Transcript
through the month of November, kind of took a little bit of a break, but I think that we have come back, at least personally I have come back a little bit more refreshed, a little bit more ready to tackle some of these things and hopefully you all got a bit of a good break. Hopefully, fingers crossed, I know IT is always moving and always doing something, so hopefully those that are in the States got a good break. But today we're going to be looking towards the next year. Oh, and I forgot to mention, if you are new to the IT Leadership Lab, welcome in. So this is a community that is dedicated to IT leaders of all shapes and sizes, different kinds of organizations, but it's basically a place for IT leaders to build community with each other, share content that they have found helpful, share resources that they've found helpful or that they actually use in their day-to-day. And we also host bi-monthly webinars so that we can discuss various IT leadership topics and then bring on leaders within the space that can share their expertise. So a lot of these are going to be kind of those soft skills types of conversations, so managing employees and discussing things with leadership or building business cases. But we also touch on the tech aspect of being an IT leader because that's a very obviously relevant part of your job still as an IT leader. So today we'll be talking about what you might be able to expect going into the future. Technology is evolving, there's a lot of things to keep an eye out for, whether that's good or bad or helpful. And then in this stream we'll be talking about what that means to you as an IT leader and what you might want to keep your eye out for. And definitely feel free to jump into the chat here in Circle if you have any questions. And yeah, I'll go ahead and have our speakers introduce themselves. So Tim, I know that you've done this probably 20 times now, so you probably have it all memorized. But if you want to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your journey in IT and what you do here in the lab. Hi, I'm Tim and I have a problem. I'm kidding. No, I'm Tim Lanning, the Vice President of IT for a non-profit in the San Antonio, Texas area. I'm currently in the middle of massive growth right now, planning to maybe hit about 600, 700 people. And we started at 75 people when I started here in 2022. So it's been a wild ride. I got promoted to VP and with that was a whole bunch of what's a budget. Oh no, everything's a dumpster fire. Okay, great. How to deal with all that. So the leadership lab has been very helpful to me in my journey. And so grateful to Brittany for all that she does and all the contributions that everyone puts into this community. It's been a massive help to me. But yeah, been doing IT for about a decade and the ride's taken me this far and I don't see that stopping. I love doing IT and just, yeah, love being where I'm at. Awesome. Well, thank you. And yeah, thank you for all the contributions. And honestly, thank you to everybody that's contributed to the lab. It's honestly great to have people in there that actually know what they're talking about and not just someone that is making things up, at least personally. But yeah, well, good to have you on again. Tony, do you want to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your journey in IT? Sure. And I'll echo Tim's comments with the benefits that the lab brings to the community, because it can be lonely at the top. And we still, as IT leaders, still have that, not we're better, we're getting better, but the language gap with the traditional C-suite. So again, thank you to Brittany and the broader team, the benefits they bring. I've been, IT's been a part of me for 30 plus years. I arguably go back in time even before that. I was introduced to the basic programming language in fifth grade. And I was hooked ever since. So I'm a geek at heart. But my role is I'm a fractional CIO. My company is VCIO Global. And we are that leadership for the SMB space for companies that don't have a full time CIO may feel they don't need a full time CIO. We scratch that itch. I'm also a partner with that company. I also am host of the YouTube channel CIO Lifeline. We've been at that for three years. I'm in that studio today. But we always talk about IT and leadership aspects. It is really business focused with an IT slant. So yeah, thanks again for having me on. Awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. I know you're probably super duper busy. I dropped both those links in for anybody that is interested in checking either of those things out. And honestly, I found Tony through CIO Lifeline. I was looking for content. There was a lot of really, really great content on there. So definitely worth checking out. All right. So today I kind of wanted to kick off this discussion and talk about some of the top tech trends that were mentioned by Gartner for 2026. They include AI supercomputing platforms, AI native development platforms, confidential computing, which is something that's a little different than cybersecurity. So based on that kind of list of things, and I can dump it into the chat as well, are there any of those that come as a surprise to y'all? And any that are kind of expected and considered for the next year? I don't think very many of these are surprising to me. Mainly because they just seem like natural extensions of the AI push that we've seen. And honestly, as the person who wants to throw chat GPT into a blender nine times out of ten, just dealing with it in my environment and just in personal life, I think this is a welcome list of things. I would honestly love to see this because it seems like a more intentional business focused perspective on AI rather than just my PDF can answer questions now. I welcome that. That looks like people are taking a step back and saying, okay, we need to seriously focus on how this could actually implement into things rather than just the generic innovation, which is good and necessary. But there comes a time where you have to plug things in specifically. Yeah, I call it the shiny new toy syndrome. And I think we're starting to get past that, thankfully. I love shiny new toys because it draws attention to it and there's power and community weighing in on the pros and cons of it. All good. But, you know, you want to secure it, you know, boring, right? You know, I like the benefits. So I'm not I'm not chat GPT in a blender guy, but as I you know, any DIY project I use around the house, I it's a crutch and and sometimes I argue with it and it doesn't give me exactly what I want. But usually I'm getting there on the business side. That's where I think I like that. We're starting to take a step back because there are no prescriptive use cases. I mean, you could say, OK, using teams and, you know, copilot as recording your meeting and, you know, giving you the sentiment of the participants. OK, I think we're past that. I feel like that's becoming baked in the cake. But what does a truly mean for your organization? These are business conversations and we're seeing a lot of people have them because there is a use case regardless of the industry you're in. It's just ferreting that out appropriately and then and then building the right solution for you because everybody's going to have a unique use case. So I'm glad we're having those conversations. But as an IT professional, all of us are right. We got to be mindful of how we secure it. And, you know, the BYOA is a thing because if you are too restrictive on your employees, they're going to they're going to bring it in. You know, they are going to figure a way to do it. I'm sorry. There was a lot in your in your comment there, Brittany. I don't want to know. No, you're good. Yeah. Monopolize. Yeah, because I think about how do you, you know, like these deep fakes, right? I mean, we I can watch a video used to be able to look at the eyes and go, oh, wait a minute. You know, it's becoming so convincingly real. And and and as much as we love the benefits on for our clients and for those on the call, so do the threat actors. So imagine their techniques, how they're going to morph and change and get people to click. I always refer to it as the pesky humans, because if we could just fire everybody in our environment, we're probably pretty safe. But we got people who take a call unsuspectingly. We got to click in a hurry this time of year, especially with all the holidays and the travel and so on. And so we got to be at a rewire our brains a little bit as to how we protect organizations. So I look at that as an emerging trend, trying to catch up with the sophistication of AI in protecting clients. That that is a to me, that's going to be a big trend. Yeah, I think one of the questions that I that I had for you all was what are some of the technology trends that are user facing that for this next year that you feel will most challenge IT in 2026? Because I think that's, you know, obviously AI is a is a big thing, but I'm not sure if y'all have more opinion than that. Yeah, and I'll weigh in and it'll end up in a question for Tim. But you know, a trend we're seeing is is the downward pressure. Yeah, downward pressure. To automate more. You know, AI, you know, a high level AI benefit is I can do more with less, which I'm a shareholder. I'm a business owner. That's great. If I'm an employee who's on the front line of this thing to automate, there's a little bit of concern. And I think it's understanding the ramifications of what this means. Like, can we automate more? Can we eliminate the mundane? Of course we can. So that is an emerge. I wouldn't call it an emerging trend. Like we've always we've been trying to automate for years. And but it has been relatively siloed. Like if you think about AI and the automation capabilities and all the big boxes are doing it, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP. I feel like there is no business, no sector that's immune to this. So I my macroeconomic brain goes, we can say these people just find something else to do. But with such a far reaching impact on this automation, it is going to be an interesting time for us. But I don't know, Tim, if you're experiencing that these types of pressures, is there a demand in your business to automate more and do recognize some of those benefits? Yes. And it comes very sporadically. This is the part where I will shamelessly plug the honestly kind of event session I put in the lab. Thank you for all for being my therapist in this instance. But especially with AI, I've seen a lot of the downward pressure. And it really, to me, it kind of revealed a deeper like leadership thing, not so much a technology like issue, but more like a, okay, there's something wrong with the organizational approach and how I fit into that. Right. So anyway, that's a whole that's a whole other thing. Basically, I have a lot of trust building to do to where I can put myself in the shoes of, you know, okay, you asked me a question, or you didn't, right? You mentioned this technology around me. Okay, number one, I know what I'm doing about it. I know what we should do about it. And I'm going to give a competent suggestion about that technology, right? So if we run into, you know, hey, I want to automate x, right? Okay, I should be able to weigh in on that. And I feel I got caught behind the eight ball a little bit with that particular point. But definitely feeling that downward pressure for AI in general, because it's very much shiny new thing effect. I love that we've already introduced that term into this webinar, I was going to use it if no one else did. But I definitely am seeing that. And I'm seeing it in weird vectors, too. Like I'm seeing some people ask me questions about the the meta smart glasses as well. So outside of the AI thing, I'm seeing weird, like wearables. And I thought we were done with Google glasses. But we're not we just someone else took a stab at it. But at it. But what, where I'm finding the difficulty is balancing the shiny new thing effect with the security side of things. And I feel like I'm not alone in that. So anyway, I hope that answered your question, though. No, it Yeah. And so if I think of, if I think of an IT leader, trend, it's going to be casting an even brighter spotlight that we are that we are business people. We're not tech people. We're not in the we're not in the dark room, keeping the lights on, you know, and someone has a busted keyboard. I mean, those are basic staples, and we're happy to do it, right. But being at the table, that's a trend I want to see continuing and accelerating. Not the C suite comes to you with a decision or a directive, it's that you're actively participating in these high level business conversations. Because we will change priorities. I mean, there are goals from the top, but how you approach it and how it gets prioritized. It has a huge influence. And so Tim, when you say, trust, man, that just gets me giddy, because that's where it starts. If you don't have the trust of the C suite, and you're just a task taker that's going to throw some acronyms that go over their head, you're off to a off to a bad start. Once you have that trust, and you are participant in the table, man, does that magic occur? Because then now you're going away from shiny new toy, you're not coming to them. Oh, my God, this is cool. Wait, do you see what we can do? It's like, what problems do we have that we can apply some creative thinking to that may have may have an AI component to it? See, now you're thinking a little more strategically. A broader trend outside of IT that we see in 2026 is data cleansing, data organization. And no, you're just not going to throw an AI agent and it's just going to magically cleanse your data and organize it for you. That's a false, that's a unicorn. But if your data, a purposeful data organization and orchestration and where it's housed and how it's protected, if that's not correct, you're going to do wrong things faster. That'll be an unfortunate outcome if you're jumping in before getting your foundation first. It's like building a house. I have a shoddy foundation once I start putting up my siding and the roof and things are going to implode on you. This is couldn't be more true. So an emphasis on data is going to be an important trend for next year because then everything else becomes a little bit easier. Right. And along that note, I mean, data cleansing is huge. I mean, we've already identified that here. We deal with a lot of state data where child welfare, foster care. So we basically have a fire hose of data that's really sensitive, the tip of data. We have an entire team that's separate from I.T., thankfully, because my brain would melt, that is just focused on making sure that data is cleansed and perfect because this is court stuff. They reference this system in, you know, honestly, not life or death, but near to it. You know, every foster care decision comes back to the case notes, anything that's in that system. So the data has to be right. It has to be perfect. And so. Because of the influences of how we came to be what we are as an organization specifically. We got good at that particular point, but I think there's a step further to that, you know, and obviously there's other organizations that don't have those same levers that are pushing them in that direction, and I think that point is valid that we do need. I think I.T. needs to take a step forward in saying. Garbage in, garbage out, people. You got to figure that out. You have to figure that out. But we can also kind of structure it in a way of, hey, what are we compliant? What are our compliance requirements? What are our security requirements? You know, let's kind of step forward and be the thought leader there. But again, I think we're coming back to the same foundation of if you as the I.T. leader, whether you've done the work or not, have this perception of just being the guy in the basement with the busted keyboard, right? You've got all the Commodore 64s on the rack behind you. If you've got that perception, then you got to work on that because it's all going to be trust. It's all going to be. You have to come alongside as a business leader like them that understands their struggles, that can weigh in from the technical perspective. But again, I agree completely without throwing out the acronyms and everything. So it all kind of circles back to that. I think we're just going to be pointing at that the entire rest of this hour. Well, yeah. And I've I've fallen on many swords that you have hanging behind you where because we we might have the best idea and we're certain that this is going to work. But if you don't have that trust with those that are actually approving the budget and messaging to the stakeholders and the shareholders, it doesn't matter. So mentor of mine always said, you might be right. I'm sure you're right. But right doesn't always win. That's a tough lesson when you're faced with what is an obvious win in your mind. And you're probably right. But if you're not, you don't have your business hat on, you don't have them built up that trust and they don't look to you as that person that's going to be your confidant and get things done, it's just not going to go anywhere. So I hope that trend continues because we are we're business people. We're not geeks. And that's that's an uphill battle. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. How would you, aside from building trust, you know, and avoiding the shiny new thing, there are some people that are afraid to invest in a shiny new thing, even if you do think that is the right decision. So my kind of next question is about how you convince people that innovation is a good next step, because I know a lot of people can be resistant to that change. Well, again, I'll be interested on Tim's approach because he's coming from so he's in a business and he's the leader of his group, his kind of his four walls. We, you know, through our clients have a lot of different scenarios that answer your question. But if I'm cherry picking, it's, you know, thankfully, there are some really good use cases that you can introduce for low cost and just a little bit of your sweat equity. And one of my go tos, so it's kind of answering the question, but with a specific use case, but I feel it's a good use case, especially for IT folks. We are horrible at documentation, horrible, let's admit it now. And if you haven't already, but if I take it a step further from an organization level policies, documents, you know, especially if lawyers get involved, like, if I want to have, if I want to troll a handbook to understand when I'm gonna have three weeks of vacation coming up, you know, I probably, I could play the would you rather game, you know, I don't want to troll this, this blanket PDF, I want to have a conversation today, I want to have a conversation. So, you know, we've built an agent, anybody can. So you can build an agent in your environment, where people can have a conversation, like, if companies are using teams as an example, and as becoming the center of their universe, very low cost, and addresses the fear and hesitancy, Brittany, you could have an agent in teams that I have a conversation with, hey, how long does my password have to be? When do I get four weeks of vacation? So you're having that chat GPT experience, but it's with policies in your company that people have to blow the dust off of to reference or you're blowing up the phone of the HR department to get an answer to them, you know, reflexively, it's like, well, it's go to the page, blah, blah, blah, you know, I mean, I'm sure they're thinking it anyway. You know, so I think that's a universal pain. And there's other similar examples. And all we're doing is demonstrating that for $30 a month, for a user, and maybe it's already there based on their Microsoft environment. I'm being Microsoft minded here. We've crafted an AI agent that is going to hear a pain point. And there's countless other examples. So crawl, walk, run, couldn't be more relevant in that fear. And where do I start scenario, Brittany, that you mentioned? Right. And I definitely agree with that, too. You have to understand the pain points that people are experiencing. If you're just trying to bring in the AI hammer for every nail, you know, if you've, if you've got people that don't want AI, because, you know, they've watched the Terminator and, you know, I would be one of those people again, chatty between a blender, but it's an interesting dynamic for me personally, as the IT leader being so kind of, I would put myself on the negative side of the spectrum of AI. But I see the use case, I see the value of it. And I see when people want it, or don't want it, I see where it's going to be useful. But definitely, you have to understand your environment before you can do any of this. Because if you have a CFO, again, in that post that I just put in the chat, I made a key mistake in my assumptions about AI. And one of those being that my boss was one of the people using chat GPT, when I thought it was just one person. So there were things that I didn't understand in the year 2025. Shock, shock. But anyway, you have to have the conversations, you have to be putting yourself out there. And that's all part of the trust building process that we've already hammered to death. But you can't figure out the pain points, to even begin to iterate on them, unless you're talking to people. Yeah, well said, you know, people inherently don't like change. And especially if you're introducing or suggesting a, I'll say an automation that might be perceived as a job security threat, which that's a real thing. If you don't have support from the very top, so again, your business hat is on, and we're going to have a very specific use case, Mrs. CEO, Mr. CFO, of where we think we can help dip our toes in the AI waters, because our competition is, we can't ignore it. Our vendors are forcing it in there. We got to have some level of knowledge. And so let's start very small. And then blah, blah, blah, right? You get that back to the trust, and you get the buy in. Why that's important. A, it gives you a green light to continue through your initiative, which is going to go through ups and downs and unpredictability. And we're not going to say, well, in six months and in $10,000, we're going to have a deliverable, throw that out the window. It's purposefully R&D minded here, because we're still trying to figure out what's our use case. But having that trust and support is going to help with your squeaky wheels, with those that feel threatened. So it gives you the juice to include them in the conversation and say, look, because I like to have the squeaky wheels. It's easy to get the people that are rah, rah, rah. And that might be where you start. But for inclusivity, making sure that we do listen, two ears, one mouth, to people of all walks of business life is going to be important for that adoption. Because you're going to find something that's going to have traction, and we need everybody on board. If I can suggest a practical idea here, just off of my own experience, and this has worked really well in the few months we've had it. I leaned into my upbringing and formed a committee. My dad was named Robert, and he's very big on Robert's rules of order. But the point is, and I deliberately called it the emerging technology committee, because I didn't want it to just be about AI. There's going to be new stuff. It's the whole purpose of this conversation is just what's out there, what's going to be coming up, what are people going to be pushing, and what are we going to be seeing signals from our users, whatever they are. I mentioned wearable tech being just one of the other ones. But I formed this emerging technology committee, and I deliberately, to your point, made it very inclusive with our communications, legal, HR, data teams, the C-suite, and some caseworkers in there, too. Just some programmatic staff that are not even at the upper echelon level, so we can understand from as best as we can. Let's evaluate this technology. Let's form policy and procedure on it first, so we know how to use it responsibly. And then let's start iterating on use cases. Hey, what's working? What is Hey, what's working, what isn't working? I would say if you have the ability to do so, or you can have the conversations with those that can, I would say that's a great step in any organization, even if it's informal. You've formed a group outside of just the IT walls that can help you weigh in on things and get perspectives that you may not even consider, and it's gonna go a long way to building that trust, so. Yeah, yeah, and you can get started on the cheap, with no doubt. And if you've been at your company long enough, you know what pain points are, so take it upon yourself. I mean, again, if there's appetite and oxygen, and they're like, hey, what are we gonna do? And that's one thing, but if they're kind of like, eh, yeah, I get it, and when we get around to it, we'll get around to it, there's that too. But you know pain points already, just through what your day in the life is. You can find some pretty compelling use cases and craft something with not a lot of time and energy to then show someone, so you're building up this momentum, or we're playing chess, not checkers. There is a path there, and you'll find it, I know it. Yeah, yeah, well said. Definitely, I think that's a great, those are all really great points. I wanted to touch on a little bit about something that may be unexpected in the coming year. I know that AI is like a huge trend, something that everybody is looking at, and there are a lot of different sub-trends underneath AI, because it's got so many different moving parts, but what do y'all think is one unexpected innovation that you feel like is gonna impact IT in this next year? I'll sneak in. Unexpected? Yeah, go ahead. No, no, you, by all means. Okay, I think we're gonna see a lot of benefit just in compute power, as like, I think what I, where I'm getting at is technology is just gonna get that much better, because we're putting in NPM chips and data centers are being propped up everywhere. Yeah, sure, do we have the water and the power to support these things? That's not for me to decide, right? That's for municipal governments to fall on the sword, if you will. But I think we're gonna see improvements that we never would have dreamed of getting, because of AI. And I think you're gonna see, especially the data center point, like, Microsoft's gonna leverage those, because I think a lot of these data centers that crop up are gonna say, well, I can't just have my income solely be AI. I need more stable customers using our throughput. So I would like to see some more geographical reliability and maybe less reliance on US East, too, that if it goes down, the entire internet's down. I would hope that that's a trend that crops up a side benefit, but just compute power in general. I think we're seeing the innovation in chips, or even with graphics cards for more desktop computing. I think the fact that it seems like Nvidia, especially, has shifted from gaming as their main audience to also, like, hey, let's use GPUs more as, like, calculatory power, rather than just, ooh, I made the shadows that much better game. I think that's also welcome, too, because that's innovation into a little bit more of that business side of things that we may be able to leverage for maybe some really niche use cases. I don't know, I'm jazzed about the fact that people are throwing money at technology infrastructure. Yeah, so I'm glass-half-full guy, glass-half-empty guy on this. So if anybody hasn't read the book, The Coming Wave, I highly recommend that read. Now, I hate to predict anything beyond six months. I think it's, things change too rapidly in our space, but the theory of the coming wave, so you have the brightest of minds, and kind of the AI godfathers here, and they allude to the fact that this is a thing, those sectors immune, and there's unemployment coming as a result of that, and while we just say, okay, you'll find something else to do, can the something else to do catch up with widespread adoption and benefits of AI that inherently lead to we can do less with more? So that's an interesting dynamic. So another glass-half-full comment is with the power needs, the consumption. These data centers are cropping up everywhere. Well, it takes real energy, real power, real throughput to fuel this. Like I can go to my large language model of choice, have a conversation that's really responsive, that's great, but it's a lot of computing power on the backend required to do that, but glass-half-full comment is nothing spurs innovation more than scarcity, and so as we are trying to, and we have brilliant minds in this country, in this world, there's only so many finite resources today to build chips. How are we gonna build the next generation? And again, back to that scarcity fuels this type of innovation. So my only definitive comment is there will be that next wave, that next evolution. I like your GPU mindset, so I have a 3080 powering my desktop. What do I get out of the 5090? Eh, you know, here's what I get. Bigger footprint, I need a larger power supply, and my electricity bill goes up, you know? I think that trends, but I feel like we're on the precipice of what that next wave is to help get more power, smaller footprint, less energy. I believe it, so we'll see how it goes. If we treat AI, this could just be straight up crackpot, you know, tinfoil hat level conspiracy. So please, feel free to put this in the Tim Lanning low-light collection if this ages horrifically poorly. I'm willing to be wrong every now and again, but I have a feeling that we're at this point with AI, like computing, right? I have a feeling we're gonna see a little bit of a correction, right? I think we're gonna see, especially as we focus more on agentic AI, use cases that actually matter, that actually, I don't know, drive a profit rather than just, here's a quick way to do 100 videos that are, you know, the most AI slop known to man, right? Like, I think that- One more Yeti video, right. Just one more, just please. I think we're gonna see that spin down a lot. I think that's a correction coming in this next year. I think it's gonna be a lot harder. I think it's still gonna be there, but the image generation is not gonna be as easy because companies are just gonna realize that, oh, wow, I'm charging this person $20 a month, but it's costing me $150 a month to compute what they're getting out of the $20 a month. Hmm, I don't need an MBA to realize that that's gonna drive me out of business. So we're gonna see some correction there. I think that might also help the scarcity that you're talking about. It's just a little bit of a correction. I mean, we're gonna immediately just bounce right back up to using something else, but I think the more silly use cases of AI are gonna be discouraged unless you're willing to pay for it, so. Well, and look at a specific use case example here, but Avatar. James Cameron made this multi-billion dollar success movie, hundreds of millions of dollars and an army to build and AI can recreate Avatar faithfully in fractions of a fraction of a fraction of effort, time and cost. I always, didn't dawn on me like the whole SAG strike, the whole Actor's Guild strike. I'm like, geez, they're out in droves about the use of AI. Well, that I could type out a paragraph and have a 10 minute short film that is convincing, engaging and looks beautiful. Yeah, I get why SAG was a little bit worried. You know, and that's just one sector, right? So again, I don't wanna be apocalyptic. I feel like it spurs innovation, but what I also hope is that we can put our energies and focus on business continuity, disaster recovery. We're beholden to putting our information in Azure, for example, and yes, they have global data centers and yes, on paper, one feeds the other. And if this goes down, you know, but we had a, we all know the recent AWS outage and we had a client, like they had all our eggs in the team's basket, despite our best effort to have a carrier backbone. This was specific to telecom. Phones weren't ringing for six hours. And this is a company that relies on inbound phone calls. So in all the redundancies behind the scenes, there's always a single point of failure that could help disrupt. So I want us to be thinking more about the QC side of things, right? Cause can I use an agent to take an hour long task down to five minutes, five seconds? Yes, but I hope we wire our brains to say, now it's gonna take 15 minutes because I'm gonna QC this. I'm going to add an extra layer of polish to make sure that all my bases are covered. And yeah, so that's where I'd love to see this go. Yeah, for sure. I also wanted to talk a little bit about, Anthony, I think you said it really well. The glass half full approach. We can always think about all of the things that are going to negatively impact IT, how all of these user-facing technologies can cause frustration for IT and concern. What do y'all think are some technologies that will improve IT organization and function in 2026? And do you have any specific examples of things that people might be able to do in 2026 that would help them be a little bit more organized and productive? I mean, I think the use of agents, like agent mentality is gonna be tremendously helpful. And there's a citizen developer element to this too, because you're empowering departments to self-service and use some of the cool tools that traditionally would have to flow through the IT department. So finding that right balance, I think, is gonna help propel, and I think we're gonna see a lot more of it. Like Power BI is an example, reporting in general for companies. Usually, if you need a new report, you just submit a ticket, help desk gets it, or you pick up the phone and ask IT. Hey, Tim, anybody from your team? Here's a concept that we'd like to do, da-da-da-da-da. IT now becomes like the data curators. We're helping organize how that information is, but we're empowering departments to use the Power BIs, to use the Cosmos, whatever your front-end tool of choice is. I think that's gonna be, I'll say, a business accelerator, that ability to help departments use like I like to say every company is a technology company, every company, and we're in the people business, just happen to do IT. So those are rooted in our DNA, and so I think that empowerment of companies using these tools, I think, is gonna be a nice acceleration point. And how that's translating to small baby nonprofit, just kidding, we're like the number four nonprofit in the state by size of budget. It's bonkers that that's how I've ended up. But how that's translating to us is we really found a need to, spoilers, we've been talking about it this entire time. How do you cleanse your data? How do you make sure it's governed and secure? Well, you can't have it, you can't have your critical accounting systems solely off of spreadsheets anymore, or if they're using SAP or QuickBooks or something, great, or Sage, great. How do you get that to talk to everything else? Okay, I think that's one of the big things that has happened. This isn't really like an emerging trend, but it's something that I think a lot of people like me are late to and we're getting to. How do you even facilitate the best possible use of AI agents or Power BI, like both of those things you mentioned? I completely agree, and I hate that you stole them directly out of my mouth before I said them, but how do you facilitate that? What we've opted to do here is build a data lake. That infrastructure is there, it's easily accessible. I'm gonna say easily accessible, we haven't built it yet. Get back to me in a year. But you have to centralize data, and that's the pain, is getting all of that into one place. So then you can build off of it easier because I can go build AI agents in QuickBooks if I want. I probably would rather die, but I could. But if I bring in all that data But if I bring in all that data. securely and cleanly into my data lake, so maybe at this point it's more of a data warehouse. However you structure it, however works best for your workflows, you can then swim in the lake. You can have the AI agents running around being able to answer more than just the policy and procedures manual that you mentioned, you've extended beyond that. You can have it answer all sorts of questions. I see the value there, that's just, think about it from that perspective. How can you as an IT department come through and organize all of that? Be less of the person gatekeeping all of that, and more of a facilitator, gosh. You know, and there's a lot of companies out there that are still on their legacy file shares, or they're using green screens to run their business. Nothing wrong with that. And I was a cloud, I was put the cloud in the blender guy, pre-AI, you know, the cynic in me going, well, yeah, cloud, fun, right? You know, ERP providers. Well, if you use our cloud version, you get all the bells and whistles. The on-prem, eh, we'll get to it. Like, I was like, well, you guys want the annuity. You know, once you're locked in, they got you. You know, so I was always, I resisted. Once I saw the benefits of this massive computing power where that data lives in the cloud, and now the advent of AI, yeah, I'm back on the bus, and I've been back on the bus for a couple of years now, but it is back to the foundational layers, you know, and getting that data organized, getting it in the cloud, getting it AI ready. These are 101 level initiatives that if you haven't been thinking about it, please do, because there are real benefits to be had. Yeah, I was just thinking about that, and every time I think about AI as a concept and a trend, I think of cloud, because, you know, when that started to become a thing, it was a buzzword that everybody used, and everyone was afraid of it, and I'm curious on your thoughts about how AI will morph into something that is a bit more commonplace and isn't necessarily that shiny new thing. Does it have to do with the, you know, what you were talking about, Tim, the reduction of using it in, you know, photo generation and those fun applications? What are y'all's thoughts on how AI will kind of morph into that just everyday commonplace kind of technology? I'll, I can go, sorry, I, I mean, I think the marketplace is responsible for that. It's, we're being forced it. Now, it's interesting, so I used to think it was more of a generational, or generational differences were part of the answer. I had my son on our recent roundtable episode getting the younger gen perspective of AI and his day in the life. I was surprised. It was, I felt like I was a step ahead than someone who I felt it would just be natively flocking to, you know? So, but I go back to, well, businesses are, you're forcing it on you, so if you're a skeptic, you gotta get over that, because the systems you use today, now, if you're still hanging on to those legacy on-prem systems, you know, there's an argument you have a security headache coming. Like, you gotta protect it. Can you be perfectly insulated from the outside world? Maybe, if you're all under one wall, but if you're outside and people have to remote in, you know, there's, anyway, a whole conversation, whole other conversation, but I always position it as, well, the vendors are forcing it on you. Microsoft's, the Oracle's, like, enterprise ERP systems for companies, you don't have a choice. SAP Business One, still on-prem, but the HANA product, 100% cloud. Microsoft's two flagship enterprise offerings, F&O and Business Central, they're in the cloud, and Business Central still has an on-prem version, but for how long? The only reason they do is because there's such a mass population of folks that have the older versions of this on-prem, and they haven't forced the hand, but it's coming. Look, I think, again, tinfoil hat, I just, I need one at this point. It's gotta be, like, a thing that I can just actually put on. The AI bubble that everyone talks about, okay, what does that mean in reality? I've already alluded to it. We're at the point where AI companies are realizing how much this is gonna cost once their venture capital all dries up, which is what's been spurring all this innovation, and I'm not saying that's bad. That's how we got the internet. It's how we got, you know, the dot-com. Yes, that was a bubble, too, but it's how we got cloud. It's how we're getting AI. That's how we're gonna get the next thing. You know, the after next. Great. What happens when these companies realize that they have to tweak things, or they have to remove functionality, or they have to paywall it in such a way that it's unaffordable to those except, you know, except those that need it? How, that's more, I think, where this is all going. I think you made a great point. It's the market that's gonna dictate all of this, and I think you just have to stick with it. I think you have to be, as the IT leader, you have to be watching over this. If you're completely ignorant, you know, in case Skynet decides to come after you, you're gonna have a hard time of it. You have to be researching these things. I've been horrible about that with AI, but you have to be in front of this, and you have to be the one, because you're prepared with disaster recovery. You're prepared with, hey, we need to RFP this thing. We need to spec this out. You need to have your organization trained, painfully, if possible, however this has to happen, for you to be the change agent, but you're doing it responsibly, and it all goes back to that trust thing that we mentioned. Yeah, you just, yep, exactly. I was hoping you'd say, come back to that, because the speed at which this technology is emerging will never be the same speed as people adopting it. At some point, you're either forcing the hand or they're coming along, but there's always gonna be that disparity. The innovators and the first adopters will always be here. Reality tends to be a lot lower. So how do you thread that needle? That's part of our job, is to thread those needles. Right. Yeah, it sounds like the biggest thing that people can do is build that trust with the rest of their organization when it comes to innovations like this. Well, I think those are all the questions I had, although I do kind of want to read Clark's message in here, because I think that it's funny and sad. He said, just this last week, and I had a client ask ChatGPT how to set up a server, network, and security for a project they were working on. They created a 16-foot VLANs for a six-person office and took down their network for eight hours because ChatGPT couldn't give them specifics on how to route traffic. I have another client who asked ChatGPT to create a cybersecurity awareness training for their team. I think this will be a trend as more people try to cut costs, but of course this will backfire and create more work for IT pros. Well, opportunities, right? I mean, I love the examples, but kind of like what I alluded to earlier, right? So a one-hour task gets converted to five seconds. It should be 15 minutes for that QC vetting layer. I think, so I think examples you shared, and yeah, it resonates, is still folks in the shiny new toy syndrome phase. And I kind of applaud the failures. I mean, that might be interpreted bad, but to me, it's part of that wake-up call, part of that correction, Tim, that you mentioned. Like, wait a minute, man, we still do need the pros in the room here. And usually lessons like that, bringing a network down, those tend to happen one time. But yeah, does it, the more work for us, I think is what you were alluding to is, okay, they've done all this bastardization and it resulted in a collapse. Now I gotta methodically unwind it and start over the right way. Definitely with you there. But we're gonna need more of these failures for people to have their correction moment. And then we move on. Yeah, what, you mean vibe coding an entire system is like, that's prone to failure? Yeah. Hello? Yes. You know, the chat's going off right now because everyone's on the right track, right? Yes. If you're an MSP or you're a consultancy service, you're rubbing your hands like, yes, finally. Yes, ha ha. But it's, I'm gonna steal what Beth said. It's shadow IT again. People are doing, people are trying things, right? And to an extent they should be able to. Okay, but taking down the entire office network because they let this happen and they just did it without consulting an actual person who has actual training and actual skills in this. What are we doing? Where's common sense? Yeah, it's moderation, right? Can chat GPT or pick your LM of choice help me with coding? I was a developer for my first 18 years in life. Yeah, to a point, but you know, it has spaghetti potential. And just because it might work, I still gotta understand what was written. If for whatever, you know, like it's all about moderation. And I hope the two examples that you shared will be used as stories, lessons learned stories later. You know, and that's how you present it to the person too, right? We're just coming. But yeah, I love that they have, I feel sad for those that have to do the rework and for the companies experiencing the pain, but I applaud, right? It took how many thousands of failures to get the light bulb right. And then that one time we got it and it's because of the lessons of the past. Let's make sure these lessons don't go untold. Yeah, absolutely. Well, do y'all have any last thoughts about this? Cause we're coming up on time. Is there anything that was not covered that maybe you have some thoughts on? Look, I think at the end of the day, I think the shift that has to happen is in your organization and your role as the IT leader within it. That's the more things change, the more they stay the same, right? You need to do whatever possible to put yourself in the room where things are happening. You need to build that trust that we've talked about this entire hour. You need to be there as the person that knows what they're doing, that isn't just content being in the server closet, unplugging and replugging in cat six cables until the day they die. If you want to make a difference in your company, you have to build that trust. You have to take that step that we've talked about to become a business leader that speaks like a business leader about technology to help them understand this thing, whatever the current thing is that's happening. There's things we've talked about today, there's things in the lab, there's things outside of the lab. Anthony does a great YouTube channel that I'm gonna go follow now and go binge watch all the content. So if you see a ton of traffic from me, I'm sorry, but there's resources out there, but it's up to you to go do this thing. Yeah, I had a former boss of mine wonder why it's six months and I haven't done any initiatives. And this was a CFO, the old traditional IT rolls up to CFO, don't get me started on that. On their good ones, sorry. But no, the point is, well, yeah, because I'm building these relationships because this will pay dividends. So yeah, just to emphasize or put a bow on what you said, Tim is super important. And also, start small. Eating elephant takes a lot of bites and you just want to find the right use case. Your company will have a pain point that surfaces to you and you can on the cheap, help demonstrate that this isn't scary because we're using it doesn't mean we've given up our secrets to the outside world. There's a winning formula there. And I'm looking forward to hearing about what you've done. Great. Well, thank you all so much for joining today. I really appreciate your time. I think that there were a lot of really good discussions to come out of this. And yeah, again, just really appreciate your time. I know you guys are super-duper busy, so thank you so much for joining today. I know you guys are super duper busy. So thank you so much for joining. We'll be back in a couple of weeks. We'll be doing the sysadmin stocking, basically your IT wishlist for the next year, what that looks like. So I just put it in the chat if anyone wants to go RSVP for that. But in the meantime, again, thank you all for joining, the chat for joining as well. Really appreciate your time, and we'll catch y'all in the next one. All right. Take care. Thanks, y'all. Thanks.
