Budgeting Superpower - AI, Resilience, and Business Risk #shorts #podcast #GoogleCloudNext

But the reality is the lesson I learned from that conversation was that if you are really, really, really tight with budgets, you become really— you have like magic superpower to see value. He would not be sold crazy post-quantum AI mind-reading AIDR by a 3-day-old startup.

Right. He would not. He has a nose for it now.

He really has a nose for it because that nose would get slapped pretty hard if he makes a mistake. Sorry, this is my metaphor. This is my metaphor, Wim. We're learning about Anton's dog training techniques, I suppose.

There's that too. But it is interesting how when you have effectively unlimited budget, you can end up with a lot of shelfware. You can end up with a failure to show ROI. But when you have a very thin margin, you as a leader have to think about what's the return here? What are my metrics? How do I prove to my leadership I didn't screw up with that purchase?

Actual business risks, not like a hand-wavy consulting paper about like security is business risk, but it's a very like a juicy real-life embodiment of for him security is very much a business risk.

And he didn't use this word, but it was clearly he articulated a strong understanding of what his minimum viable business was. Yes. When we were talking about resilience, he knew exactly which processes he needed to first make sure worked, then second, then third, make sure it worked. And I think that reflects a degree of like, Operational maturity, mission focus, because delivering groceries, people will not eat if you don't roll the trucks. The ice cream will melt, the tomatoes will rot.

He has another really good resilience lesson, which we can demonstrate right now. He demonstrated a digital device and said, okay, what if AI fails? And he immediately brought up a paper notepad and said, here's my backup. And it was very like, it's almost instantaneous. And he does think about like resilience, rollbacks, minimal viable business. That part was super impressive.