've all been exposed to some degree to what AI can do now, um, maybe you've dabbled with it a bit yourself, or maybe you've seen some amazing demo videos somewhere, or maybe you've used it a bit yourself. Uh, the concept of what a team looks like and a team texture is just changing. Um, I'll just note this is my third tech company that I've set up. And, um, my current business, we have three people in the team and, uh, for the amount of work and output that we do, um, we would in previous companies probably had about fifteen people to do the same amount of work. So, um, there's a new class of company being launched at the moment, which people call AI native companies, which are heavily using different, uh, agentic and AI systems. So essentially what that means is one human can do the work of what maybe five, six humans would have been able to do in the past when they are AI assisted. And what I think the wake up call to everybody is. This is very much. Now, this is in the market right now, and your competitors may be using this stuff, and they're going to be far more competitive than you if they're not using this term. We call it super teams. What that might be is essentially your team are far more leveraged, and they're able to do far more work with the same amount of resources. Human resourcing. Um, hopefully that makes sense. But that's just a general direction. And it's definitely, um, you know, a wake up call for people because this is not what's going to happen next year or in five years. This is happening right now, right now.

00:04:17 Speaker 4: Yeah, that's what I actually thought.

00:04:19 Sana: But something that's really like really, you know, wow, that kind of word that, you know, like in my mind, I was just saying, oh my goodness, okay, three people instead of, I mean, usually we see teams of ten or fifteen or twenty people, each of them would be having probably defined roles. And then, uh, like, you know, if, if I see for, for us also we have like five or six people in there, but then three people, however, that that is really, really cool to stay with. But then at the same time, you know, um, uh, if I look at, look at it from a point of nuance, I mean, I do understand that there is something called as AI native, uh, companies. And this is something that is really, really surprising, interesting, and a kind of, you know, it is the present. And in the future, it may look like a maybe more advanced and different from this as well, because now we are not talking about years or decades of change or transformation. We are now talking at about months or even weeks of transformation in there. I mean, every day or week there's a different new model of AI coming out different, you know, um, Platforms are coming out. We're exploring different avenues in there. But then at the same time, Howard, um, do you get pushbacks in terms of that? Okay. Does it mean that this particular statement that AI is going to replace humans? Completely true. Because now instead of, you know, you're, you're just, you know, working at a five x less capacity in terms of the human resource.

00:05:58 Howard Kingston: Um, yeah. So the statement will AI replace humans? Is that correct? The answer is yes, but it's also not correct in certain situations. So I think what is very what most people do and what the media like to do is, um, simplify things, sensationalize things. Like the reality is, will some jobs be replaced by AI? Of course they were. Of course there will be just like, just like, um, when Microsoft Excel spreadsheets came out, there used to be humans that used to do all of that bookkeeping, bookkeeping and accounting, uh, on paper. And a lot of those people's jobs got, were changed and were evolved. So this is not something brand new, like technology, um, has continuously evolved and replaced people's jobs. Even look, looking back to the printing press or the car, you know, uh, people with horses and carts were out of a job, right? Um, so this is, this isn't brand new stuff. It's just continuous. So, um, yeah, definitely some jobs are being replaced, like jobs I would not like to be in right now are entry level graphic designers at entry level, um, analysts and researchers or even people that send outbound emails and things like that. These are all things which are AI are really gobbling up right now. However, there's lots of jobs that AI won't be able to replace anytime soon. Um, you know, for example, uh, people still like to buy things from other people and especially when it's a really big purchase, for example, you're buying a house or you're doing a multi-million dollar deal. That's not just going to be done. AI to AI, you're still going to be speaking to another human and you're going to trust them and you're going to understand what they need. Um, but there's going to be AI that helps people do that more efficiently. So some things will be replaced in the short term, and then other things will be not will still require a human, but will just be enhanced by AI. So I think there's really two buckets there if that answers the question.

00:08:26 Sana: It definitely does. Definitely does. How it. And that's something that I also think on similar lines that, you know, like for, for sales. Um, yeah, I mean, the initial, maybe the levels of interactions and discussions can be enhanced by AI. Maybe the funnel enhancement and the clearing of funnel and trying to understand the pain points at an industry level or a market level. But then still, you know, your buyers, your purchase purchasers would yearn for human interactions. Definitely. But at the same time, the entry level, you know, the kind of job roles that you mentioned. Yes, very much prone. And it's happening right now. It has been happening. It is still happening right now. and that is something that, you know, we, we have seen time to time. Um, centuries for centuries and decades, for decades. So yeah, it's just, it's happening at a lightning speed.

00:09:23 Howard Kingston: Of course.

00:09:24 Sana: Yeah. Okay. Let's go to information overload here. Howard. I mean. if you look at the podcasting industry as well, too many podcasts out there, different people having different opinions on a single topic. Um, someone would say, if you do X, you'll get Y, somebody else will say, if you do X, you'll not get y, but you have to look at a different problem statement altogether. So there's a lot of information overload in there. Like too many decisions, um, too many opinions, too many voices and too much context switching as well. So if you, if you had to design a simple system for team, for a team, which is, which is drowning in slack email, um, docs or meetings, what are, what are your three routes? Or maybe more than that.

00:10:22 Howard Kingston: Um, so if I was looking to design a system to help cure information overload, um, I think it, what I would say is it's not you don't need another tool, right? Um, you know, adding in another project management system or whatever, that's not the answer. That's probably more of the problem, more so than the solution. Um, I just think there's, it always comes down to being really clear of what your priorities are. Actually just being super clear on that. Um, and that can be done with a pen and paper, by the way, that does not need slack. It doesn't need like a project management system or any of that kind of stuff. Just knowing what your core North Star goal as a company is as a team. Um, for the year and then breaking that down into what it needs to be for a quarter and then what it needs to be for the month. And then going into every week, knowing what your core priority is for the week, and then every day knowing what the core priority is for the day. Um, and that is usually not a long list. That's, I did not say a to do list. I said priorities. So that's usually one, two or three things. And the difficult thing about that is that means you'll have to say no to a lot of other things. Yeah. Um, and that creates the focus, which then allows you to start cutting out the noise because you just have to get focused on doing this one thing. Um, and yeah, you can use AI to help you focus more. Like, for example, I've built out a, um, uh, prioritization OKR system within my AI within ChatGPT. So every morning, it knows what my company's priorities are for the year and it knows what I, what agenda I have on that week. And it knows what agenda I have on that day. And every morning I talk to it, I don't type into it. I talk to it. And I'll say, based on my progress so far this week, what are the top five things I should be focusing on today? And it'll be almost like a AI assistant, like, uh, you know, Iron Man has Jarvis. You've probably seen like, I have this conversation with my AI every morning and it helps me refine and prioritize what I should be doing. And a lot of times it helps me spot gaps. I might be trying to do too many things in the day and I'll say, you know, you don't have time for that. Um, you know, are you sure you have time to take on so much today? You have these key meetings that are going to take up a lot of time, etc.. Um, but that's you. So to, to answer your question, just to sum up, um, you can definitely use AI to enhance your focus and be super productive that way. But ultimately it's about you prioritizing what's the most important thing and then saying no to everything else.

00:13:39 Sana: Um, me, I once again, uh, I think it's about yes, of course, understanding your priorities and then also leveraging AI to enhance or maybe fostering that, that process. and, regarding the tools, that's something you mentioned is, and I think it's a very legitimate, um, problem because, you know, sometimes as, as a entrepreneur, founder, especially of a tech company, you kind of get a FOMO that, you know, every day, there's some new kind of tool coming out. Like instead of typing, ah, there you are. Uh, whispering or, or just giving voice inputs to AI or maybe, you know, you are installing a different kind of AI agent in there. Um, different, different, you know, capabilities. But then I think most of the decisions sometimes, especially when it comes to tools, is driven by that fear of missing out that if I don't use that tool, it will look cool. I may not be able to tell people that I'm using this tool. So yeah, that's what I think.

00:14:43 Howard Kingston: Sure.

00:14:44 Sana: Yeah. Okay. Uh. Moving on. This is also a very kind of, uh, important question. you know, how about like, uh, some of the researchers that have come out, um, they kind of mentioned that, you know, AI is making us as lazier thinkers. What's your thought about it?

00:15:09 Howard Kingston: It's an interesting point, which I don't necessarily know if that's wrong. You know, I'm not going to say I don't believe that. Um. It's an yeah, it's an interesting one. I think it's first of all, I'd say it's, I think it's a little bit early to really know how things have impact. It's just like, for example, when social media came out, you know, ten, fifteen years ago, I think we're only really uncovering, uh, now how that impacts people and especially like young adults and things like that. I think we're really only starting to understand it now. Um, whereas and the same thing is going to happen with AI. Um, and I think it's really interesting with like, you know, AI and how, how we learn, um, does it make us lazy thinkers. I think one thing is it it can make definitely make us more productive. But does that mean but we can do more with less effort. But maybe so we're doing more things, but each individual thing, maybe we understand less deeply. And is that a good thing or a bad thing? I don't think that's clear. So you might say like one piece of research might say, that'll make us a lazy thinker. Okay, so maybe we don't think as deeply on a subject. However, we do things that would normally take a month. We get them done in a day. So is that a good thing or a bad thing? You know, I'm not here to say I think I don't think we know. Right. Like you could argue that from both sides. Like, is it better for humans to have really rigorous, deep thinking? Or is it better for humans to get ten times more done? And being more productive is one of them better than the other? I don't think we can say we know. I think it could be argued both sides, let me put it that way.

00:17:24 Sana: Yeah, actually, actually, I mean, um, it's nuanced. It's nuanced. I don't think that, you know, I also wouldn't stay on the extremes of it, you know, because that is something that has been thought about when it comes to phones or computers or social media, any, any form of disruptive technology out there. So not just just labeling it as good or bad and it doesn't serve. Okay, great. Um, however, before we wrap up, um, quickly, if you can, um, share with us a bit about, you know, because you're building a living, uh, in call, sorry, live in call sales copilot at frontier AI, uh, currently found through frontier AI. Um, what's, what's the real problem you're solving in there?

00:18:20 Howard Kingston: Um, yeah, so a little bit like when we were talking earlier, we were saying about how AI will replace some things. And then there's certain things that AI just won't replace. And one of the examples we gave is that for important sales conversations, you still want to speak to another human because you need to trust them and you need things like that, uh, which is, you know, AI is not going to replace anytime soon. So the problem we're solving with frontier AI is it kind of comes from my own past experience with my last companies. Um, I would always have a large number of human sales teams and, uh, I would. Most of the mistakes and deals we lost and we didn't successfully close, uh, were due to mistakes happening on the call. So for example, a salesperson not quite hearing, uh, uh, or answering questions by the customer, well, um, not overcoming, um, objections they might have, etc., etc.. Um, or just not knowing the answer, maybe it's a very difficult question and the salesperson has only been working in the company for six months and, you know, just doesn't quite understand all the nuance of, um, of that, of the products yet. So that's what frontier AI does. So we are AI, uh, learns everything about your company, how you sell and then live on a sales call. It guides the salesperson, um, live on a call, what they should say in real time. So, um, how that shows up is, let's say you're on Zoom or Microsoft Teams, it's listening in on the call and it's telling the salesperson in real time what they should say. So the analogy there is, it's a little bit like, um, in Google Maps, you want to be told the moment you need to make a right turn or a left turn, you want to be told that in real time, you want to be guided. Um, you don't want to like, find out after the call that you made a wrong turn and you're one hundred miles in the wrong direction. Um, it's just that's never been possible on sales calls before, and that's what we've invented essentially. So it's telling the salesperson what they should say. And so the big idea there is that if these salespeople are saying the right things, answering questions well and running better calls, then you'll make more revenue as a company. And that's what we're seeing with our, uh, the companies that are using us so far.

00:20:53 Sana: Next, Someone I would love to have, especially, you know, when it comes to inside sales. I mean, you are interacting with the client for the first time. I mean, you have done your homework, but then you don't know what's going to happen in the next seven or ten minutes on the call. If the customer or the potential lead answers your call, then I think it's, it's a cool thing to have with you. It's very helpful to be honest.

00:21:17 Howard Kingston: Cool. Thank you.

00:21:19 Sana: Okay. Awesome. Um, so in the interest of time before we wrap up, if our listeners, they would like to explore more about, of course, frontier AI and also they would like to connect with you. What would be the easiest way?

00:21:33 Howard Kingston: Yeah. Thank you. Uh, so best way to, if you want to learn more about frontier AI and what we're doing, just go to our domain. Just go to our web address, frontier X dot AI. Uh, you'll learn everything about it there. You can book in a demo, etc.. I'd love to chat to you or if you'd like to connect with me personally. Best place is probably LinkedIn. Go to LinkedIn. Just search my name, Howard Kingston. It's quite a unique name, so I'm sure I'll pop up. And, uh, I'd love to connect with you there.

00:22:06 Sana: Superb. Alice's. What I'll do is I'll have all the links in the show notes. So just refer to them along with this episode. And, um, Howard, first of all, thank you so much. Um, super, uh, you know, I appreciate that you, you know, kind of looked at this, you answer the questions with a lot of clarity in there. And, uh, I really loved your perspectives on this. So thank you so much. And of course, the work that you're doing.

00:22:33 Howard Kingston: Thank you.

00:22:35 Sana: Amazing. Thank you so much for tuning in. If this episode helped you feel clearer, follow this blend, share it with someone on your team who's carrying too much context in their head. Hi, I'm Sara and this was planned. I'll catch you in the next episode. Thank you.