Real AI Transformation Costs HALF of Everyone's Salary for 2 Years | Chris Blackburn, Liatrio

Most companies think they're transforming with AI. They're not, and the gap between what they believe and what's actually happening on the ground is costing them far more than they realize. In this episode, Craig Smith sits down with Chris Blackburn, founder and CEO of Liatrio, a consultancy that has spent a decade embedding directly inside large enterprises to help them actually change how they work, not just what tools they use. The conversation opens with a striking data point: the average enterprise Blackburn works with operates at just 5 to 6% efficiency, meaning employees spend only three to three-and-a-half hours per week on work that genuinely creates value, compared to Toyota's benchmark of 70%. The core argument is that AI is being applied to the wrong part of the problem: individual productivity gains don't flow through to the bottom line if the organizational system around the individual - the approvals, handoffs, bureaucracy, and middle management layers - stays exactly the same. Blackburn introduces a concept he calls "strangling the enterprise": rather than trying to transform a 5,500-person organization all at once, build a small, low-bureaucracy unit inside it that operates with radical autonomy, proves the model works, and expands outward. The episode closes with a frank conversation about what real transformation actually costs: roughly half of total compensation spend across the organization, sustained for two years, a number Blackburn describes as "absolutely insane" and one he believes most CFOs aren't yet prepared to confront. Key Topics Covered: ● Why the average enterprise operates at 5-6% efficiency, and what Toyota's 70% benchmark reveals about the scale of the opportunity AI could unlock ● The critical distinction between individual productivity gains and system-level improvement, and why saving an hour doesn't automatically improve the bottom line ● "Strangle the enterprise": how to build a small, autonomous AI-native unit inside a large organization rather than trying to transform the whole thing at once ● Why most CEOs are dangerously disconnected from the actual work being done, and what McKinsey says about how much time they should be spending on transformation ● What AI transformation actually costs: roughly half of total compensation spend, sustained over two years, and why most CFOs aren't ready for that number ● Why AI isn't just changing jobs but changing life - from shorter work weeks to longer health spans - and what the farming analogy reveals about how slowly societies absorb new productivity As enterprises pour money into AI tools while reporting little bottom-line impact, this conversation offers the most operationally honest account available of why that gap exists, and what organizations that actually want to close it need to be willing to do differently. Subscribe to Eye on A. I. for weekly conversations with the people building and deploying the future of AI. Craig Smith on X: https://x.com/craigss EYE On A. I. on X: https://x.com/EyeOn_AI Connect with Chris Blackburn LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisblackburn

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Turns a software and building digital products into a team sport rather than individual sport. They brought culture and process into the thinking a lot more and really just had this hyper focus of looking at the end to end of everything that's being built.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  You're a big believer that AI isn't just gonna change jobs, it's gonna change life. And I believe that too.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  We believe that because things are moving so quickly right now and how hard it is in change management for these large, complex organizations to truly operate in a new way is what we try to do is strangle away a part of the organization. So what does transformation cost to transform an organization into modern ways of working with AI? Is you are likely going to spend the equivalent of everyone's salary over a two-year period. So if the average employee is $150,000 a person, take that and divide that over two years. Everybody inside the organization.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  So efficiency, as you say, is the means, not the point. And there's a lot of talk about efficiency, but as you say, that's not the destination, not the first step.

• 1:04Speaker 00

  So Chris, why don't you start by introducing yourself? So I'm Chris Blackburn, founder and CEO of Liatrio. Started Liatrio a little over 10 years ago, after having a long history in contracting and consulting in the technology space. But really, everything goes way back further than that. My father ran a software consulting company, nothing like what we do at all today, old digital VAX, VMS systems and all that. But I really got to see what it was like to run a small business, be an entrepreneur and all of that. And I just knew that that was going to be the future for me. I have a degree in computer science, so I come from a technology background.

• 1:46Speaker 00

  And part of my early kind of transition was I found out that I do not have a huge passion for writing code. I'm not the person that can be put in a corner. The old days with, when I started, it was like, give them a pizza and a two-liter of Mountain Dew type of thing. And that just wasn't for me.

• 2:04Speaker 00

  I'm a systems thinker, I'm a huge efficiency freak. And I think that really led into a lot of the stuff that I do. So early in my career, I actually got into like system administration, both Unix, Solaris, as well as the early days of Linux and then network administration and all that type of stuff. I really liked hooking computers and systems and all of that together. Ultimately, really that led right back into software development space, but kind of the stuff around it and what we now call software delivery. So source control management, build automation and all of that, which turned into continuous integration and continuous delivery. And then really, when the DevOps movement happened, I feel like I found my space. DevOps was such a huge part for me.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  I think it aligned a lot to how I think about efficiency and not just efficiency for efficiency's sake, but efficiency of a system, the end-to-end system. So DevOps brought a lot of thinking around like value stream mapping, lean techniques, systems thinking and all that type of stuff. And I got real deep into it and super nerdy about it and just love everything there. You know, it turns software and building digital products into a team sport rather than individual sport. They brought a culture and process into the thinking a lot more. And really just had this hyper focus of looking at the end-to-end of everything that's being built. So we talked about that today. We call it the from aha to cha-ching, the entire value stream and looking at everything that connects in there.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  So ultimately, that became the beginning of my, you know, real part of my career was kind of the DevOps movement and the purity of DevOps.

• 3:41Speaker 00

  I live in Sacramento, California. Sacramento is the state capital and really all the work in the area is state and federal government work. And we all know how slow that moves. And so I wanted to find something faster and better and more awesome. So I spent all of my career in the Bay Area, a lot of that in San Francisco and all of the surrounding areas. And just really got influenced by, you know, the startup culture, hustle culture, but more than anything, like passion, excitement and motivation for building the future and all of that. I thought that was really exciting. However, I found myself all the time in large, complex organizations, enterprises.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  And I tell the story as almost a joke, but you know, you could be in a building in downtown San Francisco and stand outside the elevator and on one end of the building is a new high-flying startup and on the other end is a old stodgy enterprise. And as people walk off the elevator, you can almost just tell where they're going. Are they motivated, excited, passionate? Are they going to change the world and they're going to the startup? Do they feel like, you know, life's not awesome? This is not enjoyable, they're just here to do a job, felt like they were going to the enterprise. And I really wanted to be part of a change there. So my entire career was spent in the enterprise and it was spent trying to bring this passion, excitement, motivation to the enterprise.

• 5:03Speaker 00

  And then finally, the final piece of it was being in the enterprise, I got to see every other consulting firm on the planet there. From the biggest, most strategic firms, all the way down to the service providers. And I just really felt like if you looked at what the work that was being done, it wasn't always the customer winning, but the service provider was winning. And I just thought that was backwards and I thought I could build a firm where we would win by default if our customers win. And so that's where I started Liatrio, like I said, a little over 10 years ago. You know, in the DevOps space for enterprises or complex organizations. But really was the purity of DevOps more than anything, end-to-end flow of value, getting teams to work better together, efficiency plays,

• 5:47Speaker 00

  small batch, quick iteration to learn and experiment and try things out and uplift the organization together. And I thought that was the most important thing of Liatrio is building a firm that was doing uplift or enablement. And I think that's where we're really unique. And while everyone says it, everyone says they do enablement, I think Liatrio really stands out in the way that we do it. We work very closely with our customers, pairing, hands on the keyboard, showing them a better way, building a better kind of culture and excitement around all of that. And really, more than anything, it crosses the entire hierarchy. So today, Liatrio is about 175 people in size. About three-quarters of the team are engineers, hands on the keyboard builders and some really amazing engineers.

• 6:32Speaker 00

  But what's unique about them is they are all coaches, they're guides, they're teachers that take the customer on the journey. We have a saying that we are not the hero, we're the guide in the story, our customer needs to be the hero. And that's really exciting. 25% of Liatrio looks more like management consulting, but really that's like the change management of the rest of the organization. Working with executive as a senior leadership to show them how that they're, they're there to influence their team, guide them, think about things in the new way, challenge them and all of that. So just up and down the stack of these really large, complex organizations. So a lot of these words are, you know, used throughout the industry and mean different things.

• 7:14Speaker 00

  Change management always kind of feels like maybe a funky word that talks about just process more than anything and, and, and new ways of doing stuff. We think about change management of doing that while building with the customer. And not just change management on the teams that are builders, but change management through the entire organization. So that's what we do. Obviously, this AI thing, and I'm super excited to talk about it, has really changed how we look at the opportunity space more than anything. But I think little has changed from Liatrio's perspective is this is just a new piece of technology. Yes, it's 10 or 100 or 1,000 times greater and stronger and more powerful than the technologies before it.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  But our goal is to help our customers adopt the new technology, embed it in their ways of working, change how they work and change their organization to ultimately deliver better digital products and digital services to their customers. And really proud of what we're doing, excited for the future. You know, we've been going through this AI kind of hype cycle of what it's going to be or our engineer is going to be a thing. Now they're going to be the best thing, our consultancy is going to be around, now they're obviously needed and all that. So I'm just crazy excited for what the future has in front of us and for us to play a pretty big part of that.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it seems that you're at the cusp or in the, in the takeoff of a new industry. And I mean, as you said, consultancy's been around for a while, but this is an informed consultancy that, that didn't exist before and people, every enterprise is struggling to get their hands around it. I've seen that the big, I do some work with Boston Consulting, BCG. And, and they have a whole build arm now.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  So they go in and consult and then build solutions. Do you guys do that? And, and I've thought in watching BCG that there is a huge market, you know, just because

• 9:30Speaker 01

  of their global reach and, and the demand, they can only reach the, you know, Fortune 2000 or whatever. But there's The economy is built up of smaller organizations that that need that help. Um, and and you go down into smaller, uh, medium sized organizations. Is that right?

• 9:58Speaker 00

  We do. Our primary focus is the largest, most complex organizations for sure. Uh, and what we say is it's the largest or the most complex. We see a lot of smaller organizations that have a ton of complexity. And they have years of history and ways of doing things and structural issues and things like that that caused them to be very complex and how they deliver their digital value. And, you know, to begin with, we were just a straight technology consulting firm. And now I believe that, you know, we're going to stop talking technology or engineers and things like that. And we're going to start talking builders and, uh, knowledge workers and everyone is going to need this same uplift. So, uh, if you're a white collar worker that works at a computer, you're a knowledge worker.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  You're going to be a builder of the future is what I believe. So it also widens the net of opportunity and and teams that need that help. Um, but yeah, to answer your question, primarily focused on the largest organizations, but we spend time and you know, that mid-market or small enterprise focus as well. And I agree with you. I think a lot of them, uh, do need help. They need help across the board. The way that we're kind of driven and kind of what motivates us is is we think that the largest enterprise organizations are the companies that everyday humans rely on every single day to go about their day. Right? So these are the ones you rely on to do your banking or financial work or go to the grocery store or travel and all of that.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  And I think have ultimately the biggest opportunity or benefit to humanity for a long period of time. I love startups. I love, uh, new things that come out and I think those are going to be fantastic and grow there as well. But, uh, what guides us or what drives us is to say, what's going to be amazing for humanity in the future? And a lot of the existing companies that are there today, uh, have this real opportunity. I don't think you're going to see new startups come out of, uh, nowhere and start an airline or something like that. The cost of capital and airplanes and all that type of stuff is, uh, is so high that it's almost, uh, difficult to disrupt.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  But there's a ton of opportunity within those industries that is as an example, to make them better and make them better for everyone. Um, so that's, that's kind of where we try to focus and what gets us excited and gets us motivated.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I've read some of your, uh, stuff. You you're a, a big believer that AI isn't just going to change jobs. It's going to change life. Uh, and I believe that too, but can you explain, uh, what that means to you to change life?

• 12:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. Um, I think it's all intertwined together. Uh, it's going to change jobs that are going to enforce a change to life and all of that as well. You know, I, I, I'm always probably a big believer that I think things are going to move faster than they actually do. So there's going to be a time horizon to this and all of that. But, uh, I just believe so deeply that it's technology. And AI is just the technology of choice today, but technology is deflationary. Technology is, you know, there to do more with less type of thing. And I just believe we have this awesomeness right in front of us today. That can lead to a lot more just human life enjoyment. And I really believe that want to drive towards it. I've been telling a story lately.

• 13:17Speaker 00

  Uh, you know, where I'm excited about the future and what keeps me motivated personally, uh, my parents, uh, they're aging like, uh, well, everybody's parents are type of thing. And, uh, you know, I think about what would make them live longer so they could be around us and be around their grandchildren and here soon their great grandchildren and all of that. And it's obvious to look at things like healthcare and other areas like that, right? Is if we can improve the healthcare system to give, give them better care and cancer research and all of that type of stuff, that will definitely have an impact on their life longevity and life happiness. Right? But I take it all the way down to just the everyday uses of things. And kind of the example that I've been walking with lately is,

• 13:59Speaker 00

  you know, take airlines again, right? Is if we could figure out a way to work with Airbus or Boeing and improve their efficiency and how they build and deliver airplanes, which maybe will make them cheaper for an airline like Delta to purchase or something like that, that'll translate all the way down to the customer having easier access to airfare at a cheaper price. And that will mean that over the next 20 years that my parents are hopefully around for, they'll be able to take a, an additional international trip or two. And that will just give them joy and excitement and seeing the world. And you know why? You probably can't measure that and say that equals them living for an extra year or something like that. I think it's easy to see that there's a potential there.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  And then take that and just apply it to everything. And I think that that should be a motivator for us and keep us so excited about what the potential is to get there. You intertwine the jobs conversation in it. Uh, I think it's going to be very interesting. I think society is going to have to figure out so much of what it looks like. Uh, I've been saying, I believe that a four day work week is coming sooner than later. And then, you know, with increased, uh, efficiency and output and just awesomeness for everybody else, maybe that turns to a three or two day, who knows? But what does that mean for human purpose and passion and excitement? I think we're going to have to figure that all out. Right? I could, I have three kids in college right now at the same time. Uh, you know, so I think deeply about this as well.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  Like, what does their career look like? And how do they stay excited about what the future is when the future is pretty unknown right now and exactly what it's going to look like? And I think it's just helping them find passion, how helping them find something that they could be excited and motivated by and be part of the future versus having the future kind of tell them what to do. So that's what really keeps me excited for all of it. And, you know, this isn't just for my parents. It's for everybody's parents. It's for everybody's children. And I think that if we all get motivated behind a, a message or, or something like that, that it could just be really, really great. And I think there's the opportunity for it, you know, and that's what we see specifically. Sorry that I'm going on and on here is, you know, spending so much time in these large organizations.

• 16:14Speaker 00

  We are certain and we know there is humongous opportunity for efficiency of existing service. Uh, for opportunity of new services and all of that. And that should translate directly to the consumer. And it should translate into, uh, having more for less or having the same at cheaper prices or whatever it is. But I think could really do some amazing things. It's going to be bumpy. It's going to be rocky, especially for the next few years of what that looks like. But that's exciting to me for it to be bumpy and rocky while we figure it out, uh, for the greater good of everyone, I think.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. You use an analogy of, on of farming. Uh, that, that before mechanized farming, most of humanity spent most of its time growing food and, uh, that AI is a similar unlock, not just for one industry, but for cognitive labor, uh, that consumes a lot of, uh, modern life. Uh, what do you see as the possibilities? I mean, you mentioned, um, you know, having extending health span is, is the, the term people use now to, uh, to, you know, it's spend more time with families. You've mentioned the shorter work week.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Uh, but what are the possibilities with that?

• 17:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think this is where I think people have to figure it out. Um, so you know, the farming analogy, I think a lot of people are using it now. It's becoming pretty, pretty simple to think about. You know, if you look back in the early 1800s, you know, 90% of the population worked in the agricultural space in some way, somehow. And now it's like 3% or something like that, right? A significant change there. And if you think about dropping a John Deere tractor of 2026 back into the early 1800s, like theoretically would help that single farmer out, you know, on his very small, uh, plot of land or something like that. But the rest of the system wasn't there to support it. Right? So, uh, there wasn't, uh, uh,

• 18:22Speaker 00

  cooled, uh, travel trailers and things like that to keep the crops fresh, you know, railroad doesn't exist. It didn't exist as much as it does today. Uh, just, you know, making sure to take the, uh, increased productivity of a farm and then spread it out for everyone. And I think we're going to go through a lot of that right now is the underlying system that's going to take advantage of all of this. But what does the future look like? I don't know exactly. Uh, and I think that we're going to have to figure it out. I hope it's not, uh, more time for people to sit around on the couch, being on TikTok or watching TV, but it's more time for them to go after passion projects and things that they're excited about. Passion is a huge motivator to me and I think it's unfortunate and

• 19:06Speaker 00

  I bump into this regularly. We talk to people at our customers or in the industry and stuff like that. And, uh, they will just come out and say it that, that this industry in the space is not a passion project for them. We're in technology. We're very fortunate to be paid well because of it. And I think a lot of people are in the space because it's paid well. Uh, and they work to live, you know, type of thing and all of that versus mixing work and life together and being excited about all of that. So I think we're going to go through this giant passion reckoning, uh, happening here very soon where people are going to have to figure out what that looks like. But I think people are going to have to be intentional about it because if you're not intentional, you could just, uh, end up being on the couch, watching TV more or just scrolling more on your phone.

• 19:49Speaker 00

  And I think that that's a, that's an opportunity for a lot of people, new businesses and all that type of stuff to build more things that are more enjoyable for people to be part of. Um, but I think that that's going to be the bumpy rocky part of it as we figure it out for sure. If we just, if we just flip to a three day work week next week, you know, overnight type of thing. I think it would be really, really weird for sure. And I think that the the structure and system and the supporting mechanism of it is going to have to change, you know, like we would need more bowling alleys and golf courses and all that type of stuff for people to spend time at. And like, so it's not going to just happen overnight. It's going to need to happen, uh, you know, while the industry moves around it.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And it's going to happen gradually as people figure it out. Uh, the, I, I've had Nick Bostrom. He's a philosopher at, uh, Oxford on the podcast. He wrote that book, Super Intelligence, uh, that, that a lot of people have read. But he, he wrote a, a, a book more recently called Deep Utopia, like what is human life like? Once we have, we live in a technologically solved world and and, uh, what you're saying is, um, about motivation that I think the responsibility is going to fall back on people. It's going to have to.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Be in the education system of of how to find things that you really care about. Uh, as opposed to going out and getting a job and having a guy tell you what to do every day.

• 21:23Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, and I I talk to young people, I my my kids are tired of hearing it. I have a niece who's about to go to college and I want to shake her and say, you know, you're living in the most exciting time in the human history, like be excited.

• 21:43Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  So, uh, so efficiency, as you say, uh, is the means, not the point. Uh, and there's a lot of talk about efficiency, but but as you say, that's the not the destination. That's the the first step.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Can you talk about, uh, right now enterprises are facing a bottleneck between AI and real life? Uh, they they are chasing efficiency, but uh, a lot of that efficiency, uh, kind of gets uh,

• 22:27Speaker 01

  kind of disappears. Uh, you know, if you someone saves an hour of time, uh, they don't, that doesn't necessarily flow to the enterprise's bottom line.

• 22:38Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Uh, so can you talk about that? Uh, how enterprises are uh, adopting what they need to adopt uh, to to to transform in this AI world?

• 22:55Speaker 00

  Absolutely. There's so much to unpack here, uh, that we feel like we've, uh, learned, you know, as an industry over the last fifteen or twenty years and all of that. And you're you're exactly right. Efficiency is not the end goal. Uh, efficiency frees up the opportunity for the end goal and what that looks like. Um, so, you know, looking at the picture of this is what is efficiency? Why do you want efficiency? What does efficiency look like currently inside of large, complex organizations? And and how do you like compare it to something else, you know? So we talk a lot about our space, almost trying to mirror things like a manufacturing plant, a physical manufacturing plant.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  Or the goal of that manufacturing plant is raw materials come in one side and go out as a finished product on the other side to be sold to a customer. Uh, then we talk about the digital factory type of thing and ideas come in one end and a digital product goes out the other end for customers to use and all that. And inside the physical factory, the raw materials come in and they go through machinery and process and all of that as well. You could think about like, I don't know, building up a bumper or something like that, right? It's something cuts the metal, something drills holes into the metal, then we weld it and paint it and all of that as well.

• 24:11Speaker 00

  And if you stood in a physical manufacturing plant, it's, you know, more common now with like lean methodology and all of that to look at the efficiency and the uh, lead time and cycle time of that plant. And, uh, when people or machinery are actually actioning is the only time that actual values being done. Uh, and you want to, you know, reduce the amount of overhead and waste in the system so that you make a very efficient plant. And it's easy to see because you could watch the actual thing being built. I believe over in a, you know, software or digital kind of business, it's much more difficult to look at. And I think that's the challenge for the organizations.

• 24:53Speaker 00

  But here's what we look at is is inside of a physical manufacturing plant, there's there's data out there and and metrics and all that type of stuff. Some of the most efficient plants on the planet are Toyota plants and the Toyota process and all of that as well. And you know, they measure things like seventy percent efficiency of the flow of the system and all of that, right? Where uh, seventy percent of a human time or time of the system is spent on building value, not doing other pieces of the puzzle. We translate over that over into the digital or the enterprise. We've measured this before and it's like something like five to six percent of time is being spent on value added tasks.

• 25:33Speaker 00

  So the high level is value, overhead and waste. Value, overhead and waste is in any system whatsoever. If you talk about the physical manufacturing plant, the only time is when you're welding, when you're drilling, when you're spraying paint, those are the only value add times where you're actually producing a product of value. Overhead in the manufacturing plant would be like, uh, sharpening the drill bits or uh, servicing the welder or even sweeping the shop floor to make it, uh, safe to use. Like those things have to be done to make sure you do the value. Uh, but waste is anything else in between. It's stacked inventory, it's extra motion, it's all of those types of things. And we try to translate that over directly into software

• 26:16Speaker 00

  and the digital organizations. And like I said, we measure them that uh, the average organization that we spend time in is somewhere in the neighborhood of five percent, five to six percent of efficiency. So that means on the given forty hour work week on average, uh, a a person is only spending, you know, three, three and a half hours a week on value added activities. And value added activities are building the digital product. And we know inside a lot of organizations, there's a lot of people that do not do the building part of it. Uh, so by default, they have no value time. And it's not saying they're not valuable. Uh, but it's saying their time is should be spent on overhead activities that are helping the build time increase and all of that, right?

• 27:01Speaker 00

  What's crazy about technology and then obviously now in in the AI world is it's a two dimensional view. So if you look at just the hours in a week that's being spent on value, you could look at those actual hours and say, are they being done with leverage? Is leverage being applied to them through any type of technology or automation or nowadays AI? And you could get a, you know, two X, ten X, hundred X bump in that individual's time of being spent on the thing. But you called it out very specifically and you're totally right is just because an individual's productivity or efficiency increases, does that matter to the system? And ultimately, does that matter to the bottom line of the organizations? And I think that's where the huge challenge is at.

• 27:47Speaker 00

  And where we spend a lot of our time truly looking at the end to end. I think there is a lot of focus today, and I actually think it's rightfully so. A lot of focus on uh, the individual builder and creation of software of using AI to improve the efficiency there, but it's bottlenecked by the organization. The most complex organizations on the planet, you know, usually deliver software to production, you know, like on average, monthly at best type of thing. And that means that you have a lot of stacked up software, you have a lot of waiting, you have a lot of approval process and all of that. So we use techniques like value stream mapping. Value stream mapping is very simple. It's just visualization of the end to end flow of value and all the handoffs and coordination and all of that that go into the system. And it really ways raises awareness

• 28:33Speaker 00

  uh, to the folks of what this looks like and where their challenges are at in the org. Um, you know, kind of maybe taking a sidestep though, is is I think that the AI one that's going on right now, like I actually love it. I don't think that many organizations are seeing true bottom line or system improvement with AI. But I feel like everybody sees that it has to happen here soon, and at least that's giving them time to experiment and try things out and learn from it. So I think AI is more than just like, if it's just a catalyst today, a catalyst to change management for efficiency sake, to look at the end to end system, I think that's super successful.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  But so anyways, going all the way back to our numbers, if our our, uh, average customer is operating at five to six percent efficiency, which means they're doing three or three and a half hours of value added work in a given week. You could leverage that with AI or you could look at expanding that. And I think that's where a big focus is at is let's expand that opportunity so people are doing more value. I mean, remember the value is the fun work too. Uh, if you're if you're a builder of a system, you don't want to be sweeping the floors or servicing the drill bits or welders and stuff like that. You want to be building the product. So increasing the time that they get to spend on value added tasks and then add the second dimension of leverage through technology and AI to it is what our primary focus is across the board.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  This starts leading into so many different other areas, though, that's really complex is you know, looking at the end to end system, you start wanting to cut parts of the system out to improve the flow. And today that means cutting out a lot of existing practices and bureaucracy and handoffs that were there for a reason where you kind of wanted a human in the loop to validate, to confirm, to align, to coordinate and all of that. And I think that part's going to be difficult, but I think that's going to be where the biggest opportunity space is at with AI is to uh, reduce the human in the loop on everything there.

• 30:32Speaker 00

  So almost that you're always in approval, you're always being coordinated, uh, you're always being organized and all of that. I think that's where a huge opportunity is going to be. And I think ultimately that's going to mean more people are going to move into jobs that have been considered individual contributors, more builders, more people that are actually, uh, value producers uh, versus versus the overhead. And that, you know, that means in my mind, likely a a shrinking in the organizational hierarchy, less middle management. And this gets back into the passion part of it and all that as well, where this is a real spaghetti system for sure is do people that made their way into management want to go back into being an individual contributor?

• 31:15Speaker 00

  Knowing that's where the only, uh, place where true value is created. I think there's going to be a hierarchy for a bunch of people that sit on top of individual contributors and become the player coaches and the motivators and all of that type of stuff to the team where you're actually leveraging your skills to the to the broader team. But on average, I think it's going to be a significant reduction in that hierarchy and the the, uh, coordination, uh, in the middle layer there for sure. And I think that's going to be a very interesting thing to go through.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  You, uh, speak to a lot of, uh, CEOs or C suites of, and I know you've been critical of of, you know, there's a lot of talk about AI transformation. Uh, but as you said, a lot of it's on the margins. Uh, when you go into an organization, what's what's your process? Uh, and what are the the things that you see over and over again? That despite the, uh, the ambition, people are doing wrong?

• 32:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. Uh, yeah. So you're, you're, you're absolutely right is, you know, I think in any technology, we saw this in the, in the DevOps space is that, you know, uh, DevOps was a purity thing to start with. And then all of a sudden the term got overused and everybody was doing DevOps and DevOps kind of meant nothing. And I think that that's just an unfortunate reality of, of our industry. The same thing happened with Agile early in the days and all of that as well. Right? So it's like, are you doing the actual behaviors and the systems that kind of align to that guide and all of that? So you're right. Uh, I, I see, you know, a dozen new news articles a day about, uh, an organization transforming with AI or,

• 33:01Speaker 00

  you know, uh, deployed, uh, 30,000, uh, seats of ChatGPT. So we have enabled the organization on AI. And there's a major disconnect of what that really means. Now, is that a, is that a step in the right direction? Absolutely it is. Uh, does it mean you're transformed? Absolutely not. And, you know, depending on how you define transformation, you could think of it in a very small subset. Or you could think about it across the entire organization. I tend to think about it across the organization, which means I see very few organizations, if any, that are truly transformed, but they should be on the journey of transformation in general. So to your question, you know, what do we do? How do we come in? When, when I talk to C-suite executive leaders and all of that, the number one thing I, uh, problem I find is

• 33:46Speaker 00

  they personally are so disconnected from the work on the ground. And this again goes back into, uh, the Toyota production system and, uh, lean manufacturing and all that is, are they walking their factory floor? And I don't believe they are in almost any case. And I think that's going to be one of the biggest enablers of what the future is. Because otherwise, all they're doing is they're getting a delivery of a message through the hierarchy from the bottom to them. And you know, it just gets rosier and rosier as it goes up type of thing. And so they just want to believe that they're doing all the right things.

• 34:22Speaker 00

  But I think if executive leaders start walking the factory floor, talking to the operators, the individual contributors, the builders of software, the builders of the system overall, they'll really start understanding how far away they are from, you know, the utopia state or whatever they're trying to go after. So we encourage a ton of that. We encourage, uh, leaders to get involved in it. Um, there was a, a book out, uh, from McKinsey called, uh, Rewired or something like that. It's a few years old, actually. And it says in there that they believe that the CEO, the CEO, uh, should have something between two and four days a month of focus on the transformation. That's a significant commitment and I don't think many places are doing that at all.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  And if it means that the CEO should have that much, then down a layer should be even more and all of that. And I just don't think there's enough of a commitment towards the transformation. I don't think there's enough of an understanding of what it truly means to change. I don't think there's enough of spending time on the shop floor and looking at value stream mapping or other things like that to see where bottlenecks are in the system. So that's what we do is we come in and we talk through that. We talk about why that's important and all of that. And then we start encouraging organizations starts to start looking at what they're doing, how it's working, where bottlenecks and, and, and handoffs and struggles are at in the organization. And then find a small area of motivated people that are excited about it.

• 35:51Speaker 00

  They can go after this and, uh, and make a change and use it as a kind of use case, a starting example of what this can look like across the organization. And that's what we usually do. That's what we do as liatros. We either guide them on their mission to start or we do it with them. And I think the doing it with them is something that's very unique for us is, you know, you said this a minute ago about BCG as an example. And I look up to them in a lot of ways for certain, uh, they advise and now they build. And I think what's important for us is we advise and build with. And that's the most important thing is we don't build for, we build with. And, uh, do I think building for is important in some areas? Absolutely. It's just not a focus for us.

• 36:36Speaker 00

  Our goal is to enable the organization. So we want to come in on products where they want to build with so that they are uplifting and guiding their org. And I think that just helps a lot of the parts of the, uh, organization that are being challenged.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  Yep. And, and so you, uh, you, you put, uh, engineers into the organization. While you're there, uh, to, to understand the processes and it's, it's not, uh, you know, sitting in a boardroom and, and talking about, uh, you know, the problems that they're having.

• 37:11Speaker 00

  That's exactly it. Absolutely. So, yeah, we deploy engineers and consultants, uh, in the same way. And they're, they do the same thing just as at different layers in the organization. Is the engineers will get right into the system of building, uh, see where the struggles and difficulties are at. I mean, we see it at every customer we go into, how long it takes us to get a client laptop and get access and get into their building system and source control management. It's just bureaucracy after bureaucracy over there type of thing. So that's what the engineers do. And the consultants immediately get into, all right, let's start seeing how you're doing planning and coordination and organization and how you're enabling your teams and all that. So

• 37:53Speaker 00

  it's immersive and that's what we want to do more than anything is not, you know, have a group of people that are assessing and then giving boardroom feedback. We want to have a group of people that are doing. So our consultants and our engineers or our builders do the work so that they could report back on the struggles and the challenges inside the organization to then build a strategy and help them build a game plan for change in that.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. The, um, um, you know, you're talking about collapsing the, uh, the hierarchy, um, and having the CEO on the shop floor. Um, organizations resist change. Uh, I mean, there, there's, uh, uh, you know, people, uh, naturally whenever changes in the wind kind of retract to protect their turf. So, uh, how we, how do you get through to an organization?

• 38:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, uh, it's not easy and it's not, uh, it's not just like a simple kind of playbook to do it. You know, every organization is unique. It's unique in, in, in some way of, of, you know, where they're doing well at, where they're struggling. Uh, you know, what has come in and allowed them to do things in a better way or not. Uh, the culture of the organization, we go into some organizations that are like so friendly. They even call it like friendly to a fault. Uh, friendly to the point where they can't give each other feedback and things like that. So you walk in, you're like, wow, everybody's really excited and really motivated here. And then they can't tell anybody else the truth or changes and things like that. We go into organizations where, you know, feels very political and political games and all of that.

• 39:43Speaker 00

  Our, our, our approach is ve- is the same every single time. We're just going to embed in there. We're going to show you all what we have learned through, you know, many, many other customers and how we made them work. How we've had experience in the outside industry, uh, and just start applying to, applying that to the organization and their unique case. And, you know, we, we, we see this all the time. I'm sure every other consulting firm on the planet sees this a lot as well. Is it depends on where you start at on the org. You could get inside of a business unit or a team or whatever it is and have success in that team and then be blocked or challenged by the larger part of the organization as well.

• 40:23Speaker 00

  And, but our goal is always that like, we are never going to be blocked forever. We're going to see the block and then we're going to work a way up the organization to try to challenge those other aspects of it. Uh, and bring people along on the journey is the most important part is the worst thing we could do is be one part of the organization where we run into, I don't know, let's say a uh, architecture review board or something like that, that slows down the system and then just go tell them what's wrong with it. We would want to go over to that organization, ask them to come over to our shop floor and walk it with us and show, uh, like see what we're going through. And ask them to partner with us on what this can look like in a better, you know, uh, more efficient way for the outcomes that we want to go after.

• 41:05Speaker 00

  And it's really just bring, trying to bring everybody along on the journey. I don't go into very many organizations at all. I wish I could say zero, but I don't go into very many organizations at all where I believe there are actually people in there that are trying to harm the system. Everybody believes they're in there to try to make the system better for sure. But they're there because of something that has happened before. And if, if my role isn't here, what if you know that, uh, that time we didn't, uh, uh, review the code goes live again and we have a, a data, uh, problem or something like that. And so they put all these systems in place for things that have happened in the past. Instead of trying to build that from the ground up and, you know, this is what things like

• 41:48Speaker 00

  continuous delivery and all of those aspects we're trying to do back in the day is, is build a lot of those fundamentals and the expectations into the platform, into the pipeline so that it flows through there. I think the same thing's going to happen now is just, it's people understanding the end-to-end system, seeing where they can improve it, walking the shop floor so they understand it and being excited and motivated about the change for, uh, for the increased productivity and outcomes of that organization.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. How do you get a, a handle on an entire organization? I mean, a lot, there's a lot of talk of digital twins, uh, I mean, and, and do you, do you, uh, go in, uh, and, you know, investigate audit or whatever? And then put together a plan and present it to the C-suite? Or do you go in and, and, and just start opera- uh, operationalizing your ideas, uh, sort of incrementally? And I mean, the, uh, you're one of the, your people sent over the analogy of, uh,

• 43:01Speaker 01

  uh, like, uh, you know, I used to live in Asia, these fig trees that they're vines that take over a tree and then they drop air roots and they build a new tree around the old tree, the old tree and the center eventually dies.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  Strangler fig pattern. Yep. Absolutely.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. So how do you, uh, how do you do that? Is that, you know, you, you, you make a plan? And present it and then execute it? Or is it more organic that you're just changing things from inside?

• 43:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it really depends. It depends on the customer, it depends on the opportunity that we are going after there. You know, as a smaller boutique firm, I wish we got invited in by the C-suite to say, hey, help us transform. But that's not the reality. As a, as a smaller firm, what we do is we get in and show success. That becomes noisy, becomes excited, that works its way up the hierarchy, and we get invited in to talk about bigger and bigger things. That's been our journey forever type of thing. To answer your question, it's actually changing right now quite a bit and changing with the dynamic of the excitement around change and transformation and all that, that I think that we haven't seen in a long time is

• 44:23Speaker 00

  typically the way that we have done in the past is we come in underneath an initiative of something where they want to do something specific and the outcomes of it. And we build with them. We build a platform, applications, whatever it is for them that they want from us. And we show them how to do it in a different way. And we always do our assessment while doing. Another four-letter word of consulting is assessment, and it's like pay a bunch of money for them to give you a PowerPoint presentation. And we just don't want to do that. We want to build something and while we're building it, it's easy for us to assess the organization. And then give a recommendation for change and how you would scale that through an org.

• 45:03Speaker 00

  You said it to begin with. I mean, these are humongous organizations. Our average customer that we go into has fifty-five hundred people in technology and twelve layers of hierarchy. That's the average. So we have plenty of other ones that have tens of thousands of people in there. Changing an organization of that size is a, you know, significant task over many, many years type of thing. Our goal is to truly just build the momentum and excitement for that. You know, our goal with we leave every customer is are they on the transformation journey without us is where we ultimately want to get to is where we want to to see our customers succeed through that. So, you know, yes, that's not just six months. That's usually, you know, the

• 45:45Speaker 00

  order of years to get them on that journey, but that's where we want to leave them. To your question about, you know, this idea of the strangler fig tree or the strangler fig pattern that we've been talking about, it was an old architecture pattern. The idea was almost like the either mainframe or monolithic application is don't try to rewrite the entire monolithic application at once is how do you just pull off bits and pieces of it? Maybe even keep the old one running while the new one's running and validation and verification between the two. And then when you could shut down small pieces of the old monolithic, monolithic application, you could run it in new services outside of that. We've actually been applying that same thinking and

• 46:28Speaker 00

  we're calling it either strangle the enterprise or strangle the organization. We believe that because things are moving so quickly right now and how hard it is in change management for these large, complex organizations to truly operate in a new way. Is what we try to do is strangle away a part of the organization and literally build a net new division or business or practice inside the org that has as little restriction in the old way of operating as possible. You know, we call it like a tax-free zone as an example. The reality is, is any size organization, you will never get tax-free. But is it like low tax zone where you don't have all of the existing expectations and bureaucracy and things like that in there?

• 47:13Speaker 00

  But more than anything, it's to get the people, the, the customers, people over to the new organization. And have them have the freedom to act and operate in a new way. So we've started to see quite a bit of success in this so far is when you just say, hey, we're building a new org over here and day one, the org is one person. And what does that mean that we're going to do differently in this new and modern world? Well, some of the first things we would do is we would have very small teams. You know, this idea of two pizza teams historically in the past, I don't know what a two pizza team really is, but our, our customers were in, that's like eight to fifteen people. That's a ton of people. New teams in this new, modern world, I believe are two or three-person teams.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  Where they have autonomy, where they understand the customer, where they work really closely there. So is this a product owner that is hands-on plus a couple of builders? I think so in a lot of cases, right? And so you would start with literally a three-person team and then you could build up a second three-person team next to them. And then maybe you need a platform team to support it or whatever it is. But you slowly just start pulling pieces over rather than just saying, hey, this giant group of people, you're going to start acting and operating in a new, different way. And we've seen a ton of success in this already and where it scales really quickly over there. Now you gotta be cautious. You don't want to just grab people and bring them over and don't have them understand

• 48:41Speaker 00

  the new ways of acting and operating. And this is where I think enablement and uplift is really important. And I, you know, another challenge I think is going on right now is you know, how much investment do you really have to put in the people for them to be part of this new way of operating? One of the most frustrating things we do is when we go into organizations and we talk about AI uplift or AI enablement and we have different service offerings that range from a couple of weeks all the way up to a couple of months in time and the most frustrating thing I hear is, oh no, you know, like we were hoping for something for like a couple of hours and it's just like the feeling of, oh my gosh, do you not understand how much is in front of you? And okay, maybe all you have is budget for a couple of hours to start with, and that's better than nothing type of thing, but

• 49:27Speaker 00

  really need them to start thinking so much bigger of what the, what is needed for these organizations to transform. So going back to the strangle the organization, that's something that's really important to us as well is when we bring people over to the new org that's going to act and operate in a modern way. They go through an uplift. They go through some of our service offerings that are deep and detailed for weeks or months to have them learn about the new ways of acting and operating in a modern AI-first, small organization, small team, you know, quick iteration, fast feedback style way of acting and operating.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you mentioned, you know, budget and whether there, you know, an organization is willing to commit the people you advise them to commit to, to this kind of transformation. So what, what does real transformation actually cost? Is it spread out over, over years? So you're, you're not

• 50:27Speaker 01

  demanding too much.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  I think we're still figuring it out, but I'll, I'll, I'll share some kind of information that's right in front of us, but I want to maybe preface all of this with.

• 50:38Speaker 00

  I believe that the potential of AI is so great that spending lots of time, lots of energy and lots of resources should almost be looked at as a strategic advantage to learning on the journey that's going to, that's going to come our way is

• 50:57Speaker 00

  we have this new technology and you look at, you say, I, I understand this could be significant. But we don't exactly know how to get there today, right now, and spending just, just time and almost just R and D for no real ROI to start with, I think is an okay activity right now. I know that's hard to justify. I'm sure every CFO on the planet will hate me saying that type of thing, but I think it's a real thing for certain. Here's what we are seeing and we practice what we preach as well. And so you know, what's unique and about Liatrio that we always try to push is our people are constantly learning. They are constantly trying net new things. We spend a ton of time, we always have since the beginning of Liatrio.

• 51:40Speaker 00

  We spend a ton of time on all of our people to make sure they have time to improve, learn and practice new ways. Real early on in Liatrio's history, we built a program called Flywheel. And Flywheel meant we are going to pull our deployed engineers and consultants off of the customer for a week, a quarter and have them try new practices, technologies and techniques to improve and then go back to the customer with those new skills. It gets them out of the, you know, customers ways of acting and operating, almost frees them from that. So right there alone was four weeks a year that we were spending on this, right?

• 52:19Speaker 00

  That's not nothing. That's a significant cost, especially for a consulting firm where that means we're not billing that time and all that as well. And we had done that forever. And we see the value to our customers where our engineers and consultants are always sharp and they're always learning the latest and greatest. I think just again today, things are just on hyperspeed. Is if you go away and get deep into a customer for six months, it's almost like being under a rock for six months. You would come out and the world will look nothing the same at all. So we're spending even more time on that. We have a internal program of of AI fluency that we build that we call Forge. And the Forge is somewhere between two and six weeks per person on our team that we just

• 53:03Speaker 00

  invest in is we take our people and run it through this program here because and I think our, our folks are already starting at a higher level. You know, if this is a zero to 10 or whatever, our folks are already at a four or five and we spend two to four weeks on having them go through the system to get even higher than that. If you're starting at a zero or a one, you know, if you're just a pedestrian user of ChatGPT or something like that, you have a long ways to go. So it's more than just the individual, it's the system. So what does transformation cost? We've been doing this in a couple of different customers now, some, some very large engagements and like

• 53:42Speaker 00

  a just like wet finger in the air rule of thumb to me is to tran, to transform an organization into modern ways of working with AI is you are likely going to spend the equivalent of everyone's salary over a two-year period. So if the average employee is a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a person, take that and divide that over two years for everybody inside the organization. Those, those dollars are huge. I mean, that's like you know, seven, eight hundred person team is like a hundred million dollars. These, these numbers are absolutely insane. So I think we're going to be going through this big period and I think CFOs are going to play a big part of this as well. Is how do we calculate the ROI?

• 54:26Speaker 00

  What are we going to do better coming out of the end of it? And I think this is unique to every organization as well. There are plenty of organizations out there that could do a lot more. They could have more digital products and digital services. So I think the sale there would be like, hey, our team is going to be modern and with the same sized team, we're going to do four times as much. But I don't think every organization is like that. I think there are plenty of organizations that don't have uncapped potential, uncapped opportunity for product. And they're likely going to have to look the opposite way for, we're going to do the same amount of output with one fourth of the team size or something like that.

• 55:06Speaker 00

  And I understand that's scary and that's, uh, you know, not something that we want to talk about. I do believe, uh, I'm just so excited about the future and so positive with the belief that's going to get there. Is that there's going to be so many more new jobs, so many more new companies. And hopefully that passion part of it will allow people to go work in an industry or in a job or whatever that is much more passionate to them. But going back to the question, wet finger in the air is take the entire, uh, total cost of compensation for your organization. And you're going to run that, uh, divide that in half and that's what you're going to spend for a couple of years in a row for sure. And it's a tremendous number.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, the, um, one of the things that struck me, uh, about your reading about you guys. That you're tool agnostic, you're not tied to one ecosystem. And if you have

• 56:01Speaker 01

  AWS come in, uh, they have a consulting arm, uh, they're going to, you know, sell AWS products and services to your organization. Uh, so do you have partners or how do you decide? And this is also goes to, uh, sort of the internal, um, education, sort of ongoing education. It's hard for any of us to keep up with the research, let alone the applications and the tools that are, are coming off the research. Um, so yeah, can you talk about that? Just, um, where do you look for solutions? Uh, yeah.

• 56:41Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, I, at the beginning, we are tool and kind of product agnostic for sure. Um, I believe that there's a lot of tools that we would maybe recommend against and things like that. But you know, you're talking about the major cloud service providers and all of that. First of all, every large enterprise has all of them almost to begin with, you know what I mean? Different pockets of their organization and things like that. You know, they, they mostly all use, uh, some of the greatest software delivery platforms, GitHub, GitLab and other things like that. So, uh, we usually come in and say that, hey, what you have today is likely going to work and let's build upon that and learn from that until we get challenged and say, maybe something else, uh, can be better.

• 57:24Speaker 00

  And that's one of the biggest things as well as if you get people into this kind of continual learning and continual assessment and continual trial thing is, and you build your system, all of your systems where things can be swapped out and are not so hard quoted to a single platform. I think that's going to be something that's going to be really huge in the coming years. I would be scared to death to, to sign three and five year term, uh, commitments to a lot of these providers of any sort right now, because I think things are changing so rapidly. And what's probably going to happen is you're going to go from one to the other, then back to the first one and, you know, to a net new one and all of that.

• 58:04Speaker 00

  And that just makes an organization comfortable with change. And I think having comfort with change is probably one of the most important things that they could do. And if you build the organization and the systems comfortable with change, I think that's really, really critical. Um, on the partnerships, uh, Tati, you have about, we have a few partnerships. Um, I think that there are, if you look at a lot of smaller consultancies, I think a lot of them get started and get built, uh, through relationships as partners and that's totally fine. That's their approach, but I think that it just kind of sends you in one direction and then you're kind of beholden to the partner and I don't like that. I don't want to be beholden to them. I want this to be a win, win, win scenario.

• 58:48Speaker 00

  If our customer can win first and foremost, and as the tool or product provider in Liatrio can win, that's what I want to have. And I want to make sure that everything works in that direction. And that's not always the case. I will say, especially now things are moving so quickly, some of the newest tools and things like that that are coming out there, the folks are much more, uh, partner focused for benefit of the customer. Um, you know, I think back in the day when you were selling seats or licenses and all that type of stuff. You actually didn't care if the person used the seat or license all that much. You just cared to sell it. And we've heard all the horrible stories of the federal government and how they have, you know, hundreds of thousands of seats licenses that aren't even being used.

• 59:34Speaker 00

  But I think in this new world of tokens and usage and all that type of stuff. I believe those partners are like squarely excited and motivated by their customer using more of it and not more for waste, but more for value. And that's where I think Liatrio can play a big picture in there is building that kind of triangle relationship between the customer's going to win first. And then if the provider and Liatrio win because of that, that would be awesome together. So we're seeing a lot more positivity, uh, in partnership plays now than we have in the past.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, I've been talking to people about the C suite and how the C suite's approaching this. And, uh, you know, it seems to me that, that, uh, CEO should have a digital twin of his organization connected to a, a very focused, uh, you know, fine tuned, uh, reasoning L L M that he can brainstorm with alone in his office, ask crazy, stupid questions and, and come up with ideas.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  Uh, do you, uh, ascribe to that idea? And, and do you do that yourself? I mean, when you look at an organization, how much, uh, do you use AI as a sounding board?

• 1:00:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. Uh, great question. And like a, a million different avenues that I could think about it is, is I think that this digital twin idea, this, uh, intelligence layer of an organization, kind of all these things are coming together that we're going to learn a lot about here in the near future. Um, Jack Dorsey, uh, CEO of Block had a, a kind of a white paper recently talking about where he sees the future of large organizations going. And wow, it was crazy. It's like, you know, this, this hierarchy of one type of thing is like, he thinks that everyone is going to report directly to him. You're going to have like an intelligence layer for middle management and then all individual contributors,

• 1:01:41Speaker 00

  uh, type of thing. You think about that future and, and maybe that's like the idea of the vision of where it could go and will never end up there, but we'll end up somewhere that's better than what we're at today. Uh, but you think about that, you think about the digital twin, you think about, uh, intelligence layer across the board. Uh, and it's very interesting to think about. I think the, the complexity is, is these enterprise organizations are so complex is like, how do you digital twin something that you can't even take a picture of today? Right? And, and I think that that's where maybe it's challenging for that, but can you do that in smaller areas for sure? So maybe not the entire enterprise, but specific groups and teams and all that. And as you

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  improve them and they get more mature or what better connected, uh, you could do that, uh, across the entire board. You know, like, where do we ever go into an enterprise and they have a CMDB that is completely accurate? And it's like, never, like literally never. And if you don't have a CMDB that is accurate, how are you going to have a digital?

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  It's safe for listeners what CMDB is.

• 1:02:48Speaker 00

  Uh, a change management database, uh, and, uh, or configuration management databases. It more or less is a definition of all systems and services and, uh, like how they were put in place to be there. So the very simple one is you spin up a new server or you put, spin up a new VM, it goes into the CMDB to be tracked, uh, for the future. So people know why it's there, what it's serving, uh, and all of that. And then as you start connecting systems together, it builds a, a map and everything there. I mean, I like, since the beginning of my career, I've been on CMDB projects and wanting that to be perfect data. And I think that it's one of those things where, you know, it's got to be

• 1:03:31Speaker 00

  almost perfect for it to be valuable. And anything less than that, it's just a nuance and it's just in the way. So if you can't have a CMDB, how can you have a digital twin of your organization, which is, which is the people and the teams and the communication boundaries of all of that. So y- yes, I think that's a vision and I think that's exciting of where it's to go. Uh, I believe you could do less of that. You could do, and we've started to, to do this inside of our organization where we hook our, uh, our L L M and some, uh, automation and customization we built in there into our entire system.

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  And our entire system's pretty simple, which makes it easier. So Slack, Slack is our digital office. Everything starts in Slack. We have email, we have calendar, we have source control and we have a dozen other tools. It's really easy for us to integrate all of that together. So that our intelligence layer can see an email come through, see a new lead and HubSpot come through and, and translate and connect that directly to conversation that's going on in Slack. Uh, we also regularly record all of our internal conversations over Zoom and all that. So the transcription's all captured there. And that's all fed into the knowledge base that gives us so much information. So

• 1:04:50Speaker 00

  we do exactly what you were saying. We sit around and not just me, but everybody in the organization, what if this was going on? Like, tell me about bottlenecks in the system. Tell me where we have opportunity because our system is pretty darn well connected. I would not say it is not perfect either because it's so hard to have perfection. You know, you have a phone call with somebody or you have offline conversations or whatever it is. You have a conversation in a, in a private Slack channel that can't make it into the, the, the larger knowledge set. And I think ours is pretty good and gives us a lot of that opportunity. And yes, we, we show that off. We, we show what that could look like at a large enterprise and, and, and what it can mean to them for the future.

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay.