Episode #4 - The Human Upgrade: The Discipline of Reinvention in the Age of AI w/ Amir Khawaja

Full Episode Transcript

This is the full recorded conversation from The Human Protocol Podcast, published by The Human Protocol Group. © 2026 The Human Protocol Group. Please link to and attribute the original episode when referencing this conversation.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (00:02.197)
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Human Protocol, the podcast about staying human while building the future with AI. I am your host, Mykel Salomon. We talk about AI, leadership, and humanity, not in theory, but in how it shapes our everyday lives. Reinvention isn't a one-time act. It is really a discipline. And today, I'm joined by Amir Khawaja

distinguished engineer and leader of site reliability in the payment division at Discover, part of Capital One. With over 25 years of experience in driving digital transformation, Amir has experience leading software delivery, product, platform, and operations team. Amir believes that creating a great employee experience helps drive a great customer experience.

Amir also believes that creating... Oops, okay, I'll get that off. So with this philosophy, Amir gives relentless focus to solving complex business and technology challenges in a way that serves the customer. His leadership style blends technical expertise with his passion for martial arts to bring a unique style that has a strong focus on people. As a third degree black belt in Taek wondo

Amir has a passion for helping others grow personally and professionally. His ability to share his knowledge extends beyond the math and his profession. His ability to share his, oops, sorry. He has shared his expertise for over a decade as an adjunct professor teaching web development technologies. Furthermore, you can find him sharing his expertise in leadership, technology, and personal growth.

in a podcast he co-hosts called Black Belts and Boardrooms. In this episode, we're going to be exploring how AI is reshaping roles, how to train your mind, and how to lead teams through the greatest reinvention of our era with discipline over panic. Amir, one more time. Welcome to The Human Protocol.

Amir Khawaja (02:24.14)
Michael, thank you for having me.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (02:27.541)
Perfect. Thank you very much. I'm very excited for the conversations that we're going to have today. And I think it will add a lot of value for what we're bringing today to the table. And usually, I like to kick these sessions on with something that I ask every guest. When we remove the titles, the LinkedIn bio, and everything that everyone knows about Amir, who is Amir?

at his core.

Amir Khawaja (02:59.982)
Wow. So at my core, I am somebody who loves to serve. know, everything I do, everything I aspire to be is usually in service of something. And in this case, most of the time actually is in service of my family, whether it's my children, my wife, my parents, my siblings, my community. I'm always learning and trying to get better so that I can serve them in some capacity, whether it's giving my time, financial help, or just, you know, my ability to

use my skills. That's really who I am at my very core is somebody who loves to be of service and loves to be of value to others.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (03:39.423)
Great. Thanks for sharing that, Amir. Much appreciated. And when we were thinking about everything that is going today with AI, right, and the topic and what would be adding to this conversation today, we connected right away with something that I think a lot of people will connect to it and will appreciate the conversation today, which is what needs to happen with us, right?

to get ready for the next level with AI. And that's why we titled this episode, The Human Upgrade, The Discipline of Reinvention in the Age of AI. And when I look at your history, right, especially in martial arts and Taekwondo, though, and all the discipline that it takes for you to be successful on that practice, what do you think...

practicing and being so much engaged on that, it teaches you and us and can teach us about business leadership in times of AI.

Amir Khawaja (04:50.606)
You know, so let me, let me start with the AI piece of this thing, because I think that's an, that's an interesting topic in general. Part of the reason is, you know, I'm reminded, so I started my career back in the nineties and back then you had the dot-com boom. If you could write code, you had a job practically. If you were not yet on the internet, there were companies looking to sell you beyond the internet and people were latching onto it, you know, in groves.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (05:08.885)
Mm-hmm.

Amir Khawaja (05:19.054)
It's like a gold mine rush, gold rush. AI sort of is the same way. So I'm actually feeling a lot like it was the nineties, just a lot faster because now the computing has caught up. You've got tremendous compute power to power these data centers that need all of these LLMs and the data that they need to run all the workloads. So from a human perspective, discipline wise, to me it's,

You're always learning, first of all. We say this to ourselves, we say this to everybody that comes in our path. You're always running. The difference I feel now is you have to learn faster. So the upgrade cycles are smaller. Your ability to quickly understand what the problem is and then react to it is becoming more and more frequent and jarring. So from a human perspective, I think that's really where the focus becomes is how can I...

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (05:51.615)
Mm-hmm.

Amir Khawaja (06:15.274)
manage the pace of innovation that's happening around me and how can I manage the rate of change that's happening around me.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (06:22.419)
And that's where the discipline part is more, it's extremely important today more than ever, right? It's the commitment that you have to put on trying to reinvent yourself on a daily basis with all the changes that are coming via AI. That's where discipline should come and help you to keep the focus on what really matters.

Amir Khawaja (06:41.934)
Absolutely. mean, discipline, think in general should be a good life skill that we all should learn, know, regardless of what technology is doing.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (06:46.645)
Mm hmm. Yes. Yeah, totally. Totally. can't agree more with you on that. It really is. And what would you tell to those leaders, Amir, that they keep reacting instead of focusing on reinventing themselves and reinventing their teams?

Amir Khawaja (06:53.709)
Yeah.

Amir Khawaja (07:08.664)
Yeah, think, so I try to stay away from words like reinvention because that's a very difficult word for people in general, you know, because you're asking them to become something that they're not, or they're no longer going to be. So I think the better word that I like to use, at least for myself, is how adaptable are you and how quickly can you adapt? You know, if I think about in terms of adaptability, then for me, it's all about, well, what is it that I'm trying to solve for?

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (07:15.956)
Mm-hmm.

Amir Khawaja (07:36.623)
Does it apply to me? So the two questions I always used to ask my students, you know, as a, in the first week of class, when I was teaching in the, in the university system is, you know, what problem are you solving and why do you care? And you can extrapolate that question into any different part of your life. You know, what problem are you solving and why do you care? It's buying a new iPhone. What problem is it going to solve for you? Do you have a slow iPhone? You know, or take it to AI. What problem are you solving? Is it going to be an efficiency in some workload that you have?

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (07:48.181)
Mm.

Amir Khawaja (08:06.496)
Or is it really just because you have a fear of missing out, like the industry seems to, you know, constantly want you to believe, Hey, if you're not on the AI bandwagon, then you're missing out. So it's that level of adaptability and understanding before you get to the point of, me incorporate this technology now in my enterprise.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (08:25.905)
And don't you think that that power of adaptability is kind of the basis of people being able to reinvent themselves? If you keep adapting yourself, right, if you keep adjusting and adapting to the new changes, is it that some sort of reinventing themselves as we move along?

Amir Khawaja (08:48.182)
If I think about reinvention in the terms of leaving everything in the past, in the past, and just moving forward to the next thing, I think that does a disservice to the person. For me, you know, I'm a culmination of everything I've experienced and I think so are you and so is everybody else we meet. You know, we take what we experienced in the past and it informs where we are today. So again, know, reinvention to me doesn't feel like the right word. You know, there's a saying,

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (08:59.039)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (09:10.815)
Hmm.

Amir Khawaja (09:18.158)
People like change, but they don't like being changed. So if you reinvent, you know, if you reinvent, you're effectively telling them that, you know, you're no longer the thing that you were in the past. You're now this new thing. So, but, but I get the sentiment by the way, so I'm not trying to be argumentative. I get the sentiment of reinvention. You know, you're a technologist one day and maybe a public speaker another. That is a form of reinvention. However, one is not.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (09:21.461)
Yes, that's very true.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (09:36.575)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (09:42.837)
Hmm.

Amir Khawaja (09:47.586)
without information for the other. The technologist is still going to be there.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (09:50.023)
Absolutely. Yeah, no, no, no, absolutely. And I appreciate that angle that you put towards the adaptability part of it. think that when you frame it that way, it makes total sense. It really does. And I really like that. When we look at the type of roles that we have today, Amir and especially you, that you're leading through this era of transformation with AI.

How do you see roles evolving, right? In a way that we were focused on task in the past and now where we are heading is more as to what capabilities you are bringing to the table as part of the role. How do you see that transition happening?

Amir Khawaja (10:41.176)
So I take a slightly different perspective. mean, jobs obviously is always the first thing that people like to think about, you know, in terms of AI or any kind of major technical shift. And this is a major technical shift without a doubt. So from a jobs perspective, I think, you know, if I look at what AI brings to the table, you know, I think of AI in one of three capacities. It's either going to augment my team in some way. I'm going to be able to delegate to it something or

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (10:48.81)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (11:09.844)
Hmm.

Amir Khawaja (11:10.976)
it's going to completely automate something for me that I can't automate in other ways. So if I have, for example, a function in my organization that is, you know, being done, it could be done by a machine better, and then I free up capacity and people working on better, more exciting work, then that's something that I would consider. But I would look at it from the lens of, I augmenting? Am I delegating or am I automating? And those, that's usually the starting point for how I think about

how do I want to incorporate AI in my environment? Because ultimately, AI will only be as good as the information you serve it. And it's very dependent on the data. So I have to even ask myself before I can even get to that stage, do I have good enough data? Do I have clear procedures? Is the process well-defined? Start there before thinking about the jobs that will change and things like that. But ultimately, yes.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (11:48.008)
Absolutely.

Amir Khawaja (12:09.088)
I do believe jobs will change. They will become more hybrid. Or at least that's how I like to think about it. The example I use is if I'm a webmaster in the 90s, I'm no longer a webmaster in 2025. That role doesn't exist anymore. But what has happened is that the webmaster in the 90s morphed into a mobile application developer. Because if you remember, HTML was the first way in which you could build mobile apps and then native comes along and so on.

And then you go from there into a full stack engineer. So that's an example of gradual hybridization of the webmaster role. And similarly, if you look at the data analyst or the business analyst, the business analyst role back in the eighties and nineties was somebody who looked at documentations, procedures, wrote documents, et cetera, started looking at data for patterns. Eventually the business analyst also becomes the data analyst.

And the data analyst fast forward in 2025 is actually more of a data scientist. You have junior data scientists, you've got senior data scientists, you've got data leaders, chief data officer, you know, and this is again, an example of a gradual displacement of what was just a function that was not driven by computing, but is now driven more. And along the way, salaries for both of these

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (13:22.292)
Mm-hmm.

Amir Khawaja (13:26.988)
roles have increased significantly. So data scientist gets paid a lot more than a business analyst, for example, right? So the same, I believe is happening here with AI, you we'll see some roles that will become augmented, you know? So for example, you know, I might want my ticketing system, just to use that as an example, to be more easily distilled into, you know, this is noise, this is not noise, but then have somebody periodically look at the folder with a noise.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (13:31.497)
Right. Right.

Amir Khawaja (13:55.865)
to say if it's done well or not. So that's an example of augmentation.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (13:58.324)
Yes.

Right, and you touched into a great point earlier, which is the question of the why. Why are we using it for? And you talk about augmentation and three different categories that you use on your daily basis. And it's something that I also use a lot.

People needs to understand that everything that you're trying to implement or roll out, like AI for example, it has to start with a need that you have. What is your why? Why are you trying to bring AI to your business or to your daily life? It has to be to try to solve a problem. And it has to make sense for you. And it makes me think, because you portrayed it beautifully.

how their roles have been evolving since the 90s, right? But are you concerned at all for the pace of how AI may be disrupting and changing things that fast?

Amir Khawaja (15:12.608)
I am concerned. if I, you know, and I love the name of your show, by the way, the Human Protocol Podcast. So I'll just pick on that as the framing for what I'm about to say. You know, if I think about the impact of computing or technology in general, you know, it's changed how we interact and how we talk to each other as human beings. You know, we went from, let me pick up the telephone and dial a number and speak to that person to texting to now we just interact with emojis, pictures.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (15:38.867)
Yes.

Amir Khawaja (15:39.394)
You know, if a cave person were to look at us now and they'll say, well, we've just pretty much gone back to when we were drawing pictures or hieroglyphics, you know, just that's an extreme example, but I think you get the point.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (15:51.273)
Yes, I've noticed that. It's a degradation of how we communicate with each other, if you put it that way, right? Because we're using emojis now instead of actually talking to each other for the most part.

Amir Khawaja (16:03.288)
Well, so I wouldn't call it degradation, but I would call it an optimization, you know, because our minds work faster than our speech and our speech works faster than our ability to write. So if we think about in terms of speed, then our ability to consume information and communicate information is going to look for optimization, right? So if I send you an emoji, you will probably look at that picture and you have a sentence or two or a paragraph in your head immediately.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (16:32.905)
Yes, that is true.

Amir Khawaja (16:33.526)
Right? Or if I write two or three words and I send an emoji with it, you've got the emotion with it. You've got the sentiment. If you know the person, you know exactly what they're thinking. And now you're laughing in your head or you're crying or you're whatever, right? There's a bunch of different things. So that level of optimization is really critical. I think as we move even more forward into an age where machines can do more for us, you know, so it's more about not just my ability to communicate to another human being. It's.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (16:43.635)
Mm-hmm.

Amir Khawaja (17:03.288)
How am I able to communicate to a more junior teammate on my team? So that's how I think about AI is it's another person, but it's a person that's still growing and evolving. How do I train this person? Well, maybe person is a stretch, but how do I train this machine to be more like the assistant that I want it to be? And that's kind of where we are today. AI in its current form is more about can it...

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (17:25.173)
Hmm.

Amir Khawaja (17:32.633)
You know, find the next best character to represent whatever is it that I asked it to do and do it very, very quickly. The modalities that AI supports today is incredible. We've got multimodal AI agents today that can talk to each other and solve for problems that, know, in the past were only just imagined. So from that perspective, it's changing how we as people in communities will interact with each other. But there's also, you know, to put the more community.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (17:39.507)
Hmm.

Amir Khawaja (18:02.508)
spin to it, there's an impact to rich communities versus poor communities who can actually afford access to these types of technologies. Because to me, I'm thinking about, you know, working in a fortune 500 company, I've got access to resources that a small mom and pop shop won't. So my ability to solve for more complex problems is better than somebody who is running a small business. But at the same time,

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (18:28.767)
Mm-hmm.

Amir Khawaja (18:30.444)
that small business can also benefit from some of the capabilities, but then how do you even begin to start incorporating those capabilities, right? And I come back to the 90s, where if you could write code, you had a job. So if you could create AI agents specific to the problems, you will then have a market that you can capture. And you don't have to capture large markets like Google, for example, you know, but you should be able to then use those skills to solve for real.

problems that small businesses might face, for instance.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (19:01.299)
Yeah, that's the key to solve for real problems, right? We always need to be searching for what is the problem that we're trying to solve. And yes, I use the degradation of communication in a way just to try to spark some controversy. Depending on who you're talking to. Maybe if I talk to my mom, right? She can tell me, yes, you guys are not communicating as we used to communicate it back then. We used to have long conversations, right?

Amir Khawaja (19:14.857)
Hahaha!

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (19:30.461)
and the interactions were so much different than it is today. And that's part of what technology is bringing into our lives and what AI is bringing into our life, which is these type of changes. And it's up to us as humans, right, to try to remain connected with each other one way or the other. And I think that's kind of why this type of conversation is important because while we go through this transformation, right, and...

Amir Khawaja (19:30.808)
Yeah.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (19:58.901)
how we're gonna continue to remain humans, right, and connected to each other when the technology is there and is doing a lot of things for us not to connect to each other more and more, right? How can we put the technology to work for us in a way that still will continue to help us in the future and not kind of keep us apart more and more? And it's a concern that I have, and it's part of the reason why...

I'm having this conversation with you today and with others is to try to find out where are we going from now, right? What is the human upgrade? If I ask Amir, what do you think is the human upgrade that we need to face this new era with AI?

Amir Khawaja (20:51.48)
You know, the, word adaptability keeps coming to my mind because that's what I'm doing with myself is I'm trying to understand and learn and learn fast because this is really what AI is doing to all of us. It's forcing us to learn fast. and I think ultimately, you know, there's, there's, there's more to it than just the technology piece of it itself. You know, I think about ethics and I think of governance and I think of risk. You know, if you, if you think about where, for example, open AI is today or Google is today.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (20:59.519)
Mm-hmm.

Amir Khawaja (21:20.898)
or any of these other companies that are building literally the platform for LLMs. OpenAI is likely going to become the first platform where you will start building apps and solutions or agents. It's already happening, but eventually I think you'll see a marketplace for this pop-up. And OpenAI in my gut instinct tells me it's going to be the place where most of these solutions will live first. But from the community side of things and human side of things,

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (21:25.951)
Mm-hmm.

Amir Khawaja (21:50.061)
The upgrade is going to be how can we still retain our ability to solve problems and which problems do we really want to spend our energy on? Because as more and more of these agents and AI LLMs become mature, we will actually have a choice. We'll be able to decide which problem is worth my time and which problem is not. Do I just want to pay for it? And I'll give you a concrete example.

We're not there yet today, but I can see this happening with the AI agents. You you're driving and you remind yourself, I should have ordered cat food. I didn't do that. I won't be back until two days from now. So you should be able to talk to your agent and you should be able to say, Hey, place an order for cat food. And it'll go and, you know, make that purchase and ship that to your house through Amazon or any other service you're using. So that level of assistance.

is going to change, you know, how much time and effort we're going to spend on the things that are important or not. You know, grocery shopping is being just a basic use case, but there'll be other parts of it. You know, you're, parking in a garage. Your car can do that decision-making for you. You know, we'll have that flexibility. do you want to buy a car that has self-driving? Okay, great. Then you'll have other additional capabilities unlocked for you that most other people without that feed that vehicle is going to have.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (22:54.997)
Mm-hmm.

Amir Khawaja (23:18.21)
So we'll start seeing more and more of these. And I think from a cultural perspective, we'll see more and more divide between those who have and those who don't, because these conveniences will pop up in corners that even we can't imagine today.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (23:34.835)
Right, and it makes me think that all these use cases, business cases, use cases that you mentioned are happening today, right? There are people already creating agents, right, to automate more of much of the daily task that people are doing, that businesses are doing. But when enough is enough, it's a question that I always put in myself, because...

Efficiency we all like and we all appreciate the efficiency and I think everybody's looking for that today. Everybody wants to automate as much as we can because we want that type of efficiency bring to the business, right? But also the more that we automate and the more efficient that we get, when is enough? I asked that myself.

When is really enough? When are we going to think as humans, as business owners, hey, we should stop right here. Because the more we automate, the more we may be removing the need to have humans in the middle of it. And it's a real concern that I have. And it's part of the adaptability and the changes that we are experiencing today already.

Amir Khawaja (24:57.09)
Yeah. So me personally, I'm not worried about that at all. And I'll tell you why. You know, the human nature has an infinite capacity to expand and grow. And I firmly believe that I've seen it in myself and others. You know, we, to your point about using the word reinvent, there are many people who we know in our personal circles, I'm sure that we can say, well, so-and-so reinvented themselves. And in the same vein, I think a lot of people

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (25:19.85)
Mm-hmm.

Amir Khawaja (25:26.882)
Given the need, know, there's the old saying, necessity is the mother of invention. Given a need, people are going to go ahead and learn a skill, practice a skill, invest the time, and circumstances will drive them towards that. I think as long as there's a dollar to be made, people are gonna build solutions and it's never going to be enough. So, you know, that may be bad news for you. You know, it's never going to be enough.

But again, I come back to the question, why do I care? What problem is it solving? Why do I care? Ultimately, my concerns are not going to be the same as, for example, Sam Altman in OpenAI. It won't be the same with Google and Sundar Pichai, for example. My concerns are going to drive what is important to me. So right now, as a leader of an operations organization,

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (26:07.807)
Mm-hmm.

Amir Khawaja (26:23.53)
My concerns is very much about how can I make my people in my team be better in what they do, make less mistakes because, you know, it's less manual. How can I help them, you know, think more abstractly or move beyond what they're just now doing? Cause again, everybody has the desire to grow, know, giving them exciting work, giving them work that's meaningful. That's my responsibility as a leader and every leader.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (26:36.552)
Mm-hmm.

Amir Khawaja (26:52.664)
quite frankly.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (26:55.285)
Totally agree. And I think if you look at some of the benefits that AI is bringing to our lives, it's really removing those repeatable tasks that consumes a lot of time for us and allowing us and our teams to really focus on finding ways to grow through meaningful tasks that maybe in the past, because everybody was so busy, people didn't have time to focus on. And I think that will allow

Absolutely leadership to focus and try to build that type of more meaningful tasks and careers for our people. And you made me think right now about AI governance. And I'm curious to see how do you see AI governance today and in the future really as part of leadership, right? How do you see that, Amir?

Amir Khawaja (27:53.369)
So governance to me is going to be very important in the age of AI. I firmly believe we're exiting information age and we're now in an age of AI where we'll see more and more different ways in which we incorporate this technology. Governance would look like, how do I make sure that my AI systems are not compromised because of some bad actor trying to take advantage, right? Because AI systems are still software. How you think about...

the controls for it as well? Is it giving me misinformation because AI can also hallucinate? So that's part of governance. I going to be able to give it data so that it can reinforce the learning that it's already made? So think about frauds, solutions and things like that. Credit score, as another example. So for me, governance in the enterprise,

is going to definitely mean leadership creating the ecosystem where everybody can participate in making sure that AI systems are supported with the proper feedback loops because AI systems need feedback loops in order to continually support and serve the business. AI systems need to have hygiene. You can't just throw data at it. You've got to make sure that you've got procedures and processes in place that is going to give it quality data, not just anything that comes down the pipe.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (29:17.489)
Extremely important, yes.

Amir Khawaja (29:17.742)
You're going to have to have, you know, controls in place that say, you know, we have to evaluate periodically, whether it's once a month or a quarter or a year, all the different procedures and processes that support whatever business use case that is powered by or supported by AI systems. So governance is going to take a few different flavors. And I think a lot of this is going to be driven by not necessarily just the leaderships by themselves.

It's actually going to be driven by the people who are actually closest to the data and the information. Because ultimately, you know, if I think of AI as an assistant, then I've just given every single person in an organization a superpower. They will be able to, you know, set the assistant who has an entire knowledge of the enterprise, do things that previously would have needed multiple conversations with different people in the organization.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (30:00.157)
Mm-hmm.

Amir Khawaja (30:13.132)
So if you give that or can give that superpower, then really as a leader, my control, my concern should be how can I make sure that the environment continues to stay healthy? How can I make sure that the people closest to the information can successfully make decisions? Where do I put the guardrails for the decisions where they can make it all day long? And then every, you know, if it hits a certain threshold, then I come in and make those decisions. Because, you know, again, to your

comment about speed, businesses want to move faster. And who else can make the decision fastest than the people with the information.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (30:45.471)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (30:50.869)
All back to the data, right? And that's where this information will be coming from. And to your point, the data in times of AI, and it's really what's gonna make these AI assistants or these AI solutions as a superpower as they can be. Because there is also sometimes a trust issue and concerns about the outputs that we're getting from these. And that's where I totally agree with you.

the guardrails needs to be in place. At what point we're going to jump in and say, OK, I'm taking over right now. Because I think we're going to continue to see, as part of this evolution, changes around AI governance related to the data. And the outputs are linked to the data, for the most part.

Amir Khawaja (31:44.089)
Yeah. And I think AI governance is going to be an example of a cross-functional governance team because you're going to need to have multiple disciplines contributing to potential issues that could come up. And I think this will be a new thing for businesses to think about or leaders to think about is, I want one type of skillset or background? Do I want a multitude of skillset? What does that cross-functional committee look like? Exactly.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (31:49.301)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (32:00.071)
Bye.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (32:08.841)
that can add value to the conversation, right?

Amir Khawaja (32:13.154)
Yep, exactly.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (32:14.321)
Especially when these solutions, these AI solutions will touch every aspect of our organizations. Every single team will be involved one way or the other at some point.

Amir Khawaja (32:28.418)
Yeah, I mean, so I think I have to be careful. You know, when I, when I think about AI, I'm usually very cautious because, know, if I, if I try to look at everything that an AI can solve, then I'm going back to the analogy that everything's a nail, right? If everything's a nail, then the only tool I need is a hammer. And that's not true about AI. AI is good for certain use cases. You know, you don't necessarily need a full blown LLM for everything. You can even do it with just a basic machine learning algorithm, for example.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (32:35.625)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (32:47.157)
Hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (32:56.543)
Ryan.

Amir Khawaja (32:58.162)
you know, we'll start seeing not just large language models like we have today. We'll start seeing what's also called small language models show up and we're already seeing manifestations of this. know, eventually I can see small language models in IOTs and automobiles and other places, kiosks even, that will be able to make smarter decisions, make better experiences available to customers and people. you know, even as engineer writing code.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (33:06.239)
Mm-hmm.

Amir Khawaja (33:25.4)
I, you know, there's going to be an opportunity for us to look at creating more and more disposable code. Yeah. Because ultimately, you know, I think engineers are not going to lose their job. They'll be more focused on what does durable code look like for the enterprise. And that durable code is then going to be kept and maintained with or without AI assistance, probably with AI assistance. But then everybody else in the organization should be free to create as much disposable code as they want to.

to experiment. And that's another thing about AI is that, you know, allowing experimentation as a leader to take place in your organization is only going to help increase the innovation that comes out of different parts of the different industries out there.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (34:07.593)
Yeah. Yeah, totally agree. And that type of experimentation, it's also happening in our personal lives, right? These AI solutions enable us to be as creative as we want to be. People can even build a website today without being a software developer or an engineer. Right. So those are the part of the benefits that AI is bringing to our lives. And I totally agree that experimentation is one of the things that I really am.

enjoy the most with AI, because it's allowing us to be creative in a way that I don't think we have been this, you know, free in the past as far as being able to create new things and experiment with new things and see how things may look like. But I'm curious, Amir, how do you see, right, and whenever as a leader, right,

We're having these tough conversations with our people that may be, may fear what may happen with AI. I'm curious what can you bring to this conversation today based on the discipline that martial arts and getting back to the discipline of martial arts kind of taught you, right, as a human being. How can we navigate through this complex

you know, and very difficult conversation to have with our people or people that think different about AI.

Amir Khawaja (35:45.583)
Yeah, I I, land on the word empathy a lot when it comes to trying to help my teammates or try to help people that, you know, come to me with questions and things like that. you know, ultimately what it boils down to is seeing from seeing from the other person's perspective. So, you know, what does your emotional IQ look like as a person, as a leader? You know, so for me, I, I always believe that people first, and that's just my leadership style. That's my personal philosophy is people first,

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (36:03.189)
Mm-hmm

Amir Khawaja (36:14.73)
And if you take care of your people, profits will follow. So for me, if somebody is concerned about AI, it's very important for me to understand from their perspective, what about AI is concerning them? Sometimes it could just be a lack of information. Sometimes it could be just a lack of clarity because their role for the longest time has been doing one thing. Sometimes it could just be, you know, curiosity, but they don't know where to even go and begin.

So it just depends on who I'm talking to, what is it that they're looking for, and just always trying to see things from the other person's point of view.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (36:53.683)
that helps tremendously, right? When you have the ability to not only position, but to put yourself on other person's shoes and try to feel what they're going through to better understand what that person, where this person may be coming from. It really opened our perspective in a way that as leaders also, we learn a lot, right?

Because we are seeing this from our point of view and our own lenses. And sometimes we don't see where people are coming from. And this where this type of conversation usually help us to keep us grounded. And keeping us grounded in times of AI, think, especially as leaders, is extremely important. And I'm curious to know.

What keeps Amir grounded, right? In times of AI, in times of disruption, in times of world changes, do you have a tool or something that keeps you grounded on a daily basis?

Amir Khawaja (38:11.138)
What problem does it solve? You know, I keep coming back to that question because it's a good starting prompt for me. What problems does it solve? You know, because ultimately any new technology solution that shows up in the marketplace and is getting press is going to be solving something. You so for me, what's important to understand is, you know, if the value that the technology or the solution is providing to me, really worth my time to spend.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (38:19.829)
Yep.

Amir Khawaja (38:39.938)
my attention and look at it and do a proof of concept, et cetera, then yeah, let me go try it. But that's really what grounds me the most is that what problem does it solve? I try to understand because somebody on the other side of that solution is looking to make a dollar, looking to make a profit. They don't spend this time because it's charity. That's just the reality of things. And that's okay. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (38:59.167)
Yes.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (39:04.851)
Yes, that's not how the word works, And nothing wrong with it, right? It's just the way things are.

Amir Khawaja (39:11.19)
No? Yeah, and everybody deserves to, you know, earn a great living at the end of the day, you know, but ultimately, you know, if I'm going to consume anything, if anything around me is affecting me or impacting me, I'll come back to the question, what problem does it solve? You know, and if it's directly impacting me immediately, then maybe I have to just react and get out of the way. But for the most part, you know, if I have time to think, that's the question that I'll start with. And that's what grounds me is, is trying to understand that part.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (39:32.41)
Thank

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (39:37.429)
Yeah. Yeah, and I love it. I love it because it's the question is, what is the problem that you're trying to solve? What is your why? Right? And for people, the why or the problem to solve, it's going to be different from a human being to human being, but it's a great way to get started. Right? Let me take a look at the problem that I'm trying to solve, and then we take it from there. Absolutely.

Amir Khawaja (39:47.971)
Mm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (40:07.061)
What would you tell, Amir, to those individuals that are trying to get started with AI that may not have the benefits and like you and I that work with technology, right, and we are experimenting with AI today, for those people that haven't even started to work with AI, what would be your piece of advice to them?

Amir Khawaja (40:37.41)
I think AI is very accessible right now. know, pick Gemini, for example. I mean, if you're on the internet and you're using search, you're already using AI. I mean, Google has replaced the first response to be a Gemini response now, right? It was optional first, but now every result is a Gemini response. I think, excuse me, anybody who is...

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (40:45.993)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (40:51.495)
Yeah.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (41:06.175)
Take your time.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (41:12.285)
Not a problem.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (41:16.977)
One of the benefits of Riverside is that we're not live. So it's okay. We get back to it.

Amir Khawaja (41:24.632)
Yep, just allergies have.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (41:29.831)
Yeah, I know, those allergies sometimes. Oof.

Amir Khawaja (41:32.985)
They are. Sorry, let me come back to that. So if you're already using Google Gemini, or sorry, using Google for searching, you're already exposed to AI. So just asking, for example, instead of just typing a search, excuse me, for a term, just type in in natural language, whatever is it that you would ask yourself to do. So instead of saying, hey, I'm going to find the first 10 results,

And then this is how I'm going to go click on one of these and then I'm just going to go scan the page, et cetera. Stop doing that. Just in your search bar in Google or any browser you use, just say, you know, whatever you're trying to do and look at the results. Surprisingly, it'll give you the answer in the first shot as opposed to you trying to scan the page.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (42:10.271)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (42:22.613)
Right. Yeah. And it's came through a million articles as we used to have in the past. Right. It's amazing how things have evolved in this direction, especially with AI. Now, as you were mentioning, if you go to Google search, you are getting the answer for the most part right away instead of having to select and going through articles as it used to be in the past.

And we are seeing that also other companies and other searches that are embedding AI. And sometimes we don't even notice. And the answer that we're getting is already an AI, an LLM already working on it. Yeah.

Amir Khawaja (43:05.154)
Yeah, you actually reminded me of a TEDx or was it a TED talk that I listened to some months ago where the speaker was making the case for we are the last generation that will ever read a book. Because we will have a machine that can tell us based on our questions about the book and about the information that is contained therein. know, and beyond that, you know, the question becomes, do I write?

for people or do I write for machines? Because that's the follow-up question at that point, you know, because, yeah.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (43:39.815)
I know you didn't like the degradation of communication when I mentioned back then, but look where this is heading right now, because this is a very clear example. People are writing books, right, and using AI to write books for them. For other people to use AIs to put a summary together of the book. You know, so when I look at this, say, is this really?

Amir Khawaja (43:58.508)
Yes.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (44:10.099)
what we need. Is this really what's going to add value to us in this future?

Amir Khawaja (44:17.88)
So actually, that is a good way to say the best skill for a human being in the age of AI is going to be critical thinking. And that's what I tell my kids, know, now they're college age and I tell them critical thinking is going to be your best ally in the age of AI. Because it's not a shortage of knowledge. We had the knowledge in the internet, you know, for many, many years now, many decades in fact.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (44:27.839)
Mm-hmm.

Amir Khawaja (44:46.414)
You don't have to look very far to find the question to something that's general knowledge. What you didn't have was the ability to critically think, but if a machine can shortcut that for you, then it jeopardizes the one thing you actually can do really well, and that's think critically. So the question then becomes, how can you use AI as a sparring partner to sharpen your skills as opposed to you become dependent on AI?

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (45:12.149)
Yep, it should not replace our critical thinking. It can help to accelerate it as we can. We want to do probably multiple things at once, but it should not be used to replace that key part of what makes us human beings so valuable, which is our critical thinking.

Amir Khawaja (45:36.206)
Well, the best news is that we don't have to worry about that, not yet, because AI can only operate on information we give it and information that's currently in existence. It cannot operate on some futurist type of scenario.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (45:50.093)
I love the not yet that you put there. So that's good news right now. And I appreciate that I'm here. I really do. really do. But let's see, right? Let's see what's going to happen. This thing is moving so fast. And same thing I want to ask you. What would you advise to companies and businesses, right?

Amir Khawaja (45:54.144)
You

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (46:18.921)
trying to or going through implementation of AI into their daily business operations.

Amir Khawaja (46:27.214)
So I think it's experimentation. You have to be comfortable with experimentation, but not without understanding where your models are coming from, where is the data living? It's very easy to go to OpenAI's website and start typing things in. It's going to live in the public sphere forever at that point. So what's important for businesses is to say, if you've identified use cases,

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (46:38.889)
Hmm.

Amir Khawaja (46:54.966)
You know that these are solutions viable. It can be viably solved with AI. Then you have to start looking at your procurement and your resourcing to say, am I going to host the models myself? Do I have enough skillset in the business? Do I need to hire a vendor? Is my vendor going to be, you know, capable enough to make sure that my data is protected? Cause you know, business secrets are not something you just want to type into Google or Gemini or, you know, open AI or whatever.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (47:21.875)
Absolutely.

Amir Khawaja (47:24.674)
You want to be able to control not just the ecosystem, you know, but you should also be able to identify small use cases that you can start testing this out now. And this is again, assuming, you know, that you have quality of data established. You've got procedures that are clearly understood and defined. You've got the personnel to make sure that hygiene of this data is maintained as you keep feeding this information. Cause obviously the machine needs to be fed with new information as it keeps growing. And then what are the.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (47:36.629)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (47:49.237)
Mm-hmm.

the training part of it, learning part of it, comes into play.

Amir Khawaja (47:54.991)
Exactly. Exactly. And not just the learning, it's the people, you know, because you don't want to just hand a solution to people and say, here you go, AI powered. It's going to be amazing. It's going to save you whatever 15 % of your time. The people who are going to be ultimately the beneficiaries of those solutions need to understand why AI is the best way to solve for it. And they should have the ability to also provide feedback.

When the system is not operating in the way that they know it should have reacted or behaved. You know, so again, it's, think for businesses, it's important to have that clear view about what feedbacks loop feedback loops do I need to set up? The people who are going to use it, do they have sufficient training? Do I have my governance figured out? Do I have my risks understood? if there's, if there's data coming from external systems, what safeguards do I have in place?

But just start experimenting with small use cases is really the only way to go about the AI revolution.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (48:56.691)
Yep, yep, I agree, I agree. And where the data is hosted, right, especially for businesses and enterprises is extremely important. It's always kind of the main and one of the few things that you need to try to invest time on it before you implement any AI solution. Where is your data being hosted? Is it staying within your tenant or is going away? Especially...

for sensitive information and business information that should not leave your tenant. And those are the type of things that you always need to have in mind when you are reviewing, bringing a potential AI solution to your business. And it makes me think right now, Amir, something that I keep, I've been thinking lately, it's I think we need more disclosure from companies, from these AI companies on.

where the data is being sourced from. I don't think there is a lot of conversation from where the data is coming. What are these companies getting the data from? And how much is that we are trusting these answers in a way that we don't even know where the data is coming from? And it makes me think, what can we do to try to...

still trust the solution and the data and the answers that we're getting, but without even knowing where it's coming from. Have you ever thought about that?

Amir Khawaja (50:36.462)
I have, and really I think it's a layered cake at the end of the day. So if I look at it from the lens of B2C versus B2B, if I'm going to Gemini or chat GPT or any of those other public GPTs out there, then it's going to be whatever's in the open internet. If I go to, for example, Expedia, and let's say Expedia is looking at hotels for me and figuring out an entire itinerary,

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (50:45.02)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (50:55.829)
Hmm.

Amir Khawaja (51:06.028)
That's a more refined use case. It's not depending on the data that is out in the public internet. It's actually using data from suppliers, people who you do business with. And this is where I think the trust factor is going to come in multiple levels. My trust as a consumer is going to be different than my trust as a leader in an organization or my trust as a user of a tool in my enterprise. The trust level is going to vary and it's not just going to be

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (51:10.335)
Right.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (51:15.445)
Right.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (51:27.935)
Mm-hmm.

Amir Khawaja (51:35.404)
you know, the same for public data versus, you know, enterprise data.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (51:38.517)
Not one size fits all, absolutely not, right? Yeah, yeah, I agree. And we're probably gonna be seeing a lot more on that in the next couple of years as we continue to amplify the use of AI, not only in our personal lives, right? But also in businesses. Now, I was reading the other day, even the federal government, it had a contract with OpenAI.

Amir Khawaja (51:43.36)
No, no.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (52:08.35)
for some of governments, branches, and offices to start using open AI as part of it. I think we're going to see a lot more coming from AI governance and data governance and ethics around that a lot more now that the government start getting more and more into the picture as well with AI.

Amir Khawaja (52:32.354)
Yeah. And I think it'll be an interesting battle because right now we're just seeing the, the army's lineup to use a military analogy. You know, the battlefield has been set and different skills are being posted. You know, ultimately I think as always, and this is not to mean in any kind of satirical way, but I think government is always playing catch up with the private sector. And I think we'll see the same thing here.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (52:35.253)
Hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (52:42.527)
Hmm.

Amir Khawaja (52:59.746)
The difference will be that the acceleration of the technology will probably force government to move faster. And I think we might see some of that play out, you know, as more younger leaders come into politics and lead the country in different states and federal level, I think we'll see some of those experiences show up in policy. And, you again, not to change the tenor of the conversation towards politics, but I think that's going to be in some ways good for the country.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (53:05.288)
Mm-hmm.

Amir Khawaja (53:29.304)
but we're always going to get the influence of technology companies on it, because they are very powerful, of course, they've got lobbyists. And that's not a bad thing because that's just how our market economies work. But at the end of the day, I think as a consumer of this technology, my first concern is always my privacy in some way, how much am I willing to give up? And I think that is a concern that we should all share and we should all have.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (53:41.14)
Ryan.

Amir Khawaja (53:57.207)
At least a clear understanding for ourselves. What is an acceptable level of risk for me? How much do I want to give up? And does it bother me if a little bit more than just that data was exfiltrated or left at least in my control? Right. So that, that is something that I think about.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (54:15.881)
Yeah. And you actually just kind of touched on something that I was going to ask you anyways right now, which is what do you think the government should be helping us with as we try to lay on, you know, a future with AI where somehow we guarantee that people from different levels, professionals, regular human beings,

have access to the same technology in a way that can help everyone. And I think that's kind of part of what the government should be there for. And the reason why I bring these questions to the show is because, I don't know you, but I feel like this is a wild west right there. Companies are doing whatever they want because there is not a lot of

regulations or laws dictating the limits on to what they can build and what and how they should be building these for us. And I think that's when we're going to need the government trying to insert more into these AI conversation more and more into the future.

Amir Khawaja (55:34.201)
Yeah. So I think we've got plenty of examples of that. If you just look in the last 30 years, you know, think tech companies have always tried to break the mold, you know, and I'll, and I'll use some very specific examples, Airbnb, for instance, you know, being able to rent your house and do it cheaper than a hotel, for example, was unheard of until it was done. And then what happens, regulations eventually caught up. Then you started seeing these restrictions in communities and municipalities show up saying, if your home is a short-term rental.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (55:42.932)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (55:49.598)
Right.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (55:53.269)
Mm-hmm.

Amir Khawaja (56:03.886)
These are the rules that you need to follow. You know, in the same way, for example, we saw this with the sales tax before, if you remember, if you're a business, a retail brick and mortar business, you were forced to charge a sales tax. It wasn't until, you know, a decade ago, did we start seeing nationwide regulations in America, at least show up and say, if you're an online business, you have to collect sales tax from all 50 States. Right. And that created a burden for small businesses because now all of a sudden

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (56:27.593)
Hmm.

Amir Khawaja (56:33.272)
How do you even build that into your e-commerce website if you just downloaded an open source WooCommerce or any other solution out there? Now you had to connect with the third party, integrate with their APIs to be able to calculate taxes. So Ernst & Young made probably a bunch of money just on that feature alone, as one example. And then you can go and look into, what's another example, Uber. It practically decimated the taxi cab business.

through technology. So I think technology is always going to push the envelope and even going back, actually, I'm reminded about, if you remember encryption back in the nineties and eighties, you could not build a software solution that used strong encryption and make it available in countries outside the U S you had to register with the FBI and you had to declare that your technology used strong encryption. This is when RSA keys, you know, certificates, if you had stronger than

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (57:11.272)
Hmm.

Amir Khawaja (57:30.83)
What is it 128 bit you had to like 256 bit you had to declare your technology uses strong encryption and There was export controls on it. So there's plenty of examples of this that we see in our history and AI is not going to be any different. It's another it's a platform play you're gonna see Utility these companies will become utilities effectively

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (57:52.775)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we're seeing action from, for example, governments of China, for example, Europe, already trying to embrace some global standards around data privacy and ethics in AI, that I'm going to be very curious to see how this evolves and how we move forward, right, with all these governments and different regulations from country to country and see what the US...

we'll be doing next, right? As far as kind of the rules that will be in place to make sure that we continue to evolve in a way that we don't feel the disruption so much as far as we can expect, basically.

Amir Khawaja (58:43.544)
Yeah, think AI will definitely, it's like nuclear energy. It really what it is. It's which country can control AI. Yeah, it is.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (58:51.381)
Mmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (58:55.421)
It's a race right now, right? It's really a race. And the concern is that there's not a lot of conversation about the amount of energy and our infrastructure being able to win this race. Because from what I've been reading in the past few weeks, it seems that, especially in the US,

our infrastructure is not prepared to the amount of energy that we need to produce, right? And that we are expecting to produce. Because every time we hit enter and we prompt something, that's energy being consumed in a data center somewhere, right? Getting the answer from you. Imagine as we continue to accelerate the use of AI, we're going to need a lot more to produce a lot more energy. And human beings are not

very familiar with how technology works, for example, people usually don't think on this type of thing, right? People just want their answer. They hit a button, and they don't care what happened in the back end. People that are in technology like you and I, we know there's a lot involved in the back end to get the right answers for whatever we are coming up, or the application, or the system. And I'm really concerned, because as you mentioned, it's really like it's a race right now.

It's everybody, all countries, they just want to win this race. They really want.

Amir Khawaja (01:00:24.43)
Yeah. And it's not just electricity, it's also water for cooling these data centers. Right. So in Texas alone, there was one study that I saw that estimated in 2025, we're going to use 49 billion gallons of water to cool data centers in Texas alone. In another study that was shared in the Guardian newspaper a few months ago, it was estimated that in 2024, 20 % of all of the global data centers

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (01:00:27.561)
And thank you.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (01:00:39.925)
Wow.

Amir Khawaja (01:00:53.966)
power consumption was spent towards running these LLMs or these AI systems. So that amounts to about 83 terawatt hours of power consumption in 2024. In 2025, it'll just go up, right? So these are very power hungry resource, natural resource hungry systems. And it's not just the data center. It's the raw materials you need to build the chips to run these LLMs as well.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (01:01:04.489)
That's a lot.

Amir Khawaja (01:01:23.822)
What does it do to your ESG program if you're an enterprise that has an ESG program?

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (01:01:24.51)
It's it.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (01:01:31.472)
boy, now you make me think.

Amir Khawaja (01:01:31.918)
It's going to challenge your ESG initiative.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (01:01:35.189)
It's a whole supply chain involved on this, right? A lot of key parts, not only from natural resources and energy that are involved on producing a response to your prompt. That we don't think enough about that. And we should, we should, right? It's kind of our responsibility in a way to really think about...

every time that we're trying to get the best answer from from chat GPT or an LLM and we keep doing and we keep doing. There's a lot of energy and a lot of things happening in the backend to make that happen. But yeah, that would be probably a conversation for another day, Amir. Because that will be a topic to talk about another hour just on that topic, I think, right?

Amir Khawaja (01:02:23.628)
Yeah.

Amir Khawaja (01:02:32.046)
Absolutely. I mean, I think it boils down to awareness at the end of the day. You know, I think everything has, there's nothing free. AI isn't free. And the technology behind it is significantly more powerful than any solution we've seen and deployed today in the enterprise. The resource consumption, the capacity, et cetera, it's very large. So I think as we interact more and become more comfortable and familiar with AI, we will just have to understand.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (01:02:47.592)
Mm-hmm.

Amir Khawaja (01:03:01.898)
all the different dimensions that make this possible. And I think a lot of that comes from top down really leadership, making sure that people are aware that here's what we're doing, here's what is the investment, here's what it's doing to your environment, if that's even a concern to you as an organization.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (01:03:05.173)
Mm-hmm.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (01:03:20.373)
and continue to bring more awareness, right? So people fully understand not only the technology, but the ramification and implication of building this technology and what it means for us as a society as we move forward, right? Because as we're seeing the future with AI, we're seeing these more, the ramifications of it will continue to amplify.

as we will have more people and future generations also embracing AI and embedding AI as part of our daily life. So very interesting, Amir. And last but not least, what would be your piece of advice if you look back and you find your younger self reflected today?

Imagine having Amir today as your younger self and the future generations. What would be your piece of advice for your younger self and the future generations about this future with AI?

Amir Khawaja (01:04:38.104)
So if I frame this for the future generations, me talking to my younger self, I would say the advice I would give myself and which is what I give others is meet yourself. And we are self-aware human beings and everybody's self-aware at a specific level. But when I say the words meet yourself, it's go beyond just what my likes and dislikes are.

Because ultimately, you know, unless we identify what is truly non-negotiable for us as an individual, it makes adaptability or to your point to use your word, reinvention, a challenge, you know, because we're not going to give up our non-negotiable values. But at the end of the day, we still need to adapt to a changing world. And that is going to be a constant in my life, in your life, in your listeners life and everybody. So what I would tell myself is meet yourself.

because that is going to be an important input to how you adapt.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (01:05:38.697)
Yeah, thanks for that, Emil. Appreciate those words. And this has been a very thoughtful conversation I've enjoyed. So thank you for sharing your time, your wisdom, and your humanity with us. It's been my real, real pleasure to have you on the show. And this has been an extremely, extremely thoughtful conversation. So I appreciate you, OK?

Amir Khawaja (01:06:05.688)
Thank you for having me.

THE HUMAN PROTOCOL PODCAST (01:06:07.027)
Right? So if today's conversation sparks something in you, make sure that you share this episode with your friends, with your family, with your loved one. Please follow the Human Protocol and join us every week as we really explore what does it mean to stay human while building the future with AI. Thank you all, and I see you next time.