The Aboard Podcast

Paul Ford: Hi, I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul: This is The Aboard Podcast, the podcast about how AI is changing the world of software development. Richard, how are you?

Rich: I’m doing well. How are you?

Paul: I’m good. Let’s talk about the subject of this podcast in just a second. And I want to tell you about some nice college students I met.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: All right, let’s play the theme.

[intro music]

Paul: How you doing?

Rich: I’m doing good.

Paul: How’s family?

Rich: Everyone’s great. Big play. Matilda is being sung in my house constantly.

Paul: It’s a lot. It’s a lot. The singing girl is a lot.

Rich: But its performances are today and tomorrow, and then it’s over.

Paul: It’s never over.

Rich: Oh…

Paul: There’s always another performance.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: Yeah, but that’s okay. My daughter went for ballet, which I gotta say though, it’s New York. So you end up going to this enormous auditorium where it’s a really good Nutcracker. You’re like, oh!

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You end up really enjoying yourself. Okay, so that’s not what this is about. We had some lovely college students come in. It was a class from the New School, in the journalism program.

Rich: The New School is a school here in New York City.

Paul: That’s right. Yeah. It’s a sort of the alternative college.

Rich: Art and design is its focus.

Paul: No, no, it’s broad liberal arts, all sorts of stuff.

Rich: Oh!

Paul: It’s big. You’re thinking about Parsons.

Rich: Which it’s partnered with, I think.

Paul: That’s right.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But no, no, it’s a big college, but I mean, it’s just a classic New York institution at this point.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: So about 14 students came by and they’re, they wanted to learn about AI. They’re learning about technology and how it interacts with journalism.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: And I didn’t know what we were going to get right, like, because this could be like, “I hate you guys for existing.” It could be like, “Help me save my journalism career.”

Rich: “Hire me.”

Paul: “Hire me.” All of that. Right? And what I found, and it was just nice, I just want to share it with the audience.

Rich: Age range?

Paul: 19 to 21.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: And they look like babies to me now.

Rich: Well, you’re an old man.

Paul: I have 14 year olds at home, so I’m just like, oh—

Rich: You’re old.

Paul: You’re my children plus four.

Rich: You’re old.

Paul: I’m middle-aged.

Rich: We move fast in the world of software…

Paul: [laughing] We’re old also in the world of software. So anyway, we asked them, you were in the room for a minute, and they were very—this is funny because we’re kind of grey, and they’re very colorful. Like, they all have dyed hair. One guy was wearing a red coat. I was just like, this is nice.

Rich: A red trench coat is utterly fine.

Paul: It was like going to a, like, an aviary. You’re like, wow. [laughter] Everything was just very shiny.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: And they’re super smart and super nice, but what was really—and they had tons of questions. But what’s really interesting was when you asked them about AI, one person was like, “Hey, look, I use it. I have a job. I use it at my job.” We didn’t go into that. But she was like, “Yeah, but you know, I don’t run and use it too much when I’m in school because, like, I’m supposed to be learning how to think and do things with my brain.”

Rich: Yeah. I think the hesitation—I was there for that question.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Around, I won’t grow. I won’t grow my skills and my capabilities and my mind won’t expand if I just rely on this thing. And it was frankly, for young people to be consciously aware of that—again, this is an extremely small sample size.

Paul: It’s a small sampling, but it was a very, it was a diverse group of human beings.

Rich: Diverse group of human beings. But the sentiment of like, hey, I still want to be a fully formed person with, like, interesting capabilities. That’s awareness—

Paul: You know what I realized? I thought about this a little bit after. It’s always been there for them through their undergrad experience.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Right? So we’re thinking of this as a new thing in the world. And they’re just like, yeah, this is part of college. People just use AI to write their papers.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And so for them, it’s very normal.

Rich: Yeah, yeah, it is, it is. It’s normal. And the schools are paralyzed, it’s worth noting. School policy and what your professor tells you, it’s kind of meaningless because they know that tool’s in your pocket. They know it’s on your laptop. That ship has sailed. So policy around how you should or shouldn’t use it is kind of out the window. I think what’s interesting is sort of the self-regulating aspect of it. And I hope that is something that’s more broadly viewed, which is like, how do you become awesome at anything and make peoples’ eyebrows raised if you’re all dipping into the same well of knowledge? Right?

Paul: This is the thing. It was a very, like, this is very anecdotal, but at the same time if you look at how people talk about AI in the world, it is either, like, this is the most evil thing and it has paralyzed our children. They cannot think. They will never be able to think again.

Rich: It’s a lot of dramatic headlines, right?

Paul: Or it’s absolutely the future of everything.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And instead, what I saw were a lot of, like, kind of city kids. Maybe they’re not from the city, but they’re now of the city.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And they’re just like, man, I don’t know. It is what it is. Like, one student used it a lot for vibe coding. They were doing it right?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And they were like, you know, everybody talks about the environmental costs, but they’re not as bad as, like, taking a 40-minute shower. And I was like, yeah, but, you know, like, people got to be able to talk about—

Rich: Who takes a 40-minute shower?

Paul: Oh my God.

Rich: Do people do that?

Paul: Teen girls, dude. It is a challenge in the household.

Rich: I’m out in, like, five.

Paul: Yeah, I know, I know you. You usually get it down to like, one.

Rich: No.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Five. [laughter] Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m grappling with the sort of ethical use of it. But I think they’re also, I like the self-interest here. They’re like, wait a minute, if I just do this, then I’m not interesting at all. Like, I won’t have anything interesting to say. I won’t be reading interesting things.

Paul: You’re not going to compete.

Rich: You’re not going to compete. Let’s just be pure, just in a competitive sphere. How do I stand out? Right?

Paul: I want to be smart. I want to be special.

Rich: We talked in the past about how people are using it to sort of fire hose applications for jobs.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And then on the other end, the, like, recruiter at the company is using AI to filter through the firehose of stuff that came in that’s gonna die fast. Like, let’s get that out of the way.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Like, how do you stand out? How do you connect? I’m glad they’re wary of it. I’m glad they’re like, okay, wait, I gotta, I gotta stand out here.

Paul: I don’t know. I just saw a room of people who were, like, well put together.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: A lot of people were, like, wearing makeup. Their clothes were nicely chosen, their hair was groomed, and they were just like, this may or may not be for me.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: And I was like, okay. You seem to be, like, there’s obviously a way to be healthy with this. And you know what it made me think? And then I want to talk a little more broadly about the industry. It made me think that a lot of our narratives, a lot of how we talk about AI, is inherited from the debacle of social media.

Rich: Mmm.

Paul: That essentially, because I think that’s really happened, especially with the kind of the haters. The haters are, like, look what Facebook did. And it doesn’t help that the social media companies are all over it.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But like, look what Facebook did to our society.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Right. Look what Twitter has done. And now we have more of this. But it’s worse. It’s pretending to be a human being.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I didn’t get that sense from them. The sense I got from them is like, this is kind of a utility over in the corner.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I use it or I don’t. They don’t feel that they’re cut off from the world by not using it. Whereas social media, that’s a lot harder.

Rich: Yeah. I think the gravitational pull of social media is much harder.

Paul: We saw it over the last 10, 15 years.

Rich: Because the end points are other people.

Paul: That’s right.

Rich: You want to connect with and see, and they want them to see you. And that’s harder. And frankly, probably more damaging. Like, I feel like… AI gets boring.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: I think that’s the thing. And young people like to be, they like to be tickled. Like, punk rock landed for a reason. Right? And it’s so boring. It’s so boring. Like, it’s great to find out something about a piece of history, but boy, is it boring.

Paul: It’s true. It’s rarely—it can be quirky or surprising, but it’s not weird. You know what’s weird? Wikipedia is weird.

Rich: Wikipedia is weird because it’s an artifact of humans negotiating. [laughing]

Paul: You’ll read this one paragraph and you’ll be like, “Ohhh, what happened here?”

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: You go into the talk page and you’re like, “Oh, no.”

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul: I think that is the thing. You don’t have that artifacts, you don’t have the artifacts of sort of human contention when you get that LLM M output. It’s just kind of digested.

Rich: And we’re not, we’re not taking the grumpy old men position here. Like, AI is gonna definitely change the world. That’s gonna happen.

Paul: Well, neither were they. Right?

Rich: Neither were they, yeah.

Paul: They’re just, they know it’s gonna be in their lives forever.

Rich: It’s utility.

Paul: And they know that they’ll probably have to use it at work.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But they’re like, “I will be a more interesting person if I go ahead and read a book.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So God bless. I thought that was just interesting.

Rich: It was positive to see, for me at least.

Paul: I just wanted to share it. Now I want to share with you an article.

Rich: Uh oh.

Paul: Okay?

Rich: More positivity, Paul?

Paul: An alternative viewpoint. So we talk, again, software is changing in this new world.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: It’s from the Guardian.

Rich: Oh!

Paul: I subscribe. I have the app.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: PwC. What is PwC?

Rich: PricewaterhouseCoopers is one of the big, giant consultancies.

Paul: Hundreds of thousands of employees.

Rich: Its roots are in, like, auditing and accounting.

Paul: Let’s give people an explainer here and we’re going to talk, so their CEO is coming down hard, like, we all got to use AI. So but let’s, when auditing, accounting, you go public, you’re a giant company, right?

Rich: You need independent auditing.

Paul: Why do you need that?

Rich: There is an assumption, especially if you have regulatory requirements on reporting, there is an assumptions that humans fudge things. [laughing]

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And so you need an independent audit. By the way, it’s not just for reporting your numbers to governments. It’s also when somebody’s acquiring you and you need an independent audit of your books, or you’re filing for bankruptcy and you need an independent audit of your assets or whatever it may be. It’s a million reasons to do it.

Paul: And the way that you regulate and manage a company, increasingly, is not just by looking at a bunch of pieces of paper, but software.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Yeah. So PwC ends up being one of the biggest implementers of giant software platforms.

Rich: Yes, yes, yes. Sorry, I—

Paul: No, no, no, I threw that at you.

Rich: No, no, look, I see it a little differently, which is these organizations branch out because they’re already, the lines to the decision makers are already in place.

Paul: Right.

Rich: And then you say, well, we’ve now got an IT offering and it’s, like, oh, cool, I’ll introduce you to whomever. Right? And you see this, it’s common amongst big consulting is that they branch out because they’re already in the room.

Paul: I mean, so PwC, you’re going to go public, you might talk to PwC. You’re going to build your—

Rich: You might talk to Deloitte, you might talk to a few firms.

Paul: You’re going to implement SAP’s new version for logistics across your 300,000—

Rich: Also might talk to people.

Paul: Exactly. So this is a very, very big company that touches—it kind of touches every, like, the really largest companies at a very, very low level, it’s very global. And so accounting, finance, and then also sort of all the deep, ugly software where you see it—

Rich: A lot of maintaining of old software.

Paul: That’s right.

Rich: Is one of their things.

Paul: So they’re very big. You know, we’ve talked to them. They’re very nice. And so the CEO in the U.S. whose name, Paul Griggs.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: Said the following: “Senior staff who were not ‘paranoid about being AI-first’ would probably be replaced by others who were ready to embrace the technology. “I don’t think anyone gets a free pass here. Anyone,’ Griggs told the Financial Times. An employee who thinks they have the ‘opportunity to opt out” of AI is “not going to be here that long,’ Griggs added.” And I’ll give you just a few more facts and I think we should talk about, if you’re that employee, what you should do.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Okay? Griggs said, “PwC’s employment strategy had changed as AI altered its working practices, but that the firm remained ‘a net acquirer—’” So they’re still growing. Consulting grew 5.5% last year.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: Because of all this AI transformation.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: Ironically, it’s supposed to be killing them. Early evidence that maybe the balance isn’t towards total labor destruction.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: We’ll see. And they’re hiring more data specialists. They have 365,000 employees. They’re going to change some tax and consulting services into AI-powered automated tools. And the tax and consulting tools are going to be accessed without a PwC person in the loop. And the last bit is they’re going to launch an AI platform that offers automated services for clients called PwC1.

Now, let’s be clear. This is all exhausting just hearing about it. I start to die inside. Except the part that’s not exhausting is that they manage and have input into trillions and trillions of dollars in the world economy, like boats moving across the ocean kind of stuff.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: So what you’re hearing here is like, look, we don’t have a real regulatory framework around AI. We don’t have a real national or global strategy. We’ve dropped these technologies in the world. And I think the college students are figuring it out in their way. But I think that at some level, PwC issuing this, they’re kind of the last to move. Right? Like, they’re not going to do—they’ll have a lot of big initiatives and stuff, but they’re not going to move fast, ever.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Because they can’t. If they do, that’s too much risk into the system. So what do you think is going on here? Let’s say you, if you’re working at PwC, what should you do?

Rich: I want to make a distinction between someone that is responsible for outputting work or responsible for other people to output work.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: If you’re responsible for outputting work—

Paul: An individual contributor.

Rich: Thank you.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: You should be using—you shouldn’t wait for the CEO to tell you to use these tools. You should use these tools. You’ll be more productive. You’ll undo ugly knots probably more quickly. And that time that you’ve reclaimed doesn’t mean you get to take a walk in the park. It means you get to somehow showcase other value to the organization because you’re a smarty who likes new tools. Essentially,

Paul: let them take a frickin’ walk in the park. We always do this. You can take a walk in the park.

Rich: Oh, here we go.

Paul: I mean, look, the people who work here take walks in the park.

Rich: True.

Paul: And they work—

Rich: You can take a walk in the park, Paul. Fine.

Paul: You know, we come down as like these, like, “Argh! You gotta just—”

Rich: “Get back to work!”

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: We’re not that, as leaders.

Rich: Well, yeah, okay, fine.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: That person, I mean, it’s coded in the CEO’s message, which is kind of a salad of recommendations. [laughing]

Paul: God forbid anyone ever say anything like, “Hey, here’s the three things I really need you to do to succeed.” Let’s actually talk about that for a sec. Because a CEO can kind of do two things. They can either say three inspiring words that will become the watchwords for the next five years.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Until they get fired two years from now.

Rich: Uh huh.

Paul: Or, or they can threaten you.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And this is a threatening CEO.

Rich: Yeah, I think he’s, I think he’s, he’s also signaling to the world that PwC is now AI-first.

Paul: We’re on it. We’re on it.

Rich: Yeah, there’s a bit of that. So he’s essentially saying, if you’re an IC, if you’re an individual contributor, use the tools. We expect you to.

Paul: Well, I think he’s reacting to the fact that Accenture is getting 30,000 people certified on Claude Code. Right?

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul: Right? So all the people in the neighborhood are leaning in in their own way.

Rich: You got to use these tools.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: You got to use these tools.

Paul: And you have to show, if you’re the giant company, that you’re on it.

Rich: Yes, yes. Here’s the other persona. A lot trickier. Much, much trickier.

Paul: The manager.

Rich: The manager. The manager and—

Paul: So let’s be real. I see, like you should have a Claude subscription or, you know, whatever they let you use at PricewaterhouseCoopers, which is probably called, like, Price AI.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Cooper’s.

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul: And you get to use Cooper instead of Claude.

Rich: You said PwC1.

Paul: Yeah. That’s bad. God, what a terrible name.

Rich: It’s accountants.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: They don’t know.

Paul: One.

Rich: They don’t know.

Paul: Yeah, I can’t. Well, what’s the next version gonna be called?

Rich: Two.

Paul: Yeah. [laughter] Yeah. They could have gone for Alpha, too. They could have done at least something.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Anyway, they’re accountants.

Rich: We’ve talked about this in the past. The managers and the managers’ managers and the ones that have, like, literally, human infrastructure in these organizations, which is—

Paul: They’re referring to partners a lot here, too. Like, partners have to get on it, too. So those are managers.

Rich: What does that even mean?

Paul: It means—

Rich: What does that even mean?

Paul: What does a partner mean? It means somebody who brings revenue into the organization.

Rich: Yeah, it does.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: It does. Yeah, it often does, by the way.

Paul: Actually, that’s, for people who don’t know. Like, that’s when you hear, like, someone be like, “They’re a McKinsey partner.” That means that they bring $10 million a year in service.

Rich: That’s real.

Paul: Right?

Rich: That’s right.

Paul: And if they don’t bring $10 million a year in, and they’re probably not a partner.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: So…

Rich: So let’s say. Let’s say the quiet part out loud. Is that the saying?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Say the quiet part out loud: There are partners who will bring millions of dollars in, and if they impose AI too quickly to their relationships, it calls into question the revenue they bring in. That is a fact. That is an absolute fact.

Paul: This is a funny puzzle. Let’s explore this. This is, let me think what, let me give it back, which is, AI is a really great cost-savings mechanism, right?

Rich: It is a great, “what you thought was relevant is now irrelevant” mechanism.

Paul: So you have $10, 15 million in billings from these, like, I don’t know, paper companies.

Rich: PDF vetting and generation off of spreadsheets.

Paul: Oh, yeah. And a big ERP integration like this—

Rich: They are…

Paul: Don’t even worry if you don’t know what this is.

Rich: There are 70 people offshore who do that.

Paul: Yeah. Oh, and we’re translating a legacy code base to a new code base. All these things.

Rich: All these things.

Paul: If you let you and me in, we’ll tell you that can all get done in three weeks. We’re dangerous that way.

Rich: We are.

Paul: Okay?

Rich: We don’t have—and I’m not saying we’re amazing. What I’m saying is we don’t have that to lose. [laughing]

Paul: No.

Rich: We don’t have the legacy revenue to lose.

Paul: So I’m bringing in $15 million a year by billing out PwC people and charging licensing, all this stuff.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Right? And now the boss just said, “Okay, drive this value out to your customers. Let’s do it. Let’s be there.”

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: But if I do that, I can’t justify more than $5 million a year.

Rich: For…?

Paul: Everything I do.

Rich: Oh, yes, yes, yes. You go from $15 to 5.

Paul: What the hell do I do now?

Rich: This is—

Paul: I’m gonna drag my feet, first of all. Every human being, and we’re seeing this everywhere, they’re gonna drag their feet.

Rich: I’m a filthy human being. I would drag my feet.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: I have a timeshare in Aruba.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: That I got my eye on. I haven’t bought it yet.

Paul: No.

Rich: And I’m waiting for my bonus. And it’s in September.

Paul: That’s right.

Rich: I’m gonna drag my damn feet. And yes, I’ve got 50 people who do this amazing thing where it checks the fields in the PDF and then it combines a dozen of them into one mega-PDF and it puts it in a folder. And they’re really good at it.

Paul: But wait, Rich, the CEO said we have to be really smart about AI.

Rich: Fine. I’ll cake it on as, guess what? You want to pick a color theme for your PDF or whatever?

Paul: No, but I think everybody kind of knows this pattern. Like, the CEO says it, and the people are like, “Absolutely, boss!” And then they do a little dance, they sell some AI work on top of stuff.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And they desperately try to keep the number from going down.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Right? How would you know if a CEO was actually serious about wanting to do this kind of transformation?

Rich: He’s not.

Paul: No, but how—what would that, what would be the signal?

Rich: The signal here, and everything you said about what he said.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Is not about transformational change, right? Like, I don’t know what the chart looked like. I wrote about this two weeks ago, three weeks ago. I don’t know what the revenue chart looked like when Netflix transitioned from mail-in DVDs to streaming.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: I’m gonna guess that there was a rough, it’s like a, you know, post-operative trauma.

Paul: Do you remember the early streaming? It wasn’t that good.

Rich: It wasn’t that good. So they probably, I guess, had an overlapping strategy where they kept going with the DVD ads and kept mailing them.

Paul: They did.

Rich: They obliterated Blockbuster.

Paul: There was like one last day of DVD.

Rich: So just for everyone listening, Netflix started as a mail-in DVD business, destroyed the video stores around the country, and then Reed Hastings, the CEO, said, “Streaming will come.” It wasn’t there. It was not there yet. And he’s like, “It’s gonna come and that’s what we’re gonna be. And we’re gonna start on that now.” And it was so dramatic such that, you know, where the business, the revenue business around the DVD mailing was not dead yet. He was essentially saying, “I want off.”

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: “I want off of it. And we’re going to figure that out.” And I don’t know what it charted like. I wonder if there was, like, a, if you charted the stock during that time, if there was a rough patch as they transitioned.

Paul: I mean, sure as hell wasn’t good for the people who made the plastic envelopes.

Rich: It wasn’t good for a lot of people.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Right? Like, there were warehouses where the DVDs were.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: All of that. So is this CEO essentially saying, “Go and blow up your contracts because we have these incredible tools.” Of course not.

Paul: From what I know of very large consulting firms that work on governance.

Rich: That’s not what they’re saying.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: What they’re going to try to do is sell these new capabilities, right, on top of what they currently do. And look, the day is coming where smaller upstarts are going to say, why are you even doing all that?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Where frankly, one of the big four—big four is consulting, the big four consulting firms—from across the street be like, “We’ll bring your costs down 30%. Like, that’s what we do. And we’ll do it with AI.”

Paul: It’s real tricky, though, because if they say that to the person who’s on a big—if they say that’s a person who’s spent giving millions of dollars to PwC every year?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But they don’t say that to the person who’s next door who’s giving them millions of dollars a year? Right? It’s going to get—

Rich: This is the rub.

Paul: Either got to go one way or the other here.

Rich: Yeah. And so we’re in the beginning a transformational phase. I think firms like ours who don’t have that difficult decision—because I’m not sure, I’m not saying I wouldn’t be any, just as cowardly as the partner at PwC if I had that revenue to lose. I’m not that high-minded.

Paul: Yeah. I mean PwC is in the article. But, like, it’s every one of these companies.

Rich: Every one of these companies. We’re young.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: We are insanely fast at shipping quality software because we don’t have a status quo.

Paul: Well, frankly, that’s our only bet.

Rich: Well, it’s not just that. We are unencumbered by a past. That is a huge, huge advantage.

Paul: The funny thing is that we’re not. We continually go back and get really confused at how cheap and fast everything is now because we—

Rich: We’re still transitioning.

Paul: It’s still really hard for us to acknowledge the amount of change that’s happened in our industry, even though we don’t have, the only clients we serve now are people who, we’re sort of doing the accelerated stuff for them.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But, like, every time we sit down and try to figure out our pricing and so on, we keep going back 10 years, when it was…

Rich: It’s hard. This is a hell of a transition.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Let’s go back to that manager who’s got, let’s say they’re a senior partner and they actually have a dozen partners under them and then hundreds of people below them.

Paul: That’s right.

Rich: And there’s this monthly partner dinner that they do, and they all smoke cigars and they talk about how well everyone’s doing and whatnot. And then there is this, this thing that is really of two minds. One is it is absolutely an existential threat on the status quo. And the status quo is their revenue. It is the, it is the bonuses that they get. It is real. Like, we should just call it out. Through another lens, it is maybe a new revenue driver. Maybe? Like, can I, I mean, I’ll just say one word: Agentforce.

Paul: Sure.

Rich: Everybody’s like, “Salesforce is dead.” And then they just doubled down. Benioff, you know what he said? He said, “I may rename Salesforce to Agentforce.”

Paul: Oh, dear God.

Rich: Oh, yeah. I mean, what a brilliant thing to say.

Paul: Then it becomes Agentdream at the big conference.

Rich: Dreamagent.

Paul: Dreamagent…

Rich: Force.

Paul: Force. Yeah, That’s bad.

Rich: But you see, what he’s trying to say.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: Do not tell me it’s an either/or. I am this.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: I am the future. Right? And I’m also 40% more expensive, but don’t worry about that.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Right. That’s literally what he said. He’s like, you know what? Rather than running from the tornado, I’m a tornado chaser. I’m going to go into it, and I’m going to be, I’m going to be one, is what he’s saying. And he’s very savvy in how he signals and messages.

Paul: He’s probably the best salesperson alive.

Rich: Incredible.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: I mean, he literally named his company after sales.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Okay. These guys and I’m not dispelling, but a manager who frankly has done incredibly well to cultivate the culture and the status quo that is in front of him or her has to now look at this thing as potentially disruptive or potentially advantageous. And then you got the CEO yammering on about, like, “You better get on it.”

Paul: Well, you’re going to, we’re going to have people solve tax problems using this tool without you in the mix.

Rich: Yeah, that’s right.

Paul: So we’re going to, we are going to start cannibalizing a little bit here.

Rich: Now, when will the clients say, and here’s the good news for, and this is because of firsthand experience. Here’s the good news for the likes of PwC. The clients very much still want people right now connecting them to these capabilities. It is not great when you’re like, “Check it out. Did this last night. What do you think?”

Paul: Right.

Rich: It’s not great. They are, money is running through their systems. They worry about a lot of different things. They worry about being too hasty or quick about stuff. And so people will still matter. I just don’t know if it’s the same people who are combining PDFs. That’s the, that’s the shift.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: That shift will take a long time. There’s still money to be made, there’s still houses to buy in the Caribbean. And so I think there is a weird disincentive to move too fast. And yet the CEO is going to write a thing.

Paul: So I think that’s real. I think we’re seeing that with all the big consulting firms. We’re starting to watch them more closely.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Let’s take, we got three minutes.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Okay? Let’s design a consulting firm that’s not us. More like—we’re about building you a product.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Right? You come to us, we build your products.

Rich: We will live with you and help you transition to AI as well.

Paul: We’re strategic about it. We’re strategic about it.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: It’s not that. What I’m saying is like, but you’re not going to call us to audit your books.

Rich: No, no, no. We are software people.

Paul: Design that firm. Design the big consulting firm for this new era. What’s it look like?

Rich: It’s strategic-heavy.

Paul: Okay. What does that mean?

Rich: Before you type into the box and start using all these cool tools and Claude Code and Claude Cowork and all this fun stuff, organizations are deeply complex systems that are part people, part computers. Almost every organization. Understanding that, spending time with that, and then crafting a solution for that particular organism.

Paul: But Rich, we already do this. Why would I want to hire—

Rich: What does this?

Paul: RichdeserthouseCoopers when I could hire PricewaterhouseCoopers who already send great strategists in?

Rich: No, but Pricewaterhouse, unlike, by the way, other firms that are more strategy-focused, Pricewaterhouse, they’ll see the strategy. They’ll sit there and spend three weeks and talk through what it should be, and then they bring 200 people.

Paul: Yeah, sure.

Rich: Like that’s what they sell. That’s what they’re about.

Paul: You’re thinking five.

Rich: I’m thinking five. No, I’m not thinking that. I’m not even thinking that. I’m thinking the strategy part of it is invaluable because AI can’t do it. AI can’t hang out and interview your users, understand your processes, study your—it’ll be useful to study your data. But that expertise of talking to the right people, what are your goals? What are your, what’s your five-year goal? Like that is management consulting of the highest order. Right? That interaction is going to get more expensive, I believe.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Because the machines, the execution side of that strategy, is going to get really cheap. Right? Because the machines are great at execution. But the time spent with those organizations is going to get more expensive. I think it’s going to get more expensive, by the way, because the money’s gone on the other end, to some extent, and the value is really at the top of the process, which is the strategic dialogue.

Paul: I mean, there’s a real risk coming, which is you can have all the software you ever wanted.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Sounds amazing.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: That can be a disaster.

Rich: It’s a, it’s a risk.

Paul: Yeah. You don’t want—what you, actually, here’s, I’ll tell you how I see the future.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I think that, and there have been a lot of, like, you ever heard the term data lake?

Rich: I have.

Paul: Right, the idea is that you’re going to centralize everything.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And those are always huge, huge efforts. Those efforts get a lot easier with vibe coding because it’s easier to migrate things into one consolidated system.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And I do see a future where you’re going in and you’re saying, “Look, here’s the future. The future is we’re going to take all your stuff, we’re going to put it in one place, and then we can very tactically spin up kind of any product you need.”

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Do you need a product for your salespeople? Do you need a product for marketing? Should the sales product and the marketing product talk to each other?

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Et cetera, et cetera. So that is going to get so much easier and cheaper.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But getting to the decision point, getting the data unlocked, and figuring out how—

Rich: Crafting the strategy.

Paul: That’s right.

Rich: Most people don’t have the skills to craft that strategy. I don’t mean that as a put down. It’s a particular skill.

Paul: A large organization, instead of picking up a platform like SAP or Salesforce and saying this will be the only platform we use or we’re going to just throw everything into a “data lake” and hope that whatever bobs to the surface is useful.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Can really have a truly well-architected platform that describes their whole business.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And then they can have any product they want on top of it in relatively short order. And those products are now disposable.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You can iterate. So it’s a very, very different culture of tracking, thinking. Even the governance parts of it, even the more complicated parts are going to get a lot more systematized. But there’s no way to skip the cleanup and the organization and the strategy steps in front.

Rich: Correct.

Paul: So that transformation is on the table and it wasn’t before.

Rich: Yeah, I think, look, this is the ultimate transformation tool. AI is the ultimate transformation tool. I think there are weird disincentives between partners in these large firms, frankly amongst their clients because they’re risk-averse and their numbers look good anyways. Like, “Do I really want to deal with this? Yeah, I know I’m on, I’m on Cobol, but…”

Paul: It works.

Rich: My numbers look great.

Paul: It works.

Rich: My numbers look great.

Paul: How many—we talk to tons of companies. And a lot of times people come and they want transformational change and then when you actually dig in they’re like, “I’m okay, really.”

Rich: Well, it’s not just saying I’m okay. It’s like, “Okay, well I want you to talk to Stan.”

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And he’s been doing this for 15 years and you show up and you are the grim reaper.

Paul: Everybody wants the new thing, but they never want to tell Stan no.

Rich: They never want to tell Stan no. That’s a normal thing.

Paul: Okay. So, but you, let’s, let’s close that. You define this new, the new consulting because we don’t think that the back end is where—because if you think about it, like a company like McKinsey, purely strategic, relatively small, expanded hugely over the last 20 years to cover more and more build and more and more digital stuff.

Rich: They felt they had to. They were in the room, they’re trusted, the brand is strong.

Paul: So this has been the move and people are basically so like a consulting firm now competes with Accenture, which competes with consulting firms, which competes with PwC, which competes with on and on and on.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: But what you see is a pattern where the strategy upfront in a real platform architecture and really thinking it through becomes where all of the work is going to be. Because so much of the work on the backend is going to be following a pattern, letting AI do it, and just go.

Rich: Yeah, I mean, I think we’ve learned as we’ve gone into organizations how strong the sort of the political will to resist any change is.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: It’s just not a negative thing. It just is what it is. I think, I think eventually everybody’s going to have to loosen up because, like, when the competitor across the street does it, you’re gonna have to do it. Right? I mean, that’s just—once you get a car on your phone, it was a matter of time for the taxis and the car service companies to reckon with that. Right? Like, that’s coming. It’s not going to be that fast just because humans are stubborn. But it’s coming. It’s coming. I mean, there are other mechanisms. You know, there are, there are funds and there are investors, there’s private equity that buy stuff that’s running inefficiently by design. Their whole goal is to make you more efficient.

Paul: Oh, they’re excited about this stuff.

Rich: They’re excited about this stuff, yes.

Paul: They see this as a way to unlock a lot of problem.

Rich: Yes. And that, that—your political resistance is not going to go very far there. Like, they are the owner and they’re going to make it happen one way or the other. That’s a, that’s a more sledgehammer approach. For organizations to let go? I’ll close it with this. There are partners at PwC who are close friends with their clients for 20 years.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: That is real.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Like, those relationships go deep. There is an alignment there that’s very strong. And I’m not saying that—

Paul: No, and it’s earned trust.

Rich: It’s not—yeah, it’s not bad. It’s not anything.

Paul: It’s really good. They worked really hard to build this really proactive relationship.

Rich: The spouse has come out for dinner.

Paul: Yeah, that’s right.

Rich: And that’s a real thing and that’s a meaningful thing for people. And so this is something that has shown up and it’s a rainbow-colored tornado that is spinning at everything. Some things will move more quickly than others, but it’ll take time.

Paul: You’re right. Everybody’s still going out to that nice steakhouse. That’s real.

Rich: That’s real.

Paul: Yep, that’s real. All right, so what does Aboard do?

Rich: Speaking of steak.

Paul: What does Aboard do?

Rich: We believe that AI is a transformational tool, and we embrace that, and we come in, we spend time with you, and we craft a solution. We’re really, really good at getting it to a credible place very quickly. So it looks like a demo within a week, but it’s actually a lot more than that. We have an amazing process and pipeline for building reliable software with this stuff. And we also understand we got to spend time with you first. So give us a call, hello@aboard.com.

Paul: I mean, the way to start that is that email that goes straight to you and me and to the team.

Rich: We’re small and nimble.

Paul: We’d love to talk to you. All right, so hello@aboard.com. Check out our website, aboard.com. We would love a good rating for the podcast, a good thumbs up on YouTube.

Rich: I want to close it with this. Paul, we made some friends at PwC. We love you guys. We think you’re great.

Paul: Oh, yeah, I didn’t see this as critical. Just like, here’s the PwC CEO saying it to half a million people.

Rich: [laughing] Yeah, exactly.

Paul: And that, I think, is an interesting moment to talk about. Yeah, they’re great. There’s tons of great people there.

Rich: I’m gonna write a rap song for PwC that I’ll sing next week. Do you sing a rap song or do you rap it?

Paul: Just even asking that question is really bad.

Rich: [laughing] All right.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Have a lovely week.

Paul: Bye!

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