Aaron Boyd Transcript
Clint Betts
Aaron, thank you so much for coming on. It means a lot to have you here. Tell us about what you're working on. I'm so excited about it for a variety of reasons, but primarily because I'm from Utah, a small state in the United States, and so many people leave Utah for New York City or San Francisco because that's where the big jobs are. That's where the big things are, and I love anything that allows people to stay where they're from, close to their family, and still be as successful as they would in those other places.
Aaron Boyd
Yeah. Well, thanks Clint. First of all, thanks for bringing me on board, bringing me on the show. Really appreciate the opportunity to talk about the projects we're working on. I have a few thoughts to answer your question because I left, right?
Clint Betts
Yeah. You did leave.
Aaron Boyd
Living in Australia, I was in Utah until I was eight. I came back for uni, as they say in Australia, College here, and left again. So I think there's a story to tell on both sides in terms of opportunities to do this kind of digital nomad thing, which is a recent term, but something I've been doing for quite some time, but also to provide innovation and technologies that allow people to make that choice and to stay in their communities if they so choose. I think that in an increasingly interconnected world, it just brings opportunity and a certain amount of independence and freedom to live and work where you want, depending on your situation.
Welchman Kean does a lot of work in the developing world, and I don't love the term developing because it implies that you have to. It implies that development means improvement. I think we've learned that's not always the case, but in terms of still providing opportunities to people who want other things in their lives and want to grow and want to have access to other opportunities, other workforce engagements, different types of careers or educational opportunities, and with some of our projects that we're working on, we're helping to provide that to these communities in developing countries.
Clint Betts
And what countries specifically?
Aaron Boyd
So we're a global company. We are spread all over the place. We're not a significantly large company. We're large for a consulting firm, I would say, but we have offices in Singapore and some representation here in the US and opening up in Panama soon. So it hasn't been announced yet. Don't tell anybody, but we're working on that and hiring staff for that kind of regional representation. We've been doing a lot of work in the Pacific Islands. We have a lot of engagement with primarily Vanuatu, which is not usually on American social consciousness, but I'd say it's a country that is, I would say, Northwest of Fiji. You've heard of Fiji before. We've had engagements with Fiji as well, and we've had some conversations with their Ministry of Education around this kind of remote connectivity project and sustainability for remote connectivity. We've done a lot of work in Carabas, which is another country that a lot of people haven't heard of, and the Solomon Islands, which you probably have in that history. And now we're having these conversations in Latin America and the Caribbean. So, I just came from Grenada and Barbados.
Clint Betts
You get to be in the cool places, man.
Aaron Boyd
That was the point.
Clint Betts
The most beautiful places.
Aaron Boyd
That's the idea. That's the idea: to get to these cool places. I like to engage when I travel. Look, I grew up in Israel for many, many years and lived in Cyprus for many years when I was young and lived in a lot of places and developed this allergy against being the tourist. So I like to travel with a purpose, and I like to engage with governments, with communities, with businesses, and bring those people together around innovative ideas. That's what we're doing.
Clint Betts
Yeah, I started this conversation by asking how cool it is that you can figure out a way to stay and work where you live or where you grew up. How awesome is that? But the reverse of that is just as cool, if not cooler, where you can work wherever you want in the world. And that technology and that ability, that's a relatively new thing.
Aaron Boyd
Yeah, it is. The idea of a remote-first is not something, at least for me, that started during COVID. This was something I've been thinking about for 20 years, wanting to build a company around a remote first concept. You can't do that in every industry. If you're engaged in material production or factory work, you have to have shifts. But going back historically with the industrial revolution, what we have now evolved out of that concept, you go to work, and there are a lot of people who choose other careers because they don't like being in an office, and that works for some people, but it's nice to think of opportunities for those. I think COVID and everything we went through with lockdowns gave us opportunities to try that out.
Some people do not require it, but some people really thrive in those environments. They like being social in the office space, or they like that kind of nine-to-five structure, or they leave work at work. Other people have a more flexible mindset, and there are those who like to work at two in the morning, and that works for them. That's when the creative juices get flowing. So we've tried to create an environment at Welchman King where the people we hire really are the kinds of people that really thrive in that kind of virtual environment, virtual teams, and can work and find ways to be proactive and productive in those environments. There are some people who just have a hard time with that. So we try to find the ones who that works for.
We also found that it builds a lot of loyalty when you have a working environment, especially internationally. In cultures like Singapore, where our headquarters is, it's very much built around a structured environment. So to offer up a remote first opportunity, especially for working mothers or others who have a lot of responsibility in the home or elsewhere or just really like that flexibility, it's difficult to find companies that offer that, especially with the return to work policies and hierarchical cultures. So we do things like working around school pickup time schedules and making sure that our meetings aren't interfering with some really important key moments in people's lives.
Clint Betts
How is AI changing everything that you just described? Is it making it easier to do remote work and what do you think? Are we going to have jobs in five, 10 years?
Aaron Boyd
Yeah, Ai is ... there's part of me that thinks, and there's some of this kind of, it's the next crypto or blockchain or cloud or 3D printing or whatever the wave of what everyone's talking about is. What comes of that, I think you'll have the wave, and then you'll have what sticks. AI is a game-changer in a lot of ways. We'll adapt to it. People will find jobs. It's not going to take those ... it will take away some jobs. We have writers that work for us. They use AI, and it needs to be used in the right way because if you have AI doing all your writing, it's not going to be creative or different. Then, everybody is coming up with the exact same formula based on the exact same algorithms. I think that for writers, that produces an opportunity to show that you can do something that AI can't, which is the case, and it's never ... AI is not human, and I don't know why we keep having this God complex that makes us want to invent ourselves, but there are other exciting opportunities.
I think in terms of our use case, one of the best ... there are two ways we're looking at AI and how it can improve the lives of people in some of the least developed countries in the world. One of these is around AI and biometrics, and what you do with a population that is not connected, never been connected, and you kind of want to preserve that, but they also need to be registered in some way, shape, or form for the national ID system. So we're looking at ways to service those requirements. What do you do when someone's roughly 45 years old, and they don't know what their birth date is, and they're in a culture that doesn't really engage that way, and yet they have government privileges that they're not a part of?
Clint Betts
They don't have access to it.
Aaron Boyd
They don't have access and the ability to vote, the ability to do a lot of things that are their rights and privileges and they're just not engaged.
Clint Betts
That's a fascinating challenge, actually.
Aaron Boyd
So that's one. Another one is the communications language is a construct. If we have human understanding, there are a lot of things that people can do that they wouldn't otherwise be able to do. There are jobs they can perform. I think AI aided communication across international boundaries across international. So you may have a budding engineer who just isn't great, and they're judged on their English, not on their engineering skills. So, with AI helping that along, they can write their emails in ways that the idea will get across. We have engineers like that here in Utah.
Clint Betts
Of course.
Aaron Boyd
Maybe they need a little bit of help. But I think crossing cultural, and I think AI is going to do a lot for that remote work opportunity. There's another conversation around jobs and if we democratize the whole world, where do all the jobs go?
Clint Betts
Usually, these groundbreaking technologies, though, create more jobs than they devastate more jobs than they destroy. That's typically been the case with big industrial revolution-type things. But it is scary. Who knows if that trend will continue?
Aaron Boyd
You can talk from a place of fear about the jobs we're going to lose, or you can realize that most of the jobs we have now are invented anyway.
Clint Betts
Right, exactly.
Aaron Boyd
So we evolve, we adapt. Jobs will be created. There are a lot of jobs around AI development that didn't exist. So we'll get there and we'll continue to find ways to live our lives and adapt to what it is. There's a lot to be done around AI policy and regulation and things like that. One of the things, at least from a developing country standpoint, a point that I want to get across is that it's important to ensure that their worldview if our future is guided in some way, shape, or form by AI, that those algorithms and those parameters are representative of more than a ... there are cultures around the world that are going to be impacted by this, and it is important to consider those cultural values in terms of how we build that in. Beyond that, I have a close friend who's very involved in AI, women in AI, and she has thoughts on this when the developers of AI are predominantly male and will develop whether they intend to do it or not, from that worldview and that mindset.
Clint Betts
That's an interesting challenge.
Aaron Boyd
It's significant when it comes to culture. There's an organization called the International Telecommunication Union that most people don't know about and wouldn't have a reason to, but it's the place where the world is agreed. We come together and talk about standards, and they've started an annual event called AI for Good. So it's intended to bring countries and companies together around this conversation. AI is one of the new conversations that they're building this conversation around. ITU is a sister organization of the United Nations, so it's based in Geneva, but a lot of important things happen there, and there are a lot of good people who are trying to ensure that the policies are moving forward in a way that benefits humanity. So, if you haven't heard of ITU, I suggest you look into it.
Clint Betts
Yeah, that's cool. Speaking of benefit, you're a benefit corporation, right?
Aaron Boyd
Yeah. We are. B Corp, there are companies out there, and you'll see the B Corp symbol specifically out of Singapore. We're a Singapore B Corp, and around this idea that profit isn't the end of all doing business, a lot of companies talk about being socially minded, but a B Corp actually enshrines that in the laws of your business entity. It was a year-long process of being evaluated and audited, and you have the opportunity to talk about what you're doing. There are a bunch of different categories in which to qualify. We did quite well in that.
Clint Betts
What's the governance structure? I'm sure people are wondering because it's not a nonprofit, but it's also not like your standard corporation, and so is it in the documents of the company where you're like, we will do X as part of this, so you kind of have to do it. Am I understanding that right?
Aaron Boyd
Yeah, basically, it is a for-profit company, but it's a social enterprise. This concept has been around roughly since the early seventies around a social enterprise, but B Corp and B Lab have tried to build this in so that even by going through the process, business owners can recognize what those values are, and then you build those into your structures, and you build those into your articles and incorporation really. If your company grows and you sell it, those are baked in. If there's a new board, if they bring on a new CEO, you still have these governing principles around social welfare and around what you're trying to do in terms of sustainability and the environment and all of those kinds of guiding principles.
Clint Betts
Tell me about Singapore. Why is it such an incredible place for companies and businesses? It's becoming like a New York or a London in terms of its ability on the finance side, on business side, it's pretty incredible. Why is that?
Aaron Boyd
Yeah, there's a bunch of reasons, but it was very intentional. Singapore is a phenomenal project that is very much about building and becoming the financial hub of Asia. There's a lot of innovation, there's a lot of cash flow, and a lot of that has to do with kind of China's development over the past 30, 40 years where, yes, you have Shanghai, and you have Hong Kong, but in terms of also Southeast Asia and where people go to pull Asia together, Singapore is a very comfortable place to do that. But Singapore's development following its independence from Malaysia has been very intentional, and there's a good reason for that in terms of their policies, the way that they work with their ... and look, no place is perfect, but they work towards, it's a very technocratic governance model. So they work towards what works for their population and with their population. A good example is corruption. It's very, very, very rare that you'll find cases of corruption in the Singapore government because their government employees are some of the highest-paid positions. So you're not going to risk that by doing something untoward.
Clint Betts
Yeah, that's an interesting solution.
Aaron Boyd
So people want those government roles and you get your best and prizes to fill those roles. We have very good relationships with the IMDA who sponsors our memberships to various international organizations like the International Telecommunication Union or Asia Pacific that are these forums around technology and digital transformation and a lot of these other areas, international technology standards. Satellite is a big one right now.
Clint Betts
When you go to these developing countries, how do you identify the leaders in those communities and how do you support them? How do you build them up, give them the resources they need, but also they're already leaders in those communities and so we can learn from them as well. So I just wonder how do you identify leaders in those?
Aaron Boyd
So I think there's a bit of paradigm shift that happens when you're doing more than just kind of coming in and touching so-called developing countries and communities. I think those who come from a developed mindset or very urban environments and very kind of technologically a lot of infrastructure, and you go to these very, very remote, very rural communities, your instinct is to see poverty, and it's just not the case. It's just a way of life. The instinct then is to do something about it and think, oh. But when you experience it, and you're there, again, humans are very adaptable. When you go camping, you're in a very similar circumstance unless you've bought everything REI has to offer to make it a comfortable thing, but you adapt.
I can tell you that in terms of sheer happiness, they have challenges, and they have good days, and they have bad days, just like we are. So there's no real association there, and you have to disconnect from that. And no kind of sociology class from college is going to teach you how to do that. That's something you have to experience for yourself. So when you go, and you engage, we have the benefit of having an MOU with the government of Vanuatu around this digital transformation project that we're rolling out, and they bring us to the communities. Dalcy is our local on the ground contact. She's the former head of the regulator. She knows these communities. But even when you go from the urban environment of Port Vila, which is the capital of Vanuatu, and you go out to the outlying islands, and there's a project we're working on in an island called Malakula where there's just no connectivity on this island. Vanuatu has numerous islands, big and small, in the low eighties.
So you can imagine, and some very, very ... each one of them has its own little microculture. So if you have the time to look up Vanuatu and things like Pentecost Island in there, bungee jumping basically with vines, look it up; it's really cool.
Clint Betts
That's cool.
Aaron Boyd
Or Tana Island in the Cargo cult. Really interesting stuff. So, it's a phenomenally diverse environment. But again, even when they're going from Port Vila to these remote islands, there's a difference. There's even after people from those islands come to the urban center, their mindset changes, and they adapt to that urban environment. Those are usually the ones who end up in leadership positions in government and in running businesses. But they've come from all over. The idea is, how do we build those opportunities without having to pull them out of the islands and have those opportunities in the city? How do we keep them close to their families? How do we keep them? Or going back once they've built up the skills. If they've learned some telecommunications or some kind of engineering or other kinds of medical skill sets, how do we send them back to their communities and sustain them and give them an environment where they can continue to have a career but be close to family?
Clint Betts
Yeah, it seems like it's not like you're trying to change cultures, change lifestyles, change anything other than providing access to opportunities, which is a big deal.
Aaron Boyd
Yeah, we talk about connecting the unconnected. A little under half the world is still unconnected. There are people who should be, honestly. We don't need to connect everyone. There have been a lot of projects over the past 20 or 30 years, and some of them have been successful, but many have not. We've launched a project called the Economic Micro Hub that is built around a multi-use facility that brings all of those use cases around connectivity, not just connecting a community and then leaving them to fend for themselves and all of the good and bad that the internet brings. There are a lot of organizations that focus on digital literacy around helping children's online protection helping newly connected communities understand some of the dangers and, misinformation, and disinformation around the world. People get online, and the first thing they download is Facebook, and they think that's the internet.
So there are pros and cons to that, honestly, with a newly connected community. It's important that those big tech companies really come to the table in terms of taking responsibility for not only the pros but also the cons of working with this. A lot of these countries don't really get much service when things go wrong on social media. So, in terms of social responsibility, those are things where companies like ours are trying to bridge that gap from both a planning and a policy standpoint to make sure people are protected from harmful content in places where they really don't have much to stand on and push back on these.
We want to go beyond that. We want to look at what benefits connectivity brings, and I think some of the real benefits can come in terms of online access to online education and having a virtual office environment where they can go and connect. A couple of the big issues Vanuatu is facing that we're trying to resolve is if you want, for instance, an ID in Vanuatu, you have to go to Port Villa, and travel is expensive. Right now, there are some issues with the national airline. So you've got to take a boat, and it can be overnight. You're talking about a twelve-hour trip, and from your community, it might be an eight-hour drive to a 12-hour boat ride to a three-hour drive to go and get your ID. And the cost is high. Even you and I here in the United States would, at this point, say, wow, that's an expensive ticket.
So they save up for six months just for this ticket to go to the Capitol. So they get an ID so that they might be able to get a seasonal job in Australia or New Zealand or something like that. But then they're there and they're in the "big city" in Port Villa, and they don't really go back.
Clint Betts
Interesting.
Aaron Boyd
They find jobs, and they build friends, and they start getting together and drinking kava, which is a local kind of thing. Some just find a new life there, but they don't go back. We want to make sure there are opportunities and connectivity so that that opportunity exists. If they have a job that they could do remotely or that you can build something, a way that they can do that e-government national ID service from their island, then they don't lose those working-age young adults to other opportunities, which if they want to pursue those, great, but we want those opportunities to be local as well.
Clint Betts
What's something you've learned in all of your experience in this that shocked you or would resonate with a group of CEOs and leaders? What have you learned in doing all this? It's fascinating. You have this incredible career and this incredible position to be helping so many different people from around the world. What have you learned from this?
Aaron Boyd
There's been a lot of learning, and I keep learning. You think you know a region, one thing you learn is there's not much difference. Yes, there are cultural differences, but we're all people. And once you start ... and there are minor cultural differences that can really get you in, you can offend people really quickly if you don't know what's going on and you say or do the right thing, and usually you get some leeway if you're from somewhere else. But fundamentally, what I've learned is that it binds us all together.
Certain types of humor and certain types of jokes are universal. Everybody has families. Everybody has family situations, significant others, partners, and children, and the challenges that we face are absolutely universal across the world. Everybody understands those basic dynamics, no matter what your definition of family is or whatever it is. I think I've learned that a lot of that is a cultural construct. The fundamentals of what that is, when you get past whatever we build on top of it and whatever, we start to wrap around that, whatever structure we put around that kind of falls apart really quickly when you realize that we're all human beings. Fundamentally, the human mind is pretty much the same no matter how much education you've had, how much work experience you have, or where you're from. Yes, there are significant differences, but that's really the surface.
Clint Betts
Well, it's been incredible to have you on here. We end every interview at Ceo.com with the same question, and that is at Ceo.com, we believe the chances one gives is just as important as the chances one take. When you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
Aaron Boyd
That is a really, really interesting question. There's, I imagine, a whole lineup.
Clint Betts
It's a hard question.
Aaron Boyd
A whole lineup of individuals. I think just being here and sitting at this table, I am not that far away from my very first kind of post-college job in Salt Lake City, in the Triad Center at the time, in advertising DSW Partners. They were bought by Euro RSG, and it was advertising and digital. We were doing stuff for Intel. It was cool. It was great fun. I don't even remember the name of the hiring manager, but he picked someone up and put me as an account manager over a pretty significant account for working for Intel at the time.
Clint Betts
Yeah.
Aaron Boyd
There was a lot of trust there, and I think he recognized that here was someone who maybe thought a little bit differently, and maybe that was good. So yeah, it was a great opportunity. It happened here in Utah.
Clint Betts
Right here in Utah. It's incredible. Aaron, thank you so much for coming on.
Aaron Boyd
Thank you, Clint.
Edited for readability.