Embracing and Navigating Change in the era of AI

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AI is the latest disruptive innovation of our time. It challenges organizations to rethink how to deliver products, empower teams, and remain relevant in an era of continuous change. In this session, Sergio Flores, Principal Agile Program Manager at Discover Financial Services, talks us through the importance of adopting new ways of thinking — or, in other words, adopting an Agile Mindset to empower individuals and teams.

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Transcript

Well, welcome to DevOps Dream in twenty twenty four.

Happy to be back again. Thanks to friends at Gearset and Discover for their support.

Today, we'll be talking about the importance of embracing change.

Thanks to the introduction of the latest trends in AI, being able to navigate and embrace change, has never been so important, as AI is literally the latest disruption innovation of our time.

We are challenged to rethink how we deliver products, how we work together, how we service our customers, how we embrace risk, embrace change.

Navigating all that can be complex.

So in this session, we're gonna be focusing on the importance of adopting new ways of thinking so we can approach these challenges more proactively, more effectively.

And in other words, it's about it's gonna sound cliche, but it's having an an agile mindset, navigating that change and being able to, adopt change, as we work as individuals and teams.

Alright. Well, thank you for being here. Who am I? I'm Sergio. I'm a principal agile program manager at Discover. My words are my own.

I've spent the better part of my career as an agile coach, although I started as a quality assurance tester way back when. Always been in the customer side of the ecosystem.

Haven't really been in consulting or, you know, SI, so it's always been on the, customer side of change. So it's an interesting dynamic, to approach problems when you're presented with new technology that you have to embrace and work together with people so that you can solve problems together while also balancing that delicate scale between change and that risk of opportunity.

So what does that mean for us?

So we have AI. Everybody loves AI.

We have this shiny new opportunity for us to embrace.

You know, it provides us customer experiences, reduced time to market, increased productivity maybe.

Just recently at Google IO, we have Gemini coming into the space.

We have OpenAI continuing to push out new versions of Chat GPT.

Salesforce is pushing out Einstein AI.

So we have a variety of opportunities to, leverage new technologies together while working together, so every major player in tech is coming up with, ways to integrate artificial intelligence or even ways to come up with their new versions of AI so that they can compete in the eco system. So it's the hottest, fastest growing tech segment in recent memory, and it is likely to remain this way for the foreseeable future.

So AI has the potential to revolutionize how we live and work.

This presents us with a unique challenge, embracing change faster than ever before, and this this can be, exciting, but yet, maybe presenting us with an opportunity to rethink how we work together.

Embracing change means survival.

It means the difference between being left behind by our competitors or being a revolutionary in our market, in our space, and how we serve our customers, how we work together.

Your mindset is, your mindset as a leader is the key to embracing this change. As individuals, as we work together, our ability to be able to take that risk is going to mean the difference, in how we manage our opportunity to embrace these tools.

So as this can influence everything from our culture down to our profit margins. It's all interconnected.

So how we approach this has to have the right mindset to enable us to be successful.

So what does what does it mean to have an ideal mindset?

What does it look like? It means breaking down silos, enabling transparency, embracing failure as a means to learn from each other, but also as a way to improve, willing to try and try again.

Each iteration is an opportunity to learn something. It's an opportunity for us to improve as long as we are willing to take the lessons learned from those, experiments, from those perceived failures, and being willing to adopt as we move forward.

Navigating change successfully requires us to be vulnerable so we can overcome the fear of failure.

Overcoming the fear of the unknown.

It's going to be important for us to be able to take that leap and be able to work together, be vulnerable with our coworkers, with our customers, and be able to ask ourselves, are we doing the right thing, and how are we going to embrace this new technology so we can do something more effective and more, productive for ourselves?

But what if we don't change at all, and, what if something just magical happens? What are the risks of having this mindset, not being willing to accept change, not being willing to embrace that new opportunity?

What if we're afraid of the unknown?

Resistant to change will impede your ability to keep your employees and your customers happy.

Let's face it. In general, if you typically like doing the same thing over and over again without ever changing anything, you're probably gonna have difficulty keeping your customers and your employees happy.

So it's going to be important for you to be able to embrace that change, navigate that change by asking yourself questions along the way through retrospectives, and being willing to learn from those experiences.

So happy customers are the most important thing in this equation. But in order to have happy customers, you gotta have happy employees. Happy employees come from that formula of embracing change, being willing to be supportive, listening to our teams, and being willing to take those in insights to implement how we adopt change.

So happy teams in our scenario, happy happy teams are are a result of being willing to listen to people when they come to us with those lessons learned from the field. So when you are approaching new concepts like artificial intelligence, it presents an opportunity to listen to customers about their concerns, about their willingness to take risks, and our own employees' ability to embrace those tools to serve our customers.

So quick note on employee happiness again. Regardless of the challenge that you're trying to solve as a leader, trust and empowerment of our teams, is the most critical pillar that will support your ability to navigate these changes.

So how can we be sure that we are navigating change effectively?

We can leverage tools, many of you may be familiar with already.

Through retrospectives, we can understand what went well, so we can continue doing, that piece better, understand what didn't go well, and that way we can learn from it and then try again in the next iteration.

This should be a continuous engagement for you.

Every interaction with your customer, with your team is an opportunity to learn, and this process also starts with humility and knowing when we need help, knowing when we need to reach out to our customers and to our teams to say, hey. How can we do this better? How can we approach this new tool, this new process in a different way that we haven't thought of before?

So being willing to reach out for help is important.

Don't think that embracing a new tool like artificial intelligence is going to be as simple as just diving in. It's important to work with people, being willing to be vulnerable, being willing to accept those new opportunities together, and sometimes that also means reaching out to other folks that may be more experienced in the, field of accepting change and navigating change, working with, consulting firms, coaches to, you know, help us look at things with a different view.

And it's really your mindset at the end of the day that's going to define the difference between, you being able to succeed in these changes or your ability to learn from them as well.

So, one of the most important things that I wanted to, you know, highlight, is navigating changes going to be essential for you to be able to embrace these new tools like artificial intelligence, because they present a level of risk with, you know, your ability to be able to service customers. So, navigate this change by embracing, your ability to work together with people within your teams, listening to them, and also, of course, your customers.

Now if you wanna connect, we I have a QR code there. It'll take you directly to my LinkedIn page.

Not sure how much time I have left, but, does anybody have any particular questions or any items that they wanna bring up?

Okay.

Alright. Well, thank you so much. Much appreciated.