451 -Your Value Is Bigger Than Your Code w/Peter Vardaro

451-Peter Vardaro

Host: Mike Kelley

Guest: Peter Vaedaro

Mike Kelley: All right. Welcome back to, You've Been Heard the show where we

pull back the curtain for the IT leaders steering the ship today, and the rising

stars hungry for their own seat at the table. We've officially banned boardroom

buzzwords and rehearsed corporate scripts in favor of genuine, unvarnished talk

about what it really takes to lead. Peter, huge welcome to the show. We're

thrilled you've decided to join us today and trade stories with us over at

youvebeenheardcom. Sitting in the guest chair is Peter Vardaro, a tech executive

who knows what it feels like to have grease on his hands from the IT engine room

before stepping into the driver's seat. What makes Peter's playbook so

compelling isn't just his track record with enterprise scale, it's his knack for

cutting through tech complexity like a hot knife through butter, proving you

don't need an empire of jargon to build agile, resilient teams that actually

love what they do. So Peter, would you mind introducing yourself and sharing a

little on the ride that you've gone through to get to where you're at today?

Peter Vardaro: Oh, absolutely. My pleasure. And thank you so much for your warm

welcome. And thank you so much for having me on here. I've heard so much about

your show and really, it seems like a cherished nugget in the community of just

truth and unfiltered, just rawness that I'm so happy to be a part of. Right.

Mike Kelley: I appreciate that. Thank you.

Peter Vardaro: So thank you again. my name is Peter. I did start my career

actually in business operations. So in the healthcare industry, I actually

started as what's called a bmet, biomedical engineering technician. So I used to

work on equipment and out of the pure hatred for the software I used, I started

to like, say, I need to come up with something better. And that led me down a

path of it. that led me into enterprise applications where I've been very

happily sitting and working with teams to make things better.

Mike Kelley: So, tell me a little bit more about that, journey into the

enterprise stuff. Because, we talked a little bit before the show and we're

talking about the differences between, duffer and individual and stuff for

enterprise. And it amazes me how often people don't recognize the difference of

trying to do like navigation for an enterprise compared to navigation for you or

I on our phone to get to the store. Yeah.

Peter Vardaro: Absolutely. it has to work at enterprise scale because there's

going to be a lot of times where you're not going to hear about the small things

that don't work because you're soldiers and foot soldiers on the ground. They're

going to keep trying to trudge ahead. And a process that takes five minutes and

really should only take a minute and a half is costing your business money. And

if you don't recognize that with a business process analysis, looking at it and

just seeing why that's, oh, you can't scale your business. You have one thousand

employees using this application at once. Your APIs have to be scalable, right?

They have to be able to accept that data. They have to be able to hit the

database correctly. it's not like it's one time. And if you lose something, it's

not too big of a deal. You're losing revenue, you're losing customers

potentially if it's not properly done.

Mike Kelley: Okay. so you started to recognize that, but I'm sure you didn't.

Well, you already actually said that you came in with a little bit of that

innate knowledge because you were one of those foot soldiers, and you were the

guy that was suffering through that. Push the button and wait five minutes. and

so then you started wanting to, well, I'm sure you probably started figuring

out, hey, there's a button here. What's this one do? What's that one do? What's

this one do? Yeah.

Peter Vardaro: And you go.

Mike Kelley: Down, you got to know the software.

Peter Vardaro: Yeah. You go down this dangerous path because then you come up

with a proof concept that's not scalable by any means too, right? You come up

with your own, like, proof of concept that just kind of gets you by and just

shows you what it can do. And then you get a taste for what it can be and what

it can do for the business overall. And then eventually you start digging into

it and you're like, oh, I need to do something different because this can't

scale the way it is. So then you start kind of looking at, you know, your

enterprise level software and get involved in that stuff. And you start finding

that you can still do some of that really great tooling with something that's

much more scalable.

Mike Kelley: So as you talk about scaling, help simplify that because you know

what? It's almost one of those buzzwords that, I said we weren't going to talk

about, but it, it's a normal one and it's one that we just, in all honesty and a

majority of the conversations I've had with our fellows, we haven't really dove

into scaling and what scaling means and what does it take. And, back to your

example, a five minute thing. It should take one minute. So there's four wasted

minutes. And if you got a thousand people doing it, there's four thousand wasted

minutes per each of these transactions. That's when scaling actually kind of

comes into play. But how does it come into play in the way that you're talking

about setting the foundation.

Peter Vardaro: Yeah. So a number of times you start in a big problem. Also, that

challenge that's presented by the business is sometimes if they have trouble

foreseeing their own success, they tell you to plan for X and then they're

hitting Y, which is much further ahead. Right? One of the applications that we

built was planning for one service center. So all the application was planned to

do is, it's always going to have these certain types of transaction with one

location. Well, then by the time we released the demo, they had three support

centers that were going to have to do this. And it creates a whole new pathway

that was completely missed during requirements gathering. So now, because that

almost like planned obsolescence into let's just build it one way without

thinking about how the business could grow without planning on what would ten

years in the future look like, five years in the future look like something that

you're, what does success look like in your wildest dreams? Plan for it at the

foundation.

Mike Kelley: Now, here's an aspect of this that I've found that I need to be

careful of because I have this tendency to gold plate things from the beginning.

So when we're trying to do a minimally viable product to, well, today's

methodology is get out the bare bones and then.

Peter Vardaro: There's nothing so permanent as a temporary solution.

Mike Kelley: I remember hearing that or a different version of that. There's

nothing as expensive as the cheapest solution. It was in Spanish, but they

translated it for me. and there's nothing so permanent as the, working on

temporarily designing something in production.

Peter Vardaro: Yes. Yeah. As soon as the business can see something works, they

just want to roll with it, right? Because that scaling is not necessarily

understood until unfortunately, you're in possibly a bind, right? Something that

you design that you really only tested with a half dozen users, just to see if

you can get through a workflow, doesn't mean it's going to behave the same way

at a thousand users, right? Especially when you're talking about records that

are supposed to maybe stack on top of each other, start exhibiting different

behaviors once you're really starting to fire rapidly, with a lot more traffic,

that's when things start to get a little bit complicated.

Mike Kelley: So for our fellows who find themselves in this situation, they

started to build some kind of an application. They started to put something

together and they did their job and they got their requirements and, did the

research, but didn't realize that the business was starting to look towards the

future and what they could do tomorrow. what suggestions do you have for helping

build that foundation in a way that will allow for the scaling?

Peter Vardaro: Generally always under promise, over deliver. So keep a little

bit in your back pocket from what your estimates are on what the thing can do,

and then put your project management hat on too, and make sure that as long as

everyone understands with what they're working with, what the scale is, that

everybody understands that this will have this expected lifespan. Right. and if

you are also very honest, that may help you get the seat at the table that

you're looking for, right? Because if you can be very raw and honest with the

business as well and say, this can has a viable life at this point, if we go

this route or if we go this route, we can do this. Can you tell me a little bit

about what our future plans look like? You can possibly be there for the

business decision as well.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. And that one's critical. I mean, it's part of understanding

the business and having that business acumen. But, being able to be with them

while they're making those decisions helps you understand or, better how to

direct each of the individual projects that you're dealing with. yeah.

Peter Vardaro: There's nothing typically worse than when we're included in a

reactive nature, right? When we're included after a decision has been made,

they've purchased the software, they've made decision to go this route. And,

maybe a quick conversation could have alleviated a lot of pain points, or at

least given us all the understanding. So that way we move forward together.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. So tell me a little bit more about this, working with the med

tech and some of your experiences there and, the challenges of scaling up what

kinds of things have you seen or been involved in. I'm really interested in what

were the constraints that got you to say, I'm tired of being a tech. I want to

help the other guys like me who are suffering from this frustration.

Peter Vardaro: I found myself sitting in a hallway between, like operating

rooms, working on a machine called a cell saver. spins blood down from a

surgery, cleans it and allows you to kind of reuse it for a patient during

surgery. It's actually very good clinically to help with patients recovery. And

I'm working on this machine, and it's taking me so much longer to document my

work than to actually work on the machine. The machine was actually a dream to

work on. it used to be really fun. Machine had almost like a little bit of a

flat surface, almost like you could put your laptop right on there. So it was

perfect for the documentation portion of it. But I found like poor connectivity,

having to rewrite things like five times. I always had the understanding you're

going to do a lot of documentation when working on medical devices. It's a

critical part of it to understand, what the thing is going through, but it just

was exacerbated by the conditions of the software, my network connection, all of

that. And I thought to myself, there's really got to be a better way. My guys

are wasting a lot of time doing this, too. A lot of times I'd have to send

multiple guys out, one of them just to do documentation for the others, because

the documentation just got that rigorous.

Mike Kelley: and you're in between operating rooms and you think that you'd have

all of the connectivity that you'd need. Hospitals are usually highly connected

locations.

Peter Vardaro: There were definitely a lot of older hospitals, especially in the

northeast here where you've got a lot of, masonry work that affects a lot of

connections. And if you don't necessarily think that you're going to need an

access point in an operating room, you may not have one very close.

Mike Kelley: To you because how many people are supposed to be on the computer

while they're slicing somebody up?

Peter Vardaro: It starts to change over time, right? Because they start using

different technologies that then requires it. But at the time, you know, fifteen

years ago, that wasn't as much of a thought.

Mike Kelley: Okay. And so you went from dealing with that, trying to figure out

how to scale that. So, what was some of the adventures that you undertook as you

made that move? I mean, switching over to being a network admin and doing

network scans and deploying connectivity throughout buildings like that. It

sounds like you were dealing with multiple buildings and focused more on the

equipment, not the facility.

Peter Vardaro: I was very focused on the machines. That was really everything

that I did. So I almost had no thought on the network. And we tried to make it

so I could always work offline if possible. So cellular connections, things like

that, which were definitely difficult to work with, especially with the

conditions of these northeast hospitals from time to time. Right. eventually

what I tried doing is I just tried building something in like little low code

app builder just to get my hands dirty. I kind of showed it to, team is like a

proof of concept and people like, you gotta show this to the CEO and CEO saw it

and he's like, oh, you're going to do more of this and starts to kind of move me

into that IT direction because he recognized immediately that there was

absolutely opportunity there.

Mike Kelley: You bet you didn't think to copyright it before you showed it to

him.

Peter Vardaro: At the time I was young, I had none of these ideas right. I was

just looking to make things better.

Mike Kelley: Right, and that seems to be a fundamental piece of many of us in

these seats and I want to solve the puzzle. Yes, I want to help, and I want to

make things better. I want to make it faster. what other kinds of challenges do

you run into with medical equipment and working with that in general?

Peter Vardaro: Well, eventually I got to, work a little bit less with the

medical equipment and started working more with the application, as one does.

Right. And then I started to realize, okay, it wasn't even all of it just being

the documentation. It was the whole logistics portion of it. So, not working

directly for hospitals, but actually being a service provider, we are providing,

medical devices to hospitals who need them just in time as their senses spikes,

they run out of these devices and need backups and need to, fulfill things for

patients that they are expecting coming in the door. And the whole logistics

problem of it that became much more interesting because you can start to plan a

little bit based on a lot of different information. You start to look at things

that are really cool, like the CDC's flu map, and you look at your warehouse

trends and you start looking at what your average inventory turn is. That's

something. Now you can start using some of your regular data points to start

solving those problems. And that became a really cool challenge.

Mike Kelley: You started to learn the data science or did you bring others in to

help you figure out those leading indicators? and when they were telling you,

okay, increase stock here, get move stock from there to there. because I'm

assuming you were learning all of this prior to today's tool sets.

Peter Vardaro: Yeah, absolutely. So essentially a lot of what our industry went

through at the time was just understanding based on gut feel. So the only other

thing that we have is we can compare to the Australian flu map, which is offset

from the US flu map to give us an indicator of how bad flu is going to be here.

That gives us not really a very strong number, but almost like a coefficient to

say, okay, this is what we can kind of expect, but really it's much more of a

data science problem. And we're still working through that a bit more. You

always kind of want to refine, just like with an AI model, just keep training it

to see what you can. You want to reduce the number of wasted movements in your

inventory transactions. So transfers cost money, getting equipment up and ready,

preventive maintenance, all the costs, money you want to try to avoid having too

much equipment and avoid moving stuff unnecessarily. So knowing where stuff

should be at the right time is a really good thing to know.

Mike Kelley: So the levels of inventory and the types of devices that you're

talking about, are you talking about things that you can sling over your

shoulder and move around the facility? Or are you talking about like, things

that get deployed into a room and never move again until the lease is up.

Peter Vardaro: Majority of the stuff that we do is movable medical equipment,

which is going to be like IV pumps that go on a pole. A lot of respiratory

equipment like ventilators, high flow therapy devices. We also do a lot of beds

and therapeutic surfaces. Those all have different inventory turns to them,

which is really cool. and it's not something that necessarily all fits on the

same schedule in the same way. Different types of illnesses also create spikes

in the inventory differently.

Mike Kelley: Okay. you were doing all of this back in twenty twenty, weren't

you?

Peter Vardaro: I was involved in twenty twenty, actually. I even had to put my

biomed hat back on for a little bit because there was nobody trained on some of

the equipment that I was at the time. So we have a need for more and more

technical people. And, I really hope that more people get much more involved in

the technology. but at the time, there were certain devices that were, hard to

service that I still knew how to. So I put that hat back on and, did a little

bit of that with my sleeves rolled up to, but yeah, we were doing in twenty

twenty, but it got so bad. It was like you didn't have two ventilators to rub

together if you needed to. Right.

Mike Kelley: Right. Yeah. And that's what made me think of that was because you

mentioned those,

Peter Vardaro: It completely destroys all your data sets too. You can't look

back to twenty twenty or any time around and like, make sense of your data. It's

completely disrupted. So now we're starting to get some good data again. But

also post Covid, you had a lot of hospitals by excess equipment. You had a lot

of things that happened that, disrupts the normal flow of inventory. So

nothing's been the same. Nothing will probably be the same again. The only

constants change, right?

Mike Kelley: Yeah. Unfortunately. okay. So moved into the application. What kind

of an application are we talking about then or at scale for your organization?

Because it's not a warehouse management system is it.

Peter Vardaro: Or it is in a warehouse management system. And we're building off

of, standard platform tools like ServiceNow and building with some plug ins to

that as well. So what's really cool is that something like that, I can get,

developers who can turn things around very quickly. they have some baselines for

the inventory management stuff. And then you can also build some of your data

science. And then they've got great plugins that will connect to snowflake. So

not to plug any vendors for anything, but you know, that's just our tech stack.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. And it's the norm of the day, man. There's what, five

different solutions out there that fit into that realm. so what are some of the

other things that you've found or challenges that you'd like to share with

others that whose eyes aren't going to glaze over and who understand what you're

talking about? Yeah.

Peter Vardaro: I think, a lot of the challenges is really the communication

sometimes with the business and even coming from that business operation side, I

start to talk to other units. There are things that even as things change and

you step away from that, you're not involved in that day to day anymore. You

have to spend a lot more time listening because their problems are changing day

by day. you have to listen three times more than you think. You need to slow

everything down. Spend a lot more time listening. And that trust will start to

come your way, that you're actually doing right by them too, because they may

not even tell you the entire truth until they believe that you're listening.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. And I was wondering, so how do you train your people to

listen? Because you can no longer be out there doing all of that. So now you've

got to have your team going out and doing that. And so how are you tempering

them or training them to think about or look or try a little harder?

Peter Vardaro: Well, a lot of times I'll try to make sure people shadow me a

little bit and I'll get right in there and have that conversation, especially on

certain high value initiatives. And, I'll let my team after we'll do like little

sync up meeting. What did you think? What could we have done better? And then

I'll let them run with it a couple times and I'll shadow and we'll just kind of

give each other like honest advice. What could we have done better each other?

And I try to just be very honest and open with my team at all times. if I've

done something wrong, I always want them to tell me if they do anything wrong,

I'm going to tell them. And not in any type of way that's supposed to be

backlash. It's just say you're going to get better results if you do it this

way. And teams always kind of appreciate it if you treat everybody well, they're

happy to hear it.

Mike Kelley: Yeah, I was listening to a book recently and some of that's like

the difference between being nice and being kind and sometimes being nice is

when you're not telling everybody the whole truth because you're trying to be

kind or nice to their feelings. And being kind is sometimes that harsh truth and

giving it, showing them that kindness and being honest with them.

Peter Vardaro: Yeah. Not telling them truth isn't going to help your team grow.

And you can't grow if your team's not growing. So I need somebody who's going to

be able to take my old position for me to make, grow up that ladder. And if I

don't have that, I'm not going to get there or even I'm given the opportunity to

get there. Everything is collapsing behind me and I'm not going to stay there

very long anyway.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. Because you'll get pulled back in. Yeah. And it seems to be

something that so many of us don't really understand too, is that, build my

replacement; a lot of us get afraid of doing that and not recognizing that by

having somebody that can follow behind me, I can move to a different. I can

grow, I can continue to do something new and different. And they're growing

because they're learning all of the things that I've learned. Yeah.

Peter Vardaro: I try to tell every member of my team, their value is not what

they think it is. Every single time my developer thinks that their value is in

the line of code that they wrote. My business analyst thinks that it's in the

process. They develop. Like it's never that. The brain that you have in your

head can do better. You can come up with complex ideas that solve problems that

make the world better for somebody else. That's your values making things better

the same way we're trying to. However you do that, those are tools you're using.

That's not what gives you value. So detach yourself from the thing that you

think gives you value and change yourself. Rewrite what you think is true.

Mike Kelley: Interesting. I really like that thought and the way that you've

articulated it, because it's true. It really is. So what was the experience that

helped you? You understand your value. When did you understand that lesson or

did you have somebody teaching you?

Peter Vardaro: I feel like for me, it was something that I just kind of saw in

the little mini successes I had in building the first applications and little

widgets that were making my life better because it wasn't just making my life

better, it made life better for a lot of people. So a lot of times we'll kind of

like bring our business analysts through from the help desk and say, I'll tell

them there are features in this help desk, whether you realize it or not. If

somebody has a repeat issue, it's probably something we can automate and fix. So

I'll try to get them started there. And then I'll tell them when you fix a

ticket, that helps one person, when you write a feature that helps everybody,

that possibly helps hundreds of people. And now I get to tell them when I get to

grow one of you into a director. I've helped possibly thousands of people, so

the scale just grew.

Mike Kelley: That's awesome. Peter. at this point, I don't know how many of

these podcasts I've done. to me, you're articulating a unique thought. and I see

it and I understand it and Iike, I'd like to think that I've done it myself. but

I've never seen it in that light. you got any more, you can expand on it.

Peter Vardaro: I think that's just the beauty of scale. When you start to see

the winds happen, you get a little bit hungrier for them. So I like to make sure

that the team members know what that win feels like. And one thing that we also

really like to go back to is let's calculate this internal return on our

investment. So there are a couple times where, team members will, write

something up, write up the features developers work on it, make sure that

everyone gets their shout out and their day in the light and a little bit of

shine that we can put on them, but then we'll try and come back at that point of

that ROI, at least a year, we'll look back and we'll say, okay, this is how many

hours we saved. And when it's something huge, like I think there was one

logistics, one that saved like four hundred hours a month. We were just like

completely floored.

Mike Kelley: That's ten employees. That's ten full time employees.

Peter Vardaro: Yeah, absolutely. Now, of course, it doesn't mean that you can

like reduce ten employees headcount. It just means that now you have that

scalability in the business. I have capacity to fill with more revenue

generating activity actually. Instead, there you can give people a little bit of

room to breathe and do their job better. Instead, we'll look at a feature like

that and I'll highlight to the team members who worked on it. This is because of

you. You guys put your hands on this and made the people who do this their day

easier. They could now do their job better. And ultimately, at the end of the

day and our industry, it helped the patient.

Mike Kelley: Which is always a good thing to be able to, bring it back to you as

you're affecting lives, and not just in the way that we're talking about of our

coworkers and making their, days a little bit easier. and it's also an

interesting way to think of scale too, right? Because, when you started talking

about scale, I'm thinking about, yeah, okay, build this widget for this office

and it's going to help that group or that company. but oh, now we need to get it

to five distribution centers and scaling like that or. You built it for ten

people and now you want it for one hundred people, and now you want it for one

thousand people. But trying to teach the tech support or the help desk guys,

hey, a ticket equals helping one person a feature or that fix that stops that

recurring issue helps the organization.

Peter Vardaro: Yep. Absolutely. And as they start, I can see the gears turning.

And then as those features get released, those bug fixes get released and they

start to realize that their regular ticket count went down at post release.

They're like, oh, I get it now. That's kind of the cool thing. I love kind of

teaching that to people and then seeing it actually happen. That's really great.

Mike Kelley: Got any examples?

Peter Vardaro: Well, there was definitely that one with that, large feature with

the, saving four hundred hours. There's another one where we just Automated a

billing process that was just taking up a lot of time, and we just put a bunch

of hours back in everyone's plate, and that was huge. I think one of the ones

that probably a little bit more proud of our customer experience team was really

starting to run a bit ragged because they were just they one of the hardest

working groups in our organization because they run a twenty four hour business,

because our customers are twenty four over seven, three sixty five. So they have

to staff overnight. They have to keep people running through holidays and

everything. And we found that we could automate a couple of ordering processes

that came through certain pathways. And we were able to reduce something like

three hundred orders in a certain given time period, which, just made everyone

breathe easier. Now, the rush to hire people because, okay, if we're not, we're

going to burn more people out. That slowed and they got that breathing room.

That was one that I thought was exceptional.

Mike Kelley: Awesome. So, there was some hints to the vendor circus. And when I

was doing my background research on you. what things have you learned from

working with vendors and trying to manage, the hype and the promises and, it

almost sounds like, part of your organization is dealing or being a vendor

yourself too. Yes. So it's got to be an interesting dichotomy there.

Peter Vardaro: Yeah. Providing the service from what we do for our customers, a

lot of the service that we provide has to be ready well in advance. So there's

not just the just in time delivery, like when you're working with an IT vendor.

So that's a little bit different because that that battleground is actually

every day way in advance. You usually keep like a queue of equipment in advance.

So our battlegrounds are really more in supply chain, making sure parts are

ready at the right time and all that. when it comes to managing it vendors, that

does become a little bit tricky because, especially, I mean, for a while, I've

interviewed many people who, worked in different areas, worked with different

programming languages for a long time. And it doesn't necessarily tell you what

they're willing to understand about the business. And it's really that if they

don't understand it themselves, then they're really just going to be able to

write code off of what a story gives them, and it will be absent of anything

that's missing there. So that puts a lot more pressure internally to make sure

that that story is written perfectly. And so I really look for people who can

think and preempt the problems the business isn't thinking about. And I try to

also be very honest that I don't expect every relationship to be perfect. I

expect us to be open and honest with each other, and that's just to work through

things.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. And that honesty again, and just being able to, talk it

through and be able to tell people when it's not working, when it is working,

and look for the new solution.

Peter Vardaro: And give them the opportunity to correct course, If they're

willing to course correct, then let's be teammates. Let's do this. If you're not

willing to, because you don't think that you should have to learn the business,

I don't really have time for that.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. It's kind of harsh, but if you're not learning the business

anymore, then. No. Yeah.

Peter Vardaro: Yeah. In the world of AI, that is going to really radically

transform the way everyone does everything. I think it is more important than

ever for us to understand the core reason why do we do anything that should be,

your statement, every meeting we start needs to be, why are we here? Right. Stay

focused. What is it that we're doing? what problem are we trying to solve today

and stay on that track? if you have people who are not understanding the depths

of that, then they're not really fully engaged. They're just going to write code

and writing code is being simplified.

Mike Kelley: Yeah, very simplified. and writing many things like that

documentation. I wonder how radically different your life would be had you had

the tools that are available today back then. So talk to me a little about AI

and the influences into your world and are you seeing it on the frontend? Are

you dealing with it, trying to build it into the backend? How is AI affecting

you and what you do on a regular day?

Peter Vardaro: Yeah, absolutely. We've actually just started up with AI strategy

and governance team. and actually, the director who oversees that was one of my

BA's at one point. And I honestly, one of the proudest things was actually

having him move into that role. we're starting to look at the new things that we

can do with it. it's one of those things where we also have to be a bit cautious

and really like hone in on the governance because there is a protected health

information involved in some of these orders. So there are certain types of

orders that we can kind of already start implementing some AI around. So most

movable medical equipment will not have an attachment to a patient. Hardly ever.

But a bed and therapeutic surface, the bed and mattress and frame, all that

stuff that typically does get attached to a patient in a database standpoint. so

it's one of those things that we've been a little bit cautious about making sure

that all of the tools are compliant because you have to make sure the entire

chain of command through that's holding that data has to be encrypted at rest in

transit all the way through. So every tool that you use in between has to be

okay. So we're getting to those initiatives. a lot of times AI is very

beneficial for us on the problems that everybody has. Logistics problems. How

many parts should I order? I have this many preventive maintenance things coming

up. So we get to plug it in for things like that. That's very helpful. but we're

looking to really solve bigger and bigger problems with it.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. Like trying to have it or feeding it the flu data and letting

it help solve some of these things or just trying to train that model and work

with that. But then again, PII and HIPAA have to be careful.

Peter Vardaro: You can let it make recommendations, right? But you have to still

have a human driving it.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. I keep seeing it now h I t l human in the loop. And then I

started to see human on the loop where they're watching it versus it being in

there and interacting with it. And, so how many AIs are being forced upon you

compared to AI that you're implementing? Because that's, been kind of a

discussion too. the third party.

Peter Vardaro: I don't think that anything is really forced on us. I think my

organization has been really curious to see what we can do with it. So I have a

lot of people excited, and we're kind of trying a little bit with everything,

some of what we're doing, like I mentioned, some of the platform we work on is

ServiceNow. So we're using some of their native, AI tools as well to try it

through that just because it kind of also simplifies things when you have less

integrations to work with. That also is nice to not have to troubleshoot that.

so we're definitely doing a big chunk with that. and then building a few things

called Gemini chat.

Mike Kelley: Okay. How are you guys trying to control that and keep people from

just grabbing or using the public models.

Peter Vardaro: So what we started to do, and this is really I'll have to see if

I can get John introduced to you guys because he's doing a phenomenal job with

this. he is actually helped work with infrastructure to see who's using it. And

then he just gave them licensing because you know, they're going to use it, give

them the, our licensing to make sure that they're using the right version.

Mike Kelley: Right version. And then does that give you guys the administrative

control to make sure that it's not training public models and all of those

pieces? Okay.

Peter Vardaro: Yeah. So now it's not, like, shame on you for using AI. It's,

hey, saw you were going to use AI. Let's get you working collaboratively with

us.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. work with us and let us pay for it. Yeah. You just go do.

Alright, so I had a conversation with somebody a little earlier today and we

were talking about vibe coding. What are you running into in that world? Because

I keep hearing that one being, double edged sword or dagger or.

Peter Vardaro: There are some dangerous points with it because if someone

doesn't understand what their vibe coding is probably just going to be a proof

of concept does not necessarily have the ability to scale because now more of

the pure infrastructure things, right? So a lot of times you end up with

something that someone thought of actually a pretty good workflow, right? But

and then you get into it and underneath the surface, the technologies that are

used are not going to work the same way. I keep thinking about even, scalability

is one of those things that comes up, when humans write it, when computer writes

it, right, it's going to be if I use, say, something like Azure sync, which

doesn't give you a lot of control over the data that syncs across versus I use

an API sync that has a lot more control. There's a clear difference in

scalability, one gets implemented a lot faster than the other. So if you're vibe

coding, a lot of times speed is your goal and it's going to be reflected in that

and the technology underneath. it absolutely has, some challenges there. And you

do have to try to work collaboratively with the business because if they're

happy to see this, you have to realize there's something that they like in it.

So you can take that as a proof of concept, but then you still have to build it

into an enterprise tool.

Mike Kelley: Yeah, I was going to bring that up, individual product versus an

enterprise product. So you got to take that individual product that they've

created or coded or that concept that they came up with, and then start to turn

it into an enterprise solution.

Peter Vardaro: Absolutely. But it's great. Almost like a wireframe, if you think

about it. Right? A user is trying to understand what can I get out of my brain

to give to you that this is exactly what I want. The flow. They vibe code it.

They give you a wireframe. This is what I want to have a button here. I want to

click here. I want it to bring me here. And this is what all I want the app to

do. Well that's great. Wireframing. Now that makes it a lot easier to

communicate to a development team. All right, let's build this. But let's put

some best practices in it.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. And not only the wireframe, but it also helps them being the

business user, communicate in or translate their ideas into something that those

coders can use. Yeah, yeah.

Peter Vardaro: There's always this communication gap that you're trying to

resolve between what somebody has in their head and what they can't put down,

and the repeatable processes that you might have in your head. And also the

other things that the business is trying to accomplish simultaneously. So you

want to fit all that stuff together at the same time. And the better of an image

you have, the faster you can get there.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. So true. What other lessons do you want to impart to our

peers that are listening to us and or those that are listening, trying to move

forward; scalability values, not where you think it is?

Peter Vardaro: Yeah, I, think that a lot of things is just, the human aspect of

it. Listen more than you talk where you can, guide people with, kindness and

humility and all that stuff will always pay off. It doesn't matter what it is

that's going on. Be kind and it'll pay act.

Mike Kelley: That's an awesome thought. I really like that. because in all

honesty, I try to follow those ideals myself. so the question that I warned you

about earlier, what do you think we'll be talking about in eighteen months that

we haven't been talking about now?

Peter Vardaro: So, I think that we're going to have a need for more humans. I

think that that's actually going to be the surprising thing. as much as this

stuff is really cool, we're going to realize that some of it needs to be a

little bit more human. And I see that some of that is also coming true in what

is starting to be built. They're talking about Claude watermarking, its work

because we need to know what's human generated, and we're going to put value

differently on the things that are human generated. We're going to want things

that are human generated and other aspects of our life. Not really so much the

tech industry, right. It's going to be more so that we're going to value these

human to human, conversations and relationships. And, I think that that's going

to be a big deal. I think that, we're going to see a few different waves of what

happens with AI that, people will panic, things will subside, they'll panic

again, that'll happen. That's going to be a natural wave and progression. But I

think more than ever, eventually we're going to say, I really miss talking to

people the same way that we used to.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. very interesting talk and the wave analogy, because in my

mind, I was thinking the same thing, the tsunami of oh comes through, wipes

everything out. All of these people get taken out of customer service and being

the human interacting with people. And then right now we're in that point where

everything's rescinding back in and now they're starting to hire people back.

So, very interesting thought.

Peter Vardaro: I think actually one of my favorite use cases is, Ikea that

reduce so much of their customer service team with AI and just repurpose them

into kitchen designers. That opened up a brand new vertical for them. So they

expanded everything, their entire business by shifting customer service

representatives into a much more valuable, teammate.

Mike Kelley: And you know what? I haven't followed that story. Have they needed

to bring any of their customer service people back yet?

Peter Vardaro: Or I think that's working pretty well when it's targeted. Because

if you've got someone who says, this is my order number and these are the parts

that I needed, I think that works pretty well. And you can have that kind of do

that type of work. Absolutely. And now you can have a human being who isn't just

looking at a manual, looking things up and would you previously think is lower

value work? And now they can do something like put the creativity into kitchen

design. So I love that we can shift people into new verticals altogether. And

then you realize you need more people in this.

Mike Kelley: Yeah. And you kind of hit your circle on, we need more people.

Well, I have enjoyed this conversation. I hope you enjoyed it as well. I hope

our listeners enjoyed it, and remember to drop us a, like, listen to them some

more and join the community youvebeenheard.com. Peter, I appreciate the

conversation and the sharing of your experience, your honesty and your wisdom.

thank you so much for your time today.

Peter Vardaro: Thank you Mike. This was a lot of fun. I really appreciate you so

much. This was great.