Time to Talk about AI

Sam, Good morning. Happy Monday. LinkedIn friends. Value First Nation. Welcome to another episode of Value First AI Daily, your collaborative intelligence report. It is Monday, March 2, 2026. George B. Thomas, how we doing today?

Doing good this morning, Chris. How are you doing?

I am doing great. Nico. Having some technical difficulties. Did get to spend a couple hours with him yesterday. Doing another tech stack reimagined. A lot has happened in the last month and here we are in March already.

I know it's crazy to think that it's March 2nd and, you know, the world keeps rotating, revolving, and we're all buckled in and just trying to hang on.

I think, indeed. On that note, this is the magic trick I'm about to pull of talking about current events without talking about them directly. Have you ever watched a leadership team try to put together a marketing strategy when they don't have any marketers on that team or they haven't necessarily brought somebody in with marketing shops to create that strategy?

Well, I can't say yes to that because I'm the guy with marketing chops that would have been brought in to actually talk to the leadership team that you just referenced that if I ever saw them try to put strategy together. So the answer is no, not really. But I can imagine that it happens, without a doubt. I also can imagine a world where a leader has played the role, or at least attempted to play the role of marketer and then thinks that they may, or. And they may be equipped to try to go down that journey. But why do you, why do you bring that up, Chris?

Well, I think with the events that we're seeing in AI right now as it relates to our government, and I was watching an interesting interview, I think it's 60 minutes with Dario, him trying to basically explain his side of the story without just feeding into all the sound bite, gotcha questions that he was being asked and the concept of like, who who should be deciding, like, what happens with AI and what the direction should be. And this is a very public versus private company kind of conversation. And it was interesting because I, I think of it like the marketing, you know, situation inside of orgs. And this is where, you know, I was often brought in to, you know, to help build that muscle, like in an organization like hired indirectly. And now I'm finding that I've done such a good job of positioning myself as not a marketer and focus on the data model and revops and all that stuff. There's marketing conversations that they don't even ask, like for, for the advice.

Right.

But what you see is, like, you have people that are not trained in a thing trying to create a strategy without the knowledge of how to do it. And that doesn't usually go well. Right? So. And I think what we're seeing is it's getting harder and harder to bring people from outside of the organization. And again, this is where AI can dramatically solve for this gap. Like, it's harder and harder to rely completely on the external resource to get some kind of marketing strategy in place and actually executed and adopted inside of the organization without building some kind of knowledge or capability yourself. So the challenge that we have right now is the people closest to the action, the Frontier Labs, when AI has a doubling rate of anywhere from two to four months, depending on when you're looking at it. Like, how. Let me put it to you like this. If, if, if somebody came up to you, and it could be marketing or it could be AI. And they said, george, man, I think we're just falling behind. I think I have a good grasp about what's happening with AI. I'm experiencing value. But I see decisions being made, like, by our leaders in the org, and they don't understand AI. And I want to be able to do something to, to help, you know, prevent them making bad decisions about AI for our organization. Like, what would you. How would you direct them?

I mean, depend. The answer is it depends, right? Like, there's a whole lot more questions that need to be asked than the information that you're giving me. But that being said, the first place that I would start is I would ask if the organization has any type of AI training program in place. For instance, I work with this one organization and I sit on their L10s on a weekly basis. And like, I, I add stuff to it, but I listen a lot. And one of the things that they talk about is making sure that AI is flowing through their organization. And they literally have gone through. I think they're on their second, second AI program, which. The second one is way better than the first one. No names to be named, by the way, but they're in this second program where the entire organization is, I'd say challenged, but maybe the better word is mandated to go through this program so that they can create a level playing field of the understanding and then they can disseminate. Now, what does that mean for us? The other thing that I'm noticing about that organization, and this is. Chris Wise said there'd be a lot more questions I would want to ask is on these L10s, I am close to the leadership team or parts of the leadership team. And there is a level of curiosity to like, how can we use it? How should we be using it? Like they are curious and asking questions. If I was talking to somebody else in your mock scenario and there was not a level of curiosity, then the second place that I would want to try to inject them into, if there is no educational program, that's one. Second place, if there is no curiosity, that's two. How do we get the leadership team or the people that are making decisions to be curious to be asking the questions so that they can either ask the right questions or stumble on the question that will put them in the right direction.

Yeah, I like that. That second one for sure. Like the stumbling on the question. Like, you don't have to know, like all these frameworks and like the shortcuts that everybody tries to take. Like all of that gets in the way of like building your own capability. I think. And that's where I think in this domain and why they call it's on leaders to like, you don't get to delegate this one. Right. Like, you have to understand and like this is like any, any major resource for the organization. And when you can think of AI, it starts here. It's AI is infrastructure. And George and I were just talking about it in the green room. Like clouds down. All right. Or was. Maybe still is.

No, it's back up now.

Okay.

But for a time down, which. Go ahead, Chris. I got some feelings on how I felt when that was the case.

Yeah. So I, since I started my day at 5, went out for a walk. Right before the walk, I said, all right, Claude, let's do some daily ops and check out this transcript from yesterday and do a deep dive there. And then when I get back, you know, we'll, we'll dig in. I come back and I start getting ready and I hadn't. And actually started to use like I, I tried to access Claude on my phone and it wasn't working. So I was like, okay, just put it down. Put it down right now. Not mission critical. Then I come back to the desk and I start reading and consuming the responses and I start responding.

It's down again.

And, and I don't like. So I'm not experiencing any outage like at the workstation. Right. Like the phone and what I was about to ask and look into. It's kind of a nice to have. Right. But then at the same time, colleague George tries to use it an hour later and is unable to use it. Right. And what we talked about is, okay, this kind of backbone infrastructure of our day, like, goes away, right? So what we started talking about, we started talking about contingency plans, like, okay, what's the backup gonna be? And, but it's not. It's never reaches. But, okay, well, maybe we shouldn't. Maybe using AI is not a good idea.

Yeah, I definitely didn't go to that, but it's. By the way, it looked like it was up, and then this thing started flashing in the right hand corner, and then also now it crashed back down to the Will Return soon screen. So it's, it is still down, at least in my part of the world. Maybe yours is working, which. Good. But it definitely is. Well, let's not use AI. It goes back to what you said is like, okay, I'm having a learning lesson this morning. The lesson is that I have my assistant very much tied into Claude and some other things through APIs. But what is the switch that can flip, where all of a sudden, if one is down, we could run with the other and not skip a beat, meaning the other AI? The thing about it, though, that I immediately thought of when I saw that as I was like, man, how many humans in their work today or this morning? Which, by the way, for most mere mortal humans, they're probably on a drive to work, thinking about getting out of bed to go to work. Because where we're at, where I'm at, it's 8. Where you're at, it's 7. 7. 16. Right?

Yeah.

Oh, geez. Anyway, and, and so, like, maybe this will be resolved by time that, no, most humans that aren't creating podcasts early in the morning are at work and they'll be good to go. But my first thought was like, ooh, how many people are screwed or gonna have a rough day? Because they've created systems that are based really heavily on cowork or Claude chat or Claude code or any of those pieces. Because if, if, if I know most humans, they're, they're using a single tool now. I, I, it's funny because Michael Stelzner did a post on Facebook, like, maybe a day or two ago, and he said, like, which one do you use? And he named, like, Claude and Chat GPT, to which I responded, Claude and Chat GBT with the dash of Gemini and like, to, to kind of just tell the story of, like, yo, folks, I'm not, I, I refuse to go one because of, like, this morning, right? I, if I was working on, let's just say, you know, some type of information around the Hub Heroes podcast and I only used Claude, I'd be screwed. But if I have chat GPT that also has the context and understanding of what the Hub Heroes podcast is, I can flip over there and I can either do it just as strong or limp along or whatever, you know, but at least if you're paying attention to trying to have your systems work with two, three different possibilities now, you're in a little bit better place than hey boss. It's almost like if the Internet went out, like, if the Internet went out right now, we wouldn't have jobs. Me, you, I'd be able to go sit on my couch and like sip a hot toddy and like eat some bon bons. Because I could tell my clients, look, the Internet was out today. Many people are getting in this world where, look, sorry, our AI that we use was out today. And that's a scary, kind of a scary place to be.

But yeah, and as, as Nico joins us, I think finding a way to, to be fluid, create the space for fluidity. Like, you know, if this were a quote unquote normal show.

Yeah.

Like Nico could. It's probably not joining like halfway through, right? It's like, all right, didn't make the start. Yeah, you know, not gonna, like, it's done. That was the opportunity. But instead, you know, got through the tech difficult wealthies. Like the, the culture of the show is just, you know, show up, show up. Right. And then value will be had. And like AI has never put us in a better position to create this kind of space. And a great story that I heard from Ryan Ginsberg yesterday, and this is the part that just, I think most of the practitioners who are used to like strict scoping and strict build out and like strict like if A, then, if not A, then B, like every time. And like, like, so his dad, Ryan Ginsburg dad who he activated AI, native activated a couple of weeks ago, owned some Subway shops, sandwich place.

Okay.

And the other day his register software went out and since he was activated in the middle of the workday at a subway shop, right, like he vibe coded up his own register, like spreadsheet kind of deal so that he could type stuff in as he went through the day. And at the end of the day it was like a 10 minute activity to like reconcile. Right. And like, so what would have happened without AI? First of all, his day would been super shitty.

Yeah, without a doubt. And I've been there, by the way. I've been there in the restaurant industry with a calculator and A notepad and like, oh God, this is going to be the worst day of my life.

Right? And like, second of all, like, as a business owner, after that day, you're like, okay, do I want to invest time in making sure this never happens again because it was detrimental to the business? And is that going to mean calling up, you know, one of us or Ryan Ginsberg and saying, all right, what does the scope of this project need to look like? Come do some discovery. Like, does it just. Do we just need to add on to the software? We're just missing some things. Do I need a different kind of software that's not going to go down, that has more uptime that I'm going to pay more for because they're guaranteeing it and then there's insurance and all, like, all of that just wiped away, including the stress and anxiety of the moment. Because AI is available and gives you access to capability to solve in the moment. I think that solving in the moment part is immeasurable and everybody's underestimating that, like, related to almost every kind of business focused AI conversation. Right. That's the stuff that gets people to adopt, like, it's here when I need it, like right now. And there's just never been anything like that. And like, to the point of thinking of it as infrastructure. Right. Even if the Internet goes out, like, thinking of that as an infrastructure, there's probably some stuff, like you could pull up the laptop, you know, maybe draft some stuff, get some thoughts out. Like, you can still do some stuff if you want to. And that's another layer of like the constraint that you build. Because we talked about, like, okay, if this is the backbone of Echo, this is where maybe this is where local LLMs come in. Yeah, right. Yeah. But if it's, if those local LLMs are not as powerful as cloud code opus, you know, 4.6. That doesn't mean we can't. It's not a good route to go. It just might mean we're doing different things like that that don't require, you know, so much. Like if the lights go out and we just got candles, we're probably not going live. Like, if we got no lighting, we're not trying to do things that require lighting. Yeah, right. But we could still have conversations. And so I'm just open to any thoughts there.

I personally, it's funny because I've been toying around with this idea of local LLM anyway, right? And then this morning happens and it's like, okay, so like, how many layers of I Don't want to be hosed. Do you want to put in. Right, so it's like, okay, if Claude goes down, then Codex, you know, flip this switch and all sudden Codex works with Echo. Or if, if both for some reason are like, I don't have Internet access or something. Right. But I have power. Okay, well, third switch that you can flip now it's like, you know, this local LLM that you chose to, to roll with, whatever that may be. I mean one. I don't know how many humans have machines that are powerful enough to do what we're talking about, but some do. And the models are getting better, easier, smaller, like pow. You know, so. So we're getting to that point, but I definitely am interested even more after this morning and entertaining the idea of like, what does it look like if I hook a local LLM with Echo and all the power that it has, only to be kind of a backup scenario if need be, you know, because. Because don't get me wrong, I still love me some freaking cloud code. Like, and I love me some agent teams and like all of, all of those good things. So. Yeah. But I don't want to be down either.

Come on in Nico, the war.

I mean, he's kind of being shy. It's like he's. He's like, I want to say something, but I don't want to say something.

But like where, where like my, you know, I'm. I'm in that. I'm just in that camp of like, can't go back, don't really know how. And you know, me and Chris were kind of talking about it yesterday where like. And I kind of. I wonder if you feel the same way, especially like now that you've developed such a close working relationship with Echo. We were talking about the fact that I was looking at. I put together a state of go to market report and basically was showing how like. Yeah, last year everybody was, you know, just querying almost like a souped up Google. Right. And kind of like single agent focused at best. And like this year obviously like the three of us are more orchestration based already kind of just making that adaptation naturally. And so I'm seeing it and, and listening to you in the last couple weeks I've been hearing like statements that kind of solidify this where I feel like it's it. While it's still easy to get started. A level of difficulty is starting to form.

Yeah.

A level of complexity.

Yeah.

And there is it. What, what I find like super interesting though, like just the story that you Were saying, Chris, about Ryan's dad being able to solve that, like plug that gap so quickly and solve that problem so quickly. And we were talking about the fact that startups and small businesses like yes, no one in an enterprise is going to go code their own CRM. It's too risky. No one has time. It's blah, blah. No one even in a large business, probably not even in a medium size, but in a startup and small business, hell yes, absolutely. Overhead is the number one thing that you have to get rid of. So it's the first thing that you're, you're going to. Software is the number one cost that you have. So that's the one thing you're going to try to get rid of and lower as much as you can to be able to solve a real world problem like that, that quickly and like you say, reconcile it with, with your system. So essentially if he wanted to like now he can go do like mobile service or something like that, you know what I mean? Like a whole new extension has opened up to the point where if that's all he needed in order to reconcile his system, maybe now after like a month he's designing his own point of sale and he's not even using that point of sale service anymore because realistically he just needs a cash register app and square. Right. Like these technologies are changing things in, in a way that people are really like people aren't like you're really not sort of seeing like the potential, the explosive potential that goes on with this stuff. And it's not even like it's. Yeah, it's a matter of getting activated to it. Right. But you can hear the stories we just had somebody on last week, Mary Ellen, who's talking about a real world case solving real world problem with AI. So it's not just this thing where it's only a matter of building programs or it's only a matter of working with agents. It's only a matter of building stuff out for software specific purposes or SaaS purposes. You know, even some of the, even the things that I'm building out, they are solving real world issues. That's the whole point. Right?

Well, I, it's funny that you talk about real world issues. I mean, I think all of us are solving our world, our real world issues, whether, you know what I mean? And, and what's interesting is just this idea. When I heard you talking, Nico, I was like, just the word choices. And, and I don't know how many humans realize the amount of choices that they never had. At their fingertips that they do now. Because, like, if you. I. I kid you not. And I know that sometimes I say things and people are like, oh, yeah, okay, George, just slow down. But I kid you not. Like, you could wake up in the morning and have an idea or a dream, and you could have a prototype within minutes to hours to a day, depending on how big your dream is. And while there are some complexities that you have to navigate around, but again, AI can help you with that. It's relatively simple compared to historically, the mammoth mountains that you would have to leap of design and development and research and just keep the list going to get there as fast as you can get there today. Like, you have choices.

Yeah.

And my question is, what are you gonna choose to do?

Oh, man. Yeah. This is why belief number two of value, first is empowerment over learned helplessness. Because just like with that, that story was just so powerful. Like, he built the thing because he believed he could. Like, AI also allowed him to build it, but now he's empowered just to solve it, to just solve the problem instead of having to call up it or somebody else, because, one, he's not trained. He doesn't know how to do it, whatever. But to the risk of if he does try to solve it himself, like, he might bring the system down. And then everybody's having to, like, all of that stuff that we've been taught about how the back end, you know, works. Right. Is just dramatically different now. And we do have choices. Everybody in almost every role of a business now has options they did not have before. Right. It does start with asking AI questions, though. And if that's. If that's where you start, start there. Hey. Hey, Claude. Hey, Chat. Hey, Gemini. This is what's happening right now. What are my options? Like, if that's where you gotta start, start there. And even that is a problem that you're solving because you don't know what options you have. Oh, man. Then I'll start to down the path. And we're gonna keep hitting on it every day. So until Tuesday. Have a great Monday, everybody. Welcome to March. Thanks, guys.

Peace out.