#398 Building Value in Big Data: Tommy Ogden’s Take on Analytics, Frameworks, and AI

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Mehmet: Hello and welcome back to a new episode of the CTO show with Mehmet. Today I'm very pleased joining me, Tommy Ogden. Tommy, thank you very much for being here today with me on the show. The way I love to do it is I keep it to my guests to introduce themselves. So tell us a bit more about [00:01:00] you, your journey and what you're currently up to.

Mehmet: And then we can, of course, deep dive in the topics of consultation and everything related to data analytics and all this. So. The floor is yours.

Tommy: Mehmet, and thank you for having me on. So my name is Tommy Ogden. I am a director at Activera Consulting. We are a boutique management consulting and I. T.

Tommy: advisory firm for oil and gas based in Houston, Texas. I am the director, but also the Pillar lead for our delivery excellence pillar, delivery excellence is project program and portfolio management as well as agile transformation. And over the past 15 years as a consultant, I've been focused on projects primarily in the big data and analytics space.

Tommy: I graduated with my MBA from the university of Houston. And a master of global management from the Thunderbird, uh, international school of business, and then started working with a boutique firm doing project and [00:02:00] program management did that for six or seven years. And our small firm was then bought by Accenture.

Tommy: So, uh, that's how I made it into, into the big one. Uh, and I stayed there for about four years and then decided, you know, I liked the boutique management style, to be honest, uh, you know, it was great working for Accenture, lots of smart people doing lots of good work, but just personal preference wise, wanted to go back into a boutique consultancy.

Tommy: And so actually got back together with a few of the folks from the original boutique firm and we started, and so I co founded Active Era Consulting. And so now we, we work with oil and gas clients, um, including super majors and majors, and even some of the smaller players as well, doing a lot of technology projects for them.

Mehmet: That's cool. And again, thank you, Tommy, for being here with me today. What a journey I would say now. You know, just out of curiosity from you mentioned something which, you [00:03:00] know, attracted me. I don't say I didn't prepare that question. Sure. Um, I hear it a lot from people like, of course, they enjoy the experience of working with like someone like the big force as we know them.

Mehmet: Um, is it like it's more, um, kind of, uh, Having freedom of your own frameworks when you do these consultancies, is it like, you know, like more flexibility, like what is exactly for you, you know, having this, uh, you know, preference to, to, to work as, as a boutique firm rather than, than a big one.

Tommy: Yeah, yeah, it's a good question.

Tommy: And it truly is that that personal preference that you described. There's some people that start their careers out of undergraduate at a big firm like an Accenture or Deloitte or a Bain or a BCG or McKinsey or whatever it may be. And they're there for 30, 40 years. Plus years and then they retire and they love it, right?

Tommy: The entire time. [00:04:00] For me personally, uh, it was a bit of a change going from a 100 person boutique firm to, I believe the last time I checked it was 743, 000 people at Accenture, literally the largest consulting firm in the world. And so as you might imagine, there are some differences. One of them is, uh, it being a public company.

Tommy: Right. Sort of being beholden to shareholders and worrying about the stock price. Uh, there is naturally with an organization that large, uh, some hierarchy, uh, and that doesn't exist as much in a boutique firm, right? I'm, I'm able to, to send a text to the managing partner at active era and he'll respond within a minute.

Tommy: Right. If I tried to reach out to Julie sweet, the CEO of Accenture, not so much. I don't even have her number. So that, that hierarchy is something that I, I didn't personally like. I prefer a flat hierarchy as well. And you know, there's less political [00:05:00] jostling and bureaucracy as well at a smaller firm. So for a number of those reasons, it just fits with my personality better to, to be part of a smaller firm.

Mehmet: Got you. Of course. That's indeed, uh, something which personally also, I prefer, uh, you know, working with startups versus working like with like big firms respect for all, of course. But yeah, I can, I can relate also from personal perspective to what you're mentioning here, Tommy. Um, you know, you emphasize about having, you know, from a consultant perspective, Inventory of, uh, frameworks.

Mehmet: Um, so explain to me more about this and when to use which I would say this would be the next up question.

Tommy: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So I'll tell you a story of how it came about and sort of our. Uh, active era consulting and my personal, uh, belief [00:06:00] in frameworks was, was in business school, right? You're learning all sorts of different things.

Tommy: You've got strategy classes and finance classes and supply chain classes. And you, you, if you're going into consulting, you're thinking, okay, well, I'm coming in. Uh, I'm a fresh graduate. I'm going to hit the ground day one, Monday morning, a client is going to come to me with a problem. I'm gonna have to solve it using all of the knowledge that I've gained over the past few months.

Tommy: And so for me personally, I was I was a little paralyzed with fear, sort of deer in headlights, like what? You know, how am I going to go about solving this problem? And one of the things that we've realized over our decades of consulting experience is that You don't have to start from scratch, right? You can, as it, as it, the phrase goes, right, stand on the shoulders of giants.

Tommy: I mean, over the past hundred years, folks in academia and, and great business leaders and business minds have come up with these frameworks that allow you to logically [00:07:00] structure an approach to a problem. Right. To get an answer. And all you need to do is understand, like you said, Mehmet, like, how do you pick which one to apply to which situation and then customize, tailor, make it fit for purpose for the client situation that you currently have.

Tommy: And so the way we are going about solving that is we're actually in the midst of engaging a university, the University of Houston. Um, to help come up with an inventory of frameworks right with our own personal experience as well as some research, come up with a list of those classify them effectively across a number of different variables and create a lightweight recommendation engine so you can go to a site.

Tommy: Plug in some of the variables related to the problem that you're, you're having in front of a client or otherwise. And then it, the engine will spit out the top three recommended frameworks for approaching that type of problem. So that's how we're [00:08:00] going about solving it in, in a more scalable way. Um, but I, I think if you try to take a SWOT analysis, Right.

Tommy: Which everyone's heard of SWOT, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, and you just cookie cutter, you know, uh, try to apply that framework to every single problem you come across. It's not going to be the right fit, but there are frameworks out there for every type of problem. I'm, I'm definitely a believer in that.

Tommy: And we're just trying to find a way to scale that effectively.

Mehmet: That's really cool, you know, to, to understand that from your perspective, Tommy, with of course, the experience that you have. Um, so. Also while preparing for, for the episode, like I've seen that you mentioned that the best consultants use structured approaches, uh, while retaining flexibility.

Mehmet: So of course I didn't do consultancy in the sense of, you know, the way you did it, but you know, maybe on a smaller scale. [00:09:00] And one of the things, especially when I was, you know, shifting my career, I would say towards like That kind of job is balancing between, you know, this flexibility and, you know, things that change fast versus the structure, right?

Mehmet: So, so, so you have a, you have the framework, let's say, right? So, so you are giving, you are giving something, but next day, and especially AI, right? So you go, you go today and you, I know like you work with energy sector, which is. pretty much, you know, up to some time it was like, yeah, these are the guys who changed like very slow.

Mehmet: But recently, and I'm talking from a perspective, I live in the UAE, you know, in, in, uh, in Dubai and, you know, the big, the big ones are very close to me. So I've seen them like transforming also very, very fast. Um, so. Tell me more about what, what's your approach to, to, to that.

Tommy: Sure. Yeah. So [00:10:00] I think you're right.

Tommy: First of all, about that trend, uh, the, the concept, uh, of digital transformation, uh, was, was the buzzword at, at energy companies, you know, we'll say seven, eight years ago, uh, everybody, you know, all the super majors, everyone's getting involved. The, the national oil companies trying to understand Yeah. What does that mean for their organization?

Tommy: You know, how can they take cloud, mobile, internet of things, industrial internet of things, analytics, right? Put all of these things together, uh, and essentially provide an R. O. I. For their business. And to me, that's what a digital transformation is, right? Trying to leverage all of those different technologies effectively.

Tommy: And the problem that has happened Come from that, right? It's a great thing and it's what's needed to, to have a competitive advantage in today's society. But the problem is, is that a lot of people try things, they do proofs of concept, right? POCs or pilots. [00:11:00] Where they'll, they'll have an idea and then they'll try it, right?

Tommy: And it, it sort of gets stuck there. In fact, I was on a panel the other day and one of the other panelists said, uh, one of their clients had more pilots than Lufthansa. I thought that was pretty clever. Um, but that, that's true, right? And, and these companies are just trying these things and they're maybe even proving out some value, but they're not able to scale.

Tommy: Right? And that's how you go about getting the value out of these things. It's not in doing a pilot. And so that's where, when you're talking about having flexibility of, you know, pushing the envelope in a number of different directions, uh, and having sort of an innovative culture to, to bring that along, but then having that structure in place in order to scale it effectively to the broader organization, if that's how you go about getting the value.

Tommy: And that's the hard part, right? Any, any data scientists, uh, can on their local machine solve [00:12:00] You know, X, Y, and Z number of problems, but when you try and put that out to an entire group of reservoir engineers, um, or drilling and completions folks, there's, there's adoption challenges, there's, uh, technology availability and connectivity challenges, and there's all sorts of things that you run into.

Tommy: And if you don't have that, that good foundational structure, uh, then you're not going to be able to scale effectively. And so that's, I think that balance that you're describing between flexibility and structure.

Mehmet: Absolutely. You know, and I liked, uh, I like when you mentioned about the, um, you know, the things, how digital transformation was the buzz and, you know, like all, all these things, uh, over there.

Mehmet: So, Like if I want to to to put it in another way, right? So, um, What would be? today, you know the Right [00:13:00] approach to have proper, you know, I would say What's called like, uh, pre product development, right? So so so if I want to to put the processes right and to avoid falling in the pitfalls that companies Should avoid during this phase.

Mehmet: So so what what what you can tell us about that?

Tommy: Okay. Yeah, sure. So I think having everyone's heard of the three like people, process and technology, right? I mean, you got to have the right people. You got to let's say it's an analytics product. Okay, we're talking data scientists, data engineers, probably more important than data scientists to a certain degree.

Tommy: Um, machine learning engineers. Right. You've got to have product owners in the business that understand the problem that they're trying to solve and can, you know, bring, uh, prioritized requirements together. So you've got to have the right people. You've got to have the right technology, right? Which cloud providers have made pretty easy, but there are, you know, more targeted analytics, uh, like ML [00:14:00] ops platforms.

Tommy: So, yeah. Like domino data lab is an example or data robot, for example, and, and those tools allow your people to be effective, right? They can, they can get access to GPUs and compute. They can reuse code that has already been created from patterns that they've used in the past. Those platforms allow them to sort of standardize things around governance and policy as well.

Tommy: So that's the people and the technology side. And what you're describing is really more the process. And having a good end to end operating model for building any product analytics or otherwise is, is absolutely key. And what we've seen work, especially in the pre product space, like you're describing is having a really good intake process.

Tommy: So under having a, a wide ranging and well known, right? The entire company is aware of the process for submitting an idea for a specific. Use case, right? Let's say in [00:15:00] analytics again, you have an analytics idea, put it in here. There's a group of people that are dedicated to tracking those ideas and triaging them effectively, right?

Tommy: Then they will, for the ones that make it to the next step, go through a value, right? A lightweight business case. You'll do some prioritization based on effort, number of resources, cost, ROI. Right. Based on those factors, you essentially get to a prioritized list of products that you want to develop. And that's where the pre product differentiation can occur.

Tommy: Because what you do between the prioritized list and the active development is absolutely key. And the way, the, The way we've seen it done very effectively for our oil and gas clients is, is through design thinking, right? That whole process of trying to understand where you are in the value stream. Okay, then understanding, okay, who are the people that are going to be using the [00:16:00] product that we're developing?

Tommy: Can we create some personas around? petrochemical engineers or geophysicists, right? Who's actually going to be using this thing? Can we do some empathy mapping to try and understand their current state, what they're currently hearing, how they're feeling, what are their problems? What are their pain points, right?

Tommy: Then doing some journey mapping, which is saying, okay, how does a geophysicist go about in their day and where are the pain points across that timeline as they're using the current state product? And then once you've done all of that, right? You can then start getting into the work items, right? Okay. So if this is a pain point they're having, right.

Tommy: If they're, if there's a lot of geologic uncertainty, right. They don't know what's going on under the ground. How are we as a product development team going to tackle that problem so that it, it resolves that pain point. And that's where you start building out your features and your stories and the work that's actually going to get done by the development team and only once you have that built [00:17:00] out, do you actually go into development, right?

Tommy: And so that whole, uh, slot right there between the prioritization of the product. And the active development, right? That needs to be solid and on point in order for the product to eventually be effective.

Mehmet: You know, I, I like, you know, you brought the topic of design thinking, and this brings to me, uh, the way you're, you're describing how you work when you take the approach of design thinking, Tommy, it's very close to even how startups actually, they start to, Um, I see always, you know, the consultants kind of a founders in a different angle, right?

Mehmet: Because what you're trying to do is you're trying to uncover a pain. You're trying to see how big is that pain, right? Um, it's kind of, How much, [00:18:00] uh, you know, when, so when solving this pain, you can give back to the business. Now, before I go into more details, cause I have a follow up question. Have you faced, Tommy, the challenge when working with your clients that of course you're coming to them with the empathy, But have you ever encountered from them kind of a resistance?

Mehmet: Hey, We don't have anything here Go away Stay away from me Not today, right because usually the people they don't like change and when when you're trying to to uncover these so people first reaction usually because they They expect that the change will come because of all what you are doing. So they push back and probably they will not share much of information with you.

Mehmet: So have you saw anything like this? And if yes, like how have you, what was your secret sauce to overcome this, this challenge?

Tommy: Sure. Yes, I have seen that. [00:19:00] Absolutely. Uh, and, and you're right. Change fatigue is what we call it is, is, is pervasive. Across these large organizations, because especially in this digital transformation world we're talking about, you know, you've got the, the technologies that we mentioned, but then there's also blockchain and there's also, you know, robotic process automation.

Tommy: And there's also, uh, climate change, right? And, and all of the energy transition initiatives that are happening. So people are, yeah, they're sick of change and, and they just kind of want to get down to work and, and do their own thing. So how do you go about resolving that? I'd be interested to hear your, uh, your thoughts and insight in from an entrepreneurial perspective, right?

Tommy: And, and these sort of tech founders and how they do that, how we've gone about doing it is, is twofold. One, we ensure that the ideas originate from the business, right? Cause. You, you, you get in it sometimes where a lot of those people, we describe the data engineers and data [00:20:00] scientists and machine learning engineers and all those folks, a lot of time they're in the central IT function of an organization and they have, it can sometimes have this idea of, you know, if you build it, they will come right?

Tommy: And they're trying to solve a problem that they think exists in the business and then they spend all of this time and effort and resources to build that, give it over to the business and say, ta-da. And the business is like, Oh, that's not really anything I can use. So thanks. You know, have a good day.

Tommy: That's a problem, right? And that's kind of what you're describing. If you can shift the onus onto the business person, right? Somebody who is a representative from a business unit or another function and have them talk to their folks and come up with ideas through that funnel, which is why we described.

Tommy: That idea that intake form that it's that it's totally pervasive across the entire company. [00:21:00] Everybody knows about it, right? Because if it's just an I. T. thing, you're only going to get ideas from I. T. But if the business knows about it and they're they're doing a pull. Rather than a push for new products, right?

Tommy: I think that's a better way to approach it and sort of overcome some of the challenges you described. So that's one way we've seen work. The other is just having having that representative, that product owner we talked about earlier from the business, right? And sometimes those product owners have day jobs.

Tommy: And they can't dedicate, you know, a hundred percent of their time to a specific product and its development. And that is a challenge. That is a challenge that you see from an agile perspective. Um, really, but if you can solve that problem, if you can get a dedicated product owner and you can ensure that the ideas are coming from the business, then you alleviate a lot of the challenges you've described.

Mehmet: Yeah, absolutely. Just, you know, again, a lot of thoughts coming to my mind, but to the last thing you mentioned, uh, Tommy, um, [00:22:00] We are recording on the 20th of September. So I think three days ago, and this will be aired sometime in October. So, um, one report by IBM and, uh, you know, it was shared on multiple, uh, you know, outlets and the title that attracted me was business leaders are losing faith in it.

Mehmet: Right. Okay. So, and now back to the consultancy thing and back to, to all this. So I said like, okay, like it's kind of like business leaders want to blame, you know, like, yeah. So these guys, they were talking to us in, in technical jargons. We didn't understand to your point about, you know, understanding the value and all this.

Mehmet: Uh, but I said like, I believe, you know, it's a, it's a, Two side problem I would say like because Honestly, I don't like anymore the word it [00:23:00] information technology, you know, because I think it's so outdated And this is my opinion Of course people can agree or disagree and because you know, we didn't show ourselves as it departments I used to be in an it department, you know 20 years ago.

Mehmet: So I know where the pains come from But because you asked me, how would you do this if from an entrepreneur perspective, and this all will relate together. So the, I think the biggest challenge is to frame the problem itself in a way that we can understand that actually we have a problem. I think this is where the whole thing starts.

Mehmet: And to your point, like just coming up with a solution and then try to see where the problem is. So, and successful entrepreneurs, you know, the way they do it is that actually. They understand the pain and they can explain this pain in a language, which is not too much sale ish, I would say to the tech folks that they say, [00:24:00] Hey, yeah, we can relate to that.

Mehmet: Oh yes, we have such problem. We are facing these challenges. So this is what I've seen like working fine. And of course, back to the design thinking, you mentioned the empathy part of design thinking, because this is why I love design thinking because it works on the empathy, right? And building this.

Mehmet: Relation with, uh, with whatever the stakeholder is, and I've seen this is working, but here I can relate to something which, uh, I know you do very well also, Tommy, which is related to explaining. Everything, you know, you, you, you, you're working on in the form of analytics that can be understood by everyone.

Mehmet: And I know that you have developed some models. that can, you know, help in understanding what is more important [00:25:00] is the value and value tracking. So how do you integrate analytics into these practices to drive real business impact at Activera?

Tommy: Yeah, absolutely. So there you touched on so many points there, but they're all great, right?

Tommy: They're all really good points. Um, so I mean, what was it Einstein or was Feynman or was this, I think it was some physicist, right? Who said, uh, if you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough, right? I mean, it, that's very true. And if you start it. Speaking in technology or, you know, the antiquated term it, uh, which I agree with you, by the way, um, if you start speaking in, in technology jargon, right?

Tommy: You're going to lose people. And as consultants. Uh, and maybe as, you know, innovators and entrepreneurs as well, sometimes you can, you can get stuck in that, in that mindset of that, you know, that consulting speak. And it's very [00:26:00] challenging. I was actually with a client the other day and, uh, I was talking to them about our ecosystem partners, right?

Tommy: And, you know, to me, that was just a normal term. And she looked at me and said, I don't, what, what is an ecosystem partner? Like I, I, I turned a wrench for the first two years of my career. Like, I don't understand what you're talking about and it was a good, you know, shake, uh, of, of myself internally to say, you know, okay, like try to speak in the, in the language of the business, right?

Tommy: It's a good reminder. Because, you know, all too often you get caught up in the acronyms and the, you know, the technology and the jargon and you lose people. And I would say that's also true, uh, from when you're trying to make data driven decisions, right? If, if you've got a, let's say a Power BI dashboard or Spotfire, Tableau, whatever you want, right?

Tommy: And it's, it's just super complicated and you've got an X and a Y axis, but then you've got like Z bubbles on it and there's all sorts of stuff going on. Um, You're going to lose people. [00:27:00] You really are. You need to sort of bare bones down to very simply, how does this affect the decision that I'm trying to make?

Tommy: How can I make this decision better based off of what you're, you're providing me? Right? And so that's really what the business is looking for. What I T or what technology I'll, you know, I don't know how to make it more 21st century. Um, what they're looking for is, is, uh, have you heard of, uh, Rosie? It's, it's like a financial, you know, metrics is return on capital employed.

Tommy: R O C E. Right. Well, these, these VPs of technology, right. These, these CDOs, chief digital officers. They're pouring millions and millions of dollars into these new digital things that we described, the blockchains, the RPAs, the analytics, et cetera. They're looking for roadie, right? They want that return on digital dollars [00:28:00] employed.

Tommy: And in order to do that most effectively, we have found analytics can actually provide the highest return in the shortest term, uh, for those folks to say, Hey, my investment is actually. You know, coming to fruition, and it's it's manifesting a return for for our organization. And so when we looked at standing up, uh, analytic centers of excellence across, you know, our different clients, One of the things that we really put forth as an absolute must have is the concept of value tracking of these things.

Tommy: You don't want to just be stuck in the POC and pilot hell, uh, where you're not getting any value out of these things. So how do we go about tracking that effectively? Well, it starts with that idea phase that we talked about before, when we were talking about the end to end process you need when the business approaches you.

Tommy: Let's say the technology department with an idea, you immediately need to have a back of the napkin math [00:29:00] conversation with them to say, Hey, if we were able to solve this problem you're having, what would that be worth to you? Right? Just back of the napkin math doesn't have to be any, you know, huge formulas, just a range, right?

Tommy: But as you continue through that process, that operating model from triage Into framing and prioritization doing that lightweight business case. You, you continually narrow down that number to something that makes sense, not only for the technology department, but for the business who eventually after that product is developed and deployed.

Tommy: You are going to go back to them and say, Hey, remember that, that number that we came up with? Well, we solved your problem. You've been using the product for six months now. Have you gotten that value out of it? Right? You agreed to the number. We're coming back and we're knocking on your door for that sign off.

Tommy: Right? And the technology department is not signing off on it. No, it's not. It [00:30:00] is the business owner who is responsible for signing off on that value. And that's what the technology team takes back to the chief digital officer and says, look, you gave us an investment of your money. We built this product.

Tommy: It is being used by that business unit. And that business unit sponsor has signed off that here's the return on that money. So that's your roadie. Right. And you have to have that as a well oiled machine or else your analytics program is going to die because you're not able to properly show those wins.

Mehmet: Let me ask you this, Tommy, very quickly, and I know maybe it's a, you know, it requires an episode by itself, but, uh, to implement something like this, how long it takes,

Tommy: I think if you're talking about the value piece in particular, yes, yeah, I think that's fast, honestly, I mean, For the thing that I just described, it's like six months later and there's all this product, right?[00:31:00]

Tommy: I mean, that takes a while because you've got to have a team, you know, get in place and you've got to have some of the, some of the variability in, in analytics challenges, right? So like, you'll have some moonshot things that are really big, you know, multimillion dollars, and then you've got some of the quick win stuff and you've got some things in the middle.

Tommy: Getting that going takes a little bit of time. But if you're just talking about discussing value with the business, capturing some initial low hanging fruit ideas and getting some quick wins, right? With a very small team, you stand that up really fast, right? And then you scale it as the team scales. You take the money that you've saved the business and you reinvest it.

Tommy: Or you go back to that CDO and said, Hey, you gave us a million dollars to get this off the ground. The business has now signed off on 1. 5. Give us another 500, 000. Let's see what we can do, right? Reinvest that money that you've saved the business into scaling the analytics department and it'll pay dividends [00:32:00] over time.

Tommy: But I really think that you can get that up and up and running off the ground quickly.

Mehmet: You know, like, uh, you mentioned that like, it's like acting as a VC. Which is, which is true because this is what, this is what VCs they do. So they have, you know, probably the initial, initial investment, then they track this in firm of a MOIC or IRR or whatever.

Mehmet: And then later, later on, you know, they, they might, if, if, if something is very successful, they might do a follow on investment in that because yeah, like, it looks like. This project, let's say in the sense of consultant, uh, space. Yeah, this is working fine. We should, we should like double the investment there and get the results.

Mehmet: Um, uh, and I think this is where Tommy, people like yourself are very valuable. And I think, you know, What you describe, and this is why I'm relating maybe to the first part of the discussion about [00:33:00] being small agile team from a consultancy firm perspective, because I think you will be able to deliver this faster than and no offense, of course, like to the bigger, you know, consultancy first, because they have these You know, bureaucracy and practices that they need to prepare.

Mehmet: And, you know, the slides and the hundreds of pages of reports that they need to write. Because, you know, and I'm saying this because the way you describe it, very simple, right? And maybe some someone would say, hey, like, yeah, but Tommy's saying it on the podcast. It looks easy, but it's not. But actually, you know, this is why I ask you how long it takes.

Mehmet: And I like when you said, yeah. It takes time, but it's not like something which should take years for us to implement to track the value, which is very, very important. I would say, um, and you know, I'm happy if you see me excited because this is exactly how things should, should, should, uh, should happen in any organization.

Mehmet: Um, so. [00:34:00] Coming back to the trends and, you know, everything in between, how much are you seeing a I not from the custom perspective, rather in the consultancy itself, taking its space like are you seeing some use cases of using a I as a co pilot for you as a as a consultant? What are the use cases you are seeing in that space?

Mehmet: Yeah.

Tommy: So before I answer that, I just, I just want to comment, I guess, on your, your previous, just saying, I guess I didn't realize the corollary between, you know, entrepreneurship and, you know, we're talking VCs and, you know, And, and kind of what we're doing for, like, I do see it now when you describe the, the, you know, it is very similar processes with, you know, the personas and the pain points and the VC funding.

Tommy: And I just, I guess personally, I don't think about it like that. Um, but it really is, there's, there's best practices, right. [00:35:00] Um, in, in that space and, uh, and it makes sense. So. Um, thanks for enlightening me today on, on that aspect of it. Um, so, so yeah, so I think, uh, I think AI is, is just, it's so, oh my gosh, it's just, it's everywhere.

Tommy: It really is. And, and I, you could blame chat GPT for it if you want to, you know, we're coming up on November of 24. I believe it was November of 22. It's been two years ago now. That that came out. It hasn't been three years, but I've never seen organizations react so quickly to a new trend, right? I mean, you, you look at, let's say, cloud computing, you know, back when Azure stood up and AWS and, you know, you, you saw adoption.

Tommy: Um, you saw it, you know, pretty quickly, let's say, but nothing like what you saw with with GPT. [00:36:00] Right. And I think a lot of the reasons why is that people were able to use it in their own personal lives. Right. And then they're immediately, especially boards of directors and, you know, folks who maybe aren't, you know, that technologically advanced, uh, are sitting there saying, why don't we have this in our company?

Tommy: Right. I can go and I can query a bot, uh, and get an answer to anything or it can make up a joke or whatever. Why aren't we applying this to business? Right. And so, Organizations, especially public ones with shareholders are immediately having to respond to that and spin up organizations to answer that question really fast.

Tommy: And so that is a trend that that just caught on like, like fire. I'm sure you've seen those charts Mehmet when it, when it talks about like, uh, adoption or, or a number of users for different apps over time. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And you see, you know, Netflix was like, it took them X amount of months to get [00:37:00] to a million subscribers or whatever it is.

Tommy: Right. But then you, you look at newer and newer applications and it's like days, right? You're getting 10 million. You know, new users in a day on an app, right? That comes out. And, uh, I think it was, was it threads or something from Facebook? It was just like immediate. And so I I'm seeing that trend with, with AI as well.

Tommy: I mean, it's not a new concept. I mean, machine learning and AI has been around since the fifties and sixties and, you know, kind of had a little bump in the eighties and then went away for a while. And now it's, you know, back in its Renaissance, but people have been thinking about this. For the last decade, right?

Tommy: I mean, the term data science, you know, started about a decade ago, but it's describing things that have happened, you know, in the past as well. It's just our compute has caught up with our abilities to do, you know, deep learning, let's say, and, uh, and now we're able to actually get value out of these things, whereas previously it was [00:38:00] prohibitively expensive.

Tommy: And so, you As you're seeing this trend of new adoption, new AI, more compute, more cloud, right? You, you've got this, this snowball effect, uh, with AI going across the world. And, uh, and I, you know, there's going to be another hit coming and AI is only going to get more popular.

Mehmet: Absolutely. And, uh, you know, like this is what, People, especially in the startup world, they call it the hockey stick graph.

Mehmet: So how fast, yeah. So how fast they, they, you see the adoption, the thing to point Tommy, I think the reason why organizations acted fast, uh, exactly. I agree with you because everyone had access to chat GPT when it was launched. So you can't ignore it. Everyone is talking about it. In the news in in on social media, you know everywhere.

Mehmet: So I think no Cto cdo, whatever the title [00:39:00] Is could have ignored it and I think they saw direct threat funny enough, you know is uh, Like people immediately realized because what with the cloud computing and the other, you know, uh, and this is the transformation trend. So people were like, okay, you know, we can't keep doing whatever we are doing.

Mehmet: Nothing will happen. Right. But I think when they saw the use cases is Very fast and you know the new the new startups actually there were like new startup that they were popping still they are popping out Every day, I would say, you know building funny enough building on top of the api of of uh Open ai which is For me, it's like, fantastic, they're just building UIs, wrappers on top of an API and disrupting businesses, right?

Mehmet: So this for me was really, really big. So this brings me, like, what's next for consultancy businesses, Tommy? I would not ask you for the future decades. I would ask you the [00:40:00] coming years.

Tommy: Yes. Well, my, my crystal ball broke on the way over to the interview. So I, I can't see too far into the future. Um, but different businesses.

Tommy: Or different roles within businesses are going to be affected differently, right? So, uh, you saw this with manufacturing, um, right? Where you've got now these robotic arms that are, you know, putting cars together and welding doors, right? And getting things off the factory floor, right? Those, those jobs that used to be Thank you.

Tommy: Done by individuals, right? Or are sort of being automated away to a certain degree. I don't think, um, consulting in general can, can be automated away fully. I think it can be augmented and that's how we really look at AI. Uh, is how can you leverage a tool or a suite of tools? Like you said, there's new ones popping up, you know, every day to augment what we're able to do effectively.

Tommy: Um, but. You're still going to [00:41:00] need people who can take the information that's coming in and put a, an effective strategy together for, let's say, international expansion, right? I don't, I don't expect, uh, I don't expect chat GPT to be able to do that, right? And then manage all of the people and change that we described earlier, right?

Tommy: You've got all this change coming. Uh, and AI isn't going to be able to. To go approach those people and talk to them about the changes that are coming and, you know, get into the empathy side of the house that we've discussed a couple of times, but you can use a I to come up with ideas, right? And you can use it to to scour the web.

Tommy: And if I just used it yesterday at my client, I was trying to we're doing, um, infrastructure is code. If you've heard of Hashi Corp and terraform and trying to instantiate infrastructure, you can use it to instantiate infrastructure. Like through AWS, they've got, you know, EC2 instances or Lambda or S3 [00:42:00] buckets, right?

Tommy: Those kinds of things right now, you just have to go into AWS and kind of click around and then spin them up and then, you know, get credentials over to people. Well, what we're trying to do is, is use infrastructure as code. So you've got some coding that you use to spin that stuff up in a more consistent and standardized way.

Tommy: So that's the project I'm on right now, and that's going to change a lot of people's workflows. Right. Because currently they're used to the ClickOps style. Uh, and now there's a different way. And so as part of our change management and our adoption of this new thing, I went into to chat GPT, I'm not, you know, I'm not embarrassed to say, and I did, I searched, I was like, what are some good options for engaging people on teams and in, in via email so that they, you know, they.

Tommy: Pay attention. Like I want, I want high engagement right now. I got 10 different ideas. Some of them were trash. I [00:43:00] would never, I would never use that. Right. But it's an idea that the chat GPT had, but it allowed me to spark my own mind and like, Oh, that's interesting. How could I use that? To maybe engage this group of people, right?

Tommy: And just to bring it full circle, Mehmet, and this is the last thing I'll say, that's exactly what we're we were talking about earlier with frameworks, right? It's it's looking at a problem that you're trying to solve, coming up with some way to potentially approach it in a structured way, but then tailoring it and customizing it To the problem that you're actually trying to solve, right?

Tommy: And so that's what chat GPT was in that instance to me. It was just a framework that I could query and then take the ideas that came about and customize it to the situation that I was trying to deal with. So, you know, that's it's that's what I do. It's a framework on wheels

Mehmet: This is exactly how I use chat gpt and yeah again for [00:44:00] me and thank you tommy for being transparent like I don't hide You know that I rely Not specifically only chat gpt.

Mehmet: You know, i'm recently i'm With the claude also as well a little bit of gemini, you know, like and to your point like this is exactly because you know Just as final thing I want to say before, you know, we we conclude. Um You The other day I was sitting in a session where people were asked to throw some ideas, right?

Mehmet: And some of them, you know, they were like, I would not call them trash, but you're like, not relevant. Let's put it this way. Um, so, and this is exactly, I think what ChatGPT does and all these LLMs, they actually, they imitate the way us humans, we, we, we do our thinking, right? So you ask a group of people to come up with an idea to solve a specific problem.

Mehmet: So the first two or three, they will be like, eh, you know. Like low quality. And then it was time. People will start to put everything together like it's a kind of a brainstorming session, right? And then you start to see like the good ideas really slowly, [00:45:00] slowly coming out. And I think a I accelerate this to a to an extent that Honestly speaking, I just I want to say this also as well.

Mehmet: I stopped relying on on on search engines and I use now chat GPT, but the same way I used to use the search engine like Google, right? So it's not to write things, but because I know the data is there, but I wanted to extract it in a specific way that. Makes sense to me. Yeah. So finally, Tommy, like let me ask you where people can get in touch with you and find more about, uh, your company.

Tommy: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Uh, so we have active era consulting.com. Uh, it's A-C-T-I-V-E-R-A, uh, so you can find us on the web. Uh, I'm also very active on LinkedIn, so I think it's linkedin.com/in/tommy ogden. But you know, if you search Tommy Ogden, I should be the first thing that pops up. So if you want to connect and feel free to keep the conversation going, happy to do that.

Mehmet: Cool. [00:46:00] Tommy, thank you very much for the time there. I really enjoyed the conversation. Like the flow was really smooth and all thanks for you for making this. People usually they are a little bit skeptical about consultants, but you broke this. I can say this, of course, of course, I'm not skeptical because I was a consultant and I still consider myself as a consultant.

Mehmet: So, um, but yeah, like really great insights. Uh, and you know, uh, Tons of information you shared with the audience today and they don't need to go and you know type and search the Letters because all the links you just mentioned they can find them on the show notes So if you are listening to this podcast on your favorite podcasting app, they are in the show notes If you are watching us on youtube, you'll find them in the description And you know as I say always Uh, you know if you just discovered this podcast just today Thank you for listening If you enjoyed [00:47:00] please subscribe and share it with your friends and colleagues and anyone who might be interested And if you are one of the people who came coming back and listening to us or watching us Thank you for doing so and keep sending me your comments suggestions and recommendations.

Mehmet: I read Every single one of them. So thank you for tuning in today. We'll meet again very soon. Thank you. Bye. Bye