[Music] Welcome to another episode of Techan. I’m Usher and today we’re exploring AI hype versus AI reality and what’s really working in the enterprise with Eric Juan, the CEO of Ignite Techch, GFI software and chorus. He’s a true pioneer in AIdriven digital clones and has led some impressive AI first transformations. He’s also a writer, tech educator, and a passionate runner who’s completed like 50 plus marathons and ultramarathons together. That’s an achievement, Eric. And welcome to the show. It’s great to have you on the podcast. Thank you. Thank you very much, Asher. I appreciate it. Yeah. All right. Awesome. So, I always knew about marathons, but I never knew about ultramarathons, and I had to like look it up and see what that really is. So, my question first is, you’re running three companies, and you still find time for ultramarathons. I mean, what’s harder, running a 100 mile uh run or turning around a tech company? Yeah, a lot of people aren’t familiar with ultramarathons. Uh it technically is anything over the 26.2 mi distance literally. So 50ks, 50 m, 100ks, and then 100 mileers and there’s even some 200 mileers out there and some other extreme things. It’s super interesting. You say what’s harder or turning around a tech company. They’re different. They’re sort of completely different, but I will say that the ultramarathon mindset that you have to adapt has certainly helped me in a lot of professional cases because it teaches you to just stick to it no matter what. The biggest challenge in long-distance running is this little guy that sits on your shoulder the whole time saying, “We don’t want to be doing this. We could stop. Like, it’s okay. You could just quit.” Like, yeah, you know, maybe you didn’t train hard enough. like at some point you’ve got to like flick it off your shoulder and just say that’s it and I’m going and sometimes it’s like that with a business. I will say the AI transformation of our companies. You mentioned the word pioneer which sounded a little funny but it certainly was at the very early part. It was early 2023 where we woke up and said, “Oh my god, we’ve got to change everything.” And we were figuring things out as we went. There was no blueprint. There was no blueprint. There were not other companies that we could point to and say, “Oh, that’s the way that we’re doing it.” and we made some really bold declarations that a 100% clear weren’t sure we were correct. We believed we were, but we didn’t know. But I think it’s kind of the same thing. You don’t know if you should finish that 100 mileer, but you just keep going and then you finish and you figure that out. You know, you kind of figure things out along the way. So, yeah, I’d say it’s transferable in some ways. I think at the end of the day, it’s all about consistency and just keep, you know, kind of moving forward where you can uh achieve success in both places. Yeah, I would say beyond consistency, it’s about unwavering belief, right? I mean, great things are often accomplished when you believe you see something and you just stay on that path. You you’re willing to listen and you are willing to alter course, but you’re also not willing to just give up when you encounter resistance. And such was the case. I mean, we had a cultural transformation within our companies that resulted in many cases some people having to leave the company even though they had been here for years and were remarkable at their jobs, but they were just like arms folded and like, uh-uh, I’m not going to do this. It’s like, you’re not going to do it. Oh, no. Well, that’s not going to work for us. Right? So, it’s kind of the same. You just got to keep believing and stay your course. I think I think that’s when great things get accomplished often times. So I had this question later down but now since you’ve mentioned it that there was a huge cultural shift kind of happening and taking place a lot of leaders what I’ve seen is right now in the rush to implement AI they kind of overlook the human side of the equation right so establishing that culture that trust that collaboration so how did you guys kind of how did you go about it putting all of that together yeah well we started with the humans like we made an announcement like it took over an all hands meeting we have all hands regular regularly just like you know all companies and typical all the hands had been you know how did we do last quarter what are the goals for this quarter I’m sorry now it looks like a boring agenda but that was kind of our all the hands format for a lot of companies and we just put a big X on the agenda literally for drama on the slide deck we put a big X said nope that’s not what we’re talking about here’s what we’re talking about the whole world has changed and we have to change we we see this very clearly as an existential threat to the existence of our company And by the way, for every other company around us, we don’t want that to happen. We’re going to change. You know, I’ve got over three decades of experience in the tech industry. And the tech industry, we’re famous for telling everybody that latest thing is the most important thing ever and it’s going to change lives and everything else. And often times that is overhyped. It is. Didn’t believe that this one was. And the main reason why was it’s like that movie from a couple of years ago that won all the Oscars. Everything everywhere all at once. That’s what was happening. This was going to change business, healthc care, the legal profession, nonprofits, education. Like there’s no place this doesn’t touch. It’s everywhere. And so we had to change. Yeah. It’s a revolution very similar to the ’90s, right? So you had your internet coming in and it’s something on a very similar scale. Before that, I think the transition. So if you look at back at history, you’ve always this major transition was from mainframe to home computers, PCs, personal computers, laptops and then you had like two three decades where the PC concept was just evolving. So no major change as such but you know personal computer concept and then the internet was a radical change. After that you had social media as uh news channel and and all medias and everything and then this basically is is as much big as as when internet came in and then got into the hands of people. That’s right. Now you have distribution is so strong you know you have knowledge going out so strong that the adoption of this technology is like 100x faster than the adoption of internet or those things. I mean even in developing countries, even in farfetched areas, GPT is there. So yeah. Yeah. I refer to all these as and it was one of the things that I labeled back in 2023 at Genai Expo. I said there have been five tectonic shifts in the tech industry. I I don’t know. I just kind of like the way that sounded. Tectonic tech, right? The first one was the internet 100%. The internet suddenly democratized access to information, made it available depending regardless of what platform it was running on, regardless of what operating system it was running on. You suddenly got interconnect. Number two then was the personal computer. The personal computer democratized computing because as you mentioned the mainframe, the mainframe used to keep everything in one little spot and you had to come ask for it if you were part of a company. You had to ask for your data and your reports. So suddenly we were putting computers on your desktop and you could do your own work, right? Number three then was the browser which took the internet and made the information readily accessible to people. So that now democratized data in a way that made it really easy. You just typed it in a URL and you got it where before you used to have to download files and email files and things like that. Number four was the iPhone. I see the iPhone is a in substantial tectonic shift because it put a computer in people’s pocket and all these things internet plus you know iPhone was in fact it wasn’t me it was Jensen Hang who said this is the iPhone moment for AI and that was number five number five AI democratized AI GPT chat GPT democratized AI AI is not new been around for decades we’ve been doing machine learning and AI for years but your neighbor didn’t your grandmother didn’t your 8-year-old daughter didn’t but suddenly chat GBT made AI available to everybody. So it’s this common thread of democratizing when you take tech and you make it suddenly available to everybody on a wide basis you get incredible adoption and then things just kind of virally grow and that’s what’s happened here. Absolutely. No, that’s that’s 100%. I think this access to all this technology at a $20 per month subscription I think is just is has made it made it really crazy and and and yeah so this this fear of actually impacting everybody you always had this fear right so remember the time when spreadsheets came and everybody was talking like that hey you you’ll never need accountants now no that would happen similarly I think here but yes there’s a certain transfer of mundane task but then there will be a certain group of people who would grow 20x if they are able to leverage the power of AI successfully and that’s I guess that’s the core message that everybody has to explain to their team and you know make sure that they understand that while they are kind of trying to adopt the overall change all right that’s right it’s 100% right you pointed out you would never need accountants anymore do we have fewer accountants I don’t think we do this this is a key point you just made a key point we always fear the unknown we’re always scared to death of the unknown and when we’re scared We tell scary stories. We know this is going to happen. Like I have tremendous faith in humans. Humans always figure this stuff out. We were afraid of the internet too. We figured it out. We will adapt to this too. And we are. We’re already starting to adapt it. And our particular approach to helping customers adapt that is keeping them not only in the loop, but making them the controller of the AI, which is the way we advocate AI use. We advocate it being this wonderful assistant to help you do things, not you gave it something and it’s out making decisions and not consulting you and like running your company. Like no, that’s not that’s not that’s true. Before we dive deep, I would like to, you know, kind of clear the air on the jargon a little bit. So when we say AI first transformation, what does that exactly mean? Everybody’s like throwing out air terms here. So what what does this what it what it means for you and how you think that what it means? Yeah. Well, for any listeners of this podcast, if they want to know the the the detailed answer, they can go to ignite.aibi first. And at that URL is a conversation that I had with Chat GPT back in 2023 that said, I’m getting ready to hire a bunch of people that are going to be AI first. Help me define what that means very clearly. Long long conversation that they can look at. Quick summary is you first think of AI to do anything. You first ask yourself the question, in what way could I bring AI into this? And it this is this is something we all struggle with. We’ve been doing things the same way for years. And our natural inclination is to go back to doing it the way we’ve done it. And then you go, well, wait a minute. Why am I like going over here and saying, what do you think? So, you know, you get better and better and better at that. And I will give you an example. You mentioned in the opening, I’m a writer. I have been a writer for decades. I used to write columns and magazines. And you know, that’s something that I always felt like I was pretty good at. You know, maybe not the best writer, but pretty good. Okay. I don’t write anything anymore. I don’t write anything anymore. I don’t write a complex email. I don’t write a legal document. I don’t write not from scratch, not on a blank page. Now, I might start with the rough edges that has the most important meaning that I want. But then I go give it to AI and say, “Help me polish it, make it be more consistent.” You know, let’s just start with the simplest thing, typos. There’s no excuse for typos in 2025. And at Ignite Tech, everybody knows that if somebody in the marketing department creates some content and says, “What do you think?” and there’s a typo. I’m not kidding. They’re fired. Why? Because AI would catch every typo. It just means you didn’t take 30 seconds to check it for typos. At least check it for typos. But Ashar, I’m getting this from attorneys. I’m getting this from our attorneys who are, you know, highly educated, super incredible attorneys writing complex things. And I had an email. I shared this at at a conference. I was speaking at a CEO conference uh early April, and I shared the actual email. I redacted the name, so you know, it was anonymous, but it was literally an email. He said, “Hey, Eric, here’s the draft settlement agreement. I think I got most of the typos out, but I’m still looking.” And I wrote him back and I said, “Why do you still have typos? If you just fed this into AI, it would find 100% of the typos. Even if you don’t want it to work on the language because you don’t trust it yet, it’ll find your typos. You said, “Yeah, you’re right. I really should.” Like, that’s AI first. AI first is where can I bring it in to my work stream, whatever work I’m doing, drafting a settlement agreement, you know, writing code, debugging code, you know, analyzing an interview. I’ve used it for hiring. I have transcripts of my interviews and I go download the transcripts of the interviews and I go feed multiple candidates into AI and say here’s the job description. Yeah, here’s the conversations. Help me find insight. Let me see. And it’s it’s unbelievable at its ability to find nuances and languages and spot red flags. Like it’s amazing. So yeah, that’s a long answer to your simple question. That’s a that’s actually a pretty good idea that Yeah, it’s a great idea. So the idea really is like the world said AI first. So whatever you’re about to do think AI can help me here how can it help me and you get to modify your workflow or making that part of the process right there’s this concept of bolt on versus actual real transformation. So right% yeah and in some cases then we have this entire discussion and in some cases we say yes absolutely AI can be used as a bolton where you’re drafting legal documents you’re drafting emails you’re doing all of this that’s just a bolt on to your process but then you have certain internal systems which have to improve and you have to kind of start off with that understanding the exact problem what we looking to solve and then that’s where the second kind of layer of transformation starts happening. So absolutely that’s right. No, you’re right. You’re right. In the early days, we all did it. I mean, I will we did we did it. We we slapped on. We bolted on like, hey, we put some AI on. It’s like, yeah, but it’s not really useful and nobody really cares because we were all learning, right? I mean, as you mentioned, we’re pioneers because it’s a frontier and we’re all just starting. We’ve certainly learned that just offering up AI for AI’s sake is of course not useful to people. So, you’ve got to find something that really does drive a benefit. And I think we’re much better at that now to not do that. You know, unfortunately, I think co-pilot, that word, got a bad brand because co-pilot was kind of bolt-on by definition. I’m not talking about Microsoft specifically. I mean just generically people said, “I’ve got a co-pilot and it’s free.” And you’re like, “And it should be free because it really doesn’t do much for me, you know.” Yeah. So, yeah. No, absolutely. I think everything starts from it was more of an assistant than it went on to individual and then but guess I guess that’s that’s the right way to put it. It’s co-pilot when it started then people started really thinking of it as a bolt-on moment. So, but now but now we’re redesigning software and we’re recreating software where in some cases we’re taking existing software and completely rewriting it with AI to do the same function. Like throw the old codebase out and just there are people you you’ll find them online. They they like have created a version of Slack for example in two days. Is it perfect? No. Does it have everything Slack does? No. Most of the functions it actually does in many cases and lots of cases of this out right. Can I save a thousand bucks a month for my 100 employees? Absolutely. Maybe. Yeah. Right. Maybe where you feel where you see the hole in that while that is absolutely capable is we still believe and we see that there needs to be kind of a software mentality wrapped around that. So I see AI startups doing that like hey I reproduce this product in three days. You’re like yeah but you like you don’t understand how to support it. You don’t understand authentication. you don’t understand security problems because you’re an AI startup. So you kind of still need an enterprise mentality around it for large businesses and that’s where we come in right we’re an enterprise software company with an AI innovation engine inside of it that’s yeah absolutely I think you can so even if with all these tools what we I mean the best example is cursor right so cursor inelves cursor itself has 80 engineers doing something right so I’m sure they’re using cursor to develop cursor but at the end of the day there’s a human force behind that is developing cursor or lovable for that matter all of these poll writing tools and or wind ser that open AAI just paid 3 billion for sounds like something we should pay attention to. I don’t know if you saw the rumor yesterday. I want to go on record that I predicted this over two weeks ago. The rumor yesterday is that Apple is looking to buy Perplexity. Yes, that’s true. Because two weeks ago I predicted this internally. I told my team I said I see some things that indicate that this might be happening. That be amazing if Apple was able to get that kind of because Perplexi is magnificent. It is magnificent. Aravan Strinvas has done an amazing job with Perplexity. But are they ever going to have the girth to go out and displace Google? Were they ever going to have the money, the ability with Apple? They would. That’ll be a fun battle if that happens. Absolutely. because all of hopefully everybody when you’re listening to this 6 months from now and Apple has bought perplexity you can reflect on this conversation absolutely and yeah 100% because Apple is behind AI so from a technology perspective and then Apple doesn’t have a search engine all of a sudden gets two things in one right and once Google goes out it’s uh it’s it’s game on you know you’ll have a real challenge now and perplexity gets a very strong foundational base and support and the money and the resour resources that they can to and the reach and the scale and all everything they get everything. I mean, if ifiting it’ be so exciting. I hope I so hope it happen. I’m a big fan of Apple and its products and always have been. Uh they are absolutely behind. They know it. They misfired last year with Apple Intelligence. Uh but to their credit, I will always give Apple credit for one thing. They never rush something out that’s fit for their for their customers. They delay or they cancel or they change and they’ve done that all through their history. But they don’t usually deliver products that fall flat, right? And they don’t want to do that here. So, who knows? I hope it happens. Let’s see. Apple became more of a hardware company than a software company in the last few years. And I think that was one of the core reasons they kind of got AI and all of those things. So, because they were focusing more on hardwares and that side, but that’s just my personal opinion. But I think if they they do this acquisition, they can very fairly quickly catch up. Although I do think Google knows, nobody knows better, you know, search knows it better and and listen, they’ve caught up with Gemini. So, yeah, they’ve caught up with Gemini. It’s going to be a good battle. It’s going to be a good battle. It’s going to be interesting. Yeah. All right. All right. So, so just a quick announcements. We talked about the history a little bit. What was your okay, this changes everything moment with AI. The point from where you know, you went from curious to allin and and you’re like, okay, this is this is going to be radical. Well, I took note in October of 2022 when chat GPT came out and we started working with it and experimenting it, but no, the light bulb had not gone off. It literally was Jensen Hong’s statement that this is the iPhone moment for AI. I said he’s 100% right. I hadn’t thought of it that way. We’ve got to get in gear really quick, otherwise we’re going to get left behind. And that was that really was my if you want to call it awakening. It was that statement. I thought he’s 100% right. Now, of course, it was self- serving because they make GPUs that power this. I get it. But I thought he was right. I thought he was 100% right. And to his point, Ashar, when lay people, you know, I’m I’m a tech guy. Everybody knows I’m a tech guy, my friends, my family. When I start getting questions from people that are my friends and my family that aren’t in the tech industry, then then that’s when you also know, right? You know, I’ll take the iPhone. My wife never wanted a smartphone ever. Back in the day when before iPhone, you know, before 2007, we had, you know, flip phones and everybody loved their little flip phones and all that. I always had the little geeky ones with keyboards. I was sending emails. I loved all that. My wife is like, “Don’t you ever buy me one of those.” Like, ever. I don’t No communicator and blackberry or the trio. Remember the trio? Yeah. Out of the palm line. I was a big fan. Or or even Blackberry. And then the iPhone came out. My wife’s like, “Oh, I want one of those.” Right. And so when that stuff starts happening, you pay attention. I think and that was happening. I started hearing, “Have you heard of this thing called Chad GBT?” Yeah. Why are you asking? It’s like, well, so that plus Jensen Wong’s statement, I think, is was kind of like, oh my god, this is going to change because it’s the same. It’s democratize when whenever you democratize something, meaning by definition, you now make it available to almost everybody regardless of any barrier, technology, price, whatever, great things happen. They always have throughout history. Yeah, there you go. Awesome. All right. One of the other things I mean I there are so many surveys out there that talk about the ROI from AI and then they kind of everybody gives some you know some numbers. I don’t know how they base it on but they go like you know it ranges anywhere from 20 to 30% this there’s a 25% return on ROI investment in AI there’s a 20% return there’s a 35% some number comes up and and in your experience why when do you think the AI projects fall short what’s the you what’s usually the real culprit behind the failure well I think there there are or businesses and enterprises in general yeah there are a few but I’ll highlight one in particular that I think is important and this again was consistent with the message that I delivered to the CEO. It was called the CEO summit back in April uh in Atlanta, April of 2025. It has to come from the top down. The CEO has to believe it, has to decree it, and not only that, has to be involved in it. They can’t delegate it to a tech team. They can’t answer ask their CTO to go figure it out. They can’t dabble in it. They can’t run a little pilot project. I mean, you know, it it’s kind of like the difference between commitment and participation, right? Consider a a ham and egg breakfast, right? The chicken is involved by contributing eggs, but the pig is committed. You kind of need to be the pig. You got to be allin. You got to say, “This is important. You have to believe it. You have to participate. You have to fund it. You have to create time. You have to make it a priority.” You can’t say, “Well, we’ve got a fill-in-theblank business to run. We’ll look at that.” It’s got to be we got to change the fill-in-theblank business to being an AI run company. Because Asha, we’re not far from hearing about attorneys who are AI first, doctors that are AI first. We’re not far from this where you are going to start looking for a doctor that you know endorses the usage of AI in their practice, meaning they look up things and they learn themselves and they put questions in or they give it to you to educate you and the like. The same with attorneys, right? So, it’s got to come from the top and that I see I see that difference. I think participation at a lower level that doesn’t involve everybody. And let me pick on another common problem. If you don’t get your if if companies large and small don’t get their legal people fully educated before those legal people write guidelines or write compliance rules. How can they write guidelines and compliance if they themselves don’t understand what they’re talking about? And so they’re by definition what they do is they just ban. They just say you can’t. You can’t. Now you’ve just said here here’s one of the greatest tools in maybe the history of civilization. You can’t use it. You know that’s because they’re not informed. That’s their default position. Turn it off until we know. Well, how about we just go no and then we can decide what to do. And I’m not advocating freewheeling. Turn everything on. Don’t worry about it. I’m not. I’m advocating informed decisionmaking. And this starts at the top. So I’ve seen a lot of the surveys like you have many of them. And often times they’re disappointed because they’re misguided and they haven’t led from the top. So yeah, absolutely. So if I had to add to it, I think the other factor that I have seen is a lot of times it’s it’s the it’s the shiny object syndrome as well where you’re just excited about adding the technology rather than really thinking where do I add it? What do I am I solving with it that can eventually lead to some project kind of falling short, right? So well I I burst into a smile when you said that for the following reason. When I spoke at the CEO conference, I was the closing keynote of the day. The opening keynote was uh a very well-known Fortune50 CEO. I’m not going to name him, I’ll just say that. And he gave kind of a fireside chat. He took questions from the audience. And I asked him a very specific question. And his response was, “AI is the next shiny new toy.” And I’m like, “Oh, you just gave me my opening line for my keynote this afternoon, which I said, I have to disagree with my esteemed colleague who said that. I know why he said it, but I think he’s wrong. I think he’s absolutely wrong and I think that’s a terrible message to be giving your company honestly. So yeah that’s why yeah shiny shiny. So we always kind of so tell them that hey it’s always the problem that you have to start with. It’s always the identifying the right use case the problem set the data I mean whatever you you’re looking to achieve out of it and then any technology can come in. I mean we have seen cases where people are going like that we need an agentic system we need an autonomous system and then you can just apply a simple workflow based concepts and and the problem gets resolved and it’s fixed. Then we’ve seen a lot of times where you’re bolting on this this AI stuff and then the problem really lights and the fact that there was somebody who was supposed to you know do XYZ and he’s not doing it hence the problem still you know is there you have to foster a culture of uh excited adventure. you you have to you have to foster this culture that says we don’t know yet what we’re going to uncover. And by the way, it’s changing almost every single day. So we need all of you to keep a breast every day of recent announcements. You need the most current announcements. You need to keep experimenting. You got to keep challenging yourself and don’t think that you’ve got the best solution because you probably don’t now. It’s changed and just keep reinventing over and over again. And our team believes that and they love it. So we we compel them to set aside time on their calendar literally every single day to go read and learn. Yeah. And then they often come down they say hey I read this and and we say we don’t want you to just pass on a tip. Download it test it give us benchmarks. Tell us what you learned. So we you have to foster a culture of wonder. Honestly let me just give you that tagline. Foster a culture of wonder about AI and let them go what are we going to discover today? Like in what way are are we going to change something today? And if you give that expectation, people find it often. That’s what’s exciting. That’s true. Can you share one AI use case that you feel has been a real what’s the word? A real workhorse and you know, something that you would say that this was great. I mean, this has really turned out. I’ve got so many number one number one. You know, we’re a software company. You don’t need to understand a language in depth anymore. You don’t need to be a Python expert to write Python. You don’t need to go learn R, right? You know who knows it? The LLMs. What you need to do is understand soft software architecture. What makes a solid commercially ready software product? And you need to guide the AI to do that for you. Your time to market is so much better. It’s incredible. And and it gives you superpowers. Before we used to divide people by language, kind of like spoken language, but also coding language. It’s like, oh, you know R, you know, he knows Python. Go talk to he’s a Java guy. Go talk to Not anymore. We don’t need that anymore. Number two is clearly anything written in any language by the way. Any language, right? Yes. Yeah. And so we’ve got, you know, we we we’ve created from scratch in the last year two brand new AI products. One called My Personas and one called Ele. And both of those products, they’re commercially available. They’re out in the market. People are using them. My Personas creates an AI clone of a person. Not an avatar, but a clone of somebody that you know. So, for example, if you go to our website, ignite.a, AI. You’ll click on the little my personas logo and you’ll talk to Succi Ramos who is our chief commercial officer and she can answer all kinds of questions about Ignite Tech, about our product. And here’s the cool thing about my personas. If you ask Succi a question and its AI doesn’t know it, it’ll go ask Succi directly and Succi will then answer that question, give it back to the person that’s interacting with it and then update the knowledge of the AI so the next time that question is asked, it’ll know the answer. And that’s all patented technology that this self-learning, you know, constantly expanding knowledge. That’s my personas. And this other creates my digital twin or digital clone. Creates your digital twin 100%. Creates your digital twin, but has this learning capability, right, which is really quite remarkable. Then we’ve got this other product called Eloquins AI. Eloquins AI is a persona, but it is an email persona. So you can there’s all kinds of use cases. Somebody sends in an email asking a question, the per the email persona answers always in perfect perfect language, 160 languages that it speaks, you know, so it’s multilingual and it’s always very much on point and it can go back and forth with interaction with those uh, you know, with the people on the email. What’s the use case? I don’t know where there isn’t a use case. Let me just take one events. Every single event, whether it’s a marathon to go back to our running theme or it’s a upcoming AI conference, the same thing happens to the organizers about two weeks out, they start getting inundated with the same questions over and over and over and over again. When does it start? Can I see the agenda? Where should I stay? I’d like to be a sponsor. Oh, oh my god, these poor organizers. Even though they published all that information, four ways, there will still be people asking, oh, everybody just asks the same questions and they can’t keep up and they lose their minds. Well, what if you didn’t have to do that? You could just ask the My persona. It’s like, here’s where you stay and here’s a discount code and yes, there are group discounts or whatever. That’s just one use case. And we use it internally. For example, we just acquired a company four weeks ago, a company called Chorus, Khos, and we immediately set up an Eloquins ID, which is chorusignitech.ai, for customers to ask all kinds of questions. What does this mean? What are the plans for the product? You know, can you tell me about the roadmap? All of that. and it it has real conversations, very personal, always bespoke. They’re not templates. It’s really quite remarkable. So all of those use cases really change the game. So talking about acquisitions and mergers, I I believe you’ve done more than I mean you have a good experience in in doing those as as and you earlier before we started the podcast, you were also sharing this story about uh MMA evaluations and everything. So my question is kind of related to that as well. But where a company claims to be AI powered, what are the red signals that you kind of look into which you know that the capabilities might be more branding than really reality? So separating the hype from what actually the product is. How do you guys how do you kind of go about it? What how do you do some due diligence? And I mean in the enterprise market we really just look for a couple of markers that are important. Uh number one we look for retention. Retention is an indication what customers feel about the product in its current state and have over the last few years. That’s probably the most important barometer we look at. We don’t look at profitability because we always know how to make things operationally profitable. That’s what we do. We’re really good at it. We we look at retention. We don’t look at any software now with this AI lens and not see AI potential. I mean, there’s there’s no software that you should look at and say, “Yeah, there’s nothing you could do with AI.” That there’s there’s room to change that everywhere, right? So yeah, but a lot of software nowadays are more like rappers over GPD. Uh how do you kind of see how can products really then differentiate? I guess data could be one thing. You have proprietary data but I mean yeah so that that’s what the trend I’m seeing nowadays as well. A lot of AI startups that are coming up and I mean even perplexity started as a rapper to charge GPT but right so what how do you see or determine that hey product can really go beyond a rapper or is it really a rapper? We’re not buying AI companies. That’s not what we’re doing. We’re buying enterprise software companies that have existing customer bases, revenue streams, history, and then we’re bringing our AI innovation to that. We’re not buying we’re not buying hype. We’re not buying ideas. We’re buying software companies that we can validate have an existing market like Chorus. Chorus has this marvelously passionate customer base. Uh the core product they have is a community. You know, we’re all familiar with communities like the extension of brand support where you go out and different people in the community answer questions and interact with users and it’s not the company that’s their core product that and brand care taking care of, you know, the messaging around brand out there like on social media and the like. Really passionate customer base. We’ve learned uh in the community space in particular. There are people that regard themselves as community people. I didn’t know that until we bought Porus. They’ve come out in droves since the acquisition. It’s great. We love it. love the passion and we’re bringing an AI lens to everything that we see there and we’ve got some great ideas for example on on perplexity communities often work well by finding articles on a community in a Google search but what happens if they show up in a perplexity search now are they the right articles are they attributed back to the brand in any way shape or form or is it masked because it’s in an answer engine right so we need to create discoverability in answer engines not just search engines like Perplexity and as part of our AI plans. So I guess data is one big factor that can really differentiate you, right? So organizations that have access to good proprietary data can automatically now build really strong AI applications because that’s the biggest factor that comes into play. That’s that’s is that a correct assumption? Well, we look at data as of course golden and super important, but we’ve got a strategy where we build what we call an AI. So instead of an API, it’s an AI PI. And what that is is a gateway, a a mapping if you will, to the data that’s downstream that AI knows how to interact with. So the key is we’ve got data in these enterprise software products that we acquire and we have that’s locked up in certain databases. Could be Oracle, could be MySQL, who knows what. You don’t want to teach AI how to do that all discreetly. So we write this interface called an AIPI which allows you to interact with that data and do things with it. That’s very similar to anthropics MCP definition. Okay, MCP is often times a strategy in our AIPI, but that’s the the basic lens. So, yeah, that’s how you unlock data, you know, years worth of data that is unbelievably valuable. How can you feed that into AI? That’s our strategy, right? Coming to AI agents and autonomous workflows. We’re looking at a lot of organizations, a lot of entrepreneurs, two person teams, three person teams taking businesses from 0 to 40,000 uh MMR or let’s say 0 to 2 million ARS or 10 million ARS. And how based on your experience so far, how realistic is it really to build a business using AI agents in such a short time? I mean, do you think that this AI rapid AIdriven growth is an exception or it will really become a norm in the next two three years putting it out? 100% believe that. 100% believe that. I don’t think it’s an anomaly at all. I think we’re just starting to figure that out. I It’s got nothing to do with agents. Agents is just the latest concept of that. But this idea of AI enabling solo so-called soloreneurs or one bill one person one billion dollar companies. I don’t know if it’s a billion that just you know that gets a lot of attention. But you can write scalable software using AI. You can build a scalable software company using AI if you approach it that way. Right. I I 100% believe that and we we we’re going to see that. More importantly, we’re going to see very large company, substantial revenue in the billions be completely displaced by these companies. We’re going to see it happen. We’re, you know, you could just pick a name public company, Fortune50, who thinks that they’re fat and happy and it’s all fine. They’ve got this locked up. No, we’re going to see major displacement, not disruption, but like destruction of an existing market with existing companies. And they’re not going to know what hit them. They’re going to be like, “What the hell?” This is why we’re out talking on all on podcasts, on shows, uh on uh at, you know, events to say, “Don’t let that happen to you. If you do, we told you it was going to happen. Don’t let it happen to you.” Are you talking about big tech companies or generally enterprises or businesses in general? Everything. Because big big tech company is and a threat which is the reason they’re on this buying buying spree all the time right so big tech for sure that yeah big tech for sure yeah I mean look at what you know the challenge that perplexity created for Google I mean correct actually has affected it actually has right I think ever since their existence it’s the first time that Google there’s there something that has really come that can you know displace Google which is why they’re on this buying spree as well right so they want to make sure they grab the tech they grab the people and they have the coming in. So yeah, that’s that’s what it is. You know, it’s an it’s an arms race to a to a large extent. It’s similar to an arms race as it relates to tech. So the last time we saw anything like that was the dot time frame in, you know, the beginning of 2000. I hate to say that because everybody hears com bubble. Okay, I get that. Yeah. And we all know that, right? I mean, there were lots of us. I don’t see that happening this time. I don’t I I don’t see it bursting. I don’t see that happening. Yeah. Correct. So the bubble might not burst but there will be smaller bubbles that get busted out right. So for instance, right right so smaller startups they get wiped out once GPT you know OpenAI releases something and they instantly get wiped out because obviously they don’t have the distribution as much as as OpenAI and Chity would be. All right so or anthropic can’t ever leave anthropic out of this conversation. I mean they’re doing some great work right now. I mean correct you’ve really kind of got the big three right now. Open AI, Anthropic Lama and Meta Lama and of course Gemini and Gemini. Yeah, that’s right. Sorry. Big four. Big four. You’re right. Four. Four. Yeah. If you include Gemini, forget Gemini cuz it was called Bard and that didn’t make any sense. And they misfired so badly when they started. They’ve now made up for it. So, you’re right. I’m sorry. I I have to remember. Yeah. So, you have Facebook, uh, I think Llama, Apple’s, Apple Intelligence, um, you have Amazon’s, uh, I don’t know what Amazon’s. Well, Amazon’s heavily invested in anthropic, of course. Anthropic, of course. primary investor in right so you have entropic or clawed Amazon over there you have Microsoft with open AI and then you have open AI and then you have other perplexity and all these guys as well so but yeah absolutely so let’s so if it’s a if a business I’m I’m a business owner I’m an enterprise and I had to build an AI team that from scratch you know inside a company which is kind of stuck in their existing ws and what what are the first five seats that you’d fill or first three whatever and how would you kind of construct uh that team structure. So I mean I I could tell you exactly what I did. The very first thing I did was hire the anchor to that who now I call my chief AI officer. I’ve built everything around that role in that person. And not only that, uh we changed the organization completely. So we changed it from having traditional reporting. So like finance reporting to the CFO, marketing reporting to the CMO, all those people report in to the CIO. All of them. The entire Okay. So the entire hierarchy gets changed. Yeah. To be clear, what they have is a very strong dotted line to their domain owner. So they still report to the CFO and a dotted line. They still report to the CMO in a dotted line. So those business owners, those domain owners, they’re the ones that say, “Here’s what we want to do.” The AI team helps them figure out how. So that way we share amongst the entire organization the AI learnings the things we’ve already written the things we’ve already built to make certain that across the entire org best practices are being used otherwise you end up with the finance team wrote their little AI things the marketing team wrote their little IIA and we did that to start with we did that and then we said okay that was good but not SC you know pretty soon people were writing the same thing but different ways and that was maybe good in the beginning but now we’re like low let’s bring all the ideas together Angela, if you look at my org chart, it literally has the CIO and the entire org reporting in not from an HR standpoint, from an AI guidance standpoint. So, what’s the I know you gave that piece of advice uh that it has to come from the top. Other than that, what’s one other advice that you’d like to give to CEOs who are diving into AI to make sure their team doesn’t just buy into the technology, but also the vision behind it? It’s the phrase that I often use, and I’ll just repeat it. Uh, if you don’t think you’re behind, if you think you’re behind, good. If you don’t think behind, you’re toast. You’re just, you’re doomed. You’re doomed, honestly. So, get your head out of the sand. Don’t act like this is a passing fad. Don’t act like this is going away. It’s not. You’re going to wake up one day displaced. You’re going to be right your company or you or both are going to be looking and wonder what happened. I just believe that to my core. And, you know, it’s it’s proving out over the last couple of years. Right. Yeah. All right. So, it’s a do or die situation. It it it is it’s an existential threat and I don’t believe that’s hyperbole. Not at all. To close on a personal note, uh you’ve led turnarounds, scaled companies, you’ve embraced constant change. What’s the one hard lesson in leadership or life that’s kind of stayed with you through it all, running ultramarathons, everything? Yeah. I I mean, listen, it’s a joy and it’s a privilege to lead. Uh I don’t manage, I lead. That’s that’s my philosophy. It’s what I I ask my people to be leaders, not managers. You know, if you’ve hired the people that are aligned with your culture and aligned with the way you think, I think you, for the most part, you’ve got that opportunity. I’m excited every day. I love what I do. I always have. I’ve really I’m a passionate believer in our company and the way we’re structured and the way we’re doing it. It’s not perfect. You know, sometimes things don’t work, but we figure it out. This is an opportunity to really shape the future, not only of people, but of the industry. And uh it’s it’s just super exciting to be a part of. So, yeah, I think everybody should feel that way wherever they are, honestly. Yeah, absolutely. You should find the passion in your work. I mean, I I do believe that, you know, that constant pressure that, you know, do something that you’re passionate about the little bit. I I don’t believe it in a lot because a lot of times it’s it’s hard to find it’s hard to box that you’re passion. I mean, I might be passionate about singing, right? But still, it’s very hard to at times box it into something of which I can make money, of which I can make a life of. So, a lot of times you just have to you kind of start learning to love what you do automatically to a certain extent. So that kind of grows there as well. I’d say it’s slightly different. Instead of searching for that which you’re passionate about, I would say be passionate about anything you do or just don’t do it. Literally just like just pass on like otherwise otherwise you’re going to get less than you know the best results that you possibly can. Right. So I’ve been for I’ve been fortunate in that way. It’s the way I’ve felt you know professionally and even personally. So yeah. Awesome. Awesome. All right. So Eric, been awesome having you today. uh like you said I knew about marathons but never about ultramarathons. So that’s a good learning that I take away besides you know uh how you’ve kind of uh implemented changes across your org and done for other organization. It was really pleasure kind of talking to you and and then you know talking about this AI first transformations and everything. Yeah I enjoyed it too. Thank you. Thanks Ash. All right. [Music]
