Transcript
Matthew: What advice do you have to your customers, to our listeners, to really navigate this? Should they go in blind and disrupt everything? Should they go with a partner like you? Should they go do the Stanford AI course to master AI? What's the one to three things you want them to do right now?
Maruf Ahmed: They definitely should get a partner like us. But honestly, like I said, 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. So you have to embrace it. I would say embrace it. Don't be afraid of it.
We have gone through many of these technological changes over the 19th century and 20th century, whether it's the Industrial Revolution, whether it's the computer revolution, now it's the AI revolution. And people who have been not scared, but prudently put those practices in their business, were more successful 15 years down the road. So we want to be consultative with our partners, our customers. That's what we are trying to do.
I could see that the conversation on AI is happening at a far higher level than the conversation around staffing. Staffing used to happen at a director manager level. AI conversation is at a C-suite level. But nothing to be scared of, but something to be done with proper risk, mitigation, governance, and framework. Those are important. Okay, what are the legal implications? What are the AI implications? What are the ethical implications? Those things are important.
Certainly you can take a Stanford course. I took one of those courses myself. I think it talks about the basics, but just like everything, you only learn when you are in it and when you kind of fail in it and learn from that failure. So when you say just go gung-ho on the AI 100%, I probably would not do that, because I love failure to learn from, but you don't want a failure that is fatal and ruins your business. But I would take this very seriously and I would not sit on the sidelines either. Two years ago maybe there were some companies on the sidelines. If you're on the sidelines, regardless of the industry, you are probably falling behind.
