On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we talk about the rise of Identic AI, why you need to build for AI agents first, and how AI is bigger than SaaS ever was. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help innovation leaders navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to grow and thrive in a world of hyper uncertainty and accelerating change. Join me, Brian Ardinger and Miles Zero's, Robyn Bolton. As we discuss the latest tools, tactics, and trends for creating innovations with impact, let's get started.

Podcast Transcript with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton

AI Agents, Personal Concierge Tools, and the Future of Innovation

[00:00:30] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And with me I have Robyn Bolton from Mile Zero. Robyn, welcome back. 

[00:00:50] Robyn Bolton: Thank you. Glad to be back. 

[00:00:51] Brian Ardinger: We are always on the hunt for new and innovative things. Every week we try to bring you some of the most interesting articles or things that we've come across in our world of innovation. We'll just jump right in.

The first article we wanna talk about today is called, With the Rise of Agents, we are entering the world of identic AI and this is an HBR interview with. Don Tapscott. This is actually a podcast that HBR put out, and Don talks about this movement of not only AI agents, but the fact that you're going to have AI agents that are identified specifically to you and your tastes almost like your virtual concierge in a variety of different topics.

And these agents will know everything about you as well as everything about what they need to do as an agent. And this world is going to fundamentally change the way we do business, et cetera. 

[00:01:39] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, this is an interesting one and it feels both very kind of sci-fi and very likely to happen tomorrow. I'm skeptical on the timeline, like I totally believe this will happen.

I don't really think it's going to happen in the next few years, especially because you know, yesterday I asked Claude to proofread something for me. I gave it a document, and it went off and proofread a totally different document from a different chat. So, if AI can't handle a straightforward request like that right now, I don't think it's anytime soon going to be understanding my judgment and my values and taking actions on my behalf. You know, could it happen one day? Sure. Why not? 

[00:02:19] Brian Ardinger: It will be interesting to see, I mean, we're seeing a lot of experiments out there with Clawbot and that people are jumping headfirst. I saw a Twitter post, there was an event in New York, I think yesterday where 2000 people who were doing things with their Clawbot got together and talked about what they were doing with their Clawbots.

Building for AI Agents First. Product Design, Trust, and What Comes Next

It was interesting from the standpoint of the amount of energy and excitement around it. But then on the flip side, a lot of the conversation was there wasn't still any real meat around it. It was nice to have testing, experimenting those tests and those are experiments will, you know, hopefully result in something, but I think we're not quite there yet.

But it is interesting to peer into the future. What's so exciting about the Clawbot scenarios and that is the fact that it really did give a vision of, oh, what happens if this could actually do this? And it opened up a whole new conversation pieces where it moved it beyond, oh, this is just a Google Chat bot kind of experience. And I think that's where that genie's not going back in the bottle. 

[00:03:14] Robyn Bolton: No, it's very exciting. It's still a ways off, probably years, not decades, but. 

[00:03:20] Brian Ardinger: Can only change, it's also hard to put everything that you own, you know, all your personality and all your quirks and everything into a bot so that it can do things for you when you don't trust the bot. So. 

[00:03:31] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, I just imagine trying to do that with a bot and being like, no, thank you. 

[00:03:34] Brian Ardinger: There are things I don't like.

[00:03:35] Robyn Bolton: You can keep your quirks. Yeah. 

[00:03:38] Brian Ardinger: Alright with the second article, Why you need to build your product for AI agents first. So tangentially similar to what we were talking about previously. This is Peter Yang wrote an article talking about since the structure of how you are building is changing. If indeed agents are going to do the bidding for you in a variety of these things, you no longer need to necessarily build for people going to your website or using a user interface because you are building for agents who are talking to other agents who are doing things.

So if you're in a new builder today, some of the things you should be looking at is how can you actually build for agent flow and how can you build so that the agents can work faster, and what might you strip away and what might you change? Based on that particular paradigm shift. 

[00:04:23] Robyn Bolton: Yeah. I mean, I am always one for, you know, simplicity, like getting to the root, getting really clear, really simple. And there's a certain amount of complexity that's required and things. It does get stripped out by AI as it, you know, goes through and kind of does the regression analysis or the prediction analysis and all of that.

Designing Products for AI Workflows, APIs, MCPs, and Human Experience

So I've really conflicted reading this one because I'm like, well, I don't know how to design for AI. I don't know what that means, especially because things are moving so fast and since another instance where Clawbot shows up as a big character in the story. But I was also like, what if I don't want to?

Like what if there's more nuance? What if there's more richness? What if there's things that will get lost if I design for AI? And that of course could sound like the death throes of the human. So yeah. So I was really conflicted. But I think it's, it makes a really interesting point and an important point that we've got to figure out.

[00:05:24] Brian Ardinger: If you strip away the beautiful UX that people have designed to make you feel the emotion around the product, and the agent never interacts with that, how does that change the product itself? Yeah. Or the experience that you're creating. The article also goes on to give you some of those skill sets of like how to think about this if you are building.

He has some talking about the APIs or the tools, the skills are the recipes, and then the MCPs are actually the kitchen and how it bundles it all together and how these particular components of AI. The way these AI tools are coming together, you can create environments and that such that you're building for agents to make it easier for those folks to do your bidding as well.

[00:06:02] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, I thought the analogy of APIs or the tools, skills of the recipes, MCPs are the kitchen. You know, I thought even that analogy was helpful because there was so much terminology around this that it's easy to kind of get lost and get stuck and I feel like this is something most of us are all learning together and the journey continues. 

[00:06:21] Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. And we have to realize that we're probably still on the 5% leading edge at this point. Yes. If you're listening to the podcast or you're reading Twitter, you're probably on that side, so you're probably ahead of the game. 

[00:06:30] Robyn Bolton: I can assure you that that is true.

AI as a Skeleton Key. Customer Agency, Friction, and Hostage Business Models

[00:06:33] Brian Ardinger: The next article is the Skeleton Key from Alistair Croll. Alistair, a good friend of ours, wrote the, the book Lean Analytics, and he doesn't write as often as he used to, but when he does write, it's always amazing stuff. His latest article off his website talks about how he's moving into trying to becoming a builder again. And he, he talked about this idea of the skeleton key and how AI in that can effectively unlock some of the enshittification that we're seeing in the world today.

You know, if you think about how products are built, a lot of times they're built to add friction so that you can't cancel it, for example, or you can't download or export your data. That friction, such that you can go to an AI now and he walks to a particular example where he gave Claude, here's the end result I want, and then had the code actually go through and try and experiment with 10 different things to eventually figure out a way to break this barrier down.

And the fact that he didn't have to do that, he didn't have to have code, and he actually could take back agency over the fact that a lot of these companies are building things that are purposely trying to either add friction or stop you from doing what you want or what you want to build.

[00:07:44] Robyn Bolton: This article was amazing. The idea of AI as a skeleton key was just so thought provoking. And his comment about he makes this distinction between happy customers versus hostage customers. And that just so struck me because so much when we talk about business models, as innovators we're actively trying to think like, how do we lock people in? How do we drive loyalty and the conversation is exactly how do we lock people in.

I'm like, we are actually designing business models to take people hostage and wouldn't we be better off designing to make people happy and so delight them that they don't want to leave. And so even though this was his distinction of happy versus hostage was kind of bigger beyond what he was saying about the skeleton key of AI, I just thought it was such a good reminder that as we designed things, whether it's AI, whether it's not AI, that really we should be thinking about how to make our customers happy and not take some hostage.

AI vs SaaS. Why Replacing Work Could Be Bigger Than Replacing Software

[00:08:50] Brian Ardinger: Like I said, it kind of brings back the opportunity for the customer themselves. Like, can some of these tools actually give you the agency that you didn't have before? If you can ask your agent, or if you can ask Claude to help me figure out how to become not a hostage to whatever I'm being out there, how does that change the dynamics? Hopefully it will force companies to become more happy customer driven versus hostage customer driven. 

[00:09:14] Robyn Bolton: You are described as, oftentimes my husband and I will talk about how we work with the company because they're the best of the worst and they're all the worst. If that's how people describe you, you might want to start looking at your business model and what you do, because the hostages have a skeleton key and we're going to break out.

[00:09:33] Brian Ardinger: All right. The last article of the day is AI is Bigger than SaaS Ever was, and this is from NfX. It's a article talking about, probably saw on the news last week, all the SaaS companies took a 20% hit on their evaluations and they found out that AI is going to come and take it over in the next week or two.

Don't know if that's the case, but you're seeing that transition maybe from software as a service to AI as a service. And this article talks about the first wave of software development was all about translation. How you take analog processes and make them digital. Amazon basically digitize the bookstore, et cetera.

The second wave is all about creation. How do you build things that didn't exist in the analog world like Facebook or Instagram or Lyft? And then now we're moving into this environment where AI has this team and everything has a technical ability, and the constraint is no longer resources or engineering. It's really the vision. And this is going to be a bigger defining moment than any of the other transitions were. 

[00:10:30] Robyn Bolton: There were a couple sentences in this article that really kind of stopped me in my tracks, and especially we're recording this in time, the jobs report just came out. The US economy lost more jobs than was expected.

And it just brought me right back to this article because as he says here that here's a simple way to see why AI is bigger than SaaS. That you know, the best SaaS platform charges a thousand dollars per person. The person using the software earns a hundred thousand a year. So, that's a hundred x shift in what's up for grabs at the individual level.

AI and the Future of Work. Labor Market Disruption, Enterprise Software, and Innovation Strategy

And then when you look at the market sizes, SaaS is about 1 trillion in global software spend. Global labor is 50 to $60 trillion market. And so this last quote of when you stop thinking about replacing software and start thinking about replacing work, the ceiling disappears. And even though he says work, all I saw was workers. And when you think about the numbers in that context. This is one of the moments where I'm like, I need to like step away and have a quiet moment because this is massive. 

[00:11:39] Brian Ardinger: It's so interesting because I think everybody's feeling this tension right now because it feels like it's out of control, but yet you see the reality of like a SaaS coming, like Salesforce does not go away overnight. They're too big. They have so many other moats and things that they can defend. You know, in new entrants. You know, you're not going to just vibe code your way into a Salesforce at the enterprise level overnight. And so it's that tension between where the future could be and it's rapidly coming.

And yet the reality of where we actually are, and I think the tension is we don't know that time span. That's the kind of the hard part right now is trying to determine how close are we to this new potential world that we all see coming. 

[00:12:22] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, exactly. I mean, when you look at the history of disruption. Honestly, in industries that were disrupted by new technologies, the stories are quick. The stories take a couple minutes to say, but the actual disruption took decades. And it didn't mean that whatever's getting disrupted disappeared off the face of the earth. It often just kind of shrunk and became less dominant.

And so as much as I, I do take comfort in that things are also moving faster and faster. So again, this is just something that, be aware of and to kind of keep an eye on and think about. But it's, it's years. It's years. It's not months. 

[00:13:04] Brian Ardinger: Well, let's hope so. So, if it's months, we'll still be here. So, talking about this, we'll 

[00:13:07] Robyn Bolton: cover all of it. Don't worry. 

[00:13:09] Brian Ardinger: That concludes another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. Thanks for coming out and we'll see you next time.
That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. Today's episode was produced and engineered by Susan Stibal. If you want to learn more about our teams, our content, our services, check out insideoutside.io or if you want to connect with Robyn Bolton, go to MileZero.io, and until next time, go out and innovate.

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