Paul Ford: Hi, I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul: And you are listening to Reqless, the podcast about how AI is changing the world of software…and it is 2025.

Rich: Happy New Year!

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Paul: Richard.

Rich: Yes, sir?

Paul: Let’s not do a big bunch of predictions.

Rich: Do you do resolutions?

Paul: I’ve learned a few things about resolutions.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: They don’t work that great. But I think you can—you can have, like, a big, broad goal that you’re already working on.

Rich: Yeah. They’re unfair, in a way, a weird way. It’s too much pressure right out of the gate.

Paul: You tend to set the standard to, like, the absolute best apex version of yourself.

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul: Like, I’m running that marathon.

Rich: I’m gonna work out every day.

Paul: Every day. And then you miss one day and you’re like, it’s over. So no, my resolutions are more like, I want more physical resiliency. I want to do a little more reading.

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul: But really, really broad.

Rich: Got it.

Paul: But let’s not talk about us. Let’s talk about the industry.

Rich: All right.

Paul: All right. So look, rather than, like, sit here and be like, “AI is going to do this and that is going to do that.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Which I don’t, I don’t think is productive. So we should tell people, you and I, we have a software company, and it uses AI to help you build business software.

Rich: Yep.

Paul: The level of change in the industry is actually requiring us to kind of rethink a lot of our strategy and start to adapt to the velocity.

Rich: It’s almost like a challenge. It’s like, I’m not gonna, I’m now racing a machine. I’m racing that goofy robot you see in those, like—

Paul: Like John Henry versus the steam engine.

Rich: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul: He dies at the end. But it’s—

Rich: Well, different endings, this time.

Paul: Hopefully. No, I think, you know, I’m learning a lot from just using the tools every day. And what I want to do is I want to throw out a theme for the year. Not quite a resolution, but a theme.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: Like, a thing to address. And it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’m going to use a very small example, and then we’re going to go up to bigger examples.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: So I advise a very do-gooder New York press organization. They’re cooperative, they’re great, and they ask for kind of business advice sometimes, and they ask, now, you came out of editorial, and—

Rich: Size it up. For how many staff?

Paul: Eight people.

Rich: They have their own office?

Paul: No, nothing. There’s just, like, nothing.

Rich: It’s just eight people.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: If, like—

Rich: Tiny.

Paul: $1,000 is a lot of money for them to spend on anything, right?

Rich: Got it.

Paul: They’re just shoestring.

Rich: They make money?

Paul: They do.

Rich: They pay salaries.

Paul: They do.

Rich: All right. So it’s an ongoing concern.

Paul: It is, but it’s just tight all the time.

Rich: Right. Of course.

Paul: I went and talked to them and had a great conversation. I rarely go to Bushwick and so that was exciting for me. [laughter] And they were like, and I’m listening and I’m hearing them and I’m like, these people really don’t have access to a lot of tools. They get to use software as a service, Google Sheets. They get to use systems—

Rich: Cheap stuff.

Paul: Off the shelf or free. Slack, just sort of the basics.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: But they don’t really have access to software that is addressing their particular needs.

Rich: Well, I guess I’ll ask the question: Do they need it? Will they work better and smarter and will be, will it be a better publication if they had better software?

Paul: I’m going to say, as a person who truly loves software, finds it empowering, has achieved really interesting things in my own life by learning and understanding it and doing things with it and has seen it change organizations. The answer is absolutely yes. But culturally, we just don’t have that conversation because, you know, a full Salesforce implementation is utterly—

Rich: It’s not on the table for them. They simply cannot afford it.

Paul: Do-gooder orgs would call us at the agency and be like, “I have $5,000 to fix this.” And it I was like, “You’re off by, like, a factor of 50.”

Rich: Sure, sure.

Paul: “And I can help you. I’m going to give you some free advice here. But I can’t fix it.”

Rich: Sure.

Paul: What I think AI is going to do—and then I’m going to, I’m going to make this a little bigger. I’m not just talking about the, a small organization, but I’m going to talk about half the world economy, or half the American economy. What I think AI can do is allow them…I think that we, we fantasize that we’re in a software glut because there’s software scattered all the way everywhere. But I actually think we’re kind of in a software famine. There isn’t, there aren’t enough tools that are customized to people’s needs, given what computers can do.

Rich: Because of cost.

Paul: Because of cost. Because programmers in particular, engineering—

Rich: It’s expensive!

Paul: It’s very expensive and it’s going to continue to be expensive. You still need humans in the loop. But I do think that you can do so much more with so much less now. You can orchestrate things. Organize things. You can have it solve particular problems. Integrate with, you know, APIs. I’m, I’ll give you an example which would be like, you know, a custom subscription-tracking tool that also lets me know who came to a party.

Rich: Sure…

Paul: Because—

Rich: It’ll track customers…

Paul: It’ll send them an email saying like, “You know, you came to the party. Do you want to buy the book?”

Rich: Sure.

Paul: You know, that kind of thing. That’s hard to build. You only really build that if you’re a pretty big organization, and you do…

Rich: It’s hard to build.

Paul: It’s hard to build. It’s easy to do for 20 people. It’s really hard when you have thousands.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But if you—and really the only people who solve it are the people who have kind of, like, millions of people on their list.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: In the future—and now, starting kind of now, you will kind of type into the box that you need that. And it’ll build some of it. Some of it will break, today.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But there—

Rich: Today?

Paul: You can make progress, serious progress along that goal. Today you still need to be pretty nerdy. My guess is in about a year or two you will just be able to type it into the box and get a relatively good approximation.

Rich: I think you’re right. That’s not now, but okay. [laughing]

Paul: So that’s—

Rich: You went from, like, in the next year—you went from now to the in the next year.

Paul: But we are headed in that direction.

Rich: Absolutely.

Paul: Incremental progress—

Rich: Absolutely.

Paul: —in a $3 trillion industry is zillions of dollars of progress.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: That’s math.

Rich: That’s right.

Paul: Okay, now let me expand it. That is a small organization. They’re great. I love them. We had a good conversation. Now let’s take it up to not the really big businesses, but the middle tier, what’s called middle market and some small businesses, larger small businesses—

Rich: SMB.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: Small-to-medium-sized businesses.

Paul: Describe those companies in broad terms.

Rich: Well, typically there’s actually parameters around defining a small-to-medium-sized business, which is I think a business between, I’m going to go ahead and say $10 million and $300 million in revenue.

Paul: That’s right. Often—

Rich: $400 million in revenue. There’s no science to it.

Paul: Scaling up to hundreds of employees, maybe thousands.

Rich: Tens to hundreds of employees. Maybe thousands. There are so many of those businesses. So many of them. And they’re a huge part of the economy.

Paul: They’re half the economy.

Rich: They’re half the economy.

Paul: But they’re a pain to service.

Rich: They’re in that no-man’s land.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: They’re in that no-man’s land because, first off, they’re not foolish enough to run their business on Google Sheets. They’re not going to do that.

Paul: No.

Rich: They do have products. But they can’t by the bespoke, highly customized, thoughtfully laid out software tools that really fit like a glove for their needs.

Paul: So they can’t afford the really good tailor. But they’re too big for off the rack.

Rich: That’s right. That’s right.

Paul: And there really isn’t much like, as I’m saying, and I’m sort of going to squeeze that metaphor, even though it isn’t perfect?

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: There isn’t a lot between like the bespoke tailor and off the rack.

Rich: No.

Paul: There isn’t, like, half-tailor.

Rich: No. And you know, the thing you got to remember about businesses is that businesses experience change in meaningful ways, especially growing businesses. And so software doesn’t move, to-date, status quo, software doesn’t move quickly. It doesn’t react quickly enough to the change, the sort of dramatic change that can hit a small business. And when I say small business, it could be hundreds of employees. But if they crack—I’ll give you an example. I’ll use a concrete example. They had rights to seven states in the Northeast and they won the rights to the Midwest.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: And now—

Paul: Their territory has expanded. The distributor, the manufacturers said, “Go.”

Rich: Exactly. Enormous growth ahead.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Okay? Let’s throw a party. Pop open the champagne. The tools they have to scale up and to react to that kind of change, which is you could, on its face, looks like positive change? Creates enormous strain. And so what ends up happening is the cost of change is too high on the software side, so they kind of just keep going. And what happens is humans create all these shims to just keep the machine moving. They’ll use spreadsheets, they’ll use, you know, it’ll be manual. Email becomes workflow. It gets intense. And so why is that happening? It’s happening is because they don’t have the time. That’s, by the way, it’s not just money. It’s time. They don’t have 10 months.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: To, like, sit down with consultants and—

Paul: Let’s pretend: You be a company looking for change.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I’ll be the software industry today. And then we’ll do what we think it’s going to be like in the future.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: So, hey Rich, great to meet you. I’m glad I’m here from—

Rich: How are ya?

Paul: I’m here from [laughing] Deloitte Salesforce Microsoft Monolith.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Okay? And tell me about your problem.

Rich: I’ll tell you my problem and it’s a tricky one. I sell mail-in prescriptions, medicine. It’s cheaper than walking into Walgreens. And I just got a green light to sell in Oregon and Washington state.

Paul: Uh huh.

Rich: Which is big new markets for us. There’s a problem, though. The state laws require different forms and different information, different patient information before I can sell to them. And—

Paul: Hey, that’s great. While you’re talking, I’m just looking at fantasy football scores. [laughter] But I’m going to tell you, I pattern matched on three or four words you said.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: And I’m ready to sell you the HIPAA Compliance Cloud with built-in Washington State—or D.C. I wasn’t really listening—compliance tools. And it’s about six months for us to do the analysis and set it up for you. It’ll cost about $2 million, but then—

Rich: No, but—

Paul: It is yours for $100,000 a year.

Rich: No, no—

Paul: Month! Month! [laughing in-character] Oh God, I’m sorry!

Rich: No, no, no. First off, I need it sooner. Can I just hack what I have?

Paul: [laughing manically in-character] Oh God! Oh, yeah, absolutely! You can do that.

Rich: Okay, so—

Paul: Why don’t you just go back to your world of garbage and live in your garbage world on a pile of garbage software and do garbage?

Rich: Okay…

Paul: Because that’s what you can do. Because my company is worth $2 trillion.

Rich: First off, you’re very mean for a salesperson. I’m just going to say that out loud.

Paul: Well, I’m just being—I’m the software industry. And the software industry is really mean. [laughing]

Rich: Okay. Now I hang up the phone and what often happens, what often happens is you get the three freelancers and one engineer on staff.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: To hack.

Paul: There’s that. And there’s also, “Hey, we’re going to outsource this to [insert major region of the world].” Eastern Europe, South America…

Rich: Exactly.

Paul: India. Also there is a middle tier of, like, non-Salesforce CRMs. Like a Pipedrive, where it’s like, “We’re going to customize that for you.”

Rich: Yeah. And look, what we’re talking about here is the pressure that hits a small business who needs that change.

Paul: But why don’t they just spend the $2 million and get what everybody else has?

Rich: I think two reasons. One, that’s a lot of money.

Paul: It’s, I think it’s—

Rich: It’s a low margin business, let’s say. I’m just running—

Paul: Even if it’s not, they’re not used to tickets like that for software. It’s scary.

Rich: It’s scary. And there’s another reason, which is time.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: They tell you five months and it’s like, “No, we, we need to go to market. It’s fall, people need antibiotics, people get sick.”

Paul: It’s also like you, when you buy software, you have to have an instinct for what works.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: To spend those millions of dollars. It’s so scary because most projects fail.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: So, so now if you really wanted to spend that $2 million, you actually have to go find a half-million-dollar employee who can spend it for you.

Rich: There is all that.

Paul: So that your risk is low.

Rich: I need a CTO. I was having dinner with a friend who, a friend of theirs who I don’t know, I’ve never met was, has a growing, thriving company and he just turned to me and he said, “He’s decided he needs a CTO.”

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Right? And what that is is essentially I need to, I need someone who’s competent enough to buy the right services and software. That’s really what you’re talking—

Paul: And that’s pain. Nobody—because literally so many people are not going to get Ski-Doos, because you have to buy that resource.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: Right? That’s how—

Rich: I’ve talked to this executive who has a heavily modified Hummer to make it electrical. That was his project.

Paul: Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Right?

Rich: [laughing] I’m not joking.

Paul: No, I know. There’s an element of middle-market where it’s pretty goofy.

Rich: It’s goofy.

Paul: And it’s like, “I just want that lake house. Why would I have to get Salesforce?”

Rich: So now let me take over this podcast.

Paul: Thank God.

Rich: Okay? You are Mr. Legacy. You are everything until this very moment.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Now I’m going to talk about the future.

Paul: Okay, so I’m the, I’m, I’m going to come to you as the business stakeholder.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Hi Rich. Boy, okay, we have, like, 20 years of code and we have this, we have an old Microsoft system and we’ve got, there’s some Linux servers. Anyway, it’s really wild. We use it for CRM, we use it for resource planning. But since we grew the market, we can’t actually, like, things—for some reason it just won’t let me put Michigan in.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And so I got all these problems, man. And the last guy was like, just go use Salesforce. But it’s just endless. Like I just, I’d have to build a 20-person team to handle it. And we don’t have the money right now. I don’t have the budget.

Rich: Let’s pause this little Arthur Miller play for a second.

Paul: Okay… Biff! Biff!

Rich: It’s worth noting that for a lot of small businesses, they’re not asking for a patch. They’re actually asking to get out of a whole world that they’re in to get to a better place. And we call that digital transformation. We call that, you know—

Paul: But small businesses may not even know how to ask for it. They’re just like—

Rich: They don’t know how to ask for it.

Paul: ‘I’m in pain, my leg hurts.”

Rich: That’s right. So here we are today. Now this is the future. Yeah, what we’re going to do is we’re going to put a solutions engineer next to you. Talk to your team. We just need to spend a day and we’ll show you some software later this week.

Paul: I think this is real. I think that because I could do this today if I was the solutions engineer.

Rich: You could do this today.

Paul: Not even with Aboard. Like I could just do this with fake components and kind of, like…

Rich: You could kind of cobble stuff together. And what this is shattering, by the way, is the idea that these innovations that we’re seeing that are coming at us at a ridiculous clip are really just the domain of, like, experts and engineers. And the truth is they’re going to trickle up and out to the culture around buying software, paying for software around business needs. It’s going to take time.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: It’s going to take a minute. But it’s going to make its way out.

Paul: I mean I think what’s wild is the two spaces I think about that are tremendously underserved, because middle market ultimately there are a lot of products that will kind of get them through even though they, they limp along. But NGOs get fleeced terribly, because what happens is they get, they actually can go out and get magical budget. They can get donations to like do a Salesforce-based implementation.

Rich: Sure. Salesforce—huge amount of Salesforce spend at NGOs.

Paul: But the maintenance, it’s almost like when rich people get the building built but there’s no money for the janitors at the college. You know, it’s all, you know, the, the something center for the performing arts.

Rich: But a lot of software has been bought that sits dormant, man.

Paul: That’s what happens. Right? And so like I actually think maintenance and sort of long-term development, as long as well as cheaper stuff will have a big impact there. Government is the one that is going to be, when it ever breaks, you know, if you can get, they’re very locked into their procurement systems and the consulting firms they use. But government is a space where you know, the app on your phone that helps you get access to your veterans’ benefits.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Could be developed 10 times faster.

Rich: It can. And the truth is this isn’t going to happen quickly.

Paul: No.

Rich: It’s not going to happen quickly because there’s too much money at stake.

Paul: Exactly. There’s a lot of moats and defenses.

Rich: Now I want to talk about garbage.

Paul: All right, let’s talk about. So anyway. So, but wait. Let’s just make our—the thing that I see happening next year, like starting today. The reality is I could prototype, if you gave me two weeks. Me, Paul Ford system solution specialist, I could sit with you, I know business software very well.

Rich: Yup.

Paul: I could sit with you as a human and then I could sit down at a prompt because I’m a person who knows how to program, and I could build you a reasonable first pass solution using open-source software and I could put it in front of you and I could say, “What do you like?” What we’re aiming for at Aboard is maybe you could do that in, like, a minute. Like, you could get that first version out.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: And then we could figure out what you need. But even now, as we’re building that, that is possible today. And the space is moving so quickly that, by the end of the year I expect it to be going even faster, more iterative, lots of new tools being built and things getting into people’s hands.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So here we are today. Now talk about garbage.

Rich: In New York City.

Paul: Where we live.

Rich: Where we live, there’s a weird relationship with garbage. The city itself has the Department of Sanitation. They collect garbage from residential homes.

Paul: And I love New York because we won’t let you put it anywhere except on the street. So New York is literally a city of garbage.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: We can’t have big, big bins or anything. And I don’t want to talk about that anymore.

Rich: Strangely, if you are a commercial business—

Paul: Oh!

Rich: A truck that is not related to the city.

Paul: Meaning a bit like, we’re in an office right now, that is a commercial business.

Rich: A restaurant.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: A truck that is not affiliated with the city, that is affiliated with a private business that will be lit up like a Christmas tree for some reason.

Paul: Yeah, they’re very—

Rich: And painted a glossy coat of paint.

Paul: Huh!

Rich: Will collect your garbage.

Paul: You know, you know what I like to say about rules like that?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: They were godfathered in. [laughing]

Rich: There you go. So let’s not be coy about it.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: The truth is, to this day.

Paul: Mmm hmm?

Rich: The city has ceded the collection of commercial garbage to what is essentially a locked-in, anti-competitive, territorial breakdown of private businesses that collect rubbish to this day.

Paul: Godfathered.

Rich: [laughter] If you have a restaurant in Bay Ridge, especially Bay Ridge.

Paul: Yeah. 100%.

Rich: If you have a restaurant in Bay Ridge, you don’t get to pick from three different rubbish-removal companies and get the cheapest.

Paul: No. There are a few, like, the cable companies and the rubbish companies, they just got it on lock.

Rich: Why, you may ask, am I bringing this up in the world of AI? And I’m bringing it up because you’re. You just made a 2025 prediction, but that may be a ’26 or ’27 prediction. And the reason for that is that people will defend that territory. And that will be defended in a very—there’s too much money at stake.

Paul: The technological capability to build in a really good working prototype at about 10X the speed exists today. The cultural understanding and demand and excitement about that might approach zero today.

Rich: And there will be many who will dispel it, who will tell you that it’s not good and it’s not safe and it’s not secure.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Why? Because there’s too much money at stake.

Paul: Well, there’s also, there are points there which is, like, people run very robust cybersecurity infrastructure, blah, blah, blah.

Rich: The work, software work is messy no matter what.

Paul: Yeah. Privacy is a huge issue.

Rich: But there are contracts out there that are $1 million a month that people are going to defend to the death. Like, let’s just be real here. Because I may say, “Hey, I want to exercise the cancellation clause. I know I have to give you a kill fee.”

Paul: Yes.

Rich: “And you can have your damn kill fee because I’m about to chop my costs by 90%.”

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: That is not going to happen tomorrow.

Paul: No, they’re not going to take that in comfortably. They’re going to fight the first second that they hear. And it’s, it’s, honestly, you know what’s really gonna happen, Richard? It won’t be like, “You can’t have that,” because that’s never how it goes. It goes, “Use AI Services Cloud. We have one.”

Rich: It will happen slowly.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And then very, very quickly.

Paul: But they, no, no, but what? The big players who are defending that—

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: They’re gonna provide pseudo products.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And they’re gonna say, you can’t let your people just sit at some random prompt and make software all day.

Rich: It’s, there’s probably a term for it out of like, business school. I’m sure HBR has talked about it. Something about defending the status quo in the business context.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: The defensibility of your territory, it’s a moat around it.

Paul: No, it’s lock-in.

Rich: It’s lock-in. Call it whatever you want.

Paul: They’re going to defend. They’re going to defend and try to further the lock-in.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: AI explodes lock-in, in ways that I don’t think folks are processing.

Rich: Humans and culture will fight it.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: It will take a minute. I thought it was going to take 10 years. I think it’s going to take a lot less time than that. It’ll be a year, years.

Paul: I mean the good news, if you—

Rich: I think we’ll start to see the cracks this year.

Paul: If you out there defending your turf, the good news is, like, getting good results requires a lot of practice and thinking.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So since there’s almost none of that in the software industry right now because everybody’s really tired and doesn’t come into the office, you have a minute to figure it out. But yeah, I think you’re like, it’s going to get more and more turnkey.

Rich: Wow. Looking forward to ’25. It should be an exciting year for us.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: And everyone.

Paul: Well, thankfully there’s nothing else going on in the world, so we can just keep our eyes on this.

Rich: Fun!

Paul: Yeah. Good times.

Rich: Check us out at aboard.com. We’d love to talk to you about how that software you never thought you could afford, you can all of a sudden get exactly what you need.

Paul: That is real. That is what we’re going for.

Rich: Hello@aboard.com.

Paul: Bye! Happy 2025.

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