443- Learn the Business. Earn the Influence w/Andrew Schutsky

Doug Camin: welcome back to today's episode of You've Been Heard The platform
for IT leaders. I am Doug Camin, I am here with Andrew Schutsky, the VP and CIO
at Carlisle Weatherproofing Technologies. Welcome to the show, Andrew.

Andrew Schutsky: Doug, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.

Doug Camin: So Andrew, you're currently with Carlisle Weatherproofing, but you
have a long history going back, you've been at a variety of different industries
going way back. You started in, aerospace and defense, which actually small
world. What are the past guests that I just had on the podcast, also has been
here to my town, to the local aerospace plant. That's why you're the second
person who's been here. Who knows where I'm at in the last couple of weeks. can
you tell us a little bit about your early journey in your career and how that
shaped, where you're going today?

Andrew Schutsky: Yeah. So I'm probably not your typical path of an IT leader. I
kind of took a rather circuitous route to where I got today, but I wouldn't I
wouldn't trade it for anything. So I started, as you alluded, I'll even take you
back to during college, I was fortunate enough to do a bunch of stints in co-ops
when I was at Drexel. Starting in SAP on the software side and seeing that
evolve, really technical role on the networking side, kind of did my stint there
all the way back actually to the help desk in my first internship.

Doug Camin: And it's great to be out of help. It's always good to have help desk
experience when you.

Andrew Schutsky: Yeah, yeah. I mean, and it was funny starting your career at a
large conglomerate. I think they were a thirty billion dollars company at the
time. It was just kind of like finding your footing in the corporate world and
then spending a couple of years rotating through co-ops, five years in
management consulting with Deloitte, which is really great to learn. The I
learned a lot of the industry of aerospace and defense, as you alluded to. But
more specifically, that's kind of where I found my niche as a supply chain
manufacturing technologist. That's kind of where I built my brand. And I was
industry specific, highly regulated. And that got me eventually five years of
travel, fifty weeks a year got old pretty quickly. So I found an in-house gig in
the Philly area at a medical device company, Medical packaging. Spent nine years
there rotating, actually starting in IT and demand planning, forecasting, supply
chain stuff on the technology side. That got me recognized, got my first R&D
role outside of it. That led to a role in procurement and supply chain. And at
that point, honestly, nine years in there, after rotating through different
functions, I'm like, you know what? Maybe I'm done with technology. I was always
close to it. And a lot of transformation projects and procurement and supply
chain and planning and snap and all that cool stuff. But at that point, I'm
like, you know what? Maybe I want to be COO. career is going well. Was a lot of
upward mobility. one day I got a call from a recruiter or it wasn't one day it
was a series of days actually, like very adamant. Hey, I've got a really
compelling technology role at an industrial manufacturing company. It was te
connectivity, which I wound up going to, made a compelling argument to go back
to the tech side. It's like, hey, you'd be leading basically all supply chain
and manufacturing digital strategy for about sixty facilities, five billion
dollars in spend. So I'm like, okay, pretty compelling. Let me give it a shot.
And, they made it financially lucrative. and I was like, okay, the risk is worth
the reward. Let's give it a shot. Yeah. I spent the first year there, making
great connections, building rapport with people and getting results. And I guess
to my surprise, less than a year into that role, I was recruited by my manager
at the time to take on my first CIO role at a leading medical device business.
And shout out to Tony. Tony's been a great mentor of mine. and continues to be.
We actually had dinner maybe a month ago. and taking a shot on someone to lead
and run an IT organization who had never done it before. That's always the most
daunting leap. Probably. I'd spent about two years in that business, working a
lot in Ireland and Galway. So thankful for those opportunities and experiences
building out the IT practice there, doing a bunch of different transformational
work from analytics and ERP foundational stuff that led me to another CIO role
at TI in aerospace and defense, coming back to my roots, back to the Lockheed
days and, brought back memories of spending time in Binghamton and Marietta.
spent a little about a year there. And before I got recruited to Carlisle,
again, very, very compelling recruiter came to me from Russell Reynolds and was
like, hey, I saw what you're doing. Love what you're doing. I know you've got a
great rapport at TI. Come have coffee with me. And I said, no, probably seven or
eight different times. And finally, just really, really adamant and said like,
look, I think this is really a good fit. come have a conversation. Finally, did
you know that probably process. I mean, it went on for maybe three or four
months and then landed at Carlisle here in January twenty twenty four. And,
we've grown so much here. It's been the last two and a half, almost two and
three quarters years have flown by, for acquisitions, building a customer
experience platform, modernizing our core systems and data. It's been, it's
flown by. each day can be exhausting. I'm sure a lot of a lot of listeners can
relate to this. Each day can feel like it's twenty hours long, but the weeks and
months and years just seem to zip by. So that's, my last twenty five years
getting back to twenty twenty one in a nutshell.

Doug Camin: So, great. Thanks for sharing. So I think about a lot of the guests
we have on here have had a career that's, I'll call it like straight in it. And
that's, me, I'm a CIO, but if you go back and you look at my career history, I
was, in an IT consulting business. And I learned this stuff. And then I moved
into management and then I moved into the, being a director of it or a CIO and,
other entities and then moved up from there. So my thread has always been just
in the technology delivery space. And I think that's true of a lot of folks in
this area. So I'd love to explore with you some of the differences about how
somebody who's had so many different spaces, you mentioned your first CIO role.
They came for you in the last couple of years, but you've been in leadership
roles at a lot of other spaces way prior to that. So what experiences did you
pull from those that you think were incredibly valuable to make you a better CIO
in IT leader?

Andrew Schutsky: And the biggest thing that I think about is just seeing
technology from a different lens of the business. And that's specifically how do
I use technology to drive results, right? So I know we'll probably get into
advice for up and coming professionals. And there's a couple of things that I
attribute to being successful at rather early part of my career compared to a
lot of my peers. And that's just really understanding where to drive value,
right? And everybody says that it's cliche, but when you live in the world of
supply chain, when you live in the world of logistics, you learn to speak the
language that really resonates. So is it a matter of not deploying technology
capability and planning for the sake of planning? I'm doing it to drive lead
time improvement. I'm doing it to win additional business from my competition
that otherwise can't keep up with service levels. I'm doing it to improve,
working capital, reduce inventory levels. So learning where people's, struggle
with things and seeing it from an outside in perspective as a supply chain
planner, as a leading a supply chain function, or leading an R&D function,
learning where innovation matters and coupling that with their passion and
technology has been really, really powerful. And I think it's been maybe a
differentiator for me versus like, hey, I've done network engineering, I've done
infrastructure, I've done service desk, I've done AI and data. And, typical IT
leader may run their gamut through rotating through different functions. There's
nothing wrong with that at all. what I've loved about my path is, again, I've
learned to develop empathy from seeing it from the lens of a consumer of
technology and someone who uses it. Their job is in technology, but their drive
is their job is to get results for the organization. a couple that with, I've
got a kind of an entrepreneurial background and I just love to solve problems
and build things at scale, whether it's teams and people. So you put those two
things together and that's kind of been my value prop as I've rotated in these
different roles.

Doug Camin: Yeah. So, and I think I'm really glad you shared that because I
think about my own career too. And I'm just kind of putting myself in the seat
of our listeners here. And one thing that you said really resonates with me,
which is the idea of a lot of us, we don't always see the value creation side.
We don't always see the other side of it because, we're in the seed of having to
deliver the technology, but we're not always in the seed of having to receive
it. and that perspective is incredibly valuable. I know that's a, I would call
it like a gap for myself, but I know that that's something that I have to put
effort in to make sure to understand. I have to stop and think and be like, am I
thinking about this from just my perspective? Or am I actually thinking about
how the finance team is going to receive what we're doing, or what's going to
happen when payroll goes live with this new product or tool, and they don't like
these pieces of it. And we have to work through, some challenge or other issue
that's there. from my side, it's just a problem to be solved. but the empathy of
understanding how they're going to receive it is critical here too.

Andrew Schutsky: Totally. and to me, it's part of gaining credibility, right?
There's this learning what matters. I mean, I'll give you another aspect that's
related to this recent leadership development training we went through with, the
team here is called the one eighty concept. I don't know if you've heard of
this. When you're presenting a pitch deck or a concept or investment proposal,
always turn around and look at the audience and think about what's going through
their mind. If it's a CEO or CFO, they've got a million things on their mind.
And on a technology mind. I'm thinking about how I'm going to build it, how I'm
going to test it, how I'm going to. What are the risks of deployment? What could
go wrong with data that that's less than one percent of what's on their mind
almost guaranteed, right? They're thinking about, hey, I've got, a proposal from
R&D to launch a new product. I've got a new manufacturing building. I'm standing
up, I've got warranty systems I might be launching. I've got service and support
and customer service. They've got a million things on their mind. So go in with
that in mind and thinking about, okay, what's going to be important to them and
then start your presentation. what's going to grab their interest. I lead my
career with the same way. I was like, once you really build the relationships,
whether what their hot buttons are or what's going to what's going to move the
needle. And you couple that with just really, really learning the business.
That's a good entry point for, whatever you're proposing.

Doug Camin: So I want to plug out a little bit. You mentioned here, Carlisle,
what you're doing now. So. Well, I'll ask my question in a second. Tell us a
little about what Carlisle does and what you're.

Andrew Schutsky: So we are the leading, building envelope, construction
materials business, in the world. So fortune five hundred building materials
manufacturer. We do what we call the building envelope. So think about outside
walls to inside the walls, insulation, commercial roofing, air barriers, films,
coatings. We create, energy efficient building materials and solutions, for a
cleaner future basically. So about four and a half billion dollars in revenue in
total for Carlisle. We've got two main divisions. One is construction materials,
which does largely a lot of commercial roofing and architectural metals. And
we've got our Weatherproofing business, which is a lot of coatings, air
barriers, films, coatings, insulation, spray foam, EPS coatings or EPS
insulation.

Doug Camin: So okay. And so my question here, you mentioned that you've been
building a lot of new platforms here. You've gone through several acquisitions,
you're building new platforms, you're building out a team. So this is a rapidly
growing business at this point. tell me a little more about what it is. what are
you focused on? What are you building? What tools are you bringing in? what it
is you're focused on building out as you grow and you scale up.

Andrew Schutsky: Yeah. I'll take you through the last couple of years. In a
nutshell. the first year we did it, I mean, the first eighteen months we went
through four acquisitions. So a lot of that was building the foundation,
consolidating the core things like ERP and CRM, working on data, getting all of
our PMO infrastructure process in place and tidy. You would think that, for four
and a half billion dollar company would have this on rinse and repeat. And we
largely we had a playbook. We found we had to make some refinements to that,
which is not uncommon talking to my peers. Right. getting into year two and
three now we're doing a lot more, I call it advanced functionality, building a
lot of data and analytics platforms, getting more into AI, moving from proof of
concept to scalable solutions there. We're focusing a lot on the customer
experience. So a lot of that built on some custom applications, some of them
using Salesforce as our main CRM, SAP being our backbone for a lot of our
products. we're working a lot on the procurement side of things. I mean, you
think about our, like I said, I mentioned knowing your business and knowing what
the levers for improvement are. We're a lot, a lot of building materials about
managing price cost and customer experience. Right? And how do I do one of those
things better than the others to, take share from competition or manage my
capital more effectively? And if you look at vision twenty thirty for Carlisle.
A lot of it is centered around the Carlisle experience. A lot of it is being
superior capital allocators, and if you look at our stock performance, it
reflects that.

Doug Camin: So yeah, I just went through, a NetSuite deployment, for us. So I
finished a couple of months ago. Replatforming the place where I'm currently at,
we're a mental health nonprofit that's smaller than four billion, that's for
sure. But, okay. but, I think about a lot of the same threads that you've
mentioned here about how you go through the process of identifying new tools,
identifying new platforms. we've used Salesforce in our space, as well building
out CRM in our case, we have a legacy systems that we had to work on replacing
because they, as the business had grown, we had outgrown the capacity of those
systems as well. So, new era new look, new enterprise architecture, kind of, our
analysis to get us to where we wanted to go. So actually, I want to jump topics
here. We talked a little bit about your business, what you've done, where you've
been your career. This is not your first time being on a podcast. And actually
you have a lot of experience as a podcast host. Tell me a little bit about this.

Andrew Schutsky: Yeah. So I mentioned the entrepreneurial side of me. I've had a
passion for real estate investing since, I mean, my first investment property
was two thousand and seven, so almost twenty years now. I had gotten together
with a group of guys in the commercial building space, that shared a common
interest and, so you know what? There's a lot of real estate shows out there.
There isn't really one that covers the gamut of commercial real estate
investing, short term rentals, which is kind of the two areas I live in. combine
that with insights from brokers, combine that with insights from insurance
agents that specialize in these different properties, talk to passive investors,
talk to active investors. So I ran a show for the better part of two years. And
because of that, you get invited to be a guest multiple times. That was really
cool. But I spent probably from twenty twenty one to twenty twenty four being
pretty active in the real estate side of things, less or so now just time is
more demanding than it ever has been and this job for sure. But, it's been a
passion of mine, a lot of passions, but that one is probably something I'll take
with me for the rest of my life. So that kind of led the podcast. It led to a
lot of really cool connections with people, some of which I still talk to pretty
regularly now.

Doug Camin: I think you mentioned you did almost two hundred episodes. Was it
that money we.

Andrew Schutsky: Internally it was about eighty eight, I think.

Doug Camin: Oh, probably.

Andrew Schutsky: Including myself as a guest is probably some I've never
counted, but probably one hundred and fifty total.

Doug Camin: Okay. But I mean, I think about that pacing over two years. Yeah.
eight, ninety episodes. I feel it like hustle culture, like, vibes here.

Andrew Schutsky: Like it is a lot. I mean, and at that point, I was more active
in, the market was a totally different place than it is today in terms of
commercial real estate. So a lot more active and just looking and vetting
properties. And it's my wife's like, I don't know how you do it all. And my only
secret sauce is like getting up at four in the morning and doing, spending a
couple hours analyzing properties, preparing for hosts and things like that. I'd
also note that my shows were shorter. They were like twenty, twenty five minutes
quick hitting maybe five or six topics. We get on with it. And, the listeners
seem to appreciate that the brevity of it, conciseness of the messaging and
just, but yeah, it was really fun. And I miss being a host, but I'll get back to
it someday.

Doug Camin: Yeah.

Andrew Schutsky: Yeah.

Doug Camin: So talk a little bit about personal side here. you've mentioned your
early career. We talked about some of your early career stuff, but when you were
growing up? Were you into technology? Were you like the tech kid tech guy doing
all this?

Andrew Schutsky: Yeah, this is probably where it's a more traditional path into
tech. I was just at a kindergarten, and my parents and my grandfather bought me
my first computer was an IBM computer, eight hundred eighty eight eight hundred
eighty eight processor back in the eighties.

Doug Camin: Classic IBM, PC.

Andrew Schutsky: Classic, IBM, PC like low density floppy drives. Like I think
the hard drive is like twenty megabytes. Think about that today. Like twenty
megabytes is a PowerPoint file. That was the entire hard drive on this thing.

Doug Camin: I remember my very first one, my dad worked for IBM because no.

Andrew Schutsky: That's awesome.

Doug Camin: Yeah, yeah, this is IBM country up here in Binghamton. And, matter
of fact that the Lockheed plant that you've been to was an IBM plant back in,
prior to the nineteen ninety six, I think it converted over to Lockheed. And,
mine had only floppy disks, So like he had to boot it to the floppy disk. There
was no hard drive. And, I remember in elementary school going, my parents would
put me in. I grew up in Austin, Texas, because my father, as an IBM, transferred
to the Austin facility from the Binghamton facility in the early nineteen
eighties. And the computer systems, the things we had, the tools. We had these
basic just two floppy disks. Boot that up there was like a little flight
simulator game. I remember play and stuff like that. So so you got a computer
and yours. Yours had a hard drive, as you recall. It did.

Andrew Schutsky: I was fortunate, I guess.

Doug Camin: Yes, fortunate. Yeah. So you just had a hard drive. What did you do
about it? What was your favorite thing?

Andrew Schutsky: Oh, man, I was a full out nerd at that point. So interesting
enough. I just like messing around in dos, writing little scripts. I used to do
logo writer and things like that.

Doug Camin: I remember you did the turtle, did you turtle?

Andrew Schutsky: Oh yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I used to do, I think it was, I
don't know if doom was the, I can't remember if it was like the early days or
that was a couple years later, my first maybe it was like a two.

Doug Camin: It was like, yeah, it was like the nineties.

Andrew Schutsky: It was a little later, but some games. Honestly, I just like
messing around in DOS and file structures. I was a full out nerd. here's what's
interesting. I was six years old and I started like, again, back to the
entrepreneurial side of things. My neighbors were like, hey, I hear your son's
pretty savvy to my mom, can you help me set up my computer? So that became my
first segue. That and selling candy were my first entrepreneurial adventures.
Like, hey, come help me set up my computer. I remember getting like fifty bucks
on a Saturday back in the eighties was like a fortune.

Doug Camin: That's a lot of money, man.

Andrew Schutsky: To a, probably a first or second grader at that time that
continued throughout grade school. I think as I got older, I got more into
sports. I lost a little touch with that stuff. I'm like, okay, I don't want to
be the nerdy kid. I want to play basketball, by the time I got into high school,
got a little bit away from that more into like the audio and car stereo
installation stuff. So I was doing that on the side and, as I got back into
college and started to study tech again, I got more back into the more
professional realm of software and hardware. So, and that led to my co op I
talked about earlier, which was the network engineering side at SAB.

Doug Camin: So all right, one of the things I always try to ask our guests,
something about you. So, but in your case, I feel like we've plumbed a lot out,
we talked about, some of your early career stuff. So I'm going to jump right
into talking about advice that you have for other leaders that are out here. one
of the big pieces is you've had a career that is not specifically been in all
it. So what advice would you have for up and coming IT leaders?

Andrew Schutsky: Now, I love that question. And I'm fortunate enough to mentor a
few individuals in our inspire program locally here and at Carlisle internally,
which is great. I always look for how do you differentiate yourself, right. And
it's likely not going to be learning every aspect of technology and nook and
cranny of the earth and get you recognized because there's several millions of
us out there that know that really well. What a lot of specifically technology
leaders don't really focus on, or maybe they could be good at it, but they just
don't spend the time on it are two things. One, really build relationships with
the leaders in your organization, right? And get to know them. Get to know what
they like, get to know what their interests are. Get to know the level of detail
they like. And the second is really learn the line of business you're in, right?
And if that's your own business, like really know the industry, if it's a
industry like building materials or manufacturing or services, what are the
competitive advantage levers in the organization? And if you know that and you
know what drives value in the organization and you know what the capabilities of
products in your portfolio, which I think most IT people are really, are really
good at like, hey, I know what's really great about Oracle or SAP or Salesforce
and all these cool things you can do great. How do you use them to drive it? How
do you do that well, and what are the right, what's the right verbiage to use to
get your ideas across the finish line? So more often than not, my coaching is
like, okay, you sent me a fifty page deck. Like literally this is real time
right now. Executive summary for a solution, we're building fifty two pages and
thirty minutes.

Doug Camin: That's the executive.

Andrew Schutsky: Summary. Executive summary. And I'm like, okay, this is a this
is something the work of our integration partner was and our internal team. And
I'm like, listen, you gotta think about like, again, back to what's on the minds
of the leaders in the organization and my peers and myself, like you've got
dozens of topics coming through your mind each day, narrow it down to what
really matters. So start with a high level process, then get into the details if
you need to, but like reserve the time for what's most important first. So if
you there's an ask up front, get right to the ask up front. Your time will run
out quickly. I promise you, we'll lose interest in four minutes, right? So be
concise, be brief, be relevant.

Doug Camin: Okay, so you mentioned that you do some mentoring work and, through
Carlisle and I think in other places too. Tell us a little bit more about that.
What do you specifically do to build up and, and develop your teams and your
leaders, the emerging folks that you see.

Andrew Schutsky: Yeah. No, I love that. like I said, I'm fortunate to do this
externally with inspire. So if you're not familiar inspire, there's multiple C,
I, O and C and CSO organizations in different pockets of the US. Like I know
Philly's got a chapter. Houston's got a chapter. New York City has a chapter.
And as part of that, there's a community of CIOs. We get together, every other
month for a certain topic in person, virtual, whatever it may be, one or the
other levers of that is a mentoring organization. We're like, hey, anybody who
has an interest in developing two to three candidates over the course of a
quarter, you meet a few times and you meet. And the first thing I asked him
like, hey, tell me about yourself. Tell me about your background. And then
second question. This is usually hard for them to answer the first time is like,
what's your next role? Like specifically, what are you looking to do? And ninety
plus percent of the time they're like, I don't really know. So then it's an
exploratory exercise of like, all right, well, what do you like doing? What do
you not like doing? Do you like leading people? Have you led people? Have you
not led let people do you. And then trying to draw out like. Are you on a
technical track of like a specialist, an architect level principal, architect,
like the highest level of that or like, hey, I want to run and manage an
organization. I want to be CEO or CIO or a CTO, whatever it may be. And a lot of
our sessions are really spent getting clarity on what exactly that next role
could look like. And a lot of times we get there by rolling out the stuff they
don't like doing, right? Like a lot of times they might say, you know what? I've
let people don't love doing that. Or I've led large projects, don't love doing
that. I kind of just want to do my thing in my corner. Or it is like sometimes
it's like, I do want to manage a team. I just don't know where to start. So to
me, it's just getting really, really crisp. On what your next role look like.
And at Carlisle, we do something called an individual development plan, which
outlines and details like, okay, once you've got clarity on what you want to do,
what's your target horizon and time frame and what are the activities and
milestones you want to do to get there, and who's going to hold you accountable
to getting there because anybody can put something on paper, right? Like you can
anybody can put a two or three page PowerPoint. You can do it with Claude right
now. Say, hey, my next role is a director of infrastructure, right?

Doug Camin: How many things we could do with AI right now?

Andrew Schutsky: One hundred percent. I mean, but who is going to hold you
accountable? And do you have enough specificity and your action plans to get
there? Right. So there's two things is like getting clear on what it looks like,
getting clear on the vision, and then having some pragmatic way to say every
quarter, every month. Here's what success looks like. Very few people do. The
second part well is like monitor the execution and myself included at times.

Doug Camin: So the accountability component, so.

Andrew Schutsky: Accountability component is good.

Doug Camin: What I'm hearing here is like you're saying, let's not just make a
plan, but I'm going to help you with the accountability of are you tracking
against that? Are you doing what you've discussed or laid out? And if not, let's
pivot, let's adapt. Let's figure out what you need to do.

Andrew Schutsky: And the reality is like, if you're an outside party, like with
the inspire case, it's probably not going to be me holding you accountable for
years on end. Right. Because that that engagement will usually end. I'll rotate
through in three to six months with a new set of mentees. So it's got to be a
group of peers, right? Like, so if you can commit to and it's the same with the
gym, right? Anybody can write a private prescription, for a workout plan or
regimen for a quarter, but you really need some, a group of people who are like
minded, who have similar motivations to hold each other accountable. And that's
a peer group is going to hold a lot more weight than just me coming from the
outside and once a quarter and saying, hey, how are you doing? They're going to
feel a lot more accountable in a group of peers, for sure.

Doug Camin: Yeah, I love it. Thanks. Thank you for sharing. That's great. So.
All right. I sometimes ask a question about old technology. what old stuff do
you hang on to? Anything you still using like, a flip phone in the corner? No
telling anyone.

Andrew Schutsky: No, I'm pretty much a purge kind of guy. I have some exceptions
with little things hanging around. But no, I'm not like a nostalgic, like hold
on to things. I'm more of like, let somebody else enjoy it. If I'm not using,
give it away, donate it, give it to the kids. Let him play with it. Move it to a
different house. Something like that. Rather than like, collect things. I just
like technology evolves so quickly, as you know. I'd rather like, give it away
and move on to something later on when the time's right. And I'm the same way
with the cars too. Like I'm not super sentimental with that. With few
exceptions, but there's always something new to play with.

Doug Camin: So what, vehicles are you, hanging on to that older ones.

Andrew Schutsky: I've got some like a sixty seven Chevy two with like a modern
fuel injected drivetrain in it that,

Doug Camin: like a restomod setup.

Andrew Schutsky: Yeah. Correct. Exactly. I don't know if you knew that term.
I've got a fifty seven Chevy and I love to do a mid year Corvette like the C2
sixty three sixty seven. That's probably next on the target list. It was kind of
out of space. I got cars stacked in the garage and I'm in the process of getting
rid of. I got everything from that stuff to like Tesla electric trucks. I mean,
it's a problem. I say I'll admit it, but yeah.

Doug Camin: It's fun. we gotta have hobbies.

Doug Camin: what's.

Andrew Schutsky: Cool about the modern electric stuff, which I never thought I'd
be into this stuff as much as I am. Being an old muscle car guy is like, you
combine the performance of the electric side of things and the technology. It's
just like the ultimate, like you get combined full self-driving with the,
acceleration velocity of like, I have a Tesla Model S plaid. That thing is just
like, it's like an amusement park in a car.

Doug Camin: It's a rocket ship. Absolutely.

Andrew Schutsky: It's nuts. It's nuts. So like, there's a lot of my friends are
like, I don't know, there's not, there's not the experience of driving. That's
true. Like you don't have the sound, but like, you kind of forget about that
when it goes zero to sixty in less than two seconds.

Doug Camin: So it presses you into that seat.

Doug Camin: Yeah.

Andrew Schutsky: It's an experience. It's an experience.

Doug Camin: But I want to shift us back into talking. We're coming up towards
the end of the episode here. we haven't talked a lot about AI yet, so, always
the topic of conversation with folks.

Andrew Schutsky: Is.

Doug Camin: Talk at least a little bit about what are you doing in that space,
what's exciting for you? What do you think is not going to be exciting? I'll let
you expound on all those questions a little bit.

Andrew Schutsky: I'll kind of answer it briefly in two parts. Personally, I use
it some type of LLM or AI probably every day on some aspect. It could be from
medical diagnostics for myself, which maybe it's the wrong thing to do to
learning to fix things that I haven't endeavored in before to build things, to
cleaning up my LinkedIn resume. And then on the professional side of things,
like I said, we're managing a lot with running the business, customer
experience, managing price, managing cost, managing inflation, and a crazy and
crazy period with the war going on right now. So building tools and I'll call
them weapons to arm the business in those different aspects. but a lot of work.
On staying competitive with price. A lot of work on. We're looking at some
different aspects of. I can't divulge too much, of course, on the services side
of the business. So a lot of new offerings coming out, a lot of it internally
used right now. I expect more and more customer facing stuff to come out in the
next year or two.

Doug Camin: So yeah, there's been a lot of talk in news reporting about the fact
that some of these AI pieces and I'm not making this a generalized statement
about AI, but there's businesses are struggling to find some of the bigger
returns. there's been these big talk like, oh it's going to replace all the
employees and all this stuff. Yeah. And then as people have been pushing it, and
I've experienced this in my own organization too, as you push in, it's harder to
find some of those use cases. Yes. And the use cases become more narrow, which
is probably more practical, like, hey, it's going to really change this one
aspect of what we're doing. It's going to be a force multiplier for this team or
that type of thing. in your case. what has been the most impactful AI enabled
deployment or change that you've pushed into the business?

Andrew Schutsky: Without a doubt, two different gen AI tools and most recently,
Claude. So as we've used that, I think people are seeing more in a more
widespread basis. And I think they are seeing a more widespread basis. The power
of what this can do, and I'll say we've been using gen AI as more of a proof of
concept tool. So like if I'm doing one off pricing analysis or cost or supplier
analysis, there's that like light bulb on crap moment in 30s. It did what I did
in a week of having four analysts go run regression analysis and freight spend
or whatever it may be. And now like, okay, Andrew, you have my attention. How do
we now build this at scale and automate some of those use cases? So I love using
the gen AI tools and Claude specifically for proof of concepts, say, hey, let me
give it a whole bunch of data. let me let it churn through it and spit out a
meaningful result in a presentation. But they don't want to do that every day
manually, right? So now it's like, how do I automate that? But I think having
access to those POC tools on a very, very low cost basis, even if it's manually
feeding data, can really help turn on some light bulbs of like what's possible
now. It doesn't mean we're going to go dump millions of dollars at scale at any
one project without proving it out. But I really love that we're the
organizations embracing things like Copilot and Claude specifically to just do
basic tasks, automation and analysis, and helping us get to an answer or
decision in a fraction of the time we did before. I know that's kind of vague,
but specifically, and like I said, we're doing a lot of stuff in supply chain. A
lot of manufacturing companies are as well. How do we use it to manage freight
and costs? How do we use it to enter supplier negotiations more thoughtfully?
How do I look at real time market data, especially for things like we're in
asphalt, right? So a lot of petroleum based products, wildly volatile, volatile
right now. And they will be for some time, but that's turned on. The single
biggest tool for me and the organization so far has been things like Anthropic
and Claude and even copilot, and showing what's possible in a fraction of the
time what they did before.

Doug Camin: Yeah. So for me, that's also been, I think what you're describing
mirrors some of the experience that I've had, which is that at least in the
particular business that I exist in, we haven't found that big one thing where
it's like, this totally changed. But what we've seen is that for this set of
this set of employees, giving them access to Claude, giving them access to
ChatGPT, giving them access to copilot has changed and accelerated their
workflows and their timing and the stuff that they're doing and stuff like that.
I have a good friend of mine, he works at Cornell University, actually, and he.
I'll call him up and he'll be like, oh, man, I've got these these agents running
right now doing all this stuff. It's analyzing this stuff. It's got, it
interfaces with another agent that, that looks at these logs every day and does
all these things. so, different entities are finding different use cases where
some of them are building, like these highly automated workflows and stuff like
that. And some, I think this is where you and I are standing at the moment
anyways, is our particular businesses have been finding that they're leveraging
the people and not necessarily the process as of yet.

Andrew Schutsky: Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And I think as things evolve,
the conversation will spin more towards, okay, employee productivity is great,
do more with less fantastic, but how can we use it to drive competitive
advantage from our customer service standpoint to get them answers really
quickly? Like in our line of business? It's not like if you take like high tech
and banking where technology is the product and like that's all customers see or
and building materials is more of a legacy, relationship based business, but
still high touch customer service today. And sometimes it takes us longer than
we'd like to turn around a quote or a warranty claim. That's where we need to
get to a point of near real time responses to those types of more complicated
pricing requests. Like we've got, for instance, we make foam insulation, we can
shape it nine thousand different ways from Sunday. That can cause complexity and
it can cause it to take days to turn a quote around. If we could do that in
seconds, that becomes an advantage, right? So things like that will be more
mainstream and probably more of our focus area than in the coming year.

Doug Camin: So awesome. All right. now, we're really getting to the end here. I
always ask at the end, what's your advice for other IT leaders? What's inspired
you? And so two questions. What's inspired you as a leader and what is your
advice for other leaders?

Andrew Schutsky: My inspiration has kind of been simple. my passion for what I
do led me to what I'm doing. But I think what's kept me in the game is curiosity
and just never letting go of learning something new. So as an example, I just
finished, a CTO program at Wharton, year long investment and learning from other
people, not only learning new technology, but learning how they could be applied
and just being relentlessly curious keeps help, kept me motivated. And I think
it helps when you find your area of passion and finding that. My advice would be
like, find what you really, really want to do next. Get really crisp on that and
get after a plan to make it happen. So and find peers to help you along the way.

Doug Camin: Awesome. All right, Andrew, thank you so much for investing your
time on the podcast with us today.

Andrew Schutsky: Appreciate it. Doug. It's been a pleasure. It's been fun.

Doug Camin: All right. That's a wrap on today's episode of You've Been Heard the
platform for IT leaders. I'm Doug Camin, and we look forward to coming to you on
our next episode.