How to navigate the future of software development with AI?

Oleg

Hello, Richard! Welcome to the Devico Breakfast Bar! Thanks for joining me today. Could you please introduce yourself and tell me about your background?

Richard

Oleg, thank you for having me today. So, I'm Rich Walker. I am the CEO of Quick. We are a software company, software as a service company, that makes it easier to process forms. I mean, who likes filling out paperwork by hand, right? So, what we've done is we've collected over 40,000 forms across the financial services industry, and we've made it easier to fill out the forms, pre-fill it with data, get it e-signed with DocuSign, and now even process completed forms to get structured data off of it. A little bit more about my background. I started my first business when I was 12. I started over 10 different companies since then. And I'm passionate about helping people be their best version of themselves. I'm a technologist by trade in the sense that I trained myself. I learned how to develop software so I could build great solutions. And here we are in 22nd year of business.

Oleg

Great. You've spent most of your life running your own business. What's the stuff that gets you out of bed in the morning?

Richard

You know, I think humans have a fundamental need to help other people. Cause when you think about it, we're social creatures, right? And so, if you want to find fulfillment, you need to be able to serve others in some capacity. And I found out over a decade ago that my purpose in life is to help people be their best version of themselves. And I started my company because when I worked for other people, I didn't feel like I was empowered to do my best work. So, what I was really doing in starting my company was finding a way to empower myself to do my best work. And frankly, that's a fundamental layer. A cornerstone of our company is empowering others to do their best work. And over 20 years, I've gone through burnout, I've gone through evolutions of our product. We've reinvented ourselves. I still want to get up every day to help others be their best version and to ensure that my customers can do what they do best and paperwork is nobody's best work except ours.

Oleg

Great! You have a podcast where you talk to business leaders from different industries to gain insights, but how else do you stay on top of industry trends and events? And are there any particular valuable resources or sources of information, that you find?

Richard

You know, I think the number one way is to talk to customers. The more you talk to your customers and understand their challenges, and therefore you hear what they're going through, what regulations are coming up that it's impacting their business, what industry trends are happening. I think talking to customers is absolutely the best way to know what's going on in the world. I go to various conferences. There's a round table that I love to go to, which is a lot more intimate. And you hear it very directly from people what they're trying to do, what their challenges are, et cetera.

But outside that, I'm also very active on LinkedIn. People post about things all the time. And I'm subscribed to various trade journals in my industry that I get emails pretty much daily. And every now and then I read an article that seems interesting. It's kind of funny because I was a financial advisor, and here I am running a software company, right? We serve financial advisors, but, I still read a lot of financial advisor articles. I still keep up with changes in 401k limits and IRS changes, not because I'm trying to be a practitioner, but just because it's interesting, and it's also an indication of what's going on in the world for my customers. So, that's generally what I do.

Oleg

I wish I had more time reading various sources of information, including LinkedIn. But the reality is...

Richard

10 minutes, man. All you need –.10 minutes, Skim it - you've done.

Oleg

I have 10 minutes, 15 minutes, up to half an hour. But sometimes, you want to spend more time, but it's limited.

Richard

That's true.

Oleg

Could you mention any professionals or leaders from your network who inspire you in your professional journey?

Richard

Sure. A gentleman by the name of Mark Butler. He's somebody who's always inspired me. He worked at Purging for a very long time. He became the head of a technology division at Purging that they spun out. And he was just somebody that I really, really valued because he presented himself very professionally. He carried himself with, I think, just the utmost confidence and professionalism. I just respected his rapport that he had with people, as well as his intellect, and what he did in the industry. So he's somebody I've always admired. We've become good friends.

And I look to him for what's going on in the world as well. I mean, we talked about how I keep up with trends. People like him are really impactful in that way. There's somebody else I'd mentioned as well – my friend, Chip Kispert, who is the owner of Beacon Strategies. He and I communicate from time to time about what's going on in the world, but he's also really involved with our community. He knows what's going on. And I greatly, greatly value his feedback and his perspective on things. He has challenged me to be a better leader, to be a better manager, and to really drive my company to new heights. And I always look forward to talking to him.

Oleg

Amazing. In addition to your professional life, do you have any personal interests or hobbies that you're passionate about and how do they complement your work or provide balance in your life?

Richard

So, I've always defined six different passions in my life to run myself. I've said, ‘If I got stranded on an island, what would be the things I would want to have around me?’ Number one is relationships. And I know it's kind of strange to say that because we want to be around other people. But what I care about is what drives human behavior. I'm really, really interested on becoming better for myself, being a better communicator, and understanding what makes people tick. And you find that out through relationships. So, that's one of my focuses.

Hobbies that you talked about, I love cars, and everybody knows it. Whenever we have a meeting, my analogies always relate to cars, engines, vehicles, drive trains, things like that. I'm going to turn 50 this coming year, and I told my wife, 'I'm going to get a car, a car for me, a project.' I don't know what it's going to be yet. I'm looking at various options, but I've put aside that passion to raise my kids. And we have some cool cars. I mean, we have Volvos, but I love them. But yeah, I want to actually get more into tinkering with cars and maybe building something for fun.

Oleg

Okay. Great. Given that we can no longer imagine the world without AI, how do you see AI evolving in the software development industry and what opportunities and challenges do you envision for the future?

Richard

I think AI is playing a very significant role. It's a sea change that we're going through. And it's very much like the days when the Internet came out, and you had to decide what it meant. So today, what I think it means is if you don't learn how to incorporate AI into your world, into your skill set, into your tool set, and into your thinking, you're going to be left behind. I'm not afraid of AI putting people out of business. I'm afraid of people not increasing their skills and their intellect with AI as a tool set to help them get there. So, if you can improve your skill set, your tool set, with AI, I think you're going to thrive in whatever role that you have.

I'm going back to the software development question. I see AI playing a stronger and stronger role in that because you already see AI attempting or successfully delivering software.

And so, I think we're going to get to a point where... If you go back in time, you had third-generation language, fourth-generation language. I think AI is the next generation of language when it comes to programming. There are certain things that programmers just won't have to think about as much because AI should handle it for them. I mean, I still think that's a couple of years away. But I do see that software development can become easier, more efficient. And one thing I always think about is I believe that AI is not going to be the same type of creativity that a human can have. So, I still think the human ability to think differently, to communicate differently, to put pieces together differently is going to have a really important part in the software development process.

Oleg

Last week I was in the CEO breakfast in the morning and one of the leaders from another company, he used to be a developer, and he showed me an application he built with help of ChatGPT. He spent, I think, two days, and he told me like, 'Look, Oleg, I would spend three, four weeks building the same without ChatGPT.' Of course, you still need to be a developer to build an application with ChatGPT, but it significantly simplifies your life. Significantly.

Richard

Yeah. It's incredible.

Oleg

It's happening now. Yeah. I can't imagine what will be in the future.

Richard

I think it helps people become more efficient and faster at doing the things they want to do. So, we are going to see more code go into production faster, as a result.

Oleg

Could you share some specific use cases or projects where AI has made a significant difference for your clients or your own operations?

Richard

Well, sure. We are actually just rolling out a new product that's AI-driven. One of the challenges people have when they fill out forms is they say, 'Okay, now that I can put data on the forms, how do I get data off the forms?' And if you can be 100 percent electric or electronic with your document, that's great. You can move the data electronically, but people still fill out forms by hand or they print them and wet sign them. Or even if they e-sign, then the data gets locked down as part of the content. So, how do you reliably get the data off the documents? Well, I think there's tons of AI out there that will read documents, and interpret documents, and give you summaries and things like that.

But forms are highly structured. You need to be able to go look where the information lives and reliably pull it out. So, our new product, called Form Extract, will read off the field data with 99.9 percent accuracy, even if it's handwritten, and then provide context as to what that information means.So, we can tell you data types, locations, other metadata, et cetera, around it. And that is an AI-driven process. I think we'll become even more sophisticated over time as we employ more AI tools into this product. But yeah, I think it's going to have a huge impact on customers who are currently having to bring documents in from various channels.

They can't control how the user gets to the document: some are PDF, some are paper, some are through third parties. But what they could control is how they ingest the documents coming to them. So, that's one of the ways I think that we're seeing it happen. I'll tell you one other thing that has been interesting for us. I started 2023 with a goal for every person on my team. I said, "Your goal is to figure out how to use AI in your job to make it better." Well, I have a forms team, and this group of people, they build the forms for our clients. One of the challenges they've had for a long time is how they go through the process of approving a document that goes into our workflow.

Unfortunately, it's a legacy tool that we built a long time ago that requires a lot of clicking and waiting to approve a document that they know should be approved. And they've complained about it. But we didn't have the resources to go build a new website. What they found was a tool using AI to perform the human clicking and waiting for them. And they've reduced that process down to $3 an hour using this AI-driven tool to perform the human labor without them touching the screen anymore. I think that has a huge impact on our customers too because it means we can turn around forms faster and do it at less cost. So, more efficiency and speed always help our customers.

Oleg

Great. What skills and expertise do you believe are crucial for software developers to thrive in an AI-centric world?

Richard

Whether it's AI-centric world or not, I think it’s a different way of looking at software development. As a software developer, I was not classically trained: I didn't go to college for that. In fact, I got my degree in finance. I taught myself software development. And what I realized that I do differently than most developers is that I'm very, very good at pattern recognition. So, I couldn't actually explain why the code worked in some cases, but I could explain the pattern that I saw that made it work. So, personally, I think that one of the keys to being great in software development is recognizing how things work from a pattern recognition standpoint and applying it in new ways or different ways to your product. So, where does AI come into that? I mean, I know AI can find patterns too, but maybe it can help you diagnose different products or different methodologies to solve problems that weren't necessarily being solved by that current method. Does that make sense?

Oleg

Yeah, it does. Could you please comment on the problems associated with the lack of qualified specialists in the IT sector, namely in connection with the industry you operate?

Richard

One of the most amazing things to happen since the late 2000, like 2008, 2009, was the advent of AWS, and then Azure, and these cloud-based service providers. And what did they do? And this really comes back to products like VMware as well. They made it possible to scale and grow infrastructure in ways that we hadn't imagined before. And, as a result, now we have serverless technologies and we have code that can run independent of hardware. There are so many different ways now, like AWS and Amazon Web Services. They have hundreds of technologies that you can leverage to build the systems that you want. Well, that in case created a gap in skills. It's hard to find people that know all of those different technologies or skill sets to put it together.And that has then become expensive. You have to go out and hire very expensive people to make that happen. I think there's more and more systems like that coming out. I mean, you've seen it in the past year.

We went from understanding very little about AI. Most of it was machine learning or things that we just didn't play with till ChatGPT coming out. And suddenly everybody has to become a prompt engineer. We all had to learn how to talk to the AI better. And I think more and more things like that are going to happen as AI is infused into the world. Sure, you can talk to the machine maybe now, but getting it to listen to you in the way that you need it to, getting it to communicate the way you need, this creates a gap in capabilities. Personally, we're trying to build upon. We're trying to get our team to learn more and more of these skills so that it's easier for us to move forward. So to me, that's one of the big gaps that the innovation of infrastructure and technology is creating difficulties in getting the skills on your team to build it and then manage it long term.

Oleg

Okay. Thanks for the detailed response. Could you share how the development team is structured, your development team is structured? Have you ever considered outsourcing?

Richard

Sure. Well, we started outsourcing actually in 2010. I chose to look at it a little differently. I didn't want to outsource my team. I wanted to actually have a team that was offshore that was part of my company. Yeah, I didn't want to start a company in a new country and manage the laws and regulations. So, I partnered with a firm that understood my goal. My goal was that the person who joins my team is in my company. They're part of my team. They don't work on other projects And I treat them like that. I mean, they get Christmas bonuses like anybody else.

We treat them like our employees, even though they're not in our technical company. So, the structure of our team is: in the USA, we have our scrum master and project manager, and then in Latin America, we have two team leaders – one that focuses more on DevOps and one that focuses on team operations. And then we have our developers, which are primarily spread across Latin America. We have somebody who focuses on remediation, code quality, and keeping up with legacy projects. Then we have senior and junior developers. We also have a full-time designer, UI/UX designer, and a full-time QA person. Stateside we have a database administrator, and primarily we did that because our offshore company didn't have DBA skills or database administrator skills. Our director of IT is local.

But let me kind of step back the way we thought about this. Originally when I started my company, it was me. And then we hired a couple of developers local. And we grew, and then that changed. When things changed, my COO and I, what we said was 'What is our core competency as a company?' And, our core competency was customer service, forms operations, and product design, as well as admin, but not actually product build. So, we said, 'Let's go find a company who's really, really good at building our product but we're going to keep the product design local.' So, I have two product managers, plus I still get involved in product design. And now, I mean, what are we in? Year 13 of working together. It's a very well-oiled machine for us. It works well.

Oleg

What were the factors that prompted you to consider IT outsourcing?

Richard

So, a couple of things. One was cost. It's expensive in America to hire people: not just their salary, you have a lot of overhead. The second problem was management. I just wasn't a big enough company to manage the hiring, and firing, and HR, and all the things that go with it. I think about how my team hires a new person and the work they put that person through just to get to the interview, the tests they do. Those are all things that I don't have to worry about and don't want to worry about.

So, offloading management was a really really big aspect to this. And third was just finding great people. I don't want to upset anybody by saying this, but there's a lot of developers who are very egotistical and narrow-minded, especially as they start making more money And that's just not the kind of company culture we have. We're a very collaborative company We try to serve our customers really well. We try to empower each other to do their best work. And there's no room for that superego. So, I just found going offshore, I didn't have to deal with that as much. Certainly, there's still people like that, but I haven't had as many of those types of challenges with ego, and that allows for a much tighter and better collaboration.

Oleg

Got it. What are the benefits and drawbacks of IT outsourcing?

Richard

I kind of mentioned the benefits laying your last question: cost management and the HR side of things too. But I'll tell you one of the drawbacks, one of the challenges. Number one is you really have to communicate well. If you think that you're going to write a specification and throw it over a wall and have it built, you're wrong. You can't look at it that way. It has to be a very integrated team who communicates a lot. Our engineering team, which may be offshore, works very closely with our product development team. They take part in customer calls. They sometimes service customers if necessary. Because if they don't understand the business problem, how can they understand to develop the software, right?

So, that level of communication has to be really well thought out. It has to be integrated into the company process – not just 'Oh, I'm gonna design something' and say, ‘Go build it.' So, that to me is one of the drawbacks and misaligned expectations that you think, ‘Oh, I'm just going to go offshore. I'll just send them my project and they'll get it done.’ That's just not the way it is. The other drawback is because they're offshore and because they technically work for another company, it's still hard to include them in our company. We have found ways to do it, like I said, like Christmas bonuses. We still give Christmas bonuses, but we don't get to pay them directly. It goes through the company, and then they pay them.

They're not local, so we can't take them out to a team lunch. And it's hard to see each other. And if I want to fly them in, it's really expensive to do it. And we have done it for a few of them, but it's hard to do it for everybody and to really include everybody. So, I think some of the inner office type of stuff, and some of the rapport building, and the communication is harder, but you can do it. And we do – we do a lot of things to ensure we are communicating, building friendships, and building a strong rapport.

Oleg

Absolutely agree. How do you measure the success of collaboration with an IT outsourcing vendor?

Richard

You know, I think that's just in the result of what you're getting. Once you get through some of the initial hurdles of learning how to work together, which might take a year. I mean, I've had failed projects. We worked with an infrastructure provider before for our Amazon cloud. And the first project we did was, I think, a total failure. But we didn't give up. I looked at this as a partnership. We had invested all this time and money to build this relationship. We weren't just going to give up because the project failed. Now we knew how to communicate better with each other. And we learned from that. So, I forgot your question, actually.

Oleg

How do you measure the success of collaboration with an IT outsourcing partner?

Richard

Yeah. So then, I think what you look at is 'Are you achieving your goals? And are you improving on how you achieve those goals?' So, after the first failure, we said, ‘What can we do better as a team?’ And some of them came back to us realizing we weren't spending enough to get dedicated resources or getting a dedicated manager.

We were trying to do this ad hoc. So, we said, 'Okay, we'll commit to spending more to get a more dedicated team.' It's learning through that, but it's also the outcomes. Again, it comes back to having clear objectives for your company and therefore for your IT needs and to achieve those. I'll give you another one. We worked for two and a half to three years to achieve SOC 2 compliance. Why did it take that long?

Well, in large part, it was because we decided a key component to our SOC 2 compliance would be re-architecting how we manage our servers at Amazon. So, we went from a monolith server to containers. And we had 127 web applications. It wasn't trivial for us. So, it took a while to migrate all of those things. And it wasn't just 'Hey, push them into a container.' We had to rewrite code into .Net Core. So, we had to upgrade projects and do it over a slow period of time. But anyway, that allowed us to get to where we wanted to be. And that was greatly dependent on the two different types of teams we have offshore: our infrastructure team and our software development team.

Oleg

Great. Thanks for the answer. And finally, what advice would you give to other companies considering IT outsourcing?

Richard

I think it's really important to leverage other people's skills that are better than yours. A long time ago, somebody said to me, 'You need to surround yourself with smarter people than yourself.' And here's the funny thing: I think I'm super smart. So, I was like, 'Who's smarter than me? How am I going to do that?' But what I realized is it's not about me. It's not about my brain power. It's about skill sets. And so I look at it and say, 'Who has a better skill set for what we need to accomplish? Is it easier to bring that in-house? Is it more affordable to bring it in-house? Or is it better to take it to a company? Who has that specialty?' And one of the benefits of working with an IT outsource company is that they can bring a whole bunch of different people to the table, which means they can cover the skillset with a lot of different people and give you the benefit of a lot of people working on a project, even for a short period of time. We've had projects where we said, 'We don't know the architecture.' And they brought in an architecture expert for that skillset or that technology to help us figure it out.

And then we worked with our team to implement it. So, if you know what you're trying to accomplish, go look for the companies that can be the experts in that arena and bring them on board. Second thing I also advise is to find a company where you feel like you can truly partner with them. Don't treat this like a vendor-customer relationship. You don't want them to feel like they're just second fiddle. You want them to be part of your team. You want them to be part of your company culture if you want to get the results that you're looking for. Now, I'm not saying you have to have a perfect marriage in that. But I would look at somebody like you, I would say, 'Are you and I on the same page as leaders, as managers and ethics? And if so, then can we work together? And can our teams have that?' Cause the tone at the top, right? You set the tone for your company. I set the tone for my company. And if we have similar tones, similar culture, I think we'll be successful.

Oleg

Great. Richard, thanks for your time. I'm sure this information will be valuable for majority of our listeners. Thanks for joining me today. Thanks for finding time, really appreciate it.

Richard

My pleasure, Oleg. Thanks for inviting me today.