#19 - Ryan Falkenberg, Co-CEO of CLEVVA - Augmenting Sales & Support experts to exponentially scale the value they deliver

My guest on the podcast this week is Ryan Falkenberg, Co-founder and Co-CEO of CLEVVA, a South African Augmented AI company that leverages digital intelligence to empower, not simply replace people.

Ryan has always been fascinated by what makes people tick, and what makes them perform optimally. He’s been frustrated at the slow pace of change when it comes to education and learning. To address that, he created a learning consultancy, Hi-Performance Learning, that aimed to push the boundaries of organizational learning through e-learning, gamification and expert systems.

To then remove the constraints by tech. bandwidth, he founded CUDA Technologies.

Yet no matter how they optimized formal learning, a core problem remained. People still had to memorize and repeat complex decision formula in a world that was accelerating. It was time for a complete rethink. This was the starting point for CLEVVA

The big idea behind CLEVVA inspired me, hence I invited Ryan to my podcast. During our interview, we explore how we can use technology to boost the differentiation factor of people, and how we can relieve them from the stress of making mistakes and the consequences that often has – and instead take the weight of their shoulders to let them truly focus on what they love doing and where they add the most value. Here are some of Ryan’s quotes:

"Human beings are currently trapped in the role of robots.”

"How do we humanize our workforces? How do we make them powerful as opposed to making them robotic?"

Our challenge ‑‑ and I think it's a global issue ‑‑ is that, in schools, we essentially teach young people a couple of mental skill sets.

The whole journey of teaching people to replicate, teaching people to memorize and teaching people to comply was something that was very powerful in the industrial era.

Currently, human beings are not differentiators. They're a scale problem

The volume of human resources that are underutilized is enormous.

I realized I can get you doing stuff which would normally take me two or three years. You can get it in a matter of weeks. That becomes very exciting for companies, but it also becomes exciting for the individuals because they really start differentiating themselves.

By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

• That to deliver remarkable impact with your solution, you have to understand the granular truth of where your solution hits the ground, and then work backward to remove all barriers.
• What the key ingredients are to maximize the impact technologies such as AI can make in unlocking Human potential.
• Why it is key to blend your solution with the operating systems your users are working with all day long.