Epsiode 203: AI is Moving Fast, Killing IT Revisits the Cabana, & This Isn't Goodbye but See You Later

[00:00:01] From somewhere deep in the cloud and the corners of the earth, this is the Killing IT Podcast. With a focus on helping you make sense and dollars of all things IT. With your hosts Dave Sobel, Ryan Morris, and Karl Palachuk.

[00:00:21] Welcome everybody to episode 203 of the Killing IT Podcast. I know you guys are in good voice today. You think we practice? Well, you know, I mean it's spring. I don't know about you, I got allergies. So you might not have allergies where you are. Is it spring?

[00:00:43] I mean I guess it's warm today but it's been cold. You're just rubbing it in man because if you're in the east it's warm today. If you're where Karl is it's always warm. Not here man. It windchill three degrees this morning so I think freaking funny.

[00:00:58] Well I'm going to kick us over with our fun question and say what two words describe you best? Hard for me because there's relax and focus. So we'll succeed as an external bit right? So relax and focus is relax.

[00:01:21] I will say I buy every sign I can find that says relax, focus or succeed. There's very few signs that just say succeed or success. So I got all the relaxed signs you would ever want.

[00:01:35] I'm going to go with optimistic pragmatist because I like to think of myself that way a little bit. I'm generally a pretty happy optimistic kind of guy but I'm also pretty practical and down to earth on stuff so I would have thought those two.

[00:01:54] I think you generated that through chat GVT. I did not. Out of his own vocabulary and see the sign of a good answer there is I would actually agree with that about you so many words but I would agree with those yeah.

[00:02:11] For me I would say voracious and verbose and nobody is surprised by that second. I'm definitely agreeing with verbose. The problem is that there's 400,000 words that could describe me how do you pick two?

[00:02:28] The thing about the first one right that voracious, the one thing I can say about myself is if I find something fascinating I'm going to absolutely positively devour it until I understand it and then I'm going to tell everybody in the entire world about it.

[00:02:44] That's just the nature of who I am and I'm hoping that that converts into a business model. That's the hope here that we continue to do after all these years but the fact

[00:02:56] that if you still to this day if you ask my mother what I do for a living, well he gets paid to talk. That's pretty much true. Which ain't wrong. Which ain't wrong.

[00:03:06] David and I have been paid to talk each of us for at least 20 out of the last 30 years maybe more. But we both did some radio so talking is fun. Yeah, get paid to talk. I'm all about talking. That's...

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[00:04:14] No, I wasn't paid to say any of that so. All right, topic number one today gentlemen is something we've talked about many, many times but we just literally before we turned on the microphone agreed the hottest topic for

[00:04:29] the next five years is probably going to be artificial intelligence because what we've reached the point where the arms race has begun. Microsoft has released a new version. I don't think it's quite yet to 4.0 but it's very, very close.

[00:04:45] It's integrated into Bing as a product called Prometheus which sounds ominous. And Google is about to come out with theirs and now you have Ernie and Claude and we actually have products where you can put in a credit card and buy AI chat output by the word.

[00:05:06] And so that future anyway is here. The next generation we also agree is probably going to be integrating this into the back end of everything you'd possibly imagine. The only question that I have is not whether it's coming but whether it's a good thing

[00:05:24] but it is absolutely here. It's like all things it is good and bad so I'm gonna say I've actually my new thing on this is it is shadow IT on speed. I wanted to go with shadow IT on cocaine but I decided that that might be a little

[00:05:38] much. So I'm going with shadow IT on speed because it's all the same things of shadow IT. It's all this uncontrolled usage and not visibility from the IT department and not necessarily compliant with all the rules. It's all of the things of shadow IT. It's just way faster.

[00:05:58] It is way faster because I mean I'm stunned by the adoption numbers both raw adoption numbers you know million users in five days for a chat GPT for you know Microsoft getting to a million on the wait list in 48 hours.

[00:06:14] Like you've got all of this but also the adoption and actual work. The US Army has already declared they're using it like it's now part of like they've got actual implementations mostly in their press groups and stuff but they're using

[00:06:28] it the number of professionals using it is already broken I think 35% of professionals like actively using it in their day job. That didn't take long. That's head spinningly fast but it's all the same problems of like it got rolled out just

[00:06:44] happened users started doing it that's not a bad thing but there are guardrails and thinking that organizations need to think about you know the lawyers are already weighing in telling you know Amazon and Microsoft saying like by the way don't like give

[00:07:00] it confidential information it'll go to the training algorithm like you have you have to be like super careful of that you know but unless somebody says that or trains it is super easy for people to just use it and it just happened. Shadow IT on speed my friends.

[00:07:18] See I will buy that characterization because it is what happens when a technology finally gets put into the wild right there's all kinds of R&D there's planning there's productizing we bring it to market and then you give it to your customers and the

[00:07:33] question is why I want them to use it for but I have no idea what they might wind up choosing to use it for that's just the nature of this stuff right that's why

[00:07:44] we say it's a tool could be used for good it could be used for evil. I think what's fascinating is how we have observed over the last couple of years the evolution in the conversation focused on AI while it was in development phase

[00:07:58] in beta phase in behind the scenes world we could talk about guardrails we could talk about ethics we could talk about whether the could versus should aspects of all the iterations of artificial intelligence.

[00:08:15] Now that we have released this into a product that got to scale so fast that all of the competitors now who've been being careful and they there was risk and they wanted to be responsible now that this thing hit a million and a

[00:08:31] hundred million and oh my god it's taken over the world all guardrail conversations are just static in the wind right we are now in the place of it doesn't matter whether or not it returns accurate information or racist

[00:08:47] information or hateful information we got ship and that's all we can do right now the guys at Google all along they've been working on their Lambda technology for a very long time and they have been reasonably

[00:09:00] responsible with it we don't want to release it to the world because we do not yet have full fidelity in the accuracy and the confidence of the information that it will return and when chat GPT got released they still said

[00:09:15] the same thing and when they got to a million users in five days they still said the same thing when they got to a hundred million users in less than 60 days they said screw you here's a release announcement and we are in the

[00:09:29] wind and now the Chinese are coming and the Indians are coming and everybody else is going to be releasing something so while I'm cool with the idea of what it can do and I am very optimistic about the application of this I just

[00:09:44] want to be the one who says all that talk about ethics and guardrails and whatever we're gonna sound like the old man on his lawn shouting at clouds if that's what we stay focused on in this world because everybody is just

[00:09:57] damn the torpedoes full speed ahead well but I'm gonna layer on where I think there's a lot of value right now so 100% right I think 100% I'm on board with you this is going to go like sideways but what's also valuable right now is

[00:10:10] is there is a huge space of professionals knowing how to utilize the tool and apply human ethics to that I'm gonna check to make sure I'm not promoting racist stuff like it may say it and I'm not gonna use that in

[00:10:24] my business right or I'm gonna actually fact check some of this stuff to make sure that it's correct I'm like there is real value in the human layer right now that can really be exploited that's also true for IT services companies

[00:10:38] for those people that are doing the implementations here like you can use your human smarts to make money I want to say I also want to put a layer of caution on top of this this may be one of the first technologies where

[00:10:51] the prices will go up very far very fast because if you think about it if your options are higher a good copywriter or higher a junior person who can use chat GPT or whatever the the one of the the writer ones that we have linked to

[00:11:11] in here hyper write AI if you take that and you say give me a friendly voice give me an informative voice give me this many words and then you take the output put it through Grammarly and twist a little bit you might save 50 or $60,000

[00:11:26] in salary for one user of this and so that means like okay what's the budget well it's 40 or $50,000 a year for this tool well that's gonna make the prices go up from $20 a month very very quickly with the layers of you know kind

[00:11:46] of finesse that you might want to add into it this could become a very expensive product and divide the world into haves and have nots even more than it already is with regard to technology education and everything else so I just caution

[00:12:01] you that that might be a future that we're in nope I agree with you and I think that's what's fascinating the speed with which the technology has developed has launched us out of the what can it do what should we use it for

[00:12:14] into okay well what's the business model around this thing and normally that takes a couple of years of noodling and testing and real-world application it took a couple of weeks to get there with this stuff the fact that there are

[00:12:26] actual job postings out there right now that say seeking a prompt engineer and they don't mean an on time in the individual what they mean is somebody who can professionally ask questions to chat GPT with care and

[00:12:40] rigor and detail and structure to yield from it the best possible outputs prompt engineering is a professional skill and that thing didn't exist literally seven weeks ago so that it's now a business conversation and we all got to figure

[00:12:56] out you know there's job listings out there already looking for five years experience here must have actually been the engineer who wrote the source code rather than it must have prompted your experience for five years take it out

[00:13:09] people I'm gonna move us on to our next topic and in a way we're gonna actually take a moment and sort of set the stage a little bit we're gonna go think back when right before we launched this show so we've been doing this show about

[00:13:20] almost four years now and the genesis for killing it was the three of us getting together to sit at the pool and had a cabana at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas where we wanted to get away from the world and talk a little bit

[00:13:35] and we wanted to talk about changing the style of conversation around the way people talk about it in fact that's the where the origin of the name is killing it killing it like changing that conversation we had a lot of

[00:13:48] conversations around so much of what we saw happening was around very tactical stuff who bought who what did this vendor program mean channel account management type stuff what like very tactical so we said we wanted to actually we didn't think there was enough space to have these larger

[00:14:08] conversations and we said we kind of wanted to figure out a place to do that and thus came the pandemic and I think it's worth us taking a little bit of time or because came this podcast I mean let's it's worth taking a

[00:14:21] little bit of time of revisiting those core principles and so we're going to talk a little bit about what we think we've actually accomplished so far so far here in terms of that conversation I'm going to kind of start to car a

[00:14:32] little bit because one of the big things we talked about was this change of of nomenclature with MSP to ITSP right that's when I know you you think think a lot of it's interesting because when I think back two things come

[00:14:44] to mind one is that as Ryan was leaving Vegas and Dave and I were going there we decided to get together for one day to talk about what we could do together and Dave said well I'll get us a room when the room

[00:15:00] turned out to be a cabana at the poolside the other thing is that we came out of that literally committed to we want to change the conversation and there are very few times when I've been involved in

[00:15:15] something to the point where I can look back and say on that day we set this goal and on this day four years later I can tell you that I think we did it we wanted to change the conversation we thought that the

[00:15:28] term MSP was outdated and that it was not a good generic term for talking about our industry and we didn't really come settle on IT service provider at the time but we knew MSP had to go away and I

[00:15:47] remember telling a couple of people at the time that we're going to replace MSP as a common terminology in our industry and they were like what the hell that that's a that's a big goal but I think IT

[00:16:01] SP is now growing in acceptance MSP is still here but I think there's more of a sense that you can be an IT service provider without being a managed service provider and there's a little bit of irony that the first state to write the definition of MSP into

[00:16:20] the law into the code of the state got it wrong because Louisiana defines an MSP as somebody who provides IT services primarily through the state of Louisiana or its subsidiaries so I think that's interesting and I also think that we did a lot to I

[00:16:42] think up level the conversation for SMB IT in general and I'm proud of what we've done. See, I will echo that and I think there's a reason why we were so convinced it was a good idea back then right? I think we had

[00:17:00] if you looked around at the industry at that point in time what I observed and I think you guys agree with this it was all about inside baseball. We were talking about us and how we

[00:17:13] did what we did as opposed to the people we did it for as our clients and the outcomes we were producing and the basic justification for why somebody would want to do the things that we do. We were arguing about tool sets and about this

[00:17:30] monitoring capability and about that piece of technology and my tool does it this way and you can just imagine a convention of guys who remodel kitchens for a living getting together and arguing about well you know what that brand drywall

[00:17:44] that's stupid and I don't like that and I like this hammer and I don't like that and everybody else in the entire world who's not in that industry looking at those people and saying why in the hell are you talking about that? That's not why we hire

[00:17:59] you. That's not what we care about that has nothing to do with the value that you add to the world. So the objective with changing the conversation was to get out of the weeds of this is how I've set up and configured the dashboards on my

[00:18:14] particular tool sets which nobody outside of your walls cares about and get back into the world of yeah but why do people care about technology at all? Why do they care about new and emerging technologies and if it works if the stuff

[00:18:30] we talk about actually does what it claims to do why would that be a good thing? What's the value that we're actually bringing out of our industry into the world at large? I think one of the most important lessons that we've learned in the last four

[00:18:49] years has come in the last four months right a reminder that to you and me and the people that we work with every day it's hard to remember it's hard to imagine that not everybody in America works in IT right like I've been doing this

[00:19:06] for 28 years now you guys have been doing this for a long time it is very easy to get very inside your own belly button in this industry and be convinced that like well of course people care about IT because we do literally and

[00:19:20] yet when layoffs started happening back in the fall major IT companies were making excuses about why they over hired and misread the economics signals and we saw 10,000 here and 3,000 here and all these big ass numbers and then the economy didn't really change and somebody who doesn't work

[00:19:40] in technology by the way reminds us that less than 2% of working adults in America work in IT and yet what we do literally directly affects the job that every single person in every single industry does so if we can get out of arguing

[00:20:02] about how you do things inside baseball inside IT and get refocused on by the way guys there's fewer than 2% of us who are changing the world for all of the other 98% that's important that's cool and we ought to be able to discuss

[00:20:21] that in ways that non nerd inside people like us can actually go oh no kidding that's interesting I find that interesting tip of the hat to my genius friend Dave for coming up with the phrase why do we care because I do think over on the

[00:20:39] business of tech podcasts which you should all subscribe to it is really the question of the day like when we talk about these things okay that's interesting because we're nerds but why do we care like what why does it actually matter

[00:20:52] that we talk about yeah I mean it's funny because it was the it's for me it's been the catalyst that's thought a lot about the that I think about every story now it's like well

[00:20:59] do I have a why do I care on this do I care about this story and too often it's like I dismiss a ton of tactical stuff where it's well and you would have actually thrown topics and said you guys want to talk about this because

[00:21:12] it's not important enough for for the business of tech but it might be just right for for another podcast well it's true because we well but also we can explore we're exploring the idea where we were doing exploration of the idea here

[00:21:25] versus on business tech it's like why better have a reason like that that's a news commentaries show you can't do a 10 minute deep dive on a five minute show not so much doesn't fit no you know 10 pounds of potato five

[00:21:40] pound bag that that's always been the issue but see I I look at the things that we have observed in real time in the last four years right the things that we live through and the changes in the industry not just the pandemic

[00:21:55] because obviously that was a big one and it it did accelerate very many technology trends that were already planted but they just became very mainstream very very quickly because of that but you look at some of the evolution of technology and it's it's a very

[00:22:12] interesting bookmark to say the thing we just talked about in topic number one here today the the launch into the real world application of AI and none of us knows where that's ultimately going to go and how how disruptive to real life

[00:22:29] it's going to wind up being in the next six months that is a massive new conversation that we couldn't imagine four years ago and that's not nearly the only thing that we deal with in terms of new technologies big emerging

[00:22:46] trends that it's not enough to just say this new product is out guess I should put it on the line card and I should go ask my customers you guys got any budget for that you guys want to buy one because I could sell it to you for

[00:22:57] 10% less than anybody else because that's what we do in this industry that's not the point of the technology that's been coming out you got to stop and think about it in like does that affect society does that affect humanity does that affect the economy and yeah the answer

[00:23:13] about all of these things is they do and so if if all we can talk about as the practitioners of technology is what brand hammer do you use do you guys like that blue drywall or the red drywall when you're trying to get

[00:23:29] nobody cares right like that I don't mean to be dismissive about the pivotal nature of the tools we use to do our jobs because obviously that matters but outside of our walls nobody that we sell to cares if you'd

[00:23:45] like to be relevant to your customers and if you'd like them to continue to be a customer in the sense that they pay you you need to be relevant in their world not relevant in our world not just an outsourced

[00:23:56] IT department but we are here to transform how you do your business with technology and I could show you how to do that I could be I could be the Sherpa that takes you on this very very interesting journey and I think

[00:24:12] that is the biggest change that I hear now compared to four years well in this kind of conversation also allows you to be dismissive of ideas you know I'm going to say like you know I'm with Carl and kind of his thinking on this one

[00:24:25] it's like things like crypto and NFTs it's like I could see a mile away that's not a thing right right it all called it but oftentimes in technology we're unwilling to say the emperor has no clothes because

[00:24:39] you know you're you're afraid of missing it or or because it's all we're constantly looking for the next big thing so you're constantly going from hype cycle to hype cycle and it is very easy to fall into the well that's a thing that's

[00:24:51] a thing that's a thing these are all going to be things like well no actually a bunch of these are not like a bunch of these are just not and it is okay to have a difficult conversation to dissect it and say this is

[00:25:03] not going to happen oh and by the way these other things that we've talked about for a while are going to go away like these other things are going to disappear we have to have those critical conversations in order to get some and the the focus that

[00:25:14] we've enjoyed and truly enjoyed on emerging technologies uh is kind of enlightening with regard to you not knowing where you are in the hype cycle right sorry or in the evolution of something because many of these things like we can see it coming I mean I we've

[00:25:33] all seen driverless cars coming forever I did I don't know it was a few years ago because I it was before the pandemic so it must have been 2019 took a ride in Las Vegas in the driverless car with

[00:25:46] one engineer behind the wheel and one engineer sitting beside you so you know there's so it really didn't wasn't a driverless car a lot less like a driverless car than you would imagine but um you know there's things like that where we see it coming and we see

[00:26:02] that it's the the early immersion of anti technology has a lot more troubleshooting and fine-tuning and fixing and trial and error and you know rounds of funding than it looks like 10 15 20 years later you know we look back

[00:26:18] was oh on this day this person invented this thing like yeah except right there were the 20 years before that it never gets it into Wikipedia and then there's a 10 years after that where it emerges from

[00:26:33] a real idea into a usable saleable product so many many things are in that I have to say in terms of nostalgia my favorite thing that we've done this show early on as we started our

[00:26:47] bet which today no one has won none none of us have had a pizza or a burrito delivered by drone or robot to our front door and they it may be another four years before that actually happens I I've thought about making a trip to San Francisco

[00:27:03] just because I'm I've been told it's real there I could go like three miles see Dave Dave lives within three miles but it still doesn't win the bet you go to Fairfax City and get the ones delivered there early but it doesn't win the

[00:27:16] bet because that's my house what what I will say is I traveled more than three miles last week I was at a client event in Bangkok Thailand and one of the days we went out and got lunch

[00:27:26] in a local restaurant and in a very traditional environment in a place where you were eating very authentic food with traditional trappings and all of the the things that go with it

[00:27:40] all that food was actually delivered to our table by a robot not by a human so well all of this nostalgia I think actually is is the reason we wanted to explore is we actually do think we've

[00:27:51] hit a certain level of achievement like we we set a bunch of goals and we have achieved them and as such I think we've come to the conclusion that we're actually going to take a bit of a break

[00:28:01] from the show and we're going to we're not disappearing you'll see killing it killing it stuff again but in terms of the regular rhythm of the podcast we're going to take a break from that we are already Carl we're going to be a feature in your online conference

[00:28:16] later this later this year going live so you'll be able to to see us in that format I have every expectation we will be getting together for some specials and for some occasional

[00:28:27] stuff I've got some ideas going on that are probably going to happen over on the MSP radio YouTube channel there's a bunch of different places but in terms of the regular cadence here

[00:28:35] on the podcast we're going to take a bit of a break that also gives us fresh minds all that kind of stuff so you know this this is that recap to say hey we we did a bunch of stuff we

[00:28:45] set out to do that's a good thing it's it's good to acknowledge that you've hit those goals and maybe that's even a good time to to take a break which and I think that this is

[00:28:57] the space where you say now what's next right like the okay so we care about it because it matters to the world and it should be changing the world but now where do we go and what are

[00:29:08] we doing and obviously all three of us are anxiously engaged in many other endeavors the podcast has always been the extra thing quite frankly it's generally the most pivotal appointment on our calendars in a week that we know we have to plan around it's like

[00:29:26] things on monday can move things on friday can move but on wednesday you know where you're going to be at a certain time for for recording the podcast right but it's always been an additional thing and I think what's interesting is how it informs the ongoing conversation of

[00:29:42] what else we do with our time because Dave obviously you got a lot going on in the podcast world carl has been building a community forever and I actually got to get back on an airplane to go

[00:29:53] to a place and do it recently which was awesome but you know it's not the end of the stuff we do it's just the now what's next as we transition into those kinds of regular applications

[00:30:05] and in technology four years is a great long run so I would encourage you all to check out the show notes we will have our contact information in there our social media links connect

[00:30:17] to us on all the all the things and you can always find me at smallbisthoughts.com and of course I have the SMB online conference coming up in May we're all going to be there occasionally

[00:30:32] we show up to do a killing it live at a vendor event and I expect that to continue as well and you can find me of course every every single business day on the business tech podcast I would

[00:30:42] encourage you go to businessof.tech slash subscribe where you can get your option of the audio podcast the video podcast or my mailing list you can actually get the weekly newsletter or the daily digest either one is a great way to keep that rhythm coming into your inbox

[00:30:59] and we encourage you to go there and and I am much less platform or programmatic than these two which is a problem that we still haven't fixed in four years so the best way to reach me is either

[00:31:10] email I am armorris at morrismp.com and or you can get me on LinkedIn Ryan Morris 303 on LinkedIn and we are all here and obviously continue to pay attention to the things that

[00:31:25] we pay attention to so if anybody is you know itching for an opinion about what's going on in technology one quick email to any one of the three of us and you might get back

[00:31:38] a chat gpt like response but it'll come from my brings we're better than chat gpt opinions on demand thank you all for being our wonderful listeners and thank you for the feedback we've gotten and

[00:31:51] all the support over the years and we will see you soon but for now we are happy to say thank you for joining us on episode 203 of the killing it podcast thanks for tuning in to the killing it podcast please share with your friends and tell

[00:32:13] everyone to subscribe on itunes stitcher and all the podcast places join us next week and help us keep killing it in the technology business