KPMG is investing $200 million to create an AI hub in their Dublin office. The organization engaged Jim Carroll for its 2024 leadership meeting, seeking his insight on the longer-term, disruptive opportunities unfolding with this fast-moving technology. He spoke to over 1,100 professional staff on the impact of the AI Megatrends, and our accelerating future.
Daily Inspiration: Forward Oriented Thinking – “Get to your future faster!”
“Get to your future faster!” – Futurist Jim Carroll
If you are going to spend most of your future tomorrow, wouldn’t it make sense to understand what it will look like when you get there? And wouldn’t it make sense to take a few steps right now to make sure you are ready for it, given how quickly it is coming at you? Shouldn’t you try to get to your future, faster?
With that being the case, here are my steps to align yourself with tomorrow, today:
- Accept that the future will be different from today
- With that, embrace it
- Don’t fight it – train for it
- Work harder to understand it
- Figure out what you need to do better in it
- Listen to the right people to understand what it will look like when you get there
- In that context, take the time to think about what you need to do to get ready for it
- Understand the new skills you will need once you arrive
- Start learning those new skills right now to make sure you are ready
- Have faith in your ability to succeed once you are there
- Know that the future is a voyage, not a destination.
- Accept personal responsibility for this voyage
- Be prepared for twists and turns that are a part of the voyage
- Battle the volatility that you might encounter along the way
- Practice the art of positivity to make sure your mindset is aligned with the opportunity it presents
- Enjoy the present while doing these things as you get ready for what comes next!
Tomorrow will be here sooner than you think.
Why not start getting ready now?
Daily Inspiration: “Own your tomorrow”
“Own your tomorrow” – Futurist Jim Carroll
Today’s photo is from my keynote yesterday in Dublin for KPMG – what a wonderful stage!
I spent a bit of time speaking to the audience that it was up to them to master the skill of just-in-time knowledge using new AI tools – it’s up to every one of them to enhance their skills by taking on personal responsibility for this new knowledge voyage.
Personal responsibility – they are responsible for their future, not someone else.
And that’s a key point that relates to a bigger issue – if you don’t set your plan for the future, someone else will!
It’s your future. No one is going to hand it to you on a silver platter. You’ve got to figure it out and direct how it will unfold. That means taking personal responsibility and ownership for the decisions that you’ll make along the way. You can’t blame others for the mistakes that you might make; in the same way, you can’t think that your success is the result of the effort of other people.
Your future IS all about you.
Own it, shape it, direct it, get intimately involved with it. Because, at the end of the day, you are the one who is going to be most involved in living it.
This means, of course, you need some good insight into the trends that might impact your future. That’s why you need a good personal ‘trends radar.’ You can better shape and own your future if you have better insight into what comes next – and so learning how to become a futurist for your future is probably one of the best things that you can do.
How do you do that? Immerse yourself in knowledge; bathe in insight; surround yourself with optimists; devour critical thinking; and constantly be on the prowl for signs and directions into what comes next. Keep an open mind rather than a closed viewpoint. Listen to different opinions – while you don’t necessarily have to agree with them, you should develop the ability to interpret them.
Above all, decide to take action. Reinvent yourself, your skills, your capabilities, your knowledge. Don’t presume that anything you know today will be relevant tomorrow; don’t become complacent with the idea that the skill you have right now will be valuable tomorrow; don’t believe that your current comfort zone will be the target zone for what comes next.
It’s your future – it doesn’t belong to anyone else.
What you decide to do with it is what matters.
Daily Inspiration : AI & Strategy – “To make tomorrow real, you need to be real about tomorrow!”
“To make tomorrow real, you need to be real about tomorrow!” – Futurist Jim Carroll
Over the last two years, I’ve done dozens of CEO-level corporate offsites focused on AI.
Here’s what I’ve learned corporate groups are looking for – first and foremost, they know that they need to be realistic about where this might take them tomorrow.
1. They want strategy, not hype.
2. They want to know how AI might help them achieve other strategic goals – they don’t view AI as a strategy in and of itself
3. They want to know the mid-and-long term trends, not just what’s happening right now
4. They know that AI is bigger than ChatGPT – and want to know what that is all about, and what it means for them.
5. Because of that, they want to understand what’s happening with AI robotics, machine vision, machine learning, and other big trends.
5. They aren’t buying into the idea that AI will steal all the jobs – they want to know how to empower their workforce with AI-based knowledge and skills
7. They don’t want to understand *how* AI works – they want to know its impact and opportunities.
8. They aren’t prepared to invest a lot in AI until they have real strategic clarity on all these things.
9. They are looking for detailed insight that is particular to their industry, knowledge base, and skill set
10. They know that this is a long-term voyage, not a short-term hit, and so they want insight on how to approach it.
With that in mind, they are thinking about a wide variety of strategic, leadership-oriented questions:
- how will AI affect my industry?
- what existential, big industry challenges might come my way that I am not aware of?
- what impact will these new AI technologies have on my company or association?
- what new strategic opportunities might exist?
- what complex new challenges might the acceleration of AI present me with?
- what skills issues are emerging that I need to start thinking about now?
- what disruptive transformation might occur?
- what new legal and risk issues must I plan for?
- what is the possibility for the emergence of new competitors that are building on AI-based disruption?
- what barriers do I have in the way that might hold me back from adapting to AI-based change in my industry?
- what experience and skill set should I be building?
In other words – it’s not AI that matters, it’s the strategic thinking around its emergence.
In other words, to realize the opportunity of AI, they need to be real about what it represents – and in that context, know that to make tomorrow real, they need to be real about tomorrow!
Daily Inspiration: Forward Oriented Organizations – “You’ll never know how to unlock your true potential if you don’t know how to unlock tomorrow!”
“You’ll never know how to unlock your true potential if you don’t know how to unlock tomorrow!” – Futurist Jim Carroll
Let me pause for a brief bit of promo material.
It’s a new keynote topic I rolled out for a client that booked me a few weeks ago. In the exploratory calls with them, it became evident that they were less focused on understanding the trends that might impact them and more needing to understand the implications of trends they were already aware of, and how to implement them. With that in mind, I pulled together a new keynote topic that has already drawn the interest of some others – Unlocking Tomorrow: How to Get To Your Future, Faster.
In the lead-in, I state the obvious:
“Companies that do not yet exist will build products not yet conceived using materials not yet invented with methodologies not yet imagined. Will you be part of this tomorrow, today?”
That’s the mindset that Futurist Jim Carroll brings to this fast-moving, insight-rich keynote that will leave you inspired to get to your future, faster.
Imagine if you could accelerate your way into the future, by clearly aligning future trends, your strategic thinking, and your internal engine of creativity. That‘s the insight that Futurist Jim Carroll
shares in this keynote.
It goes on:
This leadership keynote will help you to:
See Disruptive Trends: understand the trends that will impact you in the near and longer-term
Focus on Opportunity: you will achieve clarity on the trends that matter
Align to Disruption: you will shift your thinking to the actions that matter
Unlock Creativity: you will discover that it’s buried in your teams – and how you can let it out
Achieve Agility: you will learn more about the role of fast-teams
Enhance Your Speed: you will discover how to better align to our faster future
Accelerate Innovation: you will find ways to rethink your strategic pipeline
Deliver on Growth Opportunities: you shift from reactive defense to disruptive offense
This leads to this observation:
Innovative organizations succeed by mastering the pace of the new high-velocity economy. In a world of accelerating trends, they do this by understanding what it takes to align with fast emerging opportunities!
They can join in some good company:
Futurist and innovation expert Jim Carroll shares his critical lessons on achieving growth in an era of acceleration, with his 10 Rules for Aligning to Your Faster Future, Faster. Derived from Jim’s experience providing senior leadership guidance to over 2,000 organizations and 2 million people worldwide, the rules will provide you with the insight you need to align to an era of acceleration – valuable lessons from global innovation leaders.
You can be sure that I’ll be sharing some insight in posts to come on the ’10 Rules’ – after all, my client list has allowed me to observe what organizations are doing well, and not so well, on their path to ‘unlocking tomorrow.’
You will join the company of global leaders at Disney, Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, BASF, Nikon, and hundreds more who have found that Jim’s crystal clear trends and innovation insight take them into a world in which the future belongs to those who are fast!
The takeaway for you? Other than a brief view into how I work to position myself in the global leadership insight marketplace, ask yourself the question: are you missing out on your potential by not knowing how to unlock the opportunities of tomorrow?
Food for thought!
Daily Inspiration: Keynotes & Customization – “An epic commitment to quality will always achieve epic results!”
“An epic commitment to quality will always achieve epic results!” – Futurist Jim Carroll
I’m in Dublin again!
I’ve probably flown over Ireland at least 100 times to and from keynotes and family trips to Europe and the Middle East, and yet, until this year, I’d never found myself fortunate enough to visit the country. Now, I’m in the midst of my second visit this year!
Earlier in January, I was over for a keynote for a CEO-led strategic planning meeting for ICON plc – a company in the clinical pharmaceutical trial space. They led the 64,000 global patient trials of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, and so they are major players in the global healthcare space. They needed a realistic overview of the role that AI might play for them in the short, medium, and longer term. Like many, they’ve heard the hype and hysteria but needed something beyond the hype – and so they organized a two-day corporate offsite meeting of all their key staff, about 300 people.
The marketing and event agency in Dublin, the Energy Group found me and thought that I might be a good fit to open this event. That led to an exploratory call with the Icon team – and for that, I did a lot of prep work, digging into my research service to get concise insight into the role of AI within the industry, and to enhance and update what I already knew about the industry.
Further heavy-duty research and customization led to an extremely well-received keynote, with this comment coming back from the key person who booked me: “You were phenomenal… wow the feedback on your session has been fantastic!”
The fact is, I put A LOT of work into customizing every keynote, with a heck of a lot of research and presentation going into it – so I don’t mind celebrating such feedback. I detail my customization process on a little microsite at customization.jimcarroll.com.
When you put your effort into delivering an epic quality product – in this, my keynote – you often end up with epic! results. So what brings me to Dublin again? The folks at KPMG Ireland heard about my talk and arranged to bring me over this week, through the London Speakers Bureau, one the world’s largest speakers agencies. And so with that, I’ll find myself on stage this Thursday afternoon, speaking to 1,000+ staff from KPMG Ireland about the impact of AI on their industry and the clients that they serve. That was not the only epic result of the original Icon keynote – the Energy Group also spoke to their client HP, who became convinced that I could do an epic job on a film project that happened a few weeks ago in San Jose. That video project will be released in the next few weeks.
Why do I consider all of this to be EPIC (one of my favorite words?) The photo used in today’s quote is from our visit to Ireland in January and was taken outside the EPIC Irish Immigration Museum – that’s its actual name, and so it features an EPIC sign out front. The museum experience itself? Of course – it was EPIC!
Being of Irish heritage, with the family on my mom’s side traced back to 1749, our earlier visit last January was EPIC! My wife and I made our way down to the town that my ancestors are from, Kilmacthomas in County Waterford, where we met up with some of our long-lost ancestors – and then spent some time in the museum to learn so much more about this island nation which has truly been defined by centuries of immigration.
Ireland? Epic!
Putting quality work into a project so that you achieve epic results?
Even more epic!
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