Swimming With Sharks: Enterprise GenAI Unplugged - S3 Episode 2: Mike Lyons

In this exciting episode of Swimming with Sharks, Kevin Dean, CEO of ManoByte, welcomes Mike Lyons, founder of KaiRise, to explore the intersection of Agile methodologies and generative AI. Mike shares his unique journey through the IT landscape, from small firms to large consulting agencies, shedding light on how AI is shaping business processes and the power of agility in driving innovation.

Introduction: Kevin introduces Mike Lyons, who has decades of experience in IT, ranging from higher education to government, finance, and non-profits. They dive into Mike’s deep insights on Agile ways of working and how organizations can capitalize on AI technology for better decision-making and enhanced efficiency.

Interview Highlights:

• Agile in the AI Era: Mike explains how Agile is not just about frameworks like Scrum, but about fostering a mindset of adaptability and rapid learning, especially when integrating AI tools.
• Learning Through Failure: Drawing on personal experiences, Mike discusses how businesses can learn more from failures than successes, particularly with emerging technologies like generative AI.
• Experimentation and Innovation: The conversation explores why companies need to allow a "thousand flowers to bloom" and how innovation thrives at the edges—outside traditional boardroom strategies.

Key Takeaways:

• Embrace Agile: Organizations must adopt Agile ways of working to stay competitive, especially in today’s fast-paced AI-driven world.
• Security vs. Innovation: Striking a balance between encouraging experimentation with AI tools and maintaining data security and governance is crucial.
• Future of AI: The episode concludes with a discussion on the global implications of AI, including how it can address accessibility and humanitarian challenges, and what’s next in the rapidly evolving tech landscape.

Transcript

0:01

Welcome, welcome, welcome. My name is Kevin Dean and this is Swimming with Sharks, where we will take a deep dive into use cases in the world of GNI. We are going to talk today to Mike Lyons from Chi Rise. And today I am super excited to have him on the show. Welcome, Mike, how are you doing today? Hey Kevin, doing good man, it's great to see you again. Likewise, likewise. So I'm super excited to kind of chat with you today. But before we get started, maybe you can tell the audience a little bit about yourself and your journey. Yeah, thanks. I joke that, you I sort of got introduced to IT back in the 1900s. Not maybe like stone and chisel, but not too far after. But really I've been in IT my whole career, my undergraduate work is in information systems. And I just have had this very interesting and unique career journey that I don't know I could have planned. I've worked in very, very small sort of shops, a private investigator firm in Southern California, like very small. That's where I sort of was doing early IT work. Then I went to work in higher education at the University of California, Riverside and worked in higher ed, which has a whole different sort of, you know, environment and how you're dealing with business. And then I went to work in a finance company, a very large financial firm. And then I went to work in government. And then I went to work in nonprofit. And now I work full -time at a very large consulting firm and I own my own company. So it's been a wonderful career filled with ups and downs. And I like to say I've seen agile ways of working work really well. And I've seen them like work horribly, just terrible, not good stuff. And probably like you, Kevin, I learned significantly more from those. failures, I'm a bit air quoting like failures, I don't know, they're learning opportunities, learn so much in those things. And here we are today, you know, 18 months into this radical new world of what most people would say 18 months of generative AI. We'll get into that, I'm sure. And it's like, I'm learning more by failing than I like succeeding. anyway, that's just a quick run through. I love that, Mike, that is so awesome. And it's interesting that, you know, you and I have kind of been around the block and there's a saying, what's old is new again. How do you feel about that statement as it relates to, let's take off GEN .AI and just put in AI. How do you feel that statement resonates? Well, we think about this idea of having a big bucket of data and then interrogating it to get answers, I mean, that's what computers have been doing. Like, that's why we made them. Well, I guess we made them to interrogate numbers back in the day. It was like a fancy calculator, but the idea is the same. You like get data and then interrogate it and make it do something for you. In a nutshell, that's kind of what we see today is just a big globs of data and how do you sort of look at it differently? So that might be how I reflect on this. And as you pointed out, there's nothing new under the sun. Yes, I would agree with that. Yeah. So when we think about what's going on, we talked about over the last 18 months, generative AI has become a hot topic, a very hot topic. What have you, and you talked about that you're learning from your failings. And honestly, you and I were together at a conference last week and we were hearing a lot of big companies talking about their learning through failure. And you work with a lot of agile stuff. Can you tell me about what you're learning from agile and those are principles and how they could apply to the world that people are seeing themselves in with looking at GNI? man, that's a really good question. I'm not sure I've sort of maybe drawn the parallel between the two, but let's jump in there a second. I for anybody listening who is familiar with Agile ways of working, you'll know that Agile is all about how fast we can learn, how fast we can adapt, and how fast we can sort of be creating the right thing for the right people. Notice I didn't say it's about Scrum. I didn't say it's about sort of Kanban or extreme programming. Those things are important. And yes, like, yes, please, please begin to understand those approaches. But an adaptive mindset is like, well, I want to be fast to learn. That's this idea of agility. So circle that back to, well, again, 18 months ago, the dawn of sort of this, you know, open AI world, and we democratized access to data. big time and now anybody with any sort of device can get access to just more data than we can even do what to do with. Okay, well, so how might you go about learning that? Well, if we were pre sort of agile, I would build out a plan. I would build out a very detailed plan. Here's what I'm gonna do and here's what I'm gonna do it and I would lock it all in and then I would go, know, execute on that plan to learn it. And then, you know, maybe nine months from now, I would pop out on the other end and I would have like this knowledge. And there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not saying that that's wrong. I'm just saying it's slow. A different way, an agile way of learning about AI is to, you know, download ChatGPT on your phone or Claude. or perplexity or insert any of the other tools out there and begin to interact with it. Instead of launching a Google search, try searching with Claude. See what it tells you. Or, hey, I'm not here to promote any particular brand, but copilot .microsoft .com. Available to everybody. You don't need permission. To just sort of sum that up, I think... agile ways of working and being like an Agilist. This is kind of how I think about stuff. So I'm going to go try it and then I'm going to fail a little bit. And I was like, I just learned something. You can't use it for that. Or you shouldn't use it for that. Or was wrong. It hallucinated. Like I already know better, you know, like stuff like that. I think that, and I don't know, I think most people probably are like that. They're just kind of jumping in and giving it a try. If you're waiting for somebody to sort of tell you how this thing works. I don't know. I don't think that's it. You gotta get in. Yeah, yeah, you've got to get in. And I think one of the things that I heard at the conference is that the people who are the learners and taking these steps now are really going to be the experts for the future because everybody else is going to have a learning curve to continue to catch up to. But you mentioned, you know, let's get in, let's try it, let's put on chat GPT. Let's talk about risk and governance. So You've got, let's just go out and do it. That's one camp. You've got another camp that says, hold the phone, don't do anything until we give you the A -OK. Where's the middle ground? Because you've got to have some type of balance between, OK, we're going to open up the gates to everything versus we've got security, data privacy, regulations, all of those things. How do you think about those types of issues? Well, okay, that's a great point. And I agree. But security by sort of, you know, locking us down from using the internet, well, that doesn't make any sense either. Let's go back in time just two years ago. There was no such thing as me being able to do any of the tools I just described. They just didn't exist. They were nascent. were like, you know, so two, three years ago. The data models were being built. you we know that OpenAI spent years building the data models. Yes. But you and I couldn't access it. Okay. If I were to visit, you know, Dropbox .com and upload all of my company secrets, would I do that? Probably not. Well, why not? It wasn't because my company blocked Dropbox .com. I physically could do that. or box .com or Google Drive or insert whatever cloud storage data place you want. I don't care. Your company didn't block all of them. Most likely. I don't know. There's probably some companies. Let's just say in general, your company allows you to go out and use the internet. But you didn't think, I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to take all the company secrets and make them public. I don't know, there's bad actors in companies, okay, I get it. But why in large, companies are built on trust. We trust our employees to not go be stupid. Okay, so it's the same thing now, right? Why didn't you just lock down the internet when the internet came out? Well, because there's so much value in using it. There's so much value in all of the benefits that it brings. Well, the same is true today. But what I think is this, we've got these glaring examples of people literally uploading the company secrets into chat GBT and then interrogating them. Okay. But our knee jerk reaction can't be, well then everybody's trying to be stupid too. I don't buy that. We have the same problem we two years ago as we do today. Don't be stupid. Yeah, don't be stupid. I like that a lot. So when I think about not being stupid, I think that there is stupidity because you did something because you're an idiot versus that was done because you just didn't have the knowledge. Can you talk to me about how you think about educating individuals within organizations to help them? be smarter and not do stupid things just because they did it by accident. I didn't know. Isn't that something? I mean, we already, as organizations, we already have that in place. I mean, every organization, not every, many organizations have sort of corporate policies in place and then you train your employees on it. That's not unusual. It's not uncommon. Even startups have like some form of like a greed upon working agreements. There's something. So again, I just... Nothing new under the sun. How are you doing it today? well then do that. Like if you have a, let's say you have a biannual security review that you do with your teams. Okay. Well, you should be saying, and here's how you're going to interact with large language models. Cause, cause I can't, I can't possibly block them off from your phone. It's just, you can't do it. I can't the internet. Okay. So train them, just teach them. And, and do you have to be creative and come up with. new kind of what new kind of language. Yes. You might have to involve your attorneys. Yes. You might have to update your NDA documentation. Yes. But to just sort of go the other ditch, which is just ignore it and not tell people about it or, or try to block everything as it comes up. It's just not, you can't do it. You can't keep up. So I would, I would say it just needs to be part of your already security conscious culture that I hope your organizations have. I love that. let's talk on the other side. What are some of the innovations that you think can come out from really diving in and leveraging open AI, leveraging GNI and allowing your organizations to experiment with GNI? Yeah, you mentioned earlier that you and I were chatting at a conference recently. And I'll tell the story I told you a few moments ago, just real quick here though. The kickoff keynote at that event, I thought did a much better job. So I'm just gonna kind of borrow from that. But this individual, he was saying encouraging organizations that... Innovation happens at the edges. It happens by letting people think and experiment. It rarely happens sort of in the conference room where we go to a whiteboard and say, okay, everybody for the next hour, we're going to innovate. No, that's not how innovation works. Innovation happens at the edges. And his point was, so this was his language. This is not mine, but I thought it worked really well. allow a thousand plants to bloom, a thousand flowers to bloom. It's like, well, what does that mean? What he meant was, you know, let a thousand experiments run and see, you know, what's going to come forth, what's going to birth, what's going to, what's, and, if, if you do that, you'll be surprised. This was one of his key takeaways is you don't know what's going to happen. You don't know where the innovation is going to happen. Now that, that whole, like, you don't know. man, no C -suite executive ever not, they don't, they like to know. So you're telling a bunch of CEOs to sort of like hippie dippy, I don't know, man, innovation could happen. Okay. And they're just, their minds are like, no, I got to lock it down. I got to, you know, block this or whatever. And he's saying, allow a thousand plants to bloom because some of them. some of them are going to flowers or fruit. I'm messing the analogy up. I'm sorry. We kind of get the point. then last thing he said is, and this was, thought, he's like, commit to like at least going a little bit deeper on 10 of those ideas, and then commit to taking one idea to production by 2025. And I that was a bold, like, okay, now in my, in my CEO head, I'm like, yeah. Okay, now wait a minute. I don't know about the thousand flowers, but I do know let's do 10 experiments and let's commit to having one of those be something we push out to prod at 2025. That sounds good to me. I like that. Now, what's it gonna be? I don't know. I gotta plant a thousand seeds. that's awesome, right? In order to get that, you've got to plan a thousand seats in order to get there. And it sounds a lot like... adopting kind of that Google mentality, you know, how Google employees, they get like 20 % of their time to be able to innovate on whatever type of idea and concept that they want to do. So they're given that time to innovate. think that that concept to me has always sounded attractive, right? Innovating, learning, experimenting, and you just never know what's going to happen. You got to give employees and people the space to do that. I love that a lot. I agree. I agree. there is one about like sort of capacity and while not specific to sort of AI is this idea as leaders, how tolerant are we when it comes to capacity? And have we gotten to this place where sort of busyness equals work or value? And again, this isn't an AI topic, but it is an interesting one. So if you're listening and you're a leader, Have you confused busyness with value? Because they're not the same thing. And email is a corporate killer. If you think your inbox is some way, that should have almost nothing to do with your day to day. Don't use that. Or here's the one, my personal gripe is the real time group chat. I think that's going to be the death of companies. I really do. It's horrible. You might be thinking, but I need to communicate quickly. It's like, really? You need to interrupt me so that I can read like 30 like Slack is awful. It's just awful for productivity. That's the effect. It's like a meeting with no agenda and everybody's invited. Gross. You would never go to that meeting, but somehow you allow it during the day. That's a whole, I'm steering us off. I love that concept and it's so true, right? I think we're so busy and companies are so busy that it cuts back on innovation. And I do believe that it does tie into the conversation of GEN .AI, right? What? What we've heard a lot of people saying is that GEN .AI is going to give us the ability to leverage our time in a way that we can be more strategic and more productive. But if we are putting constraints on our organizations in other ways, then the promise really doesn't come to fruition if we don't allow not just GEN .AI, but the way that we think about our day -to -day to change that, then nothing else changes either. Wasn't email supposed to do that for us? didn't happen. wasn't, you know, what? And so now Slack was supposed to do that for us. Now, no, Gen .ai will do it. Really? Like, I don't know. History has not proven that we've used technology to like to free up time. There's a meme, you probably saw it, Kevin, you've probably seen this. It's a quote and I'll, messing it up, but it's a young lady and she says something like, I thought, I'll mess it up. I thought Gen .ai was supposed to, free me up from doing the dishes and doing laundry so I could do art and write poems. Instead, it's doing art and poems and I still have the laundry and dishes, right? That kind of sentiment, it's like, yeah, we didn't really get any better. Yeah, like we didn't like figure this out right the three times right we'll have to figure it out at some point right? And yeah, I don't mean to diminish any of the things that have become good. I don't mean that. I just found it funny. No, no, it's not it. And it is funny. You got to laugh at these things. We got to be able to laugh at ourselves, right? Because I think too, like being able to see different perspectives, to be able to laugh at yourselves and to be able to laugh at others is a part of the innovation and cycle, right? Those types of things, you to be able to say, man, that was not the best idea, but you know what? It was kind of funny. And you learn something from it, right? Well, yeah, because lest we fall into this sort of like dogmatic, I have all the answers. You know, again, we joke back in the 1900s, I can remember thinking like I was the smartest person in the room where I had some, and the older I get, the more I'm like, I barely know anything. I don't know much. And so there's plenty of smart people. And, you know, if we do take ourselves too seriously, we run the risk of thinking innovation happens in a conference room at a whiteboard. It doesn't. it's very unlikely that you're going to innovate that way. you know, I think about, you know, that quote, like, if you if you are the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. Right. You need to in a different room where you're not the smartest person because you're not going to ever learn or grow. Right. And you're going to just continue to put down others. So. funny. So tell me a little bit about Kyrize. What type of cool stuff are you guys doing over there? Yeah, thanks. So Kyrize is a online training company and there's myself and two other guys. we started, we're now four and a half years into this journey. And we are the global leader in self -paced agile training that ends in an industry recognized certification, the IC Agile certified professional. IC Agile is the International Contority for Agile global well -known certification agency. And quick story that they asked. I've been teaching the ICP sort of in person. I've been teaching it online and we approached him and said, would you be interested in doing a self -paced thing? And they're like, no. What do mean no? They say, well, our learning objectives are all around like the learner has to interact with the material and provide, you know, there's conversations and feedback and all the stuff Blooms taxonomy of learning talks about. And we're like, okay, would you be willing to pilot with us? And they did, they agreed, and took us about six months. And they didn't lower the bar on the standards. This is why I appreciate it. They didn't lower the bar. They're like, you still got to figure out how the learner is going to interact, the learner is going to provide, like, how are we going to get feedback? And so we've been working with them. took us about six months. We finally got our first product out. Our next product is coming to market here in the next two months, another certified course on project management. And we've been able to embrace like, some of the generative AI tools in the course. So I'll give you some quick examples there. One of them is something called Ask Mike. the learner, like one of the learning objectives is the learner has to create a product roadmap and then update that roadmap based on feedback. Well, Kevin, it's a self -paced class, so I'm never going to real -time give them feedback. I'm not in a classroom. So how might you meet that learning objective? Well, we use a large language model based on Everything I've ever said, all of my transcripts, all of my LinkedIn posts, any talk, any podcast I've ever been on is in my clone. And so when you are presented with this idea of building a roadmap, the learner creates a roadmap. They use a tool like Google slides or something. We want to make it free. And then they upload that into my clone and the clone actually reads the image, makes decisions based on where you have put your features and dates and whatnot, we give it some constraints. And then the clone, the large language model provides that feedback. The learner then takes that feedback, makes updates and provides it again. And the clone remembers the conversation it just had and says, okay, good, I see you've moved this over there. You might consider moving that this way. And don't forget, you've got this go live event on, you know, next quarter, 2026, whatever. That's a powerful thing we did not have access to 18 months ago. Like I could, what's that? It's fun. It's pretty, it's neat. And there's added bonus. If you hit the little voice button, it'll talk in my voice. It'll like, you can interact with it. You can actually call me. I have a contact called call my clone. You can call me and have a talk with. So I asked myself what to do this weekend. That's cool stuff. I think what we're hearing and we're seeing is there's a lot of ways to be innovative nowadays and now it's just absolutely escalating. The speed is, it's astounding. I don't know that you're much closer to this than I am, but I cannot keep up. I don't, and I'm on the thing. I'm on this all day. Like I'm reading, I'm researching, I'm working, I'm in it and I'm nowhere near keeping up with it. How are you doing that? The same as everybody else, right? And one of ways that I do it is by having these conversations because every time I have these conversations, I'm learning from people who are out there executing on use cases. They're sharing with me new things, new ideas. And that's how I'm really, I think for me personally, learning is a very interactive experience, right? And so you can read, that's one thing, but I believe listening, talking, interacting, challenging, all of that really enhances the learning experience. And so that's why having these conversations with smart people like yourself are great for me because it helps me to continue to say, you know what? Mike said this, I'm going to go and dig into that. And, and those are the types of things that help me to continue to grow and learn. So that's why, you know, we're doing this podcast because, you know, you and I have talked about this. at the conference, you know, the passion is there's so much out there. People need to be able to have a source where they can go and like learn and hear and interact and think about things that maybe they hadn't thought about before and try new use cases. Something you mentioned too was, and I agree with all that, that's sort of experiential, many, many ways to learn. And I agree talking about it helps. I was preparing for our talk today by reading through, you know, today, the latest sort of rounds of what's happening. like, ugh, just it's, going on podcasts or for you hosting podcasts is a great way to learn. It's also interesting, I think you mentioned this idea that, you know, we talked about like there's nothing new under the sun, but we've had this data around for a while. We've been able to interrogate data. What are you seeing? Why the big fuss? If this is nothing new under the sun, what do you think is the fuss all about? Yeah, I think the fuss is back to a point that you mentioned. It's the speed of which it, one, it's the speed of which we can get results, right? So I can ask a question and get the results back in seconds. That speed has never been where it is now. And that's why NVIDIA is just like through the roof, right? I mean, it's because they're giving us speed, right? So I think speed is one of the top reasons. Number two, I think we are widening the base, meaning that before folks like you and me who went to school for computer information science and we geeked out, we nerded out, we've been in this space, we programmed, we've done all those things, we've always heard about, known about, theorized, theorized and played around with this for a while. But now my kids, can go on to chat GPT and create something in a matter of hours that would have taken us six months, multimillion dollars to deliver, right? So I think those are the two reasons, speed and it's widening the base. Yeah. Yeah, the accessibility piece, I agree with you. The accessibility piece is interesting. I wonder if you have thoughts on like, what's next? mean, a lot of people globally have a smartphone, have a device that can connect or have access to the internet, but there's a large group of people that don't have access to that, be it maybe financially or even... remoteness of areas. I wonder how does the technology advancement help them? Have you considered any of that? Or think of like people living in poverty and how can we use generative AI for good to help our globe? Yeah, one, that's an awesome question and a series for a whole nother deeper. 100%, like we can start, we can start, can spin our own podcast for that one. But here's what I, I've been asked this question multiple times. It's almost like a reoccurring question that gets asked back to the host. And what I will say is this, what's exciting, about the future is that we really don't know what the future is going to hold. Right? And that's kind of cool. Right? So you already have lots of small smart people, know, Bill and Melinda Gates, right? They're spending their time and their energy and their research to help humanity from a medical standpoint. They've been doing this for years. This is helping to expedite that. One of the best use cases for GEN .AI is in the medical space. so being able to provide better healthcare for individuals is important. And I volunteer in the healthcare space. that is something that there's immediate value in that right now today. And I believe that there's a lot of... advances that will come quickly because of it. believe that giving lots where there wasn't internet, there are mobile phones. So around the globe, know, know, 15, 20 years ago, we saw the leapfrog where people didn't have access to the internet. They didn't have access to computers, but now almost anybody can have a phone regardless of where you are. You know, I think about, watched a an interview with a gentleman who came from a third world country and now he's an executive for a large organization and all of it because of the way that technology has advanced. So I think there is a lot of opportunities that this technology can give to people. It's exciting to see what will come. But at end of day, not to go too deep into this, think it's gonna all swing back to what we said in the beginning. What's old is new, right? And so yes, there's conversations about the bias of JDI and there's a lot of other conversations that we could have about ethics and JDI. But at the end of the day, it's gonna be what will we as responsible humans do with it, right? And so that's what it comes down to. And that's a bigger question than I think we could touch on this podcast. That's a good word. I didn't have the answer. I was just going to ask Chet CPT for the answer. man. Wow. Wow. Should have done that. A friend of mine was talking about this book that he was reading, how, you know, Gen. AI started, you know, it's the typical story, right? It's protecting itself, so it would answer the questions and then when people say, no, we need to shut this down, it would give answers and generate things to be able to protect itself. It's a pretty cool book. got to get, I'll get the name of the book and throw it in the... Podcast page when it goes live. It's a cool book It is interesting. I think that you're onto something though. It's like when we think about more globally and sort of from a humanitarian type approach, I just don't think we know, but we need to be open. We need to be open to try. It's the thousand plants or thousand blooms construct. Like, don't know, but we could try and to tie it all the way back to sort of this agile approach. Agile. And this is my area, like I'm not an AI expert. I'm focused on agile delivery and helping organizations deliver well in the product space. I want companies to be able to respond quickly to opportunities, risks and threats, quickly capitalize on those. I'm actually, I like variability. think variability can be a good thing if you can capitalize on it. But if you're bogged down, mired down in this sort of bureaucratic, I've got to run every decision by three committees and they only meet every other Tuesday. Like you are not naked, we just don't live there anymore. It's not that that was bad. It's just not now. It's not fast enough and agility just gives you speed. It just gives you like this ability to react, not speed in delivering products to market, not necessarily, but speed in decision, speed in learning, speed in potentially delivery, delivering the right thing, like all of that. And so That's where we try to, Kyrize, we try to teach people that. We try to teach agile ways of working, adaptive ways of working. Our new product that will be out this fall, it's called Agile Project Management, which just then shutters down people's spine. They're like, agile projects aren't a thing. Just relax a minute, would you? Like agile project management is a thing. I see it all the time. And we're going to certify people in this and we're using generative AI to help make that learning better and more sort of. intuitive and also interactive and it's just great fun. really am enjoying that. That is so awesome. So just to kind of switch it up a little bit, most people who listen to the podcast know that I am a big music buff. So tell me, after we're done having this conversation today, give me a song that I need to go and listen to later on today. sure. Yeah. So new release coming out by my favorite band called Skillet. Skillet is a, they're gonna, so they're gonna be in like the heavy rock kind of. So they've got a new release coming out in November. The first two songs are out and one of them is, it's called, the name just escaped me. It's not Unliked or it's a. Well now I gotta go. yeah, let's see there. So their new release is coming out and it is a song called unpopular. John Cooper. It's fun. It's a fun song. I like that band. They've been around a while. So check out my skillet. I love it. So that's going be the sound that we're going to go and rock out to later today. Mike, this has been so much fun. This has been a lot of Hey, if people want to catch up with you later, how do they do it? Yeah, thanks for asking. LinkedIn is going to be the best way to do it. There's actually a link on my profile that says, let's talk in real life that'll take you right. And I mean that. And I do this probably a couple of times a month. Just people will say, let's meet and talk about all things. My area is agile delivery. So if that's interest of you, LinkedIn, search for Mike Lyons. come up. I'm easy to find. And that's the best way. Awesome, we'll make sure that we include the link when we post this out. Hey, it's been a lot of fun chatting with you, Mike, and I'm sure we're gonna have lots of more conversations to follow. Thanks everybody for tuning into the show and we'll catch you the next time. See ya.