The Value Creators Podcast Episode #68. Bliss, Love, Empathy, and Business: Human-Centered Marketing with Stephen Sakach

Listen to the episode here:

How do you design a company—and an AI—that leads with empathy?

In this episode of The Value Creators Podcast, Hunter Hastings speaks with Stephen Sakach, founder and CEO of The Zero Company and creator of aiCMO, an AI-powered marketing platform built to scale human connection. Stephen shares his journey through digital media, consciousness studies, and systems design to develop a framework where love, purpose, and empathy drive business performance.

He calls it BLISS—Build Love Into Scalable Systems.

Key insights include:

  • How empathy can become the foundation for scalable marketing systems
  • Why companies must audit their operations through the lens of purpose
  • What it takes to align AI development with emotional intelligence and ethical goals

This is a visionary, practical conversation for anyone building the future—consciously.

Resources:

➡️ Learn What They Didn’t Teach You In Business School: The Value Creators Online Business Course

Learn more about Zero Company Performance Marketing

Learn more about aiCMO.io

Connect with Stephen Sakach on LinkedIn

Connect with Hunter Hastings on LinkedIn

Subscribe to The Value Creators on Substack

Knowledge Capsule

1. Empathy Is a Business Skill, Not Just a Trait

  • Empathy can be taught, practiced, and systematized.
  • It’s essential for customer connection and employee satisfaction.
  • It’s the foundation for authentic, resonant marketing.

2. Purpose Must Be Lived, Not Posted

  • A purpose statement on a wall is meaningless without alignment.
  • Companies should audit all systems and decisions through their stated purpose.
  • Real purpose inspires internal motivation and external advocacy.

3. Emotional Connection Drives Lifetime Value

  • Customers emotionally connected to a brand are 300% more valuable.
  • Emotional resonance leads to referrals, reviews, and loyalty.
  • Purposeful storytelling creates deeper brand relationships.

4. Empathy Can—and Should—Scale

  • Sakach’s BLISS model embeds love into systems, not just culture.
  • Businesses can design processes that prompt consistent compassion.
  • Empathy isn’t random—it can be engineered into experience.

5. Marketing AI Needs Empathic Guardrails

  • AI without humanistic intention optimizes only for profit.
  • Guardrails like purpose and values steer AI toward constructive outcomes.
  • aiCMO prompts businesses to consider people, not just metrics.

6. Data and Emotion Are Not Mutually Exclusive

  • Empathetic insights can be reflected in metrics like retention or sentiment.
  • Tools like aiCMO help identify “empathy signals” across customer journeys.
  • Qualitative outcomes can be modeled and scaled with care.

7. The Entrepreneur as Empath

  • Entrepreneurs create value by understanding felt needs.
  • Emotional intelligence is essential to discovering and delivering value.
  • Internal entrepreneurship thrives in self-managed, purpose-led cultures.

8. Self-Management Unlocks Innovation

  • Zero Company is structured as networked pods with independent decision-making panels.
  • Employees take ownership and pursue passion within structure.
  • This autonomy fosters creativity and accountability at scale.

9. Conscious Culture Attracts Conscious Talent

  • Younger generations seek purpose-driven work, even at lower pay.
  • Companies that embody empathy have a strategic advantage in hiring.
  • Culture grounded in values is magnetic and sustainable.

10. AI Must Reflect Human Values

  • Training AI on empathy-centric data reshapes outputs.
  • Tools like aiCMO evaluate customer emotion at every journey stage.
  • Experience design must optimize for positive emotional outcomes.

11. ROI Meets ROL—Return on Love

  • Empathy improves retention, reduces churn, and builds advocacy.
  • Trust, gratitude, and surprise-and-delight are measurable business assets.
  • Marketing that feels good performs better over time.

12. The Shift Toward Conscious Business Is Inevitable

  • Systems will evolve toward purpose and emotional intelligence.
  • Businesses that resist empathy will lose relevance and talent.
  • The future belongs to companies who build with love.

The Value Creators Podcast Episode #67. Useful Robots Are Here: Automation, Ethics, and Entrepreneurial Innovation with Marianela Nanninga

Listen to the episode here:

The robots are here. Are they useful? Are they ethical?

In this episode of The Value Creators Podcast, Hunter Hastings speaks with Marianela Nanninga, CEO of ToDo Robotics. Marianela shares her journey from global tech sales to building one of the most innovative commercial robotics ventures in the U.S. Focused on usefulness over hype, she explains how robots are transforming hospitality, healthcare, and food service by performing real work—with real ROI.

From AI-driven cleaners in 24/7 casinos to chip-delivering restaurant bots, this episode explores the entrepreneurial mindset, systems integration, and human-centered design needed to lead in the robotics revolution.

Key insights include:

  • Why “Usseful Robotics” is about integration, not hype
  • How automation complements (not replaces) human work
  • What ethical deployment really means in practice

Whether you’re leading innovation, exploring automation, or rethinking operational strategy, this conversation is filled with insights for the future.

Resources:

➡️ Learn What They Didn’t Teach You In Business School: The Value Creators Online Business Course

Learn more about ToDo Robotics

Connect with Marianela Nanninga on LinkedIn

Connect with Hunter Hastings on LinkedIn

Subscribe to The Value Creators on Substack

Knowledge Capsule

1. Robotics Must Be Useful to Create Value

  • ToDo Robotics focuses on function, not futuristic promises.
  • Robots must perform real, repetitive tasks—consistently and measurably.
  • Vaporware is eliminated through deep operational integration.

2. ROI Is Tangible and Immediate

  • In hospitality, robots often pay for themselves in 6–9 months.
  • In casinos, ROI can exceed 600% as a result of 24/7 usage.
  • Consistency in cleaning and data reporting boosts guest satisfaction.

3. Automation Doesn’t Replace—It Elevates

  • Robots handle repetitive tasks; humans focus on high-value areas.
  • Workers are retrained to operate, manage, and maintain robots.
  • Job turnover in cleaning is high—robots help stabilize labor demand.

4. Mapping and Deployment Are Precision Work

  • Each location is custom-mapped with sensors and LIDAR.
  • Robots adapt to environmental changes with alternate path logic.
  • Staff are trained not just to operate but to troubleshoot and manage.

5. Integration Is the New Frontier

  • The value isn’t just in navigation—it’s in API-level integration.
  • ToDo Robotics integrates with POS, table management, and logistics systems.
  • Robots can now host guests, guide them to tables, and sync with restaurant ops.

6. Customers Co-Create Innovation

  • Clients request new robot capabilities—customizations become R&D.
  • Use cases evolve from direct experience and frontline needs.
  • Co-creation is part of ToDo’s development process.

7. AI and Machine Learning Improve Daily

  • Commercial robots receive software updates every 2–3 months.
  • Each update improves sensors, behavior, and precision.
  • Robots learn from their environments to optimize over time.

8. The Tipping Point Is Near—but Not Here Yet

  • Customer adoption is growing, especially among younger users.
  • Robots are becoming normal in restaurants, casinos, and care centers.
  • But true mainstream integration is still in progress.

9. System Integration Is Entrepreneurial Craft

  • ToDo Robotics acts as a systems integrator, not just a seller.
  • Real value comes from combining hardware, software, and support.
  • Project management is essential to long-term success.

10. Ethical Deployment Matters

  • Robots should relieve humans from drudgery, not eliminate them.
  • Companies must define the ethical limits of automation.
  • Transparency, purpose, and human benefit are central values.

11. Robotics Creates New Career Paths

  • Housekeepers become robotics supervisors and troubleshooters.
  • ToDo Robotics partners with universities to train future operators.
  • Certifications will drive a new labor market segment.

12. Founder-Mode Companies Operate Differently

  • Marianela manages expectations while staying hands-on.
  • She adapts robots to operations—not the other way around.
  • Founders who get into the details on the ground create better value alignment.

Designing The Enterprise As A Living, Learning System

Co-Authors Hunter Hastings and Mark Beliczky

Imagine an enterprise that behaves more like a living being than a machine—a system that senses its environment, processes signals, and responds with coherence and purpose. As a team member in a system you experience intelligent collaboration rather than command-and-control authority. The organization senses your presence, adapts its behavior, and aligns its internal functions accordingly. That’s the future Béliczky and Hastings envision: not an organization with a brain at the top and subordinates below, but a living system where cognition is embedded everywhere (Béliczky & Hastings, 2025).

This shift in metaphor—from hierarchy and central planning to distributed intelligence and responsive systems—is more than aesthetic. It’s foundational. In this new world, we don’t isolate the brain as a privileged locus of strategy. Instead, we treat every part of the organization as a signal processor, capable of interpreting and acting on the value signals that flow continuously from the environment.

Béliczky and Hastings’ critique of legacy organizational models is well-placed. The top-down, mechanistic structures of the industrial era, with their bureaucratic inertia and slow response times, simply can’t keep up with today’s complex and rapidly changing market environments. Rather than seeing organizations as machines, they propose a view grounded in complex adaptive systems (Snowden & Boone, 2007; Wheatley, 2006, Holland, 2014). These systems are constantly in motion, always learning, always reshaping themselves through interaction with their environment.

At the heart of this new worldview is a focus on signal processing. Customers, markets, and ecosystems are continuously sending signals—needs, desires, shifts in behavior—and the organization needs to detect, interpret, organize, and respond to these signals in real-time. The organization becomes a vast network of signal processors, each with its own specialty. Like organs in a body, these processors are not isolated but interconnected. Some are especially tuned to detect customer needs, others translate those needs into product development, while others coordinate delivery and communication.

The Sentient Enterprise Reimagined

Strategic sentience emerges from this dynamic interplay. It’s not about having a grand plan; it’s about evolving the capacity to understand, reflect, and choose. A strategically sentient organization can sense its own state, perceive what’s happening in the environment, and reconfigure itself accordingly—not through top-down command, but through distributed intelligence and cognition (Clark, 2013).

Communities of Specialization and Signal Intelligence

One of the most important elements of this new model is the concept of Communities of Specialization, or COS. Each COS is like a highly specialized organ, formed to interpret and act on a specific kind of signal. These communities consist of human agents supported by AI—blending insight and data processing to generate high-quality, adaptive responses. The marketing COS, for example, is not just a department. It’s a living node in a network, interpreting customer signals (empathic diagnosis), translating them into product concepts, and passing those refined insights along to innovation and production COS.

Signals don’t just flow from the outside world. They move internally as well—from COS to COS—helping the system continuously refine and adjust its performance. When a particular signal is misread or fails to yield value, that pathway is corrected. What emerges is a process of natural selection for organizational responses. Valuable outputs survive and spread; ineffective ones are abandoned. Over time, this process leads to increasing specialization, greater value coherence, and faster adaptive cycles — a value network (Friston, 2010).

COS are not static. They evolve, merge, and dissolve as needed. Some are closer to the customer boundary, directly interacting with external signals. Others operate within the company, creating the internal conditions for success. But all are part of the same living system, responding to the same imperatives: to sense value, create value, and learn from outcomes.

Distributed Cognition and Talent+AI

This living system does not run on human intelligence alone. Every COS is supported by what Béliczky and Hastings describe as Talent+AI operators. These agents are responsible for optimizing the interplay between human capabilities and artificial intelligence within each COS. Think of them as cognitive performance coaches—helping each COS, and the entire network, make smarter decisions, faster.

The real magic happens not in any one COS, but in the connections between them: the better the interconnections in and between COSs, the greater the signal and interpretation flow, the greater 2-way traffic, and the stronger the value creation capacity.. As each COS refines its signal processing and shares its learnings, patterns begin to emerge. Strategy is no longer a plan crafted in the boardroom. It’s a pattern that arises from the flow of signals, the feedback from action, and the shared intelligence of the entire network (Hutchins, 1995; Simon, 1969).

Rethinking Leadership and Organizational Design

In this model, leaders don’t command—they orchestrate and curate. Their role is to shape the environment in which COS can emerge, evolve, and interconnect. They act more like neurologists than generals, enhancing the enterprise’s overall cognitive health and ensuring signal pathways remain open, fluid, and coherent. Their success is measured not by how well they dictate outcomes, but by how well they foster emergent strategy from the bottom up.

This is where Hayek’s foundational insight from The Use of Knowledge in Society proves invaluable. He emphasized that knowledge is inherently dispersed across individuals in society and that no central authority can fully aggregate or utilize this knowledge effectively (Hayek, 1945). This understanding aligns directly with the architecture of a strategically sentient enterprise, which does not attempt to centralize decision-making but instead creates dynamic systems that allow localized, context-rich knowledge to emerge and flow throughout the organization. In this view, the enterprise becomes a mechanism not for control, but for enabling the distributed intelligence of its agents to drive adaptive and value-creating action.

From Static Planning to Living Intelligence

In the end, the metaphor or mental model matters. We need to stop designing organizations as if they were machines—or even just brains—and begin designing them as ecosystems of intelligent agents. These agents, organized into COS, interpret signals, generate value, and learn together. Strategy arises not from a single mind, but from the integration of many specialized minds in conversation.

This isn’t a hypothetical future. It’s already happening—in emergent teams, in agile networks, in learning organizations that prioritize adaptation over control. But we need to name it, design for it, and elevate it. We need to stop thinking about thinking as a central function, and start thinking of it as the outcome of a living, learning and adaptive system.

The future of enterprise is not just sentient. It’s strategically sentient. And in that future, every agent, every COS, every signal counts.

Like this idea? Lets co-design the next evolution of value creation—adaptive, intelligent, and alive.

Co-Authors: Mark Beliczky and Hunter Hastings

References

Béliczky, M., & Hastings, H. (2025). The Emergent 21st Century Sentient Enterprise: A New Model for You. Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/emergent-21st-century-sentient-enterprise-new-model-you-mark-béliczky

Clark, A. (2013). Mindware: An introduction to the philosophy of cognitive science. Oxford University Press.

Denning, S. (2005). The leader’s guide to storytelling: Mastering the art and discipline of business narrative. Jossey-Bass.

Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2), 127–138.

Hayek, F. A. (1945). The use of knowledge in society. The American Economic Review, 35(4), 519–530.

Holland, J. H. (2014). Complexity: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.

Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. MIT Press.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Klein, G. (2013). Seeing what others don’t: The remarkable ways we gain insights. PublicAffairs.

Reinertsen, D. G. (2009). The principles of product development flow: Second generation lean product development. Celeritas Publishing.

Schwartz, P. (1991). The art of the long view: Planning for the future in an uncertain world. Doubleday.

Senge, P. M. (1990). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. Doubleday.

Simon, H. A. (1969). The sciences of the artificial. MIT Press.

Snowden, D. J., & Boone, M. E. (2007). A leader’s framework for decision making. Harvard Business Review, 85(11), 68–76.

Wheatley, M. J. (2006). Leadership and the new science: Discovering order in a chaotic world. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.