Three and a half years is a long time to not do something you enjoy. In my defence, I had good intentions every single one of those years! [In hindsight, I may have been operating on an intentions-heavy, outcomes-light model.]
Anyway, Jason Gray and I have started a podcast! It’s called Optimise to Innovate and it’s out now…
What’s it about?
I often have conversations with potential customers that they’ve invested internally in the cloud, or an AI platform, or the shiny new thing, and six months later it’s costing more than expected, people haven’t adopted it properly, and the team that was supposed to be transformed is still clinging on by the fingernails to their legacy solutions. The technology didn’t fail exactly, it just didn’t meet expectations, or more often, there were no accurate expectations set up front!
That gap between “we invested in this” and “this is working and adopted widely” is what Jason and I wanted to dig into with the podcast. Together with guests who’ve been in the weeds on solving these problems, we’re covering cloud investment, AI adoption, FinOps, software asset management, and all the awkward middle bits that nobody puts in a press release.
What’s out so far?
We’ve published three episodes:
Episode 1: Making Workplace AI Work for You
Our first proper episode, with Tomi Karafilov joining us to talk about workplace AI. Not the breathless “AI will change everything” conversation, but the practical reality of implementing it and getting people to actually use it. My favourite quote from Tomi was “the brain in front of the computer is you”, which is something we often forget when we expect a new toy to do everything.
Episode 2: FinOps – You Can’t Tool Your Way Out of Bad Cloud Habits
We brought in FinOps experts Parker Nancollas and Anthony Thurston, to talk about the people side of cloud cost control. They really drove home the message that, FinOps has little to nothing to do with tooling, and everything to do with culture and habits. If your cloud bill has ever made you wince , this one might give you a few handy tips!
Episode 3: Agentic AI Is Not Really About Agents
Out yesterday! Alex Waldhaus and Seva Shchepanskyi joined us to cut through the noise around agentic AI. Their central argument was on point – all the talk and hype about agents is a bit of a distraction. What you’re actually doing is redesigning business processes, and all the usual rules still apply. Get your data in order first, layer in automation gradually, keep humans in the loop, design for when things go wrong, not just for when they go right, etc [Radical concepts, I know!]
My favourite line of the episode came from Alex Waldhaus: “The real risk is not that agentic AI fails. The real risk is that companies deploy it like magic instead of engineering it like a system.” I’m totally stealing that one… [Go listen.]
Where to find us
The podcast is available on all the usual platforms. Search for “Optimise to Innovate” wherever you get your podcasts, or head straight to optimisetoinnovate.buzzsprout.com for the links to your favourite platforms.
If you’ve got a topic you’d like us to cover, or you want to come on as a guest, drop us an email at o2i@softwareone.com. We’re always looking for interesting people with strong opinions and real experience.
And if you enjoy it, hit subscribe. It legitimately helps more than you’d think! 🎙️