Techstrong Gang – August 1, 2024

Hey, everyone. Happy Thursday. You know, no matter how hot you are, you can't escape the hype cycle.

We're gonna talk about all things AI today, as well as a brave new world of aviation. You're watching Textron Gang. Hi everyone.

Happy Thursday. It's Alan Shimmel from Strong for Tech, strong Gang. You know what goes up must come down.

Well, not always, but perhaps it's, we're seeing this going on in ai. We're gonna have a, i what I think is gonna be a vigorous debate and discussion on that today. I'm looking forward to it.

We have a bunch more, uh, really good topics to bring up. They're all sort of AI related in, in some respect. But before we do, let me introduce you to our great panel.

We've got lined up for you today, both here locally in our Boca headquarters and studios, as well as literally spanning the continent. So, uh, we'll, we'll, again, we'll go west to east and start off with, uh, our editor, John Schwartz, special editor. Hey, John, welcome.

Hope All's well out there on the, uh, on the left coast. Things are all great here on the left coast. It's great to be here, as always.

Thank you, John. Joining us from his perch, Hyatt Top, the Rocky Mountains, our CTO in future CTA, Mitch Ashley. Hey, Mitchell, welcome.

Just breathing the smoke from the left coast here in Colorado. Sorry, Mitch. Hope you all do okay out there.

I feel so bad, but all the fires, but we're doing okay. It fires by you too, isn't there, Mitchell? We, we do, we just had some up, up, uh, by Longmont.

Yeah. And yeah, I saw, um, our friend Julie Church who used to work with us. It's still secure.

The, the like ridge next to her was, was ablaze and Sheeva evacuate her house, doing Evacuations. We're dealing with it here. We're contributing smoke too, so I can't complain about anybody else's smoke.

This is, this is your fault. Well, maybe we could, maybe we should add that, have Bonnie comment on it and say, that's a great segue to our Echo Insights sustainability analyst and, and editor of, of our Echo Insights, the series of podcast videos, articles. Bonnie Schneider.

Hey, Bonnie. Hey Alan. Great to be here.

So this is an every year thing or, yeah, Unfortunately it's getting worse. Climate change has brought out more expansive wildfires affecting more people. I mean it, look, we, we lost line or in Maui last year, right?

It, I don't know if when and if it'll ever be what it is, but it's a reoccurring thing and I, I don't think it's a question of leaving too many leaves on the floor, as some politicians might tell. They like simple answers to complex questions. So does everyone.

Anyway, moving beyond Bonnie. I don't know if, if he's a simple answer to a complex question or not. It's our chief content officer, Mike Bazar.

Hey, Mike, once I heard that word simple, I think you were coming my way. Yeah, It was only a matter of time Anyway. Alright, so let's kick it off today.

You know, you just can't escape the hype sky hype cycle and every technology innovation that I've seen in 30 plus years has, has none of 'em can escape the gravity of the hype cycle. That being said, is this one different? I don't know, but certainly AI skepticism seems on the rise.

ai. And, uh, what do you think? Well, I'm gonna think two things about this.

One is there's tons of VC money going into these largest language models that seem very expensive to maintain an update on an ongoing basis and how they're gonna pay for that is unclear, and I think the folks at Wall Street are beating up on that fact. And then the second thing is, um, in addition to John's article, there's a post on text drawing AI talking about the amount of money that enterprises are gonna be spending. And on the one hand it says, on average it's 47 and a half million on Gen ai.

But then it also points out that a lot of that money is being repurposed from projects that they're already spending money on. So it's kind of like double Counting net net new money. It's not net net new money.

And I think we saw some of that reflected in the Microsoft results this past week. But John, what's your take? What are they saying in the Valley?

Is this kind of starting to feel like, uh, you know, panic city out there? It's starting to feel a little bit like 19 98, 19 99. And this one will kinda go back and talk about a couple proof points there.

Um, there's a survey that's coming out that 72% of consumers aren't using ai. Uh, there's, there was an article in the information which was really interesting about open AI itself. It burning through cash, uh, $5 billion loss this year.

There were the Microsoft results, which disappointed some in terms of, of what you just mentioned. It all really underscores this idea that we're really early in the game and the expectations are, are outsized on generative ai. Uh, we had a conference call with the Salesforce chief AI officer Clara, she on Monday, and she referred to this year as AI's version of 1998 for the internet.

She says the hype cycle is basically in the early stages. And as these companies lay the groundwork for AI operations, there is no immediate payoff. You know, this is an investment, this is gonna take a year or two to eventually lead to, to a payoff.

Even our own Daniel Newman from the Futurum group put it well this week. Um, he said on X that the digestion period for AA is likely more three to four quarters at least, rather than a few quarters. So again, we, we create this industry or this tech movements where we expect everything to change immediately, and these things take time and, and the investment will eventually pay off for some, not everyone.

So we're seeing a bit of panic and, and cracks in the FI right now. So I I I want to take a contrary position. First of all, 72% of consumers don't use ai.

No, they use ai, they just don't know they use ai, right? When people are doing Google searches and they're reading that first, uh, result, which is AI generated when they read stories on not our sites, but on other sites that are written by ai when they, when they're doing shopping on Amazon and or, or anywhere, you know, these, all of these things have AI components in them. They may not have a flashing light bulb that says, this was generated in ai, or this was AI was used in the making of this.

So most consumers wouldn't know, right? Most consumers say, oh, I, I don't go to chat GPT and therefore I don't use ai. Yeah, that's a, I think that's a red herring.

Yeah. Other, just really quickly, when we talk about that poll, whether it's 70% or if it's lower of, of folks who say they don't use it, that's still there. At least, at least 30% of folks are using Gen AI within 18 months of vestibular, which just Absolutely Think a number when you look, when you think about it.

And it's probably much higher than 30% as as you said. Yeah, No, I, I think people are interacting with AI generated stuff all the time. It's are they actually prompting themselves?

Okay, maybe 70% don't prompt And is it stuff that makes money or is it just noise? Because Google's creating a thing that is a summary of something, but people are like, well, so what I like, I like the AI summaries. Google has, I, I've been using those more because I'm fed up with looking at, on your average Google search today, there's, there's six sponsored links, three organic links.

I use the AI generated link and you know, shame on Google if we go in that route. But let's look at some of the other things here. The story about the $5 billion cash burn at, uh, open ai.

What was it? The information. The information, yeah.

That was like such a hit piece to me. I read that two days ago too, and I'm, I'm thinking, you know, who paid them for this? Because it was short.

It was, it was like deep throat, right? Unnamed sources Deep Throat said they broke into the Watergate hoteler there, there was nothing there to, to show that that's real. And even if they were burning a couple billion dollars, they have the ability to go raise.

Yes, exactly. VCs know better. They give them money in a heartbeat.

They raise at least $13 billion to Microsoft's investment alone and this idea that they would file for bankruptcy, which is mentioned in the article. Yeah, they filing that was just, come on man. Someone should get shocked for that.

It's Amazon got got, was hit many times for, it's the investments it made and the amount of money it was losing for years. Absolutely. I remember those days And, and Salesforce as well.

But at, at some point that money has to get made back by somebody At some point. Yeah. They're, they're barely two years in.

Yeah. They're, they're value At what current rate of revenue will it take them to recur the investments that current? Look, this is your typical venture and VCs know it, and that's why they're still inventing, you know, what you're looking for, the hockey stick when it hockey sticks.

This is all small potatoes, small potatoes. I think the a difference here, Alan too is, you know, AI is not a feature in many cases or not a product. It's a feature inside Of, it's a feature that that's so it's very hard to put your thumb on it.

Yeah. And It, it's gonna be uneven in how it grows. It's not suddenly gonna take off and everybody's got copilot across the world.

Now we're Sticks, hockey sticks, right? And then Microsoft, look, I think Microsoft got, Abu AI got a bum rap because Azure didn't have a good quarter. Right?

That's not AI's fault in my mind, but, you know, they're blaming it on AI here. And Microsoft took a beating. They were making the assessment that AI should have pulled more revenue up for cloud since that's the delivery vehicle for, But what really happened here was Azure didn't do well.

Right? And so you looking at AI as a savior, well, look, every time, you know, the great white hope is ai, the new great white hope, come on. I I, I, I don't blame AI for that either.

How much? Well, you know, Alan, I'm sorry, go ahead Adam. Go ahead.

No, I was just gonna say, how much of it is, is employee adaption of ai? That's, that's a great point. I mean, we're, I mean, we're gonna have a segment later.

We talk about that even more in depth. The fact the matter is, is that people are being trained on something that's fairly new to 'em. They're not gonna be optimally efficient with something that they just learned how to use or something.

They're just u using or learn and, and, and to, to expect instant productivity and operational efficiency and revenue. It's just like, it's completely unrealistic. You know, if you go back and look, Alan, if you go back and look at Gardner's 2023 hype cycle for ai, generative AI is at the very top of the peak of inflation.

I kind of feel like we're, we're stuck in the 90 high nineties temperature, like in Colorado. It just stays there. And we're still there today.

We're still at the top. We're not on the other side of this yet, of the, you know, rushing Down to the top. I don't know if we've actually hit the trow, right?

It goes the We've got a waste to Go disillusionment. I I think you're barely over the apex. That's my point is we're still at the top, you know?

Yeah. Just at the top of the rollercoaster Here. Absolutely.

I think we, the expectations for gen AI were set all wrong. I think that the enterprises and all these business execs thought that this was a magic silver bullet and it was gonna do all this amazing stuff overnight. And so they were like, oh, all these processes are gonna be automated.

Didn't realize that Gen AI is probabilistic. So it's a, it's an advisor, it's a good guess. But a lot of these business execs, I think thought it was gonna be this deterministic thing that they would just slide into their process.

And they are now realizing that this thing needs to be engineered into those processes. And that takes time. I'll, I'll go one better to you on that.

That's not what they thought. You know, what they thought they could cut heads by using ai. I was being cut.

And they, and so in, in a, in a tech industry that was doing massive layoffs, the real going on there was no big deal. We're gonna have AI and we're gonna be even more productive. And, and what they're finding is AI doesn't necessarily replace a lot of jobs.

Not today. Anyway, you know, I, I went to dinner couple nights ago with my friend John Willis, right? And John, John is up to his ears in, in ai, right?

He's he was on the show earlier this Week. Yes. He mentioned it.

It was, that was Monday, I think. Right? I went to dinner with him Tuesday.

And, um, anyway, you know, he's, he's doing this series of workshops on vector databases and using AI for coding and so forth like that. And he's saying in, in his work with developers, what AI is generating code wise right now is about 30% of, of the code that you need to, to get things done. But it's going up and being refined constantly.

John's uh, take was look in two, three years, I don't know if you're gonna need developers now, he's being I think overhyped, but, you know, we've gotta give this, this is the internet was around 15 years or 20 years before it went commercial. Right? We were all, well, not all of us, but some of us were doing white area searches and gopher and stuff like that before there was a web, web Crawler, Uh, ai.

Now AI's been around 30, 40 years, the principles behind it. But, you know, the open AI chat bot came out, what, November will be two years. Talk to me in two years.

And I, I think the smart money knows that. And that's why in spite of all the smoke we see here, VC money is still pouring it. See, I think the wise investment is really understanding the problems that are best solved with ai.

That's what, that's the phase we're in. It's, it's not the rush to go by every ai ai tool. And we suddenly solved all of our problems.

The experience around non-deterministic answers. Well, when can you use that? How can you tighten that up?

How do we manage our own data and protect it from going into models that we don't want it to? And all those issues that we're learning about by, and also going down the wrong path, like that was the wrong app to do with Gen ai. We should have built a ML model or something else.

Mm-Hmm. So we're still very much in the learning phase About Yeah. With experimenting, right?

Like a teenager or an adolescent experiment, I would say. Wherever there's smoke, as we have seen earlier in the conversation, there's fire and the thing that's on fire is cash And there's plenty of cash in the world. But I do like the way you brought that back, Mike.

That was, that is good. Anyway, hey, we gotta take a break here on Techstrong Gang. I almost said text strong ai, but we do have ai.

Okay. Um, anyway, we're gonna take a break and we're gonna come back on continuing on this AI train. Does AI increase employee burnout?

Does it cause cancer? I, you know what, what's next? You're watching Textron Gang.

All right, we're back in. Originally when AI first came out, at least Gen ai, we were all talking about how this would automate things and save toil and, uh, maybe eliminate jobs. But we have an article up on text drawing AI where it seems to be increasing people's burnout.

And the subject seems to be that as you increase the volume of work, there's an impedance mismatch on the ability of humans to kinda process all of that and to orchestrate all those additional things that they're now supposed to manage. But John, I know you've been talking to folks over at Salesforce and other folks, and there is this whole conversation about, well, what is the ROI benefit? What is the impact on people?

And so what are you hearing? Well, you know, General AI in a census, it, it's Considered a savior. And, and I think somebody referred to it as a great white hope, but in a sense it's been put at a disadvantage.

Um, when it first kind of gained momentum. We were in this era, or on the tail end of an era where companies were furiously trying to figure a way to cut back. Uh, they were on the downside of the covid boost for business, especially for tech companies.

You know, we were stuck at home. We were using online services more than ever. And, and then we were going through this era of cost cutting, especially out here in Silicon Valley.

And the idea was AI would, would, would magically appear and it would replace jobs and making much more, everything would be much more efficient. And you know, now we have, that's not the case. Now we have people trying to learn how to use it because they're not being displaced.

So there's this learning curve that's taking place. It's going on for quite a while. We actually did a segment on this, I believe, about the training issues and how it's not catching on as quickly as possible.

Plus we have the pressure from the CEO level on down for efficiency, which puts a lot more pressure on the engineers. And we've talked about that as well. It's in a sense, again, we're part of this victim of, of a hype cycle.

And the employees are feeling the pinch because they are still there. But they have to co-exist with ai. They don't know exactly whether they should trust it or how to use it.

They eventually will. Again, they will. It, it takes time.

But I mean, notoriously, Silicon Valley is one of the most impatient places in the world. And I think this is, this is where we are now, and it will get better. But for now, it's probably I miserable experience.

You're internally, you're, You're being, you're being kind about the valley. 'cause I spent 10 years out there and you couldn't meet a bunch of people who are more divorced from reality than the people in the valley. Especially all the vendors that work there.

They have very little knowledge about how actually anything that they build gets used by folks on the other side of the country in the East Coast, Midwest and how that whole thing boring The West Coast too. They they can, they could care less. I mean, it, it's, it's like a total disconnect.

You're totally right. I, I think you wanna talk about divorce from reality where we live, it's pretty divorced from reality about in bubble. Yeah.

Be careful with Glasshouse there. Yeah. But, but that being said, I do wanna point that this was not a tech strong do AI story was on our digital CXO Yeah.

Outlet. And for those of you who are not familiar, digital, CXO is our, uh, site aimed at C level A across all C level disciplines, whether it's finance, tech, product, exec, whatever. And, um, and it's a great site for these when you're talking about these kinds of things.

So I just wanna put a quick plug in there for digital CXO. Um, you know, I think the reason for this goes back to our previous discussion, Mitchell, you mentioned AI adoption and use is sort of lumpy. And so what's, what's happening is where it is being used, it, it's like akin to when we were starting to do a lot of automation in DevOps, right?

All of a sudden if you were automating something humans, you didn't have enough humans to keep up with it. And we started having all of these discussions at like Gene Kim's, DevOps, enterprise Summit, whatever the name is now, um, about employee burnout and stuff. Because automation was pushing them to go faster, faster, faster, faster.

Until the automation kinda works its way through the entire cycle and through the entire process, you're gonna have those kinds of stop, you know, it's like driving on a highway and you go from, you know, 70 miles an hour and all of a sudden you got red traffic, you got, I think that it, it's due to the nature of AI adoption, if anything. Well, I think it's also the Over extremely over-inflated expectations. Um, we're talking about firestorms in the west and Colorado.

You know, when fires get big enough, they create their own weather. Bonnie can tell us all about that, right? That's right.

And that's essentially what AI has been doing, creating its own weather, where the expectations all the way up to the c-suite, maybe from the c-suite down are, this is, you know, they're believing their own hype in everybody else's, which is this is gonna change everything. So we gotta change everything before we're, you know, we're we're eliminated and we're we lost out. But in fact, we really need to think of this as not just productivity of workers and processes.

What's the productivity of ai? How is AI itself helping us? And how, what is our learning curve for it?

Being able to make an impact. And that's what it's taking. You don't put the internet out there to everybody and suddenly we're in 2024 and we're operating in a full, you know, almost full digital economy.

It is a, it is a cycle. It's a growth path. And part of that, you know, executives do it to themselves.

We do it to ourselves as technologists of overhyping the technology maybe to get funding, maybe just 'cause we're excited about it and it's the next shiny thing. But you have to have some realistic expectations. And companies who are, I think you mentioned the layoffs, Alan, I think some of those layoffs in, in saying AI is gonna replace workers.

That was just an excuse. They probably didn't really believe that. But it's easy for the market to accept that as an answer.

'cause everybody else is doing it. When in reality they're gonna retool with different skills. Maybe some of it is AI or a or not.

But the point being is AI has its own learning and productivity curve of how we use it. And we are on that, we are on that treadmill when I just, how can we get the most from it the quickest. I was talking to a developer this morning about the John Willis comment about two years from now, we won't need developers, et cetera, et cetera.

He was pointing out, basically he called BS on the whole thing. He said, what? I spent maybe 20% of my time actually writing code.

The rest of my time is spent problem solving and figuring out what the thing that needs to be fixed is and how it's gonna be done and how it's gonna be constructed. He says, AI's not gonna do that for me anytime soon. It's why Not?

Because Basically the issue is the level of reasoning required and the understanding of the problem isn't capable for the, to teach to the LLM. 'cause the problems are new all the time. It's not the same old problem.

It's not the same old repetitive thing. Every time we're trying to build a piece of software that's truly innovative, we're doing something completely new and different. Car is a human brain, You know, to me this is the classic thesis.

It's synthesis, anti thesis, antithesis, synthesis thing. Right. And does that, is that the ultimate aim of what can't we have our AI do that?

Or is that really a human? I think, I think if you need, uh, to rewrite a piece of code or to use a code over again, and to have AI generate something in a very structured way that you know what you're gonna do and, and cut and paste, give That, that's an AI thing. Give, but can AI figure out why it's not work?

Yes. But can AI figure out that we need this to do this, this way and this is an opportunity to use software to automate a thing? No.

So the, the core idea for the doing of the thing in the first place seems to me is always gonna be a human. There's estimates different numbers. 8 trillion lines of code written, new code written.

8 trillion lines of code and generate new code in one step? So I'll do respect to John Willis, who I love, and he is a great guy, is making a statement like, we won't need the developers anymore. Is is nonsensical.

I i, is it gonna replace what developers are doing or change their job? Sure. But it's not gonna take over everything that's out there.

That's just, it's just not reality. You know? This is, It's a he and hype cycle.

Mm-Hmm. Yeah. I always Like in the ends how really pervasive all of this is gonna end up being really Right.

People are resistant to change. They, they're, they don't want to try to learn something new. I mean, I I, a vast majority of people like the even go back to the consumers u using Gen I arguably how many use it.

I just wonder how pervasive and how influential all this is actually gonna end up being in the next for at least five years. It's probably gonna be a gradual move. Right?

But people out here assume everything's gonna change 'cause they think it's gonna change. They don't think about the practical uses Mike mentioned throughout, among like the everyday people. I mean this is, this is the ultimate bubble within a bubble.

Um, people have these concepts and they put 'em on a whiteboard and they stand around and they ooh, and they ah, but it doesn't really translate often into, into real life. Yeah, I agree. I think it's gonna take time with just the process of using AI and developers and seeing what can they do, what can't they do?

What is it? What kind of mistakes are being made and where does the human need to come in and correct them? And that's all gonna change over the next few years.

I agree. What, well, maybe we could do a five or a 10 year reunion and look back on that. But, but let, let's bring it back to burnout though.

Do you really, Do We really think employees are getting burned out on, on I employees are getting burned out for sure. Burnout is real. Is AI increasing it, I guess is really my question.

I think it'll be a curve. I think it'll increase it while we figure out how to make it work and then longer term it might reduce it. But initially I think change is stress.

Mm-Hmm. And pressure. I haven't seen, I haven't seen the burnout curve increase, but I'm not watching it closely either.

To me, if that, if that's true, if, uh, we're seeing increase in burnout because people are using ai, that tells me AI is not yet productive enough to displace the work it takes to use it and use its output versus not using it at all. That doesn't mean it's bad. It just means we're still in that learning curve of how best to use it.

And if it's adding work and not displacing other work, um, or changing it and making existing work more efficient that we're just not there. And on that productivity curve I was talking about, I think that's, I think Mitch is right. It's, it's like it's creating more work right now rather than reducing it.

That's, that's what the rub is I think for within a lot of companies. I think that's what they're discovering to their dismaying. I'm being, I'll make it simple.

Right. Um, Salesforce also had a back simple. Yeah.

Salesforce, here we go. Salesforce had this report talking about how salespeople were using more of AI with mixed results. But, um, let's just say I had a sales rep capable of managing actively eight accounts.

Now with ai, they're managing three times as many, but they're not, humans aren't really set up to manage three times as many accounts. 'cause there's just more things to think about, more pieces to kinda work through and ultimately that will stress them out. Absolutely.

Absolutely. Alright. You know, before we get burned out, let's take a break here on Techstrong gag.

We're gonna come back and, and Bond. We've got a great segment. Bonnie's gonna lead here on the brave new world of aviation.

Stay tuned. You're watching Techstrong Inc. I'm Bonnie Schneider, sustainability contributor to the Techron Group.

I'm excited to introduce you to a groundbreaking new initiative from Techstrong Research. The sustainability pulse meter. The pulse meter offers valuable insights into how environmental responsibility factors into tech purchasing decisions for key players in the industry.

Position your company as a leader in the industry and differentiate from your competitors with a sustainability pulse meter offered exclusively from tech strong research when it comes to climate change and reducing emissions. One of the biggest problems is transportation, specifically aviation. So innovative tech thinkers are saying, okay, well how can we have flights that are zero emissions and run on sustainable fuel versus jet fuel.

I just had take a closer look to see where we are now in this technology and what needs to come in the future in order to have more eco-friendly flying. Hi everyone, I'm Bonnie Schneider with your Ecotech analyst Insights. The aviation world is under immense pressure to make travel more sustainable.

One of the most talked about developments is the emergence of the electric aircraft. These all electric planes could revolutionize short haul flights powered by lithium ion batteries. These electric flights produce zero direct emissions.

Sustainable aviation fuels or AFS are emerging as a viable alternative to traditional jet fuel. AFS are produced from sources like agricultural and municipal solid waste or even carbon dioxide captured from the air. Another promising technology is based on the power of hydrogen.

While this technology is still in its early stages, hydrogen has the potential to become a game changer. That's because it produces no direct carbon emissions and can be produced using renewable energy sources. There's also exciting innovations in aircraft design.

The sustainable flight national partnership of NASA is working on developing technologies like advanced wing designs, hybrid electric propulsion systems and boundary layer ingestion to optimize fuel efficiency and reduce noise pollution. These cutting edge technologies are challenging the aviation industry to rethink its approach and prioritize sustainability from the ground up. So one of the issues that I didn't address, uh, because it's so exciting to think about this as a prospect, is infrastructure changes.

Let's say we have more electric flights. Okay, well then we have to make changes to all our airports to make sure that they can host these electric flights. And we also have to consider what would be the cost then to get a ticket on an electric flight.

How expensive is that gonna be? So there's still a lot of, uh, different areas that needs to be thought out on this, uh, exciting prospect. I, I don't know if it would necessarily cost more.

I mean, you're just gotta bring in some DC current to charge these batteries. I think what's interesting though, and, and this is not just as it relates to, uh, to this particular topic, but you know, the idea of getting in a car that is electric battery powered people get some anxiety about range, but in terms of Yeah, no, it's the same look, it even goes faster than a regular car. You tell them they're going to get an electrically battery powered plane.

Airplane. Oh no I'm not. That's what I, but it's the same thing.

People don't realize that, you know, without a doubt flying in an airline is the safest form of transportation basically in the world. Right. And it's much, much safer than cars.

It's probably much, much safer than it's not. Probably it is much safer than trains, you know, automobiles, even boats I would venture. But when you start talking about new powertrains mm-Hmm.

For planes, people get a little, a little edgy. Yeah. And I think there's gonna be a lot of reluctance to it.

It's not like we're refu re refueling our aircraft, our airliners in mid air, you know, if we were for low on fuel. Right. We, we deal with range anxiety today, if you will, on regular aircraft.

You know, one of the things I I wonder though about Bonnie, I don't know if they've talked about, seems to me the weight difference is much greater just like it is on cars, the kind of batteries you would need and maybe the, you know, solid state batteries will help that as well. Are there any thoughts about sort of the efficiency on, on electric ev kind of for airplanes and, and what that cost Return is? I don't know the cost, but I know it's lithium ion batteries that they're customizing for these planes.

And then some of them are running on sustainable fuel. And I had this image when, when I was saying about fueling mid-flight or some of it's on agriculture waste, municipal waste. Imagine what that would look like if you're trying to fuel in mid-flight.

So I I, I don't know the cost of it, but I think that it would have to be worked out. But the, the batteries that they're designing are specifically for this and specifically for the weight. And as I mentioned in the piece, NASA is involved in creating just a more aerodynamic design than what we have now for wingspan and wing and, and just the way a plane would go.

So, so they're kind of working in both directions on that. Mm-Hmm. Would the, could you have solar panels on the planes?

Mm. Then I know I hired the sun or junior Until your wings. Milk.

Yeah. Yeah. Well what's conversely though, I could pull into a cloud and recharge during a storm.

'cause I Right. Hydrogen. Hydrogen, right.

I mean please Are these planes gonna be, are they gonna be, uh, this is a dumb question, but are they gonna be configurations smaller? There are no dumb questions, John. Oh, I ask a lot of, So what, what was the question?

Oh, so the question is, do the planes themselves, like the size of the planes change or like the experience of a consumer eventually? Potentially. Eventually.

Yeah. The ones, the ones that I've seen so far seem to be smaller than what we're used to. Let's say flying we're, we're on a passenger flight.

Um, so that's still being in the works. But what was interesting when I was looking at the future plans and future investments, the investment and the market is projected to grow and they're seeing even by 2030 we're gonna start to see this, um, more widespread. So the technology is growing.

It's, it's not quite here yet. We've had some flights that have gone short distances, uh, maybe 200 miles on. I was gonna ask you that.

Sustainable field. Yeah. Yeah.

Like even Virgin Airlines had had one. So, so it is happening on a smaller scale. There's an Israeli company that's just got, I think more funding on this.

So, um, we'll see more of it, but it's still in the very early stages. Are there Certain airlines too that that would be at the forefront? Sorry.

Um, are there certain airlines like, uh, that, that are looking into this or more aggressive about this for like shorter flights? Like, like Yes. The uk um, Airbus, um, just got, uh, funding, they actually just this week announced it that they're, they're gonna be investing more in, uh, sustainable air travel.

Well, air Airbus is Boeing's main, you know? Yeah. That's one of the 2 million play manufacturers duopoly.

Right. I, you know, like, so for instance, there's, there's that company out of Denver or Colorado Mitchell that's doing, uh, super sodic Mm-Hmm. And I think they were looking at more sustainable, you know, because jet jet fuel's probably one of the dirtiest fuels in terms of pollution, um, out there.

And what, what was the name of the company? Was it Boom or something? I think it's boom, I can't remember.

Yeah. But um, look, I, I know in the world of boats we are now there are electric boats for sale. Mm-Hmm.

And they're big, they're not little rowboats or something. There's some big electric boats. Um, I, you know, I I do think it's the future.

I, I think, you know, I think like something like Tesla for instance, right? Might its future might be in building and designing better batteries that are necessarily building cars. Mm-hmm.

Right. I think that the battery, That is the holy grail of Silicon Valley by the way. That has been for years.

Yeah. Batteries, If we could build lighter batteries that store more, that recharge faster, then all of these things are possible. Are these the same people who Promised me a flying car 10 years?

I was gonna mention, I was just gonna mention, you Know, I saw a recent article where we, there's a company coming out with a flying car. It's gonna be electric's. Several.

Yeah, there's several working on It. Well, you know how some people with electric cars, I know this was like a few years ago when I was looking at them, let's say to buy one, some people are apprehensive, like you said, let's say to go an electric plane, but would they be less apprehensive if it was a hybrid model if we said we're using, Well, no, that's the popularity of plugin hybrids, right? So that's what NASA is working now with those hybrid models.

And I, I saw some, um, at Gatwick airport in, in London. So that might be a way to ease people into it. I don't, Mike, do you remember all these flying core stories we would do like 10 or 15 years ago?

So imagine getting on the, imagine getting on the airliner and you look at pee appear into the cockpit and there's one tablet that's the interface for all the controls. You know, we've changed the interface Time you're looking in and there's no pilot ai. Yeah.

When we try this maybe with shorter flights early on and see, I think Absolutely that's what they're doing. Because when you look like air, air, air, the airline business in the US and even quite frankly in Europe, you know, it's always that hub and spoke kind of thing, right. And you know, Airbus had to pull, they stopped making the three 80, the double decker because there just wasn't enough routes that had that kind of traffic.

We, that was required. They went to the three 50 here in the us So many regional airports are starved. Yeah, because you, it's two ex, no one wants to fly.

Really a prop job though. I kinda like them. But you know, even the regional jets like the Embraer or Bombardier Jets, um, they're not efficient enough.

I mean, if we could get really cost efficient, so we don't, we can break outta that hub and spoke. It's almost like a, a super light rail service, right? Like Yeah.

But a regional airports would have these, or you'd even like a commuter flights ostensibly, like when people go, So if I want to go from Memphis to Austin, I don't have to go through St. Louis. That'd be great.

That Would be great. Yeah. No, I mean that's the idea here, right?

Get break the hub and spoke model. But we'll see. Anyway, Bonnie, great.

Great work on that one. Thank you. And just a, a quick plug, right?

So that is on our Techstrong tv. The video we showed you is on Techstrong tv under Echo Tech Analyst Insights. It's Echo Tech Insights.

Bonnie's, you know, has quite a library of, of uh, content on this subject. So if you are a greeny or you, you know, you, you like this kind of stuff, go check it out on Textron tv. Just look under series for Echo Tech insights, Right?

That's right. Alright guys, I think that's gonna wrap Textron Gang for Thursday and um, I, we'll be back tomorrow. I hope so.

Let's hope so. Okay, John Mitchell, thanks for joining us. Bonnie and Mike, thank you.

Thank you out here for watching and, and listening and writing and keeping us, you know, honest here at Textron Gang. We love doing this. We'll be back tomorrow with more for now though.

That's it. We're out Cloud native now is the web's leading resource for the growing cloud native ecosystem. com is your destination for news, thought leadership, features and webinars on cloud native architecture, Kubernetes serverless, cloud native application development, microservices, service mesh, cloud native security, and more.

Stay on the cutting edge of modern application development at Cloud Native now.