#93 - Mark Esposito, Co-Founder of Nexus FrontierTech - Building a position of advantage by blending humans and tech in new ways

This podcast interview focuses on the essence of the book 'The AI Republic: Building the Nexus Between Humans and Intelligent Automation'. My guest is one of the authors, Mark Esposito.

He is a Co-founder of Nexus FrontierTech, a leading global firm providing AI solutions to a variety of clients across industries, sectors, and regions. In 2016, he was listed on the Radar of Thinkers50 as one of the 30 most prominent business thinkers on the rise, globally.

Mark has worked as Professor of Business & Economics at Hult International Business School and at Thunderbird Global School of Management at Arizona State University and as Fellow at the Judge Business School in the UK, as part of the Circular Economy Center.

He has developed and conducted courses in Business, Government & Society & Economic Strategy and Competitiveness for Harvard University's Division of Continuing Education.

Mark also served as Institutes Council Co-Leader at the Microeconomics of Competitiveness program (MOC) at the Institute of Strategy and Competitiveness, at Harvard Business School under the mentorship of Professor Michael E. Porter.

I interviewed Mark for the first time in episode 22 of my podcast. We then focused on his best-selling book, ‘Understanding How the Future Unfolds’. Today, we discuss his new book, ‘The AI Republic’ and explore the changes that are required to build a position of advantage by blending humans and tech in a relevant way.

Here are some of his quotes:

There is a whole degree of misinformation about AI out there.

Especially from a business perspective of B2B, where we're trying to make clients.

Regardless of how educated they were, I think they were heavily influenced by what they were hearing.

The more you work with AI scientists, the less they call it intelligence.

They call it everything but AI.

I said: ‘Why is there such a big gap between what the scientists who develop this technology talk about and what everybody else describes?’

And so, the AI Republic is really the effort to create this relationship between what we think that technology is and can do, which is by itself is a phenomenal advance in our technologies, and the misinformation that I think we're currently have so that we can empower more and more people, first of all to know, and once they know, they can make a deliberate decision whether they need it or whether they actually they just need some good form of either automation or digital transformation.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

1. That to succeed with AI we have to get the entire organization engaged – not only IT. Understand IT needs to be part of the core strategy and that it’s a collaborative long-term process, not a one-off thing.
2. Why the question is never ‘how do humans compare with machines?’, but instead ‘How do I integrate technology in jobs that currently exist or can exist?’ and ‘How do I empower this to become a form of excellence?’
3. That getting started is a lot about recognizing where your business model is generating a friction with where the market is going – and from there determining where technology can help you.