University IT
A Discussion With Josh Penzell
AI Frontiers:
Dialogues with Tech Pioneers Podcast
Guest: Josh Penzell
Transcript
Any views, discussions, or opinions expressed in this podcast do not represent in any way the opinions or positions of Stanford University, its staff, or its employees.
Don Cameron:
Welcome to the AI Frontiers podcast, a Dialogue with Tech Pioneers hosted by Stanford University Technology Training. I'm Don Cameron. We are excited to welcome Josh Penzell, who consults on AI-driven organizational change, with extensive experience in sales enablement, process improvement, and organizational innovation. He developed a theater think methodology, blending his theater background to create impactful learning experiences for global companies such as Amazon, Skillsoft, and ELB learning. And Josh, we appreciate the time you took today from your busy schedule to join us.
Josh Penzell:
Oh no, thank you for having me. Don, I appreciate you. Thanks a lot.
Don Cameron:
To start off, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got to where you are today, working in AI innovation?
Josh Penzell:
Who knows how we end up where we are, right, prismatic career. So I'll give you. I'll try to go through the whole prismatic story, because I think it's sometimes intriguing to folks. I started out grabbing a bunch of those IT certifications in the late 90s, A+, Net+, right? That'll come back to play in a second. But I got my degree in acting, wanted to be an actor, went to Northwestern, and made some money doing the IT stuff on the side. Eventually went to grad school at UNLV, was on faculty, you know, adjuncting there. Didn't finish the degree. Went to Brooklyn College, where I ended up getting my Master of Fine Arts, and I was a theater director and in the union and but while I'm there, it's New York City, so I had to start training. And I found an ad probably on Craigslist at that time that said, you know, training for A+, Net+. And I said I could do that. And then I started training trainers. And because those were Department of Defense sort of requirements, right? And people needed them, and I had 100% pass rate on getting people through, I somehow developed this side - right - career, teaching people how to teach while I was doing theater, right, and getting my MFA. And that goes on, right. And essentially, I approached the company that was publishing some of those books. They had a side company. I ended up working for that company, which did presentation skills, right? And sales skills, where I was able to take all this theater stuff and sort of meld it into a professional world, right? And I just decided theater wasn't going to do it at that point, right? My wife and I wanted to have a family, so I ended up in hotels, got to Amazon, somehow launched Alexa globally, right, to all the offline sales channels, and then was at a company called Zoox for a bit doing autonomous vehicles. Right? You're nodding your head, that you might know because of where they're located. Then Zillow Rentals, running sales enablement. I then moved over to Skillsoft, where I was for a bit. And finally, you'll be learning where I am now. So the question is, why AI? And it just made sense to the way I had always been thinking, right, which was essentially first principles, bottom up, not top down. And so, when the technology suddenly became available and accessible. It made innate sense to me, right? And enabled me to start working through things and thinking through things faster that, you know, other people weren't thinking through and as a result, it sort of became the thing people were looking at me for. By the way, I got an MBA at the University of Illinois back there, so I have a business degree too, and I can't tell you how or why, right, but somehow I probably could, we could talk about it. We will. But somehow my unique perspective, right, of looking at human behavior, of looking at this thing which replicates human behavior or attempts to, which is trained on human knowledge, which Jensen Huang said, the IT department of the future is going to be the HR department of AI agents. That means this is relationship-based. This is communication-based. This is not a technology like us launching right, crimping wires and cables back in, you know, those days, and having to learn the OSI model. So I don't know how, but it all just worked out that way. And here I am. And over the last year and a half, I've, basically, been working with organizations and talking at conferences and keynoting because of what I think is a unique viewpoint right on how we should be approaching this transformative I don't know, this paradigm shift, which is what it is, which is not like a technology or a tool like a teammate. Or a temp, or a new hire, or an intern, or whatever metaphor you want to use an actor, right? And I think it all starts from there, and then there are some key mechanisms and metaphors that come from there that sort of guide it. But there you go. There's the longish spiel that, I think gets you to why and how, which I have no idea.
