Vitamins vs. Pain Killers vs. Whippets - The Enterprise AI Adoption Problem

0:08Aaron: Good morning, good evening, where you are, and welcome back to the Enterprise AI Show. This is your host, Aaron. And for those catching this on video, you can see I'm not in the massive studio again. In the Where in the World is Aaron this week game, I'm actually with my family in Tuscaloosa, Alabama for the ECU versus Bama home opener football game. That's American football. by the way, for our international listeners out there. Let's move on to today's show. For today's show, Brian, Brandon, and I discuss enterprise AI adoption using the sales analogy, whether AI is a vitamin or a painkiller.

0:46Aaron: We argue successful transformation still requires that burning platform event. And we even create a new third category, the AI Whip It. And if you want to know what that means, stick around and find out. And all of that is coming up right after this quick break.

1:05Today's show is sponsored by Nasuni. There's a growing gap in AI right now between what's possible in theory and what successfully works at scale inside an enterprise. The difference comes down to unstructured file data. Many AI initiatives struggle because the file data they depend on is scattered, unstructured, and disconnected from where and how work actually happens. Nasuni changes that. It brings your unstructured file data into a single, secure foundation so AI, both generative and agentic, can access it with the context, governance, and performance it needs in production. Bring AI to where your unstructured data lives.

1:40See what it takes to activate your data for AI and request a demo at nasuni.com slash AI.

1:49Aaron: What does the outside world already know about your company? Cybercriminals could be seeing leaked credentials, compromised session cookies, exposed infrastructure, and even impersonations of your brand and executives. NordLayer Intelligence by Nordstellar gives security teams visibility into those threats across the deep and dark web. Data breaches, attack surfaces, and brand impersonation all in one platform. Find out what attackers know before they can use it. Visit nordlayer.com slash intelligence slash enterprise AI and use code enterprise 10 for 10 % off your Nordstellar plan.

2:36Aaron: And we're back. And we have a quick topic that we want to talk about today, but one that'll be actually kind of interesting because I feel like on a lot of these topics, I can kind of tell where folks are going to go. I honestly have no idea where Brandon and Brian are going to go with this one today. So this will be interesting. But our topic for today is AI adoption. And a little bit like we've been talking about recently, like there's been kind of pros and cons of all of this. And there's been financial aspects of all of this. But I'm going to go back to the super classic sales analogy, is AI vitamins or painkillers.

3:15Aaron: And are we doing this because we should be doing it? Are we doing it because it's actually providing real value? And this kind of wraps up, you know, our last couple of shows have all been talking about a general theme of profitability around all of this, but I kind of want to flip it around and not approach it from a vendor side, but flip it from a customer and an enterprise side. And so with that, I'm going to kind of kick it over to Brendan. What's your thoughts on all of this and like this thesis we were kind of kicking around before we hit record on all of this and then we'll see where it goes from there yeah so i mean i think it's the classic question about digital transformation right now and i've we've all been around a lot of the conversations that would say something like a vendor goes in they say that like they're like the chief therapy officer and a lot of times they'll say it's like the the project that the client wasn't successful because they just weren't ready to change right they weren't ready to change They weren't open to it, whether this is DevOps or virtualization or containers.

4:12The list of technologies we've talked about in the show goes on forever. And so I guess one of the things I've been thinking a lot about AI is like, has anything really changed? Because I always say at this point, I kind of believe that unless you have some type of like major event driving some type of transformation, it's not going to be successful. So it's almost like I could save, you know, if someone wants me to go in and if I sit down with an executive and they're like, and I'm just like, I'm like, how's business? He's like, pretty good. How's like how the employee is doing? He's like, pretty good.

4:41How are you doing the competition? Pretty good. I'm like, at the end of the day, if this person doesn't really feel like they're in dire need of something, right? Something is changing, whether they're about to go out of business, the competitor has changed. I used to work a lot in doing migrations. I always joke, it's like when I talk about a company that wants to migrate because maybe they could save more money, it's like we'd have a great conversation, nothing would happen. But sometimes I get on the phone and they'd be like, the data center has been sold. It's going to close on March 1st. We have got to be migrated.

5:11I'm like, everybody is motivated. We're all like, this project's about to happen. And, you know, and that's kind of where I think with AI is sort of like, I'm kind of just questioning myself. It's sort of like if you don't today, if when you're talking about AI and we talk about all the benefits of it, but if you still go into a client today or any type of customer and they can't tell you of that problem, I think you're pretty much going to fail just like before. So in some ways, I feel like nothing has actually changed. So I know, Brian, you spend a lot of time talking to these executives. So I would love to hear your perspective.

5:41Am I right? Or are these executives all now forward thinking and they're embracing this technology to reap the benefits, even if they don't have a burning problem going on? Yeah, I think it's a weird scenario because we've seen new technologies over time that would maybe be similar where you're like, I don't know if it's a burning platform scenario. But like, you know, I could see where this would be better. I could see where this would be faster. I think part of why this is so confusing is it's been such a compressed cycle. Like we've all kind of lived through the, okay, did you, have you seen ChatGPT yet?

6:16I mean, like, dude, it's pretty cool. Like, have you seen it? And then there was the, okay, I guess we should figure out how to get this into our business. And then, you know, and then we lived through, you know, some of the, well, you know, we're going to do AI first. It's a top down thing. so-and-so gets their billion-dollar valuation in the stock market, whatever it might be. And now I think we're sort of in that a little bit trough of disillusionment in that when you talk to executives or you talk to lead architects or whatever, you get two stories out of them. You get the, yeah, we're doing a lot of stuff.

6:48Yeah. I mean, we're doing some of that. We're doing some agent stuff and we're doing some stuff and we've got some guardrails and we're definitely cleaning our data so it's getting better and we've got some pilots going on. And then at the same time, you're sort of like, but do you have a minimum viable product? Do you have the Netflix use case? Do you have the whatever? And then there's a lot of sort of, yeah, I mean, but there's still some things we're working through and so forth. So, I mean, I think we're very much, I don't want to call it like the trough of disillusionment, but we're kind of at that stage where it's like, okay, we got the hype from our boss.

7:19It came, it trickled down. We started figuring it out. It was cool that I got to be the person that got to work on the AI stuff. So that's cool. And I'm probably smarter than 99 % of the people in my company because I've been forced to adopt it. We've run into a bunch of hiccups that are complicated. It's like, oh, well, like which ones? Oh, well, like data is hard. And, you know, getting people to adopt it at scale is hard and doing it in a cost effective way is, is hard. I haven't seen a whole lot of people who are like, we're giving up on it because I think there's still this, you know, the, the burning platform is this inherent fear that the people you compete against or the company that you don't know yet is going to figure it out and then become your business.

7:58You know, same sort of thing we ran into and it was like, Hey, software's eating the world. but there's, you know, I think there's distinctly the burning platform in essence for a lot of these folks is like my, my burning platform is, is perceived competition that we can't necessarily nail down. But at the same time, I don't really know how to put out the fire of the platform because I don't know how to do this cheaper. I don't know how to do it at a, at a team scale or a group scale. And I don't really know how to like make it behave like a deterministic application. Like we've done for 25 years, like, but that's everybody's expectation of it.

8:31So it does very much feel like this like it's we're not in a trough of disillusionment but we're also not in a you know like there aren't that many adrian cockcrofts either running around being like look how look how awesome this stuff is and like we've kind of feel like we've maybe been in that for a little while now like we've talked about like what is the you know who is that who is the adrian cockcroft of ai stuff and i'm not sure who that is and i'm actually gonna you know

8:56Aaron: the way we kind of presented this was it's binary. You know, either you need one or you don't. I actually think there's a third category here. Yes, there is burning platform, painkiller. I got a pain. I got to solve it right now. There's the vitamins of like, hey, it would be awesome. It's aspirational. Maybe I need it. Maybe I don't. But Brian and I have talked about this a couple of times in the past. There's a third category, and this is the one you need to be really careful about. And that is the CIO who wants to come in put a whole bunch of things around a big project to put something big on their resume, and then they're out the door, and you're left holding the bag.

9:34I mean, the third category is whippets, right? Yes. The vitamin, is it an aspirin, or is it a whippet? Right now, there's a lot of folks that it's a whippet.

9:44Aaron: Yes. Yes, 1 ,000%. Quick hit, quick buzz, and you move on. But I guess I'm with you on all that, but I think the part I guess I find most interesting is like, you know, people want to like embrace AI and stuff, or they'll often talk about wanting to do it. And it's like in almost every organization, if you just give me like an hour, I can probably be like, there's probably a process here that's way too long. Right. And in your own personal life, you can think of numerous things, right? Like my son just went back to high school. We have so many paper forms to sign, right? Your children are in college, I'm sure you have many paper forms you have to sign, right?

10:24This is just a simple example, right? And I think what I always find interesting, right, is sort of like you can point these things out to people, right? And most of the time, they're going to tell you why it needs to be done that way, right? You're going to go to a doctor's office in the next few weeks or months. You're going to be handed a paper form, right? About like, you need to fill this out and they're going to maybe want to take a copy of your insurance card. And so you see all of these, I see these all the time. Right. And there was another article that we, I don't know if we talked about the show.

10:53It was like, here we were, it's like a convenience store. I think it's up your way. It was something like they have like six virtual machines. This is in like a, the equivalent of like a seven 11. I can't remember the name of it. It's like a something. Oh, is it the Wawa? Yeah, I think it wasn't Wawa. It's Sheetz. I think it was Sheetz, right? And it's like, so I just remember, and they were saying they're paying too much for VMware. I'm like, no shit. Right. Like what? And I just thought to myself, like, I want to go to this store. I want to go to this store and be like, show me the six virtual machines and what you're doing.

11:20Because I'm like, I feel like we can get rid of all of it. I just feel like we can get this down to one computer, right? Potentially. I mean, it's almost like a personal challenge. I want to go there and be convinced. I mean, I can tell you exactly how they do it. I've built out the system. I know exactly how they do this stuff. Because there's one VM that handles keeping track of the gas pumps. There's one that keeps track of interactions with Visa or the credit card. The point of sale terminal, right? There's one for the inventory system. There's one that goes for the security cameras. There's one for something else, like the ATM machine in there or the video slot machine, whatever the heck it is.

11:56And yes, could you run those all in one VM so you didn't have six? Yes, you could. Do all six of those vendors allow you to run other stuff in there? No, they expect it to be an appliance. And that's how you get to six. Sure, but it's just one of these things. You did a good example. You just explained to me why it can't be changed. And I'm like, no, it can be changed. I'm like, even if it's something, because this is great. This is almost like a real-time example. I'd be like, Brian, that was great. Thanks so much for educating me. Maybe as an executive, I'd be like, that was great. Well, if nothing else, maybe we just build a container.

12:29Let's build you a free container out of this. That would be my first pitch, right? And let's just, you tell me what that, in fact, you tell me what that company wants, and I'm going to go build you exactly what you need. You can run it for free. You can run it for almost for nothing, right? Certainly, I'm not going to stick with the VMware. And then maybe I'd go further and be like, well, what else is in here? Like, what else could we do? So I don't know. Like I said, it's a personal challenge. I would like to, if anyone from Sheets is listening, you want me to come in, you want to prove me wrong, I'd love to do it.

12:54But my point is just that, right? It's sort of like most of the time, right, people don't, like they don't want to do this kind of stuff, right? And then this is kind of back to like, now maybe if it was like, and Sheets is actually, it looks like they were doing it because they're like, it's too expensive to pay VMware. That was their burning platform moment. But I just kind of, this kind of goes back to what I said before. was sort of like, I kind of feel like AI is in the same kind of point. And maybe somebody did. Maybe we're picking on this customer a little too much. Maybe they did. Maybe they opened up Claude and the CIO was like, hey, if you were going to do this today, how could I do this and get rid of VMware?

13:27Maybe they did all that. Maybe Claude came back with like a super complicated, expensive solution. Like that doesn't work. We're going to keep doing that. But my feeling is just like, we're still in that same kind of point of view. And I just feel like most of the time people want to tell you why their process and the way they're doing things is right. and they don't necessarily want to, and that's fine. They don't want to necessarily embrace the change, but it also sort of caps what you can do with AI, right? And so that's why I always kind of go back to my thing. It's like, well, I still think you need to identify kind of the burning platform moment to get people motivated.

13:57I don't know. Aaron, what do you think? You're in this a lot with AI people?

14:01Aaron: No, you just proved out, Brandon, with your analysis of Sheets, the FDE model for AI. All it is is somebody comes in and turns the vitamin into the painkiller or the whippet. they you know you come in it's your typical deal qualification you talk to the customer and you go hey what what's painful for you today well if i fix that would that be awesome would you pay me for that yes yes i'd pay you for that great awesome here's you know here's ai agentic workflow here's a new model to solve your problem like i mean this is why fdes are so popular in the industry right now and that's why you know everyone is doing them because it's removing the friction and it's creating the painkiller moments when...

14:45But maybe that's where I'm going to be a little bit too much on the AI kind of panacea. This is the kind of thing you wish people would do of their own initiative, right? And I bet you people listening to this podcast do it. I've created so many different skills. In fact, I had so many skills that Cloud was like, hey, you have too many. These are just wasting. If you're not using them, they're taking out too much of your context windows. Disable them. And it's because it's just like, after I've been doing something two or three times, I'm like, this feels like something I can automate. I can make it faster.

15:16I can do it in a better way. And I hope, you know, that's what I guess the, to me, that's the real promise of AI is like everyone sitting at their desk or doing projects like this could, can, if they will, like take the initiative to get it done and not even so much to like save the company money. It's like to go home early and play with your kids or to go out and do live your personal life. Right. That's what I always think about. It's like, if I can just get the stuff done faster and I can go on and live my life and do what I want. Like that's a huge win, but I don't know. I still feel like there's just a lot of, there's a lot of pushback, right?

15:46People are just, they're happy with their, the, the, they're, they like the sheet subs and they like the VMs that are there, right? Just keep it all the same. I think that, I think the one thing, the more I think about this, like, like maybe why some of this AI stuff hasn't taken off is like, it, it still feels like the one sort of sort of like major technology shift that we've had in the last 20 or 30 years that that seems to have absolutely nothing of no no concept of like collaboration or like it gets better because there's more people involved with with using it network effect there's no network effect to it so like i fully appreciate every time you come on and go man i'm doing awesome stuff with it i have created 10 000 skills and i get but like every one of your use cases are like you doing one thing like you looking at something in your world and going, I could automate that.

16:34I could do whatever. But like, there is no, and people will argue like, oh, these things aren't good. But like, there's no AI SharePoint. There's no AI Zoom. There's no AI WebEx. There's no AI like thing. Like for example, I mean, if you're a team, so let's say, I mean, let's say you're like a team of lawyers or something like that. The fact that you would have, you know, 10 lawyers going off and doing the same thing is fine, but there's no collective memory for those lawyers. So, I mean, yes, their individual learning curve got better, but like they do collaborative stuff in the work they do.

17:05And that doesn't get any better because they've both gotten smarter because like, you know, like they could just drop off the face of the earth and there's nothing, there's no memory that sticks around. There's no anything that does that stuff. And I think that's the piece where I don't know that, you know, that's not why people, you know, are using it or not using it. They might simply be doing it because they're like, I'm still valuable. But from like an enterprise perspective, AI has no concept of like, how do I get people to work better? It's entirely based around the idea of like, okay, step one, how would I get rid of the person?

17:38And then step two becomes like, cool, I left an awesome process behind. But like, if that person who was tied to have knowing having the knowledge went away, or they got pushed onto some other project, there's no residual for the business. And like every other moving the ball forward technology has always left something residual that allowed people to collaborate, whether it was a good way or a bad way, right? Like SharePoint sucks and WebEx sucks. But like, but at the time, they moved the ball forward. And I don't feel like there's anything in AI yet in the enterprise context that you point to and you go, oh, yeah, that's, and this is terrible analogy, but like, that's the SharePoint of AI, right?

18:18That's the collaborative memory. That's the collaborative, like, you know, give me a tool where people go like, Hey, we did a bunch of brainstorming. We threw a bunch of problems at it and then it just solved it. But we did that collectively, not your clot account or Aaron's clot account. And that's the way that that's the way like enterprises work. And I, and in general, like, I feel like the anthropics in the open eyes of the world are like, I'm going to solve the problem by replicating a thousand lawyers instead of being like the first stuff I'm going to do is make a thousand lawyers look like 2000 lawyers or whatever, you know, or like something like 10 lawyers look like a thousand lawyers.

18:53And to me, like, that's the nuance between like these folks all came out of the same nerd DNA as, as Google and Google still stinks at interacting with people. But like the tools they make do have some collaborative abilities to sharing things with docs while you're building a doc. And you can like, that wouldn't work in AI because they'd be like, well, I'll just interact with the doc and then me and the AI will just fix it. And you're like, well, yeah, but what do you, what happens when you pull the lawyers in, you pull the salespeople in and they're like that, that piece I think is still missed that to me, that's the burning, that's the burning platform that kind of gets blurred because management's like, oh, AI, cool.

19:30That's the thing I get to use to fire people. But at the same time, they're also like, but I want the process that replaces them to be better. And that's not just going to happen because you made a hundred skills and they sit in a folder somewhere that that's missing, I think, in the burning platform analogy. Yeah, maybe so. I'm still, you know, I guess I'm still kind of amazed today, even in large corporations. Like I'll just, you know, one example is I think there's a book, like write like an Amazonian, like Amazon has like a specific writing style and maybe someone Amazon email and tell us how it is.

19:58But it's like, to me, that's like a perfect skill, right? Like they should just have a skill that someone goes through and builds a skill and be like, hey, edit this piece so that it follows all of the criteria. So it's written like an Amazonian. And then you just put the skill up and internally, however they want to tell everybody, everything that you write, every time you write a memo, put it through this because that's going to make sure that you've done it correctly. And it'll even maybe output be like, here, I've made these corrections. Here's things you need to look at. Here's what you need to learn how to do it.

20:25Right. Seems like super simple. Seems like every time a company rolls out a new set of templates, right, a new PowerPoint and Word document templates, like you would throw the skill out and be like, here's all the things that we do. Here's how we do copyrights. Here's how we refer to our company. Here's how we copy edit, right? All of that stuff could just come out in like one shot. And it's like, never see it. I know. And I would love for people to tell me I'm wrong. I would love for you. And it's just like, but it's out there. And it's like, you're right. I mean, maybe it's just the one level of effort too hard, right?

20:55It's just like downloading this markdown file and putting it in your favorite code harness is just too much, right? Just people just don't want to do it. But when I look out there and I'm always just back to like, maybe you would do that. Maybe that would work if there was no comps department left or there were no editors. The only way to get edited was to use this skill. Maybe that would be the burning platform for that moment. So I don't know. It just kind of comes back to all of this. If it's going to be adopted in some major way, you still probably are stuck with having some type of urgent need to do it.

21:26And without that, to Brian's point, probably things just go on the way that they've been going on. Yeah, got nothing else to say.

21:38Aaron: I think we close it out there. That was a good summary there, Brandon. All right. I'm going to close it out for us. Everyone out there, thank you so much for listening this week. We certainly appreciate it. And of course, wherever you get your podcasts, if you could leave us a review, that would be amazing as well. And we'd always love to hear from you as well. Always looking for feedback on the show or on new guests and ideas as well. And with that, I'm going to say thank you to everyone for listening. And we will talk to everyone next week. Thanks for listening. Check us out at theenterpriseaishow.com for past shows, newsletters, and all things Enterprise AI.