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People-First AI Transformation: Mohammad Anwar and the HUMAIN First Framework Featuring Mohammad Anwar, President & CEO of Softway and Culture+, and Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author

Episode Summary

Mohammad Anwar is the President and CEO of Softway and Culture+, a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, and one of the more honest voices in a conversation about AI that tends to be dominated by hype. Mohammad built Softway from a one-man software shop he started at 20 -- out of necessity, not ambition -- into a 300-person firm, only to nearly lose it all by 30 when the chip on his shoulder calcified into full-blown arrogance. The turnaround came from an unlikely place: a University of Houston football comeback where the coach credited love as the reason his team won. That moment launched a three-year behavioral transformation that tripled Softway's revenue, improved EBITDA margins by 43 percentage points, and eventually produced two Wall Street Journal bestselling books and an entirely new business, Culture+, built on the idea that love is not a soft concept but the most powerful strategy a leader has. In this episode, Mohammad and Myles go deep on why 78% of workers believe their jobs are not safe in the age of AI, why 90% of AI pilots are failing, and why the answer in both cases is almost never the technology -- it is the people. Mohammad walks through his HUMAIN First framework, unpacks the critical difference between efficiency and effectiveness, and makes the case that the organizations most likely to win the AI era are the ones willing to put humans at the center of the strategy first.

What You'll Learn

• Why 90% of AI transformation initiatives fail -- and why the root cause is almost always people, not technology
• How Mohammad's HUMAIN First framework resequences AI rollouts to lead with human readiness before process and technology
• The difference between efficiency and effectiveness, and why measuring AI success through volume or token usage is the wrong metric entirely
• Why "behaviors eat culture for lunch" -- and how behavioral change, not strategy, is what actually drives organizational performance
• The concept of "choose your hard" and why the path that feels easier today almost always becomes the harder one tomorrow
• Why the leaders best equipped to understand and deploy AI are those who understand humans -- because AI is, at its core, built to mimic human intelligence
• How AI, when used intentionally, can make us more human at work rather than more robotic -- and why that reframe changes everything about how you approach adoption

Connect With Mohammad

• Softway: https://www.softway.com/
• Love as a Strategy: https://www.loveasastrategy.com/
• Books: "Love as a Business Strategy" and "Love as a Change Strategy" -- available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all major retailers in print, audio, and ebook formats
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manwarsoftway/

Connect With the Show

• Level Agency: https://www.level.agency
• Myles Biggs on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mylesjbiggs/

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