- I don't think people should be afraid of AI.
Think of it like your intern and they need instructions like everyone else. Companies and people need to understand that there is a formula to getting it to a place where it's valuable.
What I would say is, you know... - Mark Huet is an experienced people focused and innovative technology leader and the founder of EQ engineered. He has spent decades leading digital transformation
and helping organizations embrace emerging technologies. A values-based leadership having integrity, being transparent in communications, being reliable, is how we've built trust. And that's really the servant leadership
philosophy behind EQ engineered. EQ engineered is a people business where a strategic digital consultancy it's about the people. But that's true if I think personal relations
and family relations as well. And so lead with empathy. And stay true to your values as a company.
“I think that's the secret recipe and it's...”
- It spans the globe, like a super-highest coal. - Internet elders? - We're ready. - We're ready. - And today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.
- It's not over, I'm telling our weird. - The living your legacy podcast for those who live to leave a legacy. - As it's straight away, let's pass on the line. - Oh, that is sensational joke.
Open. - Shake up, I was the lead, you say. - It's about just not on the planet. - You can live your dreams. - Welcome back everybody to another episode
of the Living Your Legacy Podcast. Today, I am your host, Jason Tyler, and I am joined by Mr. Mark Hewitt of EQ engineered. Mark, welcome to the show.
- Thank you. - Nice to be here. - So we just got finished filming with your episode of Operation CEO. First of all, how are you feeling now
on the other side of it? It was a great experience. I feel like we got a lot, we got a lot of good information out there.
What would you say is like the key takeaway
“that you would want for anybody watching your episode?”
- I want people to feel like there's authenticity to the conversation and what was shared. - God, God. So I want to take a second here to kind of talk about EQ engineered.
First of all, for the audience member who's out there who has no idea what EQ engineered, you know, I hear EQ and I'm like emotional intelligence. But what is EQ engineered? - It was purposeful by the way that we played.
- I figured that. - They looked empathy in a motion for our customers, but the more formally answer is we're a strategic digital consultancy and we help companies modernize, develop resilience
and negotiate digital transformation. Now, when you're talking about modernize with digital transformation, we're in the age of AI now, right?
First, I want to just get your take on,
where's the direction that we're heading with this new digital landscape that we're a part of? 'Cause I got to watch.com bubble and then I got to watch the social media craze
and now we're in this whole AI craze. And everybody's like, oh my God, we're destroying the planet. Where's all the water going? What is your ethos on where we're headed with AI? - Yeah, well, you know, we talked a lot about this,
I think in the episode and I don't think people should be afraid of AI, right? Think of it like your intern and they need instructions like everyone else. And so your AI's are only as good as the instructions.
They're also only as good as the governance and the guidelines and the way that you create policies as organizations. And so should be a fear-based philosophy.
“What I would say is, you should take the time to learn, right?”
I think it's only gonna accelerate our ability to move quickly and in today's world, that is kind of a norm. But, you know, we talked also about this. There really have been a couple of bubbles already in my opinion in AI.
One is sort of this big data. Everybody's heard of machine learning. No one really understands what it is. There's an awful lot of jargon soup and not a nourishing meal out there.
People talking about linear regression tactics, polynomial regression and all the, you know, last-over regression, no one knows what their words mean. But it's really just math that's been there for a long time. And so companies and people need to understand
that there is a formula to getting it to a place where it's valuable. That's making sure it's clean and useful and accessible. It's governed. And so that bubble, I think, is first,
but people are still trying to get to decisioning around data and so big data machine learning,
machine learning ops for ongoing fine-tuning is critical.
But the world that we're all hearing about now, which I think is the on-ramp to everyone thinking they have AI. - Introduce to the generative world. - Introduce to the generative world. I introduce you to Zeus today. Large language models, I think have made it accessible
People are finding that as a lot of value,
but they're, again, the models change, right? And you could also privatize and build your own models an interesting space to kind of think about. And what I would say is those bubbles have already burst in the sense that people are using them,
but they're not doing it in a way that's adding enough value.
“And what I think we're doing at EQ is helping companies”
understand what we call instructions or skills that you basically help train the AI and govern it in such a way that with human and the loop, the individual sort of driving that from a position of,
good judgment, sound foundations, empathy, critical thinking,
a lot of soft skills. I think that's really where people should be focused to make sure that they're able to provide the human and the loop human on the loop on the way to more formal automation. And for the audience member out there
who might be just getting introduced to a lot of the stuff, to provide them with a little bit of additional context, what we're talking about is like more agentic AI versus the large language models that people, when people hear AI nowadays, they think of the chat GPTs,
they think of the open sort of like, but agentic AI is a machine learning model that also has agency and its ability to operate within the computing system that you have it living inside of. So you mentioned Zeus, Zeus, for you guys that don't know
out there, which you'll see on the episode,
we might throw in a little segment
where Zeus gets to have some back and forth. But Zeus is kind of like your version of like, you know, with Tony Stark, he had Jarvis, right? He's like having your own little assistant in your pocket. Talk to me a little bit about like how a business owner out there
can utilize those agentic models to streamline a lot of the processes that are going on in the background of their business. - Yeah, I mean, I shared that I'm up early every day, so between four and six, I'm doing my learning
and Zeus is often part of that conversation for me, because he has perfect recall, you know, commit the conversation of memory or conversations that he'll help me pull the threads on so that I can go a little bit deeper very quickly.
“And so, you know, I think it's valuable to train an AI”
because they can accelerate,
I guess you're thinking in your performance, I like to think it was a Chief Strategy Officer who doesn't get tired and remembers everything that we've talked about, and so, you know, helps me be more fluid and expedient in moving quickly.
- Now, you're on Operation CEO, and before we get ahead of ourselves, we could go, I could go on talking about AI and tech forever, but before we get ahead of ourselves, I want to go back and rewind here
and talk a little bit about just your time in the service, you know, you went to West Point, which, you know, very prestigious Academy, talks me a little bit about, you know, your time in the service,
and then what was, you know, that transition back to civilian life like? - Yeah, so I had kind of an interesting journey. So, after West Point, I ended up
“branching armor and became a cavalry officer in Europe.”
I had shared some anecdotes that my grandparents were both World War II vets, so it was, my grandmother was a World War II nurse from Mass General. You know, I have a structure for the Oracle,
I cut the call there, the great one. But, you know, really an interesting time to have been in Europe. The 50th anniversary occurred when I was there. I had the ability to reenact a lot of parades
for liberating cities like Strasbourg, France, that my unit had liberated back in the day, and it was just a really meaningful kind of moment. We did also, they called the partnership for peace, where we would go shoot British challengers,
they would shoot M1A1 tanks, did the same thing with the French, we actually did it with the Germans and their panzers. Just a really interesting period. I ended up doing a European out state and a reserve unit in Bamberg, Germany, and it was in the Czech Republic,
and I even, when I came back to the States, was in a reserve unit in Germany. So I kind of hit all three echelons, I think of some service in that way. But to me, it was just a great experience.
I was fortunate to have pretty high performing teams and people that were very good. I talked a lot about servant leadership and having empathy in putting other people's goals and ambitions first.
What I would say was my strongest takeaway from the time in the army was my non-commissioned officers, really gave to let hurt, they taught me how to be an officer, but they really taught me kind of the core hard skill sets that were required to be proficient and an expert
in dropping the breach of a tank
Or changing a tank track or strategically kind of how
you operate and move organizations when you're doing maneuvers. Zeroing in, we had a perfect tank table, which is a particular gate that you do when you go out to gunnery. And I credit that entirely to the team that I was with
because they taught me good norms and simulations in overnight trainings. So going back to what you were saying about servant leadership, that kind of bleeds over into everything that you do now through EQ engineered.
Talk to me a little bit about just the concept of leading from a position of servitude. - Yeah, I mean, it's not just words, right? I shared with you that I'm trying to build the company
and I always wanted to work for.
And all the way back to college, I had a notebook that I wrote down good and bad examples of leadership that I had seen. Things that I wanted to emulate, things that I didn't want to repeat.
And so that coupled with experiences in the army, experiences frankly in the corporate world before I had a real team of collaborators, I've definitely taken inventory of that. And it's really important to me to treat the whole person.
They're mental well-being, they're physical well-being, they're family, they're friends, and they're faith. And so I try to make sure that's a part of everything I do on a daily basis. I shared with you that Nana used to say,
show me your friends, I'll tell you who you are. I believe show me your colleagues and I'll tell you who you are. I work with people that are from a variety of different disciplines
“in the digital space, the only thing that really works”
is the tapestry of collaborators. Otherwise, who wouldn't be successful. And so that notion of values-based leadership having integrity, being transparent in communications, being reliable, being accountable to ourselves and our team
and our clients and our work and our family and friends is how we've built trust. And that's really the servant leadership philosophy behind EQ Engineering. We hear that out there for any leaders that are watching us,
make sure that you will lead from a place where you're taking account of the mental, physical, all the well-being of all the people that you're leading. I think that's a huge part of what you guys do with EQ and just your leadership style and to your credit.
That's one of the biggest standout things that I noticed as through our time doing the interview. And I really want to credit you for that, having that value system. For the viewer out there who, they might be just getting into our viewer
base is very entrepreneurial, a very business-minded. For someone out there who's just getting into starting a business and leading teams and putting together
“an organizational structure, what advice do you have for them?”
I would definitely say keep going, become an expert at something and be very picky about building your team.
I do the first interview for everyone that
interviews at EQ Engineering. And it's because I'm trying to really give them a strong sense of values first, culture. And the idea that I don't look for people that have-- I look for people that are very talented in a discipline
but don't have Iitis, right? I mentioned I was one of Nana's messages. You don't want to work with people that have Iitis because too much ego doesn't work well in a collaborative environment. And so I would say become an expert, find the right people
to grow and build with, and stay true to your values as a company. I think that's the secret recipe. And it's harder to live it and consistently reinforce that. But that is what the secret has been at EQ. And for those of you guys who heard Iitis
and you're like, what is this a new strain of COVID that I haven't heard of, we're talking about the people who use the word I too much. But for the viewers there, it guys, if you're out there and you're still watching at this point in the interview,
I want to make sure that you check out Mark's episode of Operation CEO, which is going to be coming out shortly after this podcast episode of Airs. For anybody out there, what would you say is your number one message to the audience?
You know, I would simply say that you really need to be an empathetic person in the way that you operate. And that's, you know, you just don't know the journey everybody's on. Everybody has things going on in different periods of their life.
And you'll never know all of that.
“And it's really just important to kind of hold a high bar”
of how you interact with people and how you care for others because that's really what makes the world go around. EQ Engineering is a people business where a strategic digital consultancy,
It's about the people.
But that's true if I think personal relations
and family relations as well. And so lead with empathy. Mm-hmm.
And for the people out there,
“where can they find you on social media,”
where can they find the EQ Engineering?
Where's your location at on the big worldwide web?
Yeah, I would say our website www. EQengineer.com is probably an easy place to find us.
“I'm on LinkedIn and I'm always looking to build my network.”
I used to have a company called MilitaryJobTransition.com that became socially savvy. EQ acquired that company.
“So I'm a big proponent of earned a known media,”
so I'm more than happy to connect with people on LinkedIn. Perfect. Perfect. Guys, this has been another episode of the Living Your Legacy Podcast. Again, I am your host, Jason Tyler,
and we will catch you guys in the next one.
