Your AI Project Doesn't Need More Agents
Show notes
SUMMARY: Brandon speaks with Rich Ziade, co-founder and CEO of Aboard, about why enterprise AI projects fail without real discovery, why "agents" have been oversold as a headcount play, and why organizational urgency, not new tooling, is what actually makes digital transformation succeed.
SHOW: 1057
SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Enterprise AI Show #1057 Transcript
SHOW VIDEO: https://youtu.be/RMgycbmuXGs
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Topic 1 - From lawyer to digital transformation CEO: Rich's path through Postlight (with co-founder Paul Ford), the sale in 2021, and how Aboard was already incubating inside Postlight Labs before AI "landed like a spaceship."
Topic 1a - The six months after ChatGPT arrived: why Aboard resisted rushing a prompt-based fix into messy, political, human organizations, and why "vibe coding" convinced them to hang back rather than parachute AI into a company.
Topic 2 - The doctor/patient analogy: executives walk in asking for a specific AI "medicine" instead of describing the underlying pain, and why real engagements start with tests and diagnosis, not the prescription the client thinks they want.
Topic 2a - Why discovery hasn't fundamentally changed in the AI era — still in-person interviews and observation, with AI mainly useful for note-taking and summarizing documentation, not for skipping the hard thinking.
Topic 3 - The agent hype cycle: why Rich thinks the "millions of agents" narrative (including Anthropic's Boris Cherny running swarms of planning/implementation agents) reflects an engineering-execution worldview rather than a product or organizational one — and why he sees the agent narrative cooling off.
Topic 3a - The "spreadsheet problem" vs. targeted AI: most of Aboard's actual delivery work (90%+) isn't agents — it's modernizing spreadsheet-run processes and building narrow RAG/vector tools so people can query their own data in plain English.
Topic 4 - "Forward deployed" as the new name for an old idea — going on-site, listening, and understanding a client's world before proposing a solution.
Topic 5 - Why no successful digital transformation starts without a real, externally imposed deadline or crisis — and why "innovation labs" without urgency rarely ship anything.
Topic 6 - Lightning round: Is AI a bubble? Should GPUs be securitized assets? Three things to do in NYC in one day.
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