PTW3 053: Tom Altman Discusses AI, Blockchain and Business Growth with Donna Mitchell

Thanks for checking in the Pivoting the Web 3 podcast. Go to pivotingtheweb3podcast.com to download and listen or web3game plan to check out the videos. Thank you.

Donna Mitchell

00:00:09 - 00:00:54

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to Pivoting to Web three, Pivoting to Web three Podcasts. And soon to be Pivoting to Web three Podcasts. And technology is going to be included. We're getting ready to bring in different types of guests with different aspects of technology and grow with web3 and get involved in the other applications that are taking place and emerging trends. But until that time, I want to introduce you to Tom Altman. And Tom is a fractional CTO, over 25 years experience in technology and innovation. He's known for laying the foundation of technology concrete.

Donna Mitchell

00:00:54 - 00:01:44

Tom helps businesses align their tech strategy with growth objectives, fueling growth by strategically aligning technology with vision for bold innovation. He was a DJ turned web developer and then ended up in management and everything else in between and beyond that. He's now C suite and he's going to share with us some insight to technology foundation, growing into the future and how to strategically survive and thrive. Tom, say hello to your audience and ours. How are you today? Let us know. How did you end up in the area you're in now in technology from starting off as a dj? That's a long way. Tell us about that.

Tom Altman

00:01:44 - 00:02:00

Thank you, Donna. You made it sound so much more magical than I was thinking. Wow. I better have to get a copy of this. I could put that on my resume because. Wow. But no, thank you so much. Yeah, radio DJ back in the 90s, enjoyed it.

Tom Altman

00:02:00 - 00:02:44

I realized that I was more of a technical guy. So I went back to school, learned how to be a web developer back in the 2000s when websites were coming online and it was just a great time. And I realized then, Donna, that I was not a very good web developer. And when you're not a very good web developer, you either quit or become management. So I went the management route and worked my way through the ranks and spent about the last 15 years or so working in E commerce. And that is where I became a CTO and have really just enjoyed the whole technology spectrum from scoop to nuts, all the home automations and all those things. Being in E commerce when I was growing up was wonderful for me. That's where I cut my team.

Tom Altman

00:02:44 - 00:02:46

Thank you very much for having me.

Donna Mitchell

00:02:47 - 00:03:22

Thank you for reaching out and wanting to be on pivoting to Web3 podcast. Tell me, being in the CTO area, you're in that C suite. And in the C suite, you got a lot of vision, you've got a lot of mission, but you have a lot of changes. And with all the changes in AI and all the different applications, tell us, how do you decide what to do in regards to managing the change in the culture? What are some tactics and tips you can share before we do a deeper dive in the technology and integrating with different companies?

Tom Altman

00:03:22 - 00:04:25

Sure. Like you said, my kind of elevator pitch to people is I like to pour digital concrete. When you start to think about concrete, you start to think about the foundation of a company, foundation of things. And so if you don't have your foundation solid, then you can run into problems the higher up your building gets or your company gets. What we like to do is start out by digging into the systems that you have and drawing out a map and lines back and forth so we really get a feeling of what is the base of your company. Once we have that established, then we can say, okay, what are the processes that you use in each one of those systems? And once you have those processes defined, you start to see where there's maybe some cracks, places where we can come back, fill in, make better. But also, as we look into the future, as you mentioned about AI readiness is where can we start to gain some efficiencies? Because I think that's what technology is doing for us. Right.

Tom Altman

00:04:25 - 00:04:40

It's been the thing that continues to make us quicker, faster, better. When you get those sops all dialed in and really documented well, we see opportunities there for technology to come in and help make a company even more efficient.

Donna Mitchell

00:04:41 - 00:05:02

So with that said, you have all the business processes, you have the people, and you have the processes. On the process side, can you think of a time recently that you've had a company that was quite antiquated and what your company did or the vision and the strategy that you put in place and what the outcomes were.

Tom Altman

00:05:02 - 00:05:49

Let me tell you about a company that I was working with, E Commerce. And so where we're starting to see SOPs or maybe just the ways that we deal with customers. So this was a customer that did online selling, and they were having trouble because they had a high number of products. So this is a company that had a hundred thousand products and nine salespeople taking phone calls to help answer those calls. We really only ever sold 7,000 products, but they had this catalog that was a mile deep and a mile wide. One of the most interesting questions had to do with questions that customers would call in about their remote controls. What we found was a really interesting solution. We took the product manuals for all the remote controls and put them in a knowledge base.

Tom Altman

00:05:49 - 00:06:42

We stored those up and allowed AI to read them at the same time. They would answer questions that would come up. So it was just a perfect resource for those sales teams to be able to, or the sales people to. When they were on the phone with the customer, they could type in an answer that they might not know and that would go out, hit those manuals and provide great answers, answers they probably already knew but had forgotten because there were just so many different ones. So I see a huge piece of this happening right now. You get sold this idea of chat bots and those chat bots are getting better all the time. Even just access of your own employees to get information quicker, faster than foaming through or opening up a PDF is one of the ways that we're seeing AI being able to surmise information and help people get to the right piece and then it gives you a source. So if you really need to go in and look at that page of the manual, then boom, you can one click right there.

Tom Altman

00:06:42 - 00:06:47

So that's one minor way that's been happening a lot in places that we've helped people.

Donna Mitchell

00:06:48 - 00:07:20

So it sounds like if I understand what you just said, everybody that's worried about losing their jobs to a bot or some automation can really enhance your job and what you're doing and save time or be able to give you quicker information more efficiently and effectively, which could improve morale and the entire culture of an organization, just including additional technology and insights for the employee and for the customer. Am I understanding that correctly?

Tom Altman

00:07:20 - 00:08:16

I think you nailed it. One of the words I get tired of hearing so much is busy, right? And that happens in our personal lives and happens in our professional lives. We get busy doing these tasks. And I think what you're going to see come in is we're going to be either automate these tasks or we're going to allow these AI agents, which is a helper that can come along and you can give either the agent or the automation one of your tasks and that will still leave time. I think one of the most perfect examples of that, if we think financials, is most companies have a lot of invoices that have to get matched up with positive. So what we're seeing now is AI automations, agents that are going to come in, they're going to take a look at all the invoices, they're going to match up the POS and using the 8020 rule, 80% of the POS match an invoice. There should be no reason why we shouldn't just check them off the list. And then that takes that finances team down from a two to three hours a day.

Tom Altman

00:08:16 - 00:08:38

But something that might be two hours a week, that's just one great example. And there's always going to be POS and invoices that don't match. And that's when we want the finance team to jump in and figure out, hey, what happened here? But there's so many times when they're just checking the box. And what we also find is they actually get better at inspecting that 20% because they haven't mundanely clicked through the other 80%.

Donna Mitchell

00:08:39 - 00:09:33

With the experience that you have, there's a broad base of entrepreneurs, brands, corporations, and nonprofits in my audience. What are some of the other areas that you've seen that would really benefit? Or can you give us some additional insight on who's really positioned in the type of sector or industry or company that would work well with AI for what's out there today? I know there's a lot of changes taking place and it's quick. What's happening today may not be happening in a few months, but if I was listening, how do I know I've got the type of business and what do I need to be able to move forward and bring an AI? Do I need a certain amount of data or a certain amount of employees or a certain amount of systems or the type of systems? Can you give us some insight for those that are positioned now that could utilize your services with additional technology?

Tom Altman

00:09:34 - 00:10:06

I can think of three examples based on what you said. Let's start with hr. HR tends to give a lot of questions, and sometimes those questions are repetitive. That's when we feel those emails that come out that are saying, I've been asked three times a day. Next week is a holiday and the day we're taking off is Friday. Imagine if the employee handbook was something that the employees could chat against and ask, hey, when are we taking 4th of July this year in the United States? Oh, it's going to be this day. And we're doing that because of these reasons. So that's one easy example of a product that everyone probably already has.

Tom Altman

00:10:06 - 00:10:52

They've already established what days they're taking off. But the questions boil up as those holidays get closer. When you mentioned nonprofit, that's close to my heart, helping these organizations do better. They're always low on resources, low on people, and unfortunately, sometimes volunteers aren't always the most experts at doing everything. So that's where you have a plethora of knowledge base that you can bring together knowledge, be able to answer questions. These are smart people that are volunteering, but they just may not have access quickly to the data. So this is a place where you can align a knowledge base or some sort of a chat function to help them get answers that they need. I was meeting with a nonprofit today and they're always looking to find all the grants that they can find.

Tom Altman

00:10:52 - 00:11:51

This gentleman and I had a great talk. He's going out and searching the web for grants that he can apply to and he's using agent to go do that for him. Then he's taking that information and storing it temporarily and then using his grants that he's wrote in the past to write drafts of Brant applications for the future. He's in a small nonprofit and he's the only one working there. His hope is that he can take a burden of that time, the long time to search for grants and then use his knowledge that he's already used building the last few grant applications to write a preview. That's an opportunity for him to maximize his time and then hopefully getting a little bit more money and he can build the system up for himself. The third way that I can think of is when you think about people that are overtaxed and overworked at times, that's where we get into more of this automation pieces. And I think there's so many things that just have to get done in a day's business.

Tom Altman

00:11:51 - 00:12:19

If we can find those SOPs and read through those, sometimes that stuff that just has to get done is also some of the most boring work that people do. We get that off their plate and now it's a little bit more enjoyable to be at work and they just have a little bit more fun. So I think those are a few ways I would recommend when people are thinking, what is it that I can do? Look through your SOPs or ask for some help to make sure you have SOPs and see where those efficiencies can take place.

Donna Mitchell

00:12:19 - 00:12:59

That's a good comment right there because there's a lot of businesses that don't have SOPs or standard operating procedures and need that developed. But before we go down that rabbit hole, I really want to talk about the C suite, the fractional CEO. How does that come into the innovation piece or the real acceleration of a company in their mission and vision? How does all that work together? What is a fractional? Let's Just go for it. What is a fractional C eocto? What's this fractional piece that everybody's talking about in the last few years?

Tom Altman

00:13:01 - 00:13:45

It's not like a fractional piece of pie, Donnie of old pie. Talk about fractional executives. It's essentially an employee that works for your company just like anybody else, except it's in the C suite and generally speaking part time. Now there are exceptions. There can be some interim. If you have a quick exit of someone, can bring in someone on an interim basis. But fractional in general really is, hey, this is a great company, we're growing wonderfully. But is it really fiscally responsible at this moment in time to bring on a full boat CTO in the salary that comes with it and the benefits that come with it? Generally speaking, it might not be.

Tom Altman

00:13:45 - 00:14:58

I think this was started about 10 years ago. Very popular in the CFO space. It was not uncommon to see fractional CFOs come in and work with the controller and be one day a week, 10 hours a week kind of person that could come along, go to the meetings, understand the problem, make sure that the finance team is on track and then let them execute just like they would if you were there. And I know in my role as a CTO there's been a lot of times that I find myself doing work that probably wasn't CTO level work, but it just had to get done so that I did it. And then I started to think about how much money was spent when I was doing those remedial tasks. When I talked to people that are in business, they say, wow, I really wish this fractional thing is around long because I could have hired a fractional cto, a fractional CIO information specialist and maybe even a fractional chro. We, we have a handful of chros that work at Altus CXO and they do a great job, get the things done and then let everyone at that business do their work. So the kind of one phrase is fractional are part time C suite people that bring a lot of experience to you at a reduced price for the company.

Donna Mitchell

00:14:58 - 00:15:38

That's true. It sounds pretty good though. It's good thing. Quite a few people that I'm starting to hear about fractional this and fractional that. And thank you for covering that. When you're looking at a company and their strategies, what type of data do they need to have? Whether they need a strategic plan or a communication plan, and some have no plans at all. How do you know you can help them? What is Your assessment tool. What do you guys use to decide whether you're going to work with a company or a solopreneur or is there a minimum employees or size that you're concerned or want to work with?

Tom Altman

00:15:38 - 00:16:21

I've struggled with this a little bit, Donna, because sometimes you want to look at that 10 to $250 million range. But also I'm starting to see the more pattern becomes, it's more like a 25 to 125 employees sometimes too. It just depends on that business, who they are and what they are. I think when you start to see one more trigger is, is growing fast. This company is growing fast. They've taken a a small group of people and they're making good money. They're just starting to get over the tops of their skis a little bit. Perfect time that a fractional person can come in, help you make sure you're staying between those guardrails a little bit and gets you to that next step.

Tom Altman

00:16:21 - 00:17:15

When let's take a fractional CFO, maybe we'll get you to a 200 to 250 numbers range and then we'll help you hire a CFO that fits the company that you become. You start out with a five person startup and pretty soon you're at 25 or 30. Some of the people that are great at startups aren't necessarily great at getting to that solid back of a company. And that's where I think fractionals bring that experience in and can either help people move on or help people move up. When you're looking at a company, call it 25 or 30 people, you're not going to have a lot of people with a lot of experience. These fractals can come in, bring that experience to your teams and just help raise them up. A company that I worked with recently is a company and they have a really great director of technology that takes care of all their software. But the CE reports directly to the CEO.

Tom Altman

00:17:15 - 00:18:03

The CEO hasn't been a CTO in his past. He's been a great CEO. So he can help define some of these pieces. But where he struggles is understanding the strife down of the time that I spent this helping people learn and grow and giving them strategies that's really just narrowly specific to a development team. You mentioned one other thing about strategy in there. I think every single CEO has a strategy. Now the question is, have they communicated well with the C suite and has that message gotten down to the rest of the team? And I think that's another place where just being there before seeing this thing happen, really hoping that that CEO makes sure that people understand the strategy. I've been on more than one engagement where I said, here's the strategy.

Tom Altman

00:18:03 - 00:18:42

Did you know that your CEO wants to grow this company to $750 million revenue in the next five years? And they said, I had no idea. The CEO doesn't understand why this person isn't building the infrastructure out from a 250 to a $750 million company. You begin to wonder, am I the therapist? Am I the what? Am I here? Because, you know, they're just not communicating well, or if they are, both sides aren't hearing each other. And I think, you know, people with our stature, maybe I should say, Donna, have been there, done that, been on both sides, and can really help stretch the lines of communication for these leaders.

Donna Mitchell

00:18:42 - 00:19:00

So being in the CTO space, what type of technology should people be looking at today? What gives you concerns? Or what are some of the things that you're utilizing that really benefit technology advancements for corporations or smaller brands? Let's talk about the technology piece. What's going on in that arena?

Tom Altman

00:19:00 - 00:19:32

One of the things that attracted me to your podcast, Donna, was that web 3.0 word, right? And when you think of that's. It's on the crust. I think AI lands in between web two and Web three. But blockchain, you and I both know that one, and that is an interesting piece. Blockchain is this digital ledger that keeps track based on hashing information so that it can't be modified. And that excites me with smart contracts and blockchains. These are just electronic agreements. The best example I heard was imagine if your insurance.

Tom Altman

00:19:32 - 00:20:08

Let's talk about healthcare for a second. It's funny, because people get very worried about hipaa, right? My doctor has a copy of my health stuff, and they're not affiliated with the hospital, so the hospital has a copy of all my information. And then we've got this insurance guy. So now three people have a copy of all my health data. I want to be safe, and everything's getting broken into all the time. One of my favorite examples of a smart contract using blockchain was imagine if the doctor requested that I get a procedure. That smart contract could reach out and tell the hospital and the insurance company that it's okay. We could all agree that particular smart contract was valid.

Tom Altman

00:20:08 - 00:20:38

Good. We can all agree that it's okay for Tom to partake on this thing, and then everything retracts back because the credentials and the information was agreed upon. And they can come back and rest in one spot. Hopefully we can get to the point where I can really own that myself and control it. And I think as we progress to blockchain and smart contracts, that's one of the things that excite me the most, that we truly could have control of the information that's ours. And then it'll probably just get hacked by some quantum trigger anyway. But at least I'd feel better in the meantime, right?

Donna Mitchell

00:20:38 - 00:20:43

Other trends that you're seeing or what you guys use or really rely on when you work with companies.

Tom Altman

00:20:44 - 00:21:37

Yeah, I think we know that a company is really ready for AI and even Web 3.0 when they have those processes wrote out. And it sounds so simple, and it probably sounds like I'm repeating myself, but if you don't have your SOPs, if you don't have your processes written out, it is going to be very difficult for you to get to where you're going. You've heard of hallucinations in these AIs, right? So for people that aren't familiar with hallucination, let's just use ChatGPT just for the sake of the argument. If you give garbage into the CHAT GPT for a question, what should I have for dinner tonight? And hit enter, the One thing that ChatGPT is programmed to do is give you an answer. You're going to get an answer every time. It still might say, that's the best answer for me. So when we start to say, I'm looking for a dinner tonight, that's not seafood, and that falls under my dietary constraints. And this.

Tom Altman

00:21:37 - 00:22:31

So the more information that we can give that CHAT GPT, the better information we're going to get back out. And this is the same way you start to look at the future of all these things. If we don't have a process written down, it's really just like a wishing well at that point. So that's why I'm mostly concerned about people getting down on some of these newer technologies, because maybe they don't fully understand what it takes to get a proper answer. And what if we can combat that and show that it's a logic machine more than an answer machine? It's taking logic and trying to find answers that it knows exists and melt them to your particular problem. So that's the one thing that scares me the most, is that people jump in with both feet before they're fully ready, and then it just provides a bad experience for them. But I think on the flip side, the more preparation we can do today the better off you're going to be in the next few years and maybe months.

Donna Mitchell

00:22:32 - 00:23:26

That's true. You don't want to get left behind because things are moving so fast. When you look at remote work and all the changes that are taking place, it seems to me that AI is going to be very beneficial in some ways and create new jobs or new ways of working, being creative and integrating with blockchain technology in intersections, in different areas and layers and sectors and industries. So when you look at all of that and your experience as a fractional cto, what concerns you that you've seen out there and what's happening? Is it the pace, the morals, the bias, the governance? What is it that concerns you and rolls around in the back of your mind and keep you up at night sometimes saying I can't believe this happened. There had been any real challenges or aha, moments that you can share.

Tom Altman

00:23:26 - 00:24:35

I remember in the year 2000, when you talk about jobs, right, the first thing I thought of was I was sitting there on December 31, 1999. We were hosting our own web servers in the closet in the basement of the building that I worked in at the time, waiting to see what happened when that clock ticked over, right? But one thing I didn't do right after that, on January 1, 2000, I didn't post anything to any social media. That's because it hadn't existed yet. Top I think of all the jobs that have been created from 2000 till now that were just non existent 20 years ago, it's almost hard to imagine the number of jobs that will be created by all of this. It reminds me of the word exponential growth. When I see the word exponential, I think of that hockey stick growth curve that goes up and I think, oh my gosh, that's the hardest part to really understand how much things are going to be changing. And so I think couple things, don't get locked into any certain product or platform today. You really need to know your business as much as you possibly can because the uniqueness that you have is all about your business.

Tom Altman

00:24:35 - 00:25:17

These AIs, chatbots, blockchains, they're going to conform to you. The one thing that's unique to you is your business and your story. So the more you can deep dive into everything about you, I think the technology is going to catch up to help you there. So that's why we focus so much on this systems diagram, knowledge graph and policies and procedures, because I think that's going to be the thing that changes the people that know their business. Forward and back will adapt or the bots will adapt to them. But if you don't know your business, you're going to be starting to see hallucinations about answers of what will fix or help grow your business. As we get to the next phase.

Donna Mitchell

00:25:17 - 00:25:24

Of all this, thank you for that. How can people get in contact with you? And do you want to share the company that does all this?

Tom Altman

00:25:24 - 00:25:25

Sure.

Donna Mitchell

00:25:25 - 00:25:32

Fractional CTOs and consultations and strategies. And what do you want to share that I didn't ask.

Tom Altman

00:25:32 - 00:25:57

Absolutely. Let's start with. The company's name is Altus Cxo. If you just type in altuso.com, you will find us. There's information about our people. We're all seasoned C Suite people. We have a number of CFO, CHROs, CMOs, CTOs, CFS, all the O's and all the C's and everything that goes in between data. And then if you want to reach out to me, I would love to talk to anyone.

Tom Altman

00:25:57 - 00:26:20

The easiest way is just Tom Altman. Look for this face that was made for radio on there. It's Tom Altman on the end of the LinkedIn look. For me, I'd love to connect, take time to talk, no charge. I love to have discovery calls and just learn more about people. We're building out some cheat sheets and I can give you those. We're giving those away so that you can, hey, if you can do it, if you have the staff, do it. We're not here to.

Tom Altman

00:26:20 - 00:26:38

We're here to grow all businesses. I had a CEO one time that we were on the phone with a software company and he said, why don't you just help me stay in business? And I think that's the base of it all. I think we work together, we could all be so much better and learn from each other. So that's where we're at. LinkedIn, Tom Altman, that would be great.

Donna Mitchell

00:26:38 - 00:26:58

And everybody can find you. Also on pivoting to Web3 podcast. You have a page there. It's going to be Tom Altman and a lot of the great information he shared. So thank you everyone for listening. Thank you, Tom, for being on pivoting to Web3 podcast. I am excited and we're shaping tomorrow together. Thank you so much and look forward to seeing you again.

Donna Mitchell

00:26:58 - 00:27:10

Thanks for checking in the Pivoting the Web 3 podcast. Go to pivotingtheweb3podcast.com to download and listen or web3gameplan to check out the videos. Thank you. We're shaping tomorrow together.