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CEO of Nodes & Links Reveals How AI Will Revolutionize the SaaS Industry
58 Plays1 month ago
This week Greg Lawton, CEO of AI project management software, Nodes & Links, joins Carlos and Jason to provide insights on:
The Belt and Road Initiative that is coming out of China. The two prevailing views on how planning should work on major projects. Whether the advancement of AI will lead to the downfall of SaaS businesses in the long run.
Follow Carlos on Linkedin | Follow Jason on Linkedin | Check out Aphex
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Transcript
Introduction to Epistemology and Propositions
00:00:00
Speaker
I think about two things. One is the ah epistemology, which is how we know what we know. And then the second is the propositions that really really people are basing this on. And to get to my theory, I'm going to play a bit of mental gymnastics. And we're going to do... I was just going to get Olu to Google those two words for me, but yeah thanks for giving the day. Do an ad infinite and trip, which essentially go go extremes on both sides and all extremes seem ridiculous. So it's like, okay, but something.
Welcome Back and Guest Introduction
00:00:32
Speaker
Welcome back to the podcast. So after a couple of weeks, getting feedback of a little bit of internal like nepotism with affects only guests for the podcast. We've decided to branch out a little bit. And today I'm joined by Carlos as per usual and Greg, CEO of nodes and links and podcaster extraordinaire. Hello folks. How are you doing? I don't know. I've got my podcaster extraordinaire, but we'll go with that.
00:00:58
Speaker
Well, it's the the bar's low, so relative to us, you are. It sounds dead.
00:01:06
Speaker
How are things with both of you?
News Highlight: Dubai's Waste Management Facility
00:01:09
Speaker
All good. I was trying to find a cool bit of news that I normally run at the beginning and the sexiest thing I could find was a waste management facility in Dubai that's now up and running. ah So that was the extent of my cool news story. A bit of a slow fun fact week. I had to start. Go on yourself, Greg. How's things?
00:01:29
Speaker
but well I'm actually ah I don't have time to look at the news at the moment because I just spend my life on a plane like I'm traveling all over the place and I tell it like one of the things they don't tell you about being an entrepreneur is the brutalness of jet lag.
00:01:44
Speaker
you You feel like 20 years older. You need Jason's power. Having just done the last few weeks, a couple of us did company offsights,
Challenges of Company Offsite Travels
00:01:56
Speaker
Greg. We did one in Oz, one in Vietnam, one in the UK, and two of us had to do all three of them back to back.
00:02:04
Speaker
And, uh, by the end I needed to be put in like an induced coma, I think. And I went through a whole card of, um, of to Mazapan. So that's the other other consequence.
00:02:18
Speaker
um Very, very good. ah Let's dive in because we're a bit short on time and we've got some pretty hefty
China's Belt and Road Initiative Overview
00:02:26
Speaker
topics on the docket. So three things we're going to look at and chat about this week. ah We're going to start off looking at the Belt and Road Initiative, which is China's plan of a modern Silk Road spanning over 120Ks. And Greg's going to tell us what it is. No, I'm joking. Carlos is.
00:02:42
Speaker
Next, we're going to dive into a bit of a kind of ideological battle in this idea of how planning will evolve into the future of this kind of top down orchestration versus like onsite coordination. And then finally, ah We're all going to get into a and some groupthink and talk about the some recent ah conversation on a technology and business podcast, the All In podcast, where they talked about the idea of potentially SaaS companies and systems of record becoming obsolete due to advancements in AI and agenda AI. so
00:03:22
Speaker
Hefty topics to say the least. So let's just dive in straight off the bat. So Belt and Road Initiative ah is something that that China is doing and investing a lot of money
Financial Investments and Controversies
00:03:33
Speaker
in. In a nutshell, the Belt and Road Initiative is this global infrastructure development strategy launched surprisingly recently. I was surprised to read it was in 2013 by President Xi Jinping.
00:03:46
Speaker
The idea is to help improve connectivity between China and over 150 other countries across Europe, Asia, Africa and beyond. And it's intending to consist of components that are a land-based kind of silk road economic belt and this kind of sea 21st century maritime belt. The initiative has already ah resulted in infrastructure spending surpassing one trillion dollars with further estimates of potential investments which may or may not come to pass of up to eight trillion US dollar equivalents. And so these are resulting in projects in countries around the world of
00:04:31
Speaker
transportation projects, energy projects, telecommunications. So a lot of industrial development. It's something that I think a lot of people would be war aware of the, they would have heard the the the name. There's a lot of people that would be very positive about what it's doing in terms of the economic development of the region and China. And then there are a lot of people that have a fairly dim view of ah what China might be trying to do.
00:04:57
Speaker
So I guess from a perspective of infrastructure development or the scheme in general, I don't know, Carlos, what are your thoughts on and have you have you followed and been across what China has been doing?
China's Lending Strategy and Moral Concerns
00:05:09
Speaker
I've seen pockets. I think looking into it, I didn't quite grasp the scan of what they're doing. The ah the old phrase, all roads lead to Rome is going to be, I think, refactored to China by the sounds of it.
00:05:22
Speaker
Yeah, it's really impressive what they're doing, because ah lot a lot of countries that wouldn't necessarily be able to afford infrastructure, whether it's highways, ports for exports, um rail and everything else, obviously you can take a lot of positives from that. The controversy comes through the way that they're being financed.
00:05:39
Speaker
it it seems they sort of lend money to build a lot of this infrastructure and as soon as they sort of default on loans they then take ownership or long leases on the actual asset that they were building. It's a very sort of triggering conversation I think for a lot of individuals because it looks a bit scandalous.
00:06:00
Speaker
I'm not sure where I sit on the the benefits versus the the the moral side of what they're trying to achieve. and The um the like one trillion in in ah funding for largely infrastructure is ah There's a lot of
Project Scale and Best Practices
00:06:16
Speaker
cabbage. you know We've looked in previous episodes or in previous weeks, we've talked about like largest contractors across the world and looking at ah league tables of where infrastructure development is happening. And and there's there's always so many of the Chinese contractors super high up the list and the scale of those companies and the projects relative to
00:06:37
Speaker
what we would spend most of our time talking about is crazy that like they look like a ah pimple on an elephant almost, ah given the size of some of the work that's happening there. So yeah, it's just interesting to see how what is like commonly talked about versus what's really happening and how much spend's happening there. Greg, have you had much exposure to any of the kind of projects spinning off of Belt and Road?
Global Policies and Execution Differences
00:07:02
Speaker
So i've had I've had exposure to ah individuals who know the policy and strategy in a bit more detail. The projects spinning off are obviously in parts of the world that we traditionally don't generally sell services to. That's exactly why china one of the reasons why China's taking this approach. what What I'd probably say here is that there's a very big difference between policy and politics and execution on the ground.
00:07:31
Speaker
to your point, it it's all under an initiative of ah the the Belt and Road. But in reality, what it what it is is a 10,000 projects happening around the world and a general policy of China promoting, and I'll use very flavorful language here,
00:07:49
Speaker
inter-country joint working to build out infrastructure and upskill to the benefit of both parties who signed the contract. I see this happening as these kind of big policy decisions happen happening in think places like Saudi with neon.
00:08:09
Speaker
actually, they happen in America, the the entire Manhattan Project as well. But right right now, you've you've got big infrastructure around Chitfabs and data centers and hyperscaling, which is a big policy of the US government, because that's not so what What I see right now is is actually the emergence of a lot of policies that are executed via infrastructure and they're global in scale. It's almost like country the big countries are competing through infrastructure.
00:08:40
Speaker
and And obviously, the like the way that these things would typically play out, as you said, to the benefit of ah people signing the the contract. So you've got they're largely being executed by local and or Chinese contractors delivering a lot of the the big infrastructure projects.
Strategic Projects and Anti-globalization
00:08:58
Speaker
But it's it interesting to reflect on ah the scale of a scheme like Belton Road and how little like knowledge or best practice sharing is kind of flowing from that to the kind of say like European contractors that are ah largely not delivering a lot of that work. And so you get this kind of it's this it's almost like linked to this anti globalization thing right where you got these big kind of superpowers
00:09:28
Speaker
kind of making these big strategic plays and they're wanting their kind of largely they're like local ah companies to deliver those projects and so there's almost no best practice sharing across.
00:09:42
Speaker
Well, i think it I think it's touch and go again. This this really touches politics because I'm British. Go back 300 years. How much knowledge sharing did we do when we in the with the colonies? Lots of forced knowledge sharing. Lots of fun, forced knowledge sharing. Yeah, exactly. like We're entering this with the most hypocritical sense possible.
00:10:04
Speaker
if i was you know If I was sitting here and I had a trillion dollars, and I was going, um I want places to invest, and a trillion dollars isn't a real thing. What it is, is I have the ability to direct people's time into the areas that I think are most important.
00:10:22
Speaker
That's really what you're sitting on is however many workers that can do things. That's really what a trillion dollars is. So you're like, I'm sitting on a huge um industry and they can build infrastructure. Now, if I was sitting on that, I'd be going, OK, well, have I exhausted of all of the infrastructure I can build? what's What's the one that is gives me the best return to my country. And it's like, well, all of the silicon is in Africa. So do you know what, we'll go over there, and we'll build all these ports. And yes, of course, we'll do it in, you know, we don't own the country. So we'll do it in a way where it's beneficial for both parties or whatever perception people have of beneficial, but that's what I'd be doing. So if I'm sitting on 15 million construction workers, parachute them into wherever ah
00:11:11
Speaker
I mean, so in that sense, why am I knowledge sharing? Like, it just slows the process down. I'm only knowledge sharing if the country only permits me to do that building if I do it.
00:11:23
Speaker
I was going to make a point about everyone being kind of like humans on the one planet, but I think that might, uh,
Debate on Project Delivery Schedules
00:11:29
Speaker
I think I might get two meta. So, um, I, I think it's a, it's, it's interesting to reflect on, yeah, again, the scale of this, uh, in the, in the kind of realm of geopolitics and how the things that like a lot of people delivering projects and stuff that we would work on on a day to day basis is, um,
00:11:51
Speaker
It's very much like still very small fries in the scale of all the things happening in the in the world. Sometimes you find that the world feels like a small place and then other times it feels like a ah vast place. Anyway, that already got meta. So let's jump on let's pivot to a let's pivot to something more of our wheelhouse. Let's talk about planning.
00:12:10
Speaker
To set this topic up, there's a debate that's kind of, uh, I've observed and I've had folks, uh, raise with me over years almost and a couple of folks in the last few weeks. So I thought it would be interesting to talk about on this episode. And and Greg, we specifically reached out to you cause I thought you'd have some interesting views on, on this. But if I was to kind of summarize and set the topic up,
00:12:36
Speaker
You have this kind of fact in in project delivery, specifically like maybe we think about major project delivery where the schedules that we would think of it like as a master schedule that that that projects would typically have are a sort of rough approximation of what we're going to do. It's kind of like an abstraction or a simplification of reality to say this is what we are planning to do.
00:13:01
Speaker
and intentionally not knowing that there's like a state of the world
Future of Scheduling with Technology
00:13:05
Speaker
at a certain point in the project that um we won't know about everything that's happening. The schedule doesn't bake into it all of the detail of what's happening on that side at that point in time. And if we think about what happens in the pick some long distance future point when all these sort of technological advancements that you can think of might've come to fruition.
00:13:28
Speaker
There's a like, some people project this kind of logical progression where the schedules get more detail, more granularity, almost this like fully formed digital representation of what's going to happen and baking in all of the context of how the the the project will progress over time.
00:13:48
Speaker
thinking of like almost like a ah digital twin video game scenario where we could tell that in nine months time in two days, operative X is going to do this thing in this specific spot. And you could even project that that operative could be a robot that's kind of deployed as a result of what the schedule is saying. ah This is not me saying this, but this is kind of like one projection of the future that that some folks feel passionate about.
00:14:15
Speaker
The other approach that people are talking about is this idea that um the schedule as it exists today is kind of an abstraction. Putting more reality in the into the abstraction is kind of a fool's errand and we'll never really model the state of the site on a particular date. The people that may or may not turn up to work, the logistics, the traffic of the local area, you know, all these like ah moving pieces that end up impact impacting what gets done, what can get done today, tomorrow, next week. et cetera. And that the the logical extension of how the project gets delivered is this um is this set of tools that empower a project team to kind of be ah kind of like ah coordinators or conductors of an orchestra and take schedules and input, but all these other inputs like logistics and and what the state of the the project is. So that was a fairly lengthy monologue setting up these kind of two
00:15:11
Speaker
views of the world and there could be others in between. But I don't know, Greg, is that something that you've got a theory of ah of how things may evolve?
Theory of Project Delivery and Epistemology
00:15:20
Speaker
I definitely have a theory. Whether or not it's right, I don't know. that Well, that's what it shows about theories. that and come to pass yeah So the way I think about this is I i think about two things. One is the ah epistemology, which is how we know what we know. And then the second is the propositions that really really people are basing this on. And to get to my theory, I'm going to play a bit of mental gymnastics and we're going to do I was just going to get Olu to Google those two words for me, but yeah thanks for giving the day. Do an ad infinite and trip, which essentially go go extremes on both sides and all extremes seem ridiculous. So it's like, okay, but something. So um i'll i'll take I'll take two points. So number one is, what what is the fundamental characteristic of waterfall projects that we're involved in delivering? And the fundamental characteristic is that interconnections matter.
00:16:11
Speaker
as opposed to agile project management methodologies, which is formed on the proposition that interconnections are loose and and generally don't matter in the overall delivery of things. That's the science. The consequence of that is you have to do some kind of sequential planning. But it's also a fallacy to think that all levels are waterfall, and some levels don't approach and are onto bad jobs. so you've you've got to You've got a ah level problem, is what I'll call it.
00:16:41
Speaker
The other thing as well is you've you've got forces of economics. Could we wait until we've perfectly designed and coordinated absolutely everything before the first shovel hits the ground? Of course we could, but it would take forever, cost an absolute fortune, and the second a shovel hits the ground, something will go wrong and your plan goes to crap. Flipping it on its head, so therefore, should we just kind of roughly sketch a building and crack on?
00:17:10
Speaker
No, that's also ridiculous as well. You need an element of planning. there's ah there's a question ah it' it's not sir It's not a question to me of you know this progression towards more detail. It's actually a question of economic curves.
00:17:26
Speaker
at what point is the optimum economic point to stop detailed planning and leave forward wave planning to be able to execute the mission? That's number one. Number number two is around what these things are trying to achieve.
Role of Schedules in Policy Management
00:17:44
Speaker
A schedule is trying to ah is really trying to achieve high-level policy management.
00:17:50
Speaker
So it's what contracts do we have in place? How do we coordinate multiple stakeholders? And I'm talking here like give get dates, equipment delivery, these kinds of things. How do we coordinate these at a master level, given that there are separate organisms, organizations, but organisms living together? And then how do we just give simplified instructions to a team who then have a level of experience to go and go execute that?
00:18:20
Speaker
Where that model completely falls apart is manufacturing. So there's this concept in operation as management of the, um the repetit it's called the repetition curve. So on one axis, you've got utilities, so electric. You make a billion electrics a second. Internet is the same, water's the same. It's essentially, it's just a repetitive game of creation.
00:18:47
Speaker
They're not projects, but on the far end, you have what we talk about, which is projects and a unique endeavor to do something. But as you go along, you have mass production lines, you have like car production lines, these kinds of things, like limited um production lines, like submarines. So you don't build one, you build seven at a time, that kind of thing. So what I'd say is it depends how repetitive it is.
00:19:12
Speaker
if you're If you're in a trade in an environment doing a job that's going to be done 10,000 times, you actually it's not a project environment anymore. It's a manufacturing environment. So you can go into very, very detailed repetitive planning of how things are done. But if you're not in that environment, there's going to be tweaks and twists at all times.
00:19:36
Speaker
so what's what's ah What's an interesting paradigm is that the projects and the teams thinking about this kind of like top-down detailed approach tend to in in in my anecdotal experience be that very like I'm doing the one-off project scenario thing and that one that is probably where you're you've got the capacity to do it in granular detail, detail those folks are often doing that project or production in such a controlled environment that it's not actually a problem because you're just measuring cycle times and production in a a relatively controlled environment.
Manufacturing vs. Unique Project Planning
00:20:09
Speaker
But the the so the sad news, if I was to play back to you what I heard you say, is that we're going to continue forth in this kind of messy middle. No, not necessarily. So I actually there'll be changes i think there'll be changes across the board. I just think the changes will be different than what people are talking about. So for example, if you're more of the manufacturing end, so you're doing projects that really are manufacturing,
00:20:36
Speaker
Yes, you're going to be going towards the automated planning than the detailed planning and you're going to be going towards that element. If you're more in the projects element, you're going to have lessons learned being passed to you via things like AI because it's a synthesization of data.
00:20:56
Speaker
But the execution is going to remain with the team. And then in between, it's going to just be a flex on what level the top down flips into the bottom up planning. And that level will fluctuate based on the three extreme points I mentioned. that That's my prediction of how things will work.
00:21:20
Speaker
So for anyone listening that's in that top-down camp, basically, unless you get to that top-down camp, you're always in the middle somewhere, because there's always a gap. There's always that kind of like last-mile delivery or last-mile coordination. I think so um i think we know who won the argument. Go, Carlos. Yes. yeah Just thought I'd give another con a bit of contrast to two technically-minded people in one simple, constantly surveyor belt. Some construction-adjacent input from the Conde Surveyor.
AI in Design and Planning Speed
00:21:49
Speaker
As i I tried to oversimplify the conversation when thinking about it and there's definitely the thought on can we do design quicker and nail the design before we go to site and surely that will become way quicker with AI because it will understand specs, requirements, works information, all that good stuff and should be able to make changes quickly. The bottleneck in the middle at the moment which is restricting most of the where could it go options is probably the understanding of what's actually happening because at the moment a lot of people are in this bottom up thing because all the real information that gets surfaced is supervisors form and engineers on a daily basis working out what's actually happening on site and all the conditions surrounding them. If we can actually nail the
00:22:28
Speaker
what is happening right now. I'm not talking about site diary, like everything that's happening in real time. That opens up every opportunity to do, I don't know if the future would then be like a model driven daily brief or whatever that output is, but I think that's the missing piece that restricts us at the moment to conventional planning methods. So I think that's the thing I can't get my head around actually solving it. Like there's lots of organizations now that do daily scans and all these things to understand progress, but it's the actually what's happening right now is really hard to move away from your experience bias of there's always this bottom up element because they're the only ones that actually know and not a model or a system. Well, I think it depends on the level of what we class as bottom up. The problem with topics like this, to me, is the
Human and Machine Coordination Challenges
00:23:15
Speaker
lexicon. We don't use accurate enough language when we're actually talking about things. So to your point, could I imagine a future whereby a system has analyzed every
00:23:26
Speaker
concreting daily plan that's been produced across a company for the last 10 years. And then with pretty damn good accuracy could give the concreting team a plan every single day of what they need to do. Yeah. But what that does is it dries down what the task is. You know, you've still got, like if we think extreme, you've still got a task of turn the ignition key in the concreting truck.
00:23:54
Speaker
Drive it around the corner it just pushes down where the bottom-up planning starts to happen and at some point the bottom-up planning to humans seems ridiculous it's just both we just going to do those things but to machines really complex.
00:24:11
Speaker
like This is actually where humans and machines have a big disconnect. Humans have evolved in a very, very messy world. So things like hand-eye coordination and making making sense of how to coordinate around the world is natural to us. And actually, front-brain thinking with mathematics and logic is actually really difficult for us. It is the most recent evolution.
00:24:34
Speaker
Whereas computers are logic machines. So the counter is the truth. Actually, being able to do ah contextual understanding of the world is very difficult. And this whole AI wave, if you zoom out, this is ah my big theory, if you zoom out 2,000 years, this will be like the first fish crawled out of the ocean kind of thing for AI being able to understand the context of the world. that that's you know In 2,000 years, it'd be a totally different story.
00:25:04
Speaker
Like that, that's where we are. So all I'd say is, you know, you're slowly going to be pushing top the top down down, but there'll come a point where the technology physically can't get any further until you've got full robotics.
AI's Impact on Business Systems of Record
00:25:18
Speaker
I'm going to, given the time constraints and the discussion of AI and fish crawling out of water, I'm going to use that as a hard segue into topic three, because this is one I'm dead keen for your thoughts on, Greg. So recently, I was listening to a podcast that both Carlos and I listened to. It's right there in my, like, subscribe podcast, Greg, next to Beyond Deadlines. So it gets a regular. I also subscribe to this one, by the way.
00:25:47
Speaker
so um the So recently in the All In podcast, one of the hosts of the podcast, Chamath Pali Papatiya, was talking about this idea that as AI evolves and you get this ability to have these agents go and take actions and do things and understand ah systems and and how businesses operate.
00:26:10
Speaker
there is a kind of theory of the world where source of truth, system of record, SaaS platforms, like a workday, Salesforce, et cetera, which are essentially a source of truth of of some form of data within a business that have some UI for information going in, some business logic about how it gets updated, who can view it, and then some some UI that people can consume and understand.
00:26:38
Speaker
ah is at risk of kind of like losing its grip within a business and it could be replaced by ah kind of just a ah data lake and and and ah agents that go and understand and and the business logic and do the the activities on their behalf. and Because I would have made a meal of that explanation, always queued up the video, we're going to play ah like a one to two minute clip of what was covered, and then we can talk about it after straight up.
00:27:07
Speaker
The radical idea that I would put out there is I think that systems of record no longer exist because they don't need to. And the reason is because all you have is data and you have a pipeline of information. Can you level set and just explain to people what system of record is to show audience? Inside of a company, you'll have a handful of systems that people would say are the single source of truth. They're the things that are used for reporting compliance. An example would be for your general ledger. So to NetSuite record your revenues, you'd use NetSuite or you'd use Oracle GL or you'd use Workday Financials. The software economy over the last 20 years have been built on this premise. We will create the system of record. You will build apps on top of the system of record and the knowledge workers will come in and that's how they will get work done.
00:27:58
Speaker
And I think that SACS is right. This totally flips that on its head. Instead, what will happen is people will provision an agent and roughly direct what they want the outcome to be, and they'll be process independent. They won't care how they do it. They just want the answer. The obvious thing that happens in that world is systems of record lose a grip on the vault that they had in terms of the data that runs a company. You don't necessarily need it within the same reliance and primacy that you did five and 10 years ago. That'll have an impact to the software economy. All right, Ollie, we can cut it there.
Future of Software Companies with AI
00:28:38
Speaker
So ah Greg and Karl also software companies are we fucked.
00:28:45
Speaker
There's the language. I completely agree with everything he's saying. And it's actually, That's been core a core part of our investment pitch for half a decade. Two components. ah it It's what job is the software doing. And by the way, this is for systems of systems of record, not systems of collaboration. Systems of collaboration is something different. It's about what's the task needed to be done.
00:29:10
Speaker
And my big thing is what he was getting onto, which is companies are going to, he talks about leverage. I talk, my term is a productivity multiplier. Companies are going to get massive productivity multipliers, the work that humans do. So it's like AI is a productivity multiplying technology. So if they if they if they make this shift,
00:29:34
Speaker
Essentially what will happen is large amounts of labour budget will flow into IT budget and essentially what we're bringing in is an AI workforce. the The way I think about it is, okay, let's say you hire a thousand people today. In 10 years, you'll hire 10 million people. It's just that 9,990,000 of them will be AI bots that cost you a penny, and 10,000 of them will be humans that cost you a huge amount of money, and you have to have all HR processes and all of these things around that's very difficult to manage.
00:30:09
Speaker
so if we If we were to double click on that, and and and I like your distinction of like system of record versus system of collaboration, but if we were to take like schedule as something that we kind of know and interact with as a group, the system of record is famously for most people something like a P6.
00:30:27
Speaker
not necessari No, not necessarily. The system of record is the schedule file, which can be a .xer.pp or .msp file format at the moment, and quite a few people have structured that in data lakes specifically. It's just that they use P6 to create it and to open and interact with that file.
00:30:49
Speaker
One of the the ah directions of the world that you could kind of imagine happening is that these systems of record already hold the the the user experience and a bunch of these flows of things people do to input information, get information out, ah come through this gateway of these systems of record. They hold the data in which the people are trying to edit, manipulate, view, whatever.
00:31:15
Speaker
They that puts them in a number of cases in like the primary seat to implement a lot of this Agentic behavior and they also have the enterprise logic of like who can edit it who can't edit it What's it mean when it is edited all that stuff?
00:31:31
Speaker
ah like I could easily forecast a ah view of the world where ah HubSpot, Salesforce or the or any kind of system of record platform is... ah the The outcome does happen that you've described, but it happens via the the existing player because they've They've got the kind of underlying primitive which is data and ah some enterprise RBAC logic of who and who can see and edit what. A hundred percent. I wouldn't say i wouldn't say the data is a unique advantage in all honesty. Data is very, very easy to come by. The the only data that
00:32:08
Speaker
I've come across that has any unique value is the internal production rate and costs in terms of ah in terms of the construction companies because that's you can gear your competition based on that. But to be honest, the vast majority is worthless because you can very easily get hold of it, demand supply.
00:32:30
Speaker
What I'd say is that it's the it's two things. One is access to the skill sets to build agentic technologies specifically for that use case. And the second thing is access to customers to be able to sell it because the technology is pointless unless you can sell it something. Incumbents are very well-placed to access customers. The big question is, are they well-placed given their gun governance structures Given the reporting and revenue requirements, you know because if you've IPO'd or you you have to meet forecasts and all of these kinds of things, given all of this, is there enough appetite to cannibalize something, to build something new so that so that someone else doesn't come up about and cannibalize you? That's more of the question to me.
00:33:20
Speaker
I think many of them would see ah definitely the like um prior generation of sa SaaS platforms, I think can definitely see the like existential risk and opportunity and ah aggressively moving. But then there's like the prior generations of like something like a P6 is like several generations ago. I have no, there's a whole other topic that we should dive into when we don't have sub one minute left in this episode, which is the future of that piece of software.
Episode Wrap-up and Future Topics
00:33:56
Speaker
Carlos, you're about to say something. I was going to say, I'm about to be the most unprofessional podcast host and say that we've for overrun slightly and I have to leave. partying that start you run So I'll let you run the rap. Do you want a rap? Do you want to roll the rap?
00:34:10
Speaker
yeah i'll roll up I'm going to first i go apologize for cutting this episode short. I feel like we could have gone for double A. We'll have to do a part D at some point in the future because I think there's like yeah more than enough to dive into. Sorry, Carlos, read us out. yeah Greg, thank you very much for joining the show and so thank you very much everyone for listening to today's show. If you did enjoy today's episode, please do think about liking up the video or following us on your chosen podcast platform. Your support is very much appreciated and we'll catch you all next week. Bye bye.