Leaders and Their Stories

Richard Lowe (00:00.908)
Hello, I'm Richard Lowe and this is the Leaders and Their Stories podcast. I'm here with Ben the Automator and Ben's a regular now. He'll be coming probably once a month. So I hope you'll like him. And Ben, why don't you give a short introduction of yourself?

Ben "The Automator" (00:13.541)
Hahaha.

Ben "The Automator" (00:17.883)
Sure, yeah. Ben the Automator, 20 years of IT security and automation experience, over half a million hours of tasks obliterated, and over just about $16, $17 million in revenue saved.

Richard Lowe (00:37.772)
Not bad, not bad. Well, I figured it'd be appropriate tonight to talk about digital transformation, because that's kind of sort of what you do. And I've led two digital transformation projects, so we can probably have a nice conversation, be a little different than what we normally have. What do think? You like that?

Ben "The Automator" (00:51.93)
Yeah, that sounds great.

Richard Lowe (00:55.672)
So how would you define digital transformation?

Ben "The Automator" (00:58.81)
I mean, digital transformation is really just getting out of the stone age of for your processes really, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's like this, if you are still manually entering data, a robot's probably going to replace that in or has already. So from a digital transformation perspective for me,

It's about making your repeatable processes automated and transforming the way that your business operates.

Richard Lowe (01:35.502)
I think you said a key term there, which is transforming. And it's important to understand that a common term that's pushed around by a lot of people about digital transformation is people, processes, and technology. People comes first, then processes, then technology, which is why digital transformation projects should never be led by the IT department. Because what does the IT department want to do? They want to put in new technology. That's what they do. It makes total sense. Well, you don't necessarily need new technology.

You might need people to be optimized. any process, well, I don't know if you optimize people. You might need people to have to work to change the mix of people. might need processes changed. And then you might need new technology. But if you start from the technology end.

you're probably paying homage to some vendor who has some new sexy tool for you. And like what you do is you work on automating things, which is starting from people. You're automating processes that people use. So I doubt if you I think you rarely say, correct me if I'm wrong, you need to buy this newfangled piece of hardware.

Ben "The Automator" (02:36.163)
Correct.

Ben "The Automator" (02:47.117)
No, in fact, it's the exact opposite for me. I want you to use your existing software and make it suck less.

Richard Lowe (02:57.346)
That's a good way to put it. That's a great TikTok, by the way.

yeah, that's the point. You, your people, you always start from people and that could mean a lot of things. I've written three books on digital transformation and I led the digital transformation at Trader Joe's twice. We had two of them. One was from paper to for out of the stone age to into the bronze age and then from the bronze age into the, into the modern technology. I think they did another one where they went into the cloud and stuff. So.

And I created private clouds. think they're now totally in the cloud, but it's been 11, 12 years since I've been there. So digital transformation could mean a lot of things. And it also often doesn't mean you're doing your entire company all at once. You might be just digitally transforming accounting or the sub-department of accounting or the IT department or any number of other things.

Ben "The Automator" (03:57.241)
Yeah, I mean, as I've told you before, automation or transformation of removal of a process in this case, if it saves you five minutes per day, that's 1 % of a job, of a head count. If you can do that for an entire department, you've probably just fixed your budget issues.

Richard Lowe (04:26.264)
Yep. Now, one of ways I like to put it in my books or some of them anyway, was what it's running, what's becoming is you have digital employees and human employees. I have a digital employee, it's called ChatGPT and it does work for me and it does a lot of work for me. I might throw a transcript at it and say, make sense of this for me. I really wasn't listening during the interview. I didn't understand it or something and it'll tell me all about it. That doesn't happen. I never have that kind of problem.

But, you know, what to do is, what did I commit to? What did they commit to? What are the deadlines we talked about? A lot better than note taking, except for the one time that I lost the transcript. So that became a little pain, but it's always glitches and glitches in the matrix. So what do you think of that concept of the digital employee?

Ben "The Automator" (05:14.849)
That's right.

Ben "The Automator" (05:20.696)
I mean, digital employees are a must these days, right? And I'll take that a step further. I think you need a digital co-employee. So if you're an employee, you need the ability to utilize Chat GPT or some other AI such as Copilot to be able to get your job done faster.

Richard Lowe (05:48.728)
Right.

Ben "The Automator" (05:50.166)
You know, as, as far as the digital employee goes, just remember anything you hate doing AI can probably do it better. As long as you give it enough parameters and enough instructions to get what you want.

Richard Lowe (06:08.364)
Yes. And as long as it's not beyond the capabilities of the AI itself. There are things like I wanted it to review an entire book and it just didn't have the memory or resources to do it. So I had to just give it to it in chunks. Go figure. It couldn't read a whole 60,000 word book and cut it down. Probably will be in a very short time because I'm sure they get feedback on that kind of stuff. yeah, it was frustrating.

Ben "The Automator" (06:13.399)
Mm-hmm.

Ben "The Automator" (06:21.29)
You

Richard Lowe (06:37.998)
Well, I wanted to tell me, you know, did I do any redundancies in the book? That's the thing it's great for. If there's anything redundant, it told, once I broke it down, it told me, yeah, you got a couple. And that fixed that.

Ben "The Automator" (06:49.624)
Do you ever use a scratch pad when you interact with chat jpt? Have you heard of that concept?

Richard Lowe (06:57.495)
I have not.

Ben "The Automator" (06:59.156)
So when you're in chat GPT or pretty much any AI, if you tell it to utilize a scratch pad to keep track of its thoughts and movements, what it'll do is it'll actually almost make a digital to do list and then go back and double check it. Now there's other ways you can, you can actually leverage that even more by utilizing what they call second order and third or excuse me.

Richard Lowe (07:18.254)
Hmm.

Ben "The Automator" (07:28.701)
second order and third order thinking. So that's kind of like having a peer review your work and then having an architect review your thoughts and your peers thoughts.

Richard Lowe (07:41.122)
Nice, nice. So it's not the first order like in Star Wars, it's second order and third order.

Ben "The Automator" (07:46.007)
Exactly.

Richard Lowe (07:49.902)
Yes, although I'm surprised I'm bringing it up because I thought those were terrible movies, but everybody has their own opinion.

Yeah. yeah, AI is interesting. I had a project that I wrote about that was using AR and VR as part of their digital transformation as a warehouse. they actually had VR, no AR that you put our glasses on. And their job was to go out to the warehouse and find the cases and things that they needed to put on the truck. Well, part of the problem is where is it? So it would actually put arrows on the floor.

Then there were spots where they shouldn't go that are dangerous. So it would have signs up and then the guy could do this and the box would open up and he's VR is AR and show them what's inside. And this was all done through glasses and it was very, very, very successful and really cut down the amount of wasted effort on the part of the warehouse man. And that was a big digital transformation project for them.

Ben "The Automator" (08:51.412)
Yeah, I can imagine. Is that kind of like Ready Player One style? Where they on those Omnipads running and, you know.

Richard Lowe (09:02.368)
No, no, they were walking around the warehouse with just the goggles. Yeah. And they had a cart, they had a cart with some stuff with a computer on it. So they carried that around too. Cause they needed the extraneous computer because the goggles didn't have a computing power. I mean, this was a few years ago. So it wasn't, it wasn't the metaverse.

Yeah, that's something that I haven't heard a lot about lately, thank God. But we'll see how it goes. But that was an interesting digital transformation project that did not involve AI at all. It was just AR and VR. And it worked very, very well. So it's not always AI. Digital transformation does not mean AI. It could mean anything.

Ben "The Automator" (09:46.134)
Right. Right.

I actually specialize in SOAR technology, security orchestration, automation and remediation. And as you know, this is what cybersecurity companies use to create codified SOC processes, like investigating a phishing email or something along those lines. I know a lot of people are saying SOAR,

is dead, but you'd be surprised just how many companies out there are still leveraging it like we do it at Phoenix Cyber. And, you know, as far as those transformations go, mean, you know, how do you, how would you handle a digital transformation for a single process that's like 4,000 steps?

Richard Lowe (10:46.508)
that's well in that case you're probably your best step is to put all those things into an artificial intelligence plan. Okay, what here's redundant? What here has bad flows like it goes off to the side comes back? What here can we optimize all kinds of questions you could ask AI about that. Of course, the hard part is getting that all into an AI because it's probably not document it's probably not documented to a certain amount.

Ben "The Automator" (11:09.398)
Very true. With regards to the digital transformation, a lot of your slow and fatigue points are going to be that tribal knowledge, the lack of documentation, the lack of artifacts that actually exist, and then whether Timmy and Sally actually do the process the same or not.

Richard Lowe (11:34.574)
Yeah. And the, the other will address, I mean, your first stage of digital transformation needs to be document what you got. And one of the first stages, because you don't know what to optimize until you know what you got, unless you're going to just flat out replace it. Um, but that'll help solve the problem of what if Sally leaves, which is always going to happen. Somebody will always leave at some point in their life, they're going to leave. And then if it's not, if it's tribal knowledge, you're pretty much screwed.

Richard Lowe (12:07.084)
If they're the only ones who know how to do this thing, you're in trouble.

especially if it's mission critical. They're the only ones who know how to take the nuclear power plant rods out of the power plant and put them into this place here in a certain way so that they do this and this and this. That person's gone. What are you going to do?

Ben "The Automator" (12:28.69)
Right. Right.

So with the, oh, go ahead, go ahead, I'm sorry. No, no.

Richard Lowe (12:32.8)
It's like the, old, sorry, go ahead. Did you know just slight, the old Apollo stuff, one of the reasons why they didn't proceed is every single Apollo spacecraft was hand built. Those things weren't factory create. mean, you know, there were factories building them or assembly lines and stuff. There's no automation back then. The wire outboards and the boards and the computers were all handmade. In fact, they were programmed with wires.

They didn't have code in them to a certain extent. They had some code. It was really primitive, but when you wanted a program and you move this wire here and this wire here and this wire here. And when the person who knows how to do that dies or moves on or is not available anymore, what are you going to do? That's not documented. Anyway, you were going to say something. So.

Ben "The Automator" (13:28.685)
And now I don't remember.

Richard Lowe (13:30.766)
It's okay. Well, digital transformation is a complex thing. the first thing you, if you're a consultant, say you're hired to digital transform a relatively, you know, 50 person company, a hundred person company. Probably one of the first things you do is start interviewing people, start to try and at least get a grasp on what's going on and maybe document it and get some flow charts and things, mind maps, whatever you use to try and figure out what the hell's going on here. You may use AI for that. You may not just kind of depends on.

how complex it is and what you got, then I imagine the next step would be what are the pain points?

What is the biggest bang for the buck? There's some things you're not gonna dock. You're not gonna change. There's some things that's just minor. Sally can continue to do that.

Ben "The Automator" (14:18.813)
Now what's your thoughts?

Richard Lowe (14:19.096)
There's no money in that. There's no ROI in that, for example. Go ahead. Sorry.

Ben "The Automator" (14:24.734)
No, it's okay. I think there's just a little lag and I apologize. I was gonna say, now what's your thought on actually tackling the most painful process for the business, whether that be air prone or risk or time consuming or issues with customer delight, right?

What are your thoughts on how to prioritize that? Because what I heard, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you said you're gonna come in and you're gonna start documenting all these things. But how are you prioritizing?

Richard Lowe (15:06.498)
Well, you're gonna talk, the first thing you're gonna do is try and get a grasp on the whole thing. So they said, just digitally transform, we just want to digitally transform. They don't really know what it means. You know, I want you to fix accounting because it's costing us a lot of money or something like that. Or operations is, I don't know where all that money is going, digitally transform it. So you're at that stage. And that's quite common, I'm sure. Especially on smaller companies, they don't know what to do. They just know that they've heard this word and fix it.

So what are you going to do? You're going to look for those pain points. You're going to interview people. You're going to interview Sally, you're going to interview Joe, and you're going to interview the comptroller and the CFO. They're going have different viewpoints. if it's accounting. CFO is going to say, well, know, this is what's costing you money. While the people below are going to say, no, no, no, no, this process is taking me half the day every day and it's stupid. And I guess then at that point, you're going to leave it up to the powers that be to decide which one is the best for the company to do.

to start with, you're going to, they're probably going to pick the one that has the best ROI. Does Sally doing that one task, 50 % of her job, does that have a good ROI? Does it matter? Whereas optimizing this pain point that has to do with customers, you generally want to start with customer facing stuff. Is that where you want to put your effort first? I would say generally it's customer facing or operational tangles.

that are just killing your company where their operations is just not, you know, your company grew too fast. Those are the two areas. Accounting is probably the least on my list.

Ben "The Automator" (16:45.597)
But to me, accounting would be one of those things that's actually repeatable nowadays, right? It's very repeatable and therefore, you know, you don't require an entire staff of accounting people anymore. Really what you require is one to two people with a well-trained bot or a program that enables them to do their work faster.

Richard Lowe (17:14.498)
And that could be the question is where are you going to get your biggest bang? What's the most important thing to the business given that you don't have infinite resources. So you might, you might say, okay, I want to hit the customer facing stuff first. want to hit the operational tangles second, and let's hit accounting third, and let's worry about some other thing. Marketing last on the line and sales last in line. Cause we're not having a problem with that. It kind of depends. Accounting may come first because maybe you're not paying creditors on time.

Ben "The Automator" (17:22.14)
Mm-hmm.

Richard Lowe (17:44.588)
Or maybe you look at the amount of people, we got 50 people in accounting, we're only a hundred person company. What the heck?

You find out you don't need that many people because you can put in a couple chat GPT scripts and you're done

Ben "The Automator" (18:00.37)
So who do you think is the most interested in digital transformation these days?

Richard Lowe (18:11.2)
Every business should be interested in it because they will get gains from it. Larger companies I've been hearing are creating actually a C level board level position called CAO, the Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, the Chief Digital Transformation Officer. These are becoming more more normal because they need to be at the business level. They need to be high up so that they can decide what is the best for the

business and we don't have infinite resources. So Sally, it may be very annoying that Sally's spending half her day on that. And that may be costing us some money, but she's only getting 25 grand a year. Whereas having this, this operations person not delivering product on time to the stores, that may be costing a million dollars a year. Which one do you hit first? You know.

Richard Lowe (19:05.581)
And it's usually first, which one do you hit first? Because once they see the benefits, it just steamrolls.

Richard Lowe (19:13.558)
And then maybe hit Sally as a side project. say, okay, we're going to do Sally in accounting. Just as we'll just do it we can save this money. But in the meantime, we're going to focus on, on operations because that's where the big money is. The big return kind of depends on the goals of the company.

Ben "The Automator" (19:29.253)
Now, do you believe that digital transformation of infrastructure going cloud is still relevant these days? I see it bouncing back and forth, people going back to on-prem infrastructure. you know, so do you have anything that you'd like to weigh in on that?

Richard Lowe (19:50.284)
Yeah, surprise, surprise. It turns out the cloud isn't free. And it actually, if you don't carefully watch the resources, it actually is very, very expensive. You could wind up using tons of disk space that you don't use or have your developers creating lots and lots and lots of clones because it's safe. And suddenly you're spending a lot of money on disk space that you don't need to, a lot of money. And it's so easy for those people to do it or to use more compute resources or whatever.

So a lot people say, well, let's just go back to on-prem. Well, then you've got the heavy lift of the hardware. So what are you going to do? I think it's going to go to a mixture of both. You're going to have some on-prem and some in the cloud. And the cloud's great for scalability. So Christmas comes, know, Trader Joe's, we would typically do three times the business as normal on Christmas. We definitely want that scalability. We want to take that spike.

That's with on-prem, you're wasting all that compute during the rest of the year. So you're going to, you're going to use the cloud for that spike, but you might have your normal business be on-prem and use the cloud as a, as a contingency. That's not costing you a lot until you need it.

Ben "The Automator" (21:08.493)
Yeah, that's true.

What do you think is holding businesses back from digital transformation? Is it that they're scared? Is it that they don't know better?

Richard Lowe (21:24.406)
I would say is that they're looking at it from an IT point of view is a big problem. It's not an IT project. not think of it as an IT project. It is a business project. It actually should be called business transformation. I think a lot of places do. And it really is you're transforming your business. You're transforming your culture, transforming your finances, your IT, you're transforming different components. You have to transform the culture because these people are, they're going to be worried about their jobs. They're going to, they've got this anti-tech.

feeling probably a lot of hate, a lot of companies that people hate IT and dislike it a lot. Cause IT is very buddinski, know, sometimes we're just going to put this on your sermon system, whether you like it or not kind of thing. I was part of IT. know that, you know, we're going to implement this whole new thing. You don't really have much to say about it. We'll ask for your input, but you know, we're really just asking.

Ben "The Automator" (22:11.993)
Mm-hmm.

Richard Lowe (22:21.61)
And we crash things, know, IT does a lot. I was in IT, so I can say this. We cause a lot of problems. We help with a lot of problems too. So I hope that answered the question.

Richard Lowe (22:36.29)
I like the way you're interviewing me now.

Ben "The Automator" (22:41.711)
We just need more topics. Yeah, keep going, keep going.

Richard Lowe (22:45.465)
I got plenty. I got plenty up here.

Richard Lowe (22:50.274)
Now we got enough for a year's worth of these things. Easy.

Ben "The Automator" (22:55.907)
Awesome. So what do you, what do you feel like the digital transformation or the business transformation? I like that. What do you feel like a business transformation value is for a company? said it's steamrolls. You said that it's, know, I, and I both know that it's amazing, but for anybody out there that that's skeptical, what kind of value is in a, in a transformation like that?

Richard Lowe (23:23.694)
If you're in a competitive marketplace, your competitors are probably digitally transforming. If you're not, you're going to die. You're going to be, you're going to eventually be swallowed up or your business is going to die. Uh, cause they're going to put in something that's customer facing. That's better than what you got. They're going to untangle some of their operational problems. They'll probably even take care of Sally at some point and give her, you know, maybe a nice retirement party or whatever.

So you're going to lose if you don't do digital transformation fast. It's actually going to happen very fast. It's not AI. Digital transformation is bigger than AI. AI is part of digital transformation. Just like VR and artificial reality, excuse me, augmented reality and virtual reality are part of digital transformation. AI is part of digital transformation. Robotics might be part of your digital transformation. All these different components go into it. So don't think

We're going to put AI into a company. Think we're going to digitally transform our company. If you're a trucking company, maybe you're going to get autonomous forklifts. So you're going to have robotics then maybe you have autonomous trucks, but does that really work? How about starting with, this is a great place to start that paper manifest, put it on a tablet for crying out loud. I think a lot of them are starting to do that, but think of all the time that's wasted just writing down numbers that could be shared.

That's a great place to start your digital transformation. Getting rid of paper reports from the warehouse. That's another great place.

Ben "The Automator" (25:01.359)
Think about how hard it is to read the handwriting of some people. I don't even write anymore. I write maybe once or twice a year. And when I do, it feels almost foreign, but people still go, what's this? What's that?

Richard Lowe (25:20.024)
Well, not only to read it, but to share it and to audit it and to all these other things. Handwriting is very difficult in many, many things. Writing into a computer, it's in a database. Now there's problems with databases. mean, that's a whole other story, but we can do a whole podcast on those databases because everything underneath of it has databases. Everything has database. mean, even robotics has data underneath data. Without data, there is none of this stuff.

And that's probably one of the base problems that a lot of companies have is their data is in terrible shape and they got to clean it. They got to unsilo it. Siloing means your account, your, we can have a whole podcast on this, but siloing means you've got your marketing data is in a separate computers than your, than your sales data, than your accounting data, and they don't talk to each other.

So these different databases, can use different communications. They might even use different programming languages. Some of may be offsite. That's all siloed data. What you want to do is centralize that so that it can all be, or at least connect it so that it can all be looked at as a whole. Because if you're doing, say, ROI report, whatever the business term is, reports on the marketing silo and on a different, say, or,

actually I've did a report on it. Say you had a business that had a different location in every state and every one of those was a different silo. It's going to be very hard to match up the numbers because they're all different. Now, if you put them all so that they're all connected or even the same database, then it becomes much easier. The reporting becomes much easier and you can get a better picture of what your company does. You can make better decisions just doing that. That could be a big project.

But there are companies that'll do it. And I've actually written reports on companies that do that. I've written reports for them, not on them.

Ben "The Automator" (27:23.885)
slightly different.

Richard Lowe (27:26.926)
Yeah. Yeah. And then there's a, there's even a bigger net of how do you secure it? How do you keep it private? How do you audit it? How do you, how long do you need to keep it? Um, how much do need to keep? mean, there's a bazillion topics in that in data that we could talk about. We'll save that for another podcast though.

Richard Lowe (27:51.66)
Well, we've been going for about 30 minutes. think that was a good point to stop. What do you think?

Ben "The Automator" (27:57.037)
I think so. Yep.

Richard Lowe (27:58.53)
All right, so if you could sum up what we just talked about in a couple sentences, what would you say?

Ben "The Automator" (28:05.343)
well, what you said is the most important that you need to start with people and that it doesn't need to be an IT initiated or an IT owned project, let's put it that way. Digital also should be done from the business perspective and not from, you know, just putting in AI everywhere.

I mean, I think that you should definitely use AI to enable your business, but it should be done in a way that is carefully implemented. And, you know, you should have somebody constantly QA-ing those prompts and changing them because they will eventually get out of sync. And then lastly, pretty much all businesses can benefit from it. Right?

There's not a business out there from trucking to manufacturing to IT companies, consultants, they can all benefit from this. And Sally in accounting is going to have a fantastic retirement party when accounting becomes fully automated.

Richard Lowe (29:27.424)
or she'll be repurposed to another department, whichever works best. That all needs to be part of your cultural transformation is what do do with these people who are now getting reduced or out of a job? If you just say you're out of a job, they're going to start actively opposing you and you don't want that.

Ben "The Automator" (29:29.991)
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Ben "The Automator" (29:47.113)
Right. You want everybody to be on board with it, right? You don't want to replace people. You want to get rid of the stuff either A, they don't want to do or B, that they shouldn't be doing.

Richard Lowe (29:52.056)
Right.

Richard Lowe (30:01.56)
Right.

Richard Lowe (30:04.93)
Right. All right. Well, that's a great place to stop it. I'm Richard Lowe, the writing king and ghostwriting guru. This has been the Leaders and Their Stories podcast. And we got into a fascinating discussion that had almost nothing to with ghostwriting, but that's fine. And where can they reach you?

Ben "The Automator" (30:22.943)
Yeah, if they want to reach me, just look me up on LinkedIn, BenTheAutomator, and you can also go to bentheautomator.com.

Richard Lowe (30:34.254)
If you look up on LinkedIn, guarantee you won't have any trouble with the profile picture. It's pretty obvious who he is. All right.

Ben "The Automator" (30:38.218)
You

Is it the green hair or is it my picture of like that, you know?

Richard Lowe (30:48.142)
That's a persona.

It's very unique and very distinct. I like it. Like me and my shirts, you know, it's very distinct.

Ben "The Automator" (30:57.685)
That's right.

Richard Lowe (31:00.374)
Alright, well thank you for watching and we'll have another one of these in a month with Bin the Automator. Thank you.

Ben "The Automator" (31:06.315)
Thank you. Bye.