Bill Gates Agrees With Me
So there I was...
Everyone staring at me. "Hello, Mrs. Jones? Hi, my name is Steve." The gauntlet had been thrown down by one of the more acerbic salespeople I now found myself managing, and I had been challenged to get on the phone and close an upsell to prove I wasn't full of shit. You know that feeling where you know if you nail it you will be a hero and if you in any way fall short you will forever be in a fight to regain your credibility? That was the feeling at exactly this moment.
After Desert Storm I found myself working for a national services company in both sales and operations leadership roles. I have to say, as horrible as the experience was overall, I forged better friendships and learned more professionally than at any time since. It was the crucible. We worked six days a week, had insane revenue goals, and were paid peanuts. But I developed strategies that made it work, and my teams were always top performers nationally.
As a company we had hit a major revenue shortfall, and in Southern California we did not have the same opportunities as other regions for additional services revenue. I had to come up with something. Whenever there is a problem that hasn't been solved or properly addressed, my instinct is to go back to the data and re-examine the customer psychology. And going through our customer data a pattern had emerged in missed services among the prepaid accounts. It was the perfect reason to make contact.
I built a campaign from scratch to schedule any skipped regular services and add a very useful additional service at a discount. The result would be at least a 15% increase in per account revenue for those that agreed, but the sales team did not believe it could be done. So, I got on the phone and proved them wrong. I gave that sale to the next person that closed, and we were off to the races. And we surpassed our revenue target.
I tell that story because my core approach is to act, but not without developing a strategy after I do my homework. I held no sway over our revenue targets, but had all the responsibility for hitting them. Since there was no plan being offered from on high and the solution required a unique perspective, I made a choice and acted.
This morning Bill Gates agreed with me. Not about a sales campaign, obviously, but about a philosophy.
Gates published a piece calling the AI transition one of the most turbulent periods in history, and landed one painful truth: "there is no plan to ease the entry into the AI era." He lays out three things that keep him up. Jobs vanishing, many for good. It will hit the youngest hardest, those Gen Z kids reaching for a first rung on a ladder that is being regularly sawed off. And it is not just the white-collar rungs, it is some of the blue-collar ones too. Nefarious actors with no skill suddenly handed real power through fraud, deepfakes, and alarmingly, the ability to design a new disease. And the one I also see quietly eroding society, the AI companions who comfort us without ever pushing us, who never get mad, and are mostly unable to tell us the hard thing. They will rob us of the growth that only comes from the crucible. Then he says what I have been imploring my readers through dozens of posts: leaders must build new institutions and frameworks, and the responsibility is shared across academia, business, government, and civil society.
I read all of it nodding, because it is a civilization-sized empty chair. Everything I typically write about is one decision and one missing human. Gates looked at the current landscape in AI and found the exact same thing. "There is no plan" is not a comment about technology. It is a comment about the chair responsible for the largest decisions our species faces right now, and the determination by one of the most connected men in tech is that nobody is in the seat.
Bill is right about this. But I have to double-click on where he states the responsibility should be shared across academia, business, government, and civil society. I have spent countless hours dissecting this idea, and there is more to it. A chair that belongs to everyone belongs to no one. "We all need to act" is exactly how you point at an empty chair and hang a nameplate on it that reads Committee. And we all know the fantastic output that produces. The commission from my previous Robodebt post told us culture is set from the top down, and yes, leaders have to act. But the trap hiding inside "shared responsibility" is the number of people pointing at one another in a circular firing squad. Everyone is responsible is the sad creaking sound an empty chair makes when it is trying to look full.
Here is where my old salesroom and Bill Gates come full circle. I did not have a plan handed down to me. I had a target I did not set and could not change, and total ownership of hitting it. I could have waited for my corporate overlords in Memphis to invent a play for Southern California and pushed the responsibility on the team to just do more. Instead I went back to the data, found a pattern no one considered, built the campaign, and got on the phone myself to prove it was real. This would have been a much more difficult lesson had that not worked. When there is no plan from on high, the chair does not sit empty until a global framework arrives in some future year. The chair is yours, right where you are standing, today.
And if you'll indulge me for a moment, his three fears are just my empty chair metaphor in three varieties. Vanishing jobs is the human pulled out of the chair entirely. Emboldened criminals are the consequence with no one left to pin it on. And that last one, the companion that never pushes back, is potentially the most dangerous because it is something that does not care whether or not you actually grow. It is a machine doing a flawless impression of a person who does not exist and you cannot let yourself be seduced by it.
I will applaud Bill's optimism because I share it. He is right that this could be the greatest equalizer we have ever built. But on the flipside of the greatest equalizer coin is the potential to be the worst source of injustice. Those both cannot land face up, and nobody wants to wake up to find we chose poorly. A person sits down in a chair and chooses, and then the next person, and then another, all the way down from the summit Gates worries about to the single workflow you might be about to switch on this afternoon. The non-existent plan is not solved by a document from somebody important. It is a million small acts of sitting down and owning the decision by anyone who can.
So here is my question today, from a guy who once picked up a phone in front of a room that did not believe him because waiting was not a plan.
Bill Gates says there is no plan. He is right. But he's not giving you permission to wait for one, he's giving you an assignment. The plan is for you, in your chair, to make a decision, and act today. So the only question left to ask is analogous to what I asked my skeptical sales team. The phone is not going to dial itself, are you going to pick it up?
Source: A turbulent AI era and critical choices to make, Bill Gates, Gates Notes
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