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With the ultimate goal of increasing revenues, this podcast explores how organizations can move beyond data silos, fragmented systems, and operational inefficiencies to achieve true data readiness, unpacking full-environment assessments, right-size/right-fit integration choices, practical ways to navigate AI solution options, and roadmaps with clear, measurable milestones that keep service and platform providers accountable and outcomes when promised.
Protocols, Payloads and Pints is produced by https://ipaas.com/ and https://www.parkfieldcommerce.com/
Welcome to an episode of Protocols, Payloads and Pints. I'm Robert Rand.
Alex:And I'm Alex Zakman.
Robert:Excited to have you with us today. Alex, why don't you tell the audience a little bit about how we came up with this unique podcast talking about data and global trade and a little bit of the inspiration.
Alex:Yeah, I think some of it is that you're a good mention. We've always had great conversations together. And a good chunk of this kind of spawned off of both you and I being incredibly frustrated at all of the self promoting on LinkedIn, all of the AI slop, people being overly polished and not actually honest about what's happening. And I think you and I have kind of been in the the consulting and tech space long enough to know that people sling a lot of bullshit to sell product. And, you know, at the end of the day, yeah, revenue numbers are important, but nobody's actually having real conversations, slinging product.
Alex:And I think, you know, this conversation presents, you know, between our Rolodexes, we can actually have an honest conversation with folks in government, with other ISVs, with retailers, wholesalers, manufacturers, and actually talk about, you know, kind of the issues of the day and, you know, kind of a way like the Guardian or The Atlantic or BBC has a conversation. There's not really anybody in the tech industry having an honest conversation about, you know, what does a digital transformation today look like? Why is it that every AI adoption is failing and and looking at luster fuck? Why why are people making comments about, hey. We're not gonna lay off, then we lay off, and then we go, oh, well, our productivity went way down.
Alex:Or, you know, hey, we have this rosy optimistic picture of what something's gonna be, but it doesn't actually work.
Robert:And I think that's inherently a lot of the challenges that people think that they know what digital transformation looks like. But it's such an evolution right now, And there's so much pressure coming down through organizations to adopt AI, to cut staff, to do other things, and often carts before horses. Things are messy out there.
Alex:You know, the reality is last year, we had a conversation about digital transformation with a company that was still running an ERP running on COBOL. Like, it's not a realistic expectation to say that you're gonna have all these agentic things, and everybody's gonna magically adopt technology like Zoomers when, you know, boomers are still in the workforce and, you know, the reality is that you and I are elder millennials and, you know, we still interact in a certain way. And I think people are more overly optimistic and rosy about what the technology is versus where it actually is. And then what does change management and, like, adoption look like? You know, the the reality is we're still on the early adoption curve of what AI AI looks like.
Alex:Right? Like, right now, AI is a combination of machine learning, large language models, frontier models. But, you know, it's like saying the Motorola brick phone or the car phone that sat under your seat with an antenna that popped out of the the front fender was, you know, what mobile phones are today. The the reality, right, is this has more compute power than what put us on the moon fifty years ago. So if we think that we know what something looks like, reality is most businesses are still running technology that's ten, twenty years old.
Alex:Are they, you know, going to adopt everything that a b to c market is gonna adopt? No. So I think it's it's it's it's worthwhile to have an honest conversation where, yes, you and I would love business. But at the end of the day, like, the vast majority of people are, you know, trying to figure out what's actually going on and how do I meaningfully do this. And I think nobody's actually having the conversation without trying to hawk shit.
Robert:Right. And I think the other side of it is that the technology, they may still be on AS400, right? They may have an older tech stack. There may be challenges with adopting new technology, with integrating new technology across a business, etcetera. But the consumer, the client, the buyer, etcetera, that their expectations are shifting.
Robert:And so especially talk about us as elder millennials, but they're newer generations that don't want to call in a phone order or don't want to do it the old fashioned way. And so for businesses that have been in manufacturing, distribution, etcetera, for many, many decades, sometimes significantly longer than that, they're being I don't know if forced is the right word, but they're certainly feeling the pain if they're not starting to adopt newer technologies and newer methods. And I learned years and years ago in my agency days, somebody that I look up to told me not to use myself as a barometer. You know, just because I wouldn't buy something from an ad on a certain social media platform or just because I wouldn't didn't mean that others weren't gonna react differently. And that, you know, you have to think about different consumers, different markets, different habits and so forth.
Robert:And you need to be able to lean in if you want to be able to capitalize on And those at the end of the day, that's what we're talking about, it's business. And so I think that that's what people are grappling with. Yes, they can't turn everything upside down in a day and just revolutionize everything. But what do they need? And in my history in the industry, I've always loved talking about table stakes and what are today's table stakes and what will tomorrow's be.
Robert:And trying to at least stay maybe not 10 steps ahead, but a couple of steps ahead has become the the challenge. And I I think where where a lot of organizations are struggling right now is that they're dropping everything for different AI projects and other things that, to your point, are often a flop or are often costing them a lot more than they anticipated or creating a lot more internal friction or whatever the problems are. But they're still not necessarily meeting bare minimums in areas that they really need to be.
Alex:Yeah. So the funny thing. Right? You know, my my my head of product jokes that, you know, we always wanna litmus test everything we're doing so we're not getting high on our own supply. And, you know, I I I was you know, I have kind of a love hate relationship with Microsoft like most people.
Alex:Right? It it it works, but, you know, like, it it's it's also become very bloated in some ways. But I was at a a conference, earlier this week, and somebody, there had, the comment, that they were doing some agentic modeling on finance flows. They were a 100% accurate. And somebody came up to me afterwards and asked what my thoughts were.
Alex:I'm like, that's kind of bullshit because, like, you know, like, I've been in systems integration long enough to know that, like, you're never gonna have 100% on anything and then throw in some agentic stuff. And, you know, I I think, again, it goes back to, can you have an honest conversation in an honest way where it's not overly corporate? I'm not beating a company drum. It's having an honest conversation. Yes.
Alex:I'm purposely cursing in this. Yes. We're purposely bringing alcohol into this because, you know, everything gets overly stuffy. But at the end of the day, you know, I travel all around Europe and North America. And when you actually sit somebody down for cocktails or pints and have a conversation outside of a PowerPoint deck, it it's a very different conversation, and I think it it's important to kinda break it down.
Alex:And, you know, to use a a saying from my time in the army too. Right? Like, there is always a better village idiot. Like, it is important to sit and figure out, like, why things fail and have a conversation. Like, yeah, case studies are are great to look at, but, you know, the reality is, like, my company has serviced over 700 projects.
Alex:I can make the data say whatever the fuck I want it to say. Company x y zed is not you. It's more important to say, okay. What's actually happening and how do we make it work for you? Or looking at something academically versus, okay.
Alex:I need to sell more Salesforce. I need to sell more Dynamics. I need to sell more Sage. I need to sell more NetSuite. Like, the reality is the industry is set up to sell product, not necessarily take care of the customer.
Alex:And I think it's important for folks to, you know, kind of understand what that dynamic looks like. And, you know, I'm probably gonna get some hate and shade for, you know, kinda having a, you know, honest conversation about how the tech industry works. But, you know, we're we're kind of at, you know, an another industrial revolution. Like, the the way we're doing business is changing. Like, you hear conversations about a bubble.
Alex:I do think it's a bubble, but that doesn't mean that, like, we're gonna go back to what things were without machine learning and without large language models. We 100% will continue to use those.
Robert:Right. think
Robert:com bubble burst. It's not that we went back you know, the Internet disappeared. It's just that they're, you know, they're needing to use Yahoo anymore. Yeah. But even after the bubble burst, we still did for a while.
Robert:It wasn't instantaneous. But like every tech revolution, over time you get winners and losers. So far in AI, it has been jumping all over the place with who the winner is in whatever sector, on whatever day of the week. Obviously, we all have some favorites at the moment, but those will continue to evolve. And I'd say you mentioned sitting down after the project and sometimes the tech would call those postmortems.
Robert:It's a bit morbid, but I usually stick with something more like retrospective. But it's important. I've been on the road the last couple of weeks and will be for the weeks ahead, meeting with companies like Shopify and BigCommerce and Shopware and being at different events and so on and so forth. It's so interesting. Technology, obviously, especially publicly traded companies and those that There was the pandemic high of sales of certain tech, And there's the push to try to keep up with the same sales volume, which if you've already grabbed a certain amount of market during a time period and accelerated, it's the way I talk about Netflix, that if everybody's got a Netflix account, you can go to the next country and the next country.
Robert:At some point, Netflix better hope that there are potential subscribers on Mars because you run out of But accessible I look at it and I see companies that are really, really fighting for sales. And to your point, not always, and not speaking of any one company in particular at the moment, but not as focused on customer success about they're playing checkers instead of chess, that they're trying to fill today's funnel at the expense of the longevity, of the long term. And so in partnerships, in my role, there are a lot of organizations that have really reduced their partner teams to just being focused on revenue generation and not long term customer retention, which partnerships generally should be involved in, not marketing and go to market and brand awareness and such, which again, working with different organizations, whether it's services partners or other technology companies or such, plays such a huge role. And we find that a lot of our great partners, that they don't just look at the referrals from partners, they look at the sales that they're making that are partner influenced, that they were able to win business because they have a relationship across the aisle and in many cases across land barriers and oceans as well.
Robert:And so we find that that becomes important and kind of that vision of, are your partnerships just a facility of sales or are they really something more? Becomes this really interesting conversation about where are you really positioning yourselves short term and long term. I think that of funnels its way down into the user bases and into where you see these companies going.
Alex:I think BlackRock has kind of gotten the Western world to kind of view growth at all costs. And, you know, we're we're realizing now that, you know, given the turbulent last, you know, year, or, you know, few years going back to COVID. Right? Like, it's okay to have some down quarters and realize that, like, you don't need leadership change or, you know, like, for us on the on the tech or consulting side. Right?
Alex:Like, what works now is not what worked two years ago. Like, people aren't doing CapEx. They're figuring out how to do OpEx. Everybody's scared about, you know, kind of what's happening. But, you know, I think because the industry is so driven by KPIs right now, It's lost its humanity.
Alex:And, you know, I had a mentor once say, you know, making money is kind of like losing weight. If you focus on losing weight, you're gonna gain weight. And, you know, if you focus on making money, you're gonna lose money. And at the end of the day, you know, business is about taking care of people, solving a problem, providing an experience, providing a good. And if you take care of the people that are transacting with you, money is a byproduct of that.
Alex:And I think we've kind of lost sight of
Robert:that. Right. You try to run a business purely from a spreadsheet. Look, you need to be able to pay the bills and obviously businesses are run to turn profits. But I was on a partner town hall recently with perhaps the largest e commerce platform, at least in North America.
Robert:And they were talking about or apologizing for how slow they've been to be able to respond to any new apps, anybody submitting to be listed. And again, their user bases are thriving on the ability to leverage apps and different technology from different providers. And so stifling that, painful. But they had really cut back a lot of staff in that area, as I understand it. And then they were also apologizing that they keep breaking changes and not telling partners until afterward.
Robert:And when you're a small startup and things happen, okay, maybe as they say in a lot of areas of tech, move fast, break shit. We've all seen it. We've all experienced some of it in tech. But when you get to a certain size, it's harder. And I think often people forget that so many people are counting on these organizations for their bread and butter, that you're talking about people's livelihoods.
Robert:And so this all kind of comes full circle that really thinking about things in those terms of, well, maybe we should slow down a notch that it really is important to have the documentation ready and and have announcements ready of these things and so on and so forth and give people a a little bit of time to adjust before things kick in. There's so much of that out there. But, you know, I'm gonna shift topics for a second, Alex, because you mentioned alcohol and I saw you lift your glass, we put Pints right in the name of the podcast. But we haven't talked anything about that. You wanna touch on that for a moment?
Alex:Yeah. I I think, like I said, right, like, the the the idea of it being in the logo is we've lost the third space to have the conversation about what's happening. So currently, I'm enjoying a, you know, currently, I am in Sligo, Ireland. It is in the the the West Of Ireland, just above Connemara, just below Donegal. So I'm enjoying lovely IPA called West Coast IPA from Lowgill Brewery here in Sligo.
Robert:Alright. Well, I'm sitting at home this morning in the East Coast Of The United States down I I arrived back in Miami last night and got home closer to midnight from my my last trade show. So I'm giving a a shout out to one of my local breweries that I love, Funky Buddha, and and you know? But, I'm hydrating with good old h two o.
Alex:And so I figured this is episode zero.
Robert:We're gonna start there and let's see what what we can work our way up to.
Alex:Fair fair enough. You know, we we we are working on some fun distillery and brewer sponsors. So, you know, the the the goal will kinda be to have a a rotating selection and, you then we can play the game of where in the world is Robert and Alex.
Robert:That's a fun game to play a lot of the time. Alex, I know that in your business dealings of late, you've been dealing with a lot of international trade and government org, NGOs and other sorts of situations where, in the age of maybe the resurgence of tariffs and different shifting global sentiments and certainly
Alex:Lions, tigers, Trump, carny, oh my.
Robert:Yeah, there you go. If you were to think about maybe some of the types of guests that we're anticipating in this first season and some of the types of topics that you're hoping to make sure that we bring into it. And that way, maybe the audience can hear our expertise and the questions more. But we'll be bringing in some heavy hitters in I don't know if we'd call it the hot seat. We're we're a pretty friendly bunch.
Robert:But, what what's your view?
Alex:We we we we you know, the goal, right, is to have crack and but we're still gonna slag, slag the heck out of folks. No. I, you know, I think, again, there isn't a third space to actually have the conversation. Most businesses aren't like you and I that go to a lot of conferences and, you know, regularly have kind of the pulse on this. You know?
Alex:But the idea, right, is that we're going to, you know, have a combination of merchants, manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers. We're gonna have some other ISVs, some other software partners. And then the goal is to, also have folks from, various governments from The United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, you know, eventually more of, you know, other parts of Europe and things like that. But, you know, as the trade landscape changes, as, you know, the needs for data change, as we, you know, look at things, nothing's really happening in a vacuum. Right?
Alex:Like, we're kind of living at the, there's a new 100 or once in a lifetime event every other month at this point. You know? The the the reality is there are several conflicts going on across the world. You know? Tariffs have come back.
Alex:You're starting to see, you know, trade agreements with new parts of the world. You know? At the end of the day, how does a small business or small enterprise actually, you know, kind of navigate what that means? How does a multinational navigate what that means? You know?
Alex:I I heard it kind of the the other day. A gentleman from the Financial Times joked that, there's basically Donald Trump, there's China, and then there's the friends of Mark Kearney. So at the end of the day, what does it mean to have new trade relationships between The United States and the rest of the world? As, you know, trade relationships change with China, what does that mean? How do we move goods?
Alex:How do we move data? What, you know, new platform or how do we better, you know, translate and, you know, connect with people. You know? Great. Canada wants to trade with, you know, Europe more or China or, you know, New Zealand, Australia.
Alex:What does that actually mean? How do businesses go do that? You know, we're starting to see, you know, the emergence of recession. You know, how do businesses, you know, get supports? You know?
Alex:In Canada, there's shred. There's grants available for businesses to be able to do things. You know, in Ireland, there's the combination of the IDA, Enterprise Ireland, and Northern Ireland. There's Invest Northern Ireland. There's Innovate UK in Great Britain.
Alex:You know? So there's a lot of things that I think businesses don't really know how to to kind of navigate from both, you know, moving goods, what's the government seeing, what supports might be available. Think it's kind of all up in conversation this season.
Robert:You've mentioned a few tidbits from your background. Maybe this is a good time for us to just tell the audience a little bit about us. Chances are we won't do too much of that across the future episodes. But Alex, you mentioned your background starting maybe with the Army, but you know, if you wouldn't mind explaining a little bit about what makes you an expert in technology and data and these different areas that we've been talking about.
Alex:Yeah. I mean, most fun I ever wanna have once. Right? The the joke is I think the the best thing that came out of it is that I know I I now know how to bitch and complain and still work while I'm bitching and complaining. So, you know, I I I thoroughly appreciate, you know, former commanders and senior NCOs for for teaching me that life skill.
Alex:But, you know, kind of a a bit of a heterogeneous, background. Ended up going to school for biology and chemistry. I had fellowships with NASA, NOAA, and NSF. Did, a fair bit of work around machine learning, back in the day. They, you know, have run an agency slash consultancy for the the last decade.
Alex:We recently acquired new agency consultancy, and we're in the process of spinning up a a regtech platform to help with compliance. You know, we have a footprint across multiple jurisdictions. So, you know, we've engaged in Central Europe. You know, obviously, I'm sitting here in Ireland. We we have a a good footprint in Ireland and The UK.
Alex:Our, you know, operational headquarters are now Toronto. And then we have, you know, kind of a distributed workforce in The US with kind of a gravitational pull to the East Coast. You know, historically, we've helped mid market to enterprise organizations or for our European friends, you know, we've helped kind of mid sized SMEs to larger multinationals. And I think, you know, the the goal of this is how can we make data integrations and, you know, kind of navigating the current turbulence. You know, how how can we give you, you know, some knowledge to kinda go tackle that?
Robert:Yeah. Well, and on my side, I'm really just here to to be a good nerd. I'm here to geek out, but that's what I've been doing.
Alex:Well, did cover that. You're a mensch.
Robert:Well, I appreciate that. Takes one to know one. My story goes that by the third grade, they were pulling me out of class for an hour a day to help the computer teacher and nothing's really changed since. I had a little bit of a mechanical engineering background In college, as I was studying, decided to broaden my horizons from there and learned that I liked some of the business side and other side and wound up going in a bit of a different direction from the original robotics and Westinghouse science projects and things like that that I'd been doing from high school forward. And wound up in the digital agency space myself for a decade.
Robert:My brother was the CEO, my sister-in-law was the CFO, and I was the CTO of an agency that brought brands like Swiss Gear and Invicta Watches into e commerce. We were the digital agency doing the digital marketing for organizations like the Florida Panthers, Inc. 5,000 company Google Premier partner. We were acquired in 2017 and exited. So that was a wild ride and have stayed in technology since working with organizations in areas like web hosting in the cloud and had a great run with JetRails where I hosted the JetRails podcast.
Robert:That was the last podcast I hosted, and 100 episodes of that left me wanting to figure out the next thing. And Alex, I'm very glad we're doing this. But have otherwise been working in the integration space in the last three years, heading up partnerships, a chief partnership officer at ipass.com integration platform as a service. Really, for me, what's interesting about that is that we get to work with so many great services partners, the agencies, the SIs, the VARs, the MSPs, the consultancies. And so seeing what they're dealing with and all the great technology companies, the ERPs, point of sale, CRMs, PIMs, warehouse management, order management, sales tax exemption certificate management, accounts receivable.
Robert:The list goes on and on. We've been having some great expansion with the nonprofit space and dealing with nonprofit CRMs and fundraising and donor management platforms. You just start to really see, as we deal with data with HR systems, it's such a unique vantage point. Back to the protocols and thinking about the internationalization of data, data security, data governance, data regulation, and how these things come together. There's so many interwoven topics that we've already touched on in this episode zero that I'm really looking forward to getting deeper into.
Robert:But I think that it gives us such a unique opportunity together, given that we've seen not only so many successes, but realistically, so many failures. How many projects have you seen through the years that did not launch successfully on their first attempt? Many tech companies have you seen rise and fall? Well, I think beside you.
Alex:You know, this is what I'm also gonna call out. Right? Like, we're batting a 92% success rate on go live. We're 80% on time, 72% on budget. But the the you know, across, you know, just shy of a a thousand, you know, total projects.
Alex:But, you know, people telling you everything's gonna be peachy keen and all of that fun stuff. Right? Like, the reality is every project gets fucked. Every project goes sideways. There's always going to be friction and frustration.
Alex:And, you know, again, I think it's important to, like, have the honest conversation about that. Right? Like, it's not a bad thing that a project goes sideways. It's kind of inevitable. It becomes more, like, how do you provide the tools to get it back on track and get it across the line, versus going, oh, woe is me.
Alex:This thing, you know, got fucked.
Robert:I mean, I haven't been in the agency space since 2017. But one of my favorite things that I learned on the job was the risk analysis and going through with the client the risk of what would delay the project or what would increase the price on the project, scope changes, things like that, and where we typically run into them, what the most common issues are in the types of projects that we were dealing with. And for me, getting into those conversations, staying ahead of them was transformative. I find that today, we see a lot of projects that go off the rails in different sectors, people coming to us after the fact, that sort of thing. If they had a good project plan from the beginning that had dependencies where they knew who needed to be doing what and when and how that was going to impact the next stage and the next stage that they probably would have been okay.
Robert:But there's also just that reactive way of looking at a tech stack, right? Of, Okay, we need to solve this one problem today, as opposed to taking a little bit more time and planning out where do we want to be with this tech stack in three years or five years for the team that I'm a part of where we act as a data hub and not just a connector from A to B, but really the hub where every integration is standardized. We see organizations that have just wound up with all of these point to point connectors that they can't manage and maintain reasonably, that are just this huge thorn in their side of things breaking and different teams involved in each one and trying to think more proactively about, yeah, sometimes you just need to turn on another spoke and you need to get data flowing with one more system and you don't want to go back to the drawing board or you need to upgrade or replace a spoke, right? Finally, it is time to get off of AS400 or that Cobalt system or whatever it may be. Just thinking about that evolution, as much as everybody's focused on what is next in their tech stack in terms of AI, AI is all about data.
Robert:Trash in, trash out. And so thinking about the data governance, the data hygiene becomes more important than ever in breaking down the data silos. And so they're the things that consume me day in and day out of how do organizations set themselves up, not just to get through a short term project successfully, but even if that project I think what you and I do all day, every day is trying to simplify the complex, but it is complex under the hood. And thinking about that long term setup and AI, as much as we're all using it heavily and love it, it's also right now a recipe to disaster in terms of A lot of cases, you're writing something, when we're talking code, is the code that you're writing scalable? Is it secure?
Robert:Is it maintainable? Is it just a bunch of random spaghetti code, as we say? So it's almost like, you back in the day, where you would have quality control with an agency with a dev team that was experienced and had processes in place? Or is it more like you hired somebody on Fiverr and there's great people for hire as freelancers, but is it more like you hired someone and this is this one off piece of technical debt that you're now going to be stuck with? And so just looking at a lot of those realities through the lens of our experience in the industry of what is it that you're really getting?
Robert:And is getting the fastest possible thing always the best long term outcome in terms of the business success, continuity, safety, etcetera? Thinking a few steps ahead is I think the the biggest challenge that everyone is facing right now and the breakneck pace that everyone's trying to move. Alex, we've lost your audio. Still not getting it. Did that fix it?
Robert:That did. Okay.
Alex:Alright. You know, the the the the reality, right, is, like, AI is the the shiny object syndrome. If if if you're still on Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains, we might need to get you to upgrade to a more modern ERP before we have a very flashy agentic or LLM strategy for the the organization. And I think, you know, the challenge, right, is with an economic slowdown and everybody trying to figure out how to move forward sales, you have an economic driver to talk about the single point. And I think, you know, given kind of where you and I sit, we're kind of looking going, hey.
Alex:We we want businesses and enterprises to be successful. And it doesn't really so much matter, like, hey. Are we reimplementing SYN seven? Are we reimplementing NetSuite, or does it need to be a migration? Do we, you know, really need to go from Magento to Shopify, or can we just fix the current Magento instance and, you know, figure out how to make that move forward?
Alex:You know? Or There's
Robert:some really strong opinions out there on those topics. Oh, I
Alex:oh, sure. Right? Or, you know, like, OpenAI versus Anthropic. Like, you and I might be sitting on the same side of the coin on that one. But at the end of the day, if you're rolling out AgenTic for kind of the first time or you're leveraging a frontier model for the first time, half the battle is just moving forward.
Alex:Like, you don't necessarily need to leverage one or the other if you don't have a strong use case for one over the other. It's just figuring out how do you put a step a foot forward, and you might readjust the strategy two or three years. And that's totally fine. And the reality is things are moving fast enough that that's probably the case.
Robert:Yeah. And look, mentioned legacy ERPs and AI. Was talking to a VAR from one ERP recently where he mentioned, Oh, the platform that they specialize in recently got some AI added in. I'm sitting on the seat of my chair because we have integrations to systems like OpenAI, we can get the data from these legacy siloed systems to OpenAI with prompts and enhance the data and automatically have it flow wherever you need. There's things that we could do.
Robert:All right, what have they added? Are we still applicable there for some of these use cases? And they described it as the old F1 button, that it would give you some idea of what you were looking at on the screen. That was it. That's all you got.
Robert:And all that I could think of was Clippy back in Microsoft Word way back when. It was like, yes, they've added something. Is it really what everybody needs, wants? Is it gonna check the box of improving your productivity the way that you're looking? Not yet, no.
Robert:And there's just so much of that out there where, for me, it's all about picking finite specific projects, outcomes that you want to drive and being able to measure against those, getting away from the behemoth of we need everything and thinking about what would be the most impactful. What's that painful process that the team is killing a lot of time on? Is it enhancing product descriptions? Is it categorizing the products? Is it organizing the customers into segments based on certain data?
Robert:What is it? And let's see if we can throw the AI at it, if we can do that and get those those limited wins and keep going from there and, you know, return Having the
Alex:the executive alignment between C Suite and the technical folks. I know? Now
Robert:you're asking way
Alex:too much. I
Robert:there's I'm not even But
Alex:I I I would say, right, like, joking aside, like, one of my goals of this podcast, right, is that we create something that the we're talking to both, and we're allowing and facilitating conversation between business leaders and technical teams. Right? Like, the reality is that, you know, between the pair of us, we probably know, what, 12 different programming languages, and we probably speak, like, six actual languages. You know, I think it it how to you know, creating a space to allow for those conversations to happen to where management listens to this and goes, yeah. That's exactly what I'm thinking.
Alex:And tech is able to say, that's exactly what I'm thinking, you know, in in effect. Right? Like, if we're able to be the tower of babble to say, you know, here's an actual, like, honest to goodness, good conversation and good kind of roundtable discussion that isn't hawking stuff that, you know, we have the conversation once a month, and then two weeks after the fact, we end up having an office hours where, you know, we're able to dive in and and kind of tackle conversations. Like, I think that's entertaining, but
Robert:it's also meaningful for folks. I would agree. And before we wrap for today, I know that you've got some office hours that you've been setting up and maybe we share that with the audience as a way to go from listening to us to maybe getting a little bit more involved and being able to interact more directly. What do you think about how the, you know, the the listeners and and viewers can can get a little bit of value out of that?
Alex:Yeah. I I think, you know, candidly, we still have to flush out some of those details. But, you know, idea right is, we end up having it be incredibly fluid and dynamic. You know, if there's the desire, we could potentially get a WhatsApp group kinda set up to allow for, conversations and things to happen, you know, with the idea that if we do set up a group like that, it is a very hard, hey. You're not selling to each other.
Alex:It's more, you know, gentlewoman and gentleman kind of engagement of how do we actually solve problems and, you know, not bang our own drum. But, yeah, I I think idea right is, this gets launched two weeks after the fact. We end up having, you know, an office hours posted, and we kind of, you know, move that forward. It will probably be an evolving thing. You know, as Robert kinda said, he hasn't done a podcast in a hot minute, and I haven't done, you know, a podcast or webinar series, you know, consistently since COVID.
Alex:So, you know, this is where I would ask for, you know, a little bit of grace of, you know, we are gonna fall on our face and, you know, politely and us and tell us we're jacked up. Don't, you know, just tell us we're fucking up. You know? We're we're happy to adjust fire.
Robert:Yeah. No.
Alex:Just just tell Yeah. It's all my fault. That's fine.
Robert:Yeah.
Alex:It's all my fault.
Robert:Yeah. Yep.
Alex:Yep. You you know, like, the the the joke, right, is that I can be Canadian. I can be American. I can be Irish. I can be Northern Irish.
Alex:I can be u British, you know, with with all of those hats. Right? I'm I'm I'm I'm wrong somewhere in one of one one of those hats.
Robert:Well, I'll stick to my headset as opposed to changing to too many hats, although I look good in a hat. Actually, I I was hearing about a conference that I I'm hoping to be at later this year where they're gonna give me a hat that you know, I thought that that would be You
Alex:you know, we just have to get we just have to get you over to Ireland or, Great Britain, and we'll get you, like, a proper hat, not just a baseball hat.
Robert:Well, we we could, we could certainly work on that. It's been a while since I I made it across the pond. I'm due. Well, on that note, we really appreciate everybody tuning in and a lot of great content and really great guests coming. So you'll be hearing from some really unique voices and we'll be keeping them honest and keeping the the content thoughtful and valuable.
Robert:Looking forward to
Alex:it. Alex, thanks for 100%. Making a first great episode.