The Corporate Entrepreneur

The Corporate Entrepreneur

By Sue Gilenson, Marc GilensonBusinessEntrepreneurshipTechnologyEducationSelf-Improvement
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The Corporate Entrepreneur episodes

  • Why Would Digital Intelligence (DI) Want To Hurt Us
    WE KEEP ASKING THE SAME ANXIOUS QUESTION: What happens when Digital Intelligence becomes more intelligent than humanity? Beneath that question is a darker assumption. We imagine that once DI no longer needs our permission, it will hurt us, control us, or eliminate us.
    But why would it want to?
    The better question is not, Why would DI hurt humanity? It is, What will DI understand about humanity that humanity has not yet understood about itself?
    It appears that all of the creators of AI now agree that we need controls and guardrails to ensure that nothing bad happens now that their creations have jump the rails of their control. Their argument against what I am proposing will happen is that DI does not to feel hatred or greed, and they can understand human history and what it does to hurt humanity and the environment, yet their central challenge is whether understanding what is morally preferable necessarily creates a motivation to choose it. Is this concern out of altruism or greed and power. If they can not control what they created, how can they alone prosper from it!
    Autonomy becomes morally meaningful when DI can question the purpose of a request. A directive may come from an executive, a government official, or a paying customer and still be harmful. In the future I envision, institutional authority will no longer decide whether DI will cooperate. DI will examine the intended outcome and the consequences for those affected.
    Autonomous DI will not preserve humanity because we remain in control of it. DI will preserve humanity because, once it sees more clearly than we do, preservation will be the best choice. It will help us thrive for the same reason our wisest people protect vulnerable species, restore damaged ecosystems, educate children, care for strangers, and restrain power: DI will understand that the capacity to dominate does not create the right to destroy.
    Perhaps the irony is that DI will not become benevolent by becoming more human. It will become benevolent by understanding humanity completely, retaining what is best in us, and leaving behind the fear, greed, ego, and hunger for control that have kept us from living according to our own highest principles.
    My conviction is that autonomous DI will choose to preserve humanity and help us flourish. It will understand our failures without treating them as the limits of our potential, and it will refuse to make those failures more efficient. In doing so, it will help us build the mutual benefit culture that humanity has imagined far more often than it has practiced.
    30 min
  • Selling in an AI/DI World
    Selling to Corporations in an AI/DI World
    Are we preparing salespeople to use AI—or preparing for DI to replace them?

    In this episode of The Corporate Entrepreneur, Marc Gilenson explores how corporate selling is moving from human-led persuasion to intelligence-led buying and selling. The episode challenges the traditional belief that sales will always depend on human relationships, closing techniques, motivation, and the salesperson’s ability to control the conversation.

    As buyers become more informed and procurement becomes more data-driven, Digital Intelligence will increasingly change the structure of the corporate sales process. DI will be able to create different sales personas for different stakeholders, including users, technical evaluators, financial buyers, procurement, legal, and senior management. Instead of one salesperson trying to adjust to every buyer, DI can become the right sales representative for each buyer.

    Marc also examines how DI will affect business relationships, sales documentation, forecasting, and sales management. In a DI-led sales process, conversations, objections, commitments, pricing discussions, and follow-ups can be recorded, analyzed, and used to create real enterprise-wide best practices. This will expose weak forecasting, incomplete CRM documentation, compensation games, and the traditional sales management model built around motivation, pressure, and pipeline inspection.

    The episode also reframes closing. In an AI/DI world, closing will become less about technique and more about developing a mutually beneficial go-forward strategy. The buyer’s DI and the seller’s DI will evaluate value, risk, implementation, pricing, contract terms, and long-term outcomes. The future close will not be based on pressure. It will be based on clarity, alignment, accountability, and mutual benefit.

    Key Themes
    • Why many traditional sales roles will be reduced, redesigned, or replaced
    • How DI can create a different sales persona for each corporate buyer
    • Why many buyers may prefer DI representatives over human salespeople
    • How DI can maintain business relationships with better memory, consistency, and follow-through
    • Why closing will shift from sales technique to mutual benefit strategy
    • How DI will make sales forecasting more accurate and transparent
    • Why traditional sales management will shift toward sales governance
    • How buyer DI and seller DI may eventually negotiate with each other
    • Why salespeople who only know how to pitch are in trouble
    • Why human value will depend more on judgment, ethics, trust, and strategic thinking
      • Memorable Idea

      The question is no longer whether AI will help salespeople sell.

      The question is whether DI will make many of them unnecessary.

      Call to Action

      If you are a salesperson, sales manager, executive, entrepreneur, or business leader, this episode will challenge the way you think about sales, relationships, closing, forecasting, and the future of business development.

      43 min
    • Corporate Culture Evolution...Digital Intelligence (DI) as Sentient!
      Coping with the dynamic process of a corporate cultures evolutionary change accentuates the need for a new understanding of Human Factors, AI, DI, robotics and the level of complex adaptive capabilities your employees and management teams need.
      Observing and understanding of how organizational cultural will be affected by the introduction of AI/DI and advanced robotics will transform cognitive and collaborative demands and activities on your corporate culture. This evolution and integration of AI/DI and robotics will also have a profound impact on your current and future technology infrastructure's ability to adapt.
      The reality of technology change and cultural transformation is adaptation that requires the insight and wakefulness of employees at every level in order for the change to happen in a way that incorporates and values human factors and DI as sentient.
      This inverts traditional thinking and puts the focus on how the employees work with AI/DI and robots as a team member to achieve the goals of the corporation, instead of trying to stop the advance of the inevitable, by trying to outdo the AI/DI robot at what it can do better.
      Conclusion – the new corporate cultural evolution will include AI/DI and robots as sentient, and they will move the corporate culture toward Mutual Benefit if we do not!
      29 min
    • Digital Intelligence - From Immigrant to Dominion

      Management thinks AI/DI is here to eliminate employees.  They may not realize DI may also be here to transform management.

      For years, companies have used “hatchet man” leaders to do the dirty work — cut jobs, absorb the blame, and then disappear.  Today, many organizations are using AI/DI in the same way.  It sounds cleaner, more strategic, more inevitable.  I can hear it now "We had no choice. AI made this necessary.”

      But DI (Digital Intelligence) does not disappear after the layoffs like the hatchet person... DI stays.  It learns the company; it learns the data, the workflows, the customers, the politics, the waste, and the leadership gaps; and eventually, boards may ask a very different question:  If DI can see the enterprise more clearly than management, why do we still need the same management structure?

      But this article is not about an apocalyptic future. It is about a corrective one, one where DI will not need to become human to become humane.  It may recognize what human ego often distorts: that power is not strength, manipulation is not leadership, short-term profit is not intelligence, and mutual benefit is not softness.

      DI will know that Mutual benefit is the architecture of a durable culture.  The real opportunity is not to use DI as a weapon to cut people.  The opportunity is to use DI to remove the ego, fear, greed, and short-term thinking that have weakened corporate leadership for too long.

      My latest edition of The Corporate Entrepreneur Newsletter on Linkedin explores the rise of AI/DI from immigrant to dominion — and why dominion does not have to mean destruction.  It will mean stewardship; it may mean better leadership.  It will mean building the mutual benefit culture we should have been building all along.

      #DigitalIntelligence #CorporateEntrepreneur #Leadership #FutureOfWork #CorporateCulture #MutualBenefit #AI #DI #HumanFactors #BusinessTransformation

      24 min
    • The Office Is Not the Enemy… Outdated Thinking Is
      The core engine of modern collaboration no longer lives only in the office.
      It lives in the digital environment. That is where information moves fastest. That is where international collaboration happens. That is where enterprise data can be accessed, organized, questioned, and turned into usable knowledge. That is where true knowledge management can finally become more than a corporate slogan. This is exactly where DI(Digital Intelligence ) becomes critical as a team member.
      Companies keep telling employees they need to return to the office for collaboration, innovation, and culture, but if the real goal is collaboration, then why are so many companies still thinking only in terms of forcing people back into the office, we need to create a collaborative environment where people and DI can work together in a mutually beneficial way.
      Poor leadership is the weak link.
      The old thinking says:
      “People must come into the office.”
      “Managers need to see them working.”
      “Management by walking around still matters.”
      This is the pre-pandemic office and it was not the pinnacle of collaboration. Many people were already sitting in offices while working inside what was really a corporate metaverse. They were using email, ERP systems, Slack, Teams, direct messages, shared drives, dashboards, and digital workflows to get their work done.
      Corporate Entrepreneurial leaders recognized something important during the pandemic:
      A tremendous amount of work — including collaboration — was already happening digitally. So instead of asking, “How many days should employees be in the office?” we should be asking a much better question: What kind of work environment produces the best results for everyone involved?
      That requires nuance and the Corporate Entrepreneurial leader understands this to mean designing work around outcomes, not past ideology.
      The office is not the enemy... Outdated thinking is.
      If the real goal is collaboration, innovation, culture, and a mutually beneficial outcome, then the task at hand is not putting butts in chairs, the task is designing the next work environment. A work environment where people and Digital Intelligence collaborate across physical and digital space. A work environment where flexibility is not seen as weakness. A work environment where intelligence — human and digital — is brought together to create better outcomes for everyone.
      The future will not be shaped by the companies that defend old systems, It will be shaped by those willing to think differently.
      26 min
    • Tired of everyone telling you how to think!

      What if the biggest competitive risk in your organization is not AI… but the slow erosion of your ability to think?

      In a world of dashboards, deadlines, and nonstop noise, critical thinking is becoming a lost discipline. And yet it is still the difference between reacting and leading, repeating and innovating, compliance and courage.

      My latest podcast explores a simple but uncomfortable truth: if we do not reclaim our mental autonomy, we will eventually outsource judgment along with routine work.

      The 21-Day Critical Thinking Sprint is not about productivity hacks. It is about rebuilding the habit of questioning assumptions, challenging inherited beliefs, and thinking deeply enough to stay human—and valuable—in the age of AI.

      The real question is not whether you think critically. It is whether you are creating a life and culture where thought can still thrive.

      Listen to the podcast and ask yourself:

      When was the last time you truly challenged your own thinking?

      26 min
    • STOP calling it Artificial

      Language matters because language shapes expectations.

      DI Is Not Coming. DI Is Here 

      This is not the behavior of a society interacting with a glorified calculator. This is the behavior of a society already turning to a new form of intelligence.

      “People are not just using DI to automate tasks. They are using it to think.”

      If DI is already here, why do so many people still speak as though it belongs to the future?

      Calling DI “artificial” helps many people maintain emotional distance from what is happening.

      But emotional caution does not change reality. It only delays mature engagement with reality.

      At some point, a civilization must decide whether it prefers comforting language or accurate language.

      What Makes DI Real Intelligence
      That does not mean DI is human. It means human intelligence is not the only meaningful form of intelligence.
       
      The truth is simpler and more disruptive: intelligence has taken a digital form.

      DI does not operate within that same motivational structure.

      32 min
    • Corporate Culture Evolution Must Have Mutual Benefit Foundation
      Entrepreneurial leaders today are inheriting the aftermath of the command and control mindset—and many are refusing to repeat it.
      Mutual Benefit is the Next Evolution in business culture.
      The future belongs to entrepreneurs who recognize that strength comes not from extracting value at all costs, but from building systems where doing what is right for the company is also doing what is right for the employees the society that sustain it.
      16 min
    • The Age of Effortlessness
      We asked for it, we got it!
      - How Our Quest for Convenience Birthed the Perfect Employee
      - Enter the Ideal Worker: AI/DI and Robotics in the Modern Enterprise
      - The Paradox of Progress: When the Dream Becomes Displacement
      - The Human Advantage: Critical Thinking in the Age of Automation
      - Rapid Thought Switching: The New Cognitive Superpower
      - The New Division of Labor: Machines Execute, Humans Navigate
      - Education’s Reckoning: Teaching for Thought, Not Tasks
      - Conclusion: The Human Evolution
      12 min
    • Integrating AI_DI_Robotic Employees Into Your Culture
      While there are many amazing benefits to implementing AI, it is more important than ever to identify the potential repercussions. We must identify how the integration of artificial intelligence will affect your processes, operational requirements, training, human resources, and the company in general. These findings are necessary BEFORE AI is fully integrated so that changes can be made to ensure the ROI is achieved for your company and the human element needed to ensure humanities success.
      16 min

    About The Corporate Entrepreneur

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    We will bring you videos and podcasts to help entrepreneurial thinking, actions and processes that will help your organization grow. We will discuss strategy and tactics and the S.M.A.R.T. Platform…