Rick Pozniak: You have vast experience, great customer connections and then add digital tools on top of that, you have a very powerful resource, which is why I think reskilling is so important. You probably aren’t going to get everybody to convert and think that way, but boy, it’s worth the effort.

Adam Honig: Hello and welcome to Make It. Move it. Sell it. On this podcast, I talk with company leaders about how they’re modernizing the business of making, moving, and selling products and of course, having fun along the way. I’m your host, Adam Honig, the CEO of Spiro.AI. We make amazing AI software for companies in the supply chain, but we’re not talking about that today. Instead, today we’re talking with Rick Pozniak, the founder and president of MOVE78 Solutions. Welcome to the show, Rick.

Rick Pozniak: Hi, Adam. Thanks for having me.

Adam Honig: It’s a pleasure. It was great meeting you the other day. Rick and I were at the Applied AI for Distributors event, and we had some breakfast together and happened to strike up a really interesting conversation. I thought it’d be amazing to have you on the show, so I really appreciate that. Maybe a good place to start, Rick, is just tell the folks a little bit about your journey and where you are today.

Rick Pozniak: I’ve been in the industrial distribution space my whole life, specifically in electrical distribution, working for some of the bigger guys, Rexel and Sonepar, and doing a lot of digital work there. But in my past, I really had a lot of different roles; sales, marketing, industrial automation, I sold that for a while. It really let me understand the complete workings of distributors and wholesalers. The last ten years, I’ve really been in the digital space. About a year ago, I decided I could do more helping other distributors. I founded MOVE78. Just a quick note on where I picked the name, people always think I’m in the moving business, but it’s not. There was a movie made a few years ago about Google’s early foray into AI with DeepMind. They started by playing a game, the game, Go, which is very popular especially with Asians, the black and white tiles and you try to control a board, but it’s even more strategic than chess. They ended up playing the grandmaster who was really confident that he could beat the AI. First couple games, the AI just smoked him, and he realized he had to think totally different. Really, the takeaway from this is that man plus AI is much stronger than man fighting AI. He finally beat the AI at one game and made this move that was totally unprecedented for the game, and it was the 78th move of the game. That’s where I got the name for the company. But we’re doing a lot of AI work right now, but still traditional type stuff with customer service automation, expanding digital channels. Most people think of digital as their website and their app, but there’s a lot of different ways customers are looking to connect with the distributors, so I work on that. One of the topics we’re talking about today is digital reskilling. As I’m working on those other two, a lot of companies are asking, “Listen, we know we have to change the culture of our company and get more digitally literate.” I’m doing work in that space as well, too. I’m looking forward to discussing that topic today.

Adam Honig: I want to get back to this Move 78. It’s meta here a little bit, naming the company after the move that the person made to outwit the AI. Here we are helping people with digital and with AI. You’re working on your own secret Move 78 that can help companies, I presume.

Rick Pozniak: Yes, maybe move 156 or something like that.

Adam Honig: Exactly. It’s got to be some number like that. But ultimately, I think DeepMind cornered the market on Go. Somehow, they figured out all of the strategies of those guys.

Rick Pozniak: Yes, it was shocking how big of a news this was, especially for Go players. They believed we were a decade away from a machine beating a champion, but it showed how much AI has come along. It was devastating yet revealing at the same time.

Adam Honig: Now, when you think about the ownership and executives in the distribution space who are looking at their own businesses and thinking about digital transformation as well as AI, do you feel like they’re in the same spot? They say, well, it’s coming; it’ll be here in 20 years. But you say, no, it’s going to be here tomorrow. How do you see that?

Rick Pozniak: Great point. I think they’re underestimating how quickly things are happening. Most distributors have at least some digital teams built already, usually to address e-commerce and digital marketing. But if you’re not incorporating all aspects of your business in digital, you’re completely missing the boat. I think you’re right; we’ve got time. We’ve got time to work this through and time to build the right team, time to re-educate our people. I’m just the opposite thinking we got very short periods of time. I was looking for the right type of analogy to talk about what you just mentioned, and another solution provider and I came up with this the other day. Are you familiar with tsunamis? A tsunami, everyone knows, is this massive tidal wave that just wreaks destruction. But what’s really interesting in what happens before a tidal wave, before a tsunami, is the water gets sucked back, and it’s building up enough water to then do what it does. But in those few seconds or minute, if you’re at a beach, the water disappears and all of a sudden, you’ve got shells and marine life and everything, and it looks super interesting. What typically happens is people start walking out and picking up the shells and just fascinated by what’s going on. Seconds later, guess what? There’s this massive tidal wave that can wipe them out or be extremely destructive. I really think we’re in that space right now where the water has been sucked out and something big is going to hit us in weeks, months, and I don’t think we’re ready for it. Instead of running for high ground like we should be doing or preparing for digital, I think we’re not moving fast enough.

Adam Honig: I love this analogy, and let’s make it practical for people. What is the ramification if they don’t go to digital? Do you feel like there’s new entrants that are going to come in? Is it their competitors that are going to get there first? Is it the manufacturers themselves who are just going to move into dealing with the customers directly? What’s the ramification of not adopting it quicker?

Rick Pozniak: I think you hit on all of them. It probably won’t be any one of those that will disrupt a distributor’s business, but it’ll be external forces, like some of the other distributors, maybe not even in their space, like electrical or plumbing or HVAC, but an MRO distributor that has figured out this whole digital game and sells into their space. We know that Home Depot was bought into distribution now, and they’re really good at it, too. I think all these external forces, I’m still waiting for a pure digital distributor pop up and really disrupt things, too. I think they will be disrupted from all angles. If you’re not ready, yikes.

Adam Honig: I feel like distribution in particular is more vulnerable to this disruption than other industries. If you’re a manufacturer, you’ve got your process for producing products. People can copy the products at some level, but it takes a lot of investment and startup. But to get going in the distribution to start an AI-first or digital-first distribution business has a lot less overhead than some of these other businesses. You don’t have that ownership of the product in the same way. That’s what makes me concerned that there might be more vulnerability there.

Rick Pozniak: Yes, I totally agree. At the end of the day, a distributor is a middleman. Yes, we’re doing a lot of work to add services to increase our value, but we’re in that middle of the supply chain, so I think it’s even harder to be completely digital, but more important, because you got the manufacturer on one side and your customers on the other, and you got to be digital on both ends.

Adam Honig: We work with manufacturers and distributors, and one of the trends that I see in manufacturing is that there’s a generational hand-off, if you will. The grandfather started the business, the father’s running it, maybe handing it off to his daughter now to be the third generation, and they are much more digitally capable than the older generations, and they’re thinking, oh, why can’t we do e-commerce, too? Why can’t we go directly to our customers? I think if that trend continues, it just continues to squeeze the space where the distributors play. That’s on my mind.

Rick Pozniak: It’s funny too, in the electrical space where I’m most familiar, there’s lots of consolidation. it’s a lot of the smaller distributors just thinking they can’t do digital, so they’re selling out to the big guys. In many cases, they are too far behind to catch up. I came from big distribution, so I know that there’s a lot of resources being thrown towards digital. But the midsize and even the larger small guys, the cost of software has come down and they’re extremely nimble. You can do digital really good and not be the big guys with tons of resources and deeper pockets. I think everybody can do digital if you have the mindset and that gets back to everybody having that mindset, not just a digital team.

Adam Honig: Do you think it’s mostly a mental holdback at this point on the part of the distribution from going digital? Is there an organizational concern? What’s really the holdback?

Rick Pozniak: I think so. That old saying strategy for breakfast, that’s true. If you had everybody in your organization thinking digitally and coming to you with ideas on how to improve this process or that process and once you do and implement a solution, everyone buys in instead of having to spend months or years on the adoption piece, you’re going to kill it.

Adam Honig: I totally agree. This is one of the things that was so interesting about our conversation a couple of weeks ago is for people to adopt a solution like Spiro does require a culture change. It requires people to be willing to try to do things differently. There’s older, more experienced workers who are very eager to adapt technology, but somehow a lot of people aren’t. That’s definitely something that we see a lot of.

Rick Pozniak: That point about an older experienced worker adopting technology, they are the most powerful people in an organization. When you have vast experience, great customer connections, and then add digital tools on that, you have a very powerful resource, which is why I think reskilling is so important. You probably aren’t going to get everybody to convert and think that way, but boy, it’s worth the effort to try to change the mindset of your most experienced people because there’s so much value there.

Adam Honig: You’re not recommending that we just use AI to get everybody out of the organization then.

Rick Pozniak: No. It’s funny being in this space that most people equate that’s what my mission is, but it’s not. At least, we’re a long way away from that. Augmenting people, I love that term. Augmenting people in their current roles makes them that much better, that much smarter. They’re able to kick butt and do twice or three times as much as they could a couple of years ago.

Adam Honig: The more experienced workers, of course, are your product experts. They’re your customer relationship owners. They’re the trusted advisors, probably, for a lot of people that you’re dealing with, so not having those people doesn’t make any sense at all. But I’m curious. In your work with this more experienced workforce, what strategies have you seen to be successful in helping people make that shift to using digital and thinking about things differently?

Rick Pozniak: It’s funny, I have to admit, I’m in the experimenting stage right now. I do offer a course. It’s called “Building Digital Confidence for Experienced Employees,” a full-day course. In this course, you explain why your company uses technology. What is a tech stack? How does your company use that to conduct its business? Then, you talk about AI, friend or foe. You take a full day and start showing them that technology doesn’t have to be evil or it’s not going to replace you unless you let it. However, the problem is most people don’t have a full day, and definitely taking them off-site to do it in person is difficult. So, I’m trying to see how we can do this through online courses. There’s not one method either that works. Well, obviously, every human learns a little differently. I’m trying to see what’s the best way to reach experienced employees. In the past month, I’ve talked to seven or eight HR people from different-sized organizations at distributors, and even they have very different opinions on what is reskilling. Typically, when I start that discussion, they say, “We have a training department.” I’m very much of the belief that reskilling and training are two totally different topics. Training is learning a particular skill; reskilling is changing your mindset. Most HR people are still struggling with that themselves too. How do we change the culture of our company to accept digital? Some of them just believe it’s organic, and it’s going to happen. The more digital tools we throw in front of them, the more they have to learn. In a way, they’re right, but you’re going to lose people in the wash when you do it with that method. Why not be proactive and try to get them on board in this early stage of digital implementation if you can change their mindset? It’s way better than forcing digital tools on them.

Adam Honig: I think you’re on the money with that. I think today, it really is a mindset change that the technology, while some of it can be complicated, a lot of it really isn’t. It’s more like you have the willingness to invest a very small amount of time to see how something works. I live in Boston, so there are diehard Red Sox fans here, and they’re never going to root for another team. I feel like sometimes that’s the attitude that people have about what they do. They say, I do it this way. I would never do it that way because the Yankees do it the other way, or I don’t know what their reason is, but it’s really just more of mindset than aptitude.

Rick Pozniak: It’s shocking how many people believe their little slice of what needs to be done is so human or relationship-driven, and technology can’t take care of that. We’re just seeing in the last couple of years, this is so untrue. At the conference we were both at, one keynote speaker played a clip of a digital customer service agent, and everyone in the room thought it was on the receiving end of the call. It turned out that the chatbot was making a call to transportation companies to source some flatbeds and then negotiating the price on it. I’ve never seen 350 people go silent like that when we all realized, no, it was the outgoing call that was the chatbot. There’s no limits on what can eventually be done, and back to reskilling, if people see that before they’re fully convinced of the benefits of digital, they’re going to be scared as hell that, “Wow, I am totally going to be replaced.” That was one far ahead example, but most companies are not in that space and won’t be there for a long time. Is it important right now to deal with their heads and their brain and their mindset? You’ve mentioned it a few times. That’s what we got to deal with in the next year, for sure.

Adam Honig: You know what, Rick? I’m getting this idea that what we actually need is AI to help us with the change management first, and then we will really be going someplace. We got to get on that. We’ll work on that. But you mentioned the strategy of, I don’t want to say instilling fear, but making people aware if they don’t get on the train, they’re potentially going to be missing out on stuff. What about incentives? I know we’ve worked with companies that have put formal incentives in place to try to get people to break the cycle of behavior, whether it’s a monetary thing or a recognition thing. Have you seen that work in your world?

Rick Pozniak: I haven’t seen a great example of it working, but it’s to use a carrot or a hammer to get things done. We should investigate all the ways of being positive with reinforcement and give incentives. I don’t have a good answer on that one. Like I said, it’s still experimenting on what works and what doesn’t. It’ll definitely be the company’s experience too with that. Is their culture typically just forcing it down employees throats, or are they a company that really likes to spend at least a little bit of money on adoption, change management? One of the other things I’m helping companies work on is scaling of projects and implementation. I’ll tell you, typically, and you would know this too, when you invest in a piece of software, usually companies are used to just scraping up enough money to pay for that software. We don’t need training or change management and adoption processes, all that. That’s usually what causes a tech project to fail.

Adam Honig: Yes, a lot of companies, they just show up with a box of software, and they drop it off and say, good luck with that. Let us know how it works out. That’s totally a recipe for disaster.

Rick Pozniak: I like a McKinsey report that says for every dollar spent on software, spend a dollar on training and change management. That would be really nice. I think success would go way up, but I don’t think companies are quite ready to spend that kind of money on the soft side of tech.

Adam Honig: It’s hard for companies to make the decision and see what the ROI would be. It’s something we see a lot. They know it’s going to work for them. They know it’s going to benefit them, but they can’t quite put their finger on where they’re going to get that extra dollar back from. For a lot of businesses, that’s the holdup.

Rick Pozniak: I know it was like that with e-commerce. Distributors have spent a lot of money implementing web shops and mobile apps, and most of them say they haven’t gotten the ROI they expected. But I have done quite a bit of work in that space, too and my belief is that a customer using your website is what your true goal should be. They may have different ways of giving you an order and holding them back from placing the order online, but getting them on your website, using your tool to find the right product and engage with you that way, that’s what the ROI should have always been measured as.

Adam Honig: In my experience, a lot of these companies have implemented great e-commerce systems, and they still have the same sales team talking with the customers on a regular basis and dealing with them directly.

Rick Pozniak: Worse yet, a salesman who doesn’t even know how to navigate a customer through their own website, I just view that as horrible.

Adam Honig: Yes, it can be tricky. Going back to the incentives, one of the strategies that I saw that I thought was really interesting is, and this is a local example, so I don’t know if it’s going to work for everybody out there. But we were working with this company in Texas, and there was a famous barbecue place in this particular area of Texas that they lived in. They had a gift card for the barbecue place that if people did so much technology adoption of this particular type of technology, they got a gift card to it. I’ll tell you, for this culture, for this company, that was the thing that helped people just say, well, I guess I got to try it. It wasn’t perfect. People have different styles and everything like that, but it definitely helped break the ice on adoption. I wonder, if carefully tailored, that’s the place to start. Maybe save the stick for later and maybe start with the carrot. That’s what’s in my mind.

Rick Pozniak: I agree. Texas barbecue, you can’t go wrong with that.

Adam Honig: Yes, everybody likes that.

Rick Pozniak: I’m curious about your opinion on even just training for the tools you guys offer. Is everything online? Do you do any in-person? What success have you guys realized?

Adam Honig: We do primarily Zoom-based trainings, Teams-based trainings with people. We tend to do very short trainings, no more than an hour, maybe even 45 minutes. We’d rather schedule multiple sessions than try to cram everything into somebody’s head all at one go even if that takes more effort on our team. The ability for anybody to learn is, beyond a certain amount of time, really hard. The problem with going on-site is you want to maximize that exposure. You flew somebody in. You’ve got a subject matter expert there. You really want to take advantage of it. Can you really hold the audience for that half a day or day? That’s the challenge that I’ve seen.

Rick Pozniak: I’m going to bring up a topic here that you’re either for or against. When we do the training, I seem to notice that testing after the training has completely gone away. I’m a big fan of testing to see what was retained by the people you trained. That seems to be a no-no now. Getting back to the reskilling, I think there’s more and more, even just in preparing for this call, I wanted to see what’s available now on digital literacy testing. It’s a great way to see where somebody is, and then at three months, test them again to see if there was progress. But boy, when you administer tests to people, they get really anxious. They get upset that you’re testing what they know. I’m a fan of that, especially now that if we’re able to test digital literacy, I think companies need to start looking at that and seeing where the base of their employees is at and then applying training or courses to deal with the mental aspect. A lot of digital literacy is on your own using tools, learning how different interfaces work so you can pick things up quicker. I’m a fan of that. Nobody that I know of is doing any kind of digital literacy testing.

Adam Honig: When I hear that, the first thing I think of is trigonometry, which is something that everybody hates getting tested on. I totally understand why there’s resistance to it.

Rick Pozniak: Are we bringing back bad high school memories for you here?

Adam Honig: Mostly, because I have to be helping my high school-aged son through all of that again now. But instead of testing, I wonder if there’s a way that the participants can be providing feedback. You just learned about this software product that we’re implementing, instead of saying, did you learn it properly? But say, what was your feedback on how your experience was with the learning? That could also give you some understanding of the learned capability at the same time, but it would be less threatening. Is that an option?

Rick Pozniak: Sure. I know my opinion is that probably on the far end of the spectrum because of what you just said that it turns people off. They’ll try to avoid it. The amount of stress people have just from taking simple tests is large. If you could work it into gentle feedback would probably be more successful.

Adam Honig: I mean, everybody likes to tell you their opinion about something.

Rick Pozniak: Yes, no shortage there. I agree that if we could find out a way to get that information in a less threatening way, for sure.

Adam Honig: Yes, totally. Rick, this has been really interesting conversation. Can you tell the folks at home here how they can reach out to you if they’re interested in learning more about the course that you give or any of your other services?

Rick Pozniak: Just visit my site, move78solutions.com. There’s more information on what I do on the reskilling stuff, the courses that we offer.

Adam Honig: Rick, I really appreciate your coming on the show. I loved talking about how we can reskill people and really help distribution companies get ahead of the curve because definitely that tsunami is coming right at them. There’s no question in my mind.

Rick Pozniak: I agree. Thanks for having me on here, Adam. I enjoyed the conversation.

Adam Honig: Right on. It’s my pleasure. As a reminder to our listeners, you can find every episode of the Make It. Move It. Sell It. podcast at spiro.ai/podcast. Be sure to subscribe. I don’t know, Rick, do you think we should tell people to give us a five-star rating or something like that?

Rick Pozniak: For sure.

Adam Honig: We won’t give them a test. I promise, if they give it a five-star rating review–

Rick Pozniak: No tests.

Adam Honig: No tests, very good. But please go ahead and give us a nice review, share it with a friend, and we really appreciate your tuning in, so looking forward to seeing you on the next episode.

Ryan Collier: There are a lot of times when you type in that information, it says, ‘Hey, a single flight at this is about $250,000.’ Almost all the time, I go right back into it and I say, ‘Where did you find this information?’ It’ll say, ‘Well, I got this from two quotes based on y’all’s information, and here are the two quotes.’ Then, from there, we can dig into that. We’re not using AI, we’re using AI to find our answers at the end of the day, really, because there are so many times where it’s like, ‘Well, where were our spiral staircases? Can we find one of those?’ We’re flipping through pages, and now it’s like, ‘Hey, you can find it a lot easier from there.’ We’re trusting ourselves on that more than AI. I am trusting the AI to find the answer though.

Adam Honig: Hello, and welcome to the Make It. Move It. Sell It. podcast. On this podcast, I talk with company leaders about how they’re modernizing the business of making, moving, and selling products, and of course, having fun along the way. I’m your host, Adam Honig, the CEO of Spiro.ai. We make amazing AI software for companies in the supply chain, but we’re not talking about that today. Instead, today, we’re talking with Ryan Collier, the host of The ChatGPT Report podcast, and also the Director of Business Development at the Shickel Corporation. Welcome to the podcast, Ryan.

Ryan Collier: Adam, I really appreciate you having me. Thank you.

Adam Honig: My pleasure. Anybody who goes by the name of the “King of Steel” has to be on the podcast. That’s one of my rules, you know?

Ryan Collier: Yes, I made that name up myself, so I don’t know how much credit I can really take for that.

Adam Honig: So, there wasn’t like a big coronation. Did they put a steel crown on your head or something like that?

Ryan Collier: You know, it’s funny you mention steel crowns. Our head of accounting in the office is a whiz at Excel, and we did make her a stainless steel “Queen of Excel” crown. I have not received one of those yet, so I don’t know if I deserve one or not.

Adam Honig: Well, tell us a little bit about Shickel and why you decided to use the “King of Steel” name.

Ryan Collier: Shickel Corporation has been around for about 80 years. We specialize in ornamental metals. We construct monumental staircases, stainless steel guardrails, and glass guardrails. I often joke that we do all the attractive features that owners like to see in typical buildings. Our main area of operation is in the DMV area, all over Virginia, North Carolina. We work with a variety of materials, from bronze to stainless steel and carbon steel. We bend, break, paint – anything you can imagine. If it’s a drawing or if an architect has dreamed it up, we’re typically the guys to work on it and install that type of work.

Adam Honig: I saw a whole bunch of really fancy staircases and things like that on your LinkedIn profile.

Ryan Collier: That’s really our bread and butter. I mean, we do curved stairs. We’ve done huge portals into different buildings. Like I said, the stairs, the curved, the monumental type of stairs – that’s really where we excel, I would say. We know how to build those things. We love stairs over here, we really do. But again, it’s not just the stairs, it’s all the unique features that owners typically need an answer to as well.

Adam Honig: We were talking a little bit earlier about this, but what are the most unusual or interesting applications that you guys have seen?

Ryan Collier: We do a lot of different, unique projects for companies. For example, there’s a local company for which we’re creating a tree. If you’ve been with the company for a year or two, you get a little metal green leaf, and you get to attach it to this tree. But we’ve also done different types of work. There’s a steel called Corten that rusts, and then it never rusts again. You have to weather it to get it to a specific color. These architects, they get this idea of, “Oh, I really want this deep orange on this building.” But the problem is when the steel comes in from the shop, it’s not that orange at all. It has to be weathered. There’s a great video, if you look at my LinkedIn, of us having these planters for plants outside of a building. We have them sitting outside of our paint shop and we have just a spigot of water going back and forth on it, trying to speed up the weathering process so we can get to that really pretty orange that you’re not going to see for years unless it’s rained on. In terms of unusual, we’ve got some little weird trees like that. They’re 20ft tall just trying to weather steel to make it look to what the architect wants. I wasn’t even expecting that job to come in. It came in, and I remember standing out there taking the video and I asked the guys, I said, “What are we doing here?” Well, the customer wanted this, so we got to get it done like this.

Adam Honig: That’s awesome. There’s a hall at my university that was supposed to weather very nicely like that, but it just turned into the worst brown color ever.

Ryan Collier: The key to it is that it needs to be rained on and it needs some sun on it. Surprisingly, when they’re indoors, they don’t weather.

Adam Honig: The King of Steel, so it sounded like your background was more in technology before joining Shickel, is that right?

Ryan Collier: I worked in tech sales for a couple of years, and I was good at it. I very much enjoyed it, especially the sales aspect. However, when the head of Business Development here was retiring, I was approached for the role. I knew a lot of people, including the owner, who asked me to come on board. I was honest with him and admitted that I didn’t know much about steel. He assured me that they could teach me. I’ve been here for six years now, so I think I’ve learned a thing or two.

Adam Honig: Compared to AI, how fast was it picking up the steel then?

Ryan Collier: I think it’s more fun to be in the construction industry. In terms of tech and what you’re selling, there really isn’t a tangible product you’re looking at. You’re really selling the idea, the vision of a product. Here, on the other hand, I could go into an office and say, “Hey, here are some samples for you,” and showcase what we’ve done. You can feel and touch it. I prefer this type of sales a little bit more because I talk to people all the time and they say, “Man, I saw your recent videos and some of the stairs you guys did. They are cool.” I respond to them, “It is cool, isn’t it? These are neat things.”

Adam Honig: People are actually physically touching them and everything. We work with a lot of manufacturers, and I was in a factory last week. It’s really gratifying to see a physical product as opposed to something super abstract like software. What are people doing with it? We don’t know.

Ryan Collier: The other thing too, is that the only problem you have with it is that you really have to be in people’s offices to show them the samples. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve taken a picture of it, sent it to them, and it’s in the wrong lighting. They say, “Yeah, that’s perfect. I love that look.” Then they get it and they go, “Wait a minute, wait a minute.” That’s the only downside of it.

Adam Honig: It’s harder to show it on Zoom or something like that.

Ryan Collier: Correct. Covid was an interesting time for us trying to showcase our work. I was working day and night trying to figure that out.

Adam Honig: We have a customer that makes room-sized crushing machines. You put gritty material in it, and it comes out as a fine powder at the bottom. How on earth do you ever show somebody how this thing is going to work? They basically have to invite people to their plant to see how it works in order to demo it. For someone from the software world, that’s such a radical thought, isn’t it?

Ryan Collier: Right. It’s so much more in-person, and hopefully, their plant isn’t in the middle of nowhere because that’s what we deal with sometimes. We’re not exactly in the city center, so to drag people out here to look at our stuff sometimes can be like pulling teeth.

Adam Honig: It’s really interesting because working with a lot of companies in this space, they seem very relationship-oriented to me. I feel like part of that comes from this need for the in-person showing of the product, if you will. Do you feel like that’s a driver as well?

Ryan Collier: Yes, I think that’s another thing, too. I attend a lot of events and I try to talk with our customers as best we can. I think a lot of that, too, is when we do a project, we want to build a relationship more than anything because we want to get your business for the next job, and the next job, and the next job. In order to get that, you have to do a good job. If you do a terrible job, they’re not going to come back to you. If you have the wherewithal just to say, “Hey, if we do a bad job, I’m at all these events that you’re at. I’m in your office all the time. You can tell me if we did a terrible job,” and I’ll tell you why or what happened there. I do think construction is much more about relationships than it was in tech. I mean, it really is. Especially in our world with ornamental metals, which isn’t always low bid work, it’s, “Hey, I’m willing to pay a little extra to know that this product is going to look good, the architect’s going to look good, and that the owner that we’re working with is going to hire us again. Therefore, you guys will get hired again.” There’s a lot of that balancing act, and like I said, I tell people all the time, “If you don’t like our work, you can yell at me in person because I’m at all these things.”

Adam Honig: It’s really interesting to think about it being the finishing touch that people really focus on because there’s so much that goes into making a building or any kind of structure. But people definitely get hung up on those little details.

Ryan Collier: Oh, you’re not kidding. We did Duke University years ago. We worked on their dining hall and created these massive portals. It was this black in color. At the end of the day, we had done over a thousand blackening samples to get it to exactly what they wanted. Now, mind you, of the thousand they picked, I think it was one of the top ten that we had shown them. We went through this whole process and they still ended up going back to one of the top ten. But just showcasing that and being customer service oriented there, it was crazy. But we had to do what we had to do. You had to get down to business and you had to say, “Hey, you’re asking for this, we’ve got to provide for you now.”

Adam Honig: I’m super interested to get your take on how AI might be impacting that. But before we jump into that, I just want to back up for a second. You started a podcast, The ChatGPT Report, which has become very popular with people about AI and stuff like that. How did you get into that?

Ryan Collier: It’s a funny story. It was actually two of us originally, and my one friend dropped out about a little less than a year ago just because he was like, “It’s just becoming a lot for me. I can’t maintain it.” I said, “That’s fine.” But he and I, it was the first week ChatGPT had come out and he had shown it to me, and it was almost like finding the internet, to be honest with you. It’s just what you could input, what you could do with it. After he had shown it to me, I said, “We should start a podcast on this. I think it’d be pretty cool. I don’t know if they would listen to us, we should start.” He said, “No chance, we shouldn’t do it.” I told him, “Well, I’m going to do it anyway. I don’t even know what we’re going to talk about. I don’t even know the style of it or anything.” He and I are pretty competitive. He said, “Well, I don’t want you to be successful without me, so I’m going to do it with you.” That’s how it started, and I’m glad he started it with me because he was the brains behind everything. I’m the guy that doesn’t mind failing. I guess that’s why I’m in sales because you fail every day there anyway. We just kicked it off from there, and we just got a ton of traction from individuals who wanted to hear about it, just listened to it. One of the best compliments I got on the podcast is there’s an individual who sells for ChatGPT and was just one of, I guess, the 700 or 800 employees there. She emailed us and said, “Listening to your podcast, I credit a good amount with me getting the job because I knew what was happening in the space.” That was the coolest compliment I think I got from it was what we were looking at, she actually got a job at that company, at OpenAI, at the end of the day. Again, it really was just two guys being like, “Let’s go for it.”

Adam Honig: I love your comment about how ChatGPT was like finding the internet again. I had a similar experience. I was waiting for the developer beta to open for the OpenAI API before ChatGPT, and I was at the beach with my wife when I got the email saying, “You now have access,” and I was like, “We got to go.” She was like, “What are you talking about?” I said, “I gotta go use this thing. I’ll see you later.” It’s crazy just how impactful it’s been in such a short period of time.

Ryan Collier: To me, it’s almost as if ChatGPT and the text-to-images feature, especially nowadays, have really changed the game for an entire industry. I’m talking more about editing, and what do they call that when people do–

Adam Honig: Like augmenting?

Ryan Collier: Yes, that type of stuff. I would never be able to create an episode artwork by myself. I’m a terrible artist. That’s a fact. I have a ten-year-old’s handwriting, I think, sometimes. Being able to create episode artwork for each episode on the fly has changed the game for me. Without AI, I don’t think I’d even be able to have a podcast because there’s almost too much work on it. I can summarize things. I can say, “Let’s add this picture, let’s do this.” “Hey, if you were doing an X marketing campaign, how would you go about with this?” The possibilities are endless. I saw an interesting comment. Someone said, “I feel like I have too much work now that ChatGPT has come out and these large language models are here.” I told him back, I said, “I think the reason you’re having too much work is because you realize you can take on so much work now that AI’s able to really take a good chunk of the busy work away from you.” So, long answer there.

Adam Honig: No, that’s exactly what we think. At Spiro, our philosophy has always been, ‘How do we use AI to make it so you can get to the strategic things that you want to do, not the mundane work? Let’s have the computer do the mundane work.’ That’s the way to go.

Ryan Collier: Yes.

Adam Honig: Going back to the business relationship and the content of your day-to-day job, how do you feel about the ability of AI to build relationships with people and start to take over some of those functions?

Ryan Collier: That’s a tough question to answer because I think right now in the industry where we are, relationships are still king. I think people are still skeptical about AI. I don’t really see a significant change in the relationship side for another 5 to 10 years, unless obviously major changes happen. Where I have seen it change in our industry is really on the estimating side of things. Togal.AI is something that we tested out a little while ago, which does takeoffs and you can feed it drawings. But because ornamental metals are so specific, and sometimes the drawings are bad and it’s really tough to find, we found out that it was good for flooring, roofing, big picture type of stuff. But for the metals that we were dealing with, it really didn’t take off as much as we thought it would. I foresee estimating changing more from AI than necessarily project management or just construction in general because again, you need a project manager on a job. You need someone to call when things hit the fan. You really do because in construction, as I’m sure you know, no project is perfect and that’s just how it is. You need someone to call. You need someone to complain to and someone to ask questions about things. As good as AI is, you go to Google and you type in, “Hey, how do you build this spiral stair with this type of radius?” It’s not going to give you a good answer. You still need to come to us to figure all those tough questions out. The other day, I had someone ask me, “Can you weld aluminum and carbon steel together?” The answer is an emphatic no.

Adam Honig: Okay, I’m going to file that one away for the future.

Ryan Collier: There you go. Aluminum would melt by the time you got it heated up for the steel, so it turns into a puddle. The reason I know that question too is because in the first year I was here, I asked the question, and I think everyone thought I was an idiot for asking it. But back to the point, even things like that where you’re trying to figure out how we do these, the answers aren’t necessarily all right there. Again, you could find that answer on Google, but if you’re looking at different radiuses and stuff like that, there’s still a lot to do.

Adam Honig: But I think going back to your earlier point, though, if somebody has to show up to demonstrate the product and make sure it fits and does everything that’s appropriate, I guess one day Arnold Schwarzenegger, Terminator will show up and do all that for us. But that’s not at all what ChatGPT is going to do. That’s a long way off, even if it’s ever possible. Even the voice agents that I’m hearing that people are trying to make for cold calling and whatnot, they sound so terrible.

Ryan Collier: They’re still in such an infancy phase. I try not to be too critical about it because a lot of people are like, “Well, don’t forget the first phones, don’t forget the first iterations of this,” and I get that. But I think what we’re dealing with right now is a lot of these companies are overshooting. They’re saying, “Look at all what they can do,” and then they can only do 10% of that. There’s a lot of hype in AI right now that it really needs to be pulled back. Togal.AI has some of the best marketing team out there. Their stuff looks incredible. Then you get it working on your software, and you’re like, “This isn’t exactly what I was hoping for.” There’s a lot of that. Everyone’s always talking about AGI, which is the AI is going to do everything for you. I think that’s a little overhyped just to say the least. But I do think AI will be able to help in the construction industry. I’ll add to that by saying we’re working on some stuff to help us in the budgeting phase. If you know anything about construction, there’s budgeting, and then you go to hard bid where your number, it means something. What we’re working on is a GPT in ChatGPT that we’re uploading all of our, let’s say, spiral stairs, all those from our quotes, and our quotes are very detailed. We upload all of our quotes from the past year, and then we’re asking the GPT questions so that individuals like me can budget it. Right now, those budgets go upstairs to the estimating, it’d take about a day or two to throw a budget on it, and then they’re out the door. But the spiral stair two levels is $500,000. There’s nothing specific to it or very detailed to it. What we’re doing is we’re putting all of our information into this tool and then asking it questions like, “Hey, if I did a radius of this and it was glass guardrail, what’s about the price?” Then it would be able to give us the information and say, “Hey, based on your last quotes, this is what we’re looking at for pricing and also, this is the quote where it came from. If you want to look at more detail, you can find it there.” Right now, even all of our data, we have it all there. We’re engineers, we love that data, but we don’t utilize it as best as we can. That’s what we’re trying to do here. We’re still doing the front end work, but again, if it’s a budget, we don’t need to spend a day or two. It should take me 15 minutes to type out some stuff and get that quick answer and go, “Hey, you’re covered at this price.”

Adam Honig: Let me ask you this question. You’ve got all the historical information. You’ve got it in a custom GPT, and you’re querying it, basically asking it questions. Do people trust the answers though? What’s the process for QAing that?

Ryan Collier: How we trust those answers is obviously we’re doing it on budgets. We’re not doing it on bids. I want to make sure to clarify that. Secondly, there’s a lot of times when you type in that information, it says, “Hey, a single flight at this is about $250,000.” Almost all the time, I go right back into it and I say, “Well, where did you find this information?” It’ll say, “Well, I got this from two quotes based on y’all’s information, and here are the two quotes.” Then from there we can dig into that. We’re not using AI, we’re using AI to find our answers at the end of the day, really, because there’s so many times where it’s like, “Well, where were our spiral staircases? Can we find one of those?” We’re flipping through pages and now it’s like, “Hey, you can find it a lot easier from there.” We’re trusting ourselves on that more than AI. I’m trusting the AI to find the answer though.

Adam Honig: Yes, it’s like a souped-up search in a way.

Ryan Collier: Yes. It’s a souped-up search that is more for Shickel than just going to the broad internet and asking, “What do you think?” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve typed on Google, “How much would this cost?” Then it gives me an outrageous number. Where did it even get that from? I don’t know what’s happening here.

Adam Honig: This is a really cool project. I really like this project a lot. Are you seeing other trends more broadly in the industry, or do you think the trend is more towards specific applications like the ones that you’re talking about here?

Ryan Collier: Well, I’m going to talk next week so I can get back to you on that. But what we’re seeing is, I think, construction has been so busy for the past couple of years, if not decades, really, that I don’t know if people have really taken the time to go, “What do we need AI to take out for us, and what do we just do ourselves?” Right now, I think, the construction industry is finally starting to get into, “Hey, some of this stuff can help us out with this and this and this.” But, like you said, do we trust it? Our accounting department is like, “I’ll use it for some things, but I got to trust my numbers at the end of the day.” I get that because those are real-life consequences. I haven’t seen the industry turn that much. Again, I think that’s due to busyness. To your earlier point, do you really trust the full data coming out? The only reason I trust it, like I said, is because it’s our data at the end of the day.

Adam Honig: I know Elon Musk, of course, loves to talk about how many accidents human drivers have when people criticize self-driving cars and stuff like that. But somehow, it still feels different to me.

Ryan Collier: I don’t know where to place it. I really don’t, because just on a side note, we were working on an obituary for my grandmother the other week. My wife, who’s very good at English and all the vocabulary and all that stuff, even after ChatGPT came out with the answer for it and tidied it up per se, she was like, “There’s no consistency here. What’s happening here?” You’re right. I don’t know where you go from it from that point of view, really.

Adam Honig: But I think you’re right. I think it’s super exciting. I think the more specific you can make it, this is what I’ve been seeing, the better it is, like not a general-purpose, ‘Hey, do anything,’ but solve this one very specific thing. That’s where we’ve seen the most success.

Ryan Collier: Yes, I would agree with that too. There are a lot of people out there that talk about how AI is going to disrupt many industries, but those that can figure out one specific problem and how to address it or how to utilize AI with that are going to make a significant impact. They talk a lot about startups being taken over because of AI, but then they’re saying, “Well, what about the top 10% that actually have a real-life use case?”

Adam Honig: It’s actually interesting because I definitely feel like the AI will come for the high-tech industry first. It’s going to be a long time before they get to construction.

Ryan Collier: Yes, that’s a thing. Our welders really are artists. We have technology. We’ve got lasers, we’ve got brakes, top-of-the-line stuff, but all of them still need a human operator, and all of them still have their issues. You’re absolutely right. You talk about the tech industry. They’re going through a ton of layoffs right now, so it is one of those things where it’s like, “Is AI already infiltrating that market?” Maybe in 20 years, it’ll get to me. Hopefully, I’m retired by then, I don’t know.

Adam Honig: Ryan, this has been great. I really love getting your perspective on this. Tell folks how they can find your podcast.

Ryan Collier: Yes, you can find me on LinkedIn. My name is Ryan Collier. Again, if you click my LinkedIn profile, you’ll see the “King of Steel”. Then The ChatGPT Report, which is the podcast I host weekly and where I do weekly interviews, is “TheChatGPTReport”, all one word, and it’s the purple logo on LinkedIn as well as X. Follow me there, and if you have any questions, you can always shoot me over a LinkedIn message once you find me there.

Adam Honig: Right on. We really appreciate you coming on the show. As a reminder to listeners, you can find every episode of the Make It. Move It. Sell It. podcast at spiro.ai/podcast. I don’t know, Ryan, do you think people should give us a good rating for this episode?

Ryan Collier: I think so, I hope so, at least a 4, minimum.

Adam Honig: I think they should. It might go higher, we’ll see. At any rate, please subscribe and give us a good rating and check out Ryan’s podcast. For everybody tuning in, we really appreciate it, and we look forward to seeing you at the next episode.

Justin Kao: For our industry, the marriage of having your own technical background, your own industry experience with AI to make you more efficient, to help you with those outreach points, that’s the beauty of it. I think that’s where it’s going to work really well.

Adam Honig: Hello and welcome to the Make It. Move It. Sell It. podcast. On this podcast, I talk with company leaders about how they’re modernizing the business of making, moving, and selling products, and of course, having fun along the way. I’m your host, Adam Honig, the CEO Spiro.AI. We make amazing AI software for companies in the supply chain. Joining me today, we’re talking with my partner, Justin Kao, the other founder of Spiro.AI.

Justin Kao: Thank you for having me. I am honored. Finally, I let you guys bust me out once a year, and I’m always looking forward to it.

Adam Honig: I know. We try to keep you under wraps. There’s way too much value that you would bring.

Justin Kao: Right. That’s the reason why you don’t let me talk in public.

Adam Honig: Exactly. Well, it has been a little bit over a year since you were on the podcast, and I feel like AI has just been crazy in this past year. We’ve seen all kinds of new models, new uses, new cases. I’m wondering from your perspective; how do you feel like customers are really looking at this? The manufacturers and distributors that you talk with, are they feeling more comfortable with it? Do they feel threatened with it? Is there a backlash? What’s your perspective on that?

Justin Kao: It’s interesting you asked that. We’ve been attending a lot more conferences this past year. I think a little bit of everything that you mentioned has been happening ever since ChatGPT came out a few years back. Obviously, AI got just pushed to the forefront of everything, and everyone’s been obsessed with it. Manufacturing and distribution have technically been really slow industries at adopting technology. So, in most scenarios, they’d be 10 to 15 years behind, not just a few years behind. But it’s so noisy that you really can’t ignore it. What’s been happening at the conversations I’m having at a lot of these trade shows is that people are really figuring out how to put this into their business, and people are actually starting to do it. I’m seeing some really cool stuff happening. A lot of times at these trade shows, they’re going to have speakers talking about applications for AI, how to really push digital transformation because a lot of our customers, a lot of manufacturers, a lot of distributors are still using Excel spreadsheets or Post-it notes to figure out what to do next. It’s really interesting. People are scared in a sense because they haven’t really been great at adopting new technologies in the past, but they are hearing so much about all the things that you can be doing with this and how you can be way more effective and push your organization to the next level that you can’t really ignore it. It’s a mix of all of those things that you’re talking about.

Adam Honig: Speaking about Post-it notes, I was at a manufacturing company yesterday, and we were doing a little bit of user training on some things related to Spiro. One of our users had a sticky note pasted up right up on the top of her monitor that said ChatGPT. She really wanted to make sure that she was not forgetting it, I guess.

Justin Kao: So, the Post-it note just said ChatGPT.

Adam Honig: That’s all it said was ChatGPT. It’s just like a reminder that she had this amazing thing available to her that she could use for free whenever she wanted, you know.

Justin Kao: ChatGPT has done a lot for folks in understanding the application of AI. Typically, when someone comes up to me and is like, hey, how does this work? I generally ask, have you guys used ChatGPT before? Because that is a good way to gauge how interested they are in AI. More times than not, people are saying, yeah, I’ve played with it. It’s amazing. We’re doing some similar things in Spiro where we’re using AI to summarize emails, phone calls, Teams meetings, order information, and people put the pieces together. They’re seeing that this information over here can help me better understand what’s going on with my customer. It’s really helped a lot to just fully educate the market around AI.

Adam Honig: I was really worried myself that there might be a big backlash against it because of the fun use cases like having it write a silly poem or a song or take a crazy picture or something like that. But I feel like people can really see through the dumb things, if you will, and focus on the areas that can provide them with a lot of business value.

Justin Kao: Yes. I mean, there are some things that are pretty crazy out there. I’ve seen software that can mimic a call agent with AI. It’s not quite there yet, and you can tell the cadence of the voice and the conversation that they’re having that it’s not a person talking to you. You’re talking about people making Drake songs or Tupac songs or using AI technology. Well, that’s not going to be that far to mimic a salesperson. We’re saying the same thing all the time. Anyway, at a certain point, you’re going to be able to do that, and there’s a lot of audio out there on Adam Honig. Eventually, I’m going to have an Adam Honig AI bot that I can use to sell. It had to be you because you got the radio voice. You wouldn’t want a Justin Kao AI bot. But you’d want Adam Honig AI bot, and it’s going to be able to sell you and have a conversation with you. It’s scary and exciting all at the same time.

Adam Honig: We have a customer who makes a technical piece of equipment. What they were telling me is that they’ve found this service that they can load their documents into it, and it creates training videos based upon the spec. The beauty of it is not just that it creates the video, which is awesome, but that if the spec changes, they can just run it back through because this is so hard. You do a training video on Spiro on our software, then we update something, and it’s out of sync. If you have a complicated product that does evolve and change, I think it’s such a great use case of having the AI be able to just do that for you. Even if it’s obviously AI, it’s better than not.

Justin Kao: I think your example and what people are seeing is that people are starting to realize that AI can help them save so much time like the example that you brought up where a software is reading bits of content and coming up with training videos. A friend of mine started a company that does AI order entry where you can take a picture and enter orders automatically, or for example, our AI where we’re automatically summarizing a lot of communication. People are starting to finally connect the dots there where they say, AI is cool, but what does it do? I think people are starting to understand that it’s time savings. It’s efficiency. It’s a lot of stuff that I could focus on the more important things rather than data entry or writing up reports. I can really just focus on the most value-added things of my job. That’s the exciting thing for folks, and they’re starting to see that.

Adam Honig: I feel like the concern about AI destroying jobs is also going away. I feel like there was a lot of concern about that when AI was first coming out that all these jobs they’re going to lose. I don’t feel like any of our customers have decided to let people go as a result of using AI. Have you seen that?

Justin Kao: I have not. I think that you’re right. It’s really focusing their time on the valuable aspects of their job. Instead of having to work extra hours afterwards, like after you go visit a customer, instead of having to go to your hotel room and log all your notes through a CRM, that’s just already taken care of for you. You can spend more time on research. You can spend more time making sure you’re up to date on what they’ve ordered, any past issues they’ve had. It’s redirecting your focus and hopefully helping you sell more. It’s not about replacing your job. Now that call center software I was talking about before, it’s not quite there yet. Maybe that eventually might replace some call center employees, but I’m not seeing it for the value-added sales. I’m definitely not seeing it in the industry because you need a lot of knowledge, information, technical know-how to be able to sell in manufacturing and distribution. There’s no way AI is taking any of that away from anyone anytime soon.

Adam Honig: Right. We did a recent industry survey here at Spiro, and we went out to thousands of manufacturers and distributors and took their pulse on what was going on in the industry. One of the bits of feedback that came back that was very interesting was that a large number of them, four out of five, reported that they had unexpectedly lost accounts of over $100,000. We see this as a clear use case for AI to help with. Maybe you could just tell us how that might work.

Justin Kao: With Spiro specifically, we’ve got AI software that looks through your normal cadences with your customers, understands how often you should be reaching out to them, and it prompts you to not let that fall through the cracks. Anecdotally, we’ve actually had a customer that just signed on recently, and they’ve got program managers who are working with their customers. They realized that they’re in bad with a specific customer, and it didn’t come out until the customer tried to cancel. If they had Spiro at that point in time, they would have known ahead of time that their customer wasn’t being taken care of the right way. Things like that, it’s table stakes at this point, I think. You’ve got a lot of companies investing in it—the ones who are brave to really dip their feet in the AI first. As those companies start to be really better at taking care of their customers, I think other people will start to see that they need to be doing this too, because it just makes the team that you have that much more efficient.

Adam Honig: But I think the important thing here for me is also that I don’t feel like an AI voice agent just calling up the company, the customer that they’re worried about losing is going to be the move. I’m a little bit worried because I think we all get hundreds of emails every day, so many of which seem like they’re being generated by AI today that if you link up the AI with all this calling technology and stuff like that, the world is going to be a very messy place.

Justin Kao: I think that’s totally the wrong application of it, and to me, it’s just lazy, honestly. It’s taking content that’s pre-written and spamming it out. It’s no different than copying and pasting a million emails. I feel like that’s totally the wrong application of it. The way I see it working really well is it’s helping you understand the profile of your customer. It’s helping you understand maybe next steps, but you still have to reach out with the right expertise, still have to know what’s going on. You still have to do a little bit of research, and you can’t just go in blind. I think if you’re using an AI call center agent, it’s not there yet. They can’t really do that kind of research for you. It doesn’t really know the next steps. But with tools like Spiro, you can really understand what’s going on and use that in combination with your own technical expertise, with your own industry background, and really make the most of those outreaches. For our industry, the marriage of having your own technical background, your own industry experience with AI to make you more efficient, to help you with those outreach points, that’s the beauty of it. I think that’s really where it’s going to work really well.

Adam Honig: We’ve always looked at AI as a way to give extra capabilities to the team. How do we use it to boost the things that they do really well, instead of replacing low-level mundane things?

Justin Kao: Exactly. Yeah.

Adam Honig: So, shifting gears a little bit, talking about customers, on the podcast, Justin, I do try to keep it a little bit light and interesting. Maybe you could just tell us a little bit about any unusual customers or prospects that you’ve been dealing with recently.

Justin Kao: All of our customers, they’re all kind of weird in their own right. We’ve got a customer conference called VISION. Last year was the first year we did it. Meeting a lot of these folks for the first time in person, getting them all together to have a few drinks, we definitely have a few characters. As far as most interesting products, I got to say, we had one customer in women’s sexual health—we can go that far maybe. That was an interesting product that they sold.

Adam Honig: I seem to remember that visiting their website was occasionally a surprising event.

Justin Kao: I think that was the most out-there product that we’ve helped sell. But we’ve got a lot of customers using Spiro in a lot of different ways. I’ve seen the gamut of the use cases, but I think that one takes the cake as far as interesting products.

Adam Honig: I heard that we, at one point, had somebody who wanted to use Spiro as a dating app as well.

Justin Kao: That’s true actually. I forgot about that guy. I had someone reach out to me towards the beginning of Spiro. He loves Spiro as a salesperson, and I guess this guy was getting so many dates on all his dating platforms that he’s like, I need Spiro to be my dating platform. I want it to register for a Spiro phone number. I want it synced to all the dating apps, bring all the contacts in, and recommend me, using the AI, who to reach out to. He came to me with a full business plan. He was like, this is how I’d sell it. I need you guys to get in on this. This is going to be huge. I was like, dude, we’ve got enough customers to take care of on our own. I can’t be dealing with crazy people like you. I just said good luck to him. Hopefully, maybe he built his own dating CRM, I don’t know. We should check up on him, though.

Adam Honig: You got to admire the entrepreneurial spirit, though. I mean, some people get really seized with the vision, and they go and just do it. Good for them.

Justin Kao: You can’t hate on it; it’s just not for us.

Adam Honig: Tell us a little bit more about the upcoming VISION Conference. What’s that going to be all about?

Justin Kao: We typically have a small subgroup of customers and folks in the industry that come together. We talked about technology, AI, CRM best practices. It’s really just a meeting of the minds to really help folks understand, get the most out of their CRM experience. It’s a great way for folks to meet other folks and meet other companies who are similar sizes, serving similar industries, or even just totally out there, but really just having folks come together and swap ideas about digital transformation, CRM, and AI and how it applies to their companies and their businesses. It’s really a good time. We’re having it from August 19th through the 21st, I believe. It’s in Boston. It’ll be a good time to be in Boston. We’ll be doing it in the Seaport. It’s just a good time to have a lot of folks come together and just learn about Spiro, learn about how to make the most out of it, and learn about best practices.

Adam Honig: I think at last year’s conference, I was super impressed with the knowledge that people had about what they were looking for to help improve their businesses. We had a lot of sessions talking about how we enhance the product. What can it do to help the wheels of commerce turn better? A lot of the things that we’ve built into Spiro over these past 12 months or so have actually come directly from people’s feedback, especially at the conference.

Justin Kao: That’s a good point because we are so in our world. A lot of the times, we build the product, we sell it, we maintain it. But we’re not using it day to day the same way our customers are. We’ve got customers who live in Spiro. They’re in this thing. When they log in at 9 a.m. and when they log out at 5:00 p.m., they spent their day in Spiro, and they’ve got thoughts, and they’ve got ideas around how to make it better. I think if you’re not with these folks every day, you don’t even realize until you meet them in person that they’re so passionate about it. The first time we had VISION, we’ve met some folks who are doing some, I thought, really creative things with Spiro, building their own solutions, building their own customized reporting analytics. I was blown away by just the capability of our customers, of how to come up with these creative solutions. That’s actually one of the things I look forward to the most is talking to some of the more advanced users of Spiro and understanding how they’re doing it, because that informs things we should be doing. How do we make their lives easier when using the application?

Adam Honig: The other thing that was really interesting for me is given our focus on companies in the supply chain, manufacturers and distributors, we actually have customers, distributors, who sell manufacturers’ products, and they’re both Spiro customers. It’s amazing to see that mix. There’s actually business going on at the AI conference. It’s interesting that way.

Justin Kao: It’s like you said, seeing the wheels of commerce turn. Just these little conversations that people are having, it’s really cool to see.

Adam Honig: It’s going to be a great event. There’s going to be more details on the Spiro website. If Spiro customers are interested in attending, you can definitely get all of your information there. Let’s shift gears for a minute here, too. One of the things that I’ve been talking a lot about with people on this podcast is changing customer expectations. I’m wondering if you feel like AI has had a role in that, expecting everything to be faster, quicker, more updated from a delivery and product standpoint. How are you feeling about that?

Justin Kao: That’s an interesting question because AI is a bit of a double-edged sword with customer expectations. Because it’s kind of the Wild West a little bit in the AI world, expectations range the board of what people think it should do and what it shouldn’t do or what its capabilities even are. Oftentimes, we have people who fill in the gaps with their own creativity. We’ve got a—I would call them—creative bunch of folks who use Spiro. Sometimes that aligns with reality, and sometimes it doesn’t. We always have to have a conversation with folks to make sure that they fully understand what we’re doing and how it can help them in very concrete ways. I think, again, managing expectations within the context of AI itself can be sometimes difficult because people see the possibilities, and they’re dreamers, and you pick Spiro because you’re a dreamer. You’re not picking Spiro if you want the status quo. If you want to play it safe, you will still use Microsoft or Salesforce or HubSpot or something like that. There’s a bit of an aspect of that to even picking or going with a small software startup like us in the first place. That being said, it’s difficult to rein it in sometimes. But at the same time, the AI itself that we’re working on, what the stuff that we’re working on, I know from our own product roadmap what we’re doing. It’s going to meet a lot of those expectations. It’s very exciting. There are a few features that I know we’ve got in the roadmap that I can’t wait for them to get out there because there’s certain times where maybe the AI itself doesn’t do exactly what the person thought of, but there’s going to be stuff that’s coming out from us in the near future that will blow people’s minds and will fill all those gaps. I’m very excited for that kind of thing.

Adam Honig: It is very exciting. For a lot of our customers, I feel like it falls into the general bucket of digital transformation. I know your background before starting Spiro with me was in the consulting business. I’m wondering what your take is on a lot of these digital transformation products. What do you think that companies should really be thinking about as they get underway with that?

Justin Kao: Digital transformation is like one of those keywords that you hear about at all these conferences. I think every session, every conference I’ve been to in the past year has had some sessions devoted to digital transformation. It’s one of those things where I think a lot of people are asking for best practices on, but it’s almost a personal thing for a company. They have to really be bought in from the top all the way down.

Adam Honig: So, you can’t just appoint a digital transformation czar and let that person go off and do it?

Justin Kao: Usually not. That’s not usually how I’ve seen it be successful at least. People have to really be bought in because what I see sometimes is that if you have a CEO who is really into pushing things to the future, but a workforce primarily not interested in that, it’s not going to work. Digital transformation is not going to work because unless you’re really focused and almost really pushing it hard on your team, they’re not going to adopt it. They’re not going to do whatever software you’re trying to put in front of them. You need buy-in all the way from the top to the bottom. I think one of the things that you have to be hyper aware of with digital transformation is what the benefit is for the person who’s going to actually be using the tool gets from that. One of our customers calls it the “what’s in it for me” slide, the Wifm slide, that I put now in every deck I do. If my customer wants me to help with the training of any kind or with any of our implementation team with their training, I’m asking them to put a Wifm slide, “What’s in it for me?” because they need to clearly see what’s in it for you. If the digital transformation is the result of management just needing more reports or management needing more data, there’s no “what’s in it for me,” and then it’s not going to drive the right behaviors. You need that buy-in. People at the top need to see why it’s important. People in the middle management layer need to understand why it’s important, and then the people who are actually boots-on-the-ground doing this stuff need to understand why it’s going to help them. You need it at all levels. That is the most important thing for digital transformation.

Adam Honig: I totally agree. I think we’ve all seen companies with great intentions, projects just going off the rails because they haven’t really thought that through. Even as much as everybody would like the projects to go faster, I think it’s better to spend a little bit more time getting organized and thoughtful about how it’s going to help everybody on the team.

Justin Kao: The most successful projects I see a lot of the corporations that invest in them have done that work already. They’ve gone through the use cases from the management perspective, from the executive perspective, and from the end-user perspective. You’ve got folks from the end-user level who can speak to it, who know what changes are coming and are excited about those changes. They have enough of a pain point where they understand they need to make this better. If everyone is happy with the status quo, but you have an executive team or ownership team who wants to just push it anyway, that generally doesn’t make for a good recipe for success.

Adam Honig: I think you’re on the money there. Listen, Justin, I really appreciate your coming on the podcast. Not too frequently, but I think once a year sounds like the right cadence for me. I really appreciate your sharing with us what you’re learning about AI, working with all of the different Spiro customers and providing a little insight as to vision and some thoughts on digital transformation. I really appreciate that.

Justin Kao: Thanks for letting me come on once a year. Maybe next time, you’re going to let me come on in six months or something.

Adam Honig: Well, it depends. Here’s the thing: I think we should ask the listeners, as we always do, to maybe rate the show, maybe give us a five-star rating or something like that. Do you think they’d do that, Justin?

Justin Kao: Maybe. I don’t know.

Adam Honig: All right. If we can get enough ratings, we can definitely get you back on here more frequently.

Justin Kao: All right, we’ll push it out there. We’ll put it out on the ether. Give us five stars. Let me come in more than once a year.

Adam Honig: All right. Well, thank you, Justin. Just as a reminder to all of our listeners, you can find every episode of the Make It. Move It. Sell It. podcast at spiro.ai/podcast. Like Justin was saying, give us a good review, maybe subscribe, maybe let us know what you think. In the meanwhile, we will look forward to speaking to you in the next episode.