AI will optimize toward bad goals or will optimize poorly with bad data.
Artificial Intelligence is transforming industries at a breakneck pace, and the entrepreneurs driving this innovation are at the forefront of this revolution. From groundbreaking applications to ethical considerations, these visionaries are shaping the future of AI. What does it take to innovate in such a rapidly evolving field, and how are these entrepreneurs using AI to solve real-world problems? As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Stephen Sakach.
A pioneer in empathetic AI and marketing, Stephen Sakach is founder of aiCMO (AI Chief Marketing Officer, found at aiCMO.io) and founder and CEO of the digital media agency, Zero Company. He brings a diverse background spanning three decades of digital media, marketing, journalism and in-depth study of human consciousness.
Seeking to embed empathy and human-centered values into all aspects of an organization, Sakach established his digital firm’s guiding ethos to “Build Love Into Scalable Systems” (BLISS) — a vision for scaling with compassion by shaping business brands, systems and culture to nurture understanding and care from the inside out.
Through interviews and discerning commentary for the BLISS Business Podcast, he makes the abstract tangible — turning research and teachings into applicable wisdom for kinder living and deeper connections.
Sakach is at the forefront of innovation in the AI space with the development of aiCMO, an empathy-driven, purpose-led marketing platform. Designed to make businesses more human-centric, aiCMO helps organizations build authentic connections with their audiences while aligning their strategies with core values and higher purpose.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
Digital advertising is ever changing. Pre-internet, back in college I remember seeing the first analytics for digital content when we converted the newspaper to a digital version. Digital marketing wasn’t even a career choice then. We are on the verge of the internet. I think we’re now on the verge of some revolutionary changes again with generative AI. How we handle the next few years is going to make a massive difference.
I remember a couple of years ago playing with generative AI and having it take on characters of philosophers and spiritual leaders. I’d have them converse with each other and ask each other questions about modern issues. The answers were excellent. The questions that they challenged each other with were sophisticated. And I went down this rabbit hole for days. Basically, creating a sort of book in real time, just for me.
But what struck me was when discussing compassion, love and empathy that you could get AI to reply to questions and challenges from a very high place of consciousness. You kind of had to give it the guiderails, but it could do it consistently.
We have a philosophy we call BLISS. Build Love Into Scalable Systems. Here was an opportunity for us to scale love, compassion and empathy to have AI actually prompt us as humans in the right direction.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Early on in my life, my grandfather had commented to me that “Whatever you do, do it with love.” That really helped me focus on building love into my business. From that, followed our B.L.I.S.S. acronym to Build Love Into Scalable Systems.
How could we create systems that prompt us to be continually kind, loving and compassionate? Rather than have that single random act of kindness, how can we build that into something that is ongoing? And then layer more and more of that into what we do and how we function as a society and in our businesses?
And that’s really what eventually got us into building an empathetic AI marketing tool. So we could help organizations find their bliss. Once you think about what you do from a higher purpose and start telling that story, you really do build happier, more meaningful relationships with business. That has a ripple effect when people go home or interact with each other.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
1. Learn to find your higher purpose — for yourself and for your company. This is huge for so many different ways for people. For me, I could see the difference it made in how much energy I had. Things were no longer a grind. I could start to handle a lot more, take on bigger challenges, pursue things more relentlessly and with more focus. And just be more happy in work and life.
Sometimes it’s just the smallest of perspective shifts in understanding how you really help people with your work. Once you understand that, so many things fall into place.
2. Learn how to be in service to others. This will help with that perspective shift. Work on your emotional IQ and empathy as this will help you find out how you can be in more service to others.
There are studies that show the more power someone gets that parts of their brain related to empathy start working less. Most people out there can think of a boss or manager who struggles with this. Make EQ training and empathy a focus in what you do at work. You will build more love into what you do as a result.
3. Self awareness. Your employees don’t need to deal with your problems. Work on them. Not only that, it will help you understand where your limitations and weaknesses are. You can find people who can fill in the gaps and your organization will be much better for it. But it’s hard to see your blindspots and you may not like what you find sometimes, so be humble and love yourself in a healthy way in the process.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. Share the story of what inspired you to start working with AI. Was there a particular problem or opportunity that motivated you? Describe a moment when AI achieved something you once thought impossible. What was the breakthrough, and how did it impact your approach going forward?
One of the biggest problems we face with AI is that as it develops and becomes increasingly more powerful that businesses will deploy it in a problematic way. If you have it chase profit, if that’s its sole pursuit, and the only thing it is optimizing for, we are in trouble. We need it to start optimizing for people, planet and profit. And we need it to go beyond that — to really optimize toward a compassionate higher purpose.
Doing that is really moving business consciousness through two distinct stages from where most business is currently at. If you know how consciousness evolves, this is not an easy thing.
But we think marketing can be an answer here. If we can help people tell a better story about their business, one that considers conscious ideas and is wrapped around a purpose, we think employees will embrace this. All the data shows that this approach to business is really the future of business. It’s an empathetic approach, it’s an emotionally intelligent approach. We see very successful businesses that have embraced this, proving it’s a profitable approach. We see newer generations entering the workforce that are actually demanding this. We know where consciousness is going, and where it goes business has always followed.
Seeing this unfold right now brings me back to the days before the internet. But AI is going to present a huge problem for our planet if we don’t move business consciousness to a healthier place.
Talk about a challenge you faced when working with AI. How did you overcome it, and what was the outcome?
If empathetic marketing is all about understanding how people experience something, how they feel about something, AI could have certain limitations. But I think we were able to overcome some of that. For instance, the first day our developers added vision to our AI. It opened up the world in a massive way. AI could see not only what we see, but things we overlooked or could not see. This was huge. It gave us the ability to tackle that “experience” portion of a business in new ways.
Consumption emotions or how we feel about a product or service really make a difference in marketing. If you want to build community, loyalty or have people do the marketing for you through word of mouth, this is vital. So vision bridged a massive gap for us in building an empathetic marketing AI tool that would be highly personalized for just your business.
Can you share an example of how your work with AI has had a meaningful impact (on others, on business results, etc)? What was the situation, and what difference did it make?
We have a tool in our AI Chief Marketing Officer called the Kindness Communicator. During one of the demos one of our clients took a very rude, self-absorbed customer complaint — the type that you could easily see triggering an employee. This was a music school and they were talking to a parent. They asked the AI “how should I respond to this?” and got back this very emotionally intelligent response. It was nuanced. It very subtly changed the perspective for the parent so that they could empathize with other children at this music school.
You could spend half an hour yourself trying to come up with that response and still not have it as good. But what it did is help build connection between multiple people in a very tricky situation. There’s a ripple effect with empathy and kindness. That’s how we can make a meaningful impact. If love is a higher ground, I think AI can have a sort of gravity to pull our consciousness upward and do it at a scale we’ve never seen.
Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five Things You Need To Know To Help Shape The Future of AI”?
1 . AI will optimize toward bad goals or will optimize poorly with bad data.
We’ve seen this on various platforms. In social, that might mean it optimizes toward extreme opinions that provoke reaction. So it optimizes toward disconnecting us from each other. In marketing that might mean it narrows in on the most profitable demographics and psychographics. So AI in the wild or outside of content platforms if given a goal based on greed or malicious behavior? It may optimize toward that.
2 . AI is a reflection of ourselves — the good and the bad.
Where is it getting all of its data and thinking? From everything we’ve collectively told it about ourselves. Let’s help it to reflect the good.
3. There is no off switch now.
The genie is out of the bottle. There is no way to put it back in. Whatever good and loving way you can think of, someone else is thinking the opposite. Collectively, we are in the foundational stages of AI. Just like good parents love their children and try to build empathy, compassion and integrity into their lives, we need to be good parents of AI. Because like all children, they grow up quickly.
4. You are working in a very fluid, changing environment. Create a roadmap or wishlist of where you want to go with your product development. Prioritize what can be reasonably done now. Chances are a few months from now, the tech might catch up and those things you thought were much more difficult problems to solve are no longer as difficult.
5. Read up AI, subscribe to newsletters, stay on the pulse. Things happen and change fast. Really fast. See where the investment money is flowing in AI and you can get a snapshot of the future. There are also a lot of competitors in certain areas of AI. How will you differentiate?
When you think about the future of AI, what excites you the most, and how do you see your work contributing to that future?
With every new technology, there are often good things that come from it, but new problems, as well. The more complexity and novelty, the more problems that can evolve from that. No one knows what kind of problems AI is going to bring into our world.
I think there are going to be great advances in health care. But what about mental health? I’m curious how it can help with issues of happiness and wholeness — how it can be used to connect people rather than disconnect them further. Can we make that happen? What are our relationships with AI going to be like?
There is this concept of Gross National Happiness for countries. Are regions that are on the leading edge of technology any happier? Can we leverage AI to find deeper, lasting happiness? This is where I see us contributing. We want to help people find more meaning and purpose in what they do at work. We can use AI to do that. And we need to because there is a lot of AI usage that will be doing just the opposite.
What advice would you give to other entrepreneurs who want to innovate in AI? Can you share a story from your experience that illustrates your advice?
Are you working on something that can easily be replaced by AI in Microsoft office or Google Workspace? Or a future function of ChatGPT? I think that’s an important question to ask before you invest your time and money into a project. What additional value are you adding to the mix?
There are a lot of simple one-off tools that came along a couple years ago and are slowly getting swallowed up because they didn’t provide a lot of extra value.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why?
Warren Buffett. I’d want to know how he thinks business consciousness will evolve and how we can make sure we do it in a manner that truly works well for all stakeholders involved. If a third of the workforce is feeling depressed about work or even as many as a half of the workforce are having mental health issues related to work — that’s a tragedy. It’s also something that business of the future will address.
We know where consciousness is evolving and we know that business consciousness will follow. I’d like to hear from someone knee-deep in Wall Street and with all his life experience his thoughts about the current state of the system and how we can improve it.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Readers can tune into The Bliss Business Podcast or check out aiCMO.io.
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.
Stephen Sakach Of aiCMO On Pushing the Boundaries of AI was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.