In an era where the skills necessary for the future of work are constantly evolving, Dwayne Matthews has dedicated his career to cultivating a skilled and adaptable workforce — from building a future-ready education system to proactively upskilling today’s labour force — in order to drive continued innovation, productivity, and long-term economic prosperity in our AI-fueled future.
As the founder of TomorrowNow Learning Labs, Dwayne explores the impact of disruptive innovation on the future of education and the future of work. He is often a featured guest on national television programs, including CTV’s Your Morning and The Marilyn Denis Show.
Prior to this, Dwayne was the Chief Innovation Evangelist and President of NeuroEdX, a company using neurotechnology and AI to prepare people for the fourth industrial revolution. The technology platform was used to train US Air Force Pilots and Navy Seals and has over 38 peer-reviewed published papers, 40 ongoing research projects, and eight patents, making it the most scientifically validated cognitive technology in the world.
Dwayne recently joined us “Inside Our Boardroom” to explore the emerging challenges and possibilities of AI, what’s next in the evolution of this disruptive technology, and how companies can proactively prepare their people to navigate this ever-shifting AI landscape.
Answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Shaping Tomorrow: How to Best Navigate an AI-Driven Future
Speakers Spotlight: How Can Companies Be Proactive in Navigating AI?
Dwayne Matthews: It’s important for organizations to realize that everyone is now in the R&D business — everybody’s in research and development, and everybody’s in open innovation. By open innovation I mean finding innovation outside of your organization, inside of your organization, and outside of your industry, and leveraging it to create a certain amount of strategic foresight and build a crucible.
I had an opportunity to work with Shell and they have something called the Shell Game Changer. When I spoke to the leaders at Shell Game Changer, they said, we’re not an oil company, we’re an energy company. Today, that energy is oil but tomorrow, it could be dust from the moon. So they spend a lot of time looking outside of themselves and creating this crucible where they’re able to let things gel, let things bubble up a little, and create value from that.
Shell Game Changer has been wildly successful, and I believe that a lot of organizations would benefit from having an R&D, open-innovation-type lab that sits just on the side of their organization, and focuses on the things that could be coming that they wouldn’t necessarily be able to see if they remained solely focused on their industry.
In his informative keynotes, Dwayne dives into non-obvious insights and forward-thinking strategies that help leaders better respond to change and proactively shape the future of their organizations. Hear more from Dwayne in the video below:
From Fear to Glee: Opening Yourself Up to Possibility
SpSp: Where do you fall on a scale of fear-to-glee about AI? Why?
DM: The first thing I think about when I think about AI is paradigms shifting. So if I take a step back and think back to 1871, this is when Canada first introduced compulsory education. At this point, 98% of all people on planet Earth were farmers. I like to imagine the schoolteachers and the principals knocking on the door of a farm and saying, I’d like to take your five children away from the farm — which is everyone’s job right now — and put them in a room for six hours a day, 192 days of the year. From this, society is going to have more food than we would ever need, and we’re going to be able to build a whole new, richer economy. I think most people would have thought that’s absolutely crazy. But that’s what we did, and we did that by taming a new technology at the time, called the printed book.
Right now, we’re seeing a convergence of a number of different technologies that are sort of gelled together with artificial intelligence — compute power, renewable energies, advanced materials, etc. We have all these things converging into one, and it’s the first time probably in about 100 years that we have an opportunity to create something new. That’s going to lead to a significant amount of fear, the same way it would have led to fear with the farmers back in 1871.
So, do I think we’re going to have bumps in the road? Yes. Do I think we’re going to have to plan for those bumps? Yes. Am I optimistic? I’m radically optimistic about the possibilities.
Generative AI vs. Semantic AI
SpSp: Can you explain semantic AI and how it differs from the AI applications we’re seeing today?
DM: A lot of people are excited about generative AI, but I think generative AI has a really big challenge. One is the platform integration is massive, which means that if you’re a company and you get locked in really early, all your information goes in there and it’s really difficult to disconnect from that particular platform. I think smart companies are going to start moving towards open platforms or their own built platforms.
I think the sneaky winner in this is going to be semantic AI. Semantic AI uses natural language and machine learning. It uses knowledge graphs, it uses significantly less energy, and it allows companies to build their own internal enterprise software and spin those up in very short spaces of time based on a prompt. I think that’s going to be radically different than the generative AI model that’s controlled by someone else. So is this an AOL-Google moment, perhaps?
The other piece is that we’re seeing personal on-device semantic AI emerge slowly and quietly in the form of Apple intelligence. I think that once you have those two semantic AI pieces in place — they may not necessarily be as good at syntax as ChatGPT but they’re really good at privacy, accuracy, and energy efficiency in terms of compute power — we could see a shift. I don’t think that generative AI and open AI is going to write the end of the AI story. I think they’re the beginning of it.
Dwayne explores the AI possibilities he’s excited about in the video below, particularly the next step in the AI evolution:
Unlocking Human Potential with AI
SpSp: What did working at NeuroEdX teach you?
DM: I have three main chapters in my career. One was my education career where I was teaching. Second was open innovation, where I was looking for technologies, for patents, and for people that would shift entire paradigms, and then the third was human performance. How do you enhance human performance itself?
When I was at Neuro edX, I had an opportunity to work with one of the most brilliant neuroscientists definitely here in Canada. His name is Dr. Jocelyn Faubert out of the University of Montreal, and he created something called a 3D MOT, which stands for 3D multi-object tracking. It helped people train their selective and sustained attention and increase mental processing speed.
The platform itself was designed for athletes and it was eventually used by the US Air Force and the US Navy SEALs. At that point we asked ourselves, if we can enhance human performance for these elite groups, could we do that in education? And we realized that the answer was yes. It had a profound impact on people with ADHD, students with autism, and also what you would call neurotypical individuals, helping them enhance their ability to focus.
In today’s era of information, the ability to focus is a superpower. The ability to process information quickly is a superpower. We spent a lot of time focusing on that, and it was very, very exciting.
The Intersection of AI and Creativity
SpSp: How will AI affect jobs and creativity?
DM: I think what we’re going to slowly see, in certain components of our society, is the decoupling of work and employment. That’s huge because right now those things almost seem like one in the same. But once we start to realize that they’re separate, we’ll start to see that we’re going to create new opportunities to create value.
If I went back 100 years and I said to a farmer, someone’s going to get paid $100,000 dollars to send electrical impulses on beams of light back and forth all day. They would have said, that’s absolutely crazy. But that’s precisely what 50% of the population does right now — we send emails and have meetings back and forth all day and we create value.
So AI will help us find new ways to create value and we’ll find new opportunities. For example, something I find really interesting right now is reversing photosynthesis as one of the key elements to solving our energy crisis. Essentially, what we do now is harness ancient sunlight — we dig it from the ground and it releases a lot of emissions. But if we can harness it at the beginning, like photosynthesis, we would become significantly more energy efficient. One of the ways to do that is for us to find lots of new advanced materials. Well, with AI, we’re able to find hundreds of thousands of new advanced materials, which made this idea of reverse photosynthesis a possibility. We’re talking about being able to solve a lot of the energy crisis for a lot of the world.
So, I think we have a lot of fascinating opportunities ahead that may have seemed like science fiction in 2021, but is not science fiction in 2024 and beyond. There are a lot of really brilliant people that don’t have the time or space to allow their brilliance room to breathe. AI can provide that.
Dwayne dives deeper into the intersection of AI and creativity in the video below and the many possibilities AI provides us to enhance and support human intelligence on a grander scale than ever seen before.
Hire Dwayne Matthews to Speak at Your Event
If you’re looking for someone to excite and invigorate your team to the possibilities AI brings, Dwayne Matthews is your guide. He offers a blueprint for professionals and leaders who want to not only survive but thrive in the AI era, sharing practical strategies and advice that enables audiences to unlock the full potential of human intelligence in an AI-driven world.
Contact us to learn more about Dwayne and how his informative, up-to-the-minute keynotes can help you win in the era of AI.
