In this episode of Coffee With Digital Trailblazers, participants discuss AI's impact on the workplace amid tech layoffs, emphasizing change management, culture, and empathy in leadership. They explore the balance between automation and human oversight, highlighting collaboration across teams and future discussions on AI's role in social good and mental health.

In this episode of Coffee With Digital Trailblazers, participants discuss the importance of co-creation in innovation partnerships among companies, startups, and nonprofits. They offer insights on onboarding partners, setting expectations, and managing risks, sharing real-world stories and emphasizing the need for collaboration, creativity, and AI readiness for future talent.

The discussion revolves around the challenges of knowledge management, particularly in construction and manufacturing settings. Emphasis is placed on tribal knowledge, which risks losing operations continuity when key personnel depart. Participants dialogue on barriers like culture and documentation, and explore leveraging technology and AI to bridge knowledge gaps, ensuring smoother transitions and organizational resilience.

The 139th episode of "Coffee with Digital Trailblazers" featured Stephanie Sylvester discussing AI's role as a teammate in digital workplaces. The discussion included AI implementation strategies, organizational readiness, and security considerations, emphasizing productivity enhancement and maintaining human expertise. Future meetings aim to further explore AI's impact on digital transformation.

Participants Isaac Sacolick Joanne Friedman Heather May Joseph Puglisi Martin Davis Derrick Butts John Patrick Luethe Liz Martinez Niraj Tenary Episode Summary This week’s episode of “Coffee with Digital Trailblazers” focused on the concept of “frontier firms” – organizations that are embracing AI and agents to transform their operations. Key points include: Effective AI governance requires a holistic approach that aligns strategy, operations, and data/security management, rather than just policy-based controls. Frontier firms are blending machine intelligence with human judgment, creating AI-operated but human-led systems. Adopting AI and agents requires careful governance and collaboration across IT, security, legal, and business teams to manage risks and ensure reliable, secure operations. Leading organizations are using AI agents for tasks like software development, compliance, and customer service – with humans maintaining oversight and control. Transcript Isaac Sacolick: Greetings everyone. Welcome to this week’s Coffee with Digital Trailblazers. I’m just going to give this a few seconds to get a bunch of people here and we’ll get started with a very interesting topic with a very interesting guest and just sit tight. This is our hundred, is that right? Hundred 35th episode. Holy cow. Time flies by and I met a whole bunch of new people this week that I’m excited to have on the program and be a part of our community of Digital Trailblazers. If you are here, please do say hello in the common stream and I look forward to this conversation. We’re you going to be talking about from digital leaders to Front Frontier Firm? And I’m going to let our special guest, Neraj Dani, who’s the CEO of net woven, tell us a little bit about that when we get started. We are just waiting for getting a few more people here and then we’ll start with our conversations today. Hello Gloria. Welcome. Got Derek on here on the common stream. We’ve got Neraj. Who else is here today? Everybody do say hello. I want this to be an open conversation. Hello Dennis. Thank you for joining. You’re all welcome to comment. I will call out some of the comments that I think are useful. We might put some of our comments into the actual whiteboard as we start creating it. Hello Jay. Jay is a good friend, StarCIO member, an X Microsoft. I’m just going to say an ex Microsoft TA copilot experts. Great to see you. Hello Michael. Thank you for joining from Atlanta. Michael, I think you know this, I’ll be speaking on Atlanta. The new date is September 10th. This is an event at the Microsoft Center that net woven is sponsoring and I am very excited to be there. So Michael, if you don’t have the access link to get to that, do let me know. I’ll make sure you get on the list to be able to come see that program on AI governance in about a little bit over a month. Folks, thanks for joining this week’s conversation from...

Participants Isaac Sacolick Joanne Friedman Heather May Joseph Puglisi Martin Davis John Patrick Luethe Episode Summary AI is increasingly automating and transforming traditional IT functions like software development, testing, operations, and infrastructure management. This raises questions about the future of IT jobs and departments. However, the consensus is that IT roles will evolve rather than disappear completely. IT professionals will need to focus more on strategic business alignment, understanding user needs, and applying the right tools and technologies to drive value. New roles will emerge around areas like AI governance, data strategy, and optimizing AI and cloud usage. IT professionals will need to develop a mix of technical, business, and leadership skills to succeed. Organizations will need to rethink their IT operating models and talent strategies to adapt to the AI era. This includes consolidating roles, developing multi-skilled employees, and finding the right balance between human and AI capabilities. Overall, the IT industry is undergoing significant transformation, but IT professionals who can evolve their skills and roles will continue to be valuable assets to their organizations. Transcript Isaac Sacolick: Greetings everyone. Welcome to this week’s Coffee with Digital Trailblazers. Great to have you here this week I’m going to give my usual two or three minutes for everybody to join. We’ve got quite a bit of signup for this one, so clearly people are interested in the future IT and what AI is or will not do to it. I’m not surprised that we will want to hear how leadership is going to change, how the different functions in IT is going to change how you’re going to change your career. So very excited to see this. Hello, Steve. Hi Chris. Chris is my supporter of the week. I want to just thank Chris for just being such an outstanding partner. I think I announced a few times I was scheduled to do a keynote out in Atlanta next week on AI governance and he is helping me reschedule that because of things that I’m going through personally. So I just want to thank Chris for just being such a strong friend and supporter and go check out net woven and give a date here. Chris. I think we’re doing it September 10th as our rescheduled date for those of you in the Atlanta area. We’ll be doing an AI governance summit around then and I’m really excited for it. Of course, that means I’m going to have to update my deck again because by the time we September rolls around everything we’re talking about AI today, we’ll be completely obsolete or at least different and we’ll have some new things to talk about. We’ll see Martin and Joe, we’ll see if that continues on that way. Hello Jay, welcome for joining and our conversation this week. AI era transformation is the ai, the end of it as we know it. There are some who might suggest it is the end of it every four to six years there’s some maverick in Harvard Business Review who comes up with some kind of article suggesting that it has done and then of course we’re like, well, not so fast.

Participants Isaac Sacolick Christian Potts Joanne Friedman Heather May Joseph Puglisi Martin Davis Derrick Butts John Patrick Luethe Liz Martinez Episode Summary This session discusses the “silent drag on productivity” caused by digital sprawl and the proliferation of SaaS applications in organizations. Key points include: Companies of all sizes are struggling with having too many disconnected tools and applications, leading to lost productivity, security risks, and lack of a single source of truth. Specific issues include duplication of applications across teams, lack of integration between tools, unused applications still being paid for, and IT and business units not aligning on technology strategy. The impact on employees is significant, with tools making it harder to get work done, impacting safety, and creating communication breakdowns. Potential solutions include consolidating tools, aligning on a strategic technology platform, and empowering employees to be part of the process of building end-to-end workflows and data connections. Transcript Isaac Sacolick: Greetings everyone. Welcome to this week’s Coffee with Digital Trailblazers. We are started giving everybody a few seconds to join. I could see LinkedIn is having a little bit more of a delay than usual, so I’m just going to give this a few more seconds. I don’t see it on my screen. It says the event will start soon, but on the main screen it says it started. It’s really interesting how this works. I’m going to do a refresh here to see if that fixes it Joe Puglisi: On in and it’s got a count of six people. Isaac Sacolick: Yeah. Okay, so we got a quorum going. Greetings, everyone. Thank you for coming back. We skipped last week’s coffee hour for the US Memorial Day holiday, trying to give everybody a chance to kick off their summer, and it’s great to see some repeating folks here. Hello, Chris. Thank you for joining. John, it’s great to see you. David. Thank you for joining. There’s Joe saying hello to everybody. I will say hello to everybody too. We’re just going to give everybody a few seconds to join this episode and our discussion on the silent drag on productivity navigating digital sprawl. This is a recurring theme here where we talk about how do we bring technologies together? How do we help make our employees more efficient? How do we connect our data? How do we do things in a more secure way? Hello, Steve. Thank you for joining. Hello, Dennis and Heather. Heather, you’re welcome to join us on stage. Thank you for joining this week and I’m going to give it a couple more minutes. I do want to introduce today our episode is sponsored by QuickBase. I’ll have a little bit more about QuickBase later in the show, but w...

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10 Memorable Insights Matthew Frye: “Intelligent operations today is really speaking to visibility and control across the field and back to the office… automating frontline data collection, connecting data and workflows and dashboards to decision makers, and really reducing those manual handoffs that can cause problems.” Joanne Friedman, PhD: “Operational intelligence is kind of table stakes these days for large manufacturing organizations… It means agentic AI. It means AI that can provide real-time feedback on equipment, predictive maintenance windows, and spare parts management.” Martin Davis: “Imagine a maintenance supervisor walking through a plant using a head-up display that instantly identifies machinery, provides core performance data, shows maintenance logs, and flags potential issues before they become critical.” Elizabeth Martinez: “This is just the next level of tools to help us keep that throughput and flow going. Time equals money, and we want to leverage AI tools to solve problems as fast as possible, predict these problems, or get ahead of these problems.” Joseph Puglisi: “The shrinking workforce, the lack of professionals in plumbing and carpentry… is going to drive construction to where these technologies will become table stakes, or you just won’t be able to deliver.” Joanne Friedman, PhD: “We must capture the expertise of the workforce not only before it retires but also to use for training new people entering that workforce.” Derek Butts: “When you look at intelligent operations, it really depends on the industry… employing remote sensor technology helps minimize risks and allows you to monitor what you need to know about equipment before it fails.” John Patrick Luethe: “There’s no one common way for all these devices to communicate. The technology and software side is rapidly evolving, while devices in the field often have very long shelf lives.” Matthew Frye: “We’re going to be getting data that’s coming in, put through filters by AI, which will give visibility to leadership to make good decisions and keep people safe on a daily basis.” Joanne Friedman, PhD: “Agents are meant to run autonomously, but I don’t know a single huge manufacturer in the world that’s going to trust an agent right out of the gate. You need to show reliability, ensure data is clean and accurate, and build trust across stakeholder groups.”

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About this episode This episode of the Coffee With Digital Trailblazers was sponsored by Appian. Speakers Isaac Sacolick – President of StarCIO. Bestselling author. 1,000+ articles on StarCIO, CIO.com, and InfoWorld. Keynote speaker. CIO and Digital Transformation influencer. Thinkers360 top IT, DevOps, and Agile Leader. Mike Beckley – CTO and founder of Appian Joanne Friedman – CEO/Principal of Smart Manufacturing at Comnnektedminds Inc, Industry 4.0 and Digital Transformation Coach Joe Puglisi – Chairman, North Andover Investors. Veteran CIO in construction and manufacturing John Patrick Luethe – Product management, DevOps,  service delivery leader Liz Martinez – MD at The PMO Whisperer About the Coffee With Digital Trailblazers The event is hosted by Isaac Sacolick on LinkedIn Fridays at 11 am ET. The event attacts digitial transformation leaders, from CXOs to team leaders, who learn from experts on driving change in their organizations. Every week we explore a topic and share lessons learned, and all are welcom to attend. Visit https://starcio.com/coffee/next-event which will redirect to the next event. Recordings of the events are available to StarCIO Digital Trailblazer Community members .Review the community’s advisory, leadernng, and leadership programs. Episode Transcript Isaac Sacolick: Mike, I’m glad you’re here. We can get started now. Welcome everyone to this week’s Coffee with Digital Trailblazers. We are excited to have this week a session on why AI is boring in 2025 and how all of you can learn a little bit about how to accelerate your transformation programs. Today’s session is brought to you by Appian, a software company that orchestrates business processes, and I want to thank Mike Beckley for joining us today and being our guest speaker. Welcome John, Joe and Joanne to the floor. And Mike, we can give it a few more seconds just to get some more people to join. It’s usually like 1104 or five where I really get started with everybody, so everybody should be getting ready for in the US getting ready for your Thanksgiving weekends. I’m really excited. I’ll be doing some travel this week to go visit my son in Arizona, so if any of you’re in Arizona and want to meet up with me, I’ll be in Phoenix for a day and I will be in Tucson for a few days and happy to say hello to anybody who is around again. Today we’re talking about why AI is boring in 2025 and how to accelerate transformation. Again, today’s session is brought to you by Appian, a software company that orchestrates business processes. Mike, it’s so good to have you on stage despite our few hiccups. I want to give you a form first, tell us why you think AI is going to be boring in 2025. Mike Beckley: Yeah, thank you Isaac. So glad to be here and to get past our firewalls. Finally. So what’s boring about AI is that it’s going mainstream, but it’s how it’s going mainstream that’s uniquely boring. The most powerful and effective use cases for generative AI are simply not flashy and exciting the way they have been in the past year. Regenerative ai, we’ve all gotten to see how amazing it is at drawing pictures, at painting, at generating photos and images, and it’s incredible at that. It’s a...

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