Maximos Lih, founder and CEO of Emboldened LLC and a former operating partner at Google Ventures, argues that AI’s failures — not its successes — reveal a company’s biggest growth opportunities, and that leaders who treat AI as a one-for-one headcount swap destroy their own competitive moat. In this episode, Maximos draws on nearly a decade of investing in companies like Uber, Slack, and Flatiron Health to show why AI adoption is a leadership problem, not a tooling problem.
This episode answers:
- Why do most companies get AI adoption wrong from the start?
- What’s the difference between “the language of procurement” and “the language of utilization”?
- How did IKEA turn a 53% AI chatbot failure rate into $1.4 billion in new revenue?
- Why is efficiency a commodity that won’t protect your business?
- What single question reveals whether AI is actually working for you?
- How is the sales leader’s role expanding in the agentic age?
Ready to rethink how your team adopts AI? Connect with Maximos Lih at https://www.linkedin.com/in/maximoslih/
Visit us on Apple Podcast. You can also find SalesPOP! on all major podcast stations.
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