Closing the Enterprise AI Trust Gap

Hey everyone, we're back here at Techstrong TV. Hey, my next guest here is Brian Stimpfl. Brian is the CEO of a company called S-Dox.

We're going to hear all about S-Dox and have a good discussion. But first, let's welcome Brian to Techstrong TV. Brian, welcome.

Nice to have you here. Thanks for coming in. Pleasure to meet you, Alan.

Pleasure to be here with Techstrong. Looking forward to a great conversation. Very cool.

So Brian, as I mentioned, you're the CEO over at S-Dox, but give people a sense of your journey or how you came to be CEO here. Yeah, sure. God, it's a long journey, and like most, it's not linear.

Lots of twists and lots of turns. I get an opportunity every summer to speak to a group of interns that we have come in from the University of Michigan. We have an office in Ann Arbor.

And I always tell them- Oh, very cool ... your path is not going to be a straight line. You're going to take a lot of twists and turns, and you're going to end up places you never, ever expected.

So in that vein, I've ended up here at S-Dox, and I started, I was a finance major in college. I came out as a budget analyst at a defense contractor, but quickly moved into financial services. And in the '90s, if your viewers can remember back that far, I know some of us can.

I do. Yes. There was what I would call really the last revolution in business before this one, and I think we are in the midst of another revolution, and that was the advent of the internet, the changes that it brought to the business landscape, to the consumer landscape, and I was lucky enough to work at a firm called TD Ameritrade.

Some may remember it. They were recently acquired by Charles Schwab. I worked for a predecessor company of TD's called Waterhouse Securities in the '90s, and I had the opportunity to build the first early versions of PC and internet trading before that was a real thing.

So the migration from going into offices, even calling up on telephones and speaking to stockbrokers, we built the first models around self-serving internet trading platforms. And that really brought me into financial services over the next 25 years of my career, serving consumers, serving businesses, really with the nexus of technology and business, and really being at the forefront of a lot that was happening in the financial services space. So fast-forward, I went from TD to a small outfit in Minneapolis in the financial services space, to Scottrade, to Prudential Securities, and now to S-Dox over the last four years.

And the founder of S-Dox is actually an old colleague of mine from TD Ameritrade, and he went to work for Salesforce, started this company as a native ISV within the Salesforce ecosystem, built an app on the AppExchange, and now we've been around for about 15 years at S-Dox serving customers- Wow ... in the document automation space. I love it.

Similarly, I didn't start in technology. I actually went to law school and was doing the law thing and computers were my hobby, and also in the '90s, I made a right turn into the internet, and here I am. I've sold a few companies, closed a few companies, but doing the Techstrong thing here now for about 14 years.

And it's interesting, I also speak to a lot of kids. My two sons are recent college graduates over the last three years now, four years. I have the same with two.

Youngest. Yeah. Just graduated last few years, yeah.

Yeah. They're both, thank God, working. But, well, one went on to law school, and he's graduated and now working as an attorney, and the other one's a TV sportscaster, but getting his master's now in communication journalism, broadcast journalism.

I hear you. " They're probably going to have three or four different careers. I just can't tell them what those careers are because the things they're going to do probably don't even exist right now.

Yeah. There was no internet when I graduated in the '80s, not the '90s. There was no internet.

If I told someone I was going to have a web hosting company, what the hell is that? And we were in ASP. I helped start and take public an application service provider.

Unheard of. It's the same place, right? Absolutely.

But I feel for these kids because AI, while I think ultimately AI creates a lot of opportunities for them, from where they sit right now, it's tough. Mm-hmm. They're talking about knocking out junior-level jobs, entry-level jobs.

These kids are having a hard time finding jobs out of college. It's tough. It's a tough road right now.

It absolutely is. I do think the opportunity's going to be there, but I feel for them, and I feel their angst, which is, I think, why we're seeing stories of when at college graduations, if you mention AI, they boo. " And the people who are getting rich from AI are a small subset of billionaires, and it's not them.

So, I empathize and feel the pain of these kids coming out of school. Absolutely. Let's talk about sDocs.

So it started, great story, right? Starts as an ISV in the Salesforce marketplace- That's right ... 15 years ago.

Yeah. Again, I won't overcomplicate it because it's not complicated. Essentially, we're a document generation and e-signature platform that's built 100% native to Salesforce.

So if you're looking to create a quote or a contract or an invoice, or you want to create a bulk set of documents on any one of those different platforms, you can do that with the sDocs application, generate the documents, have those documents, if necessary, be signed through a governed workflow within Salesforce without having that data ever leave Salesforce. So that's essentially what we do at its most basic level. We've been at it for a little over 15 years now.

Started in 2010, as I mentioned. We're in the top 1% of all rated apps on the Salesforce App Exchange, and that native posture of your data never leaves our platform is really central to our philosophy. And that plays right into a lot of the things I think that you've already mentioned, Alan, that we're going to talk about, right around governed execution.

Absolutely. First of all, let me raise my hand and say, I believe we're a NetStox customer through, we're part of Futurum Group. Oh, love that.

Thank you. And we're on Salesforce, and I think we use sDocs for our SOWs and all that good stuff. Excellent.

But that being said, or putting that to the side even, we talk about disruption. This is an area AI is going to have an effect in. You could embrace it, or you could try to put off the inevitable.

I'm going to assume sDocs is embracing it. How are you embracing it? Yeah, I would start by saying, I think that everyone, whether they want to or not, is embracing it, because if it's not a choice that we're making, it's being forced upon us.

So, I 100% agree with you. It's happening to you if you're not actually embracing and happening with it. So, when we think about AI at sDocs, I always start with, we still want to be solving real-world problems, and solving for opportunities for our customers.

Now, right now, I think when we look at AI, AI is in the early stages. It's been about content generation. It's been about creating text, creating images, really these simpler use cases.

I think now we're looking at that conversation moving truly to execution. And the question is, are enterprises really ready for that? And at sDocs, I think we are.

I think we're having certainly a lot of conversations about it, but we're starting to turn those conversations into execution. But I think, Alan, when you look across the landscape of companies, I think Cisco just came out with a study, and everyone's got their own interpretation and study on AI, but Cisco came out with their AI security study earlier this year. And in that study, they said that 85% of large enterprises have already piloted AI agents.

So they're embracing agentic AI. But only 5% of those organizations have actually deployed those agents to production. And the question then is, why?

Why that slow sort of path to adoption? And I think the gap between those two numbers is really where you get at that trust and governance problem. There's a gap in confidence, and the companies that are actually closing that gap are not the ones just letting AI freestyle and do its own thing.

They're the ones who are trying to really give AI a trusted place to land. Yeah. I agree with you.

We've been on our own agentic experimentation here at Tectstrong. We're not a big company. We're small, 25 people at Tectstrong itself.

But one of the lessons we've learned is you got to put the guardrails in. You can't just let it run wild and then be surprised when stuff hits the fan or it doesn't do what you thought it was going to do, or the way you thought it was going to do it. It really excels, though, when you put it on the right path with the right guardrails, with the right goals, with the right instructions.

That's how this thing works. Absolutely. It's another interesting anecdote.

Last year, we did our own study. And I think it was roughly, I won't ask Zach to chime in here, but I think there was 600-plus IT security and compliance leaders at the companies that we serve. And we serve large governmental agencies, we serve large private entities, smaller companies, so the full gamut.

And what we heard is that leaders unequivocally want automation. Like moving from manual processing, which is highly dangerous, fraught with errors, fraught with risks, moving to automation is absolutely where they want to go. But this confidence gap is really what was also apparent in the study that was leading to the slow progress.

And even overall opposition to change. Having the employees in the company embrace that move to change the processes overall. Now, what we found was that automation can build trust, to your point, if done properly.

So moving along that scale of we do things manually today, we want to do things in sort of a governed automation is the goal. Moving along that scale is a journey, and every company has to do it at their own pace. What we found was that over two-thirds of the leaders that we talked to said that the most trust that they had Were in tools that were natively built into their trusted CRM.

And that's why we've really built our platform, along with that Salesforce platform, in a native environment, because we believe those tools have already been built and set up. That governance layer is already there. So if you can leverage these new AI capabilities, these LLMs coming in, if you can do that within those trusted environments, that's where you're going to be most set up for success.

I agree. And it is trust, because at the end of the day, I think that's what's driving, or maybe it's a lack of trust that's driving a lot of this. As you said, none of us can sit here and ignore AI, right?

No. If you ignore it, I think that's a recipe for being obsolete at 30 or whatever the commercial used to be, right? But however, what we're seeing is a lot of pushback.

We're seeing, as I mentioned, pushback from kids graduating college. We're seeing pushback from people whose communities are being potentially negatively impacted with AI data centers, right? People are saying, "Not in my backyard.

Go build it somewhere else," right? I have a place in Utah, and it's all the rage right now of what's going on there. So you know.

Well, they want to build, what is it, 40,000 acres or something, this data center there? Massive data center. And it's a big deal for the residents there, yeah.

Oh, it sure as hell is. So we're getting pushback there. But the other place we're getting pushback is in the workforce itself, in the workplace itself.

And some of it is fear, right? Fear of losing your job, fear of having your job taken away. A lot of it is also fear of this thing is going to make some terrible mistake and wipe out our customer list, wipe out our Salesforce database, wipe out something else, make some huge mistake, or some bad guys are going to use it and create some security incident.

It's a lack of trust, a lack of confidence- That's right ... in using that. And there's not enough of a track record for people to- No ...

feel confident yet. And a lot of times, I think when we talk about, and this is not unique to AI, this is overall digital transformation, but when you talk about moving to automated workflows, when you talk about anything disintermediating your people, that's when people get very nervous. And what we talk about a lot with our customers is that's not necessary to completely disintermediate, right?

Add in manual processing where you feel it's necessary, manual checkpoints where you feel it's necessary. You don't have to let these things run on the rails without supervision. Actually, we advise strictly against that.

There's got to be a combination of applying new technologies, but yet applying the old school governance rules. " Verify. Yep.

And it applies in this world more than ever. That's not a '90s phrase, by the way. That's an '80s phrase.

There you go. But I do remember it, and I think that is... And again, you know what, Brian?

I'll take a full circle back to our opening, talking about our kids. By the time our kids are out there for 5, 10 years, there'll be more trust. There'll be more of a track record.

There'll be more confidence and more of a best practices that we follow for these things. But as we sit here today, and for the next couple years, it just doesn't exist. And so we're kind of making it up as we go a little bit.

And at the same time, you got a lot of companies that are just feeling pressure to rush heads long into this. Well, and I think that's the danger that we all have to take a pause on. Because there is a rush.

There's a competitive rush. Mm-hmm. " Fomo.

Yeah. And I believe that in this moment, we have to be purposeful. And I say we, I mean, yes, S-Dox, but I think us as a technological society as a whole, we have to be purposeful about how we employ this technology, how we apply it to real-world problems.

I come back to that. So when I look at what we do today at S-Dox and what we do with Salesforce on their platform, how do we leverage our intellectual property today, the 15 years of effort that we've put into this application? How do we supercharge that with this new super powerful technology of AI, but do that in a way that engenders trust, that has guardrails, that operates on the platform that already has trusted logic, trusted audit, workflows, that again, we can leverage.

So it's a combination of those things that I think is going to lead us forward. And I think then, when we talk about our kids, those things will wind up leading to different jobs, new jobs, new paradigms that we haven't quite discovered. You and I were sharing our journeys on our jobs.

I don't think I've had a job since 1995, a job description that was in place before 1995. No. So every job I've been in since then, those jobs didn't exist before the mid-'90s.

Yeah. So I think that when we look back 20 years, 30 years from now, that same discussion will probably still hold true for the generation that's coming up now. I love it.

Hey, Brian, I told you these are 15-minute interviews. Yeah. I could talk with you all day, but I got to wrap things up.

For people who want to get more information from S-Dox, where do they go? com. I think that's a great place to go.

If you're on the Salesforce platform, you can go to the AppExchange and look up our app, S-Dox. It is, as I mentioned, on the AppExchange, highly rated, highly adopted. And we have social media presence.

We're at conferences and events. But I'd say the best place, just come and see us on the web, and that will give you all you need to learn about where you need to go next. Thank you.

Keep up the great work. You got to stay one step ahead of this stuff, Brian. A lot of people transmit a lot of their business documentation via S-Dox, a lot of contracts and so forth, SOWs.

So counting on you to make sure that it stays on the right side of things from a security and everything else with AI involved in it. But also come back and keep us posted about what's going on. It's a great conversation.

Absolutely. I would love to talk more. This has been awesome.

Thanks, Alan, for taking the time. I appreciate it. My pleasure.

Brian Stimpfl, CEO of S-Dox here on Techstrong TV. We're going to take a break right here. We've got more Techstrong TV coming at you, so stay tuned.