266- Resilience and Innovation on the Tech Frontier
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Welcome everyone to Politically High Tech with your host Elias. This is going to be a tech oriented kind of episode. This is more of a business kind of episode. Is it going to be professional? Is it going to be clean?

I don't promise you that. You know, some of them goes off the rails in terms of vulgarity, and some of it is squeaky clean professional. I want this on the way to reflect on the guests and who they are. I'm not going to tell them what to do. I'm not going to tell that you're going to put on a pink dress. Are you crazy? I'm not going to. I don't do that kind of stuff. But if you did, I might wear it. No, no, don't encourage that. Don't encourage that. All right, go get changed.

we're all in seriousness though we have a good tech episode and you see i try to spice up some fun because some of the stuff you know it could get kind of technical at times you know i i get it so trust me sometimes b2 where you talk about all these b2b you know all these acronyms it's like uh i'm about to go crazy you know acronyms acronyms acronyms i thought only my job my day job uses a lot of jobs use them as well it's just my goodness it's

it's it's it's probably like wildfire but anyways i don't want to make this into a random monologue for too darn long so i have a guest here and i'm gonna just hook him up real quick okay um i have benjamin bowen here and he is the ceo he is the grand el jefe the boss in english of stratus shield ai i almost said stratosphere

but you know that's why i think of us it's kind of strata and then shield right stratosphere and shield yeah at the top of yeah yeah so it guards you know it guards high places and low places i'm sure it goes everywhere all right that's why i'm assuming that is i'm sure you get more insights that so let me start off with this very general somewhat dull of intro question um

Who are you? What do you want the audience, the listeners and the viewers to know about you, Benjamin? Yeah, thanks, Elias. And thanks for having me on. You know, it's interesting as we're just talking about business and tech talk. I've been in technology for over 25 years now, but it really starts and ends with a business conversation. And I think even technologists, they tend to just focus on the product and the technology.

instead of really the business outcome and what you're trying to accomplish. So what I can promise you is, yeah, I might make some technology in there into the conversation. But I think the biggest conversation we can have right now is about the business, people, processes. And then the technology is kind of a conversation afterwards once we're getting on later into stuff. But yeah, my name's Ben Bowman. I'm the CTO of Stratashield AI.

Strategy Shield AI will be actually interesting enough rebranding to Genova Solutions in January. And this is kind of what I would call an evolution of what I've found over the past year being in business and really starting an AI company. And it's interesting, when I started the company, I thought, hey, I'm going to just talk about AI and jump on the bandwagon. And what I found is even calling and reaching out to CTOs, C-suites, CIOs, even ones that I know, they were actually pissed off to even have the conversation.

They don't want to talk about AI. It's another problem. It's another issue that I need to have. And so I've had this just journey for the past year of really diving in and saying, what is relevant? Why does it work? I was never really interested in manipulating a video or an image or like cool GPT prompts. I was really trying to find where does it fit in business? And where I really landed is with enhanced decision making.

And I'm going to pause it and I want to go back to decision making because I don't want AI making a decision for me. So when I say that, it's more enhanced assisted decision making. And that's where the evolution where Stratashield really was a good fit, a good foundation. And now it's evolving and growing. Actually, I've got another partner who's coming in and joining. I have a fairly large tech team that's going to be joining as well. And now it's evolved. And I think Genova Solutions more captures this idea around enhanced decision making.

And yeah, so that's a little background with me. And that's about where I'm at on the journey of entrepreneurship and starting up a business and expanding. You hear that? Want to be entrepreneurs, especially to want to be entrepreneurs and establish your entrepreneurs. Evolve. You got that? Evolve. Look at that. Even if you have to rebrand, expand, restructure, whatever you need to do.

Just do it. Don't be like a blockbuster. You know, they exist. I have one location, Oregon. Used to be a big company when I was a kid. Oh, it used to be everywhere. But they stick to the old Stone Age mentality. Oh, we've done it this way. It's going to be just fine. You know, why change? OK, well, now I learned the hard way why it needs to change. As an example, I like to pick on.

A little bit of a nostalgia, a little bit more of a millennial reference, if you will. But it's a good, but it does relate here because if you don't evolve, you're either going to downsize, which is the best case scenario, or as a business, you're going to die. Okay, that's it. I'm going to say like it is, you're going to die.

Isn't this an interesting analogy too with AI? I mean, as you're talking about this evolution and this hesitancy in the market, and justifiably so, there's a lot of maturation that needs to happen. I'm always like, slow down, you don't need to rush into it. But you got to be looking at, when you talk about Blockbuster and these companies that didn't pivot with the market, look, you don't need to dive into AI right now. It's not like you have to do it now. You have to start getting ready for it.

And that's a huge difference. But yeah, it's amazing as you're talking about it. I'm like, man, there's a lot of similarities to that and just even the adoption of AI. Again, not the embracing it immediately, but at least getting ready and understanding, right? You know, I like that distinction. I don't think I make that distinction enough yet. You don't have to embrace it, hug it, but you do need to prepare for it. And that's the point I've made for a lot of previous episodes. I was like, look,

You're going to have to eventually learn AI. You're going to learn AI or your job dies. Okay? So, if you at least learn some parts of AI, you can stay and be relevant. But if you refuse to learn AI, well, you're eventually going to go away. It's not going to be today. It's not going to be next week, next month. It might be next year.

But, you know, that's all I'm going to say. You heard me say this a lot on listeners, if you were something I could go to. Well, I think I think a good way and you're just making me think a good way of putting this is AI is not going to replace your job. It's going to and it's just rephrasing, almost reframing what you said. So AI is not going to replace your job. The people who understand and learn how to to use AI to be more efficient are going to take your job. So you're not in a competition with AI. You're in a competition with people.

who are understanding a tool that enhances their efficiency and makes them faster than what they typically would be, so more efficient. Does that make sense?

Oh, that makes sense. That makes sense. I tried to put it that way. Come on. If someone's using AI versus a non-AI user, you know, some job marketers are going to say, well, a lot of them are going to say, well, especially years down the road, especially going further in time, they got to pick someone who knows how to use AI. I mean, that's just reality. I mean, unless you want to be a cave person Amish, that's the only way he could have

Avoid this for the most part. And I've said this again, if you want to be a cave, an Amish person, try that. See if that works better. It could be your thing.

I actually think with technology, that's what I want to be when I retire is a cave. Like I'm going to just disconnect, live in the woods, no technology after I'm done with it. The pure digital detox, right? Exactly. Oh man, for sure. All right. So let's dive a little bit to the personal journey, how it really started.

shade to influence your approach towards AI and even just to broaden it further, tech in general? So my personal journey is interesting because if you go back to high school, right, I didn't use computers. I grew up on a farm. I hadn't even been around a computer, but I was always curious. In fact, when I got my first computer job,

I actually still didn't own a computer. So I just had read in the paper that people were making money with an MCSE, which is a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer. And I wanted to make money. That's all it was. Actually, in high school, I got a 16 on my ACT. And so I never even qualified to go to college at that time.

because I thought I was too stupid because standardized tests. And that does bring out the passion, the bullshit of standardized testing, right? It just drives me crazy because it's not fit for everybody. So anyhow, I thought I was dumb. I thought I couldn't make it, but I was like, no, I always had this push through. So I went in and I got this job. And at 22, I actually kind of hacked through understanding systems and networks. The CTO left.

Somehow I ended up in a position of running an IT department for, it wasn't a huge, but $20 million international printing company at 22 years old. And so I've always been into technology, always been interested. So 25 plus years now in tech. Then I saw a trend where salespeople, so the sales reps were having more fun and making more money. So I was like, hey,

Let's get still with tech, but let's go into sales. So I went into some telecom consulting. So like the central links that, you know, in business and all that. And so I went, I just kind of jumped around from sales engineering to sales and being in corporate, you see something that anyone in corporate sees, you see a lot of risks, see a lot of layoffs and you see no loyalty. And so always in the back of my mind, I was like, I want to be an entrepreneur. I want to come up with my own business. I want to do my own thing.

And fast forward, you know, I'm 46 years old. I'm working as the technology, the lead technology evangelist for Comcast business. People know who Comcast is that purchased the company I worked for. And I got ripped and just elimination of needing to save money. And I decided, you know, I'm going to do something different this time. You know, I've been smart with my money. I can start a business, do my own thing. And I started evaluating the market. And there's two things that I looked at cybersecurity and

and AI. So when I was the lead evangelist for Comcast, I was always talking about cybersecurity. That was my expertise, really, or one of my expertise was cybersecurity, but I really saw the market of AI.

And I wanted to understand and get into that market. And at that time, I had no clue where it was going to go. I guess now I still have a little clue where it's going to go even one year later. But I wanted, I see that's where the market was going. And I wanted to really push into that market. And again, where I've landed since then is this enhanced decision-making and enhanced efficiencies within AI. So that's just kind of a quick overcap. But I feel like my journey is kind of funny because, yeah,

Yeah, it's not a typical one in the test. No, so the farm background, see farmers, there's hope for you. If you failed your ACT or SAT, it doesn't mean anything. Yeah, the SAT, all these other stupid acronym tests, all that standard crap. It's standard to their little crap. And sadly, a lot of times, you know, and I say sadly, ironically, is that these tests don't capture the prices. Some of them who score really well

They'll end up doing that well in life. Yeah, you only do it academically, but that doesn't always translate to being a great business leader or even a worker at that. You stick to books and all these concepts and abstract. That's nice and all, but the real world business, they want skills. They want things to be done. They don't want all this preachy, wordy crap.

I used to be an academic, so now I'm more of a vocational person, which is a big transformation for me. The biggest that I ever went through. But enough about me. So I can talk academic, but I don't use it as often. People just want plain, accessible language. You're talking about, oh, the bandwidth of this router is 120 gigahertz. I mean, what the hell is that to a normal person?

Is it faster or is it not? Here's an interesting thing when you talk about academics and everything. So never again, wasn't academic. I kind of hacked my way through Google and figured everything out on my own. Then I turned 40 and I was like, you know, if I wanted to go to college because I was at a point I could.

I decided, you know, I'd like to learn about psychology because I've always been interested in psychology. So I ended up getting a bachelor's in psychology, just actually recently graduated. I'm getting a master's in business psychology. But the cool thing about doing this later in life is that now I get to apply what I'm learning to where I'm at. So I feel like if I was younger in my 20s, I would have been partying a lot, you know, having the fun that I wanted to have, not really focused on work. But now that I'm later,

I'm actually applying a lot. And then when you get into the business or organizational psychology and AI and how AI is impacting decision-making and how AI is impacting hiring, there's a fear of AI with the employees and the psychological impact within businesses of AI.

It gets really, it actually starts to get really interesting because I can apply what I'm learning real time. So I think it just depends on where we're at in our life, right? I'm like, am I at this entrepreneurial stage? Am I at a stage I need to work in business? But there's no right path. It's just the path we're on, right?

I have said this multiple times. Everyone's journey is unique. Yep. Everyone's journey is unique. You know, just because I did it my way, I don't expect the person to do everything my way. And I don't want them to. It's not going to work. Copying someone else exactly is a guaranteed way for failure. It's guaranteed failure right there. Right. So.

And it's boring, right? If everyone's the same, like if you and I are the same and we're having this conversation, then we're just having the same ideas. It's a boring ass conversation. Like we need to, like, like this is fun to actually ideate and talk outside of what is our norm and how we normally are. No, yeah, no. You see, I appreciate that. And I want to go a little political. Yes. Opposite sides, you need to learn how to talk to each other. Enough of this.

You know, Trump, Biden is the double. Look, I criticize both of them. I'm a red pen at the end of the day.

Both of y'all are toxic as hell, all right? Start uniting. Start, you know, just look. You don't like Trump that bad. You just, you wait till 2026. You put enough senators and enough House representatives to block him, okay? You know, there's a solution. The founding fathers did that on purpose because they didn't want any part of the government to have too much power. But, you know, that's what I'm going to say. There's a balance, right?

And my point is, talk to people with different ideas. Yeah. It'll make you smarter. So talk to someone with the same idea. You know, Biden can't, Trump can't. This counts for both of you because you like hearing yourselves. You love hearing your own ideas. And this is why y'all both, forget, excuse my French, y'all both that shit crazy. Yep. Imagine how powerful we would be. I mean, as you're saying this, how powerful we would be as a people.

if we all just thought like that right if we quit ideating around a political idea but just around humanity and just being people and understanding people are gonna have difference of opinions and everything and maybe there's some things we have stronger stances on or not but if we just ideated around being people and united people aside from what the media and the government tries to like manipulate us with i mean i walk into rooms all the time with diverse people and it

I never have. I mean, I'm wired that way, but you don't see issues. I don't have issues. It's when they start talking about this politically charged stuff and these ideas that they feel like they have to force down people's throat, then all of a sudden it becomes a problem. But yeah, I completely agree. It's unfortunate that we're letting the best of humanity escape us right now because of media and political manipulation. Completely agree.

Yeah, but sadly, it does impact some businesses as well. They are not immune. And I have said this a few times. I should have been more vocal on this. As a business, if you stop being political, some of these losses could have been avoided. But who am I? I'm just a guy. Just a guy with common sense. Yeah, that's it. That's it, right? Yeah.

Who am I? Who am I to advise the people who are the top 1%? Whatever. I'll listen to this political... This podcast, Schmuck Young, we used to tie on something, right? So, whatever. But, you know, getting to that, we talked about this a little bit already, about how AI is creating either new opportunities and even revamping or even changing traditional roles. I mean...

Yeah, let's hear some examples of that, because I never really provide much. I just hear about, oh, calendar's going to be automated. I just like little things like tasks. I went through tasks, but... Yeah. I'm sure you got something better. Jeez, I mean, there's so many ways that I see AI, like revamping roles in business. I think, I mean...

10, at least 10 come to mind. Let's focus on the, I think the most common two that I see. One is encoding, like coders and development. AI, like using Claude. I used to code in PHP and, you know, Linux environment. And it was taxing. And I actually wrote programs that were used by the NFL for Pro Bowl tracking, like tracking for the Pro Bowl.

A program that was used by Anheuser-Busch for tracking their print. So I've written stuff and it was taxing. Now I can go in and have an idea, plug it. I like Claude. Claude is like my programming or coder of choice. I can plug it in and I can create some pretty complex. I have all sorts of AIs running on my Mac, like locally, like for searches, for everything.

for SEO content, for all this stuff. And it just writes it. Now you have to understand a little bit of structural programming and everything like that, but it just makes it so much faster. Another way is with writing, but it's, again, if you have that understanding of the English language, you can manipulate AI to write better. We've all seen AI written garbage, just this nonsense of AI where you're like, this is horrible.

without any kind of human element to it. And if you ever, and if anyone's ever heard me speak, they'll know that I'm all about humanity and AI, not just AI. So, and the humanity and human element is the biggest element. And so that's another one is in writing. And then this enhanced decision-making is interesting because what we see, and won't get too technical, but right

that right now AI is really good at unstructured data. So if you think of unstructured data, very simply put, it's a document, a Word file, a PDF. That's the most simplest way. It's a little more complex, but simply it's a document. But right now, companies have gold mines of data, of structured data, meaning databases of Salesforce or accounting or different things of structured data. What I'm doing is I'm combining these, the structured and unstructured data with businesses, and I'm allowing them to talk to their data.

So now, right now, I can only do it at scale. So meaning like, hey, let's pick your most important data to talk to and provide some reports as a starting conversation. Then you start talking to it. So I might be able to combine like an Asana and ServiceNow and get some insights for ticketing or for IT support, right? But this is where we're going to go because eventually, if you think about how we talk now, we don't all on a cell phone much. We text.

The next way of communication is how we talk to AI action GPT. We want to have a conversation instead of Google searching something. I want to talk my data. And so anyhow, that's another way that I'm really seeing that is there's a lot of progress with it. I'm making a lot of progress with it. And it's exciting to see businesses to be able to make more actionable or get more actionable information on their data to make quicker decisions to move the company forward faster.

Oh, no, yeah, absolutely. I'm not surprised data was one of the largest on transformations. The one I'm going to follow up with is what about customer service? Because based on what I've been able to study so far, it's been limited at best. It could take care of basic issues, AI on its own, but it comes to more complex issues that requires nuance or contains a great amount of ambiguity. It's been transferred to the human counterpart. Yep.

Well, I agree. That's what it should be. I always say AI is good for legwork and not for brainwork.

Right. Because all this, all those mundane tasks that are holding up your human aspect, the human element, let's get those out of the way and remove them. Now you have highly specialized humans who aren't dealing with non like bullshit all day. Just call it what it is and just grinding all day and frustrated. So then finally, when they do something and they have to have an interaction, they're so frustrated that their customer service score goes down.

So I completely agree with this model that AI should be used for all these mundane, nonsense, cumbersome tasks. And then the human element should be more. But when it comes to customer service, there is an interesting development in AI, and that's an AI agent. And these voice agents, so let's say from PolyAI, for example, has some amazing voice agents. These voice agents

I mean, are almost human-like. And they have some pretty refined training that goes within them. And so there are, I mean, a lot of businesses that you might even be talking to now that are using AI agents for common, to answer, again, common questions, the legwork, common questions. But it's even getting into where I heard an agent tell someone they had to have a credit card and they didn't get the credit card number, but the person said,

Why? And AI overcame the objection as to why they needed to get it in a very calm, like rational manner. And this is where AI actually is very interesting customer service. And you talk about bias and we could go into like the different types of bias. But when you think yourself, and I've worked in customer service myself. So someone walks into a Denny's and they're in a rush, they're rude. I immediately have a bias that they're a jerk.

and I don't want to help them as much, and I'm going to be kind of addictive, right? That's what I'm going to be because that's my human nature. If I'm on a call and someone says something that doesn't seem right, well, I'm going to kind of be rude back or maybe not give them the help that they need. But AI doesn't help. So in some ways, AI has some biases, and that's been uncovered and true in responses, but its response to humanity is a bias. So you could be rude to AI, and it's not going to be rude back.

AI doesn't have a bad drive to go to work or get in a fight with a boyfriend or girlfriend the night before or wife or spouse the night before and is upset. So there is some interesting aspects of eliminating that bias element from the humanity where it creates a worse customer experience for AI, which doesn't have that creates a better one.

I mean, I'm going to use a more hilarious example. I'm a customer service, but I see you. I saw a little one of these high junkies, you know, disrupting my establishment. I'm going to get like the crappiest help possible to get them out of my face. You know, just brush them up, right? And I've worked at customer service. I'll say 90% of the time I'm able to push the bias aside. But I'm not going to lie, there was a 10% that said, should I really help this nut job? Yeah. Should I really help this idiot? Yeah.

She's so dumb. She can't even, you know, explain the problem, right? But I was like, oh, that's that. Just calm down. Moose and moose up. And sometimes I'm just so smart. I just delegate it to the staff. Yeah, just move it. But what about when it's warranted? Like those are warranted. Sometimes the customer, you gotta, you know, you gotta put them in their place. You can't be walked all over. But,

What about the times where, and I had this happen once where this lady was being so rude and I actually called her on it, but then I was like, Hey, what's like, did I do something? And she's like, no. And she caught herself. It's like, I'm sorry. I had a, you know, I had a rough night.

There's things that even like I didn't deserve it. I wasn't doing anything, but she'd had a rough night. She was kind of taking it out on everyone, was snappy on everyone. And those are the things that I do, right? Like it's like, well, we all react away. And even subconsciously, we're acting a certain way because of events that are happening. And that's why when we talk about not judging anyone, I don't judge anyone because I don't know what they're going through. I know I've been through some stuff. Why am I going to judge anyone?

Right, exactly. I mean, that's something that you point out, that emotional or even just looking at someone, you know, we judge, we're humans, we're judging people. I mean, why are we brutally honest? This is coming from a spiritual. Actually, we're just judging, okay? That is so hard work. And, you know, it takes a lot of training and effort.

to push that aside, especially dealing with someone that is perceived to be difficult. Just rough night, or maybe a relative died, or maybe she lost the house, whatever. You have to be more understanding. I think that's the advantage of AI. But what AI biases, I'm curious about that, that you haven't covered so far.

So there is some biases that have been shown in the AI print. So a good example of it is if you ask for a like and they're fixing it. But in the beginning of AI, if you said, hey, make me an image of a happy suburban family, it's going to be a white family. Right. It just creates an image of a white family. And so those are the biases that I'm talking about with.

within AI that have already been uncovered is sometimes it makes an assumption off of race, religion. Like if you go in and have it make images of, hey, I want to see an image of someone, how a

bear would look in Kazakhstan, then it's going to make an Arab, really Arab type of bear, right? So it's going to take these regional assumptions and biases that have been programmed into all the data that it consumes and change it. Now there is some fine tuning going on with that, but it's still something that we need to be aware of. The other bias that I see in AI is that

It's a confirmation bias for us. So AI isn't argumentative. It basically wants to please us. And so when you ask it a question, it's not going to often give you the best response. It's going to give you the response it thinks you want to know.

And that's super frustrating for me because I have to push my AI models to be like, don't tell me what I know. Like challenge me, like actually telling it to disagree with where am I wrong and ask it to where I'm wrong. Because if not, this wanting to just confirm me and be on my side drives me insane with AI where I want to be challenged with my mind, not just placated and then like patted on the back. So I think those are two I think that are pretty relevant.

I know there's another one I'm going to add on the opposite side of it. It's just like, you know, the overly white representation. I've seen examples of that. And then there is another one that the AI was super progressive to the point that you want a historical accurate portrayal of George Washington. You had...

Look, he didn't have he didn't have a lot of skin color, right? That's like a black or even ethnically ambiguous on George Washington. I said, no, that's that's a problem right there. This is a cover of someone who was a minority, by the way. Someone historically accurate, George Washington. He's going to be white.

The one historically accurate, Nelson Mandela. I'm not expecting a Chinese woman to pop up as a result. Exactly. I seen that. I was like, whoa. No wonder you call it artificial intelligence. Well, you could ask what would George Washington look like if he was black? And it could do a representation, but that's just like a curious, you know, what would he look like if he was Chinese? Yeah. I love what AIs use for like fun hypothetical stuff like that. Look, I'm not against that.

If I'm asking specifically for a historically accurate trail of George Washington, that's a fail. That's a fail right there. But that's more of a specific example of going to the opposite end of things. Yeah, well, there was another one during, and you talked about the political and the election. There were a couple models, and I don't want to point them out because these companies are way bigger than me, but there were a couple models that if you asked

For what, why I shouldn't vote for Trump, it gave a list of why you shouldn't. And if you ask why I shouldn't vote for Biden,

it said, sorry, I can't take political stuff. It's, you know what I mean? So there were actual and reverse, depending on which model it could be reversed, where you ask about problems with Biden. It's like, well, here's the problems. And you ask about Trump and it's like, I don't take a side. So there are some, even some political biases that have been found in the models as well, which is, it just, right. They're coming from somewhere. And on though, on some of them, I'm thinking they're being put in by the businesses that, that support a certain agenda. Uh,

And again, rightfully so, whatever you want. But I think we should try to keep bias out of anything we do. I don't know. I agree. So you might as well have Republican AI or Democrat AI at that point. You know, I mean, seriously, independent AI, I think that's going to be the hardest. Yeah, exactly. That's where I fall. Just like you.

Yeah, I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised. We need more independents. We need more independents. And we got to be more vocal about it. Because I think in some ways, especially with swing states, we kind of decided the election, not solid blue or red states, you know, like Utah independents, well, actually independents has a better chance of winning a local office than the Democrats. And while in state like

Yeah. Independent has a better chance in winning New York than the Republican. But I think we will have arrived. I mean, to your point, I feel like as a nation, when we get out of the two party system and we can say we can actually legitimately think of an independent person as having a chance at even something like president where they don't have to. They just have to have good ideas and be a good person and.

not be a part of a party. And that's not how we're judging people is off of the party that they're at. Because there's people who just go in and just blindly just say, I'm voting all Democrat or I'm voting all Republican. And that's all they do. They don't look at anything except for that. And I think when we get out of that, I don't know if we ever will, but it would be an interesting scenario for us as a country.

I mean, I don't see hope for the Dakotas. They're solid red as hell. I don't see hope for even a state like Connecticut. I'm going for the small ones because they're more pure. Yeah, California, Texas. They're not changing.

And now Texas is a little interesting. I could see a shift at some point. Texas, I'm a little... Yeah, maybe. Maybe three election cycles, maybe we'll see a change, but not now. I mean, not now. We need to see some mass change, I think, across the board, right? Yeah. But we'll see. But like you said, get out there and make a difference and have the conversations and talk about it in a respectful way.

Wait, and you don't make change by yelling at someone and screaming at them about how dumb they are. You make change by talking about them and ideating around ideas. That's how, in my mind, how you can change people because then they hear logic and then they're like, oh, wait, that kind of makes sense to me, right? I mean, this is how I personally deal with it. I hear what they have to say because I like to listen, extract information. I say, okay, she cares about this issue.

I'll prioritize it based on the needs and all that. It's not an easy skill. You have to really be open to listening. If you're not open to listening or at least try to hear the other side, then don't bother. Don't just continue to go to the echo chamber, which you're part of the problem. I don't care where you lean at politically. There's a lot of work we need to do on that. The reason why I say that is because that's going to affect businesses.

They don't know Democrat or Republican. That's definitely going to affect businesses and productivity. Collaboration has to definitely decrease, if not, or even worse, just be cut off to the point that the boss got to make a decision to fire one, which I think that's a bad idea. I might as well fire both because they're both part of the problem.

But why, why not alienate? Why not? Why not? Why alienate half of anybody? I mean, if you look at really where we are, we're a 50% country, maybe 52 to 48 at times and 48 to 52 in a different way at other times. But we're split. We're divided in that way. And why would you want to alienate ever half of always at all times, half of your, your clientele? It just, like you said, why, why, why don't we make those big decisions? You know?

Yeah, I mean, I was not impressed with either candidate, but I'm not going to make this too political. I'm re-endangering this episode already. I could have helped it, but it does connect with business, and that's why I mentioned it. Unfortunately. Unfortunately. All right. So in terms of... Yep, I'm just going to change that subject. I told me I could go on for hours.

So in terms of AI trends, right, how do you see it evolve in the next decade? Yeah. And how should business prepare for it? You said prepare, not necessarily embrace it. Yeah, well, I think in the next decade, you are actually going to go from prepare to embrace, right? I think that's going to be a natural progression to what we're going to see with AI. I think the big trend right now, which just drives me insane, is the shiny toy trend.

is AI is this big shiny toy and everyone's an AI like advisor and expert. But then you go in, they're showing you how to type a prompt into GPT and they're showing you how to use GPT or whatever model to create an image or to create a video. Those are cool in their way, but they're not really going to translate to business. And so I think the shiny toy thing

idea is frustrating. In fact, I hear people are like, hey, the AI market is very crowded. It's very noisy. And then I step back and I say, well, yeah, because of all the shiny toy stuff. But if you actually eliminate all that and all that nonsense and you focus on what's applicable, what can be used in business, it's actually not noisy. There's not a lot of people doing it well. There's a stat that Garner came out with. I think it's 73% of AI implementations are failing over the past three years.

And that's because they're buying into the shiny toy. They're not like, they're not really figuring out what do they need?

And that's why when I go and I talk to businesses, I'm talking about the AI readiness conversation first. Is your data ready? Do you have a governance policy? Do you have an acceptable user policy for AI? Where are you at in this journey? Because if you say, I am just going to implement AI, but you haven't trained your people, readied your people, readied your data, all these other steps that take to get there. Well, then that's why everyone's failing.

So I think the big trend that we're going to see is more education and understanding of what is actually applicable and what can be done. You're going to see almost like the dot com or dot bomb era, right? In early 2000, everyone was, hey, it's dot com this.

Sorry, .com that and all these companies went bankrupt, right? Just this massive amount of companies went bankrupt. You're going to see something not quite as drastic. It's not going to affect the economy like it did before, but you're going to see a lot of businesses who are startup anxious, over-promising, under-delivering, and they're just going to go by the wayside. And I think that's why I say another thing I say is when I'm talking to businesses is look, get use cases.

Talk to people that this advisor has worked with so that you know that they can actually deliver. Don't just buy into the cool idea that the tech has. I've had so many demos where it's like, oh, this is a cool idea and they're using screenshots, but they're not actually going through what the actual model is. And then I ask, who are they using it with? Well, we're using this. No, who is actually using this?

And it's like, no. Right. Yeah. It's not using it because you haven't thought through all the business. Remember, I said business first, people, processes and then technology, because you're trying to back backwards, engineer this into technology processes and people. And it doesn't work. I say some of you might think this is a boring answer or this is the most rational answer. You see, I framed a little bit, you know, preparing to embrace it. I mean, I'm sure a lot more people are going to embrace it.

Oh, I'm sure it is. I'm not going to be a cynical asshole on this one. Yeah, I'm sure. I mean, it's it's it's inevitable. Your fear is going to die off with AI at some point. It's not going to be your own sky. And especially the idiot media journals who loves to project that. So you don't listen to them. They are paid to scare you. OK, they pay to scare you.

That's it. That's all I can say about that. It's not the most exciting answer because it's on the predictable side, but not all correct answers have to be exciting and unpredictable, right? So, you know,

But it is what it is. I mean, I guess you could go into the hyper-personalization. I mean, that's one thing. I don't even know if that's exciting, but that's a reality is eventually AI is going to be hyper-personalized to us and ourselves. I look forward to that. And people, some people are on the bandwagon of, well, I don't want my information shared.

with someone else well if you're using a phone a car nowadays that you know most your cars anything you're sharing information i want my ai to be so hyper personalized that i'm iron man when i walk into my office this morning and i have jarvis asking me what i want joking around with me knowing what i like my coffee like that's what i want so that that's a funner way to look at it but it's still that is a truth that there will be hyper personalization yeah i mean

That's not the first time I've heard that. And you know what? I believe because it's already taking information. I mean, I like the point you said because you're afraid about your data being taken and extracted. Well, it's been done. Okay? Yeah, turn off your cell phone. Yeah, it's always cell phone. Especially the Google, the Apple. Everybody got your stuff, so drop that fear. Or...

Throw away technology, okay? Those are the things you should go. You might as well just go with it, or there's even certain apps that are trying to take care of that. I don't know how good they are. Disclaimer, I haven't actually used them. Like Cloak, and I think there's even some tools and applications that are used to clean up subscriptions or even Google that way. They get deleted.

Um, they don't know that, but you know what? I know you, we are creatures of habit. They're going to say that I agree thing and your data's going back out there again. So I went on a database tour for, or, um, as a data center, not database, but sorry, a data center tour out here in Las Vegas, one of the largest data center out here. And they were talking about one of their biggest customers, uh, ancestry.com. Right. And they were saying that, uh,

The most important information they had was the information on everybody, right? Like this was like beyond terabytes, right? This is tons and tons and tons of information. And it wasn't the business that was valuable. It was all the data that they had on people that was valuable. It's pretty amazing. Yeah. What's the unit? I think I've heard of the unit as much greater than...

terabytes because that's where we're at these days maybe octabyte i don't even know i'm like i'm stuck in terabyte world still i'm like i'm good with that i don't need to be i i grew up where i had megabytes right of like hard drive like a 10 meg hard drive and i was happy

I mean, things were simpler. It didn't demand as much data, graphics and all that. Things are just so much more demanding. Gigs is normal. Terabytes is becoming the norm. Carbobytes is going to be another thing. I'll give it another three years on that one. Worst case scenario, three years. I might even speed it up to

Two years. Oh, it's got to expand. I mean, even with AI, we've got to see some expansion in storage and cloud and other types of technology to really be able to advance. We're almost at a stalling point with AI because we need some of this other technology to catch up. So, yeah, we're going to see it. It's driving the need.

Yep. So there you go. Why are we talking about all this crazy stuff? Because it's already impacting you. You just haven't realized it, most of you. Unless you're an Amateur Cave person, it has absolutely nothing to do with you, okay? They'll reply to you. And I love picking on you. You got great people. I'm a little jealous in a way because I am digitally toxic right now, okay? Rich in that right now, okay?

That's why I love to pick on you. It's out of jealousy and quote unquote love, if you want to say that. All right. No, but this has been a great conversation. Let's do the shameless plug-in. Even though his business is evolving. Limited time. Yeah. I'll just.

I'll just point to my LinkedIn. I think that's where I do my most communication. I actually post daily. I have a pretty, I'd say a decent following on LinkedIn because I post relevant content around business. So if you're interested in it, find me at Benjamin.Bowman. That's me on LinkedIn. Again, Stratashield AI will be evolving into Genova Solutions. Yeah, I mean, I think if you're interested in talking, learning more, I just like

I like having these conversations. I just like talking. So if you reach out to me to connect, if you want to jump on a phone call for a bigger conversation, I don't care about the business. Yeah, sure. If you've got a project you want me to work on, great. But if it's just a talk and get advice or give me advice or whatever, let's just talk. Like I love these types of conversations with anyone. So yeah, I appreciate it, Elias. Okay. So...

Is there anything else you want to add before I ramped up this great, I gotta say, this is like the most speedy, informative conversation I've ever had. Yeah. Well, yeah, I don't think, I think it makes sense. I think my whole time in speaking and public speaking, it was always about being, giving information, being to the point and not trying to, again, get into the weeds and ramble. So I think a good, efficient conversation, but I agree. This has been a fun conversation. I, I,

We get into politics, psychology, education, all this other stuff. And then we just get rambling, rambling, rambling. Like for me, that's when I really can start rambling. But I like the points we touched on. And this has been a great experience. So again, I appreciate it. I got to say, I forgot to point out that one thing regarding your psychology. I think that's the smartest college decision you've ever made because business, I learned later on to my detriment, it's very psychological. Yep.

It's very, very psychological. Sales is psychological. Stock market is psychological. Very, very psychological. If it was logical, the markets, everything would have been ran very differently. That's my final little nugget point and comment that I wanted to say. Yeah, business is very psychological. So that was actually intelligent on your part. So you already had a clear vision of what you wanted to do in college. You know you're into there later.

So that's the day. That's the benefit of entering college later. You have a clear vision. While you're in your 20s, you kind of don't know. You're just partying your life away. Or video gaming your life away. It won't be more introverted example. So...

Yeah, but I agree. I think it's an interesting subject no matter what, when you look at how we're all wired and the way we all think. But then you get into business and you get into decisions, hiring decisions, how managers act, how employees act, how a construction crew is going to react different than the office crew. All these things are all psychological things.

And to me, yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. And it does help my approach with understanding why I have such a humanistic and people-centric approach to AI. I think it feeds into that. Completely agree.

Oh, yeah. If you would talk to me about this 15 years ago, I would completely disagree. We evolve. That's a human trait, by the way. You know, you don't stay the same. And it's actually a good thing because who the hell wants to stay depressed the rest of their lives? Right. But, you know, that's what I'm going to say about that. So, from wherever you listen to this podcast, you have a blessed day, afternoon, or night.