Rewriting the AI Playbook with Tricia Napper and David Bauer
In this episode: The story behind loomAI and what "getting agents into production one decision at a time" really means Why the race for AI value is colliding with rising token costs and energy limits, and how automating a bad process just gets you bad results faster Where Salesforce fits in a consumption-priced, agentic world, and why the trust layer and configuration still matter The governance problem every CIO is waking up to as agents multiply across the org The data vocabulary shift: why yesterday's clean data is often today's dead data What the consulting firm of the future looks like, from the 1,200 decisions a business makes each day to a learning organization that contracts on outcomes Drawing the line in regulated industries: human-in-the-loop, and why background agents beat customer-facing ones for now Why human connection becomes more valuable, not less, as everyone races to automate Timestamp guide: [00:00] — Intro and what's ahead [00:48] — Erin and Eric catch up, and set up the loomAI founders [03:05] — Meet Tricia Napper and David Bauer, and the loomAI origin story [03:56] — The elevator pitch: agents into production, one decision at a time [04:31] — Building an AI-native company, and the learning curve of starting up [06:50] — The AI backlash: ROI pressure, the cost pendulum, and turning off the models [07:34] — The race for value, and automation vs. reimagination [10:24] — Where Salesforce fits: trust layer, configuration, and consumption pricing [14:10] — Buy vs. build, and the CIO fear of agent proliferation [15:36] — Governance, and the case for a third party managing the guardrails [16:31] — When you don't need another tool: starting with the problem, not the tech [18:39] — The data vocabulary shift and the problem of dead data [21:08] — Who drives AI now, business or IT [24:29] — The consulting firm of the future and the 1,200-decisions-a-day business [26:48] — The learning organization vs. the all-knowing expert, and contracting on outcomes [29:35] — Guardrails in regulated industries and keeping humans in the loop [32:05] — Keeping the human in front of the customer, and the AI slop problem [34:08] — Customer Obsessed picks [37:28] — Erin and Eric debrief: business process, alignment, and keeping people front and center [39:56] — How AI changes the C-suite, and freeing people from the busy work [42:01] — The IKEA story: automating service calls and building a new business line [43:24] — Finding the customers who need a human, and where brands fall short [46:55] — Why great ideas need space, trust, and culture over surveillance Customer Obsessed Picks: Tricia Napper: The Red Tent by Anita Diamant, and How to Know a Person by David Brooks David Bauer: Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
