We were lucky to catch up with Robert Tercek recently and have shared our conversation below.
Robert, appreciate you joining us today. So, let’s start with trends – what are some of the largest or more impactful trends you are seeing in the industry?
The advent of agentic artificial intellilgence is both the most overhyped and most underappreciated trend in any industry. I believe we are at a threshold moment: we’ve passed the point where there is real doubt about whether AI systems work, and yet we have not reached the point where the value of AI agents is widely understood. These systems are not yet in widespread use by consumer today, but they will be tomorrow.
Transitional moments like this one are important because they are ripe with possibility and peril. It is very easy to miss them entirely, because of our conditioning.
I’ve had the opportunity to play an active role through several previous transitions: I launched MTV Music Television in 30 different countries during the advent of global television channels; at Sony I launched some of the first multiplayer games on the Web; at PacketVideo I launched the world’s first streaming video on mobile phones; for Oprah Winfrey, I launched the world’s largest live learning programs. At the time, these initiatives were considered outliers, unproven experiments. Today these services are used by hundreds of millions of people every day.
Each time I launched a new service, a group of knowledgeable “experts” loudly declared that “it will never work” or “the customer will never go for it.” or “the business model does not work”.
For instance, I demonstrated streaming video in mobile networks to the Chief Technology Officer at Vodafone in 2000. At the time, Vodafone was the most important mobile network operator in the world. To do the demo, we used a standard-issue Motorola handset on the Vodafone network. We were inside Vodafone headquarters. And it worked! Hurray. Video appeared on the screen. And then the CTO declared, “This will never work.” Despite a successful demonstration, the meeting was over.
I remember how puzzled I was by that reaction. Obviously, it _did_ work: all we needed to discuss was the path to testing and deployment. But he refused to accept it as a possibility.
I’ve encountered this so many times, in a variety of circumstances, that I now believe it is a universal reaction. Kind of a primordial instinct. When we see something in front of our eyes that defies some deeply-held convictions, many of us are unable to resist the impulse to reject the new information. After all, it’s a lot easier to declare that something is impossible than it is to revisit every assumption that you hold about the fundamental economics and physics of your industry.
I advise people to resist the impulse. Avoid saying, “That will never work”. Never is a very long time. When you say something will never happen, you are reinforcing your mental conditioning. You are creating an obstacle in your own path towards embracing the near future.
Which brings me back to our present moment. Today we stand on the threshold between the old industrial era of the 20th century, and the still-new era of intelligent machines. There is plenty of evidence to support the forecast that, very soon, we will all be in the habit of talking to our cars and computers and households. And we will soon delegate tasks to our personal AI agents, such as scheduling meetings, screening incoming messages, even booking travel arrangement and making purchase decisions.
When this occurs, many of the most successful business models of the past 20 years will be overturned, including search (the largest category of computer software) and mobile apps (one of the biggest success stories of the past 15 years).
Today these simple examples strike most people as science fiction. They are difficult to imagine, and even harder to accept as imminent. That’s because we have hundreds of years of conditioning to tell us that dumb machines cannot think or make decisions independently.
The people who cultivate the facility to embrace these novel possibilities and peer beyond them to the cascade of potential consequences have a super power. These are the people who will shape the future. That’s because they are prepared for it. They envision it, they recognize it and they know what to steer for.
You, too, can cultivate the habit of envisioning possibility instead of blurting out, “That will never happen”.
Robert, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
My name is Robert Tercek. I am an award-winning author, an artist, an entrepreneur and a creative executive in the media and technology industries. I design and launch new services that never existed before. Most of the jobs I’ve held did not exist before I took them, and in several cases the companies and even the industries did not exist when I started.
During my career, I launched a lot of new media platforms and innovative services, including: the first multichannel TV system in Asia (working for MTV at Star TV in Hong Kong) which covered a quarter of the Earth’s surface and 2/3 of the world’s population including all of China, Indonesia and India; the first multiplayer games on the Web for Sony Station, a joint venture between Sony Pictures Entertainment and Sony Corporation; the world’s first streaming video on mobile phones; the first mobile app store for a US carrier (AT&T); and the world’s largest live learning program for Oprah Winfrey.
Today these services reach hundreds of millions of people. But at the time, there were many skeptics.
I do not consider myself a skeptic but I am realistic: I get curious about technology and I am not afraid to think through the possibilities and envision future scenarios. That helps me understand the timing: there are a lot of factors that must be true in order for a new technology to gain traction with consumers. When I visualize future scenarios, I can see a path, like a series of stepping stones, of things that must happen in order for that scenario to become true. When I notice that an industry seems to be making progress on that path, it’s easy for me to project the next several steps.
That habit of mind seems to make me different from many of my peers who are media executives: they tend to block out the possibility of change because they are determined to preserve the past. After all, they have a lot invested in maintaining the systems that they’ve mastered. Their mastery of the past is what makes them powerful today. It is very difficult for most people to spend time envisioning how their power base will erode. Technology is indifferent to power bases. It can render outdated business process obsolete in months.
Today lots of organizations seek my perspective about future scenarios. I’ve worked with government agencies, universities, standards bodies, and major corporations in every part of the world on scenarios. What I help these organizations do is twofold: break the habits of groupthink and baked-in resistance to change; and work together in a collaborative and constructive manner to envision what comes next. That second point, about collaboration, is really important. Because if the whole organization fails to embrace a shared understanding of future possibilities and probabilities, then it is very likely that the deeply-rooted resistance will prevail.
Sometimes people experience an emotional reaction when I lead workshops and scenario-planning exercises. It is useful to pay attention to your emotional reaction to change. Even if the emotions are irrational, they can help us identify and understand the sensitivities, perceived weaknesses and hidden fears that will emerge as stumbling blocks or obstacles. Too often the impulse is to ignore the emotions, or override those feelings with the force of intellect, but I think that is like turning off a radar. Emotions can be useful signals if you listen carefully.
My favorite way to help organizations embrace the future is to do live, on-site, full day workshops that consist of linear teaching and interactive group exercises. I love it when I work with a company that commits wholeheartedly to this process. Together we make great progress in just a few hours. Many of my clients have pulled me aside to confide that they hate offsites and strategy meetings, but they love my workshops. A big reason this process works is that I get every participant to commit to it and to focus on tangible results. Not just strategy and ideas, but an action plan with owners.
I started my career as a designer and artist working for television directors in New York. Interestingly, most TV directors cannot draw pictures, which is a little odd when you consider that their job is to tell stories with pictures. That’s why they liked working with me. I could draw what they were describing, even as they spoke about it. For them, it was like magic to see their ideas emerge as illustrations and sketches on my drawing pad. Because I worked with a dozen different directors, I got the opportunity to see a variety of approaches to the job. And soon enough, I became a TV director myself.
For readers who are not familiar with that industry, the job of a director is to take a written script and turn it into a fully-realized world inhabited by credible characters. This is hard. It is a heroic feat of applied imagination, and it takes phenomenal focus and disciplined decision-making.
On any given day, a film or TV director will make thousands of decisions, big and small, about lighting, framing, scene, camera motion, decor, props, costumes, hairstyles, blocking and action, dialog, emotional intensity of performance, and also broad but intangible thematic elements like color, texture, mood, theme, and so on.
It’s a demanding job. People who are good at it have a knack for conveying information quickly and clearly to a crew. For me, the ability to envision complete scenarios and draw them, so that other people could see what was in my imagination, this is the key to success.
And it was this visualization ability that later enabled me to conceive of entirely new products, new services, new companies and sometimes entirely new industries.
I’ve had the amazing opportunity to do this in Southeast Asia, India, China, Japan, and all over Europe and the Nordic region and even in Russia, as well as in North and South America. I love what I do, and I love to share it with other people.
Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?
I read a lot, sometimes fiction, sometimes history, and sometimes books about the future. My most passionate interest is the future: the near future, the distant future, alternative scenarios, … and even the far out crazy stuff that we get in science fiction. One of the most important books I’ve read is Ray Kurzweil’s THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR because he explains, in plain English, the transformation that everyone today is contending with. In this book Kurzweil explains why the rate of change is accelerating, and how utterly destabilizing that will be for every person and society at large. TL;DR we humans are not great at dealing with change in the first place, and as it the pace quickens, we are likely to make mistakes. One look at the current political landscape makes this point quite obvious. As the rate of change increases, many of society’s most trusted institutions will break because they cannot evolve fast enough. Though they may serve as a brake or guardrail against out-of-control future scenarios, the fact is that these institutions must evolve or they may become irrelevant. Why is this stuff important? Because I find new business opportunities within the gaps between the future and the here-and-now.
How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?
i just raised USD $12 million for a startup technology venture that is focused on artificial intelligence. In the process, I learned that there are now 20,000 startup ventures focused on AI. So that’s the competition. Yikes. But in spite of all that competition, I managed to close the first round oversubscribed by keen investors.
How did we do it?
Whether you are raising $300,000 or $1 million or $10 million, the key factors remain the same:
!. Show me that your company has a unique proposition or a unique way to address the market.
2. Your team must be worldclass, with a track record of excellence. in its field.
3. You must demonstrate that there is clear demande for this kind of service.
4. Your solution must work seamlesly with their current workflow
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.RobertTercek.com
- Linkedin: www.linkedin/com/tercek
Image Credits
Robert Tercek
Ralph Simon