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Tales from the PROS is hosted by Michael Georgiou, Co-Founder, and Eric Lawrence, Director of Growth at Imaginovation, an award-winning app and software development company. Each episode dives into honest, unscripted conversations, hard-earned lessons, and educational insight into how to help bridge the gap between technology and people.
If you’re a founder, exec, or innovator trying to navigate the tech world without getting burned, this podcast is your no-BS roadmap. Through real talk, personal stories, and insights from the front lines, you’ll pick up smarter ways to build software, steer clear of common mistakes, and choose the right partners in a crowded, often confusing space.
Whether you’re scaling a startup, driving digital change at a larger company, or just love keeping up with tech innovation, Tales from the PROS brings you straight-shooting advice and inspiration without the fluff.
Michael Georgiou (00:01.368)
Hey everyone, welcome back to Tales from the Pros. I'm your host, Michael Georgiou co-founder at Imaginovation joined by my co-host and our director of growth, Eric Lawrence. And today we've got our other co-founder and head of technology, Pete Peranzo If you've been following business news lately in the past year, you know that generative AI is everywhere, right? Especially when it comes to business operations. But here's the truth, not every company needs it.
and not every process benefits from it. Today, we're cutting past the hype to talk about how AI can streamline workflows, automate routine tasks, and support better decision-making. And we'll walk through a few real operational scenarios and break down whether AI really adds value or if it just creates more work. So let's get started. Thanks guys for being here. Pete, what's going on, man? How you doing? Good. Thanks for being here. Yeah, welcome back.
Pete (00:54.858)
Hey, hey, what's up? How's it going? Glad to be back.
Michael Georgiou (01:00.268)
And Eric, good for you to be here,
Eric Lawrence (01:03.542)
Yeah, always. It's a beautiful day.
Michael Georgiou (01:07.128)
Yeah. Yeah. So guys, yeah, you know, we'll get started here. know, AI, as we know, is always a topic of discussion. We're kind of always, we always come back to AI somehow, right? We were always talking about something else and then AI kind of jumps in the conversation. But especially in our industry, right? Where we, as a company at Imagine Novation, we help build software. We build amazing, remarkable software for other businesses.
Now with AI technology, it's inevitable to not include that as part of software development, essentially. But for this episode, we really want to kind of dive deep into when is it the right time to include AI or is it the wrong time or is there ever a wrong time? So we really want to kind of get into this sort of conversation that I think a lot of businesses and other people can really find value from.
Eric Lawrence (02:08.469)
Yeah. In, in regards to generative AI, I know that's kind of the next big thing. It's where AI takes it to that next step and it's able to kind of build off itself and come up with its own ideas.
A lot of people are talking about it in a lot of ways, but it's, feel like it's not discussed enough as far as the impact it's going to make on the business side of things. And when I'm speaking with people on the front lines, I hear from a lot of owners that are calling or CTOs and they're, all trying to figure out how can I be using this in my business? And I think there's kind of that divide between is there a product out there that I could use?
Michael Georgiou (02:43.31)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Lawrence (02:47.126)
Should I invest in it myself? So I think it might be good to kind of dissect that a little piece and specifically about like why leaders feel pressure to adopt AI into their operations. I guess Pete, like what, have you seen when it comes to AI and operations? What are people kind of looking into the most?
Pete (03:06.762)
Yeah.
Yeah, so you just brought me back, man, like 20, 25 years to my first job, real job. I went to work for this company called Blue Phoenix. And these guys, these developers, they're extremely talented guys. And I had the interview. And I remember this guy, Corey O'Brien, Pete Ferreira. I was in the room. They were grilling me. And the question that really stuck in my mind, and I ask this now when I interview people, it's always one of my questions is,
Michael Georgiou (03:12.462)
you
Pete (03:38.131)
When do you automate a task? And they weren't really looking for an answer. It's an open ended question. But you have to think about the impact it's going to have. It's going to save you time, right? Maybe. How much time is it going to save you? Are you doing things one time, 10 times? Are there errors that can occur? Here's where IOs go with it. And this is where, to answer your question,
Is the process you're automating correct? That's where a lot of companies jump the gun. And if the processes aren't correct, it doesn't matter if you automate it or stick AI on top of it. It's not going to improve things. It could actually make it more cumbersome and actually worse. And then there's another analogy I heard recently that really stuck with me too, where they say you don't put nitrous oxide
Michael Georgiou (04:13.262)
Hmm.
Pete (04:37.917)
into Ford Pinto, right? So you have to have an existing infrastructure that's ready to kind of take on this new technology before you can kind of just stick it in there.
Eric Lawrence (04:50.944)
Hmm. So are you suggesting when it comes to AI, it's more important to think about what should we be doing from a process standpoint to be automating our work and improving that overall before we even consider AI is AI just like the next iteration of that down the line? or, can somebody kind of skip that step to jump right into AI?
Pete (05:15.593)
You can, you can always skip a step, right? But that's the question that companies need to ask themselves. Is it better for me to skip going back and looking at my processes and improving those and just sticking AI on top of it? Or will I get more value from taking a step back and saying, hold on guys, maybe we're not ready for AI. Maybe there's more value to fix our existing process and then add AI on top of that. And that's where companies really need to kind of take a good hard look at themselves and figure out.
the answer to those questions.
Michael Georgiou (05:46.648)
So kind of like Pete, like what you're saying is, you know, businesses really need to take like a kind of like a hard deep look within their business, their systems, their operations, their processes. And it's kind of like an audit. It's like a self business audit, To see if, yeah, self reflection, yeah. To see if that's even something that's even needed yet. Is it even time? Because if you can add all this technology, not just AI, but...
Pete (06:03.997)
self-reflection.
Pete (06:11.187)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Georgiou (06:15.49)
but anything else, right? If you're adding something to improve something that's broken, then it's kind of like, you're not really improving it, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah.
Pete (06:29.947)
Exactly. Yep. That's well said, Mike, for sure.
Michael Georgiou (06:34.946)
Yeah, that's cool. And I guess like, know, with Pete, like Pete, if you think about it, right? when, for example, like when we're working with a client and they need, or they're asking for AI for some application, whether it's a, you know, just a small or a large company and they have, you know, automation that they really want to implement, it doesn't always mean that AI needs to do it.
essentially, right? Because I think that's something that gets misconstrued a lot. It's like, is automation always AI? Not necessarily. I mean, you know better than I do, but what do you think?
Pete (07:13.492)
Yeah, so there's agentic AI, right, which is essentially you're creating a worker to do something, a digital worker. I like to think of it like that. But then, you know, have generative AI where it's actually just generating output, right? So coding, creative videos. So it really just depends on the type of AI. all AI is not, AI doesn't mean automation, right? So for our business, right, we build solutions for people, right?
Michael Georgiou (07:22.349)
Yeah.
Michael Georgiou (07:37.122)
Yep.
Pete (07:42.571)
And this is kind of a scary example. But in the past, when someone came to us with a technical problem, we said, OK, you know what? I need two engineers. This very complex algorithm that we have to create, it might take us three months. We have to build it, test it, and so on and so forth. Now, when we build that module, we just send it to ChatGPT or Gemini or one of the
Michael Georgiou (07:47.918)
Thank
Hehe.
Pete (08:11.495)
you know, hundreds of models and we just get the answer back. and you know, that, that essentially it's a brain. It's really just kind of an artificial brain that's providing a solution. Now there's, there's, you can get very specific and create these like agentic agents, right? Where you say, Hey, I need you every day to go through all my Slack channels and tell me who typed how many messages and then send her a report of who's the most active person.
Michael Georgiou (08:14.701)
Yeah, true.
Pete (08:40.487)
based on X, Y, and Z, how many times they type the word code review or something. So you can create these very specific little bots, in a sense, that can automate things that you were previously having manual people do, kind of manual workers, in a sense.
Michael Georgiou (08:44.972)
Hmm.
Eric Lawrence (08:57.102)
Hmm. Interesting. As far as the different models that are out there, I know that you've been playing around with a fair amount of them. What would you say are in your experience the best when it comes to, uh, gen AI.
Michael Georgiou (08:59.233)
Yeah, that's cool.
Pete (09:05.683)
Yeah
Michael Georgiou (09:13.877)
Thank
Pete (09:14.822)
Yeah, Gen.ai. So for coding, we've been messing around with ChatGPD Codex. I think GPT-5 Codex just dropped about a week ago. And we're one-shotting apps. Like, give it the parameters, the high level vision, PRDs, and we get an output. We can get an MVP out in eight hours now, which would take us a month before.
Michael Georgiou (09:41.294)
Crazy. Yeah.
Pete (09:42.384)
Yeah, it's crazy. that's kind of our go-to, but we've been messing around with lovable, which is using the 4.0 model, I believe, and they're slowly transitioning. There was a trial period where they had GPT-5 on there. But Mike, and you know, we've been messing around with it. We've been trying to fix one bug for three days. So the thing about AI, generative AI, and especially from the coding perspective,
Michael Georgiou (09:57.334)
Mm-hmm. A lot.
Pete (10:10.948)
And if you integrate it into your platform is once you integrate it in, it's only going to get smarter. So if you think about it, you're putting a brain in your system. That brain is going to sit there and be the algorithm. It's going to be the algorithm. You're passing in information, and it's giving you an answer. Right now, that brain might be pretty stupid, even though it's pretty smart. But in five years from now, that brain is going to be more intelligent than
Michael Georgiou (10:34.988)
Right.
Pete (10:40.914)
10,000 times smarter than all the human civilization put together. So if you integrate it now, your system is going to naturally evolve and get smarter without you having to upgrade it. It's going to naturally upgrade. You just update the model.
Michael Georgiou (10:48.686)
.
Eric Lawrence (10:57.036)
Yeah, I've noticed at least from a lot of calls that we've been getting from people that have been using things like lovable vibe coding tools that are out there. It's interesting because, and I see you laughing because you probably know where I'm going with this. I think they're good in a lot of ways at starting to build a product, starting to build an app.
Michael Georgiou (10:59.308)
Yeah, it's crazy, man.
Michael Georgiou (11:06.894)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Lawrence (11:19.662)
But there's a wall that people tend to hit where that's when they end up calling us. say, I, you know, I don't know much about coding. I've been working on this thing for five months. I feel like I'm 85 % of the way there. What's it going to take for me to get this over the finish line? Like you guys are programmers, you know what to do, but I, there's just this, this misconception, it seems about all of the hidden work that comes into actually getting one of these over the finish line and having a really solid scalable product.
Michael Georgiou (11:46.446)
So true.
Pete (11:49.743)
Yeah, I like to think of it, you can think of it like checkers to chess to go. And the number of permutations of the moves is infinitely complex, more complex than the next game, right? So right now, a year ago, these tools were good enough to solve checkers, right? Now today, maybe it can solve chess, but it can't quite solve go yet. And then eventually in a year or two, it'll be able to solve go and then
Michael Georgiou (11:50.892)
Yeah.
Michael Georgiou (12:11.278)
Mm-hmm.
Pete (12:19.323)
you know, five, 10 years from now, you know, it's going to create a game we can't even comprehend with the number of permutations. But long story short, you know, these tools, the more they're very good at MVPs and a small set of features. But once you start having things that need to interact, like if you build an MVP and then say, hey, add a gamification layer on top of this MVP, it can't kind of tie in the different pieces together. And that's, that's where it's, it's failing. And then just like any developer will tell you,
When you tell it to fix one bug, sometimes it creates two. So, you know, and it's good for us from a technology standpoint because we get people experimenting, getting something, and they can show us and say, hey, I got this cool thing. You know, it's not working quite exactly the way I want it, but here's my idea, right? Instead of us having to extrapolate that from their mind.
They can show us or we can even spend a couple hours and produce something that they can touch and play with and see if they like it or not. So there's a lot of benefits, but there's also a lot of negative aspects of it too. And then at the end of the day, the people that are really going to excel, I think Zach says this well, it's going to make the average person 10 times better at creating apps, right?
Michael Georgiou (13:31.415)
Yeah.
Pete (13:43.012)
but it's going to make a good engineer a thousand times better at creating an app. if you know what you're doing, you have to know how to talk to machines. That's really what it kind of comes down to. That's what I'm teaching my kids as well. You really don't have to know how to do stuff anymore. You have to know how to get stuff done. So those are the people that are going to be able to take advantage of this technology.
Michael Georgiou (13:43.694)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Georgiou (14:06.04)
Yeah, it seems like I know when we've been building some of these little tools and widgets and some of these vibe coding apps like, like, like lovable or replet. It's, it's crazy because they're so, they're so powerful when you use it. Like you, just tell it what you want. want it to create this widget that is a lead generator or whatever it is. And you know, when you, when you design it in there, it's pretty cool. I mean, it's
It's kind of, it's scary. Cause I know what you're thinking, Pete. It's obviously it's going to get better and better and better. mean, it's getting better every, every day, every week, every month. But when you use it and you're kind of building this little prototype or design or whatever, it's like, you have to know how to use the tool and not just think, Hey, when I type something in, it's just going to build it. There's like a process of how to actually use these tools. So the more you learn how to use them with your own operative,
Pete (14:58.947)
Right.
Michael Georgiou (15:03.0)
for your own self or your business operation, you're gonna continuously get better at it. There's like certain processes and frameworks, because this is, yeah, perfectly said, it's a skill. Because I remember when I met with you and we were building that one of those widgets, and I liked how you were structuring the kind of, you're giving me this framework to work within. I was like, can I just keep?
going until it gets better, you're like, you can, but that's not really the most efficient way. And in fact, you have to know how to kind of talk to it and give it some sort of guidance in a sense. Have a framework that it can use as like a foundation and then it will continuously improve on that. You know? It's cool.
Pete (15:36.066)
Right.
Pete (15:48.46)
Yeah, the tools will be advancing, but I'll tell you when we're going to be in trouble. We're going be in trouble when you can go into lovable and just type in, create me a product that is better than lovable.
Michael Georgiou (15:54.701)
Yeah.
Eric Lawrence (16:03.246)
I don't, I don't want to go like too far down the rabbit hole, but I was, was just thinking in the moment, I feel, and this is, this is my hot take that lovable is kind of like what Garmin was for a GPS where it's its own product. It's its own thing. But when you think about like the major LLMs that are out there, like eventually they're just going to be
Michael Georgiou (16:04.302)
It's nuts. my gosh.
Pete (16:04.462)
Like, like, yes.
Michael Georgiou (16:23.79)
Hmm.
Eric Lawrence (16:29.898)
They get enough business and they're big enough and they're so advanced that they're just going to like kind of do what lovable does, but better kind of like, you you have Google maps and Apple maps and they're just native. don't pay for that anymore.
Pete (16:36.844)
Yeah, well that's
Pete (16:43.267)
So that's exactly what GPT Codex is. So GPT Codex actually integrates. It's GPT's product that integrates on top of VS Code or your other IDE. So that's the perfect example. Lovable is Garmin, and GPT Codex is Google Maps. And so it's here, right? And it's way better. And I don't know. That's my opinion, but you can go test it for yourself and see the results. It's pretty crazy.
Michael Georgiou (16:45.033)
All right.
Michael Georgiou (16:51.874)
Hmm.
Eric Lawrence (17:09.73)
We'll see by the time this episode drops, it might be common knowledge.
Pete (17:14.415)
Yeah, and I just saw, don't know, Elon Musk posted the Grok 4 has now just rejumped over everything. All the benchmarks are, yeah. So the speed at which these things are accelerating to, you know, we're in an arms race. We're in an arms race against China, right? And then the internal, these US companies are essentially in an arms race against each other. They're all building the biggest and best brain. That's essentially what's happening right now.
Michael Georgiou (17:22.309)
my gosh.
Michael Georgiou (17:31.875)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Lawrence (17:42.809)
So great. go ahead. Well, I wanted to bring this back to businesses because I know a lot of the people here listening are kind of hearing these things about it's an arms race. It's getting better and better and better each day, but it still feels like there's this big barrier to entry of getting their business set up on, you know, some of these advanced AI models. Like what can somebody do to break down that barrier? So it doesn't feel like
Michael Georgiou (17:43.225)
go ahead. Go ahead, Eric. Yeah, go ahead.
Eric Lawrence (18:12.618)
it's this massive mountain they need to climb to actually get use out of these things because this is like a whole new world of efficiency that they could be tapping into.
Pete (18:22.913)
Yeah, and you know, it's kind of like the previous, what do you call it, the digital transformation, right? That was the buzzword 10 years ago, and now it's the AI transformation. you wanna, and I'm not trying to sell services here, but you don't hire a fisherman to come and fix your plumbing, right? So you go, if you're really serious about integrating it into your existing,
Michael Georgiou (18:31.682)
Yep, yep.
Michael Georgiou (18:44.248)
Yep, exactly.
Pete (18:51.266)
Technology stack or your business whatever you really need to find an expert that you trust who can kind of help get you to the next level And you know, like I said, it starts with the processes. You got to not just say hey, here's an application You just say hey, here's my overarching business someone needs to come in understand your business and say yeah We could stick AI there But I don't think that your process is right like we need to redo that then we can put AI and this is how much time you would save and unfortunately, you know
Here's how much labor costs you can save, right? That's what's happening right now. I think Microsoft just laid off 6,000 people. My father's old company, Novo Nordisk, is laying off like 10,000 people. Yeah, there's a lot of experts saying that there's gonna be a massive reduction in labor costs and profits are gonna soar, but then the economy is gonna be in this weird state because people aren't gonna have money to spend, right? All the money is gonna be going to the smaller number of people.
Michael Georgiou (19:31.18)
Really? wow.
Michael Georgiou (19:52.014)
Interesting. And do you think something else like when you're kind of evaluating, when you and the team are evaluating when AI is needed or not needed, for example, when businesses have some sort of process issues, business process issues, technology systems issues internally, it's really important to really know what their exact
Eric Lawrence (19:52.142)
Hmm.
Michael Georgiou (20:21.71)
pain points and challenges are, because I know we talk lot about that, right? That's critical to know basically, like you talked about a couple of minutes ago was auditing, kind of going in, understanding the processes within the organization, and then looking and seeing where the gray areas are, what needs to be improved, where are the actual problems in their operation, and what can be automated using AI or even just a custom piece of software or a tool.
Pete (20:32.268)
Mm-hmm.
Pete (20:52.352)
Yeah, you know, you have to look at like every business is different. So we deal with business that have compliance issues, data cleansing issues, just manual, manual, repetitive tasks. based on the business, you know, we would come in, look, say, hey, you know, we think we can do this or like, wait, hold on, but we have this compliance thing that we need to take care of. that's, you know, based on our meetings with the clients, we figure out where they're most kind of like a
points of failure could occur and their pain points obviously and say, here's a solution that's gonna implement AI and this is what it's gonna do and this is how it's gonna do it and this is what it's gonna, this is why it's valuable, this is what it's getting you. And like I said, it might get you five coins today, but next year when it's upgraded, that five coins might be five million coins, right? And it's a,
Michael Georgiou (21:24.856)
Yeah.
Michael Georgiou (21:38.466)
Yeah, it's cool.
Pete (21:52.02)
It's a something that just is going to continuously give you returns because it's only going to get better and smarter. So the sooner you implement it, the more returns you're going to get. It's like anything, right? I this is my favorite. I think I might have even quoted this in the last podcast, but it's from the Bitcoin standard. You're honest. You're on an island, right? And every day at Desert Island, you got to eat. So you go out and you catch a fish with your hands. At what point do you say, hey, I'm going to take one day. I'm not going to eat today.
I'm going to go and create a fishing pole, right? And now I can catch a fish in 15 minutes instead of eight hours. And that's what AI is. you implement it in a good system that's ready, you're going to get something that's going to produce. the difference with AI and just the fishing pole is today it's a fishing pole. Tomorrow it's a fishing net. And in five years from now, it's a fishing factory. And in 30 years from now,
Michael Georgiou (22:47.693)
Hmm.
Pete (22:48.487)
It's a piece of nanotechnology that can just produce fish out of raw matter.
Eric Lawrence (22:56.443)
It's wild to think. Do you ever, do you ever see regression coming in with this Pete? And I say that because everybody's kind of mobilizing to invest in AI, but I mean, not to get too science fiction on you, but let's say
Michael Georgiou (22:56.494)
No, that's a cool perspective. That's cool. really like that. Yeah, that's powerful.
Eric Lawrence (23:13.74)
all these companies are adjusting for it. People are getting laid off. There's this big almost gap that's happening between the haves and the have nots of this world. Usually that creates at least some, you know, socioeconomic and political conditions that revolutions happen, violence happens, governments look at it and say, do we need to scale this back? And then everybody that's invested in it gets kind of chopped off at the knees.
Pete (23:40.042)
Yep. Yeah. So I recommend reading this book. The Singularity is Nearer. It's Ray Kurzweil's follow up to Singularity is Nearer. essentially what he says is the age of abundance is coming, right? And the whole book is kind of touching on that. And what that means is technology is in this exponential curve, right? And where AI is going to kind of build itself at some point and we'll have the singularity overnight within a couple of hours. But the one thing that he says in there
Michael Georgiou (23:48.85)
I've heard about that.
Pete (24:08.521)
The only thing that is guaranteed with all this change is conflict. There's going to be a lot of conflict because people are going to lose their jobs. You know, this thing can can make money useless, right? I mean, if the AI gets super intelligent and you can, everyone can just go and say, hey, here's a thousand dollars, make me a million dollars. Money has no value anymore, right? In a sense, there was political. mean, you can already see the deep fakes and stuff. You know, I've seen Trump doing like, you know,
Michael Georgiou (24:14.35)
Yeah.
Michael Georgiou (24:30.637)
Yeah.
Pete (24:38.64)
saying the speech at the UN and it's all, you can't even tell if it's real or fake anymore, right? So it's already starting to impact things and as it gets more intelligent, more intelligent, the impact is just going to get greater and greater.
Michael Georgiou (24:43.714)
Yeah.
Michael Georgiou (24:54.166)
Yeah, it's interesting you say that. I saw something, I think it was earlier this week on LinkedIn. I seen it on Reddit, Reddit, crazy stuff on Reddit, on LinkedIn, and there was this big discussion, huge, massive, a lot of conflict between people with AI, and I'm not trying to scare people out there with AI. AI is very, I mean, we all obviously believe it. That's why we're here, we're doing this episode, but.
You know, it was interesting because there was this guy, remember, there was this guy that was commenting and a lot of these, a lot of these people's other like comments. He was always there kind of commenting on everything. And he was basically saying that I'm afraid to implement AI in my own business. He's like, I feel like if I do that, the AI is going to take over my own business and I'm going to get kicked out. And it went viral. It was crazy. Huh?
Pete (25:36.138)
Mm-hmm.
Pete (25:48.2)
Yeah. Yeah.
Eric Lawrence (25:49.262)
Kind of sounds like sellers on Amazon.
Pete (25:52.362)
Yeah. there's now products that you can actually install on your phone. It's kind of sad, man, but it's social networks where you're the only real person. So when you go in there and you post something, like people are liking it and they're putting their pictures and they're commenting. it's AI. That's kind of where we're going. I don't know if you guys have messed around with Grok. They have companion mode.
Michael Georgiou (25:53.869)
Yeah.
Pete (26:22.282)
quote unquote companion mode, which is essentially, it's kind of like your digital girlfriend or boyfriend. They have one for kids too. I mean, there's so many possibilities and as civilization kind of embraces it and moves into the future, we just need to be careful because it is dangerous. It is dangerous. I think Elon said a couple of years ago that this is a thousand more times
Michael Georgiou (26:25.896)
I know, yeah. Yeah, there's all that stuff coming out. It's crazy,
Pete (26:51.975)
more dangerous than a nuclear weapon.
Michael Georgiou (26:54.594)
Yeah, no, I believe it. And, you know, I was going to ask earlier Pete as well as like kind of getting back to reality. I know it's very easy for us to like, you know, talk about so many things with how this can impact us and it is, it's already doing it. And I'm really kind of excited, but I guess a little bit scared of where it's going to go, hopefully it goes in the right direction. like anything we have to adapt and evolve, you know, as humanity.
Going back to kind of business, like, are you seeing any sort of industries, Pete, that are gonna need AI, generative AI more in their ops? And I asked that to give you context. Remember a couple of days ago when we were in our blog review and you mentioned something to me that I completely agree with, that you said with customer support, people, need to be very careful.
Pete (27:43.432)
Yeah.
Michael Georgiou (27:51.885)
because they're implementing gen AI where they're basically, they're having the robots answer the phones and all that and talk to people and it's just destroying their businesses. You know?
Pete (28:00.989)
Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's funny you say that. and I think this is, Zach, follows this guy. and kind of where this is going is it's very similar to social media, right? When it first came out, everyone was like, this is the greatest thing since white bread. You know, I get to put, I could see these people from high school, but now it's like, everyone's, everyone hates it, right? Everyone I talked to is like, I gotta, I gotta log into my shit. And so.
Michael Georgiou (28:20.226)
Yeah.
Michael Georgiou (28:27.5)
Yeah, I'm sick of it, yeah. Yeah.
Pete (28:31.346)
there's this kind of like idea that we need to get back into human interaction and the AIs taking us away from that. And like with anything, right? All trends kind of come back. So I know like my kids, they play outside. I don't let them on the computer. I don't let them have much screen time. I'm very limited because I know what it does. like there's this idea that
there's going to be almost like two groups of people, one that is like augmented in a sense, right, using AI. And you saw Meta's glasses, right? Like you can just, it's AI, it's your AI companion. You can talk to it and it's hearing your conversation. It's going to help you think. And then there's this other group of people that are going to be like, Hey, like we're humans. We don't want anything to do with technology. We're kind of like free souls. And
Michael Georgiou (29:14.232)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Georgiou (29:25.804)
Completely agree. Yep.
Pete (29:29.672)
You know at some point what's gonna happen to is the AI is gonna be so intelligent but You're not gonna have a community around it right because if I want to start a product I could just go out Go in lovable type it up. It's created boom. I can try to get people but if you don't have a community No one's gonna really care about your as Eric says AI slop right? You know if anyone could just go and create a product like you can't really just get people on it
Michael Georgiou (29:53.228)
Yeah, yeah, very true.
Pete (29:59.121)
So you have to build a strong community. that's really what is going to be valuable, in my opinion, as these tools progress.
Michael Georgiou (30:06.894)
So, you know, I agree. you're saying that with, and not just on the marketing side, right? I mean, I know that's a big one is you have to, you know, for a product, need to have a community of users or people interested in the product, whether it's in the organization or it's outside as potential customers. But like, you're talking about like, that with any sort of gen AI that may or may not be needed in a company, there's always going to be that human component.
that's gonna be needed. You feel or no?
Pete (30:37.608)
Unless you're building a solution for the machines, which could be a new market, right? These machines are gonna need companionship too. Maybe they need some human companionship as they develop emotion, right?
Michael Georgiou (30:42.092)
I see.
Eric Lawrence (30:44.918)
Yeah.
Michael Georgiou (30:45.228)
Maybe we just started a new market.
Michael Georgiou (30:52.44)
This is nuts.
Eric Lawrence (30:54.286)
Well, Michael, will say as far as industries that are adopting AI, I keep thinking back to when Taco Bell tried to introduce an AI drive through and somebody came by like first day and ordered a thousand cups of water and it crashed the whole thing.
Michael Georgiou (30:55.6)
my gosh.
Michael Georgiou (30:59.405)
Yeah.
Michael Georgiou (31:13.204)
man, yeah.
Pete (31:14.245)
Is that true or that a urban legend?
Eric Lawrence (31:17.374)
don't fact check me on that. Or I guess do like take a look. But yeah, yeah, I heard about that. It was
Pete (31:18.951)
Snopes? Do I have to go to Snopes and check that?
Michael Georgiou (31:23.05)
I heard, yeah, you can see Taco Bell suing us for something like this. No, we don't know. I heard about it, but I don't know if it was a joke or not. It wouldn't surprise me if it's not though, Eric. wouldn't, I mean, think about the horror stories we have heard about with Gen.ai, right? There's a lot of good, like with everything, right? Think about when phones came out, right? mean, it was, know, think about the evolution with mobile. It's crazy, right? AI is is a thousand times X the-
Pete (31:45.927)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Georgiou (31:53.166)
the technology that a phone is. It's insane where we are right now.
Pete (31:56.985)
Yeah. It's like a hammer, right? It's a tool. You can build a house with it or you can hit someone in the head with it.
Michael Georgiou (32:03.436)
Yeah. Yeah. No, it's, very true. and, I guess, you know, before, we finish here, guys, we have a couple more minutes, but I wanted to show, everyone kind of some things that can be built, using AI, Gen, Gen AI. And just to let everyone know, this is not like, I mean, it's something that we built, but it's not like a SaaS product of ours or anything like that. But, it was a really cool tool, that, actually Eric and Pete.
built using a vibe coding platform So it'd be cool to kind of go through it and give everyone a little bit of a visual You know and we can go through it quickly, but it's I think could be very valuable The audit the audit AI assessment audit tool
Pete (32:45.537)
Which one are you talking about,
Yeah, and yeah, I think we spent just a few hours, you know, so to give people an idea like it's very, quick.
Michael Georgiou (32:52.376)
Crazy.
Eric Lawrence (32:56.566)
Yeah. Yeah. And the tool, like you said, Michael was made so that people could get a better assessment of, you know, could they be benefiting by plugging AI into their own processes? So let me go ahead and pull that up.
Michael Georgiou (32:57.581)
Yeah.
Michael Georgiou (33:12.684)
And it was cool because when you guys created this, it was, I guess, initially made to learn the of the vibe coding tool, but it was also something that was very kind of intentional in a sense that we wanna build things internally like this as an example, a small example.
that can benefit our own organization to capture new leads and provide other people with some sort of value on their business and AI.
Pete (33:48.035)
Yeah, we have a team of 50 to 100 devs at any point. And instead of when the sales and marketing team needs a tool created, they would come to us and it would take us a couple of weeks to build these things out. Now the team could just go and build this out in an hour. It's pretty incredible if you really think about it.
Michael Georgiou (33:53.102)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Georgiou (34:09.774)
Yeah, I know, it's awesome. So here, Eric, if you wanna walk them through kind of a little bit of guiding them, a little bit of what this is, step by step a little bit.
Eric Lawrence (34:11.595)
And you can see here.
Eric Lawrence (34:19.158)
Yeah. So it's, basically an assessment where you're able to fill in, per your business, each of these questions, how many different software tools we'll just use some examples of, you know, HubSpot Twilio, we're just throwing out some examples, you know, roughly how many hours per week does your team spend on repetitive manual tasks?
Michael Georgiou (34:43.532)
which we talked to Pete mentioned earlier, right? That's a big way to automate within your business.
Eric Lawrence (34:49.922)
Yep, so I believe there are 10 questions.
You go through each one.
Michael Georgiou (35:03.308)
Yeah, it's basically just a simple assessment that anyone can use, right? That is going to give them an output of data, I would assume, a report, a score, yeah, like a scorecard, A report, yep.
Pete (35:15.737)
score.
Eric Lawrence (35:21.742)
So you could see in this one, it's about, yeah, 50, it's halfway. So there could certainly be ways to improve and it'll give you pointers on that. It'll tell you, you know, how ready are you to implement AI? So like Pete was mentioning, it may, you may not be ready. You may not have the foundation or the infrastructure to handle AI at this point. In this example, it's saying you do need to work on some other things before you implement AI. It gives insights and it even gives
gives an action plan. within here, this is a big thing for a lot of businesses. They want to make sure can can I justify spending the money to invest in doing this? And it'll help put a number to that, put an amount of hours. And there's, you know, even a chance to talk with our team afterwards if somebody so needs to. So that's just a quick high level look at it.
Michael Georgiou (36:12.824)
Yeah.
Michael Georgiou (36:16.748)
That's cool, man. See, yeah, it just shows you, you know, everyone, the power of, you know, of these tools, you know, but at the moment where things are now, you know, there is, there's a lot of limitations with these platforms, right? They're not, they're nowhere where they're going to be later on, right? And this is where I think, you know, AI can be implemented, but
you're also going to need experts, expert humans that are going to, I say humans, I'm a robot, I'm already becoming AI. I feel like I'm a freaking robot. no, just basically like experts to help and to provide the guidance of planning and using these tools as well as kind of custom solutions as well in kind of a comprehensive solution to provide the value to your organization to whether in...
Eric Lawrence (36:54.306)
Yeah.
Michael Georgiou (37:13.888)
something needs to be automated, if it's a process or if it's some sort of a system, whatever it might be. So there's just a lot of ways in, think at any sort of company in any industry really that need this type of technology that can really, you know, take you to the next level. It's pretty crazy. What's out there? Yeah.
Pete (37:35.907)
We're in amazing times for sure. It's exciting to be alive right now.
Michael Georgiou (37:40.844)
Yeah, no it is. Yeah, no, it's fun.
Eric Lawrence (37:40.952)
Yep. And before, before we wrap things up here, I do want to give a shout out to today's sponsor. That would be magic task, which is our project management tool by choice. We also built it, but really what it's for is it's simplified. It's gamified. It's great for if you're just wanting to implement it in your own life or at an organizational level, it's there to make your life easier, to be more organized.
and to feel rewarded when you get things done. be sure to check it out at magictask.io.
Michael Georgiou (38:16.238)
Thanks, Eric. Appreciate it. Yeah, guys, really, really good. Really appreciate you being here. Thanks, Pete. I think this is a very interesting and valuable episode. And it's cool because we talked about a lot of different things, but it just shows everything's so connected, right? It's not just business. It's about kind of life and just being at home and whatever. Everything's connected. it's where we are right now, right? So it's cool. Yeah. Thanks, Pete. Really appreciate it. Eric.
Thanks again, man. And again, I'm your host, Michael Georgiou from Tales from the PROS Eric Lawrence, our cohost, and Pete, thanks for being here, man. Thank you. All right, guys. Thanks.
Pete (38:55.394)
Thank you guys. Have a good afternoon.
Eric Lawrence (38:56.238)
See ya.