Speaker 0 | 00:00.184

A multiplicity of ways that people have screwed it up.

Speaker 1 | 00:02.965

Okay. I mean, you have one of the simpler ones, so that’s good. You take it. I mean, yeah. Every now and then people spell my name with a fill, with an F. Yeah. But that happens. It’s usually at Starbucks on the drink handoff plane.

Speaker 0 | 00:18.871

It does happen.

Speaker 1 | 00:20.492

Everyone out there listening, we’re speaking with Adam Krob today. And construction technology. visionary. 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. I think 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 in 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?

Speaker 0 | 01:12.926

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 uh approach to technology because there was a lot going on with a lot of different kinds of people using technology where you know 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 um There’s a lot of oddities in terms of contract structures that affect ERP systems, that affect payroll systems. So understanding that.

Speaker 1 | 02:05.075

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 during COVID?

Speaker 0 | 02:14.740

Oh, yes. It was a very interesting time. There were some very specific things 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 kind of steel doors. Just, you know, like a standard steel door that you’d put into a into a hospital or into a like a fire door or something.

Speaker 1 | 02:41.084

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 02:41.844

Yeah. Just a standard door. You know, not anything complicated.

Speaker 1 | 02:45.707

I mean, I mean,

Speaker 0 | 02:46.627

talented.

Speaker 1 | 02:47.436

I have two podcast studios. I have one in Morocco because I like to outsource to expats that live in Morocco, northern Morocco, specifically near the Mediterranean. It’s very nice. And steel doors are a plentiful here.

Speaker 0 | 03:02.446

Yes.

Speaker 1 | 03:03.026

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.

Speaker 0 | 03:11.312

It’s more like,

Speaker 1 | 03:15.294

I don’t know. It’s… Yeah, it’s more like Abdurahman welded it yesterday in the garage. And we put, but it’s strong. I’ll tell you that. 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 is 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, anyhow, sorry, 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 it’s probably just an API into ChatGPT. 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?

Speaker 0 | 04:33.574

Yeah. 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. So, you know, it’s just that’s what’s driving the bus right now. And, you know, we interestingly, when I started 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. by extension, the number of small startups that started in. And of course, many of them don’t exist anymore. In fact, most of them don’t.

Speaker 1 | 05:19.592

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’s 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 this one’s coming up. Well, just renew it because we don’t have time. We’ve got 120 of these and I’ve got more things to deal with right now. Maybe there’s an AI for that. There is,

Speaker 0 | 06:24.771

in fact.

Speaker 1 | 06:26.052

Definitely is. Can I have that? Guys, I’ll white label that one on the Dissecting Popular IT Nerds website. Message me today. I’ll take a $100 Amazon gift card to sit in on your presentation. 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, they basically have 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. 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.

Speaker 0 | 07:29.844

Yes. So, you know, in the construction industry, we’ve seen a couple of them grow out that info. 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, you know, how to demonstrate the value of AI in your company, because I think that that is something, you know, 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. 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, you know, there are some real legitimate things where we would be able to drive value, one of which is a tool that automates a lot of the work that we that we have in one of the processes as we start a job, which is called the takeoff process. It basically says, OK, 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 find.

Speaker 1 | 08:56.528

Are you saying as the job goes on? Are you saying as the job goes on?

Speaker 0 | 09:00.470

Particularly at the beginning of the job, there’s this process where you get all of the different subcontractors in. They all say, oh, well, you know, 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. Before, it would be like, okay, go back to the architect. The architect draws a 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, you know, it’s shorter construction time, it’s less labor. And that labor would just… be eaten up by an overhead kind of a cost and it would reduce profitability.

Speaker 1 | 10:24.164

So are you basically talking about unforeseen changes in any given construction project that happen on every single project or no?

Speaker 0 | 10:30.889

A hundred percent, yeah.

Speaker 1 | 10:32.050

Okay. Because I don’t know. I mean, I know 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 like 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 redraw this? and do the human work within a fraction of a time?

Speaker 0 | 11:45.732

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-And that’s probably a nanosecond or whatever it is. You know, it’s not too long.

Speaker 1 | 12:09.028

It depends on how many people are on chat GPT that day or something like that.

Speaker 0 | 12:13.091

Actually, it’s running 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.

Speaker 1 | 12:28.801

Is this something that you guys made up, or is this an actual vendor that came to you?

Speaker 0 | 12:33.685

This is a vendor that we’ve been working with. Okay.

Speaker 1 | 12:37.768

They can sponsor the show, by the way. We don’t reveal them. Don’t reveal them yet.

Speaker 0 | 12:41.150

I will not.

Speaker 1 | 12:42.111

If said vendor, we’re going to fill in the blank here, is Greg. That’s what we’re going to fill in the blank. Yes. We’d like to sponsor Dicey New Popular IT Nerds, please. Adam is going to connect us.

Speaker 0 | 12:53.338

The other…

Speaker 1 | 12:55.039

We have a lot of construction guys, by the way. We do. We have a lot of construction guys on the show. So there is traffic for you guys.

Speaker 0 | 13:02.585

The other is really through our platform. We have a… We’re going to… 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 situations where there is a change, it often becomes, you know, 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 we’ll 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 together in a nice, neat way and then sends it off to the owner. Those kinds of things 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 who are very smart and we don’t want them just pushing paper around and building.

Speaker 1 | 14:39.745

We don’t want smart people doing $10 an hour jobs.

Speaker 0 | 14:42.469

Exactly. And so, you know, 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 AI, is I did a—

Speaker 1 | 14:56.097

You’re not on a crusade.

Speaker 0 | 14:57.137

I am on a crusade, because I think that we don’t—I don’t think we do it well.

Speaker 1 | 15:02.119

You’re torches and pickforks and swords and your AI.

Speaker 0 | 15:05.820

Shields, your AI shields, exactly. I did an exit interview with our summer interns. at the end of last year. And I said, like, 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 you feel to 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 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 um i think that 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.

Speaker 1 | 16:40.409

I had it happen two days ago. And I hired an AI guy, I don’t know, two years ago. And it’s been a very fun journey. Sometimes we have to, we need our own special whiteboard, which is just where we park things not to do. Right. Because we come up with so many ideas and go, oh, we could do this with that and this and then great. And like 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 here’s an example of upskilling someone. So he’s like Greg. Greg, he’s my expat from France. He has a great French accent. And. We had some weird DNS error. He’s working on another one right now, actually. 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 I was like, 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, C name records and DNS stuff. And like. And basically he used a screen reader and, 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 it figured 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 a, but no, but if you think about it, how would that upskilling, um, 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, don’t use Cloud anymore. We’re using ChatGPT now. And then the next thing, no, we’re using Cloud 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 changing so fast.

Speaker 0 | 20:13.272

It’s going to be painful, I think. So what we have is we have a steering committee that’s just drawn AI.

Speaker 1 | 20:20.974

And we have-AI steering committee. This is great. Bullet point this one. This is like a-I don’t know what that is, but is this a common thing? I’ve never heard this before. I’ve never-AI steering. This is great. Now, all of a sudden, we’re going to hear about it, and I’m going to get a $50,000.

Speaker 0 | 20:37.559

Yeah, people are going to be like, oh, yeah, we do that too. But 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 tool we like, which tool works best. And at a certain point, like yesterday, we were talking about quad versus chat GPT versus co-pilot 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…

Speaker 1 | 21:30.759

Is the decision.

Speaker 0 | 21:32.020

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, they’re structuring it as a platform. So, I mean, it’s a question of how do we do that most effectively? I mean, 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, 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, and we are having, we, 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,

Speaker 1 | 22:26.904

are you familiar with Poe? Are you familiar with Poe?

Speaker 0 | 22:30.185

I have not done Poe yet. No.

Speaker 1 | 22:31.966

So Poe is just a conglomerate of all of them. You just pay for one and get all.

Speaker 0 | 22:36.968

Okay.

Speaker 1 | 22:37.808

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 cloud and chat GBT. So you get two in one.

Speaker 0 | 22:47.236

That might be the thing to do. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 22:49.118

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. Poe.com. Okay. I don’t know if there’s a. uh 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 at&t was zoom this you know ring central zoom everyone was zoom but um anywho uh i love claude for i love claude for like english writing or i don’t know what we call that copy or writing or fixing grammatical mistakes i think it’s just less um I don’t know, hypey, I guess, 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. So with the pace of something, if you choose something and then all of a sudden, 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?

Speaker 0 | 24:15.989

I think it’s actually going to be a real challenge. And I think the pace of change is such that it’s either going to, 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 gonna have like stepwise changes and like okay we all gotta go all in with something else because like this is This is ridiculously different.

Speaker 1 | 24:42.933

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 that might make sense because he might eliminate three other employees. And everyone’s like, AI is taking our jobs.

Speaker 0 | 25:02.344

Well, and, you know, like, you know, your point about upskilling, I think, is really important, too, because I think, you know. One of the things that we constantly read about is how AI is going to eliminate chunks of work. And some of those chunks of work sit in front of the computer work. And we joke with the accounting team, it’s like, we need to upskill you guys. Because so much of what they do is really just analysis and 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 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? OK. And his his contention, and this is interesting, was that spend more time with with. the smartest people because you know like adding um 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 yes it’s also about hr vp of starbucks gave me that book a long time ago it’s an excellent excellent book basically says invest more in your top performers and because we’re always trying to fix the broken people why are we wasting our time with them you

Speaker 1 | 26:35.564

And then the top performers quit and we’re like, what?

Speaker 0 | 26:38.245

Well, and also, 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.

Speaker 1 | 27:00.117

I wish I could 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.

Speaker 0 | 27:05.832

Well, I mean, one of the things that I do is I have a, I have an agent that I’ve written in co-pilot 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.

Speaker 1 | 27:20.656

Atomic habits. That’s like an atomic habits agent.

Speaker 0 | 27:23.436

And it was really, really, it’s really, really great.

Speaker 1 | 27:25.857

Oh, can you share that with me? Is that possible? Is that like a problem you can share or something?

Speaker 0 | 27:30.518

I probably can.

Speaker 1 | 27:31.298

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 sales people no no one’s 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 right 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 norwex 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?

Speaker 0 | 28:55.320

Yeah. Oh, for sure. Okay.

Speaker 1 | 28:58.142

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 their peers that are on their same level. So give the presentation 15 minutes, get feedback from your peers, then actually have a discussion for a half an hour around that topic. And that’s one thing. The other thing is this thing that everyone’s… this thing 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 we can you really go to the people that you’re up scaling down below you because they Really you’re I hear all the time From IT people, 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 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?

Speaker 0 | 30:39.799

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 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 in 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 on GPTs. And because I like, we’re teaching them a new language. If they know that language, they have a substantial skill that no one else has. It’s very hard to get to it. I’m doing, like you said, at Coursera, I’m doing an eight-hour course on writing prompts. And so I’m going to be,

Speaker 1 | 31:34.344

is there good courses on it?

Speaker 0 | 31:36.085

Oh yeah. There’s a Vanderbilt computer science, uh, professor who’s, who’s written a great course on it. It’s on the ground jet chat GPT, but it’s really,

Speaker 1 | 31:46.151

I want to know who that guy is. Uh, no,

Speaker 0 | 31:48.072

we’ll pull it up.

Speaker 1 | 31:49.293

We’ve got to have him on the show.

Speaker 0 | 31:51.274

He’s excellent.

Speaker 1 | 31:52.334

And anyone that you know of like this, this is where we got to,

Speaker 0 | 31:55.917

it’s called prompt engineering.

Speaker 1 | 31:56.917

We’re going to have him secretly on the show and no one’s going to be able to.

Speaker 0 | 31:59.479

Chat GPT. Uh, and it is, if it’ll come up, come on, man. Uh,

Speaker 1 | 32:06.102

hold the thought, hold the thought. We’re going to have this, we’re going to have this guy on privately for ITP. Okay. No vendors are going to be, no vendors are going to be allowed. No vendors are going to be allowed. So they can be like, Hey,

Speaker 0 | 32:18.309

I’ll email you the link to the course.

Speaker 1 | 32:21.131

Okay. All right. Uh, awesome. This, this, this is exciting. Now you’re getting me because he’s,

Speaker 0 | 32:25.994

uh, 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.

Speaker 1 | 32:35.737

Is it on audio?

Speaker 0 | 32:37.459

It is on audio that I just read. And what was the other one that I just read? There are a lot, but I think there are very few that concentrate on how do we use it? 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 an assistant, as a, you know, kind of a helper. I mean, 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 a chat GPT does, what a co-pilot does is it checks my assumptions. It says, okay, you know, and you give it a, you give it a profile, a, a profile. uh for the answer and you say like answer this as a cio of a major fortune 5000 company um 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 uh

Speaker 1 | 34:11.840

missing the boat what are the assumptions that i’m missing and you know it does 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 chad gbt no what i’m saying is that that it helps me check myself in between the conversations 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 concerns and anxieties and all of the stuff that with you um what would you just love to do with them i mean

Speaker 0 | 34:37.680

I really feel like, you know, what is your day-to-day like? Because, you know, sometimes like how do you lift yourself up in 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 in deep, particularly, you know, when you’re talking about being in a company where there’s not a lot of layers, where it’s not a huge team. You know. You go from thinking about your AI strategy to figuring out why is this, why is there, why is the financial analysis tool not coming up on the Apache server? You know, like it’s in everything in between. So, you know,

Speaker 1 | 35:27.780

like context switching, constant context, with context, which robs you of your soul.

Speaker 0 | 35:34.346

It does. And so, you know, the, then have 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 um How are we documenting that in an effective way that really captures the attention of our executive teams who 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’re 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.

Speaker 1 | 36:30.429

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&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 something that if it went down would sink? 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 three percent to five percent would we see could we then correlate that two percent additional spend which could be 75 additional investment onto your additional add onto your budget can how can we correlate that to you know i don’t know whatever um slow through profit or some line and some other some other line item or or an elimination of um labor which happens to be probably in most companies the largest operational expense it is uh at least in every company that i’ve worked for i mean operational i mean that’s been the largest line um so That’s why we’re calling 2025 Changing the Face of IT. But 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, the theme is Changing the Face of IT.

Speaker 0 | 38:05.606

And I think that that’s absolutely right, because if we could change the face and the perception, then I think people would understand it. And also, I think that, you know, 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. I mean, one of the things that has frustrated me to no end is, you know, having Oracle walk in the door and saying, oh, well, you know, for another half a million dollars, we can do a data mark for you. Like, I’m sorry, I don’t have a half a million dollars for you to do a data mark 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.

Speaker 1 | 38:59.844

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.

Speaker 0 | 39:06.867

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 it’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.

Speaker 1 | 39:30.647

And that throws you into the chaos.

Speaker 0 | 39:32.629

Oh, yes, for sure. That is a word that I hate. I hate customization. Do not customize my software, please. Personalize it as much as you want, but do not customize my software. Let me build on things.

Speaker 1 | 39:45.409

What’s your favorite word? Out of the box? Turn key?

Speaker 0 | 39:49.471

What’s that?

Speaker 1 | 39:53.674

Seamless integration.

Speaker 0 | 39:54.974

Seamless integration.

Speaker 1 | 39:56.235

The easy button.

Speaker 0 | 39:57.576

The easy button. Yeah, all of the favorites.

Speaker 1 | 40:01.838

And I always ask this because I love the answer every time. Do you think IT guys have trust issues?

Speaker 0 | 40:07.241

Oh, 100%, yes. We all have trust issues because we’ve all been sold down the river. 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. You know, and, you know, like, I’m also famous, like.

Speaker 1 | 40:29.894

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 like anchors that’s got to go in 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 Um, I’ve got the popular nerds dictionary of it terminology.

Speaker 0 | 41:01.584

That’s awesome.

Speaker 1 | 41:02.564

And, um, yes. What was the last activity I did? Let’s see here. Come on. Where I need to view. Where’s my last comment? Oh, stop. Why are you not working right now? Software LinkedIn. Oh yes. Turning the Titanic. That was the last term.

Speaker 0 | 41:20.331

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 41:21.031

Trying to paint the direction of a large complex. No, but boat anchors is going up.

Speaker 0 | 41:26.230

today because it is absolutely true and it took years to get everybody to to stop hugging their boat anchor and then you know like and sometimes it just took them like systems physically dying and

Speaker 1 | 41:43.014

i said look no more maintenance it’s gonna die when it dies it dies i’m not maintaining that 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 gatekeeper, Nancy, up front that’s working off the Nortel key system. What do we call that? The person up front that’s transferring calls. It’s such a silo, I can’t even remember the name of the person. Receptionist.

Speaker 0 | 42:19.837

Receptionist, correct.

Speaker 1 | 42:21.598

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 gonna fly so we need to keep the north hell please can you find me a voicemail card on on ebay yeah you know it’s very funny i was talking to somebody the other day and i am

Speaker 0 | 42:53.102

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 putting 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.

Speaker 1 | 43:22.506

Yeah, no kidding. For real.

Speaker 0 | 43:24.787

And so if you know how to code COBOL, you should be advertising yourself as a COBOL.

Speaker 1 | 43:30.930

Does he really want to?

Speaker 0 | 43:32.591

Well, that’s a big question. I said, well, you do it on your own.

Speaker 1 | 43:36.693

Maybe he should do a course.

Speaker 0 | 43:37.954

Maybe he should do a course like old IT crap. 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 get in their minds around, like what DNS does. It is a very, 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 don’t know whether,

Speaker 1 | 44:09.370

like the problem, if you use chat GPT correctly,

Speaker 0 | 44:12.131

you’re 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. Like I can tell you, I can, 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.

Speaker 1 | 44:36.908

Maybe we should go back in time for a second, because I love going back in time. Someone said, what did someone say to me the other day? Oh, because I ask people a lot 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, you know, like on the garage door, you know, like, welcome home, like on the garage door. 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 can 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 or a video game and like the packaging? And like I can smell it. What’s your fondest memory of, I don’t know, something? There’s got to be something that if we go back in time, I could probably say something and we could do like, I say this, you say that. But, I don’t know,

Speaker 0 | 45:38.100

five and a quarter. Oh, I remember using a Compaq 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.

Speaker 1 | 45:58.329

So when you said Compaq, the first thing that came back to me was a buddy in high school, sophomore, and he was playing Dungeons & Dragons on his Compaq that was like… not a tower like the yep okay um and then operating systems i just remember the first thing that came to 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 uh with like the code i don’t arrest me it wasn’t me no i understand yeah with the you know like the key code like written on the like in marker on the disc you know i remember uh when i was a kid i had a

Speaker 0 | 46:35.299

a TI-99-4A. I must have been 16 years old.

Speaker 1 | 46:39.442

Cartridges.

Speaker 0 | 46:41.264

Well, it was cassette tapes.

Speaker 1 | 46:44.526

I mean, Texas Instruments, right?

Speaker 0 | 46:47.548

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 46:48.109

Okay.

Speaker 0 | 46:50.530

You loaded the programs from a cassette tape, and it was like sitting through. It would take an hour to load the operating system. I can program now in BASIC.

Speaker 1 | 47:01.918

It’s wild.

Speaker 0 | 47:02.919

Yay. it was fun 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 did actually function but you had to back it up onto the tape so that was that was very funny it’s completely wild it’s com it’s really really wild what’s happened in the last not 100 years oh

Speaker 1 | 47:28.314

it is really sitting around like um something’s gonna happen someone’s gonna figure something out someone’s gonna figure something out someone’s gonna figure something out real quick some some major thing is gonna happen um i’m not not trying to delve into any conspiracy theories here but something might happen here i don’t know chat gpt mike you know might go terminator 2 or whatever it is i

Speaker 0 | 47:50.583

what interests me is sort of like you know what does our world look like when you know we a chat GPT 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 timesheet. Like my foreman 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 time sheet and their production quantities. And 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.

Speaker 1 | 49:23.399

I don’t know. No, I’m just, you made me. You made me, 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 little while ago. And I happened to be overseas at the time. And 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, it’s all outside. It’s hilarious. Like if you walk around outside, it’s like we’re in the 1960s. It’s awesome because you can go down in the street and I can buy 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, everything comes from California for some reason. It’s going to be $75. So 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, 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 every 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? Meanwhile, there’s like a bunch of old uncles around here drinking tea, just sitting out in the street to be, you know, waking up at 1030, 11 o’clock in the day. So I don’t know. Maybe we’ll end with that. Love technology. It was 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.

Speaker 0 | 51:36.039

I, you know, and I, I feel like I know some people who are retiring now and retiring early because they don’t love the chaos. They’re like, we used to be able to make a real difference and we’re having a really hard time getting through the chaos.

Speaker 1 | 51:49.406

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 um 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 we’re given ownership in the company then we’ll have ownership in the company Versus feeling like, I don’t know, a replacement head when in reality. Or we needed to 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? You know, if we could figure out 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 Diceykin Popular IT Nerds. Any words of wisdom or encouragement for the listeners out there?

Speaker 0 | 53:07.446

I think that we’re actually kind of in an exciting time. I think that the kinds of tools and the abilities for us to leverage. data and turn it into something that’s really valuable for the company 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 as you know if you don’t engage with ai in the next year it’s going to be table stakes and you’re going to be behind so

Speaker 1 | 53:34.970

you know like we need to we need to jump on it understand it and move forward it’d be great together it would be great to come together collab collaborate collaborate on um all these ai ideas whether we call it ai steering um community on steroids would be great yep and then um use all this stuff to demonstrate value to executive management and i don’t know make some money and retire off the grid there you go thank you so much all right phil thanks so much