The AI Revolution: Adapting to Change

4, 4, 3, 3, 2, 2, 1. Welcome to the AI Profit Leaders Podcast. My name is Chris Weiser, here with Adam Walter, founder— oh, and president, president of Humanize IT, soon to be Humanize AI. I'm really excited about that. Adam, tell us about yourself.

Yeah, my name is Adam Walter. I, I've got a long history in engineering. I originally was a Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, on an art scholarship.

And I was kind of an art student too. That's, that's crazy.

They're the best creative types. Didn't know that about you. The best engineers I've known had PhDs in trumpet. And so I— I was an engineer for 17 years. I rose through the ranks. I was a critical infrastructure director for security. I was top-tier engineer. I was an Apache admin. You name it, I've done it.

And Apache, that's like the old web server, right?

The current web server. Yeah. The best web server.

I was an old BSD guy.

Oh, that's old.

Yeah. I was a VAX VMS guy. But we had Apache back then too.

VAX VMS was what I learned to code on. That's real Okay.

Anyway, so welcome to the AI Profit Leaders Podcast. Super pumped to have you here. So what, so what does Humanize do? Talk to me a little bit about that and how are you transitioning into, into AI? We got so much stuff that we can talk about.

Yeah, we got a lot to cover here. Humanize IT's mission is to help engineers have better conversations with their clients. We noticed a problem back in around 2020 where MSPs were talking about tickets, speeds, and feeds. And I was going in as a fractional CIO with my years of experience and helping companies understand how to use technology better. I wasn't fixing things. I was done with that. I made $36,000 MRR just advising companies on Agile and on best practices for IT. This is money that MSPs could have had. So we ended up buying a gap analysis platform called Managed Services Platform and transitioning into something called Humanize IT to help engineers identify where the gaps were and what they should actually talk to their clients about. To help their clients succeed. And that's to humanize it, humanize IT. So rather than talking about technology, you're talking about the human behind it.

It's so funny because almost, almost all of your tech people, especially your IT service providers— for anybody that's not in IT, when he says MSPs, it means managed service provider. That's your outsourced help desk, you're out, you know, all, all of the outsourced IT guys. That's kind of where Chris Weiser came from. That's how we know each other, is that world. It's really interesting that you mentioned that whole thing because so many IT people— it's kind of like The thing about IT people in general is we're techie dorks that aren't humans.

Yeah.

And that's a really cool take on it.

I think you said it earlier today even was to hammer everything's a nail. And so when you're in tech and you're so used to being the person who knows everything about tech, you think that your, your solutions will solve every problem. And so you think, oh, if they just had a new computer, if they would just do what I say. The number of times I've heard a technical person say, if the, if the client would just do what I say, they'd be fine. But they won't listen to me. And, you know, to me, that's a key indicator that you're not listening to your clients. You don't actually know what their concerns are. And so what you want to do is your agenda. You care about your agenda. You want to sell them that firewall, you want to sell them that PC, and they're over there struggling to make payroll or they're struggling with hiring more employees. And a technician can help with that, but they need to understand the problem so they can provide a solution that will help the client.

Yeah. So, uh, you mentioned talking earlier today. We are here in Austin, Texas at my headquarters. Got a bunch of people here. We're kind of recording a bunch of different content, having a little mastermind day. It's kind of a lot of fun. Uh, and I, you know, heard a little bit of your journey and how some of the things are moving around. We mentioned this in the open with Humanize IT moving to Humanize AI. We talked a little bit earlier about how fast AI is moving and how these things are transitioning so quickly. And you said, I thought I had more time. Yeah, take, take me through that journey a little bit.

So this year we go through a plan, build, run cycle in our business. So during the build phases, we roll back on our marketing and we build our product that we're going to go to market with. So this year we pushed a bunch of our cash because we're an independent software company. We're not backed by any VC or PE firms. We are our own entity, pushed our money into building out a product that was going to be better. That's Humanize IT. We made better integrations, better processes so our clients can have a better experience. We closed out that process in October, and that's when I call budget cycle. I start planning out my next year. What am I going to lean into the next year? And so I started investigating AI in the marketplace. Everybody seemed to be adopting it. I thought they're, they're rushing to it, like there's going to be some security problems, so I need to get familiar with this from an architect standpoint.

So you kind of thought you were already an early adopter at that point?

Yeah, I, I mean, I'm ahead of the game here. I did an open letter to the community. You can read it on my website at humanizeit.biz. And it explains my concerns about AI based upon what happened during the dot-com bubble and the security breaches we saw there. And so I started investigating this and I came up to a horror story. Like, I wasn't ahead of the game. I was, I was way, way behind. And so I really started leaning into, you know, learning things like Replit, learning things like Claude, and trying to figure out what the difference between the different AI solutions were out there, different terminologies. And the field had passed me by by light years. And I started thinking, oh my gosh, I'm going to get buried next year, and a lot of people are going to get buried next year. They don't see the avalanche that's coming. This isn't the dot-com, this is way, way more impactful. I went through the dot-com, I remember it well.

And the dot-com was, was more about, okay, there's a bubble there, there's stuff there, but, but it was more about loss than it was about an opportunity that— I mean, there was, there was stuff that people missed, and I totally get that. But I think, you know, and I remember the dot-com stuff too because it was, it was pretty— it was very, very impactful. But it was more about, you know, from my standpoint, it was like my business might go under because of all the reduction. This is— you're going to stay where you're at and you're missing out. Would you agree with like that? So that's what I see the difference is now is like it's not like I don't think there's going to be this huge reduction in all this other stuff. It's just that everybody that's kind of like hanging out and just doing what they always did, they're going to pretty much stay where they're at.

I don't know. I see it as you're going to see some companies that have really great employees that have a real passion for their clientele, and they're going to get augmented by AI. And when it comes to the customer trying to choose between two competitors, they're going to go with the person who's going to be more intuitive, who's going to listen to what they have to say, who's going to process their orders faster. Yeah. And so I see AI as being— it's going to take your team of 10 and turn them into a team of 50.

Or a team of 100, or a team of 100. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, the— your competitors can sit there and they're continuing to do things the way they are. They're still taking weeks to process orders. They're still taking a long time. They're not being as intuitive because they're not looking at conversations the same way. AI helps me drive— dive through all of this noise and get to valuable information much faster because I'm not spending all my time reading and digesting and analyzing data.

Yeah. So I think we're speaking the same language because it's just, you know, I think the opportunity here is absolutely insane. It's probably, you know, not only for the managed service providers that might watch this, for the IT cybersecurity folks that might watch this, but any of your traditional businesses. Yes, there's a massive, massive opportunity to, to make more money more efficiently. And so many people are seeing the AI thing as like it's going to replace employees, blah, blah, blah. No, it's going to— like you said, a very key word there, which I love and we don't hear enough of— it's going to augment. And, and the people that are good, it's going to make them absolutely freaking amazing if you allow it to. I also think there's going to be a whole group of business. We were talking about this during the mastermind. I kind of started the mastermind stuff and we were a group of, you know, 10 people talking around a room as we did this stuff. And I talked a little bit about that. There's definitely people out there, a good chunk that are like, this is a fad. I don't like— I don't believe AI is tech, especially in the IT MSP industry. We're definitely seeing that where it's like, nope, I'm not going to— I'm not an expert in that, you know. I don't know if you saw my— we were talking about a Facebook post earlier today. I know you're in my big Facebook group that had that there, and you said you lurked and you saw it. But there was some guys in there that said, I'm not an expert on that, so I'm not going to talk about it. I'm not going to talk about AI and focus on AI. And what's funny about the IT MSP industry is how many MSPs are security experts? I would, I would say less than 5%, probably less than 2%, are really truly secure. But you know what they all dabble in? They go play in security management, and they play in risk management. And I don't What's, what's, where's your thoughts on that whole thing? Cause I feel like we're on the same page.

Yeah, I think, I think just to speak real world here. So I started researching AI and its implications on my business and how I was going to roll this out a year from now. I got so scared when I started seeing where AI is and what its potential is that I stopped my dev cycle, went into my savings as a company, and I started burning through my savings to implement AI and rewrite as fast as possible. And in about 2 months— now I'm a computer science background, so I've got a, I've got a little bit of head start, and I have an entire coding base that I launched off of. In about 2 months, I went from knowing what I thought was a lot about AI to realizing I was way behind, to now where I'm a thought leader. In 2 months.

I would, I would agree, in the room today, yeah, you were definitely the thought leader around all of the you know, all the coding backend stuff, you were sitting there and the guys were looking at you like, holy crap, this guy's an expert.

It's just that that's how fast you're going to learn. And I, even if you're, even if you're a regular business owner whose expertise is you're an attorney, so your legal jargon, or maybe your expertise is dental hygiene, you're even going to learn at this accelerated rate because that's what AI does is it enables you to accelerate, it augments who you are.

Yeah, I kind of said, I've said this on stage all the way back on my first AI event to the IT industry was in April. So back— and I said, you guys need to change this. You need to— that's kind of where we launched this whole— the whole idea for the book and all the stuff came from that show, preparing for that show and doing that. And I said on stage that day, I've always been a great idea guy. Like, I've always been really good about that. And I was always here. But my challenge was always getting idea to implementation, full execution on that. And AI is doing that for me. Yeah. And it's, you know, so I think the term augment is such a good— I'm stealing that. Sorry, it's mine now. It's such a good phrase because it takes anyone that has ideas, any business owner, any forward thinker, dental hygiene, like literally anybody that's— and it helps you implement faster and better.

Yeah, I would say like for you EOS people out there, EOS, if you're an implementer, it's going to make you implement faster and it's going to give you better data to make decisions off of. If you're a visionary in your, in your company, it's going to allow you to see more opportunities to help direct your company. That's what AI is going to do for you. And like, I read through this entire book today because I don't think you're going to talk about it.

Yeah, you're really sitting here today.

It was awesome. I finished it. That was just a big confirmation bias for me. Like, I'm like, yes, yes, yes. Oh, that's a great— yep. Read through this. That's if you want Adam's thoughts after diving in and spending 16 hours a day on AI for 2 months with a computer science background with over 20 years of experience in IT. This is a distilled version of what I was thinking in my head. Oh, that's cool.

Thanks, man. I appreciate it. And so—

Hey, go do a review on Amazon, please. All right out there. But yeah, like, but it's from a business standpoint, you're not gonna see like, hey, what is, you know, an MCP? What is Replit? What is Level? You're not gonna see any of that technical jargon, but you are going to get a feel for how impactful this is. And I don't think there's a single number in there I disagreed with. I went in my software and I created several calculators because, oh my gosh, yes. And you are hitting it right on the head there. I need this calculator to help people understand the impact of this on the world today.

Yeah.

From a business standpoint, this isn't a technical thing. This is a Business Item Empowered by Technology.

And I think, you know, first of all, thanks for the, for the props on the book. That's really cool. It's really cool to sit there and watch you read it all day and actually have you actually complete it. But the thing that we really focused on in the book is how you need to put AI into your daily mindset, but you need to focus on the strategic side. And so many people, especially business owners, are just thinking tool, tool, tool, tool. And you heard me, you know, you heard me say today, to a, to a hammer, everything's a nail. And to people that lead with tools, it's turn into, and we're kind of already seeing this, people that are like, ooh, I can go vibe code this. And if you don't know what vibe code means, if you don't know what this means, it's I want to speak an idea into or type an idea into a platform that will write the backend code for me. It doesn't do like, it's typical, like even ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude or any of these ones, they kind of hallucinate at times. Well, so does vibe coding. Like it doesn't do a great job putting the finishing touches on anything. And I think what we're going to watch happen over the next hours to months to years is we're going to watch a ton of people in small business. Ooh, vibe code, vibe code, vibe code.

They're going to get that instant gratification.

Yes. And they're going to put stuff in and it's going to explode things. And there's going to be this whole level. And if you're an IT person or even a consultant or a project person, you're going to run behind a lot of the stuff and be cleanup mode on a lot of these things.

And it's why a lot of money will be made in what we call refactoring. That's cleaning up code.

Yep. And so much of it is going to be lead with strategy, not And I have no problem with trying to throw a tool at an idea, but I think you gotta be really careful about just like, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna yes and that.

So take that concept and you hear your employee saying, I wanna vibe code this for our team. And if you hear that word vibe code, right? Stop just for a second and say, tell me your idea. And then go find somebody who has a programming background to create it or find an MSP or a technical provider and have them vibe code it. You're still gonna get it. It's gonna cost a little bit more. but it's gonna be done correctly.

Mm-hmm.

It's not gonna cost you the $30,000 it would cost if you had a professional dev team do this from scratch. And it's gonna take days.

Yeah.

But now you've got a key business solution. Maybe it's something that helps you process customers better.

And make sure it solves a problem first too, I'd say. Right? Yep.

Make sure it solves a problem.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, one of the things that I've kind of noticed as I, as I built out my AI dev team and all, like, all the stuff that I have, there's— and I wanna get your take on this 'cause it's kind of a different thing and it's, and it's something that I think everyone watching this can— this is, this is a good piece What I've kind of seen is your traditional coders are, they still kind of want to traditionally code and they really have a hard time determining, like they're like, ooh, vibe code, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. And it takes a rare person, which it's taken me a while to find them to say, okay, I'm going to look at this project and I'm going to choose whether to tradition code or combine code or vibe code and get me there faster. Cause they don't want to, like the old school guys are like, like hours for dollars, I need to have billing, billable, blah, blah. And it's probably not a whole lot different than the legal industry because I think we're going to see that happen there too because they're all like hours for dollars, hours for— so anybody that's trading that, I think it's kind of hard to determine for them where AI is a benefit. And I will tell you, I'm very good friends with a dev shop owner. He had to cut multiple guys because they just flat out refused to look at anything AI because they're like, no, it writes bad code. Like they're like, no, no, no. It writes bad code.

The browser wars are back, people.

Right. Yeah. It's the same. So do you agree with that? Where's your, do you disagree with that? Where's your head on that?

I'm going to take a quick story, jump back in time to the '90s. Do you remember the Mosaic browser?

Yeah. Yeah.

Do you remember all the different Netscape? We had an endless Google or not Google. Google came out with one later on called Chrome and we had Internet Explorer was this new thing and it became a race because. Netscape was really good at rendering good code. Internet Explorer was really good at rendering bad code. Which one of these browsers do you know today? Because the Internet Explorer took the world as it was.

And Internet Explorer is now Edge, right?

Internet Explorer took the world as it was. Netscape took the world as they wanted it to be. So you had these coders who were Luddites.

Man, that's a really good term.

They're falling behind because they're resistant to change. These are just Luddites. This has been around for millennia. People who are resistant to change. Now imagine an artist saying, I don't want to use tempera paints because they're not oil. They're not real. Well, you're missing out on an entire medium. You know, I am a potter. I only work with clay. I do not work with porcelain. And so, okay, you're going to make all of your stuff from scratch and you're going to put it together and not use anything prefabricated. Now, how are you going to build something bigger? You're limiting your artistic ability by refusing to use the media that is available. Yeah, a good artist knows we use the media that's available to us to build the thing that's in our mind. And so if you're refusing to do that—

if there's a take from today that's really good, dude, I really like that a lot.

You need to be able— it's just like this. We're running a business. If you're going to run a hamburger joint and you can't see outside your current menu, you might go out of business.

Or maybe even a way of processing, like, how did you make burgers? It's, you know, making it more efficient, making it better. Because no, we, we do everything the old school way. Okay, that's fine. But I can only serve so many clients a day that way.

Well, look at Wendy's. They got, they got square burgers.

I thought it was called tendies.

No, I don't know anymore.

They're doing chicken tenders now. So they got their whole commercial called tendies and it's funny. So they're like, oh, we're now tendies.

But I mean, you got a lot of people who think about businesses and they look at the trend and think, what does people actually want? If I go to a steakhouse, I'm not looking for chicken fingers unless I'm trying to attract a younger, a crowd that has younger kids. Who don't want a steak. But I want a steak as a dad, but I've got a 2-year-old who won't touch anything but chicken nuggets. Yeah, you know, I'm gonna have chicken nuggets on the menu because I want that guy to order a $70 steak. You got to think outside the box. You got to think creatively. You can't say, I am not this.

Yeah, so we had a— did a few different episodes today with some IT guys, uh, in the room. They were all like, you got to have IT strategy. They were all, I think, reading my book and kind of stand behind of that. Do you agree with that? Where's your head around strategy and Yeah.

So strategy is weird because we, in IT, I see a lot of people, they think operations is strategy. They don't see the difference between the CEO and the COO, which is why I don't call myself a CEO. I know what you people do and I'm not capable of that. That's not my talent set. I'm really good at working with staff culture and crafting that. I'm a president. But some of these MSPs think that they're thinking strategically when they're thinking operationally and tactically. And because of that, they're falling behind and they're not helping businesses. A strategy just says, hey, tell me about your business and what you're trying to accomplish. So I went to a school and I said, tell me about your school and what's going well and what's not going. And this school gave me this long list of things that were going really well. And then they gave me a longer list, all these things they couldn't do because they didn't, they had bad internet because they wanted to get their kids to Chromebooks so they could be like the other schools, but they just couldn't get technology to work right in their in their workplace because the MSPs kept coming in and fixing tickets, fixing printers, and fixing PCs. They never looked at the big issue of what the school was trying to accomplish and making sure that the internet was the right size for a Chromebook program to make sure that teachers were supported and to make sure the system was capable of doing all this art and all this media that the school was trying to do. And so they spent 10 years behind other schools until I came in, and it wasn't I did anything special. I just sat and listened and created a strategy around what they wanted to do.

I did Not the operation side.

No.

Yeah, yeah. Because that all effectively was there, but they never got a strategy that worked.

Correct. So they were missing things like they just doubled the size of the internet. It's a funny story I tell on my podcast all the time. They went from 10 to 20 megs for a school of 170 people.

Yeah.

And so they couldn't figure out why they were dropping internet all the time. So a technician would show up, they would fix the internet, and they would leave. And no one ever looked into the why.

Yeah.

What's the actual issue here?

What's the core problem here?

Yeah. Yeah. Like, oh, you want to be able to do all this? Oh man, let me look and see if you have the right technology. So me as a, as a guy, I didn't, I didn't troubleshoot the internet connection. I just identified that they were having slow internet problems. And I, I looked at all these problems and I went to an MSP and said, here are the 3 core issues they have. I heard this from 7 different key stakeholder interviews I had. Now help them. And within 2 weeks, we had them running flawlessly. By the next school year, we had a donor come in and donate Chromebooks so they could run a Chromebook program. We solved the problems they wanted. It wasn't about the printers. It wasn't about the PCs. It was about the whole problem of the school and what they're trying to accomplish.

I love it. I love it. Okay. Some really good lessons from you today. Any final words?

Yeah. When you talk to customers or when you're, if you're a technology person, don't, don't be like me. Listen more than you speak. You need to be quiet and listen to your client. A SBR, a QBR, a TBR, whatever it is, it's about reviewing what they're doing. Not what you're doing. From a business standpoint, if you're working with a technology provider who doesn't understand your business, go find one that does, who will listen to what your problems are, what your dreams are, and who will help you build that dream.

I love it. Great, great feedback. All right, I want to thank Adam Walter— sorry, President of Humanize IT, soon to be Humanize AI. Thanks for being on the AI Profit Leaders Podcast, and we'll see you guys next time.

Thank you.