Paul Ford: Hi, I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul: This is Reqless, R-E-Q-L-E-S-S, the podcast about how AI is changing the world of software. It’s a subject very dear to the two of us. We’re trying to understand this brand- new world. And we have an amazing theme song, so let’s play it.

[intro music]

Rich: We are the founders of a company called Aboard, and we are cooking up wild and crazy tools that spin up big, sprawling, complicated software with AI way faster than we used to do it. We skip a lot of those steps, Paul. It’s pretty cool stuff. Check it out at aboard.com.

Paul: That’s right. That is our marketing for the day. Now, Rich.

Rich: Yes, sir?

Paul: I recently read an article. I’m not going to give you the title because it’ll kind of like, it’s a spoiler, the title, but it was in eweek.com. Remember eWeek?

Rich: It’s still around?

Paul: I used to get it on paper.

Rich: eWeek must be 17 people now.

Paul: I don’t want to talk about that part.

Rich: Fine.

Paul: So, November 30, 2024, a journalist named Madeline Clark summarized a Slack study. Slack did a study.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: The Slack Workplace Index. We know that AI is growing. People are using AI in business, right? They have to be, because Sam Altman is a, is the world’s defining genius and Anthropic and blah blah blah. So we hear—

Rich: Tons of money’s going into it.

Paul: All day, every day. Nothing but AI. Nothing, nothing, nothing. You and I have pivoted our whole software careers.

Rich: We’re a little enamored with it all.

Paul: Yeah, we’re kind of figuring this all out while also being, you know, trepidatious and concerned. Last year how—what was the increase in adoption of AI tools?

Rich: When you say last year, you mean 2023?

Paul: Sure.

Rich: 20%.

Paul: 8%.

Rich: Okay. It’s small.

Paul: Okay, but growing.

Rich: Smaller than I thought, but growing.

Paul: It’s getting bigger and getting bigger. Are you ready? You ready?

Rich: Yes.

Paul: From August through October of this year—

Rich: 2024?

Paul: 2024.

Rich: Okay?

Paul: According to Slack, according to his report, how much did adoption of AI tools in the kind of enterprise-y workplace: How much did it increase, percentage-wise? Go crazy.

Rich: Well, it’s a short amount of time. Can you give me the whole year?

Paul: Yeah, I know, I know.

Rich: But…22%.

Paul: 1%.

Rich: What?

Paul: Yeah, it’s actually stalled.

Rich: Hmm!

Paul: According to this survey.

Rich: Go on.

Paul: There are studies showing that people are finding more revenue with these technologies and blah, blah, blah. But according to Slack, people are saying—they’re saying four things. Okay? And this is the article, it’s called “Why Is the U.S. Falling Behind in AI Adoption? Shocking Insights Revealed.”

Rich: Wait, is it falling behind other countries?

Paul: Well, I think we are, actually, but I mean, we’re—I’ll give you an example. We’re definitely falling behind the Philippines because they do giant call centers and everyone is being forced to use AI to get faster at their call-center response.

Rich: Yup.

Paul: So like, I think the classic industries where humans were already kind of commoditized and now the AI can commoditize it?

Rich: It’ll gun for it, yeah.

Paul: Yeah. So like, there’s adoption all over the place.

Rich: Right.

Paul: But I don’t think, you know, America’s white collar is not ready to be lumped in with call centers and so on.

Rich: Right.

Paul: My kids, I’m going to, I’m like, literally like, “Hey, buddy, sports medicine? HVAC?” [laughing] Like, we’re going to need all that. Anyway, here are the four reasons why people are not adopting AI.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: Okay? Or they’re not talking about it. One, lack of employer-provided AI training.

Rich: Okay…

Paul: Two, uncertainty about appropriate usage in the workplace. So no policies. Three, pressure to become an expert while receiving no or little support from management. And four, workers feel uncomfortable admitting they’re using it to their management avengers because they think they’ll get in trouble.

Rich: Mmm. Mmm.

Paul: Okay, so. So those things, according to Slack, according to this article, are sort of creating this, this chilling effect where all the excitement that’s happening out in the world in San Francisco’s on fire—well, literally and not literally and metaphorically—like, everyone is so excited. So on this train, including us, but the actual person who is working in an office, filling out forms, making phone calls, getting you to the delivery, telling you how to use FedEx to ship it to them, all that stuff that people do all day? They’re like, “Nah, I don’t like it, this is weird.” And actually they did a study in Britain and it’s, like, a very small adoption rate as well. People are like, “This isn’t that big a deal.” It’s like 13% of people are like, “Yeah, it’s a big deal.” But most people who are in contact with this kind of work and this kind of stuff are just like, “I don’t know what this is for.”

Rich: I have many thoughts.

Paul: Well, are we just idiots for creating a podcast about this new big thing?

Rich: No, I don’t think we are.

Paul: Thank God. Phew! That was a high-risk question right there.

Rich: [whooshing noise of relief]

Paul: “Yes, Paul, yes.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Click!

Rich: I think if people are able to use AI to get eight hours of work done in an hour and then go to the museum and have lunch with a friend, they’re doing it. [laughing] And they’re not gonna answer a survey very openly.

Paul: Well, I mean, you know what I think a lot about is, like, Upwork, and sort of places where you—

Rich: Yeah!

Paul: —give somebody, like, $200 and they do something for you.

Rich: Yeah, yeah, and—

Paul: You don’t know what is doing that.

Rich: You don’t know what is doing that. And, and I, so I’m a little suspicious of the numbers, though I’m not shocked by the numbers. And I’ll, I’ll tell you why I’m not shocked. I think that AI, as it solves different professions and different tasks?

Paul: Sure.

Rich: It will insinuate it—and we’re too early. It will insinuate itself into how people work. The idea that at the worker level, at the employee level, is how AI is going to kind of spread and gain adoption, I don’t think is correct. I think some people are tinkerers and they like to mess around. But I think when they come back from summer vacation, the company announces an orientation around using a new AI tool, and everyone has to use it because it’s going to make everything more efficient and save the company a lot of money? That is a top-down adoption that is driven by the interests of the business.

Paul: I think there’s another thing going on. Just about every day—and it’s this very surreal moment because people are…they have very strong reactions to this technology or they don’t think it’s relevant or so on. All of those people are using large language models in the course of the day. They’re using it when they hit reply in Gmail. They’re using it when…

Rich: It’s a great point.

Paul: When you, when you listen to a podcast, maybe not this one, but many, like, the auto-transcription tools, search.

Rich: Insinuating itself into many of the common tools we use today and making them run better.

Paul: I think a lot of it is going to land in organizations in the, like, Oh, you’re going to use the new invoice upload assistant.”

Rich: Exactly.

Paul: Right? And nobody’s going to think, oh, that’s powered by OpenAI’s API.

Rich: Nobody cares.

Paul: So I think there’s that. I think—so there’s the kind of software as a service, enterprise drift of these tools to accelerate existing processes. I think there’s another thing here which is the current way that we experience these technologies has nothing to do with the bureaucratic process that drives most big companies.

Rich: True.

Paul: Right. And so what people, what I see that Slack study, and Slack is part of Salesforce and Salesforce is all in on AI and so on and so forth.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: When I see that study, what I hear people saying is very related to what you just said: “We didn’t do the off site.” Like, “I don’t—you gave me a text box and you said, use this.”

Rich: That’s not going to cut it.

Paul: And not only could I maybe, maybe I’m really smart and I could go figure this out and I could bring value, but I know that invoicing isn’t going to want me to use to—they’re not going to want to pay $20 a month. They’re going to yell at me. I know that Mike over there isn’t going to want to help me out with it because he’s going to be like, “What are you using this for?”

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: I know my boss will either want to talk about it too much or not enough.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: And so you go, I mean, this is cool. And my kids are using it to cheat on their social studies assignments, but what the hell does this have to do with my job in selling large amounts of carpet or trading derivatives or whatever the hell I do all day?

Rich: Correct. Look, we’re just so early. It’s too early. And the truth is, if my job is to—

Paul: Well, once again, Silicon Valley, you’ve done it again. Because you’ve now made it seem like fait accompli and we’re all the way in and this is—we’re already late.

Rich: No, no, no. Like, if my job—I’ll give you another example. If I’m on a sales team and my job is to look at prospect data that’s hitting our website and our ad spend, okay? And I just sit there and I stare at dashboards and reports kind of all day. And I report, I bundle up the information to report it to the sales team. There are probably good tools out there to help me do that better, right?

Paul: Yes.

Rich: But they’re not ready for mass consumption yet. Like, you really need to know the nuances of some of these tools to really leverage them just yet. I could be a paralegal who’s been asked to write a brief about some case or some motion that’s getting applied and I need you to do some research. There are tools out there that are starting to materialize, but it’s really early. Well, very well-funded companies that are just, it’s just really early.

Paul: I’ll tell you what I’m realizing about this thing, because I’ve been in deep and I’m really trying to understand it. We’re trying to understand it. Even though we’re getting good results, they don’t always, like, make sense. And we’re not using it to find facts or as, like, a fake search engine. We’re using it to do things like parse text and you know, like, do normal stuff.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: The thing that is exciting and motivating to me is because I used to be and still am a software professional. Software professionals, at a pretty high level, what you do is you understand a business case. Could be a not-for-profit wants to talk to more people and send out more emails. It could be a company needs to host a series of events or whatever and they want to make sure that people interact on the web regarding the event.

Rich: Mmm hmm. Yeah.

Paul: So 20 years of this, and what you do is you learn the process of the organization and you translate that into software.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: And if you—I was never a great coder, I was never a great business person, but I’m a good translator between worlds. I like when people are in the room. So what’s fascinating to me is it’s, like, this is the thing that they made for me. Because I can tell it about a process and say, follow the process.

Rich: Right.

Paul: Most people on earth are downstream of a process. They are given a node and an artifact they have to create.

Rich: They’re a stop in the assembly line.

Paul: I’m going to give you a set of documents. You’re going to read the documents and then you’re going to create a summary and you’re going to send that to these three lawyers. Okay?

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And that’s your next two weeks.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Okay? And now you can kind of tell AI to do that, but it can’t get—you can actually start to inform it about the nuances. You can have, you know, Claude or ChatGPT do a lot of that. But most people never think that way because they’re not programming like, they’re not like you actually do have to program it. You’re programming it in English, you’re telling it about the process.

Rich: And what I think will happen over time is I think some of these tools will hide all of it away and will just do things better for you without you, programming without you—and this is the point you were making earlier about email autocomplete. And it’s just there’s all these little slick things that are happening that we’re not noticing. Except the machine seems to be doing a better job than it used to with transcripts and with email drafts and things like that. That doesn’t require any work for me. I didn’t have to install an integration app to get email to write better or suggest more.

Paul: I think that is—you see that, actually, you know who does a lot of this is Salesforce. You know, there’s a lot of, like, you click the button and you get the transcription.

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They like to do that. And you know what? It makes sense. Like, that’s something that’s relatable. That seems—sometimes it’ll not get it right, but that’s okay. You could just try again.

Paul: Sure.

Rich: If you want to try again. And I think that’s what I mean by it’s just way too early, is I think usability somehow sneaks its way into the adoption of these things. And you can’t just parachute in a tool and just say, it’s going to take over the world.

Paul: Now, are we too early? Do you think we should be talking about this?

Rich: No, we are not too early. We are not, in my view. I don’t think we are too early.

Paul: Well, I think, I think the reality is this very problematic and confusing new thing exists. And it really exists.

Rich: I don’t think businesses know just yet how powerful this new set of technologies is to their bottom line.

Paul: I gotta tell you—

Rich: They just don’t know.

Paul: I second guess myself all the time. But I also go like, you know, your instincts have been pretty good in the past. And I didn’t, like I said, the bell didn’t for—crypto was just a trillion dollars. Right?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like, that’s what Bitcoin’s worth. It’s worth about a trillion dollars. Like it’s a trillion-dollar industry.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: This is coming for a $60 trillion global economy, in a way—and the people steering it appear to be, like, really into the Power Rangers and not much else.

Rich: No.

Paul: Like, they’re not in the culture in the way that—it’s coming for culture, but they’re not connected to culture. And when I say culture, I don’t mean, like, AI is going to ruin museums. It may or may not. [laughter] Okay?

Rich: There’ll be some nice kiosks.

Paul: But what I mean—business is culture. Apps are culture. We love to, we’ve always fantasized that we can turn people into little interchangeable robots, but we’ve never been able to do it.

Rich: Yeah, it’s going to take us a minute to metabolize something that is reducing the cost of production for certain things by a thousand times. That is bananas, right?

Paul: Well so—okay, so we’ve had this conversation and I was, I was like, it’s, it’s coming tomorrow. And you’re like, no, it’ll be five, ten years. And then you kind of revised it to two years. Like, it’s coming.

Rich: It’s two years. I see it as two years. Mainly because I have, we have, I have friends and colleagues and peers in the business community in New York City—we’re here in New York City—that often tell me that 20% of their margin is technology. And they’re not, they’re not in the technology business.

Paul: They’re not technology companies.

Rich: They’re not a technology company—or 30%. And I was like, “Man, if you can get me 10% off of that, that’s all money in my pocket.”

Paul: This was the fantasy of ‘software is eating the world’. And it got to this point where it was, like, “20%? It should be 30%! If you make filing cabinets, you’re going to sell so many more filing cabinets with a truly efficient digital platform.”

Rich: We’ve been saying this in different ways, I think, throughout this podcast.

Paul: Right.

Rich: Which is that there is a power shift that’s about to occur that is going to take a lot of the leverage away from technologists. And great technology does that. That’s what great technology does.

Paul: All right, so sit down. I am now the CEO of a company that makes and sells filing cabinets. Okay?

Rich: Okay.

Paul: All right. You seem like a smart guy. I had lunch with you once, years ago. And you’re telling me that this is going to do something to my IT spend?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: What’s it going to do? How much money am I going to save, Richard? I got to make filing cabinets.

Rich: Okay. This is very hard. Like, first off, you know, if you just sell filing—you make filing cabinets. If you’re using AutoCAD, if you’re using some sort of design tools to build filing cabinets?

Paul: Well, let’s say I’m a pretty big producer. I got to get trucks out. I got logistics, I have ERP systems, I have new lines, catalogs, a whole lot of distributorships.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: I’m in the whole capitalist world here.

Rich: No, Every time you want to customize some corner of your ERP for your business, it’s a million dollars.

Paul: That’s right. And every filing cabinet I sell, $10 of my revenue goes towards websites.

Rich: These systems are necessary for bookkeeping, they’re necessary for inventory tracking, they’re necessary for a million different—

Paul: But if you got that to a dollar, I could buy that beach house. So what, you know, what’s your promise here?

Rich: I don’t think it’s a matter of getting it to a dollar. I think it’s a matter of… All businesses do, almost all businesses, except for really, really big ones that build their own stuff, all businesses bend their business to the software, because the software is too costly to bend to how they work.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: And so they adjust how they work. They hire specific people to sort of bridge the gap between what expensive software requires of them and the way they actually want to work.

Paul: And this is why the biggest businesses are the ones that provide the expensive software.

Rich: Yes. Or some of the biggest—like, I have no doubt that Walmart has built their own tools.

Paul: Oh, they do. They have one of the best logistics systems—

Rich: Exactly.

Paul: Imaginable, right?

Rich: Economics—they’re finally turned into their turn to their favor where it’s like, okay, there’s too much at stake. We’ll do it.

Paul: No, I remember Walmart had like Walmart Labs on GitHub. Like they were doing all kinds. Like they, they are a—they hit a scale, and that’s why they competed with Amazon.

Rich: Most companies say these words in the office. “Yeah, just gotta—you gotta pick something from that dropdown. Just pick anything. I’m not sure why.” [laughing]

Paul: I once worked, I worked on a project once where the head of technology—it was for a big not-for-profit—she turned to us and she said, “Pick any one you want. It just has to cost a half a million dollars.”

Rich: [laughing] Like, all of it, right?

Paul: And we chose the worst content platform I have ever seen in my life.

Rich: Yeah. And why is that? It’s because they feel, they feel like they have absolutely no power and no ability to really have agency over these tools that make their businesses run. There’s going to be a day, the day is coming and it’s not that far away, where, you know, the head of logistics for a company is going to say, “I want it to work this way and I want it to work this way next week.”

Paul: This is—okay, I’m going to close on my thesis and I’m going to, actually, we’re going to have to break it down because it’s a little jargony, which is that every SaaS product is headed towards becoming an SDK that is orchestrated by AI.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Okay?

Rich: [laughing] Why not?

Paul: Let me explain what I mean. Which is a tool like Airtable or a tool like Salesforce, okay, is a bunch of widgets, ultimately. It talks to a database and it’s, you click a dropdown and you put some information in, and now the next person who comes along can select that item from the dropdown. Like, that’s software as a service. I hit it on the web, I adapt it a little bit according to their wizards and guides, I might even have some custom code, and then everybody in the organization uses it. Okay?

Rich: Okay.

Paul: Break that into a thousand little component pieces, just like they do back at the office, like at the SAP office, or they think of their components. You can say with AI, “Hey, I would like the card—” You could say, “I would like the cards that are from Ohio to be blue.” Okay? And now, you know, actually, AI can do a lot of that if they’ve instrumented it correctly. Or you could say, “I would like these alerts to trigger whenever this thing happens.” And you used to have to do a lot of work to do that, but now it starts to happen.

Rich: Well, you used to express it, and then a product manager or business analyst would then draft a detailed document about how to do it.

Paul: That’s right.

Rich: And then you’d walk that over to engineering and they would give you a time estimate. A lot of that is about to get obliterated.

Paul: The future of Salesforce is this: I go to a text box and I type in, “I sell sneakers.”

Rich: [laughing] Just express yourself.

Paul: No, that’s right. And it’s like, “Oh, well, here’s your sneaker sales tool.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Right? “And this is, this is the best practice. Would you like to modify it?” “Yes, I’d like to, I sell Japanese sneakers.”

Rich: Mess around with it.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Is that coming?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Things that are monolithic are going to be broken into development kits, and you’re going to manage them by typing to them.

Rich: Will it take business culture time to sort of call everyone out and say, like, “I want—like, it’s over, guys. I understand it and I want it now.” It’s going to take time.

Paul: You have to train salespeople and consultants to sit down and explain this.

Rich: I think it’s going to take everyone a minute to realize that the dramatic commoditization of what they thought was expected—the reason business people find comfort in paying big, for big ticket items is that it’s comforting to them. It means that a lot of energy and work went into it and a lot of risk was mitigated.

Paul: Sure.

Rich: That’s what—especially when you come back to a—

Paul: As long as the people down the street are paying the exact same amount.

Rich: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Now all of a sudden, that same thing, you’re telling them it’s going to cost $11. Like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold your horses. I’m not betting my whole business on an $11 trinket.

Paul: I mean, let me, let me put it this way. What if I told you that I could sell you a car and it’s $50.

Rich: Exactly. Same thing, same thing. Like, well, that’s not, I’m not putting my family in that car. I’m not putting my family in that car.

Paul: Or you know what else, like, the $15 plane tickets in Europe?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You’re just, like—

Rich: Easy Jet.

Paul: You’re like, “Ugh, God. Ughhhh….” [laughter]

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah. All of the pilots, the pilots have felony convictions.

Paul: Exactly. If they’re human.

Rich: They’re human.

Paul: They could be, like, orangoutangs.

Rich: That’s going to take a minute.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: That comfort level around the cost of change. The change order is about to—if you. If the change order was a stock on the stock market, it’s going to go from a hundred dollars to a dollar.

Paul: I also have to say, almost luckily, are the stewards and shepherds of these technologies are some of its worst explainers. Like, you know who was extraordinary with this stuff? Bill Gates. Bill Gates, like, “Look at that. Yeah, you click on that and now you have a business.” [laughter] And he just like, he just, like, extracted money from the ether.

Rich: Yeah, sure.

Paul: And destroyed capitalism, like, in his own image for about 10 years. Like, just, bleugh! It’s all about Microsoft.

Rich: Massive, massive disruption when that came out.

Paul: And you just like, I’m, Sam Altman and these. Whoever it is in Anthropic. The other Sam Altman, or whatever it is.

Rich: [laughing] Poor guy. We gotta figure out his name.

Paul: We’ll find his name, we’ll learn his name. We’re using his tools. They do not really know how to talk to this part of the world, as far as I can tell.

Rich: They don’t. And they don’t feel like they need to yet.

Paul: Whereas, like man Gates and Ballmer? They knew they were talking to GE.

Rich: Ballmer, he was ready to sell vacuum cleaners.

Paul: That’s the thing.

Rich: So you had a team there—

Paul: And their culture actually came out of like Procter & Gamble.

Rich: I think a lot, I think a lot of those people will show up.

Paul: Eventually, but I think it’s so complicated that the person who knows how to sell Crest toothpaste today, they don’t see any bridge into this world.

Rich: No.

Paul: Right? So, like, eventually it’s got to be sold like Crest toothpaste. And it is just not, we’re not there yet.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But meanwhile, the money’s pouring in. It’s a wacky moment. Anyway, Richard, It’s, we’re gonna keep saying that, like, “Wow, it’s a crazy time!”

Rich: No, I think, I think the theme of this, this podcast is that the adoption is not going to come from, like, the individual’s desk. It’s going to come from cultural changes around how businesses work and how they think about value and how they think about tech. You’re essentially telling them that there’s a massive shift that happened and most businesses don’t care about tech.

Paul: Well, we’re introducing a new idea. You and I have continually been focusing on how anyone can pick this up and do really remarkable, very powerful things. But the thing we’re saying today is that a lot of that change and that access to that power is going to come in a very top- down way. “You’re going to use this now. You’re gonna do this.”

Rich: Absolutely.

Paul: Because that is how large bureaucracies work. And the world runs on large bureaucracies.

Rich: Exactly.

Paul: All right, well, I mean, time will tell, right? We’re gonna see. I agree with you. I just don’t see the like sudden spontaneous tidal wave happening in the next minute.

Rich: It’s just not coordinated enough.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: It’s, it’s not how it usually happens. Right. It’s fun. It’s a fun tool to, like, help with the kids’ homework. That’s happening.

Paul: Everybody’s like, how can you not use this power? But it’s like, have you ever seen five people in an office try to decide on where to go to lunch? Like, it’s just like, that’s—

Rich: Or order a lunch. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Paul: All right, friends, well, if you want to get in touch with us, send the email to hello@aboard.com. Check out Aboard. Keep listening, tell your friends about Reqless, and do all those other good podcast things. We’re always open to criticism, feedback, and information. Send us that message. Hello@aboard.com. You got anything else, Richard?

Rich: Have a wonderful week, is what I have for you.

Paul: That is an incredibly important message and I’m glad you shared it.

Rich: Take care, everybody.

Paul: Bye.

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