All Episodes

August 13, 2024 16 mins
In this episode, we talk to Benjamin Bowman, a technologist and the founder of StratiShield AI, about the evolving role of AI in business. We explore the duality of technology—the good and the bad—and discuss how AI can free up human creativity by taking over mundane tasks. Benjamin shares insights on the importance of emotional intelligence in the tech world and the potential future of AI in our daily lives. We also dive into the ethical considerations of AI and its impact on decision-making at the executive level.
Mark as Played
Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to Tectastic, where we navigate theintersection of technology and business,
uncovering innovations that redefine our world.
Benjamin Bowman of Scratchield AI.
Welcome to it's fantastic.
It's lovely to have you here.
Awesome.
Thanks, Christian.
I'm excited to be on.
I really wanna get into what you're doing, andwe were talking in the preamble just briefly

(00:23):
here about that pause a view of technology, andwe're both in technology.
And why the heck would we be building thisstuff if we didn't believe we could make the
world better by doing so.
And you've got your own podcast.
You've got your own show, and you had a gueston recently that went down deep into the
darkness.
And, I regularly get that too.
And, you know, I think most people that aredrawn towards entrepreneurship and especially

(00:46):
the technology side are hyper intelligentpeople.
We are you know, we're well versed in theeverything going on.
We try to stay in the form.
I know there's been studies about this, but,like, intelligence tends to be the pest because
you could see all the darkness.
Yeah.
And finding your way through that has been thecourse of my life.
It's, I'll find myself in that depth despair.
And then I'll find an opportunity in it, andI'll bring that right back up and become

(01:08):
optimized again.
And that's where my current company started.
Was it a depth despair.
Love it.
But I wanna hear your journey, and I I imaginethere's a similar story there with StrataShield
AI.
Yeah.
You know, it's interesting.
Even as you talk about being positive, and Ithink as an entrepreneur, you have to be almost
blindly optimistic sometimes.
About what you're doing, right, and just thisstrong belief of positivity.

(01:32):
And then you get into technology, and this isanother interesting thing.
And I talk about this.
We, you know, we talked about the duality ofman.
And the good and the evil.
And technology is very similar.
And let's take cell phones.
For example, cell phones are such a greattechnology because I can connect to people get
ahold of my family.
I can talk, text, do all these things, hop onthe internet, connect to my business.

(01:53):
But then I'm also always connected.
Always connected to the world.
I'm never getting away.
I'm always connected to the internet.
And so there is it's a it is a fun andinteresting duality when you talk about the
good and the positive what I do see is thatI'll take the positives of technology, I'd say
99% of the time, and I'm sure there's sometechnologies we can do without.

(02:13):
But 99 a percent of the time.
I'll take the positives, and the positive seemsto over weigh the negative.
And that just seems to be you know, the ebb andflow of technology.
But with my business, it was interesting.
I've been a technologist for over 20 years.
Always in, like, I I've been an IT director,led a led an IT team for an international

(02:34):
printing company.
I got into sells for a bit because I thought II saw the sales people were having all the fun.
I was like, wait.
I'm I'm doing this.
I wanna have more fun.
So I got into sales for a bit and really, Ifeel like a well rounded approach of this being
able to talk about technology, but also notbeing able to having to get into the weeds like
a lot of the engineers.
And I and that really developed a passion forme of helping people understand technology.

(02:59):
And you talked about the IQ, and I've beenaround some heavily IQ people in this industry
that are just so smart.
Just talking circles around me, but I'm seeinga need for EQ.
Oh, yeah.
Like, emotional intelligence now, especially inbusiness and especially in engineering and
technology.
And that's what I'm really trying to bringabout.
And even with my business with StrataShield AI,what I'm trying to do is I'm not trying to

(03:22):
uncover one basic piece of AI and b, just thisone specialist.
What I wanna do is I wanna help companiesunderstand how AI actually fits into their
business.
And who can you relevantly use as an AIprovider in your business that is going to make
a change, create an ROI, and all the thingsthat matter to an executive?
My strong belief is that ai and humanity arebetter together.

(03:46):
And hue humans are better with ai, and ai isdefinitely better with with humanity.
And you talk about programmers, you talk aboutworkers, and you're not replacing them.
What you're doing is you're getting rid oftheir tedious task, you know, that they have to
do.
And I know I've programmed and the tediousnessof organization and sometimes even getting

(04:06):
things right and breaking one thing of code.
And if I can eliminate that, but I can focus onthe creativity of the program.
And like you said, I can focus on how does itimpact the business?
What are the KPIs I'm trying to accomplish?
What am I trying to do for the business?
And I remember when I was an IT director, Ireported directly to the CEO, and he brought me
in.
And I was actually I ran IT team because$20,000,000 company.

(04:29):
Right?
That was a smaller company.
Yeah.
And he's like, I don't really care how easyyour job is.
I care about how easy you make everyone else'sjob.
Right.
And Yeah.
This is my thought with AI too.
Right?
Like, I that's the beauty of AI.
AI doesn't have the emotion of my job sodifficult or whatever.
I wanna utilize AI to give time back to theemployee.

(04:50):
And I hope someday that we're not just talkingabout giving time back to the employee to work
more hours and do more work.
Yeah.
I'm hoping it's for self care, self healing,this emotional intelligence, the psychological
aspect of work that able to give the employeemore time with their family, more time to
recover, more time to think, more time to getcreative, and all these positive things that we

(05:11):
need to do.
That's how we should be using Right?
Amen.
I mean, like, seriously, the, the tyranny oftechnology that we've actually put on ourselves
that you talked about the cell phone earlierAnd I've always thought of that as a digital
leash.
Yeah.
I am most productive personally when I am offthe technology, when I'm out in nature, and I'm
I am allowed to think clearly without all thedistractions.

(05:33):
And I think most people are, our head ofproduct says that he's got a magic lawnmower.
He's got a writing lawnmower.
And all his best ideas come when he's on hislawnmower.
I'm like, then get out of the lawnmower.
Get off the computer.
Go.
Get out of nature.
Absolutely.
Get out there and do it.
Yeah.
I think that's another thing that's interestingabout AI is because the dominant paradigm of

(05:54):
our lives, your career, my career has beensitting in front of those monitors, right, is a
keyboard in front of a monitor.
And that's because our principal way of gettinginformation and passing it around is through
these screens in software.
And then the web came out and Google and but itwas still trapped in that screen.
And then we got, you know, mobile compute.
We're tracking a new screen that we can takewith us.

(06:17):
Right.
And then social media, and we're trapped in asocial screen outside of work.
That's right.
But as we move towards chat and boys, I thinkthe the tyranny of that technology, that
monitor the terminal that you're sitting infront of becomes far less important because I
don't have Skype.
Yep.
I can talk, and that is gonna allow us to,like, move the office to wherever you are.
And and quite literally, I can be in meetingswhile I'm walking, which I started to do with

(06:40):
the phone already.
But I still had to send people an email.
I still had to, you know, write up notes aboutthe meeting or I put together a PowerPoint
slide so people would see it.
But we're at a point now where you don't haveto do any of that anymore.
Every meeting I have, I have an AI assistantthat's transcribing it.
That's doing a better job than I ever did.
Right.
Right.
Ever.
Yeah.

(07:01):
Yeah.
And another, you know, you got me thinking now,you know, this automation and where we're gonna
go with AI and tech and even getting more timeback.
But right now, AI is like arguing aboutwhether, ventriloquist puppet is really
speaking or else if it's the ventriloquistspeaking through the pump.
Right?
That's kinda like how we are with AI right now.
But eventually, when AI starts being able tomake more conscious, and I I don't even like

(07:27):
decisions because I think that's a dangerousgame to play to open up AI to conscious
decisions yet, and maybe it'll get there, butconscious recommendations and can start
consciously manipulating schedules Right.
Accepting appointments having base leveltedious conversations, especially from a C
suite.
I mean, imagine if you could have your AI talkto sales reps
Oh, man.

(07:47):
How wonderful that would be.
When we get to that point, yeah, okay.
Yeah.
I I've seen that device.
And so how is it?
It does it deliver, or is it the beginning.
And I can't remember the device name, but Iread an article about it 2 months ago.
Yeah.
The Does
it deliver what exactly what we're talkingabout.
The Radinar 1.
Now, there are some things that I think thatare absolutely amazing about this thing.

(08:09):
Yeah.
And, I did a lot of travel in the last 20 yearsbecause of work and then going into countries
where, you know, I speak a couple languages,but I don't speak all of them.
And, you know, just getting around in anairport in China, I speak Mandarin.
Yeah.
It was difficult.
Whereas with this, I would have no trouble atall.
I just would've held it up.
It would've translated it instantly for me.
Same thing with person going over the telecomin the airport saying, Hey, your flight's gonna

(08:32):
be 5 minutes early get in line.
Like, this would have saved me so muchheartache and things like that.
Yeah.
The integrations they have aren't enough yet.
Like, they, they really need to get into, like,get into my outlook calendar, like, manage that
for me, get into travelocity or Expedia or someway that I could actually book trips because
today it's limited to, like, Uber, DoorDash,Like, there's only a few real integrations they

(08:56):
have, but for those, it's pretty damn cool tobe able to just say, do this and it does it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And we gotta start somewhere, and you cancompare that device to the blackberry.
Almost even though there's not the hype aroundit yet, but remember the blackberry with cell
phones, It finally got us using the cell phonebecause we could answer emails.
We could do more stuff on it.
Now if you compare a cell phone to what ablackberry is, the blackberry is not even a

(09:18):
drop in compared to what we're doing with thecell phone, but I kinda see similarities with
that.
We've gotta start somewhere.
Yeah.
And then the advancement will eventually, andother people coming in will take care of it.
Do you see that same?
I I do.
I this is a $299 device.
You know, what's what's my iPhone?
Like, 1200 bucks or something?
And, like, yeah.
Now, the iPhone has a lot more capabilities insome sense.
And if, like, Siri became the thing it wasalways meant to be, then on this device becomes

(09:42):
pointless, other than the price point.
But, yeah, I agree.
Like, getting the first step there and findingout what people engage with and what we really
want.
Right?
For me, I need a personal assistant.
Like, I we're talking about this before theshow.
Right?
Well, I've got producer for the show because Ican't do it.
I don't have the time of my day to do it.
And now I need one for the video side of thesame thing.
Yep.
Right?

(10:03):
I also need somebody to manage my calendarbecause of the amount of fresher and, like,
there's so many people that want theinformation I have or want times with me, which
I need to give them, but I don't have that manyhours in the day.
So how do I manage that, and end up taking timeaway from doing that to manage it?
So having a tool that did that, like, Calendly,it's kind of a drop in that direction too.

(10:24):
Right?
It's the first step towards that.
Yeah.
Just more automation would be nice.
Now what about this, though?
So you get, Elon Musk and his his neuroling.
And you just this language thing always isfascinating.
And I would answer yes to this.
So I'm just saying this isn't a trick question,but if you could put Chip in your head and
speak any language in the world.
Oh, yeah.
I do.
Have access to data.
And I know that's his big picture goal landingon Mars.

(10:46):
There's a lot of adventure stuff, but I don'tknow.
Do you think eventually get to where that'sthis is, like, just embedded in us?
Or that is a slippery slope too.
I know.
Yeah.
I I don't know.
I I'm a little torn on that, and and it andit's comes down to the acknowledgement power,
then whoever controls our access to informationcontrols everything.
Yeah.
And if you've got some device in your head thatis going through somebody else's objectives,

(11:11):
whatever they are,
Mhmm.
That's what you're gonna know.
They have all the power over you.
100%.
I don't trust any individual or any corporationto have all that power.
Yeah.
And I think we have enough knowledge.
You and I with our tech background incybersecurity to also understand that am I
really gonna open up myself to be Right.
Literally act,

(11:32):
especially your brain.
Right?
I mean, it's like Right.
What would a denial of service attack do toyour brain?
Oh my god.
Well, hopefully, it's limited to onlyinteracting with cerebral cortex or the
language center or something like that.
But, yeah, no.
Right.
Oh my gosh.
It's just a just weird thought there.
Going back to the good or bad thing, one of themetaphors I always use is fire.

(11:52):
Right?
I can heat my home.
I can cook my food.
And most people, that's what they would usefire for when fire is first discovered.
But I can also burn down your village.
And AI, any any technology has those same tradeoffs.
Every technology does.
Everything that we create has positives andnegatives it can be used for.
But the preponderance of human beings are goingto use it for the positive thing.

(12:13):
Yeah.
We
just have to protect against the nefariousactors And they're often easy to find because
they say it out loud.
Yep.
Absolutely.
And, you know, it it's interesting that as welook at the way AI can be used and AI's been
used with us.
I mean, you could even say against us in insome ways for years.

(12:35):
And if you talk about social media andadvertising, everything like that.
Like you said, that's it's been using machinelearning, which is within the framework of AI
for probably 5 years to a decade now A longtime.
To specifically target ads to us and target,the way we browse and the way we look.
It's funny because you talk about I'm overallpositive because I'm one of those people that
love when a good ad pops up because I've beengoogling something like, yes.

(12:59):
What I've been looking for.
And I know people are like, I hate whensuddenly I'm talking about something and an ad
pops up for me.
I love that because it's just like, hey.
There it is.
I don't have to go find it.
But AI has been it's been it I don't I mean,weaponized and used for and bad.
Again, good we talk about the good and bad andeverything for years.
And when we talk about AI, again, I think it'simportant when you say AI, we're not at real

(13:20):
artificial intelligence or super AI right now.
We're still working within the framework ofmachine learning, big data, neural networks,
things like that.
They've been around for a Absolutely.
Hey, Ben.
I was just realizing we're getting actuallygetting you short of time, and I want you to be
able to plug your show because I like, you'reobviously a great guest, and then tell me
you're also a great host.
What's your show about?
And how can people find it?
Sure.
So my show that I do is AI insights theexecutive brief.

(13:43):
And right now, that is only on YouTube.
And it's strata shield.ai.
I'm gonna be separating it soon, but right nowit's under my business, but Stratushield.ai.
And what that is is it is almost exactly whatit is.
It's an executive breach.
So I interview executive suites they're VPs,CTOs, CMOs, CLOs.

(14:06):
So anyone from an executive layer and we talkabout how AI is impacting their job, how AI is
impacting the industry, their decision making,how what kind of board decisions are being made
around AI.
And I think it's fascinating because what thisappeals to is if you're a CT or a C suite or
and you're wanting to see what are my peersthinking right now.

(14:28):
It's a great platform.
If you have a if you're aspiring to be a csuite or executive level person, well, it's a
great platform.
Because now you can see how are your how do howdo these people think?
How do they talk?
And then also if you're in cells and you andyou're trying to get a hold of talk to C Suites
and executives about technology.
It's a great platform because, again, you'reseeing how how how do they think?

(14:49):
What what are their problem What is the realissue?
How are they making these decisions?
So I think so far it's been fascinating.
I just filmed my 12th at so yesterday, I'mfilming my thirteenth 1 2 hours after you and I
are done.
So it's still fairly new.
Yeah.
It's definitely growing, and I'm excited aboutit.
That's fantastic, man.
Thanks for letting me talk a little about it.
Ben, absolute pleasure having a show, man.

(15:10):
Seriously, this is a great conversation.
I'd like to do it again, and I'd love to getmore into specifically what you guys are doing
with your customers and, like, talk through ause case or 2.
Absolutely, Christian.
Thank you so much for having me.
And I just absolutely.
I'll jump back on.
I want you on my show as well.
Because I think you have great insights and theconversation was natural.
It was pure, and I abs I just absolutely lovedit.
Thank you.

(15:33):
And that's a wrap for this episode ofTectastic.
Wanna thank you personally for joining us, andwe'll see you next time.
Until then, keep exploring, and stay curious.
Thank you for listening.
If you are new here and enjoyed the content,please subscribe.
It really helps us out.
And if you are a regular listener, thanks somuch for your continued support.

(15:55):
Overwhelmed by tech debt.
Discover Vala AI.
The solution to tech challenges with thesimplicity of a click.
No engineering background?
No problem.
Vala AI enables anyone to effortlessly tackletech issues, freeing up your time from tech
headaches.
Make tech debt vanish with Vala AI, where yourtech solutions are just a click away.
Advertise With Us

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know
The Joe Rogan Experience

The Joe Rogan Experience

The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.

Dateline NBC

Dateline NBC

Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Special Summer Offer: Exclusively on Apple Podcasts, try our Dateline Premium subscription completely free for one month! With Dateline Premium, you get every episode ad-free plus exclusive bonus content.

Music, radio and podcasts, all free. Listen online or download the iHeart App.

Connect

© 2025 iHeartMedia, Inc.