Computer says no Brian Hartzer
The former Westpac CEO turned AI evangelist hasn't got his Matthew Grounds bot even close to down pat.
Every so often, former Westpac CEO Brian Hartzer emerges from semi-obscurity to delight us with his child-like ingenuousness. Of course, only someone built this way could respond to his own professional implosion by seeking to reinvent himself as a leadership guru.[[Writing a book is really par for the course for former Westpac CEOs, and at least Hartzer's – The Leadership Star: A Practical Guide to Building Engagement – isn't a monument to himself, unlike Gail Kelly's revisionist memoir.]]
When new NAB's new business banking boss Andrew Auerbach gets to Melbourne and inevitably starts his new podcast, he absolutely must book Hartzer as his first guest. Those two together would be dynamite!
Joe Aston
Last week, Hartzer told the Australian Financial Review that he now uses generative artificial intelligence tools "all day, every day, for everything that I do". He then described a recent occasion where he needed M&A advice, after a foreign investor approached payday lender Beforepay (which Hartzer chairs) about taking an equity stake. "We're a small company. I can't afford [Barrenjoey co-founder] Matthew Grounds, but I'd love to know what Matthew Grounds would say about this. So I asked [chatbot] Claude to act like Matthew Grounds to hear what he would tell me".
GenAI is only as good as the data and parameters it's given, and plainly, the real Matthew Grounds is under no threat of replacement by Claude so long as it's schooled by Hartzer. Its output was cartoonishly inane: "Let's cut to the chase – I've seen this play out hundreds of times," fake Grounds began. "What you do over the next 72 hours will significantly impact the outcome. Don't show your hand too early".
I would bet any money that Grounds has never in his life opened a client pitch with, "Let's cut to the chase." The bot is quite obviously confusing Grounds with Jefferies' Michael Stock.