Latest / UnDocked: The Maritime Transformation Show / Private Equity CTO Teaches a Masterclass on Agentic AI

Transcript

Private Equity CTO Teaches a Masterclass on Agentic AI · UnDocked: The Maritime Transformation Show

• Nick Chubb: Hello everyone and welcome to Undocked. Hello Raal Raal: Hi there Nick, how you doing? Nick Chubb: I'm well, thank you. And a very special hello to you, Peter. You're looking slightly bewildered that we've invited you on this podcast. And that's probably because I invited you about 24 hours ago. So let me give some context. who's listening for a while knows that ⁓ acquired ⁓ ⁓ ship over the summer. ⁓ that meant kind of putting ⁓ down and doing a lot of work. Peter Rossi: Hi. You all right? Nick Chubb: to get it up and running. And we've got a really good team in place now. And so I ended up sort of popping my head back up and sort of seeing what's going on in the technology world about two weeks ago and realized that I'd missed some fairly major updates when it came to AI. So I actually put a post out publicly on LinkedIn asking for some help. And Peter very graciously volunteered his time to tell me a bit about what's going on in agentic AI. And... I kind of sat in the hour we spent together slightly mind blown and then I spent the rest of the day playing with these tools myself and I was so utterly... ⁓ blown away by it that I decided that we had to get Peter on to the podcast to tell Raal and then also to tell everyone in our audience who listens and is interested in the maritime technology world. ⁓ Peter, do want to just give us bit of a background as to who you are and ⁓ I how we know each other? Peter Rossi: Yeah, sure. So yeah, Peter Rossi, I'm a technologist by trade, I've sort of 26 years in the industry, designing, building, scaling platforms for people. I started in Formula One with McLaren's Formula One team and then traveled the world with them running Trackside IT. Um, then went off and did, um, did some consulting work, um, so helped redesign a number of sort of large e-commerce platforms. Got into the VC world, started that by doing, um, sort of tech due diligence for small BC companies, um, before tech due diligence was sort of known as a thing that you did during M &A. it was quite funny at a time when, you know, I was sort of speaking to them and they were going, well, like, like we literally don't know what we're investing in. Like some of the times it works, sometimes we cover them. Raal: Yeah. Peter Rossi: Like some of the times we think it's an app that's already on the app store and it's just a picture of an app on a PowerPoint presentation. Then I got involved in a cloud startup that was VC backed. initially it wasn't, was, it was interestingly invested in my, a number of 1980s pop stars, like half of Spandau Ballet. it was quite, it was quite interesting, interesting time. Raal: You Nick Chubb: You Peter Rossi: and build a SaaS company as well, sold that in 2021 into a private equity group. And then when joined them, we packaged and sold that business in 22 and then sort of over the last four years, I've been with them as their CTO doing basically a big buy and build. We acquired 22 companies internationally over the last four years and been integrating those into the tech stack. So yeah, that's me, I suppose. quite varied ⁓ a vertical perspective. Nick I, ⁓ we sort of met when I invested in Belugo as maritime business and you were setting up Thetius at the time. Raal: Today's episode is brought to you by In a digital bridge environment, poor visibility isn't an inconvenience, it's a safety risk. Fortex N-Line maritime monitors give marine professionals the clarity and confidence they need. Their specialists engineer every display with high brightness, anti-glare glass and extremely wide dimming options for any lighting condition. Peter Rossi: We had some interesting conversations about what it's like starting a business and getting going. Nick Chubb: Indeed. So you went from a McLaren F1 to working with half a Spandau Ballet as investors and the natural lead on for that with the Glitz and Glamour is maritime, right? So how did you end up investing into the maritime industry? Peter Rossi: Yeah. ⁓ Raal: Moving up the showbiz stakes, Peter Rossi: I just felt like it was missing in my life. like all of these things, ⁓ tech ⁓ a it's an enabler for a lot of businesses. I'm not a big thing about tech for tech's sake. I enjoy it as a tool to solve problems. ⁓ Raal: Backed by DNV certification and trusted globally, these monitors have been used in navigational system monitoring and CCTV systems. Integration is seamless with multiple video inputs, Across fleet ownership, shipbuilding, and marine systems integration, Fortec provides a partnership grounded in expertise, Nick Chubb: hahahaha Peter Rossi: I met some interesting people at the time that were in the bunkering world they saw an interesting opportunity to ⁓ something there. So I got involved with them, helping them to sort of build something. ⁓ ended up becoming Beluga, Raal: regulatory assurance and lifecycle support. Discover the N-line series at Fortec UK. often talk about ⁓ &A and putting businesses together and certainly from a sort of data and integration point of view. But did I hear you right when you said the current thing you work on ⁓ is 22 companies? That's quite excessive. ⁓ All in the same kind of space or is it, ⁓ you know, what of level of integration is going there? Peter Rossi: Yeah, it's 20. ⁓ Nick Chubb: you Peter Rossi: Yeah, it was certification. So I say certification, microcross ISO 9001 or 27001. It's one of those. It's even more glamorous. It's one of those ones where you you're down the park and people go, what is it that you're doing? Oh, I'm going to lose you in a second. So it's an interest. Yeah, again, I'm going to say it's an interesting commercial thing because it's businesses like nobody talks. Nick Chubb: gets more glamorous. You Peter Rossi: There's a five year old dream for setting up a business and having an ISO 270001 certificate on their wall. That's not the dream. They want to build a business and be successful and all that stuff. The thing about ISO certification is that it enables you to sell more. Typically, the reason why companies get 9000, 127000 is say you built a SaaS company and it was going well and you were selling to customers and then all of a sudden Google came along and we love your product. want to roll it out across all of our user base. we'll pay you ⁓ five million a year licenses. Can ⁓ you just send your 27001 certificate so that we know that ⁓ you're securing it all properly? literally just a tick box exercise. ⁓ they, ⁓ it's like, ⁓ that's barrier. So they go out and work a certification business. consultancy or software company to help them achieve I say 27,001 and that's why they're going to do it. reason why private equity likes it is because it's like an annuity model, right? Businesses get driven into buying it. It's not discretionary spending because they then need it to keep selling. So they keep coming back year on year for recertification. And so your book builds year on year and you just go from there. And it's still quite a fragmented market. Raal: Yeah. Yeah. Peter Rossi: So, you know, I joined at a time when the business doing just under 10 million of revenue and about three million of EBITDA. And they acquired my business, a software company in that space. And I was just doing some consulting, sort of with a handover. And I thought, you know, it's interesting. I got to know the C-suite and saw what they were doing. And actually, yeah, you know, sort of coming back to that point, it was an interesting problem. They didn't have a CTA or a tech strategy at the time. So I sort of wrote the strategy, got to know them, and then we sort of went on that journey. at the time I joined, as I say, it was about 10 million in revenue. And they'd been doing a bit of a roll up in the UK, bought their first business in Ireland, and hadn't really done any more. They wanted to sort of take the model and try it in the US, which again is quite good fun. Because normally, if you're doing VC back tech in the UK, you want to get bought by a... US company that's that's the dream right it's rare that you're a UK company that's going out buying American which was that was that's quite the wrong way around ⁓ Raal: They must love that when that happens. Peter Rossi: ⁓ Raal: well, kind of, just another point that just struck me there as well, when you said about tech due diligence, because obviously I've been through that quite a times and the importance of that, getting that expertise in to kind of actually check into it. And we were talking about this ⁓ through an lens ⁓ in an where we were talking about no code, low code, vibe coding and like that. Because now of course, you can give the simulcrum of a very effective application without actually being able to write a line of code. ⁓ That kind of DD works probably becoming even more important in the world of AI, right? Peter Rossi: Yeah, no, no, is. It is. I think it's still sort of changing because there's this view at the moment that, like Vibercoded software is buggy and it's got loads of security holes in it. And ⁓ ⁓ are finding themselves in a position where they're taking a product for VC funding and the VCs are going like, well, tell me about how it was written. And I'll just talk to an AI and it did it. know, there's literally no, there's nobody engineering wise under the hood that's doing that. ⁓ to sort of give a counterbalance to that. AI written software can be amazing. If you, if you've got somebody that knows what they're doing with it, it will just rapidly accelerate them. can build something that's 10 times better than you would have built by I, suppose I'm one those people that I can end up, I end up annoying other technologists because I'm not a purist at all. ⁓ I am, you know, there's always industry best practice. And everyone it gets very sort of bogged down in what the latest best practices today around how you build things or technologies you should use or packaging or CI CD pipelines or whatever it is. ⁓ And ⁓ really, know, don't care. it's actually about what is the business trying to do and what makes sense for that business ⁓ to work with. Yes, you have a, you know, a super sexy, you know, best-in-class software stack that runs your business or your client base and stuff. But ultimately, if your business is still growing, the product's still working, and it's still underpinning all of your revenue, then actually, we just need to look at the risks. Where might you hit a scaling problem? Or where might there be a security thing that we need to tighten up? Or maybe it does need to go in the bin. It's rare. It's very rare. I spent a lot of my... a lot of my career being bought in by boards and funds to go and and help companies where they've gone like, said they were going to go and rebuild their core product and it's 12 months in and it's not done. And they haven't moved forward commercially in that time. keep going on. It's like, well, yeah, it's pretty obvious you shouldn't have done it. Nick Chubb: You've got no experience of that, Raal I'm sure. Raal: None. at all. Don't know what you're talking about. Nick Chubb: I like we could probably have ⁓ a whole talking about ⁓ private equity decisions. But ⁓ I'm ⁓ that ⁓ brought you here to talk about ⁓ what is on ⁓ with ⁓ and more specifically, agentic AI. ⁓ could you just give us your view on... what's changed in the last six months that's taken us from talking to a chat interface to some of the stuff that we've talked about over the last few days. Peter Rossi: Yeah, yeah, I think the thing is, ⁓ actually slightly going into the tech due diligence bit for a second, ⁓ You can carbon date a company by its tech stack a lot of the time. so they start showing it to you. Okay, so Ruby on Rails application, right? This company was formed around 2014. Okay, it's classic ASP. This is probably around 2004. And it is generally most of the time. And those companies get stuck on those tech stacks because that's what they know at the time. And obviously the cost of moving something else is really high. So they tend to not do that. And what I'm finding with AI is that, you in the last three years, it's crazy what's happened. It's moved on at a rate of knots. And actually what you find is like a lot of people have their views on AI and lots of people are using it in vertical commands, but they're using it at sort of different capability levels that typically get locked in at a point in time. You know, they tried it or they tried it for a bit or they went into it and came out of it and went back. But you can tell when they started using it and then what their view is around how you continue to use it and what its capabilities are. So there's still a lot of people that view AI as a, like a chat interface. You know, they got introduced to chat GPT back in 22, 23. They used it a bit like Google to ask it a question. Might've got an answer out the other side of it, could've been useful. They might've found that the answer was rubbish, hallucinated, and that was it. The thing is sort of over time, that's changed a lot, I'll tend to break it down to like tier one, tier two, tier three AI. So sort of tier one is, is like your basic chat GPT interfaces, Gemini or Claude, that's your, you you go in, you start a new chat, you have a conversation with them about something and it's operating very much inside of that box. So it's very useful, very powerful. The models have moved along at a rate of knots. And so we're at GPT-5 now with OpenAI, or 5.4 as they released the other day, you've got Opus 4.6. Incredibly powerful models that you can do a lot with. In fact, if you look at what, if you go back to GPT-4 or before, that was mind blowing back then, but actually it's complete rubbish now in comparison to what they're doing. a lot of people are still locked there. You know, I talk to people, know, do you use AI? Yeah, I know I use Copilot and I just talk to Claude and I've got lots of conversations in there and that's it. And that's their view of the world. It's never got more expansive than that. But at the same time as all that stuff came out, OpenAI launched APIs to be able to programmatically interface with their models. played around with a things, built a few Chrome plugins and things and found that actually, it's really useful for doing things like data ⁓ The models are brilliant. ⁓ Imagine you acquire a and it's got like a mailing list or they've got a customer database and you say, look, we need to send out an email to all of these businesses and let them know that we've changed hands and the data that you get can be really messy. ⁓ get a spreadsheet that's got cells and it's got three male addresses. Some of them have got hats in them, there's semicolons all over the place. Addresses, addresses are hilarious from a database perspective because everyone's got a slightly different view on how you should store it. Should be addressed one, two, three, town, city, zip, what And ⁓ the lovely thing about a language model is that It understands that really easily. It's the sort of you can eat for breakfast. So you can just say, here's the columns that I'm trying to get, and then here's the data and give it back to me in a structured format. can sort of clean up data really easily. And that sort of thing is really, powerful. it's also really difficult to programmatically solve that, with, know, like, oh, if it looks like this, then do that with it. And then, you know, it's the sort of thing that you'd probably spend just as time as you would if you're it manually. It's like the old adage of, know, why spend 10 minutes doing something manually when you can spend two weeks failing to automate it. So yeah, so that's your tier one. You know, then the API stuff came out. Tier two is sort of where apps had started to really integrate it and make it sort of leverageable as a tool. So in the software development world, Nick Chubb: That's literally my life. Raal: You Peter Rossi: people that program do programming inside of an IDE or an integrated development environment. That's like VS code or something, all those lines that you open up. Microsoft brought out Copilot with Git ⁓ that you've got an AI live with you while you're doing software development. And it's not just a ⁓ window, it's got context about the thing that you're working on. So you can sort of highlight a function and go, can you help me? ⁓ with this database called this bits erroring or something like that. Yeah, a very basic level that's sort what it was doing. That grew a lot. And there was a number of different tools that came out after that. You've got Cursor, which is really popular, Windsurf and a few others. and it's exploded after that. You've seen AI getting built into absolutely everything. And then sort of after that, sort of tier three is really sort of when businesses started using those APIs themselves to start. How do we bolt this into our existing ERP and SAS solutions and internal processes and actually leverage our internal data to do something interesting with it? I think that's how it's changed. Tooling-wise, over the time, every time a new thing came out, you thought, personally am guilty of going, like, wow, this is it. Everything that came before is completely defunct. This is the way forward, and nothing's going to beat it. Nick Chubb: Mm. Peter Rossi: literally three months later, something else comes around and just eats the other thing for breakfast. most recently, about months ago, ⁓ I would that Claude code coming out was probably the thing ⁓ that made biggest difference to the industry. ⁓ That ⁓ huge. then most recently, OpenClaude being released. I would argue it's the thing that probably eats Claude Cote for breakfast, although there's still space for Claude Code's a funny one because I think it's the most badly branded product in history in comparison to what it actually does and how you can leverage it and the power that it's got that you can use it for, almost anything other than software development, if you go to that point I was saying about ⁓ your chat interfaces, ⁓ the AI is a box. ⁓ can really only ⁓ talk to a bit with ⁓ They've improved that. They've added functionality ⁓ projects so can upload files into it, it can reference them. ⁓ And you can use connectors to connect to. you know, HubSpot or Git or your file system so that it can go off and reference them. It works, but it's a little bit boxed in. Claude Code was, ⁓ or is, ⁓ it's a tool that you can and install on your laptop. If you're in the Mac ecosystem, you're in luck because it's super easy. for office website, have a look at Claude Code. You'll a way to install it. You need a subscription, you know still works on the $20 a month subscription So still at the very cheap end of it if you just want to try all you do is create a folder on your desktop ⁓ and ⁓ Open your terminal, go into that folder, type Claude, bang. Claude's running in that folder. You might not have anything in it at that time, and you can just start talking to Claude about, a chat interface. You don't have to worry about command lines or anything you need to do. At this point, all you've had to do is type Claude and hit enter, and you're in. And you can then use it like you're using your chat interface with chat GPT or Claude or whatever it is that you're normally using. But at this point, you've got the power of your laptop and all your files and your file system available to sort of drop into that folder. you can start providing you with context and things to do. Nick, when I was talking to you the other day, were talking about social media management. It's always one of the ones that people come to with AI I think product management is another really interesting one. I'll talk about that. Basically, I use Publer as a social media publishing tool. There's loads, how you can use Buffer or Sprout or Hootsuite or whatever. So I got a folder in there and I said to it, look, I'm using Publer. I'd like to be able to schedule posts inside of it. to be able to pull analytics on the poster, going, I'd like to be able to monitor and change the schedule And it goes, ⁓ OK. Right. So it goes off and researches the API and goes, right, actually, if you could put the API key in this environment variable, I'll write some scripts that can do that. And then it stores that in its context and goes, right, I can talk to public now. What do you want to do? So then ⁓ I've then given ⁓ another that's got my tone voice. I download all of my articles I've written on LinkedIn and published in other places, put that all into a text file I'd like you to pause that and write tone of voice style guide. ⁓ Okay, it does that. It knows me. It can write like at that point. And then at that point, I've got a very powerful tool, we start sort of building up. ⁓ building up some articles that we can post and publish. Where it then starts getting more powerful is you start layering in additional AI tooling. One of the ones I really like is an app called Granola. So Granola AI is free at the moment. put it on your phone, you can install it on your laptop as well. ⁓ It's AI transcription tool. So if in the car, I can just hit record. start tracking to it, ramble to it about all sorts of things I'm talking, you thinking in my mind, ⁓ yeah, let's think and I've got this idea ⁓ Yeah. ⁓ And let's do thing, your thoughts have be coherent necessarily. You're not in the way that you have a conversation with a human, right? You can go all over the place with it for a bit and it'll just Raal: legitimate reason to talk to myself, Peter. ⁓ Nick Chubb: Ha ha. Raal: Yeah. Peter Rossi: It'll grab it all. It will then rework that into something coherent. ⁓ I just take the raw transcripts out there. know, granola will, will turn it into nice AI notes then I go back to my social media folder and go, right. Here's, here's a, here's a transcript from me talking to myself, but what do you think of this? ⁓ yeah, no, this is an interesting article. We know based on articles that you've run before that these bits ⁓ are interesting. So let's tweak this and then we'll schedule it. Or we can atomize it into a number of different posts. It'll Raal: there's bits of that that you're describing there that I do already, but in a very convoluted sort of way ⁓ in a very kind of non ⁓ kind of way. You know, I'm doing bits of that chain and honing bits down. But what you've described there is just like ⁓ incredible kind of workflow doing all of that for you as well. It's actually. ⁓ Nick Chubb: Well, we're recording this on Thursday, right? And I met Peter at nine o'clock on Monday. Peter, I bought it, by the way. I went for Claude Cowork instead of Claude Code. But it's still very, very good. So I downloaded Claude Cowork and I thought, let's try this social media use case. And. Peter Rossi: Thank Nick Chubb: There's two things I really love. I love coming up with ideas and I love fiddling with copy. Like I really enjoy the actual kind of working copy bit. But I hate all the admin that sort of sits around it. So I basically said exactly that to Claude Cowork. And just to show you where I was at by Tuesday morning, I can now push a button on my laptop and talk into the laptop. It will then, and I'll say, take down a social idea. Raal: Mmm. Nick Chubb: and I'll talk through the idea, as Peter says, totally unstructured, totally sort of rambling. It then takes that, structures it a bit better, and then saves it in a folder of my social ideas. And then I have another button, I can push a button that says process all my social ideas. It will take all of those ideas. it would just sort of work them up against my style guide at exactly the same thing. I took like 200 social media posts, 15 articles that I'd written over the years. It posted them against my style guide. And I hate actually going into social media and typing it all out and cut and pasting. And so it actually, it now... puts everything up into Buffer as a draft for me. And then I can go into Buffer and then I can fiddle with the copy and I can hit the schedule button. But the thing that was amazing about it was it sort of said to me, OK, so I'm setting all this up. I'm setting this workflow up. It said, could you get me the Buffer API key? I was like, yeah, OK. So I went and got the Buffer API key and I pasted it in. And then it sort of ran for a bit and it said, it's not working. Let me just see if I can do this manually myself. And then it just took over Chrome for me. Went to Buffer. and then just clicking around the interface started scheduling posts for me. And it was honestly, was like I was a caveman discovering fire. I've never ever seen anything like it in my life. And it just completely blew my mind. And since then, I've built a whole lot of other stuff. now have a, now API's into Airtable, which is our kind of core database where we store all our interview transcripts. can go all the way through all of our interview transcripts. We do about 300 a year. And it was honestly, was like I was a caveman discovering fire. ⁓ I've never ever seen anything like it in my life. Raal: Hahaha! Hahaha! Peter Rossi: Thank Thank Nick Chubb: out ⁓ key findings, ⁓ thematic analysis and then write research reports based on primary research ⁓ it can do it in about five, ten minutes and took ⁓ an hour to set the workflow up. ⁓ honestly mind-blowing. Raal: Wow. And Peter, think this is something that you said earlier chimed with me. You sort of said, I don't find technology that interesting. And I'm kind of a bit like that with technology generally, but with AI as well. Like AI as a subject doesn't interest me. Having an army of robots to do my bidding, that I can get behind. Peter Rossi: Yeah. So that's a thing, you know, as Nick said, so Claude Cowork and he came out recently, was about a month ago, and this is Anthropics Go, it's sort of trying to bring Claude Kowat to the masses without people being scared about having a command line interface. The benefit with, yes, you get a lot of the power, as you've seen, that one of the nice things about Claude Kowat, though, as well, is that you can create, You can create skills and functions inside of it. you could work with it to describe a process like, I want you to go off to this website and research this, and I want you to go and cross-reference it with this bit of information. Then I want you to go and research this, run LinkedIn, and I want you to write an article that does this and then process it. And rather than going in every time and doing that, you can say, now turn that into a skill. And then even more so, you don't need to run it yourself. You can then schedule that with your computer and say, Claude, run this skill, please. And there's no coding, you haven't had to sort of work through this sort of complicated process of doing that. I think the, one of the things I'd imagine the technologists here will be screaming, what about the security? So it's probably a buffing on that a little bit, since we've been talking about API keys. I think, you you've got to be conscious about what you're doing with it, where that data is going and what you're doing. they, know, largely if you've got a... Raal: Yeah. Peter Rossi: you know, sort of a subscription, a paid subscription with the AI. You can toggle in the settings that whether or not you can use that data for training purposes. So be aware of that. you know, sort of putting passwords and API keys straight into the chat. It's not, you know, it's not best practice. It's not recommended. But you can pass it to it in environment files. particularly when you're working with Claude code and Claude co-work, it'll say, can you give me a file and I'll go and put it in there for you and then you can use it. And there's still a lot of security around that at the moment. People talk to you because realistically it still reads the file. But there's lots of new and that's the everyone's learning still at the moment about that, you know, new toolings coming out around credential proxying and all sorts of stuff. the thing is, don't give it access to your crown jewels. Don't don't let it make payments or give it access to your bank account or anything like that. That's the bit where you want to be a bit more worried about it and keep it sandboxed. Nick Chubb: And it's worth saying there are stories of entire databases being deleted, right? Just permanently deleted by Claude going a little bit rogue. So there are very real risks here. ⁓ Peter Rossi: Yeah. Yeah, you know, I don't want to scare anyone with that because I think that's the thing. think a lot of people do get very bogged down in it and it's a tool at the end of the day. Right. So imagine, an electric saw is a very useful tool for, you know, doing building work with. Brilliant. You could also chop your fingers off. It's exactly the same thing. It doesn't, and it doesn't mean just because you can chop your fingers off, you shouldn't use an electric saw. It's just got to be aware of the fact that you may need to use safety goggles and be careful about what you do. Raal: what I've found is that I've only really been comfortable using AI say for example, analyzing data if I've got the ⁓ power to correlate back and look at what I'm getting and question that against the data itself that I'm looking at the more you use and the more you delegate that and the more you remove yourself from the process, is there a danger that. the accuracy becomes an issue as well. And how do you kind of stop that from being an issue? Peter Rossi: Yeah, well, there's a couple of points there really. is around human judgment and human in the loop being massively important still. ⁓ in the social media cycle that we've just been talking about there, ⁓ he can press a button, it's only scheduling it, it's not actually sending it. And before it actually gets sent, what are you doing, Nick? Are you reading it? Nick Chubb: I'm not just reading, I'm doing some pretty heavy editing because the quality of the actual post is variable. But you're right, Peter Rossi: ⁓ There was an article yesterday that I saw around sort Amazon's junior engineers are all being told that ⁓ it's been written into their contracts, that ⁓ you are for what the AI writes and puts you've got to... You can't just go, ⁓ we got it wrong. It's its fault. It's yours. ⁓ If you committed it, it's your fault. So people have read it and make sure that they understand it. So human judgment is really important. And ultimately, think, at the moment, that's where careers are going. People are going to be into much more, like less doing and more judgment. know, like, is it that's been produced? Is that correct? Is that the right thing for the business for me? ⁓ What is it we're trying achieve? And yes, that's good. You can go and do it. I was in... ⁓ process automation back in 2008, and we were doing, was in a managed service provider. So they had a very basic model of for every 35 servers that we brought on to manage, we used to have to hire another person. And my target was to try and get that up to 200 servers per head. with monitoring automation and then using tooling off the back of that to sort of correlate and then go and go and try and fix the problem. But, you know, realized very early on that actually automatically fixing the problem could be a bit of a nightmare. You know, like get a low disk space issue on the server. I don't want to automatically go and delete the database because yeah, solves one problem creates another. what we did was ⁓ tooling that went off of it, scanned it, and then came back with suggestions to the actual humans in the team and said, look, this service got this space problem, here's all the files, this is what I think I should do, should I do it? Yes. At that point, it's much more scalable. Nick Chubb: That's an, it's an almost perfect analogy to ship management actually. know, most ship managers. you know, the kind of fleet manager job will look after anything from kind of 10 to 30 vessels. And certainly what we've started to see is at senior leadership level, then the question is being asked with the same team, can we get that up to 100 vessels, 150 vessels? And I think, ship management is full of edge cases, there's lots of safety, critical decision-making, but ultimately it is a very process-driven world and there's currently a lot of manual processes that live within that. So your story almost perfectly fits that in terms of taking the automation to a point where a human can judge it and also management by exception, rather having a human pushing stuff back and forth. ⁓ Peter Rossi: Yeah, so, you know, think judgment is key. yeah, humanly, and I think that's where a lot of this is going. You can see that there's a bit of an interesting problem, right, around the fact that if the plan is to gut the junior workforce and just have a sort of middle management, senior management doing judgment work, then at some point you run out of people that are capable of judging it because they've never done the work. They never know what's the right thing to do. I think there's all sorts of ethical, existential issues with capitalism and stuff that are coming up. Nick Chubb: Yeah. Raal: Sustainability issue, yeah. Peter Rossi: Yeah, it's an interesting one. Raal: ⁓ I think Nick, you're onto something there in terms of where we should go with the discussion. Cause I think ⁓ also that thing that you mentioned there in ship management or the various layers through ⁓ management and crew management, all those things, where you are that oversight ⁓ lots of different, ⁓ call them agents within the ⁓ and being able to spot. those kind of areas. That's one aspect of it where I think AI could be hugely important. ⁓ I imagine that in most ship will come in and in the morning they want to tell me what I need to know. Tell me where, where I've got to kind of jump, and what's my next best action? This is ⁓ really areas where software can really thrive. But the second thing is you said yourself, Nick, the, the, one of the things that's hampered technology adoption and people really digitization really living up to its promise in maritime is exactly the number of exceptions. The impossibility of putting any rules down. You know, I remember throughout my career trying to map out like what's the rules here? What's the process? And people will go and I'll think, have I got it? Is that it? And then they'll go, yes, but except. Nick Chubb: except Raal: And that's when the whole thing falls down. And you said yourself, Peter, earlier on, that's where AI ⁓ can be so effective, right? Because it can allow for those little mental leaps that says, I'm making a judgment. that, I mean, what's your view in, a maritime context? You mentioned you had some experience with, would you agree with that? Do you see it as a land of opportunity for AI? ⁓ Peter Rossi: Yeah. there's an interesting point there about ⁓ that and a lot of the exception handling stuff, you go, ⁓ yes, that but, right, actually comes from ⁓ like longitudinal data, right? You know, because three years ago you had this problem that was the thing, right? AI won't forget, right? You can, on a per customer basis, you can have it logging absolutely every decision. It's where I think it's going to be really interesting in medical. ⁓ particularly around the matter, you you imagine a GP surgery, somebody comes along with a, stomach ache, they see one doctor, nothing, you know, they go, oh, it's okay, don't worry about it, go away. And then sort of three months later, they come back and they've got some pain somewhere else and they go, it's this, don't worry about it. And the GP won't necessarily join all of those dots, but an AI will just very quickly look at the notes and go, no. we need to send them for X-rays or blood tests on this because I think actually due to X, Y and Z happening, can show you some pattern recognition that means that this might be heading in this direction. I think a lot of those exceptions become really interesting, just because it becomes like data training for the model. you're going to end up with a lot more sort of domain specific models and capabilities that really help businesses. The way the AI market is going at the moment, There isn't much of a moat there for those companies. It's all predicated around the point of view, like somebody's going to win and then they're going to get a lot of SaaS subscription revenue from people using or leveraging their AI. There isn't much of a moat around the model itself and its capability and its thinking because those are being open sourced really quickly. ⁓ anybody saw the article the other day about Anthropic put out saying that Moonshot and Deepsea created over 24,000 accounts and they were using Claw to trade in their own models. And that's just an open source model now. So Kimi 2.5 and VLN 5 are all, they're ranking up there with Opus. So if you've got the hardware to run them, it's free. Well, you've got to the hardware. Nick Chubb: Yes, I did see that. Yeah. Peter Rossi: And so really the moat isn't the model. ⁓ Really all they've got at the moment is and capacity. People can consume from them. ⁓ But again, that's moving. ⁓ Nick Chubb: I was just going say off the back of that, there's kind of two layers I'm thinking about this. If we just take a mid-size shipping company that may have got an evolving maturity when it comes to IT, and there's a desire to start working with these tools, what would you advise the non-technical fleet managers do to start? engaging with this stuff and then also what would you advise if you were advising the CIO what would you advise they do to engage with it but also manage all the non-technical people who want to be using this stuff. Peter Rossi: Yeah, rolling out across an organization is a whole other other bag. ⁓ And there's a couple of different things. think over the next few years, you're going to see a shift where you've got companies that exist as they are today that are going to adopt AI or try to adopt AI. And what you're going to see there is that org structure is not going to change. What they're going to try and do is just drive more productivity with the existing structure that they've got. I tend to refer to AI as augmentation of people rather than replacement of them. I saw an interesting way of describing it saying it's like an exoskeleton that you can step into that. Turbocharged is your capability. you think, you know, same processes in place, but more useful information and tooling available therefore means that the productivity can increase. think where it's going to change over the next couple of years is you're to get new businesses starting that structure themselves differently based around the way that AI is there. So if you assume that AI is always going to be there in your business, then how would you design it differently from a product design, stakeholder management? UI design, development, QA, customer service, all of it. If you put AI first, what do the humans actually need to do? what do humans actually need to do? It's, you're gonna need them for what they're actually doing and where are you gonna get the real value from? That's where it's gonna change. But to go back to your point around, you know, sort of real world useful stuff. If you're... Nick Chubb: Yeah. Peter Rossi: If you're a one man band out there in a small business, would definitely go and have a look at some of the tools and really lean into them. And I don't mean just go and try it. Like if you're wondering whether or not it can or can't do something, ask it. You you'll start working with it and go, let's go back to the social media thing. I'm going to get it to. Design some social media social media place for me you look at it go That's not really how I would write it and you start working on. Okay. Well, I'll take that and I'll rewrite it the way I would like it Well, how about you go back to it with with that one that you've rewritten and say this is how I would have written it Can you remember that? Yeah, I can do that. Brilliant. All right, so that's leaning it and that's learning a bit more about it You started using it one way and then you've learned you've taught it to do something else Same again with the next step of that, you you then take that copy and paste it, put it into LinkedIn, done. You say to it, I've done this now, I've scheduled it on LinkedIn. Is there a way that you could automatically do that? Yeah. And then it will work with you to help you do that. Very, very powerful tools. So I would highly recommend leaning into it. So look at these tools, try them, push their capabilities. Something you hear about a lot is people going, know, it's dumbing down because they're not actually going out researching. It depends on the sort of person you are, but personally I've learned a hell of a lot. It can explain things to me. I spend a lot of time getting it to explain stuff to me. And I'm what do you think about this? And how does that come together? How could we do that? It's also massively aware of other products and tools and services out there that I was never aware of. Even from a tech standpoint, and I live in this world, and I know what companies are getting invested in. I know who's starting. I know what's exciting. I know what people are using. And it's still telling me about, yeah, you could do it this way. Can you? All right. And it's really interesting. So lean into some of these tools and see what they can do for you. Nick Chubb: Hmm. Peter Rossi: perspective, it's you've got to look at it from a bit of a governance perspective. It's a of a boring conversation at this point because we're doing the sexy fun, actually using it, doing stuff and then we start moving into fud and security. It's a governance problem because you give everyone access to a tool and then you don't know how they're using it. You don't know where your data is going, you don't know what it's being used for, whether or not they're just they're acting as a human in the loop, but they're saying, yes, no one's actually done the training for them to say, you need to read this, you're accountable for it. And then that accountability then comes down to employee handbook, process training, all that sort of stuff. I think the obvious ones to look at are Nick Chubb: Hmm. Peter Rossi: copilot licenses from Microsoft 365. And if you want to do actual AI integration, there's from a development and data perspective, working with Azure or because they've got the open AI and secure back end so that you can use their API, but you know that it's only doing it in the UK and the UK data center and it's not your data is not going anywhere. Same with AWS Bedrock. You can do the same with that and you can run different models. with them as well. So I think that's those are the safest ways of doing it. The benefit of using something like Copilot is you can put all sorts of rules around who can use it, got all the nice larger corporate tooling ⁓ and security stuff there. But it also very quickly it hooks in really quickly too. It can read all your teams messages, it can read all of your emails, it can access your file system so it's got more access to your corporate data. Build some tools like... I don't know if anyone ever gets involved in supply chain questionnaires. You start supplying stuff to a company and they send you a lovely questionnaire every year. Can you answer these 400 questions please about your business, its status, the finances and then also information security, what you're doing with our data, all that sort of stuff. Nick Chubb: That's the bait in it by live. Yeah. Peter Rossi: What we did was take all of the ones that we've done over the last couple of years along with our corporate processes. manuals and guidelines and trained a model on it. And then surfaced it in the Teams chat bot internally. So if anybody got a supply question there, they could drop it in and it would just read it and give them all the answers, or they could chat to it and go, this customer's asking me this question. Here's the standard answer that we would normally give them. It's really powerful. And you can do that sort of thing really quite quickly with 365 in a safe, governancey, way. It's not as sexy as I'd like it to be, but it does work. Nick Chubb: It's interesting though because I think everyone jumps when we think about the maritime industry, everyone jumps to really big, difficult challenges like autonomous navigation and things like that. But actually, there's just so much administration that exists in the industry and so much of your life if you're working in a shoreside role is filling out compliance questionnaires and all of this sort of stuff. I think, yes, it's not. Peter Rossi: Mm. Nick Chubb: it's not sort of sexy on the surface, but actually like it's really what's going to move the needle in terms of productivity for an organization in a very short space of time at a relatively low risk. And I think suddenly that then becomes very, very interesting. Peter Rossi: I spent a lot of my career doing effectively time and motion studies from an IT perspective and it's one of the things I enjoy a lot anyway, just sort of looking at what companies are doing, where they're spending time, what's the waste of people's time because ultimately the human resources, human capital in business, you're A, most expensive, also you're most valuable. and you want to leverage them. You want them to be doing the thing that they're good at, whether that's helping the customer, selling more things, buying the right stuff, finding efficiencies in the accounting or whatever it is. That's what they're good at. And it's the human oversight bit. And everyone prides themselves on how good they are at doing that bit of work. They don't pride themselves on how good they are at filling out form. It's a waste of their time. So using those tools to find that's really important. And yeah, and yeah. Raal: And I think it's kind of as well identifying the bits where a human being's not really adding any value as well, right? So just correlating data and, you know, joining up some of those processes which are heavily manual, like picking out something from an email, then adding it into a ledger over here and all that kind of stuff. There's no value being added and yet you're using their time. But I would say, I mean, I think one of the things here, and this is kind of the point I was making to the rollout of technology, obviously the AI is being trained. The AI is acquiring more and more of those human skills and where humans add value. And I think ⁓ one of the things to think about when you're rolling these technologies out is the fact that you're in many ways asking the workforce. to make themselves redundant potentially in the way that they're training on these systems, getting turkeys to vote for Christmas. And so I think that I'm interested to know, like when you're talking to people about how they roll technology, about how do they take the workforce on that journey with them so that people aren't feeling like this is something that they should be opposed to or should be trying to sort of put sand in the wheels of, you know what I mean? Peter Rossi: Yeah, and you always get that. Tech change is far less about technology and far more about hearts and minds and process change and how you roll this stuff out across a business. ⁓ If you go back to the point I made right at the start, acquiring these companies, it's not about the tech. It's about making sure that people understand why we're changing things, how we're changing things, that they feel safe, that they're going to keep their jobs and where it's going, or that the job might change, but for the better. And there's a reason for it. The last thing you want is people sticking sand in the wheels and really slowing it down. Yeah, know fundamentally work is going to change for a lot of people but generally for the better I you know, if I go back to the point around the fact that I was doing process automation back in 2008 So, you know what? It's nearly 20 years ago. I had the same problem with the engineering teams then they were sort of going He's here to take our jobs. No, it's just, do you really enjoy spending time looking at servers, trying to work out where the files are? You know, no, you don't. You enjoy doing more complicated debugging across networking and things like that. Don't do that. Don't spend your time doing the basic stuff. And that's where it's going to go in the short term until businesses really work out how to restructure themselves around this. Nick Chubb: I think there's the other thing to think about with that is I personally would be worried being in an organization that isn't leaning into this stuff because the organization that does is going to have such a big competitive advantage that the organization as a whole could end up ⁓ being taken out of the market by a competitor that really leans in. So I think it's really important that at every level in an organization that we kind of lean into this. someone else is, someone else already is. Peter Rossi: Think about it. Raal: Well, and and sorry just to say as well to your point there Nick about that's the worker as well skills being left behind. You mentioned it with people who are people who are tending tending some horrible old tech stack, you know, if they then suddenly find themselves needing a job somewhere else and they've got their skills are completely out of date. I mean, just to kind of you started the program talking about the fact that you felt that you were falling behind, you know, that will be a massive concern to loads of people. Peter Rossi: Well. Raal: You and I are talking about AI virtually every week. If we don't feel Nick Chubb: Yeah. Yeah, I just took my eye off it for a couple of months, and that was enough to feel like I'm in a different world that I don't understand. Go on. Peter Rossi: Well, to that point though, right? I've spent a lot of time talking about Claude Cade and... Nick Chubb: Mm. Peter Rossi: called Cowork. Yeah, other tools do exist. But they, arguably, I've brought you up to sort of mid 25. I haven't brought you up to today. It's already moved on. All of this stuff is just fun. You're just doing old stuff now, I got you excited about something that's out of date. The world fundamentally changed about four or five weeks ago when Nick Chubb: Don't say that! Peter Rossi: sort of open claw got released. It's an open source tool for effectively agentic workflows that sits over the top of the AIs. The major thing that it boils down to is that something like Claude Code or Chatchie PT or anything like that is passive. It sits there and waits for you to tell it what to do or ask it to do something. You can schedule some work for it to do and it will go and do that, but it's only doing stuff when you tell it to do it. What OpenClaw really does is it brings in heartbeats and memories. So every 30 seconds fires a heartbeat and goes, should I be doing something? Should I be doing something? Is there something I'm working on? Something I could look at? And you then, through that framework, you can hook it into basically any data source you want. It's your emails, your calendars, your socials, your home automation server, anything you want. And it can then act on that and draw that stuff together. It can also do software development, server control, deployment. If you have a look on openclaw.ai, it's the website for the open source project. And there's a showcase on there. I've been reading about it. I've seen stuff going on Twitter. and I had a on the website and there was a showcase article about it where basically a guy saying, yeah, so I had a bit of an aha moment and the world is never going to be the same again after this. And he said, I was... Working with it on a on a software app and the all the tests were failing on it So I got it to have a look at that Work out log into the live server. Have a look at what the problems were Understand where the bugs were, and code a fix for it, push that into our source control, review it. I reviewed it. It then pushed it, deployed it to live, fixed the problem. I also noticed a UX bug in the tool. I discussed it with it. It looked at it, worked out a plan, presented the plan. I said, yes. It went and did it and deployed it. All done over voice while I was walking the dog. I like, yeah, I think I need to have a at this. Raal: ⁓ Nick Chubb: Yeah Raal: Wow. Peter Rossi: And Nick Chubb: I mean, that's hours of work for a testing engineer to do. Peter Rossi: Still human in the loop. Still human in the loop. ⁓ Raal: I mean, how? Nick Chubb: Yeah. Raal: But that is also something that I think is really interesting. And that kind of plays into perhaps a discussion that we wanted to get into. ⁓ You mentioned there ⁓ but what you're describing there, walking the dog, that's kind of like, you know, space 2001, whatever style interface, right? You're just talking to this kind of sentient or at least appearing to be sentient being that's kind of doing all this stuff for you. And that, for me, when I think about like the safest jobs that if you'd have said two or three years ago, if you'd said, what are the safest jobs? I'd have said, you know, software engineers and UX developers, UX is going to be huge. It's a growing sort of industry. If you ask me now, I would put people off from both those things because if I see the future as being an elimination of interfaces almost. Peter Rossi: Yeah, I was having this conversation with people about six months ago. If you look at, you want to fast forward a couple of years, the internet as we know it, what's the point? And devices, mobile phones as we know them, what's the point? A mobile phone sort of exists so that you can use an app that shows you some structured data in a way that then you look to understand it and consume it in a way that you want to consume it. It's just going to be data services with like MCP, model context protocol running where you want to book a holiday. Your AI will go off and talk to a couple of different providers. It will come back with some, you know, some costs. I can play with it. I've got, I've got. I've got an AI agent that runs daily looking at holidays for me, right? It's aware of the kids' school holidays, right? It knows when they're on holiday, when we can go. It knows inset days. It knows that I like to... And it's not just a basic, like, ⁓ I want a seven days in Tenerife or something along those lines. It knows that I like to play around with holidays to get good value where I'll play around with, rather than going for seven, we'll go for eight days or we'll go for six days. Or if we shift it to go on a Friday rather than a Saturday, you get a cheaper flight or me along those lines. It does all of that for me because I've told it what I want it to do and then it just gives me like oh yeah here you go this is a good option. Raal: Wow. But that leads us into a sort of a perhaps a broader discussion of what AI is really going to do to the software market. I mean, this is something you and I have talked about Nick on the show, isn't it? Nick Chubb: blowing. Yeah, where does that leave SAS as a concept? Peter Rossi: Where does it leave SAS? ⁓ Yes, there is a growing, this is the end of SAS era. And then you get, know, Mark Benny off of Salesforce saying, no, it's not. They're all not. And you can sort of see both sides to this. Where is it going? Where is it going? If you go back to the point that I made about what is SAS, it's fundamentally, it solves a domain specific problem by putting some processes over the top of some data. Really, that's all it's doing. It doesn't matter whether it's Salesforce, HubSpot. And the bigger the product, the more stuff it does for you. Salesforce is a big tool. HubSpot's a big tool. What's actually going to happen? People at the moment are saying, well, I can just get it to build some software. You know, I don't need to go and pay for a SAS license. I'll just get it to go and build some stuff for me. Really basic stuff it can probably do very quickly if you haven't got a good engineering team to do that. Where's it going? It can probably do that even faster. Accelerate even further. What's the point? Do you even need an interface? Do you need a SAS tool that helps your sales team use that every day? Is it even relevant? No. The data is relevant. And the AI model understanding your data and your business is relevant. And then working with the AI for it to then surface what's important to you in your job and helping you do that is important. And how it's going to do that's probably not through a very structured SaaS app because it's just not required. I think that's probably where it's going to go. Is it going to happen that quickly? No. Nick Chubb: One of my experiments this week was I just said to them, I just needed to do this just to keep track of things I'm doing. I said this to Claude Cowart. I said, okay, and then it went off for a couple of minutes. And he went, here you go. And it gave me a link to a web app. And it was like a really basic, know, static HTML page web app. with my to-do list on it. And I was like, ⁓ wow, OK. So then I opened it up in another tab and sort of typed something in and added it to the to-do list. And I saw it wasn't syncing across browser tabs because it was literally just a static HTML file. So I it's not syncing across tabs. And it went, ⁓ hang on. let me build a JSON file and then we can store the JSON file and then it can call the JSON file anytime you load it wherever you want it and it works. And I'm still using it today. And that took 30 seconds, maybe a minute tops. And I was expecting it just to create a bullet point list and it just went and built a web app, very basic web app. But I can kind of see that almost all of the value that's gonna exist in the market will be in the kind of data. layer and actually having ownership of the data layer, how that data then gets presented in various interfaces is going to be completely customizable at the push of a button. Peter Rossi: I think it's all going to change. I've said earlier in conversation about what is the actual defensible mode that these AI companies have got. really they don't. Two things are happening simultaneously. The cost of the hardware is coming down, and the open source capabilities and the processing requirements that you need for these AIs is coming down as well. What does it actually mean for industry? It means that people are going to be running their own AIs soon. The tipping point previously for just to give you an idea of how much people are leveraging AI. you're software business of a decent size, the tipping point is when your development team is spending more than $20,000 a month, on API credits, that's the point that you would then go and invest in hardware and run that locally. And you'd be amazed in the amount of businesses that are spending that sort of cash a lot. And you would then go and spend quarter of a million quid buying some racks for your office. And that's a shift away from cloud, right? That's coming back to one. The tipping point this week was a few hardware providers, Asus, have launched this AI supercomputer box. It's just under three grand. Nick Chubb: Mm. Hmm. Peter Rossi: and it will run effectively a frontier model 24 seven on your desk and there's no there's no token API subscription you've got to pay for that it'll just run at one of these open source models that's been trained on you know on cloud publicly people will then get better at how you then train those data sets, how you work with them, because they'll have much more control over them, because they'll be used to running them locally. And then that's where things will really start to spiral. I think what you'll actually start to see is probably mass decentralization of AI, which then leads into power problems and how's the grid going to deal with that whole other world. Nick Chubb: Yeah. Raal: That potentially answers another point because we talked about this the other day that the compute power may actually end up being the problem again. So from a SaaS business point of view, you've got SaaS businesses which are under threat from AI, but then they're also there if they'd lead into AI and are really leveraging it at the moment, the computing costs are quite exorbitant. There was one example that we talked about on the show that you found Nick where The guy was basically the bigger his business got, the more expensive it was. And we joked that computing is now becoming like a restaurant model. You know what I mean? In terms of the margins are going to go out the window. But if I understand correctly in what you're saying about that kind of decentralization and bringing that in-house, you potentially solve that problem. Is that what you were saying? Peter Rossi: Yeah, yeah, basically. ⁓ There's some other bits of how Stripe launched a new product the other day. If you stripe the credit card processing SAS tool that everyone plugs into. They launched a AI token tracking tool for businesses. So if you've built AI capability into your tool that people are using, you can make that consumable thing so that they then charge for. So rather than, ⁓ I've built AI in, then I either need to somehow bundle that into a monthly cost or work it out. You can actually just say it's the cost per token and we'll just bill you extra per month. And that's built into Stripe's model. because it is it's definitely a problem out there as you say like the bigger the business gets the more expensive it costs to run the models ⁓ Nick Chubb: So you've got hardware costs coming down and efficiency going up. And again, I guess that comes back to your point about people building their own custom models because A, it's become possible, but B, it allows you to only focus on the things that are really important to whatever output you're trying to get. Raal: another one in the sense that most people were prepared ⁓ or happy the trade off of saying, I'm to put all my data into this application because I can then leverage all of the things that the application can do for me. The company is then sitting on all of that data, which allows it to have some sort of real capital there. ⁓ And ⁓ like what you're seeing there is a potential breaking of the contract because if the company actually says, well, A, I just want it to just focus on my information and B, I want to have control of the servers and architecture. And then the application itself becomes less relevant because I can either create my own mini apps which work on the data or I can get an agent that's working directly on the data. So for me, it is a inflection point, I think, when we will start to see some of these traditional business models break down. Peter Rossi: And that's exactly the point, right? I think I've just taken you on a bit of a journey there where you're now seeing it, that it's going to be more about what is the next generation of company and what does it look like? What is the org structure of that business? What's relevant to that business? How do you organize all of your humans around this new AI and data model to actually move forwards? That's where the big change is going to come. I've seen in technology so many So cloud, mobile phone, when smartphones came out, it was such a big thing around 2008. that wasn't a top down change, it was a bottom up change, right? wasn't companies going, companies were going, we need Blackberry. when the iPhone came out, were like, we can use Blackberry Enterprise Server, we've got security, government was like, you know, we've got full encryption and stuff. And then, then MPs were going, yeah, but I'm using my phone, I'm using my iPhone because this is so much better. And then, and that's, it changed from bottom up, not top down. think it's going to be the same. You've got companies that exist at the moment. saying, we're going to deploy this heavily governed model over the top of the way we currently work. But actually, there'll be a groundswell back up again with new businesses coming that are competitive or competitors that actually go, do you know what? We can reorganize our entire business around how this works. And we're going to change. Don't know how that's going to happen yet. Cloud is another one. And that was turkeys waiting for Christmas. The amount of people that I went to sessions with, I was like, doesn't this mean that my job's going to go? So yeah, but learn to do something else. Raal: you talked a little bit there about like what, what's going to be needed from business to evolve. But I mean, you know, we don't want to go too far in the future because this is going a crazy lick, what do you see as the next big things that are going to be coming along and what do you expect? to look like maybe in the next six months, 12 months. Peter Rossi: It's more agentic AI. Right, so open claw my life has not been the same in the last six weeks since I've had that. It provides me with so much insight and access and capability to things that I can't even begin to explain how much it's having to my life and professional capability. The thing that you'll see about this stuff is there's lots of people writing content out there. You'll see people going, ⁓ let me. ⁓ comment AI underneath and I'll give you my quarter of a million dollar per month playbook for how to build a marketing agency. There's a lot of rubbish like that out there at the moment. And really the people that are really benefiting from it, that really see it as a competitive advantage aren't talking about it. They're just getting on with it and going, I'm just going to stay quiet about this because it's killer. So if you look at the AI industry in general sees that. Nick Chubb: Mm-hmm. Peter Rossi: the guy that wrote OpenClaw, he recently, I don't know if you saw, got aquihired by OpeningEye. So was an open source project. He was quite happily bundling along doing that and released it. And then they came and acquired him for a billion dollars. So 400 million in cash and 600 million in stocks. Not bad, not a deal for an open core. Nick Chubb: And because it's open source, they weren't even buying OpenClaw, they were literally just hiring him, right? Peter Rossi: No. Yeah, and he's gone to go and run their authentic program. But doesn't mean he's the best guy for it. He's done a brilliant job and it's an amazing thing. And they've also got distribution, right? There's this product everywhere and people are using it. But it's open source. I've used it. Nick Chubb: Yeah. Peter Rossi: I've got Claude code to rip apart the source code for it and take bits out of it and plug it into other things I've been doing because it's useful. The way it does instant messaging integration with Telegram is really useful for something else I was doing. So it's like, ⁓ yeah, let's do that. ⁓ Raal: what you're describing is, we started out about, I think it was ⁓ three four ago now, I think we did an episode on the super worker, how AI was gonna charge the super worker. And what you describe in the way that you've got that set up in the last six weeks sounds very, very close to what we were riffing about then. ⁓ Nick Chubb: Yeah, yeah. Peter Rossi: Mm. Raal: The thing that I think is kind of my only comment would be that I kind of feel like it's it's almost more like the super worker is the is a freelance worker in a sense, because Peter Rossi: Yeah, it's something that we haven't touched on. The assumption is that if you give AI to a very capable person, then they're going to be 10 times more efficient. And it doesn't hold at all. I've tried to do this. You take a team of 10 developers. and all very, very capable and give them AI tooling. 50 % of them will get 10 times faster and 50 % them get out. I don't like it. It's not about I don't like it. It's non-deterministic. I can't deal with it. It's just inference. It's gaslighting me. It comes down to a certain sort of personality. I think a way of describing it is Raal: Hahaha Peter Rossi: If you hand somebody a hammer, you you look at what does this do for me? You can say, what does this do for me, this hammer? Or what could I do with this thing? And then you can start hitting different things with it and go, oh, this is interesting. Oh, well, I find it's quite useful for putting up shelves or hammering nails in. Oh, I didn't realize that you could maybe hammer a screw in maybe. Oh, no, that's not a great use for it. That doesn't work very well. That sort of mindset works really well with AI. because if somebody says to you, use AI for this, and then they go and try and do that and they don't get a great response, what's the point in coming back to doing it again? Somebody says, here's a really interesting tool, go and try and use it for absolutely every aspect of your life and see what it can do for you. And not everyone's gonna do that. Not everyone's gonna do that. It's that sort of mindset that will win. Nick Chubb: Hmm. Yeah. Raal: And if I may just one follow up question, they're being educated for a world that's going to look very, very different, right? By the time leave school, ⁓ Peter Rossi: moment. So things that exist the real world, human to human, ⁓ social skills, psychology. ⁓ Although to be fair, actually, that's slightly getting disintermediated. ⁓ Plumbing, carpentry, building, all of sort of stuff you know, product build. I think that there is an interesting point about education in general that if you've seen some of the studies that they've done in the US with a very basic level, they got a class and gave them 50 % of them the normal textbooks and said that this is the textbook you're going to work through and you're going to do your homework from this set week by week. And then the other 50 % they got them to each of them to write a little bio about themselves and say what it is that they enjoy, their favourite TV programme, sports shows, what interests them, what didn't interest them. And then they produced an AI generated version that was very specific of that textbook for them. So, you know, the maths question might be about their favourite Formula One team or it might be about their favourite footballer or something. They did a lot better. It was easily, you know, and that Nick Chubb: Wow. Wow. Peter Rossi: I, you know, when I saw multimodal AI from Gemini the first time, I recommend that you Google it and have a was a demo they did a couple of years ago, right? Things have moved on at a rate of knots. And was just a multimodal means that it can do video and talk and audio and text all at the same time. different modes of engagement. But it had a camera over the top of desk. it was somebody that, they put a piece of paper down and they started drawing something. it was like, what's this? ⁓ it's a duck. And then they colored it in blue. That's weird, ducks aren't normally blue. But then the thing that they did was they put a map out on the table and said, what's this? It said it was a map of the world. Can you come up with a game, an educational game for this? said, yeah, OK, where did kangaroos come from? And they pointed to Australia and said, tick. And it sort of played like that. My daughter has dyslexia. And so, yeah, but she's very capable. But words can be a bit of a barrier to her. But she can talk about stuff and learn and absorb through doing and watching and listening. And. AI is an amazing tool for that. Absolutely amazing tool. It can teach you about anything in a way. in a very personal way for her in a way that she understands and it can gamify it in real time. It can do all of that stuff. I think it's if you look at the send crisis that we've got in the UK actually if they leverage AI on a personal basis that almost goes away you know if they can work out by doing it. People talk about it as a AI's bad because you can cheat. Yes of course you can you could ask it to write your essay for you but that comes down to the person that's using it. Do you actually want to learn or you just trying to game the system. And there will always be people that want to game the system and they don't want to learn. But I've used it with my daughter for... She got the lead in the school show and she had a long script to learn which you can imagine is quite a complicated thing there. I wrote a tool that she could then practice the parts through voice with it from her iPad. So she could, it played all the other parts and then when she spoke it helped correct her. I know you didn't get that bit quite right and she learned it that way. And I can say to you, she's doing a bit of maths homework but Raal: Wow. Wow, that's fantastic. Peter Rossi: Just let me carry on, it's not that I can't do it. They've changed the way maths is done or something like that. That's what they do at school. But I can then say to it, I'm working with my daughter and she's doing this bit of homework. Can you talk her through how to do it in this method, but don't give her the answer? And would more than happily sit there and work through it with her. So yeah, superpower. Raal: Yes. Wow, yeah. Nick Chubb: The thing is, stuff like that, three years ago would have been two years of a team of five developers and a research team to enable that kind of app to exist. And now you've just been able to do it in your spare time for your daughter. Yeah. Not even concentrating on it. That's incredible. Peter Rossi: I did that while I was watching TV. didn't just there on the sofa and did it. One eye on the TV program, one eye on my phone. Nick Chubb: ⁓ Peter, I've got two other questions for you. One, would you be willing to come back in like six, 12 months and just give us an update? Peter Rossi: Thank Nick Chubb: Yeah. And then two, you've been very, generous with your time, both to me personally and also to our audience here. Do you want to give a bit of a plug to either yourself or to Belugo? Raal: to. Peter Rossi: thanks very much. So the maritime industry may be aware of Beligo. We launched that product originally back in 2020, sort of invested in it back then. It's a bunkering platform, so helping, it was designed originally to help people find better pricing for marine bunkering. I think overall one of the problems is there's other things that need to be solved. And also found that although it was this lovely designed web app and tool that had chat and everything in it, ⁓ market typically operates on WhatsApp and instant messaging and Telegram ICE. ⁓ So, yeah, what I've been doing with the team is ⁓ whole product's been completely re-engineered to be chat and AI And so it lives entirely inside of WhatsApp and... ⁓ Telegram and it's going to be lead gen for the the supply side of the market and we're gearing up to relaunch that shortly. So yeah I'm quite excited about it and interested to see where it goes, what it does, ⁓ it's going back to that point around the fact that you can write bad software very easily with AI but actually writing software still takes time. ⁓ looking forward to launching that. And that's good. ⁓ Nick Chubb: Awesome. And where should people reach out to you if they found this interesting and want to pick your brain? Peter Rossi: Yeah, sure. LinkedIn is easiest to place. So Peter Rossi and they also can email me. Peter at zpventures.com. Yeah, more than happy to chat to anyone about this stuff. I find it fascinating and I just love solving problems. No, I really enjoyed it. ⁓ Raal: Well, you solved the problem for us today. So thank you very much for that. Nick Chubb: Amazing. All right. Well, we'll hold you to that. Thank you so much. We really, really appreciate it. ⁓ yeah, you've opened our eyes and I hope you've opened the eyes of some of our audience as well. Thanks all. Peter Rossi: Thank you very much.