The UX Reckoning: Designing for an Agentic AI World with Drew Burdick, Founder of StealthX

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For decades, user experience has been built around a simple assumption: the human is the operator. We click, swipe, navigate, and tell systems what to do. But that assumption is breaking down. In this episode of Signal & Noise, hosts Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with Drew Burdick to explore what happens when AI systems stop waiting for instructions and start acting on our behalf. As agentic AI moves from experimentation to production, UX is no longer about screens and flows—it’s about designing relationships, trust, and alignment between humans and autonomous systems.Drew brings a practitioner’s perspective on how UX must evolve when agents anticipate intent, take action across systems, and reason about outcomes. We dig into what “Agentic UX” really means, which long-held UX assumptions no longer apply, and why the next generation of interfaces may be invisible, conversational, or entirely new in form. The conversation covers emerging interaction models, transparency and control, trust calibration, failure states, and the ethical responsibilities designers inherit when machines begin making decisions. We also discuss how UX teams, designers, and organizations need to restructure skills, roles, and workflows to stay relevant in an agentic world. This episode is for designers, product leaders, and technologists grappling with a fundamental shift: when AI becomes a collaborator instead of a tool, experience design becomes one of the most strategic disciplines in the company.

Read the full transcript bellow:

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Brett House (00:01)

Hey everybody, welcome back to Signal and Noise. We took a little bit of a break, but Rio Longacre and I are back with an incredible guest, Drew Burdick, ⁓ on the UX reckoning, designing for an agentic AI world. So Drew joins us from StealthX, right, who you're the founder and CEO of StealthX. You worked with Rio at Slalom Consulting, and I was reading up a little bit about StealthX, and you and I talked ahead of time.

As you've described it as designing and building and delivering great experiences for fat of ⁓ experiences fast. You're a SEAL team for quickly creating great experiences. You harness the power of strategy, design and technology. A lot of words that really describe UX in the next generation of UX. And I know you've ⁓ talked about a lot of this sort of in the ecosystem. You've done a ton of podcasting and thought leadership yourself. Tell the audience a little bit about yourself and what you're doing at Self X and how much you hate Duke.

Drew Burdick (01:06)

Hey, thanks for having the show. Yeah. So Charlotte, North Carolina. It was funny. We were talking a little bit ago and not Chapel Hill. Different, different UNC is where I hail from. And yeah, no to Duke. So a little bit about me. I've got over 15 years of experience in the design industry. I started my career as a graphic designer, moved into UX and product design, and I've worked in various companies and most recently was at slalom where Rio and I worked together, ⁓ working with fortune 500s, helping them solve kind of big sticky customer and employee experience problems. And then, ⁓ about a year and a half ago, I decided to jump ship. saw this massive tidal wave of AI coming for everyone. And I said, I want to be on the surfboard on that wave. I don't want to be on the battleship or the Titanic at the bottom of the wave. And so I quit. ⁓

Brett House (01:57)

I hear you that sounds common. I'm doing the same thing right now.

Rio (02:00)

Yeah, I'd rather be riding the wave than crushed by it,

Drew Burdick (02:04)

Yeah,

Brett House (02:04)

Yeah.

Drew Burdick (02:04)

yeah, right, right. Exactly. Yeah, I was like, okay, I want to get off the ship. So anyway, yeah, got a small team, 12 folks working within markets to help them solve, you know, experience problems. And we're leveraging AI in every part of that. So like we're using AI to design and build experiences quickly. We're building things that are powered by AI. ⁓ And it's been a blast, had an absolute blast since we started.

Brett House (02:28)

Yeah, and Rio described you before introducing you formally as sort of the guru when it comes to UX design and the next generation of this. just another before Rio introduces. Yeah. Yeah.

Rio (02:38)

Well, I think it's specifically for AI too, Brett. Like, you know, that he's just doing some really cool work. like that, I think it's like, and a lot of this is like, has never been done before. So I just love the content Drew's been creating his podcasts. He posts a lot on LinkedIn, blogs a lot. So I just thought it'd be great to have him on the show.

Drew Burdick (02:55)

Yeah, I appreciate it.

Brett House (02:55)

For sure, and before Rio introduces the theme of the show, which is sort of customary for our podcast where he'll tell you exactly what we're gonna talk about and get really wonky on, ⁓ just a little news about Signal & Noise. So this is our first episode with Drew where ⁓ Signal & Noise is an independent company. Signal & Noise LLC out of New Jersey. Rio and I are the co-founders and we're launching SignalAndNoise.ai. ⁓ come next year, probably a fast follow to CES. And it's not just the podcast. It's gonna have a whole editorial section driven by operators versus journalists that are sort of writing opinion pieces. So it's a lot of the key people like Drew and others in the industry that are doing the hard work and know what the opportunities and the risks are ⁓ in the ecosystem. And we're gonna have an executive voices.

A section to our media franchise where we have a bunch of guest execs that are subject matter experts across a bunch of key topics that we're all talking about from data strategy to AI. And we're going to be showcasing and promoting them ⁓ as ⁓ kind of a new media platform for this new age we're facing.

Rio (04:02)

Yeah, a place where creators can go and we're going to aggregate all that great content and really give people a place they can get their unfiltered, unvarnished opinions out there. And I think that we need more of that in this industry. So I'm excited for it, Brett. Stay tuned. It's just a few weeks out. ⁓ Website's almost done. And we've got some really, really great creators who have already said they're interested and are going to be contributing content. So super stoked about it. But back to this episode. So Drew, as I mentioned,

Really happy to have you on here. We've known each other for a bunch of years. worked together at Slalom where we did a lot of great customer experience, user experience work, strategy work. But the timing for this is great, right? Because we're now a couple of years into this, I guess three years into the whole AI thing, post-JATS GPT, right? And I wrote this article on it a couple of weeks ago about like, does this mean we redesigned everything was kind of the question that I posited in this article.

As we go to this future of user experience is going to be more AI first, AI native, and maybe quote unquote, agentic, right? Even though that's not totally defined yet, but there is a belief that everything's going to, like, SaaS is going to be redone, applications are going to be redone. Maybe we won't even need applications anymore, right? The whole user experience online is going to shift. And I wanted to talk about what does that mean, as well as how is that impacting the UX profession? I I wrote, it's funny, I posted.

You know, Brett, we were looking for some design help. I posted just a LinkedIn thing asking for a couple of independent designers. I got hundreds of people reach out. It was insane. And I don't think it reflects well on the state of the UX industry in terms of like how much work there is for practitioners. And I suspect AI is least partially to blame for that, right? It's just not as much production design work as there was. But you really look at why is this...

Drew Burdick (05:39)

Mm-hmm.

Brett House (05:51)

Well, and Rio, thank you for filtering that out because you didn't send me 300, you sent me two, which is...

Rio (05:57)

You know, I got hundreds. was bananas. but like, you look at UX, I mean, I've been working either, I mean, not a designer, but I've been working with designers, running teams of designers for, you know, about 20 years. You look at it over the past 30 years, like UX is really built in this, like several foundational assumptions, right? That the user is at the center of this, right? They're going to click, swipe, browse, navigate. And these interfaces that we created for them really designed as...almost as maps and control panels where humans could click, they could tell the system what to do by interacting with it. But I really feel like as we shift to this agentic future, this AI native future, maybe that model starts to collapse a little bit. Agentic AI is not going to wait for instructions necessarily. It's going to interact with you. It's going to maybe talk to other agents. In theory, should be even anticipating what's going on, or at least trying to.

It's going to gather context, take action, reason about goals, right? And then orchestrate not only within systems, but even across systems, which really is a huge change, right? And I think this begs a couple of questions. Number one, what happens to the dashboard or the interface? mean, does the whole, all of UI radically change? And then what does this do to UX as a profession, right? I does it reinvent itself in a positive way? Does it become a renaissance for the industry or does...

Or do we just have too many designers, right, who are in UX and many of them are frankly not gonna find homes in this new environment? I don't think we know the answers yet, but Drew, I thought you'd be the perfect person to bring on to have these discussions, because I don't really think anyone has front row to this change more so than you do. So welcome to the show, really excited. Main topics we're gonna cover is what happens when interface becomes changed or invisible.

What skills will UX teams need when AI takes over? And then how are we going to design systems and products and tools for this new reality? So Drew, welcome. Super glad to have you here.

Drew Burdick (07:55)

Yeah, no, I'm excited. And this is a fun topic. been, I probably spend like 50 % of every day talking about this stuff. So very good geek out and go real deep, real fast. So yeah, thanks for having me.

Brett House (08:06)

So it

Rio (08:06)

baby wait.

Brett House (08:06)

started at 10,000 foot level. How is AI changing the UX profession right now? Like, without going too deep. What are your perspectives on that?

Drew Burdick (08:13)

Yeah, for sure. So, ⁓ I'll start with this metaphor. I use it often with clients and people I'm talking to. And it's this idea that, ⁓ if you rewind the clock, you know, a couple of decades, we had, ⁓ VHS tapes, right? And it was, you had to put it in, rewind it when you were done, right? All the things. And if you wanted to load in,

Brett House (08:32)

Well, we had a Betamax VHS war before that, but yes.

Drew Burdick (08:35)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Exactly. That's

Rio (08:36)

Not everyone a beta, but some people did, right? There's that like war between the two, right?

Drew Burdick (08:38)

right. Yeah, yeah. And ⁓ I think a lot of people are kind of, you the next thing we had was DVD, right. And then after that, we had now streaming. And I think a lot of people think that we we've kind of turned from VHS to DVD, but we kind of skipped the DVD and went to streaming. Right. Is really the way that I think about it. And like to kind of bring that to more reality. There's a lot of you exers right now that are like, like we just, it's still, there's still a physical thing that we're putting in a device and we're going to play it and it's going to do the music and whatever, play movie or whatever. And it's like, sure. Some companies aren't ready for streaming yet. Right? Like clients that we work with, ⁓ we actually have a client right now where, ⁓ they have this 15 year old kind of piece of software, enterprise software. And when we originally started working on this project with them, we like concept of this whole kind of AI forward type of a, you know, product.

And they were like, we don't, but what about the filters and the search and the sorting and the tables? we're like, ⁓ exactly, exactly. So there's kind of this like funny dance right now where you still have companies that are mentally in the VHS world. You have UXers who are like, can continue to make VHSs, which I think that's a dying breed.

Brett House (09:42)

Which is a classic UI solution, right?

Drew Burdick (10:00)

Then you have the people who are like, we're working on DVDs, which is kind of the next turn, right? Where you're doing more like agent powered, agentic kind of workflows within a classic user interface. And then there's like something entirely different, which is where the interface starts to disappear and you're really solving a completely different problem. So at a 50,000 foot view, that's kind of how we think about it and how we've been telling clients about it.

Rio (10:18)

Yeah. Yeah.

Brett House (10:18)

Hold on, I just got a funny question on this. Where do LPs fit into this mix? Right? You talk... Because if the analogy holds, your question next, I promise, but if this analogy holds, DVDs and CDs had a pretty short lifespan, kind of like tapes did, and went defunct. Right? So where the hell do LPs and albums fit into the play, right? They've stuck around for some reason. But anyways, ⁓ I get what you're saying from an analogy perspective.

Rio (10:36)

Tapes are coming back now.

Drew Burdick (10:41)

That's a great question.

Rio (10:44)

Yeah. Yeah. No, I think people are living in different worlds now. I think that that is a really good analogy. Right. And then what I think is so interesting about the shift that you're right. You've worked in UX for years. Right. And as a design professional, right, there's this whole concept of UX was people are going to interact with systems. We have to watch them. We have to see how they interact. We're going to have to get understand their needs or requirements. And we're going to build the backlog of features and we're going to design around this. We're going to create tools and systems around this, right? I think what's so interesting is no one really knows what they want. No one knows what it's going to look like. Is it just going to be a bunch of prompts? Is it going to interact with people? So a lot of it almost seems to me like is like guesswork where we're reinventing things and it's more or less grounded in like ethnographic, qualitative, quantitative research and more like we're just going to create things based on what we think people will probably want and we'll hope that they like them and then maybe change them over time. I think it's almost turning the whole process around. I if that makes sense or not.

Drew Burdick (11:44)

Totally agree,

Brett House (11:44)

Is that a

Drew Burdick (11:46)

totally.

Brett House (11:46)

build it and they will come type of mentality though?

Drew Burdick (11:48)

I think it's a hypothesis driven. like we've, you know, to your point Rio, like we've gone previously, ethnographic research really kind of seek to understand what customers and users need and want. And then you're designing against those things. And I think you tagged me in something LinkedIn yesterday, ⁓ which was spot on. It's basically, you know, if you do what the customers or users are asking for, that's not actually solving their needs or their problems. Sometimes they like don't know, they don't know what they actually want. ⁓ the thing that's like the nuance here is to your point.

We're like, it's the same thing that happened when like planes were created, right? Like Kitty Hawk, right? The Wright brothers like built the plane and everyone's like, this is like a different, I don't have to drive anywhere or like going from horses to cars. So what we've been seeing often is you kind of develop these hypotheses to test, right? And because of the cost of designing and building things is so much less now, you can test a whole lot faster and put things in front of people and kind of understand like what their mental models are and how do you stair step them into kind of new paradigms, right?

Brett House (12:52)

Yeah, and you make a critical point about the fact that your customers aren't going to tell you this stuff, right? The customer that's using the horse and buggy isn't going to tell you that they want the car, right? The customer that's... Yeah, yeah, the customer...

Rio (13:01)

But they'll tell you they want to go faster, right? And

Drew Burdick (13:03)

Yeah, faster horse.

Rio (13:04)

that's what they need. Now, they might want a faster horse, but what they need is to go faster.

Brett House (13:08)

Yeah, it's an innovator's dilemma. This is the classic Clayton Christensen. If you listen to customers too hard and too fast, they're not going to tell you what the next wave is. And the next wave is going to be the wave that disrupts you. So don't adapt to that. So that sounds very interesting.

Drew Burdick (13:25)

Yeah.

Rio (13:25)

Yeah, but I think that like how much of this is like, okay, so it's hypothesis driven, you're creating things. I like that, Drew, where you're saying like, it doesn't matter if they're off. It doesn't matter if we don't know. We can move quicker now in this age because I imagine like design is becoming more AI enabled, right? So you're moving faster with smaller teams, more nimble. The iterative cycle is probably much quicker now, right?

Drew Burdick (13:44)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, for sure. Like, so we use a lot of different tools to really quickly build proof. We call it proof of value, which is essentially like we're using cursor cloud code. Yeah. Like, yeah, yeah. Well, and truly like it's that's our, that's our whole mantra is speed to market, speed to value. Like how quickly can we get something in the market, test and learn, determine if there's true value there, right? Value to the business value to the customer. And,

Rio (14:00)

That's so much better than proof of concept, by the way.

Brett House (14:02)

Proof of- proof of value, yes this is a- for sure.

Drew Burdick (14:20)

The cost of building is so cheap. we can, in a couple of weeks, we can get something in the hands of a customer with real data that actually works. We're not spending tons of cycles, like trying to like build out the infrastructure or build out authentication or build out the databases or whatever. Like those things you can just turnkey, you know, hook them up and it works. And then you're able to validate like, okay, this is, this is actually working. And obviously I'm using the, the frame of like bringing a new thing to the market, a new. a new product, a new capability, a new feature. When you're working in like Brownfield existing SaaS, it's a little bit different. We've like, we're working with a client right now. They're a legacy SaaS company and they were like, we got to figure out how to like take this and make it more AI forward. And as we kind of looked under the.

Rio (15:07)

By that, do they mean just slap like a prompt box on top of the website? What do they mean? Yeah.

Brett House (15:09)

Some conversational prop to enable that, yeah.

Drew Burdick (15:13)

Yeah, well, they basically were like, we're going to get disrupted, right? They're a specific industry. They're, they're really concerned about the disruption piece. And so they brought us in, you know, we kind of position ourselves as special forces, SEAL team, whatever. And they're like, Hey, can you just like go run in a on the side and figure out like what we should do? So we helped them figure out the strategy, built a proof of value and got, you know, everybody excited about it, right? Cause we tested with people and they were really excited. And then now we're.

Brett House (15:26)

Yeah.

Drew Burdick (15:42)

What was built as a separate kind of like sidecar, it's now becoming part of, it's going to be integrated into the whole mothership. And that's what we're doing right now. We're like bringing it in, but we started with this independent, let's make it easy to talk to your data. Let's make it easy to have agentic powered workflows so that people are getting proactive insight versus them having to go search, sort, filter and find what they're looking for.

Rio (16:03)

Are they seeing that the new version you've deployed is like performing better? Do people like it more? Are they getting better feedback? I mean, what's the rationale for them wanting to collapse this together? Or is just they're saying we need to be like forward-looking?

Brett House (16:04)

Yeah.

Drew Burdick (16:15)

Yeah, it's, it's kind of a combination of both. want to be forward looking, also today. So they work in the employee recognition and reward space, which is like super niche SAS, but they work with massive enterprises and program administrators are people who like run these rewards programs. ⁓ And what happens is that they're going and they're like generating reports and then the report doesn't do what they want. So they hit up their customer success person. like, Hey, we need a special report. And then they're having a make these spreadsheets and stuff. And we're like, hey, what if you wrapped all of that information in an MCP server, which is basically a way to give AI access to that data. And then those program administrators, when they want a specific type of report or anything, data visualization, whatever, they can just like talk to it and it will generate it on the fly. And they were like, that's possible? And we're like, yeah, that's totally possible. And then we built it for them. And now they're like, this is the new mental model. Like we don't want a custom report every time and our customer success people are having to like create spreadsheets, just talk to it and get what you need, right?

Brett House (17:16)

Yeah, well, yeah, in the the mental model and that there's a lot of key themes going on here because we talked about proof of value really, which goes down to what is the need state and how do we actually translate that so there isn't sort of human blockage or human blockers, right, ⁓ that are sort of preventing something from happening. So one of my buddies who Rio is a very good friend of Judah Phillips, Jonathan Corbin, he launched a org called Maven AGI that just raised about $78, $80 million. They're one of the big startups, AI startups. Yeah, one of the big, they're one of the top three startups, AI startups coming out of Boston, and they're supporting customer success and customer experience use cases, right? Like customer support use cases, right? He came from a customer success background ⁓ with like companies like HubSpot and things like that.

Rio (17:46)

Was it their seed? That was their seed round, right? The the raises are crazy now, right?

Brett House (18:06)

And he was saying he posted something on LinkedIn that I thought was super interesting. He said 38 % of companies are now piloting AI agents, but only 11 % are actually pushing these things into production. Right? And he...

Rio (18:19)

Yeah, but Brett, that reminds me of that bullshit, like that study by McKinsey that would everyone publish 95 % of these proof of concepts fail, which I thought it was kind of, I think that's BS, right? I mean, like.

Brett House (18:31)

Well, no, but he's saying that a proof of cut, but that that 11 % of people that are actually pushing a production, the remaining, you know, ⁓ X percent are just procrastinating, right? It's not, it's not proving value. They're just jumping on a bandwagon to show. And it sounds like you're, you're trying to really connect the dots with the build and the actual end value that you're delivering to the client. Cause if that's not clear and immediately apparent and trackable, then what are you building it for? Right.

Drew Burdick (18:59)

Yeah, totally. I think I wanted to share like something that with the lens of UX, all these roles are collapsing too, right? So like what once was you have this role and this role, you have a product manager or product owner, you've got a UX designer, you have a software engineer, you might have, you know, a QA person, like this stuff is all just like collapsing into one or two roles. And I think that's the other thing that a lot of designers product people, engineers aren't willing to do maybe. Like there's kind of, you all have probably read the book, or Who Moved My Cheese? And like such a great allegory, but it kind of like the people who are just like, no, no, la, la, la, like the cheese will come back again. And you're like, no, it's not, it's not coming back, right? Cheese is gone, we gotta move. And so the folks that I'm seeing that are, you mentioned Rio, like 200 plus people applied to this role. Like we've seen the same thing, but those people are, it's the folks who are.

Brett House (19:36)

Yeah.

Rio (19:43)

She's gone, yeah.

Drew Burdick (19:56)

wanting to stay in the world of I'm gonna be in Figma pushing pixels, designing interface, or if you're an engineer, it's, yeah, exactly. They're like, know, there are, and arguably they're even the VHS people, right? That are like, the VHS will never die. And you're like, it's dead, or it's on its way out, right?

Brett House (20:01)

Yeah, the DVD people. ⁓Yeah.

Rio (20:13)

Yeah, if your work is resizing banners or just making different variants of things, I can't imagine there's too much of that work anymore. There's probably some, but I'm sure AI is doing a lot of it. Clients are maybe doing a lot of the resells. But I thought you brought up a really good point, Drew, about how these teams are collapsing.

I think my hypothesis and based on I'm seeing, I think there's actually a lot of design work for design leaders, but design leaders because of the AI tools can now, they can kind of be engineers or at least they can do some engineering. They can kind of be productors. A lot of things they can probably, you can probably do as a design leader that you couldn't do before. I wonder if you could maybe spend a moment on that.

Drew Burdick (20:53)

Yeah, for sure. So, ⁓ I'll kind of rewind the clock three years ago and, this is like pre ancient history at this point. Yeah. so if you recall, like when all these things were starting to come online, right? Chat, GPT and Claude and Gemini and all this stuff. And well, at that time it was called Bard. ⁓ you could all just, everybody was kind of, ⁓ it hallucinates and the quality is bad and so on and so forth. Every three months, every month, really it's like the quality continues to jump.

Brett House (20:58)

Ancient history!

Drew Burdick (21:22)

further and further along. And so about a year ago, they're starting to become this.

Brett House (21:26)

And if you're not seeing that, you're not using it. Sorry.

Drew Burdick (21:28)

Exactly, exactly. And there's people that in that they have the paradigm of like, it's still capable of what it was three years ago. That's not.

Rio (21:34)

yeah, the one he tells you, it hallucinates all the time. Like he's not used, I mean, you have to check things, but yeah, for sure.

Brett House (21:36)

yeah, it's the ultimate mental blocker, for sure.

Drew Burdick (21:40)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, a year ago ish there was this term that came out vibe coding, right? And it's been knocked so many times like, it's not quality code. It's not whatever. Like you're missing the point. Like the point is you can use tools like Figma make lovable bolts, et cetera, to quickly and efficiently spin up an interface.

Brett House (21:58)

Loveable, yeah.

Drew Burdick (22:06)

right? And test ideas and concepts with real users or stakeholders, get feedback. Exactly. Exactly.

Brett House (22:10)

without being an engineer or a coder, right? You can put an MVP, Judah Phillips, our buddy who runs Boston AI Week, was coaching me on that. And he's just like, get lovable, get ChatGPT Pro, pay the $200 a month, stop with your Japanese, my wife, we tend to be a little bit more conservative with our spending, but he's like, screw that Japanese behavior and go ahead and buy it. Right? I was like, okay, Judah, but you're right. mean, it allows the non-engineer the non-coder, the non-producer to actually build this stuff, right?

Rio (22:44)

And even beyond engineering, there's probably other stuff too. I mean, you can use it for so many things that are time consuming, that are fairly specialized, that would take a lot of research, organization. It's just great at doing these things.

Drew Burdick (23:00)

Yeah, we, we, so, I have an AI and engineering leader and we were actually getting ready to launch a product that we built for ourselves to the market. And, ⁓ I vibe coded the whole thing and, and in lovable. And I basically was like, Hey, Rick, I built this thing. Here's kind of what I'm thinking. Here's what, you know, and then he took that and then he basically rebuilt it using cloud code and cursor in a very well architected, scalable way. And it was like, it was great because it

Brett House (23:28)

You had a messy MVP, but it was good enough to enable him to build it like with... yeah.

Drew Burdick (23:31)

Exactly. Exactly. And it was great because it helped cut out a lot of the miscommunication around feature, you know, feature requirements, technical expectations. It was like, it was very clear because you could actually like, it had a real database that he could look at the schema. It had real, you know, data that I put in there and it was like, yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. So we went from, you know, my vibe coded thing to real actual product in like a couple of weeks because it was.

We didn't have to have all the meetings and back and forth and documents and it was just pretty simple and clear, right?

Brett House (24:10)

Yeah, and I think we've got a cat going wild in the background. Is that a cat or is that a child? That's all right, we can keep talking. I was like, it sounds like a cat, but don't cat, you know the funny thing is, this is just a bit of a side, is that cats have evolved despite their lesser amount of time with humans than dogs, so they're not quite as, you know, that's why they're considered somewhat antisocial.

Rio (24:13)

Sorry, my cat is going crazy. Let me kick him out of here.

Brett House (24:32)

But they've evolved, they have so much vocal range, they have like 250 different, I have two cats, so this is what I know, 250 different vocal octaves and levels they can, which is exponentially more than canines. they've, yeah, but they've evolved to make sounds that are very close to human baby sounds, which humans cannot resist, right? And so they're controlling us, we're not controlling them.

Rio (24:44)

That's something AI can do. AI can maybe decode how cats communicate, right?

Well, my cat, when he's hungry, he jumps on my desk and goes right by my ear and makes those sounds, Brett. it's...

Brett House (25:05)

Yeah, you're like, it's a baby crying. And then this biological mechanism kicks in. I must protect the baby. And it's your damn cat. But sorry, we said we were going to make this podcast entertaining, Drew. So I apologize if we get off a little topic. But wait, where were we? Sorry. Right before.

Drew Burdick (25:17)

Ha ha No, no.

Yeah, yeah. So ⁓ basically the TLDR is it's so much faster and easier to prototype and then get that to an actual engineer. And then, you the other side of the coin is we just recently went through our own hiring exercise. We were trying to hire what we're calling AI forward engineers. And it is extremely difficult not only to find like AI forward UX, like designers, but AI forward engineers, because

Drew Burdick (25:48)

that you kind of ask them like, you're using these tools, right? And they're like, yeah, yeah, totally, totally. And then you start actually looking at what they're doing and you're like, nope, you're not.

Brett House (25:58)

You're not building prototypes. You're not building MVPs like you did with the vibe coding use case.

Drew Burdick (26:02)

Well, and not only that, it's, P have you probably have heard the concept of like a 10 X designer or 10 X engineer. Really? We're now in the like a hundred X territory where, uh, designers and engineers can have these different agents and subagents that are performing different parts of the process. And they're essentially like watching over those things and orchestrating to make sure that they get to the outcome. And like, it's a very different. You're moving like moving up in altitude as a.

Brett House (26:09)

Yeah. Yeah.

Drew Burdick (26:32)

a practitioner because you're no longer like executing on all the stuff you're watching and making sure that the stuff is executed well so it's almost like everyone's becoming a manager right just in

Brett House (26:40)

Yeah, well, yeah, let me ground this into reality with both creative directors who I've managed and worked with for a long time. And I've got very specific use cases. Now in my own behavior, think kind of mirrors what you're saying is that as a practitioner, I'm not just asking while I'm in a project. I actually have a bunch of ⁓ like deep learning exercises happening on the side while I'm doing something.

Right. And so I'm going into chat GPT pro and I'm having it build all this stuff for me, which could take 10 minutes. could take 20 minutes depending on the level of complexity while I'm doing other stuff. So it allows you to do all this concurrent sort of productivity action, which kind of is it's a compounding effect. I mean, now a hundred acts, that's, that's, that's pretty aggressive. That's pretty ambitious versus 10 X. Right.

Drew Burdick (27:24)

Yeah. mean, like think about it this way though, right? If you have as an engineer, right? You have an agent that's doing, ⁓ pull requests reviews. don't know you know what pull request is, but it's basically like once code is ready to kind of review, someone will check it and make sure it's good. And then they'll merge it into the main repo. ⁓ you got an agent that does that. You have an agent that's doing like this one part of the architecture that have an agent that's doing all your deployments. have an agent that's doing, so you have what previously would have taken.

30 engineers, 15 engineers, and you have one person with a number of agents that are doing these things. And what's pretty cool, I don't know if you all have used Claude or how much you've used Claude, but ⁓ Claude code is by far one of the most powerful tools for this. you can have...

Rio (28:09)

Yeah, for code generation, Claude's the best. ⁓ you look at the numbers and they've captured B2B just like Chatsheet BT has captured B2C.

Drew Burdick (28:17)

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But like you can teach it skills and you can make these little sub agents that you can train on your information and then it will, it'll execute on those different tasks. So that's why I think if you look at like what engineers are doing right now, I think design and marketers and pretty much all other capabilities or functions should be thinking the same way. Like how do you start to create ⁓ a swarm of agents that are

Brett House (28:40)

But between thought and action, how do you, like to me, the biggest blocker, right back to that, like sort of utilization, taking things out of like prototype sort of procrastination hell, actually getting things that are useful for teams. mean, Coca Cola's CMO was CEO, excuse me, Manolo Arroyo was interviewed in the drum. And he was, his whole conversation was about ⁓ the importance of human capital. you know, again, you know, he's defending his team and his resources but how human creativity and human sort of orchestration is gonna be critical when combined with these AI capabilities, right?

Rio (29:17)

Well, Brett, this is an interesting point you bring up, Because someone asked me the other day, in fact, saw Spencer Skates, he's CEO of Amplitude, their product analytics, a great tool, I've done a lot of work with him. He tweeted the other day about junior people using AI, which being much more effective. And my response was...This what I've seen, and granted this is in consulting, right, and then in some related fields, is that I've actually seen senior people, because of the subject matter expertise they have, the ability to connect dots, and the ability to understand, have the context to bring in better content, write prompts that are fairly well structured, and iteratively work with the AI, I've actually seen senior people get more value more quickly than some junior people, which is almost paradoxical, right?

Brett House (30:09)

Yeah.

Rio (30:10)

I actually think in this new environment, Drew, like the 10x, 100x, whatever it's going to be, having that knowledge, AI, it's almost like it's an accelerator based on, but if you're starting from zero, if you don't know what to ask it, if you don't know how to work with it, it'll help you, but I find people with that knowledge, you're the ones that become the 10x or 100x or whatever that multiple is, the people with that background. So I think I actually favor senior people, which is interesting.

Drew Burdick (30:35)

Yep. I totally agree. I also, I want to go back to something Brett said, which is a core thesis of ours. ⁓ so all these sort of agents and things we just talked about that make the work easier or faster, ⁓ means that what will matter most is a differentiated, unique, memorable brand and experience. ⁓ because everything else, everything else is getting commoditized, right? Like the, execution is the easy part. The hard part becomes like, what should we build? How are we gonna bring it to market? How do we get in front of people, right? How do we build an audience and distribution here? And then also making sure that you stand out among all the sort of sameness, right? Because all this stuff, again, like if you're just like quickly building things and whatever, and that becomes the status quo, that I think is where it matters. And the human moments, like you said, Brett, like it's the moments that matter in the journey where we should be spending more as, you know, as a designer, we should be thinking more intentionally about, okay,

These things can be optimized and automated. These things can be streamlined by AI. This is the part that I really need to think deeply about and understand the nuance, because it's like a key moment in their journey, right?

Rio (31:44)

But true, it brings up an interesting point though. If everyone's going towards an interface with a prompt, like how do you differentiate, right? Like if everyone of my prompt's purple background versus yours is blue, like how, if that's really, I mean, I don't think that's where things are going, but like that's one thesis is everything's just going to go to a prompt where people can interact with voice or text, right? Like what are you saying? Like how can a brand differentiate itself in this? And where do you see things going in terms of how these interfaces will actually look beyond being a prompt?

Drew Burdick (32:11)

Yeah, I think so. This is talked about the role kind of collapse that's been happening. I think one of the really interesting or fascinating things that I'm starting to see is the blend of growth, which is kind of like product sales and marketing piece in with the actual experience component, because ⁓ you can have a really great experience, but if you don't know how to get in front of people and you don't know how to stand out, it doesn't really matter. It's the whole like the field of dreams is a lie, right? Like if you build it, they won't come. ⁓

Brett House (32:27)

Yep.

Drew Burdick (32:39)

And so one of the things that we spend a lot of time and energy thinking about with our clients is not just like, what's the experiential part of it, but what is the go-to-market? What is the ⁓ messaging and positioning and framing as well as ⁓ like we're building one right now. And we've been spending a lot of time talking to them about who their ICP is, right? Their ideal customer profile. And what is it like, where are those people? Like what are, what are the watering holes that they're kind of congregating at? Where are the communities that they're involved in?

Brett House (32:59)

Yeah.

Drew Burdick (33:07)

What is the content that they care about? And then showing up in an authentic and human and personal way in those places where you as a brand start to really be kind of connected to, wow, this brand really cares about this community, really cares about this niche or this industry. They are actually real people, not just a faceless organization with a bunch of AI built stuff, right? Like that.

Brett House (33:30)

Yeah, and this can be B2B companies that are trying to launch new products, And Drew's leaning into an area, as we all talked about, right? ⁓ And I'm launching, think by the time this episode goes live, I'm launching a company called High Signals, which is in sort of stealth mode, but by the time people hear this, we'll be live. And that's exactly what we're doing. And I've seen that in sort of the tech, AI, SaaS, Martech, Data Tech space for two decades, right? And now it's now because of this compounding factor where you can get prototypes out the door quicker, you can test and prototype things more quickly, the kind of production life cycles are decreased, right? I'm finding that commercial teams are struggling to keep up, right? And there's even a widening gap between what the product team's developing, right? Which you might be working with a product team that says, we're gonna bring this thing to market, we're gonna prototype it, we're going to test it, we're gonna align data to it, train the models, and then we're gonna...you start to figure out how do we explain this to our end customers, right? But from that product to the product marketing function, to the sales function, to the commercial success, ⁓ there is breakage, human breakage and data breakage. They're oftentimes operating under different KPIs, different objectives, different goals. And explainability kind of breaks down as you get further away from the product. like that when you, you know.

Rio (34:48)

It Well, Brett, I think you hit on a good point too. it's not only does do you have breakage internally, but I think like the way people, whether they're buying software or buying a plane ticket, right? I think the way that they make their decisions has fundamentally changed. Like people don't want like the buyer journey is completely crashed, right? It's not like we used to map it out, right? You you go from marketing to sales to service. I think that people are.

Brett House (35:11)

Yep.

Rio (35:16)

making their decisions by talking to people they know, people they trust, people they like, they're going to like networking things, like through the meetups you have down in Charlotte, right? I I bet you get people from all sorts of industries who are just in learning more, meeting other people, like-minded people. So think the decisions have been driven by, it's almost like this return to in real life, right? People based on trust, based on authenticity. And I think that, you know, number one, the fatigue with like,

Brett House (35:36)

Yeah, that's it.

Rio (35:42)

post COVID sitting behind screens, you 15, 18 calls a day. People are sick of that, number one, but I think the AI slop, like the fact that there's just people are inundated with like his garbage content. So there's this like desire for like authentic interactions and authentic, really high quality engagement of content.

Drew Burdick (35:47)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it's like a Renaissance, Like there's actually this week LinkedIn released their AI report for the year or whatever. And one of the things they hit on, which is not new, is the loneliness pandemic, right? So post-COVID, right? There's all these people who are, you know, they're kind of working remote, not interacting with humans day in and day out. And yeah, right, never putting on pants. Yeah. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But you know, those... Right, right.

Brett House (36:00)

Yeah.

Rio (36:18)

Never putting on pants.

Brett House (36:21)

sweatpants on planes, you know.

Rio (36:26)

Or shorts is worse. I actually saw the governor of Colorado on a flight to San Diego. The dude was wearing shorts. I mean,

Brett House (36:33)

Yeah, Rio's put LinkedIn

Drew Burdick (36:34)

Wow.

Brett House (36:34)

posts about this that I've seen like years ago and he's

Rio (36:36)

I mean, it's unforgivable. I'm sorry. That's a good...

Brett House (36:40)

We do not want to see your legs or your socks.

Drew Burdick (36:40)

⁓ man.

Rio (36:42)

I don't know if I can vote for this guy again. He's wearing shorts and a plane. But okay, Drew, sorry man, interrupted you.

Drew Burdick (36:47)

No, no, no, it's funny. But yeah, no, like the amount of people that are interested in ⁓ wanting to see real people in real life. And so I think the brands and the businesses, both B2C and B2B, that are starting to invest in those spaces are really going to be successful. And I actually think going back to the UX part of this, that's where I think a lot of UXers could start to shift, is, hey,

You have a acute understanding of like human psychology, sociology, behavioral science, like those kinds of things are so critically important as we think about how do we create these environments for people to connect and intersect with their, businesses and brands, right? that's what I kind of think that a lot of design people, if they kind of think about, Hey, the VHS is dying, right? It's kind of like letterpress 40 years ago or whatever, or like type setting.

Right? Like those things are now like artisanal things. There's only like a handful of people that do that stuff in the world anymore. That's what UX is going to become in its current form. So if you got to move into more of this, how do we think about product more generally? How do we think experience more generally? And then how do we think about bringing these things to the people in a way that resonates with them? It's not just like, you know, Hey, a bunch of AI words and slop going at you that no one pays attention to. Right.

Rio (38:03)

What does this do to you? UX teams though, mean, this has got to make, think, you know, like, like anything in, let's say professional services is kind of a pyramid model where you have leverage, where you have people to top selling the work and people at the bottom or doing the work, right? And then the amount of time doing versus selling kind of shifts as you, as you go down the pyramid and you usually have more people at the bottom. I see like if a lot of the production design work that, you know, the resizing, schlocky banners and like, you know, the pixel pushing stuff and a lot of that is

Brett House (38:03)

Yeah. Yeah.

Rio (38:31)

going, not disappearing, but it's being automated now, right? What does that do to the design team or the design practice?

Drew Burdick (38:38)

Yeah. I mean, I think it puts simply as blood it's getting blown up, right? Which is why you're seeing tons of layoffs. You're seeing people like 200 plus, you know, ⁓ applications for roles. I think that that's where designers are going to have to really kind of look themselves in the mirror and say, I got to evolve or die. Right. The cheese has moved and, and the cheese will not come back. And we need to be thoughtful about how you reposition yourself. I mean, I like, came up through graphic design and then moved into UX. It's no different, right? Graphic design.

Brett House (38:41)

Yeah.

Drew Burdick (39:07)

arguably is now like this artisanal thing, right? You don't have a lot of graphic designers anymore because, or illustrators, right? And I remember when I moved into UX from graphic design, it was the same thought process where I was like, I see the way this is going and it's not a career path that's gonna have longevity. I need to shift, right? And I moved into UX and then same thing now, right? Like I need to shift again to the kind of broader experience design that's more than just interface.

Rio (39:12)

Or illustrators, right, yeah.

Brett House (39:26)

Yeah. Yeah, well, but when you talk to the actual designers and creative directors of SaaS companies, a lot that I service and have worked for, and non kind of future forward AI companies, ⁓ the people in the marketing teams, know, the creative directors, art directors, whatever, still are seeing a gap, right? And I'm getting this like explicitly told to me, like, yeah, it's not quite at, you know, you're in it, so you see that there isn't a gap technically but you just have to have to know how to sort of lean in. But what I'm seeing when it, know, everything from, you know, creating a PowerPoint slide to creating an, you know, a video from scratch, from sort of ideation to production ⁓ with AI, right? That it's pretty shitty still, right? And that's the perspective that I'm getting. mean, the PowerPoint slides that I get from Pro GPT are just a disgrace, right? And so the designers end up throwing up their hands saying it's not. making my life any easier yet but you're saying that it will come quickly and

Drew Burdick (40:38)

I think, yeah, I mean, like, let's go back to our VHS metaphor here, right? So if you look at like the sort of like curves of when things are adopted and die, like the VHS didn't die overnight or the Betamax didn't die overnight, right? It was like a, it was a, yeah, it took time to kind of fade while the DVD was rising and then the DVD died while streaming was rising. I think it's, we're on the down slope of classic UX.

Rio (40:52)

It took a long time.

Drew Burdick (41:03)

I will say one big thing that, you I constantly have this debate with many people where they're like, well, it doesn't actually do this and doesn't do that. I'm like, well, you don't actually know how to use the tools, right? Cause you're not actually using the tools. A big, big, big thing that, ⁓ I think is often missing is people, they are not asking good questions, ⁓ AKA prompt engineering. And they're also not providing the right detail or the right level of context, AKA context engineering. And if you kind of know like how to ask. ⁓the questions the right way and you know how to engineer or structure the context for an LLM, you will get really good results and most likely. Yeah. Like, yeah.

Rio (41:38)

That's like the point I made earlier. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Brett House (41:40)

It's the prompt engineering play. It's shifting the type of human capital that you need to support these functions. It's not the same people. It's people that know that are, and I think that's having a huge impact in the agency space. I don't know if you deal with a ton of agencies. I did a panel, and I were doing signal and noise at advertising week and they did a panel called AI My Creative Team, which is super relevant topic wise. had Justin Towns Copeland who's the CEO of 4A's, Joanna O'Connell, who's the chief intelligence officer of Omnicom and the famous Lou Pascales, who's just a rebel rouser. And really what it kind of came down to is back to that point I said about the CEO of Coca-Cola, that there is a human capital play here, but it's being reduced radically. And so agencies...

Rio (42:17)

Yeah, that was great.

Brett House (42:35)

which used to be an FTE sort of human capital model. It's like just throw 3000 people at it, right? Just build your team out. Now, yeah.

Rio (42:42)

You remember we talked to Sheff about that. Yeah, yeah, that was good.

Brett House (42:44)

And so Justin Townes Copeland, one of his key points was that there are independents now, agencies that 50, 100, 150 million, and that back in the day they wouldn't be able to compete with the agency, holdcos, because they didn't have the human capital. They couldn't bring that many people on board. They didn't have the capital to build that out. Now they're so tech enabled that they can scale to the level of a holdco with all of the capabilities with a much smaller subset of people. So it's your completely changed the paradigm to your point. It's not a human capital paradigm anymore.

Drew Burdick (43:12)

Yep.

Brett House (43:14)

Right?

Drew Burdick (43:15)

Yep. Well, it's like you think about the companies that are being built today. Like you all are probably familiar with Lovable. They just raised like several hundred million. They're now worth like some crazy number. They're like one of the fastest growing startups in history. And I think they hit a hundred million in like less than a year with like 30 people in Europe.

Brett House (43:20)

Yep.

Rio (43:34)

Yeah, Drew, we use Lovable. I had a short stint as a chief commercial officer at a tech company like last summer. And we rebuilt a 150 page website using Lovable and Chad CPT. I mean, we did it with one front end web person, one designer who was junior, and me. We rebuilt the entire website in about 10 days. It was crazy.

Drew Burdick (43:56)

Yep. And that's what, know, with lovable specifically, think lovable and other companies like lovable, they've, you know, flipped, you, you mentioned Rio a little bit ago, like the, the, the pyramid sort of model, right? Where it's like, you kind of build up and you have all these layers of management. You have people at the bottom, they're kind of doing the work. ⁓ the, the pyramid is completely eroding, right? Because to your point, like junior level talent don't have the skills or the expertise or the experience to be able to connect the dots as effectively. Then you have, you know, these. kind of call it mid to later career folks who have a lot of expertise and then when equipped with these tools can deliver the same or more value than like dozens of other people. So you start to be like, well, why do we need all these people? We probably don't, right?

Rio (44:39)

Yeah, it's an obelisk model. And there was that article in Harvard Business Review about how the consulting model, and I think you could apply it to design, or a lot of other things, is changing. But it begs an important question, though, about if teams are to look different, is going to be more senior people relative to junior people and generally less junior people overall? mean, the career progression certainly changes, right? And I think that these organizations will need to reflect that, how they're structured, how they incent people.

How they measure performance and success. think that's interesting. But you brought up a really good point before too about when things change, that may mean you need to make a pivot in your career. And that's a normal thing, right? To say, I'm going to keep doing this banging my head against the wall even though this work is gone. The cheese is gone, right? I mean, I think that's an important point you made about maybe thinking about how to retool, pivot a little bit, change what you do, maybe get some new skills.

Drew Burdick (45:35)

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and so for example, my team, ⁓ we are structured and operating like the seals, right? So we have like small, you've probably heard of like the two pizza model, right? Where you've got less than five people where there's, yeah. So I think there's going to be a shift towards you have much smaller kind of tightly knit teams that are, you know, overlapping roles instead of these like very clear lines. And they're going to be focusing on discrete levels of output and value. Like, okay, Hey, you're responsible for delivering this outcome.

Rio (45:46)

Ramazan, yep.

Drew Burdick (46:05)

go, right? And in addition to that, I think the re-skilling kind of up-skilling change of work, you know, what people are doing every day from a UX standpoint, one of the things that we're seeing with the UX designers that I brought on, they're doing more of the strategic thinking kind of product strategy. They're there and they're bringing like taste and judgment to the experience instead of being like making the decisions on a specific UI level, right? it, yeah, exactly. Yeah, which a lot of, honestly, a lot of folks are uncomfortable with, right? Cause it forces them to think at a different altitude.

Brett House (46:36)

Yep. They're conductors versus like the lead violinist or the oboist or whatever. Yeah. It's a different like executive function, right?

Drew Burdick (46:50)

Exactly. It's a more strategic, you know, you're playing chess, you're not playing checkers, which is what I think a lot of people don't realize is like, you gotta be really damn good at like 3d chess in this new age because you have to think 10 moves ahead and how to move things around to get to these outcomes for customers of business.

Brett House (47:07)

Yeah. Yeah. And it's not to bring in some historical notes. I think I don't know if I've said this in a former podcast. I said this on stage at advertising week. But we're in a moment where it really is like industrial revolution size and scope in terms of how it's going to change how people are used in organizations, how organizations are structured. Throw the pyramid out the window. I think it's more of a rectangle or maybe it's a reverse pyramid, whatever it is. But it's kind of a Margaret Thatcher moment like in England in the 80s.

Right? When she said, we're just going to shut down all the coal mines. And, you know, a lot of people lost their jobs. A lot of people that had spent careers, maybe even families had gone generations. Yeah. Just like West Virginia, right? As coal miners. ⁓ And she, was super painful. And a lot of, a lot of people were screaming, you know, capitalist pigs taken over England. And, ⁓ you know, this right wing capitalist pig, Margaret Thatcher is like eliminating people's livelihoods. But she realized that there was a pivot moment.

Rio (47:43)

Generations,

Brett House (48:04)

and that England needed to shift their entire economy. And we might be in, we are in this pivot moment right now where you and I, Drew, have shifted our careers because we've realized like, know, mean, Ryo and I were there in the beginning of the programmatic Renaissance and the digital media Renaissance, right? And we had to shift our lives then, but now it's like, hey, let's jump on this tidal wave and shift our own skill sets. Cause if you're not constantly learning this stuff,

Drew Burdick (48:30)

Mm-hmm.

Brett House (48:31)

and getting more advanced, you're going to be displaced or disrupted. And it's sort of, you know, riding the razor's edge, but it is, important for all of us, ⁓ no matter how mature we are in our careers.

Rio (48:40)

Yeah, no one knows what the new jobs will necessarily look like. I mean, that's very hard to predict. We can make some hypotheses about what roles might emerge, but I think it's pretty easy to think about what roles may be eliminated, know, roles that are repetition, they're not like lower agency roles, right? Those are the things that, mean, look at digital media, Brett. We both spent years working on that, right?

It's not going to take hundreds of people to traffic campaigns and measure campaigns and all that. It's just a lot of that's going to be automated by, know, know, gen, you know, initially by just applying AI to specific processes. And eventually there'll be some kind of a genetic workflow that probably sits on top of all of it. And there'll still be people in it. I don't think the expectation that, just a bunch of bots are going to run it, you know, with no, no, no, no. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But, but, you know, things are going to change and

Brett House (49:26)

Yeah, we've seen how that works. Not always so well, right?

Rio (49:34)

There's, but it may be in unforeseen ways, right? But things are going to change and people need to be ready for that, right? And I think that's the important thing. And I think for these big organizations, as you mentioned, like the pyramid breaks down, some of these big organizations, I think they're gonna find the struggling, at least in the short term until they retool or restructure.

Brett House (49:53)

Yeah, yeah. And I think to your point, Rio, with the digital media ecosystem, it's like, or even the introduction of Excel, didn't eliminate accounting jobs, right? The X-ray, right? And the AI-driven X-ray capabilities, right? Didn't eliminate radiologists' jobs, right? They actually expanded that considerably, but you have to move up the value chain in terms of the knowledge and the types of services that you're offering as a person, right? It's like a quadrant here, right? You want to be in the top left.

Drew Burdick (49:54)

Yeah.

Brett House (50:21)

or top right, guess, the top right of the quadrant. And people have to make that move sooner rather than later. So Drew, how do we handle, you've got young kids, or at least that kid, do you have more than one? Two. And they're really young. I've seen some pictures, but they're young, right?

Drew Burdick (50:33)

I have two and a third on the way. Thanks.

Rio (50:36)

All right, congrats.

Drew Burdick (50:39)

Well, my daughter's 12, my son is almost 10, and the third is gonna be zero. So we've got a big, gap.

Brett House (50:46)

And Rio's got a 13 year old, 14? 12, sorry, 12. And I've got a 16 and 18 year old, a freshman in Syracuse. mean, how, you know, he's kind of a creative guy with a good business mind, but how do they think about getting out of college? you know, cause they're looking at like a black hole, that all these entry level roles, speaking of rising up the value chain and being.

Rio (50:50)

12 12 year old yeah she'll be 13 June Well, yeah, well, how would like you like, let's say Brett Sun said, I want to be a design professional, design leader. Like, what would be your advice?

Drew Burdick (51:17)

It's a great question. Uh, I've had this dialogue with a few folks. I'll, I'll, I'll start with first what I'm investing in with my kids. And then I'll talk like kind of generally what I've suggested early stage career folks who want to be a designer. So we actually put our daughter in, she's a middle school and she's at this innovation school, um, which is pretty neat. And there it's like, they're completely rethinking the education system, like how to, how to approach the education. It's much more focusing on innovation and entrepreneurship skills. and kind of like communication skills over a lot of the tried and true classic kind of we're going to rote memorization of this, these data points that you can just GPT it and find out whatever you want. Right. ⁓ so like we're investing there cause I do feel like those skills will always be valuable, right? The ability to communicate with others, the ability, ability to have high agency, the ability to think critically, like those things are always going to be valuable. ⁓ from a, from a early career person who's like, I want to be a designer. ⁓

Brett House (51:57)

Yep.

Drew Burdick (52:15)

The thing that I often just tell folks, and I've been telling people this the whole time, because they're like, well, they're looking for a magic bullet. Like, what do I got to do that's going to help me? Whatever. When I started my career, I just busted my ass and did reps. You just get a lot of reps. And that's not what people want to hear. They're like, well, I want to get a job and I want to make 100 grand a year out the gate. And you're like, sorry, it doesn't exist anymore. If you want a career in this industry, you're going to have to go and do a lot of work for free or very cheap to build a portfolio and get the repetition where you have judgment, good judgment, good taste and ability to kind of like work with well with others, right? ⁓

Brett House (52:55)

It's the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours. My father was right all along with all the sports analogies. He's sports to sort of, and like I had, kids were baseball kids and now one of them getting, Kai's getting into golf, right? And I'm like, well, it's all about routine and reps, right? Like you have to do this, like golf especially. Right? Yeah, swing it all the time, right?

Drew Burdick (52:58)

Yeah.

Rio (53:13)

You have to be in the arena. I mean, I think that's it. Number one, you have to be in the arena.

Yeah, but also too, it's like, sure. It's a good point. Like career isn't a job, right? Like, know, like a career is like, like many jobs probably over many years, like interspersed with many decisions, the majority of which are good, you know, good in that they make, place you in a better spot than you were before you made the decision. So I think if you're making good decisions over a long period of time,

Brett House (53:23)

That's a good point.

Rio (53:42)

and you're getting involved in interesting roles around interesting people and you're learning, that's how you make a career. career is when you graduate from college and you get like a creative director, you're not gonna get it, you're not ready for it. If you got it, you wouldn't be any good at it, right? Maybe with rare exceptions, but probably not even, right? So it's a good point.

Drew Burdick (53:59)

Yeah, think like... go ahead, Brett, sorry.

Brett House (53:59)

Yeah, I'm just feeling like good about things I'm gonna go back and tell my kids that I mean, I think you hit something so well right there Rio was that it's not you got to stop thinking job and start equating career with life. Not to say we, you know, I know Americans work work hard and play little but but it's like your career. It's a life right and it's gonna have all of those ups and downs the shifts the movements the the learning the failures, right? It's not a job.

Like if you, minute you start thinking, stop thinking about things as a job, right, you're gonna be better off, right, in terms of the evolution of what you end up doing to make money, basically.

Drew Burdick (54:38)

Yeah. And I think, you know, life's a journey. And when you're early on, what your most valuable resource that you have or the resource you have the most of is time. So the thing that I, I often tell a lot of early career folks, cause they have the, they want the magic bullet. They want the silver bullet to kind of like solve, Hey, I want to get a job. want to make all this money. And I'm like, here's the thing. If you really, really want this, you go to a company that you want to work for. You do a bunch of research on them.

You proactively make something, you find the right person, you go sit in front of them, you show it to them and you tell them, hey, I want to work for free for three months because I want to learn. Like you'll get a job and then you'll be able to get the reps and get the experience in the portfolio to be able to parlay into the next thing and the next thing. Right. But people don't that's what they don't want to hear that. And they, you know, they don't want to do it. Yeah, exactly.

Brett House (55:12)

Yep. Yeah, it's an apprenticeship model, right? And that goes back to the beginnings of just work and capitalism, early capitalism. There's always an apprentice, right?

Rio (55:29)

Yeah. Well, I think in this new environment, right, it becomes probably more important again. And also, too, I mean, you think of...people expecting I'll have a job, it'll be nine to five or nine to six or whatever, then I'm gonna shut off. I'm not saying there won't be occupations that are kind of like that, maybe some will be, but generally speaking, things are always on now, right? Things don't stop. I'm seeing the most, the jobs I'm attracted to, and I would advise, I'm gonna advise my daughters, like it's kind of a work-life blend. don't, in fact, the most successful people, I know they work their asses off, they work a lot, right? Sort of think I'm gonna mail it in and work 20, 30, maybe 40 hours a week.

You know, and get seven, eight weeks of vacation every year. Like from the start, right, to think that you can do that is probably not realistic and you probably won't be very successful over time. So mean, the most successful people I know, they work a lot because they love what they do. They don't love everything that they do, but generally speaking, when you ask them, you like your job? Do you like your role? They'll generally, they'll say yes, I like it overall. That's why I'm willing to invest so much time doing it. So it's that more work-life blend, I think, is where things are going.

Drew Burdick (56:38)

Totally agree. Yeah, totally agree. I think that ⁓ the folks that kind of like wrap their head around that sooner, right? Like folks who are entering the workforce and kind of embrace the process will be most successful. There's a lot of people that I've talked to where that, you kind of give them the hard truth and they're just like, ⁓ well, I thought you would just tell me I have to just take some online course for two hours and I could get a job. And you're like, this is just not how, yeah, it's not how it works.

Rio (57:05)

I'd be an expert, yeah.

Brett House (57:06)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. might have to have moved to Europe if you're thinking if you want the easy eight week vacation, Denmark type of approach, right? And I wonder if this is all very myopic from an American perspective, or the Japanese are like that as well, like in terms of the Germans, in terms of like that work oriented cultures. I think things are changing so fast that you really do have to.

Drew Burdick (57:14)

Right. Right, right, right.

Rio (57:15)

a 35-hour work week.

Brett House (57:34)

realize that you have to be always on you have to maintain your sanity ⁓ and you've got to embrace these tools ⁓ to compound your ability to deliver value right that's that's the goal here well this has been awesome and true you lived up to the hype of it really like you got a you got a beat true man and it's been phenomenal having a conversation with you and you know for all of you know last thoughts from you and then everybody check out stealth acts you're doing some really interesting things out of Charlotte North Carolina

Rio (57:48)

This is cool.

Drew Burdick (57:50)

Appreciate it. ⁓

Rio (58:01)

Yeah, yeah, tell people how to get in touch with you if they want to find out about StealthX, get in touch with you personally, like, you know, let us know and like, that'd be amazing.

Drew Burdick (58:08)

Yeah, no, for sure. Thanks. So best place to find me drewberdick.com. It's got everything. ⁓ The company as well as I've got a podcast. I post a lot on LinkedIn. You can just, you can look me up Drew Berdick. ⁓ And yeah, like would love to connect with folks who are thinking in this way, because we're actively always hiring and looking for great talent, AI forward thinkers and people who want to be on the front of the wave. So, but yeah, thanks guys for having me on the show. It's been awesome.

Brett House (58:34)

This was great, thanks a lot.

Drew Burdick (58:35)

Yeah, for sure.

Rio (58:37)

Thank you.