Techstrong Gang – March 5, 2025

Send me your poor, your homeless, and your chips. You're watching Text on Gang. Hey everyone.

Happy Wednesday. Welcome here to Textron Gang. We've got a great show to go over with you today.

We're gonna talk about chip, migration, immigration, and everything else to do with chips. We're gonna talk a little bit about the economics of ent, ai and digital drag. No, not talking about transgender stuff, though, uh, in that regard though, we've got a great gang to talk to you about it with today, including a brand new gang member making his debut here on Textron Gang.

He's actually no stranger to the Textron family. com 11, 12 years ago, this man was one of the key people helping us get it going. He keynoted for us.

He shielded for us. He wrote for us, spoke for us, and he was one of the biggest names in, in DevOps. Still is my good friend, Andy Mann.

Hey Andy. How are you? Welcome, Alan.

I'm doing so well. It's so good to be here. Mate, you know what, this is gonna be on the, on the Textron Gang timeline.

This'll be a definite no, a definite mark on the line the day Andy Mann joins the gang. Thank you and welcome man. Ah, thank you for having me.

It's great to be here. All righty. Joining at Andy's out in Boulder, Colorado, by the way, and way up high up there in the mountains.

Well, it's a little early in the morning. He's not high up in the mountains, but, um, maybe our next guest high up in the mountains is it's the guitar man, Mitch Ashley. Hey, Mitch.

How are you Doing? Very good. I I could see Andy from here up there.

Hey, Andy. Yeah, you're doing in Boulder. Good.

Can you see Russia is the question. And don't forget they're your friend. Um, that's what we're told.

Anyway, let's move on from Colorado down to San Angelo, Texas, the tech capital of Southwest Texas, and our own editor, AMA Amanda Ani. Hey, Amanda, how are you? Hello.

Good. Happy to be here as always. Absolutely.

And then from Texas, we'll go to the dean up in Harris in New York. Our Chief Content Officer, Mike Ard. Mike, I saw I caught the end of the Yankee game yesterday.

Those kids look good. They do look good. And, and I'm sitting here trying to figure out, you know, where this potato chip crisis is gonna go next.

Let's put tariffs on chips. Um, okay, so our first, our first segment today is on mass chip migration. You know, continuing the, uh, the pilgrimage to dc Now we have the T-S-M-C-C-E-O announcing a hundred billion dollars, US Investment Plan a hundred.

We'll add that to the 2 trillion we're already investing. 'cause you can never have enough AI and data centers it seems, even if you don't have enough electricity. Um, but Mike, what, what's the deal on this one?

Well, this is the latest instance of somebody traveling to see the president and bend the knee. But, um, the Chinese government is also suggesting that basically Taiwan is in the middle of something that feels like a capital flight to the United States, and that they all the chip manufacturing's gonna move here. And maybe this is part of some larger geopolitical deal, but Andy, you have a very interesting perspective coming from, uh, an international background down under, you know, what's the rest of the world saying about all this stuff?

Oh, look, I mean, the rest of the world can see that this is, obviously, there's a lot of political and, you know, geopolitical implications around this, right? And exactly what you said we saw with CHIPS Act and stuff like that. There's obviously a great desire politically on both sides of the aisle to bring manufacturing of chips and especially AI chips into the us, you know, drive the US forward as a, an AI powerhouse.

We're a software powerhouse, but so much of the investment is going into hardware now. And we see for various ship manufacturers pledging a billion couple of billion, a hundred billion, uh, you know, used to be cloud a billion dollars with the entry point, right? Everyone was pledging a billion dollar investment.

Now, it seems that a hundred billion is the mark. Um, you know, from the rest of the world that drains a lot. There's a lot of brain drain has been going on, especially out of Asia, into the us, into Europe for some time.

And so for lots of, uh, you know, countries down in Asia Pacific especially, which is where I'm from, you can probably tell from my Colorado accent, um, there's a lot of, of, of concern around what does that, where does that leave those nations? Where does that leave that region in terms of, uh, innovation and ability to execute on the next biggest trend? So it'll be interesting to see how much of that investment actually does manifest at the us By the way, we always see under various administration's promises of investment, some of which come, some of which don't.

0. Um, in the first run, there was a massive investment, uh, promise made, uh, for various things, uh, Siemens, uh, air conditioning, other things, which didn't actually happen. So, you know what?

I'm gonna sit and wait and see what happens in reality, not just in the newspapers, but yeah, there's a lot of trepidation down under in Asia-Pac around how does that leave Asia prepared to take on This innovation revolution? I've got some thoughts. So Andy, I, I think you said some things there that demand a little digging in.

First of all, from a geo pli pure geopolitical strategy here, Taiwan is in a tough place, right? Sooner or later the thinking goes, China tries to absorb it peacefully or not. Now, if you're Taiwan and you don't want to become part of China, even though technically, you know, that's a whole different story, do you say, I wanna keep Taiwan so valuable that the US and the rest of the world cannot let China absorb it, right?

I call that the, the Taiwanese patriot who wants to keep everything in Taiwan to keep Taiwan valuable so that it's too strategic to let the Chinese have it. Or do you take the selfish oligarch path which says, Hey, I'm gonna get my money outta here and transplant my technology to the US Western Europe, what have you. And this way when the Chi, by the time the Chinese come into Taiwan, you know, the Corleone family's outta the olive oil business.

And, and that's that. And, and we're not doing it anymore. Could be a little bit of both.

I will caution, as Andy said, in the previous Trump administration, this same company TSMC announced maybe it was 10 billion net for a plant. It was in the Midwest, Wisconsin never got off the ground. I don't know if it'll get off the ground here.

Maybe this is just a way to placate the, the big baby in the White House and try to see if they could get a, an escape outta tariffs on this, right? And, and there could be that as well. The other thing though is, Andy, to your point about being in Asia-Pac country, and you know, there's an old saying, nature rapports a vacuum, and that giant sucking sound u here of this, all this money being pledged and, and resources being moved out of the region, is that vacuum nature reports it.

Someone will come in to fill that vacuum, and we know who that someone is. What you're doing is you're, you are like pulling back the ocean before the tsunami for the Chinese to come in because the chi China then will be the only game in town, right? And so whether Australia wants to or not, or, or New Zealand or TI or Singapore or any of the Asia-Pac region, maybe except for Japan, they're gonna have no choice but to deal with China because they'll be the only game in town, right?

And, and with the US erecting more trade barriers and tariffs, all of these other countries are gonna start doing free trade agreements among themselves, including Canada, right? A Canada Chinese connection. Oh, they already, Canada and Mexico already announced their response.

Yeah. Well, no, that's their response to us by adding tariffs. But they'll do China deals with less tariffs.

So what's gonna happen here is, you know, you have, uh, fort us with its own little thing, and the rest of the world's still gonna do business without us perhaps. And that, that would not be a good result. I'm not sure if this is the best analogy, but if you think about, you know what, what, one of the things that got the Japanese into the war was the blockade of World War II with the blockade of oil and ai.

And whether it's AI software, hardware is kind of the new oil of, of our commerce in our world, and everybody's scrambling to get it right. They've gotta have some, it can't be solely dependent upon one other organization. So on one hand, we're, you know, that, that game's playing out.

The other side of it is, we're paying, playing this game of risk and what, what, what land kind of grab, uh, so we have these two things going on, and it's, it's interesting that this kind of disruption makes for strange bedfellows, people signing up and partnering with China when they were US allies, us partnering with Russia. It's, it's gonna be turbulent. So to your strange bedfellows comment, um, what are the odds that T-M-T-M-S-C, the CEO and Trump were discussing the partitioning of intel during their meeting?

It seems to me that that's the next part of this conversation where the foundries go one way and the rest of intel go the other way. And as a lot of folks, especially former Intel executives pushing back hard on this saying, uh, Intel's about to make the turn, and yet they also announced that this manufacturing facility they were gonna build in Ohio is now delayed till 2030. So you know, Alan Intel for real, or not for real?

Again, I have a few thoughts on this one. First of all, is anyone surprised that that plant is being delayed? Because here, here, let me tell you the real nitty gritty, soft white, 30 secret that underlies all of this $2 trillion in AI investment, we have not proven in this country that we can build, maintain scale chip foundries that are making cutting edge chips, right?

The three nanos and two nanos, and all of these and these high-end GPUs, we haven't even proven we could build phones here. And it's not something that you're gonna snap your fingers and throw $2 trillion at, and it's gonna happen. It's going to take 10 years for us to build those foundries, train those workers, make this stuff at scale.

And we're gonna suffer in that meantime, right? Because I don't think anyone who's really proven what, you know, this isn't building cars, right? Building chips, building, you know, high-end chips like this at scale is, is something, there's a reason why TSMC is, is who it is.

They've been doing that this for 30 years and they've kind of perfected it. There's no guarantee you're just going to pop up a factory in, in, you know, Gutenberg Ohio or wherever the heck it is. And, and, and voila, you're gonna have chips coming out.

You know, this ain't Dairy Queen. So I, I worry about that. The other thing I worry about is, frankly, who the hell is the US government to decide about chopping up intel?

I, I'd like to have Intel have a seat at the table. 'cause the last time I checked, the US government doesn't own US industry, even though they're in bed together in today's oligarchy, it's still a private company, and the shareholders of Intel should be the ones who make the decision about what Intel does going forward. So I I'm against that whole thing.

I would, I would, I would beg to differ if we can chop up Ukraine. What the hell's Intel? Easy.

You're right. But don't, let's not get me started there. Don't even, when was the last time you visited Ukraine?

Maybe we should do a show there. That's A great, tell me you watched it on video. I'm only, that's not great.

I didn't watch the videos. Yeah, but no, seriously, I mean, you know, he could talk all he wants with the guy from TSMC, someone Intel. That's an intel decision last I checked.

So Andy, when you add all this up though, it doesn't look to me like the cost of semiconductors or GPUs or any of that stuff is coming down anytime soon in the next 10 years. In fact, it just may get more expensive ultimately. So, um, is this gonna hold back software development because the cost of building all these lovely AI apps is gonna be higher than anybody anticipates?

Yeah. Look, I think this will hold back some development, right? I mean the, we already saw, uh, through say COVID and the supply chain and the, the slowdown in our op in, in, in access to systems and equipment that we saw slower r and d, slower innovation.

Uh, and this will absolutely change that. We've already got, uh, bottlenecks around chips, around server access. Um, everyone wants to put, well, at least 10 billion into r and d on their blue sky projects around ai.

Um, you know, maybe some of it might even pay back some revenue at some point. We'll see how that works out. But yeah, I absolutely believe this will slow down.

There are other factors of course, which may be throttling as well. You know, uh, energy production is obviously the big one. Uh, and I know in this part of the world here in Colorado, up in Wyoming, um, lots of announcements around data center production and clean energy and all that sort of stuff.

So it's gonna be a lot of different things. But yes, I would absolutely expect this to be a drag. Yeah.

To your point, a lot of people are complaining that Microsoft quietly upgraded them and to the higher performing open AI driven version of office and, uh, didn't ask them whether that they wanted the higher performing, more costly version. And a lot of people are complaining saying, you know what? The ROI on that AI capability isn't worth that, and they wanna go back to their normal license.

So I think we're gonna see a lot more of those conversations going forward. Yeah, I mean, I, I will tell you the people I talk to in, in leadership roles around, uh, sort of desktop and operating system and so forth, are absolutely ropable about that. Uh, 'cause all of a sudden it's, and it's not just that they're not finding ROI, they're finding negative cost driver because people are, are messing around with this AI on their desktop when they should be getting to work and they're getting it all wrong because, uh, the AI is still not really up to scratch.

I, I was disappointed in the Microsoft copilot features. I, I got 'em in my office 365, I got that little symbol. I said, oh, lemme click it.

And, uh, disappointed, disappointed in it. So I have a question. Um, just been quietly listening.

So, uh, the question that comes to my mind, something you said, Alan, so we haven't done too well with chip manufacturing here in the US and now this is a big delay. We're gonna be so behind, is it worth, um, trying to have the chip manufacturing here in the US Because I know price is probably gonna be more expensive here. Is the return on investment gonna be worth it?

Or are we gonna be so behind by the time we even, I'm glad you asked this, Amanda. So for all of those out there with the same question as Amanda, I am, make no mistake, it is a worthy goal and a strategic goal for the US to say we wanna be independent. Like we're energy independent versus any, we wanna be chip independent.

We want to control the manufacturer of GPUs, AI chips, every, all semiconductor chips, and we wanna sell them to the rest of the world if they'll take 'em from us. But there's a, hold on one second, Mitch. There's a gap between wishing it and doing it.

And the, and the question is, when the rest of the world is frankly p****d off about it, where, where are you getting that, those chips during those gap And that gap might, could be five to 10 years, right? What are you gonna do for the next five to 10 years? Because if you're gonna wait five to 10 years to get your chips game's over, game's over Alan, I think the way to look at it is the, the commodity chips, even if people didn't wanna sell 'em to us, we can get those through back channel.

It's, it's the quantum, it's the AI chips, uh, the, um, things that are cutting edge. That's what we really need to own. Because yes, it's gonna be more expensive to develop it here, but if what we are creating is far superior and only we, you know, have that advantage, whether it's a six or 12 month or whatever, that's what I think we wanna make here because we can get Emory chips from here and, you know, whatever chips from, to build, you know, laptops and et cetera.

I don't think that's where the value is. It's on the cutting edge for the us You know, where this falls apart. There isn't gonna be enough rare metals in Utah to drive all this.

And so if we, so if we don't get some help from overseas in terms of, you know, maybe that's why we wanna do deals with somebody who's in at war with Russia, but, Or take over Greenland or all these other things. Yeah, but this isn't the Dutch East India company and this ain't the 16 hundreds, the imperialist days are over. Forget it.

Forget it. And Mitch, yes, you wanna build, but you gotta start somewhere. And making commodity chips is a start, but it's building those other chips that you're talking about.

I'm telling you, building the fabs for them, getting the knowhow, getting the kinks worked out is a five year minimum. It is, it is. But you have the advantage of, that's where you're starting, as opposed to you have a huge infrastructure built up of doing, you know, current generation and now you've gotta get to the next level to be able to do the GPUs and quantum chips.

So yes, I agree. It's, I mean, it's not, this is not a turnkey operation. Five years would be great If we right.

Five years optimistically. It's optimistic. And, and just, just on that point though, you know, it's not like TMSC has this manufacturing of GPUs down.

The cost of GPUs is high because they can't produce enough of them. So, you know, there's, nobody has a correct answer here on either side of the pond, as it were. It's gonna be an interesting time, you know, but like I opened it up with, under that Statue of Liberty, send me your, your poor, your homeless, whatever, and your chips.

Um, let's see what happens. You're watching Text on Gang. We'll be right back.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. Hey folks, we're back. And as promised, we're talking about the rise of the AI agent economy.

It's still early days, but AI agents will communicate with each other and eventually they will drive transactions and they may decide to do things based on how they're programmed. They're hallucinate depending on how things go. But Mitch, I know that, uh, tuum group is really putting a lot of investment into researching AI agents.

And I know you put out a report recently around Salesforce and what they're doing, and I expect more to come, but is this just the beginning? I, I, well, just a plug, I would really recommend folks follow the analyst at futurum because we're looking at not just the chips, but also agents, software development, infrastructure security, and all the impact that a AI is already having. You know, I'm thinking about Alan's comment of trying copilot Microsoft copilot and being disappointed or like I am with Apple Intelligence.

What's happening behind the scenes is people are rushing to figure out how to crude use, uh, use the LLMs and use no code natural language, as well as traditional program programming languages to create agents and see what we can do. I mean, it is still at the experimental stage, but people are starting to get their legs under them. And, uh, you know, we even see, you know, Lang Lang graph issuing, uh, prebuilt agents that you can use to talk to their models.

Uh, we did this analysis for Salesforce, or I was, uh, sponsored by Salesforce. It's our own independent analysis. But, um, looking at what the ROI and the total cost of ownership, and there's some impressive numbers, you know, it's early.

Um, but I think the thing, the people who win right now are the people that focus on agents that actually are helpful. Not just agents. Like, find a problem that your agent solves and customers who want you to solve it.

And they'll go, this is amazing. When we throw generic tools at people, here you go, here's chat GPT, here you go. Here's copilot in your Microsoft Word document.

Um, most people are not gonna figure, spend the time to figure out how to make that work for 'em if they can. So the Agentic agent and the agent topic is, it's across the board. I mean, we just had Sonotype announced and, uh, agent capabilities and their tools, you know, we've, OpenText has, I mean, everybody is announcing, uh, both AI and agent based capabilities.

So it's, it's interesting time for sure. Yeah, I, I think every other article in Tech strong AI is about a new AI agent. There you go.

Andy, let me ask you something. So let's say that I have an AI agent and it is optimized for me to buy this thing at the lowest possible cost. And let's say that you have an AI agent that's optimized to sell this thing at the highest amount of profit.

Are two agents gonna meet somewhere in an alleyway and we're gonna have a rumble to sort this out? Or how does that kinda like play out in your mind? Yeah, look, it's gonna be fun to watch it least as a, as an observer.

I don't know if you remember when, um, uh, the personal digital assistants first started to come out. You had your Alexas and you had your Siri stop, stop. My, my, my, my button just started lighting up.

'cause I said her name didn't it? Uh, anyway, you've got all the assistants, and remember at one point they got them talking to each other and they had just had a conversation for like three hours. Uh, and nothing came out.

I think there's gonna be a little bit of that. My concern, my biggest concern with the Gentech at the moment is really just about known knowns and unknown unknowns. Going back to that other Donald, um, the idea of, of, you know, AI's really good at solving known knowns.

Humans are a plethora of unknown unknowns. So look, when we, and we all know this, you go online, you go and use the chat agent, and, uh, yesterday I had to do a whole bunch of stuff with my satellite radio. And I've got, like, I've got two cars and one's active and one's inactive, and I've got a special deal on one.

But that's coming to an end. And then I've got another special deal. I don't know any agent that will deal with that complexity right now, but if all I needed to do was go online and renew my existing subscription, agen AI is gonna take care of that.

So look, I think there's, there's great opportunity in this. Uh, but I'm looking forward to the hallucinations, um, when age Agentic AI talks to agentic AI and, uh, no, they're never gonna come to an agreement. You kidding me?

So I'll tell you something. I remember when I first met Andy Mann, he was at ca and I was at a ca world in Las Vegas. They used to do a nice job at ca World in Las Vegas.

And I sat through a session, I'm trying to remember who, it might have been Andy who presented, or maybe it was Eman Zari, uh, who's president at the time. But it was the first time I became familiar with the term the AI economy. Remember that, Andy?

And, and, and this was, so this was 20 13, 20 14, maybe 2015 at the latest. And it was the AI economy in that we're gonna have a whole economy based upon AI's talking to ais, not ais, excuse me, APIs, the API I economy and APIs, talking to APIs. And I said, wow, you really think so?

Oh yeah, no, no doubt about it, mate. It was Andy who was giving that. And, and I thought it was kind of early.

As we sit here today, 57% of all the traffic on the internet is API to API. There is an API economy might have taken 10 years, same 10 years. It's gonna take us to build those chips.

Maybe by the time the chips are built, the agent ai, agentic AI economy will be real as well. But I had an interesting conversation yesterday. I'm playing with this tool.

I, I'm actually paying for it, which goes against my principle, but, um, it's called hoop ai, HOOP. And it's pretty cool. It, it, it sits on, if you're on a Mac, you could use their app.

If not, it has bots that go into Zoom, Google meet your email, slack, all the usuals, and it gathers everything that people are telling you, wanting you. And from it, the AI pulls out tasks. And then you could decide, is this a real task you want to do, ignore it, whatever.

So they like all good young companies, and by the way, these are from some of the founders of Trello, okay? So they, they know a little bit about task management and stuff like that. So they reached out and they said, Hey, you're a beta user.

Why are they charging for beta? But you're a beta user and we'd like to do an interview much like you used to do, Mitch, when we were still secure. And I had a, I spoke to the co-founder, one of the co-founders, a woman named Stella yesterday for about 45 minutes.

And the whole agentic ai, I said, look, I'd like not only to do the task, create a task for me, but if it's something sort of run of the mill, can I have an agent that just goes and does it and then crosses it off? That's where I really want to be. I don't need 30 new tasks every day.

I need something that's going to do the basic task. And she said, you know, we thought a lot about that and version two, version three of the product, 'cause version two is gonna be teamwork version three agents. And, um, she said, the problem is, why do you think people are going to use our agent?

Because every, like Mitch said, every piece of software you have today has an agent or is building an agent. So as part of this agentic AI economy, like the API economy, what agent are you going to use to do the task? Do you want the task manager's agent to do it?

Or does that talk to someone else's agent? How many agents do we need? How many agents do we have?

How do we, you know, I don't want agents just talking to agents for the sake of talking, but let's get something done. And I think that's the problem. I wanna have a secret agent that offloads all my s**t over to your agents.

Well, the upward leafy monkey agent, you know, Alan, this is a good example what I'm talking about though, you know, 'cause I tried out the hoop. First of all, I looked at what it does after I tried incident. Why the heck would I pay 20 bucks a month for that?

I can't imagine that's worth 20. But it's, you know, startups go through these phases of kind of figuring out are we solving a good problem or not? And will the market pay for it?

It, it's a good example of, I don't need another agent to tell me that 20 things that I already know, 18 of them I have to get done. I don't need another barking dog telling me I got work to do. I know I got work to do.

Help me do the work, help me get something done. Um, we, um, Futurum did a, another study, uh, talking to 200 CEOs at, at, uh, very, very large, uh, organizations. And out of the top 200 and you know, they see ai, their top thing is automation.

That's what they want AI to do for them. They want it to do the, do tasks for them. You know, they're talking about business processes, et cetera.

Not being assistance to people, distracting 'em, maybe decreasing productivity. Now AI projects internally still have a high failure rate. You know, we're early in this, but I think that's what we all have to have a critical eye towards of is it, is it a novelty?

Is it not really a problem that needs to be solved or that is a problem I need solved? Is this, is this doing something for me, my business, my my operation that actually has an ROI to it? Yeah.

And Mitch, I think there's, there's an aspect here of, um, you know, pilot versus co-pilot. I, I don't need more co-pilots. I need some pilots to what Alan was saying.

Um, so people are actually some, uh, agents that are actually gonna do the job, but we're coming at it from the wrong angle. Well, so many software businesses at least are coming at it, I think from the wrong angle, which is a new set it, Mitch, find a problem, fix a problem. Don't just release AI here, have some ai.

Uh, okay, that and three bucks 50 gets me a cup of coffee if I'm lucky. Uh, but it doesn't solve a problem. Find a problem, fix a problem.

And that's why I think we're having challenges around, well, AgTech and chat GPT and Gen AI generally as well is too many people are going at the technology going, oh, well this is cool. And it is cool. It does amazing things for playtime.

It doesn't really help me get my job done. Now, I think to, uh, and again, to Alan's point, um, the co-pilot versus pilot, I want AI to be augmentation to start with. I want it to be automation to start with, right?

Automated intelligence, augmented intelligence. I think it's a stepwise approach to artificial. And we need to get this maturity map going.

And we know this map exists. We've done it with automation before, right? This idea of trust, but verify, put in guardrails, not roadblocks, um, and start to find a problem, fix a problem.

I think there's a lot of ways of gentech can go here, but as long as people are focusing on co-pilots that are AI enabled, and, uh, step three, I don't know, underpants known kind of territory now, uh, I think we're not gonna get to a solution that we we're happy with. So I would just say, well, the issue is that those AI models don't do the same thing the same way twice. And if you're running a business process, you need it to be done the same way every time.

And that's where the disconnect is gonna be. So I have two questions. First of all, um, is there like a catalog of AI agents that people could shop through?

So I think that might be helpful, where they can hand select a number of AI agents that work together for their needs. And then number two, has there been any study, like a mass study where people share something they wish they had an AI agent for and they could put that together and determine the most effective AI agents that they should come up with? Um, it, it's a good, you have the best questions, Amanda.

That's why you're such a great interviewer on Textron tv. Um, I don't know of a, of a directory one to have to be updated. Sounds like a business plan to me.

Mitch. There you go. I, I think even, you know, the second question I really, I think is a great one, which is take it down a level.

Let's talk about the problems that we need to solve and can we put AI to it. Um, I, I heard the one of, one of the people from the CTO office at Dell talking about how they are tackling, uh, this is a public conversation. So how they're tackling using AI and development and, you know, the ideas, their plethora of ideas, but they had a process where they kind of winded them down to like, okay, what are the ones we really think have a, a value to it?

And ROI invest some experimentation. And then they, they have a few projects, a few, maybe it's a few dozen or so that are really investing in AI to solve that specific problem. So it's exactly what you're talking about Amanda.

And I think organizations have to do that for themselves, right? Um, another thing I think we're kind of missing the point on how we're selling agents. Um, I look at open AI and you have to pay extra for operator.

You have to pay at the higher end, you know, what, is it the AI agent or is it the stickiness of the agent? I, if I build a lot of stuff with somebody's agent, I'm not gonna move off of that anytime soon. If it's bringing value to me, you know, that's the, give it to me free.

Get me stuck. I will live with that for a long time and I'm happy to pay you money when I see value from it. We don't hear any about any great things happening with people doing things with Cursor or with Cursor.

We do there, but w with operator from Open ai. So that tells me, is it really, is it really that valuable yet? Yeah, like everything else, ai, a lot of it is on the come, Mitch.

Yeah. All right. Um, let's take a break here.

We've got one more great segment left for today's Textron gang talking about digital drag. No, it's not. Some show in Key West.

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Hey folks, we're back and we're talking about a report from soho where they did an analysis that says, well, how far are people along in their digital business transformation initiatives? And I think it suggested maybe a third are kind of stuck, and it's probably more than that. But Amanda, you run digital CXO for us and that's where this article is.

What's your assessment of what's going on here? I mean, we seem to be all kinda like enthused and now we're kind of tangled up in each other. Mm-hmm.

Yes. So it was an interesting study because several key points that I noticed. First of all, it's the in-office workers that are, that are lagging behind, um, versus the remote hybrid workers, which seem to be, um, experimenting and taking on, uh, more effective tools.

So that's kind of interesting. Um, uh, secondly is the, the reliance on all these spreadsheets. We were talking about this earlier in the show, we're still relying on spreadsheets and these old, um, um, methods of just sharing passwords ad hoc and, um, not, not embracing AI for security.

Um, whereas they are for other things. Uh, so I found that interesting. I had, um, typed out a few other key points.

Um, oh, it's just the use of shadow IT too is a big one where, um, they're just using all these tools and, and nobody's keeping track. So, um, we're a little behind in digital transformation compared to other countries, um, but primarily in the, um, um, not in the remote and hybrid, but the people who are going to work. So I, I would also emphasize in that regard, it's not that we're lagging in digital transformation.

We do a great job digitally. You could order and get virtually anything you want digitally today. Anything just about this survey is really for digital transformation in the workplace.

So how are workers transforming into digital? And it's not that they're not digital, right? Using a spreadsheet is still digital.

It's are they, are they leveraging digital technologies to improve productivity? I think is a better, but you know, this, I, whenever I get surveys like this and I'm jaded now from doing this all these years, I look at who put out the survey, what do they sell? And that pretty much will tell you what the survey's gonna say.

And I think there's a case of that. I, I think I'm going blind trying to enter data into this cell over here in this spreadsheet. 'cause it's so small, I cannot see what the hell is going on inside it.

And then if I wanna, well, I can tell you what your vision problems are from Mike, but Day goes on. So, So, so I'll jump to Andy and just say, I keep feeling like we're using the wrong tools for the wrong jobs all the time. Yeah.

This is, this is the story of, of tech writ large, right? The, the rush to adoption and then the stall. We see it every single revolution we saw you, you remember virtual stall 15 years, 20 years ago when we were first meeting Mike, we were talking about virtual stall, you know, adoption of virtualization followed the same pattern, big rush to adopt lots of gains.

Obvious ROI then, uh, how are we gonna manage this? How are we gonna secure this? How are we gonna back it up?

How are we do good governance compliance? Is it really doing the ROI the effort, the productivity that we wanted it to? Cloud computing was the same.

Oh, and by the way, all of this was also rogue IT and shadow IT to Amanda's research. Uh, we had rogue IT for, uh, mobile apps. Remember we had rogue IT for virtual services for cloud services.

I remember standing up in front of a conference, maybe it was one of yours, Alan, and asking the audience, uh, put your hands up if you don't have any of your workers, uh, using SaaS today. This is like in 19 20 14 or something. And a whole bunch of people put their hands up and said, no, put your hands down.

Everyone is using SaaS, right? Look, everyone is using ai. Everyone is using all these technologies.

They're trying to get it right. Um, yeah, they're using spreadsheets, but they're also using Google Sheets and they're doing some predictive and they're using some coyer, but it's stalling out because we're trying to govern, we're trying to manage, we're trying to find better use cases. We've got the obvious ones under control.

We've done the, the the, it's obviously gonna pay back. Now we're trying to struggle to find the real big, you know, nuts to crack now. So I think Alan's right, we've done a lot of great work on digital transformation as consumers, as enterprises, but we're getting to that store point and I think this is entirely predictable Crossing the chasm model right there.

But it's a good stuff on digital CXO. Hey, we've got to, uh, pull out of this one. We are a little overtime.

Te apologize. Of course, we still have a full day of text strung TV immediately following us here on the gang. So stay tuned for that.

And just a quick plug tomorrow, two 30 Eastern Time LinkedIn live. I'll be live. Shimmy says we're talking tariffs in tech.

So if you've got something good to say about it, join me on there. I look forward to it. Um, until tomorrow though, Andy, welcome to the gang, man, you came out with flying colors.

Thank you, Mike Mitchell. Amanda, absolutely. We'll have you back on again real soon.

You'll be in the regular rotation for the rest of us here. Thank you for watching Textron Gang. We'll be back tomorrow with more.

Stay tuned now for some great Textron tv.