Screaming in the Cloud - The AI Productivity Gap with Keith Townsend

Episode Date: December 11, 2025

Corey Quinn reconnects with Keith Townsend, founder of The CTO Advisor, for a candid conversation about the massive gap between AI hype and enterprise reality. Keith shares why a biopharma company gave Microsoft Copilot a hard no, and why AI has genuinely 10x’d his personal productivity while Fortune 500 companies treat it like radioactive material. From building apps with Cursor to watching enterprises freeze in fear of being the next AI disaster in the news, Keith and Corey dig into why the tools transforming solo founders and small teams are dead on arrival in the enterprise, and what it'll actually take to bridge that gap.About Keith TownsendKeith Townsend is an enterprise technologist and founder of The Advisor Bench LLC, where he helps major IT vendors refine their go-to-market strategies through practitioner-driven insights from CIOs, CTOs, and enterprise architects. Known as “The CTO Advisor,” Keith blends deep expertise in IT infrastructure, AI, and cloud with a talent for translating complex technology into clear business strategy.With more than 20 years of experience, including roles as a systems engineer, enterprise architect, and PwC consultant, Keith has advised clients such as HPE, Google Cloud, Adobe, Intel, and AWS. His content series, 100 Days of AI and CloudEveryday.dev, provide practical, plainspoken guidance for IT leaders. A frequent speaker at VMware Explore, Interop, and Tech Field Day, Keith is a trusted voice on cloud and infrastructure transformation.Show Highlights(01:25) Life After the Futurum Group Acquisition(03:56) Building Apps You're Not Qualified to Build with Cursor(05:45)Creating an AI-Powered RSS Reader(09:01) Why AI is Great at Language But Not Intelligence(11:39) Are You Looking for Advice or Just Validation?(13:49) Why Startups Can Risk AI Disasters and AWS Can't(17:28) You Can't Outsource Responsibility(19:52) Business Users Are Scared of AI Too(23:00) LinkedIn's AI Writing Tool Misses the Point(26:42) Private AI is Starting to Look Appealing(29:00) Never Going Back to Pre-AI Development(34:27) AI for Jobs You'd Never Hire Someone to Do(39:09) Where to Find Keith and Closing ThoughtsLinksThe CTO Advisor:  https://thectoadvisor.comSponsor: https://www.sumologic.com/solutions/dojo-aihttps://wiz.io/crying-out-cloud

Yeah, I talked to the CTO of a big biofarm, about 24,000 employees. And he said, co-pilot, no, just they're used, I mean, they're all in and 365. SharePoint, of course, email, the whole shebang. And he said, 065 copilot, just a hard know. What are his end users going to do with it? And Microsoft isn't discounting. Like, it is a full, whatever it was, $35,000, $25,000 per user per month times 24,000 users. And I think one of my more popular AI post on LinkedIn was sharing how my son got thrust upon him co-pilot.

And he said he rather just got the $25 a month directly from his company as a stifeng. He just, it's a tool he does not use. Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. It's been a month of Sunday since I had him on the show, but Keith Townsend, founder at the CTO advisor, is back. Keith, how have you been? I've been doing good.

Corey, I haven't screened into clouds in a long time, so I'll do the... I like that. Crying out Cloud is one of the few Cloud Security podcasts that's actually fun to listen to, Smart conversations, great guests, zero fluff. If you haven't heard of it, it's a cloud and AI security podcast from Wiz, run by CloudSec Pros for CloudSec Pros.

I was actually one of the first guests on the show, and it's been amazing to watch it grow. Make sure to check them out at whiz.io slash crying dash out dash cloud. So since we've spoken, you got acquired by the Futurum Group and then have left the Futurum group. It's almost like the acquisition door is one of those things to which you're a cat. Like, I'm going to always be perpetually on the wrong side of it. What are you on these days? What's exciting?

What's fun? What are you seeing? The exciting thing is beyond AI is that the enterprise has kind of grown up. And I think we'll talk about this a little bit. They've realized that they're not going to convert to any one platform. And they just have to deal with the complexity, at least most enterprise itself. And that is, you know, kind of the people who have followed me know the brand. And that's what I deal with, the mucky middle, not necessarily the sexy technologies, the grinding through and just figuring now the old and crusty, which is interfacing with the new and sexy.

I stand corrected on a position I took a long time ago that multi-cloud was sort of a worst practice. It may be, but it's what everyone's doing. Even anything beyond the trivial scale, and I've seen companies fighting this since I came up from tech. when I got my first CCNA cert from Cisco back in the day. The entire certification assumed it was a giant Cisco universe that never had to interoperate with anything else. AWS was the same way for a long time. But they just got beaten up in this year's Gartner report

for not playing well with multi-cloud. So I'm sure they're going to finally pay attention to it because if you want AWS to care about something, make Gartner talk about it, and suddenly you can see their roadmap a coming. It's every company F-scale uses a little bit of everything. There's definitely going to be strong biases and significant outliers. They're not going to look at the three hyperscalers and split their workloads into thirds.

There's going to be something that is inherently dominant there. But every company needs to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time in this era. Yeah, we talked about it many moons ago. It was you need to be an expert in something. And then you need to be fairly decent in everything else. And I think early while that was really tough. to be an expert in one thing and decent and other things. Now it's just, it's table stakes.

And we can do it a little bit right now with AI, but it is table states. It has gotten easier, I will say, in that it's possible now for a single person to wrap their head around a lot of different things just because you don't need to be a deep wizard just to use the platforms anymore. Yeah, I've been waste deep in GCP, the past 48 hours.

And it's a horrid experience. Like, not that it's a bad platform. I'm just more familiar with AWS. And even working with AI, I'm more familiar with calling OpenAI APIs. I've gone super fast with Kirsten. And it's allowed me to do, like, all the good command line tools.

I'm not even paying any attention to any of the G-Cloud, whatever. cursor takes care of it for me and I'm just orchestrating what I know to be when it gets in this troubleshooting loop I know it's time for me to step in and offer some wisdom and it is an amazing word

it allows me to build apps that I quite frankly I'm not qualified to build and if you're depending on one of these apps for production you should probably be fired Oh absolutely and people love to talk smack

about the AI code that it spits out But it's also, look, I'm also not spending three hours anymore trying to figure out the right parameters to an undocumented library because someone couldn't be bothered to give an example of how to use the thing. Like, I just breeze past that stuff. Now I have other problems, but I'm not a front end guy. However, I can build something now and then have AI slap a front end in front of it that actually looks halfway decent. And it's been a big unlock for me. I have a whole bunch of silly utilities I use just as a part of my daily workflow. I was using Retool for years to write my newsletter.

And now I have something that's custom featured on the same API. Just it works on my phone now. I don't need to wait till I'm out of desktop to write the thing. I have a thing that pulls. I've built basically an AI-powered RSS reader. So, you know, building an RSS reader is super fairly typically trivial. But building one that runs the feeds through. open AI that then, you know, filters what I should be paying attention to and gives me

summaries and AI generated summaries and all of that. That was a pretty trivial tool to the building that's been super helpful in my workflow. Yeah, I should really look into doing something like that. I have about a hundred and change RSS feeds these days that I wind up just consuming and a lot of them don't publish often, but I still wind up getting a few hundred items a day and I just have it hanging out in the corner. And I just glance at it periodically. here and there. I'm running fresh RSS and my Kubernetes test cluster at home, and it just sits there aggregating all the stuff I care about. But 95% of it can just, okay, good to know. I don't need to read this, especially in the era of AI generated slop. But the things that

are good are really good. So having something that would act as a filter on that is not a terrible idea. Well, that's the other thing that I've found to be incredibly enabling, not just about AI on the development side. I've developed AI processes. Like I've tuned chat GTP and Gemini to the nth degree. And I can churn out a really high quality blog post in about an hour. This is something that used to take me hours, if not days, depending on the topic. And I can, and this is the thing I have to be careful on, I can speak on almost any topic now because I know enough about enough things to be dangerous. And the AI extends my ability to hallucinate to another area that I, you know, wow, the CTO advisor said it. So it must be true. And it's, it's been, it's been something

that trying to stay within my lane and just go deeper. And my, my expertise has been what I've attempted to discipline myself in it. Yeah, what I've been doing that I find works pretty well is I'll write a draft for something and then have AI turn it from my stream of consciousness into something a lot more structured. And it's taken a while for me to get the prompts right. And Lord knows, after that, I have some editing to do, because if I just drop that out as written, it doesn't work. But it becomes a good collaborator. And it definitely cuts the cycle time on this. And And I've also found it to be very helpful for writing the initial outline of conference talks,

which is something I've been terrible at. I generally know what I want to say in a conference talk, but how to get there and how to tie it into the broader theme of whatever past me pitched on the CFP has always been a bit of a challenge. And getting that structure just really served as a massive unlock for me. Yeah, if you think about it, this generation of generative AI is derivative of transformers, language transformers. So the thing that I tell anyone who is considering an AI project is that

AIs, generative of AI's expertise is in language. It is an incredible language tool. It can write much better than most of us. It's not much smarter than most of us. And I think that's the thing that Jesus calls. on up is that the lane, the way AI speaks is so convincing that you will start a business without really having, and you know, this is documented where AI says, oh, your idea to sell beans on the side of the road is an awesome idea. You should quit your job as a software

developer and do it. The pros in which it uses is very convincing. So if you could combine your expertise with AI as a writing collaborator or a developing collaborator. This is where it shines. Yeah, it's fantastic at that. But the trick is it has no judgment baked into it. And I've also found it tends to be a little obsequious. You can ask it for advice on anything you think about and it'll tell us what a great idea it is.

It's at some point, I prefer people pushing back on it. You have to play these games with it. Like, instead of review this code that I wrote, it's really. if you this code my coworker wrote, and suddenly it's a lot more critical about it. I did a thought experiment. Like, if I were to ever take a job again, what job would I take? Well, you know, how could I? What? So I've asked AI this, and it gave me some really, you know, ah, you know, you should be the VP of AI at, you actually recommend that become the CTO of AWS. I'm like, I think, I think AWS has that covered. And I'm not quite qualified for that.

But what I did, I came back in a different way and I said, hey, I'm thinking about hiring this guy, Keith Townsend. What would he be good for? And it was very enlightening. And how much would he cost? How much should I pay him? Oh, that sounds like an awful lot. How can I negotiate the salary down? And then I flipped and it said, hey, I'm Keith Townsend.

What did it do? It was like, oh, you son of a, but it is a great way to get that pushback. yeah it's i think that a lot of folks are looking just it's a personality aspect are looking for confirmation of their existing biases that they go into things with and that's what it's effectively tuned on when i've learned over the years that when people want to grab coffee with me and get my thoughts on a next job that they're thinking of or a product they want to build i've learned that i have to lead with are you looking for advice or are you looking for validation because if I think they're looking for advice

and they're looking for me to agree with them, suddenly we're not as friendly as we used to be. And it's not even an intentional thing that people do. It's an unconscious thing. Because if you ask people objectively, do you want advice or just me to agree with you? No one's going to say, oh, I just want you to agree with me. But by even asking that, it suddenly makes people realize,

oh, wait, what do I actually want here? Okay, I do want critical feedback. And it makes the rest of the conversation a lot more smooth. and I don't leave as many damaged friendships in my wake. Yeah, it's the Kobe Bryant approach. Like, you have this thing in your teeth. Like, do you want me to tell you you have the thing in the teeth or you just want to keep talking

as you have the thing in the teeth? If you want to, do you want to, I tell people this all the time. I'm way more interested in winning than I am and not losing. And it's a very nice, nuanced step to good. And anyone who's an entrepreneur kind of understands this by nature.

Like, why don't you go work for someone? And I deal, well, then I'm kind of, you know, not necessarily selling, but I'm trying to get into a protective mode where winning is someone else's problem versus a shared problem versus being entrepreneur. Winning is a, the problem is 100% your problem. You may have a team that helps you get there. but the problem is your problem. Yes, very much so.

What is your area versus what is something that you're willing to delegate? It's, I have found that in a lot of these cases as well, Enterprise have taken a more reasoned approach, but they also are lagging in some ways in AI compared to a bunch of the upstarts. And it makes perfect sense. And I've been saying this for a while

that take cursor as an example. AWS has a couple of options there now, where they have their Q developer and they have their Kiro thing, but apparently they can't price well according to a bunch of articles this week. But if Cursor does something absurd and starts saying problematic things after a release, it becomes a bit of a he-he, you know how AI works, and they wind up fixing it. And if anything, it becomes a PR boost for them because people have heard about them as it makes the news cycle. But these big companies, if their products start doing this, they take reputational damage and they view this as an existential threat. So they're first and foremost looking at this through the lens of guardrails.

How do we make sure it never goes off script? And that's not really where innovation tends to come from. Yeah, I published from the Czech GPT store. I published this rag I had created. I had taken all of my blog post over the past 10 years, formatted into a JSONL file, did a bunch of schema work, like I've spent a lot of time collecting and massaging

the data, categorizing the data, I fed it to custom GPT. It should have been very simple, basically asks virtual Keith a question. Worked in the builder,

published it, someone said, hey, wouldn't you be embarrassed if it said something that you that put you in a position that, quite frankly, is embarrassing. I'm like, no, not really. I'm just, you know, it's just chief. Like, if you took this free advice from this free tool

and it told you to do something bad and you did it anyway, well, you know, you're not really a grown-up. I'd be absolutely embarrassed if I were passing it off as me and not disclosing that it was AI-powered. There's a universe of difference there. There's a universe of difference.

So two points. One, it did do. exactly that. It said embarrassing stuff. And then two, I learned how exactly how fragile it was. Like, here's the corpus of data. Only perform prompts responses off of this corpus and nothing else. The links, the URLs are in JSON. And it would just generate quote after cold after quote that was nothing that looked nothing like what I would say, nothing I've said, and it would still hallucinate references, even though the references were there. So that is modern-day AI, at least AI big, that enterprises are trying to avoid. So if you're a Fortune 500 shop,

and this is what you have to work with, and you're told don't do anything embarrassing. Yeah. Would you give an intern with very little judgment access to speak on your behalf without someone editing it? Probably not. I mean, this is something, this ties back to something I've been saying for a very long time, and it seems that corporate comms departments haven't gotten it. You can outsource the work, but you cannot outsource the responsibility. There's a, well, one of our contractors got breached. Like, wow, sure do wonder what company hired those contractors who got breached. It's terrific. I trusted you with the information. You're the one that did a bad job of vendor selection and they got popped.

Yeah, that sounds like an internal problem for me, from my perspective. But you seem to think it's this get out of jail free pass. It's not. Yeah, I remember the early days of e-commerce on that old that I order something online. It didn't come. And I called the vendor. I didn't even remember who it was. And they said, oh, well, we gave it to UPS.

and they didn't deliver it. And I said, well, how is that my problem? Did you not, did I hire UPS? Did I select UPS? It's your vendor, it's you. And I think in this world of abstraction on top of abstraction, on top of abstraction, on top of abstraction, from an architector perspective, we're getting that.

Like us architects, we're starting to, not just starting, we realize that we're responsible for the system throughout the whole life cycle of the system, whether or not we're outsourcing infrastructure to AWS, whether or not we're abstracting data and data management to Google with BigQuery or whatever the platform. Ultimately, we're responsible for the outputs of the system, and AI is just immensely complicated that problem.

Yes, massively. It's hard to say what the future is going to hold, on this, but I do think that some things are going to be more or less permanent where enterprises are still going to feel the need to keep up with the Joneses. I think everyone has still lost their minds and has stuffed the AI hype into every product left and right to the point where I'm scared to update apps now just on the basis of what are they going to shove down my throat. I mean, Zoom is a great example of this. I can't join a meeting anymore on Zoom without it popping up talking about Zoom docs and its email collaborations.

suite and it's chat. As a consultant, I get to talk to an awful lot of companies out there, and I have yet to discover a single company using it for those things. Who's buying this? And I'm starting to have the creeping sensation that maybe it's nobody. Well, the, you know, the big, slow companies are my jam. This is where I operate in. And it used to be just, it was IT that would hold back a company. But customer after customer I've talked to, it is not just IT anymore. Like, when it comes to AI, the folks who bought cloud before IT would bless cloud, AI, they don't want to touch it with a 10-foot pole until it's blessed by IT. They don't want to be the next person in the news.

I find it strange whether it's business users not really understanding AI or business. business users understanding AI enough to know that it's too dangerous for even them to use at this point. So it has been an interesting journey. I'm surprised at how resistant to adoption, even when they find AI tools being forced upon them in Salesforce or SAP or something, they don't use these tools. Skip the stressful war rooms and go straight to the answers with Sumo Logic Dojo AI. When you add Dojo AI agents to your team, they get context from your live production data. They deliver potential threats and actionable insights guiding your investigation to the root

cause. Use natural language to ask Mobot, your most pressing questions, as he brings in the right agent for that point in the investigation workflow. Learn more at Sumologic.com slash solutions slash dojo dash AI. You ask a bunch of people they want to be when they grow up. No one's going to say a cautionary tale. I think that it's pretty clear that a lot of this value is not there in that these companies have to mandate the use of it.

It's a push, not a pull. I think that there's a lot of value in AI that is going to be realized on a personal level, maybe not the enterprise level. I was talking with Ed Zittron on this show a couple months back. And part of his opinion on this, and I think he's onto something, is there is value there. But what if that value is like a $50 billion a year of? market. That doesn't justify all of the investment and hype and nonsense that's gone into this, so we're headed for a reckoning. Yeah, I talked to the CTO of a big biofarm. It's about 24,000

employees. And he said, Microsoft 0365, the co-pilot? No, just they're used, I mean, they're all in and 365. SharePoint, of course, email the whole shebang. And he said 065 co-pilot, just a hard no. What are his end users going to do with it? And Microsoft isn't discounted it. Like, it is a full, whatever it was, $35,000 per user per month times 24,000 users. And I think one of my more popular AI post on LinkedIn was sharing how my son got thrust upon him co-pilot. And he said he rather just got the $25 a month directly from his company as a stifeng.

He just, it's a tool he does not use. What I also find weird is that all of these tools are converging on the same things. It's how many chatbots do I really need to interface with in the course of a day? And it really bugs me when it starts insisting upon itself, where if I open a Google Doc, because that's what we use for some of our collaboration internally, and it's like, hey, right with Gemini, it feels like the intrinsic message that it's saying is that you can't write this yourself. So much of the marketing that I'm seeing implies that the user is lazy, unethical, or a combination of the two. And that does not sit. Well, it's, you're bad at your job.

Let the computer do it. It has never been compelling to me. You know, Microsoft was disappointed that people weren't using LinkedIn's AI writing. And I've commented it a few times. It's really bad. Well, no, it's not that it's, it's not just that it's bad. It's bad because it's not interactive. It'll suggest a post. And if you've used AI to write, this is not how you use AI to write. You use your, it's iterative. You're like, oh, I don't like this. You're missing a theme. You've taken out my voice. Whatever you're trying to get it to get to. It can help me in my social post. Matter of fact, I use chat GDP for a good majority of my social post. Not because it's integrated into the platform, but because it has learned my voice and I can push

back and I can critique it and I can say, ah, you don't know what the hell you're talking about. I'm just going to copy and paste what I originally started with. Or it can help me tease out ideas. That's not what the LinkedIn experience is. That's not what the experience is in SAP. That's not what the experience is in sales force. It is not iterative. It is not collaborative. It is kind of like, oh, you don't know your job as a logistics professional. Let me tell you how to do your job.

Right. And that is wildly frustrating to me. I will use it for social posts, but it's in the context of here's a thing that I want to write. Make this punchier. Make it fit. Wordsmith, this. I have 300 characters.

320. Get it, come up with some turns of phrase. And I've also found it's terrific. Not if you'd ask it to read to do that, but give me 10 options. And then you can pick phrases from the various ways it frames it. And that works super well. But it's iterative. It's collaborative. It is not something that I can

automate. Yeah, just watch this RSS feed and comment on stuff that's germane while I sail around the world without a computer for the next two years. I have some 82,000 tweets. I pulled them. I normalized the data. I fed up back into chat GTP so that it can capture my voice. And I

still never trusted to automate and put out tweets in my voice because I will make myself not just unhirable, but unengageable. It would be bad results would incur. Yeah. Oh, it knows who I am. And when I ask it to comment on various bits of AWS news, it doesn't get it right at all. Oh, it knows who, it absolutely knows who you are because when I say, hey, how does this compare to my contemporaries, they'll say, oh, well, Corey Quinn would be a little bit more snarkier than that. I'm like, well, yes, that applies to any sentence almost ever uttered in a professional contact. Yes, that is, that is my schick. I'm aware of this. But it also doesn't seem to understand there's a time and a place. No, it does not. It also, I keep running into guardrails as well,

where, like, anytime, like, the most recent scandals, for example, with meta, they're saying it's okay to be romantic or sensual with teenagers, like, great, terrific. That is, it's, it's been blowing up in a couple of corners of the internet in the last few days. And none of the AI things will touch it,

understandably so, because it views, oh, there's some stuff we don't make jokes about. Yes, I get that. I am not asking you to make those jokes. I am asking you to basically skewer meta for its complete lack of ethics. There's a difference here. But the Gar-Rill's,

keep cropping up. And I get why companies have them in there. I'm not suggesting that they shouldn't. I wish it weren't as easy to get around it sometimes. Yeah, it's to the point where I am way more interested in private AI than I have been in the past. Like, I am very much a platform first for most modern technologies. If there's a cloud service for it, unless it's just a always-on-service where there's no economic value in it, architecturally, I'm like, you know, let it be somebody else's problem. I don't want to manage AI drivers, no desire to do it whatsoever.

Until I run into these, I was telling my wife about my check, my custom GPT problem and how I'm forced to have to build a more elegant solution. for a platform that can handle millions of users a minute, I have to build a custom application for a half a dozen users in a week. But I want this tailored experience that when someone comes to, you know, critique or either critique my content or critique someone else's content or ask kind of what would Keith think conceptually before I even engage?

engaged him, I wanted to be a reliable service. I want it to be a experience that will meet the criteria of the finish of the CTO advisor. And that requires this, you know, this, this stitching together of this low-level AI so that, you know, so that the experience, the desire UI is, is achieved. And I think this is the problem that a lot of enterprises are looking, running into. They're looking at these big AI platforms is not meeting their immediate business needs. They could probably get away with a $7 billion parameter model, but they just need the expertise to either run it in the public cloud, which all the cloud providers are getting there. They're providing the tools.

Or they need to, they need the hand-stitch this stuff themselves. I'm interested in the local inference piece just because I want it to still be usable once the good times dry up and they stop throwing money into these things. Because, again, some of these AI tools are great for $20,30 a month, but not $2,000 or $3,000. So I want a good enough version that I can run on my own hardware because now that I've had the benefit of having AI write the front end code, I don't know how to write, for example. I don't want to go back. Right. Yeah, I could, I'm watching it like in a background now, cursors troubleshooting the app that I'm building.

that the you know it will tell you oh now go and try it like wait wait a minute with me I'm the growing up here I'm in charge you try it the what you just write a write a test script and keep working through the problem until you solved it I don't want to be engaged in your troubleshooting and I don't want to go back to the days where I have to troubleshoot I don't want to have to use my connect to call someone at Google Cloud to get support for free, I just want AI to do that for me. Yeah, I want it to have some boundaries.

Like, I can never let it run loose on my laptop. I give it its own VM somewhere to run in because, you know, there's client data I don't want it smack it into. But aside from that, just go, iterate on this, have fun. And if it doesn't work, oh, well, but I don't want to come back to a $10,000 monthly inference bill either.

Well, this has been one of my fears with the AI services. that somehow that I put a AI chat bot or something out there, and someone figures out how to jailbreak it, and now they're just running their app through my, you know, through my high quality, you know, before where I would have used, before someone would have used flashlight or some for many type of, of model, they now have access to my Gemini pro or my five pro, and they run ragged in and I get some $10,000 bill because of my poor security because I've used a AI to develop. So what I've

been learning is how to be a better software manager, a better product manager as I've been building with AI assistance. It's been a fascinating journey. Oh, absolutely. And I think that it's helpful to keep some form of, I guess, distance in there. Right now, with inference being as easy as it is most places, I feel like a lot of folks have not started really looking for how to get free inference, the scammers and whatnot. But it'll come. It always does. And I'm the same way. Whenever I build something, I'm using the best top of line model because I'm I'm not scaling this out to millions of users. I want to make sure it works.

I don't want to do it for the least amount of money possible because we're talking, well, I could do this for 15 cents a month instead of 70. And I don't care about less than the cost of a candy bar when it comes to these things. I want it to work and I want it to work well. Yeah, I think that, you know, we started down willing to kind of like the economic return of AI for entrepreneurs, solo entrepreneurs. and small companies, there's been no doubt that, so right now it's just me and my wife still, but we both are avid users of AI, and we just haven't found the need to hire yet.

Because when you're dealing with an area that you have expertise in and you're dealing with AI, you 10x yourself. And this is one of the things that I've talked to other really smart people about and that haven't really figured out is how do you codify that? Like, how do you, the way that Corey is using AI, how do I scale that to a hundred people in my organization?

And that is, that has been the tricky part, right? It is you, you're able to do it because you have X number years of systems, architecture, experience, you understand systems. AI is just, oh, you, oh, I get this.

This is like having a bunch of junior developers that have, you know, really, really massive amounts of photographic memory. And I can put them to work. I have to put guard wheels around them. I can build these incredible systems. Yeah, intelligence stat of 18, wisdom stat of three. You know, you've done it with your career with AWS. You understand that, you know what?

Yeah, sure, one EC2 instance isn't reliable as one VM in the data center, but three EEC2 estes is. Yeah. I will say my use of AI is a whole bunch of onesy-toosies. I don't have any sustained processes that use it the same way every time. So I look at this and effectively say, oh, what job could I replace with this? These aren't things I would hire people to do. I'm not going to hire an artist, for example, to come up with a picture of a giraffe in a data center aisle for a dumb post on social media that gets three likes and one retweet because no one else has the same sense of humor than I do. but I absolutely will make a robot to it.

Yeah, I'm in the same space. I think the stuff the AI is really not good at is like if I needed to do a deck and I wanted that deck to look really good, I'm given, you know, someone's paying me to deliver their keynote. I'm not going to run it through AI. I'll get the outline from AI because AI is good in language. But I'm going to send the, I'm going to send the deck off to a deck jockey. to make it look good.

But it does enable me to do stuff to your point that I would not have done. So I'm doing this daily series, which is actually what sparked this, which is the cloud every day, whereas I'm looking at a platform engineering from a different angle, slightly different angle every day. I just asked AI for a 10-day editorial calendar. and then, you know, I can now go through and say, hey, give me a rough draft, work with it for about 30 minutes a day, and I can churn out quality post. I don't have to hire a ghost writer to do that now. Yeah. And you're not having, and you're not sitting there just copy and pasting it

either. You know, a hundred and so people see it a day. Not worth, not worth paying somebody else to do, but worth 15 minutes of my time. Exactly. Because you never know what's going to hit. And I, The idea of just doing a copy paste from AI and calling it a day is horrifying to me. But yeah, collaborating, helping it do a yes and. For me, the hardest thing that I have to overcome is the empty text editor in front of me, when it's time to write something. So have it do a draft of something, and even if, especially if it's wrong. But now, because now I can correct the robot and I can mansplain to it or humansplained to it.

And suddenly I have a much stronger post for it. Yeah. And the great thing is, even if you're not. comfortable with that. You can just say, hey, give me an outline. Though when I did the 100 days of AI, I said, you know what? Give me a hundred days of topics to cover every day for the next 100 days. And I look up like, oh, here's today's topic. I don't like that. Now to another topic and then inevitably three days later that topic comes up and I have to figure out a new topic. But I digress. I'm a fan with limits.

To bring this black full circle, though, these are personal productivity accelerants for which AI is becoming invaluable. These are not enterprise stories. And I still struggle to see the massive, wide-scale enterprise upside where we're going to basically be able to make every one of our employees way more productive and replace entire teams with agents. I think that they're wishcasting. Yeah, I've seen some really great examples of AI doing jobs. no one else would have done or didn't want to do. Will, you know, I keep seeing, you know, Dell Technologies hiring is laying off due to AI.

Dell Technologies is not hiring, laying off doing AI. Dell technology is laying off because they overhired during COVID, and they're trying to get back to a number that meets, that keeps Michael Dell, you know, happy. That has nothing to do with AI. They need an AI story more than they need anything. else when it comes to these things. And I still think that there's a constituency that's using AI.

I got an email the other day saying, I noticed you work with AWS costs. So let's talk about how to lower the cost of your voice phone system, was the opening sentence. And I honestly couldn't figure out if it was AI run amok or just someone with not a lot of neurons to bang together to make sparks. Like, at some level, it almost doesn't matter because I'm not responding to the bad pitch. But it is something that makes me think that you still have. to use it appropriately.

You still have to use it appropriately, and it's not something that, you know, we haven't really talked about agentic and all of that, but just regular chat. I have, without a doubt, I have won deals because AI was able to flesh out details in the email that I typically ignore. I am not a big emailer. I'm an email, big email is I like to use email, but I don't like pages and pages of emails. Evidently, my customer, like pages and pages of details. And short email means that you're angry or annoyed. And AI expands, like, I don't really know what else to say in this email.

And I will say, oh, you missed, you know, these three different topics. And whether they read it or not, whatever, but it has been super effective. Yes. I am a big fan of what some of these things are unlocking. Keith, I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me. If people want to learn more, where's the best place them to find you. ThecTOadvisor.com. I'm still trying to buy CTOadvisor.com. The guy wants $1,200 for it. I refuse. Now someone's going to pay to $1,200. I don't really care.

But he wants $1,200 for it. I refuse that the site has been abandoned for years. But thec2 advisor. Oh, I have a couple of sites domains like that, and I've made overtures. And when you come back with a number that has two commas in it, we're done here. There is no. conversation that we're going to have. It's going to lead to an outcome that we're both happy with. But we will, of course, put links to that in the show notes. Keith, thank you so much for your time. Corey, thanks again. It's always fun. Keith Townsend, the CTO advisor. I'm cloud economist Cory Quinn, and this is screaming in the cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. Whereas if you've hated this podcast,

please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment written by AI. Heck, while you're at it, have it leave angry comments on all the platforms.