Phillip Swan is the Managing Partner at Pi Partners, CRO at LingoAid, and Chief Product Officer of The AI Solution Group, where he specializes in crafting customer-centric go-to-market strategies. With a focus on aligning marketing, sales, product, and operations, Phillip helps create seamless customer experiences throughout the entire journey. At Pi Partners, a GTM Advisory firm known for its innovative solutions, he leads the charge in driving customer engagement and business growth. Passionate about sharing insights, Phillip uses various platforms to inspire and empower businesses to innovate and grow.
“To truly serve your customer, you’ve got to 'grok' them—immerse yourself in a 360-degree view of their world. It’s about understanding every pain point, every motivation, and it only comes from constant interviewing and testing. This goes beyond surface-level insights; it’s about making your customer the heartbeat of every department, every decision. Only then will they feel heard, and only then will you earn their loyalty.”
- Phillip Swan
Hello and welcome everybody to this episode of The Insight Interviews. I've got a guest for you today that is extremely forward thinking, and when I say forward thinking, I mean like into the future sci fi, you know, type of things. We've got words from the past that we're going to bring into the future., we've got somebody that looks to the horizon for us and can kind of be our guide on the way there. It's none other than Philip Swan. Listen to some of the things that Philip does. One of his latest projects is being the Chief Production Officer at the AI Solution Group, which I have a bunch of questions about. He's also the managing partner of PI Partners, which is a go to market advisory firm specializing in customer engagement and business growth. There's all kinds of quotes and media around this guy, but before I get into all of that, Phillip, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me, Jason. Super excited to be here and talking with you.
Yeah, me, too. Me too. I'm pumped for where we're going to go. I have all kinds of technology questions, some questions about how we even got here to be able to have this conversation today, I want to know some things about your history, but first question that we ask all of our guests to get us facing in a particular direction, is this. As you and I engage one another today, who or what are you grateful for today, Phillip?
First and foremost, I'm grateful to my family for their support and my entire journey through all of this. Without my family, I would be nothing quite honestly. That's one of my core tenants in life. But there's one person in particular who I'm truly thankful for, thankful to, I should say, and that's a gentleman by the name of JD Meier. JD used to be Satya Nadella’s head innovation coach at Microsoft and JD, and I have known each other for many, many years, and he has had more impact on my life than I ever give him gratitude or thanks for at any one time. He's an incredible human being, and he's what brought me to the AI Solution Group. He's what got me into language services. He's just an incredible person who likes to change the world, and that's his focus. It's about changing the world.
Very cool. Being grateful to those that that mentor us and kind of go before us and are part of the reason that we're here. Very cool. I've seen some quotes from you, and is it okay if we just dive in the deep end of the pool?
Oh, please. Go. Yeah, I'm ready.
Yeah, there's a quote from you that says, I don't know if I saw this on LinkedIn or somewhere else, but I think you said this: “My journey is about anticipating and shaping the future.” Is that something that you said, first of all?
Yes, absolutely.
Okay, so, anticipating the future is one thing. We all would like to think that we're doing that in some form or fashion, but you go so far, say, no, no, I want to help shape it. What do you mean by that?
So, I've always had this dreamer aspect of me, it goes back to my younger stages. Like, I used to dream up the craziest products and solutions out there and then what I do is I take those and is it possible to actually build it? So, I take the idea and just work back. So, everything I do is about working back, you know? So, I started working for the British and then the US government, and this is what brought me to the US, and even working for the government, we were building product, and we had to see into the future, to say what is going to happen in the world? Where do we have to be in order to supply, what we need to give to make national level and state level decisions? And it's a very big responsibility, and you know, looking at your customer, and centralizing your view and your customer, I literally visualize who the customer is. Sometimes it's myself and how I would envision using products and interacting with products, other times it's people I'm sitting next to on the plane, and other times, it's just general conversations with people to really understand their pain points. And so, I've been blessed. You know, I'm old enough to have gone through several transitions in technology, so I've been at the forefront of mobile, I've been at the forefront of what became Voiceover IP, and now I'm at the forefront of artificial intelligence. Everybody talks about artificial intelligence being new. It is not, and it's been around since the 1940s and it started off with my hero, Alan Turing, who, if anybody had watched the movie The Invitation Game, it is all about how he cracked German ciphers to help us win World War Two. And the whole point of there was about making a computer appear like a human being and the level of intelligence. Could it be sentient in a certain way? And so, there's always been this competition going on, and I started off programming in 1981 and a programming language called Lisp, which was designed in France to be for artificial intelligence. So, we're talking things that have been around for a very long time. What's changed is the copious amounts of data that we have and what has also changed is the compute power has also become more available, which is why you hear about companies like Nvidia and others like that, that have that technology. That's what's enabled this explosion. And even five years ago, you were still out in the boonies if you were talking about artificial intelligence. It's really only been since 2020 2021 2022 with open AI and Anthropic and Meta with their products, Google theirs, and IBM with what's next, and you just really see these large companies now investing billions and moving at a pace that many of themselves have never seen before. And when you look at the future, I start with, what's the future I want to create for myself, or what future am I solving for? And when it came to mobile it was, it was really quite simple. I need to be detached from a wire line and a computer so I can be out doing my job. And that was literally how I got into mobile and the very, very early days of it. And we can dig into all of those history if you want, but that's not really the focus. The focus for me is understanding the customer and what future are they solving for and really working to develop products and services that will help them reach their destination faster than their competition.
Yeah, thank you for that. The idea of like helping to shape the future, and I did read a lot of your history on first of all mobile, then voice over IP, then the internet. You do seem to have a knack of seeing the future and then being involved in it. And so, with the AI piece, I guess I want to ask some questions about you personally, but then I want to ask more global questions. So, for you, what is it that you see about AI that intrigues you the most? And then I guess a follow up question about that is, what like you did with mobile, like you did with the Internet, what is it that you see yourself doing with AI?
So that's a that's a really good question. The short answer is, we focused on what's called responsible AI. And there's a fundamental issue in AI today, and it's called hallucinations, which is where data is represented as the truth, when in fact, it isn't, and we see it in politics today. We see it in everyday life. We see it just on prompt that we do ourselves. And so how do you minimize? Because you can't eliminate it, so how do you minimize your exposure to hallucination? So that was one fundamental question that got me started on this journey with the AI solution group, because it was a common problem that we were seeing with our clients as we came together in this coalition of some of the most amazing talents and in the world that I've ever worked with. And these are all people I've worked with in the past, and we are ready to bring some good. Our focus is about, you know, being good for people and good for the planet, and that's where responsible AI really comes in. So, how do you really focus on responsible AI? Well, we have to understand the regulatory environment, first of all, and compliance environment. That is incredibly complex. It's moving. When the most mature your regulatory and compliance is coming out of the European Union at this point, and we're totally on top of this, but corporations are not. So, this is a big fear for C suites, right? How do I augment my organization, and reimagine my organization with responsible AI? Which means that you're not replacing people with AI, you are augmenting the human expertise with AI. And that's a key thing to note, because AI is not about the LLM. AI is not about the data. AI is not about the algorithm. It's all about the human expertise that you want to automate. So typically, I ask my CEOs that I work with, and the C suites that I work with, and we work with is, you know, what are the superpowers within your organization that that you must have in order to grow your business and scale your business? Once we've identified those, we really understand that, okay, what do we need to automate and replicate so that these superpowers can get amplified? This is the keyword. Amplify your business with responsible AI. And that could be any number of products, but you know, whatever you want this. So, when a CEO says, oh, we're using chat GPT. I'll go like, no, no, that's not your AI strategy, right?
It's funny to hear you laugh at that. That is mainly what we're doing. I fit into that same category. And I'm like, man, I'm doing good. I'm actually using this. I'm doing good. And here you are, like, no, no, young man, you're not even close. So, expand on that.
Look, don't get me wrong. I use a chat GPT, I use Perplexity, and I use Anthropic Claude, and those are the three different LLMs and Chats GPTs that I use, but I don't trust them. What I mean is like, so I asked the question, so I've become quite proficient in prompting. And the key thing on prompting, we can have a whole discussion about this a lot. It's like you are talking to arguably the most intelligent child, a baby, that you've ever seen in the world, and that baby will follow your instructions precisely. There's going to be left to right. So, it's all about the prompting, and so you get better results, and it does learn with you as you learn those. So really learning how to prompt and get the answers that you're looking for. And then once I've got all of that worked out, I then test the responses from each of those, and it's actually a fourth one that I use, called PI, and I just test the output from each of those, and then I apply logical analysis and critical thinking to the three or four outputs that I get to come up with my answer that really makes something. So, you don't just start and stop with chat GPT. You use chat GPT, you use others if you want to get your other inputs, to your questions into your prompt, and then you really formulate your own expertise. So, how it helps me myself is that it saves my research time by about 80% and it's,
incredible how much time I save, and my productivity has gone up commensurately as a result of that, right? So, I'm not cheating in terms of content. And that's the other thing. When you use any of those algorithms and you put content out there, that's not copyrightable, because it's not yours.
Oh my gosh. I already had two questions in my brain, and then what you said at the very end there, now I've got three questions. There are so many different avenues we can go down, but I need to ask about that last part. If I go to ChatGPT, let's say I want to do some new marketing, and I go to ChatGPT, and I ask it a bunch of questions, and I ask it to write me some new marketing and then I take that and I apply some of my own critical thinking to it, like you're talking about, and I get this amazing tagline for Rewire, like, that's our new tagline, that finally encompasses everything I want to do. Talk to me about, under that scenario, being copyrightable or not copyrightable?
So in my book, that would not be copyrightable. Now, if you change a word or two, then it starts bringing in your own art to it, right? But if it generates it, I will argue that you can't copyright that. And to be safe, you get the ideas, you get the motion going, it's like, oh, that triggers the thought process. It's that hint of creativity, like, oh, yeah. Now I'm going down a path and I can test this out, and that's how I use it. So, I never, and I do mean NEVER use what any of those GPTs spit out as me as gospel, right?
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that's a good kind of place to underline where, yeah, I know, just like, it would be the same thing with Google, right? Like you put in a search, or whatever it is, and you're still applying your own critical thought process to whatever type of answers you get back or whatever. None of it should be the gospel, just like when we're having real human interactions, right? What you say, I'm taking in, and then I'm applying my past experiences, what I know on the particular topic, what I'm curious about, all of those things go into the interaction that you and I are having right now. And the same thing with Google and even AI, you know, moving forward. So, you know, hearing you on that. Okay, so back to the original two questions. You said, really, if I'm a company and I want to look at what AI could do for me, like one of the things that you mentioned earlier with your own experiences, hey, I've cut down my research by 80%. Okay, that's massive, right? Because if I have a company where I'm employing a lot of researchers, and I could improve their efficiency by 80%, well, now there's something real happening there. So, it's not to replace, it's to augment. Do you have a particular story, or do you have a client in mind, or something that can take what you're saying, augmenting the human expertise from the theory, the idea that you just talked about to like, hey, here's a specific example. I just want to dig into that a little bit more.
So, let me give you an example of that. Let's just take business modeling. A big part of reimagining a business is, what does that business model look like? And it's not as simple as saying, okay, it's, we're going to use a dynamic pricing model, and, boom, we're done. No, no, no. It's really about how you how you take chaos, because right now we're in a state of chaos with AI and businesses, and I call it a tectonic shift of platforming for a very specific reason, right? Because is so massive what is going on with the AI, in terms of re-platforming and retraining entire organizations on how to leverage AI, that it’s got to start with the business model in our experience. And so, when we work with our clients on the business model, we delve straight into the chaos of their organization, the chaos of their business and start to get those threads of organization and clarity coming out of what is in those. And that is done in as simple as a one-day workshop where we're literally working dynamically together, cooperatively and co-innovating together, to really understand with clarity what a future business model state and canvas would look like, and we literally paint a canvas, and we draw on that canvas. We have all of the building blocks that go into this, and this is totally replicable. So, this is not a one and done thing. So, it's a framework that that we have, that we give to our clients. So, you know, the example is honestly with us. We use that term; we eat our own dog food.
Yeah.
So, we ran our company through this, and it was absolutely the best session in my X number of decades of working, best workshop I have ever done, because what it brings is energy. And when you have that energy in the room, and we were working remotely as well as in person, so when people are in Europe as well us doing this, so you don't even need to be physically in the same room to feel this energy, but it's that coalescing around the chaos and getting those threads out of the chaos into an organized, well planned, would be this is the first step on this. And by doing this, it's shaved off three months, and I'm not joking, three months of our own discovery cycle on how we go to market and what we go to market with, and we did that in one afternoon.
Yeah, that's the type of thing that I was looking for. And so, with your brand new organization, the AI Solution Group, you would was it fair to say that you would go into an organization that's curious about how they might have AI augment, like you said, the human expertise, take them through the process that you yourselves went through, and there's going to be something there, there’s going to be some sort of juice there, I would assume?
Well, that's one part as a starting point. But the real starting point is an AI readiness assessment and a data readiness assessment. So, there are two different assessments, depending on which path the client wants to go, because need to understand where to baseline. Before you can improve, you got to understand the baseline.
Where you are right now, yeah.
Where you are right now and then, frankly, you got to break it, because in order to grow something, you have to break what's already there.
Yeah.
And how we break it is that we work with our clients, for them, not us, for them to create a center of excellence around AI, so that they can. We teach them how to fish, and then they do it on their own. And then our incremental value is on helping them innovate. So, we are a true agency in that we will go through and do the work and co-innovate with our clients, and then rapidly distill the 100 + ideas that we come up with into 25. We rapidly distill those into five and then we have the engineering talent, which very few people have, the AI engineering talent, to take that one idea into production pilot. Production is the key word here, because it’s got to be about their brand, it's got to be in their voice of the customer. It's got to be everything, right? It's the whole go to market, including the product, so they're not distracting their engineering teams or product teams on anything going forward. We can test this out. They can go and then we do that knowledge transfer, literally as we're building it. So, they are learning, as an organization, how to build responsible AI solutions within their organization that are relevant to them.
Yeah, I know a lot of our coaching clients at Rewire, the topic of AI comes up often, all the way from, hey, I'm just curious about it, what do you know about it, to, man, we want to implement something with AI but we’re just not sure what. And I think what you all are doing is providing a solution to go, hey, let's do some baseline assessments, and then, based on those assessments, maybe we go to the canvas idea. There's a couple different places that you could go, right? Yeah, very cool.
We do a 10x Innovation Lab which is a three-day workshop with our clients.
What does that look like?
So what that looks like is, this is the idea of like, okay, we work with their executive team in one room, virtual or physical, and we literally start throwing the spaghetti against the wall, and come up with those ideas that together will work, that won't work, that will work, and we rapidly come up within one day to 25, and we take those 25 and really stump them hard in terms of trying to break them, and we end up with five. And then from those five we go down to one, right? So, by the end of the three-day workshop, you have one concept that we're going to take into production pilot, and we go off and start developing that.
Yeah, very cool, very cool. I have a suspicion people will want to reach out to you, and we'll get to that at the end, but, I mean, I'm excited just listening to you. So, with someone like you, who you just have more AI expertise than the rest of us bell curve people out here, and so with that being said, when you look into the horizon, I mean, I started off with your quote, “Your journey is about anticipating and shaping the future”, what is it that you see in the, let's just call it one year horizon, since things move so quickly in this world? One year from now, maybe three, what are you seeing that's normal, that today we would go no way. What do you what types of things do you see that fit under that category?
Things around security. Security would be one. I'm talking about cyber security. I think we're already seeing nation states use AI to penetrate political campaigns. We've seen that within the US. With both campaigns right now, there is data leakage that's going across the field everywhere, with respect to AI. So, your information. How do you protect yourself? AI security is a big thing right now. So, I see an immediate future for AI to rapidly change it, and I'm not going to get into any details here, because there's some secret sauce that we're thinking about.
Let me interrupt you, though. I want to make sure that I'm understanding you, because I think I might not be. Do you mean for the good or for the bad? I'm not following you.
For the good. AI security for the good, for the good, where you're able to protect your company's data
Okay.
Your clients and your company the company's clients data in such a way that the bad guys can’t get a hold of it, and in the traditional model of security, like with NIST frameworks and everything else, those are all being broken, and so there has to be something else.
Okay.
So there's real disruption. The other areas include, you know, just despite your imagination at this point, right? Because it's like, what can't we do? Which is why we start the conversation of, we help you reimagine your future business. You reimagine your business with responsible AI. And you know, it's that future we want to create, right? So, everybody's going to be different. So, then we work backwards of what products need to go in there. But I think the big areas that people are going to see some big changes in this, definitely on cyber security.
Yeah, yeah. And that's good, because I think with my first reaction to what you were saying was, yeah, it's just getting worse and worse. There are more hacks, there's more breaches, there's more this, and like, yikes. But you're saying, no, actually, AI will help protect this to a higher degree than we've had the ability to do in the past, which is, and these are my words, not yours, that's a little boring, but at the same time, really, really good that that's happening.
Yeah.
Right, like, I want my data to be secure, and I want my company's data to be secure. And so, yeah. Good. Those are really good things. As we wind down our time together here, is there anything, Phillip that I haven't asked you, that you want to make sure gets out there today?
So really, the big thing for me is about, I go back to sales and growth, and really by understanding your customer. And when you and I started our conversation privately, I use the term grok, your customer.
Yeah, yeah, talk about that some more.
So grok is G R O K, and it was a word that was made up by Robert A Heim, and back in 1960 when he published “A Stranger in a Strange Line”. Now you come into my geeky nature of being a sci fi freak all my whole life. And in that book, the term grok was introduced, which was where the aliens merged with the with your body, and you get this empathetic 360-degree view of whatever you're trying to understand, right? That's why I say “grok” your customer. You need to have that 360-degree view, up and down, all around of your target customer, so that you understand her pain points or his issues, or what's keeping her up at night, or what's really motivating him, right? It goes into all kinds of different areas. And when you understand that customer, which frankly only comes from interviewing, you got to get back to basics and really understanding that target audience, you're now qualified to start solving their problems. Now that doesn't mean to say that when you solve the problems in a way that they want you to solve them. That requires another set of interviews, right? So has what I built solve what you do? No iterate. No iterate. And you keep going until you go, Eureka. I found it, right? That doesn't happen that one time. It's by constant testing, testing, testing, and even when you think you've got it, you keep testing, and that way the customer feels that they're being heard. And the other part of grokking your customers, your entire organization, and including finance, including legal, has to have the customer in the center of everything that they do, because you're going to introduce friction into their buyer or customer journeys, and when you do that, you're giving them an opportunity to say, no. No, thank you, and they're gone. And in today's world, no loyalty. So, the big thing I really want to stress to your audience is work on grokking your customer, and don't do it at a surface level. Really work hard to understand it.
Yeah, that's a great place for us to end. Grok your customer. I have not heard that term before. I'm glad you explained it, and I certainly understand it after your explanation. Well, all the way from grokking your customer to AI Solutions and in a responsible way, and I'm glad you explained that a little bit today, Phillip. So, a wide-ranging discussion. I have a feeling people might want to reach out to you. What is the best way to make that happen?
The best way to make like, two ways to make that happen is I'm on LinkedIn. I'm active on LinkedIn, and my profile is Phillip with two L's, dash, S, W, A, N. I'd love for when you go there, the first thing you see is my newsletter. I'd love for you to subscribe to it, but really simply, email me, Phillip@theAIsolutiongroup.Ai
Phillip, such good information. I feel like you're our future Sherpa. You're going to take us by the hand and lead us into the future as you're helping to shape it. Thank you for everything that you're doing. I know enough about AI to be dangerous. You helped with that knowledge today, and I do know that the responsible AI piece of it is just a huge, huge part. So, the smarter people like you that are involved in helping out with the responsible pieces we figure all this out together from a country standpoint, humanity standpoint, that people like you that are looking at it from that vantage point are super important. So, thank you for what you're doing there, and thank you for your expertise and your time today, my friend.
Well, thank you, Jason, it's been an absolute pleasure. As you can tell, I'm passionate about these topics, so happy to chat anytime.
Well, I have a feeling there may be a request for a part two. Indeed, if that's the case, and I'm right about that, we will have that future conversation. So, Phillip, thanks again, my friend.
Thank you. Take care.
So many insights from Philip Swan from the AI Solution Group. Man, this guy, we could have talked for a couple of hours. He has way, way more expertise than we dug into. I went down the AI route with Phillip because he's just got so much expertise there, and there is so much that is happening minute by minute in that world that I think could help many of us, you and I included, that I wanted to kind of go down that path. So, things that I wrote down: I didn't even know there was a term to this, hallucinations within the AI world, whether it be deep fake things or, you know, we see this in the political world, with people trying to influence our elections, and whether it's in advertising or not, but hallucinations. In other words, things that AI creates that seem real, but they're not really real. And he talked a lot about responsible AI and what they're doing to fix that or mitigate that. And so, it's just an insight that I had is, I'm just really thankful that there's people that are looking at the responsibility around AI and what to do about that, and forging regulations, laws, processes around AI for that. And then the only other thing that I made note of was just us using AI to augment the human expertise, not to replace it, but to augment it. And so, if you are in the C suite and you're listening to this and thinking about, okay, is there an AI role in my organization? The answer is probably yes. Not to necessarily replace people, but to help augment what's already being done. And the thing that caught my attention with what he said was that, and this is a tech researcher, guy, that he is using AI to reduce his research time by 80%. Well, there's just super efficiency there, and can help productivity with all of us. So anyways, those are my insights as we end every episode of The Insight Interviews, it doesn't much matter what me as the host, what my insights are, but what really matters listeners are, what were your insights?
---
Thanks for reading. If you got any value at all from this episode, a little nugget all the way up to some big, huge insight, please do us a solid by subscribing, recommending, rating, and reviewing us on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or Google. That stuff matters to us, and it allows us to continue interviewing more awesome people.