Five Generations, One Workplace: Tech Leaders on Change

[00:00:00] Chris MacFarland: I think you’re in this era where, just like those of us in the channel, you want to meet customers where they want to be met. You want to serve them where they’re going to be. Wherever they’re at, you need to provide them with the capabilities so that they can actually do their work, hopefully, very efficiently. But the challenges that we continue to see is that when you go down to the younger generations, it’s really hard to onboard, train, ’cause it’s criticized, and then there’s this really magical thing that gets lost.

[00:00:26] Intro: Technology has transformed how we live, work, and connect. And behind that change are visionary people with bold ideas. Welcome to the Bridgecast, where host Scott Kinka explores hybrid work, AI, and our evolving future with tech’s brightest minds. Presented by Bridgepointe Technologies, the nation’s leading tech advisory firm. Experience a better way, the Bridgepointe way.

[00:01:01] Scott Kinka: The question is, where do you put the save? Is it, are you driving top line, or are you experiencing the savings? We’ll get there. We’ll certainly get to that. I want to just throw this up here, because you guys were focusing a lot on end users, and there’s a couple of topics we should unpack in there.

So for those of you who weren’t in the AI panel yesterday, and certainly those listening at home would not have been, we shared this stat, which is that ChatGPT is the fastest-growing shadow AI—a shadow IT app—of all time. All right. So your customer, or you, frankly, if you’re a CIO listening at home, there is access to ChatGPT going on inside your business, and users are using it to solve their own problems, right, underneath this.

So while we’re talking about these failed projects, I mean, is it a reasonable path to just go to and say, “You know what? Let’s just embrace the people that are doing this and figure out what they’re trying to solve”? Like, how would you get after that? Gary, I’m going to come to you first. Gary Sorrentino: Well, but think about that. You have to do that. They’re going to do it either way. We’ve always worried about Shadow IT. We’ve always worried about people going home and doing things. But today, it’s on their phone. They can ask a question to their phone to get an answer that you need. If it says, “Hey, I need a quick write-up on, I don’t know, how to process a new claim”. Right? They can probably get that in 30 seconds from an external.

So the problem is, do you fight that or embrace that? The word is you embrace that. One, they have figured a way to do their job a little better. Okay? Now let’s figure out why we’re not supporting that way to do it.

At the end of the day, shadow technology is going to creep in. It’s always been there; it’s just prevalent now. It’s so available at such a low cost. And because of the advent of the iPhones and the Androids, it’s with us every single day. There are people who are having communications with it, the new verbal part, all day long. Right? They are basically, as they’re talking in their little cubicles, getting the questions that they need. That’s a fail on us. Because if they can figure out how to do their jobs better, not using what we gave them as a CIO, you’ve got to walk away and go, “I’m failing the company”. How do I find what they need, and how do I provide it to them in a controlled manner? Okay, but we still get the same outcome. Because look at it this way:

[00:03:00] Everybody in here has used a tool that your company has told them not to use. Correct? Everybody, just say yes, because we all do that. Right? It’s because the tool they gave you didn’t provide what you needed. Okay. So let’s solve for that. Let’s figure out what do you need, and how do I give it to you in the right way. Yeah. I think that’s our problem today.

[00:03:34] Scott Kinka: Let me ask you, Gary, a question now. Historically, does the average CIO—this is the line of business question , this is the lights-on versus line-of-business question—feel that they’re responsible for user satisfaction on a line-of-business app at the end?

[00:03:51] Gary Sorrentino: I hope so.

[00:03:51] Scott Kinka: I mean, I hope so too.

[00:03:53] Gary Sorrentino: I hope so.

[00:03:53] Scott Kinka: I think that that’s true.

[00:03:54] Chris MacFarland: They should, and they also should have partnerships with various groups, departments, divisions, whatever that enterprise is structured, where they have joint accountability for employee experience and customer experience. Yeah. Because all these things have to converge.

And when you think about the rapid pace of how fast OpenAI’s ChatGPT grew. I mean, if you think about it—I don’t know about everybody in this room—but I used to use Google 100 times a day five years ago. I probably use it one out of ten times now, and I’m either using ChatGPT or Grok, sometimes one of the other apps like Perplexity. But then I’m also comparing what both are telling me. And I’m like, “Okay, which one’s giving me better information based upon the questions or the dialogue that I’m trying to embrace with it?”

And I think that changes the dynamics because we’ve got this shift where everybody knows this technology exists. It’s amazing technology. My kids, regardless of age—and they’re a little bit older, in high school and college—are able to leverage these capabilities. It’s just such an amazing experience. So now, if you are the CIO, you’ve got everybody going, “Well, why don’t we have this ?” And then, “How do we use this in a different way to make us all collectively smarter together?” Yeah.

[00:05:13] Scott Kinka: So, I’m going to give one more. We’ll stay with this topic for one more question, then I want to kind of move to the people side of this. We’ll go a little bit further. But this was a chart we pulled: “Good bots, bad bots, human traffic on the Internet”. Pretty simple. I think what this says is less than 50% of internet traffic is actually human at this point. It certainly depends on who’s pulling the data down. Thankfully, we have somebody who’s in charge of a network here that passes a lot of the traffic that actually happens on the Internet. So, Chris, comment on this. Does this feel right? What is your experience? How much of our internet traffic is actually AI-generated?

[00:05:50] Chris MacFarland: So, given the month, we’re either number one or number two in moving more bits across the Internet than anybody else in the world. There is absolutely this trend line where the machine-to-machine information flow is growing faster. Right? We’ve lived the last decade where video on demand, nonlinear, was just growing, and it’s still growing at an incredible pace.

But, you know, those a little bit older in the industry, you’re probably now seeing some IoT projects, which I think are great, compelling, and you absolutely need managed services for that. But the machine-to-machine traffic is—we’re going to see this explosion that, if you’re selling bandwidth, it’s going to be good times again and again and again.

I think secondarily, the machine-to-machine communication, whether it’s AI agents communicating with each other or whether it’s just APIs across automations that are taking place, is absolutely going to grow. And then, I think the good bot, bad bot challenges mostly live in the social media world. Yeah. Where that absolutely is. You talk to the guys at X, or you talk to the people at Facebook and Instagram inside of Meta, and they’ve got armies of people trying to figure out how to manage this. And as fast as they can change the algorithm or figure out a way to kill bots that are ad bots, they figure out another way. It’s just, it’s almost like cybersecurity, where the bad actors can innovate at a little faster pace than the groups that are trying to manage these cyberspace areas. Scott Kinka: Lot of bandwidth to be bought and sold. That’s the good news. Chris MacFarland: That’s the good news. Demand for bandwidth is not going away. Scott Kinka: Not an issue. All right. Let’s go to the people and productivity side real quick. Kind of shift to this with our last 20 minutes or so. Not sharing a bunch of stats. We’ll just say we all know that we’ve changed the way—the where we work, how we work, where we’re expected to be.

I’ll just share some headlines instead. This is from The Wall Street Journal : “The rush to return to the office is stalling”. And there are two fun charts here that I’m sharing, and we’ll make sure for those at home that the video is available to you. The first chart shows the number of hours that we are spending working from home over the last couple of years. I love the second chart. This is the number of hours we’re required to be in the office versus the number of hours we’re actually going back in, which means basically and effectively, no one’s paying attention. And maybe that’s different in your own companies, but I’ll just say this, Gary, we talk about this a lot. You work for one of the preeminent collaboration companies in the world, so I’m sure you guys talk about this. Are we forever going to be in this “where we work” argument, or is there some equilibrium here? Gary Sorrentino: So, I think a couple of things. I think we’re going to see another change. Okay? For me, I think right now we’re in a state where there are still gray-haired senior managers out there , who are still thinking that for 25 years, “I’ve been a leader for this type of group, and that’s the way I know how to lead, so everybody should come in”. Yep. I think you’re going to see by 2030, some of the statistics show, that a new wave of leadership’s going to come aboard, and they’re going to re-address this. Because I think the next wave of leadership is going to say, “What’s right for the people that work for me, and what’s right for the outcome of my company ?” And maybe, “I’m going to throw away the older guy’s book”.

And I think we’re going to see that change come soon, maybe around 2030, because that’s when it’s going to show that Boomers and upper-end Gen Xers are going to start retiring. About 10,000 Boomers retire a day.

[00:09:21] Scott Kinka: Sure.

[00:09:22] Gary Sorrentino: At the end of the day, we’re going to see a new wave of people. You talk about the next wave, right? At the end of the day, the new cohort of people, Gen Zs, Gen As, who are 12 years old now. Right? They’re starting to think about companies. Right? They don’t want to work in Mom and Dad’s company anymore. Right? They want a quality of life. They want a different way of working.

The company that’s going to attract the talent pools is going to have to learn how to work a little differently. Now you’re seeing, like, you read this morning, JPMorgan opened up their tower, and Jamie wants everybody to come in. Right? He’s losing a lot of good talent. He’s keeping a lot of good talent. Right? But he’s losing that next generation of person sitting in a university going, “I want to work for one of the cool companies .” Right? “I want to be able to get a quality of life back. I want to figure this out. I don’t want to be 80 hours like my mom and dad did”.

And so, I think what we’re going to do is we’re going to be in this forever, what you said, “forever hybrid mode”. We’re going to be in this state of confusion until we see another level of a different change of management.

[00:10:21] Scott Kinka: So it’s an aging-out-of-leadership solution, or maybe to your earlier point, it’s a great parallel to the point that the measures that we use on the success of our business are probably—or the success or productivity of humans are also probably outdated. It’s an interesting way to look at it.

I’m going to—we’re going to come, we’re going to stay on that multi-generational workforce thing, but I want to ask Chris a question on the chart we’re looking at here. Like, how has this affected your business? Right? I mean, we were in the business of connecting big offices. Now we’re in the business of connecting people from home to data, then we’re going to go back to offices. Like, what’s the effect been on the way your customers are consuming network? Chris MacFarland: Yeah. I mean, I think two things. We’ll talk about it inside of Comcast. We went from no days in the office to one day mandated, to two days mandated. I think we’re technically at four. But then we moved, like, half the workforce to virtual so you don’t have to come in at all if you don’t want to. Yeah. And so we’ve had this horrible trend that almost every business has, which is the mandates just honestly don’t work.

And I think the things that all businesses, as they adapt to this different work-life hybrid environment where you’ve got mobile, home, and in the office, is, how do you—you know, I’m a huge culture person. I think fundamentally, the day your business has to make a decision of what your culture is going to be , and part of it is employee engagement and where they’re going to work and how they’re going to work. But I think you’re in this era where, just like those of us in the channel, you want to meet customers where they want to be met. You want to serve them where they’re going to be , wherever they’re at, you need to provide them with the capabilities so that they can actually do their work, hopefully, very efficiently.

But the challenges that we continue to see is that when you go down to the younger generations, it’s really hard to onboard, train, “cause it’s criticized,” and then there’s this really magical thing that gets lost. I think the collaboration companies have done amazing work, and those that really focus on it have been able to lean in here, but it’s not easy for most companies, which is serendipity is real. You know, being in this environment, I’m sure everybody in this room will have one or two conversations that turns a light bulb on to either an opportunity or a different way of thinking about work or potentially a new business to work with that you can help your customers with. And so I think it’s this real, rough challenge where you need to have the ability to meet sometimes in the office.

But at the same time, if you live in a major metro in our country now, with traffic even after COVID, you’ve got really long commute times. And then we saw this other amazing thing inside of Comcast where, because we map where our employees live or where they say they live, and then we saw tons of people move further out to the suburbs, and in many cases even rural. Yeah. And then we actually saw a lot of people migrate between states and didn’t really tell us about it. You know? And so you’re like, “Okay, we’re going to mandate the office.” Oh, but wait, you don’t live in Philly anymore. You live in South Carolina. Yeah. Like, that’s going to be a real, real challenge for this.

And so I think we’ve got this dynamic shift. The good news is, for us in the industry, they need more bandwidth. They need more cybersecurity. They need more collaboration tools. And I do think the generational thing is absolutely going to change this dynamic. And I do agree with you very much, Gary, that the Boomer—I mean, I’ve sat in some of these meetings, they’re like “hard asses”. I’m a middle-of-the-road Gen Xer, so I’m like, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, we can’t take that start into the position”. But we have. We fired people that were great employees because they refused to come back to work. Yeah. And then we had natural attrition where they’re like, “No, I’m not coming back to work, I’m leaving”. Yeah. And you got companies like Google, you know, that because, depending on which team you’re in, you’ve never even seen the Google office except, like, your first two weeks of training. Scott Kinka: Yeah. I mean, let’s go there. Gary, I know this is a passion area for you. To couple all this “where do we work” problem with the role of the CIO, we also have the first time that there are five generations in the workforce at the same time. And it’s going to change everything that we’re doing. Couple with that, obviously, that we’re going to start having AI co-workers. Yes.

But, I mean, Gary, I know this is an area you speak quite a bit about. Just walk us through how you think about the compounding kind of generational effect, work friction, remote work. How should leaders be thinking about what’s the advice for managing this? Gary Sorrentino: So, I think there are a couple of things here. One, we’re all part of a generation. I don’t know if we can see, but probably people won’t admit it, but who thinks they’re a Boomer here? Who’s got the Boomer status besides me? Okay, so we got a couple. What about Gen Xers? Yeah. Most of them are Gen Xers. What about Millennials? Yep. Here. What about Gen Z? Yeah. I’m counting like four, three. Okay?

So think about this. First of all, here’s our first problem: We’re all talking about the future at this summit. Right? Yep. The future’s not represented here. Okay? When you’re talking about CX going forward, those three people, you should be up here. You should be telling us how you want the world to be, because we are designing a world for you, not for us. Right? But just think about that, think it through. Right?

At the end of the day, they have different ways of thinking about things. But the reason I’m going there is because we’re really not talking about five generations. We’re talking about hybrid workers now. And when I mean hybrid, I don’t mean working home or not. I’m a hybrid worker. You know what I learned? I learned from my past how to act like a Boomer and how to act like a Gen Xer. But what I learned from my employees is how to act like a Millennial and how to act like a Gen Z.

You see, I’m getting a new passion. I’m going to give work as much as I can from 7:00 in the morning till 8:00 at night. But then after 8:00 at night, I’m going to give my family that same passion, that same amount of time, and I’m learning from my employees. So when we say five generations, it’s not. Okay. And the problem with management today is I have to figure out—because I used to know that the gray hairs are going to work a long time and the Gen Zs are going to question everything. Love it. But now what do I do when the Gen Xer is questioning everything like a Gen Z? That’s where this complexity comes into place. Yeah. The problem is managers have a harder time today.

When we say managers, who considers themselves a boss? Right. How about leaders? All right. Here’s a good question. Who thinks they’re a coach? You can’t be a leader and a coach.

[00:16:58] Scott Kinka: Yeah.

[00:16:58] Gary Sorrentino: Gotta choose one. Chris MacFarland: I have a bunch of businesses. Got it. It’s all over the world.

[00:17:01] Gary Sorrentino: But what I’m saying is, you’ve got to give them all the multi—you have places. You have to figure out from your employees what do they want? Yeah. They don’t want annual reviews. They want weekly feedback. Of course.

And so when we talk about these different generations, it really all comes down to, as a leader, as a coach—and I think I like to use that word. I hopefully I’m becoming more of a coach. Yeah. Right? I dropped the boss a long time ago. I went with leader for a while because that was professional. Now I want to be a coach.

[00:17:27] Scott Kinka: Yeah.

[00:17:27] Gary Sorrentino: And I think today, if as we’re coaching people, that’s when we’re going to figure out how this new economy wants to work. Right? And we’re going to see it both on our EX side, our employee side, and we’re going to see it both on our CX side. Yeah. Right? Because they’re calling up these different centers. They’re calling up the call center. They want a different way.

Most of the people here that were Boomers or Gen Xers—you sell the product, but you’re zeroing out every time you get there. When you call about your insurance premium, are you talking to a bot? No. You’re, “Hey, zero, operator”. Right? And that’s the technology we sell. Okay? But the next group is waiting for the bot. Yeah. They’re waiting for the virtual agent. You know why? They’re going to get a better answer. They’re not going to have to deal with a human, right, and things like that.

So I think what we’re seeing is this combination of the different groups coming on. I love that there are a couple of Gen Zs here. And I hope next year, if you invite me back again, that there’s at least 10 to 15% of this room is the future. Because if you are going to design the future, let’s not talk about them. Let’s talk to them. I love that.

[00:18:32] Scott Kinka: We’re running short on time, so I’m going to bust through two more quick topics. One is, AI as co-worker. Right? So just quickly—maybe a sentence from each of you. Think about the dynamic that we just talked about the generations. I mean, is this marketing, or are we really going to have AI agents? What are the companies that—Mark?

[00:18:55] Gary Sorrentino: The 2030 stat is 10% of the employees in the world will work for a bot by 2030.

[00:19:00] Chris MacFarland: And I think it’ll be higher than that. I think we’re all naive if you don’t think that you’re not going to have AI co-workers. Yep, number one. And then two, when the really great general-purpose robots hit, it’s going to move so fast—both in people’s home life and service industries and in the corporate office—that it’s going to be mind-blowing in a good way. And so, it’s a massive cultural shift. It is a massive culture shift that’s hard. You know, if you’re not an innovator or technologist like myself, it’s hard to kind of see across the transition, but I can see it coming.

And, you know, again, it’s one of these things where, you know, we think we live this amazing life today, which, in many cases, everybody in this room does. We’re blessed in so many ways. But secondarily, the level of having robots help, assist, do things, is going to be such a dramatic change that it’s hard to imagine. And I think this does scare a lot of people, especially the older generations, because, like, even my parents that are on the top end of Boomers, they’re like, “What? I will never have a robot in this house”. I’m like, “Well, if it irons your clothes, makes you breakfast, and mows the lawn by noon every day, I think you might enjoy something like that”. Gary Sorrentino: Yes. And even today, it’s turning on the lights for them.

[00:20:34] Chris MacFarland: Yeah.

[00:20:34] Gary Sorrentino: It’s starting the coffee pot in the morning. Oh, right. Absolutely. It’s doing all the things. You just don’t want to admit it. Chris MacFarland: Agreed. Yeah, 100%. Scott Kinka: That’s super interesting. For the sake of conversation, I want to get to—we’ve been talking about all the things we’re not doing right. Right? So I’m going to skip this next topic if you don’t mind just for the sake of time, and I’m just going to go to this.

First off, aren’t these guys great, by the way? I mean, I could listen to them all day long. You’re in this business, both of you, probably for the same reason that I am, which is I like to tinker with stuff. I did it my whole life, and then we build companies around it. We go out and help people build up their companies around it. So I’m going to ask two futurists here. Right? What gets you excited about the next, call it, five to ten years in technology evolution? Gary, I’m going to start with you.

[00:21:27] Gary Sorrentino: We’re finally changing the way the world works. I think that’s—I’ve been a technologist, like I said, for 47 years now, and we’ve always managed to keep businesses running, profitable, secure. But we’re finally changing how the human nature is going to work and how people are going to produce outcome and how our lives are going to—I’m so happy I’m still in technology. Because for the first time in my career, I’m actually getting up every day excited about, “Today is going to be not just a new day, it’s going to be a new beginning”. We’re going to change the way people work. We’re going to change the way people interact. We’re going to change the word “work”. Right? “Work” almost sounds like a negative word now. What we’re going to do, we’re going to figure out how people collaborate. We’re going to figure out how people have a day where they work and they go home and they’re happy about what they do. They’ve done meaningful things. And so I’m so happy about being part of that. I don’t know if we’re excited, but I’m happy that I’m part of seeing the change, and I’m happy I’m still here to see the change because it’s taken almost half a century. I love it. That’s amazing. All right, Chris, so for me—

[00:22:30] Chris MacFarland: I’ll answer this in two ways. One, when I think about our industry and our business, I think we’re all collectively in this because we know that the work that we do allows our customers to navigate their journey to become more efficient, more profitable, to serve their customers in a better way. And the technology advisor space is more relevant than it ever has been, and so I’m super excited about the fact that I’m a part of this rocket ship. I mean, Comcast, this year, we’ll grow $700,000,000 on top of a $10,000,000,000 base , which is amazing inside of a $125,000,000,000 company that mostly other parts aren’t growing as fast as we are. So we’re—that excites me because we’re making a real difference.

But secondarily, when I think about the next five years and all the things that we talked about today, there’s this massive change that’s going to happen to our world. Whether you think about the smallest towns in the remotest parts of Africa to here in the United States, we could see this vision of the world coming where everything’s hyper-efficient. We’re going to see massive deflation of everything, even though we’ve been in the last five years of crazy inflation. I can’t even still believe what the price of a pound of steak or eggs costs right now, especially for those that are in a different economic bracket.

But I do think we’re going to enter this age of abundance. Everybody’s got to figure out how to rework and change how they want to work, which I think is going to be also really cool for those of us that lean into change. But then secondarily, I always look at the quality of life for people regardless of their economic brackets. And, you know, I think we live in the most amazing time, and we’re about to hit an apex, hopefully. I mean, there’s still that 5% chance that AI becomes our overlord, which I really hope doesn’t happen because that’s the scary side of this whole thing. But, you know, when all of our businesses become hyper-efficient and all the costs come down, there’s this massive collapsing between the one-percenters and those that are kind of near the poverty line or below the poverty line. And that gets me the most excited, because it’s our industry that’s going to actually bring that to life , and I can’t think of a better way to spend my career time. Scott Kinka: That’s amazing. And a great way to end this episode of the Bridgecast. Thanks to our esteemed panel here. Gary Sorrentino and Chris MacFarland. For those of you who are listening at home, if you found this episode of the Bridgecast useful, please feel free to send it on to your team. Give us a follow, a like, and a comment. It helps keep events like this moving along, and we will catch you next time on another episode of the Bridgecast. Thanks so much for our people here in the audience.

[00:25:26] Gary Sorrentino: Speak to you, Scott.

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