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The fastest way to lose a new pool service customer is painfully simple: let the call go to voicemail while you're out on route. I sit down with Nikki Acosta and Hal Denbar from Skimmer to talk about a practical use of AI that actually earns its keep, an AI phone receptionist built specifically for pool businesses. We get into what AI should do for operators, save time, reduce interruptions, and stop real revenue leaks, instead of adding another shiny tool to the pile.Nikki breaks down how Skimmer's AI Phone works day to day: answering during the hours you choose, asking the questions you design, and routing calls based on rules for existing customers versus brand-new leads. The system can collect contact info, address, service area details, and even pool type, then store the call data inside Skimmer and create a customer record automatically. We also talk about “custom knowledge” so you can embed troubleshooting steps and safety escalations, like when a caller reports smoke or a potential equipment hazard.Hal zooms out on what this means for growth in the pool industry. Bigger companies used to win by default because they could always pick up the phone. If a small operator can answer every call with an AI voice agent, the playing field shifts. We also dig into how to choose pool service software the smart way: stability, security, business continuity, and the ability to integrate with the rest of your tech stack through APIs and webhooks. If you're looking for pool route software, field service management tools, and a realistic approach to AI automation, this one delivers.Subscribe, share this with a pool pro who misses too many calls, and leave a review with your biggest customer communication headache. What would you want an AI receptionist to handle first?We talk with Nikki Acosta and Hal Denbar from Skimmer about why missed calls quietly crush pool service growth and how an AI phone receptionist can fix it without adding office overhead. We also get honest about AI hype, what “real” time savings look like, and why software stability and security matter as much as flashy features.  • AI overwhelm and a simple test for value: does it reduce real work  • How Skimmer AI Phone answers calls and routes them by rules  • Capturing lead details automatically and creating new customer records  • Using custom knowledge for troubleshooting, escalations, and safety  • Why always answering calls changes the growth advantage of big companies  • Pricing, 30-day free trial, and what setup looks like in practice  • What to look for in pool route software: uptime, security, long-term support  • Building an integration ecosystem with APIs, webhooks, CRMs, and ERPs  • Making software simple for techs in the field and back office teams  Are you a pool service pro looking to take your business to the next level? Join the pool guy coaching program. Get expert advice, business tips, exclusive content, and get direct support from me. I'm a 35-year veteran in the industry. Whether you're starting out or scaling up, I've got the tools to help you succeed. Learn more at swimmingpoollearning.com.  If you want to try Skimmer for free, simply go to my website, swimmingpoollearning.com, and click on the skimmer banner that's on the home page of the website.  And if you want more podcasts, you can also go to that same site, swimmingpoollearning.com. On the banner, there's a podcast icon. Click on that, and there'll be over 1900 podcasts there for you to listen to at your leisure.  And if you're interested in the coaching program, you can learn more at pullguycoaching.com.  Send us Fan MailSupport the Pool Guy Podcast Show Sponsors! HASA https://bit.ly/HASAThe Bottom Feeder. Save $100 with Code: DVB100https://store.thebottomfeeder.com/Try Skimmer FREE for 30 days:https://getskimmer.com/poolguy Get UPA Liability Insurance $64 a month! https://forms.gle/F9YoTWNQ8WnvT4QBAPool Guy Coaching: https://bit.ly/40wFE6y

The Great Talent Redistribution: Where is Talent Actually Going in 2026 and beyond?  Is the start-up compensation model broken? How about big Big Tech? How about non-tech small & medium businesses? What is happening to talent, going forward? This and many other topics in this episode of Tech Deciphered. Navigation: Intro The Broken Contract? The Great Unbundling The Three (?) Destinations Alternative Cap Tables, Alternative Compensation Models Investor Landscape Fragmentation Operator Playbook and Predictions Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno Goncalves Pedro Introduction Welcome to episode 77 of Tech Deciphered. This episode will focus on the great talent redistribution. Where’s talent actually going in 2026 and beyond? The Silicon Valley deal of the last 30 years, very low salary, stock options, you will either sell for a ton of money or IPO, and everyone gets rich, is seemingly broken. Or is it really? The dominant narrative says the tech middle class is dying. We disagree. There is obviously a lot of stuff going on whereby big tech is partially barbelling. There’s a superstar concentration on the top. There’s a bit of a seemingly allowing of the belly. We’ll come back to that. We don’t quite believe that is totally true. There’s a collapse at entry level. The belly is migrating into three, potentially even more, very different destinations: AI native startups, human-verified premium businesses, and the read the industrialized middle of the S&P 500 and SMB world. Each has its own cap table, each will have its own compensation model, and each will have its own investor profile. In some ways, this is the third episode in our Reset trilogy. We started with episode 75 on the SaaS-apocalypse. We talked about the great private capital reset in episode 76, and now we talk about talent redistributions. Bertrand, exciting times, not always positive times.   Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, it’s exciting times because it’s a time of change. Of course, we have the doomsayers. If you listen to Dario Amodei of Anthropic, every white-collar job on Earth is going to disappear. I think I strongly disagree, and I suppose you too as well, we strongly disagree. It’s going to be more of a redistribution. If you look at the history of technology, this is what always happened. We forget how many jobs have disappeared over the past 150 years. We move from a time of 150 years ago. People were mostly in agriculture. Then you had a lot of weird jobs that disappeared from people transporting water to people bringing ice from the pools to people doing the job of computers. People forget that computer was a title given to human beings. We’re doing calculations. Then, of course, secretory jobs in the ’80s, ’90s, where suddenly anyone can type using a word processor, the rise of Excel, that sort of stuff. Many things have changed. Some jobs have indeed disappeared. Some jobs have totally transformed. Where you do these jobs have changed. I think we are at a similar stage where, thanks to AI, and I would say for now, or at least the rise of AI coding, there is a dramatic change happening. I don’t think it means that people will be without a job. It just means, from my perspective, that jobs are changing. You are not just doing a lowly coding level task that actually indeed could be replaced, but you are going to have more of builder type of mindset, a product manager type of mindset going forward. We also expect that the distribution of jobs, depending on the type of business, will be quite different.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro The Broken Contract? Maybe let’s reset a little bit to the broken contract, or if it’s really a broken contract. There’s been this image in technology and tech that basically you get paid very little to work in tech. You get a bunch of stock options. The earlier you are in the company, the higher the level of stock option grants you get. Then you make a ton of money at some point because the company will either sell or IPO, and that’s heard of it. Obviously, there’s a lot of movements happening right now that are changing how these dynamics work. The first part is obviously AI, and in some ways, AI is shrinking companies. It’s not unheard of that companies with as little as four or five people reach 50 million in ARR. There’s companies with one person that have gotten bought for hundreds of millions of dollars or billion of dollars. Obviously, things are moving very, very fast, and therefore, there isn’t a large employee cap table. How would you share the upside? Would you actually give a couple of percentage points to an early employee rather than your 0.2-0.5% kind of thing for early employees? The second part is a little bit the other side of the table, which is the IPO market is seemingly in a drought. There’s not much happening in IPOs. Maybe 2026, at some point, there will be an unlock, but right now, it’s seemingly difficult to get your upside. Even if you’re an employee, you have to wait a long time. The median time of IPO has climbed over 10, 11 years, the longest in over a decade. Basically, not only you have to wait a long time as if there is an IPO drought, like we might be going through right now, when do I actually get my cash back? Unless the company gets bought, maybe there are secondary transactions along the way, maybe there’s something else. But obviously there’s a little bit of a reduction and lowering of the upside seemingly for this contract and for this place. The easy conclusion that I think many are taking is, because of all of this and all the layoffs that are happening, even in big tech, that serve the tech middle class is dying, that basically AI screwing the workers, et cetera, there’s also a lot of discussion that even it might be affecting the entry-level jobs as well. Everyone coming out of undergrad right now can’t get a job, et cetera. There’s this doomsday scenario that you’re alluding to that everything is changing. We have a slightly different perspective. We think there’s a realignment of market. In layoffs, there was a lot of layoffs that were warranted. Big tech, in particular, had actually hoarded a lot of engineering capacity over the last decade or so. There’s a little bit of a realignment that needed to happen in any case. When everyone’s saying, “Well, AI is compressing everything,” well, it’s compressing right now, but we don’t think actually it’s going to compress over time. You’ll still need engineering and science talent to come on board for you to be able to scale up. It’s not like AI is going to take care of everything and teams are going to be five people for companies that are worth a trillion dollars. That’s not happening. Today’s thesis, I think a little bit of this doomsday scenario needs to be seen with a more nuanced lens. I think that’s how we’re framing today’s episode, that there’s a bit of a nuance, there are some extremes happening. We’re going to talk about those extremes, but ultimately, it’s not quite as simple as saying that the tech middle class is disappearing in early jobs are going to be a thing of the past.   Bertrand Schmitt At the same time, what you started with is true. I mean, that 50 million ARR company, just five people. At a bigger scale, that’s exactly the matrix for Anthropic. They have reached a stage where they are at a range of 12 million ARR per staff per employee. It’s metrics that are definitely never seen before. I don’t think any company raised to this level. Best in class, best run companies, one, two million per employees. I mean, that was your target if you can make it. We are definitely in a different game. But I think what matters at the end of the day, and that’s what we’re arguing, is that you have to see the big pictures. Yes, some positions might disappear inside some companies, but some other positions will be created in other companies. Usually, what people do is keep talking about the jobs who disappear and not looking at the bigger picture of jobs that are being created as well. What is true, and I think you alluded to that, is that the big tech the past 10, 15 years had some strategy of hoarding talent in a war where having the best talented people will make the difference in numbers, will make the difference between winning or losing. The Google of the world, the Microsoft of the world, the Amazon of the world, they were hoarding talent. They would try to make sure that they might not have such needs in talented number of people. But if they have the talent, it means their competitors didn’t have the talent. It means that the startup trying to reach scale couldn’t pay the giant salaries that the Google of the world were paying. There was definitely some hoarding. But it went so far in the 2020, 2021, that I think since then there has been a coming back to normal. There is also now in 2026, the recognition that it’s not true anymore. Yes, talent can be very valuable, but there is now a bigger and bigger gap between the extremely talented versus the rest that are merely talented because of AI. AI is able to replace at scale your software engineers, your software managers. I would say it’s quite new. I don’t think it was true a year ago. We’re really talking about a recent dramatic change in what can be achieved thanks to AI. We can see most of the big AI companies are moving to coding. It was started by Anthropic as a trend, OpenAI has followed through. Obviously, the Cursor of the world existed before, but they were not as successful. All the Chinese open-source models are moving very fast to coding optimization the past few weeks. It’s quite an incredible change. I think there is that dramatic change, recognition that coding can be done differently. As a result, we are going to see change in the distribution of jobs. I think it will start from the top because we see the news of the big Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others who used to hold talented software developers to a change in realization that no, we actually need to invest in AI. We need to invest in compute because compute is going to do the job of most of these people. Therefore, we can’t pay for both at the same time, even us with all our money, we cannot. Wall Street is not going to let us do that. They start by removing a lot of position. I think we see that accelerating, quite frankly. We have only seen the beginning, but in the next 2 years, we see a dramatic shift. But I think my position, I guess yours, and you know as well, is that there will be a lot more opportunities created as well, probably by also entities.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro The Great Unbundling Yeah, there will be more opportunities created. The hoarding is just taken also a little bit of a different view. To your point, there’s hoarding of resources, compute, et cetera. But there’s also hoarding of top talent. We are seeing people getting paid, packages all in that could run up to 100 million, in some cases even over 100 million over several years. This is unheard of. I mean, an officer of Meta would make, I don’t know, maybe 20, 25 million a year. It’s like now there are people that are on the top end of AI researchers that are getting paid around that amount just to join some of these companies. There’s a little bit of a different hoarding. It’s very selective hoarding of certain talent. We’ve seen some acqui-hires. We’ve talked about it in previous episodes that are just literally about getting one or two people specifically to come on board. Alexander Wang, again, going to Meta to lead their intelligence labs there. I feel, I don’t know what you feel, but I feel this is a transition moment where there is overpaying for certain talent on the top of the market. At some point, this will stabilize. You can’t keep paying people 100 million over 4 years or something like that across the board. To your point, a lot of this is actually going to scale up quickly also on the AI side. There’s a little bit of a different hoarding happening on the top end, not just the resources, but also of people, which seems to give further this notion of barbell, that there’s two extremes, the haves and have-nots, the super-duper talented people that get paid a ton of money, tens of millions of dollars a year at the very least. Then the emptying of the middle where there’s a ton of tech layoffs going on in some ways, the belly, as they would call it, is being expelled. The middle market, the managers are being fired because there’s nothing to manage. There’s a lot of positions going away. In some cases, you might keep some of the more junior talent, but with a little bit of experience. But even the talent coming out of colleges is not getting hired either. It’s a little bit of a weird thing where there’s hoarding at the top, there’s an emptying of the belly, the middle, and then the early, early, early is also not getting recruited. It’s like what gives? How is this going to look in the future? I agree fully with you, Bertrand, that there’s a migration of this talent, not only to other companies, but also to other jobs. There will be new jobs that will emerge out of this. The DevOps, dev tools market didn’t exist until maybe 20 years ago at scale, and it got created. In some ways, we’re seeing there will be new markets, there will be new roles and new jobs that will be created around engineering teams going forward. We can’t anticipate all of them. But basically, the emptying of the belly is true as it’s happening right now. The low hiring on the early and the top end, getting tons of money. We think this is a transition to something else. There’s the hoarding of engineering in general is coming to an end at momentum. Now it’s time to rightsize teams, to get the right at the table, et cetera, and start figuring out what works and what doesn’t work. We’ve already had some horror stories coming out even from Amazon where they were breaking systems with their use of AI tools, and I’m sure it’s happening across the board. I’m on a board of a company and been tremendously affected by Meta and its algorithms, where basically because of advertising, there have been people served with ads for this specific company where the ad doesn’t match the company, so basic stuff like that. It’s been actually very, very difficult because in some ways, the company goes back to Meta. It’s like, “Hey, dudes, you guys are serving ads that are not even our ads with our copyright and stuff. How does this work?” They’re like, “Oh, it’s AI.” It’s like, “Well, it’s AI but can you give me my money back?” They’re like, “No, we won’t give you money back.” This creates huge issues for companies, for example, that are very dependent on advertising, which obviously there’s a lot of industries that are. They’re actually in production systems at scale. Meta is, I think now, the largest digital advertising in the world. I think they outgrew Google in one of the last quarters. Basically, this has a tremendous effect that systems that are in production at scale are getting inputs and changes driven by AI tooling, and somehow nobody can say what the hell is happening. Again, there will be a reckoning, there will be a redistribution, there will be a rightsizing of teams and an adequacy of teams going forward. I personally think this is a transition period.   Bertrand Schmitt I think we are moving from hoarding or software engineering to hoarding the top of the top scientists in AI and hoarding of GPUs, GPUs/data center. For me, it was quite interesting to see the deal of Cursor with xAI, where basically they couldn’t get access to computing resources to run their model. But xAI had, I forgot the exact numbers, but close to half a million GPUs that no one, I mean, “no one was using” because their services are not so successful yet in terms of AI chatbot and the like. Basically, suddenly they are like, “You know what? We control access to resource.” But the new resource is, again, a mix of extremely talented AI engineering or AI scientists versus GPUs/data center. There is this race of controlling boss and everything else is going to be collateral damage. Some examples, I think, are quite interesting. You talk about some example of Amazon, even some production issues. I remember reading a quick post-mortem of one of the issues, and the conclusion was it was AI, definitely part of the issue. But the other part of the issue was AI used by junior engineers. For me, it’s interesting. It shows that actually junior plus AI is actually a danger zone. That’s why many companies are going to be way more careful. “Why do we need the junior people if they are just playing with fire?” I think we go back to that situation of barbell, as you call it. The top talents are extremely valuable because they know how a production system works. They are here to develop better AI systems. But the junior guys playing with fires, yeah, maybe it’s cute in startups, but in a big time production environment, a different story.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro There will be a barbell with top-end talent super-mega paid and then mid-level talent that is individual contributors still doing a lot of great work, et cetera. Along the way, a lot of emptying of entry, a lot of emptying of the middle. Where does the talent go? The Three (?) Destinations I think we could say there’s three destinations for this talent. Maybe there’s four, maybe there’s more. Three that we can immediately identify. One is the AI native startup piece, where we have smaller teams that potentially get to a lot of revenue or top line over time, and where the Series Seed is the primary round, where we’re seeing Series Seed being raised of tens of millions of dollars, actually even hundreds of millions of dollars in Series Seed. In some ways, the stars there can get incredible compensations in terms of stock. They will stay for private and selling in secondaries later down the road because there’s so much capital at the table. Actually, in some ways, salaries are very high as well in some of these companies. It’s not like you’re trading off anything. You can get paid a lot of money. If your company at Series Seed for 10 or 15 employees has raised 50-$100 million, you can pay great salaries. In some ways, this is the extreme destination. The AI native startups that can make it is the extreme destination. Now, there aren’t a ton of AI native startups that can raise 50-100 million to 400 million in Series Seed, just to be clear. There’s a handful of hot deals in that space, but that’s one clear destination for top-end talent going through that. In that market, I think that’s one of the destinations. The second one is more what we would call the human-verified premium. It’s more of a play of companies that has still the need of human in the loop, either in terms of development, also in terms of activity, either because go-to markets are very intensive, and so therefore you need to have sales forces, partnership teams, et cetera. Or on the engineering side, it needs to have a lot of customization, integration. Companies are not just going to the, “Oh, you can come in and just apply your AI tooling and somehow magically the systems all work.” there needs to be quite a lot of and work and high touch work in getting stuff done. A significant part of that market, I’m not sure, is super VC investible. Maybe it’s a hybrid of private equity in VC, more PE style in many cases. It’s a PE-hold, sell to someone else market. As we’ve discussed in a previous episode on the SaaS-apocalypse, that hasn’t quite worked out for PEs. Question marks on how that human-verified premium market is going to evolve. But obviously, there’s a lot of work still to be done there, even on the engineering and science side. That’s the second potential destination. Then the third more aggressive destination is the reindustrialized middle companies that have a lot of specificity in going after small and medium businesses, local or regional affectations like ERPs or CRMs for specific markets, et cetera. Those are the three natural destinations. I would add the fourth, which is big tech. I mean, big tech doesn’t magically disappear, and I don’t think it fits neatly into any of these three markets. In some ways, big tech is now looking at the extreme for top talent a little bit like the AI native startup because they can pay. They can pay the 100 million every four years, et cetera. I do think it will typify taxonomically into a fourth type emerging, where, as we discussed, you’ll have top-end individual contributor talent. You’ll have the absolute top-end of the market because they can get paid. Then you’ll start having the emergence of earlier talent that is highly capable, et cetera. That will go back to a bit of a normal distribution in terms of talent on big tech. For me, those are the four destinations that I would put at the table.   Bertrand Schmitt For me, big tech moving to big tech, I’m not sure if it’s really a destination. I mean, yes, in some ways it’s a reshuffle between the big tech companies. They are definitely all fighting in some ways for some of the same people. I can see that dramatic shift where big tech has to remove a lot of positions in order to replace by AI. Again, I think at this stage, it’s mostly driven by AI coding. We are still at the beginning because this is brand-new phenomenon that AI coding is so successful at its task. I don’t think it was true even 6 months ago. Some companies, take Anthropic, take OpenAI, are definitely there or close to be there in terms of no more writing of a single line of code by a human, zero. This is, again, 6, 12 months ago. Not true. But now it’s true in a few top companies. Take OpenClaw as well, most successful GitHub project of all time, not a single line written by its author. It would have been impossible. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of line of code in a few months. It’s impossible to achieve that manually. If you look at the other big tech companies, the Google of the world, the Meta of the world, the Microsoft of the world, they are absolutely not there yet. They are going to be there because they have no choice. It’s you either go fast there or you die. You are not going to be able to survive competitors that are shipping 10, 50, 100 times faster than you are shipping. It’s a life and death situation. All the big tech companies are going to move, and mark my word, in the next 2 years from 10, 20% of AI-written code to 100%. During that transition, the next 2 years max, if you don’t do it in 2 years, you are going to die. Your stock price is going to crash. Then, of course, you will have to make changes. You will have to invest more in GPUs. You will have to invest less in your standard typical software engineer employees. Like you, I’m very optimistic that there are new buckets. AI-native startups definitely will be there. It will be transformational. Human-verified premium, very interesting category. In a way, it will be businesses that are inevitably less scalable through AI, and there is definitely a spot from there. I think the biggest would be the reindustrialized middle SMBs. Most of S&P 500 type of business are going to dramatically offer new software opportunities, new opportunity story to talented software employees because they will need to implement AI in everything they do. They will do it. They will need people who have software engineering knowledge in order to implement these systems. For them, what’s changing dramatically really is that thanks to much cheaper cost as thanks to AI coding, a lot of software projects that they couldn’t afford to do, that they couldn’t imagine doing by themselves, they are able to do it. They will invest in a lot more software capabilities than ever before. That will be a big game changer. And software, very tuned to their business model. There might be less buying of your traditional off-the-shelf SAF software and a lot more investment in a highly custom software by their own team, assisted with AI. I think that would be the part that is most transformed by all of this in a positive way.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Alternative Cap Tables, Alternative Compensation Models This will lead to a very fundamental shift, right back to the broken contract. What does the new contract look like? It looks like alternative cap tables depending on which bucket are you transitioning into. If you’re going into your AI-native bucket, and you’re a top-end talent, you’re like, “Dude, I’m worth 100 million over 4 years, so just compensate me accordingly with a mix of options in the company plus my salary.” If you’re top 1%, you can probably get away with salaries that you’d get anyway at mid-level from 300K, 400K and above, and you can get actually a lot of options already in the company. A lot of this is happening right now. There’s a premium for AI, we know that. There’s a premium for AI at the top end of AI researching, in particular on companies that are doing hardcore research on staff AI engineers, so companies that require actual AI engineering. There is a premium that is significant. It could be as high as 18% over non-AI peers, and it widens actually with seniority, shockingly enough. This is more of an average than anything else. Now, for me, and it’s for debate, but the perspective is this extreme comp will need to compress at some point. There will still be the haves and have-nots paid much better than the have-nots, so to speak, but there will be a compression. The variance can’t be the variance we’re seeing today for absolute top-end talent. That said, there will be variants. We know that big tech for over a decade, decade and a half, for example, in the Bay Area, has been paying a lot of money for director and above levels that used to be the VPs, so a million, a million and a half a year, all in compensations. It’s not unheard of that this will actually increase after this stage. That said, I do think that the compensation extreme that we’re in will get diluted down the middle. It will actually come down at some point. It’s part of where we are today. As we know, it is still a bubble.   Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, it’s an interesting point. I think it’s possible. At the same time, that compression coming 2, 3, 5 years. At the same time, we have examples where there is no such compression. Take the top sports players in the world, golfing, basketball, NBA players. There has not really been any compression at all. For me, it’s interesting. If you look at the big tech companies, each being one of this top NBA team, why would such compression happen? As long as they are competing against each other and generating plenty of cash, I think there will be some fair question. We will see. I don’t have a strong opinion, but for me, it’s not a total given.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro For me, the shocking thing is the faster AI becomes better, the more that compression will happen, because at some point, it’s like, why do you need the top talent as well? I don’t know. It feels like you’re trying to evolve a system that’s there to replace you. It’s like, “Okay, I’m getting paid 100 million over the next 4 years”, and then you develop something that’s so good that replaces you. Thank you. That’s cool.   Bertrand Schmitt That’s a total possibility, yes, because we are in that very unusual market where the game is to only replace yourself and people like yourself. At some point, it is a possibility, I guess this one. Right now, we’re talking about replacing your “average software talent”. In 2 years, could we absolutely replace the absolute best top experts in the world? Probably. I think it’s just that at some point we’ll be reaching the stage where we strictly have no control anymore on our AI systems because no human is able to challenge and understand what’s produced. It’s not just a question of scale anymore. We’re talking about a gap in IQ, basically.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Exactly. It will happen at some point in history. We don’t know exactly when. For the second bucket, the human-verified premium bucket, it’s difficult to see how an HVAC company or an HVAC roll-up of scale or a regional health care platform or high touch go-to-market, B2B, SaaS play, et cetera, for a vertical will compete. At the same end, they have to compete and they will compete. There will be more and more jobs, we believe, for engineering talent in these companies. They’ll have to be more and more AI-enabled themselves. The cash salaries will have to be competitive within the local markets, not necessarily with Silicon Valley. There will be potentially profit sharing and revenue sharing and actual dividends played at the table. The model there on the cap table needs to change a little bit, needs to be probably propped up more on salary and on some way of doing profit sharing or actually having dividends paid to employees and figuring out employee to equity in a more aggressive manner. This is the market that probably was already very attacked, so to speak, or let’s say, occupied by private equity firms. There are still obviously part of that model that would work well. There needs to be a fundamental shift, certainly on the quantum of salary compensation, dividend compensation, profit sharing, and all of that. Then last but not the least, obviously, we had the bucket around basically the reindustrialization of the middle, so everything else, which will take most of the belly that we were talking about. This is probably a poor analogy, the belly fat. It’s not belly fat, it’s people that were doing their jobs that now are getting disrupted. In some ways, that bucket will absorb a lot of that belly, will absorb a lot of talent. The small and medium businesses that Bertrand was saying will need to crucially become more AI, software-enabled by themselves, even with some core stuff and underpinnings that actually might not even require AI in terms of infrastructure platforms. There, you need to get properly paid. Again, how many people do you need in your engineering team if you’re a small business? Probably not a lot. It’s maybe you need one or two people and that’s it. They’ll need to be very nicely paid because they’re running the stuff in the rails. This is probably a market that over time, as AI gets more and more competent, will also be disrupted, but let’s not talk about the disruption to the disruption because otherwise, we’ll stay here the whole day, but certainly a market that has a lot of potential to shift and to absorb a lot of the moments that we’re seeing in terms of layoffs happening in the US in particular.   Bertrand Schmitt This category was a category that historically could not compete with Silicon Valley salaries, could not attract the most talented engineers. It’s not a category that didn’t want to bring these people on board. It’s a category that just couldn’t afford to bring this talent on board, typically. I think it would be a dramatic shift for them when suddenly there are opportunities to hire these people. There is an opportunity to hire them at maybe more reasonable prices from this company’s perspective. You talk about small companies, the great thing is that there are millions of small companies at some point. I think things could be truly transformational. Of course, some of these engineers, software engineers, might decide to become entrepreneurs on their own. Solo entrepreneurs, small businesses, build their own, easier to build their own product to market so to serve other companies. I think there will be quite dramatic changes because not all companies will be disrupted by AI as much, but not every company will benefit from improving processes, improving software through AI. At least early on, you will need this human touch to make it work inside a business. Interestingly enough, I was hearing that some companies like IBM were hiring more younger people to do the work of going to the client, understand their needs, propose implementation plans. That forward deployed engineer, those positions, I think there will be more and more available.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Investor Landscape Fragmentation What happens to investor into the landscape? We already had an episode, the previous one, Episode 76, where we talked quite a lot about the big capital reset on the private equity and private reset, including venture capital. Just maybe to summarize, how does it align with the buckets that we’ve just been discussing? I think the AI-native bucket clearly is going to be the key bucket. There, we’re going to see two movements. One movement, which is the mega funds, as we discussed in the last episode, are no longer just VC funds. They’re really mostly multi-asset private equity funds, maybe even private equity hedge funds in some cases. Those funds will be all over the high-growth AI-native companies and will be pouring money into companies that are scaling really, really quickly. The early stage, so to speak, VCs, the actual VCs that will stay in the market will be the guys probably identifying the next big wave of AI-native companies. We’ve discussed that as well in the last episode, some research that we did at Chamaeleon that I shared in episode 76. We’ll see that as emerging. What happens to the second bucket, the bucket around human premium, human in the loop? Likely we’ll have more and more private equity capital going into it and the large-scale VC guys, the Thrives of the world, they’ve just announced Thrive Holdings, and others going after those markets as well. It’s trying to converge into the private equity market, which aligns with the point we made in the previous episode that the VC mega funds are no longer VC, that they are private equity, multi-asset class. They’re going after a bunch of things. There’s a conversion happening from VC into private equity. It was going to happen anyway because the private equity guys were coming into VC as well and the hedge funds were coming to VC as well. There’s a convergence in the middle of very, very large funds and large assets under management happening to go after some of these opportunities, certainly in Bucket B. Then this Bucket C, so to speak, the bucket of reindustrialization, as Bertrand was saying, very well, likely will be self-funded for a significant period of time. Will self-fund with their own cash flow. Doesn’t need to have a ton of capital intensity. Maybe you need one or two engineers to do stuff, but that’s it. You don’t need tons of capital. You didn’t need in the past, you won’t need it today. Not sure there’s going to be a fundamental shift to that market.   Bertrand Schmitt Yes, I certainly, overall, agree with you. That last pocket, probably little change to the capital and capital structure. Again, I see that as the biggest opportunity for a lot of people who might be less needed by big tech and also top tech companies. What is sure for the first category, the high native startups? I would say more overall in the VC ecosystem, there is no space left for SaaS anymore. I think SaaS, as we used to know it, is dead in some ways in the sense that new pure SaaS software startup are definitely out. Existing ones that are critical to run your infrastructure, the Salesforce of the world, I think they’re in a decent spot. Actually, interestingly, they changed their pricing model to now sell to AI agents, not just per seat. There is a change in pricing there. But this day and age of funding a pure SaaS software startup through VC money, no way. VC money going to AI-native startups, AI-focused startups, to biotech, to deep tech, to defense tech, yes. SaaS as a fundable category early on, I think it’s over.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro I’m a bit more nuanced as we shared in The SaaS Apocalypse episode. We can call it whatever we call. It’s applied AI is the new SaaS thing. Horizontal applied AI is the new horizontal SaaS or vertical applied AI is the new vertical SaaS. I agree in common with your point that very specific point solutions around SaaS will be disrupted by nature with all the easy stuff you can do today with AI. It will take a while. This is not something that’s going to happen this year. It’s going to happen over the next years. Maybe interesting to also talk about the exit markets. I think the IPO market, as we’ve also discussed in the past, there is, in my view, going to be a reopening of the IPO market, I think this year, probably later in the year, third or fourth quarter. The median time to IPO actually is going to be really weird because there’s going to be potentially some companies in the current landscape, bubble or no bubble, that are going to IPO, the OpenAIs of the world, Anthropics of the world, et cetera. There will be more and more aggression, I think, on M&A. Big tech has already shown it, that they want to buy into markets. Large non-tech companies have also started doing acquisitions in space. To prop up their IT teams, their engineering teams with this world that we’ve also discussed in previous episodes that I’m going to own my own engineering stack for now. As we see, that normally doesn’t withstand the test of time. At some point it will get unbundled and served by someone else. Then finally, the secondary market is very hot right now. Obviously, there’s heavy discounting on some areas, high premiums on others. The exit market, strangely enough, is going to be propped up, in my opinion, over the next year to 2 years, dramatically. Then we’ll see if there’s a big reckoning around the bubble that we are clearly in or not, if it’s a soft landing or hard landing. Definitely, there’s going to be a lot of exit paths over the next year to 2 years.   Bertrand Schmitt Concerning the “bubble”, I have two perspectives on this. One is it’s a bubble in the sense that money is going to a lot of players and some players are going to blow it up. There will be a concentration of players at the end, like it usually happens. If you look at, for instance, long time ago, the railway revolution, there was that intense influx of capital. At the end of the day, there was a dramatic change in transportation in the US and a complete railway system put in place. Yes, some investors lost money, some companies went bankrupt, but the transformation was fully real. There were a lot of top leaders at the end of this revolution. The change after that only happened, we guess, post-World War II, with the construction of the highway system and the rise of airlines and plane transportation overall. Here I feel it’s similar in the sense that, yes, there is a lot of money going in. Some players are going to blow it. They will misuse the money in different ways, but that’s part of dynamic allocation of capital. Of course, you make mistakes. That’s what happens. At the same time, I feel it’s a similar level in the sense of this is a dramatic change in the US infrastructure. This buildup of AI data centers filled with GPUs, integrated at scale with some of the best software in the world and running it, supported by a dramatic shift in energy infrastructure. This is for me similar to the Railroad Revolution. Some players might not own the data center they build because they didn’t manage well their debt, they didn’t manage to run proper software. You know what? They will get acquired by somebody else. I think we are at this level of fundamental transformation. The fact that in a matter of maybe 2 years, the move from 0% of code written by AI to 100 % written by AI is an insane dramatic shift. Just to be clear, when you move from manually coded to AI coded, we’re talking about a 100X difference in terms of speed at similar, if not better level of quality. The shift is dramatic, and on top of it, you don’t pay salaries anymore to achieve that. You pay CapEx, and with GPUs and OpEx with electricity. It’s a very big shift, positive shift in business model. New unions, no management over it, AI working 24/7. Personally, I think for me, bubble has a bad connotation in the sense of it was all for a waste. I don’t think it’s all for a waste. I think we are witnessing a dramatic revolution of our lifetimes, quite frankly, bigger than SaaS, bigger than mobile. From my perspective, it’s exciting times.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Operator Playbook and Predictions Let’s move to if you are this person, what would you do in the future? Let’s start with two extremes and go from there. One is you’re non-tech, so you’re not an engineer, et cetera. You’re trying to figure out, how do I scale my activity? Maybe physical labor is where I want to go. It’s not, “Go west” anymore. Definitely not necessarily go west. You should go to, I guess, the states that have no sales tax with very cheap energy because that’s where the data centers are being built if you want to be in that market. Obviously, there’s a lot of stuff that needs to be done: HVAC, electricity work, et cetera. Don’t go west. Go low sales taxes, low cost of energy. That’s likely where the data centers are being built. You probably can just follow. There’s, I’m sure, some way for you to follow where the data centers are being built, but that’s next, I think on that extreme of the table. The other extreme of the table, let’s say you are super ambitious, maybe you’re no longer an engineer, but you’re a product manager in your prompt engineering. You could do prompt engineering all day long. You’re 28, 29-year-old superstar. What do you go and do? Likely either you start your own thing, start your own company because you’re so good at prompt engineering, you probably can do a lot of the code yourself, particularly if you have an engineering background, or you go and join very early an AI-native startup that you think has the chance of going through the roof, and you take a pretty good salary early on, a ton of upside on the company because guess what? Companies like that need product managers. They need people to figure out UX, UI. It’s not going to be, at least for now, yet AI figuring that out for you. Those are two extremes, just to give two of the extremes, like engineering, product management persona, and physical labor at the other extreme, non-tech, et cetera.   Bertrand Schmitt In some ways, every software engineering job is going to become the equivalent of a software engineering manager or a product manager, because suddenly you don’t have to do the coding anymore. You’re managing AI that is coding for you. Either you start to have some manager hat, but we saw the humans, so it’s a very different type of manager, obviously, or you are going to be really an empowered product manager. You’re skipping the middleman. You’re skipping the traditional engineering organization because your engineering organization is AI running and doing the work for you. I still believe that it requires some serious skills. I don’t believe in the vibe coder type of value proposition. I don’t believe in the prompt engineer becoming suddenly super incredible, able to manage that. I still think it requires some serious chops to do the best from all of this and to do it in a safe and sane way. It’s very easy to have poor taste, make mistakes. I don’t know you, but keep reading these stories on the heads of companies who lost everything because of the AI agents. That deleted stuff in production, and they had no backups or the backups weren’t deleted as well. Crazy situation. You cannot run companies like this if you let your agents running wild. You could argue it’s the early days. I would argue it that that issues would be there for a while. You need to have some engineering discipline at core in the company running the business to make sure things don’t go sideways because it would be easy for things to go sideways.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro I totally agree. If you’re thinking, Oh, should my kid go into science and engineering and computer science, et cetera? Absolutely, still, because of everything that Bertrand just said. You need to understand actually what code does and what technology does and what all of that does. That’s still a skill of the future. It’s not a skill of the past. In some ways, it’s still a skill of the future very much. Maybe let’s try two more extremes. Around the same level, the person that decided to do an AI native company bootstrapped initially, having difficulty raising a mega round, but could probably get away with raising a 2-3 million seed round, et cetera. Is that still viable? The answer is yes. There’s tremendous capital efficiency right now happening in the market still, 10 plus higher than if you were doing a SaaS company, and you were a founder in 2019 or something like that. That capital efficiency is going to reverberate. You can run a tighter team, smaller team. Actually, you don’t need that many salaries. If you’re a decent engineer as a founder or if you understand enough as a product manager to just generate that code, you can do a lot of stuff yourself, can bring in maybe one or two technical elements to the team early on as you would have done if you were bootstrapped anyway. There’s obviously a path for that. The other extreme is you’re in big tech, you’re level five, individual contributor, making a ton of money, or you were a manager, and you’re now out of a job, where do you go? You can go to a big company that is non-tech, S&P 500 company that’s non-tech, something like that. You join the company, you’ll probably get paid pretty well, maybe not as high as you were paid in big tech. There’s some stock at the table, but guess what? You’ll have probably more work-life balance than you ever did. That’s the trade-off. You’ll have a better job. On the upside, you can transform the company. You can help and be part of transforming a company from non-AI to AI-first or AI-enabled in the future, whatever BS that will look like in terms of the argumentation to the board. You can actually create tremendous productivity enhancements in a big non-tech company if you come with that background. Again, you’ll have certainly a better work-life balance, so not a bad deal, to be honest.   Bertrand Schmitt Also, to be clear, I talk a lot about AI coding because it’s truly transformational. You could argue that it’s going to be self-improving. We are in the situation of a self-improving AI that keeps improving itself thanks to automated coding. It’s a dramatic, virtuous loop. Obviously, AI is also going to improve everything else. It’s going to improve your marketing, it’s going to improve your search process, it’s going to improve your DNA. Improvements will be everywhere. It’s just that right now we are at a point in the quote-unquote revolution where there is one clear piece of the puzzle that is moving faster than the rest.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Bertrand, the senior executives at non-tech don’t know anything about that. It could be just a great prompt engineer. That’s the only job you do. “I’m the chief marketing officer. I have someone below me that’s doing the whole work.” Nobody knows. Nobody’s the wiser, I guess. I’m being facetious, but not fully.   Bertrand Schmitt Yeah. There would be a transition period where what you described happen. I want to say, going back to AI coding, I think that the part of AI that as of today has reached a stage of limited AGI. We have reached, from my perspective, a limited type of AGI for coding. If you take coding as a discipline today, I think we reach AGI. If you go beyond coding, that’s true. If we are talking about coding, leveraging the latest LLMs: OPUS 4.7, ChatGPT 5.5, combined with Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode for harness, I think we’ve reached AGI in the context of coding. I’m not sure everyone fully realize that and the consequence of that. I think the rest is going to come as well. We are going to see that category by category, usually categories that are more scientific in nature, where you can replicate, where you can test easily, where you can create clear success. Metrics will be the “easiest” to follow in that direction of self-improvement. I just want to highlight that this part is truly transformational, the root cause of everything we’re talking about today. At the same time, it’s coming beyond coding.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro I think it is true. There are a couple of markets where that might not hold true, which is maybe the final path. If you’re thinking of starting your own business in plumbing and in HVAC maintenance and installation, this is a pretty good time for the reasons we already said before. There’s a lot of buildup of data centers and all that stuff, but also for other reasons, because it’s an activity that won’t be disrupted by AI yet. You need them embodied AI. You need physicality to AI to do stuff like actually fixing pipes.   Bertrand Schmitt Until Optimus replace you.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yeah, but if we’re 3, 4 years out in terms of a lot of these optimizations that we’re talking about at the software layer, we’re 10 years plus out on embodied AI, right?   Bertrand Schmitt Oh, yeah, it’s 10 years.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro We’ll probably be optimistic as we speak. That’s a nice business. I’m thinking of starting to go into that market. If you guys are interested in listening to this, just reach out to me. What’s the angle? I think there’s a lot of stuff you can do in the buildup of some of these businesses, plumbing, HVAC, all sorts of maintenance. There are markets that are just totally messed up. Handyman market in the US is totally messed up. There’s a bunch of companies out there that try to go after it with marketplaces and stuff. I honestly just start something from scratch, a small business, and go from there.   Bertrand Schmitt Yes. They’re an interesting middle. Think about accounting firms, consulting firms. I think they are not as easy to replace, but at the same time, there is no way on what they do is not going to be dramatically changed with AI. I don’t know if it’s 50, 80, 90% of the job, but this is changing quite dramatically, would be my expectation in the coming few years. Conclusion Thanks for listening episode 77 of Tech Deciphered about that great talent redistribution. As you heard it from us, we believe there is a dramatic change in play, enabled by AI coding, and that ultimately a lot of the big tech companies are changing their employee distribution, way more focused on the top talents and bringing more GPUs. As a result, we will see a change in their staffing. Some of this change will benefit AI-focused startups, but probably more likely will benefit the bigger SMBs, the S&P 500 companies of the world that will finally be able to bring inside and afford some of the talent that were in some ways trapped by the top 5, 10, 20 software companies of the world. Thank you, Nuno.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Thank you, Bertrand

In this episode, we explore why accurate inventory tracking is the secret to protecting your profit and keeping customers happy.Jordan Finners, Founder of Pimsical.app, explains how small errors in stock levels can lead to big losses and frustrated shoppers. He shares how his Shopify-native tools replace outdated systems like Stocky to make scanning and reporting faster for retail teams. You will learn how to simplify your stock takes, reduce human error, and keep your business running smoothly without expensive corporate software.Topics discussed in this episode:  How bad data hurts customer trust. Why physical inventory is a hidden cost. How barcode scanning reduces human error. What the end of Stocky means. How to stock take during store hours. Why Shopify native tools save time. What differentiates inventory tools from ERPs. How mobile phones work as scanners. Why frequent stock takes prevent panic. How to automate Shopify inventory updates. Links & Resources Website: https://www.pimsical.app/Shopify App Store: https://apps.shopify.com/stock-take-inventory-count-1LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordanfinneran/X/Twitter: https://x.com/JordanFinnersGet access to more free resources by visiting the show notes at https://tinyurl.com/5n8umbdvI'd love your feedback. Tap the the link to send me a text.______________________________________________________LOVE THE SHOW? HERE ARE THE NEXT STEPS!Follow the podcast to get every bonus episode. Tap follow now and don't miss out!   Rate & Review: Help others discover the show by rating the show on Apple Podcasts at https://tinyurl.com/ecb-apple-podcasts   Join our Free Newsletter: https://newsletter.ecommercecoffeebreak.com/   Support The Show On Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/EcommerceCoffeeBreak   Partner with us: https://ecommercecoffeebreak.com/partner-with-us/

Can we control a virtual body as naturally as our own—using only brain activity? This question, inspired by the iconic series Sword Art Online, was set by Taiga Seri, a PhD researcher at Keio University. Answering this question led Taiga to the nomination for the International BCI Award, bringing all of us one step closer to a future once imagined in science fiction.

Cindy Vindasius is the founder and CEO of Vindasius Advisory, and former Corporate Controller, and has spent more than 30 years helping high growth and enterprise companies build scalable finance systems. She's led more than a dozen ERP implementations across platforms like NetSuite, SAP, and Oracle, and has supported multiple IPOs, M&A transactions, and global compliance efforts. Her interview provides a wealth of information for FP&A professionals   Why FP&A need to be involved in ERP implementation for enhanced reporting  New wave of AI-driven ERPs: what I really think  The ROI of an ERP Implementation  ERP Mastery Program 6 video course: https://www.vindasius.com/mastery-program

Understanding DISE is one thing. Actually producing the disclosure every quarter is another. In the final episode of their three-part series, Embark's Nicole Harger and Adam Olsen are joined by Managing Director David, who brings real-world perspective from working directly with public companies on DISE implementation. If your team is asking "where do we even start," this episode is the answer.In this episode:How to conduct a readiness assessment and gap analysis before your 2027 effective dateWho needs to be in the room: why finance, IT, HR, procurement, and operations all have a roleKey decisions to make early: cost-incurred vs. expense-incurred, selling expense definition, and voluntary disclosuresSystems and data challenges: fragmented ERPs, the retail inventory method, cost pools, and how to use estimates responsiblyInternal controls for a new disclosure: what needs to be in place before your first filingHow DISE interacts with segment reporting under ASC 280 and what to address in MD&AIndustry-specific pain points for retail, consumer products, manufacturing, life sciences, and techSix practical tips for first-year adoption, including why running a pilot in 2026 could save you significant headaches

Martin McNicoll, founder of Distillerie des Cantons de l’Est This is the first episode in an occasional In The Channel series called “Life after the channel” – conversations with people who built careers in the Canadian IT channel and then went on to do something completely different. Martin McNicoll founded Gurus Solutions, originally ERP Guru, and grew it into one of NetSuite’s most decorated Canadian partners over nearly two decades – President’s Club, nine consecutive years as a Five Star Award winner, and offices from Montreal to Chicago. He sold the company in 2022 and turned his attention to something that had been brewing since a 50th birthday trip to Scotland: whisky. Distillerie des Cantons de l’Est is a grain-to-bottle operation in Mansonville, Quebec, where Martin and his team are growing organic barley and rye using regenerative agriculture, distilling on-site, and aging their whisky in oak casks. First barrels went in in December 2024, with the first whiskies expected around 2028. In this conversation, we talk about the failed attempt to buy a cask at Balvenie that started it all, the sale of Gurus and what made him finally say yes, why the skills he built running an ERP consultancy translate surprisingly well to running a distillery, and what it means to retrain a SaaS-speed brain for a product that takes years to mature. Martin also shares the story behind the McNicoll brand – his Scottish ancestors who came to Quebec with the 78th Fraser’s Highlanders in 1757 – and talks about the fight to get a distillery approved on Quebec agricultural land, replanting American oak for barrels that won’t be ready for 30 years, and what’s coming next, including a butterscotch liqueur later this year. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. This episode is a little different from what you’re used to hearing on In The Channel. It’s the first in what I’m hoping becomes an occasional series I’m calling “Life After the Channel” – conversations with people who built careers in the Canadian IT channel and then went on to do something completely different. My guest today is Martin McNicoll. If you were in the NetSuite ecosystem in Canada at any point over the last two decades, you probably know Martin. He founded ERP Guru, which was later rebranded to Gurus Solutions, grew it into one of NetSuite’s top partners in the country, picked up every award in the book, and eventually sold the company in 2022. And then he went and did something that nobody saw coming. Martin’s now building a grain-to-bottle whisky distillery in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, growing his own organic barley and rye, aging his own barrels, and building a brand rooted in his family’s Scottish heritage going back to the 1700s. It’s a great story. So let’s get right into it, my chat with Martin McNicoll. [MUSIC] Robert: Martin, thanks for taking the time. Thanks for joining us. Martin McNicoll: Robert, it’s great to be here with you today. Robert: Nice to catch up. We ran into each other a lot at SuiteWorld. And for years, when I talked to Craig West about the channel in Canada for NetSuite, you guys would be one of the first names that came up. President’s Club, Five Star, the whole nine yards. And now you’re making whisky in the Eastern Townships. Walk me through that. How did we come to be where we’re at today? Martin: Well, it’s a note on Craig. He was my RSM. He was the guy managing me and Gurus when you started. He wasn’t like head of the channel. He actually came down to Montreal to help me start the practice. So we connected for all that time. But to go back to the whisky business, I’m a Scotch fan. I’m a whisky fan. And now, like eight years ago, for my 50th birthday, I went to Scotland with a bunch of friends and had a great time visiting distilleries for a full week, just drinking Scotch and having fun and eating good food. And when we came back, a couple of years later, it was COVID. And COVID, I think, happened and a lot of people got ideas of what they really want to do. And I have a cottage in the Eastern Townships, which is, for your listeners, a bit up north of Vermont. I’m 15 minutes from Jay Peak, which is a ski resort in Vermont, on the Canada side. Beautiful place. And we stayed there for the first year of COVID. We had amazing success with Gurus. I think for everybody in the channel, cloud services companies really boomed during that time. Everybody wanted to run their business from home. It was a great time. And I said, what can we do? We had supply chain issues our customers were trying to solve. And I said, what can I do? What can I contribute? I started with ideas of being a farmer. These were shut down pretty fast. But a friend of mine said, you know what, we can grow barley and rye and we can make whisky. And I said, oh, that’s a great idea. And then the hunt was on. We found some land – I mean, that’s the only thing we could do during COVID, drive around and look for land – and found great land with a great combination of good water and enough acreage to grow the cereals. And it started like that. And then a French company approached us to buy Gurus. And it was just the right timing. So everything happened. It just gave me more money to spend on booze, sort of saying. Robert: As it should be. So to your point on that 2018 trip to Scotland, I read that the dream sort of began with a mission of bringing home a cask of whisky. Is that true? Martin: It is true. We tried to, actually. When we went to the Balvenie and we said we’d like to buy one of your casks. And they looked at us like aliens. It’s like going to a Michelin restaurant and asking to buy the pan of the chef, right? Because the cask is part of the process. That’s what gives some of the aromas to the whisky. That’s where it’s aging. So you just can’t leave with the cask. You just can’t. I mean, I guess there were some barrel programs today, but you leave the cask there. You buy the liquid that’s in the cask, that’s all yours, but you can’t leave with the cask. But that was funny. That led to very interesting conversations at the distilleries in Scotland. Crazy Canadians trying to buy a cask. That’s the IP. That’s the trade secrets of the industry. Robert: So you had Gurus for 18 years, Alan Allman Associates comes knocking. You said initially you didn’t want to sell. What changed your mind? How much of it was about making room for the distillery that was already percolating in the back of your mind versus just feeling like it was the right time to do something new? Martin: I mean, it was that. I wanted to dedicate more time, because at that point the guy running Gurus was my COO, Dominic, and he was doing a great job. I was taking more time off and giving him more bandwidth on the business to run it. And I wanted him to be the president and continue running it. And these guys came in and they said, “We want to buy your company.” I said, “Okay, I’m not interested.” So they came back a couple times and the second time said, “Okay, how much do you want?” And I gave what I thought was a crazy number and they said yes. So I was done. And today it’s one of the most profitable businesses they have in their portfolio, and they’ve added other ERPs to the mix buying other companies in North America. And for the French, Quebec and Canada is kind of the bridgehead to go to the rest of Canada and the US. They needed a company that can speak English, which Gurus dealt with very well all the time. Not all of them do. But it was great for them. A great acquisition on their side. I’m still sitting on their board in Montreal every quarter, so it keeps me connected to the business, having fun there and very proud to see the company continue to thrive. Robert: You guys built Gurus through a string of acquisitions – Enabled Success, NetStra, MD Technical Resources. You had offices from Montreal to Chicago. When you look at what you’re doing now with the distillery – buying land, building infrastructure, hiring a master distiller – does it feel like it’s the same muscles that you built in building up Gurus, or is it completely different? Martin: It is the same thing. That’s very funny. I thought it would be something else. It’s not. It’s just managing people, managing providers. I mean, the problems are different – it’s like a truck being stuck emptying a cargo of casks going to the distillery, or a pump that is broken. But it’s like following up with the providers, finding the right partners, researching, researching, researching, reading. And all the skills that I’ve developed in BI and everything that we’ve built with Gurus is fully applied here at the distillery. So I started with cloud solutions first, and we’re using all the Google stack, which I always used, with their Google Cloud. All the data of the distillery is stored in a Google Cloud database and we can do analysis. It’s just great to look at it from a data perspective and have the right people to do the job. And I recognize what I’m good at and what I’m not good at. So I break stuff sometimes. That keeps me away from some pieces of equipment. Robert: One thing that jumped out on the website for the distillery was the grain-to-bottle concept. You grow the grain, you distill it, you age it, you sell it. You control the whole chain. For 20 years you kind of sat as the middleman doing the consulting and implementation in between NetSuite and the customer. Was it something about that experience that made you want to own the whole thing this time around? Martin: Definitely. And as you know, Robert, in the ERP channel, it’s not your software, it’s NetSuite. And my team understood the software, and the best successes we had were when we found a customer, sold NetSuite, understood the requirements, gave them a realistic estimate, implemented, and took them live with the right time frame. So that to me was like the perfect – everything that would work great, boom, boom, boom. We sold, we implemented, we took them live, converted all their data. Happy customers stayed with us for years. And that was a bit of that, right? Where the channel model is changing – like the Salesforce model, even NetSuite is changing where there’s more of a side where you need to work with a direct sales team, which by definition have different objectives. Their objective is to sell the software for as much as possible. As for a partner, when you do the implementation, there’s a lot in it for you also in year two and year three. So you want the whole thing to go as smooth as possible. Different pros and cons there. And I think that was definitely an inspiration in owning the whole supply chain and making the product. And even then, I need to buy bottles from China. Robert: Yeah, it’s the classic case study, right? If one person could make a nail, it would be completely impossible to gather all the skills you would need to go from getting the metal out of the earth to producing a nail, much less a bottle of whisky, much less enterprise ERP. The distillery website says patience is part of your essence, and whisky obviously is a product that has to age for years before you can sell a bottle. In the channel, again to the contrast you were just describing, everything’s about this quarter’s numbers, this year’s President’s Club. It’s fast, it’s iterative, things change very quickly, new features are added rapidly. How do you retrain your brain from SaaS speed to whisky speed? Martin: I’m still impatient. But you know what, you go out in the field. And in the last couple years we had a lot of rain. And we had issues with weeds going into our fields, because we took fields that were used for hay to give to cows. So there’s a lot of seeds that you need to take out of that land. And we’re doing it with regenerative agriculture techniques, where we don’t use Roundup, we don’t use chemicals. And sometimes you just sit there and you prepare the soil and then you go into the field and you make it super nice and you plant. And then two weeks later it’s full of weeds. Like hectares of weeds just popping up on top of your barley. And you’re like, yeah, what are you going to do? You try, you go in there first and you try to pull them out, and then you realize the scale of this. It’s impossible, right? So patience is pushed on you, I would say, in agriculture. And for the whisky, I mean, we’re tasting it. I love whisky. And we have now barrels that are one year old. And these are rye – rye is something that grows very fast, very high, super easy. It’s like a weed in itself if you talk to the farmers. So we had a great crop of rye and we made our first rye last year. So we were opening up that cask and tasting it now, and it is great. But you can taste after one year the immaturity of the whisky. So I think you have to trust your taste buds and say, okay, this is great. There’s something nice, nice colour, this is the direction I want it to take. But it’s not ready. So you sit on it, you put the cork on top of it, hammer it down, and then just wait again. And I’m telling people, when is it ready? It’s going to be ready when it’s ready. It’s going to be great. Robert: Can’t rush it. You’re working 60 acres of organic grain, you’re building your rickhouse, you’re hiring a master distiller, you’re planning a tasting centre. This doesn’t sound like a hobby thing for retirement. This is a full second career. Do you find you’re working harder now than you were when you were running Gurus? Martin: Definitely. Because at the end, when you build a business, you assemble a team and people know what to do. You’ve got a PMO office, a back office, and a marketing team. And now you’re alone. So I’m like, can I get some help here? I have nobody. So you’re back into entering data in QuickBooks. No, I’ve solved that, I delegated that. But it’s tough. And the problem is, when I sold the business, I told my wife I’m retiring. And she said, yeah, yeah, you’re retiring. But I didn’t think, and she didn’t think, it would be this intense in terms of running it. And you’re fighting against all the bureaucracy and you have to understand all the rules, environmental rules. And you have to understand, to be a farmer, you have to apply for a permit to be a farmer. So what’s your background, sir? Well, I’m a software engineer. So really, good thing. Do you know about farming? Absolutely not. Okay, what are you going to do about it? Well, I’m going to hire someone. Who is it? I don’t know. Well, you need to get the licence first. So no, I found someone actually that really helped me and was working in the prairies in Saskatchewan for more than 10 years, working with cereals there. So it’s assembling a team, making it work together, putting all the resources in place so they can succeed. It’s the same thing. What I like is the manual labour, which you don’t get in tech. I’ve lost some weight. So that’s good, being out there and working with the equipment. One of the projects we’re working on now – for your listeners, we’re in March and mid-March in Quebec, it’s still very cold, it’s like minus 15 Celsius – so it’s the last time we’ll be able to go in the forest. And what we’re doing is harvesting some trees to plant oak trees. We’re introducing Quercus alba, which is the American oak, into our forest, because we have more forest than we have land. And the goal would be in, I don’t know, 30 years – I won’t be there – to make some barrels, maybe. So again, in that supply chain of getting there. But there’s no more oak in the area. It was all cut down for the lumber industry. So we’re replanting. That’s one of the side projects. So we’re going to go out with the equipment on Friday and go in the woods and cut some trees. That’s something I didn’t used to do. And that’s what my job involves now. A chainsaw. I’m happy. Robert: This is what you get to invent for yourself. And if you’re happy, that’s brilliant. You’re making three types of whisky as I understand it – a single malt, you touched on the rye, and a Canadian bourbon, which is not a concept I’d heard before. Very interesting. I enjoy a whisky, I am not a well-educated drinker. But for those who are listening, what’s the vision of the distillery? What are you going for with the whisky products? Martin: So we’re looking to develop high-end whisky. We’re talking about $100 bottles. So it really needs to be fine-tuned to the taste of the different products that you build. When you talk about rye whisky, it’s mainly – the cereal has to be rye. Single malt is just barley. And when you talk about bourbon, or if you talk about bourbon in Kentucky, it’s mainly based out of corn. So we have corn also on the land and we’ve added some wheat that we’ve tried. It’s a mix of different – they call it a mash bill. So our mash bill, the cereals that get taken into the equipment for the mash to create a beer. We make a beer, then we distill that beer and that’s the whisky at the end. The big difference is the cereals. So that batch we had, I think it was two years ago, big winter, and we couldn’t get the rye out of our silos because of the amount of snow and ice that was out there. So we said, hey, we have some corn there. Why don’t we make some – it’s all Canadian whisky, right? If you look at the official denomination, it’s Canadian whisky. Don’t confuse marketing with the real stuff. But it’s a mash bill that involves more than 50% corn. In this one I think it’s 65% corn. And it has that – you’ll recognize it if you’re a bourbon drinker – that very sweet, mellow taste of corn that you get into the whisky. That’s what you get from bourbon. So that’s what we’re making with that corn. Robert: I look forward to trying that, actually. Hopefully someday. On your website, I love the clan story – the McNicoll ancestors coming over with the 78th Fraser’s Highlanders in 1757, fighting at Louisbourg and Quebec, settling in La Malbaie. And now you’re bringing that Scottish whisky tradition back to Quebec soil. How much of this, as well as the ability to play with the chainsaw and hopefully bring in some casks, how much of this is about honouring that heritage? Martin: Well, that was a big part. When I started to enjoy more whisky and go back to Scotland, I went back to the land of my ancestors. So that was Portree, close to the Isle of Skye. And there’s another area also, another region, that there’s two big areas that the McNicoll clan were. So I got to visit that. That was always part of the story. And then as I was publishing some of my content on Scotland, a professor from a university here in the Eastern Townships contacted me. He said, you know, I wrote a book on the McNicoll clan, the whole story. So we started to talk and that became a very nice collaboration between him and the distillery to tell more of the story, to the point where we decided to call the whisky McNicoll. So the whiskies are going to be called McNicoll, with the different types of whisky we’re going to sell. The brand itself is my last name, which is an honour to this Scot who came to America, really, because they fought down, they went down to New York with the 78th, and the original dude came back north. And my mother has French ancestry – she’s a Chevalier, she’s French, French, French – and then Scottish, Scottish, Scottish. And then there’s a mix. You can see there’s a mix in between those two. And you look at the genealogy, and that professor went back and he found all the ancestors and all the churches here in Quebec and went down to New York, went to Scotland to find all the origins. Very interesting to see the different clans and the French into making our population today. Robert: Very cool. You touched a little earlier on the bureaucracy and that kind of fun. You went through an interesting fight with Quebec’s Agricultural Land Protection Commission to get permission to build a distillery on farmland. Without getting too deep into the legal weeds, what was that like? And is that a challenge other people thinking about agritourism or value-added agriculture should be ready for? Martin: Definitely. And doing business in anything that involves food – there are some guidelines and some rules of law that you need to follow, which is, I would say, much harder than to open a NetSuite provider or a NetSuite partner licence. I had offices all across the US and also in the rest of Canada. It was 100 times easier to open an office in California than to start an agri business in Quebec, or even I would say Canada. Some provinces are easier than Quebec, but it was always a challenge. But I knew I was right. So one thing you learn is that you surround yourself with great people. My lawyers – that’s the thing you can do when you have money, you just lawyer up. But they were great at understanding everything that was going on. I found the expert and this woman knew exactly what was happening. She found some other people that were able to go through it. And we just had to go through all the legwork and convince the commission that what we’re doing is okay. And here’s why. But it’s a process and it’s frustrating because you’re there and you want to do this project. And you’re like, I’m going to be environmentally friendly. I’m going to do this from the grain to the bottle. I want to do all those different things. And then you see all those obstacles. But I think it’s part of the challenge, going through them and winning. At the end, I won. So that’s what counts. Robert: It is exactly what counts. So if someone in the channel who’s in a place that you were at when you were with Gurus is listening to this and thinking, I’d love to do something like that someday – not necessarily to be a competitor to you, but to sell the practice, go off and do something completely different, that’s their dream – what would you tell them, having gone through this process as far as you have now? Martin: I think the fact that they have done it before – starting a consulting firm and running it and dealing with customers – they’ve built their knowledge and their expertise and their resilience into doing anything else. I would always say that implementing an ERP system is the Formula One of computer science, because you have so much complexity. And if you fail, the company can die. They will not operate. Products will not ship. Invoices will not go out. You can cripple a business by doing a wrong implementation. So I would say you’re really prepared to do anything, in my mind, after the channel, after running that type of business. I think it’s just to look at what you like to do and what’s your ambition and take it head on. Robert: Good advice. Good advice from someone who has done it and is doing it. And my last and no doubt most important question – when do we get to actually taste the whisky? When do you get to market with your products? Martin: At least two years. So to be whisky, to be called whisky, it needs to be three years in a cask, in an oak cask. And for us, we just reached our first anniversary in December. So we still have a good two years to go. And we have to decide if we are going to put it in a bottle or not. We’re going to taste it and say, is it ready or not? And if not, I’m just going to sit on it again. However, we’re coming out with a liqueur that we’re making. It’s a butterscotch liqueur that our master distiller has been developing. And he’s working also on another liqueur that we want to put out, and we’re going to sell locally. Just to get some things out of the distillery with a Scottish-type accent. Our master distiller has also some Scottish ancestry. He went to school at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh to learn about the trade. So he’s got all those ancient recipes of Scottish liqueurs. We’re pulling out of that book to create some interesting products. So that should come in a couple of months, hopefully, if I can get my bottles from China. Robert: Fascinating stuff. Good luck. It’s been very interesting catching up and it’s always fascinating to hear about the journeys of folks who’ve made a career in the channel and see what they’re doing afterwards. All the best with getting that liqueur out, and the longer term getting those three whiskies out the door. Martin: Thank you, Robert. Robert: There you have it – Martin McNicoll, formerly of Gurus Solutions, currently of Distillerie des Cantons de l’Est. I’d like to thank Martin for his time and honestly for his openness. It’s not every day that someone walks you through what it’s actually like to trade quarterly SaaS targets for fields of organic barley and barrels that won’t be ready for three years. A couple things that stuck out for me in this conversation. First, the idea that the same muscles that Martin built running a channel business – the acquisitions, the growth planning, the systems thinking – are the same muscles he’s using to build the distillery. Different industry, same instincts. I think anyone running a channel practice will recognize themselves in that. And second, the patience piece. Martin talked about planting trees today for barrels he won’t use for 30 years. That’s a fundamentally different relationship with time than most of us have in the tech world. And I think that’s something worth sitting with. If you want to learn more about what Martin’s building, you can find the distillery at distilleriedescantons.ca, and we’ll have a link for that in the show notes. Keep an eye out for the butterscotch liqueur, which should be available before the whisky is. If you enjoyed the episode, do me a favour – follow or subscribe wherever you’re listening, whether it’s Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever else you find your podcasts. And if you’re feeling generous, a rating or review goes a long way for a small show like ours. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

In this episode, Craig Jeffery speaks with David Pierce of FinSavvy about how AI can help treasury teams uncover foreign exchange exposure that is often hidden across ERPs, CRMs, purchasing systems, and other disconnected data sources. They discuss bad data, forecast accuracy, intercompany netting, real-time visibility, and how AI can improve hedging decisions by making exposures easier to identify, organize, and monitor. Links: FinSavvy: https://www.finnsavvy.com The Invisible Hedge: https://amzn.to/4srHEJo Managing Foreign Exchange Risk: https://amzn.to/4dxfaZU

On this episode of Count Me In, Adam Larson sits down with Sharoon Thomas, founder of Fulfil, for a lively conversation about the unique accounting challenges facing direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands. Sharoon Thomas shares fascinating stories from his journey working with ERP systems and D2C brands, revealing why traditional spreadsheets just can't keep up with today's high-volume, multi-channel commerce. Listen as they unpack everything from GAAP compliance, revenue recognition headaches, and how technology is shaping faster, more reliable month-end closes. Get practical insights on leveraging new ERPs and AI-driven reporting tools to simplify data chaos and boost your financial accuracy. Whether you work in accounting, finance, or operations—especially in the D2C space—this episode is packed with actionable advice and the kind of real-world examples you don't want to miss. Tune in and hear Sharoon Thomas's candid take on what healthy financial operations look like and why teaming up with your operations crew might be the smartest move you make this year. ___________________________________________________________BILL is a leading financial operations platform for startups to established brands. Headquartered in San Jose, California, we're a trusted partner of leading US financial institutions, accounting firms, and accounting software providers. We empower business owners, CFOs, controllers, and accountants to save time and take control of their payables, receivables, spend, and expense management. For more information, visit bill.com.

Today on the IC-DISC Show we're talking with Gordon Driscoll. Having spent his early career at Goldman Sachs investing tens of millions into metals companies, he kept noticing they were running their operations on Excel spreadsheets and software from the 1980s. That gap became Green Spark, a cloud-based platform now in over 900 scrap metal recycling locations. In this conversation, Gordon talks about what it took to break into an industry where relationships go back generations, why he thinks most business owners are thinking about software wrong, and how his team earned credibility by acting more like a partner than a vendor. He also shares a customer story that stuck with me about a scale operator who got his first lunch break in six years. Whether you're in scrap or not, Gordon's thinking on sustainable growth, earning the right to disrupt, and treating technology as a competitive advantage rather than a cost center is worth your time.     SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Why a Goldman Sachs investment banker left finance to build software for scrap yards The massive technology gap Gordon kept seeing in companies handling tens of millions in materials How Green Spark grew to 900+ locations by acting like a partner, not just a vendor The customer story about a scale operator getting his first lunch break in six years Why Gordon believes you have to earn the right to disrupt an industry, and what that looks like in practice The mindset shift from treating software as a cost center to using it as a competitive advantage   Contact Details LinkedIn - Gordon Driscoll LINKS Show NotesBe a Guest About IC-DISC AllianceAbout Green Spark Software   Gordon DriscollAbout Gordon TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Gordon: And I think that a lot of folks, candidly, just because they're not used to either our model or what technology can do today, they don't realize, which is changing, they still view software as a cost center. And ultimately the tools that we're seeing and the applications that we are pushing to the industry, a lot of our customers view as a competitive advantage. Dave: Good morning, Gordon. So where are you calling in from today? Gordon: Hey, Dave. Appreciate you having me on. I'm in Brooklyn, New York today. Dave: Oh, okay. That is great. So I must say, I know a lot of folks in the scrap metal industry, service providers, yard operators, brokers, but you seem to have a particularly unique background. So why don't you tell the story from the time you graduated college? Sounds like you spent some time in investment banking in New York. And what caused you to have this epiphany that you wanted to go provide software in the scrap metal industry? Gordon: Yeah, no, of course. It's worth an explanation because looking at my background on paper from finance to scrap software, it doesn't make much sense. So yeah, started my career in financial services, spent a few years in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and then moved into private equity investing, but all of that centered on natural resources, broadly speaking, but specifically the metals industry. So spent a lot of time up and down the value chain, anything from box site refineries in Australia to working with the biggest mills in the country like Cliffs or JW Aluminum or things of that nature. And then in the investing side, spent really just as much time on what I'll call the kind of conventional resource as I did the technology. And I quickly realized the businesses that we were at times giving tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars were either using Excel spreadsheets to run their business or platforms that were based in or founded in the '80s, '90s and 2000s, and ultimately saw similar patterns in the recycling industry. And by no means is using a system like that wrong by definition or inherent, but ultimately saw a massive opportunity to bring an industry that is deceptively huge that no one really pays attention to outside of the folk in the industry and folks who we saw it when we started in 2020 who are quite literally essential workers, bringing that technology to them. And it's been an awesome six years. It's been very exciting. I think that what we wanted to do, clearly the market has responded well, which I'm sure we will get into. And what's really exciting for me is not only working with the folks in this industry on a day in and day out basis, and I can talk to my relationship to the industry and general thoughts, but also specifically as technology has not really progressed linearly over the last couple years, but obviously I had some step changes with AI, being able to innovate alongside this industry and partner with our customers to bring those step changes to an industry like this. It's been super exciting. Dave: Now, well, thank you for that background recap. So let's talk about the founding of the company. So where did the name come from, Green Spark? Gordon: Yeah, great question. I unfortunately can't take credit for it. That has to be my co-founder, but we wanted to pay respect to where the industry came from in addition to one of the overlooked elements of the industry, at least from a public perception per perspective. So green in and of itself is a call to, this is the sustainability of the industry. Again, I think that metal recycling is done, especially around the work that Rema's done has done a great job over the last couple years with, let's say, public perception and really educating folks on not only the importance of this industry, but the benefits of the industry from an environmental perspective, hence the green. And Spark actually comes from something that folks used to do without XRF analyzers or without technology. And the irony is not lost on me. So 50, 60, 70 years ago, and still obviously doable today, when you spark different types of metals, the color of the spark actually denotes the greater the quality. So a yellow spark versus a red spark. So again, we wanted to, again, combine the importance of the industry with a callback to what folks used to do without all of this new technology. Dave: Okay. No, well, thank you. I was really curious about the name, and that makes a lot of sense. It's both looking at the future and still remembering the past of the industry. I like that. So you and your co-founder, did you all bootstrap this or did you tap into some of your investment banking contacts and raise money? Gordon: Yeah, so we started that way and quickly realized to do what we wanted to do at the pace that we wanted to do it would require outside capital. So yeah, we ended up talking to folks in our network in addition to capital partners that not only understood what our thesis was, which is, again, it's relatively straightforward. At GreenSpark, we want every single scrapyard and metal recycling facility on planet Earth to use our platform. It's not necessarily easy, but it is straightforward. And we realized the kind of pace that we wanted to move. And candidly, given what customers are used to in this industry, i.e., One platform that spans a large part of their business, in addition to the dynamics in the industry, which is us against folks who have been here for 20, 25, 30 years who have lazed the trail for folks like us, we realized to close that gap, we wanted to partner with folks with the capital to scale the team and scale the product relatively quickly. Dave: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. So what, and I don't want to get too technical, but I do want to get technical enough for this to make sense. So what was the differentiator or the different approach you were taking? I'm guessing you're cloud-based instead of on- premise. Is that a safe assumption? Gordon: Yeah, 100%. And yeah, I won't get too in the weeds, but I also think it's important to understand what our thesis was. Back then, what's changed over the last couple of years just given what's happened in technology? So yeah, I think from the jump, there are a couple just clear reasons why we felt good about the idea so far. Number one, we are entirely web-based. And I think importantly, we are web or cloud-based fully natively. So rather than trying to either acquire a business that's already been existing or partner with an existing software in the industry, we built everything from the ground up. It's entirely cloud-based. And I think that outside of the benefits just to this industry, really what we've seen resonate is one, the mobility of a platform like this. So the way that we describe it is every single time you touch the material, it costs you money. So if you can distribute technology and bring it closer to the material, things like scanning licenses right from your phone, things like mobile grading and inspection, things like cloud-based driver apps. You're able to cut down on those costs because you're actually bringing technology to the material, not the other way around. Number two is integrations, increasingly, which to zoom out a little bit is certainly not true two decades ago, but was true five or 10 years ago. Increasingly, customers like ours don't have the overhead to have a full-blown IT team to have developers on staff, and you're left with a bunch of one, either one system that can't do everything perfectly. So you have one system that other does stuff well, or you have a bunch of these disconnected systems that we call it this latent integration tax. It's not something that kind of hits you over the head, but when you have four or five or six systems, you have folks spending hours a day reconciling data between those two systems, making sure that you can get information from one to the other. And from day one, GreenSpark was really built as the modern connector in the industry. And again, back to our thesis, getting in every single scrapyard in the world, we want to focus on what this industry needs, and we want that focus to be super narrow. And if someone does something better than us, we just want to integrate with it. So whether it's native integrations with ERPs like QuickBooks and NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics or CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce or even, I don't know, things like Google Maps, which kind of auto completes address and powers live navigation directly in the driver app. I'd say folks are using more technology generally speaking versus less. And what we want to do is make sure that all of those systems can push and pull in the right places together versus either having our end customer do it or having our end customer require resources to connect those systems manually. Now, over the last year or two, a lot of that's changed with the admin and increasingly the maturity of artificial intelligence. And I think that's where this gets really exciting. Obviously being built on a fully cloud-native tech stack allows us to leverage that technology very quickly. And I think that the way that our team is set up, not just on the technical side, but also on our customer facing side, our ability to rapidly iterate with our customers and rapidly get feedback from our customers on how we're applying things like AI and Agentic AI to their workflow has been really invaluable over the Dave: Last year or two. Well, that is, boy, I've got a bunch of questions. So that's great on the native interoperability or interconnectivity with other apps, but help me understand the ... Because I've seen some companies in this space that maybe have focused on trying to have as much native to the app as possible. So try to do financials within the system and other things. So give me a sense of how you describe the core features of the product and where it ends and where an integration with an ERP CRM or financial software fits in. Gordon: Yeah, that is a great question. That line always changes based on what our customers want to do, but at its base, we want folks running their entire business out of GreenSpark. The way we think about it outside of the integrated GL that is on the come, which I can touch on later, is that we want to be the customer's operational system of record. So everything that they're doing on a day-to-day basis from receiving, paying, managing inventory, managing contracts, customers, outbound shipments, invoices, documentation, both over-the-road dispatch and exports and logistics tracking, in addition to our reporting suite, we want all of that to happen directly in GreenSpark. Now, to be clear, that obviously comes with the obligation, honestly, or the need to ensure that the operational and financial systems of record move in lockstep. So again, wherever someone is already working in an accounting system or a CRM, we want to push and pull data to and from those systems, but we want to really cover as much of that workflow as possible. The product has expanded both in breadth and in depth recently, and I think that there is a desire in this industry to have everything under one hood, not just from the product capability side, but folks in this industry are used to and want to work with people that they trust and that they can rely on. And I think a really important part of anyone, especially as a relative outsider, like either our business or me personally, I think it's the obligation of any vendor in this industry to emulate how the industry operates. So outside of just product capabilities, a lot of folks want to, again, work with teams that they trust and teams that they can rely on, teams that they can pick up the phone and talk to if something's wrong, which is something that we spend a lot of time and resources doing. Dave: Okay. So let's say, and this may sound like a hypothetical question, but I see it all the time where there's consolidation in this industry that's been going on for 20 years, yet the total number of scrap yards out there seems to keep increasing. And from my own personal experience, it's because some small yard gets acquired by a big company, the people who sold get disappointed with how the integration of everything works. They get through the earnout, they set out a non-compete, and then it seems like there's two more scrapyards that populate from every one that's sold because one group goes off and starts one and one another. So say somebody was starting an operation from scratch and they said, Gordon, we want to do as much in Greenspark as we can. Can you all do financials? Can you function as a CRM? Could they really run the entire business just in your single product suite? Gordon: Yeah, 1000%. We like to ... So it's funny you mentioned that. We've seen the same thing. We probably onboard what we call startup yards. We probably onboard eight to 10 of those a quarter, which really speaks to the just kind of organic growth in the industry, broadly speaking. And the way we market it is it's you and GreenSpark. Those are the two almost full-time employees at the business as you get this off the ground, you can run everything within GreenSpark. Typically, a yard like that will use something like QuickBooks, and especially for yards that are starting out, we try to be as consultative as possible because there are so many moving pieces. And candidly, in many respects, internally, we are still a startup and we know what it's been like to see the cash in, cash out every single day to have way more problems than what you do with when you're starting a business. So candidly, we love working with folks like that, and we try to extend our reach from anything from software to the scales and cameras that you should be getting, connecting that yard with other folks in our network. But to answer your question, again, we are typically the kind of second employee that folks hire because it's such a comprehensive platform that you can run your entire business out of. The other thing that I think that folks have really benefited from is process standardization. What we try to do at GreenSpark is not only give you the tools to succeed, but really the best practices, standard operating procedures and workflows built around our product that have been hardened by hundreds of customers throughout the industry. So whether it's staying on top of inventory, working the kind of physical flow of the yard out when you're going to get different pieces of information to keep trucks moving. And ultimately, what folks in that scenario should be looking at on a day-to-day, week-to-week and month-to-month basis to understand the trends in their business, we try to make that as out of the box as possible versus just giving you a set of tools and saying, "Hey, go ahead and figure it out. " Dave: No, that does make sense. Okay, that's a good overview. What's your iteration cycle like? How often are you doing point releases, major releases? Gordon: Yeah, great question. I think that again, this is one of the biggest differences between us and some of the other folks, or said another way, this is one of the main benefits of being a more modern player. We're releasing daily. So literally four or five times a week, we will be releasing new updates on the platform. Sometimes you'll never know. It could be increasing storage for image capture. Other times, you 100% will. About two weeks ago, we released a fully new module that includes live container tracking for your export containers. So if you're shipping on a CIF or a CFR basis, you can see in real time where that container is on the water with live ETA updates. So we don't need to get too deep into that use case, but I think it's a good benchmark for what those releases look like. We have the ability to obviously turn on or off any of those changes for any of our customers. Change management is obviously a huge part of the industry, broadly speaking, and obviously customers' relationships with technology. So said another way, we don't really try to change for change's sake, especially when folks are running their business in very well-defined workflows. So we're really big on communication upfront for what's going to change, if anything is going to change. And we have a really robust early access period where we'll work with, in that example, we'll identify folks who are already shipping on a CIF or CFR basis, trial that live container tracking, let's say, with 20 or 30 folks beforehand before we roll it out to the rest of the group. So we like to push updates quickly, get feedback early, and then ultimately give the users or our customers the agency to opt in or opt out based on what's most important to them. Dave: No, I can really appreciate that update frequency. I've been for about five years owner of one Tesla or another. And one of the things I really appreciate is the frequent software updates. I've also owned Rivians and they also are very good. But when you compare that to the legacy automakers, they just can't do the most basic over the air update. You have to bring your car into the dealership. And so I can appreciate the benefit of that rapid iteration. So talk to me about customer support. What kind of metric and process do you all have? If a customer has an issue, how do you triage the importance of it? How do you escalate it? What's the metrics you use for response times? Just whatever there you're comfortable discussing. Gordon: Yeah, no, that is a great question. I'd say a couple things. As I mentioned, vendors in this industry need to emulate how the industry operates and people operate in different ways. Some folks want to figure something out themselves. So we have a really robust help center within GreenSpark that has over 120 articles on how the product works. That's paired with a full online academy. So we like to get ahead of any support questions by giving folks the tools they need to succeed and equip them with as much information as possible. That said, whether something goes wrong or whether they need to talk to someone, we want to create every channel available. So whether it's phone, email, or our in- app messenger, some folks don't want to speak to someone, some folks do. So we want to make sure that we're really meeting our customers where they are, depending on what they are used to. I'd say overall for support, a lot of folks in this industry and a lot of folks in software generally speaking, always look at response time. They say, all right, yeah, we want to get back to everyone within a minute or two, or we pride ourselves on acknowledging you. That's obviously important. And our response time is under a minute. It's about 56 seconds these days. So we do want to obviously emphasize that. We care about resolution though because folks don't want to be talked to. They want their problems to be solved. So the main kind of success metrics we look at on the support side, outside of just saying, "Hey, I'm seeing what you're seeing as well," which is an important part of it. We really focus on the overall resolution. We also really focus on transparency. No one wants to shoot a message or shoot an email into a black box and not know where they stand. So average response time is under a minute. If something is wrong, we typically try to keep folks updated every 15 or 20 minutes, especially if it's a critical issue. And our average resolution time is just under an hour as well. So really trying to focus on the kind of outcome in addition to making sure that folks know exactly where they stand. Dave: Okay. Wow, I don't know the numbers from the other companies, but that seems pretty remarkable. So I've been in this industry for about 20 years and I've been going to the REMA conferences for about that long. And it seems like when I go walk the trade show at REMA, that it seems like there's just a software company on every row. And so I'm curious, I would've been, if somebody asked me, "Hey, I want to start a software business or company for the scrap industry," I would've said, "Wow, it seems super crowded, lots of competition, doesn't seem like a great place." What was the opportunity you saw that what I would call a crowded space didn't scare you? Gordon: Yeah, that's a great question. I think, again, back to the original thesis, just given the vintage of our software platform relative to others, I think that at a super high level, we felt really good about our inherent competitive advantage given our modern tech stack, the ability to leverage web-based integrations, the ability to leverage the mobility that other folks candidly structurally can't do given their tech stack and given how they're set up as a business. And again, no disrespect to anyone else in the industry. The way that I think about it is they've done a lot of the heavy lifting of educating the market on the benefits of technology and candidly taking this industry from spreadsheets and DOS systems into the 21st century. But I think that there are, as I mentioned, a lot of different ways to differentiate in this industry. And I think that especially with older products, you're never in a good spot if you are a dynamic business and Scrap is a very dynamic industry using a static software product because inherently the software that you're using or the technology that you're using is not going to be able to adapt to the changes in the industry that you require as a very dynamic business. Now, over the last couple of years, obviously with artificial intelligence and what folks can do with AI, that's opened up a multitude of possibilities on how folks can use that in their business. And it's a really interesting space, I think, in the market because everyone I talk to, whether it's someone like you, whether it's the owner's son who might be taking over the business or it's a 76-year-old truck driver, it seems like everyone's used ChatGPT or some sort of tools. It could be anything from analyzing their mortgage to asking what the weather's going to be tomorrow. But I think that's a fundamental difference between, let's say, cloud computing, which has happened over the last 10 or 15 years and what's happening now. And the reason I bring that up is there are so many advantages to using AI, not just every day, but for core business applications. Folks are used to these technologies given, I don't know, they've been in the news for the last two straight years, and if folks can use them for consumer applications, and all of those advantages really accrue asymmetrically to a platform like us. So I think when you think about the kind of advantages and it being a relatively crowded market, we view things a little bit differently because when you look at the market itself, yeah, there are a lot of players and that was born out of regional and territorial compliance differences, obviously founders relationships with folks in specific territories. But when you look at businesses that can leverage that technology that you can reliably think you can use in 2050, not 2027, and folks really are thinking that long-term in this industry, given these are generational family businesses or folks are in this for the long haul, we feel really good that the number of prospective players that you could reasonably think could run your business in 2050 is actually much smaller than the overall market. Dave: Yeah. So whereas a layman, I saw crowded market, you saw market ripe for disruption, bottom line. Gordon: Yeah. And I think people love to think about disruption in technology. And I think that the way that I think about our product and what we're looking to do, you need to earn the right to disrupt an industry. And I think that we tried to come in with a lot of humility and a lot of respect for the industry. We wouldn't have succeeded if we came in and said, "Hey, I read a 50-page PDF report on the scrap industry. You guys are doing it wrong. Here's GreenSpark." That's obviously not going to work at all. So I think that what we really try to focus on again is meeting folks where they are, evolving their workflow and then being very targeted in places for disruption. So for example, let's take dispatch. Folks are used to either a whiteboard or an Excel spreadsheet or they're using some system that might not have capabilities for a mobile driver app or candidly doesn't have the power with respect to dispatch to scale integration or a modern load board where you can drag and drop trips around. That I would say is evolving someone's workflow from what they're used to to using GreenSpark. By the same token, our dispatch AI agent actually integrates directly with folks' emails and phone systems to collect that information and autonomously create tickets on user's behalfs that all they need to do is approve, modify, or reject that dispatch request. That's what I would say is something that is disruptive to that yard in a very positive sense. But I think that understanding where to evolve versus where to disrupt given what the industry's used to is a really important part of the story as well. Dave: Okay. No, that is very helpful. And it looks like you have a milestone occurring next month. Is it your five-year anniversary? Gordon: It is my five-year anniversary. So yeah, sorry, go Dave: Ahead. So I'm just curious, how's it going? Have you been able to get even one customer? How's the thesis worked out for you? Gordon: Yeah, still waiting on number one. No, kidding. Yeah. So as I mentioned, a lot of work's gone in and the market's responded, I'd say very well so far. We're in over 900 locations right now, primarily in North America, but also internationally with yards of every shape and size. So we work with folks who are doing 50 or 60 transactions a day on the retail side up to anything from 400 to 500. We have folks who are buying specifically from dealers. We have folks who have both demo and scrap operations. We have folks who have 35 locations up and down the Eastern seaboard. So it's a really fun position to be in to have access to the feedback that we have in terms of what direction to take the product. And our focus is in the overall businesses to continue scaling both with larger customers, providing the best experience for some of our single location operations and then moving internationally. And I think that, again, keeping a really narrow focus just on metal recycling and specifically just on the tools that this industry needs and being able to leverage the integrations to, again, partner with best-in-class accounting softwares, best-in-class route optimization, best-in-class CRMs has allowed us to keep that really narrow focus and serve this industry on what they specifically need, not more generalizable parts of the technology stack. Dave: Okay. No, that sounds great. So what was the question I was going to ask you? Oh, so I know when you shared your business plan with your investors, every business plan always shows the same hockey stick growth, especially in Gordon: Technology, Dave: But your growth rate seems pretty impressive. How close did it come to your projections? Was it close? Were you behind? Are you actually ahead? How's that worked out? Gordon: Yeah, no, it's a great question. And we try to stay away from hockey stick growth like that because what we want to do is, again, we want to grow sustainably in this industry and we want to make sure that, again, we're going to be here for the next four decades, not the next four years. In terms of overall projections, we obviously race to that kind of million dollar revenue mark relatively quickly. I've been able to triple that two years ago and then double that last year. And I think that, again, it's come from the reception we've gotten in the market. It's also come from our ability to scale the team to support that. So whether it's on the engineering side or on the post-sales side, I think that there's a bit of a misnomer in folks' perception of software companies, specifically when it comes to companies with outside investment that people only care about growth. Growth is obviously an important part of the story. Hopefully everyone that listens to this wants to grow their business, but ultimately the software business model breaks if we have a customer for a year. There are high customer acquisition costs in terms of sales and setting up environments, setting up instances, and ultimately our model only works if we have folks for 10, 20, 30 years. And what we try to do is create customers for life very early on in the overall cycle. So said another way, we wouldn't have been able to achieve the growth that we are achieving if our retention wasn't as high, if not higher than our kind of new business growth, and it's something that we probably ourselves on because ultimately our customers are the lifeblood of this business and no one really wants to switch software because it's a pin in the butt. But what we try to do is again, keep those customers for life so that we can grow sustainably rather than continuing to fill a leaky bucket so to speak. Dave: No, that's one of the things I really love about the scrap metal industry. As somebody who's serving that industry like you are and I am, is one that industry tends to be incredibly relationship driven and your reputation is everything in this industry because there's two degrees of separation between every person, at least in the US scrap metal space. It's like two degrees of separation and the relationships people have last decades. I have clients, and I'm sure you do too, where the grandson is buying and selling from the grandson of another company where they've been doing business together for 70 years. And I was in a client's office early on and this guy said, "Hey, I need to take this call." And he just did a deal to sell a million dollar scrap load to somebody. And it was just on the phone call. I'm like, "Oh, do you need a moment to document that? Do you need to get the contract out? " And he's like, "No, it's done." I'm like, "Well, don't you need payment?" Because literally he was like, ship the product five minutes later. He might've called somebody and said, "Hey, ships up so- and-so." I'm like, "Well, what do you mean? You don't have a contract, you don't have a PO, you didn't get payment upfront. How do you know you're going to get paid?" And they're like, "Yeah, because I've been doing a business with him for 30 years and he's reputable and he wouldn't do that. And if he did screw me, he'd be done in the scrap business because I'd just tell Gordon: Everybody Dave: I know. " So I really appreciate that because I've found that if you're a reputable long-term thinking company, it's actually easier to get traction in this kind of industry than a business that's not that way. And they all seem to think long-term, like you said, multi-generational, the relationships last decades. So yeah, so speak a bit more to that from what you've seen as far as the importance Gordon: Of the Dave: Relationships and the reputation. Gordon: Yeah, 100%. I think back to the point about getting blackballed, we always joke, a happy customer tells, I don't know, maybe three people, if we're lucky, pissed off customer tells about a hundred. So by the same token though, I always joke with my sales reps, I don't care how good you are at selling GreenSpark. If David, you owned a yard and you were excited about GreenSpark, you're going to be our best sales rep. So again, back to the retention story, it's a double-edged sword because obviously their reputation is very important in this industry. At the same time, to maintain the growth rates that we've had, this isn't really an industry where if you triple your sales team, you triple revenue because of the network effects and because of the connectivity in the overall industry. And I think that what we really try to pride ourselves on is not just being a software company, but a partner to these businesses. So I already talked a little bit about with startup businesses, we'll consult on scales and cameras and we'll send over EMAC item list so you can get started very quickly. One of our sales reps just connected Azorba buyer with one of our new shredder operations to help grow that business. Over the last three months, we've brokered six different sales of businesses that are either using Greenspark and are looking to sell or are using GreenSpark and are looking to buy in the broader market. So outside of just being a software company, again, as I mentioned, vendors in this industry need to emulate how the industry operates. And I know that I'm probably beating a dead horse with that, but understanding how our businesses operate and trying to be the best partner to them outside of just their technology layer is really important. You'll also see us at conferences, I'm probably on the road two or three times a week, either visiting existing customers or prospective customers, and whether it's our onboarding team getting onsite for go live or same thing with renewal conversations, we try to build that relationship as much as possible because as you mentioned, that's how the industry does business. And I don't think you can be successful in this industry, whether you're buying and selling scrap or selling stuff to folks who do that if that's not core to your overall business model. Dave: No, that makes sense. I can't believe how fast the time has passed. I've just got a couple more questions for you. One is share some things that your clients have told you about why they've been really happy with the software, happy they implemented. What are the kinds of things they say to you? Is it that we really appreciate that your salesman took me out for drinks three different times? What are the things they tell you that they just really appreciate about your company? Gordon: Yeah, that's a great question. It runs the gamut based on different user roles, and it's going to be different whether it's an executive or an owner, an operations manager, a commercial buyer, or someone on the logistics team. But again, typically it is around the people that work here because those relationships are so important. So I think in terms of overall feedback, I'm actually just pulling up, we do what's called a net promoter score. And so we send out ... Yeah, exactly. And I'm just going to read you the last five, honestly. We have one owner feedback of all of these, our last six are all 10s, and the inventory tracking is unbeatable. It's user-friendly and the support team Greenspark has is the greatest of all time. Yeah, we were pretty fired up with that one. Another owner in Kentucky, I like the web-based interface. I also like the progressive attitude the company has in regards to being a leader in the space. Another one out of Texas, it is so easy to use. Another owner out of Texas, the transition was smooth. The assistance for help has been great, and so far the product delivers what was promised. And I think that ... Yeah. And again, these are all of our customers on unprompted feedback when we send these emails out. So I'd say it's a really good example of that. We're getting a lot of traction from a bunch of different people within the actual yard. So anything from, again, the scale operator to the owner is looking at different reports. And I think outside of that, we take a lot of pride in helping the folks on the front lines. We had one customer down in Louisiana, I don't know, about six months ago, we were on site and the operator said to our onboarding rep, "I can't thank you guys enough. This is the first time I've had a lunch break in six years because I can finally manage all the work that I'm doing right, right at the scale." And I'm not naive enough to sit in my ivory tower and think that we're changing the world with a scrap software, but stuff like that really does matter to folks. And making a difference, not just in the overall business growth, but for the people on the ground that are using this every single day is super rewarding. Dave: That is awesome. And then so the last two more questions. One is, so what do you enjoy the most about your role within the company that just gives you the most just enjoyment, satisfaction? Yeah, Gordon: A couple things. I'm just a huge nerd, man. I love commodities. It's the coolest thing ever. The entire world's based on resource scarcity. I think we were talking about this before, whether it's what's happening in Venezuela, what's happening with tariffs, what's happening in Greenland. Everything is about resource scarcity and everything is about being as efficient with the resources you have as possible. So talking with customers, and I think not trying to have the answer all the time, but working with them to solve their problems is really fun. I don't know, two weeks ago, copper ripped to 660, and I was some of our customers first calls. They're like, "Hey, what do we do? How do we respond so quickly? Where in Greenspark can I tie things to benchmark prices so I'm covered? What are other customers doing with these movements?" And I think that it's obviously been an uphill battle, just given you need credibility, you need a reputation in this industry, but over the last six years, getting to know the industry really well, getting to know our customers really well, and candidly, being viewed as a partner in their businesses is really exciting. Internally, ramping new employees is so fun because There's always that moment of like, "Oh, I'm not sure I knew what I got myself into with this whole industry." And I think that a lot of people, whether it's on the technology side or the actual yard side, if you haven't grown up in it, you might not know the, it's called nuances, how business is done, which is super exciting. And then third, on the product side, it's a privilege to be able to not just hear feedback from our customers, but actually be able to deliver them the new technology that we're seeing in the market. Historically, product development has been very bilateral. Customer says, "Hey, I need this field for this reason on an outbound ticket software company, build that field. The field gets built and you can go on in and do your work." The paradigm shift of what we're seeing in AI just changes all of that. So now I get to sit in my seat and pretty much say, "Hey, we can take any document in your business, ingest it, and turn it into something else." Whether it's a rail car notice that we turn into a pending load, whether it's a consumer PO that you can upload and automatically create a sales order. And we get to sit here and I get to have conversations with customers all the time and say, how would you want to apply this new tool or this new technology to your business? Hey, we can use AI material recognition to better understand how good your guys are at grading quality. Hey, we can spin up a voice agent to take phone calls and immediately surface to a buyer if someone has a load over a certain size to sell. Would that be helpful? How do you want this to work? And ultimately, what value do you see to these kind of big new categories of software? It's so fun. Dave: Wow. Yeah, your enthusiasm comes through. So my last question, is there anything I didn't ask you that you wish I had? Gordon: I don't know. I don't think so. I think we're in a really fun spot and I'd say that the folks who are listening to this, what I recommend, especially with new technology is one, obviously keep an open mind, but we have a lot of folks who traditionally approach software transitions or software generally is, do I need to do this or what is the worst that would happen if I went through a transition? And I think that a lot of folks, candidly, just because they're not used to either our model or what technology can do today, they don't realize, which is changing really in real time, they still view software as a cost center. And ultimately the tools that we're seeing and the applications that we are pushing to the industry, a lot of our customers view as a competitive advantage. And they might not love me saying that, but I would because then that'll go away over time. But I would really challenge folks to think about how they can use software and technology as a competitive advantage rather than just a record keeping system. Similarly, how they want their business to run, not just today, but in 2030, 2040, 2050, and really challenge themselves to think whether or not the systems that they're surrounded with can support that. And I think that when folks apply that framework and then take a look at businesses like ours, it becomes a decision that is not super difficult. Dave: Well, I think with that, I think that's a good stopping point. Gordon Driscoll of GreenSpark Software, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Just a really lot of great information, and I know our listeners are going to enjoy it. Gordon: Awesome. Dave: There we have it, another great episode. Thanks for listening in. If you want to continue the conversation, go to icydiscshow.com. That's icy-DISCSOW.com. And we have additional information on the podcast, archived episodes, as well as a button to be a guest. So if you'd like to be a guest, go select that and fill out the information and we'd love to have you on the show. So that's it. We'll be back next time with another episode of The Icy Disc Show.Special Guest: Gordon Driscoll.

In a world of silent cyber wars, ERPs sit at the center of risk and resilience. Discover how CIOs can design ERP as a crown jewel: assume breach, use AI wisely, and balance sovereignty, trust, and business continuity.=====This episode dives into the “silent global war” on ERP, where cyber threats are constant, interconnected systems are fragile, and resilience is the new gold standard. Our guests, Bayer's Asha Vartak and SAP's Gabriela “Gabs” Fiata, unpack how to treat ERP as a mission critical crown jewel instead of a back office system, and why assuming breach changes everything about architecture, governance, and recovery. They explore how AI can both sharpen ERP security and create new risks, from detecting anomalies and reducing alert fatigue to acting as a privileged user that must be monitored. The conversation also covers digital sovereignty, data classification by design, and placing ERP at the core of digital trust, transparency, and compliance across borders. If you want practical, board level language for ERP cyber resilience, this episode is for you.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Episode Transcript⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Useful Links: ⁠⁠SAP Cloud ERP⁠⁠⁠Bayer⁠Follow Us on Social Media!SAP S/4HANA Cloud ERP: ⁠LinkedIn⁠=====Guest: Gabriele Fiata, Head of Security Market Strategy, RISE with SAPThought leader with a strong background in security as well as business processes, controls, and enterprise risk management. For more than 20 years, he has been leading teams in implementing innovative process improvements to identify and mitigate risks to promote resilience for the whole enterprise and enable overall business growth.Gabriele's LinkedInGuest: Asha Vartak, Director, Cyber Security and Risk Management at BayerAsha Vartak has a proven record of developing and executing comprehensive cybersecurity strategies that align with organizational goals. Her expertise spans Cybersecurity Risk Management, Compliance, Threat Modeling, and Mitigation Planning and Implementation. She brings extensive experience in leading and consulting on business and information security initiatives for companies across multiple global regions. With an educational background spanning four countries—India, Australia, Germany, and the United States— Asha excels at building strong relationships with diverse stakeholders and teams.As a motivating and inspiring leader in cybersecurity, risk management, and compliance, she thrives on tackling complex projects and driving them to successful completion for organizations worldwide.Host 1: Richard Howells, SAPRichard Howells has been working in the Supply Chain Management and Manufacturing space for over 30 years. He is responsible for driving the thought leadership and awareness of SAP's ERP, Finance, and Supply Chain solutions and is an active writer, podcaster, and thought leader on the topics of supply chain, Industry 4.0, digitization, and sustainability.Follow Richard Howell on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠X⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Host 2: Oyku Ilgar, SAPOyku Ilgar is a marketer and thought leader specializing in SAP's digital supply chain and ERP solutions since 2017. As a marketer, blogger, and podcaster, she creates engaging content that highlights innovative SAP technologies and explores key topics including business trends, AI, Industry 4.0, and sustainability.She holds dual bachelor's degrees in Finance & Accounting and English Translation, along with a master's degree in Business Administration and Foreign Trade, specializing in marketing. With her background in digital transformation, Oyku communicates technology trends and industry insights to help professionals navigate the evolving business landscape.Oyku's ⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠SAP Community⁠⁠=====Key Topics: ERP security, ERP resilience, cloud ERP, AI in ERP, cybersecurity,RISE with SAP, SAP S/4HANA, digital sovereignty, data protection

On this episode of Count Me In, Adam Larson sits down with John Glasgow, founder and CEO of Campfire, for a candid conversation about building a company and transforming finance teams with AI-driven ERPs. John opens up about the challenges of juggling parenthood and entrepreneurship, lessons learned from Y Combinator, and how his frustration with outdated financial software inspired him to create something better. Whether you're a finance exec, startup founder, or just curious about the future of accounting tech, you'll enjoy Joh's practical insights on prioritizing what matters, fostering innovation, and keeping up with the ever-changing landscape of AI. Hear firsthand how Campfire is rewriting the playbook for finance teams, why ruthless prioritization is John's secret weapon, and which red flags to watch for when evaluating new tech solutions for your business. Tune in for real stories, actionable advice, and a fresh perspective on leadership, tech, and the future of finance. ___________________________________________________________BILL is a leading financial operations platform for startups to established brands. Headquartered in San Jose, California, we're a trusted partner of leading US financial institutions, accounting firms, and accounting software providers. We empower business owners, CFOs, controllers, and accountants to save time and take control of their payables, receivables, spend, and expense management. For more information, visit bill.com.

In this episode of Pathmonk Presents, Philip Aguib, VP of Sales and Marketing at Vantree Systems, breaks down how electronic data interchange (EDI) powers global supply chains—and why a human approach wins complex B2B deals. Vantree Systems delivers integrated EDI solutions that connect ERPs like SAP, Microsoft, and NetSuite across manufacturing, distribution, logistics, and CPG industries. Philip shares how referrals, trade shows, and partner ecosystems drive growth, and why outbound sales is becoming essential in an AI-shaped buying landscape. He also dives into accelerating long sales cycles, leveraging CRM data segmentation, and building trust through empathy. A practical conversation for growth leaders navigating technical markets.

John Glasgow, is the founder, CEO and CFO of Campfire AI native ERP with more than $100m in funding, built to help high growth companies close faster, get richer visibility from their accounting data, and scale. John brings his insights as an operator who has spent time in FP&A and strategic finance, including at Adobe and an executive at Invoice To Go, leading that finance company to a $625 million sale to bill.com. Campfire came out of firsthand frustration with legacy ERPs and a need to rebuild the general ledger for the AI era. In this episode: My years in FP&A and strategic finance at Adobe before becoming a founder  CFA Certification  Invoice to Go acquisition what I learned   The frustration and origin story of frustration and why Campfire was set up Why building our own AI model makes sense  Key quote: “If you slap AI on top of an ERP with summarized revenue data, then you're essentially gonna get no insights that are of any value.”

What happens when you drop an LLM on top of five ERPs and a decade of M&A? Aaron Sheehan and analyst Heather Hershey map the practical path: B2B use cases that work, risks that don't, and why chunk-by-chunk modernization beats “robot, take the wheel.”Highlights01:06 – Welcome back and introducing Heather Hershey03:35 – Defining AI, LLMs, and RAG 09:30 – Why probabilistic AI makes ops teams nervous 11:58 – Is LLM an overkill compared to ‘boring' machine learning and rule-based systems?15:19 – The real blocker: fragmented data across ERPs and other systems19:40 – The strangler pattern: modernize in chunks instead of ripping everything out21:13 – Why commerce platforms become the orchestration layer for AI/NLP24:37 – If you had $100K for AI: where to spend it 27:27 – Prisoner's dilemma: agentic shopping and the disintermediation trap34:53 – Agentic commerce predictions for B2B 40:30 – Are people replacing Google with LLMs?

Stephen Hedlund is head of finance at Rillet, an AI-native ERP which has raised over $100million from Sequoia and  Andreessen Horowitz. In  Steven's words Rillet is “building the modern NetSuite.” In this episode: How Isaac Asimov's Foundation helped me discover finance  Experience from enterprise at Walmart to building startups  Go-to-market (marketing) to Head of Finance Gillet  The moat for leading ERPs and our strategy  Being the ICP and marketing voice for Rillet  “To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.” ― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

In this session, UC Today's Kieran Devlin sits down with Kalyan Kumar (KK), Chief Product Officer at HCL Software, to diagnose a critical issue facing the Global 2000: the inability to move AI from the lab to the real world. With so many firms stuck running endless experiments without delivering hard business outcomes, this conversation offers the architectural blueprint needed to break through the deadlock. KK shares why the secret to AI success isn't actually about the AI itself—it's about how you manage the data that feeds it.Everyone is rushing to roll out AI, but few are seeing the productivity gains promised. Why? According to KK, it's not an AI problem—it's a data problem. The enterprise landscape is a "tangled web" of disparate applications, and without a data-first operating model, deploying autonomous agents often results in simply making bad decisions faster.In this deep dive, we explore why modernization doesn't mean ripping out "classic" systems like mainframes, but rather building an orchestration layer that connects them to new intelligence. KK explains why the future isn't just about picking an LLM, but about mastering metadata and preparing for a multi-agent world where governance is non-negotiable.Key discussion points:The Data-First Imperative: Why you must untether data from applications and master metadata before AI can succeed—treating your enterprise like a well-organized library rather than a chaotic storage room.Solving the Integration Paradox: How to bridge modern AI agents with "classic" core systems (ERPs, Mainframes) using universal orchestration rather than forcing a total rip-and-replace modernization.Governance in a Multi-Agent World: Preparing for the rise of Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communication and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to prevent autonomous agents from creating conflict.

In "Building the Connected Transportation Ecosystem: A Conversation with Trimble's Michael Kornhauser", Joe Lynch and Michael Kornhauser, Vice President of Trimble, discuss how integrated data and precision mapping create a more secure, efficient, and connected transportation ecosystem. About Michael Kornhauser Michael Kornhauser is sector vice president of Trimble, leading Transportation & Logistics in North America. With more than 20 years in various leadership roles, Michael has proven to be an astute and dynamic leader with deep industry understanding and passion for delivering superior customer value. Kornhauser, along with Dan Popkin, established the European operations and development of the successful CoPilot business and guided the ALK Technologies business integration into Trimble. Under his leadership, Trimble's mapping solutions have become highly recognized and respected throughout the North American trucking and rail industries. He studied at Trinity College, where he received a research grant from NASA and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering. About Trimble Transportation Trimble Transportation provides fleets with solutions to create a fully integrated supply chain. With an intelligent ecosystem of products and services, Trimble Transportation enables customers to embrace the rapid technological evolution of the industry and connect all aspects of transportation and logistics — trucks, drivers, back office, freight and assets. Trimble Transportation delivers an open, scalable platform to help customers make more informed decisions and maximize performance, visibility and safety. Key Takeaways: Building the Connected Transportation Ecosystem In "Building the Connected Transportation Ecosystem: A Conversation with Trimble's Michael Kornhauser", Joe Lynch and Michael Kornhauser, Vice President of Trimble, discuss how integrated data and precision mapping create a more secure, efficient, and connected transportation ecosystem. The Power of a Global, Integrated Ecosystem: Trimble is no longer just a collection of individual tools; it is an intelligent ecosystem designed to connect all aspects of the supply chain—trucks, drivers, back offices, and freight. Because many of Trimble's customers are multinational, the company provides a global footprint that ensures consistency in data and operations, whether a shipment is moving through North America, Europe, or beyond. Industry Under Attack: Prioritizing Cybersecurity: Kornhauser emphasizes that the transportation industry is "under attack" from increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. To combat this, Trimble invests over $100 million annually in R&D, with a significant portion dedicated to cybersecurity. By partnering with giants like Microsoft, they ensure that even small carriers using their platform have enterprise-grade protection that they couldn't afford to build on their own. The "Four Revolutions" of Transportation Tech: Michael outlines the technological shifts that have defined the industry: GPS: The foundation that allowed for real-time tracking (which Trimble pioneers helped patent). TMS (Transportation Management Systems): The transition from paper to digital "ERPs for trucking." ELD Mandate: Moving from selective enforcement to universal, data-driven safety and compliance. AI: The current revolution, focusing on automation, predictive agents, and massive efficiency gains. Strategic AI Implementation: "Eating Our Own Cooking": Unlike startups that may take a "move fast and break things" approach, Trimble is highly measured with AI. They are currently using AI internally to write code and improve customer support agents before rolling those features out to their Fortune 500 clients. This ensures that the "always-on" nature of global logistics isn't disrupted by experimental tech. The TMS as the "System of Record": Despite the many apps and sensors in a modern truck, the Transportation Management System (TMS) remains the heart of the ecosystem. Michael explains that Trimble's strategy is to keep the TMS as the central hub where "Order-to-Cash" workflows live, while connecting specialized tools (like maintenance or navigation) seamlessly into that single source of truth. Precision Mapping for "People Who Drive for Work": A major differentiator for Trimble is their proprietary mapping (PC Miler and CoPilot). Unlike consumer apps like Waze, Trimble's mapping is built for heavy-duty trucks, accounting for bridge heights, hazmat restrictions, and even specific entry/exit gates at massive industrial complexes. This "last mile" precision is often the difference between a profitable trip and a costly delay. A "Customer-First" Partner Philosophy: Trimble embraces an open platform, hosting hundreds of partners—including some competitors. Michael highlights that the goal is to eliminate the "swivel chair" effect, where a dispatcher has to jump between 10 different monitors. By allowing third-party apps (like fuel cards or specialized sensors) to integrate into the Trimble stack, they provide carriers with the flexibility to build the specific "tech stack" their niche requires. Learn More About Building the Connected Transportation Ecosystem Michael Kornhauser | Linkedin Trimble Transportation | Linkedin Trimble Transportation Trimble's Perspective: The Future of Freight is Connected with Rob Painter The Road Ahead: What Trimble Innovations Mean for Transportation with Jonah McIntire Smart Routes, Safer Stops: How Mapping Tech is Transforming Trucking with Rishi Mehra The Logistics of Logistics Podcast If you enjoy the podcast, please leave a positive review, subscribe, and share it with your friends and colleagues. The Logistics of Logistics Podcast: Google, Apple, Castbox, Spotify, Stitcher, PlayerFM, Tunein, Podbean, Owltail, Libsyn, Overcast Check out The Logistics of Logistics on Youtube

In this episode of Corporate Treasury 101, we sit down with Daniel Kalish, CEO and Co-Founder of Nilus, the AI-native cash management and treasury platform redefining how modern companies manage liquidity, forecasting, and financial control. With treasury complexity accelerating far faster than company growth, Daniel breaks down why today's teams are under unprecedented pressure, and how agentic AI is reshaping what's possible.Drawing from real-world implementations and insights across fast-growing and global companies, Daniel explains why traditional treasury stacks can't keep up, why cash visibility remains the No. 1 pain point, and how AI can move treasury from reporting to true strategic impact. He also shares how Nilus's agentic architecture is transforming liquidity planning, enriching data at scale, identifying risks in real time, and delivering ROI within weeks, not months.Whether you're leading a treasury function, evaluating your next TMS, or preparing your organization for an AI-driven future, this conversation offers a practical and actionable look at the next era of treasury. Daniel's perspectives on implementation, data reliability, and the future role of treasury leaders provide a blueprint for teams looking to increase control, reduce manual work, and unlock strategic value in 2025 and beyond.What You'll Learn in This Episode• Treasury Pain Points Today: Why companies that grow 2X often face 10X more treasury complexity, and how lean teams are struggling with visibility, control, and manual work.• Cash Visibility & Data Challenges: The hidden cost of poor data, why teams still rely on spreadsheets, and how enriched transaction-level data unlocks real forecasting accuracy.• Agentic AI vs. AI-Enabled Tools: The difference between legacy TMS platforms that “bolt on” AI and AI-native systems built to automate, analyze, and act in real time.• Implementation, Speed & ROI: How Nilus connects banks and ERPs in days, and how treasury teams gain immediate productivity, control, and financial returns.• The Future of Treasury Leadership: Why treasurers remain essential decision-makers, and the skills leaders need as AI shifts the function toward strategy, oversight, and proactive decision-making.Episode Breakdown with Timestamps [00:00] – Introduction [02:02] – The most common symptoms that signal a treasury stack is breaking down [08:30] – Cash visibility: why companies still struggle and the real cost of not knowing where cash sits [10:43] – AI-enabled TMS vs. AI-native platforms: what legacy tools can't do [14:39] – How agentic AI works: data enrichment, pattern recognition, policy engines & decision support [17:59] – Solving the data accuracy problem and how AI improves forecast reliability [21:54] – Real examples where AI surfaced risks and opportunities treasury teams previously missed [23:55] – Implementation speed: connecting banks & ERPs in days, not months [27:26] – ROI drivers: productivity, control, liquidity optimization & trapped cash [33:41] – How treasurers can become strategic leaders and expand their impact across the organizationFollow our guest Daniel Kalish: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-kalish-74194768/ Nilus: https://www.nilus.com/ Follow Corporate Treasury 101:Website : https://corporate-treasury-101.com/...

In this English-language interview, Vida Digital host Alex Neuman sits down with Igor Ilievski, founder of Amenex and creator of Amenexia, an AI-powered shopping assistant built to bring the human experience of brick-and-mortar retail into the world of 24/7 e‑commerce. Igor shares his journey from launching an online pop art store in Macedonia over 20 years ago to building a New York–based e‑commerce agency and eventually choosing Panama as the strategic hub for expanding across Latin America.Amenexia helps online stores answer customer questions in real time, personalize recommendations based on behavior and order history, and integrate with platforms like Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce and enterprise ERPs such as SAP. By using an agentic AI system that can connect to multiple models, Amanexia reduces customer support costs, boosts conversion rates from around 2% to close to 4%, and delivers a more human, conversational shopping experience at scale.​The conversation also explores the current state of e‑commerce in Panama, the challenges of moving from physical stores to effective online sales, and why most merchants fail when they treat their website as a static catalog instead of an interactive sales channel. Igor offers practical advice for founders: invest in real-time support, remove as much risk as possible from the buying process (returns, sizing, shipping clarity), and treat online customers with the same care and attention as those who walk into a physical store.​If you run an online store or plan to launch one in Panama or the wider region, this episode is a concise masterclass on using AI to improve customer experience, automation and profitability. To learn more about Amenexia, integrations with your existing stack, and how to get started, visit amenexia.ai and reach out via their contact form.

Nesta edição especial de Ano Novo, a primeira de 2026, fazemos o balanço de 2025 como o ano da "resiliência" e projetamos 2026 como o ano da "execução". Analisamos como o varejista deve sair do planejamento para a prática, enfrentando o início dos testes da Reforma Tributária e a escalada da Inteligência Artificial Agêntica, que deixa de apenas falar para começar a agir.Discutimos também o sucesso das vendas de fim de ano, onde o varejo online e os setores de itens essenciais lideraram a preferência de um consumidor racional.Entre os destaques:

Send us a textAI-native ERP systems are rapidly reshaping the enterprise software landscape by challenging long-standing assumptions about how ERPs are selected, implemented, and evolved over time. As AI becomes embedded directly into configuration, development, and daily workflows, practices once viewed as risky—such as extensive customization, rapid iteration, or even building ERP capabilities in-house—are becoming increasingly viable. Rising commercial software costs are further forcing executives to revisit the traditional buy-versus-build calculus, particularly as AI-first platforms promise faster deployments, more adaptable architectures, and experiences tailored to specific operating models. However, the category remains early, raising critical questions around governance, scalability, reliability, and long-term support. In this context, Everest ERP's AI-first approach offers a practical lens into how AI-native architectures can accelerate time-to-value while redefining what buyers, implementers, and business leaders should expect from ERP systems over the next decade.In this episode, Sam Gupta hosts Sandeep Chopra, co-CEO, Everest, to discuss how AI  impacts ERP strategy for companies.Video: https://www.elevatiq.com/events-and-webinars/your-erp-strategy-is-about-to-break-ai-is-rewriting-the-playbook/Questions for Panelists?

Send us a textEpisode 358: In this episode of The Heavy Duty Parts Report, Jamie Irvine speaks with Bryan Thueson of OptiCat and Moritz Mahler of TecAlliance about the long‑standing challenges in warranty processing across the heavy‑duty parts industry. They explain how manual, inconsistent, and inefficient warranty workflows create high process costs, poor transparency, customer frustration, and inaccurate quality tracking for both distributors and suppliers. Moritz describes how TecCom's standardized digital warranty platform—already widely adopted in Europe—streamlines claim creation, centralizes communication, integrates with ERPs and e‑commerce systems, and reduces claim processing time to under 90 seconds. Bryan highlights the improved customer experience, reduced costs, and better data accuracy that come from adopting a unified system rather than each supplier building their own. Links·         https://www.jnpopticat.com/ Sponsors of this EpisodeThe Hub Corp: Introducing the new standard in wheel-end protection: The Hub Corp's revolutionary XTRACTOR™. The only line of heavy-duty hub caps with a built-in 3-Stage Magnetic Oil Filter that safeguards critical axle components under extreme loads for longer. And with the patent-pending HexThread™ cartridge, the XTRACTOR makes hub oil servicing and inspections faster, easier, and cleaner. The Hub Corp: Challenge The Standard. Visit TheHubCorp.com to learn more and join the waitlist.  Fullbay: Fullbay is built for the heavy-duty world, giving your operation the tools to keep your fleet or independent repair shop running. Features like streamlined scheduling, real-time inventory tracking, technician efficiency insights, and detailed reports are how Fullbay helps shops reduce downtime and keep your vehicles on the road where they belong. Check out Fullbay.com/power to maximize your shop's productivity. GenAlpha: Equip360 by GenAlpha helps manufacturers and distributors grow their parts sales and make life easier for their customers. With real-time insights into inventory, pricing, and order tracking, it keeps customers coming back. Plus, it saves time by automating routine tasks and making repeat purchases simple. Explore Equip360 at GenAlpha.com.Disclaimer: This content and description may contain affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, The Heavy Duty Parts Report may receive a commission. Follow the podcast to never miss an episode. If you'd like to work with Jamie Irvine directly, you can schedule a meeting with him today.

After an 18-year rise through corporate HR—from recruiter to group president across Canada and the U.S.—Dom walked away from a “safe” executive career to build something on his own terms. In this conversation, we unpack why large organizations quietly trade momentum for bureaucracy, how technology and automation empower lean founders, and why “stability” often comes at the cost of creativity, speed, and meaning.We explore intrapreneurship vs. entrepreneurship, the hidden traps of bloated systems, and how founders can use data, automation, and open APIs to move faster without burning capital. The throughline isn't rebellion—it's agency. Building work that's fun, aligned, and alive again.No anti-corporate rant. Just lived experience, hard trade-offs, and a clear-eyed look at what it really takes to step off the stable path—and thrive.TL;DR* Stability is conditional: Corporate safety disappears the moment priorities shift.* Intrapreneur vs. founder: Big-company success doesn't equal personal leverage.* Tech as leverage: Automation and BI (not hype AI) unlock speed for lean teams.* Systems can trap you: CRMs and ERPs either enable growth—or become prisons.* Innovation dies slowly: Bureaucracy rewards optics over outcomes.* Work-life blend > balance: Fun, purpose-driven work creates sustainability.* Momentum matters: Small teams with clarity outperform slow giants.Memorable lines* “Stability often costs more than risk—you just don't see the bill right away.”* “Big systems don't fail fast. They fail quietly.”* “AI isn't magic—it's leverage if you know what problem you're solving.”* “Careers don't collapse overnight; they stall one approval layer at a time.”* “Fun isn't a perk—it's fuel.”GuestDominic Levesque — HR executive turned founder; CEO of NextWave; author and advisor on leadership, technology, and organizational transformation.

GreenLite delivers private construction plan review as an alternative to traditional city permitting processes. After spending six months testing both sides of the construction permitting transaction, the company identified owner-developers as their ICP and built a business model around Florida's privatization legislation—legislation that has now expanded to nine additional states including Texas, Tennessee, and California. In this episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with James Gallagher, CEO and Co-Founder of GreenLite, to explore how his fifth startup leveraged regulatory shifts, rejected workflow software in favor of outcomes, and scaled by targeting chief development officers at enterprise retailers struggling with permitting delays. Topics Discussed: How GreenLite discovered architects were heavy users but wrong customers due to two-part sales dynamics Why owner-developers became the ICP after six months of customer discovery across applicants and agencies The accidental discovery of private plan review through conversations with Fort Worth and Miami-Dade agencies GreenLite's platform combining regulatory permissions, licensed AEC professionals, and AI-augmented software How natural disasters and AEC talent shortages are accelerating privatization legislation nationwide Cold email strategies that converted enterprise retailers by surfacing acute pain points GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Map two-sided markets to find where purchasing authority and pain intersect: GreenLite pitched a CTO at a major architecture firm who responded positively but said "I just need to talk to my client, my customer." This revealed architects required approval from owner-developers despite being the heaviest product users. James pivoted to owner-developers who "carry the land, carry the construction loans" and feel revenue delays most acutely. The lesson: usage intensity doesn't equal buyer authority. In complex ecosystems, systematically test which party controls budget and feels enough pain to sign contracts independently. Recognize when procurement cycles kill early-stage validation velocity: Cities explicitly told James their "crazy procurement cycles" made early partnership impractical despite genuine interest. State and local education and government sales require specialized expertise and extended timelines that prevent rapid iteration. James chose to prove the model with private sector customers first. For founders: government can be a lucrative eventual market, but unless you have sled sales expertise and 12+ month runway per deal, validate PMF elsewhere first. Capitalize on regulatory tailwinds before markets realize they exist: Only Florida permitted private plan review when GreenLite launched in July 2022. By late 2024, nine states passed enabling legislation driven by natural disaster reconstruction needs and talent shortages in city building departments. James positioned GreenLite to ride this wave rather than selling transformation to resistant agencies. Founders should monitor legislative and regulatory changes in their verticals—new compliance requirements or permissions can suddenly open massive TAMs with minimal incumbent competition. Enterprise cold email converts when you surface non-obvious acute pain: GreenLite cold emailed chief development officers at major retail chains and quick-service restaurants with "Are you missing your openings due to permitting?" The response rate validated that permitting delays—not site selection or construction costs—were a critical path blocker for store rollout velocity. James targeted CDOs rather than real estate or design teams because they own the full development timeline. For enterprise sales: identify the executive accountable for the metric your solution impacts, then lead with how you move that specific number. Validate outcome-based models before building sophisticated workflow tools: GreenLite's customers rejected "another workflow product or system of record" that required API integrations with their ERPs and construction management systems. Instead, they wanted "faster, more predictable, more transparent permits." James built a viable business delivering finished permits through licensed professionals augmented by software, with the AI sophistication coming later. The business was "super viable well before the product was" by early 2023. For founders in industries resistant to software adoption: test whether buyers want tools to operate or outcomes to purchase—outcome-based pricing can achieve PMF faster and command premium willingness-to-pay. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role.  Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Explore tackling fast-evolving markets, from supply chain disruptions and sustainability pressures to geopolitical tensions requiring agile sourcing. Key insights cover cloud ERP simplifying operations for buyers facing electric vehicle tech changes, AI accelerating projects by scripting meetings and generating code, boosting efficiency by focusing teams on high-value tasks, and simulating crises for resilience. Standout examples include 50-60% unused custom ERP code inflating costs, drone pilot analogies for job evolution, and tools like the Digital Acceleration Navigator aiding change management for over 100 clients, including a major European beverage firm. Emphasis lies on composable cloud architectures, data cleansing 12 months pre-transformation, embedding sustainability KPIs for dual cost and environmental gains, and fostering cultures that empower people. Business leaders gain actionable steps for continuous innovation, scalable models, and successful digital transformations—listen now to unleash team potential!Download Episode TranscriptUseful Links:SAP Cloud ERPCapgeminiFollow Us on Social Media!SAP Cloud ERP - LinkedIn=====Guest: Elisabetta Spontoni, Executive Vice President at CapgeminiElisabetta is an Executive Vice President at Capgemini, with 30 years' experience in ICT governance, projects, and operations. As Group Offer Leader for "Digital Core," she drives the end-to-end offer lifecycle and manages the portfolio of packaged solutions, including major ERPs on top of Supply Chain packages, communities, and strategic learning initiatives. She brings strong management experience and a deep delivery operations background, with core competencies in ERP solutions (mainly SAP technologies), leading large international ICT transformation programs, and conducting sales and pre-sales activities at localand international levels, alongside go-to-market strategy and offering development. Her main sectors of expertise are the International Public Sector (United Nations), Oil & Gas, and Aerospace & Defense. Certified as a large international program director, she serves on the Capgemini Group Project Management Certification Board and the “Flying Squad” team—a select group oftop professionals handling recovery missions for critical projects worldwide. She is also certified as a Delivery Partner to support profitable growth of Capgemini's global accounts. Her key strengths include recognized leadership, collaborative work with colleagues, clients, and partners in multicultural teams, sharp ICT expertise focused on SAP technologies, delivery excellence, innovation, and executive-level communication.Host: Richard Howells, SAPRichard Howells has been working in the Supply Chain Management and Manufacturing space for over 30 years. He is responsible for driving the thought leadership and awareness of SAP's ERP, Finance, and Supply Chain solutions and is an active writer, podcaster, and thought leader on the topics of supply chain, Industry 4.0, digitization, and sustainability.Follow Richard Howell on LinkedIn and X

In this no-holds-barred episode of The Fleet Success Show, RTA's VP of Product & Consulting, Marc Canton, is joined by the Fleet Whisperer himself, Steve Saltzgiver, to dissect one of the biggest mistakes fleets make: trying to manage fleet operations through non-fleet systems like ERPs, EAMs, or telematics platforms with maintenance add-ons.Steve shares battle-tested stories from his decades of hands-on fleet leadership, where multi-million dollar companies wasted years and millions trying to shoehorn fleet into systems never meant for it. The two dive deep into the problems with using generic asset systems—and explain exactly why FMIS (Fleet Management Information Systems) like RTA are built to drive wrench time, reduce downtime, and give you clean, reliable data.Whether you're being forced into an ERP, trying to justify an FMIS to leadership, or want real-world ammo to make your case, this episode is your go-to resource. ✅ Key TakeawaysERPs and EAMs are not built for fleet: From 40-click work orders to missing fleet-specific features like VRMS codes and SRT tracking, they cause inefficiency, data loss, and user frustration.FMIS platforms deliver immediate ROI: Purpose-built systems dramatically reduce clicks, improve reporting accuracy, and streamline daily shop workflows.Fleet data needs fleet-first systems: Granular cost tracking, downtime reporting, and shop scheduling require systems designed for mobile assets, not static ones.Politics often drive bad decisions: Leadership's desire for system consolidation often ignores the operational needs of the fleet.Don't go it alone: Independent third-party evaluations can help justify the move to an FMIS. 

In this episode of SCW for Pharma, host Evren Ozkaya welcomes Tom Walls, former Head of Supply Chain Planning at Spark Therapeutics, a Roche company. The conversation kicks off with Tom sharing his career evolution from small molecules to his current focus on advanced therapy medicinal products, expressing his optimism for the potential of cell and gene therapies to treat many previously untreatable rare diseases.Evren and Tom then explore the different types of advanced therapies, clarifying that some are highly personalized (batch for a single patient) while others follow a bulk production model, all targeting rare diseases but never reaching the scale of high-volume small molecule drugs.The discussion then delves into the unique complexities of the cell and gene therapy supply chain. Tom outlines several challenges, including highly variable yields, the need for skilled teams for stability studies, small batch sizes leading to production difficulties, and the hurdles of country-specific regulations. He underscores that the short 36- to 72-hour shelf life necessitates precise scheduling, and the high cost of manufacturing capacity makes idle time a financial challenge. Tom confirms that this inherent complexity is a primary factor contributing to the therapies' high price points, often reaching the million-dollar plus range.Evren and Tom shift their focus to what defines a strong planning organization in this specialized field. Tom explains that top performers are clear communicators who make confident, data-aware decisions and can quickly align teams during unexpected issues. He highlights that planning covers several areas, including analytical, regulatory, and clinical planning, with risk management being central. Tom notes that while AI-driven production scheduling can help manage complexity and yield variability that traditional ERPs miss, the technology landscape remains fragmented, lacking a single holistic platform that covers regulatory, supply chain, demand planning, production scheduling and production monitoring domains.The conversation continues by examining the need to link planning and execution systems on top of others to understand the impact of decisions, especially with yield variability. Bringing planning and execution closer together supports optimization and strengthens communication, since plan adjustments need to translate into clear actions for teams on the ground.Evren then asks about tariffs, trade tensions, and reshoring in the United States. Tom explains that many inputs, from plasma materials to tubing components, come from China. While the US is large, not everything can be reshored due to the specialized nature of these materials. Decisions must be made carefully.They close by examining the role of AI in cell and gene therapy. Tom highlights the importance of linking regulatory, supply chain, demand planning, and execution. He sees opportunities in digital twins and anomaly detection to help teams manage risk more effectively.In the final segment, Tom shares the advice he would give his younger self. He wishes he had worked at more production sites to better understand how different operations run and how planning decisions affect people in manufacturing. He also would have spent more time with finance and regulatory teams, since planning sits at the intersection of all these functions. He encourages future professionals to build skills across these domains to succeed in this field.

Send us a textManufacturing ERP systems may appear similar on the surface, but their differences become stark once you look underneath—especially for industries where precision, engineering complexity, and compliance cannot be compromised. While many vendors promote similar modules, only specialized ERPs are architected to handle the rigorous demands of electronics, wire harness, and other engineering-intensive sectors. This webinar will unpack why industry-specific systems consistently outperform generic, one-size-fits-all ERPs, showing how they enhance traceability, strengthen real-time visibility, and seamlessly connect quoting, ordering, production, inventory, quality, and shipping into a unified operational flow. We'll explore how features like dynamic scheduling, embedded revision and configuration control, automated quality enforcement, and real-time WIP and material visibility are purpose-built—not bolted on—to support complex manufacturing. By the end, you'll clearly see how the right specialized ERP can improve accuracy, reduce errors, accelerate throughput, and ultimately drive profitability in high-stakes production environments.In this episode, Sam Gupta hosts Tanner Rogers, Director of Sales, Cetec ERP, to discuss the ultimate ERP playbook for Electronics & Wire Harness companies.Video: https://www.elevatiq.com/events-and-webinars/the-ultimate-erp-playbook-for-electronics-manufacturing/Questions for Panelists?

In this episode of Future Finance, hosts Paul Barnhurst and Glenn Hopper are joined by systems and finance transformation expert Cindy Vindasius to explore why so many ERP implementations fail, and what companies can do to fix that. They discuss the often-overlooked groundwork needed before selecting a system or deploying AI tools, and why jumping straight to automation without strong data and processes is a recipe for chaos. Whether you're planning an ERP rollout or modernizing finance operations, this conversation is packed with practical guidance for long-term success.Cindy Vindasius is a CPA and MBA with over 30 years of experience guiding high-growth technology and manufacturing companies through complex ERP, finance transformation, and AI-readiness initiatives. As the founder of Vindasius Advisory, she has led 12 ERP implementations, 8 IPO and M&A, and numerous SOX compliance projects. Her clients include industry leaders such as Tesla, Apple, 23andMe, and TenX. Through her ERP Preparedness Master Workshop and executive advisory programs, Cindy helps CFOs and CIOs align systems and processes for scale, resilience, and efficiency.In this episode, you will discover:Why 70% of ERP implementations fail and how to avoid common misstepsWhat ERP readiness really means, and why it's often overlookedHow AI-native ERPs compare to legacy systems in real-world implementationsWhy scalable data governance and documented processes are essentialHow Cindy's ERP Preparedness Master Workshop helps teams succeedThis episode highlights the often-missed foundations of ERP and AI success: preparation, clarity, and scalability. Cindy Vindasius shares the roadmap finance leaders need to transform systems from a source of chaos into a driver of growth.Join hosts Glenn and Paul as they unravel the complexities of AI in finance.AI Readiness Assessment: Take the free 3-minute AI Readiness Assessment to clearly identify your strengths and weaknesses across Finance and Operations: https://cindy-tooq6nwx.scoreapp.com/AI First Vendor Evaluation Checklist:Evaluate smarter and avoid costly mistakes with this AI First Vendor Evaluation Checklist packed with key criteria: https://www.vindasius.com/opt-inFollow Cindy:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cindy-vindasius/Website: https://www.vindasius.comFollow Glenn:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gbhopperiiiFollow Paul:LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/thefpandaguyFollow QFlow.AI:Website - https://bit.ly/4i1EkjgFuture Finance is sponsored by QFlow.ai, the strategic finance platform solving the toughest part of planning and analysis: B2B revenue. Align sales, marketing, and finance, speed up decision-making, and lock in accountability with QFlow.ai. Stay tuned for a deeper understanding of how AI is shaping the future of finance and what

Send me a messageWhat if the biggest risk in your supply chain isn't geopolitical shocks or new regulations, but the data you trust every single day?This week, I'm joined by Andy Kohm, co-founder and CEO of SCIP, a supply chain intelligence platform built to clean, connect, and operationalise data across ERPs, PLMs, control towers, and the spreadsheets nobody admits to using. Andy has spent more than a decade wrestling with the messy reality of supply chain data, and his insights couldn't be more relevant as volatility rises and digital transformation hits its limits.In this conversation, you'll hear how bad data quietly drives bad decisions - from inflated lead times to unnecessary expedites to risk scores that collapse under scrutiny. We break down why most organisations can't agree on something as simple as the “source of truth,” and how that single failure cascades into higher emissions, higher costs, and planners who simply stop believing the system.You might be surprised to learn how often companies pay 10x for components they could have sourced at the normal price - simply because the underlying data was wrong. And we dig into where AI can genuinely help today (contract intelligence, grunt-work automation) and where it's still pure theatre without clean inputs.

Send us a textThe aerospace and defense industry operates in one of the most demanding environments, where compliance, traceability, and precision are non-negotiable—yet many manufacturers still rely on generic ERPs that were never built for aviation. As a result, they pour millions into customizations just to meet basic FAA, DoD, and OEM requirements, only to end up with fragile systems that struggle under the weight of cert linkage, serial and lot tracking, shelf-life controls, and calibration traceability. In this webinar, we'll break down the “Aerospace ERP Gap,” exposing the risks and costs of forcing generic ERPs into aerospace use cases, including the all-too-common “$2M customization trap.” You'll see how industry-built ERP platforms close this gap with out-of-the-box capabilities for MRO, manufacturing, and defense contractors—delivering compliance-ready workflows, integrated configuration management, and real-time visibility across every aircraft, tool, and certificate. Ultimately, these purpose-built solutions help organizations move from reactive and fragmented to unified and intelligent, without blowing budgets or stretching implementation timelines.In this episode, Sam Gupta hosts Ralph Merhi, CEO, ERP.aero, to discuss the inside of the aerospace ERP gap, the $2M cost of getting it wrong.Video: https://www.elevatiq.com/events-and-webinars/erp-aero-overview-webinar/Questions for Panelists?

In this episode of Future Finance, hosts Paul Barnhurst and Glenn Hopper talk with Santiago Nestares, co-founder and CEO of DualEntry, about the reinvention of ERP systems through AI-native design. After scaling a global e-commerce business to over $100 million in revenue, Santiago experienced the frustrations of legacy finance systems firsthand. That pain sparked the vision for DualEntry: an ERP platform built from the ground up for the AI era.Santiago Nestares is the CEO and co-founder of DualEntry, an AI-native ERP platform. Before DualEntry, he co-founded Benitago, a leading Amazon brand aggregator. His experience running a multi-entity, high-growth business exposed the inefficiencies in traditional finance systems, inspiring him to build a next-gen ERP solution from scratch.In this episode, you will discover:Why legacy ERP systems are fundamentally broken, and how AI changes the gameHow DualEntry enables 24-hour ERP data migrationThe role of AI in journal entries, reporting, and reconciliationHow auditors are embracing automation and AI for compliance and accuracyWhy ERP systems must evolve beyond just being "AI-enabled" to truly AI-nativeSantiago Nestares joins Paul and Glenn to reveal how DualEntry is transforming ERP for the AI era. From eliminating painful migrations to building systems finance teams actually enjoy using, Santiago makes it clear: the future of ERP is AI-native, fast, and built with users in mind. ERP doesn't have to be a burden. With the right tools, it can become a strategic advantage.Join hosts Glenn and Paul as they unravel the complexities of AI in finance:Follow Santiago:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/santiago-nestares/Website: https://www.dualentry.com/Follow Glenn:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gbhopperiiiFollow Paul:LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/thefpandaguyFollow QFlow.AI:Website - https://bit.ly/4i1EkjgFuture Finance is sponsored by QFlow.ai, the strategic finance platform solving the toughest part of planning and analysis: B2B revenue. Align sales, marketing, and finance, speed up decision-making, and lock in accountability with QFlow.ai. Stay tuned for a deeper understanding of how AI is shaping the future of finance and what it means for businesses and individuals alike.In Today's Episode:[01:36] - Lessons from Scaling to $100M & ERP Frustrations[03:37] - Why ERP Migrations Are So Broken[07:47] - How DualEntry Raised a $90M Series A[10:51] - AI-Native vs. AI-Enabled ERP Systems[18:23] - Challenges and Realities of 24-Hour ERP Migration[23:26] - Why Building a Mid-Market ERP Is a Bold Move[28:18] - Using AI in Audits & Real-Time Reporting[31:45] - Rapid-Fire AI Questions[35:52] - Final Reflections & Wrap-Up

What You'll Learn- Why legacy commerce APIs and EDI no longer suffice in today's fragmented commerce landscape- How AI and emerging protocols like MCP are accelerating the need for real-time fulfillment integration- The structure, tools, and resources defined by OnX for seamless order management across ecosystems- The nonprofit "business league" legal framework that keeps OnX vendor-agnostic and collaborative- The challenges commerce platforms face with OMS integrations and how OnX aims to reduce friction- The shift from platform-centric to protocol-centric commerce enabled by open standards- How industry players—brands, 3PLs, ERP, WMS, and commerce platforms—are rallying behind OnXHihghlights- 00:00 — Welcome, introduction to Kelly Goetsch and the focus: “Connected Commerce”- 02:00 — The fragmentation problem: marketplaces, social commerce, AI, and legacy EDI- 04:00 — The rise of MCP and Agentic Commerce Protocol as enablers for a new standard- 06:00 — Building a “big tent” network: OMS, 3PLs, WMSs, ERPs connectivity challenges- 10:00 — Commerce platform vs fulfillment backend: the tech and mindset divide- 14:00 — What is OnX? Tools, resources, member base, and the standard's scope- 18:00 — How MCP makes OnX possible, collapsing layers between selling and fulfillment- 22:00 — OnX's “business league” structure explained- 24:00 — Platform, payment, and AI player involvement and adoption challenges- 28:00 — How to participate: advisory boards, GitHub access, and community involvement- 30:00 — The future of connected commerce and invitation to join OnXQuotes[00:02:00]: "If the last decade was about composable commerce, the next one is about connected commerce." - Ninaad [00:04:00]: "AI is the reason for both of these. We're really, really collapsing down." - Kelly Goetsch [00:10:00]: "About 70% of enterprise brands still run point-to-point integration, and that has its own set of challenges." - Ninaad [00:22:00]: "The benefit of that is: we, as a community, get together and evolve and change as technology changes. And that's great." - Kelly Goetsch About the GuestKelly Goetsch is a technologist and strategist shaping the future of digital commerce and order fulfillment. Known for his leadership in the MACH Alliance and now Pipe17, Kelly has been a central voice in evolving commerce technology standards. He currently chairs the Commerce Operations Foundation, driving the development and adoption of the OnX standard for connected commerce.Links Mentioned- Commerce Operations Foundation website: commerceopsfoundation.org- Commerce Operations Foundation GitHub: github.com/commerceopsfoundation- Kelly Goetsch on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kgoetsch- MACH Alliance: machalliance.org  Subscribe and Keep Learning!If you're a logistics leader looking to scale sustainably, don't miss out! Subscribe for more expert strategies on tackling modern supply chain challenges.Be sure to follow and tag the eCom Logistics Podcast on LinkedIn and YouTube

Industrial Talk is onsite at SMRP 2025 and talking to Colin Morris, Sr. Director of Solution Consulting at MaintainX about "Mobile first asset management platform". Scott MacKenzie interviews Colin from MaintainX at the SMRP conference in Fort Worth, Texas. Colin discusses Maintain X's mobile-first platform, which integrates with various systems like SCADA, ERPs, and wireless sensors to enhance maintenance decisions and asset availability. The platform, which has a three-week implementation period, supports voice summaries to capture technician knowledge and offers a full web client. MaintainX recently raised funding to enhance AI and mobility features. Colin emphasizes the importance of data strategy and extensibility in modern maintenance practices. Listeners can learn more at gomaintainx.com. Action Items [ ] Reach out to Colin on LinkedIn or the maintain X website to learn more about the platform. Outline Introduction and Welcome to Industrial Talk Podcast Scott MacKenzie introduces the Industrial Talk podcast, sponsored by CAP Logistics, emphasizing the importance of 24/7 insights into supply chains.Scott MacKenzie welcomes listeners to the podcast, highlighting the SMRP conference in Fort Worth, Texas, and introduces Colin from MaintainX.Colin shares his experience of working with Maintain X for over two years and his background in the software industry, including his time at Rockwell Automation. Colin's Background and MaintainX's Funding Colin discusses his career journey, including his 10 years in the software business before joining MaintainX.Scott MacKenzie inquires about Colin's first SMRP experience, and Colin expresses his excitement and impressions of the conference.Colin explains MaintainX's recent funding round, which will enhance AI and mobility features, and improve the product's strength.Scott MacKenzie asks about MaintainX's strategic vision and priorities, focusing on AI and mobility. MaintainX's Features and Differentiation Colin elaborates on MaintainX's mobile-first application, which is designed for technicians and other business users.Scott MacKenzie asks how MaintainX differentiates itself from other solutions, and Colin emphasizes the platform's extensibility and connectivity.Colin explains MaintainX's ability to ingest information from various sources, including wireless sensors, SCADA, and ERPs, to improve maintenance decisions.Scott MacKenzie and Colin discuss the importance of bidirectional connectivity and API bridges to integrate with existing systems. Data Strategy and Implementation Colin highlights the importance of understanding data strategy and building integrations with other systems.MaintainX offers in-house integration teams and self-serve tools for customers to connect their systems.Colin discusses the challenges of OEE and the need for real-time analytics to improve asset availability.Scott MacKenzie inquires about the point of diminishing returns with data, and Colin explains the need to balance data collection with business impact. Implementation Period and Third-Party Solutions Colin explains MaintainX's average implementation period of three weeks, emphasizing outcome-based goals.MaintainX has a team of over 40 implementation consultants, most of whom are engineers, to ensure successful setups.Colin confirms that Maintain X supports third-party solutions, including vibration vendors, Ignition, Kepware, and industrial protocols like MQTT.MaintainX is an SAP partner and connects with Oracle and other...

Ops Quickies – snackable episodes on tech, tools, and systems.

Industrial Talk is onsite at SMRP 2026 and talking to Sabira Lakhani and Jack Reinke with Sparetech about "Insights and transparency on inventory". Scott MacKenzie hosts the Industrial Talk podcast, sponsored by CAP Logistics, celebrating industry professionals. At the SMRP event in Fort Worth, he interviews Sabira Lakhani and Jack Reinke from Sparetech. Sabira, VP of Product, discusses their technology for reusing commercial furniture and lab equipment, aiming to reduce waste and costs. Jack, an account executive, highlights their software for managing spare parts, reducing downtime by providing transparency on inventory. They discuss the importance of innovation, overcoming tribal knowledge barriers, and the role of AI in future industry solutions. Spirit Tech's software can be deployed in weeks, offering significant savings through data consolidation and improved efficiency. Action Items [ ] Connect with Jack Reinke on LinkedIn.[ ] Connect with Sabira Lakhani on LinkedIn. Outline Introduction and Welcome to Industrial Talk Podcast Scott MacKenzie introduces the Industrial Talk podcast, sponsored by CAP logistics, emphasizing the importance of 24/7 insights into supply chains.The podcast aims to celebrate industry professionals and their contributions to solving global problems.Scott MacKenzie welcomes listeners to the event, SMRP, held in Fort Worth, Texas, highlighting its significance for asset management, reliability, and maintenance professionals.Scott introduces the guests, Sabira and Jack from Spirit Tech, and expresses excitement about their participation in the podcast. Guest Introductions and Backgrounds Sabira introduces herself as the VP of Product at Sparetech, new to the company but with a background in circular economy technology focused on reusing commercial furniture and lab equipment.Jack introduces himself as an account executive at Sparetech, the first US employee, and shares his background in manufacturing and commercial printing.Scott MacKenzie discusses the importance of inspiring the next generation of industry leaders and the challenges of communicating the value of innovation within the industry.Sabira and Jack share their thoughts on the need for a culture of innovation and the importance of bridging the gap between old and new technology. Challenges in Industry and Technology Adoption Scott MacKenzie emphasizes the need for better communication and understanding of the importance of innovation within the industry.Jack discusses the challenges of confidence and communication among industry professionals, especially when it comes to new technology.Sabira highlights the importance of creating a scalable way to pass on tribal knowledge within the industry.The conversation touches on the need for industry professionals to adapt to new technology and the importance of making technology user-friendly and accessible. Sparetech's Solution and Value Proposition Sabira explains Spirit Tech's focus on eliminating downtime in factories by providing transparency on spare parts data.Jack discusses the challenges of maintaining accurate inventory data and the importance of preventing the creation of duplicate parts.Scott MacKenzie inquires about the company's ability to integrate with existing systems like CMMS and ERPs, and Jack explains the flexibility of their solution, including manual file exchange for initial data uploads.Sabira and Jack discuss the potential savings and efficiency gains from using Spirit Tech's solution, including...

En este episodio de El Brieff abordamos la condonación millonaria a aseguradoras, el golpe a bancos mexicanos por acusaciones de lavado, la caída del turismo en Tulum, las protestas masivas contra Trump y negociaciones clave globales. Incluimos conflictos en Medio Oriente con ataques aéreos israelíes tras violaciones al alto al fuego, crisis en Asia y África, y movimientos estratégicos en lujo y realeza. Como director, seguro te haces esta pregunta: ¿Cómo convierto mis enormes bases de datos (CRM, ERPs) en una ventaja competitiva real? Sentir que acumulas datos sin generar valor es un dolor común. Mientras, es posible que tu competencia ya los esté usando para moverse más rápido. Nuestra especialidad en STRTGY AI es precisamente esa transformación. ¿Quieres dejar de almacenar y empezar a ganar? Conoce nuestro enfoque en transformación de datos. Conoce más en www.strtgy.ai o escríbenos a hola@strtgy.aiRecibe gratis nuestro newsletter con las noticias más importantes del día.Si te interesa una mención en El Brieff, escríbenos a arturo@strtgy.ai Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of Restoration Pros Unplugged, Clinton James sits down with Jeff Carrier, Co-Founder and CEO of Restoration ERP, to talk about how restoration companies can use technology to win more commercial work and how the new ERP Copilot AI is changing the game.Jeff breaks down how most restorers have handled commercial disaster planning in the past, why ERPs are key to landing “first call” commercial clients, and how his team built a platform that makes it simple and profitable.You'll also hear about ERP Copilot, the industry's first AI-powered sales trainer and assistant built specifically for restoration professionals. From sales call analysis and role-playing objection handling to email sequencing and disaster plan coaching, ERP Copilot gives restorers 24/7 guidance on how to approach, pitch, and close commercial clients with confidence.Whether you're already offering ERPs or just starting to target commercial properties, this episode will show you how to use automation and AI to scale your restoration business, strengthen client relationships, and win more high-value contracts.Learn more about Restoration ERP and ERP Copilot:https://restorationerp.comRestoration ERP LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/restoration-erp/Restoration ERP Youtubehttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWTf0r9LXBoSPrg06PAj5Hg-----Want to grow your restoration brand and generate more water jobs with expert marketing?Book a free strategy session with our team at Water Restoration Marketing:https://www.waterrestorationmarketing.net/schedule

Duncan Barrigan left his high-profile Chief Growth Officer role at GoCardless, a $2.2 billion payments platform, to solve what he calls the biggest challenge in financial technology: broken B2B payments. This $70 trillion market is stuck, with 98% of B2B payments handled by outdated, manual processes. Rideshare giants deploy 50-person teams just to manage accounts receivable, exposing an enormous need for modern payment processing solutions.Manual tasks and communication breakdowns are costing companies millions in wasted time. The core issue isn't just sending or receiving money—it's the chaos and disputes that slow down invoice payments and paralyze AP teams. Duncan saw that true progress means automating the entire workflow. Using the power of AI and AP automation, Lunos builds agents that handle accounts receivable at scale. These AI-powered tools negotiate, track, and resolve payment disputes without errors, never missing a detail, and supporting efficient electronic payments for modern businesses.1️⃣ Start with monitor mode first to build trust and understand AR patterns before advancing to suggest or act modes.2️⃣ Prevent disputes through real-time records instead of tracking payment promises in weekly spreadsheet downloads.3️⃣ Let email handle customer communication rather than forcing customers onto new portals that create friction.4️⃣ Use relationship-specific data for forecasting instead of broad machine learning patterns across different companies.5️⃣ Integrate like a human worker by connecting with existing ERPs, CRMs, and communication tools without forcing massive changes.GUESTDuncan Barrigan LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/duncanbarrigan/LUNOSWebsite: www.lunos.aiLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lunos-ai/FINTECH CONFIDENTIALPodcast: https://fintechconfidential.com/listenNewsletter: https://fintechconfidential.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fintechconfidentialX: https://x.com/FTconfidentialInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/fintechconfidentialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/fintechconfidentialSUPPORTERSUnder - Streamlines application and underwriting with digital PDF processing - https://under.io/ftc Skyflow - Zero trust data privacy vault with simple API calls - https://skyflowsecure.com Hawk - AI tools for real-time fraud detection and transaction monitoring - https://gethawkai.comABOUTDuncan Barrigan is a technology entrepreneur and executive. He's the Founder and CEO of Lunos, the AI partner that manages receivables just like you would. Well, how you would if you worked on it 24/7, never forgot anything and read every message ever sent to you - you get the idea.He has spent more than a decade helping businesses get paid, previously as Chief Product Officer and Chief Growth Officer at GoCardless for eight years, playing a leading role in its rise from a UK-based direct debit provider to a global bank payments unicorn worth $2.2bn, with revenue growing for $1m to well over $100m ARR. Prior to that he worked as a consultant, leading projects advising PE & VC clients on fintech and financial services M&A and strategy at Oliver Wyman. He has an MA in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge.Lunos is an AI-powered accounts receivable platform that integrates with enterprise systems to automate tracking, communication, and resolution of unpaid invoices. The system operates like a human AR agent, managing customer interactions and adapting to responses in real time.Tedd Huff is the Founder of Voalyre a professional services and Advisory firm focused on global payments and banking. He is also a video podcast host and executive producer on the Fintech Confidential...

Join Jay Gunkelman, QEEGD (the man who has analyzed over 500,000 brain scans), and host Pete Jansons for another engaging NeuroNoodle Neurofeedback Podcast episode discussing neuroscience, psychology, mental health, and brain training.✅ Topic 1 Explained: What is the “Squash” protocol (aka Nurea)? Jay revisits its late-90s origins, the idea of generalized frontal suppression, and why “gamma is good” isn't always true in clinical contexts.✅ Topic 2 Deep Dive: Caffeine's impact on EEG—why withdrawal can slow alpha into theta, and how dopamine deficits (e.g., fronto-central theta in ADD) fit into stimulant vs. reuptake-inhibitor choices.✅ Topic 3 Insights: Why diagnosis-based studies (OCD/PTSD) show mixed results and how organizing by EEG phenotype predicts very different responses—especially with alpha patterns vs. beta spindling.✅ Additional Topics:

In this episode of Restoration Pros Unplugged, Clinton James sits down with Holly Baldwin, Senior Customer Success Manager at DocuSketch, to uncover how restoration companies can transform an advanced documentation tool into a powerful sales and marketing engine.Holly shares her journey from her early days at Servpro to becoming a key leader at DocuSketch, where she now helps restoration professionals streamline operations, win more business, and deliver a true “white glove” customer experience.Key topics covered in this episode:Holly's career path from Servpro to DocuSketch.What DocuSketch really is and why it's more than “just a documentation tool.”The “no-cost pre-loss scan” strategy and why it's a game-changer for winning prospects.How restoration pros are using 360 tours and before/after portfolios to stand out from competitors.Real-world examples of DocuSketch saving companies thousands in liability claims.Overcoming objections like “we already sketch by hand.”The “access deactivation” follow-up tactic that keeps you top-of-mind with property managers.How to integrate DocuSketch with ERPs, marketing campaigns, and sales systems.Why Holly believes in systems over goals for consistent sales success.If you've ever thought DocuSketch was “just a documentation tool,” this episode will change the way you see it.Visit: https://www.docusketch.com/-----Want to grow your restoration brand and generate more water jobs with expert marketing?Book a free strategy session with our team at Water Restoration Marketing:https://www.waterrestorationmarketing.net/schedule

On average, I get asked 2x a week for fractional CFO recommendations.And on average, I get complaints 3x a week about someone's current setup.Today we investigate the booming fractional CFO market, and my checklist to making sure you get a good one.This week's podcast is brought to you by Campfire (www.campfire.ai)We've all used legacy ERPs. Painful migrations, endless consulting fees, and even after you're live, getting simple answers still means hours in spreadsheets.Campfire fixes that. It's the AI-first ERP built for modern finance and accounting teams. It's helping mid-market and enterprise teams close faster, unlock insights instantly, and scale smarter - without the additional headcount.I use Campfire myself, and it's been a game changer for our finance workflow. The interface is intuitive, migration was quick & painless, and it's freed us up to focus on strategic work.They just raised $35 million from Accel to further reimagine ERP. That's not easy to do.I'm excited to see how they keep reimagining this space – and you should be too.Check them out at www.campfire.ai This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mostlymetrics.com

What happens when a cybersecurity engineer walks into a fashion boutique? For Harish Chandramowli, it sparked an idea that's now helping small fashion brands save time, money, and sanity. A chance observation in a New York store became a mission to untangle problems in inventory, communication, and operations many brands struggle with. In this episode, I speak with Harish, founder of Flair Software, about how he went from working at Bloomberg and MongoDB to building a platform that fixes the messy back-office problems fashion brands face. Harish explains why seasonal inventory is a high-stakes game, how communication breakdowns can cost thousands, and why he built his solution to integrate with Shopify instead of competing against it. Tune in now to learn more. --- Listen to the podcast here: From Cybersecurity to Fashion Tech with Harish Chandramowli Welcome to Action's Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We have a lot of technological advances, a lot of digital technology, and a lot of the efforts around it have been used primarily around digital products, primarily around some of the platforms and everything else, but there's also an aspect that I'm hopeful around that really takes some of the digital technology that we have and uses it to enhance the physical products and the actual life that we have outside of our computers in real life. My guest today, Harish Chandramowli, is the founder of Flaire Software and he has some interesting solutions for the fashion industry and other kind of inventory-related pursuits. ---   Harish, welcome to the program.   It's a pleasure to be here.    Thank you for joining us. Now, first of all, kind of have your feet in both worlds, whether it be kind of our technological world as well as the world of fashion, the world of some of these in-real-life types of pursuits. Tell me a bit about your story, where you started and how you came up with the idea, what you observed that led to Flaire Software.   Yeah. Just taking a step back, I am not from fashion industry. It's all pretty new to me. I did my master's in cyber security actually in Johns Hopkins, then I worked as security engineer in a bunch of very data-related platforms like Bloomberg, MongoDB. And MongoDB was my last gig where I primarily started as cloud security engineer but moved on to like an Atlas dedicated team where you see how lot of different people use databases. And, interestingly, there are a lot of retail companies using databases very heavily. That made me more and more curious on how software is being used in retail industry and why database is like one of the biggest line expenditures. On top of that, when I was looking into ERPs, Oracle is one of the biggest player in the ERP market, which made me even more curious on what this space is. What happens around here? Why is a database company spending so much on an ERP, on like a data workflow?    Yeah.   This kind of made me curious but, again, it was more like I don't think I was into fashion or any of those things. I went to this store called ONS in Soho. It's a great store you should check out if you are ever in like downtown area in New York.    What's the store called again?   ONS.   Okay.   Orange, Naples, San Diego. So if you go to Soho and like downtown in the fashion districts, you will notice a lot of these small, small brands which is not your typical H&Ms or Zara.   Yeah.    So I was there, I was actually listening to their team meetings, talking a lot with their founder. I was looking at how they are operating in the back office. The first thing that stood out to me is that fashion as a whole uses a lot of software. One aspect of it which we are all familiar with is designing the fashion, like the threading, modeling and like the cut and everything. Another easier to relate option is like e-commerce site, where you list,

In this episode, we spoke with Sahitya Senapathy, Founder and CEO of Endeavor, about how generative AI and agentic platforms are redefining the future of manufacturing. Sahitya shared his journey from coding for FEMA to founding Endeavor from his college dorm room. We explored how Endeavor is using AI labor to tackle the chronic inefficiencies in back-office and front-office workflows, and how this technology could help revitalize U.S. manufacturing in the face of labor shortages and global competition. Key Insights: • Agentic AI for factories: Endeavor applies generative AI agents to automate medium-complexity tasks—such as supplier onboarding, sales order entry, and invoice reconciliation—that ERPs and SaaS tools still leave to humans. • AI as a workforce multiplier: Clients gain the equivalent of hundreds of 24/7 digital employees, cutting cycle times from months to days while freeing human staff for higher-value activities. • Native AI architecture: Unlike ERP add-ons or copilots, Endeavor's platform is designed from the ground up for AI agents, delivering outcomes (e.g., documents processed, invoices reconciled) rather than seat-based licenses. • Scaling with demand: Backed by US$7 million in funding from Kraft Ventures and others, Endeavor aims to become a generation-defining enterprise software provider for manufacturing, on par with SAP and Oracle in impact. • Re-industrialization driver: As U.S. factories face a “silver tsunami” of retirements, Endeavor positions AI labor as the answer to labor shortages, helping new manufacturing plants scale without relying solely on human hiring. • Partnership approach: Sahitya emphasizes humility and collaboration—working with veteran CIOs and digital leaders to deploy AI in ways that complement their deep industry expertise. IoT ONE database: https://www.iotone.com/case-studies The Industrial IoT Spotlight podcast is produced by Asia Growth Partners (AGP): https://asiagrowthpartners.com/

What matters more: Your company performance, or market conditions?Stubhub is preparing to go public (again) after initially pulling the plug back in March of 2025. A lot has changed since then. The market is up. And their performance is down. We analyze what's going on in the capital markets, and how to think about what matters most when you're preparing to go public.(Read: Stubhub's original S1 breakdown on Mostlymetrics.com)This week's podcast is brought to you by Campfire (www.campfire.ai)We've all used legacy ERPs. Painful migrations, endless consulting fees, and even after you're live, getting simple answers still means hours in spreadsheets.Campfire fixes that. It's the AI-first ERP built for modern finance and accounting teams. It's helping mid-market and enterprise teams close faster, unlock insights instantly, and scale smarter - without the additional headcount.I use Campfire myself, and it's been a game changer for our finance workflow. The interface is intuitive, migration was quick & painless, and it's freed us up to focus on strategic work.They just raised $35 million from Accel to further reimagine ERP. That's not easy to do.I'm excited to see how they keep reimagining this space – and you should be too.Check them out at www.campfire.ai This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mostlymetrics.com

What do Whitey Bulger, FBI Agent John Connolly, AI and Venture Capitalists have in common? In today's episode we explore an unholy alliance between two forces that need each other—massive capital piles and foundational model companies that can actually absorb that capital.This week's podcast is brought to you by Campfire (www.campfire.ai)We've all used legacy ERPs. Painful migrations, endless consulting fees, and even after you're live, getting simple answers still means hours in spreadsheets.Campfire fixes that. It's the AI-first ERP built for modern finance and accounting teams. It's helping mid-market and enterprise teams close faster, unlock insights instantly, and scale smarter - without the additional headcount.I use Campfire myself, and it's been a game changer for our finance workflow. The interface is intuitive, migration was quick & painless, and it's freed us up to focus on strategic work.They just raised $35 million from Accel to further reimagine ERP. That's not easy to do.I'm excited to see how they keep reimagining this space – and you should be too.Check them out at www.campfire.ai This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mostlymetrics.com

Today we're reviewing the state of the private markets using the NEW benchmarks released by Mostly Metrics. We surveyed our readers to see how their company's are doing… And it's tough to be a company between $5M and $25M in revenue right now.Three other things that stood out from the benchmarks this quarter:1️⃣ CAC Payback is up across the board. It's taking longer to earn back customer acquisition costs. AI is disrupting traditional search channels, and companies are building internal tooling instead of buying when it makes sense.2️⃣ Revenue is coming from existing bases. Net Dollar Retention is doing the heavy lifting — especially beyond $25M ARR. Expansion efficiency is becoming the key growth lever.3️⃣ Burn multiples keep falling. In reaction to expensive growth, capital efficiency is trending up. Even companies under $25M ARR are showing discipline.Get the whole 33 page report hereThis week's podcast is brought to you by Campfire (www.campfire.ai)We've all used legacy ERPs. Painful migrations, endless consulting fees, and even after you're live, getting simple answers still means hours in spreadsheets.Campfire fixes that. It's the AI-first ERP built for modern finance and accounting teams. It's helping mid-market and enterprise teams close faster, unlock insights instantly, and scale smarter - without the additional headcount.I use Campfire myself, and it's been a game changer for our finance workflow. The interface is intuitive, migration was quick & painless, and it's freed us up to focus on strategic work.They just raised $35 million from Accel to further reimagine ERP. That's not easy to do.I'm excited to see how they keep reimagining this space – and you should be too.Check them out at www.campfire.ai This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mostlymetrics.com

Send us a textERP implementation has come a long way from the days of consultant armies and 15-to-1 service ratios—today, it's more about smart AI-human collaboration than brute-force deployment. As Jon Reed points out in his cloud ERP article, the real transformation isn't in the flashy go-live moment, but in the gradual, AI-assisted journey to measurable value—timelines that tend to shift depending on which vendor's pitch you're hearing. In this episode, Sam Gupta joins Jon in a live LinkedIn session to unpack that journey, exploring how modern, AI-ready ERPs subtly steer vendors, customers, and system integrators toward success—minus the traditional chaos, and without relying on ChatGPT to tell the story.In this episode, Sam Gupta engages in a LinkedIn live session with Jon Reed, Diginomica in a live LinkedIn session as they take another look at the article and rewrite the script from the AI lenses (without using ChatGPT).Background Soundtrack: Away From You – Mauro SommFor more information on growth strategies for SMBs using ERP and digital transformation, visit our community at wbs. rocks or elevatiq.com. To ensure that you never miss an episode of the WBS podcast, subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform.