Joseph Yun Of bluefoxinsights.ai: How AI Is Disrupting Our Industry, and What We Can Do About It

An Interview With Cynthia Corsetti

Parents need to start thinking about what it means to prepare their children for this future. I certain that there will be a new type of business soon that helps students figure out what to do with our AI-enabled future. Maybe this is the next generation of a Kumon learning center or Mathnasium.

Artificial Intelligence is no longer the future; it is the present. It’s reshaping landscapes, altering industries, and transforming the way we live and work. With its rapid advancement, AI is causing disruption — for better or worse — in every field imaginable. While it promises efficiency and growth, it also brings challenges and uncertainties that professionals and businesses must navigate. What can one do to pivot if AI is disrupting their industry? As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Joseph Yun.

Joseph T. Yun serves as the Artificial Intelligence and Innovation Architect at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also holds the position of Research Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Swanson School of Engineering. His research focuses on building advanced AI and machine learning systems and technologies, with an emphasis on their applications across business and societal contexts. Joe also serves as the CEO of bluefoxlabs.ai, a company dedicated to AI advising and enablement.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive into our discussion our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?

When I was a child, all my friends were getting the original Nintendo, but my family did not have much money as Korean immigrants. I begged my father for a Nintendo and then as Christmas was approaching, I saw a box under the tree that looked like a Nintendo box. On Christmas, I ripped it open, only to find a Radio Shack TRS-80. My dad told me that this was called a computer and that this was the future, and I should learn it. I cried and cried, but later I started playing around with it because there was nothing else to do. That basically started my journey into computers, and I now thank my father for his vision for me.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

When Sam Altman mentioned a few years ago that there will be $1 billion one person companies in the future because of what AI could enable, I thought to myself, “Why couldn’t that be me?” I’ve had more experience with this technology through my graduate work than most people on this planet. At the same time, a bunch of my friends in private equity were asking me to, “Help them with AI.” Well, it’s been a couple years and things are tracking much better than I could have imagined. Maybe we can be the first $1 billion small business (we have three people now, but a lot of big partners). What is even more amazing is that I am still a full-time professor and AI Architect for the University of Pittsburgh, so we are figuring out how to scale this business even amidst my other areas of focus.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

• An insatiable desire to learn new things — I do not know if it’s a story, but I find that I read more books than most people. Audio books are nice because I can do them while doing something else. In fact, nowadays I look for mundane things I can do, just so I can listen to an audio book (e.g., mowing the lawn).
• An excitement for continual personal evolution — There have been numerous areas that I have achieved a fairly reasonable level of expertise, such as viola and saltwater reef keeping. Once I achieve these heights, I cannot help myself but try to find another path in which I can grow into something new.
• A desire to grow in wisdom — I always look to find mentors that are very old in age and that have achieved notable things in their lives; they are the least likely to try to pump me up, but rather they will tell me how it is, and I grow substantially through my relationships with them and learning from them. I recently moved to Pittsburgh a few years ago and one of the first things I did was to find older successful business leaders that I could learn from. I don’t ask them for money or business; I ask them for advice and for their prayers and good thoughts.

Let’s now move to the main point of our discussion about AI. Can you explain how AI is disrupting your industry? Is this disruption hurting or helping your bottom line?

We are constantly evolving, but our main services are AI advising and building out AI systems for select customers that we feel are aligned with our greater strategic goals. In some senses, we are a consulting firm, but we are not trying to scale out to become a huge consulting firm. Why? We believe AI technology will continue to disrupt the field of consulting. Consulting companies will need to figure out how to move faster and achieve greater results with less people, more AI technology usage, and at a fraction of the current cost. This is helping us because we are intentionally small, intentional about using AI for everything we can use it for and providing price points that cannot really be beat for the highest quality of advising and enablement.

Which specific AI technology has had the most significant impact on your industry?

Word embeddings.

Can you share a pivotal moment when you recognized the profound impact AI would have on your sector?

Two years ago, when my friends in private equity were coming to me instead of going to the major consulting firms, I realized that things were clearly shifting fast due to AI’s impact. I would ask them questions like, “Why don’t you just contact McKinsey and Deloitte?” They would respond with, “We did, and they can’t really help us.”

How are you preparing your workforce for the integration of AI, and what skills do you believe will be most valuable in an AI-enhanced future?

I speak with superintendents in the Pittsburgh area to consider changing K-12 education, especially in the computer and STEM areas of K-12 education. I believe the skills that people will need moving forward include learning to learn, critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and high-level technology fluency across disciplines.

What are the biggest challenges in upskilling your workforce for an AI-centric future?

We do not have that challenge because we are a startup.

What ethical considerations does AI introduce into your industry, and how are you tackling these concerns?

One of my big questions is how will society deal with the disruptive transition period that AI will bring? Currently, I speak a bit with the Canadian government on how they are thinking through these kinds of issues. Why the Canadian government instead of the US? Well, because the Canadians asked me.

What are your “Five Things You Need To Do, If AI Is Disrupting Your Industry”?

1 . Consulting firms need to own up to the fact that LLMs can do a lot of the work that they once did and dramatically change their business models and offerings. I think the fact that our firm is succeeding is an example of serious disruption to traditional consulting. I know this sounds crazy, but we decline quite a bit of work. This is because we really are looking for companies that are ready and willing to take bold moves to move forward because this is what we believe is needed to move them forward and to move us forward.

2 . Individuals need to really think about what it means to start preparing for a career transition, especially if you are in the technology realm. It seems more and more probable that all of us, including me, will be in very different roles and situations within a few years. The technology is just moving too fast right now. I’ve told my friends that I would be very surprised if I am still in academia in ten years. This is not because I dislike it, on the contrary, I am very thankful for academia. I question if higher education will survive ten years in its current format and state.

3 . Companies need to start getting really serious about figuring out their data. What differentiates your data from other datasets and how can you consider a new direction for this business via AI technologies that could leverage that data? How are you protecting that data from being crawled and taken by AI companies? I remember one customer that I was advising, and their workforce was aging out and they could not find anyone younger to replace them. I asked them a simple question, “Is your future business based more on your data than finding a replacement workforce?” I think that blew their minds and I honestly don’t think they liked that thought, but I know that they understood that it was something that really needed to think about. I am actually very interested to see if they exist in ten years as a business and they are a big organization. I think they could be gone in ten years.

4 . Top business leaders need to start creating an actionable plan of how to enable their workforce to start learning about and prototyping with AI RIGHT NOW. We are still so early in the evolution of AI, but it’s happening at a faster pace than we have seen any technology move in our lifetimes. Just ask any leader in Silicon Valley that is older. Most of them will tell you that they have never seen anything move this fast and I continue to have these kinds of conversations with very successful Silicon Valley leaders.

5 . Parents need to start thinking about what it means to prepare their children for this future. I certain that there will be a new type of business soon that helps students figure out what to do with our AI-enabled future. Maybe this is the next generation of a Kumon learning center or Mathnasium.

What are the most common misconceptions about AI within your industry, and how do you address them?

I think most people still do not understand how LLMs really work, and this creates big issues in how people use them, or specifically misuse them. Additionally, they don’t know that LLMs, if used properly, could do SO MUCH more for them if they just understood. I address this by directly them to our education site, bluefoxinsights.ai.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life?

I must be honest; no specific quote comes to mind. I read a lot, so I’m kind of always thinking of concepts from books rather than specific quotes. One of the concepts that I think a lot about is “who not how”, which is a book by Dan Sullivan. This concept is basically that people in business need to figure out what they are uniquely good at and then partner with others to do the things that they are not uniquely good at. I translate that to figuring out how AI could do the things that I am not uniquely good at.

Off-topic, but I’m curious. As someone steering the ship, what thoughts or concerns often keep you awake at night? How do those thoughts influence your daily decision-making process?

Nowadays, I wake up at random hours of the early morning (e.g., 1am, 2am, 4am), not because I’m afraid, but because I’m so excited. This is undoubtably one of the most exciting times to be alive when it comes to technological innovation. I’m not saying that there is not potential real danger. I’m just saying that this excitement is what wakes me up at random hours. I was recently eating dinner with a partner of a Silicon Valley top VC fund and he’s also a tech nerd like me. Him and I were playing around with different AI apps on our phone and just laughing about how crazy the tech was. At that same meeting though, we also were discussing how potentially concerning the speed of change was.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I was thinking about this yesterday. So, let’s say that I end up creating a $1 billion small business. Doesn’t that also mean that I could build a $1 billion non-profit someday? Maybe that non-profit is not run by humans but is totally algorithmically run and its focus is to provide financial help to those that are most negatively affected by all this technological change. It’s a totally unformed and crazy idea, but I love those kinds of ideas.

How can our readers further follow you online?

Please visit our business AI education site, bluefoxinsights.ai. I will be posting all my thoughts and updates on that site. The site is totally free right now and much of it will remain free into the future. You could also follow me on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/josephtyun.

Thank you for the time you spent sharing these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!

About the Interviewer: Cynthia Corsetti is an esteemed executive coach with over two decades in corporate leadership and 11 years in executive coaching. Author of the upcoming book, “Dark Drivers,” she guides high-performing professionals and Fortune 500 firms to recognize and manage underlying influences affecting their leadership. Beyond individual coaching, Cynthia offers a 6-month executive transition program and partners with organizations to nurture the next wave of leadership excellence.