Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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 (00:00)
Hey everyone, welcome back to Tales from the Pros. I'm Michael Georgiou co-founder at Imaginovation and your host. And I'm here with Eric, our co-host and our director of growth at Imaginovation. Today we're joined by our chief product officer, Mr. Zach Bruno to talk about one of the hottest and trendiest topics in today's generation. It's kind of misunderstood, but it's a huge topic right now. Building products with AI.
Everyone wants to do it, right? But we really need to understand the realities of it. So in this episode, we'll dive into the state of AI, product development today, the pros and cons, common myths, and where we think it's all headed. Zach, thanks for being here today, man. I appreciate it. And Eric, welcome again.
Zach Bruno (00:43)
Thanks for having me, looking forward to it.
Michael Georgiou (00:45)
Yeah, man. Yeah, it
Eric Lawrence (00:46)
Always good to be
Zach Bruno (00:46)
and be awesome.
Eric Lawrence (00:47)
here. We've been counting down the days to talk about AI.
Zach Bruno (00:50)
Yeah, yeah, it's and every day we count down is just getting more we're losing track of the of progress. Things are changing on a daily basis at this point.
Michael Georgiou (00:57)
Yeah.
Yeah, man. The AI, the AI philosopher himself.
You love philosophy. Yeah, man. So we'll kind of get right into it, Yeah, Eric, go ahead, Yeah, let's kick it off.
Eric Lawrence (01:04)
Yeah.
Yeah, I wanted to start off Zach with a question for you from your perspective as a chief product officer, what you feel the current state of building products with AI is right now, because when you think about it, the big news is model five has come out with chat GPT. I know that there are a lot of tools that are out there, when it comes to building tools with AI. So your perspective would be definitely interesting on what the current state is.
Michael Georgiou (01:30)
Thank
Zach Bruno (01:33)
Yeah. So I think the best way to think about this is sort of in, you know, three, like a three legged chair, right? When you build product, there's, you know, design, engineering and product and sort of like the overall business. Right. So it's impacting all three legs of the chair. Um, and the, main, the main part that everyone's talking about is sort of the engineering side, right? When is it going to replace coding and programming and engineering? I think what is more interesting is how it's supplementing
design, product, and delivering this overall business outcomes. So, you know, we'll get into that a little bit more, but yeah, I think that the overall state is that it's impacting everything. And obviously the biggest talk is engineering. And right now, in my opinion, the biggest use for AI is the augmentation of ideas, not necessarily the augmentation of execution.
Michael Georgiou (02:20)
Hmm, let's go.
Eric Lawrence (02:21)
Zach, do
you know, is there any well-known products that are out there that's been vibe-coded or built with AI that people are aware of?
Zach Bruno (02:29)
Yeah. Look, I think this whole hype around I'm going to build a billion dollar vibe coded company is sort of getting blown out of proportion. Right. And so, in my view, vibe coding at the current in its current state, as far as like tools, like with like lovable and stuff, like I'm not even considering those, but for tools like lovable and like, I'm like, we're just does everything for you in a prompt. that is, those are good for maybe like validating simple little products, ⁓ by no means good for scale.
Michael Georgiou (02:47)
Ahem.
Zach Bruno (02:55)
The, the, what, what I'm really is, is using tools like Claude code and, um, you know, agents that sit alongside you as your, as your coding, uh, as you're an engineer, um, for engineers, sorry. And, know, that's where the true power is. And for that, there's a lot of benefits to it, you know, besides, you know, the number one thing kind of being like workload reduction, right? A lot less tedious work is being done, um, on the engineering side, you know, you can, it kind of frees up the engineers to think more about.
the overall solution and creating the best product.
But as far as like major large platforms that have been vibe coded from scratch, who knows, right? But I think everybody is sort of vibe coding parts of their product at this point.
Eric Lawrence (03:37)
Interesting. Yeah. And for people that are out there, it might be helpful for them to understand, you know, sometimes the difference between an app that's vibe coded and an app that's actually been built from the ground up. and what, what are kind of like the pros and cons of it? Because there, there are a lot of times where I'm speaking with somebody and they have an idea and they want to bring their idea to the market. They want to have a product built. And I know a lot of times, you know,
Michael Georgiou (03:38)
Yeah.
Eric Lawrence (04:04)
budget timeline, where they are in the process is important. But for you, when you're assessing, should a product to be built from the ground up and, coded out manually, or should it be thrown into a tool like lovable to be built out? Well, what sort of considerations are you making?
Zach Bruno (04:20)
I think I'm going to refer to this line that probably several times throughout this episode here, but if you're not an engineer, vibe coding and AI will make you much more powerful. But if you are an engineer, you're going to be unstoppable because engineers are still thinking in terms of engineering solutions. Right. So when somebody says, okay, I'm a solo founder. I have no coding experience. I've never built a product before.
Michael Georgiou (04:33)
Peace.
Zach Bruno (04:45)
And they think it's feasible to vibe code a product all by themselves, um, without learning anything about programming and how things work, they're going to have a hard time. Um, and so it's sort of still in that state where it's like sort of a pipe dream, right? Um, and it's a good promise. I think it's definitely roping a lot of people in, but you still need experienced product people to build your products at the end of the day. Um, like I said, though, no doubt an inexperienced founder has a much larger leg up than they did before.
they have a chance to scaffold an MVP potentially or something maybe a little bit worse than MVP just to validate the product and the idea. But by no means would I consider it ready to grow a full scale company yet at this stage.
Eric Lawrence (05:26)
I also wonder just as like when you consider the freelance marketplace where somebody's looking to find a freelance developer to help them build what you know, what their vision is. If that's going to be a kind of like a thing to watch out for where a freelancer would charge money and basically vibe code it when that's not necessarily what the person wants or maybe the person doesn't even think to ask, how are you building this?
Michael Georgiou (05:36)
Thank
Zach Bruno (05:49)
Yeah, exactly. All this code being generated versus somebody hand crafting it essentially. That's definitely a big topic for debate over what's right and what's wrong. I'm not sure that it's wise to come to a consensus yet on that. I don't know if there's any ethical concerns around like a human did this versus AI did this, right? But in my view, as long as you're solving the outcome,
Michael Georgiou (05:50)
Yeah, that's a point.
Zach Bruno (06:11)
the business outcomes and providing value to the end users at this age shouldn't matter.
Eric Lawrence (06:15)
Yeah, so I think when we're talking about AI, it can do so much right now. And I think we're still in very much the infancy stage, but I am interested to know where do you feel like it's coming up short when it comes to building products?
Zach Bruno (06:29)
Yeah, like I said, I think one of the big problems it has right now that if you've used it, you've experienced, is that it has a tendency to kind of go off on tangents and build the wrong thing, no matter how much context you give it. And so I think it's very bad at contextualizing the goal you're trying to accomplish with actual execution. So going back to what I in the beginning as well, AI is a much more powerful.
synthesizer of ideas than it is an execution tool at this point. So if you ever tried to execute with AI, you'll find that it does a lot of things you don't want it to do. And that is the main difficulty and challenge anybody trying it will run into.
Eric Lawrence (07:04)
And are there any risks that people should consider if they want to go down the path of building with AI?
Michael Georgiou (07:05)
Hmm.
Zach Bruno (07:10)
Yeah, I wouldn't say risk, risk as much as, you know, understanding your business goals and making sure that I can deliver on that. So for example, if you're building an insurance platform, healthcare platform, knowing the regulations and compliance around that, because it's not going to take that into consideration at all, even if you tell it. So just making sure you have sort of the legal things around it squared away. Other than that, it's capable of delivering what you need, but not executing on it. If that makes sense.
It understands things, but it can't actually do it yet.
Eric Lawrence (07:38)
Makes sense. there is one thing I want to go back to that you said, where you mentioned there are like aspects, there are pieces of applications that could be built with AI. I'm interested in exploring that topic a little bit more because in a lot of ways, I feel that people can view it as like all or nothing, either build the full application with AI or you just don't. But could you talk a little bit more about like,
Michael Georgiou (07:57)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Lawrence (08:01)
maybe compartmentalizing it and building pieces with AI and how that can be advantageous.
Zach Bruno (08:06)
Great question. exactly. There's sort of this false dichotomy that you're either building AI or building products with full AI or you're not and everything's hand coded, hand custom made from scratch. And like you said, the reality is building parts of the application and the product with AI is much more powerful because it's much better at taking small context and making small tweaks. Right. So for example, let's just say you have an app and there's a
you found a bug. Okay. And you need help finding for one, triaging the bug, which means finding what the root cause is, but then also fixing it. AI is very good at finding the issue because it's very good at reasoning and logic and thinking, and then going out and executing the code, the changes to fix the bug. and because it's such a small subset of the overall code base, it's very good at doing that at this stage. Tomorrow, it could be
Michael Georgiou (08:32)
He
Zach Bruno (08:55)
capable of updating the entire code base at once and making sure that it's 100 % polished. But as of right now, that's where we're at.
that's one example with the bug fixing, but even small feature sets, small enhancements, tweaks, it's very capable of doing. And using that to incrementally build your entire product works better than trying to one shot your product with a single prompt or something like that, right? Which is the promise that you hear kind of going around at the moment.
Michael Georgiou (09:19)
And like Zach, like what do you think man, like for, you know, just companies in general that want to use AI or they maybe have already incorporated AI somehow in their operations and their products or whatever it might be, right? Cause there's many different use cases for integrating AI into your business, right? It's not only just a couple, right? It's like thousands of different ways. It's so powerful.
but it's still like very, very early. feel like we're like in kind of, it's a little bit in the kind of the cowboy ages of AI. It's still like so early. We don't know what's going to happen. There's a lot of uncertainty with like the future and what's going to happen with it and everything. But just kind of like in terms of, you know, the way companies are using it now, how do you balance like the wow factor of AI with, you know, practical
realities of cost, timelines, maintenance, support, just kind of, how do you balance that? And you can even speak on like the project level, even just from your experience.
Zach Bruno (10:20)
Yeah. So
the way you have to break down the applications and use of AI in a company and a business or in two ways, you can either use it to create more customer value to the end user in that you add an AI related feature or something that where that's AI powered, right? The other option is use AI to internalize, know, operationalize and in turn your internal workflows and make your company more efficient, which obviously in turn benefits the end customer as well.
but it also saves costs and things of that nature. So there's sort of the external and the internal component. where AI is being, we're sort of right now, the promise is like, you can use AI, make an AI powered product and get it up to market very quickly and provide a lot more value to your customers. But where I think the most underrated part of AI, where it's being most underutilized is internally. Using AI to operationalize and smooth, you know,
smooth over operations and make things more efficient and streamline things. That is the biggest opportunity in my view. With tools like Natan and a N8N that are coming out and workflow Lindy.ai workflow operation tools. These are gonna be very powerful for repetitive tasks and things that you can automate out that nobody wants to do essentially, right? And even for things like creative work, I don't think it's at that stage yet.
but like automating content creation, generating videos for marketing and having it automatically published to social media. That's right around the corner. and I think that's going to be a very powerful thing for all businesses to consider. Now talking at like the execution level as far as building software, building products, whereas the most useful in projects is using it to align your team and the ideas again,
back to that this whole concept of ideas synthesis, using it to align on the direction of the product, even like creating documentation where for years ago would have been tedious. Now it's instant, right? And it's good. Yeah. So it's good at synthesizing the ideas and the direction you're trying to go and putting into very concise and readable format.
Michael Georgiou (12:09)
Yeah, yeah.
Eric Lawrence (12:17)
Mm.
Michael Georgiou (12:17)
No, that's cool, man. Yeah. Yeah, I know. think that explains a lot. I want to touch on something. You spoke about it a little bit earlier, just some of the, call it, just like misconceptions even of AI, right? Just like how people are perceiving it now, right? It's like there's...
You know, they think like, especially with some startups, even pre, you know, we can call them dreamers, people who want to start, you know, something, whether they have funding or not, or, you know, that's a whole different conversation. But basically just like people that think they can just build a full business with AI and maybe we'll get some, you know, arguments from this episode. I'm sure some people are like, I've used NAN, which I've used before as well to...
create like my whole agentic bot to do this whole thing. it's like, you go and try it yourself and you do it, you're like, man, there's a lot of things that are still broken. It's still very early, right? And that's fine, it's a process. But I still think that there are a lot of misconceptions that it's not gonna just run your entire freaking life right now. I think the human element still needs to be heavily involved right now. Don't you agree?
Zach Bruno (13:27)
100%.
Hey, yeah, I totally agree. you know, the promise, another promise, which I agree with, it's coming, right? Like the big promise is like, there's going to be more solo companies in the next 10 years, probably than ever, because it's empowering people to do a lot more with a lot less. And so, but, but, and also like AI is the worst it's ever going to be right now, right? It's only going to get better. So whatever we're saying now is going to be obsolete in, in, in,
Michael Georgiou (13:48)
Right.
Zach Bruno (13:52)
a week from now. you know, that's, that's the whole power of it is that we don't really know where it's going, but we know that it's going to enable people to do a lot more. But right now it's not what it's all made out to be. I would say I agree with you.
Eric Lawrence (14:02)
Yeah,
one thing that I'm curious about just looking at the next five years as it relates to AI. I think the past couple years it's been kind of like a gold rush where just speaking with a lot of people, they want to build their own product. They want to advertise that is AI. It's like the thing, right? But I've just been noticing a general pushback. As far as like people viewing
AI in general, especially in creative spaces. We see a lot of mention of people just saying like, Hey, that's AI slop. I don't want AI creating images or music or that sort of thing. And I think when you start to think about it as like a way to generate ideas, I feel people are also recognizing there's serious cognitive decline out of users who rely on AI to kind of think for them. So I do wonder.
Michael Georgiou (14:33)
Hmm.
.
Eric Lawrence (14:51)
As we get further and further, if companies are going to want to promote the fact that they use AI quite as much, if it's viewed negatively by the masses.
Zach Bruno (15:01)
Great point. Yeah. So like Mike said, the human element is very important, especially in the creative spaces. Like you said, like art, making movies, music. I think for a long time, people are going to be skeptical of anything. Yeah. I generated, um, they want to know that it came from a place of a human connection, human story, human emotion. Um, and even, you know, people pick up on it, even if you don't even say it with me with AI, like it's, it's almost obvious at this point. Right. So I think where people are getting lost as well is in the.
Michael Georgiou (15:17)
Okay.
Zach Bruno (15:28)
on the business side more technically. They think just because they throw AI in there as a buzzword to their end product, whatever it is, they think that that means it's good. The problem is if you're not delivering customer value and delivering on a real result, it's just a buzzword.
Michael Georgiou (15:41)
Yeah, that's a really good point. Yeah, it's used everywhere, man. I think it's important for people out there to know, not just on the tech side of things, but just like AI in general, it's important, I think, that all of us use it with good intentions, the right motive, whether that's to help someone...
start a business or create a piece of software or integration or even just create an idea or a document. It's good to have to kind do it with a purpose and some sort of a plan knowing that that can change. And I think that's where the human element comes into play. Whether we're building a product, Zach, or whatever it might be, it's like doing it with intention, doing it with a purpose. Like you said, having that emotional kind of
Yeah, that kind of emotional effect to it, I think it's going to make AI a lot more powerful than just using it as a buzzword or even just saying, I need to ⁓ integrate AI into my product. you'll be like, but do you need to?
Zach Bruno (16:49)
Exactly.
The key here is I think like AI is going to, augmentation is more powerful than being replaced, right? So it's going to be a more powerful augmenter than it is going to be a replacement and an automator. So I think things built with, with humans or by humans with AI is better than by humans and by AI, right? We want humans to be the people building it with AI supplementing the craft.
Michael Georgiou (16:56)
Yeah.
Mmm.
Eric Lawrence (17:14)
Nice and actually on the topic of augmentation, I want to give a shout out today's sponsor, MagicTask. If you're looking to augment how you're doing your task management and how efficient you're being throughout the day, MagicTask is a tool that we use every day within our own workflows to be able to keep track of what we need to get done, to assign tasks to other team members, whether it's at work or just in life.
Michael Georgiou (17:16)
Yeah, I love that.
Eric Lawrence (17:39)
The idea is that MagicTask is a simplified and gamified task management system. So you can check it out for free at magictask.io.
Michael Georgiou (17:48)
Yeah, yeah, thanks Eric for shouting out that product. And actually, Zach is a Chief Product Officer of Magitask as well. kind of one of the visionaries of the product. I know there's a lot of plans to integrate, or however we're going to do it, but to basically add AI into the product, kind of intentionally to make sure that the outcome is very valuable.
the value is there for the end user, right? It kind of goes back to what we were talking about before. like Zach, just with your experience, with just all this buzz and just all this talk about AI and we're hearing it so much and it's just everywhere, where do you think, looking ahead, what do you think excites you more about artificial intelligence and where it's headed?
Zach Bruno (18:17)
Exactly.
Michael Georgiou (18:38)
for product development, for even the space of software development, like where do you think it's kind of going?
Zach Bruno (18:45)
So I think everything, all the promises that are being made will be delivered on. I think that they're being promised now it's exciting, it's insightful, it's exciting stuff to look forward to, right? It's not there yet, like I said, but it's coming and that is obviously the thing I'm most excited for. I would love a future, and this might be contrary to what people think, but I would love a future where it executes most of the stuff that people don't want to do. So we're free to do the things that we want to do. And so
But then that kind of getting a little philosophical, I guess, that brings in the whole idea behind AI rights and how does that play into the future? Do we need to sort of have the civil rights movement of AI in the future? Because we don't want to have them just doing everything in the world, right? And so, yeah, do they deserve freedoms and all this stuff? So we won't go down that rabbit hole, but it raises questions.
Michael Georgiou (19:29)
Yeah, it's pretty crazy, actually. was talking with my wife about this yesterday. She works at MetLife and MetLife is actually, they're integrating, what is it, ⁓ CoPilot into their entire infrastructure. now, not now, but soon, they can start using CoPilot ⁓ within like...
you know, basically, you know, analyzing documentation. They're doing it very carefully. Obviously, there's a lot of security risk and everything when you're when you're reading and analyzing ⁓ medical claims, insurance claims and stuff. I mean, you need to make sure it's like you're doing it correctly. Otherwise, you can you could screw up someone's ability to to get insured. You know, if they have cancer or they they, you know, they broke their leg or they have Alzheimer's, whatever it is. But basically, yeah, man, it's ⁓ it's crazy how a lot of these businesses are
They're kind of integrating AI into their ops, their software, and everything like that. And one thing I was thinking about, and I wanted to get your thoughts on, can you imagine a world where with the way how rapid AI is going right now, how quickly it is? And you mentioned it earlier, right? Like you said that today is the worst AI that exists, because it gets like what?
3x better every week or something like that? I don't know, but don't quote me on that. But nonetheless, it's getting better every single day, every week. So do you think that there'll be like a world where people are kind of swaying away from it? They're like afraid of it. Maybe like older generation, just like, don't want to even, they don't want to, know, for us, for example, if we're going to develop a piece of software, they say, I want you guys to develop it. I don't want AI. Is that, do you see that even like happening or you think?
What are your thoughts on that?
Zach Bruno (21:13)
Yeah, there could definitely be a sort of counterculture movement. ⁓ Like the 90's or something, where people are like, even young people would be like, no, like, we're the creative people. We want to do this ourselves, right? We don't want to use AI. We're not, resisting. ⁓ Yeah, I'm sure there will be some sort of resistance. Then again, though, like this assumes and implies that there's going to be some cataclysmic event that happens overnight. The problem with that argument is like,
Michael Georgiou (21:18)
Yeah, yep.
Hehe.
Zach Bruno (21:39)
Most things are gradual, so you don't really see them coming. Right. So AI will start being integrated in their lives more and more without us even realizing it. So further your resistance would have to start in tandem. It's not like, this thing happened. So now we're resisting and it's like 10 years of resistance. Right. so we'll see. I don't know because technology is incremental and iterative. I feel like it will be less resisted than other things throughout our history, but
Michael Georgiou (21:44)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Zach Bruno (22:04)
Only time will tell.
Eric Lawrence (22:05)
Yeah, I I foresee there being at least some pushback in some people trying to stray away from it. Not not for the Zach, like you're saying, doing things that make your life easier. But I think in particular, just with the thinking aspect of it, where what I've been noticing is like even even out of my own wife just the other day, she was reading something to me that she posted. And I was like, was that chat GPT?
Michael Georgiou (22:05)
Yeah.
Eric Lawrence (22:30)
And she was offended. She's like, no. And I'm like, well, it sounded like it. So I think you've been talking to it so much, you're picking up on its mannerisms. And I think that's the main thing is like for when you look at human history, not to get too philosophical there, there are people that kind of redefine the way that we view things. Salvador Dali, like, are we going to get thinkers that stand out in that way? If they've grown up their whole life talking to chat GPT.
and basically having their own mannerisms be molded around the models.
Zach Bruno (23:00)
Exactly. Yeah, it goes back to this augmentation thing, right? As we become more and more augmented with the AI, we merge, we become closer to being one being, we'll hardly be able to tell the difference. so that also leaves less room for resistance because we don't know if we don't even realize we're integrated. already, and in some ways we already are, right? We're pretty much everybody at this stage of history is dependent on technology.
Michael Georgiou (23:13)
Yeah.
Yeah, I know. It's a really interesting topic. I think, Eric, you and I were talking about this yesterday with AI. Some people are driven by fear. Some people can be driven by fear and just uncertainty of what is going to happen with it, where it's going to take us. Or we can look at it in a different narrative, or we can change the narrative in a sense where
we look at it as positive, as opportunistic, you know, where it's gonna really allow us to create new jobs potentially. Yeah, there's gonna be drawbacks. And you talked about that. mean, there could be, it's already taken some jobs. And I mean, that's part of evolution in technology and in the world anyways. There's always gonna be like good, bad and the ugly, right? That's kind of part of the world evolving, you know? But I think the key is for us to adapt.
and just keep improving ourselves and the way we do things, but do it in a way, at least in my opinion, in a way that is like, it still makes us, it keeps us human and it keeps us empathetic and compassionate. Cause all of that, all of those different characteristics allow us to be our best selves, even when developing a software product, you know, cause it's about intention. It's about doing things the right way. And if we use AI as a tool, right? Or a better way.
to make things more efficient and effective, then why the hell not?
Zach Bruno (24:48)
Exactly. It's like using a calculator. Nobody second guesses using a calculator, right? So I'm not gonna second guess using AI in the future when I'm building something. No.
Michael Georgiou (24:56)
Yeah, yeah. So it seems like you're very excited. more like, you're not, it doesn't seem like you are more fear driven with it in terms of where things are, where they're headed, or you do kind of have some fear, more opportunistic.
Zach Bruno (25:09)
definitely more optimistic. think it's going to create more good than bad. I think the future with people, like I said, sort of taking and doing the things that nobody wants to do and then allowing people to do things that make us more more creative and more human. And then while also helping us do it. But yeah, so I'm, I'm optimistic for the future. There's a future, you know, most people talk about AI taking over the big risk around that and
What I sort of say to that, and actually Pete, our co-founder got me into this idea. I kind of came up with the idea on my own and he was like, this has already been talked about is the gray goo versus the blue goo. ⁓ So the gray goo and blue goo is basically like, okay, if everything's getting worse and being taken over, then in theory, know, civilization is probably increasing and getting better over time. So the 51 % who's actually doing good would also be equally as powerful as the people doing bad.
Michael Georgiou (25:44)
Mm.
Zach Bruno (25:59)
So wouldn't we have something that would counteract the bad that would outweigh the bad and eventually move us forward. So it's this whole idea of, you believe that civilization is from the dawn of civilization, we're ticking downward. So there's 51 % bad, 49 % good, or do you believe we're 51 % good, 49 % bad and we're taking upward? Because we always come up with measures for prevention and we can't even comprehend what that would be in a cataclysmic AI event.
⁓ But, you know, it's safe to assume that if you believe we're growing, which I do, as a civilization, then you believe that we'll have measures in place to not allow an AI to take over.
Eric Lawrence (26:35)
Yeah, to play devil's advocate, I would, I would say that the growth has been nonlinear. There's certainly been some awful times in humanity. And I think I can't tell you the exact time it was somewhere between like, you know, 400 to 600, uh, AD, you know, there was some point in time where there was like some massive famine and awful things that happened. it's, it's, it's nonlinear in a ways. hopefully at the point.
Michael Georgiou (26:59)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Lawrence (27:02)
where we aren't ticking up, it's not cataclysm.
Zach Bruno (27:05)
Exactly. It's, really more of like on balance. We solve the problems and we move forward. Right. So like you said, we'll be going up, we'll plummet, and then we'll come back up and it should be more than the last peak in theory.
Michael Georgiou (27:11)
Yeah.
Yeah, if you think about it, nothing's really linear, I mean, what is linear? Yeah, I some people might argue that. I I'm sure there are things, but I mean, mostly if you notice even just with building, well, related to our space, right? Even like helping to build a software product, it's like this, right? You know, even just going through it, it's a journey and you have different tools to help you. AI is really one of them. That's an amazing tool.
to and it's going to continue to improve and evolve and enhance sporadically, rapidly. But yeah, it's never going to be linear. And I think that's just something everyone accepts and we just use it to the best of our ability. But yeah, I agree, Zach. I think that's a great point, man. I like how you talked about just how it could be used to help us prevent things that maybe us humans might.
maybe might miss completely just ignorance or whatever it might be. We might just completely miss it or we may not even have the intelligence to prevent something, but AI is like so powerful, right? It can help to prevent things for good, to help us to be better in a sense, you know?
Zach Bruno (28:24)
Exactly. Yep,
it's, you know, whatever fence you're on, if you believe where humanity is progressing, not falling backwards, then you should believe accordingly that if the good actors and the bad actors are equally powerful with AI, the good actors will win.
Eric Lawrence (28:38)
that. Yeah. Zach, to kind of close things out, just a final question here. If for our listeners, if there's somebody that's looking into, you know, evaluating for their own system, or maybe they're looking to build something from the ground up, what should be the next step if they're thinking about AI? What should they consider when approaching this topic?
Zach Bruno (28:38)
even if the bad actors get their hands on it.
Michael Georgiou (28:42)
Yeah.
Zach Bruno (29:02)
I think the most important thing to focus on, and I've said this before, is customer value. So whether you have a technical background, whether you do or don't, delivering value to the end customer is all that matters. So the product needs to solve a problem really well, whether it has AI or not. And if AI enhances that or enhances an internal operation, great, that's its best use case, right?
typical things that would be in a product five years ago could be made infinitely better now with AI, right? So I think just understanding the end customer value and working backwards from there, making sure that it's delivering real results, solving a real problem and not just forcing it into the product.
Michael Georgiou (29:40)
Yeah, that's a good way to kind of conclude it. Zach, awesome, man. Thank you so much, man. I really appreciate it. It won't be the last time we'll have you on here. We'll definitely have some really cool topics to kind of discuss and just have good deep conversations. think it's good to, even if we get a little philosophical, that's okay. I mean, we all love that. think it's all, everything's connected. It's never just standalone, right?
Everything's connected, man. Just like all of us, we all have something that we're kind of connected to, you know, as people. So yeah, man, it's no different. But yeah, I appreciate it, man. Thank you, Zach. Eric, thanks as always. And everyone, thank you so much. We appreciate you listening and we hope that you find value from this content. And again, your host, Michael Georgiou from Tales from the Pros, here with Zach Bruno, our CPO, and Eric Lawrence, our everything else, I guess.
Zach Bruno (30:08)
percent.
Thank
Michael Georgiou (30:29)
Eric, appreciate
it, man. Thanks, guys. Until next time. All right, fellas. Thanks.
Zach Bruno (30:31)
Thanks guys.
Bye bye.