Latest / You've Been Heard / 433- AI Needs Use Cases, Not Hype w/Alex Vasilescu

Transcript

433- AI Needs Use Cases, Not Hype w/Alex Vasilescu · You've Been Heard

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Right. There is a lot of hype about and around AI for sure, but a lot of companies, and you've probably read the Gardner reports and few other reports are stating that AI for right now, it brings some value, but not the value that we think it can bring right now. So it's a constant evolution into the adopting the technology and make it better. Right? So here at nio, again, people are excited about technology, but they want to see use cases, Right? They want to see adding value before we can say we're going to go all in on this technology. Right? So it's better to take it step by step and adapt it gradually instead of rushing it and not having the results that you expect to have. Right.
• 1:05
  Speaker B: After talking with IT leaders, I've come to discover one thing. And it's the same thing, you know, it's the same thing everyone else knows, whether they want to admit it out loud or not. Nothing gets done in any company without it touching it. Nothing. But here's the thing. When everything's on fire, when nothing's working, when the ransomware hits, when the whole business grinds to a halt, it is completely indispensable. You're the most valuable asset in the company. But when everything's running like a well oiled Tesla, you're a line item, a cost center on a spreadsheet. You've done the work, you, you've built the career, you've earned your seat at the executive roundtable. But having a seat at the table is one thing. How much nicer would it be to actually be heard? This is. You've been heard.
• 1:58
  Speaker C: Oh, it's great to have you with us again on you've been heard. We're here for the technology enthusiasts who are currently at the helm of organizations as well as the future leaders preparing for their seat at the table. We're all about the real talk here, cutting through the jargon to find out how today's top lines are successfully navigating the future of technology and leadership. Alex, huge welcome to the show. We're so grateful that you've carved out some time to dive into these topics with us today and share your experiences with our community. Over at you've been heard.com for our listeners, we're sitting down with Alex Vasilesco. A real gem in Alex's profile is that he has a Master's of science in Information Technology leadership. It represents a leader who didn't just land in management and in a management seat, but took an intentional deep dive into the academic and strategic mechanics of what it takes to lead tech organizations. Alex, we got a lot of ground to cover from the intersection of the academic theory and the trench of reality to your personal journey from Europe to the us But I'd love to start by handing the floor to you. Would you introduce yourself to our listeners and share a bit about your path? Sure.
• 3:22
  Speaker A: Thanks so much, Mike. Thank you for the invitation. I'm glad to be here and be part of this show. I listened few podcasts before and these are really great. So while I started my IT career back over 13 years ago, right after college, I was born and raised in Romania, in Bucharest, which is the the capital of the country. Right after college I went for the basically for the business administration degree and in the same time did also law. So kind of dual degree. So after high school, where I got all the curses in German, I went to the university which was still in German. So that was the normal path for me. And then after finishing college, obviously like a young individual, I did not know exactly where to go. So I had the friend that started to work at Dell Services on a German service desk and he got me introduced to that position. So I applied to the position, got the job pretty easily because I was a German speaker. I knew something about computers, but not a lot. But mostly I got hired because of my language and the ability to support customer in German language. What was really interesting here in the story was my first customer at Dell Services was called mag. MAG was a company based in Sterling Heights Manufacturing. So I was supporting those, right, with different problems, having opening tickets, resolving tickets with their issues, IT computers. So it was great for me because I learned a lot very quickly and that was the moment that really clicked for me and I felt like I want to pursue an IT career, so I did not want to do anything else.
• 5:12
  Speaker C: Yeah, so you've taken what has been a somewhat common path for a lot of us, working on the service desk or the help desk and starting in there. Now, am I catching correctly, three languages that you speak? Yes. So yes, three languages that you speak, law degree and computers.
• 5:32
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's correct. Romanian, German and English. So being at Dell, Dell Services, which I learned quickly after it was a former Perot Systems company that was bought by Dell, right? So Perot, as we all know, was the great leader of visionary in the IT industry. I had the opportunity to meet, I was sending people from different technologies, right? So I learned that what Exchange is, what Linux is, what cq, Citrix, Windows, so all these paths at different technologies. So I had to the opportunity to See with some great individuals that taught me a lot about these technologies. I was staying overtime a lot, working extra hours just because I was so passionate about what I've seen in IT and what I can do. So supporting those customers. So that was after one year. I quickly navigated into another position which was much more technical. It was a system administration analyst position because I wanted to see how I can work more with technology, be even closer than I thought I can be. So that was my first interaction with pure technology and not customers anymore.
• 6:48
  Speaker C: What was the main heart of what that system did.
• 6:52
  Speaker A: So basically we were working with VMWares, creating virtual machines, touching a little bit about networking, some Linux part on those machines and servers, right? So that was the core function of that role. But being only in front of the machines for one year and not dealing with customers, team members, any interaction made me think that this is not for me. I want to go back to being into IT operations, talking with people, being around people, leading teams, collaborating with team members and things like that. So I decided that I need to go back where I was, like more IT service desk slash operations. Then an opportunity came for me and I moved to U.S. in metro Detroit area, Michigan.
• 7:45
  Speaker C: What was the time period when you came to the US.
• 7:53
  Speaker B: Most IT leaders don't have an Internet problem, they have a management problem. Multiple locations, multiple providers, multiple bills, different contracts. We help IT leaders make Internet boring again by consolidating visibility, billing, support and monitoring without changing providers or forcing upgrades. If nothing needs fixing, we'll tell you that's vendor neutral advisory. Just go to you've been heard.com and answer the seven questions to simplify, streamline and save.
• 8:20
  Speaker A: That was 10 years ago, 2015, 2014. Around that time and I was driving by Stanley Heights. I've seen the company Mac that they used to support back in Romania. So that was something pretty interesting. So wow. You know, I supported this company in US from across the ocean from Romania. So that was very, very interesting to see that. And quickly after I started to apply to different jobs and I got my first job at hp. I was very excited. Just want to tell you, I was very excited being in US being able to apply to a US company and working for that company over there that was based in Pontiac, Michigan and I got the job as a major incident manager. It was a tough interview, different discussions with different leaders from that group. I knew something about incident management, but not a lot. So once I started the job there, I had only one customer that I had support, which was Royal Dutch Shell. Company like the oil company and you're
• 9:28
  Speaker C: handling the major incidents?
• 9:30
  Speaker A: Yes, we were a bit of pressure. Oh yeah, it was amazing because we were supporting their global operations across the entire world. We were distributed across three different regions, 24 by 7, followed the sun model, ITL based operations. And I had the opportunity to work with individuals that have been doing major incident management for 10, 15 years just doing major incident management. So they had a huge experience. I was working on a night shift during that time and after one week of starting, the leadership informed me that we had a global operations center. So they informed me that I had to be responsible to be the shift lead for the entire global operations center. And I was very young doing that. Just to put it in perspective, which was a huge pressure for me. The outages that we had for that company.
• 10:26
  Speaker C: Oh, there's no outages. Come on, be real. It was 2014. Everything was solid back then.
• 10:32
  Speaker A: Yes, yes. All those outages were very impactful with a lots of stakes into those. With a lot of pressure, with huge business impact and high visibility.
• 10:46
  Speaker C: Lots of supervisors of all kinds of different groups reaching out, going when's it going to be fixed? When's it going to be fixed? What's wrong? What happened? How are you going to keep it from happening again?
• 10:56
  Speaker A: Exactly. So you can imagine, Mike, we had calls where we had over 150 people in there.
• 11:03
  Speaker C: Oh man. Just dealing with it. Just trying to fix the issue.
• 11:06
  Speaker A: Yes, just trying to fix the issue. Just getting real time updates. Sometimes we had situation where we had two or three major incident managers into that call because it's impossible for one incident manager to handle 150 people at a time. Because you have to take notes, you have to lead the call, you have to lead the next actions. You have to always know what has been tried, what else is on the table, what other teams have to be engaged, disengage. So things like that.
• 11:37
  Speaker C: And so you're doing this globally. So when an incident like that happens, does the incident management follow or does the team stay engaged for multiple hours and then only get relief when it starts to hit like 12, 16, 24 hours that 150 people have been working?
• 11:59
  Speaker A: Yes. So that's a good question. If I can give you like an example on this. When I got on shift one day we had an outage. Very impactful. Just to give a perspective, none of the Shell vessels around the world were able to get into the port. There was a system that they were being using to scan some documents whenever they were getting close to the port. Right. And that system was down. So when I got on shift, that system was already down. I was running the call for eight hours straight. Right. And when my shift ended, there was someone else that took over from me, together with the rest of the team. So. Right. By the time I went home, I went to sleep, woke up, came back to work, that call was still going for. I took it over again for three or four more hours and then it got resolved. So it was close to 24 hours. Where none of the US vessels belonging to Shell could land in any port in the world. You can imagine the magnitude of the business impact and my behind that.
• 13:07
  Speaker C: Yeah. When. When all production or all delivery stop.
• 13:12
  Speaker A: Delivery stops. Yeah.
• 13:14
  Speaker C: So because they want that money now.
• 13:17
  Speaker A: Yes, yes. And you have to do delivers and there's the chain right behind all that.
• 13:24
  Speaker C: And man. Yeah. So I want to dive into that specific issue and I'm curious about all kinds of different things. Yeah. But let's not get lost there. Okay. So incident management, what were the big things that you learned from your time doing incident management and then what was the next step in your career?
• 13:43
  Speaker A: So in that role, their ITIL best practices were industry standard. All the processes were very well defined from A to Z. We knew exactly what we have to do at each point of time, what teams we had to engage, who, who was writing Darcy, who was responsible to do problem management, Fivewise, Fishbone. All those different processes had to be followed after the incident had been resolved. So it was a very well established process and structure which made it easy for us to work. But again, the pressure and the complexity of the outages were there. Yeah. And another thing that we were supporting, we were supporting also business continuity for them. So whenever there was a major disaster around the world or anything like that, we have to do special preparations for that. There are special meetings that we had to do before that in order for us and for Shell safety guidelines to be followed and making sure we follow specific standards. Before that disaster hit, we had Department of Meteorologies that were jumping in on calls, giving us the latest updates, dashboards with real time data and things like that. So a very well organized operation.
• 15:05
  Speaker C: And especially back in 2014, 2015, and just having that level of structure, even at my point in my career in 2015, I'd been involved for 15 years and we weren't doing ITIL. We didn't have all of those methodologies and I was working in a much smaller shop. Right, Yeah, I agree.
• 15:28
  Speaker A: And this was for me a moment where I learned in those two and a Half years, a lot every day. For me it was a capturing and absorbing of the information from anyone. And that's how I learned the best practices from that time. Right. And after two and a half years, unfortunately the contract ended or it was offshore or something like that. I cannot remember exactly what happened and I had to find another opportunity within it. And I landed at Ford which was kind of short tenure there. And then I continued my career as part of the managed services providers. Ended up at Stefanini as a service desk manager which was another great experience because I was dedicated to Honda, which manufacturing client and we had so many,
• 16:25
  Speaker C: so many another small company that an outix didn't mean much.
• 16:30
  Speaker A: Yes, I remember while we were supporting them we had that keyword that they always use when there was something bad happening lying down. So it was impactful. I started pretty small with them because the size of operation with them was not significant. But based on some really good results that I had with the team, we were able to expand operations like the footprint of the desite support across the entire US And I was responsible for all the factories like east coast, west coast and we had some really great results and experience there. And I was growing the team a lot. And again all the industry standards best practices that I learned from there, I applied to this account making sure things are going well and we improved on. And my last part of the career, last seven years approximately I was with a smaller company called CQ24 which was kind of a medium size but with a decent number of customers. And here basically I started the major incident management and problem management best practices from scratch. We were supporting over 400 customers across different industries. So I was implementing the core process for all these companies, right. Because we have been a managed service provider so we were supporting different type of infrastructures or applications for them or cloud based infrastructure, things like that.
• 17:59
  Speaker C: So you were. It was a chance for you to leverage all of that experience that you'd had working on the service desks and then doing the incident management both at HP and. Yes, and the other one.
• 18:12
  Speaker A: So it was great opportunity for me and this is the moment also when I started because I wanted to pursue further. I constantly see myself being an IT operation leader. So I started my master's in IT leadership at Walsh College and with the concentration executive leadership, definitely a very good experience which I recommend to everyone, right. To continue to do a master and continue the studies. I learned a lot, applied a lots of standards and based on the experience that I had and what I learned from the teachers IT was an amazing experience. So I was promoted as a director. So it's a pretty young age. Being the director and being customer facing with different customers from different industries helped me a lot. Right. To grow my experience and my exposure. And I expanded the team across US APAC and Europe. Right. So I had a global team and then we were quickly bought by NTT which gave us more and more opportunities with different customers. In my last year I've been with NTT supporting Gainwell. I'm not sure if you are familiar with that. Gainwell supports the entire Medicaid for United States.
• 19:38
  Speaker C: Okay.
• 19:38
  Speaker A: So it has a vast infrastructure and a big footprint. Right.
• 19:44
  Speaker C: And now we can start to talk about compliance and all kinds of fun stuff in that realm.
• 19:49
  Speaker A: Yes. Different regulations. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Different regulations, different compliance standards that had to be followed and a great experience as well because I'm coming back to situations that are really impactful and very interesting for me to learn about the client. Very interesting to understand what can be done, what processes need to be implemented, what improvements we need to do. And going back to implementing ITIL best standards, I'm a big ideal practitioner and advocate. So in all the customers and companies that I've been and all the customers that I supported, that what I have been doing all the time. And now for a few months I studied in neogenomics which is the first time in my career where I'm not part of a managed service provider company. So I'm doing IT and applying best standards for my company. I'm the senior IT service delivery manager responsible for the service desktop, for ServiceNow implementation for ITIL best practices. Also major incident management, problem management and incident management.
• 21:11
  Speaker C: How many people sit in computers?
• 21:14
  Speaker A: Around 2000.
• 21:15
  Speaker C: Decent population to take care of across multiple countries.
• 21:20
  Speaker A: Yes, it's global, but majority of our customers are in us.
• 21:25
  Speaker C: Okay.
• 21:26
  Speaker A: Yeah. It's a company that does cancer testing and research and it's a medium sized company that is growing and again they have their own improvements that we are working on right now and implementing or continue to expand and optimize ServiceNow and IT service management functions.
• 21:49
  Speaker C: Okay, so now did they already have ITIL or you're starting it from the ground up again?
• 21:55
  Speaker A: They had some ITIL standards, but I'm coming right now to optimize those and improve those and adapt new standards that will help and translate in better support and experience for the customers.
• 22:12
  Speaker C: Okay, and so what are some of the other current challenges that are in front of you today? What are the things that you got to deal with over the next Couple of years.
• 22:23
  Speaker A: So as I see the challenges, it's also how AI is trying to be adopted, because everyone is talking about this. I'm participating pretty frequently in conferences, in roundtables. Again, everyone has their own experience and journey, right? Especially using ServiceNow or adopting any AI technology in their environment, which gave me the understanding that there is no one size fits all process or way on adopting this. Everyone has their own journey, everyone has their own technology that they can leverage or use. Everyone has their own data, which is very important. Everyone is at their own pace on doing this. Right. And what is outstanding and nice to see is that we learn one from another. That's what I've seen based on interaction, discussions, we learn from each other the
• 23:20
  Speaker C: whole purpose behind the community that you've been heard. For us to help. For me to learn from you, for me to help you and for us to help those that are following behind us.
• 23:32
  Speaker A: That's correct.
• 23:33
  Speaker C: And to learn from those that led before us. So many things are different. It's amazing. I mean, we've got a decade difference, maybe 15 years difference in our starting point in our careers. Do you feel that the speed at which things are changing today is vastly different than what it was when you first started picking up the phone and supporting mag?
• 24:02
  Speaker A: Yes, I can truly say that the environment is completely different. Everything is changing pretty fast and rapidly. Expectations are completely different. What I've seen throughout my last roles into the managed service provider role is that customers are becoming very demanding. Right. And here I think there is a. A little bit of a disconnect. Right. We as managed service provider, we are there to support the customers. In order to do that, I feel, and I learned from one of my mentors, which is Paul from CQ24, is that we have to build a relationship with the customer. Right. We have to explain them what is possible. Right. What technology is available, what will fit their needs and explain them at what pace this can be implemented. Right. But I feel like now everyone wants everything very fast to be implemented rapidly and that can create some disconnects and issues.
• 25:10
  Speaker C: Okay, let me make sure that I have what you're saying. And I'm wanting to put that into the context of the AI and of the organization. So neogenomics is cancer research, right?
• 25:23
  Speaker A: Yes, and testing.
• 25:25
  Speaker C: So how are they thinking of AI? Like I work at a Truckee company. Something nice and simple. We just move stuff from here to there. Of course, it's never quite that easy. But the cancer research and what are the leaders or what are you hearing as the mandates from up on high on utilizing AI. Is AI going to solve cancer for us and I'm assuming it's not?
• 25:56
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's a tough question. But as I hear from my leaders, everyone is excited about the technology, right? But we want to see how we can leverage technology to help us into our day to day operations. Right? There is a lot of hype about and around AI for sure, but a lot of companies, and you've probably read the Gardner reports and few other reports are stating that AI for right now it brings some value, but not the value that we think it can bring right now. So it's a constant evolution into the adopting the technology and make it better. Right. So here at nio, again people are excited about technology, but they want to see use cases, right? They want to see adding value before we can say we're going to go all in on this technology. Right? So it's better to take it step by step and adapt it gradually instead of rushing it and not having the results that you expect to have. Right? That's how the approach that I've seen and again we come back to governance, we come back to data, to security, to all these important aspects that are very critical for an organization like this.
• 27:20
  Speaker C: Do you see or do you hear any of the desires and do you have any of the requests coming from the people that the doers versus leadership? Leadership comes in and says we're going to use AI by this time and it's going to solve these things. And then for me, I've got people out there at the coworker level, the everyday workers, and there's some that are grabbing for it, there's some that are pushing it away and there's some that are just kind of watching, waiting to see what happens. What is your population doing?
• 27:58
  Speaker A: So here depends on the leadership. That's how I see it. If the leadership has a clear vision on where the company is going and what technology needs to be adopted, this will translate basically to the rest of the departments and team members in the same time. We have to be realistic on what can be done, what is available and the process of implementing that. As going back to the conference that I attended at ServiceNow and there is this discussion about AI. Everyone is talking about data. If you don't have clear and concise and organized data for AI to help you solve some problems, then you'll probably sit that AI for failure.
• 28:49
  Speaker C: So interestingly enough, one of my data people, I sent them to a conference earlier this year and one of the things that they Came back from that conference with was, okay, we've got lots of this data that's not set up, that's not organized, that's not, and we need to take AI and use AI to set this up for use by AI. So back to the unstructured data. So grabbing that unstructured data and starting to put some more of the metadata on the unstructured data so that it can then be ingested and cleaned and set up for better consumption or other use cases.
• 29:34
  Speaker A: So for me, when I'm talking about data, I'm thinking about IT service management. That's where I want to leverage AI. So for me, having AI leverage, use IT at IT service management level, I need clear tickets, I need to have clear documentation and KB articles and then clear workflows and a modernized ServiceNow tool. So if I have all these and I will bring an AI solution, this will help me to drive some automation, solve tickets faster, ensure better response for the customers and things like that. So every department, it's using AI a little bit differently.
• 30:16
  Speaker C: Right. How many years of data do you have in your ServiceNow implementation?
• 30:22
  Speaker A: I've been using ServiceNow for the last 10 years.
• 30:25
  Speaker C: Okay.
• 30:26
  Speaker A: And.
• 30:26
  Speaker C: Well, you've been using it for 10 years. But how much data does Neo have in their ServiceNow implementation? Because I see that as part of the challenge is here's a way you want to use it, here's the 10 years worth of data. And now that 10 years worth of data, we, we've got to search through it to make sure that we've got all of the different classifications or tags or how many of the 10,000 tickets over that 10 years have a solution and how many of them just got closed because they aged out?
• 30:59
  Speaker A: That's correct. Yeah, that's a fair example and actually one that happens in lots of companies. And I had discussions at different conferences about this with different team members here at NIO. They've been using ServiceNow for I think, two or four years because basically there was another company that used ServiceNow. It was brought about by NIO and this is how they adopted ServiceNow. Right. So I'm still again in the process of analyzing all that data and putting the foundation right on all these structured and healthy processes before we can go to the next step. And I've learned that ServiceNow is very capable right now in terms of the AI technology. So they have some great tools that they put at the interface of ServiceNow and that will help and translate into a much better experience for the customer. So I'm Very excited to go there and ensure that we can leverage what's available from ServiceNow in terms of the AI technology.
• 32:07
  Speaker C: Okay, so quick question and kind of a change in the approach on this. So your responsibility currently at the organization is more around the service delivery and the service desk. And so focusing in on that, then you're leveraging the embedded AI within the tool set that you're using. Are you participating in the general use or general adoption of AI within the organization? Not the embedded AI that's like inside of ServiceNow but say Claude or ChatGPT or one of those as an enterprise account for the organization? Are you doing anything in that realm?
• 32:56
  Speaker A: Yes. So basically the approach when it comes to AI, as I said, every department has their own approach when it comes to that. But at the top level there is a committee, steering committee that oversees all these. Right. So it's overseeing the technology that is being used, it's overseeing the governance, it's overseeing the examples or the use cases that can be adopted. And there are special selections that will be done right in order to have the right people for these committees moving forward.
• 33:28
  Speaker C: Okay, are the different departments who are using the technology differently, are they all using the same tool or do you have, or is it NEO or is in your experience, have they been diversifying and using multiple tools?
• 33:45
  Speaker A: They are being diversifying and using multiple tools.
• 33:49
  Speaker C: You got any lessons or any things that you've learned from watching that or doing that?
• 33:54
  Speaker A: Not right now, because it's still at the early stages. Right. And as I said, the approach is let's look at the use cases first, see how much adding value and good improvement will bring for the company and for the customers. And then we will probably accelerate the adoptions. But as of right now, it's kind of in early stages.
• 34:18
  Speaker C: Okay, again, how much is the executive team pushing it versus the individual departments pulling it?
• 34:26
  Speaker A: I think it's 50, 50 people are curious and we have team members that I hear are mentioning AI and are mentioning about the use cases that they heard about outside of work or the capabilities about what entropy can do nowadays, what XAI can do with different areas. So you hear of examples of people getting excited because they leverage these different tools at home. And then you have also leadership who's excited about the technology and how we can leverage that to be more efficient, be faster, and ultimately will translate into better services for the customers.
• 35:10
  Speaker C: Is your organization doing the SaaS AI or are you doing a in house AI?
• 35:20
  Speaker A: For right now it's more of a SaaS AI, but probably there Will be discussions also for other methodologies. Probably, yeah.
• 35:30
  Speaker C: And I'm sure with some of the discoveries and the intellectual property that has to be generated, there's going to be some things that they're going to want to leverage AI with, but they don't want it being anywhere near public.
• 35:47
  Speaker A: Right.
• 35:47
  Speaker C: Or even, I know SAS is in public, but there's still that fear that it's somebody else's systems versus ours that we own and we have control over.
• 35:57
  Speaker A: That's great.
• 36:00
  Speaker C: So what things have you picked up on in your career? What things do you hold as fundamental truths that you're trying to bring with you at each of these organizations or that you're trying to teach your coworkers today? Tell me a little about some of those.
• 36:22
  Speaker A: At every place where I've been, I try to provide my 150%. I go all in with all my knowledge, all my energy and all my passion about it. I'm very passionate about technology. I'm very passionate to work with people. All the teams that I have been leading, I was doing that with passion. I tend to know everyone on my team very well. I try to build a very strong relationship with my team. I advise them both career wise and on a personal level if I can. I learn from everyone in the same time and any individual that I work with. I learned something that was my go to and I try to be like a sponge, absorb all the information and put it back in my head and see when will be the time when I can use it. So I go all in. I'm big on itil best standards, their practices. I like standardization. I like clear processes, clear structure. Being able to answer any question pretty fast. I was passing all the audits in all my companies that I've been to between 30 and 40 minutes. I had situations. For example, when I was in front with the auditors, I had to explain about the major incident management problem management process from the beginning to the end. Right. I was talking nonstop, I think for 30 minutes. At the end of the audit, the auditor coming back and say, Alex, I don't think I have any other questions. I don't remember when was the last time where I did not have a question about the process. So that gave me the feedback that I needed that I'm doing the right thing. I'm implementing the right processes, using the tools correctly and making sure I always stay on top of my teams and on top of my deliverables.
• 38:19
  Speaker C: Okay, what would you want to pass on to somebody that's following behind you or that young guy at the help desk that's just learning how to start navigating support at an msp. How do you want to help him With a quick sentence.
• 38:38
  Speaker A: So to constantly learn, never give up, and just think that the sky is the limit.
• 38:45
  Speaker C: All right, I warned you about this question. So what will we as IT leaders be talking about in 18 months that we're not talking about today?
• 38:57
  Speaker A: Probably about some AI capabilities that we were using right now that I guess in 18 months we're not going to use anymore. And when I say that, it's like quick prompts that made us very excited like one year ago where ChatGPT was able to give us some answers back. Probably all these things will be fully automated in two years from now and we'll not even talk about this anymore.
• 39:25
  Speaker C: Yeah. Huh. That'll be interesting for us to get to that point. Because like right now I can't have a conversation with almost anyone without AI being part of it.
• 39:37
  Speaker A: Yes, it'll be part of our life and the reports and everything. What I'm reading is that sooner or later everyone will have their own personal agent that will help us in day to day activities.
• 39:52
  Speaker C: All right, well, at the end of the day, when you've secured the environment, empowered the people, what's the one thing that you want to make sure the business and the industry has finally heard from IT leaders like yourself to continue
• 40:08
  Speaker A: and drive business forward, Keep innovating because that is what makes this country amazing. And that's why we have any companies that are leaders within the world because of the innovation and the constant information changes and constant collaboration and constant ownership of new things and challenges that we take upon.
• 40:35
  Speaker C: Awesome. Thank you for your time and for participating and thank you listeners and remember to hit that like that. Subscribe that button and leave a review wherever you're grabbing our podcast from and stop by you've been heard.com and check us out.