On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we talk about how an 86-year-old musical is creating a billion-dollar payoff for a bold innovator, how robots are helping 7-Eleven manage the labor crunch, and how AI work slop is damaging the progress AI is promising. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help innovation leaders navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to grow and thrive in a world of hyper uncertainty and accelerating change. Join me, Brian Ardinger, and Mile Zero's Robyn Bolton as we discuss the latest tools, tactics, and trends for creating innovations with impact. Let's get started.

Podcast Transcript with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton

[00:00:45] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and with me, I have our co-host, Robyn Bolton. Welcome Robyn.

[00:00:52] Robyn Bolton: Thank you. Great to be here as always.

[00:00:55] Brian Ardinger: We were together this week at the Bolt Conference in Indianapolis. This is a conference that's put on by gener8tor, a group of folks out of Madison and Milwaukee, and now I think they run over 300 accelerators around mostly non-tech hubs. They host a conference where they bring together startups and corporates to talk about all the amazing things that are going on. Investors can have a chance to invest in these companies, and two and a half days at the ballpark in Indianapolis to talk about innovations. Love to get your thoughts on it.

[00:01:27] Robyn Bolton: You know, the audience they brought together, as you were saying, of startups and VCs, and corporate innovators bringing all together into a very non-traditional space, which I think led to a lot of really interesting conversations. Because everybody was in a different element. And then a great mix of speakers. They had industry-specific keynotes, but then they also had hot takes, which were, you know, a whole variety of speakers giving five to seven-minute single-topic rapid-fire hot takes.

[00:02:00] Brian Ardinger: You got to do one of those hot takes.

[00:02:02] Robyn Bolton: I did do one of those hot takes, which I just love those little bite-sized nuggets of information and insight and stuff to think about.

[00:02:11] Brian Ardinger: A lot of the conversations were with other folks saying, am I crazy, or is the world crazy? 

[00:02:17] Robyn Bolton: And yes, and we did a lot of reassuring of, you are not crazy. The world is crazy. And you're also not alone. There are other people asking the same questions, and go find the other people. They're not just here at this conference. They're in your organization too.

[00:02:36] Brian Ardinger: Some of the themes that obviously were AI and all the new technologies that are changing different parts of different industries. It was interesting to see different industry takes and being in a venue, a lot of times you go to conferences and you hear only about one side or one industry, and it was nice to be able to sit in an audience and see across healthcare and see across ag and see across manufacturing, and see what was resonating.

One of the biggest things that's resonating is this idea that opportunity exists where there is dissatisfaction. And there's a lot of dissatisfaction in markets, in the politics, in the world around us. And so there's no better time to start build, try and do some stuff. 

[00:03:13] Robyn Bolton: The keynote speaker who kicked off the day, Gary Cooper, he just had some great points, and a couple that I wrote down are chaos is not in opposition to creativity, it is the precursor to it.

There's so much noise out there, and for each of us to try to be the signal in that age of noise of creating tangible, undeniable proof that better is possible and it's being built. And I thought that was just such a great message of yes, we're all feeling like the world has turned upside down, and the world is crazy. And we all have agency to do something about it, even in our small own individual way. 

[00:03:55] Brian Ardinger: Yeah, I like that talk as well. I like the fact that he emphasized that startups and founders should be thinking less about their product and solution and more about their impact. I think oftentimes we forget about that, you know, or we start the journey that way, but then you get into the weeds of like, okay, what feature do I have to ship or whatever. And you oftentimes lose sight of the fact of what's the impact we're trying to do here, regardless of the solution we created around it. 

[00:04:18] Robyn Bolton: In the face of uncertainty, don't despair, build. And I just thought that was a great rallying cry for all of us. Regardless of where we play in this space.

[00:04:29] Brian Ardinger: We've got a couple of different articles that we're going to discuss today, as our normal convention suggests. So the first thing that we wanted to throw out, there's an article in Bloomberg called The Falls First blockbuster is an 86-year-old musical. I stumbled upon this with Trung Phan. He's on Twitter, and he does a great job with a Saturday newsletter. He calls SAT News on Substack.

He outlined what this article was and some of the things that are going on with the Sphere in Las Vegas. The Sphere, if anyone's not familiar with it, it's that big globe new venue that they built for two plus billion dollars in Vegas as a way to create unique, innovative experiences and the article and Trung's analysis walk through the idea of the Wizard of Oz and how the founders of the sphere bought the rights to that film and decided to recreate it so that could play in this unique venue. And the economics in that, that were behind this particular new innovation.

So James Dolan, he licensed the classic, and from the 1939 Classic, spent about a hundred million dollars adapting it for the LED screen there, and since August 28th when it launched, it's making about $2 million a day with a full target run of about a billion dollars over the course of the time that they're going to run it. 4,000 to 5,000 people are seeing it, and they're paying $150 to $200 each time. And it's really taken off, and it's pretty incredible. So, I'd love to get your thoughts on it. 

[00:05:59] Robyn Bolton: The numbers blew my mind. I mean, I knew of the Sphere. It's huge and you see it all the time whenever they show Vegas, but I knew of it mostly as a concert venue. You know, I think U2 has done a residency there, some other performers, and this was like, okay, this makes, you know, this makes sense. This is a cool event venue.

But then we're talking about the Wizard of Oz, which you can watch on tv, but then the numbers of how many people were going to see it and they're paying a $100 to $150 for a ticket to see a movie that they've probably seen who knows how many times, and can see for free on their phone. That this almost a hundred-year-old movie is going to make a billion dollars.

It was mind-boggling. And I think in Trung's post, he had a video from inside the Sphere during a viewing, and the hilarious thing is that everybody had their phones out. Videoing capturing the Wizard of Oz on the sphere, and as I'm watching it, I'm actually getting motion sick. It was just the mind-warping experience to see the numbers and see the reaction.

[00:07:09] Brian Ardinger: The thing that struck me about the article in the inside baseball of the whole thing is, again, you think about it, this guy started this idea of, I'm going to build this crazy new venue. I'm going to spend $2 billion. And again, yeah, you kind of get it in Vegas, as you know, over the top in that. But. It's paying off in ways that I think probably even they didn't think it was going to work.

You talked about movies and the concerts and the fact that they can generate, probably double the revenue with movies because one, they don't have to pay the artists or accept the original rights to it, and such, and then can play in, you know, perpetuity. And the run is actually. Given them, enough confidence that they're going to be creating mini spheres in other cities, and or kind of rolling out this experience.

So, it could be interesting to see again, where this goes and, and where movie theaters go in the future. And I think the other thing that I guess resonated with me about this is the idea of taking a big, bold bet and it paying off. And the other thing that I think is interesting about this is the idea that sometime innovation takes a big, bold bet and you don't always necessarily know where it's going to go, but when you have the right passion and the right people around it and the the right ability to create new experiences that customers really enjoy, you have an opportunity for that innovation to pay off.

[00:08:28] Robyn Bolton: I just want to underline the experiences. This is an experience that you share with other people. And how thinking differently just to look at kind of like, Hey, we have an asset. Can we create an experience around it that brings people together? And you know that innovation isn't just a new product.

How can you use what you've already got in a different way? How can you create a shared experience? There's so many different ways to innovate that isn't just starting from scratch. 

[00:09:00] Brian Ardinger: Well, the second article is about 7-Eleven. 7-Eleven has begun a trial of self-stocking, floor-cleaning robots in Tokyo. And that jumped out a couple different ways. Obviously, robotics is a big headline in the world today, and I think what was interesting about this was not that some companies are actually trying to use this in the real world outside of manufacturing, but they're using it in an environment not to get rid of employees, but in a environment where the problem is they don't have enough employees.

And so how do you actually use the technology to help make the folks more efficient and do things that workers that they don't have actually can do the work of those workers. And I thought that was an interesting twist on all the stuff that you hear about when you talk about robotics. 

[00:09:42] Robyn Bolton: It was great to do finally, robots doing robot things in robot ways, and this is what we should be doing, that there's a robot doing work that we can't hire someone for because you know, there's labor shortage.

It's also doing a task that is so defined and repetitive that it can be easily programmed to do well. And so with all the constant hand wringing over AI and how robots are going to take our jobs and, and all that, like no look, robots doing just what we need them to do. It's working at 7-Eleven in Tokyo. The robots are doing what we need. 

[00:10:26] Brian Ardinger: I think they had a robot that was going to use to restock the store’s drink and alcohol shelves. They had another robot that was going to mop the floor. They had a couple of robots that had screens that allowed customers to interact with it. And again, I think that's the other thing we hear about robots quite a bit. You know this one robot that can do everything. In reality, it looks like the ones that are going to be successful, at least in the short term, are ones that are very focused on a particular task and doing that really well, rather than creating the ultimate robot that can do everything for you.

[00:10:57] Robyn Bolton: Yes, because you might need to mop the floor and restock the shelves at the same time and so let's just have one robot for each job. 

[00:11:06] Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, the third article, this is actually in Harvard Business Review, and its title is called AI Generated Work Slop is Destroying Productivity. I'll let you take the first stab at that.

[00:11:16] Robyn Bolton: Yeah. This one made me laugh 'cause it's a bit of, well, what did you think was going to happen with employees being given access to, not just given access to AI tools, but being told, mandated that they have to use it. And with people being told to do more with less, there are layoffs occurring. People are not getting rehired. So now you're doing two people's work by one person, and there's always parts of our jobs that we don't like doing, and it just seemed like absolutely inevitable ending to all this is people are going to outsource work they don't like to AI. AI is going to do it in AI ways.

I refer to AI as my idiot, summer intern. Sometimes it's brilliant, but most of the time I'm like. You're wasting my time, but I still love you. And so the amount of work slop that is being generated is actually being really detrimental. I think the article goes through and tracks people, you know, talking about how much time they have to spend double-checking work, correcting it, pulling people together into meetings to actually figure out what's going on.

Reading an email and then calling the person who sent it to be like, what do you actually mean with this? And so even though there's a lot of work being generated, output being generated, it's actually wasting more time. I just felt like, well, this was inevitable and yet we're surprised and now what are we going to do about it?

[00:12:55] Brian Ardinger: It'll be interesting to see how this kind of plays out. Obviously, the new days of technology, new days of AI, it creates this low effort possibility, like what this generator's like, oh, that looks like that will work. It's close enough to what I might have thought of if I would've taken the time to do it.

And so, it encourages you to go down that particular path. Hopefully, as more and more folks engage with AI and the outputs of AI will get that critical thinking hat back on and say, okay, before I send this to my coworker, let me do the first review of it. And yes, it did save me time the first time, but let me spend a little bit more time to make sure that you know what I'm putting out there actually is moving the organization forward or doing the actual real hard work that needs to take place where most things that you throw out there in the world.

The other interesting thing about this article and about outside the workforce too, is like work slop is affecting the day-to-day lives of everybody out there just from the content perspective. You can't scroll on anything nowadays that you're not seeing a bunch of work slop being put into the feeds that had very low cost to generate. Low effort to put in there, and yet it's sucking the time effort of the people that are consuming that. So, it'll be interesting to see if there's any back backlash from humans on that side as well.

[00:14:08] Robyn Bolton: So much of it is good enough that it is, especially as you think about what's getting put out on socials or magazines or things like that, it kind of gets hard as a human to be like, is it worth the amount of time and effort to do something? A hundred percent human, knowing that it will be slower and better. Am I letting better kind of be the enemy of what's required.

It raises all sorts of questions that people are trying to figure out. Where is that trade-off between the AI and the human, and optimizing for the right thing in the right place? 

[00:14:49] Brian Ardinger: Alright. Well, that summarizes some of the articles that we're seeing. If you run into particular articles that you like to send over to us, please do. We're always looking for new insights and stuff.

I would encourage you to subscribe to both of our newsletters as we are constantly out there looking for new things and pushing that out. To wrap up, we try to have some type of tactics to try every week.

My tactic is around the idea of hiring. So, we're in the process of hiring a couple of interns, good interns.

[00:15:15] Robyn Bolton: Not AI interns.

[00:15:16] Brian Ardinger: Not AI interns, real interns. And as I'm putting together the particular requirements, one of the things that…tactic that I want to double down on this time is really looking at how can we hire for curiosity for these particular roles.

And these Catalyst interns that we hire are tasked with doing a variety of research and building projects in this corporate innovation space for us, and one of the key components that we've seen with the existing interns that we have is this drive for curiosity. 

And so how do you go about trying to hire for curiosity and understand when you're looking at a person's resume or when you're talking to them in an interview? How do you find those nuggets of curiosity and what they've done in the past, and how they approach problems and what questions they ask. And trying to double down on because we found that the ones that are the most curious seem to be the most adaptive in an environment where innovation is so important. 

[00:16:07] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, I love it. My tactic, I often say hope is not a strategy. I'd also say hiding is not a strategy. I've heard in talking with people at Bolt and other folks just in the corporate decision-making right now, because there is so much uncertainty in the world that there's this ethos of let's just keep our heads down and not get noticed, and then we'll be safe.

And it's like hiding is not a strategy. If you hide long enough, you'll be forgotten. This idea of how do you take smart risks, how do you get curious about what's going on, so that you're not hiding, you're moving forward, but you're moving forward in a way that feels smart, feels measured, but neither hope nor hiding are strategies.

[00:17:02] Brian Ardinger: Good words of wisdom for sure. Excellent. Thank you for being a part of this. This concludes another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. We'll see you next week when we come back together to talk about some of the latest and greatest things that are happening in the world of innovation.

That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. Today's episode was produced and engineered by Susan Stibal. If you want to learn more about our teams, our content, our services, check out insideoutside.io. Or if you want to connect with Robyn Bolton, go to milezero.io. And until next time, go out and innovate.


Articles Referenced

The Fall’s First Blockbuster Is an 86-Year-Old Musical - Bloomberg

The Sphere’s Big Bet on “The Wizard of Oz” is Paying Off - Trung Phan

7-Eleven Begins Trial of Shelf-Stocking, Floor-Cleaning Robots in Tokyo - Japan Today

AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity - HBR