In this episode of On Boards, hosts Joe Ayoub and Raza Shaikh speak with Rod Adkins, board chairman, former IBM executive, and author of Curiosity Redefines the Limits. Rod shares insights from nearly 25 years of board experience, focusing on how directors can effectively oversee risk in an era of rapid technological disruption.
The conversation explores how boards are evolving their governance structures to address increasingly complex risks tied to technology, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence.
Rod explains why traditional audit committees are often no longer sufficient on their own and, as a result, many organizations are forming dedicated risk and technology committees to better manage forward-looking challenges.
A major focus of the discussion is AI as a transformative opportunity and a significant threat. Rod frames the present day as a new innovation cycle, emphasizing that boards must strike a careful balance between leveraging AI for competitive advantage and defending against AI-enabled risks.
Key Takeaways
- Governance must always adapt to technology and risk
- Boards are moving beyond audit committees toward dedicated risk oversight teams to better address cybersecurity, infrastructure and innovation.
- Effective governance requires a forward mindset and close alignment with management on navigating change.
AI requires a balance of opportunity and protection
AI can drive efficiency, innovation, and competitive advantage, but also introduces risks like cyber threats and trust challenges.
Boards must ensure organizations are both leveraging AI and protecting against its misuse.
- “AI vs. AI”
As threats become more sophisticated, companies must use AI-powered defenses to protect systems and data.
Maintaining trust and security will be a core board-level responsibility.
- Curiosity drives better leadership
- The best directors ask thoughtful, strategic questions, curiosity helps leaders anticipate change, challenge assumptions, and improve decision-making.
Quotes
- ”We’re just at the beginning, and we’re almost out of breath already in terms of how fast [AI] is moving and how much we see in terms of capabilities and disruption.”
- ”People that adapt to unknown situations and who productively challenge the status quo, have a curiosity or a competitive advantage for them in life and in their careers”
- “You don’t always have to have the answer, but you need to figure out how to ask the right set of questions.”
Links
https://rodneyadkins.com/book/
Curiosity Redefines the Limits: Advantages Gained from Life, the Workplace, and the Boardroom
Guest Bio
Rodney Adkins (Rod) has been Chairman of Avnet, Inc., one of the world’s largest distributors of electronic components and technology solutions, since 2018. He is also the author of Curiosity Redefines the Limits, a leadership book that explores how curiosity can serve as a powerful competitive advantage in driving innovation, leadership effectiveness, and career growth.
In addition, he is a Partner at 3RAM Group LLC, a privately held company specializing in capital investments, business consulting, and property management. Previously, Mr. Adkins was Senior Vice President of IBM, serving in that position from 2007 until 2014. Over his 33-year career with IBM, Mr. Adkins has held several operational and executive management roles spanning strategy, technology, systems, and supply chain.
Mr. Adkins’ work has spanned the world of technology and computing. He has been a leading innovator in solutions ranging from mobile devices to the world’s largest supercomputers. His significant contributions include helping to advance the Personal Computer industry, leading IBM’s POWER business to become the market leader in the UNIX market, and pioneering what became IBM’s portfolio of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions.
Mr. Adkins was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 2005, one of the highest honors in the engineering profession. His life story is archived in Wikipedia and The History Makers. He was inducted into the Miami Jackson High School Hall of Fame in 2018, the Miami Dade County Public Schools Alumni Hall of Fame in 2022, and the Georgia Tech Engineering Hall of Fame in 2024. The Wall Street Journal named Mr. Adkins among the top 100 most influential and effective corporate directors in 2025. He has been awarded honorary doctoral degrees from Georgia Tech and the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC).
Mr. Adkins serves on the board of directors for United Parcel Service (UPS), WW Grainger, and Avnet. He is a member of the Executive Leadership Council (ELC) and a trustee of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) and Rollins College. Mr. Adkins also serves on the Adrienne Arsht Center Trust Board, the Overtown Youth Center (OYC) Board, and the Community-Police Relations Foundation Board.
Transcript:
Joe: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to On Boards, a deep dive at what drives business success. I’m Joe Ayoub and I’m here with my co-host, Raza Shaikh. Twice a month, On Boards is the place to learn about one of the most critically important aspects of any company or organization; its board of directors or advisors, with a focus on the important issues that are facing boards, company leadership, and stakeholders.
Raza: Joe and I speak with a wide range of guests and talk about what makes a board successful or unsuccessful, what it means to be an effective board member, and how to make your board one of the most valuable assets of your organization.
Joe: Before we introduce our guest today, we want to thank the law firm of Nutter McClennen & Fish, who again sponsored our most recent On Boards summit in their conference center in the Boston Seaport. Nutter has been an incredible partner with us in every way. [00:01:00] We appreciate all they’ve done to support our podcast.
Our guest today is Rod Adkins. Rod serves on the board of directors for United Parcel Service, W.W. Grainger, and Avnet, one of the world’s largest distributors of electronic components and technology solutions where he chairs the board. He previously served on the boards of PayPal, PPL Corporation, Pitney Bowes, and PeopleClick. He is also a partner of 3RAM Group and a member of the Executive Leadership Council, as well at the boards of a number of nonprofits.
Raza: Rod’s work has been a leading innovator in solutions ranging from mobile devices to world’s largest supercomputers. His significant contributions include helping to advance the personal computer industry, leading IBM’s power business to become [00:02:00] market leader in the UNIX market, and pioneering what became IBM’s portfolio of Internet of Things solutions.
Joe: Rod was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2005, one of the highest honors in the engineering profession. His life story is archived in Wikipedia and The HistoryMakers, and he is the author of a recently published book entitled Curiosity Redefines The Limits. Welcome, Rod, it’s great to have you today with us on On Boards.
Rod: Well, thank you Joe, and thank you, Raza. It is great being here, and a discussion like this to me is extremely timely because we are witnessing some unprecedented changes in the world, and all of these changes, they do resonate in the boardroom, so looking forward to the discussion.
Joe: So, to begin, you’ve been at the forefront of the intersection of [00:03:00] technology and corporate governance. Can you talk about some of the challenges that companies face in assessing risk in technology, and then. How some of the companies on whose board you sit have specifically decided to address those concerns?
Rod: So, again, I think, because of the rate and pace of change, I think all companies are challenged in terms of how they adopt and embrace, and, frankly, integrate technologies as part of their overall business operations and also how they leverage these capabilities to serve the markets and the various customer opportunities, so that the largest challenge is really around how do you capture the value as the technology and the capabilities [00:04:00] rapidly change.
The other dynamic that we are seeing, not only we’re seeing technology advancing that at an incredible rate, but we’re also seeing new opportunities introduced because of new types of business models. We’re also seeing change because of how customers might want to address what I would call changes in consumer consumption patterns. So, you have all of these dynamics in terms of serving the markets and serving customers, so that creates a huge challenge, in my opinion, for companies in the 21st century.
When you sort of look at the role of the board, the board role, as you guys know, is all about oversight and governance, and the management or leadership team is in place to really lead and run the operations of the company. So, this is an interesting partnership that is in place in terms of how do you deal with change, [00:05:00] innovation and disruption in this partnership relationship where the board is focused on oversight and governance and the management team is really focused on execution and operations and, frankly, performance.
What has happened when you look at some of my boards, and I’ve been in this board community, if you will, for nearly 25 years, when I started my board journey and my very first board was a private equity company that ultimately became part of an acquisition, and then five years later joined my first public company board, and I’ve been on several public company boards as you outlined in the beginning since, and when you look at these boards, we’ve all dealt with the dynamics of risk and change. Technology innovation, business model changes, market dynamics, we all deal with that.
Most of the boards historically have dealt with these challenges as part of the [00:06:00] audit committee. But increasingly more, boards have either formed ad-hoc committees or a dedicated standalone risk, in some cases, risk and technology committee, and that is our way in terms of making sure that as directors on the board, we provide the necessary oversight and governance in partnership with the leadership of the company.
Joe: Is there one approach that you’ve observed that you think is particularly effective in assessing risk in technology?
Rod: Not really.
Joe: Depends on the company, maybe?
Rod: I think so. I think it depends on the company. It probably depends on the industry. It depends on the markets they serve. So, for instance, financial services companies, many of them have some type of standalone risk committee because they have to worry about things like fraud and anti-money laundering, so they have to apply a very specific focus on things.
The [00:07:00] energy and utilities industry, they sometimes have these risk-type committees as well because they manage assets like nuclear, so they want to have dedicated focus in some very critical and key areas.
Then in the case of my boards, we’ve used a combination of all of these things from ad-hoc committees, which is more informal to formal standalone committees that will focus on things like cybersecurity, things like the information technologies needed to run the infrastructure and also the technologies needed to deliver services to the marketplace. So, we formed committees and capabilities to focus on that. So, it really depends on the company and the market it serves and some of the areas that they need to focus on.
I’m actually chairman of a risk and technology committee for one of my boards because we do have a [00:08:00] very vast and complex sort of business structure because we have an airline fleet, we have a trucking network for delivery of packages. We focus on operational technologies and information technologies, and then we worry about things like, which all boards should be focused on in terms of how to protect the infrastructure in terms of data and privacy.
So, we focus on a lot of these things in addition to how to embrace leading edge technologies. As you can imagine, like most companies and like most boardrooms, there is a significant focus on how to leverage this transformation that we are seeing and witnessing driven by artificial intelligence.
Raza: Yeah.
Joe: What’s the profile of the other members of the committee? What types of skills and experience and background are important to help assess because you’re looking forward, [00:09:00] audit kind of looks back at what may have happened, what risks happened, but risk committees are looking ahead and trying to determine what risks are we taking and how do we address those in advance? What kind of board members have you seen make the best members of a risk and technology committee?
Rod: Well, I would say you need different flavors on the committee because although it may have a heavy emphasis on forward looking, there are some lessons to be learned from the past and also current operations. So, what I found with some of the best risk committees, they do have as part of their oversight, where they look at various elements of what we call enterprise risk management. So, they look at key areas across the business in terms of how the business is operating from a business controls perspective and also in terms of the different types of processes that they [00:10:00] deploy to run the business. So, that’s sort of one element of risk.
The other one that you point out is this ability to have skills or backgrounds or experience of various directors on the board that understand things like strategy, they understand technologies and the applications of technology. So, what I found, if you attempt to sort of describe this or summarize this in a best practices model, you have a blend of capabilities. You have some directors on the risk committee who are operational experts and they can understand and actually ask the right questions in terms of the overall business process and overall business controls, and you also have members on the board that are much more forward looking and they do understand strategy. They focus on trends in the market. They focus on how technology is evolving and they look for [00:11:00] different, what I would call inflection points and patterns in the marketplace that as part of their oversight role, they can engage and also ask the most appropriate questions to the management team in terms of the things that they should be considering as part of today’s execution and also some of the thinking around the investments required for future capabilities.
Raza: Rod, you already mentioned the two letter word, AI.
Rod: Don’t leave home without it, okay?
Raza: Yeah, don’t leave home without it. So, boards are facing artificial intelligence, perhaps both as an opportunity and as a risk. How should boards be viewing that and which part of it they should be putting more emphasis on, the opportunity or the risk?
Rod: So, Raza, as you probably would expect me to say, I think there’s a balance there, because I honestly think the answer is both. We are witnessing a [00:12:00] transformative technology, and we’ve seen technologies like this in our lifetime. I always remind people, you can go back to tracing cycles of innovation where there was a cycle we went through where the technologies were focused on counting things, and then we went into a cycle where the systems we built, you program them so that you can conduct work anywhere and any place.
Now, we’re sort of in this interesting cycle. I call it the age of disruptive innovation driven by AI because most of the systems and applications and capabilities we will be dealing with, it would be because these are systems and applications that learn, and so there’ll be a set of capabilities that frankly allow us to be much more productive. So, part of the argument I will always make is that AI creates an opportunity. When leveraged, it allows us to be much more productive and efficient, and so that’s sort of the opportunity side.
[00:13:00] There’s also a risk or a threat side to AI because whenever you get impactful technology, you always have people that focus on the technology with good intent, but you also have people that I would put in the category of bad actors. If you think about what we went through in terms of when we coined the phrase cybersecurity, the issue is there are people that will use the technologies in a way to threaten your business or your enterprise through different types of techniques that causes threats.
So, the same thing is going to happen with AI where when you think about it from a boardroom perspective, our role will need to be focused on both the opportunity side, how are we leveraging the capabilities to reach markets more effectively, to serve customers better to improve the customer experience through the product or the technology or the solution, [00:14:00] so that’s going to be one side of the equation.
But on the other side of the equation, we need to make sure that we are focused on AI and using AI for our defense, our defense systems, because the bad actors will be using AI, so your defenses also need to use AI to protect against some of these more sophisticated threats.
Raza: So, Rod, it’s going to be AI versus AI.
Rod: Right, it’s going to be AI versus AI. So, in terms of protecting your data, your infrastructure. We’re beginning to see an interesting thing in terms of how do you almost guarantee or ensure trust, because we’re seeing some interesting things showing up because of the capabilities of AI, deepfake-type threats, the sophistication of different types of threat vectors coming into the enterprise, all AI enabled. So, the tools and the defense systems will also need to leverage the capabilities of AI to protect itself.[00:15:00]
Raza: Yeah. Rod, for completeness, I would dare to say that even though it’s very clear that the threats of AI come in the form of mostly cybersecurity threats, but if your organization, their business model and your product that was serving your customer gets threatened by a competitive product that is using AI versus you not using AI, so that’s another big area or bucket of threats to an organization posed by AI. Those are not necessarily cybersecurity threats, but they’re disruptive to your business model potentially.
Joe: Competitive threat.
Rod: Raza, and fair point, we’ve seen these cycles before. So, if you remember when cloud computing showed up, when things like enabling mobility across your enterprise and your applications, all of those were disruptive, if you will, and a lot of times we like to think about it from a negative orientation, but disruption is also good [00:16:00] because it does create competition in the marketplace, and frankly, for the incumbents or the legacy companies, it forces the companies to get in shape, too, to appropriately compete in the marketplace.
So, to your point, I agree with you that we also have to look at it in terms of the disruption it may create, and disruption could be negative, but it can also be positive as well.
Raza: Meaning that’s where the board’s role comes in saying to assess that we have to be willing to understand that we need to adapt or adopt a new thing as an organization to remain competitive and be able to serve our customer the best we can compared with our competition.
Rod: Yeah, and that’s the reason why my first reaction to your question was, this is all about balance, because we do need to look at both the threat or the risk side of this equation as well as the opportunity side of the equation as well.[00:17:00]
Joe: So, you’ve been in the boardroom, as you said, for a long time and seen a number of different technology breakthroughs, if you will. And you’re right, there’s a cadence to it. Technology is always coming to us with some brave new world kind of solution. But it feels like, and certainly the conversation about AI would suggest that AI is different, that it’s a different level of opportunity and risk. Do you see it that way as well?
Rod: Absolutely. What we’re seeing is this is a different level of disruption. I mean, the scope of the line is just like crazy. So, I was reflecting on when the internet became sort of mainstream, and that was the early 1990s when it really became mainstream. If you think about the 40-year cycle of the internet, it went from like search to perform in commerce to, [00:18:00] let’s just say, we now have a proliferation of social applications. So, it’s been like a 40-year at least cycle and more of innovation around quote “the internet”.
If you think about AI, you can argue it’s been around since the fifties. I mean, we’ve been working on AI for a while. IBM built Deep Blue when we beat the chess champion. We built Watson in 2011 when it beat Jeopardy champions. So, there have been different types of applications displayed and showcased, but when ChatGPT happened, and I would say that was about four-years ago, if you think about that four-year cycle, a lot has happened in that four-year period of time, and it is incredibly disruptive, but at the same time, we are seeing tremendous innovation. The rate and pace of innovation that has been enabled by [00:19:00] this capability is just really on a different scale from what we have witnessed in the past.
Then, as you know, there have been many studies that looked at disruption from innovation, and it is typically described that these cycles can last for 50 to 100 years in terms of when it’s introduced, there will be continuous innovation for decades to come, and they usually stretch over a long period of time. What we’ve seen in forty years is just a different slope in terms of the creativity and the capabilities and innovation that we are seeing, and we’re just at the beginning of this. If you believe these cycles last for decades, we’re just at the beginning, and so we’re almost out of breath already in terms of how fast this thing is moving and how much we see in terms of capabilities and disruption.
So, yes, this is [00:20:00] moving really at a very interesting pace, and I make the argument, and I think most people would agree with this, that AI is going to be embedded into pretty much everything we do.
Joe: Right.
Rod: It is becoming part of our lifestyle, so this is not a discussion just for the boardroom; this is a life discussion in terms of this is a technology that’s going to be embedded and integrated in the various things we do.
Raza: And for me, for once, I think that boards ought to be asking the question of what’s changing, that’s a very important question and how to react up to that. But actually, because the change is so fast, then we also have to ask the other question, which is, what is not changing in 5 years, in 10 years and in 25 years? And that’s also important to anchor the organization towards a mission. I mean, famously, as Jeff Bezo said, one thing that I knew that is not changing is the customer does want the product faster [00:21:00] and cheaper 5 years from now, 10 years from now, so I think it’s the balance of those. In that rate of change, how can boards also keep an eye on where the organization needs to keep going?
Rod: Yeah, and that’s a good point that there are some things that will remain constant, and we need to leverage AI and treat AI as a way to enhance either the experience or the opportunity. And you’re right, I mean, someone was telling me the other day, or there’s a view that AI is such a threat that it is going to replace everything that we do as humans, and I don’t necessarily buy that.
I think AI is great at what I would call informational processing. Humans will always, in my opinion, I think will be better always at things like emotional processing, so when you [00:22:00] start to think about things like curiosity, things like judgment, things like managing relationships, those things are, in my opinion, will always be sort of constant.
Joe: Do you think humans are good at managing relationships? I think AI could maybe add some…
Rod: I like to think so. I would attempt to manage the relationship through computational capabilities, and the brain is sort of a computational engine. So, we do have that attribute, if you will, but we also have that emotional aspect that we can also bring to relationships as well.
So, this is going to be interesting to see how this partnership between AI and humanity, how we continue to evolve together because AI is going to be here to stay. And to your point, Raza, that you raised that in the boardroom, we really need to be mindful that there are aspects of [00:23:00] the business that we want to sort of maintain what made the company or the product or the technology great in terms of serving and providing the experiences that the market is looking for and the customer is looking for, but you use the AI to make it better.
I saw some approaches by some sales executives the other day where sales folks, some of them have viewed AI as threatening, but the sales people who have embraced it as a tool, they have become more effective sales leaders because it has allowed them to focus on the aspect of the relationship that is most important and they use the AI to sort of do all of the busy work to allow them to be much more efficient and to allow them to be much more productive.
So, this is going to be a journey and we don’t have all of the answers. We like to think [00:24:00] that after four years we have all of the answers. But again, if you always think about a technology adoption cycle, we still have a lot more room in terms of innovation to go ahead with AI, and the reason why I call it’s the gold rush, everybody’s running out and enabling everything, and some companies are discovering that they should have been a little bit more thoughtful in terms of how they are leveraging these capabilities, and you’re beginning to see companies sort of step back a little bit and say, “For various solutions and implementations, we need to look at what’s the best way to deploy some of these AI features and AI capabilities. Large language models is not always the answer to everything, because sometimes you need to do domain-specific models as an example for better optimization and better performance.
We learned this in computer science. There are [00:25:00] things that really don’t change in computer science and we know where certain applications and workloads, general purpose systems make sense, but depending on the workload and the application or the workflow, sometimes you need specialized systems that’s optimized for those environments.
The same is going to hold true in the AI world where large language models will work for a class of application and workloads and workflows, but there are better approaches where you can get better performance and optimization by using more smaller language models or optimized language models or domain-specific language models.
So, this journey we’re on, we’ll see patterns of what we’ve seen in the past related to computer science, so there’s a constant and there are some standard things that we will see, but we will also be able to leverage sort of the newness or the innovation capabilities that AI offers.
Joe: So, [00:26:00] let’s switch subjects a little bit and talk about your book, Curiosity Redefines The Limit, recently published, already a bestseller. The review I read said in part that it explores the mindset of curiosity as a powerful tool for growth in leadership. Is that accurate?
Rod: Yeah, I think so. Well, I must admit, of course, because I’m the author, it’s an interesting book.
Joe: It is your book, you can say anything you want about it.
Rod: Yeah, right. So, what I attempted to do, the book has two personalities. There’s a part of the book, let’s just call it memoirs, and you got to get through that because it sort of explains Rod Adkins. But not only that, it tees up what we call defining moments and operating principles that many of us have faced throughout our life journey, and the question is, when you face these defining moments, what do you do? Because it can sort of [00:27:00] put you on a trajectory or different trajectories, let me just say it that way, so the book sort of covers that part.
Then there’s the other part of the book that’s much more about leadership, personal growth, career development, but the foundation of the book is anchored around the power of being curious, because curiosity, in my opinion, and people who are more curious, and I coined a term called the Curiosity Advantage, which says people that constantly explore new ideas, people that adapt to unknown situations, and then people who productively challenge the status quo, that can become a curiosity or a competitive advantage for them in life and in their careers.
So, the book explores the power of curiosity and the power of asking questions because I make the argument humanity, and the [00:28:00] reason we’ve seen leadership innovation and innovation leadership is because humanity has been asking questions for over 2.6 million years, starting back when we had to deal with, I would say, things like survival or things like learning how to cook and eat. We had to figure out how to deal with communications. We had to figure out how to deal with gravity because we have to get things and move things around. We had to figure out how to deal with vision, seeing things as far away as the stars or as small as an atom. So, we had to figure out all of these things, and a lot of this started with asking pretty powerful questions around why, how and what if.
So, the book takes you through the power of being curious, and I started the book off by making the argument that I showed up in this world after seven months, so I showed up two months premature, [00:29:00] and part of the argument I make is I showed up early because I was curious. I wanted to see what the world was all about, and that sort of sets the foundation of the book, and I show evidence throughout the book in terms of people who really seek deeper knowledge and seek more information, they typically, on average, do better in life. Even in the boardroom, the directors that ask the right set of questions, you don’t always have to have the answer, but you need to figure out how to ask the right set of questions so that you can get to the best answer.
Joe: And be unafraid to ask those questions. I think people in the boardroom often just, “Well, maybe this is a dumb question, or well, let someone else ask that question.” I think the idea of your curiosity driving you to ask questions in the boardroom, that is one of the things that [00:30:00] makes a really, really impactful board member.
Rod: I agree, and the point you’re on is sort of, I call it courage, you need to ask questions, and those makes the most effective directors. By the way, in the book, there’s a significant portion dedicated to board service. What inspired me to write the book, people would typically ask me questions like, “Rod, did you know what success would look like?” So, I do answer that question.
The second question I would get is, “Well, how did you do it? What is the recipe?” So, there’s a section in the book that’s called The Recipe and the Steps, and then the most important thing, I think, in the book, it talks about all of these different experiences I had, but it was the lessons that was learned, the lessons that was learned in the classroom, the workplace and the boardroom.
Then towards the end of the book, I talk about board service because, as you can imagine, I get that question often because I’ve served on over 25 different types of entities, whether they [00:31:00] were nonprofits, for-profits, negative profit for companies, that’s a joke, and universities, so I’ve had every flavor of board, but usually the question is around compensated boards. I’m typically asked the question, “Well, Rod, how do you get on your first compensated board?” And what I decided to do is to expand on that, because to me, that’s a good question.
But questions two and three, there are actually better questions that I pose. The second question I address is, well, once you’re on the board, what do you do? And then the third question I address is, after you’re on the board for a period of time, assuming that we all have some views in terms of how we like to grow and want to be in leadership positions, the question is, how do you position yourself for [00:32:00] leadership, either chair in a committee or becoming the chairman of the board?
So, I spend time in the book talking about board service. And of course, since the book is foundational around curiosity, I also spend some time in terms of curiosity being a powerful tool, not only for life or the classroom or the workplace, but it’s also a powerful tool in the boardroom.
Raza: I actually read the title of the book in a different way as well. I’m juxtaposing it with AI and I also thought that this curiosity is a uniquely human trait and it has always been, well, machines can’t do this, and then it turns out machines did that. They can’t recognize images; well, they did. Then they can’t do this and so on, and they don’t have emotions and thoughts and all that. So, there are fewer and fewer things that are left that [00:33:00] only really humans can do. I think you mentioned relationships and so on, but I think curiosity probably is also one of those things, like actually being curious. You can prompt AI to pretend you’re curious, but that’s different. Would you agree?
Rod: Raza, I actually agree with you that of course we’re going to make AI mimic, human behavior. There is a view that once we have quantum computing, because of its computational power, add it to AI ability to do pattern recognition and things like that, you’re now going to have sort of a non-biological set of capabilities that exceeds the intelligence of a human being, and we will always be working on capabilities that mimic human features and behavior.
But I will always make the argument that that [00:34:00] is still informational processing, that is still computational, that is still more about IQ versus EQ. I’ll always continue to make that argument. As scientists, we would attempt to model as much as we can in terms of human emotional intelligence. I don’t think the capabilities will replace our appetite around being curious. We will use the technologies. Like today, I’m always curious about things and I’ll think about things and then I’ll use ChatGPT to ask a question about something I’m curious about just to get a deeper view, deeper knowledge about what I’m curious about. But that’s not replacing my desire to be curious or my ability in terms of being curious.
I actually see a lot of these AI tools assisting my [00:35:00] appetite of curiosity. And again, I do believe, and I may be proven wrong over time, but I do believe humans will always have this sort of this it and this it I would describe it as curiosity, and I would say it is around judgment.
We have our flaws in terms of how we judge things, but it’s still more of an emotional attribute, in my opinion, and of course the scientists will be coming up with attempted model, but I still think we will have that it, and I also still think we have that it in terms of just relationships, how do you manage relationships?
Like salespeople making a sales call, they’re going to use AI to say, “Well, I’m going to meet so and so, and we’re going to go through this spec sheet and the price listing and all of this, and I’m thinking this might be the approach,” you might use AI to
validate.
Joe: What would my wife like for our anniversary?
Rod: There you go. So, that’s why I make the argument that it will become more and more of a [00:36:00] partner over time. And yes, there is a threat where AI will be able to do many things better than humans. We’re beginning to see the age of humanoids where they might be able to do better sortation of packages, as an example, in a warehouse or different types of distribution and logistics type roles that’s much more requiring your hands versus your head. So, you’re going to start to see a lot of that. But to me, again, that just allows the human to focus more on the richer content within an engagement and you allow the AI as a tool to allow you to be more productive and efficient as you focus on what I would call the richer content in an engagement. Yes, it’s threatening, but at the same time, I do see it as an opportunity for leverage.
Raza: Yeah. Rod, cheers [00:37:00] to humanity and the great partnership with AI.
Rod: Yes, Sir.
Joe: Let’s hope it remains a positive partnership. Rod, this has been a terrific conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today on On Boards.
Rod: Well, Joe and Raza, I want to thank you for this opportunity because there’s always a huge demand for education and training no matter what community you’re in. When you think about the community of boards and board directors, we need to sort of maintain our wellbeing and vitality.
So, I think this platform that you guys have provided here, it’s really a great platform to allow your audience to hear different voices, and they can take some of this input and apply it in the most appropriate way for them. But again, this is a great tool for directors as they figure out how to navigate AI.
Raza: We love doing it. Joe and I love this. [00:38:00]
Joe: Thank you so much, Rod. I really appreciate that. And thank you all for listening to On Boards today with our special guest, Rod Adkins.
Raza: Please visit our website at OnBoardsPodcast.com. That’s OnBoardsPodcast.com. We would love to hear your comments, suggestions, and feedback. If you’re not already a subscriber, please be sure to subscribe at Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast and remember to leave us a five-star review.
Joe: And please tune in for the next episode on On Boards. Thanks.