The Data Hustle Transcript

Get Left Behind Unless You’re AI-Enabled and Deeply Human

Episode 7 · Jun 12, 2026

Duration: 58:44

Source subtitle file: 2026-06-12__4k4wg9wL0YE__Get_Left_Behind_Unless_You_re_AI-Enabled_And_Deeply_Human.en.srt

Generated from exported YouTube subtitles. Speaker labels are approximate.

[0:00] Tony and Juan
Good day everybody. Today we're joined by Kingsley Hall. He's a high performing enterprise account executive at Zscaler, helping organizations across the region rethink cybersecurity in an era of cloud-first everything and increasing sophisticated AI-powered threats. Today we're going to talk about what it really takes to sell cybersecurity in 2026 and how AI is rewriting the playbook on both sides of the table. How does the sales tech stack evolve as co-pilots are moving from novelty to a default expectation? What happens when tech individuals flood the sales market and start competing with sales professionals? How do sales professionals stay on top?

[0:00] Tony and Juan
And how do you even use AI properly for sales?

[0:00] Kingsley Hall
Kingsley, we're very happy to have you on the show. For everyone at home,

[0:47] Tony and Juan
can you please tell us something about yourself and what you've been up to?

[0:47] Kingsley Hall
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me, Tony. I know we go way back. It's been nearly a decade since I've known you. But for everyone at home, my name is Kingsley Hall. I've been in enterprise SaaS sales for about 10 years now. I spent most of my adult career in sales. So I've seen a lot of things, had a lot of ups, a lot of downs. And I think AI at this moment in time represents a tremendous opportunity for sales professionals, whether you're in enterprise cybersecurity, whether you're selling high ticket items. The use cases are incredible. So looking forward to getting into it. I'm very excited for this

[1:22] Tony and Juan
conversation. So I guess the first question I want to ask is, how are using AI in your role currently? Yeah, that's an interesting question. So when it comes to using AI, I think the kind of disclaimer and what a lot of our enterprise organizations are kind of going for is to use the pre-approved AI tools that have gone through the right governance and the right security so that you're not infringing on, obviously, data being leaked into sensitive locations and so on. So, but the company I work for, we have our own LLM in place. It's incredibly useful. It helps with tons of use cases as it relates to day-to-day selling, whether that's automating email wrap ups, whether that's competitive summaries of our solution

[2:06] Tony and Juan
versus another solution. And as it relates to creating assets for the customer, that's going to be really compelling and move more towards a buying decision. So we call that, I think in our world, the LLM is called ZChat. It's really, really cool. I know some other people in my network who, let's say they have a bit more of an open plan approach to AI. They have loads of different tools. They're not confined to just their AI tool of choice. So we can touch on both use cases anytime. That is interesting. I mean, I think obviously a lot of companies now are looking into, hey, we can use AI to leverage this for automations, drafting emails, drafting pitch decks, customized materials for our clients.

[2:48] Tony and Juan
Now, of course, this is sort of the low level grunt work, as I would say. We're seeing this in many industries, like the junior developers, the junior accountants, the junior lawyers, they're having trouble finding jobs because this is what you normally have them do.

[2:48] Tony and Juan
But if we take it a step further, what do you think is the capabilities that we need to build to leverage AI for, let's say, higher value work in sales?

[2:48] Kingsley Hall
Yeah, it's a great question. So you're totally right. I feel like when it comes to adopting AI, especially in enterprise sales or sales as a whole, it's a little bit of a journey, right? Yeah. You can start, and I'm sure this is the same for consulting, a lot of other

[3:30] Tony and Juan
professions out there, but level one is kind of using your LLM maybe as a glorified Google search. You might ask it a couple of questions and it spits out an amazing answer. And maybe it just stays at level one, but that in itself is a pretty cool use case, right? Having this super intelligence by a side that can answer any question at any point in time. Pretty cool. Level two, which I see a lot of people kind of starting to move to is how can we start to create frameworks around the AI, the right guard rails, right? So let's say, for instance, I'm a seller. I want to make sure that every email that my customers has, my tonality is written

[4:10] Kingsley Hall
in a way that's going to be very attractive for customers, right? The right kind of concision, the right kind of metrics or use cases or customer references. And whenever you produce an email, it follows that same beautiful format, right? I'd say that's kind of level two in my world, learning to kind of have that ability for AI to create repeat excellence. And then I'd say level three, which is really where it's starting to get interesting, is how can we actually use AI agents to automate our workflows? And this, you know, that in itself is where I feel, where a lot of professionals are heading to now. I feel like there's still a massive majority of people are still in stage

[4:54] Tony and Juan
one. That's perfectly fine. It's a journey. It's an evolution. But once you start to get a flavor of stage three and, you know, eventually stage four, having an AI ecosystem around you, damn, it gets super, super cool. It is interesting you mentioned this is a journey. I would say I've experienced the same thing, of course, and everybody else in tech as well. I will say, and I think this is an interesting thing to think about. How much urgency should they have moving through this journey? Because obviously we're seeing a lot of layoffs at big tech companies. There's a lot of white collar engineers coming on the market. And what I'm seeing at the same time, especially developing in some more advanced markets

[5:35] Tony and Juan
like the US, is we see an evolution of sales and technology roles. So we see more and more of a convergence of these roles. We've always had the sales engineers, but now suddenly everyone is talking about forward deployed engineers and like a whole plethora of new roles and skills that are being put out there on the market.

[5:35] Tony and Juan
Do you think if we take someone that is an excellent sales rep and that's maybe at level one of their journey and you compare them to someone that's maybe level four or five as a tech person, but maybe not as good of a salesperson yet, who is going to win?

[5:35] Kingsley Hall
Yeah, that's a good question. That's a really good question. I'd probably take a few steps back

[6:17] Tony and Juan
there because I want to address kind of, I think we've all heard the term that, you know, AI is not going to take your job. It's the person using AI who might. Now, I think it's, that can tend to be a bit overblown at times, but there's definitely a bit of truth to that. And what I mean by that, if you are the type of individual who can approach AI as this technology that you need to learn, play with and adopt over time, and you're looking to continuously improve and adopt that, I think your future prospects are looking really, really good, really good. And however, naturally with the adoption of AI, that is going to unlock a lot of efficiencies,

[6:56] Kingsley Hall
going to save a lot of time and the organization is going to look at those efficiency and time gains. They're going to start to think, okay, you know, person A is doing this great. He's doing two X output, but person B, he's not really doing any, you know, he's doing 0.5 X output. So why don't we just empower person A and we don't need person B anymore. So I do believe there's a slight restructuring that's going to happen, particularly in sales, where my personal belief is that you are going to see the type of seller who is incredibly AI enabled. He will have different ways to capture data, synthesize that, and create assets that make his selling easier and quicker and

[7:40] Kingsley Hall
faster. And, you know, person B is going to struggle with that. They're going to struggle with that adoption. And there's a, you know, there's a chance that we'll see a lot more person A's, maybe few of them, but they will do a free extra job of person B. So this is where I see the convergence happening. And it's a, it's a bit of a, it's an opportunity, but I think sometimes it scares a few people. It can be scary. I, I imagine this is particularly prevalent in professions where you're measured by your output and your value. And it can be very clearly tied back to a financial outcome, increased revenue, increased profits, more customers. I feel especially in sales, this is

[8:28] Kingsley Hall
actually very similar to the technology role. You cannot get away. You either have a system or customers, or you don't. And you're going to be judged by the output of your work. You can't really hide behind, well, it's, it's going to take a while. Like it just takes so much time to build something. And I'm seeing this shift kind of progress now in the technology space as well, where I always think about the technology as a pyramid. So the base of the pyramid used to be most of the time and money and effort is spent on implementation. So you're going to pay top dollar. We're going to spend three, four, five, 600 grand on these engineers in Silicon Valley that are incredibly good at building

[9:12] Tony and Juan
systems. And it's going to take a while. And they have a lot of leverage and they say, well, maybe we'll take some more time to build this. Let's, let's defer. Let's, let's pause and let's wait. And I feel like now a lot of executives are questioning this narrative. They, they see all these automations that you're just describing. They see the amount of output person a can deliver. And, and even if, even if there's potential issues, of course, with moving at that velocity that will catch up to you later, you will still get questions. You will still get questions like why, why does it take you so long?

[9:12] Tony and Juan
Why, why do you need that much time? And I feel the perception of

[9:58] Tony and Juan
the amount of time it takes to implement the workflows is, it's basically down and it's, it's going to keep, there's going to, it's going to keep going down. There will be continuous downward pressure on prices, demand, and all of that. And now we, seeing with that, again, like the development of these new roles.

[9:58] Tony and Juan
So what would you say for people that are coming from tech that are highly proficient in their domain?

[9:58] Kingsley Hall
Maybe they are a staff engineer, a senior engineer, and they're moving into the, the sales domain. What would you recommend to them? They should focus on at day one in their, uh, either their near sales role or if they're going to strike out on their own and build their own company. Yeah, that's

[10:41] Kingsley Hall
interesting. So I can speak a bit from experiences. So I've worked in quite a few amazing SaaS companies before, and I've seen a lot of career arcs where people take or transition from, let's say, an engineering role and then into sales. So I've observed the challenges that they face and I've seen those have been successful. Maybe those who haven't. And the trend that I tend to see, it's almost kind of, you kind of summarize as the founder's dilemma where it can be so compelling and so sexy to sell on features, right? And as a technologist, you might be very, very motivated by the latest technical release, you know, be it, uh, you know, it has a new user interface or it does this thing

[11:23] Kingsley Hall
that lets you get better insight here. And I think the challenge when you come from a technologist role, being too stuck on features will always limit your ability in selling because ultimately in sales, people only care about their problems, their pain points, right? And then through a journey of understanding their pain points, a bit like you're a doctor, you're trying to diagnose what the person has wrong with them. You can then prescribe them the right solution, the right feature that will solve that pain. So in summary, you want to get away from a feature specific approach. I think features, here's my shiny toy. And you want to under, you want to understand the pain that's what driving that person to change and to spend

[12:14] Tony and Juan
money on your solution. So I would flip from feature to how can I help this person? I think that's beautifully put. I've definitely seen this happen a lot now with AI. The first, let's say intuition for a lot of technologists is what can I build with this? Look at how many things I'm building, look how many features my product now has, but it's never been about the features. We've always been able to build features. This has been the case for 10, 15, 20 years. It's not just the features. It's does this matter to the person that I'm trying to sell to? Am I actually solving a pain point? And I think it's a good point that you mentioned this.

[13:01] Tony and Juan
It's sort of a form of essentialism, right? You do

[13:01] Tony and Juan
have the capability to build something, but how do you direct that into things that truly matter?

[13:01] Kingsley Hall
Driving the needle forward for that person. That person might really care about saving time. Yeah. Right. They might really care about earning X amount of money by, you know, pumping more execution in a specific revenue stream. I don't know. Bringing a product quicker to market. If you can't understand what that burning pain point is for that person and attach your feature to it, you're totally right. You can just be lost in a feature soup, which we do this cool thing, this cool thing. You throw a spigot on the wall, maybe one thing sticks, but

[13:40] Tony and Juan
really you might have landed on a small feature that he doesn't want to pay too much money for. And your competition is actually asking the right questions to get to his biggest pain point. I'm seeing this a lot of technical people trying to sell. They will see a certain value. They'll see a certain problem in a system and they'll say, "You're going to lose so much money on this." And then you ask them how much and they're like, "I don't know.

[13:40] Tony and Juan
" How do you know this is relevant?

[13:40] Kingsley Hall
Do the person you're talking to or, "Oh, we were saving hundreds of thousands of dollars on your tech bill and maybe the company is spending tens of millions of dollars and this is like a drop

[14:18] Tony and Juan
in the bucket for them." For sure. It's the age-old saying, right? I hate to be cliche with this, but we're given two years and one mouthful reason, right? We're supposed to listen before we prescribe. So that would be my biggest advice for a techie going into sales. Interesting. So talking about selling to different companies, what have you found is the biggest resistance when it comes to selling AI solutions to enterprises? AI solutions set in support. Specifically, let's say I want to sell to a sales department in a SaaS company or a bigger enterprise. I want to sell them an AI solution to help improve their workflows.

[14:18] Tony and Juan
What do you think coming from a technologist's side? I should be telling them the

[15:06] Kingsley Hall
questions I should be asking to close that deal. Yeah, totally. I think you really want to start on a very high level and understand what is that person measured on? I guess what is the pain point of which your solution can help to drive value? You talked to some good use cases there, right? Maybe you're talking to a, I don't know, product director. He wants to bring his product quicker, go to market, and his entire, let's say, job description and how he's measured is about how quickly he can do that by a number of days. If you can start to tie your solution value to his, the thing he cares about the most, his business metric, then you're off to a

[15:49] Kingsley Hall
winner, right? And obviously, as you get to know the person, they have some personal goals as well. Maybe he wants to get a promotion, maybe he wants to, so weaving that into your approach helps too. That's kind of like the evolution as you're building what we call building champions, they're personal and they're business goals. But I think it can be even simpler than that. When it comes to AI, AI is a feature and it can unlock a tremendous amount of business value specific to the person and the business in question. What I think is an interesting dynamic we're seeing is that businesses are super AI first because they see the future upside as it can relate to saving time, maybe reducing headcount,

[16:33] Kingsley Hall
which can help the bottom line. But actually rolling out an AI approach that's secure and that has the correct governance and guardrails around it, this is what I'm seeing being a huge point of friction. One side of the business wants to go full steam ahead, AI first, agents everywhere, you know, reduce headcount. The other side is like, hold on a second now, we have data moving a lot of places. We don't know exactly where it's going and we don't know who could have our data. So this is the interesting dynamic I'm seeing in a minute. I have definitely seen this happen in practice. There is this constant pressure from one side of the business to keep pushing features, to keep automating, to reduce

[17:20] Tony and Juan
headcount, like make those target numbers for the investors. And then the other side, maybe the cybersecurity team is saying, gosh, we don't even know where all this data is going.

[17:20] Tony and Juan
What are you even using?

[17:20] Kingsley Hall
What are the AI tools used in our organization? And oftentimes, when I see companies perform bad cybersecurity strategy, they'll just tell everyone in the company, everything is disallowed. No AI, wait for us to put a solution out. What happens? They're just going to take their personal accounts and put company data into that, but out any guardrails. Yeah, it's open and stop it. They're going to work around it. Or worse yet, maybe it does work. And you're instead of introducing this incredible new age technology to unlock your

[18:02] Tony and Juan
business, you're just closing your door on it while your competition move five, six, seven steps ahead. So you definitely don't want to close door policy as it relates to AI. You just want to save adoption policy. Yeah, it is a difficult conversation to have in certain industries though. I mean, I have personally a lot of experience in healthcare and we are obviously bound by a lot of rules when it comes to how we handle patient data, how you handle your governance strategies. And I can just say, well, just put all the patient data in the LLM and we'll see what happens.

[18:02] Tony and Juan
How do you approach selling to an organization like that?

[18:02] Kingsley Hall
I mean, on the one hand, of course, you want to enable

[18:46] Kingsley Hall
share output for this company through AI, but you want to comfort them, giving them the idea that this is all handled well. We're not just shooting the data out into ether and hoping for the best. Yeah, totally. So there's definitely some technologies that exist, solutions that get you better visibility into where those data flows are going, right? Right. What applications are they connecting to? What other AI agents are they talking to? That acts as the first kind of visibility and governance layer where you as the cybersecurity team, for instance, you can start to say, "Hey, I don't want it talking to the app. Switch that little data stream off." That agent right there, they shouldn't be talking. So that's level one, right?

[19:29] Kingsley Hall
Level two in a kind of secure AI agent strategy is actually starting to define actually the policies between these two, right? So you might have, I don't know, you've got a Claude co-work, you're trying to develop some code. It needs to reach out to, I don't know, your application that's hosted. It's maybe as a HR application hosted in Azure, right? For example, sure, you can just switch off that channel, that data stream and you're safe, but stage two is really about getting policy between that, right? So what type of patient data should go to this HR application? Should it be maybe just the name, first name, surname, or does it actually need to be the whole genetic genome, right?

[20:20] Kingsley Hall
So putting the right kind of policies around the amount of data that should go to these work, these external tools, that's definitely stage two. And who knows, maybe stage three is actually when you have AI agents that can help you perform those guardrails in an automated way. So you don't have to necessarily stitch them together. That's a conversation for another day, but it's, to your point, it's always going to be this battle of businesses running full steam ahead and you wanting to have the right security in place. You're not exposing sensitive data to the internet. Yeah, it is interesting seeing how many problems we're now seeing through things like vulnerabilities in the space. And a lot of people writing code at a higher

[21:10] Tony and Juan
velocity causing more downtime, more attack surface. And on the other end, LLMs being increasingly better at finding code basis, it becomes this really, really escalated battle between the red team and blue team. AI versus AI, right? Exactly. But before we dive deeper into like where you think the cybersecurity space is heading in the era of AI, there's a different question I want to ask when we're talking about putting yourself out there as a salesperson in this environment. Now, obviously, everyone is using AI, but we are all seeing a ton of AI slop. There's just so much volume out there things, so many posts, so many call calls, so many emails, and everybody's doing this.

[22:03] Tony and Juan
How do you still stick out and connect to clients and make sure you hit your quotas in this sort of enormous ocean of slop. Yeah, it's so true. And I would say it goes back to how we kind of start this conversation with how pain points drive change. So I believe it's my personal belief and others may disagree. I think traditionally software and even roll-out initiatives of companies has been a top-down approach. Like here's our new CRM, you're all going to learn it, and it's going to help you to better centralize company data and maybe make your lives a bit easier as opposed to having everywhere. Sure. When it comes to an AI first approach for the modern day seller and how they

[22:52] Kingsley Hall
can stay on top of the trend in the most efficient way, I believe that approach has to come from you as the seller. I believe that sellers who have the mentality where they're open to looking at their day-to-day workflows, it could even be something as simple as having a little notepad near your laptop. And whenever something's taken a bit too much time or a bit cognitive friction you're like, "Gosh, could that not be easier? That quote took ages to send out." You just take a little note of it on the side. Now, if you do that long enough, on that right-hand side, that notepad, you should have 20, 30 different workflows that are costing you time, energy, and are probably

[23:32] Kingsley Hall
holding back your ability to sell. Then once you've got those workflows, you have those pain points, it's up to you as a seller to then encircle the one that says, "That one is keeping me up at night. That one is really holding back my ability to sell or deliver on my customer. How can I start to use AI to automate and potentially fully do away with that workflow in a better way than I ever could?" For example, let's add some context to that. For a lot of sellers out there, actually having customer meetings and then maybe on the commute back or so, you're trying to contextualize, "How did that meeting go? What should that summary be? What are the next

[24:24] Kingsley Hall
steps?" And traditionally, you would have your laptop open, you put them emails, the meeting summary together. That could be like a 30, 40 minute job. You'd probably miss some context. You'd probably maybe miss the name of a couple of people. Now, what a lot of sellers are doing now is they're using transcription tools to capture all of the meeting conversation with the client's thumbs up first. And then they're plugging that into an AI that can essentially automate the email recap for them and have it delivered to their draft inbox. So meetings been had, you're on your commute home. You already have that perfectly entitled email summary of how that meeting went and what was discussed, how your solution solves them, next steps. So that

[25:12] Kingsley Hall
little workflow might sound little, but when you're having 10 meetings a week and that recap used to take 30 minutes each time, you save the... Put my mouse on the spot, 300 minutes, six hours of time. So that can be put into opportunities. That can be used to hit your quota even easier. These are wonderful ways to look at how to streamline your sales operation. But I was sort of trying to distinguish something a little bit more fundamental here, which is something I always tell to anyone also that is interested in striking out on their own and obviously in context here also of data consulting and AI consulting. If you want to be a truly successful consultant, you need to put yourself

[25:59] Tony and Juan
out there as a trusted advisor or industry expert. This just reduces the friction of customer acquisition. You kind of stick your head above the crowd, so to speak. And that is something that's very difficult to build and hard to automate with AI. So what would you say are things that are still distinctly human and activities we should be focusing on if we want to take it to the next level where we're not just pushing pure volume of sales inbound and outbound, but take it to the next step where we are a recognized industry leader and we're basically funneling business through our reputation. Yeah, I think it's all about leaning into the human skills that AI can replace. So kind of back to my example,

[26:51] Kingsley Hall
if you have workflows behind you that are helping free up time, then digitize the nature, there's not really a lot of value add of you doing them and they're being taken care of. If you as Mr. Founder, Mr. Sales Professional can then lean into the skills that really differentiate you as an individual, your ability to ask great questions, your ability to build great rapport and network, your ability to have as much customer or client facing time as possible. That for me is the real industry unlock because as much as AI will potentially try or there'll be workflows around it, there's no workflow that can truly capture you and your unique experiences and the charisma, the energy that you give out.

[27:38] Kingsley Hall
So I think we're going to a world where the people of tomorrow who really succeed are those who are going to really lean into networking and really lean into empathy, going to leave it into great questions and listening and still have AI doing all the the wrap work in the background. Now we've obviously met years ago in a public speaking club and we've both been actively building and practicing our skills in this space. But for those people listening in, what will be your top three like quick tips they can do to improve their charisma and their networking? Yeah, you can answer this too, right? We've done Toastmasters back in the day. But as it relates to, I think that it's never rocket science with

[28:21] Kingsley Hall
this stuff and people buy from people. That's a very classic statement but there's a the meaning behind that is if the more you can lean into your authenticity with anyone you you speak to, I think people really appreciate that. People are very sensitive when they feel that you have an ulterior motive when you approach them, right? Could be, for example, if you're on a date, right? And you have specific motives with the person opposite side of the table, they might feel creeped out. They might be like, "Whoa, this person just wants this from me," and so on. Same applies to selling, same applies to business as a whole. Being present and being authentic and you know really leaning into that is

[29:02] Tony and Juan
massive for charisma, I believe. And I think asking good questions as well. It's age old but there was a study that was done once. It was a pretty strange study but this is how it turned out. There was a guy who was taking, I think, a transatlantic flight from New York to London and he was the study subject and the study organised a person to sit next to him for the entirety of the flight. And during that entire flight, person B, the subject, and person A sat next to each other. Person A proceeded to ask loads of questions to person B like, "Oh, you know, what's your name? Where are you from?

[29:02] Tony and Juan
What do you do for work? " and so on and

[29:44] Tony and Juan
so forth. But person A's objective was to not give a single bit of information away about himself, right? So they go through this seven-hour flight. Person B leaves the plane. The moment he leaves the plane he's interviewed, he's like, "Oh, so how did you find that journey?" And he was like, "Well, I just had this really great conversation with this guy. Yeah, really charismatic. It was great. The time flight." And then the researchers asked, "Oh, do you know his name or this person he sat next to?" The guy was like, "No, that's so strange. Do you know what he does for a job?" "No, that's so straight. I've no idea." All he'd done was just ask great questions the entire time and he built

[30:25] Kingsley Hall
this amazing relationship. He thought it was super charismatic. So it goes to show, if you want people to like you, just be interested in them. It goes a massive way. I was not aware of the study. I think that's a very clever way to show this principle in action. That is, I'm definitely going to remember that one when I'm talking to some of my fellow tech consultants. Now, shifting gears a little bit back to cybersecurity and the industry as a whole. Obviously, as we mentioned before, AI is creating a lot of threat surface as well as increased capability for threat actors to act upon that surface. What are the conversations you're seeing with the enterprise that you're talking to and what are they most

[31:13] Tony and Juan
worried about? Where do you think the opportunity lies for both sales and tech people in this domain?

[31:13] Kingsley Hall
Yeah, so kind of back to what we said, companies are, for the most part, AI first. They see the potential in it. But putting the right kind of guardrails and visibility around it is the core challenge. Some solutions go above and beyond. You mentioned something really good there, attack surface, right? Something we were in a place of data is being spread into all these different environments. There are some solutions that try and hide that attack surface. So they might, for instance, and I'm absolutely not a techie, by the way, but they will almost throw a blanket over where this data is being

[31:53] Kingsley Hall
transferred so it's not exposed to the internet. And I think we're getting to a place where, in our industry, we call it zero trust. But we don't essentially want to share data with anything unless we know what that thing is and how it intends to use that data and where it's going with it. So the more we can have a bit of a zero trust approach with data sprawl and attack surface, the better and more in control we can be with potentially leaking that data. So that's where we see most of it. Again, I'm sure if I had my engineer by my side, he'd be whiteboarded away how it's done and so on, but I would say those are the trends.

[32:36] Kingsley Hall
Interesting. So why is it the most sexy industry to be in in this time? Cybersecurity. Yes. Well, sex, I mean, some people would say that AI is a bit more sexier to be in, right? Or data. But it is, it's enjoyable because it forces you to take a step back sometimes and ask if what we're doing has the right infrastructure around it to be safe and to be good for society, right? We've seen probably one of the biggest conversations being had at the moment is all around this concept of ethical AI, right? Where are we really going with AI?

[33:23] Kingsley Hall
Where we really going with data? Could it be used in such a way that maybe puts us at risk? That's, you know, leak sensitive information of ours that could potentially compromise us. Could the AI itself, you know, use that data to manipulate and maybe make or influence our behavior and so on. So I like how so the cybersecurity puts a bit of a pause on that. It says, Hey guys, before we just roll out and be so AI first, let's just take a real thought about what we're doing here. What are we looking to achieve? Do we have the right guardrails around it? Now you might imagine like, you know, a brake on a car isn't the most sexiest part of the car, right? No one goes

[34:09] Kingsley Hall
insane. Oh, I've got my Porsche. It's got these amazing brakes. They just care about the horsepower and the speed. But sometimes in society, I feel breaks are the most important component for you to have a safe journey. Wow. That is a beautiful way to put it. We're working in the brakes of society. Yeah. We're the breaks, but you know, no one likes the break sometimes. So it's cybersecurity. You got to be prepared for that. They don't like it until they crash. There we go. Do we just say there's another to you and they're right. Oh man. So yeah, obviously you've been, you've been here for, uh, how long have you been here? Actually in, in, in the middle East at

[34:51] Tony and Juan
this point. So in Dubai, I'm coming up to my fifth year, fifth year. So how has it been in your experience selling to enterprises in this region compared to maybe the regions where a lot of listeners may be more familiar with like the EU and the U S. What do you think are unique constraints that we see in this market and also unique sort of capabilities that companies excel in, in, in this region that we might be able to learn from in other places. Yeah, totally. So I think, um, I'm obviously born and raised in London. Um, my first sales role was in the UK. I then moved to, um, Belgian and the Netherlands. I got to understand how those guys done business.

[35:34] Kingsley Hall
And I've been fortunate ever since to work in the middle East and had a, you know, the great honor to work with some incredible companies out here and some incredible customers. Now I think the business dynamic from Europe, Africa, where I've also worked in the middle East, there's so many different ways to do business and, um, there's certain trends and in region, how they're done. Um, I believe that the middle East is an incredible, um, geography that is incredibly future first. And that makes it incredibly exciting to work within with, if you're in technology, because technology is all about enabling the future, the future state. And my experience working in the middle East is that a lot of leaders are visionaries, right?

[36:22] Kingsley Hall
They see a better tomorrow. They see the opportunity of these evolving technologies, be that AI, be that, um, you know, cybersecurity, be that, uh, cloud compute. It's, it's endless. And what that means is you can really go into conversations where you're sometimes left just as inspired as the customer, right? When you hear kind of what they have envisioned for their company or for their country. And I would say that summarizes my experience here in the middle East, particularly here in the UAE. It's been nothing short of a joy. Um, incredibly passionate business leaders, um, who actually making it happen, right? I think you can look at different, the different geographies across the world. And there's definitely a pace that the UAE sets that

[37:10] Kingsley Hall
others may lag behind. So I think it's pretty awesome, man. And I'm curious what you think that you've spent a bit of time now. I think what you're saying is exactly right. When I came to the middle East, I had no expectations whatsoever, but I have to say, I'm blown out of the water with the share speed of decision making. If the country decides this future, we want to build and they have a beautiful vision for the future, which I think is something we all can learn from. I've never seen something that ambitious in my life. It's not just an ambition, but it's translated into action right away. If we decide we want to have AI as a course in school done, it's now

[37:54] Kingsley Hall
required in every primary school. If we decide we want to build this building done, it's going to be done next year. If you want to run the whole government on AI agents done, it's going to be done next year. I have never in my life seen any government and any region of companies move at this breakneck pace with innovation. And I think it's very inspiring and really sets an example for all the other places on the planet. I think it's even more exciting than the areas that we've all been classically tracking technology like Silicon Valley. It's a whole different style of business and it's a whole different vision. It's much more integrated with the people, the culture, the society. There's

[38:41] Kingsley Hall
really this holistic view of we're trying to achieve something good for everybody. And that is, it's been definitely a breath of fresh air in my experience. Yeah. It's crazy. We've had recent experiences. You're totally right. It's a holistic vision. It doesn't just look at the top one, 5% encompasses everybody. And it's bloody infectious, right? You can be living here in the UAE and all of a sudden you're just feeling a little bit more pep in your step. You're a bit more driven. You want to push the boundaries for yourself because everyone around you is doing the same thing. Yeah. The network of people here is absolutely beautiful. I a hundred percent agree. And I'm not surprised to meet you here after all these years

[39:25] Tony and Juan
after having met in Amsterdam, I'm not surprised at all. This is the place where we meet again, given where this region is going to trajectory and the people that just decide to call this place their home. Yeah. Yeah. Incredible place here. The UAE, right? Kingsley. So we've been talking a lot about how sales is happening currently and all the current AI trends.

[39:25] Tony and Juan
So can you tell us a little bit more about what you think should be operating system for the sales person of the future using AI, AI setup tomorrow?

[39:25] Kingsley Hall
Totally. I think you're so right. We're starting to see a bit of a chasm, right? Where we have sales professionals to kind of stuck in their own ways and in that

[40:06] Kingsley Hall
kind of status quo. And maybe they're looking at AI as this, you know, this tool that might help them out with a thing or two, but they're choosing to ignore it because they're relying on old practices. On the other cohort, you have these sellers who are massively incorporating AI, trying to learn it, trying to see how it can unlock value into their day to day. I think as time goes on, that chasm is going to be even bigger and this isn't to instill fear. This isn't into, this isn't anything to incentivize some action. Having some kind of practice where you can touch, play, fill AI on a regular basis, I think will be really, really important. So what do I mean by the AI

[40:43] Kingsley Hall
setup tomorrow? Well, I believe that organizations probably will have a restructuring at some point where you'll start to see sellers and their skill sets start to converge a bit. Now, what do I mean by that? So let's say today you have, you know, you might have management, you might have sellers, you might have engineers. Now we know in all of those roles, be that, you know, management who are reporting essentially data, forecasting data, so on to roles above, you have engineers who may be performing product demos for their customers and you have sellers who interfacing with their customer to get them through the sales process. AI can actually help to reduce the burden of a lot of their overall roles where

[41:32] Kingsley Hall
organizations might start to say, "Hey, you know, I actually would just prefer a really technical seller who maybe his AI can guide them through a demo, a story driven demo, because he has all these kinds of templates and use cases that the bot has been trained on." And as a seller, his role is pretty much a role in the one person army and, you know, not only pitch the product, but demo the product and help them identify their technical requirements for the solution, right? This isn't a doomed, like, say a scenario to say that sales engineers are screwed and they need to, you know, they're definitely screwed, just give up. But it's just an interesting thought to have, right? That as roles converge, the seller of

[42:18] Kingsley Hall
tomorrow may find themselves in a bit more of a technical selling role. Same can be applied to reporting and management, right? If, let's say as a seller, you have a, or your organization is very kind of AI data first approach and, you know, every conversation you have is being transcribed and you can pull the relevant data and metrics from that, then all of a sudden we have really accurate forecasting data that can be put to kind of CROs and those middle lines and management could certainly be looked at and repurposed in a way where maybe their skills would be more useful, right? So we may see middle layers and management start to go a little bit. I think there has been some examples of

[43:01] Kingsley Hall
this in our industry. I won't call out certain names, but there's been big, you know, tech companies who have made layoffs tens of thousands, pretty much overnight. And the majority of those layoffs tend to be in the kind of mid layer of management where reporting, you know, analytics and let's say, those kind of mid management conversations are, that's where most of the skill sets is. So to summarize, I think the seller of tomorrow, he'll be very human. He'll be very AI first. And he will have an approach to always wanting to be improved, improving his adoption of AI. That one, as you stumbled. I'm just thinking about all of this sounds great. I mean, if you work in a larger

[43:54] Tony and Juan
organization, like let's say Zscaler, and there's a huge product

[43:54] Tony and Juan
to sell and you have a whole team of people, how would you say this when you're on a solo operator and you have to do everything. You have to make sure there's inbound, you're the face of your own company and automate all that. And there's definitely some overlap here, I would say, in what you're describing. But what would you recommend to these people?

[43:54] Kingsley Hall
I mean, obviously you're doing this yourself as well with like your newsletter and the way you're projecting yourself as an expert in the field. So what would you say to people going out on their own that are willing to apply some of these principles there? Yeah, that's a great question. I would

[44:40] Kingsley Hall
say take out the Tony playbook and kind of what you're doing here. What I just said a moment ago about how we might see certain restructuring in organizations and convergence of skills, maybe with one person with some AI agents around them. I think that's a tremendous opportunity actually for the kind of entrepreneurs or solo entrepreneurs as they're calling it, where we have a one person business and maybe in the past he's had to hire people, be that a chief financial officer, a COO, maybe a chief of staff or even a CRO. He now has an incredible ability to basically have an AI agent army where he can train these guys on certain prompts about his business vision, about maybe feeding in

[45:30] Kingsley Hall
customer context and so on. And they can give him the information to make the decisions so that he can be a one person band and run that company as if he had many employees underneath them. So I think it represents tremendous opportunity. And then we look at the automation as well, automated things like a newsletter, like content creation and so on. You know better than this than me, I'm just touching the surface, but there is an incredible opportunity to have one piece of content spread out across multiple different channels in a really quick way that saves a lot of time than we can ever do before. I mean, you've done it yourself, right? We were talking before we came into this how the

[46:11] Kingsley Hall
editing time has been slashed 10x. Absolutely. And every part of my business that I'm running, it has been unbelievably faster with the use of agents, whether it is indeed editing a podcast episode like the current one. I build my own CRM to keep track of who I'm inviting as guests over, who would be an interesting person to bring on board and the topics to talk about, do some background research on their assets. And I'm seeing a lot of the business owners that I talk to, they do them themselves. They kind of pick themselves up by the bootstrap and then they go in and they go deep with Claude to automate their whole business away. And I'm finding that a lot of folks in this

[47:01] Tony and Juan
position kind of keep this to themselves. They have the most domain knowledge, so they're actually able to automate much better than somebody external coming in and then saying, "Well, I know how to help you with AI automation." They're like, "But do you know what's relevant?" And I feel like what we've been talking to about before and getting to this essentialism, right? Like what really matters for a person and a business is just so crucial when it comes to selling.

[47:01] Tony and Juan
And I'm wondering though, like how do you keep doing that well?

[47:01] Kingsley Hall
Because again, you're talking about like, "Sure, we can produce all this content and we can spread it out to many places." Obviously, we can do tons of reach out,

[47:47] Tony and Juan
but how do we approach something like the network and relationship building in here, right? Like how build out y

[47:47] Tony and Juan
our own network of customers and clients and how do you build the trust with your group of people that you're the one that can deliver and you actually have something more to offer to them when it comes to AI and sales than what they may be able to do in-house?

[47:47] Kingsley Hall
Yeah. So I think it goes back when it comes to adopting AI as a seller, as a business professional founder, I do not think we should ever try to automate the very things that make us human. And the very things that are in my eyes will always be critical for forming business relationships

[48:37] Kingsley Hall
was that ability to really look someone in the eye, understand where they're coming from, maybe understand what they're trying to solve and pitching how your solution can help address that, right? That should always be a very human experience. So whether it's you position yourself as a thought leader in a specific domain, whether it's you trying to shift your solution and sell it to a customer, I think that's the part that needs to be doubled down on. And yeah, you should encourage learning how to tell better stories, use analogies a little bit better, meeting a different array of people that test you. And perhaps you maybe haven't had so much conversations with before, but they make you more of a social comedian in the

[49:22] Kingsley Hall
future. We should be leaning into these human skills while AI takes care of the stuff that we are comfortable to say, that's not my domain. And I'm happy for those skills to be outsourced elsewhere. That's kind of the balance that I'm going to have to make. And I think that's the odd font. I am definitely finding a very funny interaction with many people, many regions when it comes to the skills that they have specifically. Remember when you were back in school and everyone was saying, Oh, you should do a technical degree. It's good. It means you're going to make money and have the success. Don't go into the social sciences. It's, you know, there's no money in that. And then I'm having this

[50:07] Tony and Juan
conversation with all of my friends from the social sciences nowadays. And the script is completely flipped. And I see the young people today, they are completely opposite in their opinion on where it makes sense to double down on in your career.

[50:07] Tony and Juan
Now, what do you think would be some of the opportunities if we are going to create products to businesses or technical leaders or executives when it comes to build these personal skills?

[50:07] Kingsley Hall
Like what are some of the things we could concretely start building out to, to bring it to the next level when it comes to the interpersonal skills here? Oh, that's a really good question. See, if we look into personal skills and we kind of think about those that can move the

[50:49] Kingsley Hall
needle and can never truly be automated. I think a, a way or let's say a business model that helps business leaders to tell better stories or enhance their storytelling abilities. I think that would be really high ROI. I think that is a skill set that it's got loads of upside. And at least I haven't seen, you know, really anyone owning that space and being, you know, the storyteller for sellers, learning how to incorporate a vision into a really compelling story, a bit like how we did with Toastmasters. So public speaking is another one. I think there's always a massive space for that. And I'd have to say outside of that, yeah, networking, asking better questions, so on the soft social science skills, as you said,

[51:39] Tony and Juan
I believe there are definitely businesses there that will continue to remain and help people to just be more magnetic human beings or AI takes the robot out the human. I found that especially in today's age, it's very tempting to just focus on pure output, pure numbers, pure business, pure technical prowess, so to speak. And I feel like we often lose the ability to engage with what it makes, what it takes to make us human, what runs the world and just have a broader set of interests. I'm finding, and this is something I'm a little worried about with AI, and I'm seeing very similar corollaries to what we've seen with social media is there's almost sort of this addictive dopaminergic behavior happening.

[52:40] Kingsley Hall
Yeah. Right. Imagine the person that first comes onto social media, and they're like, oh, wow, this is awesome. This is engaging. There's all this stuff. And then suddenly they wasted like hundreds of hours in a month on it and haven't really done anything or learned anything. And I'm feeling that AI is doing similar things to people, but a different segment of the population. Right. Whereas maybe social media, we've seen this happen with people that are maybe more kind of type B players. We're seeing this with type A players now. They just get lost into this sense of productivity and look how much stuff I'm doing. Look how many things are happening. And I feel like we should sometimes take a

[53:25] Tony and Juan
step back and actually explore and ask questions. And maybe also in things that we're not as familiar with, I feel like you're talking about asking questions to people. I think one of the most important skills, if you want to be able to ask good questions, is just have a broad sense of understanding of different areas, different people, different businesses, different ways to look at an economy. You need to be an interesting conversation partner as well, in a sense.

[53:25] Tony and Juan
And what do you do in that sense?

[53:25] Kingsley Hall
Like how do you keep your intellectual development going on in this crazy world of automation and just push, push, push, push. Yeah. Well, that's it. It's push, push, push. And I don't want to prescribe anybody to

[54:15] Kingsley Hall
just keep on pushing and to be this intellectually, you know, incredible individual. I certainly am not. And I think there's people I would. You're understanding things. Well, there's many, many more smarter friends and people that I talk to that are something that's way out of my depth. Um, I feel at its core to get back to your kind of core question and not get lost in the, you know, the, the big AI developmental trend we're seeing and all the fun things you can do and so on. I think in life to be an essentialist is definitely a skillset. And I think, you know, you have to have time to just do human things that aren't tied to productivity output growth.

[54:57] Kingsley Hall
They're just fun. Right. I think that's actually way more, um, kind of rewarding to the whole picture than a lot of people realize. And yeah, when it comes to good questions, sure. Based on that certainly helps, but ironically, you get a lot of base knowledge from asking questions. So it's like a feedback loop, right? If you're curious about someone, they'll probably tell you a lot of interest in knowledge and that can guide you to ask better questions in the next conversation. Right. So I would again, roll back and say that the meta skill here, the skill to learn is actually a good sense of curiosity, um, digging into things with genuine interest. And that will probably make you a more role rounded person.

[55:37] Tony and Juan
I agree. This is something I've heard from a lot of friends that are in sales in different areas as well as they'll oftentimes go and ask a lot of questions to some of their, their clients that may be, you know, less likely to convert to business, but simply for the purpose of understanding what is on their mind. And then, you know, through those conversations, you can sort of, um, build up to becoming that trusted friend or trusted advisor, when it comes to everything related to the things that they care about. And I love that you keep coming back to being a good listener and asking good questions. I think it's just so severely understated in the area of technology.

[56:25] Kingsley Hall
Yeah. And authenticity, right? Um, if you lead with questions and it's Kalyaneng goal for you, right? You just want to extract this knowledge from the person. People feel that they grossed out by it. They don't, they want to feel that you're actually asking a question cause you're interested and you can come from that frame. You can literally just have a chat with someone and before you have a chat, just a quick mental check. Like, I actually want to listen to this person. Like he's got some cool things to say, like let's dig into that. That's always a great mindset to come from. Just be genuine, authentic, and I mean, I don't feel like I'm just going to ask good questions and

[56:53] Tony and Juan
that can go a massive long way for business and sales.

[56:53] Tony and Juan
Do you think the one person, $1 billion company is possible?

[56:53] Kingsley Hall
Jeez, man. I've heard this question flowed around the lot. Um, I do think it's possible. I'm not and how much it can help one individual scale and have incredible leverage like we've never seen before. I think it's only a matter of time before someone attached themselves to really important technology and has AI agents helping to scale his marketing, his distribution, his operations and so on. So I think it's just a matter of time. And yeah, we'll have to see.

[57:40] Kingsley Hall
Maybe I'm looking at him right now. I wish. So Kingsley, thanks again for this very widely ranging conversation in everything AI and human, surprisingly more human than unexpected. Thanks for joining the show.

[57:40] Tony and Juan
And yeah, if you can tell us again, where can people find you and what are you working on and what's next for you?

[57:40] Kingsley Hall
Yeah, totally. Again, thanks for having me, mate. It's been honestly a really cool conversation. So my name is Kimsey Hall. You probably find me best on LinkedIn, LinkedIn forward slash Kingsley Hall. Working on a few things, obviously, enterprise sales by day. I work for cybersecurity firm at the moment. And then outside of that, I'm very kind of curious about how Agentic AI can help enterprise sellers.

[58:28] Kingsley Hall
So I'm actively looking at my own workflows and seeing how that can improve and sharing that knowledge with the world. So you can find my newsletter, The Sales Advantage. And yeah, I just wanna say thank you to yourself, obviously the community and for having me on. It's been awesome, man. We've gotta do this again sometime.