The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Pinnacle AI: Modernizing Cloud Infrastructure and Optimizing Business Systems

Starting point is 00:00:00 You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. I'm your host, Chris Voss, here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.

Starting point is 00:00:39 There you go, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the show. We certainly appreciate you guys having me. I'm coming by the show as always. The Chris Voss Show is a family that loves you but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as your dad does, because you took apart his watch when you were a kid and never put it back together. It was his favorite watch, damn it, and he'll hate you forever.

Starting point is 00:00:56 But he does like your siblings much better. Anyway, guys, refer to the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Go to Goodreads.com, 4chesschrisvoss, LinkedIn.com, 4chesschrisvoss, the big LinkedIn newsletter, the 103,000 LinkedIn group over there, Chris Voss 1 on thecom, forgeschrisfoss, linkedin.com, forgeschrisfoss, the big LinkedIn newsletter, the 130,000 LinkedIn group over there, chrisfoss1 on the TikTok, and chrisfossfacebook.com. As always, for 15 years, we're bringing the smartest people

Starting point is 00:01:13 on the show to enlighten your minds and brighten your worlds, and boy, that sounded like so good, but I don't have the third part set up. I just made up the first two. And brighten and enlighten. That's the spirit of the Chris Foss Show. The CEOs, the billionaires, the White House presidential advisors, the Pulitzer Prize winners, all of the great journalists we have on the show. And they share with you the latest technology, what's going on in the world. And we're going to be having that today. One of our favorite

Starting point is 00:01:35 popular topics to talk about these days that everyone seems to be doing, artificial intelligence. We have Pinnacle AI, human intelligence developing artificial intelligence on the show with us today. Their senior vice president of sales, John Julia, will be joining us. And he has a 35-year track record as a successful businessman and corporate executive. He's a co-founder of a startup services company years ago, and he successfully grew a national brand through franchising, eventually selling to private investors. Over the past 25 years, John has served various account executives and sales leadership roles in the telecommunications and information technology industry with companies such as

Starting point is 00:02:16 Verizon, Lumen Technologies. And recently, before joining Pinnacle AI, John served as the Vice President of Sales for ThinkFor Forward, a rapidly growing IT, MSP, and systems integrator. Throughout his industry tenure, John has worked with enterprise customers, helping them navigate the technology landscape, driving digital transformation. Welcome to the show, John. How are you? Good, Chris. Thanks. I appreciate you having me on. I appreciate the intro. We're talking about artificial intelligence. The one thing is for certain, right? The only intelligence you're going to get from this side of the camera is artificial.

Starting point is 00:02:50 I'll try to entertain your audience. There you go. I think you'll do a good job because I'm a bot too. So, John, give us a 30,000 overview of who and what Pinnacle AI is. Yeah, absolutely, Chris. So at Pinnacle AI, we create proprietary custom solutions designed around machine learning, generative AI, really to improve, optimize, modernize business systems, processes, and functions. There you go. So what does that mean in real world terms when it hits the ground? Yeah. One of our flagship products is a product we call ComAI. It's really designed to modernize cloud infrastructure. We've identified a couple

Starting point is 00:03:32 problems right over the years. Companies have migrated away from traditional data centers to the cloud and not reading the fine print. There's not too many people that say they went to the cloud and saved money. There's a lot of hidden costs, especially in what we call egress charges. And I think when companies, you know, when reality hits, they find many times that their budgets are blown up. Traditionally, the method of controlling costs in the cloud has been through services that we refer to as FinOps, really more of a right sizing your cloud environment, making sure that it's efficient. But my partners and some of the folks that founded this company, what they really came to light was that the cloud companies, AWS, Google, Azure, they're all modernizing their environments, right? And if you're not modernizing that infrastructure, you're missing the boat from an optimization,

Starting point is 00:04:32 really from a cost savings perspective. So we've developed a tool using artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze customers' current cloud infrastructure. And then we built a recommendation engine that makes recommendations on the products and services that you should be using, develops the architectural diagrams, writes the Terraform code, provides the implementation guidelines. And, you know, again, we feel, you know, and we've seen dramatic savings when customers with their cloud expenses, right, when they actually modernize their cloud and their infrastructure,

Starting point is 00:05:12 as opposed to just making it more efficient and optimizing the resources that they're currently using. There you go. So it's called COM-AI. What's the title of it stand for? What does that mean? Yeah. So COM-AI is cloud optimization and modernization, right? We do a little play on the AI, right? Advisory and implementation. So, you know, our platform, our tool, our transformer, again, is really built on modernizing infrastructure, going from server-based infrastructure to serverless-based infrastructure. Not only do we see a dramatic reduce in cost, but also functionality and really modernizing that environment so that companies can run AI-driven applications.

Starting point is 00:05:57 There you go. Cost optimization and modernization, advisory, and implementation, com-AI. And is this targeted mostly, you know, I've heard the horror story sometimes where people go to AWS and suddenly they get a bill and they're like, we spent what? And with someone on OnlyFans, what's going on? So is it targeted only for AWS or other cloud providers? A handful of our founders came from AWS. So our tool can run in any cloud environment, but it was really based off of the AWS product set. And the reality, Chris, is that most of the cloud companies, I mean, the products that they offer their customers, they're all similar, right? They just use different names.

Starting point is 00:06:45 Yeah, yeah. It's all up in the clouds. It's in the sky there. Yeah, right. You offer, let's see, a few other products, generative aid, data warehousing, AI consulting, and AWS services. Tell us about some of these other ones. Yeah, so again, it kind of gets back to, you know,

Starting point is 00:07:03 the principle, right, of generative AI, being able to take a set of data, enter it into the transformer and have that transformer generate new content. So when we look at some of our other products and services that we have out there, we're doing a lot in natural language processing intelligent conversational chat bots for example document writing we have a couple products in development right now that are geared towards education you know helping bridge the gap between uh uh you know some some of the some of the learning discrepancies that we have between where people are in their learning curve and where they

Starting point is 00:07:45 should be. We know that there's a growing gap, especially since COVID. We're focused in education as well. But the application of generative AI, Chris, and this really kind of gets into the customization of products and services, really can be applied to most aspects within businesses today. There you go. It's an interesting field. So tell us about the company. How did it get launched? Were you there for the startup effect of it or how did you guys come about? Yes. Back when I was working for a large service provider,, work with a bunch of talented people that were kind of running our cloud practice. And, you know, over time, you know, people go on to different jobs and, you know, you lose, you lose touch. But over the summertime, I got a call from a handful of

Starting point is 00:08:37 folks that I'd worked with. They had gone to work for AWS. And when they were at AWS, one of the common problems that we initially started talking about, cloud costs, they were internal to the machine. And they saw a lot of their customers, again, on legacy products and services that really weren't given the guidance

Starting point is 00:09:01 or the tools to help them modernize their environment. One of the things, and I guess it's true with every business, you know, if you're a top spender with a company, you get all the resources, right? They love you. You're the best friend. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:09:17 And then, right, unfortunately, the 80% of the general population, you know, they're kind of left to fend for their own. So this product, ComAI, has been in development for a little while. We started getting closer, obviously, to being able to go GA and essentially bring this to market. I received a call knowing the problem working in technology and working with customers, seeing the problem of rising cloud costs and seeing customers really not being able to manage or modernize their environments to keep pace with current technologies. You know, really, you know, at that point, I decided to join the team and help these guys go to market. There you go. AI seems to, I mean, it seems to be creating a whole new world for us maybe where, you know, everything, everything seems to be AI and the future of what AI can deliver in terms of automation, in terms of efficiency and everything else seems to be

Starting point is 00:10:19 something that is one of the great things that it holds. Yeah, absolutely. Chris, you know, what's interesting is that, you know, machine learning and AI, the principle has been around for a long time, right? You can go back to the fifties, right? I think the first AI application was developed to actually play checkers, right? Machine learning, right? We all remember Bobby Fisher playing the machine in chess, right? That was based off of machine learning. War games, right? Matthew Broderick, right? You know, talk to the computer, that tic-tac-toe, right? Nobody wins. But there's been a transformation over the past couple of years, probably somewhere five or six years. Companies like Google and OpenAI started to invest a lot of money and really kind of create

Starting point is 00:11:02 new foundation models that allow data to be trained without necessarily being labeled and be self-supervised. So the dynamics have changed. And also, when we look at the processing that's required, the chip manufacturers, you know, have also developed chips that can process massive amounts of data. And the costs have come dramatically down. You know, historically, if you're a Fortune 100 company, you're right, you know, you have billions of dollars in earnings. You know, you can go to an IBM, you know, pay them, you know,

Starting point is 00:11:38 $100 million a year to run Watson. But what we're finding today is that, right, the affordability and the ease of deployment of AI really can be opened up to the masses. I think you see that with the chat GPTs of the world. Chat GPT just celebrated its one-year birthday that came to market in november 2023 has it been just one year yeah so holy crap yeah time flies you know or drags it's wow that that really became a thing man wow just one year it seems like it's feels like it's been around here for two years yeah yeah at least right yeah yeah it's like i'm just barely catching on

Starting point is 00:12:26 now damn it slow down wait for me listen thank god thank thank thank god for thank god for open ai and google because you know listen i suffer from the writer's block just like anybody else yeah yeah it helps us with a lot of stuff we'll use it for questions on the show or show themes it helps with so many different things i have friends that talk to it daily i'm like i don't know what you're doing talking to it daily but i guess if that works for you have fun with that but you know maybe you should get a wife or something if you're talking to it daily i mean you might need some people over there at your house but what are what are the things are there other things that you guys are

Starting point is 00:13:02 developing that you guys are planning on bringing the market that maybe you can tease out to us? Yeah. What do you see there? We're working on a project. Getting back to the educational space, we're working on a project we call EPIRC. One of the things, again, that learning gap, one of the things that we've recognized, I think, is fairly common sense. We all learn differently, is, is, you know, fairly common sense. We all learn differently, Chris, right? You know, some of us learn by, you know, watching a film, some of us

Starting point is 00:13:30 learn by reading, some of us learn better by actually performing a task or an exercise, right? But when we look at the educational system today, right, it's a one size fits all. We jam 40, 40 kids into a classroom, right? And, you know, they're taught based on, you know, one format of learning. So we're using computer vision with generative AI, right, to develop a platform where we can give a student a series of exams based on different learning methodologies. Watch a movie, solve a problem, read a story, and then we can actually map different points within facial recognition, tie that to some, you know, to some tests, and we can actually determine which is the best methodology for a particular student to learn. think we think that will go a long way

Starting point is 00:14:26 in bridging the educational gap that would be really interesting i really struggle in school because i'm a tactile learner if you show me i i can learn to do it but if you try and if you try and explain it to me my i just my brain glazes over and i just don't get it but if you teach me if you let me do it once with you and you go, that's how you do it. I'm like, okay, I can do this all day long.

Starting point is 00:14:48 You know, I can drive to a place. And once I drive to a place, I know where to get back there. And like you mentioned, some people have different auditorial, kinetic, visual ways of learning.

Starting point is 00:14:59 I like your concept of how I didn't think about that with education. You know, people learn at different speeds and, and that's another thing when you can you know like one of my problems i had when i grew up in california was our education system was way far ahead of utah by like two or three grades and so when i came to utah halfway through my elementary school or my elementary school i i was like two years ahead of everybody. And I tuned out because I was like, this is stupid. Like, I don't know all this.

Starting point is 00:15:31 Like, I don't need to learn this again. Well, I stayed tuned out for the rest of it. Yeah, yeah. I'm not ashamed. My educational challenges, I was too worried about thinking where I was going to score the next six pack of beer. You know?

Starting point is 00:15:45 There you go. It sounds like a teen thing. There you go. Can you share a success story or case study where your AI solutions impacted a client's business maybe? Can you tease one out? Yeah, absolutely. So we have a customer right now. They're in the tech space as well, right? They have a business development

Starting point is 00:16:05 team and like most business development teams most companies are generally younger in nature right that's that's you know that's where a lot of people start right hitting the phones cold calling sending out emails when they when they happen to get one a a prospect on the phone, right? An engineer or an architect, and they're asked a technical question. Very often the response is I'll have to get back to you. I'll have to go get an engineer. That's a kiss of death for a salesperson. You got to fish on the line. What are the chances of that person picking up?

Starting point is 00:16:41 When the business development rep calls back. So we're actually, we've actually developing for them, right? There's actually a path for the services that we're providing, a trajectory, right? But providing them like an intelligent chatbot, right? So all they have to do is query the machine when they're asked a question. And then we're training the data specifically on the technical content of this company. Oh, wow. Now the business development rep essentially de facto becomes an engineer.

Starting point is 00:17:17 Oh, wow. Phase two of that project is actually going to be converting the audio to text and now having the machine, having the transformer, making live recommendations to the business development rep, right? So there's a handful of projects that we're working on that, you know, again, right, we're modernizing, optimizing that business, and essentially increasing the effective sales rate of the business development team for our customer. There you go. That way you can get that sale closed right on the money. You don't have to sit there and wait.

Starting point is 00:17:55 I've seen some of the different talking AI that actually act as salespeople, and they're doing a live call. You've probably seen that. It's quite extraordinary to watch. It's unbelievable. And I got to tell you, Chris, one of the technology is a great equalizer for business, right? Because, again, you just get back to it used to be that only the largest companies could afford the technology to drive efficiencies but you know common day technology such as generative ai can take the one or two person company right and make them look and act like a fortune 100 company whether it's using the generative ai to develop marketing materials, right, to reach mass audiences across the globe.

Starting point is 00:18:47 That's one of the drivers for us as well. There you go. What's your guys' vision to being a player in the broader context of AI development and application globally? Yeah. You know, again, our focus is, you know, you can, you know, look, you know, Elon Musk and Neuralink, I think they just announced, right, that they just they were just able to implant a chip, a sensor chip in a human brain. You know, again, we're primarily focused on business functions, right? You know, as opposed to some of these other areas. Again, when we look at AI, you know, we put essentially artificial intelligence into categories, right? You know, we can look at narrow AI, really where we are today. And that is a machine that is performing specific tasks, right? Needs human in the loop or human intervention, right? Much as we kind of go up the stack to general AI, right,

Starting point is 00:19:49 or strong AI and then to super AI, a lot of that, Chris, is still theoretical, right? It's still theoretical, right? And I know that there's a lot of folks that are working in those areas, but again, our main focus is just improving the business function for everyday companies and really focusing on that mid-market. There you go. What are your thoughts on the ethical use of AI and ML in your projects, like concerning data, privacy, security, things of that nature?

Starting point is 00:20:25 That's a great question, right? There's a famous line from a movie, right? With great power comes great responsibility. You know, so I think, you know, when you look back at, you know, really kind of the, you know, the history of technology, you know, whenever, you know, whenever something that is developed, that's truly transformative, right, it can be used, right, to promote good and it can be used to promote bad or evil, right? Like the example I use, right, you know, you go back 80 years, there's this little project called the Manhattan Project, right?

Starting point is 00:21:00 And, right, technology created one of the most lethal weapons known to mankind but the flip side of that is that we also we also developed a way to treat cancer uh we've also developed some of the cleanest energy in the world uh social media is the same thing when you look at a lot of these social platforms a lot of good has come from a lot of these social platforms, a lot of good has come from a lot of these social platforms. But again, just the other day, we had some of the tech giants in Capitol Hill talking about, right, you know, all of the bad, right, that can come about the Facebooks of the world and against some of these other social platforms. So AI definitely represents some challenges, right? That there is a lot of good that can come from generative AI and machine learning, right? When we look at education, when we look at being able to help businesses really become

Starting point is 00:21:56 more efficient, more competitive in the marketplace, when we look at the exponential factor of how AI can be applied to research and development for new medicines but there's also inherent risk chris right there's always going to be unscrupulous people take advantage of a newer technology right to to you know to to game the you know the the average joe there you go you're almost gonna have to have good ai armies to fight the bad arms maybe i don't know yeah well we see that with cyber security today right yeah exactly yeah i remember back in the day right before the internet i was self-employed i'd get these letters right you know snail mail from somebody supposedly right you know, snail mail from somebody supposedly, right. You know, in another country that,

Starting point is 00:22:46 you know, their family worked in the government and they needed, right. They wanted your bank account so they could, you know, so they could deposit a couple million dollars in your account, right. Like all scams, right. You know, scams through using the mail, internet came along, right. The criminal evolved and AI comes along, the criminal is going to evolve again. Probably. You know, and an ideal world will stay one step ahead of them. But that's not always the case. Yeah, it'll be an interesting game.

Starting point is 00:23:16 You know, we had someone on the show who has had an interesting slant on AI, where they believe that the, let me see if I can pull it from the old noggin here, but basically, they basically took, I think it was Darwin's theory of evolution, species and stuff, and they believe that AI is its own species, that we are creating a new species, or it's creating itself,

Starting point is 00:23:43 and we need to really kind of address AI as a new species. Any thoughts you have on that? Yeah. And again, this kind of gets into the theoretical part of AI. You know, I just had this conversation the other day, right? So, you know, when we talk about the capabilities and where AI can go, look, if you, you know, you believe in a higher power, right. You know, that, you know, we were, you know, all, all born,

Starting point is 00:24:14 right. You know, from, from a great, greater being, we all have our own identity while I am open to the possibilities, right. Of, right. of machines being able to not just recognize emotion, right, but actually to feel emotion and independent thought into itself. I'm not sure we're going to get there, right? I'm not sure we're going to get there. But listen, it's an interesting theory, right right that yeah some point ai will evolve into its own subsegment of species yeah it's really interesting to think about one of the one of the aspects of what the argument was is basically you know our paradigm of being human beings is pretty simple but our we're designed to breed for the universe and propagate the species and

Starting point is 00:25:05 when it's when we're not pretty much doing that it has a way of kind of going yeah we're just washing you out so that's that's kind of that's kind of how it works and we we spend all our time you know everything we buy everything we do everything we're doing is trying to impress the other sex and you know make kids and then raise the kids and all that stuff but the interesting point that we kind of came to and i think think it was Sam Harris who came to this. I think I heard him talking with AZ-16s, Andreessen, Mark Andreessen. And the thing Sam Harris has said,

Starting point is 00:25:35 you know, the interesting thing about AI is if it's its own species, it is going to have a different sort of paradigm and outlook that will have no limit compared to ours because ours pretty much operates in a, you know, the car I buy is to impress a girl. The, you know, the money I make, the job I take is, you know, is to impress a girl and attract a mate and mate. But an AI species isn't going to have that sort of limit. It's not going to be trying to, you know, it's not trying to make prom night. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. Hopefully, hopefully not. Right.

Starting point is 00:26:09 Yeah. Well, I mean, excitement of prom night, if that's the case, it'd be a weird dance floor. That's for sure. But their, their limit of what they're going to have to think about is going to be limitless compared to, you know, what we focus on running around a little maze of rat races. And so it'll be interesting to see where it goes. And hopefully they decide to keep us around while they're at it.

Starting point is 00:26:34 Yeah. I think what's interesting, again, when we look at Neuralink and what Elon Musk is doing and as we're kind of mapping, like that's where it starts to get a little scary, right? When we start mapping out human brain waves yeah and then we can we can actually figure out you know not just how the human brain works but how emotion is is actually created right why is something funny to you and not funny to somebody else why does something make one person sad and not and not somebody else chris i always go back right and again maybe this is my last gasp of faith and creationism right i always go back to the periodic table right there's a set of elements a finite site of a set of elements that we've known about, right, that essentially make up

Starting point is 00:27:25 everything on the face of the earth today. But we can still not take those elements and create life, right? We know the building blocks, right? We can do just about anything. We create any environment in a lab, but we still cannot create that single cell out of the elements that we know. So I'm hoping, again, I'm hoping that my faith does not go unwarranted. And again, what makes us individuals, what makes Chris V, and John Julia, John Julia, is something that transcends a machine. There you go. Our ability to maybe create and think, or not think, but create. We're pretty good at creating, especially with emotion.

Starting point is 00:28:14 Maybe that will separate us, our ability to use emotion to create. There you go. So give us the final pitch out on folks. Who's your target market? That's a good question, actually. Who's your target market? That's a good question, actually. Who's your target market? People out there listening to LinkedIn and stuff like that of companies that can onboard with you. Yeah, absolutely, Chris. So when we look at a target market, it's really depending on, again, the product set that we have on the market when we look at ComAI,

Starting point is 00:28:40 anybody that's bleeding out because of cloud costs, right? And especially those companies, again, we see that there are two drivers for that product set. The first being what we, what we all know, and how it affects the purse strings. The second driver again, is that we're having this conversation about artificial intelligence. You still need, you still need infrastructure that requires high capacity of compute. It requires significant database. And if your infrastructure is not

Starting point is 00:29:14 modernized, you'll never be able to take advantage of some of these technologies that are now emerging. Anybody that's dying to cloud costs or looking to take advantage of artificial intelligence, right? Time AI is a solution that will certainly help you get there. From a market standpoint, again, right? Like at the end of the day, you know, we're really kind of focused on that, you know, S&B mid-market low enterprise space, because those are the customers that really need it. They don't have teams of cloud architects to fall back on.

Starting point is 00:29:51 They don't have the budgets to go out and needlessly spend on a whim or on a guess. They can't swing and miss. You know, as far as our other products and services, especially the products that revolve around natural language processing, again, you know, companies that are looking to compete, be more efficient, to be able to take on repetitive tasks and have predictable outcomes. Those are the types of problems that we're looking to solve. There you go. And where can they go to find out more? Yeah, so you can reach us at pinnacleai.net.

Starting point is 00:30:32 We are also on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook. So yeah, we'd love to have folks come in and check us out. There's demos that we can take customers through to actually see the tools perform live and appreciate the opportunity to give a little bit of a call out. Thank you. We certainly appreciate you coming on the show and enlightening us on the new things

Starting point is 00:30:55 that are coming from AI and how the world's changing. And man, you got to start learning AI. I can't believe it's only been a year for ChatGPT. That's crazy. ChatGPT4, right? I mean, OpenAI, right? 2016, 2017. even a year for chat gpt yeah well it's actually pt4 right you know i mean open ai right 2016 2017 but the the technology is growing at an exponential rate at this point right so

Starting point is 00:31:14 and it's just gonna go faster like i'm just trying to hold on to this point usually i'm up on things but this is moving fast yeah i i can remember the first time my father bought a fax machine. I can remember staring at that damn thing, wondering how you could put a piece of paper in one end and the exact thing come out, right. You know, 3000 miles away.

Starting point is 00:31:37 So I'm still trying to figure it out. Absolutely. I'm a long way. Thank you, Chris. I appreciate it it thank you very much we certainly appreciate it john so thanks my honest for tuning in go to goodreads.com fortune's christmas linkedin.com fortune's christmas the big linkedin newsletter subscribe to that baby it grows like a weed i didn't know there was that many people live on linkedin

Starting point is 00:31:59 and the big 130 000 linkedin group over there as well thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time

The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Pinnacle AI: Modernizing Cloud Infrastructure and Optimizing Business Systems

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