Why cognitive neuroscience holds the key to unlocking AI’s full potential in enterprise and strategic planning
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Show Notes:
In this episode of Mission Matters, host Adam Torres welcomes back Dr. Martin Trevino, a cognitive neuroscientist and technologist, to discuss his new chapter in Mission Matters: Mission-Based Leaders Share Inspiring Stories on Leadership and Success (Business Leaders Vol 11, Edition 7). They unpack how businesses can rethink digital transformation by embracing AI not just as a tool—but as a cognitive partner in decision-making, collaboration, and innovation.
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About Dr. Marty Trevino
As a Scientist/Technologist and Contract Executive, He lead efforts to design novel models of Human/Tech/AI Augmentation and advanced Visual Analytics. He works to transcend the organization from CSuite to working teams to create Human/AI UX/UI and higher degrees of resonance from a human factors lens with Cognitive Neuroscience as its base.
Fundamentally, He is a theoretical scientist, meaning my expertise is not creating models to prove a truth or false but rather asking “what is possible.” My passion is to explore the “art of the possible” and reimagine what next-generation visual analytics and novel models of humans and AI working together to innovate and solve problems.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, so today is a very special episode. I’m bringing back my good friend, Dr.
Martin Trevino. Marty man, we’ve been on this road now. For, I feel like two solid years of getting this book out of like putting it together, of curating the authors, of getting the content out. And man, man, I just like to say welcome back to the show. Oh no, my, my honor to be here. Adam. I love being with you guys.
You guys are cutting edge thought leaders and just my endless gratitude for your team, putting the book together, putting the talks together, helping to publish the papers and, and say smart, you know, say smart, good things to the world. Yeah. Well well, good to have you back and we got a lot to talk about.
So again, this is a celebration. Dr. Marty’s just recently been published in our bestselling business Leaders book series, volume 11. I cannot believe we’re already on volume 11 and and it’s such a thrill, such a honor. But we’ll start this episode with our Mission Matters minute. So Dr. Marty at Mission Matters.
As you’re well aware, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives and experts. That’s what we do. Dr. Marty, what mission matters to you? Well the passion of my life is data-driven decision making. How can we, how can we make better decisions with data as people? And over the last few years, with the inclusion of artificial intelligence into the equation, how can we build unique, novel models of humans, AI in, in complementarity for, you know, for for really good defined outcomes?
Yeah, well, you’re my guy. When it comes to ai, when it comes to figuring out how AI and how humans are going to interact and how, what this next paradigm of the world looks like as things are moving so fast. So first off, I wanna, I wanna read the the title of Dr. Marty’s chapter. I have the, I have the book here and we’ll start there.
But advanced concepts, a cognitive neuroscience approach to human. AI complimentary and dx. Dr. Marty, maybe let’s start off, ’cause even though you’ve been on the show before, we got, we’ve been very blessed the show’s growing lot, lot of new listeners. Maybe start a little bit with your background and just so that people understand why you’re so qualified to, to comment on this subject.
Yeah, so doctorate degree. I’m a cognitive neuroscientist and technologist. My specialty is how the human brain makes decisions and particularly high risk decisions with data. So most concerned, you know, with improving decision making with analytics and data, and understanding why the brain does certain things.
So I approach the whole dx, you know, digital transformation and data-driven decision making from the unique lens of the human brain. Versus a pure technology approach. So again, business degree, doctorate degrees. I served with the National Security Agency for many, many years as a senior strategist and United States cyber expert in the last six years left government service and have been working in the private sector with startups and and large organizations to help ’em figure out data-driven decision making.
And now, and now human AI complementarity. Yeah. So I like, I like how you word that, the human AI complementarity. So let’s first define that. I don’t wanna assume. I know when you first told me the term, I didn’t understand it. I’ve talked to you many times and I’ve interviewed Drew a couple times for, I don’t wanna assume everybody else does human AI complementarity.
What the heck does that even mean? Yeah. Well, let’s go to what video. CEO Jason said a few weeks ago, right as they rolled out new products he said AI will be a horizontal enabler to the entire firm. Alright. And by that PE people think of AI in, in basically, you know, two ways. Is it going to replace people or is it going to augment, augment human beings in, you know, in the best ways?
Right. And. I think replacement is definitely going to happen in, in some parts and places, but that’s really a conversation for, you know, for, for the future. Today, the key to creating value in organizations and for a digital transformation or startup is pairing humans and AI together. So the, the AI does not understand context without human inputs.
Alright. So that, that, that is absolutely critical. So people say, you know, where you gonna turn this AI loose and it’s gonna take away all of our jobs? Well, it’s pretty hard when the AI has no idea of the context. So the re the real key, the real key here, like our conversation for today. Is to think about digital transformation from, you know, from, from all aspects of the, of the continuum, right?
The, the, the far end is very simple, that AI is a, is a tool. It’s another tool. We’re gonna bring it in. That’s really not correct because AI is a thinking logic, reasoning, a form of intelligence. And you could even say super intelligence. At the other end, you know, you have human-centric the human-centric aspect of it.
We have to, we have to think deeply about, about artificial intelligence coming in within a digital transformation. But we have to think about it from a cognition lens, okay? Mm-hmm. Because you are now introducing a new form of intelligence, okay? And you don’t even have to think about it’s super intelligence or, you know, in that realm.
But, but it is. If you have a new form of intelligence coming into the organization, we have the opportunity to push the art of the possible, right? Yeah. To rethink, to rethink cognition at every level from the individual to this micro team, to the larger team, to the division, to the enterprise. Mm-hmm.
Because you now have this thing in there. We’re gonna have to create entirely new rhythms of work. So you can think about AI as just a simple tool. Well, we’ve, we’ve, you know, we’ve given you access to chat GPT or to Gemini that we’re an AI organization now. Yeah. Nothing is that simple. Nothing is that simple.
It never, that’s what everyone is going to do, right? For those, for those looking to push the art of the possible, right? We have to think about entirely new rhythms of work. At every level, just like hold ons from an individual to a bigger circle, bigger circle, and bigger circle. And artificial intelligence has the ability now to entangle all of us from a cognitive perspective.
So can we create throughout some new terms here, right? Can we create, you know, cognitive entanglement? Can we create distributed cognition? Cool idea, deep, deep thinking in the, in the realm of, of, mm-hmm. Of complementarity. Yeah. What would that even look like? Like not, not the functionality of like what it’s gonna take to get us there.
Mm-hmm. Because I know that’s still maybe a little bit Yeah. On the theoretical and it’s still, you know, it’s still being invented as we speak. Right. But what could be on the other side of that, like, ’cause you hear, you know, looking at something sci-fi way back when to now you know, where we’re at today, what could it even look like?
On the other side. Yeah. Well, and, and that’s where every company’s a little bit different there. We have to, we have to fundamentally deepen our conceptual thinking, right? Mm-hmm. If, if you think AI is just a tool and it’s something to be paid X amount of money for, and people now have access to it, and, and they’ll figure it out, okay, yeah.
They, they, they will. But that’s at the individual level. At the enterprise level, okay. If you’re going to build an organization around this. We have to think, we have to think of the inclusion of a new, of a new form of intelligence as possibly a connective tissue. The term sinu, right from the human body.
And we think of AI as being a connective tissue between individuals and other individuals. Individuals within a team framework, team to team organization wide. This type of modeling scales infinitely. Okay. And And it is a fundamental change. To how teams work because this new form of intelligence can function as to fill or to bridge knowledge gaps.
Mm-hmm. Okay. Even, even execution gaps, right? You hear a lot of talk of AI agents and we can now program AI agents to do all kinds of wonderful things and they can self optimize and that’s true, right? Yeah. So within cyber physical systems, within, especially within, you know a multi loop environments.
The AI can now function with a degree, whatever autonomy you granted, but they can self-improve, you know, self-learn and even share proactively with other me members of the team, or look at what each member of the team is doing. Think, think of it not just your personal AI intelligence, but but one that stretches across all the team and it is watching what everyone does, extracting the goodness, looking for patterns, and then can bring it all together.
So if you and I are working on the same project. We’re looking at different aspects of it and the AI detects some opportunity in there or an anomaly or et cetera. It can move in a fully autonomous way to say, Adam. You know? Right. Take a look at this. This is what Marty’s tackling on this end. It might be really interesting if the two of you talked about why, so it can even interact proactively.
Right. But the fact that we have this entire new intelligence operating with, you know, within this team gives us an absolute. Absolute ability to revisit, right? Revisit our workflows, revisit the way we think, revisit the way we, you know, we, we, we do everything. So, you know, I always like, I gotta play the other side of this too, Dr.
Marty. How are people gonna go wrong with this, like, with this concept and with trying to, whether the word is probably, the word isn’t optimized, but in their use cases, how are people gonna go wrong? Yeah. Well the sim the simplest way to go wrong is to think of it very simplistic. Right. Simplistically right.
It it’s just a new tool. We’re gonna bring it in. And you see this in marketing a lot, right? We’re, we’re now, we are now able to create content left and right, and auto publish the content s of clips of things people are never gonna watch. Go ahead. I just, right. Exactly. And, and, and you, and you see the, the, the talking heads.
Well, this will now replace your, you know, your social media manager. Oh. Oh. Yes, possibly. Yeah. But that’s the, that’s the lowest level of thinking. And oh, by the, by the way, everyone is doing that. So you’re not differentiating yourself. The, the easiest way to go wrong is to thi, it’s to think of it as just buying another, another tool for your computer.
Mm. Okay. The other way people can go wrong is it’s a fail to understand. The capabilities of, of current right large language models and, and neural nets. They, they, they are vast, very good at some things, but they are not, again, so good at other things. And it’s, it’s that, it’s that real work, right? That has to be put in.
And you know this because you built a business from scratch. Right there, there are very few things that are given to you on a single platter, right? You have to think about things at the deepest level. And so when we think about bringing AI into the organization, we really have to sit down and think about it at the most fundamental levels because the Jensen said, you know, AI will be a horizontal enabler.
He’s, he’s right, he’s correct, but the devil is in the details, and that details is in conceptual thinking, okay, everybody’s gonna do the easy. Very few people are gonna be do. You are gonna do the hard. Think about the hard in redefining cognition at every level. Collaboration, creation, problem solving, knowledge management, right?
Mm. This a ai. Integration in has the potential to revolutionize knowledge management. Hmm. Revolutionize it so simplest where people go wrong, they just, they don’t think about it enough. Moving on to the next problem. I paid my $200 to, you know, to open ai and everybody now has their, their take at the highest levels.
They don’t really understand the capabilities of, and that’s very hard. Which, you know, why, why people like me have a job Is, is that. We spend all of our time understanding those capabilities, matching those capabilities to job roles, so that when you do spend money in terms of your digital transformation, you spend it in an optimal way, right?
Mm-hmm. You need the biggest, you need the biggest bang for the buck. You need to get things upfront. Can’t afford to make too many mistakes. Hmm. Now I know that you work with a lot, a lot of companies and, and even you know, venture VCs family offices, a lot of different things. And as a consultant and giving your, you know, your insight into what’s going on in AI and then also this.
This concept of complementarity so that people can start planning and companies can start planning for what’s next. How do you deal with, in these conversations? I’m sure it has to come up like the fear, the fear of what AI is gonna do next or what’s possible. And like, is it going to, and I don’t mean at the surface level of, of like it’s gonna take our jobs.
I don’t mean that, I mean like at the systemic level, like how do you handle like those conversations like to be a fly on the wall in those meetings. So the fear runs when people are uninformed, right? Mm-hmm. If, if you walk in, if, if you say, we’re bringing, we have a huge new focus on artificial intelligence, we’re gonna bring AI in and, and, and we’re gonna incorporate it every level of the firm.
If you leave it at that, then fear spreads throughout the organization, and next thing people think is, I’m right. I’m, I’m losing my job. Yeah. When you bring it in within a change management context, okay. Talk about the details first. It’s, we’re bringing in artificial intelligence as a new, as a new partner to you.
Right. And, and that’s, that’s critical because that’s complementarity. We’re bringing Ai, ai, ai, just a new way we talk about it. We’re bringing in AI as a new partner. It’s just like you’re, you’re introducing a new employee, right? That, that, that’s exactly right. We’re bringing in a new partner. Who is, who is 100% dependent on your ability to create context.
Yeah. The AI can help you solve problems at speed and scale, right? But if you just leave it on the table with nothing, you know, with no inputs, it doesn’t know what to do next, it doesn’t know how to tackle. And, and today you, you know it’s term prompts, right? The people talk about prompts. Prompts are not something silly or dumb.
They’re actually, they, they, they provide boundaries. They provide context. They provide direction for what the artificial intelligence is intended to do. And what you find if you wanna produce anything is it actually takes hours. Hours of, of working with the AI iteratively. Right back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and refining those inputs to the artificial intelligence system.
And you are learning the whole time too. And you are adding your goodness onto that as well. So, so if you walk in and say, Hey, we’re bringing in artificial intelligence and you drop it there, then yeah, you’re gonna have fear and mistrust. And, and people are gonna resist using it. If you bring it in and you, and you frame it properly, that this is an enabler to all the human goodness that we have here.
And, and quite frankly, it is mistaken if you think I’m gonna bring an A and I’m gonna reduce my head count by. X percentage you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re missing the vote for the next decade, at least again, for the next decade. The key to creating strategic advantages is in complementarity, is how can we, how can we uniquely make humans and artificial intelligence and other forms of technology together to to, to get defined outcomes?
It’s not. How do we, how do we replace half the organization? Yeah. And it’s, and it’s also to me, it’s also how do we redistribute like skill sets? Like, so people want to have more value in their jobs, in their roles, and they want to learn and do things that are more complex. So if you can get some help and if it, you can, and you can compliment each other, then you learn, you grow fast.
Your job, your day to day is, feels hopefully more meaningful ’cause you’re making more of a contribution and at the same time you’re, you’re like engaged. You’re engaged. ’cause even that learning process of working with AI is a form of being engaged in what you’re doing. ’cause otherwise you can’t get the, any result really.
Like, and nothing worth meaningful. So it’s almost like, I don’t, I shouldn’t use the word forced, but maybe it is forced engagement if you, if you’re gonna be using the tool. I mean, you have to be, you can’t, you can’t be a passive bias. Standard. You have to like be actively thinking to use the tool. No, it has to be dynamic.
It’s dynamic iteration together. Yeah. If you, you wanna talk about real, real, real work? Real. That’s been my words, Dr. Marty. Forced. But I would expect you use something fancy like dynamic. Dynamic iterating together. There you go. Participation. Yeah, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll need to trademark that right after we’re done with this here.
Yeah, exactly. So they force but forced. Yeah. You, you go right to the right, to the right, to the harsh stuff here. You know, I, I’m a little more, I’m a, I’m a little smoother with it there, but, you know, but, but, but again, but again, you have to frame this properly. We have a new intelligence in the equation that intelligence is distributed, right?
It. Collaborative loops. Okay? And think of it this way, right? Collaborative loops between individuals, between teams, between directorates, it can move across those at speed and scale. And it can, it can even drive that, that iteration to together, right? Because it can pull everything that everybody’s working on one project correlated to other projects.
And for, and I bring that information. To both you know, the, the team and the individual to be, to be interacted with. And that person can iterate with it and, and, and refine whatever those outputs or insights, you know, are. And one of the really cool ways that, that, that’s being, that’s being pushed out there now is like mergers and acquisitions, right?
What are we gonna buy next? What do we expand to the next markets? What you see now is, is both access to the open source ai. And then the proprietary, right? Sitting, sitting on the desk in new modules with, you know, with company specific data and multiple large screens and multiple experts, but you have multiple even types of AI right there, and they’re all interacting together and.
The artificial intelligence can pull financial data, it can pull geopolitical data, right? It can pull, you know availability of, of, of resources and skill sets and what the job market looks like right there, and what the tax rates are, you know, and, and growth projections for, for, for entire industries or specific, you know, specific companies.
And so even in the realms. That will once wholly human centric, okay, require high degrees of a very lateral thinking, okay, if you will, now this new, this new complementarity if you will. So it still requires the human experts strategies very, very. Abstract concept, but now that person is being augmented in ways we never thought before.
Mm-hmm. Well, before you would’ve to have a, you know, whole team of people and they would go out and do all kinds of research and bring it back to the senior strategist. Now, now you can do all that work in hours. And have this beautiful, beautiful picture of, of what the opportunities are from an m and a perspective, legal challenges or, you know, growth perspectives you know, integration between companies, and it’s all on multiple screens right in front of you and you’re dynamically interacting with it.
And, and, and that brings us to, that brings us to a really cool concept we now need. Don’t consider AI as simply a tool, but we do need new tools to determine the effectiveness of how well we’re utilizing that. Mm. Right. Where we bring it in. Is it effective? Did we desire to reduce the, the, the, the workload, right?
Mm-hmm. What, what we, we are seeing in many places that, that the entrance of AI is in fact increasing productivity, right? And you see several studies by up to, you know, 25, 20 7%. But in other studies we’re seeing when it, when it’s not. Very well implemented. Hmm. It’s actually not impacting productivity and it’s impacting cognitive load in very negative ways.
And the last thing we need to do is impact is increase cognitive load on employees. You know within this we need, we need to very much think about not only reconceptualizing and, and presenting it to the team properly. Like you said, this is a world of, of, of collaboration, right. And complementarity, but then we need actually.
We, we need, we need new tools and new methods to determine did we do the right thing? Mm-hmm. Are we getting the bang for the buck? Because you can’t, again, if you’re just gonna implement it and declare victory and, you know, run, run to the next project. This, it’s not gonna work for this. This is here to stay.
Yeah. This, this is now, this is now something we will deal with for the rest of our lives. Hmm. Man, Dr. Marty, you’re on fire today. You got me all fired up over here. I’m over here. Like, come on, where’s this ai and this complimentary do do something for me. I’m, I’m engaged man. What kind of companies are you working with right now?
A lot of people that we’re gonna push this out to. So who gets the most value outta working with you in your team? So thank you for that. I wish I spent the last number of months taking care of family you know, with end of life type issues and lay family, lay family to rest. So I, I am really just coming back into things after several months of, of that and I got together with a, a couple of, a couple of friends of mine and, and the VC community and, and, and very, very senior executives and said, what if, what if we created a new institute?
You know, call it, call it a research and implementation initiative that, that we could help senior executives with everything from, from just good quality research, right? What, what is AI actually capable of? Because, because there, there’s no way you can be a working senior executive or even mid-level executive and keep up with the pace of advancement.
You need something, somebody, some information intelligence to distill that. Into a handful of bullet points that are relevant for you timely. So, so we’ve conceptualized and we’ll get ready to put it out there. And as a matter of fact I’d love you guys to have a look at it ’cause you are the experts in, in, in promotion and marketing.
And you guys know, know the way people think as much as I do from, you know, from a slightly different lens. But but we’re, we’re creating and getting ready, getting ready to, to fund a whole new institute that may be able to derive, derive value from data that’s gonna show map very, very functionally where to bring AI in in the organization to get the biggest bang for the buck and then even judge its effectiveness on the backside.
And I published a, a really cool article a a few months ago in pipeline Magazine. And, and, and it, it touched on the concept of of, of new, new tools. New tools from a visualization perspective, right? So we have the super intelligence, do dashboards cut it anymore? Yeah, right. Does, does your good old fashioned dashboard from the 1990s cut it And I will argue, no, it doesn’t.
It doesn’t. So we’re introducing as part of this initiative concept that we call movement through data. So as we introduce AI in there, can we fundamentally redo the user interfaces within the organizations? Mm-hmm. To be combinations of three and two dimensional. With the AI building them and augmenting them automatically you know, based on your needs, what other people are looking at, highlight the differences.
Help, help, help avoid heuristic errors. And this, this called, you know, multidimensional object space type interfaces hold hold, real tremendous potential. So so yeah, you’ll you’ll, you’ll, you’ll see that out there. I’ll, I’ll introduce that on LinkedIn and in other places. What’s the, what’s the name of the institute we’re calling it?
A research and technology institute. It’s a knowledge, knowledge, research and technology implementation. Yeah. So love it. Get our, get our, get our, get our hands dirty in helping companies implement things from a digital transformation. Create value in data for companies that cannot afford to lose the AI race.
Yeah. Dr. Marty, how do people follow up? How do they connect with you? Yeah, if you can find me on LinkedIn find me on LinkedIn, you can always search me on Mission Matters. We’ve done two or three of these together now, and you guys have helped you know, push a couple of articles out there so you can easily search me on Mission, mission Matters Dr.
Marty Trevino, and you’ll find me on these great podcasts. And if you can do that, you can link to me on, on LinkedIn and the same thing, just Dr. Marty Sino, you know, cognitive neuroscientist and, and I’m, I, I’m not, I’m not hard to find. Fantastic. And for everybody watching, just so you know, we’ll put some links in the show notes.
And speaking of the audience, if you haven’t hit the subscribe or follow button yet, what are you waiting for? This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button.
And Dr. Marty, again, congrats on becoming an author in our recently released. Thank you. Mission Matters, volume 11. We’re just starting the promo of this book. So just for everybody so everybody knows, we’ll put the links in the show notes so that you can also click on the books. We sell books, you know, buy, buy a couple of copies, give ’em away to your friends.
Like you’ll see, you’ll see more of Dr. Marty’s work in the book and he expands on it. So thanks again for coming on the show. Thank you, sir. Always a pleasure. Take care of yourself.