Protocols, Payloads & Pints: Podcast Episode 1 – From Today’s Tangle to Tomorrow’s Edge ​

Transcript has been lightly edited for readability.

Robert  [00:00]

Welcome to an episode of Protocols, Payloads and Pints. I’m Robert Rand.

Alex  [00:04]

And I’m Alex Zakman.

Robert  [00:05]

Excited to have you with us today. Alex, why don’t you tell the audience a little bit about how we came up with this unique podcast talking about data and global trade and a little bit of the inspiration.

Alex  [00:19]

Yeah, I think some of it is that you’re a good mention. We’ve always had great conversations together. And a good chunk of this kind of spawned off of both you and I being incredibly frustrated at all of the self-promoting on LinkedIn, all of the AI slop, people being overly polished and not actually honest about what’s happening. And I think you and I have kind of been in the consulting and tech space long enough to know that people oversell to sell product. And at the end of the day, yeah, revenue numbers are important, but nobody’s actually having real conversations.

Alex  [01:03]

And I think, you know, this conversation presents, between our Rolodexes, we can actually have an honest conversation with folks in government, with other ISVs, with retailers, wholesalers, manufacturers, and actually talk about the issues of the day in a way like the Guardian or The Atlantic or BBC has a conversation. There’s not really anybody in the tech industry having an honest conversation about what does a digital transformation today look like? Why is it that every AI adoption is struggling? Why are people making comments about not laying off, then laying off, and then seeing productivity go way down?

Alex  [01:56]

Or, you know, we have this rosy optimistic picture of what something’s gonna be, but it doesn’t actually work.

Robert  [02:03]

And I think that’s inherently a lot of the challenges — people think that they know what digital transformation looks like. But it’s such an evolution right now. And there’s so much pressure coming down through organizations to adopt AI, to cut staff, to do other things, and often carts before horses. Things are messy out there.

Alex  [02:26]

You know, the reality is last year, we had a conversation about digital transformation with a company that was still running an ERP on COBOL. Like, it’s not a realistic expectation to say that you’re gonna have all these agentic things, and everybody’s gonna magically adopt technology like Zoomers when boomers are still in the workforce. And the reality is that you and I are elder millennials and we still interact in a certain way. I think people are more overly optimistic and rosy about what the technology is versus where it actually is. And what does change management and adoption look like? We’re still on the early adoption curve of AI.

Alex  [03:16]

Right now, AI is a combination of machine learning, large language models, and frontier models. But it’s like saying the brick phone or the car phone was what mobile phones are today. This technology has more compute power than what put us on the moon fifty years ago. So if we think that we know what something looks like, the reality is most businesses are still running technology that’s ten, twenty years old.

Alex  [03:51]

Are they going to adopt everything that a B2C market is going to adopt? No. So I think it’s worthwhile to have an honest conversation where, yes, you and I would love business. But at the end of the day, the vast majority of people are trying to figure out what’s actually going on and how do I meaningfully do this. And I think nobody’s actually having the conversation without trying to hawk product.

Robert  [04:15]

Right. And I think the other side of it is that they may still be on AS400, they may have an older tech stack, there may be challenges with adopting and integrating new technology across a business. But the consumer, the client, the buyer — their expectations are shifting.

Robert  [04:39]

Especially talking about us as elder millennials, but there are newer generations that don’t want to call in a phone order or do it the old-fashioned way. So for businesses in manufacturing, distribution, and similar fields that have been there for many decades, they’re certainly feeling the pain if they’re not starting to adopt newer technologies. I learned years ago that you shouldn’t use yourself as a barometer — just because you wouldn’t buy something from a certain channel doesn’t mean others won’t react differently. You have to think about different consumers, different markets, different habits.

Robert  [05:36]

And you need to be able to lean in if you want to capitalize. At the end of the day, that’s what we’re talking about: business. Yes, they can’t turn everything upside down in a day. But in my history in the industry, I’ve always loved talking about table stakes — what are today’s table stakes and what will tomorrow’s be.

Robert  [06:07]

Trying to stay a couple of steps ahead has become the challenge. And where a lot of organizations are struggling right now is that they’re dropping everything for different AI projects that are often costing more than anticipated or creating internal friction. But they’re still not necessarily meeting bare minimums in areas where they really need to be.

Alex  [06:35]

Yeah. My head of product jokes that we always want to litmus test everything we’re doing so we’re not getting high on our own supply. I have a love-hate relationship with Microsoft, like most people — it works, but it’s become bloated in some ways. I was at a conference earlier this week where someone claimed they were doing agentic modeling on finance flows at 100% accuracy. Someone came up to me afterwards and asked what I thought. I said that’s kind of hard to believe, because I’ve been in systems integration long enough to know that you’re never going to have 100% on anything, especially with agentic approaches.

Alex  [07:45]

I travel all around Europe and North America. And when you actually sit somebody down for cocktails or pints and have a conversation outside of a PowerPoint deck, it’s a very different conversation. I think it’s important to break it down that way.

Alex  [08:11]

And to use a saying from my time in the army — it is always important to sit and figure out why things fail and have a real conversation. Case studies are great to look at, but the reality is my company has serviced over 700 projects. I can make the data say whatever I want it to say. Company XYZ is not you. It’s more important to say: what’s actually happening and how do we make it work for you? The industry is set up to sell product, not necessarily take care of the customer.

Alex  [09:08]

I think it’s important for folks to understand what that dynamic looks like. And I’m probably gonna get some heat for having an honest conversation about how the tech industry works. But we’re kind of at another industrial revolution — the way we’re doing business is changing. You hear conversations about a bubble. I do think it’s a bubble, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to go back to what things were without machine learning and without large language models. We will absolutely continue to use those.

Robert  [09:43]

Right. Think about when the dot-com bubble burst — it’s not that the Internet disappeared. Yahoo is no longer necessary, but even after the bubble burst, people still used it for a while. Like every tech revolution, over time you get winners and losers. So far in AI, it has been jumping all over the place with who the winner is. Obviously we all have favorites at the moment, but those will continue to evolve.

Robert  [10:25]

I’d say those post-project reviews — I usually call them retrospectives rather than postmortems. But I’ve been on the road meeting with companies like Shopify, BigCommerce, and Shopware. Technology — especially at publicly traded companies — saw pandemic highs in sales of certain tech, and there’s a push to keep up with the same sales volume. If everybody’s got a subscription, you can go to the next country and the next. At some point you run out of accessible markets. I see companies really fighting for sales, and not always focused on customer success — playing checkers instead of chess.

Robert  [11:15]

A lot of organizations have reduced their partner teams to just focus on revenue generation and not long-term customer retention. Partnerships generally should be involved in that, not just marketing and go-to-market. We find that great partners don’t just look at referrals — they look at partner-influenced sales, the business they were able to win because they have a relationship across the aisle, and in many cases across land barriers and oceans.

Robert  [12:41]

So the vision of whether your partnerships are just a facility of sales or something more becomes a really interesting conversation about where you’re really positioning yourselves short-term and long-term.

Alex  [13:08]

I think the broader market mindset has gotten the Western world to view growth at all costs. And we’re realizing now that it’s okay to have some down quarters. On the tech or consulting side, what works now is not what worked two years ago. People aren’t doing CapEx; they’re figuring out how to do OpEx. Everybody’s cautious about what’s happening. But I think because the industry is so driven by KPIs right now, it’s lost its humanity.

Alex  [13:59]

I had a mentor once say that making money is kind of like losing weight — if you focus on losing weight, you gain weight. If you focus on making money, you lose money. Business is about taking care of people, solving a problem, providing an experience, providing a good. If you take care of the people that are transacting with you, money is a byproduct of that. And I think we’ve kind of lost sight of that.

Robert  [14:27]

Right. If you try to run a business purely from a spreadsheet — look, you need to be able to pay the bills, and businesses are run to turn profits. But I was on a partner town hall recently with perhaps the largest ecommerce platform in North America. They were apologizing for how slow they’ve been to respond to new apps being submitted for listing. Their user bases thrive on leveraging apps and different technology from different providers. Stifling that is painful. They’d really cut back staff in that area. And they were also apologizing for breaking changes and not telling partners until afterward.

Robert  [15:25]

When you’re a small startup, ‘move fast and break things’ — we’ve all seen it. But when you get to a certain size, it’s harder. And often people forget that so many people are counting on these organizations for their livelihoods. Really thinking about things in those terms matters — slowing down, having documentation ready, giving people time to adjust before changes kick in.

Robert  [16:07]

But I’m going to shift topics for a second, Alex, because you mentioned alcohol and I saw you lift your glass. We put Pints right in the name of the podcast but haven’t touched on it yet. You want to share what you’re drinking?

Alex  [16:34]

Yeah. The idea of it being in the logo is that we’ve lost the third space to have the real conversation about what’s happening. Currently I’m in Sligo, Ireland — in the West of Ireland, just above Connemara, just below Donegal. So I’m enjoying a West Coast IPA from Lowgill Brewery here in Sligo.

Robert  [17:08]

Alright. Well, I arrived back in Miami last night and got home closer to midnight from my last trade show. So I’m giving a shout out to one of my local breweries that I love, Funky Buddha. But this morning I’m hydrating with good old H2O.

Alex  [17:34]

So I figured this is episode zero.

Robert  [17:41]

We’re gonna start there and let’s see what we can work our way up to.

Alex  [17:45]

Fair enough. We are working on some fun distillery and brewer sponsors. The goal will be to have a rotating selection, and then we can play the game of ‘Where in the World is Robert and Alex.’

Robert  [18:03]

That’s a fun game to play. Alex, in your business dealings of late, you’ve been dealing with a lot of international trade and government organizations, NGOs — in the age of the resurgence of tariffs and shifting global sentiments. If you were to think about some of the guests we’re anticipating this first season and some of the topics you’re hoping to cover, what’s your view?

Alex  [19:07]

The goal is to have great conversation. I think there isn’t a third space to actually have it. Most businesses aren’t like you and I, going to a lot of conferences and regularly having a pulse on things. The idea is that we’re going to have a combination of merchants, manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, some other ISVs and software partners. And then we also want folks from various governments — the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, and eventually more of Europe. As the trade landscape changes, as the needs for data change, nothing’s really happening in a vacuum.

Alex  [20:10]

We’re kind of living through once-in-a-lifetime events every other month at this point. There are several global conflicts ongoing. Tariffs have come back. You’re starting to see new trade agreements with new parts of the world. At the end of the day, how does a small business actually navigate what that means? How does a multinational? A gentleman from the Financial Times joked that there’s basically three trade blocs now: the US, China, and the friends of Mark Carney. So what does it mean to have new trade relationships between the US and the rest of the world?

Alex  [21:10]

How do we move goods? How do we move data? How do we better connect with people? Canada wants to trade more with Europe, China, New Zealand, Australia — what does that actually mean for businesses trying to go do that? We’re starting to see the emergence of recession pressures. How do businesses get supports? In Canada there’s SHRED and grants available. In Ireland there’s the IDA, Enterprise Ireland, Invest Northern Ireland, Innovate UK in Great Britain. There are a lot of things businesses don’t know how to navigate — from moving goods to what supports might be available. That’s all up for conversation this season.

Robert  [22:25]

You’ve mentioned a few tidbits from your background. Maybe this is a good time to tell the audience a little about us. Chances are we won’t do too much of this across future episodes. Alex, you mentioned the Army — can you walk us through what makes you an expert in technology, data, and these different areas?

Alex  [22:53]

Yeah. The best thing that came out of the army is that I now know how to keep working even while complaining about the situation — a life skill I thoroughly appreciate former commanders for teaching me. I have a fairly varied background: went to school for biology and chemistry, had fellowships with NASA, NOAA, and NSF. Did a fair bit of work around machine learning early on. I’ve run an agency and consultancy for about a decade, recently acquired another agency, and we’re in the process of spinning up a regtech platform to help with compliance. We have a footprint across multiple jurisdictions — Central Europe, Ireland, the UK — our operational headquarters are now in Toronto, with a distributed workforce in the US gravitating toward the East Coast.

Alex  [24:09]

Historically, we’ve helped mid-market to enterprise organizations — and for our European friends, mid-sized SMEs to larger multinationals. The goal of this is: how can we give you some knowledge to tackle the current turbulence around data integrations and operations?

Robert  [24:58]

Well, on my side, I’m really just here to be a good nerd. By the third grade they were pulling me out of class for an hour a day to help the computer teacher, and nothing’s really changed since. I had a mechanical engineering background in college, then broadened my horizons and found I liked the business side too. I wound up in the digital agency space for a decade — my brother was CEO, my sister-in-law was CFO, and I was CTO of an agency that brought brands like Swiss Gear and Invicta Watches into ecommerce. We were the digital agency for organizations like the Florida Panthers, an Inc. 5000 company, a Google Premier partner. We were acquired in 2017 and exited.

Robert  [26:35]

I’ve stayed in technology since, working in web hosting and the cloud, and had a great run with JetRails where I hosted their podcast for 100 episodes. That left me wanting to figure out the next thing. For the last three years I’ve been heading up partnerships at iPaaS.com — an integration platform as a service — working with services partners like agencies, SIs, VARs, MSPs, and consultancies, as well as great technology companies across ERP, point of sale, CRM, PIM, warehouse management, order management, accounts receivable, nonprofit CRMs, and more. It’s such a unique vantage point. Back to protocols — the internationalization of data, data security, data governance, data regulation — there are so many interwoven topics that I’m really looking forward to getting deeper into.

Robert  [28:05]

It gives us such a unique opportunity together, given that we’ve seen so many successes — but also so many failures. How many projects have you seen through the years that did not launch successfully on the first attempt? How many tech companies have you seen rise and fall?

Alex  [28:30]

We’re batting a 92% success rate on go-live, 80% on-time, 72% on-budget — across just shy of a thousand total projects. But people telling you everything’s going to be smooth sailing — the reality is every project runs into friction. There’s always going to be challenges and frustration. And I think it’s important to have the honest conversation about that. It’s not a bad thing that a project runs into obstacles — it’s kind of inevitable. What matters is having the tools to get it back on track and across the line, rather than just lamenting the situation.

Robert  [29:32]

One of my favorite things I learned on the job was the risk analysis — walking clients through the risk of what would delay the project or increase the price: scope changes, the most common issues in the types of projects we were dealing with. Getting into those conversations early, staying ahead of them, was transformative. Today we see a lot of projects go off the rails, people coming to us after the fact. If they had a good project plan from the beginning — with dependencies, knowing who needed to do what and when and how that impacted the next stage — they probably would have been okay.

Robert  [30:33]

But there’s also that reactive way of looking at a tech stack — okay, we need to solve this one problem today — as opposed to taking more time to plan out where we want to be in three or five years. For the team I’m a part of, we act as a data hub, not just a connector from A to B. Every integration is standardized. We see organizations that have wound up with all these point-to-point connectors they can’t manage — a huge thorn in their side with things breaking, different teams involved in each one. Thinking more proactively: sometimes you just need to turn on another spoke and get data flowing with one more system. Or finally replace a legacy system. Just thinking about that evolution.

Robert  [31:54]

As much as everybody’s focused on what’s next in AI, AI is all about data. Trash in, trash out. So thinking about data governance and data hygiene becomes more important than ever in breaking down data silos. The things that consume me day in and day out: how do organizations set themselves up not just to get through a short-term project successfully, but for the long term? What you and I do all day is try to simplify the complex — but it is complex under the hood. And AI right now, as much as we all love it, is also a potential recipe for problems in terms of: is the code you’re writing scalable? Is it secure? Is it maintainable? Or is it spaghetti code?

Robert  [32:45]

It’s almost like: do you have quality control with an experienced dev team that has processes in place? Or is it more like a one-off piece of technical debt you’re now stuck with? Getting the fastest possible thing is not always the best long-term outcome for business success, continuity, and safety. Thinking a few steps ahead is the biggest challenge everyone is facing right now at the breakneck pace everyone’s trying to move.

Alex  [33:51]

The reality is AI is the shiny object syndrome. If you’re still on Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains, we might need to get you to upgrade to a more modern ERP before we have a very flashy agentic or LLM strategy for the organization. The challenge is, with an economic slowdown and everyone trying to move forward sales, you have an economic driver to focus on the single shiny point. But given where you and I sit, we’re looking at this and saying: we want businesses and enterprises to be successful. It doesn’t really matter whether we’re re-implementing NetSuite, or doing a migration, or figuring out whether we really need to go from Magento to Shopify — or whether we can just fix the current Magento instance.

Alex  [35:11]

Or OpenAI versus Anthropic — you and I might be sitting on the same side of that coin. But at the end of the day, if you’re rolling out agentic AI for the first time, half the battle is just moving forward. You don’t necessarily need to pick one over the other if you don’t have a strong use case for one. Just figuring out how to put one foot forward — and you might readjust the strategy in two or three years. That’s totally fine. Things are moving fast enough that that’s probably the case.

Robert  [35:47]

Yeah. And speaking of legacy ERPs and AI — I was talking to a VAR from one ERP recently where they mentioned the platform had recently gotten some AI added in. I was sitting on the edge of my seat because we have integrations to systems like OpenAI; we can get the data from these legacy siloed systems to OpenAI with prompts and enhance the data and have it flow wherever you need. What had they added? They described it as like the old F1 button — it would give you some idea of what you were looking at on the screen. That was it. All I could think of was Clippy back in Microsoft Word. Yes, they’ve added something — but is it really what everybody needs? Not yet, no.

Robert  [36:48]

And there’s so much of that out there. For me it’s all about picking finite, specific projects with outcomes you want to drive and being able to measure against those. Getting away from ‘we need everything’ and thinking about what would be most impactful. What’s that painful process that the team is killing a lot of time on? Is it enhancing product descriptions? Categorizing products? Organizing customers into segments? What is it? And let’s see if we can apply AI to it, get those limited wins, and keep going from there.

Alex  [37:32]

Having executive alignment between the C-suite and the technical folks would help enormously.

Robert  [37:39]

Now you’re asking way too much.

Alex  [37:44]

Joking aside, one of my goals of this podcast is that we create something that talks to both sides and facilitates conversation between business leaders and technical teams. Between the pair of us, we probably know twelve different programming languages and speak six actual languages. How do you create a space to allow for those conversations to happen where management listens and says ‘that’s exactly what I’m thinking,’ and the tech team says the same? If we’re able to bridge that gap — have an honest, good-faith roundtable discussion that isn’t hawking anything — and then follow up with office hours where we dive into specific conversations, I think that’s both entertaining and meaningful.

Robert  [39:06]

I would agree. And before we wrap for today, I know that you’ve got some office hours you’ve been setting up. Maybe we share that with the audience as a way to go from listening to us to getting a little bit more involved and being able to interact more directly. What do you think?

Alex  [39:41]

Yeah. We still have to flush out some of those details. But the idea is for it to be incredibly fluid and dynamic. If there’s the desire, we could potentially get a community group set up to allow for conversations to happen — with a very clear rule: you’re not selling to each other. It’s genuine engagement about how to actually solve problems. The goal is to launch office hours a couple of weeks after each episode, and we’ll move that forward. It will probably be an evolving thing. Robert hasn’t done a podcast in a hot minute, and I haven’t done a webinar series consistently since COVID. So I’d ask for a little bit of grace — we are going to stumble, and politely let us know when we do. We’re happy to adjust.

Robert  [41:52]

Well, we really appreciate everybody tuning in. A lot of great content and really great guests are coming. You’ll be hearing from some really unique voices and we’ll be keeping things honest and the content thoughtful and valuable. Looking forward to it.

Alex  [42:15]

Absolutely. Here’s to a great first episode.