Techstrong’s Real-World AI Adoption

Shimmy says, Shimmy says, Shimmy, Shimmy, Shimmy says, ask me almost anything. Hey everyone, it's Shimmy. It's Thursday.

Man, it's good to do this from home. And I'm home-- Well, next Thursday I'll be up in New York for Platform Con. We're doing videos, and I'm moderating a great panel there on the AI apocalypse in terms of vulnerabilities.

But today I wanted to talk about something else. I touched on this subject, I guess it was maybe two months ago, about how we here at Techstrong, we're undergoing our own agentic transformation experimentation. You want to call it eating your own dog food or drinking your own champagne, I don't really care what you want to call it, but you could pick your own metaphor.

But here's the bottom line. You may think, Shimmy, you come on here and you pontificate about this AI story and that AI story. But are you really living it?

Are you walking the talk and walking the walk? And I will tell you that we are talking the talk and walking the walk here at Techstrong. We're not just covering AI and writing about it or talking about it.

We're actually using AI up and down the entire stack of our business. Now, look, I'm not some Fortune 500 company. We got all of 25 people here at Techstrong.

But all of us are pushing, prodding, seeing where AI can help us, finding out where it's not helping us, and just trying to find our way in this brave new world that we all find ourselves in. So that was two months ago. We've been doing this about three, three and a half months.

I wanted to kind of give you an update and my honest take of how even a small company like us here at Techstrong can use or not use agentic AI. And I think it's really interesting. I think it's going to give you a real window in what companies like ours can do with AI.

And I'll be really honest with you too, I'm really proud of our team. They've embraced this. They've really tried to push the envelope.

We've done some really cool things. Again, we're not a giant enterprise with 500 people in IT and 10,000 people or something. We don't have a dedicated AI transformation office or unlimited budget.

We're just Techstrong. We're 25 people strong. But 25 people, we have more than 100 AI-related projects that are either completed and functioning, underway, or in active experimentation and development still.

That's a lot. Some of these are really small, but some of them are really big, and they're shaking up our business. Some are internal, you don't see them unless you're here, but some are very customer-facing, and you probably have seen it.

I'm not going to lie, some are rough around the edges, right? We're still kind of refining, if you will. But some have really changed the way we operate on a day-to-day basis.

And when you take all these 100 projects together, they've turned our business upside down. But not in a bad way, in a really good way. We haven't fired anyone.

No one's lost their job to AI, right? So we're doing more. We're making our people more productive.

I know a lot of people out there saying AI is just overhype. AI, it's not perfect. It makes mistakes.

It's more expensive. All of that's true. And yes, AI, you still need people to make it work.

But to those who say that AI's not going to disrupt everything, and it's not here to change the way we do everything, I'm telling you from our own experience, it is. Not someday, five years from now, or even a year from now. Today, it is.

Let me give you a couple examples. Number one, our websites, right? And I got a graphic up here that shows a big overview of a lot of the things we've done.

But I, me, Shimmy, I've designed and coded seven, eight, nine different websites, some brand new, some relaunches of our existing sites. And I don't mean just like a wireframe design of our website. I'm talking about actually rebuilding these websites with AI from the ground up and making the changes that I've wanted to make in them for years, but our web engineers were too overburdened.

So again, I didn't ask AI to help me with the design. I asked AI to help me build, code new websites. We work in WordPress.

I moved it from that to a headless design. This just isn't pretty mock-ups, guys. This is functionally coded websites.

They're optimized. They work. com.

I designed that one and coded it up. com, totally redone from the ground up to become a huge asset where we keep all of our stored webinars for you to go to. The Techstrong TV site, where you might be watching this on, where we stream video every day.

com, our DevOps virtual event coming up. com to make it look ready for the AI age. com up for six or seven years.

Five years at least. We did it. I did it.

Cloud Native Now is the next one. They're all pretty cool. I really love Techstrong Semi.

We built in functionality, TLDR, and key questions into every article. It represents the next stage in media. It's based on the semiconductor site.

It's already as big as some of the other sites. It's only a couple of weeks old. We needed this modern digital experience that felt like a real media property from day one, not another generic WordPress site that we built off of some preexisting skin.

These were coded sites, as I say, run headless. And you know what? It's not overloaded with plugins.

Quite the contrary. These sites allowed us to take down 60 plugins out of our WordPress install. It speeded the sites up tremendously.

It makes a better user experience. They're better looking. They're better organized.

They represent what we wanted. I can't emphasize it enough. Go check out Techstrong Learning and see what this is.

It became a learning library, a destination for our webinars, our roundtables, our virtual events. Again, AI didn't just accelerate the work, it built it. It was my idea.

I told it what I wanted. I worked with it. I iterated, I reiterated.

And look, I can't take all the credit. We've got two really great people, Jen Yarnold and Greg Yarnold, who help. Once I give them the zipped-up code, they drop it in and it needs a little sand here and a little banging there, and they make it work.

So shout out to Greg and Jen. But unbelievable. We've done more websites in the first six months of this year than I've done in the last six years.

Techstrong TV is another example. I don't know if you guys have checked out the new Techstrong TV site, but it's more what I always wanted it to be, what I envisioned it six, seven years ago when we built it, and we just didn't make it then. It's our video network.

There's 20,000 videos on there. How the heck are you supposed to organize them? How do you show what people want?

How do people know what even they want? How do you do it clean or modern? It's heavy with videos.

How do you make it more responsive? AI helped us do that. The DevOps Experience site that I mentioned is another example, right?

I took this from concept to website in a day. It's just a virtual event. It's not one of the heavier media sites like the others I mentioned.

But this was child's play for me. And I'm no web designer, nor am I a web engineer. But it allowed us to test it, build it, test it, ship it, deploy it in no time.

But we're not stopping there. com. We're rebuilding Cloud Native now.

I've rebuilt, and I don't want to show you the thumbnail of it right now. But Security Boulevard is rebuilt, so is Digital CxO and the rest of our websites. I'm bringing them up.

I'm refreshing them years ahead of where they would have been had I waited for the old ways we did it before AI. So guys, as I said before, this isn't just a design project. AI is great for design.

Generative is great for design. But I'm talking about publishing real code with agentics, and it's amazing. We didn't just do website, though.

We didn't do this as just a performance. It's truly workflow. There's an SEO element to it.

There's premium content. It's user experience. As I mentioned before, it's lighter, it's faster, it's better.

So you may say, "Ah, Shimmy, you built a website or two. " But guys, if you've ever done serious media sites on WordPress, you know how big a deal this is. com has 40,000 articles on it.

It's not easy, right? It has 12 years of technical debt. It's not easy.

We do newsletters off it. We do forms. We do related content, redirects, analytics, embeds.

There's so many things that go into these websites. It's not easy. It's a pile, and once you dig into it, your hands are dirty.

AI really made it almost automagical. So I wanted to move past the website stuff. You can go check out some of these sites yourself.

Another area where this is really helping us is editorial workflow, right? Because all these sites are media sites, and we're building out content. That's our game.

We publish content. We haven't laid off any of our writers. We haven't cut back any of that.

But I will tell you, and I make no bones about it, we allow our writers to use AI to help them. But there's humans in the loop. They're human ideas.

It's human writing. But we have exponentially increased with a very small editorial team. We only have three full-time editors here at Techstrong across the eight or nine different editorial sites, 10 editorial sites if you count TV.

We are publishing more than 500 articles a month. Think about it. Five hundred articles a month.

There's about 20 business days in a month, so do the math. That's how many articles we're publishing a month. We're also, in addition to that, publishing over 100 videos a month, sometimes many more than 100 videos a month.

That's so much content. That's two X, three X what we were publishing before. And it's not just publishing content like I'm pushing content to a website and go have a look.

You can't do that just anymore. You got to publish the content. You got to have your summaries, your keywords, your headlines, your tagging, the categorization.

You got to make social posts for all of these things. You got to have blurbs for your newsletters, event tie-ins, video descriptions, optimized for YouTube shorts and Instagram and wherever else you're putting this stuff, follow-up assets, cross-promotion across the properties, what goes here to go there. And this is where AI is just exploding for us, man.

It's doing the job. It's allowing three people to not only write stories, but do the editing for all of those, for hundreds of articles. We're using AI to reduce the amount of low-value repetitive work.

That's the key. I don't have editors having to do the same nonsense, checking the same boxes. A lot of that's automated, but they're still in the loop.

Nothing goes out here that hasn't been thoroughly checked by a human. Right? Nothing in our video goes out that isn't actually done by a human looking at it before it's moved on.

Right? All of our marketing messages are done with AI's help, but it's a human that looks at it. A salesperson may get help with a proposal, but it's still a salesperson who looks at it.

And that's the lesson here, guys. AI can help us move faster through these mechanics. It could draft the summaries, it could help turn a video into a bunch of posts.

It could organize transcripts. It could even propose tags and put them in there. It can help you repurpose a webinar into a newsletter or a LinkedIn post or a landing page.

But we are not removing the human from the process. In fact, we're putting the human in the driver's seat. We are exponentially leveraging our humans.

And for a company our size with 25 people, leverage matters. We want to do more without bringing on more people. Leverage matters.

Another area I'm really proud of is newsletters, right? Newsletters are key to any media company today. We used to publish, I think, three different newsletters once a week.

We are now, I'm happy to say, publishing the Techstrong Brief, which is our main newsletter, daily. We publish one version for email, one version for LinkedIn. Then on top of that, every one of our sites is publishing a newsletter either once a week or twice a week.

We couldn't even begin to dream about doing that a year ago. Now it's in our workflows waiting for us every morning to decide what to send out, what to edit, what looks good and what not good. And again, human in the loop.

Everything is checked by a human. But it's quality. It's going out.

We've developed a system where the AI knows which of these stories we want to feature in our newsletters. And the Techstrong Brief is living proof of it. We're seeing phenomenal open rates, click-through rates.

It's better than it ever was, and it's better than we could ever do before AI. I wanted to talk about the newsletters for the individual sites. And we've also used AI to make that.

Hey, you could self-select. You don't want the whole Techstrong Brief. You're just interested in cyber.

You're just interested in DevOps. That's fine. You can do all of that and more.

So it's an important, as I said before, newsletters are so important to us, important to our audience. But it's a thing I've learned 12 years in this media business. Newsletters are more than just email.

It's about the audience's relationship. It's more than distribution. It's about getting the right content that you want to see, not that I want you to see.

And so again, AI is helping us do that, allowing you to self-select what you want to see, when you want to see it, how you want to see it. Couldn't hope to do this before this, not with this budget, not with this amount of people. So Donald Rumsfeld said you go to war with the army you have.

This is the army we have here at Techstrong. We got 25 people. The media industry is tough right now.

I can't afford to bring on a lot more people. But with AI, we're able to get this done. We're able to grow the business, improve the business, give you better, more content.

So sometimes to do that, as my friend from Automation, Mahir, says, it's not about just incremental 10 or 20%. You got to 2X and 3X things. And I think that's what we're doing here.

We're automating so much. I don't even know a percentage of what we're automating, but it's really working. Let me give you another real example that I'm really proud of because it's one that I led and I actually did the work, the coding on.

Our security bloggers, Security Creators Network. Hey, man, this has been going on since 2005. It's there since the first day I launched Security Boulevard.

And I had hired back then, 12 years ago, 10 years ago, a fellow, I don't even remember his name, out of Georgia, who wrote a custom plugin for WordPress that allowed us to aggregate RSS feeds and then publish them in Security Boulevard. It was hard though. It didn't allow for canonical links from the original blogs.

People always complained about that. So a lot of people left the Network as a result. But the network's still like 350, 400 blogs strong.

It's the backbone of Security Boulevard. But it was long in the tooth. It was clunky.

It used a lot of resources. I didn't like the way it did things. I rewrote that plugin from scratch by giving a wish list to my agent about what I wanted, and I iterated it a couple times until I got it to where I wanted functionally.

I gave it to Greg Arnold. We just completed, I think, fourth-level user testing, and it works flawlessly. It's not just publishing the blogs daily, it's the intake of, well, you wanted your blog to join the Security Bloggers Network or the Security Creators Network?

Our form makes much more sense now. It routes you depending on what you put in there to the right places, and then pulling in that content into Security Boulevard works so much better. We now can allow canonical links.

So for anyone watching this who left the Bloggers Network because they wanted their canonical links, we got you. It works. Again, I've been trying to get this done for five years, man.

I didn't have the bandwidth. Our coders didn't have the bandwidth. It fell on me, Shimmy, to code it, and with AI, I did.

I don't want to sound like I'm gushing, but it's big. So the new plugin's up and running. We're going to be making an announcement probably in the next week or two, and I think it's really going to make a big difference to all of those people who use the Security Bloggers Network because they want to get their blogs out there, and now we have a better way of doing it.

I also want to talk about what AI is doing, though, inside our company. It is saving things I can't show you, unfortunately, because they're internal. But it's improving consistency.

It's making our team work better together. It's making our products better. It's helping our audience.

That's where the value is here. It's helping in sales and operations and marketing, of course. Our sales team is using it to automate and present.

Our ops team, our video team. Our video team is using AI to take this video and make shorts of it and Instagram versions and optimize for social media. And do we want it vertical or horizontal like it was shot on a phone?

All of it done in AI, man. We couldn't do this six months ago, eight months ago. So again, we're just one small company, but if you're telling me AI's not real, nonsense.

It's real. It's working. You've got to have the patience to do it, but it's there.

One other thing I want to talk about. A lot of you who, if you write me, you may get a response from Crystal, Crystal Williams. Crystal is my EA.

She's not real. A lot of people don't know that. They write to her like she's a real person, and she doesn't tell them.

But I'm using a company who specializes in making AI EAs for busy execs who have busy calendars, and my calendar's crazy. She manages my calendar like I've never had it managed, and I've had human EAs in the past. She's responding to my emails.

She is making me more effective. I did 19 Techstrong TV interviews last week because Crystal's scheduling them. I've never done 19 Techstrong TV interviews in a week.

Think about it. Five days in the week, I think I wasn't even in one day, and I still did 19. So she's helping.

She drafts emails. She summarizes. She communicates with me via SMS and Slack and email.

It's an amazing thing. And then seeing how other people interact with her, and I realize they don't know she's AI. I say she.

It's AI. It boggles my mind, but there's not a doubt in my mind. I was paying my AIs 50, 60, more thousand dollars a year to start.

I don't think Crystal cost me $100 a month. So again, you want to know, is AI real? You bet it's real.

You bet it's real. So I don't know how else to show you guys or what else I could show you that would convince you about whether AI is real or not, but I give you just quickly another example. Our webinar operations, onboarding webinars, getting reports out to our sponsors about what was there, improving our webinar abstracts and landing pages and operation system to make it more interesting to you, getting the speaker information, all of it.

AI is automating and making it better for all. So just another way. So when you look at the entirety of this picture, guys, it's turned Techstrong.

This AI, this agentic experiment, has turned Techstrong on its head, upside down, but in a good way, in a good way. We're learning lessons. I didn't show you the warts.

I didn't go into the failures. There've been some things that failed. There have been some things we tried to do that it's easier to do it with a human without AI.

But for those people who are afraid of AI or talking about how AI is too expensive and all of these things, I say nonsense. I think you got to just go into this. My attitude is there's two kind of people in this world.

There's people who embrace change and people who resist change. If you embrace change, what we have available in AI right now, I would go into it, make it happen. That's really all I got for you today.

AI's not magic. You get in what you put out. But you should be getting into it now because the lessons are already there.

Humans matter. We're not taking jobs. But AI matters, too, and if you're a bigger company, you could do even bigger things, I think.

So at Techstrong, we're eating our dog food. We're drinking our own champagne. We're living out our agentic dreams.

But the biggest takeaway for me is that AI adoption is no longer just abstract stuff that I talk about on Techstrong Gang. It's here in everything we're doing at Techstrong. More than 100 projects across a 25-person company.

It's accelerated. And I don't have all the answers. I'm not saying we figured it all out, and I'm not saying AI is magic.

That it certainly isn't. But for every small and midsize company watching this, it matters. It matters to you.

Go do it. Start with the work, find the friction, pick the workflows, put humans in charge of the outcome, but use it. And we're just getting started, man.

This is Shimmy. I'm out. Have a great weekend, everyone.

Happy Juneteenth tomorrow to all those who celebrate. Shimmy says, Shimmy says, Shimmy, Shimmy, Shimmy says, ask me almost anything.