Dynamics Corner
About Dynamics Corner Podcast "Unraveling the World of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Beyond" Welcome to the Dynamics Corner Podcast, where we explore the fascinating world of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and related technologies. Co-hosted by industry veterans Kris Ruyeras and Brad Prendergast, this engaging podcast keeps you updated on the latest trends, innovations, and best practices in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 ecosystem. We dive deep into various topics in each episode, including Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Power Platform, Azure, and more. Our conversations aim to provide valuable insights, practical tips, and expert advice to help users of businesses of all sizes unlock their full potential through the power of technology. The podcast features in-depth discussions, interviews with thought leaders, real-world case studies, and helpful tips and tricks, providing a unique blend of perspectives and experiences. Join us on this exciting journey as we uncover the secrets to digital transformation, operational efficiency, and seamless system integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and beyond. Whether you're a business owner, IT professional, consultant, or just curious about the Microsoft Dynamics 365 world, the Dynamics Corner Podcast is the perfect platform to stay informed and inspired.
Dynamics Corner
Episode 431: Vibe Coding and the Future of Software Development
In this episode of Dynamics Corner, Kris and Brad are joined by Matt Strippelhoff, CEO of Red Hawk Technologies, a company he founded in 2008 that specializes in developing, supporting, and maintaining custom software applications for mid-market clients. They dive into the evolving landscape of software development, exploring the concept of "vibe coding" and the impact of AI agents on the industry. They discuss the buy vs. build dilemma, emphasizing the importance of viewing software as an asset rather than a project. The conversation also explores the new trend of Software Development as a Service, the challenges of managing cognitive load in a rapidly evolving tech landscape, and the potential future applications of AI in transforming business operations.
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Welcome everyone to another episode of Dynamics Corner. Brad, buy or build. Build a table or buy a table. I don't know. I'm your co-host, chris.
Speaker 2:And this is Brad. This episode was recorded on August 27th 2025. Chris, chris, chris. Buy versus build that's a question that I hear often, and today we had the opportunity to talk about buying versus building as well, as a topic that everyone seems to be talking about these days is where is the position of AI in software development With us? Today, we had the opportunity to speak with Matt Tripp-Strippaloff. Good morning, sir. How are you doing? Doing well. Nice to see you, brad. Nice to see you as well. Nice to hear you too, by the way.
Speaker 1:Likewise, yeah, finally we'll hear each other now.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, yes, sometimes we have those struggles and challenges, but, uh, we always make it through, which is good. Uh, you know, I have been talking about it on these episodes as we start about the you know my new fun thing that I'm doing. I'm doing a lot of vibe coding, okay, right, you know, you know it's good, bad or indifferent, but I'm able to sit down and I'm doing things that I never even thought I would be able to do. How well I'm doing them, I do not even know, but it's piqued my curiosity to where I'm creating some cool things, and I had mentioned in previous episodes I purchased a bunch of Raspberry Pis, oh yeah. And now I'm just writing a bunch of Raspberry Pis, oh yeah, and now I'm just writing a bunch of code and creating these little applications when you're vibing when you're vibing code, vibe coding, are you using this?
Speaker 1:I mean, are you doing it with a particular programming language? I know you had mentioned Python last time. Is there any other language in your vibe coding that works really well.
Speaker 2:Right now for the vibe coding aspect. I'm using python. I do have it create, not from the vibe coding point of view where I'm creating an application, but I've created some small things. Uh, you know, professionally I use it with al right. I don't call that vibe coding. I use github copilot agent to assist with coding, but I don't call that vibe coding because I'm still reviewing and processing. I knew nothing about python formally when I started this. I'm picking up and learning the syntax and structure. Don't know other libraries and stuff, uh, but I I'm using it to create powershell scripts to do some things that I need to do. And it was really actually pretty cool because even on the python I I was able to ingest APIs. I ended up creating a Docker container with MySQL, a Docker container with Apache and then created a vibe coding Python tool to process and read an API, process the data and insert it into MySQL.
Speaker 3:Fascinating. We were talking about this at my office yesterday. It's like one of our senior devs. He's been with us for about 16 years and he's probably pretty far along out of most of our devs. He's been using Cloud Code a lot and the way he described it he said the new programming language is English which is English.
Speaker 2:Thank you for saying that, because if you go back to a few episodes, I talked about that specific thing and and I do have a question I want to follow up on the vibe coding and that's what one of the hosts on the podcast had mentioned. This was several months ago. He said you know, within 10 years, what do you think will be the most? Or even five years, I forget right at this point. He said what do you think will be the most common programming language?
Speaker 2:And he answered the human language and it's almost becoming to that point where you can sit down and think of something and ask for it and again, there's different models, there's different tools but it will write the specifications for you, it will write the application for you, it will write the tests for you and you could just basically give it something and go to bed.
Speaker 3:I don't think we're far away at all from disposable applications, purpose-built, short lifespan things that we would never have done before in a traditional SDLC, because it's too much of an investment, takes too long to build these things, and now businesses are going to be spinning up applications that are purpose built and maybe they only need them for a few months, maybe they only need them for a specific purpose, and that purpose is time-based or time-sensitive and it doesn't have to hang around. It's crazy.
Speaker 2:Yes, oh, it is. And it leads to the topic of what I wanted to speak with you about, what we wanted to speak about when we were talking earlier. But first, if I ask you, what is your definition of vibe coding?
Speaker 3:Well, you know, I think of vibe coding in terms of like true vibe coding, I think is a terrible idea, and what I mean by that is my definition of vibe coding is you're vibing with the AI agent that's doing all of the coding. You know the tools that we're using. We can see the code that it's producing. We can course correct, we can rely on the agent to make modifications and updates. But I think true vibe coding, using some of these tools that are no code, you don't even see the code. It's just creating things for you. There's a lot of hype out there. I guess the way I would define true vibe coding is you're just vibing, using natural language to create things. I think it creates a lot of technical debt. I think that if you're not careful and you don't understand what these tools are doing, you can choose tools that are putting things into your code that maybe you wouldn't want there if you knew better. Got to watch out for cybersecurity risks. Slop squatting you know as a term.
Speaker 3:If you guys talked about slop squatting on any of your you have not no, so the the the slop squatting is, is starting to show up more and more. Basically, what's happening is bad actors are polluting the models with misinformation about frameworks or plugins, rather, that aren't real, but they get so much information out there that the vibe coding tools will will pick these things up, which has they're basically injecting bad code through slop squatting.
Speaker 2:So a bad actor is slop squatting, yeah, slop squatting, yeah. So a bad actor is injecting malicious code by training the models to create the malicious code, with the assumption that the individual using these tools doesn't understand what they're doing. I could see how that's very dangerous. And that brings us to this whole vibe coding talk. Again, it's vibe coding doing something at home.
Speaker 2:I'm having fun experimenting in my own isolated environment, which I don't even do, to be honest with you, it's not even on my home network network. I have a separate network that I use for vibe coding for that reason that you just mentioned, because I don't want anything to for lack of better terms pollute or do any, uh, harmful actions on my existing network. Uh, so, but again, at home it's it thing, but at work it's another thing, which comes to the whole question that we often speak about. Chris and I work, we assist with individuals enhancing or extending a business application which that business application has pre-existing well, not pre-existing has tools available that you could purchase, or you can have customizations developed for you which we can talk about. This whole AI agent thing which brings up the topic of is it better to buy or build applications? And with that, before we get into that if you would tell us a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 3:Sure, yeah, yeah. Well, I've been in this line of work for about gosh over 25 years. I started Redhawk Technologies, a software development company. We create custom business applications, middleware solutions that integrate with commercial software applications as well and mobile apps, you name it, and that's really our focus. We've been in business for a little over 17 years. Just made the Inc 5000,000 for the second year in a row, so out of the 5,000 fastest. Congrats. Thanks, man. Yeah, we ranked 1,062 on that list this year, congratulations.
Speaker 2:That's awesome, 3,000.
Speaker 3:Yeah we're really happy about that. But a big part of that success comes from our unique business model. We develop, support and maintain custom business applications under a managed service model, so it's like it's development and service, so for a fixed monthly fee schedule. We're basically a fractional DevOps team.
Speaker 1:We create support and maintain these things. That's interesting, it is a very cool model.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Now I don't know what I want. I don't know which we should talk about. Should we talk about vibe coding, AI agents, building versus buying, but the managed service model that you have. Maybe we'll blend them all together.
Speaker 3:We can blend them together. You know it's, it's yeah. Wherever you want to take the conversation, I will tell you that when we discuss new builds with customers, they have a vision for something that they want to create for their business. If it's clear to us that they haven't looked for commercial off-the-shelf solutions first and we know that there are solutions that might work for them, we would advise them to buy, not build, Even though that's not our business. We're not out here as a value-added reseller selling Microsoft products or Salesforce or tools like that. Sometimes we think it makes a lot more sense just to buy what's available off the shelf and customize suits your needs before you build something custom.
Speaker 2:For sure. So what considerations should someone take before they make that decision of buying versus building? And I see oftentimes go ahead? My mind will run on this one.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think the first step is really determining the level of customization that might be required for something commercial to suit your specific business needs. The more customization you need, the more likely it is that you would build something custom. If you think that you can adapt your business to work with the off-the-shelf solution maybe it's a blend of those things you might modify some of the things that you do so you limit the amount of customization required in an ERP or CRM platform. Then you would lean toward off-the-shelf. That would be the way that I would look at it. So I think you have to have a pretty good understanding of the business needs before you start selecting the tech stacks and the commercial software solutions that you want to evaluate.
Speaker 2:And with that, what consideration now? We talked about the vibe coding and we speak about how easy and I use that word loosely in this context it is to create solutions and I'm seeing that more and more as well, where everyone thinks oh, my famous question, how hard can it be?
Speaker 3:How hard can it be? How hard can it be? How hard can it be? When I talk to customers and prospects and we're evaluating their requirements, we're talking things through. One of the things I try to determine is how many exceptions to their rules will they have? Businesses always have a yeah, but I needed to do this, except for in this scenario. And so if they have lots of exceptions, then there's going to be a lot of complexity, and I call them exceptional companies because they have all these exceptions to their own business rules. That'll drive up a level of complexity. Whether you're vibe coding or using AI as a code assistant to create something, or you're doing something, customizations with the commercial off-the-shelf ERP, the level of exceptions that they have will drive up the complexity, the effort, the time, ongoing maintenance, you name it. It gets more and more expensive. I don't care what approach you take. You name it, it gets more and more expensive. I don't care what approach you take. If you have an exception to every business rule. If you're an exceptional company, you're going to pay an exceptional fee for it.
Speaker 1:There's always an exception.
Speaker 2:That is a good way to phrase it, because a lot of businesses again, everyone wants to have a differentiator to make them better than their competitors and what it takes, what they think that differentiator is. But oftentimes that differentiator isn't as significant as they may think. So, like you had mentioned, it's the consideration of buying versus building and you mentioned it's time. If you're building something, it takes time. You also have the risk, again, assuming that the commercial product that you're looking to buy is properly developed, vetted and it's a functional application more error-prone, I would say because you also have to go through a good testing cycle and make sure that the application works to your needs.
Speaker 2:You have maintenance on that and, as you had mentioned, with all of that is a higher cost. Now that higher cost may be mitigated based upon the complexity of what you have because it generates revenue for you. But there's that technical debt that oftentimes they don't. Someone doesn't factor into the equation of now I need to move to a newer version of that application or technology's changed. You know, as you talked about, you can extend or customize commercial built software as well. Where does that technical debt fall into play?
Speaker 1:so this is where I can go down the road on this, I think, I think lot of that when we deal with those clients at least for me from my experience is usually it's short term, like we're trying to solve a problem now. So when they're looking for a solution, they're really trying to solve okay, we have this challenge that we're dealing with, but they don't really look at it from a long-term perspective, like you had said, brad, like the technical debt. What does it take now to maintain that and also build upon that? So a lot of times they just kind of like let's just solve a problem now. And many times the conversations I've had is yeah, it was right at that time, it was the right tool at that time, but then it's been two years now. It's no longer a fit for us. And I was like two years, that's a very short period. You're not getting your investment back. I guess I would say I don't know how common that is for you, matt.
Speaker 3:It's the whole reason we developed our business model. Honestly, those early conversations with clients we're talking to them. The first thing is we want to help them realize that they need to change their perspective on the solution that we're developing. That it's not a project. Oftentimes they think of it I have a project. I need to find the right vendor to execute that project.
Speaker 3:But if you have a project mindset, there's a beginning, middle and an end, and the reality is with software, whatever you put out there is now in an ecosystem that it doesn't control. There's all these factors. Think about it like if we think about it in organic terms. If we think about it in organic terms, it's in an environment. It's designed to thrive in that environment, but the environment is changing Operating systems, hardware, et cetera.
Speaker 3:To think about it in terms of an asset versus a project that's one of the things we try to help our customers recognize is that you now have another asset that is part of your business. You only made this investment because it's an asset, and an asset is creating value, whether it's streamlining workflows and reducing the amount of workforce that you need, so you can scale and you don't have to scale through people. That's a great reason to build something custom, but that's an asset. If you have a fleet of trucks and you're in the service industry, you're changing the oil. You know you're maintaining those assets. You think of those things as assets. So, as far as remediating technical debt, updating packages and frameworks, that's all part of what we're doing under our software development as a managed service, doing under our software development as a managed service. So we're responsible for helping that asset continue to thrive as the ecosystem around that asset is changing, so it could be other things changing. It could be that they're changing to a different ERP and the integration needs to be modified. The cool thing about what's happening with AI coding assistance now are all the MCP servers that are out there for these commercial platforms make it a whole lot easier to create a technical plan. In an AI-assisted tool like Cloud Code is a good example you connect in the MCP server for Azure, for example, and then you can basically create your plan, review the plan and then have it execute the plan to build out or modify an integration.
Speaker 3:A big part of our conversation is because we primarily focus on serving mid-market, and mid-market customers don't have DevOps teams in-house, so sometimes there's some education we have to talk about what a software bill of materials is. They're like well, what's that? Well, that's the list of all of the frameworks, components, libraries that we're using. They don't really care about how the sausage is made in the end, but they kind of need to. So we have to educate them a little bit about software bill of materials routines that we have as part of our service to scan that SBOM for common vulnerabilities and exposures that are emerging. Because if the bad actors are the only ones paying attention to vulnerabilities showing up in those libraries and you're not patching those things as a matter of routine, that asset's going to turn into a liability overnight.
Speaker 2:It's a great way to think of it. I'd like your analogy just to bring back to what you you started that topic on it's a project. I mean, it's not a project. You're purchasing an asset and then you're going to do maintenance on that asset, just as if you would do for as you had mentioned a fleet of trucks, whereas a lot of times individuals exactly like you say it's a project. They start the project, they work through and implement the project and now they're done with the project.
Speaker 2:Because we always say or I always say and I talk with others in the same field and I don't want to put words in Chris's mouth ERP implementations are never done. And it's not that they're never done because the implementation is poor. It's never done because you have to look at it and frame it as maintenance, as if it's on a truck, because you do need to replace the oil. And again, that could be equated to technology changing or even your internal requirements changing as the economic climate changes as well. So it's a great way to think of it and I can honestly say, in the couple of years that I've been doing this, it's the first time I heard someone say look at it as an asset versus a project, and you may absorb that implementation differently, because now I'm purchasing a fleet of trucks, I'm purchasing something to of trucks, I'm purchasing something to provide value. I'm kind of repeating what you say because it's really sinking into me. Yeah, I really like that too With me with me.
Speaker 1:I like that very, very much because you're right. A lot of people, a lot of businesses coming in especially small, medium-sized businesses coming in and getting an ERP system at least in our world here is that it's a solution that would solve all their problems and that's it right. But they don't realize that the that Brad mentioning it doesn't end. You continue to improve upon that and you change your business process and it becomes an asset to your business so that you can be more profitable, profitable, profitable and increase revenue. But they don't realize that it takes some work to do that, to maintain it just like an asset rather than just like, hey, I want to buy this and it's supposed to solve all my problems, make me more money, yeah. So they got to change that mindset, definitely. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, if they, if they don't. And I think it still happens a lot today where yes no-transcript. That's if you want to add features.
Speaker 1:The other two are really bad man.
Speaker 3:They're really bad. Right, something happened. It's a cybersecurity issue occurred and you can track it back to that. Now, liability no longer an asset, because nobody was maintaining it and it was you know. Some vulnerability came up and it was exploited by the bad actors your operating budget is licenses. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's not enough, I don't know what you're talking about, but yes, you're right. This is a great viewpoint to have. As you had mentioned, oftentimes people don't budget for the maintenance on their system, whatever that system may be. They either purchase or develop or, as Chris, you've mentioned a lot of times, they'll budget. Okay, well, my annual license fee is X, so I'm going to pay that annual license fee, not the maintenance on that asset.
Speaker 1:They should have a budget for maintenance or new features right, like maybe implement a new feature which requires training and requires implementation and things like that. That would improve your business and that could also be enhancements too, that they should budget. But they don't think about that Like it's just license, that's it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a good perspective. Yeah, In our model we're providing what we call EMS hours. It's just good perspective. Yeah, In our model we're providing what we call EMS hours. It's just enhancements, maintenance and support. So that's part of the blended services that we're providing under that fixed monthly fee schedule. So it's all part of it.
Speaker 2:So your implementation approach is software development as a service. Would they pay a monthly fee for software development? Is that through the entire project or is it once they have the asset developed? The ongoing maintenance on that is a software development as a service. I like this model. I hear of managed services more for system monitoring, system patching. When I say system, I'm not saying application system, I'm saying operating system. To put it to different terms, we have our network operating systems, we have our network hardware, we have our network performance monitoring, like a lot of that, network operations center type management services. This is the first time I'm hearing of software development as a service. I'm interested to hear about this.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we have options that our clients can choose from in terms of how the contract is structured. If they have the capital and they want to use that capital for the initial build, we can set up the contract in a way that the first 12 months that even billing schedule, that fixed monthly fee schedule is addressing their investment required for that initial greenfield development effort, in combination with some budget for maintenance and support, because it's not going to take 12 months to build. Most things take six to nine months depending on level of complexity. So, um, we're still going to build it in that, in that window, like it were, as if it were time and materials project, but their fee schedule can be distributed out over that 12 months so they still have that fixed monthly fee schedule. If they want to preserve capital, then we will strike a deal over and generally our contracts are three to five years. We'll strike a contract with the customer that allows them to amortize the cost of that greenfield development with the bundled services over 36 months.
Speaker 2:Interesting, interesting.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it works great because oftentimes what we find is, especially in the mid market, they have some idea of what they're willing to invest.
Speaker 3:No one ever shares budget with us. You know what I mean, and a lot of times the way things are approached is there's a champion on the client side and they've been given permission to go shop and the first conversation I like to have with them is well, what is this going to do for your business? I need to understand that it's going to generate some value. Otherwise, whatever proposal we put in front of that customer, that prospect, it's just going to be pure cost and they're only going to make the investment if that cost falls within whatever number. They pulled out of their hat that we don't know what that budget is. Right, that's the only reason they're going to make the investment is because they found somebody willing to do it, for what they're willing to pay for it. But they might not even know what it's really going to do for their business. It just seemed like a cool idea, so we look at things like we want to.
Speaker 2:Welcome to our everyday.
Speaker 3:Everyday, this is Everyday.
Speaker 2:No, this is. I don't mean to cut you off, but that is like the mindset is so true is is. It's a recommendation to businesses explore what the value you're going to get from it. And that budget question, nobody wants to ask because you can have someone come to your house to do work and they'll say what are you willing to spend, how much budget do you have? You're like I'm not telling you how much is it going to cost, because everyone wants to to play that out.
Speaker 2:Well, they want to make sure that everyone wants to feel like they're getting the value for the dollar, and not somebody just saying I want to exhaust the budget, which is interesting. So everyone plays that dance and I often will try to say well, you don't have to give me a number, let's just come up with a ballpark. Because if I'm purchasing a new car, I'm either going to go buy a Toyota or I'm going to go buy a BMW. There's a lot of cost difference in there. But are you in the market for a Toyota, like a common standard vehicle? Are you looking for a high-end luxury vehicle? And then to your question why? Like, let's look at the value that it's going to give you, then spending that capital may not be so hurtful, because you can see the return on your investment, as we'll call it, yeah, uh, in this case that's uh that's a good approach.
Speaker 1:that's a hard mindset to change, though, in the industry, right, because I I, I don't know where who's making these decisions. I don't know if it's someone in finance or, like you, just have this much money but don't understand the actual what are you trying to solve, what are you trying to do? You know what are you trying to invest on, what kind of asset you want, and so forth, and so it kind of yeah, you do, we need, we need some sort of education in the industry where, like you have to change that mindset when you're bringing in software into your business. It's a pipe dream.
Speaker 3:We created some tools, really simple tools, there, and anybody can go to our website at redhawk-techcom and go to downloads. But one of them is just a really it's a glorified Excel workbook, guys. That's all it is. But but what it does is it puts them on rails to think about their manual process and routines and cost of errors and omissions, because most of our work ends up coming back to workflow automation, doing things with machine learning even AI these days creating some type of integration between systems, so you're getting people out of spreadsheets. It can be BI implementations, things like that.
Speaker 3:But for them to understand the value that it creates, they need to think about the cost of not changing. What is the cost of them not moving forward with the solution that they're going to incur week over week, month over month, year over year? And so it's an ROI calculator. So basically, all they do is they fill out information about who's involved in those processes, how frequently they're doing them, how much time those processes require. If a mistake's made, what is the cost of an error and omission, if there's an audit, and then it'll calculate what their cost is to stay with status quo, to stay with status quo. And all of a sudden, when you're looking at a custom software or even a commercial software implementation, you have something to compare it to. Okay, if I make this investment, these costs go away. How long does it take for me to get my ROI? And so it helps them make a business case? And you know what, if they can't make the business case, they shouldn't make the investment. So I'm speechless.
Speaker 1:That's a hard pill to swallow, I know.
Speaker 2:But it's a good approach to. You know, this is our build versus buy conversation. But now this is even just choosing to move beyond that implementation, it's something because it is, it's, it's a, it's a.
Speaker 2:it's a nice way to approach what you're doing and then you're treating it as purchasing an asset, where, if I'm going to go buy a refrigerator from my home, I know how much money I want spend what it's going to do for me. You could equate that to software. And why are you willing to spend that money, versus just somebody saying, oh, we have $10,000 to spend, see what you can get.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. I've got a great example for you guys. One of our clients is a credit union, and you remember when the feds were changing rates every couple of weeks there for a while? Well, all of their financial products that they had published online were hard-coded. The agency they worked with just built out the website, all of you know. But it all comes back to the interest rates, and so when their team's going in and having to modify dozens and dozens of digital assets to modify their rates and the impact of what they're offering because of the rate changes, they were spending tons of time every month.
Speaker 1:Manually changing rates. Manually changing Because it's hard-coded, all order codes, Well, on all their financial products.
Speaker 3:Right, yeah, and it's also a highly regulated industry. Whatever you're offering, that's what you've got to deliver, and if you miss something out there and a customer comes in and takes advantage of that, I mean you've got to honor it. So they said, well, what would it cost for us to have a custom just a basic custom web component where we can just indicate what the interest rate is and then all of our financial products update automatically? Well, we gave them a proposal for that and they're like whoa man, we don't want to make that investment. I'm like, okay, well, let's use this little worksheet I've got and we plugged it all in and I said, look, you're going to pay for this project twice in the next 90 days If you don't do it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, You're like oh well that makes a heck of a lot of sense. Let's go ahead and get that done, and so within two weeks we had a custom solution for them. It was really simple basic web application and solve that problem for them forever.
Speaker 1:Wow. So they didn't think about the long-term right. They just can say, oh, it's too expensive.
Speaker 3:It's too expensive, We'll die from a thousand cuts. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:It's almost like it's not a software buying problem.
Speaker 1:It's a behavior mindset problem that you're trying to solve at the very beginning, before the software solution you're bringing, because at that point it doesn't really matter. It's a bigger challenge is trying to change the way they think when they're bringing in a solution or bringing in an asset in their business.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Now with vibe coding. I want to connect us back to vibe coding here real quick.
Speaker 2:Oh, yes, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3:Yes, what's happening now is people're gonna people who aren't thinking asset versus project, which are a lot of people right thinking project now they're gonna just have their bas or their subject matter experts, vibe code the solution like it's a project and they're just gonna put that into their ecosystem and look out, man, I mean no, it's, it's that I'm seeing more and more of that uh type of thought process.
Speaker 2:And just to dovetail back to a dovetail, or just to jump back to chris, the comment that you made, it's it's also not necessarily someone offering the service or someone implementing software to change the mindset. It's important for whomever is making these decisions, you know, for those that are customers of or consumers of these products and services that may listen to this to change your mindset so you can really understand and how to calculate the value of what you're trying to do, to see if it's more than just a good idea, because, as you had mentioned, if you can really get the return on investment calculated properly, it should tell you right there is it even worth doing it? Versus, oh, it's a nice shiny object, it's cool to have, let me pay for it and now have to maintain it and bring that into it. But to go back to your other point, there is it's becoming more and more of how hard can that be without them understanding?
Speaker 2:Oh, anyone can use AI to create an email. Anyone can use CREAI. Oh, we have someone, like you said, they created this really cool little application at home last night vibe coding. Why are you going to charge me this much money to do it so?
Speaker 2:yeah it's good luck in maintaining that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, vibe code I use another analogy a nail gun won't make you a carpenter exactly, that's right.
Speaker 1:That's you could go buy that stuff off Home Depot. Right, he's not going to get it.
Speaker 2:But learning how to use the nail gun will, yeah, and someone with a nail gun that knows how to use it will be better than someone who has a hammer doing the same thing. So it's the whole thing that we keep saying AI is not going to replace you. Somebody using AI will, and that's a big thing to think about. It's not the using AI, because AI is doing it for them. It's AI is helping them with some of the mundane tasks or some of the minutiae, as you had mentioned. You can set up these agents. These agents will go do and have some functions. It's almost the equivalent of having a team of junior developers. Tasks or some of the minutiae, as you had mentioned. You can set up these agents. These agents will go do and have some functions. It's almost the equivalent of having a team of junior developers. You still bring the code back, you review the code, you make sure the code's sound. Then you implement it, not just.
Speaker 3:I could go on for days about this we're trying to and we're having quite a bit of success with this with our team here internally at RedHawk is we're helping the engineers realize that they now will be orchestrating, leveraging their many, many years of software engineering experience to orchestrate the AI agents. The AI coding agents are typing way faster and they have access to knowledge in seconds, so I'm a big fan of using AI coding agents, if done properly and securely. Secret standards.
Speaker 3:Yes, yes, and right now we're going through a very specific project, internally facing to modernize our sdlc end-to-end, to identify the, the tooling that we're going to use, writing the acceptance, use policies and determining the impact. And, guys, I'm telling you, man, it's a, it's a new world, it's a, it's a, it's a new world. I think we're having the same challenge right, brad.
Speaker 1:That's something that you have to change your standards now because you're bringing in AI agents when you're developing, so you have to fit that into your now new standards of SDLC.
Speaker 2:We can shoot off of this hard, but it's like you you said coming up with the standards and individuals orchestrating and then using the tooling, and then the one of the big things with this is accepting that you're orchestrating. It's almost everyone is a more critical of ai than they are of people. And, to go back to what you were saying is, ai has access to more information, it can go way faster and it can make mistakes or it can hallucinate, as, as people use the term, I can do the same thing, but we're going to say that Brad made a mistake. Okay, well, let's fix it.
Speaker 3:But oh we have this AI agent.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have this, this, we have this ai agent that made a mistake. Right, it still has a, potentially, and not in all cases, and I'm not trying to say it's better than a human or anything like that, but it's. Ai can do something 99 better than a human, for example, and that one percent that it missed and the human could do the same thing and miss 20, and we won't say anything about the human. But but we'll say that the AI is flawed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can never trust it again, right?
Speaker 2:It's comical to me in a sense, and I'm not saying it's better. I'm just saying it's learn how to use the tool and understand the limitations of the tool, just like we talked about the limitations of a hammer, a manual hammer, versus a hammer with a compressor right, an air hammer, whatever they call those things. I'm not a carpenter, I don't even know what they call it Air gun right.
Speaker 3:Is that what they call?
Speaker 2:it Nail gun, Okay. So it's the same type of thing. You have to know the limitations and how to tweak it, Like how much pressure do you need you limitations and how to tweak it. Like how much pressure do you need, you know, do you want to? You know, do you want? Where do you want the nail head? Do you want it to be recessed? Do you want it to be on the wood? You still have to make adjustments to get that nail exactly where you want it before you execute. So with that, how do you educate a team to accept it and then work in unison with this orchestration?
Speaker 3:Well, the first step for us was to identify the champion in our business senior engineer with more than 15 years of experience, who just wanted to dive in and really understand how to use these tools. Basically, think of them as an AI czar within the business. So figuring out what the new standards are, which tools we should be using, the acceptance use policies, what they should look like, how do we protect our client's IP, how do we collect our IP, you know, protect all of those things. And the next phase for us is and this is still early, I think a lot of companies are still early is answering that question, brad, I don't know that I have a good answer for you yet because we haven't completed the journey, but we need this leader in our organization to train, leader in our organization to train, and it's coming up within the next week, two weeks. He's going to be training multiple engineers, onboarding them on using cloud code specifically for some of the initiatives that we've got in the business right now.
Speaker 2:Will the journey ever be complete? No, because in my opinion, this is going lightning fast, because that MCP server that everyone's talking about today go back two months. I don't think it exists. I don't know the timeframe, but what I'm saying, what it feels like, is two months ago it didn't even exist.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's only been a few months, yeah, and it's a huge game changer, because the biggest problem with vibe coding early on was that it would lose context. Because the way tokenization works, you know you start having a conversation and it has a short-term memory issue. It doesn't understand the context of the larger application, so it can start getting really wonky really fast. And now you've got MCP servers that house all of that context Scan the entire code base of an existing application using cloud code, create a markdown of that, make that part of your MCP environment and guess what? Now it has context of the whole thing. It's a dip man. That's why we're really leaning into it now. Without MCP servers, I think we'd still be really skeptical.
Speaker 2:Yes, no, I like it that for the whole context and it gives you the opportunity now to even use multiple MCP servers for context, because everyone's popping up with document libraries, like you had said, it's even from our world. I've seen individuals trying to set up MCP servers, again with the context of an entire code base. Then you have one for the entire context of learning material, the libraries of documentation, and then now you can work with these together and it's.
Speaker 3:It's unbelievable. Now this is where cybersecurity risk comes into play and where I think standards need to be clearly defined for an organization. Open source MCP servers are the most likely candidates for swap squatting and malicious code finding their way into a solution. So it's different when we're talking about Microsoft Azure MCP. That's different To me. That's going to meet the standard because that's Microsoft's MCP server, so I think that's something that developers have to be very careful about. What MCP servers are they bringing into the ecosystem?
Speaker 1:A lot to consider.
Speaker 3:Man, oh man, I'm telling you. And then I think software composition analysis becomes more and more important too, because you know the developers are deciding on their libraries and frameworks traditionally, but if you're letting AI make those decisions for you, are you aware of any open source software licensing risks that might be part of your solution? You know there are some open source libraries out there that have strong copy left requirements, meaning you can't monetize that solution unless you make your solution available as an open source product. So these are things that senior engineers and people that's been in this industry for a long time, these are things that we think about, that clients don't think about. Now, if the client's cutting the experts out of the conversation and going to create their buy coding, they have no idea what risks they might be in.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry, there's a lot to think about now as you're building all these things out.
Speaker 2:It's a fascinating point to me and I think about this a lot. I see this a lot and oftentimes I wish I could go back to 1793, have electricity and hot water and just work on a farm, because life was much different, but not to shift a little bit. But it's something that you said is they rely on the experts, and I get to speak with a lot of professionals in the software industry and they're all talking about the human language, as we spoke about a few moments ago, becoming the language of the future, that working with MCP servers, as you had mentioned. They can keep the context and you're orchestrating a bunch of junior developers and I'm saying a lot of this loosely. I don't want anyone to listen to this and say, wow, you're using the wrong terms or you're doing something. I'm just trying to say, generalizing, in simple terms, what someone's doing or the perception of it. So now you're relying on an expert to manage a bunch of juniors. I'll ask this question to a lot of individuals and I think you can see where it's going is if we no longer need juniors, right, and we need the experts, how does someone get to be a junior to an expert?
Speaker 2:When AI first started, what I was saying. To be honest with you, just to be transparent. I said AI back then the language models was wiping out. The middle. Juniors could come in. They still had function. The individuals in the middle were where the language, the large language models even if you're using local models on your own were taking out sort of like the middle, where the language, the large language models or even if you're using local models on your own were taking out sort of like the middle group, and then you still had your experts coordinating the middle and then your juniors were learning from using these tools and then being mentored by the experts. But now it's almost like everybody wants an expert to manage all of these juniors so they can do code reviews. How do we get experts if we no longer need juniors? It's a rhetorical question in a sense, but do you see this yourself?
Speaker 3:Absolutely. We talk about it a lot. One of my peer groups that I meet with on a monthly basis we all own software consultancies. We're a non-competitive market, so it's like a. It's a great peer group because we can have open discussions. We're not directly competing with each other, and the topic of training young talent and what that looks like comes up often and none of us have figured it out, so I don't know. It's different now. It's really different. I think that your future developers will be groomed by seniors that have learned to properly orchestrate the AI tools and they'll be taught how to orchestrate. They're not going to be spending a lot of time in the syntax.
Speaker 2:You're right. I've heard this argument because the software development industry and again, software development industry doesn't actually mean you have to create custom applications or you're building applications. You could be in the software industry if you're creating enhancements to an existing application, such as ERP software, or creating extensions to other products. So it's all encompassing and oftentimes that's what everyone says is the software development industry is going to change. You're no longer going to need to code, You're going to be more of a orchestrator, prompt engineer, all these things that people say. But if you go back to what we talked about a few moments ago, you need to have an expert review and analyze the code to make sure that it's not to make sure that it's sound, it's not malicious, that it's using all these proper syntax and proper libraries. So now they don't have that development experience to do the review, they only have the orchestration experience.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I have to wonder how, I don't know. What I'm thinking about right now is software composition analysis, and there are tools, some really good tools, out there. We use Cast Highlight, for example, for a lot of our customers. I think you're going to see AI, checking AI. You know Cast Highlight, for example. It does a great job of not only managing the basics around software, building materials and doing CVE detection and fingerprinting, open source software licensing risk and has a workflow built into it where you can say no, this isn't a risk to our business because of the way we're using this particular custom software solution. We're not in violation of that license attached to that library or that framework. So I think we're going to see AI tools assist in workflows to check the quality of the code. I think that's just where it's going.
Speaker 3:But we're all going to have to think how much do we trust what it's telling us?
Speaker 2:I think it gets to a point where how much do you trust that the car you're driving or the vehicle that you're driving is going to work when you press the brake? Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things, driving or the vehicle that you're driving is going to work when you press the brake? Yeah, I mean, there is going, it's. It's one of those things. You there's going to be a certain level of trust to using these tools. Like we have the trust now a customer of any of ours that's using something that we've implemented. They're going to trust that it works properly. So that's what that's kind of goes back to. What I'm saying is like there has to be a certain level of trust and understanding to these things and get to a point. But then now you mentioned it's it's just sort of ai is going to train or check ai. What if we get to the point now where ai creates stuff based upon what it knows and nobody else is creating anything new, because everyone's using ai to check and create stuff? Do we just stop advancing?
Speaker 3:we might. You know, I I describe ai as the great homogenizer. It because that it's just taking a blend of all the information it's been trained on and it's going to give you the yeah, it's going to give you the mean. It's going to give you the mean it's going to give you okay, this looks pretty good.
Speaker 1:It's a next step to human evolution where we're doing less of that. I always believe that with the AI agents, I think more likely it's going to be replacing specific positions. I start seeing a lot of these agents coming out that is targeted towards a specific role of the organization. So we see that right now, brad, right for ERP, and it'll come to a point for people to truly trust and I talked about this with other people as well where you trust it better when there is some form of familiarization of human element. We talked about why is robotics having a human face right? Because we trust more. We trust it better when there's a human face. So right now, we're hearing it by voice, right. We hear it from chat, gpt, grok right, they're talking to you like a human person. So you start to feel like I'm trusting this now because it's giving me answers. It may not be right, maybe hallucinating, but I'm trusting because it's a voice.
Speaker 1:I can't imagine to a point where you have an AI agent, a developer, right, an agent that helps with your development, that has a virtual face, as if you're talking like you and I and we're vibe coding, or that has a virtual face, as if you're talking like you and I and we're vibe coding, or maybe you and I, maybe, matt, you're the AI agent with the virtual face. I would know that I would think you're real. Then we can just have a conversation here. This is what I want to do. What can you? And then you can reason with me. That would be amazing to see. Then you can trust it, because I'm like, yeah, matt looks like a real person. I could trust CZ, but I think we're coming to that point soon.
Speaker 2:You're taking it to a whole new level. Because, now we won't even need any human interaction, Because I'll just create a Matt that has a face. I can sit there and say hey, Matt, do you want?
Speaker 1:can sit there and say hey matt, do you want to watch the?
Speaker 2:game with me server right like there's your.
Speaker 3:Watch the game with me I need to sell my business and go sell firewood. That's I'm in shop and sell firewood.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna have to do something different, man I hate to say this in one respect and again to be um. I've been doing this for a long time and I'm almost happy that I'm on the tail end of my career because, like you said, it's.
Speaker 1:We were just talking about this, brad, where you have two systems that are talking, two ERP systems talking. The idea that I had in my head was you know, if you create an agent that coordinates with other agents and just have two businesses talk to each other, there's no reason to interact. They're going to know what's best between two systems If you allow them to talk to each other. They're going to know what's the most efficient way to do business together that benefits both. I don't need it. I'm going to play golf with the other owner.
Speaker 3:You need to develop that middleware solution and then you know, be the first, you guys can be the first billionaires without any employees.
Speaker 2:Well, that's exactly what it's going to be. Because, if you even think it's like the simple functions of procurement and planning, yeah, if you can have two systems, talk to each other, mrp, and you know what you need for materials, your requirements, planning, your procurement hey, I need all. I mean it's a calculation, basically Right. And it's calculation based on what. If you think of someone that you have doing forecasting and again, I'm not trying to trivialize what anyone does, don't get me wrong, it's not the oh, I just know I need this number they're coming up with a rationale for needing a number, somehow based upon what and as logistics improves and becomes more reliable, yes, there's always going to be exceptions due to weather. As such, you I could see chris to your point, something in the middle saying hey, run your mrp, tell us what you need, we'll create the orders. We'll tell the shipping department, which again is becoming autonomous in a lot of places, to ship the product, you'll get the product and you're done. Yep, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's auto-invoicing. Now I mean email responses are automated.
Speaker 2:Matt, if you're working on that, let us know. We'll jump in with you there, right, let's have a whole other conversation, fellas.
Speaker 1:We're going to improve the MCP right. We're eventually going to talk to each other, because we're going to have all the information they need.
Speaker 2:Well, the MCP is a standard, so if you can have again, you have APIs. If you start creating these standards for systems, we could go down this whole world.
Speaker 1:I know, man, I'm not saying anything more.
Speaker 2:You heard it here first, right somebody will develop this before, before this is even published now, because we put it out into the universe, as they say.
Speaker 1:So it's that's what I want. I'm going to come to you, build me this. You got it. We can buy a code in an hour.
Speaker 3:How hard can it be?
Speaker 2:Exactly that's. And it's a funny thing, it's uh, you know I'm a little loose with some of the things I say, but I used to have people say how hard can it be? And I used you can do it yourself. If it's that you know, you have to ask that question. How hard is it for you to do it yourself? And you know, get back to me when you're done Now, because there is a certain level of expertise. So AI is changing the software development world, software development as a service.
Speaker 2:I like the concept, I like the idea and it's great to hear that the buy versus build mentality that you have, or the approach that you have to make sure that the value is there for the customers, is important Because a lot of times, business decision makers who are going and undertaking these investments in assets again, I've picked up so much from this discussion Now they can see is it really worth the investment in that asset or should I just buy something? Or do I really need to have something customized for my business? And I am not going to say that nobody needs customization because that whole oh, just use out of the box, right, that's what everyone talks about. Yes, use out of the box as much as possible From a framework of thinking through your process is the way I like to say it is. Let's look at the out of the box system. Can you use it? Does it do what you need to do and what do you need to change to do it? Therefore, you don't have the cost for the customization. But don't use it to say that you have to disrupt and change your entire business to fit the out of the box. Change the approach to be.
Speaker 2:Let's analyze our processes, analyze our business to see if we should redo our processes, because I'm sure you go through it when you're identifying the problems of businesses. Why do we print this report every Friday at nine o'clock? Because it's the way we've always done it. The way we've always done it. Yeah, you know. So going through these exercises really gives you the opportunity to validate why you're doing something versus just saying you need to change your business process. So it is. It's more of an education on again, it's another thing. It's almost like you need to have educational seminars on how to choose a software product and what to consider when choosing a software product, and this is for anything. It could be ERP software. It can be, as you had mentioned web software for finance. It can be anything that you need to gain some efficiencies in your business. So I could talk about this AI stuff forever. My mind is still. I have so many things to bring up and to say. I just don't know.
Speaker 3:Right now I'm terrified and excited and motivated all at the same time. It's just a mix of emotions. I think what's going to be a lot of fun is doing rapid prototypes and proofs of concept, because that is so feasible now, just to model things out very quickly, especially on the custom side of things, just what we've done in the past couple of weeks with an internal software product that we're creating. It's months worth of work done in a week.
Speaker 2:I've heard that, like individuals are doing stuff in like it's, it's exponentially faster. It's not just oh, we've shaved off a week. It's something that could take months is now done in hours per se yeah, we've got a customer that has an iowa and web application.
Speaker 3:It's an overall platform for a specific market. It's very niche and we just launched all of this last week and it's been months worth of work. And a new feature that we needed to roll out, a sizable feature. We estimated 65 hours of engineering time Just to get to a proof of concept ofable feature. We estimated 65 hours of engineering time Just to get to a proof of concept of that feature. We used a couple of different tools that we've been exploring. We got nearly production ready on that feature in 25 hours. Not proof of concept at 65 hours, like we thought. Nearly production ready in 25. Wow, so it's coming.
Speaker 2:So, with that, right now, we value time for money. Yeah, and the question that I have with this, just to build with it, I know a lot have this thought, so I want to paint the picture properly. A lot of individuals say, well, we'll use AI, you'll have more time because you can do things faster. But we all in this world mostly here in the United States and also in other countries the shift may be different, but it's you work for 40 hours, we pay you for 40 hours and, okay, well, you have tasks to do. You do your tasks. Oh, you have free time. Here's more tasks. How can we change the time value of money to get the free time that everybody's thinking, because it's now more and I've talked about this on other episodes and I try to ask this to any conversation that we have with talented individuals such as yourself that work with this AI space, with the efficiency how can we change the thought process so that the efficiencies that we gain we're not putting additional pressure on those completing the tasks?
Speaker 3:I don't know if we can You're talking about a massive cultural shift to be able to pull that off. I think that small, independently owned businesses probably have the best opportunity to change the way that they operate, to achieve something like that where we're generating the value, we're being paid for the value that we're generating, and maybe we don't need to work 40, 50, 60 hours a week any longer and people can still be paid well. But I think that's a tall order. It's going to be interesting. I'm in the professional services industry, so even though we have our unique model, there's still a component of trading hours for dollars.
Speaker 3:So we also need to be thinking about well, either we're going to need a lot more work because we can move things through the pipeline the SDLC, so much faster Am I going to see a lot more work come through that SDLC? Or do I need to start thinking about how we change the way that we price and we structure these deals? And so now we're exploring and this is early man, I don't have any decisions on this or even really enough clarity to speak to it in a meaningful way but we have to start thinking about value-based pricing.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes yeah, yes, yes, yeah. That's a great way to put it because and I think you're on the right track and why? That hit me with the software development as a service, because it's a service you're paying for, not time that you're paying for, but internally, are you still budgeting it for the hours for the individuals to do the tasks, or or is it a value you don't have to tell me? This could be a rhetorical question, just that I throw out there, because I see there being a shift of we're offering a service, someone's paying for the service. It doesn't matter how long it takes.
Speaker 2:And again, I say this all the time I want a deck built on my house. I have a contractor come out. He doesn't tell me it's 60 hours, he tells me it's $2,000. And as you go through, if you have changes, you run into issues because they may be rotting wood or some other things that weren't visible. You do a change order, an adjustment or figure out how to mitigate that, but he's still paying his team by the hour to complete the job. So I see software development companies uh, in a loose term as a classification doing the same thing yeah, it'll still exist, I guess at that point.
Speaker 1:Right, it's just a matter of like how you're how, but that's what we need to shift.
Speaker 2:Yeah right, because we'll sell services for a fixed dollar, assuming that that fixed dollar will cover our expenses. Our expenses are going to be time-based for the most part, because that's how our culture is. So how do we fix that?
Speaker 3:all of our employees are salaried, so my costs to operate the business are fixed. The sales and delivery side has to maximize the investment we made in the operating side of the business to generate the margin that we need from the business. So if we can change the conversation with the prospect to hey, we worked with you in a consulting engagement Maybe that's time and material still, I don't know. I'm just spitballing ideas here that we've evaluated what it would mean to create this custom solution for you and the impact it's going to have on the business. You're going to see $100,000 a year ROI and we're going to price this based on value creation. You're going to pay us X and then we deliver it and you know if they're going to get $100,000 a year return on that investment, what percentage of that would they be willing to pay the vendor who created that solution? I don't know if it's going to work. I'm probably going to start having conversations like that.
Speaker 2:Well, it's something I think that needs to be. I think there will be a radical shift in business in the near term. Either it's going to be the small companies or startups like you had mentioned. You know, chris and I would be the next billionaires now with no employees, uh, for example. But I I say this all in jest, but it's it is it's going to have to be a shift because I I see a change in output versus time, versus value, versus dollars. There's a lot of variables there and everyone talks about oh yeah, I would give you a better quality of life. What I'm seeing right now, it's just putting more pressure on individuals, because now they're expected to produce more and those that aren't using AI aren't producing more. So, in essence, it's like this cycle of you need to do more because now you no longer have to do something. It's scary, because I said the same thing to someone the other day. It was yesterday. We were having a conversation.
Speaker 2:I use AI to write an email to somebody. They're using AI to create a response and then it comes back to me. We're getting to that world. There was everybody's using AI to write these lengthy emails where it's almost like just write the one sentence and just call it a day of. Okay, I need. I need a hundred dollars for three hours to do this task instead of this. Oh, how are you doing? We have to do all this. That's but that's is. It goes back to what you're saying is AI is checking AI. But look at these email exchanges that I'm having. And we talked about it. It was all AI generated. It's wild.
Speaker 3:And then it's like I think there's a piece that people are missing right now too, and that is if you look at hopefully you guys have these in your organization, we have them in ours an acceptable use policy for any AI tool that you're bringing into the business. It creates all the guardrails and training to make sure people stay within those guardrails. Well, a big important part of our AUP is that the human being is still responsible for what's generated in output. So if you can generate a lot more stuff really fast through AI, you still have to take the time to look at it. So the cognitive load is can be fairly significant, because you got to check everything that it's generating before you like I'm sure you read that email before you send it, brad.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yes, you know, I do, I do read the email.
Speaker 2:make sure that the, the, the grammar is correct because, again, the AI is not perfect, Even if it gets me 80, 90% of the way there, but I still go through grammarly or something. It still will fix the grammar, but I do read it. I don't want to say it's, I'm just saying conceptually. I didn't have to sit there and draft the email. I drafted the email in a matter of seconds. I now read it, edit it versus having to think of it completely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the flow of thought of writing that it's much faster because you just have to give it a proper prompt. It's to say, I need to respond to this email, blah, blah, blah. And then you do have to read to make sure the flow looks good and it's like, hey, it's not filling in incorrect information. So, a little bit, it's still some time there, but it's still better than in many cases where you're writing it up and you're you know, sometimes your thought goes in different directions and then it doesn't look like it's flowing right.
Speaker 2:So co-pilot or ai can certainly help make it easier for the reader to understand what you're trying to say but to matt's point, the cognitive load is greater on individuals now, and that's the point I was trying to get at is they're responsible for more output. Therefore, there's a bigger pressure today to review that output in a faster time. I don't know, have you?
Speaker 3:guys checked out the Notebook LM at all. Yes, yes, we're using that a lot in the early stages of the sales cycle and talking about cognitive load, and I can create and we're using enterprise so it doesn't. You know, we can share it across the organization, et cetera. Notebook LM Enterprise and we're using enterprise so we can share it across the organization, et cetera. Notebook enterprise. I can connect sources, background information on a company, a prospect. I can drop in PDF outputs of LinkedIn profiles of the decision makers. I can drop in transcripts from the first-time appointment sales calls. I can drop in transcripts from other conversations that we have with them in those early sales cycles and drop in a template of a project brief.
Speaker 3:I always use project briefs to educate the team before I bring in the sales. You know the engineering part of the sales cycle. I can put all that together in a few minutes. But then I've got all of this information in there that I just put in there in a few minutes and I generate the audio podcast style output. I got a 20-minute podcast I got to listen to and then I got to proofread the brief and I got to look at all the information, maybe go on and correct some things. Sometimes the, the, the transcripts are a little wonky. You know, if it doesn't understand things or it doesn't understand acronyms, you go edit those things and then you generate some additional output from notebook that you can use in the in the sales cycle. It's fascinating that you can use in the sales cycle. It's fascinating. But the cognitive load man is no joke. If I'm in a bunch of meetings all week long and I'm doing that all week long.
Speaker 2:I'm tired, yes, no, it's exhausting, it's tough to keep up with, but it's a challenge for individuals to come through when it's a strange world that we're living in. It's a new world and I'm fearful that our brains can't keep up with it, because if humans have been on the planet for 6,000 years, if you look at the advances in technology, it's really within the past 40, 50 years where we've had the most advancements.
Speaker 1:A fraction of that.
Speaker 2:And tooling, and it's almost like the time in between. Now, mcp servers didn't exist months ago. Who knows what will be invented tomorrow based upon this?
Speaker 3:Well, when quantum computing comes out, generative AI is going to be a whole. It's going to be. I don't know, I don't even have, we don't have enough time to even dive into that topic, but quantum's right around the corner.
Speaker 1:Yes, and accessible. Yeah. Yeah, that's a whole topic in itself. I love that. Yeah, I think my mind is you're both overwhelming me here.
Speaker 2:It's, you know, stemmed from a conversation that I would, that we wanted to have a buy versus build again. It's, uh, it's what I love about this. It's um it's dynamic down the road, yeah well, I, I see, and the cost of this will come down, it's I'm sure the the cost of ai right will come down significantly, I think once, once they have the interest it's, I'm sure it would.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the the cost of ai right will come down significantly. I think once, once they have the interest, it's just like anything else. I remember paying for four gig of ram. I paid several hundred dollars back in the day and even for a 1200 2400 baud modem. I was like whoa, I just spent 300 on a 2400 baud modem. I mean, I think it would be the same thing, like this email used to be the same. You used to pay by the email. People didn't even realize this right Again this is how old I am.
Speaker 1:Younger generations didn't know Like personal PCs were. Like three grand, four grand at that time, and now it's like Three grand.
Speaker 2:What are you talking about?
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, the old original desktop. I remember going to like what the Circuit City or CompuServe. I remember my dad and I went to the store and just seeing these computers were like $3,000, you know, two to $3,000 for a desktop that could barely hold a few photos. You know, in today's yeah, that was exactly it.
Speaker 2:That's what I mean. That's why I was saying I laughed at the three grand, because it's a $10,000. Anyway, it's a nice walk down Maryland. But, matt, thank you for taking the time to speak with us. I would like to see if we could schedule a follow-up in a couple of months to maybe talk about the buy versus build but I have a feeling that things will be significantly different in a few months and also maybe continue on your journey of value of time. Time, value of money, I guess you could call it as well as some of the other things that your team has experienced with AI and their workflow. But thank you again. We appreciate you taking the time to speak with us today. If anyone would like more information on the services that you provide, also your return on investment calculator, which I'm going to go take a look at after this as well, to be honest with you, see if we can incorporate using that, because I like the approach that you have what's the best way to get in contact with you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so they can visit our website, wwwredhawk-techcom. They can just search for Matt Striplehoff on LinkedIn and reach out to connect. Happy to have a conversation with your listeners, you know if anybody is interested. But yeah, this has been a lot of fun. Yeah, I would love to come back and spend time with you guys. It was a blast.
Speaker 2:Excellent, great. We appreciate it. Again, thank you very much for your time. It's truly the currency of life. Once you spend it, you can't get it back, so we truly do value any time that you spend with us, because it's time you're not doing some great things with AI at the point, so enjoy. Thank you, ciao, ciao. Thanks, matt. Thank you, chris, for your time for another episode of In the Dynamics Corner Chair, and thank you to our guests for participating.
Speaker 1:Thank you, brad, for your time. It is a wonderful episode of Dynamics Corner Chair. I would also like to thank our guests for joining us. Thank you for all of our listeners tuning in as well. You can find Brad at developerlifecom, that is D-V-L-P-R-L-I-F-E dot com, and you can interact with them via Twitter D-V-L-P-R-L-I-F-E. You can also find me at matalinoio, m-a-t-a-l-i-n-o dot I-O, and my Twitter handle is matalino16. And you can see those links down below in the show notes. Again, thank you everyone. Thank you and take care.
