In this digital age, there is a lot of technological change. Whether you’re looking to sell, deciding who to market to, determining how to market, or considering technological advances and employment, all of these challenges can have technological solutions. So, what can you do with all this technology?
In this episode, I have Ryan Pollyniak, Cloud Transformation Executive at Western Computer. We talk about cloud transformation, cloud computing, and data management. Ryan emphasizes how important it is to select the right technology solutions that can accommodate future growth and align with a long-term strategic roadmap. Additionally, we discuss the impact of AI on employment and its usefulness during the interview process. Listen and explore cloud transformation now!
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Revolutionizing Business with Cloud Transformation and AI with Ryan Pollyniak
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We live in an era where there’s a lot of technological change and a lot of technology to manage even without that change, and many of you out there are possibly looking at starting your own business and wondering, “What can I do with all this technology?” And it might even look daunting. It might even feel like another large task on top of everything else that you’re looking into, whether you’re looking into what product you want to sell, who you want to market to, how are you going to market, and what are you going to use. So, to help us sort through some of these technological solutions, technological advances, and technological change in employment, even, for those of you out there who are just looking at other employment options as well, I would like to introduce to you my guest today, Ryan Pollyniak, who is a Cloud Transformation Executive.
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Ryan, welcome to the program.
Thanks, Stephen. Glad to be on.
Well, thank you for joining and, first of all, take us through a day to day. What’s a normal activity for someone who’s a cloud transformation executive? As a lot of people are familiar with other types of executives but this particular one is very specific to our time, being that a lot of people are doing digital transformation and cloud transformations.
Absolutely, and so if you ask my seven-year-old’s third grade class when she told them that I was a cloud transformation executive, they all think I’m a meteorologist now, which is not the case. Actually, working with companies, all different sizes of companies, small businesses all the way up to smaller enterprise level businesses, make that digital transformation, key buzzword you hear all the time, you just mentioned it, have their old, legacy, on-premise systems and siloed data into the modern cloud and there’s so many things that go along with that, from keeping your data secure to leveraging the future of AI and everything else. A lot of businesses are making that switch and then you’ve also got startups, of course, which are wanting to take the appropriate foundational steps as they create their initial business systems to make sure that they’re setting themselves up for the future. So, what I’m doing is typically strategizing with the leaders of these companies and pulling in teams of solution architects and project managers and consultants to kind of realize the vision that we set.
So just to also orient our audience, in case anyone’s not familiar, like you mentioned, cloud is a term that makes people think of clouds in the air, and I think a lot of people when they put something on the cloud, even anything on their personal computers, probably think that their data just kind of floats around in the air the way the clouds do. So, what does the cloud actually mean? What is it?
That’s a great question. There are several different iterations of that. In general, cloud is computing power servers that are not in the server on premise, in your office, in your server closet, in your back office. It is having your data really in a remote location and then accessing it over the Internet, whether that’s through a VPN or some other method. Now, clouds, they’re different. Let’s say you have a business system on a physical server in your back office. Many companies want to make that move to the cloud so they don’t have to manage that server, so they don’t have to do updates and manage performance and everything else. Well, you could pay a company or you could even do it yourself in something like Azure or AWS, Amazon Web Services, and you could move that whole application, that server, into the cloud, in what’s called a private cloud at that point. That’s kind of the middle of the road. You no longer have a server in your back office but it’s still your server, just virtualized, if that makes sense. And it’s got some pluses. You don’t have to manage it anymore, assuming that you have someone doing it for you. Now, you could also have your own internal IT team just get rid of the physical machine and put that in a cloud instance and then they still do have to manage it for you. Far end of the spectrum, software as a service, SaaS. Everyone’s heard that term or a lot of folks have if you’re in the IT space, even peripherally. So what that means is you’re no longer taking Acme Company server and putting it in a cloud, you are actually subscribing to a service from a Microsoft or a NetSuite or a Salesforce and that organization is managing everything up to and including delivering that application to you via a web browser or an app on your phone or tablet and that’s all that you’re doing is subscribing to that software literally as a service. So there’s a nuance there. It’s not the same thing as just putting your server in the cloud.
So, in general, it’s getting away from the physical servers but there are varying degrees of that. Share on X
And you talked about working with both anywhere from startups to larger enterprises and some of them are kind of older enterprises or enterprises that had been around for a long time. This transformation going on, what people refer to as digital transformation, do you feel like it’s more challenging for companies that have a long history and maybe have a lot of data in other places or more challenging for that startup that’s just starting up now that now needs to figure out what they want to do but don’t have a history of where they’d put their data for six decades?
I think the established companies got a bigger lift because, depending on how you grew up, and this is a lesson for the startups, depending on how you started, you want to make sure to be forward thinking. How is my organization going to grow? What are my needs going to be in three years, five years, seven years, not just how do I most cost efficiently manage my data processing needs here at the moment. And so companies that have grown up with disparate data sources in various on-premise applications, there’s a bigger lift there because you’ve got to find a way to bring that all together. And so what I mean by that is, let’s say you’ve got, like you said, six decades’ or two decades’ worth of data in an old system and then you’re saying, “Well, I wanna move to a new SaaS application, a modern, cloud-based application, and let Microsoft manage it for me.” Well, what happens then is you’re not going to bring all of that history into your new system, and that is best practice in the European industry, accounting system industry. You’re not going to take all of your data from an old on-premise system into a new system. The structure is different. It’s very risky, it’s very costly. You don’t want to do it. So what ends up happening is, then, when you’ve got all this data in the old system. What happens if I need to look up a transaction? What happens if I need to compare data year over year, like sales trend analysis? How is this product sold in 2024 compared to what it did in 2008? Take your pick. And so if you’re going to gain those kind of insights from your data and your data is a huge asset and the value of good data is increasing exponentially because of AI which needs good data if it’s going to make any sense of what you’re trying to do, so what you end up needing to do then is to create a unified data model, which is totally doable in today’s day and age and there are all kinds of organizations that have tools to do this where you’re going to take all of that old data from your old systems and you’re going to put it in a cloud-based data warehouse and you’re going to map everything together. You’re going to bring data in from your new production system to mirror that and to create what’s called a unified data model and then you can drive your reporting off of that. So, to go back to your question, that is a bigger lift than being a green field startup with the world in front of you and saying, “Well, how do you wanna manage your data from the ground up?” that’s a little bit of an easier lift because the modern tools are going to be better equipped to handle that stuff out of the gate.
And when you work with people, whether they be startups or people with like, say, smaller businesses as they’re selecting solutions, you talked about being forward looking. Is there ever a situation where you will advise a client to implement a solution that’s expedient for the here and now just to accomplish a certain task knowing that, later on, they’re going to have to make a transformation between one of your three categories of solutions because of what happens when the business potentially or likely scales up?
First of all, you have to select a system that’s going to allow your business to scale. I’ve seen many times where there are very early stages of a startup where decisions are made to get into a system because of the cost point and then there’s not a roadmap in terms of strategy there. You’re going to run into issues very quickly. An example, without giving you a name, which I know most of the people on this podcast would know the name of this company, we were doing a project for them. They were about $15 million in annual revenue when we started the project. Nine months later, we were done and they were on track for $200 million in annual revenue. They blew up and they’re a billion-dollar company nowadays. Some of the decisions they made back then, particularly around things like business productivity suite, they were using Google, Gmail and Google Docs, which is a very useful set of tools and it’s very attractive to a startup because very simple to use, very simple to put in, inexpensive. As that company grew, they started to feel a little bit of pain because they didn’t have that long-term strategic roadmap. They realized, for a variety of reasons, and I’m not slamming the Google stuff here because it’s got its place, but for them, in particular, they wanted to shift into Office. Well, there were so many processes that were so deeply ingrained on the Google side, this company, to this day, uses both, creates a tremendous amount of problems and there’s no way that doesn’t incur a lot of pain that they’re going to be able to rip those processes out and harmonize those processes because it wasn’t done in the beginning, it kind of grew legs, it’s everywhere in the organization now, and here they are.
When people make decisions, such as we’re going to shift from Google to Microsoft, or even shift from AWS to GCP or anything like that, do you commonly observe where the people making the decisions are disconnected from the people who are implementing them and they oftentimes don’t understand how much of a cost it’s going to be as far as labor, how much of a headache it’s going to be for their employees, just how tough that transformation is going to be?
So the decision makers at the business making sure they understand the effort involved and properly translate to their employees, absolutely. So, number one, when you’re in the process of selecting a system, making sure that you’re crystal clear on expectations with the vendor, because you will run into salespeople and I have spent a lot of my career in sales and you’ll hear varying degrees of the truth there, let’s just be honest. So you want to make sure that you are documenting what you need, what the costs are going to be, what the end results are expected to be, and part of that is making sure that you’re articulating that information appropriately to the vendor because, commonly, it’s easy to forget X, Y and Z, and you’ve got to be fair, it’s a two-way street when you’re working with a software vendor who has costs and has put a proposal for it. But the other part of it is really important, which was what you mentioned, is internal change management. What are your users expecting? And one big pitfall is to not include your user base on the plans and the roadmaps and I’m not suggesting that you let everyone be a cook in the kitchen, so to speak, you can have an organizational strategy and you can make a decision without the buy in necessarily or the sign off of your user base, but what’s important from a change management perspective is letting your users know that change is coming, your employees, the people that will actually have the fingers on the keyboards of these systems, letting them know why it’s coming. Our company’s growing, we have inefficient systems, we have security liabilities, we want to take advantage of AI, we’re growing through acquisition, you name it, whatever your reasoning is, make sure that everybody understands the why. And that’s important. I mean, people deserve that. It’s the same thing that I do, to be honest, with my kids. If I lay down the law on something, I’m making sure that, on the back end, I’m also explaining, “Here’s why we’re doing it, guys, and then here’s how it’s going to impact you, hopefully, positively.” We’re not doing this to ruin your life, we’re doing it to grow the company and to help your future, and really to start that whole conversation early. Before you start a project, that has already got to be widely known. I’ve seen projects that are transforming business processes and some of the users don’t know it’s even happening until they’re testing, they’re asked to test the system right before they flip the switch to go live, and then you’ve got change management on your hands at the wrong time. You already have this major business process transformation going, your people are asking why we’re doing this when that should have been addressed before the project even happened. So, my advice is to let key people know early on and back that up with some reasoning as to why the business is taking that approach and that’ll land from a user adoption perspective much better than it will dropping it on someone right before you flip the switch.
Yeah, that makes sense perfectly because I think one of the most frustrating experiences that anyone has, whether it be an employee at a company or a user of any kind of a software package, is not understanding why something is happening and you’re being asked to do something. And you’re being asked to put a lot of effort into something without understanding why, that can be somewhat of a frustrating experience.
Sure.
So I want to speak a little bit to those people who are in the process of deciding they want to start a business or maybe starting a business now and looking at the process of looking at all things data, no matter how data heavy your business is, trying to implement the right system, worrying about all the data security concerns that we have right now because that can be really daunting as well as just which one of these solutions could be right for your particular enterprise, how much effort it might take, how much decision making is going to be in the process, how many people are going to be doing this, this, and that, it can be a real daunting part of a process, as I mentioned in the intro, on top of people trying to come up with business plans, marketing plans, product life cycle plans, and everything like that. What can people do to make it sound like something that’s more manageable, maybe?
Yeah, I recommend engaging with your peers, networking, attend conferences, invest a little bit in talking to other companies who have gone through what you’re going through. If you’re a brand-new startup, you may not want to go to a conference full of mature organizations, you want to go to a new business tech startup-type engagement and talk to people in your industry about what works. Because, look, these conversations, depending on what industry you’re in, it can vary widely. Maybe you’re planning on buying widgets from overseas and selling them at a markup. Very simple type distribution model and there are a million ERPs that could handle that in their sleep. Maybe you want to connect to an e-commerce site, like a Shopify or Magento or something like that. You can always do that kind of thing with a lot of different solutions. If you’re in an industry, however, with very specific needs, maybe you are a government contractor with all types of compliance needs or maybe you are manufacturing steel tubes that require a very specific thickness and diameter and alloy content, in those cases, you may need to focus more on the features of the software. So, what I mean by that is what does the software actually do? Am I going to be able to build a steel pipe and tell it what the diameter needs to be, what the thickness of the wall needs to be, what kind of coating it needs, what kind of alloy it’s going to have? Because if the software won’t do it, it’s not going to be of any use. But, on the other hand, if you’re the widget manufacturer and there are there are a thousand applications that’ll let you do a PO and buy your stuff and sell it, then you may want to be more focused on foundational technology and stability. The steel pipe software, that might be a 10-person company to build exactly what you need. There’s some business risk there because that company may be out of business in five years. There’s not that backing of a Microsoft or a Sage or an Oracle or an SAP. But, on the other hand, if you’re the widget manufacturer, you say, look, Microsoft has something out of the box here for distributors. They host it, they secure it, do updates and disaster recovery. We know Microsoft isn’t going anywhere. Goes beyond feature functionality. If you’re brand new and you’re saying, “How do I even start this?” you don’t just want to go for the software that has your exact features, unless you’re in a very specific industry like I mentioned. If you’re the pipe manufacturer, you need something that’ll do it. And so you’ve got this dichotomy of like industry-specific providers of solutions versus big box, secure, stable, integrated office, handle AI and secure your data to the nth degree. And data security is a big part of that. I mean, every single ransomware attack that I’ve seen over the years has been on-premise SQL database. That’s my number one thing that I’m telling CIOs and CEOs when I talk to them and they’re on an on-premise system and they’re saying, “Well, we may move to the cloud in a year, five years, there’s a big cost to it and what we have works.” And, yeah, it does. The question you need to ask is who is actually securing my data? Is it your IT director, who I’m sure is very qualified, but one person or a small group of people. Is it a third-party IT? None of those options are going to be what you’re going to get going with a true SaaS provider like a Microsoft. Dynamics 365 is as secure as it gets. You are never going to lose your data. The CrowdStrike issue that happened the other day, a lot of people probably know about that, that was a third-party endpoint security solution. Didn’t affect Microsoft SaaS solutions at all. It’s totally insulated from that. It’s in Microsoft’s back, behind the black curtain, multi-tenant software-as-a-service infrastructure.
Now, is there any type of organization that doesn’t have to worry so much about data security? And I’m thinking about, like you mentioned, a steel company, maybe 10 people, where they’re not really making money off of their data, your data is primarily your sales, your leads, your transactions and inventory type of stuff.
Well, that’s all data at the end of the day. So let me give you an example. We were working with a company who’s about a $400-million-a-year distributor. They were on an old on-premise system in the middle of an evaluation of moving to the cloud. One of the reasons they were wanting to move was data security. So, when they were ransomware attacked, which they were, there’s nothing we could have done about that, this is internally secured server, this is their legacy system, they couldn’t ship, they couldn’t invoice their customers, they couldn’t pay their vendors, they couldn’t run their business, and what the ransomware attack had done was to go and encrypt all of their backups. It was delayed, so they backed it up for 14 days and they backed it up with this ransomware every single time so they couldn’t go back and bring back a safe copy. They were done, dead in the water. I mean, $400-million-a-year company with no system to operate. So they very quickly made the decision, okay, we need to switch to a new system and we need it up and running like tomorrow. Well, a system like that typically is four- to six-month implementation cycle. So this was coming right out of COVID and we luckily had an all-star team available that could get them just functional in a couple weeks, which still took a couple weeks. They’re operating on paper and by bubble gum and duct tape for that period of time. Cost untold amounts of money. If you’re a pipe manufacturer and you can’t buy your raw materials and you can’t invoice your customers, that would still grind your business to a halt and cost you a tremendous amount of money so I think every company is beholden to protecting their data.
Now, if someone out there is really interested in starting a business, really interested in what their business is about and the business is not technological at all and that person is really not interested in learning anything about technology or acting on anything about technology, what do you think that person can do prevent the outcome that you just mentioned about everything being ground to a halt by a cyberattack or anything like that?
Trust a big-name provider with a long history. Subscribe to a SaaS-based solution. The last thing in that scenario that you want to do is try to install something on premise or even in a privately hosted cloud, like we talked about kind of the spectrum of cloud solutions earlier. You want to outsource that and ask yourself who is actually responsible for protecting my data? You want to outsource as much of that as you can. You don’t want to be managing servers. You certainly don’t want to be managing security. Something like disaster recovery, if your system actually were to go down, needed a hot failover, that’s included in the big-name SaaS solutions and it’s not in some of the others. So understanding and asking those questions along the way, “Hey, what happens if your offering goes down. Is there a failover? Is there a backup? How are updates handled? How are security patches handled?” That should be automatic. Not to be in the scenario that you painted where as a non-technical business owner or manager that I’m trying to manage on my own. You need to be running your business and outsource that stuff. Best way to do that is with a big-name SaaS solution provider.
And you said some of these providers are a little bit industry specific, which is where the whole thing about networking with other small businesses or other people in similar situations who can then tell you, like, “Oh, I implemented this one. I implemented that one. This was a good thing. This was a bad thing,” and maybe you can kind of find the right people to just really offload that entire set of tasks to.
Yeah, no question. I love the networking, especially if you’re in a unique industry, finding out what people are doing and what’s worked and what hasn’t. You can research conferences. There’s a big one for Dynamics coming up in October in San Antonio. I’ve been going to this conference since 2009. Companies, many, many times who are just evaluating some of the solutions that are on display there, show up and then network because the conferences are commonly divided into networking. Manufacturers over here, project-based companies here, financial management companies over there, and you actually sit and you eat lunch with these people and you go to sessions with them and you get to know them and you talk to them about what they actually are doing. It’s a great way to evaluate reality, compared to getting a sales pitch. A good salesperson is going to be a guide Sherpa, so to speak, and they’re going to walk you through reality and what the pluses and minuses are. You got to be buyer beware and get references because you have two layers. You have provider of the SaaS solution, the NetSuite or the Microsoft or the Sage, and then you’ve got the people that you’re actually working with, the partner, typically, it’s a partner-led ecosystem, particularly in the Microsoft world, that’s our company, Western Computer, that’s what we do, and so you’re going to want to understand that organization even better or just as well as the software itself. You know Microsoft has got good software but who’s going to be putting it in? How successful have they been? Are their customers willing to recommend them or are they going to tell you to run the other way? And there are a lot of independent review sites, like G2 is a really good one for technology where you can go and you can research a company and customers can put their honest reviews out there and the providers can’t do a single thing about it. If you get a one-star review, there it is for everyone to see.
So, do some research. The internet is full of good information. But at the same time, talking to other people in your industry is going to supplement that. Share on XYou can only get so far with Google and Bing researching things online on your own, because you need context and you need a rep.
Now, you told me that you originally were in sales and, of course, now you’re the cloud transformation executive. What does your career path looked like and what made you decide that you wanted to move on from sales to your current role and was there stuff that happened in between?
Yeah. And, really, I’m still attached to sales in a big way because I’m helping companies strategize this stuff and, yes, I’m pulling in the appropriate people but giving people realistic expectations and budgets, I mean, that’s what I do on a daily basis. So there’s a big sales element to what I do still, but my career path is, to be perfectly honest, I kind of fell into tech because I knew someone and they had a good opportunity that I interviewed for at ADP, Automatic Data Processing, a lot of people know that organization, and they put me through extensive training coming out of the University of Georgia and I learned all about tech and then working with that company, once I got a taste of working with a business owner to help them grow the business and then spend a bunch of money with us and at the end of the day just be happy as could be about it and willing to sing our praises from the rooftop and then to realize real gains themselves, I was hooked on that. Can’t do that with smoke and mirrors. You have to be creative in this business and you’ve got to tell people things they don’t want to hear sometimes. I mean, very often, it’s, “Hey, maybe X, Y or Z is not the right fit. Maybe our organization is not the right fit to help you because you’ve got some specific needs.” You can’t be all things to all people. Once I understood that and understood that you can be in sales and help people and help people realize the value that you provide as you help navigate these complex scenarios, that’s kind of how my career path arced and expanded into where I am now, which is business systems for all kinds of different companies, ranging from very small to very big and I love it.
Everyone involves themselves in sales in some kind of capacity or another, whether it’s a formal one or not. Those of you starting a business, you’re going to have to go out there and sell your product or services to people. Even those who looking for a job, you’re kind of selling yourself to your potential employer or potential employers. So people have a weird impression of sales that it doesn’t help people, you’re just pushing a product, and so you found a way to kind of take that whole concept of sales and make it something that actually helps people find the right solution as opposed to just pushing that solution, which is really interesting. How does that feel now? Do you feel like your impact is aligned with what you want to have in your life?
I tell people all the time, especially in complex sales, you shouldn’t be trying to convince people of things that aren’t in their best interests. Now, you’re an advisor, if you’re an expert and you recognize something is in someone’s best interest, explaining that is absolutely very important. But if you want to build a successful business, and this goes for all the business startups online or listening to this podcast, building a reputation is more important than ever. The sites out there where people can read reviews about how you’ve treated people and how you delivered on what you promised and how you helped them or didn’t help them, if we can’t get a case study out of someone at the end of an engagement that says, “Hey, here’s where we were. Here were our problems. Here’s where Wester Computer got us and we’re happy to document that and tell anyone who wants to work with them to go do it,” that’s how sales should be. It shouldn’t be convincing people that they need something that they don’t. And so you can’t really build a long-term business like that anymore. People, the veil has been pulled back, so to speak, with reviews online and ready access to information and just wanting to do the right thing really ought to be enough and wanting to – for me, I want to sleep at night, I want to know I’m not hurting them. But then just realizing that everything is publicly available these days, you’ve got to treat people the right way if you want to grow your business, you’ve got to deliver results, and people have got to get value for what they’re paying you.
Yeah, very much like the concept of social proof, because I think almost everyone I know that I encounter that starts their own businesses, regardless of what that business is, you’re going to start a website. I think nowadays it’s close to universal. And on that website, I always see either testimonials or corporate logos, one of the two as set of social proof, and it usually happens like after you scroll down a little bit, so you start out, you see, “This is what we’re offering. This is what the solution is,” and then you see the typical three packages that a lot of people offer, your base level, your business level, your enterprise level, or whatever type of program you’re offering, and then down, people want to know, “Well, does it work?” especially if someone landed on the page and it’s like, “Okay, well, I don’t know you yet,” and so they want to see someone, especially someone that they feel like they can relate to, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, this person,” and to use one of the most basic examples, I’m not even advocating for this at all, but, “Oh, this person lost 45 pounds on your diet. I think I can too,” but until then, it’s just because the internet connected everyone to everything and so you see an infinite number of options, even with some of the software packages that you’re talking about now, like there’s CRMs, I think is a great example where there seems to be a pretty infinite number of options for CRM and so if you land on a website because you’re looking for a CRM, you’re going to see, okay, well, well, why this CRM? Why is this the right CRM for me to use for my business?
Yeah, no question. And when you’re doing that, I would always listen to, let’s say, you’re looking for a CRM, to use your example. I would listen to each provider about what their CRM can do, not the competitor about what the other people’s CRM can do. If you start to hear, “Well, this other CRM, it’s no good for this, that, and the other reason,” they’re not the experts on that CRM, they’re the experts on their own and they’re probably not being perfectly honest. Now, something like a CRM, you want it tied to your communication tools. It goes beyond just what the CRM looks like and shiny features you see in the sales demo, how does it work with what I already use? Am I using it on my Google shop? Do I need to track Gmails or Outlook? Do I use Teams? Things like that.
Each business is different so it’s very narrow to say, well, one CRM is better than the other. It’s more what is best for your company because every company is different. Share on XWhat are your goals and what is your surrounding tech stack look like and, yeah, everyone’s going to have shiny marketing and sales out there. You got to get past that and what’s going to work for me and why. And, again, talking to references and other companies that have used that application is probably the best way to do that.
And when it comes to finding solutions, one area where I think a lot of people are potentially looking to is AI. One of the things that I say quite a bit is that since the internet connected everything to everything, we have a lot of noise, a lot of chaos, and one of the primary promises of AI, especially maybe one of its first or most recent manifestations, being ChatGPT, is to cut through all that noise, cut through like, “Oh, I had to do a Google search, look at six pages worth of things, read a bunch of articles,” AI can go out and do that for you and kind of bring all that in. Do you see AI as a tool that people can use across, whether it be computational solutions like CRM or business coaching solutions, personal development solutions, sales and marketing solutions that can actually help someone knowing the identity themselves, knowing the identity of their businesses, cut right to the right solution with less research?
Yeah, I would say it’ll stop short of cutting right to the right solution but it will dramatically reduce the research required. It can aggregate all of what you’ve mentioned. Instead of going to ten different websites and downloading all these things, it can summarize information and point you in the right direction. Now, it’s not going to tell you X, Y or Z CRM is right for Acme Corporation for all these reasons, that’s still up to the individual. But to use an analogy, I just went on a trip with my family. We were two weeks in an RV. Now, five years ago, I would have gone out and researched RV sites for each city we were in and ten years ago I would have – 20 years ago, I would have called them all and I would have had to do all this individual work, and now I can just say, well, going from Alpharetta, Georgia, to Bozeman, Montana, where are the RV sites that I needed to go to? And so did I still have to do some work to book them and to select which one I wanted? Yeah, absolutely. But that process was dramatically collapsed with the use of AI. And that’s more of a tactical use of AI, like you’ve got this task, there’s all this data I’ve got to gather, let me aggregate it and simplify the process. And then, on the other end of the AI spectrum, you’ve got this big data machine learning type AI, where, if you’re in the right system and you’re gathering data over a period of time, you can then leverage that data to make intelligent business decisions. For instance, when are my customers going to pay? That’s always been managed by a certain amount of invoices out there that are due on this date and a certain that are due on this date and I hope everybody pays and I’m anticipating as a business owner that’s my cash flow. In today’s day and age, if you have a modern system with clean data and it’s up in the cloud and you build up a little bit of a history, well, now I could say here’s how your actual customers, Acme Corporation, have paid, each individual one. This one pays on average seven days late and this one pays on average 12 days early and here are all your invoices that are out there so based on past performance and real data, here’s what you can expect in terms of cash flow. So AI can absolutely help make a decision on a business system by aggregating data. And then on the far end, once you’re implemented, and you should be looking what is the AI strategy for any application you’re looking at, if there are four people developing it, they may not have one and there’s not that technological backing. AI is more of a facilitator on the front end. The question that you asked is it going to help me pick a system. Well, yeah. It’s not going to pick one for you, though.
And for people out there that are thinking about their own potential career transitions, because this show is all about kind of rethinking where you are, where you want to be, where you want to go, and I don’t really advocate one particular solution. For some of you, it definitely means starting up your own business, which I think is wonderful. I think it’s wonderful when people bring something into the world, but for some people out there, it might be more about just finding a different role, a different position with a different type of organization doing a different type of thing. How is AI changing that employment landscape and how is AI changing currently the very nature of that decision?
Yeah, absolutely. So AI is driven by data so I think the requirement for data scientists, data engineers, people that curate and manage that data, that will continue to increase. You’re going to have people that actually work in AI training models and understand AI because AI is not autopilot. Microsoft has termed it Copilot, which is a much more apt description. You still have to have people that understand what inputs are required into AI in order to get a meaningful output. So, you’re going to have people that have some of the soft skills, I would say, sales and creative thinking and marketing that AI can help with to a degree. I think some of the soft skills are going to be more important as we go, but you’re going to need people that know how to use AI, because it’s not going to be everybody, and some of the younger generation is great at that, some of us that have been around for a long time, it’s a shift and you’ve got to adapt and use the tools at your disposal or you’re going to get left behind. So, I think in terms of segments, development may take a little bit of a hit, and a lot of this is speculation so don’t go make your career path based on this, but there are already tools here that write code, write workflows, you tell it you want a report to be written with something like Copilot for Power BI, which is a data visualization tool. When you say show me a report for sales trend for X, Y and Z product over the last two years, and it generates it for you. That was a developer’s job last year, writing workflows. You say, well, if you post a sales order, copy this person and send a copy to this person and create a file in SharePoint and then it writes that workflow for you. Those type of coding jobs are probably going to take a hit, in my opinion, and that is an opinion. Whereas the people that are curating and managing the data are going to be in high demand.
And then it sounds like what you’re also saying is that, given that once a tool is available to one person, it’s pretty much available to everybody, using AI-related tools to develop business insights, in general, is going to be something that everybody, no matter what business you’re starting right now, no matter what business you’re getting into, should be thinking about doing.
Yeah, absolutely. Generating business insights out of your data and then, on the other side, you tactically having your employees go about their day, whether it’s a marketing manager writing a description for an item or somebody getting a newsletter out or a salesperson writing an email to a prospect, that’s not really gaining a business insight but it’s executing a task more efficiently. So both of those things are very important.
And let’s say 10 years down the road, when AI has fully taken its impact, do you see that starting a business becomes an easier thing to do or a harder thing to do?
Well, starting a business? Man, that’s a great question. I’m having to think about that one for a second. You’re going to have more tools at your disposal. I mean, I can go ask Copilot right now what are the steps to create an LLC in the state of Georgia and it’s going to spit it out for me so from that standpoint, a lot of it’s easier. There’s also probably going to be more competition, because that type of exercise is being democratized a bit more. I’ve never been asked that. It’s a really good question. I think it’ll probably even out for the most part. I mean, you’re going to have to adapt to the new way of starting a business, more than anything. I mean, businesses will still be created and businesses will still go out of business and businesses will still be acquired, but I think a lot of the reasons for all of that are going to change a bit.
And then for those on the other type of path, finding a new job, we’ve all heard so much about how terrible the process is right now, I’ve experienced it myself a couple times, does that become any easier with AI possibly connecting the right person to the right employment source based on their profiles?
Yeah, I think so, and I think that that understanding the usefulness of AI and showcasing that during the interview process is going to be absolutely critical. I’ve been with Western Computer for over nine years and my last company I was with for eight years, I haven’t done a ton of job hunting lately, but we do a good bit of hiring and we expect prospective employees to understand our business and our industry and there’s no better more efficient way to do that than AI. If you’re about to hop on an interview and you can go and you can ask Copilot what’s the latest news with Western Computer before you get on an interview with our hiring manager, you can be well prepared to answer those questions and you got to use the tools that are out there. That’s my recommendation on looking for a job. And not only do you have to use the tools but articulate to your prospective employer that you can use the tools.
That sounds like that would potentially be useful for anyone looking for any type of a job, because looking up the latest news about an employer, their market competitive position, all that stuff would apply to any industry pretty much.
Yep, absolutely, no question. I mean, AI is horizontal. It’s going to work across all these industries and you’ve got to embrace it. People are out there and they’re going to be using it effectively and tools change over time and my last thought on AI here, there’s a little bit of trepidation out there. What is AI going to do? Is it going to take my job? Is it going to be Terminator and take over the world? There will inevitably be some negative effects of AI. Great parallel that I’ve heard and I love is there were negative effects with fire and electricity as well. You could burn yourself or you can be electrocuted, but the benefits far outweigh the negative impacts and people that learn how to harness the power of that stuff and properly use it are going to thrive.
That’s a wonderful final message for everyone out there listening about how we can kind of think about this movement, whether people call it the fourth industrial revolution or just a little blip or anywhere in between, but just to think about this new tool kind of emerging. Ryan, I would like to thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, helping us kind of navigate this transition as well as navigate how to go about looking at a lot of the solutions that we’re looking at and how to really make sense of this whole daunting task of how we set up our data, our cloud, our data security infrastructure, which can be just really, really mind scrambling in some kind of way.
My pleasure, Stephen. Thanks for having me on.
And I’d also like to finish up by thanking everyone out there in the audience listening, regardless of why you’re listening, hopefully you’ve got some insights on how you can go about feeling a lot better about all the steps you need to take in order to make your dreams come true.
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About Ryan Pollyniak
Ryan is the Cloud Transformation Executive at Western Computer. Ryan specializes in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 ecosystem, catering to medium to enterprise-sized
businesses, and is well-versed in ERP and CRM strategy and heavily involved in the Microsoft Dynamics Channel. What sets Ryan apart is his ability to approach ERP and CRM projects as a guide, emphasizing a simple and effective strategy.