[SNIPPET] Eric Schmidt - How can you be the best CEO ?

Matthieu Stefani (0:05)

We are the average of the people we spend the most time with. My name is Mathieu Stéphanie, and I invite entrepreneurs, athletes, and artists to raise my average, and yours. Just before we begin this episode, I'll switch to French for a brief moment to thank my sponsors.

And if I go back on your personal use of AI in this CEO job, I mean, you said you would empower your teams. What you described just now is probably what you've done for 40 years. What are your personal use, I mean, professional use of AI on a daily basis and this reasoning ?

Eric Schmidt (0:41)

Well, because I'm a programmer, I get to do things most people don't do.

Programmers are now been... Programmers used to build the house, now we design the house and the computer writes the code. So I've been writing various things similar to what you've been doing.

But that's more for as a hobby.

The way the steps work in a corporation, the first thing you have to do is get all the data connected.

There's a library called MCP, Model Context Protocol. My new passion. And I've been in the enterprise business for 40 years. MCP, which is essentially a server that talks to the historic databases, allows the large language model, and it could be anyone, to get, to essentially synthesize the data. That is a major change in architecture, because it means you can sit and you can literally see all the data that used to be segregated from you. And you can look at things. I own a rocket company, as you know, and the rocket company, I'm walking around the factory floor, and I'm thinking, what's in all these machines, these immense rocket machines ? Every one of them has a big computer in them, and none of them are talking to each other. So we agreed that we would interconnect them. And the first thing they did with, again, this is using a variant of Anthropic, and the company general uses Gemini and GCP, but for this one, Anthropic was the right answer, is just go look at what they're all doing using MCP connected to them. That telemetry monitoring allowed us to understand and save money and capital. Each of these machines is like $5 million, save me $5 million, I'm a pretty happy guy, right ? And you can save it because you can figure out efficiency and predictive analytics and things like that. So the first step, not to go on, but it's important to hear it, is just get everything interconnected. If you don't have everything interconnected, and the database of choice is ODOO, O-D-O-O right now, which is taking off, but you can do it with traditional ones as well.

And you build connectors for them. Then the second thing you do, is you start doing your current job in the current way, just reproducing what you're doing. So that takes another month. Everybody has to kind of figure that out. So the computer can now make the report that you would type in, it makes for you. That's labor saving. Then the third stage, which I'm literally dying for to see in these businesses, is the reasoning part. And the reasoning part is where you succeed. What are the questions ? First question of a CEO, is how do I have more revenue ? Revenue solves all known problems. How do I minimize my expenses while maximizing my revenue ? That's called profits. What is the best financial source of cash for work and essentially work financing, work product financing ? You can analyze all this. What's the correct split between equity and debt in today's market ? Now, these are all questions that you would ask a banker. Well, now you can just ask the computer, and the computer can give you the answer.

Matthieu Stefani (3:50)

It has all the data.

Eric Schmidt (3:51)

It has the data. Live, yeah. And more importantly, I'll give you one more which is a bit more sinister.

I'm sitting here and I have ten people, and there's some problem. And I say, what is the problem ? Now, let's imagine that one of the people is guilty of something. They're not going to say, oh, Eric, I apologize. I screwed up. You should fire me. That's not how humans work.

As a CEO, I want to understand analytically what's going on in my company. So let's imagine that the CFO has made a mistake. Now, the last thing you ever want to do is embarrass your CFO because it doesn't look good. But privately, if you get the analysis and you have the CFO's analysis, you can privately speak to the CFO and say, look, there's a mistake here. And they say, oh, that's not possible. Well, check it out. So as a CEO, the ability to anticipate problems is a key component of driving change.