Steve Lucas: Why AI Won’t Replace You—Unless You Let It

To be crystal clear, your AI strategy will fail without integrated systems. So the wake up call is fix your digital foundation now or you're not going to survive the AI era. Hey, everyone, welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health and everything in between. We guess what I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us. And today's conversation is all about AI and where it's headed. And we are jumping into the deep end here with Steve Lucas, who is the CEO of Boomi, but has also been an executive over at SAP, over at Salesforce, the CEO of Marketo and stewarded that acquisition by Adobe.

And now is the CEO of Boomi and right in the thick of things when it comes to AI. As I was prepping for this, you know, when he and I had the epiphany of AI early 2023 at around the same time, where as soon as we saw it, it was, oh, this is different and we got to do something about this. And so he, as soon as he kind of recognized it, he went right into his team and mandated that every aspect of their business has to be integrated with AI. And so over the years, he's really been AI first as a business and using it in every aspect of his business and his life. And what he does now is talking about integrated systems. And so the book that he put out there, which is really what the driver of this entire conversation was, it's called Digital Impact, the human element of AI driven tech transformation.

And we talked a lot about the AI components of this, and I just kept searching for where is the human involved? And he gave some great answers and some great insights of what we're, what we need to go back to. And the question I always have is, where are the fundamentals going to come from? And what are the fundamentals now? How do we get back to the human connection? And I think AI actually has a really good chance of bringing that connection back. And so as, as doom and gloom as a lot of people are about getting replaced by AI and all that stuff, he doesn't have that attitude. He has it as, you know, the people who are going to use AI are going to be the ones who thrive. The people who don't, yeah, they're going to be the ones that get replaced.

So I'd really recommend listening to this episode because it's a wake up call. If you're not on this stuff right now, if you're not jumping into this stuff now and figuring out how to leverage it, the people who are, are going to replace you. So I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Let's make it happen. Steve Lucas, welcome to the Make It Happen Monday podcast, my friend. How are you doing today? I am. It's fantastic. I'm also thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me. Yeah, thanks for coming on, man. I've been looking forward to this. I've been, I feel like for me, I'm like Paul Revere over here, like the British are coming, the British are coming. And, you know, the AI is coming, the AI is coming.

And, you know, living in the SaaS world and the tech world, obviously we're at the front end of it. And, you know, once you step out of it, not too many people are paying attention to it. And I think this, this one's a little different. And so I'm really interested in your perspective, you know, of what you're seeing out there. But before we get into that, talk to me a little bit about where you're coming from. And we can all, we'll get into your experience here, but talk to me a little bit about growing up, right? Like where'd you, where'd you grow up, parents? How'd you get the kind of entrepreneurial sales bug in you? And where'd that all come from? And then we'll talk about some of your cool experience with the companies that you work for.

Grew up in a small town in North Carolina. Never thought I'd be here. My, my father's a nuclear engineer by, by profession, retired now. But when I was a kid, you know, some dads take their kids out, you know, play basketball or whatever. And I did that with my dad too. But our, our, one of our many hobbies was putting together computers from old parts. He'd bring home from work and that's where I got the bug. I loved it. I loved everything about it. Still do. In fact, my son growing up, you know, I'd, I'd put together computers with him and now he's in the, in the technology field as well. So I caught the bug then just being fascinated by how all this stuff comes together and works. And not shockingly, I work for an integration company now.

I was going to say, it kind of doesn't, yeah, those roots are pretty strong. It sounds like. So then would you, and actually, you know what? I should have looked at this. Where'd you, you went to Colorado? Cause you're in Colorado, right? Did you go to, um, university of Colorado? University of Colorado. Yep. What's, uh, and what'd you study there? Well, I actually started in engineering. I thought that was a good idea. It was kind of like, my dad did it. I should do it. Why not? Yeah. Um, and then I learned probably after like my third calculus course is like math is hard. Um, wasn't really that. I mean, math is hard, but now it was, you know, like I, I found myself, uh, you know, as I, I'd spent a lot of time.

I mean, my, my, my, my dad, you know, exposed me early on to things that programming language is like Fortran before I even went to college. Um, so I kind of walked into it. It's not that, you know, I was this like sophisticated, super genius or anything like that. I just, I didn't find those things as interesting as how technology can transform a business. And, you know, back in the nineties, when I was in college, it was one of those things like you just look at the, the, the evolution from, you know, PC to client server to these, you know, we, we, we saw the, the, the formation and emergence of companies like SAP become big powerhouses. Then I was fascinated by that. So that really kind of drew me into the, the, the field that I went into.

So ultimately, um, you know, got a, a business degree, um, but I've carried that technical skillset with me. And in fact, literally my, my first job while in college was working for Microsoft, uh, doing pre-sales like sales engineering. So I'd, I'd walk around and demo stuff. My claim to fame is in 1995, but the windows 95 launch standing at a, uh, now non-existent company called incredible universe. And I got to demo on television, mind you, putting a CD into a tray and just lightly tapping the tray. Cause it's on television, right. And, uh, letting that tray close and then talk about the power of windows to be able to open that program right there on it. Hey, I hope you're enjoying the conversation so far.

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Now let's get back to the conversation. I didn't, I didn't disclose the fact that I had a Mac at home and it had done that for years, but, you know, nice. It is interesting because I graduated in 90, I graduated college in 98 and it is interesting to kind of see that that was really an interesting time. And I feel like we're at another inflection point now with this AI stuff and back then the internet, but it was a little bit slower. I mean, I don't know if you remember, you obviously remember, like a lot of people like thought it was a fad, you know, be like, ah, this internet thing. Like, this is kind of stupid, right? Whatever. And so it took a little while to get on and then there was the dial up and it made it, you know, kind of clunky, which is why a lot of people didn't love it.

But then, you know, high speed. So it evolved. Now, this feels different. We were talking before we even got on and just around this out for the people that don't know. And you should look at Steve's, you know, LinkedIn profile, but you know, went from SAP to Salesforce and then you were CEO of Marketo, right? Yep. Yep. CEO of Marketo, Adobe acquired us in 2018. Yeah. And then, and then now you're CEO here. So now you're right in the thick of it, right? So your integrated systems, you're, you're, you had a mandate that I read that, that you have to like, talk to me about the mandate that you gave to your team, because this is the rip the bandaid off. I think there's a lot of people debating right now on how do I go from the old to the new, right?

We're, I think we're all in a legacy model right now from a business standpoint and everything. And nobody knows what the future is. And so many people are scared to kind of say, I got to change. And I want to get into that with you about how do we do this? But you came in pretty heavy with, no, this is a straight up mandate. We have to, you know, integrate AI into customer success and everything else. So could you walk us through a little bit where that came from? Well, I mean, it comes from, you know, and it's, it's like, you know, it seems so obvious now to a certain degree, we're talking about AI and the revolution and blah, blah, blah. But, you know, two, two years ago, maybe two and a half years ago, when, when I think it was ChatGBT2 kind of became part of the public lexicon, everybody's talking about it.

I don't know about you, but those moments in your life where you experience the kind of the internet for the first time and your eyebrows are stuck about halfway up your head and you go, this is big, right? Or that, that, that time when you're like addicted to your Blackberry and you think, well, everything's going to suck if it doesn't have a keyboard. And then the first time you used the iPhone and again, eyebrows up and you just know it's going to change everything, right? Um, and, uh, and that moment happened with, to me with, with certainly with ChatGBT, I'm sure for Sam Altman, he was like, yeah, I knew that for a long, long time, Steve, thanks. But for me, you know, eyebrow, eyebrows glued halfway up my forehead, looking around and going, uh, we're going to rewrite everything.

That was, that was that moment. And I went into work here at Boomi. I was on fire, man. They might as well set a bear loose in the office. I was like, we are changing everything because this is going to change how we write our code. It's going to eat software from the bottom up, but it's also going to change how we use software from the top down. Look, and this is why I wrote the, this book, which we'll get to in a little bit digital impact is my, my view is, you know, like what human being wakes up in the morning and says, you know, today, I'm excited about logging into my expense report system and approving expense reports. It's like, no, no normal human does that, right? Nobody does that, but you're not going to have to do it.

I I'm going to, I'm not going to spend my time logging into a system in the very, very near future. And I'm talking for all of them. I'm going to converse with an AI agent that understands me, my job at work, what I do. And it's just going to come at me with things like, Hey, Steve, guess what? You got to, you got to know, you got three expense reports to approve. You want me to cover that? Yep. Absolutely. In the background, there's a lot of work going on, but it was that moment where I went in and it was like top to bottom with the engineering organization. And in a mandate to the entirety of my company that we, there's literally AI and everything. I will not take a meeting at work. If we haven't, the team that's talking to me, hasn't taken the opportunity to just ask it, whether it's chat GPT or Claude or Gemini, or pick one of those, you know, kind of generative or transfer or pre-trained transformers.

Like what does it think? And the reason why is because the waterline has gone up, right? There's always something you miss. It's always going to help you think at a higher level. It's time. And I think that to me, I had the same aha moment, right? And it was a little bit of a panic for what I do in my industry, because when I saw it come out early, early 2023, I, I had the aha moment, but it was like a panic moment. Cause I was like, wait a minute, I'm irrelevant. Like, like the, like the one way distribution of content and information and training. Because for me, like, you know, I train 30, 40, 50 people at a time and you learn differently than I do. And so, and so I do my best to, you know, make sure that neurolinguistic programming, I'm connecting with everybody.

But inherently you might be a visual learner and somebody else might be, whatever. I can't adjust for that. Whereas AI can. And I, and I knew that, and I, and I knew IP all of a sudden was irrelevant because it's all out there and it's smarter than us. And so I've been on this journey trying to figure out how do I stay relevant in this world. And I think that's what a lot of companies and reps are trying to figure out right now as well. And so with, with what you're seeing right now, cause you, you light bulb went off, you went, you know what, we're doing this. We're jumping in the deep end with both feet here. Cause we have to, and, and to a certain degree, you kind of practice what you preach with your company and what you do, right.

And how you integrate everything. And you can reference, you know, some of the pieces of book here of how do you recommend companies do this in a way that isn't like, do you recommend they do the same thing as you as like, Hey, you know what, screw it. It's mandate. We have to do this because we don't, we're going to get run over. Or is there, is there a structure that you can provide an organization to try to figure out how to make the transition and I'll bring it to sales. There is a legitimate argument right now. I don't think it's the right one. There's a legitimate argument to burn your entire sales work to the ground and start AI native with AI native tech and AI native sales reps and take your 50 SDRs and turn them into five.

Give them some killer ass personalization stuff and insights and those types of things. And then go, just go to work. Right. So in lieu of just firing 45 people on your sales team and try to leverage that, like, where are you with this transition right now? Is it that imperative that we rip the bandaid off or is there transition structure that companies can apply? Well, you know, I mean, as you know, contextually, that's going to vary company by company a little bit. Right. If I was building a new organization, the startup, I mean, like, I would start, I would start with AI. I wouldn't start with traditional systems and then kind of bolt AI on afterwards. I'd start with AI. Right. And there's companies out there that are getting some notoriety for saying, oh, we're abandoning Salesforce and we're, you know, I don't think that's going to happen.

I think that these systems like a Salesforce and SAP, whatever, they become databases, right? They're convenient databases where stuff about my sales or my orders for my product exist. The difference being now is like, we don't, you know, but those, those databases, the Salesforce.coms, they were invented for humans to access those systems, right? A sales rep, you access it. You put stuff in. And by the way, we know that the most inaccurate data entry people on the planet are salespeople. I love them. I was one of them. Right. So I get it. But that is true as well. But like, if you kind of, I'm going to, I'm going to come back to your question here, just a little bit of a, you know, kind of left or right flank walk here, which is like the reason I wrote this book, Digital Impact, is because I firmly believe, including sales context, that there's a wake up call that organizations need, which is our collectively, every organization has fragments and systems, disconnected data.

And we almost talk about it like in a ha-ha context, like, oh my God, it's so hard to get whatever, right? But to be crystal clear, your AI strategy will fail without integrated systems. So the wake up call is fix your digital foundation now, or you're not going to survive the AI era. It doesn't matter how quickly you move, how nimble you are. You could just kind of hop around, do a thing. If you don't fix your digital foundation, you won't survive. Not in this AI era. It's going to move too quickly. I mean, it was just for those of us, you meet, like we're, we're, we're part of it. We're watching it every day. I mean, wait 24 hours, a new model, a new, you know, something comes out. That's just transformative, right?

So it's moving quickly, but the fundamental truth, again, fix the foundation or you won't survive. So that's that. Now, in terms of practical advice that I could give, which we'll come back to in a minute. Can I, can I jump on that real quick? Yeah. Because I'm curious on, you know, on, can I, can AI fix the, the, the foundation? So I'm going to use Salesforce as an example. I was kind of used, I mean, I've trained Salesforce from 2010 to 2018. I have every single rep that went through there. I know them really well. And I've always kind of joke, like they're the, you know, they've turned it into SAP, the big, you know, Oracle or whatever. And when they buy companies, they integrate them, but they don't really, you know what I mean?

Like Einstein was a thing for five years before people even knew what it was and, you know, Benioff put it out there. And so it wasn't really integrated. And, and, but now it seems like there's an AI where you can just look at it and be like, Hey, could you fix that? And AI will fix it. So I guess my question is, is when you talk about fixing your foundation, right? Data quality, those types of things, doesn't, isn't AI an answer to that? Well, it can be. I mean, what AI can't do yet is stop leaders from making profoundly bad decisions. They, it just can't. As an example. So for example, like if you map out your core systems, so the average company today has over 360 SAS applications. Yeah. That's, that's a fact.

360 SAS applications. 360. Shit. So if the average company has 360 SAS applications, you know, this before I can even ask the question, is that tenable in a world, in an AI driven world? No, it doesn't make any sense. Right? So you gotta, you gotta do things like map out your core systems. That's part of what the digital impact book argues is literally map out your core systems. Number one. Number two is identify fragmentation, manual processes, silo data, and make those good decisions to invest in integration automation, but also simplification of your architecture. If you don't do that, then AI, no matter how intelligent it is, I mean, like humans are pretty smart and we have challenges navigating these enterprise systems.

Like AI can be super smart. But it's going to have those same challenges, right? So it's fashioned after humans to a certain degree. So all I'm saying is those, those, those are, those are truths that we can operate in no matter what. Now, like coming to your, your sales question, like how is, how is AI going to transform sales? I think in the short, there's, there's like short-term and long-term, but I want to come back to it. There's a thing that I'm just, I can't let go of and it's part of the digital impact book, but I'll come back to it like a teaser there. Coming back to your question, like how is AI transforming sales processes? Well, I think first of all, it's removing friction in sales process.

That's exactly what I think you were getting at is automate repetitive tasks, streamline workload, uh, clean up data on the back end, right? Sales person enters bad data, blah, blah, blah. All that stuff is happening, right? Like an agent's just going to crawl through your sales data and go, huh? There are 74 different versions of this same account. Let me organize there. That's going to happen. But then beyond that, it's going to help reps prioritize leads, automate follow-up, optimize customer interactions. Again, that's happening. I got my first, and it wasn't even creepy outreach from an AI avatar that was actually new things about Boomi. It was quite impressive. Maybe I'm just more curious than anything, but I listened to the robot talk to me for a while.

So that was kind of cool. No, I do too. Yeah, exactly. And, and, and within agents, the, the, you know, AI, as we move to the, the world of agentic AI, AI, these agents are going to proactively engage with prospects. Like what I just said, manage deal flow, handle admin tasks, and all that's going to happen. And then what's the result is shorter sales cycles, better close rates, better customer attention. We're going to get all that in the short term. The real question is this. It's still largely human driven where we're thinking about stuff. We're acting and then AI is helping us react. There's a, a tipping point. I believe it's not far off where AI is going to be as a seller, my proactive coach.

It's going to tell me, look, you're wasting a lot of time over here and you're, you know, on this smaller opportunity. And I see a bigger thing for you over there. That's where this is headed. All right. I never thought I'd say this, but I don't take notes on my sales calls anymore. And it's not because I'm getting lazy. It's because I'm using otter.ai to take them for me. Otter.ai lets me invite an AI note taker into all my sales calls, which not only transcribes them for me, but summarizes them, pulls out sales specific insights and syncs everything to my CRM. Oh, and it has an incredible AI chat feature that allows me to ask it any question I have about any meeting. Even if my note taker wasn't in the meeting, I can simply upload any recorded conversation to Otter.

The amount of time it personally saves me is absolutely ridiculous. And that's not even scratching the surface of what it can do for teams. So I'm super excited to be partnering with them to give you an exclusive offer to get otter.ai for sales today for free. Go to otter.ai, that's O-T-T-E-R dot A-I forward slash JBSales to get your free offer and start saving time and selling more effectively today. How dangerous is this, though, as it relates to the internet and where AI is pulling information? I understand a specific LLM that is your data, your company, that's a different story to me. But my fear right now is that we've gone from a search engine, Google, and however you want to describe Google, it's yes, it fed us the information that Google wanted to feed us.

If you and I search for the exact same thing, you and I would get very different links. But at least it gave us a little bit of the autonomy to kind of look through those links and be like, ooh, you know what, let me read this article and let me choose what is the truth, okay? Whereas now it's gone to an answer engine and it's giving you the answer because it's smarter and whatever, but it's pulling off of a data set that is inherently not accurate, right? With the internet and all the crap that's out there. So how do you, how do you, my fear right now, and we'll get to, you know, teams and everything, but as reps, unfortunately, I think a lot of us are least path to resistance, give me the easy button, give me the silver bullet.

And so I'm going to search for something, I'm going to whatever, it's going to give me the answer and I'm going to take that for what it is and I'm going to just use it without context, without depth, without curiosity. So how do you balance that with what you do, with what teams do, with a rep does to use it the right way? Because just like anything, if it's used the right way, I think it's a superpower. If it's used the wrong way, it basically just makes us irrelevant, just like cadence tools and those types of things. If you use them the right way, fantastic. If you use them as a spam engine, I don't understand why sales reps have to get paid to push those buttons. Yeah. Well, again, so I think, first of all, what you're getting at, which is part of the book itself, is that AI, we've established as extraordinary.

So I won't state that part again, but it's like garbage in, garbage out. That rule, it's the reason it's a rule, right? There are many reasons garbage in, garbage out is a rule. It held true with business intelligence and analytics, which I worked in for over a decade in software and we all pitched everybody on, look, if you have great analytics tools, it'll be the answer to everything. You know everything. But the reality is it's garbage in, garbage out. Same with AI, right? Now, the reality is like the internet is an extraordinary tool or database, right? But as you know, as you already cited, like half the information is crap, half the information is good. And we have to sort through that.

I think AI actually understanding contextually what I want, what I am working on, but also then taking corporate or company information and putting that together, I think is extraordinarily powerful. Case in point. Now, you know, you and I are, we're talking about, you know, my upcoming book, Digital Impact. That being said, I do run a software company called Boomi and Boomi, we've built a, we have our own all-knowing AI agent called ChatB, Boomi. So ChatB, what it does is literally we've trained ChatB on our products, our pricing, our packaging, customer purchase behavior, when they buy, when they don't. We feed gong information into ChatB. So literally as a salesperson, I can ask ChatB and get a profoundly more accurate answer in terms of, well, what kind of pitch should I craft?

Is there a pitch deck in the Boomi catalogs of the thousands and thousands of pitch decks that we have that perfectly suits this exact scenario? Help me understand what's the right pricing and packaging. We've actually built that. That's been in production for almost a year now at Boomi. Organizations must build these things as part of this, this world that we live in. So, but Steve, why not then just give that to the customer and let them ask the questions and have it tailor all the answers and give it the pitch deck? We are. Eventually, that's the plan. So really for us. So then what are you telling your sales reps? Because if I'm a sales rep right now watching the power of this thing and all of a sudden I realize this sucker is going to get unleashed to our clients to ask the same shit and I'm just the middleman here, I'm wondering to myself, what in the, like, where do I fit?

So what's that answer? Well, so what we're going to give to our customers, the end game, you know, for us is give our customers the ability to have a conversation with this agent that, where they can ask things like, well, you know, where's the latest content on, you know, this company's API management solution from Boomi, or what, what is my licensing for, you know, this particular product? So I'll be able to ask all those questions. What the job of this agent will be is to bring humans and the customer more closely together. Customer asks questions, agent responds to those, but then the agent can also send a follow-up note to the salesperson and say, hey, there are three things that the customer wants, you know, our existing customer wants.

Now, obviously there's permissions and data privacy and a million other things that we've got to work through on this. But I believe that this AI technology will elevate our sellers to think more about the human to human relationship with their customer, less, oh, you need this document. Let me run over and retrieve it and give it to you. That, that stuff is low value activity. Your point, a customer could ask and get that information. What they want is the empathy of human to human that we can understand. We can then empathize or convey empathy and then work with that customer to custom tailor to their meat. I think you and I both know, um, we're years of evolution down, down, downstream from this, but look, the selling relationship between the customer and the seller and AI in the middle, you're right.

It's going to evolve. Yeah. Right. It's almost, it's funny. It was old as new again. Like, are we going back to steak dinners and golf again? Because that's, that's the, that's the value that we can bring versus the, the insights and the data. Well, that's part of it though, too, is I think that at some point, if you, we fast forward to 24 months from now, when the world is awash with AI agents, and we talk about this in digital impact. So there, there, for every human, there'll be, you know, somewhere between 10 to 100 agents doing things for us. That's just going to be fact. I'm already seeing much of that today. So when that happens, what's most important, it might be dinner. That's, that's, that's, what's most important.

And, you know, the, the, the, the productivity gains that we get by an individual seller, not worrying about, well, did I get the right PowerPoint at the right time for the right person? Or someone wants, you know, an overview of their, you know, what, what, what they're licensed to use with our product. Those, those things, they're important, but those things become real taunted, nearly automated and just, you know, done conveniently with AI. And it leaves more time for us to be exactly what we are, which is human. It's interesting. Uh, and that, and actually it's also for me that, that would be great in a lot of ways. Cause I, you know, almost 50 here. I I've, you know, know how to develop rapport relationships.

I've done face-to-face selling my, the majority of my life. And, you know, this, this virtual world has been great for me at this stage of my career. Cause I, I don't want to go anymore, anywhere, anywhere anymore. Um, but a lot of these kids have grown up in this digital non-relationship development world, right? Where it's, I won't say transactional, but this is somewhat transactional when it's like, we got 30 minutes. Sorry, there's no rapport. I can't see you're a fisherman. Your, your virtual backgrounds, you know, blurred out. So I'm here to ask some questions and give you some information. And we have a generation that doesn't know how to develop rapport, doesn't know how to, you know, build those relationships.

And so it's kind of an interesting spot where they're going to be in of, of getting, you know, all the stuff that they thought was sales in a lot of ways is now getting taken over by things that are better, quite frankly. Well, if you look at the, what you're calling out, I, I think that's, it's so incredibly important to just like, if we zoom out from your point for a minute and kind of ask, how did we get here? And this is exactly what the, the, the reason the digital impact, you know, has the human elements in the subtitle is, is this. So way back when, before, you know, all of these lovely, you know, applications existed that quote unquote, make us more productive, right? Well, selling was that it was the human to human relationship.

It was go break bread together, hence the phrase, right? So we would do those things and it was looking someone in the eye. Well, then all these applications come along that are going to make us more productive, but what do we spend our time doing as sellers entering the, into a CRM thing on forecast calls, seeing what Clary says, you know, about our forecast and all that, that's not time with a customer. That's not what that is, right? And, and that's where we spend, but we think we're being productive. Well, along comes AI and we go, oh my gosh, well, could AI, would it replace us? What would it do? But what if AI handles those things proactively for us? What if it does, what, what does it gift back to us?

The exact thing that the book talks about is the human elements of this. We, we, in some respects, get our time back from these productivity enhancing, ironically, time consuming applications to go spend more time with our customer. It is amazing with all these applications, promising productivity. I think the stats show that we're the, we're as least productive as we we've ever been from a sale. I mean, Salesforce or state of sales says like whatever, 27% of a sales reps time or 37% of the sales reps time is actually focused on selling and integrating and engaging with a client was the rest is all admin crap. So, and you will see your point there. You will see that in the next 20 more, 20, 24 months flip to the percentage.

It should be 70%, 80% or more spent with customers. All right. So let's get back to the integration piece, right? I think a chapter two, uh, that you have, uh, integration, uh, using systems and fragmentation. Are we headed towards, you know, you brought it up earlier, you know, mainframes to personal computers to cloud. Like we kind of go ebbs and flows in the tech world. We go from dispersed to consolidated to disperse to consolidated. And it, and it feels like this we're, we're, we're moving. I look at all these point solutions. Okay. All these AI point solutions that are just inundating my inbox. Hey, John, could you check this out and give us your feedback? And I've just put up a wall at this point.

Like, look, I'm so sick of looking at all these stupid tools. Like if I need something, I'll go find it at this point. Um, and I just look at them. I'm like, there's, I don't, I don't see how you survive because now I look at Salesforce or Microsoft or HubSpot, the big platform, like real platform, the SAP is who have the platforms now can light up these point solutions. Whereas before it was like, Oh cow, now let me integrate, let me buy this company and integrate it. And it's, nah, it's probably not going to work. Now it's, Hey, could you make that thing exactly like, you know, kind of that and, and, and now it works. So help me understand how this, how the point solutions, where are we with consolidation and integrate and integration of systems from a platform standpoint versus these point solutions that are trying to chip away.

And, and I don't know what mark they're trying to make these days. Cause it doesn't seem like a lot of them are going to survive. Well, you did. That's kind of a left-hand right-hand discussion, right? For us is on the left hand. So you have all these competing macro forces. You've got the classic competing macro forces of, or called, uh, Oracle, SAP, IBM, Microsoft that, and these are not forces. And, and of course, hyperscalers, AWS, Google that are all competing for our time and attention and their share of wallet, right? Those macro forces are not going away. And then you've got other macro forces, like obviously large language models and pre-train transformers and all that, that's a macro force.

But then these micro forces where, you know, everybody is experimenting with AI and you're, you're kind of seeing these kind of like ankle biter distractions. Oh, this is interesting. That's interesting. But it's, there's, it's so voluminous. There's so much of it out there. It's really difficult to pay attention to like all of it, impossible to pay attention to all of it. Um, but, uh, you know, we, we explore this concept in the, in the, the digital impact book, um, around on the left hand is how are organizations transforming and simplifying. So there's, there's, um, stories around like the Australian red cross, uh, as a case in point, massive number of systems and the Australian red cross, as you know, is an emergency response organization.

And, um, the only way that the Australian red cross is able to properly respond to disasters of what, you know, which, which certainly happened, um, was to integrate their systems, irrespective of how many they have, we do, you know, there's a story about, you know, my company Boomy doing that with them and they were able to scale in 24 hours from a, a, a capacity to respond to 30 emergency incidents or transactions to 300,000 a day. Holy shit. But that's, well, that's the kind of like transformation you get if you drive simplification, drive integration, right? You get that kind of scale in the, in this, this world of AI though. Like where I'd be curious, what do you think of this? But what I think is this is I think that if you asked me, would I rather spend my day going through different enterprise applications that I'm obligated to do, like an expense report approval thing, and then, uh, approve this higher thing.

And, and, and kind of all this stuff that no one really in their right mind wants to do where we started to rather do that, or would I rather spend my day in a conversation with an intelligent AI that's aware of me and is connected to all the different systems out there, but it's really distilling down the things that are important and prioritizing those things. I think we'd rather live in that second world, right? So I think what you're going to see is a massive, massive disruption in terms of, you know, SAP or Google as a case in point, Google fights for eyeballs. That's what they do, right? And what they, their, their power is in the little box. I type something in and then it comes up and never in my lifetime did I think that I would see a technology sufficiently disruptive to come along and displace Google's dominance in terms of not just search, but the command of my attention.

And I can tell you today that, you know, having a large language model that, that understands me and I can just interact with, and it finds things like a search. I need information. I need goes out to the various systems that I need to work in Salesforce, SAP, whatever, but I'm not leaving that experience or that environment. I'm not needing, I don't need to know 74 different applications and how to find that ridiculous expense report to approve. I don't need to know those things. So that, that, that is where we're headed. What does it change is the criticality of integration, right? You need to connect all those systems. You're just connecting it to the AI. Yeah. So let's talk about decision-making in this world, um, with the need for speed and, and agility, but also, you know, the, the, the fear of going in the wrong direction too long.

And so how do you balance right now for you? Cause it seems like you, you make decisions pretty damn quick, right? You saw that there was a light bulb. You came in, you said, we got to do this. Right. And I'm similar to you. Like I, I, I, I'm not a details guy, right? Like I, I think I've been blessed with the ability to usually walk into a situation and with a couple of data points, be like, uh, that's a good idea or that's not a good idea. Let's go without having to overanalyze it. Right. Like I I'd rather make mistakes and move forward and break things than overanalyze something and not make the decision. But how do you balance your decision-making right now with as fast as you see things are moving with a, with not just, just going right.

What, what's your process for the company for you right now and how you structure your decision process and where you decide to place your bets. That was a really good question. Um, as you know, well, I, I, I have, um, I've, I've tried to consume every bit of information available out there right now. So this, uh, I'll come back to the, the, the decision-making question. Now, are you asking decision-making relative to AI or just decision-making in a, in a broader like for, as a CEO of a business in this space, moving as fast as you are with seeing the competition, seeing AI, like you, you said, you'd never thought you'd see Google. Well, there might be a competitor to you out there that you might show, see tomorrow and go, Holy shit, what happened?

I was, I was, I was blockbuster. I think you bring that up in, in something like, we're going to have a million blockbusters out there. How do you make sure that you're not blockbuster, but you're also not the fly by night. See you later because you made a decision that took you in the wrong direction. Yeah. I think that it's, first of all, it's very nuanced right now because it is like, literally, if you don't like the weather with AI, wait 24 hours. Uh, number one, number two is what I, there are truths, things that I think now kind of like several years into the, you know, AI is out there. Um, one is that how we build our products, um, is obviously changing rapidly, but the unequivocal, um, fact in my mind is that 90% of our software at some point in the future will be written by AI.

Um, now that doesn't mean that it's not curated by our very brilliant engineers that that's the, the, the, the trick in all of this. So I think, um, and, and we, you know, today I'd say probably 40% of our code is written by engineers. You know, we have all these pronouncements, you know, from these different CEOs. Oh, it's all going to be written. The reality is like, you have to be really careful with some of these, you know, kind of code generators. So I think that you will see a balance of code creation and code curation evolve. However, we are investing heavily in that because we can deliver better, broader, uh, products to our customers. So that to me is an unequivocal fact on the left hand, on the right hand, um, is these, like these large language models creating more intelligent software.

They're not going away, right? Could you imagine a world without them now? No. Right. So they're not going to go away. So I think standardizing on a few of those models and investing heavily in how do I get high rate of return in, um, in those models by integrating my data, ensuring the data is clean and structured, um, then testing out the, the, uh, the benefits of those large language models in use cases, like with sellers, for example, um, which is what we're doing, right? Is things like forecasting, uh, you know, pipeline health, more effectively coaching our sales reps, all that stuff. So those two things I think are incredibly safe, super high ground. Every company that wants to survive in this AI driven era, you must do those two things, right?

Is, and I'm not talking about experimentation with AI. I'm talking about implementation and getting AI into your company, like chat B that we talked about early. So to me, decisions around those two things are no regret moves. Those are the no regret moves. I think the hard part is where you start doing things like, um, you know, for you, you're probably super familiar with, but like the space of robotic process automation, right? There's a lot of RPA vendors out there that came in and built these robots that would record a human doing a task. And you could repeat that. I think we're finding with AI agents that you can just tell the agent to do that task. And it just does. So I think agentic automation is going to be profoundly transformative for organizations.

So I, as a CEO, when I look at my company internally, like I'm, I'm constantly looking at how can we use agentic automation? Now that is a fast moving, fast evolving space. It really is. But those are, for me, when I think about those elements, those are no regret foundational things where your company's not going to get left behind. Um, what I don't think is that we're headed to a space in the next few years where I'll just tell AI, well, I want this like super sophisticated use case scenario and just go magically figure it out. And it's going to go through all the layers of complexity with enterprise software and put it all together and serve it up on a silver platter. That, that is a long, long way away.

Um, all right. Let's finish up on this one. Cause I'm, um, this is the one I'm struggling with the most is when you and I grew up in sales, um, we did the grunt work, right? We did the shit work. We did the, you know, writing down on handwritten things, you know, making the cold calls, updating this. And that's, I, this was before CRM even, there even was a CRM and I was writing them on like a stack of papers and, you know, double spacing them so I could, you know, write underneath it and keep my notes with different pens. Um, all that grunt work allowed you and I to be in a position today where we can have a conversation around business. We don't have to follow a script. We, we, the fundamentals were instilled in us, whether we were trained on the fundamentals, which most of us weren't, or we just learned them out of pure.

We had to now that those fundamentals and that learning ground, and I'm picking on sales, but I'm picking on any industry, legal, you know, like think about the legal industry. You, you go to law school, you get your, then this first three to five years is, it's just shit work. You're just looking up case precedent. You're reading cases. Now a lawyer just goes, Hey, could you scan the library of Congress and give me the three cases that are most relevant to me? So I guess the two questions that I'm trying, that I'm personally struggling with right now are A, where do the fundamentals come from at this point for the younger generation? And B, what are the fundamentals at this point? Well, the fundamentals have changed.

I mean, first of all, I agree completely. Our generation, uh, as far as I'm concerned, best one out there, we had to walk up, you know, uphill both ways, the school, all that, you know. Gen X's baby. Gen X's all day. It is, you know, I, I do have this, I do have this appreciation for, you know, the, quite literally the first email address that I ever got. Like I was thrilled the first time I used a Blackberry, right? These productivity enhancing systems. So I will say this before we get to the fundamentals is that if there is a seller today that is not AI literate. If there is a seller today that isn't using AI in absolutely everything, I'm talking down to like, before you send that email to your customer, check with AI, right?

If you don't have that ingrained in your consciousness, um, you know, it's kind of like, I mean, I think it's just people that weren't computer literate back in the day, right? It's like, you got to have that literacy. Now that's, that's kind of, and to me, by the way, that is a fundamental, it's part of the new fundamentals. I believe, I think that, um, I have a rule that I have followed for a long, long time and it has served me well. And we're going to come back to kind of like this human to human interaction. I do not let a day expire in my life without reaching out to and interacting with a customer ever. And I'm talking like, if it's five o'clock in the afternoon and I've got a couple more hours of work, but I'm like, I'm going to dinner with my family at seven.

What am I doing? Blah, blah, blah. I will make an effort to reach out to a customer through an email, a text on LinkedIn every single day. I am amazed at here's a fundamental at how many sellers let a day expire without interacting with a customer. This is our job. This is what we do. And it could be a simple thank you note. It could be a, hey, would love to catch up sometime. It doesn't need to be epiphonic. It could be anything. So if, if I could offer up a fundamental, I don't know where all the fundamentals come from. While we've got new fundamentals, AI, I think old fundamentals, like a day never expires without meeting a customer, um, or talking to a customer. I'll give you one more fundamental.

I do not let a day. And this is like, I'm 52 years old. I've been in a software for almost 30 years and I have lived by this rule. I meet someone new every single day, every day. Now, when I was at companies like SAP, when we, you know, when we didn't have things like LinkedIn in the early days, I would just open up the company address book and email and I pick someone. And that was the person that was getting my email on a daily basis. But nowadays you can find someone on LinkedIn. You can drive that outreach. And, uh, and, and I get like, if you're an SDR listening to like a sales development rep, listening to this call here, this conversation between you and I, undoubtedly you're going, yeah, dude, like I do that a thousand times a day.

That's not what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about for you to pitch them something, talking about meeting someone, making a connection that where you could learn something from them, or they will strengthen your net, your network, which enhances your net worth eventually. So I would offer up the fundamentals are obviously new fundamentals, AI, but never let a day go by without interacting with a customer and never let a day go by without meeting someone new. And, and I think that ties to also one of mine, which is always leverage your resources. Right. I mean, it was funny as a manager, as a, as a VP, one of my first startups, you know, I would have reps being like, you know, John, I'm getting my ass kicked talking to CFOs here.

You got any tips? I'd be like, hold on a second. Um, Hey, Calvin. Yeah, John. Uh, are you a CFO? Yeah. Uh, do you get sales reps calling you every day and trying to sell you something? Yeah. You mind talking to one of our reps, my reps here about what it takes to have a conversation with a CFO? That's so true. Like, or like the gatekeeper. Like I'm getting my ass handed to me by Shelly is a gatekeeper. Go fucking talk to Shelly. She will tell you better than I will. Whatever stupid technique I'm going to share with you. She's going to tell you what actually works. Well, even our sales reps, like, well, you know, it's amazing to me. I'll, you know, you're sitting there and someone will call me up and say, Hey Steve, you know, what would like your feedback on a pitch to the CIO of fill in the blank company.

And I'll ask them all the time. Hey, have you run this by our CIO? Yeah. It's like, I mean, I could give you some feedback based on what I think, but that's the person that you're trying to, and I wish more clients, I mean, you're obviously very customer centric here. I wish more, more companies wouldn't involve their customers with their sales team. So like they educate, like, so if you're going to pick a persona this year to get you this month to go after with messaging or whatever it is, whatever thing you, why don't you go get a customer and interview the customer, let the sales team ask the customer about what they pay attention to, what they care about and those types of things, as opposed to thinking of it on ourselves.

I mean, granted, we're going to leverage AI to ask better questions to that customer. So we have some more insights, but it's amazing to me how much like everything still seems so siloed here, right? Like marketing's over here, sales is over here, CS is over here. And it kind of gets back to your point of integrated systems. I'm not talking about just integrated, the technical systems here. I'm talking about integrating the people systems here so that we're talking to each other and we're leveraging it. So true. Awesome. Well, any, uh, we're coming up on time here. Any last things, any highlights? Actually one more. What was your favorite conversation in the book? You have a lot of, um, like each chapter, it looks like you interviewed somebody, right?

What was one of your favorite, um, stories that you came across in writing this book? Well, there's, I mean, first of all, we, we interviewed a lot of, uh, a lot of organizations, uh, Australian Red Cross. I mentioned American Cancer Society, North Carolina Department of Health. I love organizations that, you know, have purpose behind what they do as well. Um, there, there are two things. I mean, one was, uh, a conversation, you know, we, we had, uh, uh, uh, an interview with the American Cancer Society and they automate rides for cancer patients. And if you think about that for a minute, you might think, well, can't, can't, uh, you know, said cancer patient take Uber. Yeah, they sure could, but they could also automate the, the, you know, helping a cancer patient that has this sometimes debilitating, debilitating, debilitating, but life-saving treatment that they have to go get.

It's those little moments that I think software just brings joy and happiness to people or makes things just a little less challenging. Um, I, I love that story. I love, um, you know, the North Carolina Department of Health using AI driven integration to manage, um, pan, the, the pandemic response, which I think was pretty awesome. Uh, one of the, one of the conversations was a conversation with Vishal Sika. He's the former CEO of Infosys and the former chief technology officer of SAP and a very, very dear friend of mine. And I asked him where all this was going, all of it, just in general. And you know, what was interesting is I expected a technology response from him. That's what I expected.

And he, he told me, which is partly where I, credit where credit is due. I'll give it to him. He said that this is a moment when humans become superhuman. And that has stuck with me that, that humans become superhuman. And it's in, in the book, digital impact. I talk about this a lot, but I, I, I will say this over and over again on this conversation and elsewhere. I don't believe that AI will replace humans. I believe it like take salespeople, for example, AI is not going to replace sellers. It will replace the ones that don't use it. That's, that's exactly what I say. You're going to get replaced by failure. AI is not going to replace engineers, but it'll replace the ones that don't use it.

Yes. And I think that's what you talk about in your series. And like, it's like, this is the call to action for us. And then, you know, so digital impact has that call to action, um, as well. Um, certainly I hope people get a chance to take a look at it, but it's been terrific talking to you. Yes, absolutely. And this is, I mean, to me, this is fascinating. I think we're that, I guess my only caveat to that's where I was wondering, you're like, Hey, what's not going to get replaced is other than sales reps who learn how to use it. Right. So that, that my big fear is that it's the Pareto's principle here, 80, 20, right. Where it's like 20% of us are going to be become superheroes, like absolute legitimate superheroes, insanely valuable across the board, but 80% are just going to get smoked.

And, and I'm hoping that that's not the case because that obviously has massive implications across the board from an economic standpoint. But man, if, if you're not, if you're not excited right now, cause you can be, you know, you can be just terrified and basically go into a dark hole and, and, you know, unplug from this and just try to ignore it, which, you know, I don't recommend, or you can be fascinated with it and use it as the, the best coach, the best mentor, the best brainstorm thing you've ever come across in your entire life. But just don't look at it at, for the answer. That's what I'm begging sales reps to do is don't look at it for the answer. Look at it to feed your curiosity.

And I just, I wish, I wish curiosity was something that I, that I think you could teach. Cause I, I, I've been searching for this one. I think curiosity is an eight. I think it is. I think you can create an environment where somebody can be curious if, if you can pick something that they're interested in learning about, but I don't think that you are born curious. And I, and, and if you are, this stuff is insane, but if you're that easy button person, I think you're in deep shit right now. Well said. So awesome, Steve. Well, the book's called, uh, the human element of AI driven transformation, digital impact. Uh, is it out, is it out already or is it coming out? Uh, next month, next month. What?

Fantastic. So, you know what, we'll release this a little bit closer to the release date so that everybody can go out there and get it. And can you pre-order it on Amazon and all that stuff? You sure can. There you go. So where, where else can people, I mean, I know you got a website for it. Where do you want to send people to go check this out? Oh, I think, I mean, well, you know, my, my company is just boomy.com. But if you want to check out the book, just head straight to Amazon. Perfect. So for those listening, go to Amazon, uh, the company is called boomy, B O O M I. And I think it's just B O O M I.com. Take the look at that. Steve, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you, man. This is, uh, this has been fun.

And hopefully we can reconnect here in about six to 12 months to see where, where, where we've evolved from there. Ditto. Love it. Absolutely. All right, everybody. So if you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did, like I say all the time at the end of all these podcasts, go out there and make somebody smile today. Cause no matter how bad your day is going or how bad you think it went, you made somebody smile today and you know, you had a good day in the world needs a lot more of that right now. So thank you all very much. And I will see you on the other side. Hey everyone. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did with your support and our incredible guests. We're one of the top sales podcasts out there right now.

And I can't thank you enough now to keep the momentum going. It would mean the world to me. If you could go and leave a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform and share some of your favorite episodes with your network. Also, I am super excited to be launching my new newsletter where I'll be sharing everything I know and everything I'm learning along the way while I'm out there selling every day, just like you go to jbarrows.com slash newsletter to sign up today. Let's all level up and make this happen together.