As we close out 2025, “TBR Talks” host Patrick Heffernan and producer and TBR Marketing Coordinator & Account Executive Haley Demers sit down for a candid, end-of-year retrospective and a sneak peek at what listeners can expect in the new year. Additionally, the pair unpack the podcast’s growth, with nearly half of this season’s conversations featuring voices from outside TBR, and share a behind-the-scenes view of the show. They also discuss how those external perspectives have broadened the scope of the dialogue; how the show has evolved as listeners began to proactively reach out, asking to participate; and the unexpected value that emerged when technology-focused discussions turned personal.

Episode highlights:

• Memorable conversations about the intersection of humanity and technology

• Surprising conversations about career paths and entry points

• Bringing new ideas and ways of thinking to the table

• Bringing in more generational views and company-centric views in 2026

Listen and learn with TBR Talks!

Submit your Key Intelligence Questions for Patrick and his guests

Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn

Learn more about TBR at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tbri.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠

TBR Talks is produced by Technology Business Research, Inc.

Edited by Haley Demers

Music by Burty Sounds via Pixabay

Art by Amanda Hamilton Sy

‘TBR Talks’ Retrospective: What We Learned in 2025

Haley Demers, Marketing Coordinator and TBR Talks Producer: Hello, Patrick.

Patrick: Hello Haley.

Haley: It’s fun to be on this side of the computer, of the podcast today. We’re sitting here because as you know, we’re approaching the end of the year. It’s time for planning and reflecting and we’re not exempt from that here at TBR Talks.

Patrick: Absolutely, yeah. We’ve spent a lot of time doing predictions and stuff, and now it’s time to do a little retrospective, a little thinking back.

Haley: Yes, for sure. So, you know, cut to us being here today, looking back, reflecting on the past few years, specifically a really cool aspect of our most recent season. We’ve had a lot of guests over the four seasons we’ve been doing TBR Talks, and we’ve had the most guests in an individual season this season, season four. So thought it’d be fun to sit down and talk with you about what that’s really been like.

Patrick: I also think on the subject of the guests that we’ve had, my math is probably wrong because math is hard, but I think we’ve had at least as many, if not more, folks from outside of TBR on than we have from inside of TBR. And I’m not counting like Angela twice, you know, she counts as once, for example, or Boz, but I think we’ve had more people from outside the firm, which is kind of cool.

Haley: Yeah, so on that track, I’ve got some data for you.

Patrick: Great

Haley: Since we are an analyst firm. So, since the start of 2024, we’ve produced 56 full episodes so far, four4onus episodes. This is going to be our 57th episode. And we’ve had 30 different guests total on the podcast.

Patrick: Wow, alright.

Haley: Eleven of those have been from outside of TBR. And do you want to guess how many have been this season?

Patrick: At least six, I think.

Haley: Six, yeah, you’re right on the money there. Did you expect it to be that many?

Patrick: No, and I think we’ve been lucky because people have been listening to it and then coming to us and saying, hey, we’d love to be on the podcast. And that’s been a surprise for me. And it’s been fantastic because the conversations we had this season four have been certainly more far-reaching, broader, wider than we’ve had in the past three seasons, I think.

Haley: Yeah, it’s been extremely cool to see folks who we talk with in our everyday, day-to-day, as well as folks who are listeners who come in and say, hey, I’ve got something to say, I think we’d be a good fit. Can we have a conversation and see where it takes us? That’s been a- it’s been a really cool feature of this past season.

Patrick: It’s been really fun. *laughs*

Memorable conversations about humanity and technology intersections

Haley: *laughs* So, I guess to kind of bring the retrospective here, I’ve got some, kind of, superlative questions for you.

Patrick: Sure.

Haley: So, in your role as Principal Analyst here at TBR, you talk to a lot of people. I’d say talking and writing are the two main features of your role.

Patrick: *laughs* Yes.

Haley: And you’re excellent at both of them. And here on TBR Talks, you’re talking to a lot of folks as well. So, I want to start with asking you what conversation was the most memorable from this batch of conversations this season?

Patrick: Yeah, I think one that we did midway through, and it was memorable for a couple of reasons. It was two people. It was Batia and Chris from EY’s Mobility Practice. I met them in the spring in Barcelona and spent time with them there and really got to know what EY was doing around people advisory services even deeper than I did before I got to Barcelona and had such a connection with them that I said, come on the podcast, let’s have a chat.

What I didn’t sort of realize was how what they’re doing at EY, and it came out during the podcast, it’s so personal. Like we talk about technology so much, and even in services, which is a people business, we talk about technology nonstop. And sometimes we forget that it’s the people part of it that actually is the hardest part, but it’s also probably the most rewarding part. And so to me, I sort of went back, listened to that conversation again and realized like, okay, part of why I think they were such a great two people to have on and also why I connected with them when we met in person was just how much they bring the personal experience into what they’re doing. And it’s beyond just the technology, it’s actually the people that they’re focused on. And mobility in particular and sort of living overseas, being assigned overseas and immigration and all that, were issues that I, you know, go back 30 plus years for me professionally. So, to be talking about immigration issues and to be talking about being assigned overseas and stuff like that. I can’t even do the math from 1995, when I was first posted overseas, to come back to that in 2025, that math actually should be pretty easy. But anyway, it was really, really cool. It was memorable for that because it was a really personal kind of discussion and it went beyond just technology, which was great.

Haley: Yeah, that was a great conversation to listen through and it was really, really cool how they were able to articulate the humanity parts of their role and how the technology intersects with the humanity, and how the humanity intersects with the technology. And neither of those parts would exist without the other.

Patrick: Right. And I’m glad you said the word humanity, that’s a better way to put it than just people. But yeah, absolutely.

Surprising conversations about career paths and entry points

Haley: Yeah. Wonderful. So what conversation was the most surprising for you?

Patrick: One that jumps out and there’s a few that were surprising, definitely. There’s one in my mind that I definitely want to get to by the end, but really surprising was talking to Kelly See. from Ericsson. And what was surprising about it was how she came into her role where she is now as a librarian. And that was her actual background, which she studied library sciences. Sort of, I don’t want to say she found the job in the newspaper or something, but it almost sounded a bit like that. She just sort of came into Ericsson as a librarian and grew up inside of that, had her professional career develop inside of that company. And I don’t think about the companies that we cover needing library skills, and yet she’s done so much at being there.

And Elizabeth too, and so her colleague Elizabeth Roberts at Ericsson as well, we had a conversation with her. And what was surprising there was, here’s somebody I’ve known since I got to TBR in 2013. So, I’ve known her over a decade. And there were just things about her background and things about what she’s doing now and how much her role has changed that I didn’t anticipate when we- because I met with them in Texas, and we said, hey, come on the podcast, it’ll be fun. And I had no idea what Kelly’s background was. And I had no idea how much Elizabeth’s job had changed in the, just in the last couple of years, really. So that was surprising.

Haley: Yeah, it’s fascinating listening to all of the conversations that we have, both with folks inside TBR who come on the show and folks outside of TBR, hearing about their paths, hearing about the way that they got to the role that they’re at, hearing about the different roles they’ve had in their organizations and in the various organizations to bring them to the point in their careers where we get to talk with them here is fascinating. I’m a few years out of school and something that I was always ravenous for was how people progressed through their careers, what twists and turns people took. And so, whenever we would have the chance to have a guest speaker be able to really dig into somebody’s career path and how they got to where they are, that was something that I always really valued, having the chance to connect with folks on. So that’s been a really cool aspect of being here and being able to do this show.

Patrick: Yeah, and it’s great, because it’s sort of, in a way, it’s aspirational that you can say, okay, things- people can do things you don’t expect, and people can have careers you don’t expect. And for you, just a couple of years out of college, it’s a chance to say, okay, there’s a lot of opportunity there. You’re not locked into one thing. And for me, it’s just fascinating to hear the stories.

Haley: For sure. Especially when you know and you interact with somebody in a day-to-day way, in the ways that your two roles intersect, and you don’t really get to see a bird’s eye view of what the rest of their world looks like when they’re at work. That’s been really fascinating.

Patrick: It has been. It’s been a lot of fun.

Bringing new ideas and new ways of thinking to the table

Haley: My next question is, what conversation brought the most new ideas to the table for you?

Patrick: Yeah, I was going to sort of save this one for the end, but it’s perfect now. So, we spoke with David Martínez at BCG’s Henderson Institute. That episode alone was perhaps my favorite of the whole season. I’ll go ahead and say that. And for a lot of reasons, one, it was one of those things where they reached out to us and said, hey, we want to be on the podcast. So that was kind of cool. The second, we covered just an incredible range, a tour de horizon of everything happening in consulting and technology and AI. I mean, it was just, it was the broadest conversation imaginable, in part because the guy is literally a PhD in political philosophy. He’s a philosopher. Never had a conversation with a philosopher and talking about technology at the same time. But the thing that, because your question was, what was the sort of the most, not surprising, what was it?

Haley: The most new ideas to the table.

Patrick: The most new ideas. This is- so the challenge, one of the challenges in this job as an analyst is you do the research, you do the thinking. Once you present, once you bring forth whatever it is, whether it’s through the writing or speaking with somebody, an idea, if it resonates, it tends to stick. So, you tend to- you get- I fall into the same habit of sort of repeating or saying the same ideas again and again because it resonates. So, like, okay, this must be true because when I say it, people nod and say, oh yeah, that makes complete sense or I hadn’t thought about it before. So, for years now, we’ve had a saying within the firm, or at least within my practice, that the technology is never the problem, it’s always the people. So, technology always works. Technology just does whatever you tell it to do. The people are always the reasons why technology isn’t adopted, why change management is harder, why things go off the rails, why expectations are met. And so, in some ways, that’s just been a mantra for us. The technology isn’t the problem, the people are. And when I mentioned that to David, he just took the philosopher’s view of that and sort of turned it around on me to say, you know, the technology itself, you can’t really even look at that as the yes, no, the problem, not the problem. That’s looking at the wrong way. It’s the intent that people put into the technology. So, it’s not that people are inherently the problem. It’s the intent that they’re bringing to the technology that is or isn’t the problem. So, for years, I’ve been thinking about this as very binary and very sort of black and white. And he was basically saying, you’re missing the gray. You’re not even thinking about the right way to think about this problem. And the problem is real. The problem is, you know, people eventually have to use technology, and if they don’t use it right, then that’s what causes the problem, and he was saying it’s all about intent, and I hadn’t thought of it that way. It was just such a better, cleaner, smarter, deeper way to think about this framework that we use all the time, and so I think going forward, if I catch myself saying, we say around here that technology isn’t the problem. I’m going to stop myself and say, nope, I’ve been corrected by a philosopher. That is not the right way to think about it. So that was just, it was a fun conversation. It was an amazing conversation. He dropped some Latin phrases in, which has only happened once so far. So set the bar very high for 2026.

Haley: Yeah, some challenges for some other Latin phrases to get dropped on the pod there. Yeah, the intent is such an interesting way of looking at human interaction and technology because you have the intent in creating the technology, and you also have the intent in using the technology. So that kind of disseminates the gray area even further than we perhaps originally were kind of considering.

Patrick: Yeah. Absolutely.

Bringing in more generational views and company-centric views in 2026

Haley: My last question for you today, Patrick, is what kind of guests or what kind of conversations would you love to have on the podcast for a season five? What are you kind of hoping we get in the studio, we get coming through the door? What are you excited to potentially talk about next season?

Patrick: Yeah, two things. And I’ll reflect on the people we spoke to this season as a way of sort of framing it. One, we spoke with Eric Müller from Work & Co. And he’s a guy who’s about as old as I am, or I hate to say this, perhaps older. He had a generational view of technology, of change, of marketing, of creativity, that I think sometimes I forget to tap into. It’s really easy to talk to people who are at the very cutting edge, that are new in their profession, or they’re new into technology, and sort of forget that. Because we used to, you remember Ezra used to be here, and even Ramunas before him, and Geoff Woollacott, we had people at the firm. I think I’m actually the oldest person at the firm now, which is a little frightening, but it’s also a reminder, like, look, the generational stuff is kind of important. So, I think next year it would be good to go out and find some people that can give us the longitudinal view of some of the changes that have happened in technology because there’s so much hype, there’s so much that seems to be changing all the time. And in fact, maybe things aren’t changing quite the way we think they are. So that’s probably terrible marketing for TBR Talks because I’m saying I don’t want to talk about the hype and the new stuff, but I do, I just want to put it in the context of generational changes across technology.

Haley: Yeah, and I think we have the ability to kind of dive into some of the nuance in all of the hype and big scary headlines that may be coming out. We have the opportunity here to sit and kind of dissect it a little bit more.

Patrick: Right, and I think, I mean, I just think about the people that are in this firm with us, most of them have been here a minimum of five years, and in some cases, 10 years or more. And so, we do have people in the building that we can tap into to give that generational view of technology.

The other thing I’ll bring up is I was recently with some friends of ours and a guy who’s in technology, and he said, hey, I was looking on LinkedIn, I saw you have a podcast. And so, I listened to it, and he said he listened to the NVIDIA episode and the Lenovo episode, both of those with Ben and Angela. And here’s a guy who’s in tech himself, and wanted to just hear a little bit more about those two companies. And he’s like, absolutely loved it. It was the right length, like 20 minutes.

Haley: Yeah.

Patrick: Like not too long. But it was coming at those two companies in a way that isn’t constantly reported in the news. It was a perspective that he wasn’t getting from his other news and information feeds. And so I think that’s something I want to really try to do more of in 2026 and season five, is find a way to look at the companies we cover, look at the technology and the issues that we cover in a way that really is separate from what’s out there in the news. It’s not enough to just reflect on what are the earnings. It’s not enough to reflect on what are the sort of big trends that are happening, but really bring that truly different TBR perspective to the companies that we’re looking at. And it was really encouraging to have somebody who really hadn’t listened to any of the episodes before immediately say, hey, you know, especially the NVIDIA one, he’s like, learned so much more about that company, things I hadn’t been hearing in the news. I’m like, that’s perfect. That’s what we’re trying to do here.

Haley: Yeah.

Patrick: So, it was really cool. So hopefully more longitudinal view in 2026 and more perspectives on the companies and the issues that we cover that folks don’t get from just the daily rush of information.

Haley: Yeah, love to hear it. That’s a great goal for next season.

Final thoughts

And I know you love adding in a kind of bonus question.

Patrick: *laughs* I can’t help it.

Haley: To our guests

Patrick: And I knew this was coming. I just don’t know what the question is.

Haley: Well, so you’ve been asking most guests for season four a similar question, and I don’t think you answered it. So, I’m going to turn it back around on you. So, the question is, in the age of AI, there’s a lot of thought of AI potentially taking jobs away, taking tasks away and so if you had your 10,000 hours to get really good at something specific, what would it be? What would be the skill that you would love to master, kind of at the drop of a hat?

Patrick: Well, at the drop of a hat or over 10,000 hours. 

Haley: *laughs* Take it or leave it, you know?

Patrick: From a very realistic, very personal perspective, I have a guitar from my father. I would love to actually learn how to play it.

Haley: Yeah.

Patrick: I played the bass guitar when I was in a band in high school. I played the drums through college. The whole rest of my family is very musical. I have that thing I need to learn how to play. I need to take the 10,000 hours and dedicate to that. But from a more work perspective, I do, the magical power I wish I could have is just to stop time long enough to think and to write down everything that I’m thinking. Because I find so many times, we say this in conversations and in calls with our clients, where we say, we can’t write down everything that we want to on paper. So, call us so we can talk. To some degree, what we’re saying there really is, if we had more time, we would have written this better, more concise, and more directly. And we would have been able to say what we’re really trying to say. And instead, we just, we put it out there and now we have to tell you what we really mean. I would love to just get better at saying what do we really mean.

Haley: Yeah.

Patrick: And saying it in a way so much different than this answer, which is concise and direct and people can understand right away and walk away with. So that would be my professional side. Personal side, 2026, I gotta learn how to play guitar. I got it. I gotta learn how to play it.

Haley: Love it. Can always add a little bit of music into your life.

Patrick: Yeah, well, I could record a- that should be the real goal is to record the intro and outro music for it.

Haley: That’d be really cool. Awesome. Thank you, Patrick.

Patrick: Thank you, Haley. This is a lot of fun. We’ll do it again at the end of season five.

Haley: This was great, see you then.

Patrick: Next week, I’ll be speaking with Chris Antlitz about his 2026 Telecom predictions.

Don’t forget to send us your key intelligence questions on business strategy, ecosystems, and management consulting through the form in the show notes below. Visit tbri.com to learn how we help tech companies, large and small, answer these questions with the research, data, and analysis that my guests bring to this conversation every week.

Once again, I’m your host, Patrick Heffernan, Principal Analyst at TBR. Thanks for joining us and see you next week.

TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe’s Top Tech Firms

Join TBR Principal Analyst Patrick Heffernan weekly for conversations on disruptions in the broader technology ecosystem and answers to key intelligence questions TBR analysts hear from executives and business unit leaders among top IT professional services firms, IT vendors, and telecom vendors and operators.

“TBR Talks” is available on all major podcast platforms. Subscribe today!

In this episode, Batia Stein, managing partner at EY Law and partner at EY People Advisory Services, and Chris Gordon, Canada region leader at EY People Advisory Services Tax, join “TBR Talks” host Patrick Heffernan for a discussion on EY’s AI strategy for its People Advisory Services practice. Stein and Gordon detail EY’s approach to automation in the tax and audit divisions within EY, and the trio also shares their thoughts on immigration, cybersecurity, data privacy and data sovereignty, as well as tax, HR and what the future may hold.

Episode highlights:

• The next trends in people advisory services

• Navigating uncertainty, AI developments and human behavior changes

• Data access challenges and changes

• How EY PAS and Tax are using AI and what gets applied to EY broadly

Listen and learn with TBR Talks!

Submit your Key Intelligence Questions for Patrick and his guests

Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn

Learn more about TBR at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tbri.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠

TBR Talks is produced by Technology Business Research, Inc.

Edited by Haley Demers

Music by Burty Sounds via Pixabay

Art by Amanda Hamilton Sy

EY’s AI Strategy for People Advisory Services: Managing Partners and Regional Leaders at EY Share AI Insights

TBR Talks Host Patrick Heffernan: Welcome to TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe’s Top Tech Firms. Where we talk business model disruption in the broad technology ecosystem from management consultancies to systems integrators, hyperscalers to independent software vendors, telecom operators to network and infrastructure vendors, and chip manufacturers to value-added resellers. We’ll be answering some of the key intelligence questions we’ve heard from executives and business unit leaders among the leading professional IT services and telecom vendors. 

I’m Patrick Heffernan, Principal Analyst, and today we’ll be talking about people advisory services with Batia Stein, Managing Partner at EY Law and a Partner within EY’s People Advisory Services practice, and Chris Gordon, Canada Region Leader at EY People Advisory Services Tax. 

Meet Batia and Chris from EY People Advisory Services

Chris and Batia, thank you so much for joining the podcast, really appreciate this. We’re in season four now, which is crazy to me. And we’ve had just such a wide range of guests this season in particular. So, it’s been an enormous amount of fun. But from what I can recall, this is the first time we’ve had anybody from People Advisory Services, from Tax on this program at all over four seasons. So, this is really, it’s exciting. This is something new, something different for us. And so, I would love if you could just introduce yourselves and give us a little bit of background and sort of explain where you’re coming from. I know we met in Barcelona, we had a great time there. Got to chat quite a bit. But if you could just let our folks know who you are and what you’re doing at EY, that’d be great.

Batia Stein, Managing Partner at EY Law and Partner at EY People Advisory Services: Great. I’ll jump right in. Well, first of all, thanks, Patrick, for having us. And it’s great to know that we are the first from PAS, from People Advisory Services Practice. So, my name is Batia Stein, and I lead EY Canada’s immigration practice. We provide Canadian, US, and global immigration services to our clients through EY’s global immigration network, which is in about 140 countries today. I am a Canadian lawyer. I’m a US attorney by profession, and I’ve been with EY for quarter of a century or so now, just over 25 years. And through that time, I’ve helped build our immigration practice very proudly. And that includes everything from service delivery model, how we work with clients, and the technology suite, which I know that you have some interest in, so we’ll talk a little bit about that in a minute. And primarily what I do is I work with my clients to provide strategic advice and thought leadership, creativity to help them navigate the uncertainty. And frankly, we find ourselves in one of the most uncertain times geopolitically. And so that’s really what I help clients with. Chris?

Patrick: Excellent.

Christopher Gordon, Canada Region Leader at EY People Advisory Services Tax: Yeah, so again, thanks, Patrick, for having us on. This is fantastic. The first nod for EY PAS. So really, really privileged to be on this podcast and sharing with you and your listeners. My name is, as you said, Chris Gordon. I am a partner here in Toronto, Canada. I’ve been with the firm, gosh, 22 years now. I’ve been in mobility for 25 years. In a prior life, I was with another firm. I think you and I, Patrick, share that firm in our history. 

Patrick: *laughs* Not to be named, okay. 

Chris: I started my career as a tax associate doing sort of US-UK cross-border tax for expats. Then I moved into broader assignment service, strategy, program design, development, helping clients manage their outsourced function for mobility. Then I moved about 17, 18 years ago into immigration, building, helping to build, working with Batia and others from London, starting from London, England, to build our global immigration business around the world. At the time, we were probably in about 30 countries. Now we’re in about 140+ countries around the world. So that was where I started my career. And then most recently, I’ve stepped into the role as the national and super region leader for Canada, for People Advisory Services. So, it’s kind of a full circle moment where I’ve gone in through all the areas of then human capital and what we call now people advisory service. And now I have the privilege of working with our team here in Canada and our leaders across the globe to set strategy for our business.

The next trends in people advisory services: Communication, connectivity and insight

Patrick: Excellent, excellent. And thank you guys for coming on. And Batia, I want to maybe ask a question because you’ve worked in immigration so long. You mentioned this is a tumultuous time in terms of what’s happening globally. But I’m curious to take maybe a bit of a giant step back. And when we think about the whole role of human resource management, people advisory services and all that, the last five years now have been tumultuous. You know, we had the pandemic, we had the quiet quitting, we had a lot of staff reductions across the technology space, which spilled into professional services. And I have to say one thing I was struck when we met in Barcelona was how closely knit a community the people were that were there. It seemed like they were all sort of relying on each other to get through. So, when you think about what some of those big trends have been over the last few years, are there things that are happening now that you think are sort of beyond just the geopolitics that are sort of building up the next few trends across immigration, across broader people advisory services?

Batia: Sure, absolutely. The one that sort of pops to mind, Patrick, immediately is really, I would call it generally speaking, communication and connectivity and insight. And all of that is really supported through technology. You know, our clients, our corporate clients really want to understand their employee populations, you know, firstly, so that they can keep up with the change. You know, if there’s a, you know, unfortunately, if there’s some kind of geopolitical incident or there’s some kind of legal change that requires them to know where their people are, what their status is, who’s impacted, they need that data and that information instantly. You know, that can happen on a weekend and they need to know it that day, right? We just had a weekend like that not too long ago. And we also want to enhance employee experience. There’s a real lens on making sure that- you know, immigration has become quite challenging for individuals. It creates a lot of uncertainty. It is something that can create anxiety. And so, employers really want to make sure that their employees have that high touch and level of insight into where they are in their process. When will their kids be able to start school? When will they be able to settle? All of those kinds of questions. And so that’s really driven by understanding the data, using technology to do that, and to create an elevated experience for both the employer and the employee. So, I think that’s the first trend and probably a primary trend that I would highlight.

Patrick: That’s fascinating. I think of the Big Four firms as having a cybersecurity team that has to react on the weekend when something goes really wrong, but it never occurred to me to think, oh, right, and the immigration folks, the people advisory folks as well.

Batia: Oh yeah. Just a few weekends ago. No jokes at all, but that happens to us quite often. Just a couple of weekends ago when the presidential proclamation was announced that around H-1Bs and the changes to the H-1B program, there was a lot of uncertainty on day one as to who that would impact and how it would impact people. Could people, for example, who were in H-1B status outside the country be allowed to come back in? 

Patrick: Right.

Batia: And so, we spent the weekend analyzing the proclamation, advising our clients, re-advising when clarification came, and helping people to manage their employee populations of hundreds and sometimes thousands of people.

Patrick: Right, and that gets, I mean, there’s probably nothing more about the employee experience, especially in immigration, than your visa and what’s your visa status and what’s your residency status. 

Batia: Absolutely.

Patrick: I’m curious too, because you mentioned employee experience. It’s one of those areas that at the beginning of the pandemic, and I know that goes back five years, but there was such an intense focus on, are our people safe? Are our people healthy? Are they happy? Do they have what they need? And then I feel like we went through a period where employee experience maybe got pushed aside. You know, we didn’t- we stopped thinking about employee experience broadly, but for you guys, it’s something that’s sort of every day. And so, I’m curious, how have you seen employee experience sort of rise up and down, if it does, at your clients in terms of, you know, is it a boardroom issue? Is it a C-suite issue? Is it something that’s just sort of pushed down lower in the organization? Or does it rise to the top again and again?

Chris: Yeah, I think if you- if we think about the pandemic, as you mentioned, as almost like a milestone, right? There’s been a change in expectation around what the employer and the obligation of the employer for the employee. And so, what we’ve seen with many companies is a heightened, especially within the HR organization. So, whether at the board room, they’re not necessarily talking about it in the same way, but certainly within the HR organization, employee experience is one of their top priorities. We are seeing definitely a shift in how organizations are functioning around that, whether that’s how they design their mobility program, how they design their HR program, the way that they communicate with their employees, the touch that they want to put on their employees in terms of both, as Batia mentioned, communication, but also this idea of surveying and making sure that everything that’s happening with the employee to their expectation. 

If we think about the shift in expectation and the immediacy in data expectations, right? People want to be able to put their finger on a button and find out their status. And so that all is part of the employee experience. As soon as an employee goes into the HR system, there is an expectation that this firm now has me, not just from a delivering my comp and my salary perspective and delivering the right opportunities, but keeping me aware of everything and anything that may affect me, that may affect my employment, that may affect the organization and the company, and even into the social space, right? 

Patrick: Right.

Chris: I want our company and our organization to support the things that I support, the causes that I support. So, it’s a much bigger issue that HR is grappling with and functioning and dealing with. A lot of organizations, like I said are restructuring how they deliver messaging. A lot of self-service tools are being implemented within organizations so that employees can actually have their finger on the pulse of what’s going on within the organization or within their mobility program or whatever it is that they’re interested in. So, there is definitely a shift that we’re seeing. Yeah, as I said, employee experience is something that we’re hearing a lot more around and certainly something that we’re helping clients address.

Patrick: You mentioned- 

Batia: I’ll just add, Chris-

Patrick: Sorry, go ahead.

Batia: Sorry, Patrick. I was just going to add that, you know, immigration is a deeply personal experience. And so, it really does impact the C-suite. It does impact board members. You know, we are regularly helping C-suite cross borders and board members. And so, there’s nothing that grabs the attention more quickly than somebody quite senior, you know, having a challenging time at the border or being stopped. And so definitely it permeates the entire organization.

Patrick: Right.

Chris: Yeah. And when you think about mobility as a connected service, tax, you want to make sure your taxes are right. You’re filing the right taxes. You’re not paying more than you need to pay. Your immigration’s correct. Your payroll’s being delivered. All of those things now are converging and integrating, and the employee is looking at all of those as a single stream of support. They’re not thinking about whether you may have a different vendor for each or the same vendor for each. They want the same experience regardless.

Patrick: Right. And I mean, tax and immigration, those are so deeply personal. I mean, that’s a really, it’s an important point to think about, like how your employees are going to feel that more than they’re going to feel their technology. 

Adopting new technology solutions at EY People Advisory Services

But let’s talk about technology for a second, because I know you guys are building some of those solutions you talked about, some of the platforms working with Microsoft and probably others. Have you seen, I guess the big question for me is the technology- in our world, the technology always works. It’s the people that mess things up. It’s the humans that screw up the technology, not the other way around. But when it comes to some of the tools that you’re developing for your clients and tools that you’re using internally within EY, are you seeing the adoption maybe happening a little faster now? Are you seeing people, and is that part of just a better designed tool, a better designed, I know one of the ones is built right into Teams. Or is it more a function of people have just gotten better and more adept at adopting technologies quicker? And just your broad experience in that regard. Chris, maybe if you want to go first on that?

Chris: Yeah, I think about our technology journey. Right, when I started, God 20 something years ago, it was an e-mail and no one expected a response to that e-mail for five days or a week or whatever, right? As expectation shifted and became more immediate, then the need for technology to really address that became critical. And if I think about then, sort of, you know, societally, there is this, everybody’s on an app, right? Like, apps have become the way forward, so the user experience, the expectation of easy, frictionless access to data, to information, is something that people are taking from their experience in life and bringing that to their experience in the work environment, in the services that their employer provides to them, and mobility being one of them. And so, as we’re seeing sort of technology really advancing super quickly, right? A system that we developed five years ago is now today an obsolete system. And so, we’re constantly evolving. 

And so through our relationship and our alliance with Microsoft, we have developed an EYMP, which is EY Mobility Pathway, which is a dynamic system that tracks, reports, allows clients through dashboarding to have their finger on the pulse. Both clients at the administrative mobility function level and also the employee, to have their finger on the pulse of their tax services, their immigration services, you know, if they’re business travelers, there’s business travel elements to that. It really is this idea of data being democratized. People being able to have access to the data anytime they want 24/7 and being able to play back and forth with that data to provide information, to pull information in a very secure way. I think you mentioned, you mentioned risk, right? Threat, cybersecurity. 

Patrick: Yeah.

Chris: So, ensuring that data is transited no more through e-mail, but through systems that are secure and immediate, real time. And it is a challenge as you said, you know, humans are still part of the process. However, with AI and generative AI, there is much more ability to reduce error, to mitigate that human error element to it, where now AI is implemented in systems. But again, there is still a tension there, right? Some organizations don’t want that implemented, there’s still a fear there. So, we have to tread carefully with that, move the industry along, whilst also respecting that there are also- that there’s expertise that still delivers support to our clients. But definitely, the technology journey is apace, and it is a race. Let’s be clear about that. It is a race to really- I don’t think there is an endpoint to this race. I think it’s going to constantly keep building as we move forward. I don’t know, Batia, if you have any other thoughts.

Batia: I was just going to say, I think that coming back to your question, Patrick, I think that data privacy, data integrity is what’s driving adoption and employee experience. Right. So, I think employees want the experience. They want to make sure that their information is secure as do our clients, our employers. And so, I think that is really something that’s driving adoption. And I’ll just say on a personal note that being part of EY, you know, you told us that you used to be part of a advisory practice as well, a consulting practice. We’re in a wonderful position. It really, it makes me- I get excited by the idea that we are an immigration practice embedded in this broader, much larger organization with advisory, with this alliance with Microsoft, with, quite frankly, with the ability to develop technology at a pace to really lead the race, using Chris’s words. That’s the piece that excites me, because this is really something that is going to sustain the future of our practice. And so being in a position where we are really surrounded, I think, with the right environment for the development is super exciting for me.

Patrick: Yeah, and I think the multidisciplinary model works so well for you and for the others in the Big Four, just because you bring so much to the table and every client might do one piece of their business really well, but they are- they do have needs across, you know, every enterprise client has needs across all of the things that EY brings to the table. 

Data access challenges and changes

I want to ask a very specific question that you may not want to answer, but I’ll have to ask it anyway. And it’s about data, because we hear about data all the time, and we hear about how that’s the piece that is preventing faster adoption of agentic AI or generative AI. It’s the piece that’s always most difficult. Everybody tells us that enterprise clients just don’t have their data in shape. They can’t accelerate. They can’t move from pilots to scale, blah, blah, blah. What we’ve heard recently that I think is fascinating is this idea that even with clients that you’ve been working with for a decade, getting sustained useful data from the clients is still a challenge. And I’m curious, we’re hearing different things about where, you know, EY fits on that spectrum of the ability to work very closely with their clients and access their data. And Chris, I know you’re laughing ’cause you’re like, you can’t believe I’m asking this question. But I’m just curious, in your more than two decades of experience, data has always been part of the equation for you. How has that changed maybe in recent years where that ability to get sustained access to the data that you need out of your clients has improved or has maybe been a roadblock.

Chris: Yeah, no, that’s a- you know how to ask those questions.

All: *laughs*

Batia: I’m glad it’s yours.

Chris: If you think about sort of the journey that we’ve been on over the last decade, let’s call it, There was this desire to protect data in a way that denied access. Right. 

Patrick: Right.

Chris: So, there were lots of layers of access controls and systems in place to limit the amount of information that was available to a provider like EY or even to HR within the organization. They don’t have access to all the individual’s data and information. With the demand for more information now coming from the employee in the organization, those systems of how they constructed and architected their data security have to now shift as well. And so, we’ve got this tension between the demand for information and demand for immediacy of information that then can drive strategic decisions with an institution of data management and data control within the tech and security organization that now needs to be reconciled. And so that’s probably part of what you’re seeing, right?

The consistent access to data, some of those controls need to be reassessed and reviewed. There has to be trust in the system. And so, as we think about the best cases where we have that access to data and those two-way data flows with our clients, those are the clients where there is a trust system that’s set up. And that means the client organization reviews all of our systems, checks out and is comfortable that they can now have a secure flow back and forth. And so those barriers, let’s call them those controls, those gates, to a degree are then lessened or removed so that we do have that consistent access and flow of data. Now, that does require trust. It also requires a different way of contracting. I can tell you, for example, if we think about the construct of contracts that were made probably 5-10 years ago even, right? Let’s say 10 years ago. And even 5 years ago, those contracts were, “you cannot use our data for any other purpose other than,” right? 

Patrick: Right.

Chris: And so, if you now want that data for insights and you as an organization want EY to now do benchmarking for you, for example, right? Your contract doesn’t allow us to do that. So again, there has to be a full reconciliation of the data systems and the data control that the organization has as their policy, and then a reconciliation of what their demand is in terms of data consumption. That’s kind of my answer to the question. I’m not sure it’s answered your question fully, but that’s where I do see the change.

Patrick: No, it’s super helpful. And I think the way you laid that out in particular to talk about trust is a perfect segue into the next thing we want to talk about, which is AI. 

Batia’s law background and EY’s Law Firm

So, let’s talk about, well, I want to talk about AI, but actually before we get to that, Batia, you said something at the very beginning that you’re an attorney. And I just have to ask how many other attorneys are there within EY? Is it a firm full of lawyers that we didn’t know about? Like, is it the secret, you know, subculture of lawyers at EY?

Batia: *laughs* That’s a good question. So, within our EY Law firm, our practice in Canada provides those three areas of law, as I said. So, it’s Canadian, US, and global outbound. We have around 300 people onshore in Canada. We’re also supported by our Global Delivery Services Center in India, by another 300 or so. So, it’s a large practice. And then of those 300 or so in Canada, we have just over 100, 120-140 lawyers and attorneys, mostly US attorneys.

Patrick: Okay, yeah. 

Batia: So, it is a- I don’t know how you would classify it. Is it a subculture? I’m not sure. But yes, we have a very strong law firm practice.

Patrick: Excellent. And then so I’m just really curious on this one particular point, like how did you end- you didn’t go to law school to work for EY, so how did you end up?

Batia: *laughs*

Patrick: Right?

Batia: I did not. So surprisingly, I’ll share my story, but surprisingly, it’s not that unusual. We have a few people with similar profiles. So I went- I actually did my undergraduate degree in cultural anthropology.

Patrick: Okay.

Batia: And decided that I needed to do something that was practical. So decided to go to law school in my third year of my anthropology degree. And went to law school so that I could work with refugees, so that I could help asylum seekers and refugees. And after graduation, I articled, interned at a boutique large immigration law firm in Canada, and then opened my own immigration practice for about two years where I did just that. I worked with refugees, worked with humanitarian cases. And at the time, EY was starting an immigration practice, piqued my interest. I saw that immigration in particular was- in Canada was following the path of U.S. immigration into the corporate world. And so, I approached the folks and joined the firm.

Patrick: That’s fascinating.

Batia: And now I do exclusively corporate law.

Patrick: It’s absolutely fascinating. And I have to say, earlier this season, we spoke with a guy who is with BCG who got his PhD in philosophy. 

Batia: There you go.

Patrick: And I thought, okay, well, that’s the first time we’ve ever had a philosopher. You actually might be the first attorney that we’ve had on the podcast. So, we’re checking off a lot of boxes today. It’s great. 

Batia: *laughs*

How EY PAS and Tax are using AI and what gets applied to EY broadly

Patrick: I do want to ask about AI, because it’s something that we talked about in Barcelona. It comes up relentlessly now. And it occurred to me when you were talking about immigration earlier, in my distant, distant past, I actually stamped visas at the embassy in Cairo, US Embassy in Cairo. 

Batia: Oh wow.

Patrick: Yeah, I did immigration visas, I did visitor visas, all that kind of stuff. And I just think about the application- 

Chris: Very cool.

Patrick: Well, yeah, it was, yeah, we could have a beer and talk about how cool that job was. 

Batia and Chris: *laughs*

Patrick: But anyway, I think now about if somebody could have filled out that form using AI, you know, how different that would have been. And the same for your own services that you’re providing to enterprise clients when it comes to literally filling out applications or forms and stuff like that. How much is the firm starting to use AI to do some of that work? And do you ever see it sort of being a huge part of the work that you’re doing?

Batia: Yeah, yeah. It’s an excellent question, and I think we’re on the journey, right? So, we definitely are using AI in cool ways and are looking at using it in even more ways and better ways. And part of the driver really is that things have become so much more complex. The only thing that is certain in the world right now for us in immigration is uncertainty. And so, we need to make sure that our best minds, greatest thinkers are focused on that, focused on client service, focused on strategy, focused on understanding the changes. And as you said, the filling out of the forms and the analyzing of the data, of which we have a lot, right? I mean, there’s a lot of data that we hold. So, analyzing that data that we hold, analyzing the data that is publicly available to enhance our decision making and our clients’ decision making around strategy is what we need to be doing. And so, we are using some tools to do that already. So, we do have some technology, as you know, in play that we are able to automate some of that process for sure, and looking to automate even more of it using AI.

Patrick: And how much do you share what you’re doing within immigration and then more broadly within People Advisory Services with the rest of the firm? I mean, how much are you getting from the rest of the firm? How much are you sharing back? And by how much, I’m really thinking like more around the innovative side, like this is a way of thinking about the data that we have. And because your firm as a whole, of course, has a massive amount of data on all your clients. But how you manage that, how you orchestrate that, what you can and can’t use, all of those things, you’re going through it individually in your practice, how much does that get shared? How easily does that get shared across the firm?

Batia: Yeah, so that’s a great question. We are, at the end of the day, in Canada, at least a law firm. And we are an immigration practice. And so, we are very careful with how much we share from a privacy perspective, from a regulatory perspective, we wouldn’t share without clients explicit consent to do that. Having said that, I like the way you phrased the question because it’s not just about the data we hold, but it’s about the way we are developing and using technology. And so, from a technology perspective and how we use technology, that for sure is, you know, we are working in this much bigger and broader environment. We are learning from our, as I said earlier, from our consulting practice, from our technology folks, and they are learning from us in terms of how we are building and what we need to do. But from a data perspective, to be very clear, that is held privately and confidentially for sure for our clients.

Patrick: Right, and then Chris, on the Tax side and the People Advisory broadly, how are you guys using AI these days? And maybe also, what do you see coming next? Like what’s the next evolution? We’ve gone from AI to GenAI to agentic AI. What’s next?

Chris: Yeah, no, if I think about sort of a tax return, for example, providing a tax return used to be, you know, a client would have to fill in, you know, an employee would have to fill in all their information on what we call an organizer, right? Now we have information in systems. The client has information in their systems. There are systems that are on apps, maybe in an employee’s phone that when they travel, if they switch that app on, their calendar gets updated for where they are in the world. That then gets pulled into this form. So now when they have the organizer format that appears in front of them saying, fill out your organizer, actually, it’s playing back information that’s already in the system. Now they just need to verify. We’re using technology, AI, APIs, connecting systems in ways that are accelerating the process of preparing tax returns, also delivering, again, on that employee experience, right? I have this data, I’ve given you this data before, how come, you know, it’s in my calendar, why is it not in my form, right? And so, we’re able to now do that. 

In terms of sort of the next level, the next stage of experience, it really is going to be around, and we’re looking and playing with and piloting certain agentic pieces of that, where actually systems are now going to be doing some of that conversational response based on data in the system. So, someone can call up in the system and say, what’s happening with my tax return? And rather than it just being, you know, a box with information, there’s actually a conversational piece to that. That’s what we’re exploring right now. How do we put agents into the system that can enhance the user and employee experience? And we’re beginning to pilot that. 

The future is endless, right? And again, it really goes back to that trust piece. How much information do you want in the hands of an individual to have a conversation with? Or how much of that, because if you want to have a conversation with an individual, you’re going to have to book a meeting time and it’s got to go do the scheduling and all those other things, right? But if it’s in the hands of agentic AI, then that can be more immediate in terms of your information request and receipt. So again, it’s really building that trust with our clients, piloting with clients that want to push the boundaries of this and then using that as a use case to demonstrate to other clients the benefits of that, and also the opportunities for improvement. So that’s kind of where we are right now across People Advisory Services. 

And if I think about Canada in that context, Canada is one of ten super regions. So earlier this year, EY, we restructured our organization into ten super regions. Canada is one of those ten super regions. And being a super region allows us to pilot some things, share that with the rest of the globe, the other nine super regions, lead in some of those innovations, and really sort of drive some of that prototyping. And we’ve seen some of that already. And it’s beginning to, as I said, it’s beginning to- it’s evolving in ways I think that, you know, the imaginations of our people are really helping us sort of push the boundaries of what’s possible. It’s really, really interesting. And as Batia said, it’s very exciting. It’s very exciting. 

Patrick: Well, you just- 

Batia: Yeah.

Patrick: Sorry, go ahead, Batia.

Batia: Oh, I was just going to add, Patrick, you know, where our clients and their employees are, allow us to- you know, one of the deep values of coming to a firm like EY is that we can use this information in- entry once and multiple use, right? 

Patrick: Right.

Batia: So, we do that for our clients, for sure, both on the immigration and tax side. Employees don’t want to have to give their information more than once. And if they allow us to share it, we absolutely do and will.

Patrick: Well, and employees don’t want to give their information more than once, because we all have so much experience of having to log into that streaming service again. We’re like, wait a minute, you already have my credentials, why am I logging into the streaming service again another time? 

Batia: Yeah.

Patrick: And you actually, Chris, you said something that I think combined with Batia earlier; you mentioned sort of immigration as such a personal thing. When we’ve been thinking about AI, we’ve been thinking about in terms of what firms like EY bring to their clients, it’s the opportunity to cut costs or increasingly to increase revenues. So, it’s cost cutting and it’s revenue growth. You two have added the employee experience to it as well. Like there is a true employee experience benefit to AI, which I think most of the time we think about AI in the broader sense of being, you know, taking away jobs, eliminating jobs, but actually you’re positioning it more, this is how AI can make not only folks at EY’s job better, but even the employees of your enterprise customers, they get the employee experience benefit of it too, right?

Chris: Yeah, as we went down this journey, probably about, I don’t know, seven or eight years ago, as we were thinking about what was going to happen within HR and the evolving landscape ahead of us. And this was pre-COVID. We came up with a tagline: humans at center. And so, everything that we do, whether that’s technology, whether it’s how we build our systems, whether that’s how we scope our services, we do that with a mind of keeping humans at the center. So whether that’s the employee of our clients, or, and when I say the employee, the traveling employee, or the administrative employee, the person that now governs the programs that we deliver, or our own people, our intent is to put humans at the center. We do believe strongly that human connection is what people crave. We are designed for connection. And so, to the extent that we can have systems do a lot of the hard, heavy work, then actually humans have more time. And as you mentioned, cost, scale, and experience, right? Humans connecting with humans definitely brings about the best outcome. And so you get the machines to do the heavy lifting piece, you get them to deal with the non-critical pieces of the process, and then you can have humans now better connected for the things that were more critical and more human-centric, dealing with a lot of that tension and the emotion that comes with, again, immigration, tax is very personal, very sensitive. So, it allows and frees up our people to now engage in a different way with our clients.

Patrick: And Batia, as the cultural anthropologist in this chat, I think you must agree with the idea that we all want to have that personal relationship and all that, right?

Batia: Absolutely, absolutely. *laughs* I will say that it’s also for our- I can talk from the perspective of our people who are working with our clients that, as I said, and I’ll say it again, the complexity around us. I mean, being an immigration lawyer when I started 20+ years ago is very different to being an immigration lawyer or an immigration service provider today. The complexity is extreme. And so really giving our people the space and the opportunity to really think about the complexity and connect with our clients around that and support them in that through the use of AI and through the use of technology is really what we need to be doing and what we are doing.

Naming the unknows: Navigating uncertainty, AI developments and human behavior changes

Patrick: Yeah, excellent, excellent. So, I have two questions left, both of them sort of big picture stuff. One is, what are the, in each of your respective spaces, what are sort of your biggest unknowns, the things that you wish you kind of had the answer to. And I’ll give you an example from our- from my perspective, one of our biggest unknowns right now is what’s going to happen to the labor pyramid within all the services companies that we follow. It’s traditionally a pyramid. You guys have an up and out model like everybody does. You have an apprenticeship model. How much is that going to change over the next few years? That for us is important to understand because it has such a huge impact on the way that you run your businesses and the success of them. But within your spaces, what is that sort of, that unknown that you wish you really had an answer to, or you think you’re going to be working to get an answer to over the next couple of years? Batia, you want to go first?

Batia: Tough questions, Patrick. I was sitting here thinking, the biggest unknown for me is the is the unknown, if that makes sense, the change that’s all around us. But in a way, that’s actually known. The one thing that is certain for us is that there’s going to be uncertainty going forward. I don’t think we’ve had a time period where there’s been as much uncertainty just around immigration requirements and geopolitics and all of that is unknown. 

The unknown really for me, and this is the exciting piece, because it’s unknown just because we’re in development still is really how we’re going to use AI and technology to support our clients and operate differently and better, to be honest. We know we’re going to do it. We’ve started on the journey, but the degree to which we are going to be able to leverage AI and technology is an exciting unknown for me because it’s just something we haven’t fully discovered yet. So, I think those would be my two answers.

Patrick: Yeah. That AI one is so true, because so much has already changed just in the last couple of years, so it really is an unknown in terms of what’s coming. So, yeah, Chris, how about you?

Chris: Yeah, again, it’s a really good question. This caused me to go into sort of pensive, thoughtful mode. But if I sort of take a step back, the one thing that sort of, and it doesn’t keep me up at night, but certainly you’d like to have maybe a crystal ball so you can kind of see into the future is how is human behavior and human expectation going to change with time? Because as we adopt technology, right, we adopt the telephone and then we adopted e-mail, the expectation was that much more immediate. What’s the new expectation going to be once we embed AI in all these things? And then how do we as an organization start to plan for that, right? That’s kind of, and so there’s the exciting pieces Batia mentioned with AI and new technology, for me is then what does that mean for human behavior? What does that mean for the new skill sets and talents, adaptability, we talk about the ability to adapt, right? We got to get people with the ability to adapt. And what are we adapting to, right? That’s the unknown piece that Batia mentioned. And so how does that change our business? How does that change our business model? How does that change our people? How does that change the makeup of the people that we attract or we’re looking to attract? Like all of those things are what I sort of think about. And now you’ve really started that wheel going in my head, I’m going to have to start to write things down now. Patrick, thank you.

Patrick: So, now overlay a generational change on top of that as well. 

Chris: Yes.

Patrick: So- because the way that I adapt to technology is very different than the way that my colleague Haley sitting next to me adapts to technology. So that’s, and then it depends on what industry. Yeah, it’s fascinating. 

Final thoughts

All right, last question. I promise we’ll wrap this up. I’ve been asking everybody this question so far this season because it kind of, it ties to AI, the sort of, again, the common story, the conventional wisdom out there is that AI is going to replace a whole bunch of jobs. So, if your job had to go away, if you could say, all right, I’m going to spend 10,000 hours now and I’m just going to, I’m going to gain a skill. There are some things that AI won’t take away. Batia, you mentioned creativity and creative thinking earlier. But if there was something you could sit down now and just say, I’m going to spend 10,000 hours and I’m going to develop an irreplaceable and- a skill that could not be replaced by AI. And it could be speaking multiple languages, although that could be replaced by AI. It could be playing the guitar. It could be turning yourself invisible, I don’t know. Pick some sort of thing that you wish you could do, some sort of skill that if you could say, I’m going to spend 10,000 hours and just perfect it, what would that skill be? Chris, you have to go first this time.

Chris: Yeah. Oh, wow. Man, you really know how to put these questions out there. These are like deep, philosophical, life altering questions. No, if I were to sort of spend 10,000 hours on something now, it would probably be, and I kind of do some of it now, but it’d be mentorship, like strengthening my chops with mentorship. Yeah, sort of, yeah, mentorship, life coaching or something like that. Because again, as the world changes, the ability for people to adjust to that change can be quite burdensome and quite taxing. And so, helping people navigate the change, which is kind of what we do every day in our roles, help sort of vision a future and bring everybody along. But sort of helping people make the change would be something. If I had nothing else to do, then I’d probably go into life coaching or something like that.

Patrick: It’s fascinating. And that’s so dependent upon trust too, the whole trusted relationship. 

Chris: Yes, sir.

Patrick: Yeah, excellent. Batia, how about you?

Batia: I’ll build on that a little bit because I love the answer. I’m going to say that focused specifically on mentoring people and building, continuing to build my own skill around interaction. Human interaction, client service, understanding, you know, empathy, understanding where people are coming from, where our clients, what’s driving our clients, because I think that’s the key to client service. I think it really is around understanding people’s positions and what’s important to them to really build that lasting relationship.

Patrick: Well, I got to say, you two are, you’re absolutely reinforcing the humans at the center message of the firm. So that’s fantastic. Excellent. Thank you both so much for coming on. This has been an enormous pleasure. I’ve really enjoyed this.

Batia: Thank you, Patrick. It’s been great.

Chris: Thank you, Patrick. It’s been a fantastic conversation.

Patrick: Tune in next week for another episode of TBR Talks. Don’t forget to send us your key intelligence questions on business strategy, ecosystems, and management consulting through the form in the show notes below. Visit tbri.com to learn how we help tech companies, large and small, answer these questions with the research, data, and analysis that my guests bring to this conversation every week. 

Once again, I’m your host, Patrick Heffernan, Principal Analyst at TBR. Thanks for joining us and see you next week.

TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe’s Top Tech Firms

Join TBR Principal Analyst Patrick Heffernan weekly for conversations on disruptions in the broader technology ecosystem and answers to key intelligence questions TBR analysts hear from executives and business unit leaders among top IT professional services firms, IT vendors, and telecom vendors and operators.

“TBR Talks” is available on all major podcast platforms. Subscribe today!

Senior Analyst Ben Carbonneau and Principal Analyst Angela Lambert review Lenovo’s 2025 Global Industry Analyst Conference, where Lenovo provided updates on its overall strategy and ambitions to shift its perception from a PC vendor to a full-stack, end-to-end solution provider. The pair discusses the event’s AI strategy announcement, how this year’s GIAC differed from past years and where Lenovo is differentiating itself from peers

Episode highlights:

• Insights into Lenovo’s Services and Solutions Group and One Lenovo strategy

• Lenovo differentiators

• Key themes from GIAC 2025

Listen and learn with TBR Talks!

Submit your Key Intelligence Questions for Patrick and his guests

Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn

Learn more about TBR at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tbri.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠

TBR Talks is produced by Technology Business Research, Inc.

Edited by Haley Demers

Music by Burty Sounds via Pixabay

Art by Amanda Hamilton Sy

Lenovo’s 2026 AI Strategy: GIAC 2025 Key Takeaways

TBR Talks Host Patrick Heffernan: Welcome to TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe’s Top Tech Firms, where we talk business model disruption in the broad technology ecosystem from management consultancies to systems integrators, hyperscalers to independent software vendors, telecom operators to network and infrastructure vendors, and chip manufacturers to value-added resellers. We’ll be answering some of the key intelligence questions we’ve heard from executives and business unit leaders among the leading professional IT services and telecom vendors. 

I’m Patrick Heffernan, Principal Analyst, and today we’ll be talking about Lenovo GIAC 2025, with Angela Lambert, Principal Analyst for TBR’s IT Infrastructure Practice, and Ben Carbonneau, Senior Analyst for TBR’s IT Infrastructure Practice. 

How was this Lenovo event different from past years?

Angela and Ben, welcome back to the podcast. It’s nice to have you guys here.

Angela Lambert, TBR Principal Analyst: Happy to be here.

Ben Carbonneau, TBR Senior Analyst: Always great to be featured. 

Patrick: And it was fun traveling with you down to North Carolina to spend three full days, it felt like, with Lenovo at their US headquarters. Super good fun, we could talk the whole time if we wanted to about food, but we should probably talk about Lenovo itself. So, let’s start with Angela, can you give us a sense of how was this event different than the ones you’ve been to in years past?

Angela: Hmm, how was it different? Well, I think what I would say, comparing Lenovo’s event this year to years past, is that what I actually see is a lot of consistency. There’s a lot of consistency in the messaging compared to last year. I think Lenovo has set their strategy in AI, and they are executing on that strategy and we didn’t see really significant departures from that. Which while as analysts, we can say, I’ve heard this before, I think from a strategic services/product standpoint, that’s actually a good thing that we saw so much consistency from last year.

Patrick: And I imagine the temptation for any company, and because we see this all the time, is to ensure that they’re presenting something new, that they’re highlighting something new, that they’re constantly telling you exactly that. You didn’t see this last year. But you’re saying there’s actually a lot of value in, hey, we know what our strategy is going to be and we’re going to execute on it.

Angela: Yeah, I think that we see that, and the value I see in that for Lenovo is the fact that their strategy is a little bit different, particularly from what I see with other infrastructure vendors. Many of them are going really hard at the big CSPs. And it would have been easy for Lenovo to have a knee-jerk reaction and shift their direction a little, but I really think that they’re staying true to focusing on their enterprise and mid-market customer base. And I think- I see a lot of long-term vision in terms of how they’re going to serve that customer base with their AI strategy.

Patrick: Right, that really came through. Ben, was there anything in particular that jumped out at you as being different or the same from years past?

Ben: Sure, yeah. So, I’ve only been to- last year was my first industry analyst conference with Lenovo, and we were fortunate enough to go to Seattle, and the event was held in conjunction with their Tech World event. I think possibly some of the reasons why we didn’t hear a lot of kind of new product launches and things along those lines is because they’re probably saving some of that for January, the Tech World in conjunction with Consumer Electronics Show. So, to be determined on that.

I think also maybe there was a reluctancy to talk too much about storage just because the company’s pending acquisition of Infinidat. But in contrast to maybe last year, I think maybe just from a nerdy technology perspective for me was I didn’t get to see as many of those kind of solutions on a showcase floor. But what was really cool, kind of a closed door sessions for analysts to tour Lenovo’s design space for their PCs, so a bunch of stuff we can’t talk about that we saw in there, but that was really, really cool for somebody who’s as into that kind of nerdy, geeky stuff as I am.

Patrick: And it was cool for me, and I’m not into the nerdy, geeky stuff, but some of the stuff in that design lab was pretty amazing. 

Lenovo’s Services and Solutions Group and One Lenovo Strategy

So, I want to talk a little bit about, I know you’ve written up an event perspective on it, and one of the things that caught my eye was you talk about the three different pieces of Lenovo. So, there’s infrastructure, there’s devices, and there’s services and solutions. And you called services the interconnective tissue. What exactly do you mean by that?

Ben: So, I think it kind of ties back to the formation of Solutions and Services Group. So, Lenovo SSG, at one point, the company operated just two businesses. So, Intelligent Devices Group and Data Center Group, which has now turned to Infrastructure Solutions Group. The company, I want to say in 2020, and Angela can check me on that, formed SSG to kind of abstract their services business and really, I think it goes toward, kind of, their whole emphasis. And one thing that really resonated to me throughout the event was that their big goal with marketing is really changing perception from being a PC vendor to being a solutions provider. I think the formation of Services and Solutions Group helps them do that by kind of making that its own separate piece. However, going back to kind of what Angela was saying about recurring themes from the different events that Lenovo’s held, one thing that I know we’ve heard several times is kind of Lenovo’s One Lenovo strategy. And that’s really where I see kind of the business units working together and less in silos to create these solutions and kind of make this Solutions and Services led pivot. I think at the basis, we know Lenovo’s a hardware company, so, they have their client devices hardware, they have their infrastructure hardware. But that Services and Solutions piece over the top, I think, is really what kind of propels them onto that Services and Solutions led Pivot, as well as kind of bringing them up the value chain from just being a hardware manufacturer into being an actual solutions kind of provider.

Patrick: Ben, you said a lot of things in there. I want to pull out two ideas in particular. One, this idea that at its core, in its DNA, they are a hardware, they’re devices, they make stuff. And then also that there’s a perception that the market doesn’t fully understand everything else that they do. So, Angela, did that come through to you, how they’re trying to shift that perception? Was there anything that struck you as a way that they might actually be able to make some progress in making that change in the coming couple of years?

Angela: I think the Lenovo team did share a lot about how they’re changing perceptions, and a lot of that’s through sponsorships and partnerships. Some of those are very public ones, like with Formula One, for example, or FIFA. I was really, really impressed by hearing the story of their customer DreamWorks and how they’ve been able to go in to a place where maybe they were more so focused on selling high-powered PCs in the past to this client, but how they could really show them how they can transform their entire data center using their Neptune servers and actually seeing kind of the metrics on the insane amount of consolidation they did there and really the overall impact on that business. I thought that was a really impressive in a way to demonstrate how they can use their One Lenovo strategy, but also the kind of change in helping the market better understand that they’re not just devices focused. There’s a much broader solution set that they can bring to customers.

Patrick: Yeah, and that customer use case was really good from DreamWorks. 

Lenovo’s differentiators

Were there other, either particular sessions or particular customer use cases that stood out for you that are most memorable from, again, three days. For example, and if it’s not a particular use case, like some way that Lenovo differentiates, because we hear a lot of stories, we hear a lot of use cases, we hear a lot of, you know, this client is so happy because this company did X for them. But what were the things that stood out when you took a step back after three days? And you say, okay, this is what actually does differentiate Lenovo. Is it liquid cooling to get all geeky? Is it Hybrid AI Advantage? Is it Device as a Service? What is it that, Angela, maybe you go first. What is it that really struck you as different about Lenovo this time? Not this time, different about Lenovo overall.

Angela: Yeah, I think some of those that you’ve called out tie into my initial comment at the outset of this discussion, which was that I see Lenovo really focusing on how they can innovate and differentiate for their enterprise and mid-market customers. And the sessions we did on liquid cooling, I’ll admit, you know, I may have gone in a little bit of a skeptic on the liquid cooling because everybody has it in some form or another. And I know there’s a lot of engineering that goes on behind that, but what really I better understood after the session was the implications of liquid cooling for an enterprise or for even a company like DreamWorks who is, you know, it’s not tens of thousands or 100,000 employees. Their IT teams are not massive. And when ultimately these companies need to make transitions to liquid cooling, Lenovo has a certain expertise around the services side in terms of assessing their current data centers, assessing what it’s going to take to retrofit this. So, it’s not the same skill set as a company that’s going in and saying, we can build a brand new data center from the ground up. They have a skill set specific to helping their customers who need to work with what they have, make it work better for them, and then also help maintain that in the long term. So that’s where I actually saw the most value out of a liquid cooling session was the real expertise in making it work for someone who’s not a gigantic CSP or GPU as a Service provider.

Patrick: And one of the- during one of the main presentations from the Services and Solutions Group, they mentioned change management, and they talked about how they have change management specialists within Lenovo, something I did not know prior to going to town in North Carolina. And that fits right in with that because you can’t provide all that kind of technology and services you just talked about without including the change management that that goes along with it. So, Ben, how about you? What sort of differentiates, what does differentiate Lenovo?

Ben: I think I’ll talk about Hybrid AI Advantage as the big differentiator that I pulled from the event and then Lenovo’s kind of consistent messaging that we’ve heard more over the last 12 months. But I guess one thing that I would say, just to kind of close the topic on liquid cooling, is that-

Patrick: Because we can’t talk about liquid cooling enough.

Ben: *laughs* Is that for me, I already mentioned One Lenovo. Another slogan that Lenovo loves to put into our ear is Hybrid AI for All. And I really think that Neptune liquid cooling really exemplifies their Hybrid AI for All strategy in the sense that, you know, while all companies, or most of the companies that Angela and I follow as far as infrastructure OEMs have liquid cooling technology, Lenovo’s different flavors of Neptune liquid cooling kind of address different customers at different stages of adoption of liquid cooling and at different stages of, you know, readiness of their environment to accept or be retrofitted for liquid cooling. So that’s one thing that really stood out to me. I think, Nvidia’s come out with RTX Server Edition GPUs, which are an air-cooled solution, you know, for AI compute workloads. But while I think that air-cooled, you know, will probably gain the most traction in on-premises enterprise data centers, well, whether it’s in the core data center or more at the far edge, I also think that there’s a place for kind of different steps of liquid cooling, whether it’s full liquid cooling, like Neptune, the full kind of flagship solution, or whether it’s Neptune Core, which targets just the hottest components, or even whether it’s Neptune Air, which I think is probably where the company is seeing the most traction in kind of converting customers to liquid cooling, where it’s really the smallest step toward liquid cooling. It doesn’t require any new plumbing into their existing environment. I see that as something that’s easier to adopt and definitely drives kind of that services opportunity that Angela alluded to with the retrofitting.

Patrick: And real quick on that, within a year, we should be able to see what the adoption rates are on that are, right? I mean, there should, if it’s going to gain traction, it’s going to gain traction now. So, we’ll know in a year from now, right?

Ben: Yes, I can’t pull them up off the top of my head. I know that Lenovo does state kind of it’s Neptune liquid cooling growth. A lot of times in it’s earnings call transcript, but it’s definitely something that’s been growing quickly. And for a company that doesn’t provide kind of those hard AI server backlog numbers, like some of its competitors, it’s something that I’ve used as a proxy in my modeling to kind of get at that AI server number.

Patrick: Right. And then you mentioned Hybrid AI Advantage. What is it about that that’s different?

Ben: I think the big differentiator for Hybrid AI Advantage is that while all the infrastructure OEMs that we follow, so including Dell and HPE, they all kind of have these joint solution portfolios built around NVIDIA AI Enterprise. What I see as a differentiator for Lenovo, and I know it’s something that they continue to invest in, they’re telling us about expanding their footprint of AI centers of excellence around the globe is their AI library. So that kind of fits into Hybrid AI Advantage where they’re not just trying to sell themselves to build a solution on top of NVIDIA’s software platform, but they’re also coming to customers with a lot more pre-built, almost ready to kind of plug and play AI solutions that were built from their ISV partners. So, I know that kind of stems from their AI Innovators program, and I can’t come up with the date that AI Innovators was founded, but I know that it was before the big rise of ChatGPT. So that’s definitely something where I see, kind of, Lenovo having an advantage over its peers, really, with that strong ecosystem of ISV partners, creating those more plug and play solutions. And then also not just kind of relying on GPU-enabled servers, but something that I see Lenovo doing also is really saying that for some AI workloads, the less intensive AI workloads, a CPU is perfectly fine and maybe the most practical kind of processor to be running these kind of workloads. So, by working with ISVs, creating solutions in conjunction with some of their CPU-oriented edge servers, I think that’s kind of an AI play that I don’t see from other infrastructure OEMs that I follow.

Patrick: Right, because it’s more lucrative to sell GPU solutions, not just say that you can get by with something cheaper and faster, or none of it’s faster, easier, right?

Ben: For sure, yeah. I think there’s a lot of glamour around the NVIDIA name, but an Intel Xeon CPU is still a strong computer processor.

Repeatable solutions

Patrick: So, I want to run something by you both, because you know Lenovo better than I do, and I was focused more on the Services and Solutions Group. And one thing I heard from them was this idea of concentrating their efforts, their go-to-market, their investments in services and solutions that are repeatable, that are replicable. So, it’s not just the single bespoke solution or the single offering aimed at a particular client, it’s something that they can bring to lots of other clients that they know they can actually scale within Lenovo within their suite of offerings. And what struck me about that is how I heard the exact same thing from Fujitsu earlier in the summer, and I heard the exact same thing from Hitachi earlier this year as well. And so it makes me think there’s a bit of a kind of a hardware, DNA, a mindset that says, in the same way that you build a device and you build it many, many, many times, you’re also building a service and you’re building it many, many, many, many times. So, is it accurate for me to think about that’s how Lenovo thinks about the world they play in and what they’re good at, and that’s why they’re looking to replicate? Or is there something more behind that I’m missing?

Angela: I do think that’s a trend you’ll see among hardware providers, and I think it’s existed in previous tech iterations, thinking back to IOT or edge computing. Whenever there’s a situation where you have a piece of hardware that has almost an infinite number of potential applications or use cases, what these vendors want to do is identify some of the maybe most applicable ones that can benefit the most customers the most quickly and roll those out. And over time, I think those will evolve. So, while it’s not, I don’t think it’s particularly unique to Lenovo, I did see that unsurprisingly, Lenovo’s focusing on some of the areas where they’re really strong. So, they’re focusing on AI in manufacturing solutions. They’re focusing on it in supply chain, in retail, in safety.

Patrick: So those are three areas where they’re sort of customer zero as well. They manufacture, they have a complex supply chain, they are in the retail space. So, right? I mean, that’s part of what they’re bringing to the table.

Angela: Absolutely, they’re very focused on, as I think it’s safe to say, Linda Yao would say, eating their own dog food. They are absolutely customer zero and doing many of those things internally and then bringing that to their customer base. 

Patrick: Right. Eating their own squirrel fish, perhaps?

Angela: The squirrel fish was-

Patrick: We’ll get back to that in just a minute. 

Key themes from GIAC

A couple last questions as we wrap up here. I want just some of the broad themes that came out. I know we’ve touched on a bunch of them so far, but just things that you sort of walked away with and maybe, if not necessarily a broad theme or a key theme from the event, just was there anything that changed your mind? Did you walk away, did you get on the plane leaving North Carolina and think, okay, I have a different view of Lenovo because of this? Either of those things.

Ben: I think even more powerful than maybe getting on the plane with a different view of Lenovo was actually a PC session that I was in that really had me getting on the plane thinking differently about the PC market. And it’s something that I’ve followed in really since the beginning of my time at TBR. And it’s always been a market that I saw as kind of almost as close as to being commoditized as really any market that we follow in tech. But what Lenovo demonstrated to me is that, you know, with going through their design lab, but even more with the software that the company’s building around their devices, is that they are going to be driving differentiation in the market. And I think there’s some things that will have to kind of wait to be publicly announced. But I do see the company, whether it’s with their kind of one AI multiple devices strategy and following Apple into that devices ecosystem play, I think Lenovo might be better equipped than, I guess, any other devices company that I’ve seen yet in executing on that. And I think, one quote that really stuck with me, I like this one, and I can’t remember which executive said it, but the quote was, you only date your hardware provider, but you marry your software provider. And I thought that quote was excellent. And I think that by building in that software layer, the kind of unified devices ecosystem, the whole one AI multiple devices play that Lenovo is doing, I think they do make their devices’ ecosystem a little bit stickier and do drive differentiation in a market that I’d otherwise seen as very commoditized.

Patrick: Yeah. I want to come back to all that in a minute. But Angela, I want to give you a chance to weigh in. What was your key theme or your sort of key takeaway or what changed for you?

Angela: I think, so like I said at the beginning, there was a lot of consistency in Lenovo’s messaging, particularly on AI strategy. What I think stood out to me was helping me remember that Lenovo is a very engineering and design-oriented company, and they’re doing just so much focus on that. And they’ve built much on that with the services group. But seeing that underpinning almost everything that we were shown throughout those three days was very powerful.

Patrick: Yeah, and you mentioned AI, and there was a really good section where they talked about in particular, agentic AI and the need to marry both intent and context and what that actually looks like in the agentic AI space, which for me was just a really great way of thinking about it. I hadn’t put it quite together like that. Ben, last year, I went to Seattle with you and we- and I learned that I actually am interested in liquid cooling. Now it’s possible I’m going to care about PCs, which is a little shocking. We’ll have to revisit this in a couple of months and see if I actually, if you can actually make me want to care about PCs. Maybe, who knows?

Ben: After Tech World and Consumer Electronics Show, you’ll be drooling over PCs.

All: *laughs*

Patrick: You knock yourself out and go to that. I’m not going to Vegas. 

Final thoughts

So, let’s wrap up. Last thing, it was a culinary delight, let’s just say that. We had a phenomenal couple of meals there. So, what was your highlight when it comes to the food, because these trips, you know, I mean, you gotta go someplace and eat well. And we went someplace and ate well. So, what was your favorite part of either of the dinners?

Angela: Oh boy, squirrel fish far and away.

Patrick: Squirrel fish was really good.

Angela: Wow.

Patrick: Yeah.

Angela: Wow, that’s all I can say, blown away.

Ben: For me, lobster and grits cannot be beat anywhere, no matter how it’s made and it was excellent as it was prepared.

Angela: Not even the tomahawk steak. I’m a little bit shocked.

Ben: Tomahawk steak was great, but lobster and grits, it’s a different tier for me.

Patrick: The bourbon tasting of three bourbons and two ryes, that was fantastic. Although I have to say the lobster and grits was good. There was no cheese in it, which I really liked. I thought it was very good. Peking duck was great. The squirrel fish though, squirrel fish was just insane.

Angela: And it was gorgeous.

Patrick: And it was gorgeous. I feel like you can ask Haley if there’s a way to put a picture of the squirrel fish along with this episode. So, Ben, Angela, thank you so much. We will revisit this again probably next year, if not sooner. I don’t know what else Lenovo’s got in store for us this year, but as they roll out new stuff, we’ll chat again. Thank you.

TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe’s Top Tech Firms

Angela: Thanks.

Ben: Thank you.

Patrick: Tune in next week for another episode of TBR Talks. Don’t forget to send us your key intelligence questions on business strategy, ecosystems, and management consulting through the form in the show notes below. Visit tbri.com to learn how we help tech companies, large and small, answer these questions with the research, data, and analysis that my guests bring to this conversation every week. 

Once again, I’m your host, Patrick Heffernan, Principal Analyst at TBR. Thanks for joining us, and see you next week.

Join TBR Principal Analyst Patrick Heffernan weekly for conversations on disruptions in the broader technology ecosystem and answers to key intelligence questions TBR analysts hear from executives and business unit leaders among top IT professional services firms, IT vendors, and telecom vendors and operators.

“TBR Talks” is available on all major podcast platforms. Subscribe today!

How accurate were TBR’s 2025 predictions for cloud and telecom markets? In this episode of “TBR Talks,” Principal Analyst and Host Patrick Heffernan reviews TBR’s 2025 telecom and cloud predictions against the year’s actual market developments as well as what these developments mean for our 2026 predictions in an age of AI-enabled research and analysis.

Last year Principal Analyst Chris Antlitz predicted major communication service providers (CSPs) would not realize ROI from 5G investments, which they did not, while Principal Analyst Allan Krans predicted Microsoft Azure would close the gap with Amazon Web Services in the IaaS market, which it did. Patrick walks listeners through each leading analyst’s process for making predictions and discusses with them how AI has and has not changed the way they go about making their market predictions.

Prediction checks:

• Did CSPs realize 5G revenue?

• Did Microsoft narrow the gap with AWS?

• Did government support increase for 6G development?

• Did cloud market overall growth slow?

Listen and learn with TBR Talks!

Submit your Key Intelligence Questions for Patrick and his guests

Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn

Learn more about TBR at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tbri.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠

TBR Talks is produced by Technology Business Research, Inc.

Edited by Haley Demers

Music by Burty Sounds via Pixabay

Art by Amanda Hamilton Sy

Revisiting TBR’s 2025 Predictions: What We Got Right (and Wrong) About Cloud and Telecom Markets

TBR Talks Host Patrick Heffernan: Welcome to TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe’s Top Tech Firms, where we talk business model disruption in the broad technology ecosystem from management consultancies to systems integrators, hyperscalers to independent software vendors, telecom operators to network and infrastructure vendors, and chip manufacturers to value-added resellers. We’ll be answering some of the key intelligence questions we’ve heard from executives and business unit leaders among the leading professional IT services and telecom vendors. 

I’m Patrick Heffernan, Principal Analyst, and today we’ll be revisiting 2025 Cloud and Telecom predictions with Allan Krans, Principal Analyst for TBR’s Cloud practice, and Chris Antlitz, Principal Analyst for TBR’s Telecom practice.

Prediction check: Did CSPs realize 5G revenue? 

Chris and Allan, welcome back to the podcast. This is season 4, believe it or not, and thank you guys for coming on. We’re recording this at the beginning of the fourth calendar quarter, Q4, for 2025. But what I want to talk about is what you predicted at the beginning of the year, around this time last year, your predictions in the telecom space and in the cloud space. And if you want to expand that and talk about broader predictions across the market, totally open to that. So, I’ll talk about a couple of the predictions and just sort of get a sense of where things turned out, whether or not you think you were right or not. One of the questions, Chris, and I’ll start with you, in the telecom space was around whether or not the CSPs started deriving ROI from their 5G investments. You didn’t think it was going to really happen in 2025. Did it? Did you start to see some change there?

Chris Antlitz, Principal Analyst: So, we’ve seen two things in the last maybe 18 months, I would say. One is that fixed wireless access, which leverages 5G, is generating many billions of dollars for the telecom industry now. The problem is that the amount of revenue that it generates is only a fraction of what the telcos would need to offset how much they’ve invested in the technology itself. So, it’s good, but it’s a tiny piece of what they actually need to generate from. 

And then the second one is network slicing, which telcos need to have a 5G standalone core, which most do not have that. Most of them aren’t even close to having that. You need that in order to do the slicing. And the few telcos that have done that, T-Mobile being one of them, they generate a little bit of money from the slicing. And so, there’s like early glimmers of, you know, revenue generation from 5G that they couldn’t have done on prior generations of the cellular technology. But when you look at the aggregate amount of revenue that it’s bringing in, these are very small numbers relative to the hundreds of billions that the telco industry has spent so far on 5G.

Patrick: And I don’t want to get too far into what’s coming next year, but maybe call out, are there a couple of, you mentioned T-Mobile. Is there anybody else you think is going to start to emulate what they did, do the same kind of thing, see those kind of even small, tiny, tiny bit of ROI?

Chris: Yeah, there’s some telcos in Asia, there’s some telcos in Europe that are doing similar things. Personally, I think T-Mobile is like the front runner here in many cases, they were just faster to the market. They have the 5G standalone core. They have the right spectrum assets to do things like carrier aggregation and better propagation characteristics. So, they have a lot of the ingredients that are needed to do this at scale and in the way that it should be being done, essentially.

Patrick: Right. Okay. All right. So, one for one so far. 

Prediction check: Did Microsoft narrow the gap with AWS?

Allan, you talked about last year, you talked about Microsoft narrowing the gap with AWS in terms of infrastructure as a service and platform as a service market share. That should be kind of easy to measure. I mean, did they start to close the gap or not? How close? And you also predicted Microsoft taking leadership in that space in 2027. Still on track for that?

Allan Krans, Principal Analyst: Yeah, still on track. The growth rates have really been quite different. Not new, but AWS very close to 10%, getting close to single digit growth the way that things were going, and Microsoft, you know, above 25% in terms of the infrastructure level. There has been an acceleration for both companies, actually, partially driven by some of the AI services at the infrastructure level that are being utilized. And so, I think that’s still on track, although the relative levels have changed a little bit. I think the big curveball, though, has been the resurgence of Oracle at the infrastructure level and the focus on the remaining performance obligation really being a key metric to measure the at least pre-commitments for AI services that are just incredibly significant. You have Oracle over $400 billion booked in terms of those commitments for- largely through an OpenAI deal, Microsoft not too far behind. And so, the disparity between that book of business and actually realizing it. I think one of the other big things that developed through the year was just building the capacity with data centers and energy and physical infrastructure from NVIDIA and everything that’s going on with the chip space to fill that short-term void in terms of getting those services up and available to actually realize hundreds of billions of dollars in booked revenue, that’s the real challenge. So, I think that’s part of what will define the competitive landscape as we go into next year.

Patrick: Yeah, excellent. I know we’ll talk about that in an upcoming episode when we go over year 2026 predictions. Just one quick thought in reading your cloud predictions for last year, or for this year, but that you made last year. I don’t think Oracle was even mentioned. So it was, they really were a surprise contender in the space this year, right?

Allan: Yeah, big surprise. They’ve kind of, it’s been a very, you know, they’re fourth or fifth in terms of the rankings for the hyperscaler landscape, which is way far down. There’s a huge disparity between the top two with Microsoft and AWS and the rest of the market. But this position in AI and some of the other political issues that have seem to be going their way in terms of opportunities for big customers have really changed that. And so, we hear a lot of, I think the verbiage was “the big three plus Oracle.” We’re hearing that more often in terms of the landscape for the infrastructure level.

Prediction check: Did government support increase for 6G development?

Patrick: Yeah, excellent. All right, so AI and politics. All right, so we’re two for two. AI and politics, a good segue back to telecom to talk about R&D and government. And the investment in R&D and the emphasis around R&D, and then also government support for the telecom industry and what’s coming next. Again, something you predicted last year was going to be important. How did that pan out over the course of 2025?

Chris: Yeah, so the industry is still relatively early with 6G R&D, but I’d say we’re about in the, you know, transitioning from the first third to the second third of the focus on the investment and the specifications. But in terms of that journey, we are seeing a lot of government involvement, especially on the DoD side. Some of those areas are helping with the investment, working with the industry, working with academia. There’s other government entities that also are involved. So, there’s funding around. And then in other countries, there’s various government set up entities that are helping with stimulating the market for that technology. I think that the private sector has been talking a little bit about 6G, but it’s been eerily quiet. 

Patrick: Hmm.

Chris: And even on the government side, it’s been pretty quiet from what it was, even just a year or two ago. And I think part of the reason for that is, AI is drowning everything else out.

Patrick: Right. Well, that’s true. I mean, you can’t go 30 minutes in any conversation without talking about AI. I do know we talked in early 2025, Chris, we talked about governments, particularly in Europe, investing more in telco and connectivity overall because of a defense spending surge. Did it happen or is it still- it’s a coming thing?

Chris: So, Europe moves incredibly slow. And what they did actually move quite fast on was getting funding set up. But now comes the hard part. Actually, the funding part is the easy part. The real hard part is orchestrating and building an ecosystem of innovation and real depth to that, not surface level. And Europe has several problems, one is brain drain. They’re losing people. A lot of their best talent comes to America. 

Patrick: Yeah.

Chris: This is just the reality, and there’s various reasons for that. But they need to really figure out how do they build something of lasting value in terms of economic opportunity, and they need regulatory reform. That’s where the hard part comes in. And that part has, they still have a long way to go.

Patrick: Yeah, I had lunch recently, but just by chance with the CTO of a very large connectivity provider that shall go unnamed, because he was very pessimistic about Europe, about just the ability to change and the ability to move at a pace that would reflect the market demand and the market need and all that. So that’s on the commercial side, then you add the government side, it’s probably just another extra layer of that.

Chris: The one interesting thing though just to add, the geopolitical and the security situation in Europe has really stirred people to attention. And it has stirred the pot quite a bit. And so, for example, like 5G and 6G technology can be leveraged for drone detection, drone, you know, like a, you can use the network as like a radar system. 

Patrick: Right.

Chris: ISAC is what it’s called, the acronym for it. These types of technologies, you need to have innovation in 5G, 6G, and they, I mean, even just given some current events that have happened there in Denmark and Estonia

Patrick: Poland.

Chris: And Poland, yeah. I mean, this is very top of mind and you’re starting to see like people really starting to just push forward with things that otherwise would have been just nice ideas, but wouldn’t have actually gone anywhere.

Patrick: Right.

Chris: So, I would say this time it’s a little different for Europe. And the key reason is there’s a security consideration here.

Prediction check: Did cloud market overall growth slow?

Patrick: Right. Right. And I’m curious now, because I hadn’t thought about it in terms of the cloud space, but maybe that’s something we can talk about too, because the last prediction I want to talk about, Allan, that you made was around the overall cloud market showing signs of maturation, most likely visible in the form of gradually slowing growth rates in 2025. So, two  questions then. Were you right that the growth rate gradually slowed in 2025. And then to Chris’s point about a shooting war kind of making people sit up and pay attention, has there been any kind of flow over into the cloud space in Europe because of what’s been happening?

Allan: Yes. So, in terms of the overall market, it was better than I predicted coming into the year. 

Patrick: Okay.

Allan: A lot of that is based on the AI and the GenAI services. If you back that out, it’s probably a slowing growth environment. However, those are real opportunities, and it’s going to be real for quite some time. They’re being realized more over the past couple of quarters at the infrastructure level. There’s still a lot of models and services being piloted at the software as a service level. Agentic really grew in terms of the focus and the belief that that’s how a lot of these are going to come to life in the SaaS solution space over the couple months. So probably a lot more, we would have focused a lot more on Agentic going into the year, but we just don’t know. 

And then in terms of how that manifests in opportunity in heavily regulated European geographies, you know, I still think the market overall is going to the biggest players. It’s being consolidated with- at the very top of the infrastructure, at the software as a service level. And so, there’s been pockets of sovereign players, local providers, but they’re not really capturing market share in a way that creates unique clouds for unique countries. It really is the sovereign build-outs for the large global providers that have come to be how these services are delivered across borders in Europe.

Patrick: Right, yeah, it makes total sense. And to be honest, I’m a little glad you were at least a little bit off on that because I talked to our colleagues, Boz and Angela, and they were three for four, so it’s better to have everybody at three. If you had done better than them, then I’d have some explaining to do.

Allan: Sure, it’s a passing grade.

Patrick: Yeah, yeah, it’s a passing grade, absolutely. 

The predictions process

So, two last questions, one for each of you. Just thinking about predictions, and Chris, you’ve been doing this for a long time. So, 10+ years here at TBR, making predictions every year. I wonder if you could reflect a little bit on the process of making predictions as you come to the end of one year and coming into the next, and sort of how that’s changed over the last few years for you, and how you see that sort of changing going forward.

Chris: Yeah, so I try to look through everything with economic lenses, because the economy is dictating what is actually going to happen. So, let me give you an example. 5G is great. Okay, it’s a great technology. But if you don’t have the business case for it, and if it can’t stand on its own, and if you don’t have the ecosystem of players that are motivated and incentivized to innovate on that technology, it’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen in the way, unless you have government distortion. It’s not going to happen in an organic way, right? You’re talking about the cloud business with Allan here. That’s an organic- it’s its own animal. It morphs on its own, it is self-sustaining, it has very defined use cases, business cases there. But for some of the things that go on in telco, maybe that’s not the case. So, what I try to do is look through an economic lens and then look at telecom through that lens and then start to ask like what kinds of things that are going on in the macro economy, maybe on the micro economy in some aspects. And then how might the telecom industry respond or have different behaviors based on what’s going on in the broader economy? That’s kind of how I try to shape the predictions that I’m making.

Patrick: Are there certain go-to sources for your economic outlook?

Chris: Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, top two. There’s others, but those are the top two.

Patrick: You rely on those two primarily, yeah. Excellent. 

How AI plays into making predictions

And Allan, let’s wrap up with sort of what’s coming next in the process, and that’s you mentioned AI, we mentioned AI, we have to mention AI. Certainly, there’s an opportunity to use tools to do predictions, but in your experience of making predictions, and when you think about what you’re going to do this year, have you factored in how you would or wouldn’t use AI to either help you make your predictions or make the predictions for you, I hate to say it.

Allan: Oh, sure. Yeah. And we’re doing this really across the whole research spectrum is first step is go out and see what everyone can access virtually for free through the AI services, just to get a starting place and to make sure that ours are so much better, more insightful and valuable for our readership and going from there. So, that’s certainly built into the process across the board. But a lot of the predictions are based on- they’re designed for the people that are already consuming our research. So, it’s things that we pick up in conversations and briefings, in interviews with end customers, in alliance and ecosystem conversations. And so, there’s a wrapper that inherently makes it valuable coming from that perspective, going deeper and thinking about things that could change, what the impact would be. I’m really calling out the things that would be most impactful in the market, I think, because you can predict, when you go out to the AI services, there’s a lot of high level, a lot of kind of baseline predictions that really aren’t valuable in and of themselves. It’s got to go 5 steps deeper into the competitive landscape, the ecosystem landscape, wrapped with that financial and economic lens that I think really makes our predictions valuable for readers.

How has the audience you write predictions for changed?

Patrick: Yeah, and for our readers specifically, and I guess maybe one more question for each of you on that. When you think about who you’re writing for, has that changed for you in the last few years? Like who, yes, you’re writing for our clients. All right. But I mean, of our clients, not names of companies, but personas or the kinds of roles that you think you’re writing for, reading these predictions.

Allan: Yeah, I mean, I think the big shift has been that it’s no longer just writing to SAP strategy executives so they can go out and beat Oracle one-to-one in direct competition. It’s much more about how they can work with different partners on the services side, on the now the AI model side, on the channel side, so they can have a more effective value proposition, reach more customers. So, I think that broader perspective where we’re really bringing in the connections between a lot of the core readership about how they can work together is a big difference.

Patrick: Yeah. Chris, what about you? Is there a different set of readers you think you’re writing for now?

Chris: I think it’s pretty much the same. I like to focus on the more strategic things, the big picture things, the things that really impact a broad set of people and things that they should be keeping in mind. And it’s shaping the narrative of what we’re seeing in the market and those trends. And that’s kind of how I’m thinking about it.

Patrick: Right.

Chris: Who I’m writing to is that broader audience.

Patrick: Right. Excellent. Well, thank you guys. We’ll come back in a couple of months and talk about the prediction that you’re making for 2026. And then a year from now, we’ll sit down and hopefully go four for four. So, we’ll see. Excellent. Thanks.

Chris: Thanks.

Allan: Thank you.

Patrick: Next week, I’ll be speaking with Angela Lambert and Boz Hristov for a retrospective on their 2025 predictions. 

Don’t forget to send us your key intelligence questions on business strategy, ecosystems, and management consulting through the form in the show notes below. Visit tbri.com to learn how we help tech companies, large and small, answer these questions with the research, data, and analysis that my guests bring to this conversation every week. 

Once again, I’m your host, Patrick Heffernan, Principal Analyst at TBR. Thanks for joining us and see you next week.

TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe’s Top Tech Firms

Join TBR Principal Analyst Patrick Heffernan weekly for conversations on disruptions in the broader technology ecosystem and answers to key intelligence questions TBR analysts hear from executives and business unit leaders among top IT professional services firms, IT vendors, and telecom vendors and operators.

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Eric Müller of Work & Co meets with “TBR Talks” host Patrick Heffernan to discuss security in the AI age, the importance of curiosity and creativity, and advice for the upcoming generation of talent from his perspective as a seasoned industry professional.

Eric Müller is an Associate Director of Product Engineering at Work & Co, part of Accenture Song. With over 20 years of experience spanning banking, social media, B2B, retail, fashion, and online gaming, he brings deep expertise in both engineering and digital security. Before joining Work & Co, Eric served as VP of Engineering and CISO at Presence, and held key roles at Wells Fargo, Charles Schwab, Razorfish, and Mekanism. He has led award-winning digital initiatives for major brands including Microsoft, Samsung, eBay, and DKNY. Eric is known for his empathetic leadership style and transparent communication, which foster resilient, high-performing teams that deliver without burnout. He also champions strong agency–client collaboration, involving partners early and often to build trust and create better outcomes. Outside of work, Eric is an amateur photographer, baking enthusiast, and passionate advocate for digital security. 

Episode highlights:

• The slow ROI of AI

• Compliance and security in the age of AI

• AI impact on developers

Listen and learn with TBR Talks!

Submit your Key Intelligence Questions for Patrick and his guests

Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn

Learn more about TBR at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tbri.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠

TBR Talks is produced by Technology Business Research, Inc.

Edited by Haley Demers

Music by Burty Sounds via Pixabay

Art by Amanda Hamilton Sy

AI: A Generational Perspective

TBR Talks Host Patrick Heffernan: Welcome to TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe’s Top Tech Firms, where we talk business model disruption in the broad technology ecosystem from management consultancies to systems integrators, hyperscalers to independent software vendors, telecom operators to network and infrastructure vendors, and chip manufacturers to value-added resellers. We’ll be answering some of the key intelligence questions we’ve heard from executives and business unit leaders among the leading professional IT services and telecom vendors. 

I’m Patrick Heffernan, Principal Analyst, and today we’ll be talking about AI and generational trends in technology with Eric Müller, Product Engineering Associate Director at Work & Co, part of Accenture Song. 

Photography and architecture to technology

All right, we’ll jump in. So, Eric, thank you very much for joining TBR Talks. Really appreciate it, and looking forward to this chat so much. Why don’t you just give us a sense, not only what you’re doing now, but your background. What brought you to the point that you are right now in your career?

Eric Müller, Product Engineering Associate Director at Work & Co: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me, by the way. I’ve been doing this for a while, and my background actually was not in computers. I started off, well let me take a step back, you know, I did get involved with computers as a kid, as a teenager. My dad had built a computer that my mom was basically using as an overpowered word processor for her doctoral dissertation. And of course, I started playing with it and I guess we’re lucky I didn’t destroy her dissertation. And, you know, when I got to college, this was in the 80s. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do, I studied photography for a little bit, I studied architecture for a little bit. I ended up working at Wells Fargo Bank, but I fell back into technology, the love was there, I missed it. And the timing was, you know, I was very lucky. It was the late 80s, and the internet was sort of like this nascent thing. And by the early 1990s, of course, the web was blowing up. 

And so, while I was at Wells Fargo, I became a developer there, started doing some web work, started contracting and bouncing around between agencies. So, I was a consultant, I worked for companies like, you know, Charles Schwab, Wells Fargo, did a brief stint at Netscape. And, you know, along the way, I just kind of kept building up these development skills and really kind of fell in love with the agency space. I think the fact that I enjoyed photography and architecture earlier in my life, and I still do photography as my primary hobby, really kind of informed where I wanted to move with technology. So, I ended up at Razorfish for a while, Edelman for a little bit, and about 13 years ago landed at a company called Presence. So, I ended up being the Head of Technology and our CISO. What we did is we partnered with design companies to build out, you know, what they had been working on, their designs. I always like to say that we realize people’s dreams as a technologist. And so along the way, Presence was acquired by Work & Co, a great design firm, strategy, technology, product development, who was also ultimately acquired by Accenture, although we are still an independent brand. And that’s how I got to where I am today.

Being curious and continuing to take on new challenges

Patrick: It’s fascinating. So, you’ve had the opportunity to work in so many different organizations, different structures within the technology space. So, I think of an agency, I think of an Accenture, I think of a bank as being just organizationally, functionally so different. Was there a certain appeal to someplace like Razorfish where it was an agency?

Eric: Yeah, you know, it’s interesting. When I look back, there are two things. One is obviously the ability to be creative. And so, I’m building stuff out, but while I’m doing that, or my team is building this stuff out, we’re also working with the creative team, and so there’s a lot of back and forth, and we bring our understanding of user experience and design as technologists and as end users to those conversations, and I’ve always worked in places that appreciated that kind of feedback. And the other thing that I really like about agencies, and I do include a company like Accenture in that, is that we are exposed to different things all the time, right? So, I have an opportunity to work with, you know, over my career, I’ve worked with small startups, I’ve worked with Fortune 100 companies. I’ve worked on hardware, software, mobile experiences, and, you know, I might work on a project for a year or two and it’s wonderful because I’m learning about new technology. I’m learning about a new business. And I dive in very deep into that space. And so, it’s just this constant, it’s like I have a new job every couple of years, but I’m not changing my employer, right? And so, working in places that appreciate that and give me that space, it’s been just incredibly fulfilling.

Patrick: And I would say in all of our research, I think a lot of the folks I speak with who enjoy what they do and they’re still with the same company are often the ones that describe exactly what- have the same experience you had, which is every couple of years they bounce around to something new, something challenging. It’s like- it’s maybe the best way to keep the best talent is to continually give them something new to do and make them challenge themselves to do it well.

Eric: Yeah, and you know, all of the companies I’ve worked at, and I think, you know, I think about Presence and Work & Co in particular, my last, you know, two companies, they really encourage learning, right? I think companies that are successful recognize that no matter how experienced a person is, that there’s always something new to learn, and they encourage that exploration. I didn’t start off in security, as an example, but when I got the Presence, you know, I realized that we had a need with our clients to really understand the security space. And so, although I’d done a little bit of work with that when I was at Charles Schwab and at Razorfish, I really dove in deep at presence, became our CISO, we got our SOC 2 compliance, and then I started consulting with our clients to help them get their SOC 2s or their ISO 27001s. And then that’s been very helpful when AI became the thing, right? And I’m talking not, you know, not just classic machine learning or data analytics but, you know, LLMs that people are talking about now. There’s a lot to learn there, and being able to go into a new field or a new technology and have that curiosity, I think, has really benefited me.

Patrick: Yeah. And you bring not only the curiosity, but also the experience. I mean, you mentioned Netscape earlier, not a whole lot of people that are, you know, that are mid-career right now would remember that, ’cause, you know, I’ll confess, Eric, you and I are both older here, but I think that experience too is important to have grown up at the early ages of technology in this sense.

Eric: Yeah, absolutely, and I find it fascinating that people talk about, I’ll lean into the age thing. You know, people talk about digital natives, and I think people miss the fact that a lot of folks our age, we actually grew up, like we were the first generation to have video games. We were the first generations to start using computers at work and we had to dive in and understand it. It wasn’t like an iPhone or an iPad, we had to really understand the operating systems.

Patrick: Right, and had to understand the change that came with being able to adopt a technology. 

The slow ROI of AI

And actually, that’s a good segue into AI. I wanted to talk about AI a little bit, in part because sort of everybody talks about AI all the time now. It’s the biggest topic. But there’s a couple questions that sort of- that kind of come to mind, particularly knowing your background, knowing what you’re doing now, and especially your background on the agency and the consulting side. There has been a ton of investment in AI, and there’s lots of really cool stories about enterprises adopting this or that, you know, particular piece of AI, particular solution. And there’s a lot of revenue for consultancies, but there hasn’t been that much ROI for the enterprises. In your opinion, and again, this gets back to your experience, your long experience in technology. Is it surprising that there hasn’t been that return on investment right away with AI? Should we have expected it to be slow? Should we have expected faster adoption? I’m just curious, like you’re thinking around all the money that’s being poured in, not a lot of ROI coming out. Does that make sense? Or did we sort of, was the expectation that adoption would be faster and ROI would be quicker, was that just a missed expectation?

Eric: You know, it’s interesting because I, yeah, I’m not that surprised. I think that with any new technology, people need to figure out how to use it. And then- so that can take a little bit of time. I think it’s unfortunate that we are spending so much money on it. I don’t think we need all these companies dumping that much money into this space. And I think there’s some missed opportunities because of that. And I think that there are some really strong use cases that I’ve seen. I mean, full disclosure, I will use an LLM when I’m writing some scripts, right? I’m not a full-time programmer anymore, but I still want to automate some stuff. So, I’ll go ahead and I’ll open up an LLM, and I’ll use it to crank out some Python scripts. And I know some great developers who are using it as a very powerful tool that accelerates their process. I know some folks who use it, I think it can be a very powerful tool if you’re, I don’t know, having to do a little bit of writing. It can be a tool to kind of support that effort. I think the problem is, is that people, for some folks, they think of it as not a tool, but as a replacement, and I don’t think that will be successful in the long run. 

I think that, you know, creativity is a human endeavor, right? An LLM is not creative. It is derivative. It generates the synthetic content. I think that’s all powerful, I think that’s a useful tool, but true creativity, true intuition, that’s a human endeavor, and I don’t think that’s ever going to be replicated by a machine. And I think the idea that we can remove humans from this process is bound to fail. And so, I’m really bothered in this space because I feel like there’s some folks who feel like, you know, they’re on the hype train and they think these AI tools are gonna come along and if we’re not careful, we’re gonna get Skynet, we’re all gonna die, right? That’s not gonna happen. I don’t buy that for a second. I also, I’m really bummed out by people who sit down and say, these tools are worthless and you know, why are we bothering with them? I don’t think that’s true either. I think the middle ground is true, that they’re very powerful tools if they’re used properly and that’s all they are, they’re support. And we shouldn’t think of them as anything more than that.

Compliance and security in the age of AI

Patrick: Yeah, I love how you brought up creativity, because I think the two things that we look at when we say, okay, there will always need to be a human in the loop, to use a very overused phrase, but still it’s the two C’s: creativity and compliance. And I’m really interested in your thoughts on the compliance part of it, because when we think about how much AI can take over running a system, and now I’m thinking more agentic AI, but running within an enterprise and be able to remain compliant and be able to meet all the regulations. That’s all well and good, but at the end of the day, when something goes wrong and something always eventually does, you’re not going to sue the robot. You need to sue a human. You need to, you know, the legal action that comes in goes after a human being. So, with your experience in security, do you think that compliance is sort of always going to be certainly accelerated by and certainly assisted by agentic AI and AI broadly, but always going to have to have that human in the loop?

Eric: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s interesting, so my first pitch here is everyone should go and read the OWASP top 10 on AI. You know, that’s the Open Web Application Security Project, and they’ve always had this top 10, a list of security vulnerabilities for general web application development. And now they have one very focused on agentic AI, and so, I think it’s a wonderful place for people to look at. So, I think that AI tools, having said that, is both the cause and the cure for a lot of security problems. So, starting with secure space, I love, you know, the fact that we can use these tools and going beyond LLMs, right? Going back into classic machine learning, data analytics, sentiment analysis, all those kinds of things, right? They’re very, very powerful tools when you are, if you’re running a SOC as an example, right? And you have to deal with, you know, hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands or millions of potential alerts, right? Having an AI tool there looking for those patterns, those potential attacks against your space, it’s just amazing, right? It takes over or enhances human experience, right? So, it looks for these patterns, it looks for potential attacks, as an example, that can then be analyzed by a human, right? So, I think that’s an excellent example of how AI tools can be incredibly powerful support tools for us in the security space. 

On the other hand, I think that these AI tools, particularly the LLMs, have a lot of security vulnerabilities. So that’s the OWASP top 10. And like any other tool, we need to make sure they are secured. And I think, unfortunately, not enough companies, not enough people are thinking about the risks of, you know, as an example, giving an agent complete control over your local computer, right? 

Patrick: Right.

Eric: There is a massive risk there. What kind of data do you have on your computer? And do you know what that agent is truly doing? Is it exfiltrating data right now? You know, is it reading your emails? Is it pulling up your bank statements? And so, I think people need to be as skeptical of AI agents as they would be of a human, right? Would you ask a random person that you really haven’t vetted into your space and give them complete control over your GitHub, over your databases, the ability to deploy whatever they want into your AWS account? You wouldn’t do that with a human. Why would you do that with an agent? 

Patrick: Right, right. And that’s, I mean, that’s the whole, the trust factor that is just- every single time the hype cycle gears up into a new higher speed around AI, the trust factor goes in the other direction. People are just uncomfortable with exactly the way you just described it. Why would you hand over the keys to your IT environment, to an agent that you haven’t actually trusted, vetted, and ensure that it’s not going to do something harmful?

Eric: Yeah, absolutely. And again, it’s not like the tools should be ignored and they shouldn’t be used, far from it. It’s just we need to be very thoughtful about the way they’re being used.

Patrick: Yeah, yeah, totally agree. 

AI isn’t going to get rid of developers

I want to sort of take a step back and like you, again, I keep referring to how long you’ve been in the business, but I think it’s important because you’ve got that longevity, that longitudinal perspective. And I’m wondering if there’s been a change, a development in the technology space that you kind of expected that didn’t happen. I mean, flying cars is the one that everybody, you know, always taps into or mentions, but forget about flying cars for a minute, something more grounded, something that’s more like, maybe even just in the last year, things that haven’t developed the way you thought would happen, or maybe the opposite, like something like, okay, we’re a lot further along with this technology development than I thought we’d be in 2025.

Eric: That’s an interesting question. You know, a long time ago, I stopped making predictions. *laughs*

Patrick: *laughs*

Eric: That’s part of the problem. I, you know, I- gosh, I really don’t know. I mean, there’s so many of these, so many trends that have come and gone, right? I’m thinking about as long as I have been in this industry, there has always been this idea that we can get rid of developers, right? So, I’m thinking all the way back, remember when 4GL languages were kind of the thing that, you know, you could drag and drop components around and your application would work. And now “what do we need these developers for,” right? 

Patrick: Right.

Eric: It’s interesting. That is a trend that I have always been skeptical about. Maybe that’s the better way to describe it, I’ve always been skeptical of this idea that we can get rid of developers, that everything can be done through drag and drop or, you know, talking to an LLM, like vibe coding or whatever. 

Patrick: Right.

Eric: And so, I’m not surprised that people have not been able to eliminate the developers. I know I’m not answering your question, but that is one trend that I have been seeing for the last 30 years, is how do we get rid of technologists and it still hasn’t happened and I’m really skeptical that it’s ever going to happen.

Getting to the higher value tasks

Patrick: So, I think it’s really important the way you frame that because it’s easier to look at the things that didn’t happen that you thought they would or things that happened quicker than you thought they would. It’s a lot harder to think about all the different expectations and predictions that sort of have flatlined or have sort of not panned out despite all of the investment and effort that people have put into it. And, you know, I think about like, when we look at companies and they tell us that through automation, RPA, artificial intelligence, agentic AI, whatever, they’re going to have such productivity gains that their people are going to be able to do higher value tasks. I always ask the same thing, which is like, why aren’t those people doing those higher value tasks now? What is stopping you? Why are you not? And that has been a drumbeat for, I don’t know, a couple decades now, where the expectation is that the technology will allow for people to do higher value tasks. And yet, those higher value tasks remain elusive. And that’s not a, I mean, that’s not a trend so much as it’s just a constant that, curiously enough, has not been resolved. Maybe it will be. Maybe we’re on the cusp of that with agentic AI and all. We’ll see. We’ll see.

Eric: Well, I do think we are seeing a little bit of that. And in some ways, I think, you know, I’m being biased here from a technology standpoint, I think we have seen that over the years. In that, as we develop more higher-level languages, that it becomes easier in some ways for folks to kind of get their job done. They’re not worried about like memory management as the classic example, right? And so that allows them to focus more on functionality, and I think, what’s interesting to me with a lot of the agentic tools, particularly in the development space, is that you can offload a lot of the basic stuff, you know, setting frameworks, you know, maybe unit tests, you know, boilerplate code. You can offload that to these tools and then your developers can focus on the core of your business. Right. 

Patrick: Right.

Eric: So, I think that in a lot of ways, that’s kind of leaning into that where your developers- you’re getting more value out of your developers, not because they’re necessarily cranking more code. And I’m always bummed out when people sit down and say, you know, I forget who said this recently, but they’re like, I’m doing 10,000 lines of code a day, you know, using agentic AI. I’m like, whatever, who cares? What problems are you solving? What is your business doing? How is it growing? I don’t care about number of lines of code. I’m concerned about functionality. I’m concerned about user interfaces. I’m concerned about your core business. And if you’re offloading a ton of that boilerplate to the AI, now your developers are working on that higher level stuff. They’re focused on the core of your business, and they’re delivering that higher level value.

Patrick: And that gets exactly back to what you said at the very beginning, that you sort of were, I’m going to paraphrase this because I can’t remember exactly the way you said it, but something to the effect of you help people realize their technology dreams. And that’s- if you’re thinking about lines of code, you’re not thinking about dreams. If you’re not thinking- but if you are thinking about why is this good for the business, what’s the business value in bringing, then you’re actually beginning to realize what you’re trying to go after, right?

Eric: Right, right. I mean, it’s the classic line that developers use, which is the best line of code is the one you don’t write. And so, you know, focus- I’m going to repeat myself, but again, it’s like, offload the boilerplate, offload the drudge work, focus on the core business value, and you’re going to have a lot of, you’ll have a successful company, and you’re going to have a lot of happy technologists as well. They’re doing work that’s meaningful.

Patrick: Right, yeah, and that’s what we all want. 

Finding a passion outside of the workplace

A couple more questions, Eric, this has been really fantastic. I’ve enjoyed this conversation immensely. I do- I’m curious because you mentioned at the beginning that you studied architecture and photography and you still bring those perspectives with you to everything you’ve done in your career. Does that make you, have you ever thought sort of, all right, what would I be advising people in their, you know, early 20s or even late teens heading into college, what should they be studying if they want to have a career that’s similar to the one you’ve had? Or what should people study if they want to go into technology other than, of course, technology?

Eric: I’ve always felt, so obviously technology, but I’ve always felt that it’s important to have a passion outside of technology. You know, I’ve always hated the phrase, if you do something you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. And it’s like, no, that’s BS. The moment that you’re sitting down and your passion becomes the thing that you need to do to put food on the table and a roof over your head, you have a different relationship with it. Because you, you know, with a passion project, you can put it down for three months, who cares, right? You can’t do that with work. And so, I think it’s important to have something outside of your career that can re-energize you. Now, it can be related to technology, if you’re a technologist and you want to have a side project, do that. Absolutely do that. But you need to carve out the space for that. But it doesn’t have to be a side project in technology. You can be into photography. I’ve had friends who play an instrument. I know technologists who love to cook. And, you know, the interesting thing about all these things, particularly with cooking and baking is there’s still this geeky kind of component with it, right? 

Patrick: True. 

Eric: You know, guitar playing can have that, photography can have that. You can kind of see how these side creative passions still lean into, you know, mathematics or, you know, formulas or, you know, kind of doing things step by step. They’re very related and for me, photography, to make it very personal, that recharges my energy over the weekend. I go out, I take some pictures. I’m not writing code. I’m not thinking about technology per se, but I’m leaning into the stuff that made me fall in love with technology in the first place. So, I come back Monday morning, I’ve got the energy back. And so, I think for a junior developer, having that kind of weekend recharge tool or passion, I think is really, really important.

Patrick: Yeah, absolutely. I agree 100%. I’ve always believed you have to have a going to work life and a non-work life. You have to have those things that you love that are not what you’re doing every day at work. 

Change management for developers around agentic AI

I want to ask to bring it back to what you’re working on, speaking of work, what you’re working on right now. I’m just curious, to sort of frame up like what are, what’s something that you’re working on now with the company you’re with that sort of has, this might be a strange question, but kind of has you puzzled? And I mean that in a good way. Like it’s a thorny thing that you’re trying to figure out now. And I’ll give you an example. We’re looking at how AI is changing the labor pyramid within IT services companies and consultancies. So, like, how is AI going to change those 800,000 people and that pyramid? And we’re trying to figure out when AI changes the size of the average consulting team, maybe it just expands their capabilities and adds digital full-time employees, whatever. We thought we would see this change by now. We would see more obelisks and fewer pyramids, but we’re seeing the opposite. Companies are actually hiring. So, we’re sort of puzzled about why that’s happening. And I’m not asking you about that. I’m just saying, is there something you’re working on sort of day-to-day that has you kind of asking, why is this happening right now? What’s going on?

Eric: So, I can’t answer that. *laughs* This is probably one we’re gonna cut out, because for NDA reasons and all that, I just really don’t speak about what I’m doing right now.

Patrick: Oh yeah, all right, I understand. Yeah, that’s fine.

Eric: Yeah, looking at it, I can look at it from- I can speak philosophically around that. I think that it’s interesting to me from talking with folks in other companies, with some of my colleagues, that there’s this idea within technology that when we have a new technology that comes along in theory, people are going to lose their jobs, right? And we’ve seen that forever. You know, the classic is the, you know, the buggy whip manufacturer, right? 

Patrick: Yep.

Eric: And I think that in this space right now, from talking with other folks and from what I’ve read, you know, we’re learning that, you know, the dream was that, and I don’t think this is a good dream. Unfortunately, a lot of companies kind of felt like- here’s a great example. I had a friend who said that when all the agentic AI stuff came out, he’s talking to his board of directors and the board said, great, when can we fire all of our developers? Right. Like, there’s this idea that we can fire everyone and our profitability will go up and look at how smart we are. And a lot of companies did that. And then they learned, hey, hallucinations are never going to go away. Like, that’s how LLMs work. You need hallucinations, right? And LLMs can’t create something from scratch, right? They’re always derivative. And so, they kind of made those choices, they realized they made mistakes, and now they’re bringing people back. They need those senior folks back who understand their core business, who understand how to make these tools work. And that’s, I think, the adjustment that we’re seeing right now.

There’s also the cost, right? You know, the AI companies need to turn a profit, and they’re starting to change their price pressure. And so, companies are starting to sit down and look at it and go, you know, for the quality of the work that we’re getting, you know, do we keep dumping money into it? In some instances, absolutely, it makes sense. It’s a great tool that’s supporting them. In other instances, I think companies are kind of rethinking it. And I think we’re still in this space where folks are trying to figure out, one, for the AI companies, how do they turn a profit? And then I think, you know, how do they turn a profit and how do they price this at a level that is profitable? And then for the companies that are using those tools, it’s like, what is the proper use case for it? And what is the team that we need to surround to make it successful?

Patrick: Right, and that is the, well that’s the sweet spot for consultancies to talk about change management. But that is the biggest challenge, I think, going forward for enterprises is it’s not necessarily the adoption of the technology, it’s the adoption within the enterprise, within the organization, what it’s actually going to mean to the structure of the organization and achieving those actual business outcomes from AI, not just the promise, the actual outcome.

Eric: Yeah.

Skills to pursue 

Patrick: Yeah. All right, so I lied. I have one last- I’ll call it a last, last question, but it really, it’s just because I’m really, given your background in photography and architecture and that you still do photography, I have to ask this. So, and we were talking about, you just mentioned, like, when can we get rid of all the developers? We talk about AI replacing people in jobs, that running fear. But we also talk about sort of the importance of skills, of mastering something so good that AI could never replace you, right? So, and just thinking like about skills like that, is there any skill, if you could say, all right, I’m taking three months off of work, I’m just going to perfect this particular skill, like playing, you know, you mentioned your friends have played guitar or maybe speak 4 languages or even turn yourself invisible. What’s a skill that you would say, okay, I’m going to spend 3 months and I’m going to master this?

Eric: Well, it depends, right? So, are we talking about reality of AI?

Patrick: No, there’s no reason to stay within the realm of reality. We can be creative here.

Eric: Well, I ask that because, I mean, if the dream is that AI can do everyone’s job. And if that is true, then there’s no skill you can pick up. If AI can replace us, if it truly is capable of replacing us, then there’s no skill you can pick up that’s going to make you valuable in the future. They’re just isn’t. But I don’t think that’s reality. I think that the cost alone, you know, the energy cost, the compute cost, all of that would be just too high to replace everyone’s job. And so, I think it’s going to be a little rough while people are trying to figure out how we use these tools, how we incorporate them, like I said, how the companies become profitable. And so, I would say, continue to follow your passion. right? If you love technology, continue to do technology. If you love medicine, keep doing medicine. If you want to do the trades, right? If you want to be an electrician or a plumber, continue to do that. And I think this will all shake out. It is going to, unfortunately, it’s going to be kind of difficult. And we’re kind of seeing that some jobs are harder to fill right now because the perception is that AI is taking it over.

Patrick: Right.

Eric: But I just don’t think that’s sustainable. I just don’t think in the long term the costs are going to justify basically replacing every human being in every company. It’s just not going to happen.

Final thoughts

Patrick: Yeah. So, listen, we’ve touched on so much stuff here. I know you said you don’t make predictions anymore, but I would like to predict that we can get together in six months and have a second round of this discussion, and we could probably expand on a lot of the different topics that you brought up and the different trends that we’re seeing, and we just- you just mentioned energy that’s definitely something I think is going to be a constraint as we go forward around AI. So, I think that would be, I’d love to have this conversation again sometime in the spring, Eric, and talk about what we see that’s different now, six months from now.

Eric: Yeah, absolutely. I’d love to see how absolutely wrong I was. *laughs*

Patrick: *laughs* I’ve been wrong so many times and it doesn’t bother me at all anymore. So, Eric, thank you so much for coming on. This has been really fantastic. I appreciate your time. Appreciate your insights.

Eric: My pleasure. Thank you very much.

Patrick: Next week I’ll be speaking with Dan Demers about managing strategic alliances and ecosystem partnerships. Don’t forget to send us your key intelligence questions on business strategy, ecosystems, and management consulting through the form in the show notes below. Visit tbri.com to learn how we help tech companies, large and small, answer these questions with the research, data, and analysis my guests bring to this conversation every week. 

Once again, I’m your host, Patrick Heffernan, Principal Analyst at TBR. Thanks for joining us and see you next week.

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