Leveraging Artificial Intelligence In Your Business To Change The World With Andrew Kennedy
God is giving us everything we need to survive and solve our problems through AI. It continues to develop and grow, which makes it easier for us to do fundamental tasks. That gives us endless opportunities to help people and make a difference. Co-Founder of Work Entropy, Andrew Kennedy, joins us for this episode with Chad Burmeister to delve into using artificial intelligence to measure gaps and understand that continuous learning is important to enrich our lives. As we all know, work has become more complex as time goes by, but AI is also growing with it so we could adapt to the changing world. Andrew Kennedy discusses the interview process to hire the right people as well as his plans for the future, what he intends to do using AI through speech analytics, production calls, and mental health support calls. Live a better story and change your world, too. Tune in and listen to this podcast episode now.
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Leveraging Artificial Intelligence In Your Business To Change The World With Andrew Kennedy
I'm with Andrew Kennedy. Andrew is the Cofounder and CEO of Work Entropy. Work Entropy talks about app-based delivery and rideshare, BYOB, not booze but Bring Your Own Boss and how to be an independent contractor, independent employee and take control of your life. In the gig economy, there's no better time to do that than now. COVID woke a lot of us up and helped us realize, “I can make money doing this or that and free up time to do whatever it is I want to be doing?” Those are the kinds of things we're going to talk about with Andrew. Andrew, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here and to talk about the journey we've been on with Work Entropy and how it ties into AI. You have a cool show.
I'm looking forward to this. You wouldn't believe the conversations we have nowadays whether it's healthcare, IT or anything and everything, AI is being deployed. I always thought, “How big is it compared to the internet?” He said, “Compare it to electricity.” This is a guy that was with IBM Watson so he knows a thing or two about a thing or two. When he says compare it to electricity, it's going to be leaps and bounds above that. Hang on for the ride, ladies and gentlemen. Before we dive into the topic, I like to rewind the tape and ask the question about when you were younger, it sounds like you were raised in New York or at least that's where you moved from but now you're in San Diego. What was your thing as a kid? What'd you love to do? What was your passion when you're 6, 7, 8 years old?
Leveraging Artificial Intelligence: Our society has not been able to truly embrace failure and look at it as learning lessons right now. You can still produce great outcomes even without being a hundred percent in that thing.
I was born and raised in the Midwest. I didn't move to New York until I was thirteen. Growing up in the Midwest, there's not a lot to do there. It's pretty flat. I grew up mostly in Iowa. I was born in Nebraska but I got into Legos early and I've loved Legos. My brother and I were always building stuff and we moved a lot too so we were always in different schools. We had a few years where we homeschooled. My mother was a stay-at-home mom and went back and forth to work. We were always into Star Wars. We always liked video games and loved Legos.
Being in the Midwest, we did have a few different places. We had some forests and we had things that we can explore. I've loved exploring, loved role-playing, playing army, hide and seek, tag, riding around the neighborhood at the bikes, exploring things and finding new things and figuring out how they worked. I feel like that's always been an ongoing theme ever since a young age just, “How does this work? Why does it work this way?” I was always asking these questions.
You'd love my theater room because I have every Star Wars poster around. It's a gray background, 120-inch projection screen with all of the deep sounds and everything. It was a dream that I had since I was a kid to have a theater room like that, now it's all Star Wars so I can relate to the Star Wars theme. The yin and the yang of life, good versus evil. Star Wars did a good job of articulating that even in a family there can be differences. Whether it's Princess Leia, Han Solo and then the son becomes a dark person but also has good in them. That was always interesting.
The theme around it and the lessons. That played into that obsession with space. It's be compacted that and opened your mind. Space travel is going to be a thing. Lo and behold, now we've got Jeff Bezos and the company, this whole wave of billionaires now going into space. We're living it. When are we going to have the real Batman pop out or the real Ironman? That is the next question. The other thing on the space, too, it's something that I was thinking back on as I was thinking about these questions. I was always was obsessed with space, Lego, Star Wars.
I built a lot of spaceships, airplanes and different things but also, there are quite a few artists in my family. My grandfather painted, my dad got into a little bit so I like to draw a lot. This just dawned on me. I used to draw different spaceships or boats at different times. I used to see how many amenities that could fit on there. I'm 5 or 6. It's like a basketball court on top of a swimming pool on top of a shopping mall on the back of a Ford truck. This stuff would come out and it'd be a Transformer style. It's funny because I look back at that and I'm like, “I forgot all about that.” Now that we're thinking about living in space and it's like that same thing. You're in a ship, you're in the atmosphere, you have taken off, you need those amenities. I've had that lifelong passion. I love space and I love drawing. I know that's not original.
I interviewed a guy on my show who helped sent fourteen of the first space shuttles to space in his early twenties. His other story was his dad was the first person in America to have open-heart surgery. Pretty neat first. Thinking about stacking a spaceship with a bowling alley, a food court, a subway and whatever else is on there, how do that tie into Work Entropy and the work you're doing?
As I’ve thought through this and reflected on it, it ties in a lot. Nowadays, we do compartmentalize too many things. That's very true with traditional employment. You have one job, 40 hours a week, you get the benefits, you can't work anywhere else, you've got the 9:00 to 5:00, you have the grind. Initially, it was something you were interested in or you had a career path you've been there for many years or maybe it's a temporary job. There are so many different variations of that but at the end of the day, more often, I'm running into people that are complacent. They're not happy. They're like, “This isn't what I want to do.” That's been the beauty of the gig economy. The ships I was talking about, it's like, "The rudder there, you don't need the crew hands. Why can't we have a bowling alley and a basketball court?”
We've been looking at superyachts because we just got back from vacation in Italy. We're near the Amalfi Coast. We were not on one but we saw plenty. These multimillion-dollar yachts do have basketball courts and all these things on there. It made me think about all this and there's so much more to life. Each individual has skills and each individual has value so why not tap into those to find work that you enjoy? Why don't we have more freedom to experiment and find out what we want to do? If I only have 2 or 3 jobs, maybe I don't even have a job in high school and the first time I get a job is after college. I don't have much perspective and experience from the sense of diversity like you go to school for a major, you have a focus that's in a single lane. I was very fortunate growing up. I was homeschooled and went to different public and private schools.
You got to try on everything for size. Different towns, different teachers, different dialects, all of it.
Leveraging Artificial Intelligence: AI is an exponential scaling feature to help manage chaos and things that don't need to have the super supervised human element.
I was very fortunate to be very supported by my parents too. They forced me to play the piano when I was very young and that was the first instrument. They're like, “Try to play it. If you don't like it, you can try other things." I got to learn sheet music and I got to get the fundamentals and I went on to try different guitars and I got to play jazz band, saxophone. Do I still play those things? No, but I got to experience it. I stuck with the guitar, though. I do love the guitar. If you don't have the opportunity to experience these things, you don't have the opportunity to understand what you truly enjoy and you miss out on that.
That's what we're trying to do with Work Entropy, bringing together the opportunity that the gig economy has and bring that to a central location and not have it so disparate. If you look at the most simple analogy with Lyft and Uber, that's what brought this to light. The gig economy has been around for a while but it was that technology-enabled services that elevated it to the next level. There's a lot of drivers that drive for Lyft and Uber. Some of the drivers are in just one of them but a lot of them have a day job or another job. Some are retired.
There are so many stories. That's what got me so interested in this, taking those rides, talking to the drivers and hearing their stories. It was because of that, we got into the community side of what we're doing with Work Entropy. We have our own podcast, The Gig Economy & You. We interview people from the gig economy. We hear their stories and it's from all different segments. We've had traveling nurses, Uber drivers and teachers. It's amazing the type of people that you meet and hearing their stories and understanding that anyone can do any of those things.
Let's flip the script for one second. Check this out. "This is Chad Burmeister on the Living A Better Story Show. We're here on the AI For Sales Show," and yet I have a parallel universe of me running a nonprofit 501(c)(3) charity that is about half of my time. Most people in the world would think that I'm working 200% of my time on ScaleX.ai, which is the company I founded but I'm not. I'm spending 50% of my time doing the show, helping change people's lives, building an app that we launched called 77Pray that cost $6,000 to build. That's going to change the people's lives in a lot of areas like food for orphans. The point that you're making is exactly articulated by what I'm doing because I can live in two different worlds and I'm equally passionate about both.
You don't have to be 100% in anything and not give 100% effort to it. You can split your intention and focus. As long as you're deliberate and purposeful about that, you can still produce great outcomes. That's something that's lost in our current society because of the ongoing fear factor of failure. Our society has not been able to truly embrace failure and look at it as learning lessons. “Don't do that. Go get your degree. Go get a nice stable job, get your retirement, your 401(k).” That doesn't exist anymore. That security isn't there anymore. That's what people are waking up to. You don't have extensions, you'll get laid off after a few years and stability is not there anymore. CEOs are rotating at 3 to 5 years and that trickles down.
VPs of Sales, 18 to 20 months is the norm. I had a person who helped the company go from Series B to Series C. They went from zero to $20 million and now, they're starting to go to $100 million. This guy, he's ousted and he's a great sales leader. You can start to think, “Am I a bad person?” No, it's just how the world works. Prepare yourself, knowing that that will happen. I remember in the MBA program that I wrote many years ago. I interviewed this ex-CEO of US West. I said, “I'm thinking of going into tech sales. Should I or should I stay with Fortune 1000?” He said, “No, you should leave."
"It's riskier for you to stay in traditional transportation sales at a low margin than it is to go be in the creative world of the software space. Go because you'll make a lot more money, you'll be happier and it will be lower risk in the long run.” You're right. The gig economy, it's lower risk. A lot of people, they're hard-coded into saying, “I need to stay with what's lower risk and low variability.” That's okay. Learn that it is a lower risk by learning to work in the gig economy.
They don't have a support system. It's still immature and young. The gig economy has so much potential and has a very bright future. Unfortunately, it's fraught with a lot of shortcomings and hard lessons that we're learning. It's like any other thing like the gold rush. We'd go in there getting massive profits, marginalizing each side and it's how we run business in the economy, which is a whole another society transformation we need to go through. That's a whole other episode.
Tell me about AI and your platform. It sounds like I'm on the same page. You've got all these people with skills just like a dating app, Match.com can put you in touch with someone. How cool would that have been if I knew that 30 years ago, the matching of exactly the right personality? I have to believe there's a gap in there when it comes to matching the right people in the right types of work. How do you leverage AI in your product?
It's so many different ways and in so many new ways and in the future ways we can't even imagine. We talk about Work Entropy and work being a set of tasks that you complete, an entropy being a general disorder and slipping into chaos. As we get more apps and things, as a society, we get more complex. Work is going to continue to get more complex. For us, AI is an exponential scaling feature with us to help manage that chaos and manage the things that don't need to have the supervised human element. How does it tie into Work Entropy? There are so many pieces of an individual that you understand their personality but if we start focusing on the work and we start toning it into skills, how do we start understanding their skills?
One of the things that we launched in May 2021 is we got into the vertical contact center. We're now working with contact center professionals to help place them in with business process outsourcing companies, call centers, businesses and the works. In the call center world, that's my background. I started at the corporation, worked my way up from a call center agent. I've done the full nine yards. I've learned a lot about those processes. I also realize there's a lot of processes that don't need to be manual any more. One of them is around the interviewing process. We work with our partners and other platforms to run good assessments and evaluations in virtual interviews.
What this does is it assesses the individual for their speech and how they articulate their tone, their pace, tries to break down and understand if they're going to be a good fit in the contact center space. We couple that with other inputs, questions and assessments to analyze what type of role they'll be good at. We're now implementing our training program, which is going to be using artificial intelligence to measure gaps and understand where we need to improve the material.
The reinforcement elements start recommending, "Here's a refresher on this skill. Here's a skill you need for this job." As we untangle all this, we're trying to simplify it and say, "At the end of the day, we can start changing the world by giving anyone on the globe the opportunity to work from home if they have a computer and internet connection and some form of communication skills or soft skills. You can do chat support and phone support."
This is revolutionary when we're talking in third-world countries that are generally out anywhere outside the US where it is still very hard to have remote work, A, because of the client requirements, B, because they want people in brick and mortar. They want to see that the agents but most importantly, C, is the infrastructure of the country doesn't always support work from home. People don't have an internet connection.
There's another initiative that we're working on as part of our foundation, the Work Entropy WE Foundation, which is going to be the nonprofit leg of this company. We're going to help support communities get the infrastructure that they need. The training, the basic skills especially where English is a second language and companies especially in the US are looking for people that can speak English and that they can pay $3 an hour.
Leveraging Artificial Intelligence: The idea is to centralize the workers and expose them to all of the platforms in a very consumable way. You can eliminate the waste that you get through the normal.
Why pay the $10 to $12 with the manager in the middle, that big company with the four walls in the Philippines, India, Costa Rica or other locations? I think Costa Rica is leading the charge a little bit there. I've seen their infrastructure is a little higher and then you can have the worker or some of the islands. I think the Caribbean also plays in that area. What we've seen in these COVID days is you don't need a physical manager on the tasks of running a call center. If you've got the right software and tools in place, you can have remote management over a pretty large team.
It's true and the numbers are there too. Customer satisfaction scores and production increases. People, when they feel empowered, they reward the company with that and companies forget that. We've found a lot of success in Mexico too. I'm in San Diego. I'm in Imperial Beach. Tijuana is a huge hotspot for outsourcing customer service and support. There's a lot of people that will work in the US in the day or they went to high school in the US and then they moved back to Tijuana. There are US citizens that moved down to Tijuana because of the cost of living. There's a lot of that cultural harmony there that exists. We found a lot of success there. It's much more competitive so we've been looking at all of the states in Mexico but I digress.
The main thing is that we're helping provide job opportunities to these people in other countries and in the US and the most important piece of it is that we're speeding up that time. Through our assessments, we're taking a process that in the call center typically takes 3 to 6 weeks. If you think about how do you apply to a job, you put in a resume then you wait and then you go to another job site, another position and you apply. Rinse and repeat but hopefully, I get an interview.
You pretty much only have your resume to stand on. What we're doing is we're revolutionizing the way that people apply to work as a portion of what we're doing. We're now giving people a virtual interview where they can record their voice, they can express themselves, they can talk about their goals, what motivates them, what are they excited about to feel a connection and give the opportunity for the potential employer or contractor to listen to that and understand that this person has a little goal.
Words on a page are words on a page. I interviewed a CEO of a company that's raised millions of dollars. She helps other women founders raise millions of dollars and she said, “One teacher pulled me aside when I was in high school and said, 'I don't think you're going to get into college. You're not suited for it.'” She said, “The teacher told me, ‘You scored worse than a monkey.’” She was like, "Are you kidding? Worse than a monkey?” Now, she is able to coach people and she's done really well but she learned that there are some skillsets that she's not suited for. "Let other people do that. I'm going to be a leader and I'm going to run the whole company."
I think what you're doing is cool. It clicked for me right there when you said, “They can see it and hear me.” That's the skill you're hiring for. You're not hiring for words on the page and how they write. That is revolutionary. Tell me about the role of AI there. If you didn't have AI, now you'd be able to be okay without AI. Is that true? What do you think about the future role of AI? Does your company even exist? I think a lot of companies are like, “No, we're built on AI these days.”
We can make that a long conversation but I'm going to make it a short one. Now, we're using AI with voice speech analytics and we're also using it through our other partner. HireIQ does our hiring assessment process with the virtual interviews then we work with Immersion AI, who does actual English certification. They've built a platform. Aside from the technology, they have the knowledge. They have PhDs and they work with universities not just in the US but in all of the regions where they do language scoring. It's not just English. It's Portuguese, Spanish, French, etc. The outcome from this is that we get to provide affordable English certifications for somebody to put on their resume if they want to say, “I'm a C1.” That will get you a job head over heels with somebody else who doesn't have a certification or has a high B2.
For those of you not familiar with the scale, it's basically A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2, with C2 being the most fluent proficient. When you're talking about this stuff, this is huge in the hiring world with any position if you're in sales and customer service. My point being, they're using artificial intelligence to automate that assessment. What would typically take 2 or 3 hours of a human assessor being there listening, talking, you got to study for it, etc., they're now able to do this in a 15 to 30-minute process through written and speaking exams.
What I like about it is that they have an adaptive assessment process. As you're going through the question, they leverage AI to understand what you're saying and assess your skill level to then give you either more challenging or easier questions to narrow in on your skill to give you the most accurate as possible rating. I love that about them.
The speech on the other side gives a general score with their interview to say how likely of a fit they are. That's how we're using it and that ties in well with my own personal background with my time at other software companies where I've done product management for interaction analytics and workforce management platforms and stuff. Those are really out-of-the-box use cases. That's something that exists now but in the future, we want to do a combination of these assessments, other training and different things that leverage AI to build together. Basically, what we want to have is the DNA of the worker.
It focuses on the skills but also the working preferences too. How good you are at a job and the skills are only half of it. Your communication and personality, it's so important and people don't look at the human margins. You're running your people into the ground. There's turnover. Look at the state of the US and the world with mental health. It's exacerbated by COVID, being stuck at home and everything. We talked to another vendor who’s going to help us with this. We're going to start using artificial intelligence through speech analytics on production calls and through mental health support calls through our organization to assess the emotional and mental state of someone so that we can start predicting when an agent's going to have emotional or any type of burnout.
This is something in the call center that from management, they get pissed off because they're like, “We have a bunch of people calling out sick or they're going on family or medical leave.” Why let someone get to that point and be in a situation of, “I no longer have an employee working for me?” Come back to humanity and say, “This person's had a rough day. They've had five people yell at them. They've been working for three weeks.” This is observation stuff, just common sense. If you're a good supervisor, you're paying attention to your people. If we can get to a place now where we're predicting that with the help of AI, it helps compliment humanity. That's the key piece that, as we're continuing to leverage AI, we have to keep that human element involved.
I read an article that IBM can predict with 94% accuracy if an employee is going to leave within the next three months just by sitting on top of email and phone and all of it. There's another company that I talked to that's in a round of funding that looks at Slack and email and looks at aggressive communication whether it's something that's derogatory or all of the above, extreme whatever. It highlights then the manager gets a notification, “You should catch this guy before the next thing happens and go have a talk with them.” It's interesting to see where this type of technology is going. If you haven't seen Balto software yet, they're a pretty new entrant to the market. They listened to the call and then they give the rep objection handling techniques. It is an interactive listening type of conversation software as opposed to fact-monitoring software. Real-time talking points, which is pretty neat.
That's what I enjoyed with my time into it. I'll keep it outside of the NDA pieces that I can share but it was so cool to live in that type of contact center now being on the other side of being a product manager after being an agent and supervisor and stuff for so many years. That's the type of technology we're looking at and working with Amazon and what they're doing with their Amazon Connect platform and getting into the real-time speech analytics. There are so many use cases. Agent burnout, escalations, upset customers, agent next best action. What you would typically have as a script and suggestions, it's now coming to the aid of the agents.
Leveraging Artificial Intelligence: Each individual in the world has value. And the moment that you, as a person, understand your value and can tap into that is life-changing.
This is what I love. That agent experience is so important for customer experience because if we can take away the distractions from that agent, they can focus wholeheartedly on the customer. Nine times out of ten, it doesn't even matter if that customer still has a problem or they didn't fully resolve it. They're going to feel that they're getting taken care of. They know that like, “Maybe you didn't fix it for me but I know you're going to follow up because you're paying attention and listening to me." In that stickiness, there is something that on paper, people try to chase but in reality, it’s just being human. We have so many distractions. We now have to build AI to remove distractions so we can focus on humans. That's how I look at it.
There's another company that we're partnering with called the World Council of Joy and their name is Joyely.com. The whole discovery is if you stack joy 2 or 3 times a day, our thoughts are like a river and we have 80,000 thoughts a day. Most of us have half negative. I've worked for the last couple of years to go, “No, that can't be true. We got to fix that.” I have 70,000 of 80,000 that are positive but there's still always a little bit of negative. By stacking joy and thinking about what's something that was uber amazing for you in life, like when I had both of my kids. Perfect. Go into that state for about a minute. Step away from the computer, think about it, take a deep breath. All it takes is a minute and that river of thoughts can be changed instantaneously to much more positivity. That's where the AI should pop up and go, “I felt the last call. You need a moment of joy. Here you go.”
Take a breather. It's fine. Take some personal time. Agents are used to getting penalized for that, “Why are you in after-call work for five minutes? We're busy. We got calls holding.” They got wrecked on back-to-back calls, let them breathe. That's in any profession. Your back-to-back Zoom calls and running kids around. I don't have kids yet but one day. I have lots of empathy. I love that and meditation is something that that's helped me. It's taking that time for yourself to remember and breathe and getting back to yourself.
Come back into reality. The other one was 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. I can't remember which sense it is but I think it's looking at five things, then let's say touch four things. You can feel the texture of it whether it's your finger, your phone, my microphone, touch four things and go down the senses. I don't think it matters which one's which. It brings you into the present moment and causes you to have a lot less stress. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and then taste something inside of your mouth. That's the last one, taste. Even lick your sleeve. You're like, “That's gross.” It grounds you into the present moment and it takes you out of the future, the past or whatever because all we have is right now so enjoy it.
That's been a big piece of my learning and that's what I love, the joy. What we're trying to do is trying to bring more moments of joy into your life. Instead of doing work that you don't enjoy or things that frustrate you. At the end of the day, you still got to make money. This original concept and going to the future state to talk about artificial intelligence there, we want to get to a point where basically work entropy is the problem we're solving. Our company is the name of the problem we're solving. We want to organize it in a way that that becomes passive. It should be so easy for me to say, “Siri, I need to make this much money by the end of the month,” and it knows your skills and it starts matching you automatically just as you would in a call center.
My background and why this is so easy for me to connect the dots is in workforce management. We used to have skills that would route calls to people. I'm going to give you very simple examples to try to illustrate how this would work. You have billing, customer support and technical support. Those are three skills. I'm a level one. I just started, so I can handle billing calls only. I only have billing calls route to me. I'm going to take a training. I'm going to take more general customer service calls and eventually, I'm going to take Wi-Fi training support. Now I can take all of these calls. The system is automatically going to be routing those calls to me based on the service levels, which was the busiest and what do we need to answer the fastest. Who do we have staffed? Those skills, who's available? This already has happened for 20, 30 years automatically and way beyond that.
It's doing it in an analog way and you're moving it to a digital.
We're abstracting that out and starting to abstract skills and start to understand the type of work that needs to be done and what skills are required for that just as you would in a call center and we'll be routing work based on your preferences. It's like, “Now, I feel talking to people. Let's do some rideshare. I'm going to drive around.” We'll start sending you stuff from Uber. We don't replace Uber but we send you work from Uber so you started doing that work. It's like, “I'm learning software development. I feel like I can program and I can build some websites.” Let's do some Fiverr jobs. Let's route some jobs from Fiverr. The idea is to centralize the workers and be able to expose them to all of the platforms in a very consumable way and eliminate the waste that you get through the normal transaction.
It's the opposite of Travelocity where, “We want the cheapest fare on the right airline.” In this case, if I'm in the matrix on this side, I'm one of the best cold callers on planet earth but I'm also the CEO of two companies. I don't have time to do that. However, what if I'm playing a trip to Italy and I need to save up $20,000 so I can take my family there? I could put myself in and say, “I'm the best cold caller of the top 25 in America. Send me your cold calls.” Now all of a sudden, I can make $1,000 a meeting for those twenty cold calls.
We're not reinventing the wheel. We're not doing anything different. We're just combining things in a different way. It's like Lego. We’re building a cool Lego set. We've got a lot of puzzles. We've got a lot of cool pieces now. The key is to put the Lego pieces together and then have AI make sure they stay together and give us feedback if they're getting loose or they're falling apart, “This isn't a good fit anymore.” That's why you got to come in with the human element and make sure, “We need to adjust this before we iterate to the next step.”
At the end of the day, we're trying to create a modern apprenticeship by exposure to many different gigs to build your skills and give you the resources you need to learn those skills, practice those skills and get jobs to pay you for those skills. Eventually, this gets to a place where it's so consumable that somebody could work from their cell phone, such as a homeless person who needs to make $15 to pay for food that day. It needs to get another $15 to get some new clothes and then needs to get $800 to start getting some rent and then needs to get $1,500 to get a bigger home.
It's the red paper clip challenge, trading up. I talked to someone in Southern California, in San Diego in fact and he's working with the government, which scares me a little bit but that's a different story. He's working to try to build tiny homes for homeless people so that it's not people living on the streets. That fits very nicely into what you're talking about where I think the funding should come from is public-private partnerships. There are a lot of people who have made billions of dollars. I know some of them. They have a good head on their shoulders and want to give back. Imagine the combination of, “Here's a set of 500 tiny homes that are all 100 square feet each." To your point, I need to make $15 and they've got that skill that matches. You can turn societies around in no time.
I'll end with this story. Robert White is a friend of our family. I used to cut his grass when I was a kid. He's now graduated 1.3 million people from his Human Potential Movement stuff. Five different companies. ARC International, he did some work with which became Landmark and all these ones you would have heard of. The best guy that he ever hired was a guy named Art.
Art was a homeless person under a bridge and in one of the classes, they did the paperclip challenge basically and said, “Go out and meet someone that you don't know, a stranger.” They met the stranger, not only that but they brought him back to the class. He sat in for four days and then he became the number one trainer in Robert's company That's what you're able to do is help people plug in and understand where they are now and very clearly define what level 1, level 2, gamify this whole thing based skillsets and get them paid the most amount they could be paid.
I'll leave it on this because it's right in with what you're saying. This whole thing started with a conversation about homelessness. Our Cofounder was homeless and he helped me learn a lot about that. The stories on our webpage, check it out. At the end of the day, this is a way to provide that stability and to understand that each individual in the world has value. The moment that you, as a person, understand your value and can tap into that, that's what's life-changing. Everyone deserves an opportunity. What you do with that opportunity is completely up to you but I do not believe that we should withhold opportunity from any individual on this planet. Work Entropy wants to bring that opportunity to everybody and help you realize your value and make the most value out of your time.
That's in full alignment. To me, the God who created us is giving us all of this, like the light switch has been turned on. When I talk to people like you that recognize that and are deploying the latest and greatest in AI to solve the world's problems whether it's hunger or women not making as much as men or every problem that's out there, can be solved by people like you. Kudos to you guys for what you're doing at Work Entropy. This has been an awesome conversation.
Thank you for having me. It's about solving human problems. You narrow in on a human problem and your business is solving that problem. I firmly believe in that. Don't try to solve too many problems at once. You'll only create new ones.
Andrew Kennedy, Cofounder of Work Entropy. What an amazing conversation. I feel like this is the conversation that helped me bridge the show and ScaleX.ai and you were the guy to help me do it so thank you for that. The lines have been coming to you.
I'd love to be on that show too and dive into my thoughts and company culture. My title is Head of Culture, externally CEO but it sounds fascinating.
We'll do that one next. I'm out for two weeks on some vacation. When I get back, I'll send you my calendar link and let's do it.
Sounds great. Enjoy your vacation. Thanks again for having me. I really appreciate it.
Thanks for joining me, Andrew Kennedy. What an awesome conversation. Visit WorkEntropy.com, see how you can get involved because whether you want to upgrade and move up whether you want to help other people, I'm sure there are ways you can get involved and help Work Entropy. Thank you. Catch you next time.
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About Andrew Kennedy
As a third-generation contributor to the gig economy, I have learned to pursue opportunities with a patient and an efficient mindset.
Humanity's storied history has taught me to cherish the good and learn from the bad. With history on our side, technology, now more than ever, provides us with a marvelous opportunity to thrive in ways that enrich our lives without exploiting our human value.
I strive to understand humanity's most challenging problems and create solutions that bring joy into our lives without commoditizing our attention.
The only constant is change. Adapt, sans mediocrity.
