Building An Enterprise AI Innovation Lab: A Master Class with Humza Teherany, Chief Strategy Officer of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment

0:00Hi, I'm Hamza Trani, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer for Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment We're the organization that runs the Toronto Raptors, the Toronto Maple Leafs, Toronto FC, and many other teams, along with the entertainment concert company as well. And I'm really interested today to talk about how to drive innovation with AI, how to accelerate it, how to be strategic as business leaders and technology leaders, as well as the crazy, super nerdy stuff. I developed a group about a year ago called our V1 Lab, our version one lab, which is our agentic development lab. and our v1 lab at mlse allows us to drop in an idea on a monday and have a full stack app latest by the end of that week usually the very first version the 0.1 is within several hours and that's because of the ability to employ agentic development principles which doesn't mean that you don't use vibe code you don't know what you're doing or you don't look at security aspects you don't plan out your work you're not using md files or you know planning mechanisms or mcps or all these other technical things that you would you would do so you still have to be a great developer but if you can harness how to use it from a technical perspective it is absolutely game-changing so for me i've probably built three or four platforms as a full stack developer in our v1 lab hand in hand with my own full stack developers now keep in mind you know uh i was a coder 25 years ago and i was doing php pearl and asp so microsoft.net and and that was a long time ago and i was never a full stack developer but now whether it's authentication or database or back end or front end or design which is even in the last two weeks this agentic design has progressed what do you use what tool do you use for that so the quad released uh a paper on the quad design skill the concept of how to encompass the design skill and it fundamentally produces one hunt in my opinion a hundred percent better design by just employing that skill and the second one is gemini gemini three pro preview i guess is um is incredible at front-end design incredible absolutely incredible front-end design so and Man, make the business case.

2:25Because I think even the framing of we built three full stack apps, you know, soup to nuts Monday to the end of the week. The fun ROI there, right? Why is that? I mean, I'm amazed. But if I'm a senior leader in another kind of classic business, what is the impact of that? Why would I want to stand up a lab that can create full stack apps in a week? Like what's the business impact? Yeah. Yeah, I think the opportunity is imagine maybe the best way for me to describe it is, is this way. You know, everybody has ideas. Everybody in an organization has ideas. Well, what if half of your organization or a third of your organization has the ability to take an idea and bring it to life in near real time?

3:12Right. Think of how long it takes people to do research, to do analysis, to do decks, to sell ideas, to figure out what the next big thing is, what the next efficiency idea is. It could be anything. It could be margin and EBITDA growth. It could be net new revenue growth. It could be fan experience. And, you know, I think ideas are wonderful and amazing and everybody's got ideas, but it's always been in business about what you do with those ideas. So now we've got capability inside our organization that can bring ideas to life within hours. And you're not done in hours. This is not a magic pill.

3:46It just helps you go a lot faster to determine whether you've got a winning idea or a non-winning idea, in which case you should move on. So we've done a lot of work on those kinds of concepts. But to what extent is it a requirement of a leader that they are capable of going deep? So, because there's a model that says, Hey, I've got to delegate AI to somebody who gets it. I mean, you're in the C-suite, right? And there's a model that says the C-suite's job is to delegate this and it's it. Whereas you, to me, this archetype of a C-suite leader capable of strategic thinking and deploying organizational resources and stuff, you're also running terminal via CLI on your personal device at all.

4:33So can you talk for a second about whether that is essential, whether it's nice to have, how you think about that skill set? I think about a year and a half ago, I transitioned back to my 25-year-ago technical self. um and i think as you grow in your career especially in the in the tech space in a company you know sometimes you start really technical and then you grow into the business side of things and you lose those technical skills um and i always maintain the technical scales of development and kind of hacking around at things uh throughout my you know the back half of my career i'd say more as a c-suite executive i've been a ceo chief strategy officer chief technology officer chief digital officer i've had a lot of different kinds of roles but a year and a half ago i'm just thinking about all of the enhancements that were coming out on consumer ai is really what got me back into it and i was on vacation with my wife and my daughter and i had about 10 days to disconnect and i really didn't disconnect but i started just kind of it was 10 days to reconnect disconnect yeah i mean it was just you know it was just like personal passion project where it started and it was you know learning about what uh chat chiquiti was doing just from a consumer perspective and then i looked in the quad and you know looking at all these other models that were coming out and then probably two months into kind of like really going deep on all the consumer tools and trying all the consumer tools which included things like uh lovable and bolt you know being able to kind of like just build fast prototypes i was like man i I got to, I got to get back into the models.

6:10I get, I got to get back into understanding how this, like, how does an LLM actually work and how's it built? What does it mean for software? And then in and around that time, Claude Code, um, actually Claude Code was much later. I think it was Cursor, Windsurf, you know, getting kind of back into VS Code and kind of operating these things inside VS Code. And it really, it took off from there. and I've spent probably since then I'd say probably two hours at minimum per day learning and my learning comes from I'm a hands-on learner I wasn't a great student in school because memorization is tough for me even now but I'm a great hands-on learner is what I just discovered later in my in my life my professional life more so so for me it was all about just trying things building things getting back into it and a lot of my self-training has come through youtube and x x just for like what people are doing what they're finding what the latest innovations are especially around ai can i ask you a question then on the because i think this is very important because i think a lot of people in c-suite often you know don't necessarily use ai as much as they promote other people should and there does seem to be this kind of magic that appears when you have a lot of domain expertise and then you increasingly understand when these models are good at that and there seem to be this kind of like step function you can do where obviously first you become very good at using one of the foundation models within open chat service like chat gmt but then a lot of people that i know that are very into this and are getting very good at it then start to kind of understand how to for example use something like clock code or cursor or some of these more you see technical tool would you help me try to describe kind of like how do you go from okay i know chat dbt i've been using it in a browser to maybe go to i now have installed the desktop version and i have added my first function so it can now look through my drive or another thing that's easy to i now have clock code installed to now i know what cursor is and How would you see that kind of like journey for people who might not even have a technical background?

8:26I think it's such an interesting question. I was having this similar debate with my head of engineering this actually last week on, should we just start putting some of our more technical people, some of our more technically savvy people inside the CLI? Just explain to what CLI is for most people who know this. command line interface where you can run you know if you have a claw desktop app or you have the open ai app on your phone or on your desktop think of the command line interface as just being directly in the guts of it and you can still ask questions and go back and forth and her perspective was it might be too technical and my perspective was you probably right but there probably is a subsection of people that would benefit from that but to answer your question directly i think it's progression i think um you know these things can be daunting the pace of change can be daunting the technical terms can be daunting i think you do have to have a technical understanding of how these things work so from the progression aspect of kind of mastering these things uh as you go i would say you know master the consumer stuff first like learn what claude is good at and what open ai chat GPT is good at, you know, learn the consumer aspects of what you can do inside those platforms.

9:43I think specifically those two platforms and Gemini's, you know, really incredible for a lot of things. I think they're getting a lot better on the consumer side too. But I would say, you know, first step one is learn how it works. Like just, and the beauty of it is you can do all of these things right inside any of these chatbots, right? You can go in it and say, like, literally, look, This might sound dumb, but like, you know, in the early days I was going in and and asking me like, explain to me very simply, how does LOM training actually work? Cause I wanted to refresh my memory and I didn't want to go read a technical journal.

10:15You know, you could, you could ask it anything. And sometimes you feel a little bit silly asking it, maybe basic questions or refresher questions, but it's just an unlimited amount of learning that you can do directly in these apps that are now sitting in our fingertips. So I would say you have an AI tutor. You have an AI tutor in your hands. Yeah. Learn the basics, master the public apps that are out there. Once you've done that, I think you can kind of cross the chasm to potentially getting into VS Code, running Cursor, running Cloud Code or running Codex or running Gemini. Right. But hang on one second here.

10:48Before we go there or before we cross the chasm, make the business case because I think they're there. Cross it, cross it. Yeah, Henrik's on the other side of the chasm. I love it. So, so one thing, but for, you just said you spend, you're a C-suite leader. You spend two hours per day, hands-on learning. If you just assume you work eight hours a day, which you don't, that's 25 % of your time. And from a CEO leader perspective, the opportunity cost of that time is enormous, right? Your time is far more expensive than other people's, right? And I think a lot of people, a lot of senior leaders, especially, don't justify investing in learning because the opportunity cost of their time is so high.

11:31So for people who don't know what the ROI is, so to speak, can you make the business case of the value? And what I'm asking you to do is kind of humble brag. What's been the impact to the business that you have made because you've gone so deep? because I think that would really help people justify I need to personally spend time even though it's a high opportunity cost humble brag go ahead yeah uh great question um you know the two hours a day is not during work hours it's actually in personal time so it's in my drive-in or in my train ride in and obviously weekends and evenings because obviously you know day jobs especially if you're a if you're a leader in an organization is uh is busy you can't just carve out two hours a day to go do side projects right so i would say the reason i've done that and the reason i will continue to do that for the foreseeable future is because i think these technologies whether you use consumer versions of them to be better at your job to be more impactful in what you're doing or you want to understand it at a great degree because you might maybe want to be a founder or develop something that that's incredible is that these technologies have changed the world and they will continue to change the world included in that are legacy businesses that have been around forever and it doesn't really matter if you're a food service company or a cleaning company or a sports and entertainment organization or a tv network these things are fundamentally going to change and have changed how business is done i think the opportunity is for most organizations is to adopt and understand.

13:11And I think the human side of it is probably the hardest part, which is kind of helping people and organizations understand the value and, and getting them to switch and change and operate in a different way, which is just human behavior. So change is hard. And I think this is, you know, it's no different with these technologies, but that's the reason why the reason why is because it's changed everything. And for me personally, you know, I've now been able to build full stack apps for MLSC. And, you know, we have a, I developed a group about a year ago called our V1 lab, our version one. Can you give a few examples of like what the V1 lab kind of like, you know, what do they come up with and how do they then actually have real impact into the organization?

13:57Maybe one winning idea and one idea that you learned wasn't winning would be kind of cool. Yeah, I think the one winning concept we've employed now is we built a platform just titled MLSE AI and it's our, it's kind of our AI homepage. It's kind of our landing spot. And we have probably about 12 different AI apps that we've built in there. And in MLSE AI, we also have an app called Ideagen. and idea gen is um if you guys remember dig do you remember the website dig yeah from a long time ago made by a guy named kevin rose um i hear them coming back but that's a different story yeah so dig dig is you know is a simple concept where people can go and post stuff kind of like reddit but you're able to you know upvote and downvote ideas and that was a concept of dig a very long time ago so we we took similar concepts to that and have and have actually recently launched idea gen out to all of maple leaf sports and entertainment and it allows anybody in the organization to go put in an idea and it allows other people to vote on the idea so you know just just that small change means that the ideas now have the opportunity to grow from anywhere to get supported from anywhere and the best ideas will grow to the top these are not necessarily ideas about ai these are business ideas it could be anything they could be from our usher on the front line to our server in the restaurant to the CEO of the company, could anybody.

15:29And I think these things are incredibly, um, democratizing of bringing the right information up, but also then once every quarter, now we might do it once every month, but we've decided on every quarter, um, is we take the top three ideas and we do what we call build in a day. And so on one day, we take those three ideas and the people who came up with those ideas and we sit in a room for the entirety of the day in fact our first build in a day is coming up in two weeks and there's three people one person building each idea just on that one day and then we have a demo day the next morning now i and sandra who's my dp of engineer are both builders for building a day right along with one of our agentic developers that sits in our B1 lab.

16:18So our concept with that is that you could do anything, but you got to pick the right thing to work on, right? It's critically important to pick the right one. On your other question of, you know, what did we get that isn't right? Well, I think we started off some time ago building almost micro apps, you know, so there was an app for research, there might have been an app for analysis, there might have been an app for creating content, you know, copywriting, all these kind of small things that, you know, the LLMs are really good at, but you want to enable large groups of people to have these capabilities.

16:56And we've learned that it's got to be more of like a software as a service kind of experience where you go in to do a set of tasks associated to your job. So one example of where we pivoted from that is we've created a platform called MLSE Deep Dive. And the Deep Dive platform allows you to go into the platform and brainstorm any idea. So you're able to go in there and basically say, you create a project and you say, I want to figure out, you know, I want to research all of the different LLMs and I want to figure out the best one to use. And you can just go crazy doing research back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.

17:37Once you build that context, or it could be launching a brand new business idea, could be anything. Once you build all the context, which you might build in an hour, in a day, in a month, we then take all of that context and send it to a deep research capability that we've built and custom provided instructions to in terms of what we're trying to get answers to. and then it actually produces a report that's very contextual to our industry sports and entertainment with all the context and all the deep research and then you can start to take that report and stick it into a really beautiful presentation format and do things like add images to it and other things that you might want to and just kind of keep iterating so the concept is you're able to take an idea that you might have in your head build on it over a period of time just like you would if you were in a company with colleagues, going to meetings, step-balling ideas with other people, maybe going to the development team and saying, could you do this?

18:37Or going to the marketing team and saying, could you think about how we might do this particular thing? But you're just doing it in this contained environment. And then you're also able to produce marketing material. So you're able to produce posters, imagery, app mock-ups. So now you can enrich your idea. And we created a version of VZero as well. internally so anybody's used the versell v0 app which allows you to go in and instruct it with a whole bunch of things and it produces like really beautiful kind of in the moment conversational based can i put questions on the ideas that yeah so the challenge for many i would assume is increasingly that the tools themselves can do a lot but they can do so much that they become a little bit numbing for people that are not used to think like this and so in many ways it seems what you guys are providing is obviously access to the technology but increasingly you're kind of showing people process or ideas for what they can actually use this tool like the the stuff that you're doing is as much a use case as it is a piece of software is that how you think about it we think about it as um similar to how we thought about software pre-ai which is it's got to be solving a problem it's got to have product market fit we got to be picking the you know it's much more expensive to do these things two years ago but you're still spending you know cycles with people's minds and energy and you want to focus those in the right area so it's exactly that and rick i think it's picking the right ideas doubling down on the things that can scale and Jeremy maybe going back to your ROI question if you can pick the right things and have people work on the right ideas and have kind of the human side of it non-technical side of it join with the technical side of it then at the end of that you might have somebody say wow this this new thing we've developed is amazing I used to do this in all these manual ways and now I can do it in one place and those are mainly the non-technical users that will provide that feedback very quickly because they'll see the value in it.

20:45I think that's when you know you're kind of hitting the, you know, the impact stuff. And I would say this isn't the crazy cutting edge stuff, as you guys know. This is just like the, what are you going to do that's basic day to day to help your organization to grow better research, better analysis, faster prototyping, faster presentations. You can spend that 80 % of the time on other things that are much more value added, growing your business, coming up with the next big bet. Well, one thing I also think about when you're mentioning these is, and this might be just super obvious. And so we can ignore what it is.

21:15But I think we talked to another person the other day who was saying he believes basically like 10, 15 % of the organization are now these super users of AI. They're really good at it. And then they can basically do a lot of the stuff we talk about. And then you have the remaining that is still kind of like climbing up the learning ladder. Right. It seems that for a lot of like the non-super users, it's almost better for them to give them to your point a tool that it doesn't really even have to be about AI. It is just, hey, you're a salesperson that's selling sponsorships. And here's like a very easy way for you to make your deck ready for when you go out and sell.

21:51You're saving two hours. And like, you know, like almost like not pitch it as AI, but just hear like all these new tools that we made. Bang on, Hendrick. I think that's key. It's almost like the AI. I think the AI for the technical people and nerds is really interesting. We could talk about it for a long time, but for somebody who's not technical, they just want to know like, how's it going to help me do my job better? And if you could just almost take out AI from the commentary and exactly as you said it, here's a tool, use it. It should help you go faster. And if you've done your job as a technologist or somebody who's looking to move the organization forward, the answer on that should be like, oh yeah, I could do my job way better in this.

22:26Right. And it just works. So then there's a really important point. And Henrik, I'm so glad that you drilled in here. What we have not heard you say, Hamza, up to this point is talking about broad enterprise adoption. We haven't heard you talk about training. We haven't heard you talk about others learning to work with AI. What we've heard is a centralized function that is AI enabled, that is unleashing the organization with stuff they need versus equipping the organization with AI tools and then letting them figure it out. Are we hearing that correctly? I'm not hearing you talk about driving it.

23:00I think it's somewhere, I think for us it's somewhere in the middle. We have rolled out access to AI tools for large groups of people in the organization. We have training programs and we have access to various kinds of things that people can use to enhance their skills. My personal learning in the last year and a half, two years on this has been, it's really hard to get people to change at scale in general terms. so if you're giving everybody a chat gpt license and saying here's ai be better it's actually really hard because like what am i supposed to do in here and if you're technical maybe you know all the answers to that but if you're anywhere you know under very technical you might be looking at that and going it's probably just easier for me to do this in my spreadsheet maybe the way to give people the reason to give people access is not to upgrade everybody it is to find those 10-15 percent who might be hidden around the organization and so that's our concept around our mlc ai platform which is you know if you're in our partnership group or if you're on marketing group where you're doing any kinds of idea or a generation of new concepts that are creative and beautiful or you want to think of anything new a report or whatever this is where you go to do it right those are the concepts that we're trying to double down on which is for things like research and analysis and deck building and assessing a spreadsheet doing all of those kinds of things here's where you go to do it and i think those opportunities have a much higher potential to grow fast you know we've built an agentic media access platform which allows us to do basically video editing and it's connected into imagine how much footage we have across our nba teams or nhl teams you know we're very old organization in terms of all the footage that we have so now our platform allows you to go in and through natural language allows our producers to search for anything and you can search for anything find anything very instantly and then you can also clip together certain clips to export to an xml to put into your video editor of choice and just get content out there faster so natural language video search it's kind of an important one for us as a sports entertainment media company we went big on that one in fact last year our teams that built that won the NBA Innovation Award on behalf of the Toronto Raptors by the NBA because of what we did with that platform was fundamentally looking at video and production and just shrinking the time to get content out to a fan, to a partner, to the market, social, etc., television, partnerships, etc.

25:38by orders of magnitude. So I do think that there is an element of you want in any organization You want your workforce to be AI enabled and trained, of course, takes time. I think the fastest ROI is pick your top. You guys both said it. Pick your top two, three, four things and just make sure you get those two, three, four things. And whether you do that in a quarter or a year, it's all good. Just do that well and you'll get the progression, you know, just like most other tech platforms or programs that people would have done a decade ago. So I want to give you this magic wand. Here it is. home so you can have it.

26:15And what I want to ask you to do, if you wave the magic wand, you're given kind of a blank slate. The CEO of another company says, we want to set ourselves up for success. From an org design perspective, what do you suggest is the right structure? Specifically, where does this capability sit? Because in some organizations, it's kind of nested in marketing. In some, it's the CHRO. Some, it's IT. Where do you think the capability sits? Where does it report and what does it have responsibility for? Yeah, I think a role like this needs to report into the CEO, you know, or frankly, be the CEO. I think it's got to be very close to the top person and the top people.

26:57And everybody has to understand what the capabilities are. Because, you know, to where we started the conversation off, this conversation isn't just for the nerds. This conversation, in my opinion, is for everybody. to some degree at this level. Because even if you don't understand hands-on keys on these things, you want to understand the macro concepts of what these things mean and how you could enable it, even if you can't build it yourself, how you could enable it if you're the CEO of a company. Because if you don't, then you won't understand and you will be left behind in your organization in orders of magnitude faster than any other time in sort of modern-day technology.

27:39Just because of the speed at which these things move. And those companies that adopt it will move faster and faster. And if you don't adopt it, ultimately you will, you know, you will move slower and slower on these things. And so you say reports to the CEO, what kind of talk, can you talk for a second about, okay, how do you interface with marketing, for example? I mean, just to get very specific, how do you interface with HR, right? What's marketing's responsibility versus this role's responsibility, et cetera, et cetera. So it's back to what we talked about with the ideas. um we get lots of ideas from our executives inside mlsc you know so my peers are chro our chief marketing officer our chief operating officer you know all of these incredible people have awesome ideas and i'll give you you know i'll give you a story shannon hosford our chief marketing officer who came up with we the north for the raptors campaign that is very well known and very award-winning you know said about a month ago like hey it would be great if we you know i saw this thing that that somebody else has and i wonder if we could do something with it and it it's kind of all these marketing agents talking to each other about just ideation and there's like five or six agents speaking to each other you know we might have a revenue person in there and a performance marketer and a data person whatever like all right that's actually a great idea and we went out in a couple of days and we built it and so then she takes it you know puts it into her team gets us feedback and we start that loop but that's when you have these things that really catch on when you've got the end users in an organization really saying, hey, I have an idea.

29:10And that's what our Ideagen platform is about, to kind of harness that at scale. But I think for any organization, the ideas are there. How do you find and what do you measure a person on that you hire into your agent team? so they they have to be up to speed on all agentic development principles which means that obviously they have to have great skills as a developer they have to be able to write code and review code but do you really do you just put like a job spec so like do you and i ask because the only way that we've been able to find people these days is that i troll youtube and i find people with like 10 ,000 followers, but not 25.

29:55And then basically DM them and ask, do you want to work with us? And often they have, you know, a lot of skills, but not a lot of money. So they're like, sure. It's a great way to do it. Um, I don't think I have a magic bullet answer on it either, but I think what we do is we've been able to find some really great people and it's people kind of like us who, who understand it, who have kind of the core skills and have chosen to take that, that right turn and go, okay I'm not going to be afraid of this thing it's not going to mean that if I don't write any every line of code that I'm less of a developer it just means I'm going to be so much better than everybody else around me as a developer that I'm going to have greater opportunities to grow like it's kind of a personal thing around growth for you know engineers and leaders but we actually do put them through a set of tests that are really driven through agentic principles we'll say we have particular idea on this we'd like you to use quad code cursor codex whatever you want we'll provide you access to it we'll give you the environment we'll give you an hour how would you do it you know we and we want them saying yeah we would use you know markdown files we would use planning mode we would we would build prds we would use mcps we would employ the skills that are out there now from uh if you're using quad code whatever the thing is you know we want to know that those people know which models to use, right?

31:14Because it's not one model that's going to do everything. So from a technical development standpoint, we want people harnessing the workflow. And we've also started to develop our kind of our own workflow package. Because if you can master that, then then you're really at the cut. And then you're really at the bleeding edge of you get all the business stuff done and get all the ideas. Then you got to have men and women, people that are have the ability to take those ideas and fly. Not irresponsibly, but responsibly. and you know i'd be remiss if i if i didn't say that at some point we move things from prototype v1 lab to production and we don't we don't launch products out there that are vibe coded um in fact we don't really vibe code we the way i describe it is um i'm adding you some context engineering terminology now i think vibe coding seems like you're just kind of hacking away with the chatbot without knowing what you're doing that's contrary to what we do i think you have to review code i think you have to look at what you're doing i think you have to be able to plan an architect but ultimately i i compare it to a pilot flying a plane if you were to observe a pilot flying a plane very rarely would you see a pilot on a yoke steering the plane right right in the rain they're just like you know you see them in the movies but um you know a pilot knows knows what all those buttons are, when to press what, and knows how to operate it as efficiently and effectively given all the conditions that they are dealing with and the stress that they're dealing with.

32:47And I think agentic development, whatever word you want to give it, true agentic development with software skills is akin to that. And I don't, I don't have a word for it necessarily. And I think the words will continue to change, but those kinds of skill sets are absolutely game-changing well i think we'll see several billion dollar companies created in the next two three four years with solo devs because i think people have the ability to do it i also think it's unlock a new type of technologist right you know i think there are people that might not ask yourself like i'm sure you're cutting chops and not up to scratch because it's been 25 years since you used them yeah but you understand fundamental technical architecture i mean i I come through a design background, but, you know, I have done my Python class, you know, so like I understand the core elements.

33:37And I think people like myself and other system thinkers that was never, never had the ability to build anything before. Yeah. I think now can. And I think to your point, can build quite robust systems while they won't be able to kind of like debuck the whatever goes. But often they don't have to because obviously the output is what really matters. And if it's up and running and it's not breaking, then, you know, like it's often fine. Yeah. Yeah. I think the ability to put the pieces together and, um, and do it in a way that, that is still quality, I think is, is also going to be key, but just the models and the technologies around that are just getting so much better.

34:22I, if I think of a year and a half ago, some of the models that were out there that were, you know, if you're writing react or TypeScript or whatever your language of choice is, right. you run into errors you have bugs you have to spend time debugging now you look at a model that just you know like an elpis 4.5 it's amazing what it can do now it's not perfect but you'll be dealing with a lot less bugs and issues if you can kind of harness harness this so i think the future on the ability to create is massively different than it was two years ago and i think it's all about the idea it's what you put into that creation mechanism and what you get out of the other side, if you can figure out the biggest things that might change your business.

35:02The other thing I would just throw out there, Jeremy, which I think is a bit to your earlier question on one of the most important things. I think people have to think about if they were building their company today, how would they build it? I think you have to, whether you do that in an actual sense in the company and you go, okay, we're going to restart our company from today, you know, 50 year old company, 60 year old company. Part of what we think about in various areas of our business and in fact, across our business is if we were starting our company today, how would you build it? Knowing all the things.

35:37That's the important thing, right? Knowing all the things is actually critical. You can't imagine how to rebuild if you don't have that foundational knowledge of what the capabilities are right now. When you sit as a C-suite member and you have that thought, which I 100 % agree with, very fast we kind of get outside the bounds of AI, right? And you're asking foundational strategy questions about your company. What business is it in? All those different things, right? Things that I think we all will have to answer in the age of AI. How do you think about having that conversation with your colleagues in the C-suite and the CEO about, hey, yes, there are technology components up here, but this will require us to potentially re-architecture the design of the organization and other things that are not necessarily technical, but will be affected by the technology?

36:30I think it's fairly easy to get there. And the way in which I've learned is the easiest way to get there, all of the mechanisms to get there take work, is going back to what a company is built to do, what their existing, forget AI, forget about technology. What is that company trying to do this fiscal year? what are their shareholders expect what are the goals of the company what are all the executives aiming to do already and then i think if you can back it into that there's the greatest opportunity to have support on whatever those initiatives are because it's not a side technology project or this ai thing it's fundamentally connected to the thing that everybody's already aiming at And then I think from there, you have greater opportunities to think about how you would reimagine something completely.

37:23And that takes sponsorship right from the top, sometimes from a board. But I also think that most boards and most CEOs are thinking about those things already. And I think these things sort of have a natural progression to come together. But I do think it always needs to start with the company, the vision, what the company's trying to do. And then you do need a technologist, somebody who can straddle both sides, which is what I love about my job is for, you know, the majority of my back half of my career, my management side of my career, I straddle the, you know, the, the, the line in between cutting edge technology and business growth.

38:06and I think putting the two things together has that's the inspiration on what I do and and why continue to love what I do in this area because when you can bring those two things together and you can actually see companies grow there's nothing better from a professional standpoint maybe that's kind of the perfect place to wrap because we talked about where this role would sit you know in an ideal world we haven't talked about who you know if again if you're advising a CEO who goes, I want to hire this person. I want to hire this capability in. Who are you looking for? What are the key skills?

38:42And you kind of, you kind of hinted at it a little bit and I just described yourself, but if you could specify what are the search parameters with a senior leadership team is working for if they want to start to embed this capability. In terms of the person that they need to bring in to help to drive and, and, and play that role. Well, I think it needs to be somebody deeply technical. I think it needs to be somebody deeply technical to understand. all of the detail of how you do it. And that's the first part you have to know, like, if you want an organization leading technology, you know, in 2025, going into 2026, I do think you have to lead by example on these things.

39:21Cause if you don't know the detail of how it's done, then that's a big gap. Number two is I think it has to be a person who can build teams and hire great people to run those functions and achieve the best out of whether you have a team of two, three, five, or 500. I think the efficiency factor of one single full stack developer has increased by a thousand percent, but you have to know how to fly that plane to do it from our previous example. So you have to have somebody who can understand it and then build system-wide thinking from a technical perspective inside the organization to actually execute.