Start Small, Think Big: Why Most AI Strategies Fail Before They Start

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season where we are talking about moving forward, getting unstuck, forward momentum, all those good things that you want to have at the beginning of the year. Honestly, you want to have them at the end of the year as well. But great time to get ourselves moving. This is the Building Better Developers podcast, also known as Develop-N-Or. I am Rob Brodhead, also known as a founder of Develop-N-Or and a founder of RB Consulting, where we help you with a technology reality check. We help you to sit down before you make that big decision, that big move and figure out do you really need to do that right now? Do you maybe need to assess some things? Do you need to get your ducks in a row before you move forward? Good thing and bad thing. Good thing is busy times, lots of stuff going on. It is just that kind of season. We've gotten out of January and even February that sometimes are a little slow and things are picking up full speed. The bad side of that is that sometimes things get a little scrambly as those that have watched the... If you're watching the YouTube, you know sometimes that happens for us. A better thing is that Michael is going to go ahead and introduce himself. Hey everyone, my name is Mike Molash. I'm one of the co-founders of Develop-N-Or, Building Better Developers. I'm also the founder of Envision Q8, where we build and test custom software that eliminates the bottlenecks so your business runs smoother and grows faster. Good thing and bad thing. Kind of the same thing going on. We've had some interesting weather this year. The bad thing is I'm dealing with the aftermath and trying to get all the erosion repaired from all the wonderful storms we've had. Good thing is hopefully the contractors we found will be able to get it all restored and fixed up. So going forward, we'll have a nice stable foundation around our house. Stable foundation tends to be a good thing. Unstable foundations? Not so much. Today we are back with an interview and we're going to go dive right in and let Brad introduce himself. Yeah, the stable foundation is a talk that we like to have as well. So hello everyone, my name is Brad Gru. I'm co-founder and CEO of Digital Meld and host of the Start Small Think Big podcast. We talk about on Start Small Think Big and with our customers every single day, we talk about laying that stable foundation. There's no point in even trying to get with, we're an AI and automation agency and there's no point in even walking down that path until you set that foundation. So that's where we like to start as well. And that is a pretty common theme when we talk about AI as one of them is that it's like you can automate the snot out of your stuff, but if it doesn't work in the first place, you're just making a broken process move faster, break quicker and just become more of a pain than it was in the start. So how did you, we'll dive right in. How did you guys get into your focus on AI? How long have you been doing that as part of helping people do it? So I've been, and I started my journey in career IT like most folks, you know, systems administration, that kind of thing. And then I became a consultant about 2010 and I got a job at Microsoft as a PFE. That's just a Premier Field Engineer. So it's just an enterprise consultant, go out on site, I specialized in the infrastructure side so Active Directory was my specialty clustering, that kind of stuff, DNS, those things. And I kind of saw the writing on the wall and I kind of transitioned to solutions architecture after that. And so just understanding, I always loved developing. I was going to be an engineer. I like looking at things from the 30,000 foot view and kind of moving the pieces on the chessboard. And so I just kind of saw those things happening. My introduction to AI and automation really started with Microsoft Power Platform. I'm not sure if folks are familiar with that, but it used to be called Microsoft Flow, now it's Power Automate. I was trying to get some data out of for Texas Department of Transportation out of one of their mainframes, like the 1980s, to a Power BI dashboard. And so I was like, how do I get this data out of here? And so I was like, oh, I could dump the data to FTP and then use Power Automate to get it the CSV to a Power BI dashboard. And that started my journey down AI and automation. So I've been a consultant for nearly 16 years now, 17 years. And I like that because it's a new challenge every day, right? And it's something to do every day. And you're helping people and being a evangelist and all those great things. And then you're juggling many, many knives in the air at the same time. So I like say you're going to get cut every now and then. And so and about two or three years ago, I just saw I was like, hey, I've been consulting for all these years for people making a whole heck of a lot of money for other people. I think I can do it better and I think I can do it more intimate. We like being a white glove service. Like I give people my cell phone number, you can call me at 2 a.m. If something goes wrong, that kind of thing. And so started on that journey. And then as soon as we started selling or trying to sell AI and automation services to mid-market companies, so we focus on billion dollar and below, thousand employee below. They don't have dedicated IT teams. Maybe they have one or two IT guys. But most times they have an MSP. And it's like, how can we even get them prepared for AI whenever they don't have their documents, their processes documented or they don't have their data in a centralized repository, most times the people's inboxes or share file share folders or stuff like that. And so that's where the podcast idea came along is like, hey, start small, think big. Where everybody, all these businesses have the idea of AI and revolutionizing their business. And to us, that's like climbing Mount Everest. But most of the time we're still stuck on the couch eating Cheetos. So let's go couch to 5K. We'll be your Sherpa all along the way. And eventually, hopefully we'll get to that that Everest that is fully automating and integrating AI across your entire business. Yeah, and I think that's a great point because there's AI, there's so much hype about it and so many promises. And I think there's they're not unrealistic. There's promises like where it can take us. But there's a there's definitely a journey to get there. And I think too often that people are sort of sold on what this is where we can go. We can automate it. We've got low code, no code. We've got all these ways that we can just like snap a finger practically and just like, boom, everything's in place. The problem is everything's in place. But if your business is not ready to do it, you're going to struggle with it. I love the start small, think big, because I think it's we talk a lot about like small incremental improvements, getting some momentum and just like, you know, not trying to take the, you know, eat the elephant in one bite, things like that. I like how it's also you guys have had sort of the thinking big is like, let's keep a big why about it as well. We're still even though we're maybe doing little things, there is definitely a payoff for this down the road. Now, how did you how did you get in? It was just one of these things that came to you as like just an epiphany and you know, while you're talking one time or thinking about something, or is this over time or you sort of built into this and said, you know, this is like this thing small or start small, think big is like a really good for lack of a better term, like a mantra for us to use. That definitely came later. It was about a year into the you know, again, as we were talking to organizations just realizing, hey, nobody really understands how they're hearing, you know, leadership at these mid-market companies are hearing they need you guys, they are going to get left behind. And so they're like, hey, we need help. And at the same time, they had no idea where to start. And lots of times people don't even know where to help them start because I tell people all the time, like, they're the experts. If you're in heavy haul trucking, if you're in construction engineering, if you're a welder, if you're like you're an expert in your domain, you just don't know it yet. I just know the tools like what makes AI special is the is the context that you give it in the context you give it is unique to you and your work experience and your companies, your company's history. That's your secret sauce. And that's my real goal. So I try to teach people it's like you can do this. It's it's a journey. We need to be there with you to kind of hold your hand and and guide you on that journey. But at the same time, I could never know the best way to transform your business with AI. You have to know what that is. And the only way you know what that is is know what the possibilities are. And so changing and that's a different mindset for most folks, right? Because like, oh, we just hire IT or we hire technologists. They come in, they put a solution for us and they put us on our path. And like, no, this the AI is a completely different. It's a paradigm shift. It's like it's you have to change how people think. You have to think automation first. They have to think about what the possibilities could be. They have to think where the integrations could be. And so it's it's a lot of education and being an evangelist. That's really, really what it comes down to. And I just wanted to be a business. I like business transformation. That's what we like to call it, because it kind of covers everything. Most of the time when people are talking about AI, they're really talking about basic automation that's been around for years. Like, let's be honest, you know, the we're still in the AOL days of AI. Like, you know, think back to the Internet like the AOL, like, oh, it's transformative. You know, sites like Google will pop up. But we're not to the Wikipedia's and the YouTube's and the Facebook's and Instagram's yet of the AI era. So we're still toddlers in the in the AI era. And so if you start to start now, start small and then think big, hey, where's they going to be in five, 10, 20 years? Is my company going to be prepared as that evolution comes? That's what we like to think of playing the infinite game. Like you've ever heard of Simon Sinek's book. Like, that's what we like to think about. So I like that. And I had not heard of anybody really refer to it as the AOL days of AI yet. But I think that's really a good way to look at it is when we started out, some people, they didn't even exist. They weren't alive when AOL came around. But when we started out, we didn't know what to do. People were just like, you know, they didn't know what search engines were. They really weren't there. They didn't. They're just like, OK, we're just like it was a it was very simplistic. Now, I think AI has moved a lot faster. I think people are starting to realize that they've yes, there are a lot of people who just use it as a really good search engine. They get deeper results, you know, a little bit different. But I think people are starting to go there. I really like the idea of you are an expert is I think that's where people sort of miss out. But I think the other step, what I'm seeing is that there's a difference between being an expert and then being able to explain that to somebody else. It seems like that is sort of where we're at right now is that people are starting to understand that they need to somehow get their what's in their head into the computer, into AI to ask the right questions, to set the right context. And how are you are you seeing that? Is that something that you're you're helping customers through as well? That's where we start. We start with just having conversations and shutting up and listening. That's really hard for technologists, right? We think we have all the best answers and we think we know we know all all the answers. And I think the biggest thing for us is to be empathetic of what probably like we go in, what problem you're trying to solve. And then we utilize the right tools for that job. The tools may be automation, the tools may be just be basic document processing. And so just going in and listening to people. And the big thing I want to hear, like if there's leaders out there, I want to tell you is like, hey, I love talking to corporate vice presidents and CEOs and CTOs. And by the end of the day, AI and automation that's driven right now in these AOL days is driven at the boots on the ground. It's driven at the people fighting the fight on the battlefield every single day. And so so basically, I love hearing from you, but how your business is running actually happens at the ground level. And so those are the people I really want to talk to and just understand what their pain points are. We just turn on Microsoft Copilot or Plot or one of the things to just record a conversation and kind of feed that in. We start with those processes. Your process is documented. OK, where is the pain point? What's something in which you can automate there? Let's just start there, automating your inbox or automating, you know, some kind of some some kind of like exception tree or something like that, like just start really small. And then once people start seeing the possibilities, they're going to find out new ways of utilizing AI and automation in their own business sector and or own company that we would have never even dreamed of because we don't live in there. And this is where I think the AI is the carts before the horses. You have guys in Silicon Valley building these big Swiss Army Knife solutions, right, where we think that the scalpel catered solution is the real future. The localized model living on a desktop and someone's someone's someone's someone's workshop out in the middle of West Texas or something like that is really going to revolutionize the world, especially when you consider 75 percent of our economy is medium and small business. And so unlocking their potential is going to move the needle a lot more than unlocking the potential of these these giant model levels. So for with so you're talking business here, but small business, that's an interesting concept there. So like entrepreneurs and developers, you know, we're out there. You know, this is kind of a wild west right now. It's like the early days of Java, you know, or even XML back in the day when there were no protocols. Everyone was writing their own thing. I see that today going on with AI. It's like everyone's kind of building apps, throwing stuff out there. But the problem is the direction. A lot of people just don't know where to begin. They don't know how to start. I know you're talking to businesses, but what about the developers, people within those businesses? What is some of the things that you have seen work for them and not work for them to kind of help grow with this AI boom, so to speak? So, you know, I think right now the real superpower of these models and AI is at the single user level, right? We've seen the rise of things like OpenClaw and agentic AI that's happening on people's desktops or people's laptops. That can help you. It has with us and I have the metrics and numbers to prove it in the last six weeks or so. We've we personally in our organization of 10x our output of our day to day tasks. That's coding. That's everything. That's creating PowerPoint presentations. That's literally almost everything we do. The problem is that's happening at our desktop levels, right? That's happening specifically for us in our workflows. That's where we still are with agentic AI and AI as a whole. Most of the time it's the context of a single person or a single individual. How you bring in the context for the organization as a whole, that takes everyone rowing in the same direction. We like to go in and create immediately whenever we get with a new client or partner as we like to call them as a center of excellence. We create a center of excellence, whether it's a data center of excellence or AI center of excellence. We bring in key stakeholders from all over the organization. Gone are the days of a VP coming in and dictating that a piece of software is going to be implemented across the organization. Then IT takes that directive and go push it out in the whole organization. This needs to be a collaborative experience across the entire organization. You need to know how Betty and HR works. You need to know how Steven Compliance works. There needs to be a key stakeholder from everyone to understand, hey, what's our scheming going to be like for our organization? Folks that have rolled out things like Data Lake or something that's large for a whole organization kind of understand that. But most mid-market companies or smaller enterprises, they don't really understand that. That's, again, trying to sell to key stakeholders that, hey, this needs to be a collaborative experience. It's not just IT driving it. It's not just technologists driving it. For the developer, the individual developer, one of the real pain points too, obviously, is how do you introduce these tools and also protect your job? There's a lot of fear that that's going to happen. I think as long as you stay ahead of that curve, you start small and think big with how can this help improve you, there's going to be folks who do their job and then folks who do their job and utilize AI. That's going to be the differentiator and trying to find that right balance right now is going to be really key for them. Following along that theme there, for those that may have already dipped their toe into AI, but there's a lot of people that are still scared of AI or they have just played around with the chat bots, or I guess the common phrase you see on all these advertisements online is everyone's using AI for Google. That's over 40, whatever. How would you recommend individuals or even small businesses dipping their toe? How would you recommend them starting small to get into AI if they're not already utilizing it to see how to improve their day-to-day workflow? Yeah, the same way I, even before AI was the big boom, I just talked to someone and I say, what's something you do every single day that you wish you could automate? It's probably five or 10 minutes. It just drives you crazy that you wish you could automate away. Start there. It may not even be AI that gets you there, but the thought process should help trigger some things once you actually start there. You could use Zapier or Power Automate or something like that to automate your inbox. That's not AI, but the process and thinking is very similar. Automation and AI to me go hand in hand. I use them interchangeably. That's why I like using business transformation. You're just transforming the way you've normally done things. I would really start there. Don't try, like you said earlier, to eat the whole elephant in one bite. It's literally one bite at a time. If you have an idea, from a developer perspective, I'm sure many of the developers out there listening, you've had an idea that you wanted to work on at some point. Maybe just take this time to work on something in your spare time. Project requirements documents, that's where I start with. If you don't know how to write a project requirements document, go ask Chachapiti, hey, I'm trying to build this product. This is what I do. I want to write a project requirements document. Can you ask me qualifying questions? We'll build it out together. Then just start there. For those that understand where this is going through, Ralph Wiggum, the Simpsons character, Claude, Claude Co., they came out with a Ralph looped system that basically follows project requirements documents. From that perspective, that's where I would really start for a developer as well. I think you need to start tinkering. If nothing else, I was just talking to some students at Texas A&M University the other night and just challenged them, hey, over the next 30 days, build something. Just build something and see where it goes. Yeah, I love that incremental step. Get going, start doing something, pick something, like you said, a pain point or something you do every day and just start automating it, start playing around with it, using AI for that. It's interesting though, I've been using AI for a couple years now and every new tool comes out, it's almost like candy. It's like, oh, what's this? Do you find yourself running into the problem because we are still kind of at that early adoption phase of this where you can go down many rabbit holes. It's like, yeah, you want to start small, but sometimes you just get overwhelmed or you go down too many rabbit holes and you kind of have to pull it back in, reset your focus. What are some of the things you do to kind of avoid that, to try to keep things small, but keep things moving forward as well as staying abreast of what's new, what's coming out, and all the changes are constantly happening right now in AI? Yeah, I have a pretty severe ADHD, so that's just something I've always dealt with. The next shiny thing, oh, squirrel, like if you're ever seeing the dog from up, that's me. I think at the end of the day, you have to hold yourself accountable. The beauty is you can have these models help say, hey, send me a reminder tomorrow, did I finish this? If I didn't, say something silly to me or something. I do stuff like that. I build these feedback loops into my workflows. Again, talking to some students a few weeks ago, they were asking, we've all had that same conversation at Analysis Paralysis when we build a new project, especially developers, what framework to use, what backend to use, what web stack to use, all these other stories. My big thing at the end of the day is going forward, those tools aren't going to matter. Shut up and build. The models are going to choose whatever is probably the best stack in that general timeframe when you start building an app. Again, you can get stuck in that Analysis Paralysis, and that's something I'm very, very guilty of. What I've done is I've built a framework of, okay, when I'm building something, I follow these same six or seven steps. I built a project management dashboard for my AI agents. It's open source. It's called Veritas Kanban. Everything I do is in there. It's not just for coding, but everything I do is literally driven by a Kanban board. There's something that triggers. Dopamine hit. Every time I close a task, oh, I did something good. In the last seven weeks, I've closed 1,100 tasks using that Kanban board, something that I would never have been able to do before. It's fascinating to see it in real time. My thing is just shut up and build. Shut up and build at the end of the day. I know that's not always the best thing to say, but don't give it an Analysis Paralysis. You're going to get left behind because there is going to be some 18-year-old whiz kid out there who knows how to use these tools, really could. He's going to put out a half a million dollar a month MMR vibe coding app. Yes, you could have had perfect code. Yes, you want to have everything done. I think finding that right balance, again, I say we're juggling knives. Every now and then you get cut. And just be prepared with the med kit whenever you are. But at the same time, the future favors the bold is a saying for a reason. The Wright brothers weren't wearing safety equipment at Kitty Hawk. So that's the world we kind of live in now. And the big billionaires and trillionaires doing all of this, that's the trillion dollar companies doing all this. They're flying by to see their pants. So why shouldn't you? This way I kind of see that. That's true. And I think it is a little bit of a throw everything at the wall and see what sticks kind of approach, especially if you're a billion or trillion dollar company. You can throw a lot at a wall and just you can just like just flood the market with ideas. But I do like I think this is very much a time where and it goes back to again when the Internet was really starting to like the worldwide web was really kicking in. People just put a web page out there. The one that I've always thought way back that I think about is the million dollar web page where he had for every pixel. So you had a million pixels on the page and every pixel he sold for a dollar advertising. And it's like it's it's so almost stupidly simple. But it's just you get something like that out there. It's like, boom, you have an idea. Go put it out there. And I think AI is the same thing. I think this is even better is I think what we're seeing with this is that like you said, you can pick whatever stack you want. And honestly, you can actually use AI to flip a stack. If you somewhere down the road or like this is this is bad. You can actually use it and start walking through and flip it to a whole different stack. It may take you a few minutes, but hey, you know, or hours or days. But it is it's like, you know, don't let perfect be the enemy of good. And I think there's I think that's great advice for anybody that wants to figure out like, how do I use this AI thing is just start pick somewhere, pick anything. I found that even some of the business I've talked to and some of the owners and entrepreneurs, it's just like use it for planning your weekend with your kids or helping them with their sports or just just pick anything. Because once you start into those conversations, I think you start learning how to have those conversations. You start realizing what you're dealing with. And it's it's like anybody else. You learn how to communicate with somebody by doing it trial and error. You figure out, oh, I didn't specify this right or I can't make this assumption. And then the next thing you know, you're you're cruising right along. Now, that sort of leads into. What do you see as what do you worry about as being like the mess that will end up having to clean up with this? Because there's there's this idea of like, if everybody's creating all this stuff, where where do you think or where are you worried that maybe it will come back out of this in a year or two and people will be going, oh, my gosh, I should have taken care of that while I was creating all that stuff. You know, I think I'm an optimist. I'm just an eternal optimist. I think if you use these tools to free up your time for the menial tasks, you can focus on the more meaningful tasks and the ones that actually move the needle. As an example, I got and I was talking to a security guy who has a PhD. He teaches he teaches tech, I mean, university the other night. And I've always been infrastructure guy, so I've always kind of been odds and security guys like what's the risk versus reward that friction in corporate and in the corporate world. And I think, again, that analysis process has happened at that level, too. And for me, I as long as you're doing your due diligence and you have a good framework, much like whenever I go into a client or customer and I'm making sure they're have they have their SOPs and PRDs in place as standard operating procedures and product requirements documents. That's that developers have a superpower right now and they don't even really think they don't really realize it. I promise you once I started utilizing agentic AI over the last two months or so, to the extent of my personal workflows, I was doing it for business workflows. I feel like I have superpowers and that sounds hyperbolic. It sounds ridiculous, but I promise you it's not. And developers are the perfect people to embrace this because you already understand the rules of object oriented programming, right? You already understand process and procedure and you know what a PRD is. You know the basics of what this is. And you know what? These models think like that. They think in that manner. So you have a superpower now that you may not be utilizing it, even if you don't want to use it for code because, hey, you have some highly secure position or it's just not allowed in your organization. Use it for your processes. Use it for your date, your task. Use it for something to improve your life. And I use I create a PRD for literally everything, not coding tasks. I create a PRD for, you know, for any kind of process we have. I created an SOP. SOPs are what I've trained. My model has hundreds of SOPs that it can reflect back to. I have an SOP of how I want to create a presentation. I don't use PowerPoint anymore. I have it create presentations as JavaScript and HTML because it knows it can move pixels on an HTML and JavaScript a lot better. It can move pixels to PowerPoint. And so I will never use PowerPoint ever, ever again. And so as an example of ways that you can utilize these tools now, and then I think saving three or four hours generating a PowerPoint presentation by just having a conversation for five or 10 minutes, I could take that time to do the things like, hey, let me double check the security of this code that it wrote for me. Let me make sure that my infrastructure where it needs to be. And so, again, I think just people need to rethink how we process and how we've been delivering things for years and just turn it on its head. That's funny. It's a little bit of a digressing, but I found the same thing as I was dealing with presentations and stuff like that. And it's like, can you kick it out? Can you kick it out in PowerPoint? All it PDFs, all this different stuff. The level of professionalism and everything else that I got out of doing web pages instead was so high that I finally say, you know what? I can just take away. I can just take away the stuff like give me the web pages. I'll screenshot them and turn them into a PowerPoint slide if I need to. I can find ways to do that. And then of course with the code, it's a lot easier for you to tweak, like tweak your text, pull the specific image in, slide some stuff around. And it does it so much faster. And that's the stuff that to me as a developer in the background, this has always been one of those things that has been frustrating because I wasn't writing code. I was writing a lot of code, but I was like fighting pixel perfect alignment on a web page or doing some little minor configuration so that this thing looks exactly the way it should or adjusting the color right so that the color scheme is the same all the way through. I've got all the CSS tags properly, things like that. These are the this is where I totally agree with the superpower is I think that the things that it really allows us the things that maybe we're weaker at that that hold us back to sort of be removed. Because now you can, like you said, you can just like you can lay out SOPs, you can put together PRDs, the things that you do best and just say, okay, here's the framework. Now go build it. And that is where we're going to pause. Don't worry, we're coming back with round two, episode two, next episode around and we get even deeper. This is really a great conversation. There's a lot of great ideas that come out of it. So there's a lot of great ideas that we already had. And we also will be talking challenge and stuff like that. He's got some really good developer specific things that he talks about. So definitely be ready to bring notes and hopefully you'll be able to be like some of the things he suggested. Maybe by the end of the next episode, you will have already created or gotten well on your way on whatever your next product and project are. That being said, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. This was sponsored by RB Consulting, your partner in building smarter, scalable tech. From startups to established teams, RB Consulting helps you turn tech chaos into clarity with proven roadmaps and hands on expertise. Visit rb-sns.com to start your next step forward. Also sponsored by Envision QA. They help businesses take control of their software by focusing on what matters most, quality, reliability, and support you can count on. Find out more at EnvisionQA.com. Thanks for tuning in to the Develop and Learn Podcast, where we're all about building better developers and better careers. I'd love to hear your thoughts or feedback, so drop a note to info at DevelopTheNewe.com. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you listen. And remember, a little bit of effort every day adds up to a great success. Keep learning, keep growing, and we'll see you in the next episode.