Risk & Resolve
The Risk & Resolve Podcast is your go-to resource for insightful conversations at the intersection of leadership, business ownership, and the insurance industry. Hosted by Ben Conner and Todd Hufford, this podcast dives deep into the challenges and opportunities that leaders face in an ever-changing world.
Each episode features candid discussions with business owners, industry experts, and thought leaders, exploring topics like innovation, risk management, and the strategies that drive success. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, executive, or insurance professional, you’ll gain actionable insights and inspiration to navigate today’s complex business landscape.
Tune in to Risk & Resolve—where leadership meets resilience.
Risk & Resolve
From Automation to Impact: AI, Business Growth, and Meaningful Work with Jason Beutler, CEO of RoboSource
Founder and CEO of Robo Source, Jason Beutler, joins Risk and Resolve to share his journey from failed startups to building a thriving automation and AI-driven consulting firm. Jason breaks down the truth about artificial intelligence, how business leaders should think about AI, and why his mission is centered on empowering people—not replacing them. We explore the evolution of technology, the misconceptions around AI, the art of prompting, and the role of meaningful work in company culture.
Main Talking Points:
• Jason Beutler’s entrepreneurial journey and lessons from early business failures
• How Robo Source evolved from consulting to holistic workflow automation
• The biggest misconceptions about AI and what it actually does
• How to create effective prompts for ChatGPT and other AI tools
• AI bias, truth, and why human-like responses matter
• The role of AI as a tool versus a business strategy
• How automation can empower teams to focus on meaningful, impactful work
• The accelerating pace of technology and where it’s headed
• Communication challenges and lessons learned as a business leader
• Jason’s future vision: transitioning from consulting to a product company
You're listening to Risk and Resolve, and now for your hosts, Ben Conner and Todd Hufford, Welcome back to another episode of Risk and Resolve. Today we are blessed to have the brilliant Jason Butler join us from RoboSource. Jason is the founder and CEO of RoboSource, a company specializing in process automation and AI-driven solutions to help businesses streamline operations and improve efficiency. Jason, thanks for being with us today.
Speaker 2:Hey, thanks a lot, Ben Looking forward to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it looks like you founded RoboSource back in 2012. Tell us about the reason and the why behind starting RoboSource at that time?
Speaker 2:Well, there's probably two things that were driving me at that point. I had started and failed three businesses prior. So from 1998 to 2006, I had started well, 98 to 2003, I ran a business, learned everything, what not to do. In that timeframe I basically ran it into the ground and was not super successful with it. I ended up starting another consulting business about two years later, from 2005 to 2007. Wasn't super successful, wasn't really growing it, but was doing essentially a lot of independent consulting, and so I decided that I wanted to. If I was going to do this, I had to learn what I was, how to actually do it. So I went to the University of Notre Dame and got an MBA, most specifically so that I could start a business and know how to run it.
Speaker 2:So when I graduated from that, we set ourselves on the path to start a business. You know, I'd like to say I sat down and thought here is a gap in the market and I've got a solution and I'm coming at it. Really, that wasn't the case. I am an entrepreneur through and through. I'm a creative engineer and the idea of working for somebody else just wasn't sitting great with me and I just I needed to go after it, and so that's really was the impetus behind it. So in 2010, I actually went out on my own and started doing some of my own independent consulting, ended up starting to get more and more successful with it.
Speaker 2:I'd learned some of the tools that were necessary and by 2012, we officially formed RoboSource and have been growing it ever since, and over time, as you learn more about yourself, you start to realize really kind of where you fit in the market, and that's where, for us, it's about helping people do meaningful, impactful work, and that's really what resonates with us is we want to. I don't know. I feel like most people. When they wake up in the morning, they don't think, man, I can't go away to put a bunch of numbers in this spreadsheet, but they're like if they could have an impact or talk with a person or engage with somebody on a human level, that's what motivates them or they could do something strategic, creative. So that's really where RoboSource came from is how can we get some of that mundane, repetitive stuff off your plate so you can do the impactful, meaningful things that are why we actually get up in the morning in the first place, and so that's really what's kind of evolved and driven us for the last 12, 13 years?
Speaker 1:now I know that this is a business that you've partnered with your wife in growing. Tell me about that, because it sounds like you started in the consulting realm, which might have been you individually, and then this endeavor you know included your wife. Tell me about that genesis and how that came to be.
Speaker 2:So again I'd like to say it was strategic. It was probably more of an accident and came out of necessity really so started doing a lot of consulting, was starting to build a name for myself on that front, started to get more and more opportunities, and in order to meet those opportunities I needed to bring in additional people, and so started bringing in other technology focused individuals to help me deliver on the promises I was making to clients. I think we're about two or three years in at that point and my wife goes have you done? And she listed out all these HR tasks that were like apparently necessary to hire someone. And I was like I don't really know what you're talking about. And she's like I'm afraid you're going to go to jail. I'm going to take over all of that.
Speaker 2:So she came in and organized all of the stuff that needed to get done right the compliance things, the things that actually are driving a business. And so again I here I paint myself as this like absent-minded professor type of role, but that's really. I mean, I really kind of am that I'm. I'm an engineer, my focus is how to apply technology to help people and a lot of the rest of the stuff I kind of lose track of. And so my wife is a very detail oriented, business minded individual that came in and said, hey, let's, let's get the rest of the business kind of in order, and she made a lot of that to happen. And so I think she came in in 2013, 2014, and really started to make that, just took that under her wing and they really is the reason why we've grown and been successful as we are is because she just keeps that all under control.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. You know, our spouses tend to cover our weaknesses and their strengths and God bless us for it. Yes, so you've been in, like the advanced technology automation robotics, if you will, for a long time. If you don't mind, like start from today, of like what does RoboSource look like today, from business application versus maybe what it was when you started and went down this path?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so today is a lot more focused on so we're really. What we end up talking about is digital transformation. So how do you take your business that has been operating successfully but is maybe operating more manually than digital? So by that, most businesses start off figuring out how to solve a problem and they put people in positions to solve those problems. We're not thinking about how do we build the most efficient, optimal computer program to make that all work. We're thinking about meeting our clients' needs and we do that by getting people doing the jobs that need to get done. So today what we do is we come in and we look at those processes, we look at what's happening there and we identify what transformation needs to happen in order to hit the business need more effectively, like what does the client really want and how can we transform our business in order to be able to meet that need more effectively? So, yes, do we use high-end technology? Absolutely, why? Because artificial intelligence is a really powerful tool and it does some really amazing things and most people have no idea what it's even capable of doing. So someone like me that has figured out the business side but came from a technology side can help do that translation from here's what technology is capable of doing and here's why you should care and what it will do for your customers at the end, because, at the end of the day, that's really why we're in business. So that's where we're at today is really helping look at that path, looking at that map and applying and kind of transforming the business to be really effective at rolling out the kinds of solutions that really their customers want. And yeah, we use artificial intelligence almost exclusively these days because of the capabilities that it has. Contrast that to let's go back to 2012.
Speaker 2:Ai has been around for a very long time. So I studied it in the 90s. The principles of the technology has been evolving for a very, very long time, in the mid in the 2000s into the early 2010s. The primary form of AI there's a lot of predictive analytics, a lot of some of the basic machine learning, and you see that on like Amazon, right, like you go to Amazon and it says 10s. The primary form of AI. There's a lot of predictive analytics, a lot of some of the basic machine learning, and you see that on like Amazon, right, like you go to Amazon and it says people who bought this also bought other things like this. Well, that's a form of AI. It's using some predictive math to figure out how to make that all happen.
Speaker 2:There's another form of AI that I spent most of my career in, and that's expert systems. And what an expert system is, is it essentially? Well, the one that I rolled out specifically was it would capture a bunch of facts about how a business should operate like or actually a better way to think about it. It would be like, say, a doctor. If you're to capture a doctor as an expert, you might say things like if your nose is running and you have a fever and you're achy, we're going to assert that you might have the flu. And so we create a whole slew of these facts that would exist inside of a system, and then when someone came in, they could basically answer questions about themselves asserting certain information oh, my nose is running, no, I'm not achy. So it would then kind of decide which of the outcomes would happen from there.
Speaker 2:So I wrote quite a few of tools around that technology, and that's really where we kind of started was on this expert system level, but at the end of the day, most of it ended up being pretty low level in my mind, pretty low level software just to automate some of the basics, things like you're probably used to seeing online. Actually, most people use today right Like QuickBooks Online or tools along those lines. Those are forms of automation and they really do help speed up a business and make a business more effective. They're not taking entire workflows and automating them. They're taking bits and pieces of it and making those tools more effective. So we went from a lot of individual bits and pieces of tools to a more holistic workflow type solution over the last 12 to 15 years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it almost seems like. Yeah, point-in-time solutions are becoming more systematized you talked about. You know most people don't truly understand AI or how automation really works. Like how would you describe what most people think about AI? Like this is the preconceived notion that everyone has, versus like this is what people actually should know, as they're like getting into the realm of this kind of a conversation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so marketing has done a really good job of making you think that artificial intelligence is actually intelligent. So most people think that the artificial intelligence, the AI let's say, chat, gpt, gemini, claude, any of those they believe that that tool is actually thinking they believe that that tool is actually thinking, meaning it's assimilating its own thoughts based upon prompts that you're giving it, and that feels a little magical. At the end of the day, though, that's not really what's going on. What we've done is we've taken the sum total of all the knowledge that we have written on the Internet and we've put them together into big probabilistic models, and so, at the end of the day, it's a math equation that is tuned to say what do you want to hear, and I'm going to try and figure out how to give that to you. So it's going to look at all of the stuff we put on the internet, all the words we put together, and it's going to try and figure out what the next set of words should be to give you the outcome that it thinks you've asked for. And the way that it determines what it thinks you've asked for is also a mathematical equation. So it's not really thinking, it's spitting back to us what we have historically, through a bunch of patterns put all over the internet for the last 20 years.
Speaker 2:So is it biased? Well, are humans biased? Like yeah, it is, because what you're going to read on the internet is probably biased Like, does it hallucinate? Well, yeah, do humans. And at first you're like no, we don't hallucinate. Well, you kind of do, though.
Speaker 2:Like I think about last week when I had a conversation with my wife and all of a sudden I'm texting her and all of a sudden the text goes cold and like she's not responding anymore. What did I just? What do I do? I started telling myself a whole bunch of stories, like I'm sitting here going like oh, I just said something that really irritated her. What did I say? I started scrolling, like what did I do that? Oh, no, what's going on here? And then she's like sorry, ended up getting interrupted. Here's what I think I was like oh, right, right, we hallucinate too.
Speaker 2:Given lack of information, we make it up. So dai is doing the same thing when it has lack of information. It has seen patterns of us making it up, so it makes it up. So the thing that I wish people understood is that, because it's predictable. You therefore can't control it. Because you you can't control it Like because it is a mathematical equation, we can't actually drive it towards the outcome that we want. It's not like a human in its entirety, where it's completely unpredictable and you can, you know, feel like you communicated with it really clearly and it doesn't understand or it goes different directions. You have a lot more control over this than normal If you're working with a normal individual.
Speaker 1:A lot more consistency. It's not going to get caught up in emotions of things or otherwise, because it's working off of that main foundation. One thing you brought up I kind of find interesting and since you opened the can of worms I'm going to go there Just the idea of truth in AI. I think there's a lot of fear about explicit bias being influenced into AI. What's your take on that?
Speaker 2:It's a reflection of humanity. It's literally mimicking the same patterns that we put into it and I don't know that you're ever going to take that out, because it's always going to be based upon human communication patterns and human communication models. I'm also not sure in its entirety that you want to take it out, because if you took that out, it wouldn't feel cute and it wouldn't feel intelligent. I think that part of the conversation that happens with people is that we we pick up on. You were raised in a different place than I was raised. You have different experiences than I have.
Speaker 2:That's part of what makes you interesting to me, and if we took all of that out and reduced this all down to whether or not we can have a logical, consistent, straight, 100% true conversation, it's not a very interesting relationship we're going to have, and the reason why AI is reflecting a lot of that is because that's what makes it feel human and that's what we want in our conversational AI when it's having a conversation with us.
Speaker 2:We want it to feel human, we want it to have opinions. Unfortunately, because we're human, we want it to have our opinions and so, as a result, we get a little bit worried when it starts reflecting opinions that aren't ours. But that's part of humanity. And in my mind, how great is it that I can go in and I can prompt an AI because I can control this one. I can prompt it to take the ulterior viewpoint of something that I have and allow me to engage that in a non-emotional way, where a human is not engaged, so I can actually explore my own emotions on that. That's pretty powerful. That allows you to do things in terms of your own personal development that you can't do before, because you now can explore the counterpoints to your own way of thinking.
Speaker 1:What an interesting way to potentially prepare yourself for a situation that may be a little unknown, if you're going to have a conversation with someone in a different job, role or, to your point, from a different culture or otherwise. But you mentioned the word prompt, yeah, and I think that that when I think of AI or even engaging with chat GPT, sometimes I'm like I don't know if I am setting it up correctly and I don't know if this is a reasonable question. But like, how should people think about like prompting, a chat GPT or using the right setup are using the right setup? Because I think when you go into it, you at least I'm going to speak on behalf of me like I kind of think of chat GPT as like interfacing with Google, which is like find me this, well, there's no prompting to that, it is just going to spit back something. How do you see prompting, or what are the best ways to use prompting to get a better use out of like an AI, an AI setup?
Speaker 2:So it is interesting. That is how most people approach it, and the first time they get it in front of a chat type of AI is they just start asking it questions like they would Google, and it actually doesn't do a very good job of answering those, because at least a lot of the current models are delayed by months of the amount of information they actually have access to. Now some of the new ones will allow you to connect and communicate with the Internet as well, but it's essentially doing a search for you. So the prompting idea, what you're trying to do with the AI is you're trying to give it the context that it needs to understand why you're asking the question you're asking. And there's a lot of math behind this and it's really fascinating. There's this concept called embeddings that essentially turn your language into mathematical equations. Then, because you now have these mathematical we call them vectors and you can think exactly like you know physics vectors from high school Because we now have these mathematical vectors, we can now do essentially similarity searches based upon the vector to bring back information. That's the same. So what you're trying to do is you're trying to give the language in such a way that the math will know how to pull back things that are the same.
Speaker 2:So what we want to do and we're prompting is we want to give it a couple of things. We want to first tell it the role that it's playing, and more prompting is we want to give it a couple of things. We want to first tell it the role that it's playing. We want to say, hey, you're going to be a business consultant that is helping me figure out my go-to-market strategy. You gave it context. You just gave it some words that allow it now to go find information that is around business consulting and go-to-market strategy. It's then going to pull that data back and start to use that as its mechanism to answer your question.
Speaker 2:Then the next thing you want to do is you want to give it step-by-step reasoning.
Speaker 2:You want to say, first I want you to do this, then I want you to do the next step, then I want you to do the third step, and the reason you do that is each of those is going to give it context on what to pull back, but you're also telling it the order of how to go about doing that actual work, and so step-by-step reasoning tends to give you a better result.
Speaker 2:Finally, the third area that I find to be really effective is they call it few shot training, but it's basically giving examples and then what you want to see back. So hey, as a business consultant, you're going to help me figure out my go-to-market strategy. Here is a paragraph of thoughts and ideas about my business and here's what I would come back with if I were you. Now here's another idea Use that same model and come back and give me the information that you pulled for me so you can give it training. You can say essentially example, here's my input, here's my output, and do that a couple of times and then when you ask it the next question, it will use that example to kind of formulate how you want to see that response.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's really good. What kept coming up in my mind while you were talking is that's probably exactly how I should probably set up my training for anyone internally, and it's not like specific and regimented, which potentially goes back to your point about it. It really isn't intelligent as much as it is, like you know. If you give it the guidelines of how to think, it can think really well or it can produce the results that you're. It's not even thinking. It's producing the results that you're really looking for.
Speaker 2:Yeah, A thought that I've been playing with in my head for a while now is what is intelligence Like? When we say, oh, that person's really intelligent, what are we really referring to, and that's. It's just. I've been playing with it and I'm sure there's a whole bunch of psychologists out there that have studied this. I haven't, but what I keep coming back to is the people that I think are intelligent are the ones that can recall information really quickly right off the top of their head.
Speaker 2:When I say something like I can't, I start talking about a business, a business concept. I'm't I started talking about a business, a business concept. I'm like man, from a marketing standpoint, I wish I could do this. And they go oh, you know what, this book said this and this book said that, and they start referencing experts on how to do it. I'm like really smart, well-read people, and that's why I think we start to confuse AI with intelligence, because it's way better at recalling things than we are. So it can go, pull all that information instantly and then spit it back to us. So we go really, really, really smart system, but it's just a recall mechanism and it's just recalling it in a way that is more natural for us to interact with. I think the actual intelligence comes into the creative application of it, and that's just now starting to emerge in some of these AI tools, but currently they just recall information really well, which is what makes it feel like it's intelligent.
Speaker 1:And they have a broad spectrum of where it can go to recall information or to access information quickly. When it comes to AI, like specifically like business leaders you know we talked about the general person of like how should they think about maybe AI a little bit differently or where do they get it wrong? But how should business leaders think about the context of AI and then how it can actually be impactful into their business?
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of the things that I'm really passionate about is the fact that AI is a tool, and it's just that it's a tool. So, as a business leader, what problems are you dealing with? They need versus they need solutions, like like that's where that's where we start is. We don't start with I need to use AI in my business or I'm going to get left behind. No, you're not. Like it's a tool Like what in my business? Or I'm going to get left behind. No, you're not. Like it's a tool Like what in your business is keeping you from scaling? What tools might exist to make that more effective? Maybe it's AI, maybe it's not. But let's shift our thinking to say I'm afraid I'm going to get left behind from this AI wave, and instead say no, what's keeping my business from growing, and let's find the right tools to fit to help solve that problem. That's the big shift that I think CEOs need to think about.
Speaker 1:Do you think that's the unlock that's happening with the craze on AI? Is that it's leading to that question?
Speaker 2:and then businesses can actually get better. That's what I'm hoping. There's still a lot of businesses I talk to come to me and they're like I don't want to get left behind. What do I need to do, Tell me, and I'm like that's the wrong question, Like you're setting yourself up for massive failure because I can put AI into about anything. It doesn't mean it can actually change anything. So let's, let's talk about that first. Then the second thing is to start to understand what.
Speaker 2:What is the tool good for? If you've got a hammer and I hand you a screw, it's not going to work real well. They're not made to work together. So what is it really good at? And some of the things that AI is really good at, and I'm just going to sum it up in one sentence. There's a lot of nuance around this, but what AI is really good at is evaluating text.
Speaker 2:In my world I call that unstructured data, so not like databases where you've got lots of formal relationships. I'm talking about like I got an email and I want to be able to understand what's going on in that email. So AI is really good at evaluating text. And then, as a result, because we're human and most of our communication happens in unstructured textual formats. Human and most of our communication happens in unstructured textual formats. Emails, word documents, PowerPoints, PDFs like Excel files, Like those are all environments that pretty much run business. 80 to 90% of all of our institutional knowledge exists in unstructured formats that AI is now unlocking, that allows us to work with and so understanding that that's the tool and that's what it's used for right now.
Speaker 1:Another question just about AI in general, and then I kind of want to go back to RoboSource in particular and your mission, but it seems and maybe it's not true, but it just seems that the last 12 months or 18 months has been way more ridiculous in the tech world than even before. One, is that true? And then two, like where is tech headed in the foreseeable future from your perspective?
Speaker 2:It's been in the news a lot more than it has been historically over the last 10 years or so, but I don't really think that it's accelerating at a pace that is outside of everything it's been doing for the last 20 years. It's an area that, for one I think AI captures our imagination. You go back to the Terminator series right when was that? Early 90s? And it's like ooh, ai is running the world, like that's a sci-fi concept that we all kind of like geek out about a little bit, and so this now is starting to kind of feel real. So people want to engage that story.
Speaker 1:My story, by the way, is iRobot. That's the movie that I was like that is crazy. And now it's happening, Like, I think, elon's robots even look like the iRobot robots. Anyway, go ahead.
Speaker 2:So there's part of that, just the human interest piece, right when we care about it more because it just is sci-fi and cool and I mean I grew up on Star Wars. I can't wait to have a droid, like I want one, like you know. That's the kind of mindset that we're getting out of that. So it's fun to imagine about, to imagine about. But technical technology has been basically accelerating at that speed for the last 20 years anyways, um, going forward, there are a lot of things that are coming. I mean you think we've been going fast. We're gonna be going way faster, partly because ai is good at unstructured data and it is good at finding patterns, so it's gonna find patterns faster than we can. So pharma and biotech like it's gonna find patterns way faster than scientists can. So pharma and biotech, it's going to find patterns way faster than scientists can and they'll allow us to experiment with a whole lot more compounds than we've ever thought we could.
Speaker 2:Before you start getting into quantum computing I don't know if you've read much about that, but there's some crazy things going on with quantum entanglement and being able to show teleportation in the quantum realm and that's how that's translating into things like maybe potentially faster than light communication. That's all a little speculative still, but we're starting to see some things that might actually indicate that could happen. So there's some crazy things that are happening on all these different sides, and I think the ability to identify patterns faster from using the technology that's being developed right now is going to greatly accelerate that in terms of how much and how quickly we bring in new technologies. Hopefully we should see that reflect in human standard of living. If we can get compounds discovered faster and tested faster and through clinical trials faster, can we bring cancer drugs to market faster. That's pretty cool. That impacts lives, you know.
Speaker 2:Same with communication. If we can communicate even faster, like right now we're able to do. You know the internet and I can communicate around the world within seconds. What if it was milliseconds? When does that change and what can we do as a result of that? So yeah, I think you're going to see technology really take off and we're really just kind of at the beginning of this information age. That's going to just sort of accelerate. Let's be honest, ai is still pretty in fit. It's still not. I mean, it's smart, but it's still not very smart like the dumbest it's ever going to be, so we need to prepare ourselves for it. We know what that looks, but we're still really early.
Speaker 1:You're right, because I even see, like, when people do like AI, like images or something, where things are like misspelled wrong or there's like an arm coming out of someone's head or something like that, when AI gets really good, what type of like security issues?
Speaker 2:might we have. Oh, security is a huge problem already, but it's not just an AI problem, it's a problem with all digital information, and I mean cyber has been an issue for decades now, right, and it's not getting better with AI. There's a whole slew of interesting questions around intellectual property and who owns what, and I'm intrigued to see what happens in the legal system around that, because there's just not a lot of precedent around it to the not a living being.
Speaker 1:You can't break laws that don't exist, right? So you're just pressing forward and then you discover the problems later, right, Yep?
Speaker 2:And then we create laws retroactively and some of it will be right and some of it will be really wrong.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, yeah, because laws are passed by people who really don't even understand the thing.
Speaker 2:Yep exactly.
Speaker 1:Whoever gets to them and prescribes some of that? What's the fix on security from your perspective? What should lawmakers consider around that?
Speaker 2:Take the internet the internet is probably one of the single most impactful technologies to ever hit business in terms of like what it's actually done to the business world business in terms of like what it's actually done to the business world. But, yeah, it's also one of the most vile tools on the planet in terms of the horrible things that can happen on the dark web. Right, and how do you control that? We have the same problem, only worse, with AI. It's probably going to be one of the most impactful tools on humanity and business, but it's going to have a dark side to it too, and so we didn't figure it out with the internet. We're still trying to figure it out, and so I think you're going to have the same problem with AI in terms of how you control and manage the security around it.
Speaker 2:Now, I think, from a business standpoint, you can do certain things to manage your risk Same as with the internet, right, like VPNs and firewalls, and there's tools that we can put in place to help manage our risk. They're not foolproof there's still some risk involved but you can do things to be safer in the way that you interact with the internet. You're going to be able to do the same thing with AI, in that there are concepts like they're starting to come around they're called guardrails that essentially will look at the prompt that you're putting in and the information you're sending into the AI and say, hey, whoa time out. There's no security number in here. Let me just go ahead and alias it to a non-real one and then I'll send it out to the AI, and when the AI gives me a response, I'll go ahead and swap it back for you. So that way we're not sending information out on the internet that it shouldn't be, but you're able to interact with it as though it did.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's definitely important to keep private information and those sorts of things out of these LLMs. So let's go back to RoboSource and what you guys are doing in particular. What you guys are doing in particular, one thing I find just incredible is the missional aspect of taking something that is so technical, like automation and AI and that sort of thing, and tying it back to how are we impacting the society or workers, because it'd be easy to say this is a worker replacement, but that's not what you say. You say no, we are actually empowering your current workforce to do more meaningful work. So when did that occur to you of like, this is really what we're doing and this is really what we're pursuing.
Speaker 2:You know, I don't know that I ever thought otherwise, and part of that is because I guess I just believe in the value and the meaning of work and that I believe that we want to do things that feel connected to our like, we want to be a part of a team, we want to engage on that level, and so I feel like every business is going to have an issue. Every business has people that want to feel like their job is important and want to feel like every business is going to have an issue. Every business has has people that want to feel like their job is is important and want to feel like they're contributing and that's what brings meaning to them. And it's not the same for everyone. Like my grandfather worked on a assembly line and you know, for him he's bolting things into a car and I don't even know what all he did, but he's putting this all in. But at the end of the day, when you asked him what he did, he was making cars safe for kids, like that's why he was there. That was his meaning. Like it was meaningless work but it wasn't meaningless to him. And so I guess from that perspective, I come in and I say, hey, what is meaningless to you and what can we get off of your plate so you can do the things that add meaning, because I think that's how people are driven.
Speaker 2:I also don't buy into this myth that all these AI tools are going to replace people. I don't think you can replace relationships. Business is not done off of technology. Business is done off of relationships with people. Even Amazon, who has automated basically the entire buying cycle, at the end of the day, what do we still make our decisions off of? The reviews at the bottom of the Amazon product that's human, like those are human to human relationships that are making that decision. Now, they were able to do that in a more efficient way, but they still put the human response in front of us for us to make a decision off of. So I don't see that going away. So I think if you're a business that's trying to make it go away, I think you're going to find that you actually push away the very people that you tried to serve, because they want to have a human relationship with something. They want to have a creative conversation. So it always felt to me like this was a tool to empower humans, not a tool to replace them.
Speaker 1:You've been leading RoboSource for, I guess, going into 13 years. What have been some of the biggest learning lessons or takeaways from your perspective in leading and running the business itself?
Speaker 2:I'm not a very good communicator and I think I am. But it comes right down to it what I think I'm telling people and what they're hearing isn't connecting, and I have to really really work on communication. At first I thought that was maybe unique to me, because I tend to be an engineer and so I maybe think a little too engineering. But the more I talk with other business leaders, the more I think that that's just a human condition, is that none of us are really communicating what we think we're communicating, or maybe say to differently. People aren't hearing what you're saying because they have their own filter. They're putting it through and so you have to repeat over and over and over again in various different ways and formats for it to actually connect with people so that they're able to do and get in line and align their efforts with where you're trying to lead an organization. Otherwise you have everybody pulling in different directions and it's chaos and it's chaos. So I've learned that I have a lot more work to do to learn how to communicate effectively with people and make sure that the message is being received. That's one area that I've learned a lot on.
Speaker 2:I've also learned that the best technology doesn't make the best solution just because the technology is superior and effective and can do some crazy amazing things, it doesn't mean that it's the right tool for the organization or the company. Either they're not ready for it culturally, or they're just not positioned to take advantage of it, or they're skeptical in some way, shape or form. Like just because I have the right solution and you've got a nail and I've got a hammer and I can come in and just pound that thing right for you, but that's not what they're ready to do. And I've got a hammer and I can come in and just pound that thing right for you, but that's not what they're ready to do. And if you don't get people on board with the transformation, then it doesn't matter what tools you put in place, they will not use them. And so this isn't a technical problem, this is a person, this is a human problem. In order to optimize it, optimize processes.
Speaker 1:So that's really good. I can relate to a lot of those, because I think when you go back to like communication in and of itself, that's not something where like, oh well, I've become good at that, so I'm good. Yeah, it's never done. It's always like it's a relentless pursuit of it and it's either on or you're not, and that could be a daily thing.
Speaker 1:And then, from the technology perspective, jason, I feel that wholeheartedly from a health plan perspective, because we can have people that really desire a different outcome, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they're willing to walk through the steps to actually deliver that, or they maybe don't understand what it really means to do that in relation to their culture and maybe it really isn't something that they want. So, very, very, very interesting, as I listened to you of like I'm learning the same lessons, my friend, yeah, you said something about and I thought it was a fascinating comment you made that you said you're a creative engineer and at first, when you said that, I was like well, those two words don't necessarily go together, but clearly, as you've been talking like, it's very apparent. That's actually like the best description for it. When did you realize about yourself that like this is your gifting that, like this, is your gifting.
Speaker 2:So my father's a pastor and when I was about eight or nine years old he and so this is we're talking early to mid eighties he decided he wanted to buy a computer to write his sermons. So he went to Radio Shack and he bought a Tandy 1000. Didn't have a hard drive, right, just the old disc drives, the big ones too like. And so he bought this computer so that he could he could write his sermons, and they had. My parents had no idea how to run this thing, but they were intrigued with it.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm an eight, nine year old kid. My dream in life at that point was I wanted to be a disney cartoon animator. I wanted to draw goofy. That's I. I would sit around for hours on end practicing drawing goofy because I wanted to get a job at Disney drawing Goofy for animations. I was there at that time realizing that I was actually very good at art. I don't have a lot of artistic talent and it didn't really matter how hard I practiced, it just never got a lot better.
Speaker 2:But I found myself keep drawing back to this computer that my dad had bought and it came with a book called Basic and it was like it was the most logical, obvious thing I had ever experienced in my life. I could open the book, I understood what was going on and I could tell the computer to do things that I wanted it to do. And I started to realize that I actually am kind of excited about this. So I did that for the next probably, you know, till I was ready to go off to college, at which point Pixar had become a thing and I thought I can get a job with my computer and animation and that's my dream job. So I looked for schools that had computer graphics as a foundation and I that's where I found my undergrad school. I ended up going to Taylor university in Indiana. They had a computer graphics program and they also had an AI track. So in the nineties I did both computer graphics so that I could be a Pixar animator and artificial intelligence, and that's when I could just resonated with me.
Speaker 2:It was this creative engineering side of things is really what drove me, and that's what I get excited about is was that side of it. But the AI piece kept coming back around and I kept wanting to use it and that's where I ended up kind of more in business than in animation is. I was drawn that way, and I would say, over the years, I found that my favorite thing to do is to especially after I went to Notre Dame and I had a foundation of understanding what what business was was to pull together the ideas from business, the ideas from psychology, the ideas from organizational leadership, the ideas from technology, and pull them all together in a way that people can understand and do something with it, because that, to me, is really why technology exists, and so I knew all this stuff was possible, but the rest of the world doesn't know. So I wanted to figure out how to share that with people in a way that they could actually use it, and that's, I think, where it all came from so, wow, I kind of think about taylor.
Speaker 1:I mean, taylor's not a big school, no, and to have an ai track and a graphic designer, computer graphic track, that had to have been a very like small nucleus of people that were on that journey with you at taylor yes, yes, there was a very small few.
Speaker 1:So peeling away from, I mean you were wanting to be more or less in like the computer and the entertainment world and you gravitated towards business. Do you feel like your dream was being continually shaped toward business, or was there somewhat like a death to this? You know, entertainment Pixar-esque view of where you wanted your life to go?
Speaker 2:I feel like I sort of just refined my edges as I was going through school and it just sort of like I still love the graphic side and the math that makes up all the you know, pixar type work.
Speaker 2:Like that's fascinating to me but I struggled with making it practical to people. There was the storytelling side of it but especially at that age and at that time I was never going to be a part of the storytelling. I was never going to shape the story. I was going to be the technical implementation of fulfilling that story and I just wanted to be a part of telling the story. And that's what drove me, I think, towards business is because I could look you in the eye and have a conversation about your story and then help apply the right tools to make that happen. And that's what I wanted to be a part of. So I love the animation side and I still dig out about Disney cartoons from the 1930s Like I think they're awesome. But at the end of the day I wanted to help shape the business story and engage with people more one-on-one as opposed to more like behind the screen to the masses. I want to be able to look them in the eye and have a conversation about the reality of what's going on there.
Speaker 1:So do you think you'll ever like attempt a short cartoon.
Speaker 2:I've attempted many. They're fun, but I'm not very good at that either.
Speaker 1:You made the right choice. I made the right choice. I think you did too Well, jason, thanks for joining today. It's been a absolutely fascinating learning about your vision and talent of not only implementing advanced technology and automations and AI and all those kinds of things, but just the method of which you do. It is absolutely fantastic of the people side and really the teaching. You're a great teacher. So again, creative engineer, you've proven the point not only of what you're actually doing today, but how you wanted to be. You know, on the cartoon side, even with computers. That's pretty incredible. We have two questions that we ask every guest that would like to ask you too. First question is what is a risk you have taken that has changed your life?
Speaker 2:So I grew up a huge Notre Dame football fan. My family is originally from South Bend, indiana, and that was kind of an area. Notre Dame was kind of the mecca of college football to me. And then I also spent some time growing up. I graduated high school at South Bend and I worked at a country club, and at the country club there were a lot of Notre Dame grads that had come through. I had tremendous amount of respect for them. I had built Notre Dame up to a dream school in my mind. There was no way I was going to go there as undergrad. They're ridiculous graduation acceptance day.
Speaker 2:In 2007, my wife talked me into applying to Notre Dame. So on one hand, the risk there seems pretty minor and trivial, but it was, I guess, such an inside of me dream to be a Notre Dame man, to be somebody that had gone to Notre Dame, that the idea of them rejecting me and saying that I was not the kind of person that wanted to go there like hit really deep. It scared me to death, and I was. I was terrified to apply because I was terrified of being told that I was not good enough, and so the risk that I took to actually put together. That application was probably, emotionally for me, one of the highest risks I couldn't possibly take, because it was literally putting it down on paper. I'm deciding, I'm going to find out if I am good enough or not for this dream, and so I was able to get into their program.
Speaker 2:I graduated from there in 2009 with an MBA, and that has changed a lot of the trajectory of what we've done.
Speaker 2:A lot of it because I now understand how to communicate with the C-suite, I understand what it is that we're actually all driving towards and I understand the issues that they're faced with. Because one of the neat things about the program that I got to be a part of was there were people from all over the world that had flown in to Notre Dame on a monthly basis and they were like the chief accounting officer of eBay her name on a monthly basis, and they were like the chief accounting officer of eBay partners at KPMG, the director of negotiations for Alcoa, and it was like I get to sit in the room with them and learn, and that changed my life, because it opened my eyes to the way that people actually are running business and thinking and allowed me then to be able to come in and really address the issues that we needed to address. So that's probably the risk that I took. That was probably more internal and emotional than it was really like risky in any other way, but it had the biggest impact, probably on me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a great story. It's like, well, obviously I know you and Kendra but the microcosm of like just her encouraging you to do that is such a great microcosm of like what I see, your business relationship and how you guys support each other and have success together. So that's such a cool story. Thanks for sharing that. Second question what's unfinished that you have the resolve to complete in the near or not so near future?
Speaker 2:So we've been a consulting firm since the beginning of the company and that's pretty much how we make our living.
Speaker 2:As we've learned more about business, a product has emerged and we've got an opportunity really to take a lot of the learnings that we've created over the last 10 to 12 years and put it into a product that we then could ship to the marketplace and they could take advantage of a lot of the tools and learnings that we've assembled over the years.
Speaker 2:And that is a hard transition to go from a consulting to a product company, and my resolve for that is it runs deep, and so that's the thing that is going to happen. But it is not a quick turnaround, it is a long-term process. That's probably going to happen over the next three to four years, three to five years, but it is again my resolve to make that happen is it's imperative to who we are, because I think it opens up doors for us to be able to help more and actually be able to help more and actually be able to help bring that meaningful, impactful work to more people, and that's what we're about. So we'd be remiss to not do it because we're limited in the scope of what we can do in a consulting realm, but with this product I think we can actually open the doors to hundreds of thousands of people to be able to do more meaningful, impactful work. And that's so. That's just deep in me.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Well, it's been, as I mentioned, just a true pleasure to watch you in action and see how you're changing the business and making it better and really impacting an important industry with a strong mission in mind. So, jason, thanks for joining us today. Have a good one.
Speaker 2:Thanks for tuning in to Risk and Resolve. See you next time.
