INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Actionable AI Solutions for Business Leaders
By Jamie Grill-Goodman
Eric Thorsen says launching Clarion Collective AI in 2024 in Armonk, NY, was a natural next step in his unique career path from musician to software engineer to CEO and founder to executive coach and advisor.
Thorsen started his career as a musician and teacher, eventually pivoting to software engineering, where he built mission-critical systems across media, fintech, and healthcare while also teaching programming at NYU. Over two decades ago, he founded a software consulting firm whose analytics platform has powered live U. S. election coverage for major media networks. He invested and guided a healthcare SaaS company to a successful exit and serves on the board of OPLM( Other Parents Like Me).
These experiences revealed the challenges of growth, leadership, and work life balance – fueling his passion for executive and leadership coaching which he has been doing for the past five years.
“ When I looked at my career, I realized there’ s two things that have been consistent. One is that I really like teaching and mentoring others … the other is solving problems with technology,” Thorsen reflects.
Within the last two years, Thorsen started to notice a lot of misconceptions around AI.
To help leaders navigate AI disruption, he launched Clarion Collective AI, a platform combining advisory services and coaching, hands-on training, and support for sustainable success.
“ A frustration that I think a lot of people feel is that there is this somewhat of a fantastic story going on about disruption and lots of misinformation and confusion,” he says.“ One of the things that I find has been very powerful is shared learning. So, I created Clarion Collective AI as a community for business leaders to come and talk about what they’ re doing as leaders.”
Clarion Collective AI aims to empower businesses to solve problems, drive down costs, and boost earnings through shared learning, expert facilitation, and actionable tools.
“ We provide advisory services for oneon-one coaching with CEOs and founders to sort of help them navigate this space. We also do some workshops for leadership teams to help them understand,‘ what does it mean to have, for example, an AI usage policy in their organizations. What things do they have to be concerned about with compliance? What are appropriate uses for this and not appropriate?’”
Additionally, Clarion Collective AI offers an“ AI Blueprint” in which Clarion does an audit on an organization to determine opportunities for applying AI technology. Clients range from $ 1million to $ 500 million revenue companies, across industries.
“ One of the reasons why I got into this was to really to help people navigate this space in a way that’ s consumable to anyone,” he notes.“ That’ s really what disruption is about. It’ s really accessible. Anybody with a browser or a phone now has access to these large language models( LLMs).”
According to Thorsen, the shift is profound.“ There’ s so much opportunity for lighter weight, less expensive ways to save a lot of efficiency in your businesses – if it’ s applied in the right way.” One of Thorsen’ s missions is helping business leaders cut through the noise.
“ There are these spectacular claims that are made about [ AI ],” he says.“ We’ re going to have two-day work weeks, or 100 % of software is going to be generated by AI … As a business leader or a person in general, how do you make sense out of any of those comments without some context around them?”
To provide that context, Thorsen breaks AI into two broad categories: physical AI and digital AI.
“ Physical – that’ s anything interacting with the physical world. So, think autonomous vehicles, robotic surgery, manufacturing robots. Then you’ ve got digital AI – that’ s text, video, audio, images – really what we consider data,” he explains.
Within digital AI, there’ s also an important distinction between deterministic and non-deterministic systems. Deterministic AI delivers consistent, predictable results.“ Five plus three always equals eight,” as Thorsen puts it. Think medical imaging or finance – areas where accuracy is critical.
On the other hand, non-deterministic AI powers more creative or interpretive tasks.“ You can think more about the creative things like marketing or creating images for branding,” he says.“ Those are completely open to interpretation. There’ s really no notion of something being right or wrong … That’ s where these large language models play.”
Despite concerns about incorrect outputs, Thorsen emphasizes that large language models( LLMs) offer a staggering amount of potential. Accenture estimates as much as 40 %
Eric Thorsen, CEO and Founder, Clarion Collective AI
of all working hours will be supported or augmented by language-based AI. Among business leaders, 98 % of respondents agree AI foundation models will play an important role in their organization’ s strategies over the next three to five years.
That includes marketing, research, and any repetitive tasks like proposals.“[ LLMs are ] great at doing research and taking lots and lots of data and distilling it down and synthesizing it into something that’ s simpler to understand.”
And the return isn’ t about replacing workers – it’ s about making experts more efficient.“ The technology doesn’ t do all the work for you, but it winds up saving them a lot of time,” he notes.
For executives leading teams, that kind of impact can translate into faster growth, increased productivity, and sharper strategic focus.
“ There are very few industries that are not going to be impacted by this,” Thorsen notes.“ Your competition is likely looking at this, and so my main piece of advice is,‘ start to dip your toes in the pool.’”
While this may sound daunting to some, Clarion Collective was founded to help business owners harness AI’ s potential without the overwhelm. It’ s all about community – bringing leaders together to learn, share, and grow as they navigate the age of AI.
Save the Date! Join COMMERCE and CIANJ July 15th for the AI Strategy Symposium: Actionable Solutions for Business Leaders. Learn more at https:// members. cianj. org / events.
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