Matthew: What would you say? How do you describe it to your friends, your customers, yourself? What do you think the state of AI is right now?
Maruf Ahmed: It is an assistant that can help you do higher level work, that can help you be better on things that you are passionate about, and take care of some of the mundane day-to-day foundational stuff. I think that every one of us probably will have an AI agent avatar somewhere that's going to help do things both professionally and personally. In ChatGPT when I go there, I was working on some landscape design and it knew the previous questions that I had asked. It was actually telling me, based on where I live and the climate, helping me do that. Previously I probably would have had to figure that out, spend some time, Google this and Google that and put things together. AI did that for me, so I could move on with the project much faster. So I think it is going to be a case where every one of us will have an assistant AI digital agent that's going to help us be better.
Maruf Ahmed: AI is real. It is like the internet, and you had probably 50% or 60% of the companies that were in that era gone, but you still have your Google and your eBay and your Amazons of the world. So I would say that our customers should definitely figure out how AI would affect them and embark on the journey. Now they can do it with partners like us, or they can get a small team that gets more AI proficient. But not knowing AI is like not using computers in the 90s. When it came out there, whether you are in the IT field, whether you are a developer or whether you are an accountant that's doing spreadsheets, if you still wanted to be in your black notebook, it did not work.
This is consequential. It is like the internet, which we faced in the early 90s. A lot of hype, a lot of data center this and data center that, but it is happening and it will happen. So rather than resisting it, adopt it and move forward with it and have a digital workforce along with a human workforce, which is the future.
