EP067 - How Artificial Intelligence will change the future of work with Iwo Szapar at Remote-First Institute
About the episode
This episode focuses on artificial intelligence and how it will change the future of work. AI technologies are growing and are here to stay. Application options are endless, especially within and for the workforce. To discuss, we have Iwo Szapar, founder of Remote-How Academy and Remote-First Institute.
About the guest
Iwo is the co-founder & CEO of Remote-How Academy, which, since 2017, has been teaching companies around the world - including Walmart, PWC, and ING Bank - how to make the most of a distributed workforce. He and his team have been praised by Forbes and BBC.
He is also the co-founder and head of remote of Remote-first Institute, a think tank dedicated to moving the world forward with better remote work and distributed organizations.
Connect with Iwo on LinkedIn.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
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Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the show. This episode will be a fancy one. We will be talking with Iwo Szapar who is, I don't think that everyone needs an introduction what he's doing. He's doing five plus years in remote work consulting, remote work advocation, and many on, but he will introduce himself later. We will discuss how the future of work evolves right now in front of our eyes and what's the future of work for the near future involving AI. We will speak a lot of, about AI. So hi, Iwo. Welcome to the show. Thanks for making the time.
Thanks a lot for having me. It's great to be back.
It's great to be back. Yes. You're a second time on the show. So it's a weird question for you, but how did you start working remotely? What's your journey? And please bear in mind that the podcast has a runtime of one hour. So yeah no, I will get this one. I will give the headline.
Keep short. It was actually super long time ago because it was my first real job in 2011. I was an intern at the digital marketing agency and we've been told like, Hey, you can work anywhere. You can come to the office. You can work from a coffee shop, whatever. You just have a project. We had a very specific project that was our own. And that we needed to create and then monetize websites with news and stuff. That was my first experience that work can be done anywhere. But yeah, then it took six years of working office remote hybrid everything in between to go in the full remote first mode and then start actually a business around it. But yeah, it's been quite a long journey. When we first spoke, I think it was like two or three years ago I think it was even like 2018 or so when we were launching the Remote How Academy, so yes.
Yeah, time. You actually at that time you actually launched, so it was full-fledged. It was a longer course but there wasn't any consultant network behind it. It was a long course where, people gave some lectures and then so on and so on. And from there you started Remote First Institute. Now you are doing some AI stuff. So lots of things happened. How did you see the I think we can call it evolution of remote work from the start of the pandemic, and I think it's an interesting cornerstone, what happened after the pandemic as well. So how did you see that?
Yeah, so probably it's worth to mention where we were starting in 2017 when the idea was born, so at that time, remote was totally not on the table for a majority of organizations. What we associated with remote was mainly like home office on Friday because you had that plumber coming in or you actually needed to get some stuff done because in the office it was a constant chaos and you were not able to be productive. That was one of the most common thing that we heard before COVID when people are saying, Oh yeah, I need to work remotely from, because I need to finally finish this report so that the position we were starting and the reason why we actually decided to go with Remote How was what, two main reasons. So one was that the need of a mindset shift. So that companies needed to understand that decision makers that this is the model that works for already quite some companies at that time, the Buffers of ist, et cetera. But you need to know how to make this work. So you need knowledge. You need change management, you need training, et cetera, et cetera. So that was that the world before COVID and it was a slow transition and we were at the time in the world where there was a huge challenge with talent acquisition. So more and more companies started to look at having promote employees or like giving the option to be more distributed as a way to be a more competitive business. But still tiny portion of the market, a majority of companies, like I said allowed unofficial remote work from time to time. And of course, there was no structural change inside these organizations to be ready to have a distributed team, right? Even if they had two offices and they were collaborating with each other, they were already distributed, but there was like a huge legacy in how ineffective they were.
Sorry to stop you, but it's so interesting that because I also so the whole process, how people actually sold these and also yourself, how it sold these to other companies and the messaging around the whole concept was more about getting deeper done, as you said, that if you want to get shit done you do it at home because there is less distraction compared to the office. And that was like a selling point for most people because there was at that time, don't forget everyone that before COVID, the open plan office was like a staple for every creative knowledge type work. Yeah. And that's a very distractive environment. Not really great for collaboration. Even teams who are working in an open plan office, they tend to go to a meeting room separately to do some collaborative work together without any distraction and having some focus, but it's really disturbing for those who are doing some deep work and that was one of the messaging that you and the others also used around this. And the other one was really selling the idea of having a global workforce to solve the talent shortages that you might experience, especially, and that's where I think it's like relevant where both of our are coming from, you're coming from Poland, I'm coming from Hungary. These are like a limited markets for talent acquisition. But it was also great selling point for American companies. And that's actually changed pandemic. And what did you see? Because that's like putting the whole idea on steroids.
Yes and also one more important thing to mention here that I forgot on saying like the foundation story was that the changes in how people value experience over possession. So millennials at that time, that was the huge shift when they started to be like, okay, I don't need another salary raise. I prefer to be able to have more experiences which you could have seen in many reports, HR reports, left and right especially those coming from U. S. Or Western Europe showing that people want different things than just more money, right? And remote work was one of the enablers. That could give you this kind of experiences, right? That it's not always about traveling. You can still have interesting experience in your area around, right? So that was the point when we were starting and then COVID happens and there was no discussion if you believe in remote or not, if you are able to do it or not, if your organization is ready, no, it's just happens and you need to go with this. So I see this in right now as a retrospective, we had a couple of phases. So the phase one was complete chaos. And we're just trying to survive also in general as humans, right? So throughout all the waves that we had companies were in the survival mode, not doing any strategic changes, right? So that was mainly throughout the whole 2020. And then also they didn't know when they are heading with this longterm. Then in 2021, you had for the first time this like a back to the office thing. Maybe we can just hang out there, whatever. And that's basically something that keeps repeating every fall. So you had fall 2021 back, went back to the office, returned to the office. 2022, the same. Now, 2023, it's again, the same. They're wondering what will happen in one year. I don't know, because this is the moment after the summer where executives are coming back and okay, offices are empty. What the hell? We're paying so much money for this. So that was like this lack of a long term strategy change and with the long term strategy change comes a lot of internal aspects that needs to be adjusted. You need to put in resources, you need to put money, you need to put in people, you need to basically create a project that is changing. How you're working internally on so many different aspects. And as we all know learning and development and change management was neglected a lot for most companies before COVID hit and unfortunately for most companies, it's still the case because those are change management is super super hard, time consuming, you don't see results for most cases, you cannot see results immediately. And for training it's similar. Plus people, not everyone is a big fan of learning or learning new things because the old way was working so why we should, et cetera, et cetera. At the end of the day, where we are today, to have a closure here, it's no longer about remote, hybrid, distributed, remote first, whatever. It's just the way we need to change how we are working in general. And if you add, we will get to AI later, but if you add AI to this whole equation, right? It's basically a complete game changer. Yeah, no, I guess I will get there not because teasing like why we started to dig into this so much because finally there is a technology that can enable a lot of the best practices that we've been preaching for years to either empower the individual or on the organizational level. So set a lot of the stuff more on autopilot or like a process driven thing, rather than just remembering and changing behavior. So it's the best, honestly, it's the best what could have happened to distributed work movement to actually help accelerate this, but yeah, as of today we are again in the moment when there are huge changes happening already or will happen very soon. So organizations, they're not adopting and not investing in the change yet. They will just fall behind.
Yes, I totally agree. And just to reflect to the current situation that we have. And because it's super interesting and I also want to express that, yes, you started the remote how academy first, and then you started the remote first institute to provide some education and advocacy activities around remote work, which is to me it was a real, and forgive me, but it's a really weird thing because first you started the service and then started the advocation, not the other way around.
If we look at the timeline, Uhhuh , the first thing that we did was the Remote Future Summit. That we organized in June, 2018. And that was like the moment when we when, where Remote How was born. We organized a free virtual event for over 5,000 people from all over the world. Uhhuh. We had, I guess 118 countries. So we organized a big event. We had 64 speakers. A ton of content. The event was going on for a couple of days, and then at the end of the event, we ended up with hours and hours of content. We ended up with a big community of people that were interested in this remote work thing. And this is how we decided okay, there is a need for education, there is a need for community, so let's keep the remote how going into the direction of the education.
Yeah, and they were the first movers, and then the remote first institute actually advocates for those who were not the first movers, but they are still ready to adopt.
Yes. Yes. Plus in between what was kind of also accelerated the whole thing was the marketplace that we launched in 2021. So we launched a marketplace with over 200 experts in remote and hybrid that have been helping companies like Walmart, Microsoft, et cetera either on the consulting side or on the virtual side, virtual training side.
And I mentioned this only because it really ties into this to the present. And I don't know how you see, but I do believe that now no one really talks about remote work anymore. We talk about work. Which can be remote distributed hybrid or whatever we call it. It doesn't really matter how we named the child. It's totally different that we had somewhat different that we had during the pandemic and before the pandemic. Because the perception of the employees also changed. Now we are not just having digital nomads, we have remote workers who are working full time and so on and so on. So it totally changes the whole landscape and the picture. And now we see that many and even more, the majority of the companies that are starting right now at this now and during this present they are all remote. No one actually is investing in an office now, and I think we will plateau into somewhat like a characteristics of percentages between companies that they are fully office hybrid and remote. And I think it's important to see and that's where I want to tie into the AI. That do we and will we have more tools that can accelerate this change or help improve those who want to work remotely. So the question is. What do you see? What, where AI or will it be AI which can help to drive this boost in productivity?
Yes. I wouldn't say that when I see that the future of AI, it's all tied to the boost of productivity. No it's a big part of this for a sure ,this is what will be, what is already an outcome. And you have studies showing that the increase is 40 ish percent, some are saying even like 60 percent, et cetera. So let's say that even if it's 50 percent, it's like a lot. So definitely productivity is one thing. The other thing is because this is the productivity on the individual level, right? I can create a report faster. I can create this email faster and the list goes on and on. But then the next point or there will be a couple of them. So this is where we are today. And I haven't prepared an answer here. So let's see where I go with the imaginary of where AI is.
Let's give it a fly.
Let's give it a fly. Okay. So this is where we are right now. Then one of the next steps are AI assistance. So it's not just the tool that is giving you some answers, right? Like pure generative AI, but those are like a assistance that can perform certain tasks autonomously or semi autonomously, depending like how you structure the the workflow. This is where we are, this is where we're heading. Where everyone will have their own, a system, but it's still enhancing your productivity as an individual, right? Then what will be happening is how we can improve the organization or a team. The first thing that comes here is obviously to diagnose your challenges and diagnose what are the problems. And this is one of the things that we're doing with AI mentor and the distributed team audit that is doing for teams. So you need to pinpoint the challenges and you need to get solutions. Okay. This is basically the question where the the consultant role is, and then the whole change management process for sure, right now it, AI will be helping a lot and then speeding up the process. So looking at the team organization level, first use case is to understand what we need to improve. The other one is obviously tougher, but how we can empower our workflows with AI what kind of stuff can become eventually like fully AI powered as an example, like customer support, for instance, their companies are playing around with this to, to have this more or less on autopilot and then Last but not least one of the kind of end games here, which I'm extremely excited about, is how AI can help maintain and improve the context within the organization. Because this is I had a very interesting conversation with a friend of mine who asked me a question. What is the biggest difference between humans and AI? And I gave him a bunch of answers. They were correct, but that was not what he was looking for, and he said this one key word, context, AI is amazing at keeping the context. And if you look at a lot of the things that are within the organization, the culture, the processes, the documentation, how you're doing certain things, how you're communicating, blah, blah, blah, blah, millions of things that are basically creating the company itself besides the product, this is where AI can help. And what I'm saying here is that in the future, I see a future where each company has their own LLM, that is basically learning how the company is operating and is enhancing work of individuals and teams and then the company can also plug in to external LLMs that are specialized in certain aspects. Let's say how to operate as a distributed team or like how to be an amazing sales team, whatever it is, to incorporate this new context, this new know-how? So to wrap this up, we are at the very early stage of enhancing the knowledge worker experience with ai. And there is a really long way to go. But at the end of the day, an article that I just read today, we are heading towards not even a four day work week, but a three day work week according to Bill Gates.
Yes, totally. I think there are a lot of indirect effects of AI in terms of how we will work. I can't hold myself and want to ask one question. Maybe that's too deep for the audience. I don't know. But if the AI is the best to giving and keeping the context of the workforce or the organization or whatever they are doing as a group of people. If every company will have their own learning LLMs to work for them within their own context, within their own organization, how they work, what they do and so on, assisting that said particular individual company. Where does it lead in terms of intellectual property, for example, if you involve other LLMs in that. So pretty much what I'm trying to get here is that if you as a company working in a certain way, and your own AI helps you to further optimize the way you work anyway. The way you work, is it an intellectual property of your company, or is it just a habit how you work? And a practice how you work? Because if you involve other AI elements into your workflows, obviously they are sharing everything with each other, right? So other companies can replicate the processes of how you as a company work together. Yeah. Have you thought about that implication?
Yes, of course. So that's why we will see companies having their own LLMs which are not sharing the data with others. Right now most companies are using LLMs like GPT for Claude, et cetera which basically means that they are providing the data that is training that is being used to train these models to become to be even better. But then they're giving access to this data, right? Of course companies are trying, like open AI launched a few months ago the enterprise version, which basically means that. We're not sharing this with anyone. We're not using this to train. This is like your own LLM. So long term I would say even midterms midterm because companies are obviously slower to adapt and then individual users, but midterm companies that can afford this, because this is also way more costly to have your own LM that is also, that you're also training on your on your data. We'll go into this direction, but there will be a bunch of options and some of these companies are even, we'll even decide to do to with open source LLMs not to be dependent. So open source LLMs would definitely become more and more interesting for companies that would also mean that they would need to hire talent. Machine learning engineers for instance, that would be able to maintain it. But then if not, there will be options where you can just plug in to GPT5, six, whatever in the future and just leverage this know how. But of course everyone on board within your company need to understand that if you're using this, then this data is no longer private. So it's a trade off definitely.
It's interesting. It will be interesting to see how it will indirectly impact, for example, leadership and management, because if you think about it, it's pretty much an operating system that helps you run your company in a certain way, assist you, or pretty much runs things for you and how leaders and managers will react to that because right now. Even today, I think we give a lot of credit to certain leaderships leadership styles and leaders, how they lead a certain company and what can we learn from that individual approach but I personally, I do believe that most of these approaches are standardizable and template viable or AI viable if we can see that, what do you think?
Yeah. And honestly I don't have answers. I don't have all the answers. I never would, but the particular aspect of the future of management. And also the future of external experts that are coming to companies to help them, for instance on the leadership development front it's unclear because on the one side, let's maybe take this example of expert with a certain knowledge and experience, right? What if you can just talk with AI and at 24 seven and have it right. Of course there needs to be and this will probably never go away that the human interaction aspect. But we would need to redefine what it means to lead someone, what it means to manage someone because, it's no longer be about sending the message, Hey, what you're doing now. Hey, have you done this? Hey, I need this now, blah, blah, blah, blah, because those are the older processes that you should standardize. You should look for optimal solutions and a lot of them you can set. Somehow on autopilot, right? When it comes to, let's say, project planning and then project execution and then project summary, a lot of the project management that is happening can be AI powered to a certain extent, right? So for instance, this is one of the best things that Could have happened to end of micromanagement because finally you will get a technology that will prevent this micromanagement from happening, right? Or it will help to erase it. So at the end of the day, managers, leaders would finally need to spend more time on human interactions. And this is actually one of the things that is connected with the whole distributed work revolution. What we've been emphasizing that people that started to lead a distributed team because of COVID, they needed to become a small community manager of someone that is not just doing stuff related to projects, deadlines, blah, blah, blah.
Sure.
But it's also facilitating the culture within the company and within the team and it's actually doing stuff, not just saying that they're doing go culture, blah, blah, blah. But actually making this happen on a regular basis. From the manager perspective, team leader to put it simple, first of all have the invest in understanding how AI is working right now and where it's heading, what are the possibilities learn how it can help make your operational work easier. And then third invest in soft skills because once AI knows everything that the stuff that we are left with our soft skills.
Yes, totally. Totally. And then the mentor that you are building the AI mentor. So it directly impacts these kind of managerial styles. What does it do exactly and how people can leverage that? Tell me a little bit more about that. Just to move into like more solid, yeah yes.
So with AI mentor, we're playing around with a couple of different a assistance that are helping distributed teams. One of them is a distributed team audit, which basically means that team members are talking with AI about their work. Of course, it's structured, we have four different areas, communication, collaboration, leadership, etc. It takes between 10 to 15 minutes per area and it's basically an interview. AI is doing interview with your team members. It's like super conversational. It asks follow up questions, blah, blah, blah. And then at the end, you're getting a report as an individual with your distributed work score and overview on different areas instantly and it's free. And then if you want to do it for your team, you're doing a team report, which is basically saying, okay, those are the areas for improvement. Here are your challenges super, super in depth report. And those are the recommended solutions that, that you should take, right? So that's one of the things the other one is like a pure one on one ongoing coaching with a mentor where basically it becomes your go to person for anything related to your work. Can be related to helping your team perform better, can be anything like use cases are different. We also have a policy generator where you can generate your playbook, your handbook, your team agreement based on the input and your specific scenario. So yeah, and right now we're adding more and more, more AA assistance based on the needs of community. But yeah, it's really interesting to see what kind of use cases people have in mind, how AI can enhance their day to day work.
And do you have any feedback already?
Oh, yes. And actually this is the, so we've been building different products for these five, six years. And this is the best what we've heard so far. Which is like finally yes. And I've been putting building in public updates. Every month I'm just working on the one for November, but from the previous ones we had quotes like incredibly powerful output for a team seeking to level up managing distributed teams, or one of the best AI chatbots I interacted with, or it's not a standardized survey, but individualized Q and A kind of conversation, blah, blah, blah. People love it. We currently have 632 users. So this is interesting. I'm happy that people see the value. Honestly, people are shocked that this is so good because we've been building this basically there was a lot of trial and error, how to run this conversation. Because we have different stages and the things that they, I need to learn, blah, blah, blah. But once you get to a point where people are like, Oh shit, this is as if I'm talking with a human, and then you're not waiting weeks to get the report or like a presentation, you're like getting this instant, they're like. Wow and the reason here is because we've been doing this non AI way for a few years with our remote work audit. It was like a consulting project that we just knew the process and we just needed to transform this to be AI powered.
Very exciting. And just FYI, by the way, these kind of audits pre AI it was done, as you said, by a consultant or an external or whoever took a week or something. Oh, no, it took weeks and weeks to get the data, but to compile the report, it's another week.
So it's yeah, it was. It was a long process. I think.
And not to mention the price. So we usually. Oh, the price.
The price. The most expensive was 16, 000. Yeah, 16, 000 to run for 400 people. So basically right now you're slashing costs significantly which is also amazing because it helps to democratize the access. To this knowledge and democratize access to understanding what are your understanding what are the challenges. So it helps you make data driven decisions, like at the end of the day, a lot of the decisions that we're making are just like, I think that this is the right way. No, you need data, right? And not every company can afford to hire a Deloitte type of consultants. There are also not always great, but still like they will provide you with some input. So yeah, helping to provide more context more data to companies is definitely a way to go.
Let's close this conversation with some future telling, obviously. You said that, I think you read an article or and that's how you phrased it, but you said that there will be a three day work week in the near future. We are, this show is recorded in November, end of November 2023, so pretty much 2024. Let's say we are in 2030. How people will work, what people will work on in a three day work week, how will we work? It's almost like five to six years. It's pretty close, but not that close. And you and I both know that the whole market can shift to unproportional values within one or two years. If I remember back when I started working remotely in 2014. Oh my God. Like seriously, we didn't have tools at all. Nothing, no documentation. No, we didn't even talk about AI. We didn't even have Slack, nothing. And the market has been shifted within 10 years so much that now it's almost like unclear what's happening. So let's do some future telling. What do you think we will do within five years? And if there will be a three day work week, what people will work on? If everything or most of the things will be handled by AI, for example.
So on the three day workweek, I think we need to seriously start a serious conversation about universal basic income. And this is one of the things that the new, the old and new CEO of open AI is working on. There's a company that he co-founded called World Coin. I don't know if you've heard of them. Yes. Yeah. So for our listeners, world Coin is basically a hardware that is scanning your eye to tell that you're a human. Because in the future internet, you won't know if someone is a bot or a human. So that's one of the ways how we can think about the future, that universal basic income might become a thing. The other futuristic look at what we'll do with all this time I hope that more and more of us will get engaged in NGOs and in general community work, social work, helping fight the climate crisis. Those are the things that right now because of the five day work week and and the general setup of the society that is like growth driven to generalize this is something what might change. The other futuristic aspects lot of the stuff that were supposed to be a trend or a change will be accelerated. For instance productizing services, this is something where AI is perfect and distributed team audit is one of these examples where you can take the knowledge. Sure. Put it into the process and start selling this on a repeat basis. So that's another thing. Looking more into I wouldn't see even existing trends, but the reality, there will be more and more freelancers, there will be more and more people that are just doing stuff on their own and not necessarily digital freelancers, because more and more people would like to do something. Create something with their own hands, right? So there is this growing needs. Just yesterday, I got the message on my LinkedIn from someone that quit that's quitted the corporate job after eight years. And she's right now going to Sweden for three months to teach how to cook for vegans. And we'll focus on that right after doing data analysis for eight years. Those are the shifts that will happen in how people perceive work and life. It it started during the pandemic where people started to reevaluate what they're doing. And I think AI is like an another wind of change that will push this even further.
I saw a great movie a couple of months ago. It's called After Young where an android it is one of the center of the story. And the society is, it's pretty like a Apple commercial. Super minimalistic. Everything is like streamlined, self driven cars, no climate change issues or something like that. And the lead actor the protagonist he owns a tea shop and because he loves making tea dry tea and he does everything around tea because that's his thing. And I feel that's a very well optimistic, but it's like the future that we are trying to head to that people would do their thing, which is their thing. Everything is, it's individual. So you can pick your trade, pick your focus, pick your passion. And you don't need to worry about the income or how you sustain yourself, or what car you have, because every car is the same car. So it's interesting to see what will happen. And I do believe that yes, even within five years, we will see tremendous shifts in terms of how we work. And how we live. And how we live, yes totally. Totally. You're pretty findable. But in case no one knows who you are where people can find you and subscribe and sign up to the AI mentor, for example.
Definitely the best place to go to my LinkedIn and then you will find all the good stuff and all the links.
I will link everything in the podcast episode below. So make sure to visit anywhere that show as well. Cool. Thank you, Iwo. That was a great stuff. Super inspirational as always. Thanks a lot.
Looking forward to the third edition.
Me too couple of years and we'll be talking about humanoid robots.
I dunno if that will be Iwo having this podcast or Ai Iwo.
Or your automate automated autonomous avatar.
Exactly. It was really great. Thanks so much.
