Latest / You've Been Heard / 342- WHAT THE 404 is an AI steering committee!!! And what does it have to do with operation efficiency? by Adam Krob

Transcript

342- WHAT THE 404 is an AI steering committee!!! And what does it have to do with operation efficiency? by Adam Krob · You've Been Heard

• 0:04
  Speaker A: Everyone out there listening. We're speaking with Adam Krob today and construction technology visionary. We have, we have to. We have to differentiate nowadays because there is a difference in it. There's some things that are very different and there's some things that are same. Like I think we, we probably all experience some of the similar problems when it comes to leadership, but we have different problems when it comes to, I don't know, ERP systems or softwares that we use or something like that across various different industries. So some people end up taking. I've never really asked this question. What do you think, do you think in it, do you think someone, and IT leadership in general, do you think someone should focus on a market or a niche market, or do you think they should jump around?
• 0:53
  Speaker B: You know, I've jumped around a bit, so I can say that I probably prefer the jumping around. Although it's taken me a long time to truly understand the construction industry in depth. It's very much its own thing. I started out in educational technology and working in universities, which kind of gave me a broader brush approach to technology because there was a lot going on with a lot of different kinds of people using technology where if I were in manufacturing or in finance or something like that, it's a lot more focused. But construction, it is its own little world. Particularly in terms of the financials. There's a lot of oddities in terms of contract structures that affect ERP systems, that affect payroll systems.
• 1:41
  Speaker A: So understanding that I would imagine buying construction materials, I would imagine with fluctuation in pricing and stuff, must have been interesting during COVID Were you in construction.
• 1:51
  Speaker B: During COVID Oh, yes. It was a very interesting time. There were some very specific things or that were almost impossible to source. Interestingly, steel doors. Steel doors and steel door frames were very hard to source. And so we had a lot of challenges getting those on time to be.
• 2:09
  Speaker A: What kind of steel doors?
• 2:10
  Speaker B: Just, you know, like a standard steel door that you'd put into a, into a hospital or into a.
• 2:16
  Speaker A: Like a fireproof door or something?
• 2:18
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, just a standard door, you know, not anything complicated.
• 2:22
  Speaker A: I'm in.
• 2:23
  Speaker B: I'm in challenging.
• 2:24
  Speaker A: I have two podcast studios. I have one in Morocco because I like to. I like to outsource to expats that live in Morocco. Northern, Northern Morocco, specifically near the Mediterranean. It's very nice. And steel doors are a plenty full here. Yes, I think everything is a steel door. The garage is a steel door. The entryway to the house is a steel door. But it's not the Steel door that I think would pass inspection at an hospital. It's more like, I don't know, it's. Yeah, it's more like Abd al Rahman welded it yesterday in the garage and we put. But it's strong, I'll tell you that.
• 3:01
  Speaker B: Oh yeah.
• 3:01
  Speaker A: I'll tell you one thing, it'll probably. I mean, no one's getting through that thing and it's got bolts on it and everything. I'm like, why do you guys need, why do you need so much security over here? You don't even have. You're so safe in this. It's surprising that you would think like, you know, northern African country as safe. There's no, there's no guns. No one walks around with guns. You don't have to worry about shootings and stuff like that. But we've got these big steel doors with bolts on them. So. Anywho. Sorry, that was a. I digressed there for a second. Things that people really want to hear about nowadays is not every AI guy that shows up in my inbox trying to sell me something with AI. And I found that you made some funnies that I thought were quite laughable, which is, you know, every vendor has its heavy side of. Every vendor product comes with a hefty side of AI nowadays. And you know, it's probably just a. An API into Chat GPT or it's just, hey, we wrote this prompt really good and we're going to label it somehow and it's going to be an API into ChatGPT. Does that sound about right? My.
• 4:08
  Speaker B: Yeah, I mean like. And I think the big driver of that is that you can't get a dollar from a venture capitalist these days without having AI in your pitch deck.
• 4:17
  Speaker A: Exactly.
• 4:18
  Speaker B: So, you know, like it. It's just. That's what's driving the bus right now. And you know, we. Interestingly, when I started in, in construction technology, it was right before SoftBank did a big buy in. In a lot of VCs in the construction industry. And the result of that was that there was a huge uptick very quickly in the number of venture capital firms getting in and then sort of by extension the number of small startups that started. And of course, many of them don't exist anymore. In fact, most of them don't.
• 4:53
  Speaker A: Are there any IT guys actually running any of these? Because this is the theme of 2025 for dissecting popular IT nerds. And it's really about how do we change the face of it and put more technology leadership in the driver's seat. And you just said, really? It's about who' driving the bus. And it's clearly not IT leadership. And there's this long standing relationship between IT and vendors. And it's pretty much vendors leading the marketing noise and space and the speak in the industry. And then you've got IT leadership overwhelmed with a barrage of things in the marketplace. Probably managing anywhere from 80 to 120 applications on average with all different contract dates coming up in what I like to call the metaphorical spreadsheet with contract dates. And you know, this one's coming up. Well, just renew it because you know. Right, because we don't have time, you know, or we've got 120 of these and I've got more things to to deal with right now. So maybe there's an AI for that. The now there is in fact. Yes, definitely is. Can I have that, guys? Can we. I'll white label that one. On the Defsecting Popularity Nerds website. Message me today. I'll take a hundred dollar Amazon gift card to sit in on your presentation. This is, this is the theme of the day that I've noticed when I logged in today, at least on LinkedIn. However, people are asking for meaning actual IT leadership. People that listen to the show. When I survey people, basically like four or five common themes. One is security layering techniques. We want more security layering techniques because if you're in the mid market, people hate the mid market term. Let's say Fortune 5000. We're just like, can you stop calling us mid market? Okay, sorry, Fortune 5000 leadership. Fortune 5000. They want to hear about security layering techniques because they got to do more with less all the time. And they want to hear about real gen AI, if that exists. Gen AI or AI use cases. And I believe you might have a few examples.
• 6:56
  Speaker B: Yes. So you know, in, in the construction industry, we've seen a couple of them grow out that have actually been able to demonstrate real value. Which I think is one of the big challenges right now with AI. I'm giving a talk where it's basically just an open forum where we're discussing how to demonstrate the value of AI in your company. Because I think that that is something. Every time you sit with a salesperson and this is true of any AI of any construction of any technology, I think they say, well, we're going to save you a ton of time. Okay, well what does that really mean? Do I really get another person back that would be working on a project that I could use somewhere else? Or that I don't need to charge back that job. But there are some real legitimate things where we'll be able to drive value, one of which is a tool that automates a lot of the work that we have. In one of the processes is we start a job which is called the takeoff process. It basically says, okay, how long is this wall? How high is it? Are there any cutouts? How much paint do I need? And so, you know, that's really great. We do that when we first bid the job. It's a pretty labor intensive process. But then we'd love to do it again because invariably there are changes that make an impact to the amount of materials or the amount of labor that we're going to.
• 8:18
  Speaker A: Are you saying as the job goes on, Are you saying as the job.
• 8:21
  Speaker B: Goes on, Particularly at the beginning of the job, there's this process where you get all of the different subcontractors and they all say, oh, well, you know, I can't, I can't put my pipe here because you've got a duct here. Well, I've got to do, you know, I've got to do something else. Okay, well, that's going to impact this wall here. And so there's a lot of, you know, juggling at the very beginning, in particular, hopefully at the beginning, because that's when it's the cheapest. But if you can do it again after you've made changes, then all of a sudden you have an opportunity to say, okay, well, look, we can do a what if analysis that we couldn't do before. We can say, okay, if you make this change, that's great, but here's what it's really going to cost. And we can do that for you quickly, you know, because before it would be like, okay, go back to the architect. The architect withdraws the plan, somebody else goes and sits down for it takes a week. This could take less than a day. And so, you know, those kinds of things drive real value because in the end, the owner who is capitalizing this project, if you could save a week of change and make a decision in a day rather than a week, you have less carrying cost for that project. So there's real dollar value there, particularly at that end. But also it's shorter construction time, it's less labor, and that labor would just be eaten up by an overhead kind of cost, and it would reduce profitability.
• 9:44
  Speaker A: Hey guys, this is Phil Howard, founder of Dissecting Popular IT nerds. I just want to take a few minutes to address something. It has become fairly apparent. I'm sure all of you will agree over the years that slow vendor response, vendor response times, vendors in general, the the average is mediocre. Support is mediocre. Mediocrity is the name of the game. Not only is this a risk to your network security, because I've seen vendors on numerous occasions share sensitive information, but there's also a direct correlation to your budget and your company's bottom line. Not to mention the sales reps that are trying to sell you and your CEO and your CFO on a daily basis. That causes a whole nother realm of problems that we don't have time to address. Our Back office program at dissecting popular IT nerds we've put together specifically for IT leadership and it's on a mission to eliminate this mediocrity. And the best part is that we're doing this in a way that will not cost your IT department a dime. So if you'd like us to help you out, get better pricing, better support, and jump on pressing issues in minutes, not days, then contact us now so we can get on a call with you and conduct a value discovery session where we find out what you have, why you have IT and where you want to go, and how we can improve your life, your IT department, and your company's bottom line. What you're going to end up with is, number one, just faster support from partners who care about your organization's uptime and bottom line. And because you're going to be able to access our 1.2 billion in combined buying power, you'll be able to benefit significantly from historical data. And on top of that, you'll also benefit from the skills of hundreds of on demand experts that we have working behind the scenes that are all attached to our back office support program. So if you'd like again, none of this is ever going to cost you a dime. At the very least, it's going to open your eyes to what's possible. Let our back office team provide you the high touch solutions and support that your IT team deserves so that you can stop calling 1-800-Gold-POUND SAND for support. Now, if you're wondering what does this apply to, this applies to your ISPs, your telecom providers, all your application providers, whether you're a Microsoft Shop or a Google Shop. What you might be paying for aws, even Azure Colocation Space, any of those vendors that you're paying a monthly bill to, we can help you with. Hey, it's Greg the Frenchman, secretly managing the podcast behind the curtain to request your one on one call. Contact us@internetpopularit.net and remember, it will never cost you a dime. So are these. Are you basically talking about unforeseen changes in any given construction project that happen on every single project or. No.
• 12:47
  Speaker B: 100%, yes.
• 12:48
  Speaker A: Okay. Because I don't know. I mean, I know from my own mini. From my own mini. Hardships and let's use the word heartburn. What else could we say? Heartburn. Anxieties from house remodels. I've moved. Let's see, Colorado, Virginia, Massachusetts, Maine. Second house, Maine, Connecticut. That's six. We've got a Morocco in there. Seven. So seven times. And of those seven times, I've at least done some kind of major renovation to the house. Other times have been actual additions or something. Never ever, ever has it gone according to plan. Never once, never once have you not run into a pipe. Never once have you not pulled back a wall and you're like, oh, actually that's a retaining wall. We were wrong. We were wrong. And yeah, things have to be redrawn. Sometimes architects are involved. So I'm assuming this is what you're talking about. So how does the AI. Are you saying you're entering it into some kind of software and AI can. Can redraw this and do the human work within a fract?
• 13:55
  Speaker B: Correct. So basically you change the model. Everyone collaboratively works in the three dimensional model. And then from the three dimensional model you're able to say, okay, AI, go, and now redraw this building and tell me how much paint I need or whatever the material is.
• 14:12
  Speaker A: Probably a nanosecond or whatever it is.
• 14:14
  Speaker B: You know, it's, it's not too long.
• 14:18
  Speaker A: It depends on how many people are on ChatGPT that day or something like that.
• 14:22
  Speaker B: Actually, it's running on its own private. On its own private machine learning model. It's not a large language model, so it's actually much more efficient. You could actually run it more reasonably on their servers. But, you know, it's not something that.
• 14:39
  Speaker A: Is this something that you guys made up or is this an actual vendor that came to you with?
• 14:42
  Speaker B: This is a vendor that we've been working with, but, you know, lots of.
• 14:46
  Speaker A: Okay, they can sponsor the show, by the way. We don't reveal them. Don't reveal them yet. If they. I will not if said vendor. We're going to fill in the blank. Here is Greg. That's. We're going to fill in the blank. Yes, I would like to sponsor Disney popularity nerds, please. Adam is connect Us, the other. We have a lot of construction guys by the way. We do, we have a lot of, we have a lot of construction guys on the show. So there is, there is traffic for you guys.
• 15:09
  Speaker B: The other is really through our platform, we have a construction management platform. And they've been trying to do better than just, you know, AI washing their, their tool with, you know, an overlay of chat, GPT or in their case, Microsoft Copilot. So they have, they're building agents that do specific things and we've built agents also where we, we think we're going to be able to drive a lot of value. One of, one of which is that, you know, in these, in these situations where there is a change, it often becomes, you know, a, a need for us to do a change order and then tell the owner and then, you know, and that process is pretty lengthy and it's very expensive people that do that. And so they now have an agent that will suggest a structure for that based on the information that you have and will pull up all of the relevant data from there from the data that we've collected about the particular situation. If we see, you know, this wall is not meeting up in the right place, well, you know, here's what we're going to have to do to make that change and it pulls all that in a nice neat way and then sends it off to the owner. Those kinds of things where we're, where we're reducing the time and cost of very expensive people is really great because they become more extensible because fundamentally we can do more jobs with the same number of people that becomes really, really valuable. And those people are very smart and we don't want them just pushing paper around and building.
• 16:44
  Speaker A: We don't want smart people doing $10 an hour jobs.
• 16:47
  Speaker B: Exactly. And, and so, you know, the, I think that that's very interesting. One of the things that I've done personally because I am on a crusade to drive the value of, of AI is I.
• 16:59
  Speaker A: You're on a crusade or you're not on a crusade?
• 17:01
  Speaker B: I am on a crusade because I think that we don't, I don't think we, I don't think we do it well.
• 17:05
  Speaker A: Grab your torches and pick forks and swords and your AI shields.
• 17:10
  Speaker B: Your AI shields. Exactly. I did an exit interview with our summer interns at the end of last year and I said, how long did it take you not just to do the jobs that you were asked and what are those particular jobs, but how long did it take you to do it? The way that we want you to do it and how long did it take for you to feel comfortable doing that job. And this year, we're all in on AI agents who are reading our standard operating procedures, who are mining our best practices that we have, all in these nice little formats that are now readable by the GPT. And now we're going to see how long does it take the intern to really get up to speed? Because that is a substantial unrealized cost of how much time does it take to actually mentor a person and get them up to speed. I think that the, there's. There'll be an additional investment in teaching them how to use the, the. The AI most effectively. And that's something that I'm personally digging into with a lot of depth. There's some really great free resources out there or resources that are really pretty cheap on Coursera and things like that, on writing really great prompts. But if we can teach them and they can start contributing value more quickly, then we lose that month, which is, you know, a third of our summer for the interns where they're just kind of stumbling around trying to figure it out.
• 18:39
  Speaker A: I had it happen two days ago and my. I hired an AI guy like, I don't know, two years ago. And it's been a very fun journey. Sometimes we have to. Sometimes we have to, like, we need like our own special whiteboard, which is just where we park things not to do.
• 19:00
  Speaker B: Right?
• 19:00
  Speaker A: Because you come up with so many ideas and, oh, we could do this with that and this and then great. And he has to tell me no on my ideas and I have to tell him no on the next app to buy that we're not buying. You know what I mean? Like, is it really so. But here's, here's an example of upskilling someone. So he's like, he's looking. Greg. Greg. He's my expat from France. He has a great French accent and we had some weird DNS era. He's working on another one right now, actually. And, and I, you know, when you've been something about just domains and MX Records and everything, it's just one of those things you don't do that often. So it gets really annoying when you do have to do it. And working with hosting providers and cname records and all this stuff, you just kind of do it, you know, once every two or three years at least in my case. And then you kind of forget about it and then you have to, like, relearn it again and all this type of stuff. So we had a weird. We just launched the new website, we changed hosting providers and I really didn't want to do it, but I. It was one of those things where you really hate your hosting provider, but they're kind of holding you hostage because you know all the work that you're going to have to do to change and you're going to know all the screwed up mistakes that are going to happen and errors and. But out of, out of principle, I did it. Out of principle, I left. So of course all kinds of weird, you know, delivery issues and problems came up. So I was out to dinner with a group of people, I couldn't leave. And we had like this bad, like, you know, weird something going wrong. And. And I was like, dude, I can't. I just. He called me, I was like, I don't know what to do. I'm not in a place where I can pull up a screen and get on a computer right now. And he's like, okay, okay. I mean, he used AI to pull some screen reader up and read what was going on the screen and like immediately educated him on like, you know, cname records and DNS stuff. And like, basically he used a screen reader and like, learned the whole process probably better than me over the last five years in a matter of. He called me back like five minutes later. He said, hey, I got to figure it out. I found this like, great screen reader, like this great AI screen reader that read the thing and like told me exactly what to do. And I learned this. I know all about it now. Okay. I'm like, okay, awesome. I knew you could buy, you know, that's. But no, but if you think about it, how would that. Upskilling, that's one of the common challenges that IT leaders have is how do I upskill my team fast enough and how do I trust them and hand over the keys to the castle, so to speak, in certain areas. And I think that to me, that's an example of where AI would help. Now granted, he's a very good prompter. He knows, like, he has studied that for like a year. He's been doing that for a year. And the other thing that I'd like to ask you is what about all the changes? Like how like one day he's like, phil, no, don't use Claude anymore. We're using ChatGPT now. And then the next thing you know, we're using CLAUDE now because it upgraded and it's actually doing better than ChatGPT. And now we're not even Using. We're not even using either of those now. Now we're going to use this instead. How do you think that's. It's, it's, it's changing so fast.
• 22:00
  Speaker B: It's, it's going to be painful, I think, you know, so what we have is we, we have a. We have a steering committee that's just drawn. AI steering committee.
• 22:09
  Speaker A: An AI steering committee. This is great. Bullet point, this one. We. This is like a. I don't know what that is, but as this. Is this a common thing? I've never heard of this before.
• 22:17
  Speaker B: I've never, I've a high steering.
• 22:20
  Speaker A: This is great. Now all of a sudden we're going to hear about it and so I'm going to get a 50.
• 22:24
  Speaker B: Yeah, people are going to be like, oh, yeah, we do that too. But I have, I have like legal, I have operations, I have field people. We get together and we talk every other week about what are we doing with AI, what are the concerns. We talk about policy concerns. We continuously are looking at which, which tool we like, which tool works best and you know, crazy. At a certain, at a certain point, like yesterday we were talking about Quad versus chatgpt versus Copilot because we really feel like there's some value of having a common platform across, particularly as we start creating agents where we can share. We really need to be making a decision and we've kind of put it off and kicked the can down the road and people continue to do their own thing. But this is a decision that I feel like we really need to make and we need to move forward with so that we can take advantage of some of the.
• 23:16
  Speaker A: What is the decision?
• 23:17
  Speaker B: The platform. Well, which platform we use because the agents, like, in order to share agents, you really need to be part. I mean, the way that they're structuring this is they're structuring it as a platform. So I mean, it's a question of how do we do that most effectively. Microsoft is trying the capture strategy, which I, by the way, really love Copilot, because I do love the integration with the email and with teams and with Excel and things like that. But I also think ChatGPT, though, the way that you can write prompts is much more, Much more straightforward and much more powerful in some ways. But then I know people who love Claude because the interface is really cool. So we're really. We're, we're. And we are having.
• 24:03
  Speaker A: We.
• 24:03
  Speaker B: We're asking the same question you asked is why. Why do we need to have one? Well, we're going to be spending resources. So how do we.
• 24:10
  Speaker A: Are you familiar with poe? Are you familiar with.
• 24:13
  Speaker B: I have not done PO yet though.
• 24:15
  Speaker A: So PO is just a conglomerate of all of them. You just pay for one and get all. Okay, well, it's kind of like a. But you're not going to get anything. Microsoft, forget about that. Or probably Google. It's just going to be. But you do get Claude and chat gbt. So you get two.
• 24:29
  Speaker B: Might be the thing to do. Yeah.
• 24:31
  Speaker A: And then you get all kinds of other crazy things. Like, well, you get all the, you know, all the image stuff and you know, I mean, it's just kind of like a secret weapon that I've been, I haven't told too many people about yet, but it's, I mean, it's, you might as well just use it now. Po.com.
• 24:45
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 24:45
  Speaker A: Now I don't know if there's a, like a limit or they're like, you know, one, one release behind or something like that. Like back in the day, everyone was using Zoom, you know, but white labeling it like ATT was Zoom. This, you know, ring central was Zoom. Everyone was Zoom. But anywho, I love Claude for, I love Claude for like English writing or I don't know, what do we call that? Copy or writing or fixing grammatical mistakes. I think it's just less, I don't know, hypey, I guess, as would be the term or something. Like, sometimes I'm writing something for like the podcast and something will come up really, just like really hypey. And you have to like, use it like these are banned words you're not allowed to use. Like, you know, discover, unlock, or, you know, unlock your potential on dissecting popular IT nerds. No, I just. No. Anywho, so very, very interesting. I don't know if we answered that question though. What, what's the, so with the, with the pace of something, if you choose something and then all of a sudden some, it's like that's why people are saying you can't choose. You got to be very flexible. So how do you be flexible in this AI world?
• 25:50
  Speaker B: I, I, I think, I think it's actually going to be a real challenge. And I, I think the pace of change is such that it's either going to, it, we're either not going to be able to extract sufficient value for it to make sense for us to change or that, you know, and, or we're going to have like stepwise changes and like, okay, we all got to go all in with something. Else, because, like, this is, this is ridiculously different.
• 26:17
  Speaker A: And we're, you know, or instead of an AI steering committee, you're going to have to have an AI steering guy as well. Like, no, you got to use this one for this. You're going to have to have a guy that's just like, no, no, you got to use this one for this. No, you got to use this one for this. And, and, and that might make sense because it might eliminate three other employees and everyone's like, AI is taking our jobs well.
• 26:37
  Speaker B: And, you know, like the, you know, your, your point about upskilling I think is really important too, because I think, you know, one of the things that, that we constantly read about is how, you know, AI is going to eliminate chunks of work. And some of those chunks of work are. Sit in front of the computer work. And, you know, like we joke with the accounting team is like, we need to upskill you guys. Because so much of what they do is really just analysis and, and, you know, processing. And so we really have to make sure we're thinking about how are we upskilling these folks? Because these are super smart folks and could, and understand the business, and they could be driving value in another way. But, you know, there's a really great. It's Marshall Goldsmith, I think, wrote the book what got you here Won't get you There, which is one of my favorite books of all time, really.
• 27:29
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 27:29
  Speaker B: And his, his contention, and this is interesting, was that spend more time with. With the smartest people because, you know, like, adding, oh, no, it's not that one. Well, that's a good one too. But there's another one. Is, is like, first break all the rules. That was the other one I was thinking of. Yep. It's also about hr, VP of Starbucks.
• 27:51
  Speaker A: Gave me that book long time ago.
• 27:52
  Speaker B: It's an excellent, excellent book. Basically says, invest more in your top performers. And because we're always trying to fix.
• 28:00
  Speaker A: The broken people, why are we wasting our time with them? And then the top performers quit and we're like, what?
• 28:05
  Speaker B: Well, and also like an additional investment in a top performer nets you much more value than an additional effort in a medium or a lacquer. The possibility of AI, if it does good things with reskilling people, it can bring that lower tier up a little bit.
• 28:23
  Speaker A: So you have a good plug into my brain and tell me all the things that I do wrong and just forget about those and do all these things right.
• 28:30
  Speaker B: Well, I mean, one of the things that I do is I have a. I Have an agent that I've written in Copilot that reviews my schedule and I tell it what I did all day and I say, so how did I do? Like, what things am I not focusing on? What am I. What should I.
• 28:44
  Speaker A: It's like Atomic habits. That's like an Atomic habits agent.
• 28:47
  Speaker B: And it was really, really. It's really, really great.
• 28:49
  Speaker A: Oh, can you share that with me? Is that possible? Is that like a prompt you can share or something?
• 28:53
  Speaker B: I want to probably can.
• 28:55
  Speaker A: Or how do I write it? Or maybe. Okay, let's just break it down real quick. You know, this is great. So, all right. We have a secret community that we're building. It's only for senior IT directors. No salespeople. No, no one is getting. I don't like to talk about it too much because I don't want, like, you know, I just don't want to get annoyed by people.
• 29:10
  Speaker B: Right.
• 29:10
  Speaker A: But we're, we're trying to figure out. So here's the problem with communities. You tell, tell me this, please. I just want to know. I have done the research and I want to know if we're spot on. IT directors go to something called like a Norex or a Gartner Breakout or IT Expo, or they get invited to this or they get invited to that. And this is typically what happens. You're at an event, it's secretively, or not so secretively, basically sponsored by a vendor. You show up to the event wanting to have a roundtable discussion about X, but really it's a vendor presentation and you're amongst a group of people that are irrelevant to you, meaning they're not senior IT leaders or they're all on different levels. And it might even be time and location. I don't know. Bad time and location, whatever that is. Bad time and location. And further, there may be some egomaniac at the event that just wants to really listen to himself speak. So it's not really a full collaboration. Did I hit. Is that accurate?
• 30:12
  Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, for sure.
• 30:14
  Speaker A: Okay. So we really are building a community minus all of that. And what we want. And the other thing that we found is that really it's more about peer presentations. We want peers. We want everyone to be able to give a presentation on something that they are passionate about talking about and then actually get feedback from that, from their peers that are on their same level. So give the presentation 15 minutes, allow. Get feedback from your peers, then actually have a discussion for a half an hour around that topic. And that's one thing. The, the, the other thing Is this thing that everyone's, this thing we, we like to call sanity checks. Right. Because IT leaders have. You can't really tell. You can't really tell executive management, hey, I think this is the best choice because. And it's like a multi million dollar decision. You have to really go in with confidence based on this. And then you can't because if you, if you're like, hey guys, I don't know, what do you think they're gonna be like? Do we have the right guy for the job? And then the second thing is gonna be can you really go to the people that you're upskilling down below you? Because they really, you're. I hear all the time from IT people that they're protecting their staff. I have to protect my staff so they don't go around feeling that they're getting fired all the time. They need to be able to do their jobs. So you've got this. It. Loneliness at the top. So that's the second piece however, I think, and I really love this idea of an AI steering. AI steering committee. I want to know what people are doing with AI. That is really, really awesome and good. And I think that that would be a great breakout session. Yes or no?
• 31:50
  Speaker B: Yep, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean like I love to talk to other people about what they're doing. You know, that is one of the things that I also have. I have, I have three other committees that are working on AI that are just working groups. One of which is, you know, a group of really smart, mostly young people who are just using it and are out there using it. So we're coordinating, moving the same direction. I don't really care what direction it is as long as we're moving the same direction. Then I have people working on training, really prompt training, honestly for GPTs, prompt training and because I like we are teaching them a new language. This is if they know that language that they have a substantial skill that no one else has. You know, like it's very hard to get to it. I'm, I'm doing like I said, a coursera. I'm doing like an eight hour course on writing prompts. And so I'm going to be.
• 32:42
  Speaker A: Is there good courses on it?
• 32:44
  Speaker B: Oh yeah, there's a Vanderbilt computer science professor who's, who's written a great course on it. It's around chat GPT but it's really.
• 32:53
  Speaker A: Who is it? I want to know who that guy is. Gotta know.
• 32:55
  Speaker B: I'll pull it up.
• 32:56
  Speaker A: We gotta have him on the show.
• 32:57
  Speaker B: He's Excellent.
• 32:58
  Speaker A: And anyone that you know of, like this. This is where we gotta.
• 33:01
  Speaker B: It's called Prompt Engineering.
• 33:03
  Speaker A: Have him secretly on the show and no one's gonna.
• 33:07
  Speaker B: And it is. If it'll come up. Come on.
• 33:11
  Speaker A: Okay, hold the thought, hold the thought. We're going to have this. We're gonna have this guy on privately for IT people. Okay? No vendors are gonna be. No vendors are going to be allowed. No vendors are gonna be allowed. So they can be like, hey, I'll email you the.
• 33:24
  Speaker B: The link to the course.
• 33:25
  Speaker A: Okay. All right. Awesome. This. This. This is exciting. Now you're getting me.
• 33:30
  Speaker B: Because his, you know, like, there's. He's really good. There are a couple of terrific books out there. There's a book called CO Intelligence that I think is really, really good. That it is on audio that I just read. And what was the other one that I just read? There are. There are a lot, but I think there are very few that concentrate on, like, how do we use it? Like, how do we use it? You know, not just like, how do we use it technically, but how do we use it to make what we do better? And this whole concept of an AI as a. As an assistant, as a, you know, kind of a helper. Your point about the loneliness at the top is one of the things that I think is really challenging for IT leaders, like collaborating with IT because they're. And also, like, most of the people who I would collaborate with are work for my competitors. And so, you know, at a certain point, you can talk about the technical, but you don't want to talk about the practical because, you know, your. Your organization might not be thrilled about that. So, you know, you. You either go outside the industry or you try to figure it out yourself. But I find what. What ChatGPT does, what a copilot does, is it checks my assumptions. It says, okay, you know, and you give it a. You give it a pro, a. A profile for the answer. You say, like, answer this. As a CIO of a major Fortune 5000 company, you know, what do you think about this particular approach that I'm taking? Ask me five questions and then tell me where. Where I'm missing. Missing the boat. What are the assumptions that I'm missing? And, you know, it does come up.
• 35:13
  Speaker A: Are you saying we need to stay. Are you saying we need. It's okay to stay lonely at the top then, because we've got chat gbt.
• 35:18
  Speaker B: No, what I'm saying is that. That it helps me check myself in between the conversations.
• 35:24
  Speaker A: If you could get together with A group of your colleagues that are all kind of on the same level and have the same feelings and concerns and anxieties and all this stuff that with you, what would you just love to do with them?
• 35:33
  Speaker B: I mean I really feel like, you know, what is your day to day like? Because, you know, sometimes like how and how do you lift yourself up from the chaos? You know, one of the things I think is a big challenge with it and that I've really tried to focus on is getting out of the chaos. Because the chaos is so. It's so easy to get to get in deep. Particularly you know, when you're talking about being in a company that, where there's not a lot of layers, where it's not. Not a huge team. You know, you go from thinking about your AI strategy to figuring out why is financial analysis tool not coming up on the Apache server. You know, like it's. And everything in between.
• 36:14
  Speaker A: So you know, it's like context switching, constant context switch, context switching which robs you of your soul.
• 36:21
  Speaker B: It does. And so, you know, the, then having, you know like making sure and how, how do we focus and having this kind of a, of a community would provide that structured time and effort to focus where you're actually saying, okay look, we're not going to be talking about, you know, whether your Apache server is running or not. We're going to be talking about how are you driving the organization forward. We're going to be talking about how are we demonstrating that we're delivering value to people who don't really understand what we do. You know, how are we documenting that in an effective way that really captures the attention of our. Our executive teams are constantly looking for ways to reduce or limit the amount of spend that we're doing in it, which we all every single day, you know, like, oh my God, why are you spending so much on it? And you're like I'm spending this much less than my peers. Oh well, that doesn't matter.
• 37:13
  Speaker A: If you actually look at the line item and I think someone said this to me a long time ago and he said if you actually look at the P and L and you look at the line item percentage that is spent on technology, it's like, it's probably a lot more nowadays. Back then it was like 3%. I don't know what it is now, but why is something that affects every single area of the company and draw and something that if it went down would sink the plunge the company into an abyss and you might as well just like file for Bankruptcy. Why does it have such a low percentage? Like, why not say what would happen if we took it from 3% to 5%? Would we see. Could we then correlate that 2% additional spend, which could be 75% additional investment onto your additional add onto your budget? How can we correlate that to, you know, I don't know, whatever flow through profit or some line item, some other, some other line item or, or an elimination of labor, which happens to be probably in most companies, the largest operational expense. It is at least in every company that I've worked for. I mean, operational. I mean, that's been the largest lineup. So that's why we're calling 2025 changing the face of It. That's why our theme for 2025, dissecting popular IT nerds and digital transformation leaders, the community that we're getting ready to launch on the 15th where the theme is Changing the Face of It.
• 38:42
  Speaker B: And I think that that's absolutely right because if we could change the face of and the perception, then I think people will understand it. And also I think that we're at a place where we have some opportunities to really engage with some platform providers that let us do things where we can punch above our weight class. One of the things that has frustrated me to no end is having Oracle walk in the door and saying, oh, well, for another half a million dollars we can do a data mart for you. Like, I'm sorry, I don't have a half a million dollars for you to do a data mart for me. Because that's not even like writing any of the analysis. That's just you grabbing the data and storing it for me.
• 39:31
  Speaker A: What's even worse is when Oracle walks into the CEO's office and then the CEO comes to you, hey, guess what, we just spent a half a million on Oracle.
• 39:38
  Speaker B: I know. And you're like, and what does it do? And what is the, you know, like, or you know like? We have this highly customized solution that we can make into anything we want to do. Of course it's going to require another two people to support it for the rest of our lives. And you know, by the way, if there's a patch that comes out, it's a three month process to validate that that patch actually works and didn't break something fundamental.
• 40:01
  Speaker A: And that throws you into the chaos.
• 40:03
  Speaker B: Oh, yes, for sure. You know, like, I am I. That is a word that I hate. I hate customization. Like, do not customize my software, please personalize it as much as you want. But do not customize my software. Let me build on things.
• 40:16
  Speaker A: So what's your favorite word out of the box? Turnkey. Seamless. Integration.
• 40:25
  Speaker B: Seamless integration.
• 40:26
  Speaker A: The easy button.
• 40:27
  Speaker B: The easy button. All of the. All of the favorite.
• 40:32
  Speaker A: I always ask this because I love the answer every time. Do you think IT guys have trust issues?
• 40:36
  Speaker B: Oh, 100%, yes. We all have trust issues because we've all been sold downriver. Or you walk into a situation and you're like, and why did you decide to buy this software? Okay, well, let's not do that. So, you know, and you know, like, I also famous, like, you know, famously. Like, I think one of the biggest things that we had to do, you know, when I first started this position was look at legacy systems. And I, I just, I rebranded them. I said, okay, these are boat anchors. These pull our organization down. So boat anchors.
• 41:13
  Speaker A: That's got to go on the dictionary of. I haven't done it in a while. I've got it. Every now and then I have these great ideas. It should have been on the whiteboard, but I actually launched this one without getting permission. But I've got the popular. I've got the popular nerds dictionary of IT terminology.
• 41:27
  Speaker B: That's awesome.
• 41:29
  Speaker A: And yes. What was the last activity I did? Let's see here. Come on. Where I need to view. Where is my last comment? Oh, stop. Why are you not working right now? Software. LinkedIn. Oh, yes. Turning the Titanic. That was the last term.
• 41:45
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 41:45
  Speaker A: Trying to change the direction of a large complex. No, but boat anchors is going up.
• 41:51
  Speaker B: Today because it is absolutely true. And it took years to get everybody to, to stop hugging their boat. Anchorage. And then, you know, like, and sometimes it just took them, like, systems physically dying. I said, look, no more maintenance. It's going to die. When it dies, it dies. I'm not maintaining that.
• 42:11
  Speaker A: It's kind of like the old, like, you know, there's still. I, this is just so, you know, I'm. This is a stereotype. This is probably completely wrong. It's the, the gatekeeper Nancy up front that's working off the, the, the Nortel key system. What do we call that? The, the, the, the person up front that's transferring calls. It's such an old. It's such a silo. I can't even remember the name of the person. Receptionist. Receptionist.
• 42:42
  Speaker B: Receptionist. Correct.
• 42:43
  Speaker A: Yes. I'm sorry, we can't change because Nancy up front will not needs to have a sidecar. So do you guys have a sidecar? No, you don't understand, like, you know what I'M saying like it's like it's like on a screen now. It's like you like kind of click and use a mouse and stuff like no, no, that's not going to fly. So we need to keep the Northel please. Can you find me a voicemail card on, on ebay?
• 43:07
  Speaker B: Yeah, you know it's very funny. I was talking to somebody the other day and, and I, and he said, you know, I'm kind of thinking about doing something else in it. I said, do you know how to do cobol? Can you write cobol? If you can write cobol then you should be, then you should be paying out your resume saying I can write cobol. Because there are many, many, many large organizations who have old jcl, COBOL based ERP systems and all of their, all of the people who used to support them are retiring.
• 43:38
  Speaker A: Yeah, no kidding. For real.
• 43:40
  Speaker B: And so if you know how to code Cobol, you should be advertising yourself as a Cobalt.
• 43:46
  Speaker A: Does he really want to? He should have.
• 43:48
  Speaker B: Well I said that, that's a big question. I said do it on your side.
• 43:51
  Speaker A: But maybe he should do a course. Maybe he should do a course like old IT crap.
• 44:00
  Speaker B: Well, you were talking about DNS records. I mean that is one of those things that if you didn't grow up at the beginning of the Internet, it is really hard for people to understand like to getting their minds around what DNS does. It's a very simplistic thing. But if you don't understand what a cname does versus what a text record does, you're going to have a problem. And it's, it's just I, I don't know whether you're not going to have.
• 44:24
  Speaker A: A problem if you use ChatGPT correctly.
• 44:26
  Speaker B: You're really not very true. But I mean it's just very interesting that like I know network engineers who are like I don't really want to deal with that. I want to deal with, you know, switching and things like that. I can tell you I can do the DNS configuration still because like hell I coded basic HTML, set up my own web servers so you know, like I can do all that stuff but like I don't want to.
• 44:49
  Speaker A: Maybe we should go back in time for a singer because I love going back. I love going back in time. Someone said, what did someone say to me the other day? Oh, oh. Because I asked people a lot what, what their favorite piece of technology was from the 80s and someone said my dot matrix printer. I was like, that's interesting. They're like, yeah, Because I just loved making those big banners that you could print out. And then like, you know, like on the garage door. You know, like welcome home. Like on the garage door.
• 45:14
  Speaker B: Exactly.
• 45:14
  Speaker A: You know, it was like a big banner and I was like, ah, you just brought back. Really. I mean, that to me brings back memories. Literally. I could like smell memories. I can smell it. I can smell the technology. Remember, like the smell of technology. Remember, like the smell of opening up a new nes like, or a video game. And like the, the packaging and like, I, I can smell it.
• 45:36
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 45:36
  Speaker A: You know, what's your fondest memory of? I don't know, something. There's gotta be something that if we go back in time, I, I could probably say something and you would, you know, we could do like, I say this, you say that, but I don't know. Five and a quarter.
• 45:49
  Speaker B: Oh, I, I remember, I remember using a compact with, with a five and a quarter and just trying to load an operating system and shoving five and a quarter inch disks over and over and over again. I actually had a hard drive, but.
• 46:04
  Speaker A: So when you said compact, the first thing that came back to me was a bunny in high school, sophomore. And he was playing Dungeons and Dragons on a compact on his compact. That was like. Not a tower.
• 46:13
  Speaker B: Yep.
• 46:13
  Speaker A: Okay. And then operating systems. I just remember the first thing that came into my mind was like a CD with like, you know, WIN XP like written in Sharpie or something on it. You know, like I, I remember with the, with like the code. Don't arrest me. It wasn't me.
• 46:30
  Speaker B: Yeah, no, I understand.
• 46:31
  Speaker A: Yeah, with the, you know, like the key code, like written on the, like in marker on the disc.
• 46:36
  Speaker B: You know, I remember when I was a kid, I had a TI 99.4A. I must have been 16 years old.
• 46:43
  Speaker A: And cartridges.
• 46:45
  Speaker B: Well, was, it was a cassette tapes.
• 46:47
  Speaker A: I, I mean, Texas Instruments, right?
• 46:50
  Speaker B: Yeah. Okay, you, you loaded, you loaded the programs from a cassette tape and it was like, you know, sitting through. It would take an hour to load the operating system and be like, I can program now in basic.
• 47:03
  Speaker A: It's wild.
• 47:04
  Speaker B: Yay.
• 47:05
  Speaker A: It was fun.
• 47:06
  Speaker B: And you know, like, it was a lot of fun. You know, I got to do my first programming and I, you know, wrote a little game and you know, like it was nothing, but it was, it was something, it actually functioned, but you had to back it up on the tape. So that was very funny.
• 47:21
  Speaker A: It's completely wild. It's really, really wild. What's happened in the last, not 100 years? Oh, it is really sitting around like something's going to happen. Someone's going to figure something out. Someone, we're going to figure something out. Someone's going to figure something out real quick. Some, some major thing is going to happen. I'm not, not trying to delve into any conspiracy theories here, but something might happen here. I don't know, Chat GBT might, you know, might go Terminator 2 or whatever it is.
• 47:49
  Speaker B: What interests me is sort of like, you know, what does our world look like when, you know, we have a ChatGPT or an LLM standing between us and the technology. So like we mediate then our experience with the world more and more and more through an LLM. And you know, like, I was thinking about this for a, for a timesheet. Like my foreman in the, in the field coming home after a long day of work, they do not want to fill out their timesheet. They hate it. It is one of the worst things that they do. So if they could have somebody, as they're driving home, ask them 10 questions and it fills out their timesheet and their, their production quantities and they're, they're like, why wouldn't you do that then? You don't have a problem with data quality. You don't have a problem with people missing things. They just talk and it puts the data in and it's a beautiful thing. But in the same way, like, is there kind of a mediation between you and the world then? I mean, like, it's just. I've been thinking about this a lot. It's like if that becomes our standard way of interfacing with machines, which I think it probably will, there's some call for an interface, but I'd a lot rather be able to code an interface using an LLM because I don't have to anticipate what the heck you're going to do, you know, like some of those key functions I probably put in there, but let the LLM figure it out. I don't know.
• 49:14
  Speaker A: No, I'm just. You. You made me. You made me. I, I literally went off into like, kind of like I'm not even make believe land. You would think it's make believe, but it's actually real. And for whatever reason, whatever you said made me think about all those drones that were flying over New Jersey like a, like a little while ago. And, and I happened to be overseas at the time and I, I'm in. I would love to see how we could, how this technology is going to affect other countries because again, I'm in Morocco right now. I have a dev team. I've got 100 meg fiber running right into this. I mean, if you saw outside, it's hilarious. Like, if you walk around outside, it's like we're in the 1960s. It's awesome because I can go down the street and I can buy like, like two grocery bags full of like produce and it's all organic and everything. It cost me a whole $7. Whereas I go to the supermarket back home. It's going to be, I don't know, it's come. Everything comes from California for some reason. It's going to be $75. So that was, that's cool. That's the cool part. But I still got 100 meg fiber and I'm recording this podcast right now. But every, I would say 70, 50% of the businesses are still working on paper, like a paper register, like still. You know, the books, the books literally are the books. And the people that do have computers, it's just really interesting. But then they'll have, you know, the one app, that's the delivery app where you can order from restaurant and that's cool. So they're taking over. Security is abysmal. So there's a lot of potential there. But here's what's not a problem. Just chill people with a smile on their face. And I logged in and I'm like, what the heck is going on? There's all these drones flying over New Jersey and I mean like, really, what is going on? And meanwhile there's just like a bunch of old uncles around here drinking tea, just sitting out in the street, being, you know, waking up at a 10:30, 11:00 in the day. So I don't know, maybe we'll end with that. Love technology. There's a lot of fun growing up. It's wild now. It's, it's, it's, it's like you said, right now, it's chaos. I wish I had the answer for you.
• 51:14
  Speaker B: I, you know, and I feel like I know some people who are retiring now and retiring early because they don't love the chaos. Like, we used to be able to make a real difference and we're having a really hard time getting to the chaos.
• 51:26
  Speaker A: Well, let me end with this. You do make a real difference. Everything happens in any company with it. We need to realize that and we need to be able to speak that in a very confident manner and we need to let people know that. Look, you can't just keep sifting through it. Leaders, like, you need to trust us. You need to love us because we're here, you know, And I, I think part of it has to do with we need to have more ownership in the company or be given more ownership in the company. Because if we're given ownership in the company, then will have ownership in the company versus feeling like, I don't know, a replacement head when in reality, or we need to just step up and really make a big difference or, I don't know, do some really cool side stuff, you know, like, I don't know, what were we talking about earlier? The. The. You know, if we could figure out the, the how we use AI for real and really come together and figure all that out, it would be cool. It would be cool. And I think that is going to happen. So it has been an absolute pleasure having you on Dissecting popular IT Nerds. Any words of wisdom or encouragement for the listeners out there.
• 52:37
  Speaker B: I think that we're actually kind of at an exciting time. I think the kinds of tools and the abilities for us to leverage data and turn it into something that's really valuable for our companies is, is there. We just got to make it, we got to do it, we got to engage with it. If we don't, you know, AIs gonna, you know, if you don't engage with AI in the next year, it's gonna be table stakes and you're gonna be behind. So, you know, like, we need to, we need to jump on it, understand it and move forward.
• 53:05
  Speaker A: It'd be great together. It would be great to come together, collaborate on all these AI ideas. Whether we call it AI steering community on steroids would be great. And then use all this stuff to demonstrate value to executive management and, I don't know, make some money and retire off the grid.
• 53:27
  Speaker B: There you go.
• 53:29
  Speaker A: Thank you so much.
• 53:30
  Speaker B: All right, Phil, thanks so much.