#317 Christian Hammer on AI's Role in Eradicating Tech Debt and Shaping Our Future

[00:00:00] 

Mehmet: Hello and welcome back to a new episode of the CTO Show with Mehmet. Today, I'm very pleased joining me, Christian Hammer. Christian, thank you very much for being with me on the show. The way I love to do it is I keep it to my guests to introduce [00:01:00] themselves because I have a theory, no one can do someone else better than themselves.

Mehmet: So tell us a bit about you, about what you do currently, and then we can take it from there. So the floor is yours. 

Christian: Awesome. Well, today I'm the CEO and founder of Vala AI, which is focused on eliminating tech debt because well, that sucks. I've been in software dev in some form or another for 30 years. I actually first wrote my first application when I think I was like, I was like eight or nine years old, but.

Christian: Professional career started about 30 years ago, and in one form or another, I've been doing that ever since, either as a hand on foot early in my life, but often as a leader and most recently as the CTO at TradeLens, which was a global consortium between all major ocean companies. Again, 

Mehmet: thank you very much for being with me here today, Christian.

Mehmet: Now, the way, you know, I like to do some research before we do [00:02:00] the actual recording, of course. And, you know, I went, I went to, to, to your website, actually. And, you know, I, I'm a big believer in purposes and why we build things. And you know, one, one thing I've seen on the website is like, you want to redefine software management with AI.

Mehmet: And this is to me, like it's a very strong mission statement. So tell me a little bit more about, you know, So first of all, you mentioned technical depth sucks, and of course, all of us, we agree with that. But there must be something, you know, very strong, you know, that pushes us, hey, I need to start this. I am on a mission to change things.

Mehmet: So tell me about this and what's the role of AI in all that? 

Christian: Certainly. So I mentioned at a very young age, I I got the opportunity to learn how to program when I was very young, I was eight or nine years old. And I loved the experience of creation that was possible [00:03:00] because I had learned the arcane technical knowledge of the computer.

Christian: I could speak its language and get it to do the things I wanted to. And what modern LLMs have allowed us to do is to break down that barrier. Now the computer can actually understand the languages that we speak in the way that we speak it. You no longer have to speak computer. You no longer have to learn how to code.

Christian: Now that's not entirely true, right? Like, you still, even the best code assisting AI tool can't build an enterprise application, it can't connect up a bunch of uh, Uh, distributed or unique different pieces of technology and craft them in a way that is well orchestrated. And that's actually what Vol is doing already, is we're taking a look at the entire enterprise architecture for large companies and telling them where they have technical debt, giving them kind of a, I'd say it's the R.

Christian: B. Dragon's view, because in old timey maps, That they would have, uh, areas of unexplored territory and they'd draw little monsters or put little dragons in it in [00:04:00] areas where there was unknowns and therefore danger. And from a enterprise architecture perspective, those unknowns are dangerous. There are places where I don't have a team working on it.

Christian: I don't have appropriate testing coverage. I don't have, you know, all the things that I need monitoring instrumentation. And so they represent discrete portions of tech debt. But tech debt takes on many forms. Okay. Some of it's just patterns that we've changed over time or technologies that we've decided to outdate.

Christian: So we, um, on the other side of the spectrum within the organization, at the developer level, we have an AI code review tool that actually sits within Git and, uh, helps you match the patterns that do the best practices of the company, make changes that are suggested from that higher level architectural view.

Christian: On, uh, you know, maybe replacing a library that you're using is a better choice or whatever. Like, it's pointing out where there's problems that you can address at that moment. I say that we're trying to transform that. The things I want people, you know, businesses with [00:05:00] very large tech organizations are notoriously slow.

Christian: Now that's largely due to things like technical debt, but it's, it's kind of absurd that the bigger the technology organization, the longer it's been around, the slower it moves. We're in the business of automating things and making things move faster. Therefore, the more of us that are working on it, the longer we've been working on it, the faster and more efficient it should be.

Christian: But in truth, it's been the opposite. And I want to make that true. Um, because I think it's, it's nuts to have a huge amount of humanity doing effort in things that aren't creating any new value, aren't helping the world become a better place. And one of the main drivers for me in this most recent, uh, company was my wife has, uh, I said she's got alphabet soup after her name, she's got so many advanced degrees and professional certifications, uh, attached to her name.

Christian: That's, it looks like a soup, but when she gets hired by a major company to do what she's this extraordinarily [00:06:00] knowledgeable, experienced person with, she ends up just managing old broken technology that was implemented at some point in the past, uh, that was supposed to do something related to that. And so she ends up helping the technology along instead of the technology helping her along.

Christian: And that's backwards. We don't create these technologies to give us work to do. We create these technologies to do work for us. And that's what we're trying to make sure happens. We're trying to ensure that that's actually what occurs. 

Mehmet: Yeah. You know, you, you reminded me of, uh, you know, of the discussion that was still, it's in going since years.

Mehmet: You know, regarding the technical depth, when, you know, people were talking about, uh, COBOL, the language usually banks, they use and, and the, and the problem, how, you know, uh, this technology gets. really stuck in, in, in, you know, in that [00:07:00] area and no one was able to change it. But from the other side, uh, Christian, like how really now jokes aside, this technical depth, what could be the negative impacts on the long run?

Mehmet: So you mentioned a couple of things. You mentioned that they will be slow to adopt new things. So there must be some technical aspect of, you know, change and Could be also some business, uh, you know, impact on, on, uh, on, you know, being slow. So walk us through like both these two, two sides of the road, I would say.

Christian: There's actually a lot more to it than that. So I, I, I usually talk about how much it slows down now. A business, no matter how well staffed, which they are, is going to make changes to their strategy. And it's often happening on a quarterly basis. Uh, this is caused by market changes. Consumer sentiment changes, demand from their shareholders, whatever it is, the business is not a static thing, yet our [00:08:00] technology evolves at a much slower rate than that.

Christian: Uh, if every quarter we're making a minor adjustment to our strategy, our technology is not advanced to that. We can't replace the ERP solution that we have in place when we go from being. Wholesale to direct consumer, because we're making that kind of massive strategic change. So that's a big part of it is we're just not able to move the technology at the speed of change that the business needs.

Christian: The other part is that, well, technology is at the process of, I mean, as we develop technology, as we're writing code, we're learning more and more about the business as developers and technologists, and we're getting more specific. And as you do that, you have to adapt the technology as you learn, right?

Christian: But I thought we were going to do it this way. I thought that's what the customer was asking for or the user needed. And I found out later that that wasn't quite right. Or what also occurs quite frequently is people leave the organization. Whether it's the person that was using [00:09:00] the tool or the person that developed the tool, when they leave, a lot of knowledge is lost, and so a lot of the reasons decisions are made gets lost with that.

Christian: And so technical debt comes in myriad, myriad forms. Some of the most impactful and most important ones, though, are simple things like legislation change. There's new requirements on privacy around data in the EU. You know, that's not new today, but that happened fairly recently. And those types of things have a profound impact on what the technology itself has to do.

Christian: How it protects the data, how it shares the data, how it moves that data around, for example. And if the technology can't adopt at that rate, you're in breach of major laws, subject to fines, litigation, all kinds of fun stuff. Then there's also the security vulnerability piece. People are finding new, well especially with new AI tools, people are able to find exploitable opportunities within existing systems at a much faster pace.

Christian: And if we can't respond in time by being able to fix and patch those problems at speed, then our [00:10:00] systems become much more risky to exploit through cybercrime. So there are many ways technical debt can impact business, and some of them are existential, right? That litigation problem, that problem of the law is changing, and it's having to adapt for the cyber security risks can put a multi billion dollar business

Mehmet: Absolutely. Um, one thing, uh, you know, again, to the point about innovation and AI, I won't keep it to, you know, to bridge, uh, two ideas together. I would say now we've talked about, you know, the technical depth and its impact. And of course, you at Fallow AI, how, how you are on this mission to do this now, but if we want to.

Mehmet: Take more a kind of a 30, 000 feet view, I would say. And if I want to look at the broader landscape, um, [00:11:00] how do you see AI in general impacting, you know, innovation? Across different industries. And do you think, like, this is something that can go in the same speed and pace across all industries? Or, you know, some they will go faster, while others will be kind of a little bit, uh, last movers?

Christian: That's a tough one to answer. I think it falls down in the same way that when the, uh, the World Wide Web actually happened. In 1994, the first browser came to the World Mosaic. And, um, all of a sudden, the entire, all industries started. Transforming some of them very, very rapidly because they were largely just information industries anyway.

Christian: You can think of things like news and, uh, message passing, things like that, where it was just information. And so of course it was going to be disrupted earlier. Things like, I don't know, selling furniture are going to be much, much [00:12:00] later because the traditional process of buying something like furniture doesn't happen in a way that's easily Move to the web civilly.

Christian: I think that our industries are going to be affected by AI in a sequence of I would call them tiers of industries. There are those that are easily disrupted by this technology now, because, uh, what is being done today without AI is easily reproducible with today's AI. Customer service is an area where I would expect there to be rapid, rapid replacement with AI.

Christian: I think that's happening. Um, research and writing, things that are easily done with AI tools today. Are going to be rapidly disrupted. I would argue that like a lot of software development, and especially the, the, the things around software development, uh, QA and the automation of that DevOps and the automation of that, those are going to be rapidly changing because of tools like AI.

Christian: [00:13:00] But I think that like any other technology that humans have created in our long existence, there's a huge upside as well as there's the risk that comes along with it. And the upside is that. I think that it largely frees us from the mundane and trivial tasks, like the fact that I can write software in a dozen different languages.

Christian: Is, uh, it's cool for me, but like, it's not cool. It's like my wife gets no benefit from that other than the paycheck that I was able to drop the ability to use the technology in a way that it understands us and it can derive the intent from that. And then act on that is a huge enabler of, uh, innovation.

Christian: And I'll use an example of, uh, how I've seen this in action at a large company. When I was at Nike, I was brought in as their entrepreneur when I injected digital DNA and built up their direct to consumer, uh, digital organization. They have incredibly intelligent people, very [00:14:00] passionate and very creative people throughout the organization and marketing and design and, you know, all across the org.

Christian: And then we have the, the digital team that was there, you know, building tools. But when you can bridge those two teams, where you can take the Technically capable person, you know, individuals, and you could pair them with the people that have the great problem that needed to be solved in the, you know, maybe technology would solve it when you paired them together.

Christian: You were able to do amazing things and whole new product lines, whole new innovations in the industry occurred. Nike ID came out of that, which is the design a shoe on an app or on a website and then have it delivered to your home. That was somebody in the design team that came to us and said, I have this idea.

Christian: And then the digital team was able to disrupt it, taking out the need for us to go to a group of people which has cost and time association and be able to use a new technology like AI to do that, like freeze [00:15:00] innovation up at a rapidly accelerating pace. And at some point, theoretically, you have, you know, a act of doing it on its own and it's transforming entire industries.

Christian: Without the need of human intervention, although I do think it takes human being desire in an attempt to drive it. Absolutely. I 

Mehmet: agree with you, Christian. Now, it's good that you mentioned these examples. I don't like to ask loaded questions, but I have to merge these two together. So now, how important culture is?

Mehmet: Because, you know, like you, you just said it, but you might have like smart people, bright people over there, but you know, sometimes we feel, and I always talk to startup founders always about importance of the culture of innovation. So how important the culture of innovation is. Of innovation to be within any team, whether they are in a startup or whether they are [00:16:00] in a big organization, but you and this is how I would relate to the second question and why usually, uh, large organizations.

Mehmet: Adopting and scaling innovation can be challenging. Um, so how, how, how you advise them to handle that? I would say, 

Christian: yeah, it's actually been a tough nut to crack for most people. That have been thrust into that role like that. So you're, whenever you're brought in to become like an innovation leader, like I was with that role at Nike and many others in the past, you're asked to change the culture, frankly.

Christian: I mean, it goes right to that point. The culture of a large organization is really, Impacted by the people that are there. Of course. I mean, the culture is not in a vacuum. It's not something that exists without people are that large, you know, driving factor in it. And what, why large companies tend to have [00:17:00] issue with innovating is multi prong.

Christian: So the first is who are they disrupting by creating this new innovation? If you're a company, again, Nike, again, if you're a company like 90 percent of the basketball shoe market. Disrupting that industry means you're disrupting yourself and you've built an entire company with many people's jobs tied to the performance, KPIs, sales targets, whatever they are around, um, continuing that, you know, dominance.

Christian: And if you come in and you fundamentally put that at risk by disrupting it, by innovating it. You are like really upsetting a lot of people. So within the organization, it's hard to overcome that for good reason. You're also putting at risk the revenue associated with that company. It's very difficult to come back.

Christian: So that's the first part you're, you have to overcome the existing, uh, mountain that is that company success today. The second part is that a large company is [00:18:00] usually drawing a certain type of. Person towards it. Now, if you're if you're drawn towards innovation disruption, you're very comfortable with change generally, because that's what you're trying to drive and you don't go to a big company to do that for a bunch of reasons.

Christian: But the 1st is, it's very difficult to do that there. But the 2nd is big companies are. Much more known for being stable, reliable, comfortable, safe places to work. So the type of person who applies for a job at a big company doesn't tend to crave change and to try to drive an innovation. So you have the problem of the people that have been drawn towards it.

Christian: So how do you create that culture, that cultural shift in that space? Uh, personally, I have cheat code that I use. I would look for one major technology project that needed to be done for whatever reason, and I would bring in an outside like solutions integrator or [00:19:00] somebody like that because they brought in new blood, you know, bringing in contractors that were, you know, You know, at a large agency where they get to see many different projects across many different industries and many different companies, they've been implementing best practices with the newest technology, and they have a very certain profile that they tend to fit, which is one that you want in that innovative.

Christian: You're making a big company, so you bring in that new blood as part of that effort. And the other big thing you were able to do is eliminate a big chunk of technical debt. And one of my favorite projects to do in the past was like a cloud migration from an on premise data center, because it forced you to look at all the different pieces of the technology stack and evaluate whether or not.

Christian: You should replace it wholesale if you could move it to the cloud for whatever reason it was possible to do that. Uh, so you had to ask a lot of tough questions of the business. The combination of erasing a big chunk of the legacy technology, And bringing in a new perspective, [00:20:00] uh, often gave you the critical mashing needed to shift the culture in an equal way.

Christian: The other thing that I would do, if that, you know, if that didn't work, you try a couple of times. But the other thing is to try to, I don't like creating like a, a startup lab within a company, but it can work. And that's what I ended up doing at Nike was we created Valiant, which was a, uh, digital, digital innovation lab within the, uh, Nike company.

Christian: But you have to have engagement from the rest of the organization. It can't be done in isolation. You can't just say, okay, we're going to go over here and we're going to think start smart thoughts and we're going to come up with something. No, you needed that input from the business on, um, things, the problems that they were dealing with and opportunities to transform in an interesting way and the best way I've gotten to do that was to really treat it like almost like hackathons, except much more like a pitch deck, you know, somebody coming in with a pitch like shark tank almost.

Christian: And then pitching it to the development team and the development team, breaking up into [00:21:00] teams to go chase the different opportunities that there present a, uh, like a very basic prototype and then everybody to decide as a group, like which one we're going to invest in long term filled out and that gave the people within the organization, like a big profile bump, if you weren't in the innovation team, but your project got picked up, that was a very cool thing.

Christian: If you could show up on your annual bonus, like as a. Hey, you had this big impact. Um, potentially if it was the one that got picked up, you'd probably get pulled into the team for a duration, which was a neat new opportunity for you too. So it was a good way of injecting a bit of excitement into people that otherwise would not have been able Uh, I would say approximate, but hadn't been close to an innovation center like that and give them all the, you know, the social benefits that go along with that as well as potentially the financial ones.

Christian: And so, uh, there are many ways you can attack it. Those are the two that I found have been the best way to try and solve the culture problem, because [00:22:00] bare minimum, you're going to have to change some amount of technology, some amount of people. Impact the culture in any meaningful way. And your point earlier about like COBOL in the stack, there are some places where the legacy technology is intractable and you're going to have, you're going to have a very difficult time ever replacing it because the.

Christian: Individuals who created and anybody even evaluated are long since out of the workforce and you know, they can't come in and tell you why technology does what it does. That problem, eliminating that piece of tech, that is the most difficult part. And if your culture is very, very tied to those legacy technologies, for whatever reason, like in banking, they tend to be.

Christian: It's near impossible to make that shift.

Mehmet: Absolutely. Uh, on that point, this I face it because I worked in the field, you know, and the last thing you mentioned, I used to see it a lot. And now another thing we, you know, which is a takeaway, I can say companies that [00:23:00] I've seen, they do, uh, what this kind of, sometimes they call them, like, Entrepreneurship, uh, programs within the organization.

Mehmet: So at least, you know, they encourage, you know, people to go and come up with new ideas and they don't call them hackathon, uh, necessarily, but yeah, now there's an element, I think, Christian, which is also important, which is leadership. I mean, from leadership perspective, sometimes you need to do a balance between innovation and at the same time, you know, you have the board, and you know, you need to go there and tell them about also the risks associated to that.

Mehmet: Now, from your experience, like what is the best way to have this balance between, um, you know, innovating and the realities, I would say, of, of proper risk management. And probably maybe sometime [00:24:00] it's like resource constraints. So how they can still, you know, manage to be innovative, innovative and, you know, be in this culture that you just mentioned.

Christian: Yeah. So you're always up against that risk versus reward problem. When you're a smaller organization that doesn't have a lot of revenue or a lot of customers, the risk level is pretty low and all the, Everything's potential, everything's opportunity. Once you're at a certain scale that, that inverts and your board becomes a lot more, uh, the pain, a lot more attention to the risk side of it.

Christian: And as the CEO, you end up spending more of your time trying to mitigate risks than you do about like trying to increase productivity or trying to transform them in a meaningful way. But this is actually the innovators dilemma or, um, what often happens in big companies and big industries is they get intractable and then somebody comes in and Fundamentally alters the entire industry by being super disruptive and innovative.

Christian: And so when you have to always keep in front of the board and the other executive [00:25:00] leaders, when you're in that role is every time we're not the ones doing the major innovation, we have to have a strategy to respond to it. Either we're going to have to have an acquisition strategy to go acquire the people that are doing this, and that's not a bad strategy, that actually works very, very well, is let somebody else take the risk, let them figure out the right way to do it, and then we're going to acquire them, but you better be ready to acquire them and integrate it directly, so you've got to have that plan in place, or we have to be the ones doing the disruption, because That innovation, that disruption is an existential risk to the business.

Christian: So when you're putting it on the tally sheet and trying to determine like, well, how risky is it to do this thing? I would always say that we're risking the entire business by not doing it. Somebody else can come in and completely obliterate our market position if they did this thing. And that's what you're going to measure, be measured against.

Christian: So if you're looking at something and it's pretty minor, the opportunity they're looking at [00:26:00] going, well, okay, moving this direction is going to give us a 5 percent revenue bump. What, and if you lost it, it's going to hit our, our top line revenue by, you know, a quarter. One or 2%, uh, that's not worth risking business over, but if it's, if it's something that you look at and go, Oh my goodness, it, it has the potential of, uh, pushing us out of the market because it could be so transformative.

Christian: A good example of a place where that happened in the early nineties was, um, in the United States, we had us decks, which was the yellow pages, the phone book, and in 1996, they got the opportunity to buy, uh, the, the I don't remember which of the companies it was, but it was basically a company building a phone book online and they laughed because they were the dominant.

Christian: Like everybody has a phone book out there everywhere. Two years later, they were effectively out of business because all that information had moved online. And it was largely because the, the company didn't [00:27:00] understand what it really was, the value that it created. It thought of itself as the physical phone book rather than the information within it.

Christian: So it's very critical if you want a company to stay on top of its market, if you're already there, or to become top of the market, is to understand the value you provide. What, what are you giving your customers that nobody else is? And when you know that, you can evaluate everything that's coming up and decide whether or not It's a risk or not.

Christian: If the board doesn't understand that, if you don't understand that, you have no chance of having that conversation. So it's critical you have that first, but then you just weigh in against it. Is this an existential risk or not? 

Mehmet: Now, let us look at all this, you know, fast moving, changes with AI from little bit founder or, uh, entrepreneurs perspective.

Mehmet: So how do you think, you know, to [00:28:00] be founders or existing founders, they can cultivate on, on, on this speed, especially, you know, and it doesn't matter whether it's in, in, in the B2B space, in the D2C space. You know, are you seeing, you know, some, some opportunities for more startups that can leverage this to, to serve, uh, whether like B2B or B2C customers?

Christian: I actually have a whiteboard in my office here that is covered in concepts, the areas where there's specific pain that can be solved with a clever AI solution. Uh, unfortunately, I'd like, I'm going to give the opposite of what I have normal advice I would normally give, and I'm going to be, uh, be the hammer.

Christian: The issue is, uh, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail and with AI, everything looks like it should be solved by it's very much one of those hammers. And the last thing you should have. Is they a technology looking for a problem to solve, but in this [00:29:00] particular case, there's so many opportunities.

Christian: There's so many things that you could be doing with it that it's not a bad question to ask right up front. There are areas within our, um, information society that are very difficult for people to overcome. Now, Google search was the dominant. Information finding, fact finding, um, for the last 20 years. It was the dominant player there.

Christian: I believe that in this new world in which I have a AI tool and maybe it's voice, maybe it's chat, whatever, in which I can ask it to do anything for me. And I'm thinking of like the rabbit, I think of the capabilities of that and say, okay, great. Now, how do I get accurate information about the things I can ask it to do?

Christian: I'm planning a trip to Bangalore and I need to, you know, hotel, flight, rental car, whatever. Uh, when I get there, I'm going to ask this [00:30:00] assistant to do it. And maybe it knows enough about me to make good decisions. But how do I, how do I find out if my dominant way of getting information is now through that tool?

Christian: So finding ways of solving that information and trust issue that comes along with information. One of the reasons Google was successful is they cracked the trust problem. A lot of the earlier search engines like, I asked Jeeves or Yahoo search, or there's a whole bunch of them. Uh, they just weren't as good convincing you that the information they were sharing was accurate.

Christian: They didn't create that trust. And I believe that in the Apex space, we're gonna have a very similar thing where. I might get to trust that handheld device because it's with me all the time. Like, I do trust my iPhone and various apps on it because I use it all the time. But, uh, when it comes to things like brand awareness, what's the best quality service I'm going to get, those things need to be addressed with this new technology [00:31:00] in ways that they haven't been yet.

Christian: Uh, that's the first place to think of because it's the first thing that gets transformed. That information piece is the first industry that will get fundamentally altered by the same technology. So what are the other places where information is the thing being passed around? Advertising is another one.

Christian: Advertising in the world of, you know, search was dominated by SEO. You know, search optimization, Google ads, social media came out. You also have, which honestly, social media is in a way, another form of, um, content proliferation and sharing that search was also doing just it with my friends telling me it was valuable information instead of.

Christian: Google search on it was valuable information, but that, that, how do I find out about the things that I might be interested in and how do I find out if it's the things that are right for me, that's been handled by advertising and most of the world for the last 60 years and [00:32:00] advertising hasn't really changed a lot in that time period.

Christian: But now with our different way of accessing all the information that's available in the world, uh, there has to be another way of doing that discovery. That's just information. So it's going to be around those spaces first, although, you know, with the rate of change that's happening within the AI space already, who knows in six months, we might be talking about how, uh, you know, we use AI tools to design furniture that's printed in our homes for all I know.

Mehmet: This is my problem. Whenever I discuss AI on my podcast, I need to push it out as fast as possible because I'm afraid that we discussed something and, you know, after, um, Two weeks or three weeks from now, things completely changed. So, uh, absolutely. And by the way, just know, I will give an example today. I mean, early morning for me, you know, I've, I've seen this, uh, uh, tweet about on X about, uh, I think [00:33:00] it's called, uh, Devin, you know.

Mehmet: Oh yeah, 

Christian: Devin. Man, that was a high opener because it was something I was trying to build a year ago and I was possible. 

Mehmet: And, and you know, like now from concept perspective, I repeated this multiple times. Even, I remember exactly same time last year, I was still doing solo on my, on my podcast. I wasn't having the, the interview format, because I start to read about the concept of agent in AI.

Mehmet: And, you know, like there was, uh, auto GPT, there was baby GPT, these kinds of things now, regardless of what framework people were using and talking about, what attracted me was the concept of having multiple AI agents that they talk to each others. And then, you know, someone can orchestrate. Pretty much same as a product manager in software development.

Mehmet: And then you give a task to UI guy, you give another task to, um, you know, the software engineer to write the code. And then you might [00:34:00] give it to a QA engineer. And of course like probably there will be A way to talk to customers also as an agent as well, and we've seen some example of this now in the I would say in the middle of this storm, uh christian What is the future is holding specifically in in?

Mehmet: In our jobs as technologists like I mean, do you think we we we we're gonna become all of us product managers having ideas? Or even I would say Yeah, product managers, chief technology officers, that we have ideas, we just give it to AI and then I will Build it to us. Is this where we're heading really?

Christian: Yeah. Yeah, it is Uh, I so I went down the same path when it was baby AGI and those different tools came out I actually created one also called brother and it was Kind of making fun of big brother and some of the other names that were going to uh, you know, AI bad sideline movies, but [00:35:00] uh You The, the reality is that that statement I made earlier about the non technologist is going to be able to sit down and tell the computer what it wants the way that it, you know, in a way that the person understands the computer will learn, you know, it'll understand and be able to respond to.

Christian: Devon was just the newest example of that same thing, you know, a baby AGI, a brother, uh, being able to take your intent. Now brother did the exact same thing you were describing. That's one that I abandoned as a product idea almost right out of the gate. Because, um, it's very possible today to build a tool like that.

Christian: That builds a simple solution that sits down and makes a app maybe, but to build something that can coordinate the actions of a bunch of enterprise technology solutions, like ERP, CRM, you know, all the pieces of the logistics chain, like the WMS, et cetera, that's a different beast. And. I do believe though that that's happening very rapidly.

Christian: The technology is [00:36:00] evolving towards that. I wrote a paper three or four months ago talking about ASA, which is automatic software adaptation where the technology will be, by using a bunch of AI agents, the technology will adapt and change based on input from customers, the business. And, uh, report bugs and all that, that it'll use agent architecture as a kind of a swarm sitting over top of it that'll constantly be updating it and fixing it.

Christian: And that's already happened. Devin was a great example of how that'll be done, too. So what does that turn our types of roles into? Uh, there is still the need for the high level architectural understanding of how it all interconnects. You're still going to, for a considerably long time, have, uh, systems throughout it that still need to be integrated with, still need to be understood, and somebody's got to do the, The check on it to make sure it's not going haywire, going nuts.

Christian: And somebody is going to have to be directing it towards better, more efficient patterns. [00:37:00] Now that doesn't mean that a solutions architect AI, uh, won't exist. That's actually almost exactly what we're building at all. So, uh, those types of roles will be informed by AI better than, uh, more than that will be replaced by that's, that's actually a critical distinction.

Christian: I don't think Devin on its own. Is going to be the, you know, a complete replacement for software engineers. You're still going to need somebody. And it's like, it's like the senior software engineer versus the junior software engineer on a team. Yeah, the junior software engineer can write code, but man, I don't necessarily want it going into production without a senior software engineer going, Oof, don't do that.

Christian: Do this instead, right? There's going to be a period of time in probably the next four or five years where that's actually critically necessary, but after that, I don't know. Um, five years out, you're talking about AGI being live everywhere on every part of this. And at what point does the [00:38:00] human involvement of somebody like a CTO need to be there anymore?

Christian: Uh, I think the role turns largely into more of an administrative evaluator of what's happening and whether or not it's gone haywire or not. It's more of a management than it is of a technologist type role at that point. And it is closer today to a product manager than it is to, you know, the CTO of my past.

Christian: And tomorrow it will be much, much closer to that. You'll see more of a CPO than CTO need. 

Mehmet: Yeah. So it's like, we still need someone to be the, the, the, The mind behind or the doing the steering, I would say, uh, to, to get things now aside or AI by itself, it's, it's something, you know, but I know, and I know you like to talk about this Christian.

Mehmet: I think there's a lot also of other emerging texts, deep texts, whatever you want to call them, that they are also emerging. And I think with AI, they would. [00:39:00] You know, accelerate us even more than we are already in an acceleration mode now. From what you are seeing, because you interact with a lot of, uh, companies, you interact, you know, with a lot of other, uh, tech leaders, and I know you have your own podcast also as well.

Mehmet: So, what, what, what you are seeing from trends perspective in this emerging techs and what we can expect to be the next big thing? 

Christian: Yeah, so there's no question that quantum computing is going to have a massive impact when it finally reaches a level of supportability and, well, frankly, existence, that it's out in the wild.

Christian: It, coupled with AI, has the potential to Fundamentally, I don't know, I guess it was called escape velocity. It has the ability for the technology to transcend the ability of humans comprehension to understanding what it's doing. And that's not that far away. The coupling of that with things like IOT, uh, web, [00:40:00] actually the Web3 trends are quite fascinating to me.

Christian: They're kind of a reversal. Of what's happened with the internet over the last 20 years. So, sorry, this is a, this is a topic that I care about, but I don't like the direction it's gone. The, the initial internet was meant to be a way of distributing knowledge and having it broken up into many different departments so that it couldn't be controlled from any one entity.

Christian: You couldn't have a government come in and censor all information. For example, it was done for military originally because they needed that ability to have like a. You know, entire army get captured and not lose all the information and still be able to connect up the rest of the reports. And over time, though, the web became something that became largely centralized because of platforms like Google and Facebook, where most people spend most of their time when they're on the internet, the trend in web three towards.

Christian: Like a decentralized view of the web and it's computing and having information stored, you know, for you in [00:41:00] your environment is a fascinating thing that has the potential to, again, fundamentally alter the way that we, uh, access information on the world. And the fact that we can move it onto our, our, uh, local devices, our phones, and we can travel around with that knowledge and information and interact with each other in interesting ways.

Christian: A lot of potential, but I'm not seeing it turn into anything meaningful yet. Unfortunately, the, the activities of building like, um, NFTs and coins, like, you know, all the, all the various clients, I think it's just complete nonsense because they, they're taking something that was meant to be a simple task, the transfer of value in the form of like money from one party to another.

Christian: Uh, it's very easy with paper. It's very easy with our existing technologies and they turn it into something that's difficult. So that was a weird direction to go, but, uh, the technology is still has a potential. When you [00:42:00] add in things like drone technology and some of the very rapid advancements that are happening with battery tech and even wireless charging.

Christian: Uh, there's a drone technology company. I think they were based in Russia. Now they're based somewhere in the United States. Where they're the drink, the drums can stay up perpetually because they're using, um, wireless technology to, to charge the batteries while it's in flight. So they don't have to come down to land.

Christian: When you start coupling these things all together, uh, you start to have, like I said, there's, there's a point where the technology reaches escape velocity and it transcends our ability to predict where it's going to go. The sci fi world of my youth is already the truth. And we're past it in a lot of ways.

Christian: And the sci fi world of tomorrow looks like magic to us already. So there are a lot of technologies that are fascinating vision. Most of them are really closely tied to AI though. The self driving car [00:43:00] is still kind of in the future, but you know, I own a Tesla and when I first got it, I could summon it.

Christian: It still does that. Right. So it can drive itself to a degree that can change entire industries, make our world safer. The EV tool, uh, flying technology eliminates the need potentially for roads. There's, there's so many things happening and it's happening so fast. That's actually very difficult to stay on top of anymore, which was exciting and terrible, right?

Christian: It is 

Mehmet: very exciting. Because you can't 

Christian: predict it. You look into the future and go, well, what's going to happen in five years? And like, five years is an infinity. Every three months, the advances in AI are so profound that they're hard to imagine. Devon came out a week ago and it's, you know, it's something that none of us thought would happen for five years, just three months ago.

Mehmet: Yeah, absolutely. Because I remember, you know, when I started, when I decided to start my podcast and it was like beginning of 2023 when still chat GPT wasn't new. So, you know, like I was saying, [00:44:00] okay, I think the trend in five to 10 years. And then I said, Hey, hold on one second. I think I need to change the statement because.

Mehmet: Five, 10 years is the infinity, as you said. And then I start to, once I start to have guests, I figured out I can't even ask for one year. I should ask in a couple of months from now, because things are moving so fast. Uh, and, and, you know, to your point, Christian, like. A lot of things are changing and you know you when you mentioned like you're the You know sci fi of your childhood is already there and actually yes, like I remember, you know Watching the cartoon with people, you know talking using their watches and you know having this Thing you put on your head, and then you start to see a different world, like all what you're seeing with, like, the Apple Vision Pro and all these things.

Mehmet: Talking to a, to a computer and answering you in a smart way. What could I say? Like, this is my childhood. The one 

Christian: I left off, but I [00:45:00] actually, I've been involved in it for a very long time. I got involved in computer, sorry, yeah. Robots at a young age, too. I got involved in a lot of the competitions for it. I started the robotics club at the university of that, that type of thing.

Christian: And then when 3d printing came into the world, I had worked at Tektronix, had their color printing, imaging division. And the year I took a year between high school and university. And that year I worked in the prototype lab, which was an amazing experience. Building advanced color printers, basic, you know, desktop printers, right?

Christian: But advanced ones. And we had built some very, very, very early 3d printers kind of by accident. Uh, the layers of ink were thick because it was meant to print on t shirts and mugs and things like that. And on one of the things we were printing, which was just a port, I think it built up a bunch of layers and one of the engineers said, Oh my God, we can, we can print in 3d and that turned in like a whole industries come out of that.

Christian: And I think that the future 3d [00:46:00] printing or advanced manufacturing as a whole. Is going to have, it's another one of those things that has a profound impact on our entire lives. And I go actually back to the Nike ID product, because the idea for that was not, I designed it on a phone and then a month later, it shows up at my house after being made in a factory in China.

Christian: The goal was I designed on my phone and I go pick it up on a foot locker in 30 minutes. I go pick up at a local store. That was our goal, but that meant You had assembly robots and 3D printers and, you know, things that could sew and cut and do all the, all the parts of making a shoe there. So advanced manufacturing is one that I'm really excited about, but it's taking a lot longer than like AI.

Christian: Like AI is transforming things every two weeks and advanced manufacturing is on its second decade already. 

Mehmet: It's, it's almost daily basis now, like almost daily basis. I, I keep track as much as I can, of course, but sometime, [00:47:00] uh, I figured out during the weekend, Oh, I miss on this. And I miss on that. Oh, you know, I need to go and review and prepare better next time.

Mehmet: I say to myself, uh, you're saying, you know, it's like very rich, uh, and insightful, uh, discussion today. If you want to leave us with like, One advice and more to fellow founders and fellow CTOs or anyone who's interested in this field what you tell us and where we can find more about you. 

Christian: There's lots of ways you can find more about me, uh, Christian hammer.io, or uh, tech Podcast Tech, astic Tech, or ai.com.

Christian: We're all good places. Also on LinkedIn, on C Hammer one. The thing that I would leave everybody with is this. We don't know where the future's going. It's impossible to predict because it's happening so fast is happening to us. The most important thing you can do is to keep learning, keep evolving, and if you're building a company, know that there's no such thing as a durable mode.[00:48:00] 

Christian: Anybody can, because of things like AI, they can reproduce your technology in a matter of weeks and months. So always be evolving, always be innovating. That's how you win. 

Mehmet: Absolutely. It's, it's something that I think it's important more than any time before. I'm fan of, you know, uh, being in what I like to call the blue ocean space.

Mehmet: And, and now with AI, to your point, you really need to be doing something. Of course, I'm not saying they will not be able to copy you, but make, you need to be really innovative. You really need to come up with. Crazy ideas I would say to to be there. So thank you for this advisation I really appreciate the time that you know, you you spent with with me today and all the Uh stories and all the experience that that you shared with us.

Mehmet: I really appreciate that and final word This is due to the audience. This is how I usually end my episodes So [00:49:00] if you just discovered this podcast by luck, thank you for passing by. I hope you enjoyed Please if you did subscribe tell your friends and colleagues You About it and if you are one of the loyal fans that keep coming back Thank you very much for your support and for your advices and for your suggestions Keep them coming and stay tuned for a new episode in very very soon time.

Mehmet: Thank you. See you. Bye