Techstrong Is Eating Its Own Agentic AI Dog Food

Shimmy says, Shimmy says, Shimmy, Shimmy, Shimmy says, Ask me almost anything Hey everyone, welcome to this week's Shimmy Says. You know, this one's gonna be a little different. I say that every week, but this one really is a little different.

You know, we're living in petty times, and you know that moment when you realize that, you know, the flip-- the switch is flipped, something big just changed things, and we're never going back to where we were before. Over here at Techstrong, we had that moment this week. I'm gonna tell you more abou-about it, but it involved an AI agent, a WordPress, and one very stubborn editor.

Sounds like a joke. They didn't all walk into a bar at the same time. But, you know, there's so much talk about AI, AI, agentic AI.

Of course, Nvidia had GTC this week, and Jensen Huang was up there talking all about how, you know, this is gonna add a trillion dollars in revenue. " We got other people saying, "It could be amazing. " Well, that, that's what I wanna talk to you about today.

But I'm not gonna talk about what I've read or what I've heard, what other people are saying. I wanna get real this week. I'm gonna tell you exactly what our experience here at Techstrong has been, you know?

I, I call it Techstrong: Eating Our Own AI Agentic Dog Food, and it's really a peek behind the curtains how one small tech media company has, you know, adopted or at least tried to adopt agentic AI and what our experience has been and how it's changed things. And I, I, I hope it'll serve as a, a real point of information for you, not hype. I do- I don't have any horse in the game here, but I, I wanna tell you exactly what we've done.

So let's, let's really talk about what's going on with AI, right? As I said before, not the press releases or the slides or the, the prophets of LinkedIn, you know, telling you we're all going to be replaced by lunchtime next Tuesday. Well, I'll be at RSA next Tuesday.

I wanna tell you what happens, as I said before, in a real company, when a real company like Techstrong deploys this stuff inside our business. You know, it's funny. We've been covering AI at Techstrong since it burst on the scene two and a half or so years ago.

But we've gone from covering AI to running on AI, and, and that's very different, right? Talking about it, writing about it's great. Eating that dog food, that's another story.

So let me, let me get into it here, right? So when ChatGPT first burst on the screen, I guess it was late twenty twenty-three, we did what every tech media company did. We wrote stories.

We interviewed vendors. We debated the implication. We tested it out.

And what do I mean by tested out? You know what I mean. The parlor tricks, the magic stuff, right?

"Write me a poem. Take this article in the style of Shakespeare. Summarize that article.

" You know, and for people who hadn't seen the AI kind of parlor tricks before, it was magical. It-- You got, like, all kinds of oohs and aahs. But for those of us, especially in security tech in general, but security more importantly, we were very impressed but cautious.

Look, it hallucinated. It made stuff up. It lied.

It deleted stuff. There was all kinds of security. And, and around the wrapper of it, no matter how bad it screwed things up, it always sounded so confident.

Even when it was wrong, it sounded confident. " So internally here at Techstrong, we thought it was really cool, but it wasn't ready for primetime. We were not about to let a machine publish under, under our brand without human oversight.

We told our writers, "No AI. " And, you know, the credibility we've spent years building, well, that's something that's real. But let me tell you what else is real.

Sometime last year, September, October, certainly by November, it got real. All of the models got so much better. Not just clever, but they became useful, consistent, capable of doing real work.

And I'm gonna tell you what else happened too at the same time that kind of flipped the switch. Humans, especially us here at Techstrong, we got better at using them. We learned one-shot prompts, two-shot prompts.

How do you-- You don't take-- You know, you don't take what it first gives you. How do you stop prompting from being guesswork and make it a skill? We learned how to steer the gen AI models, how to structure requests, how to get the output that matched your voice.

And you know what? As I said, sometime around November, December, man, we weren't playing around anymore with AI. We were collaborating with it, and that, that was a huge change for us.

Now, yeah, there's a lot of AI slop out there, and we tried not to let that go through the filters. But there's tons of AI slop out there. It's low-quality garbage that's flooding the internet.

It's low-quality bug reports that are flooding open source projects. But there's a part that we don't acknowledge, and that is that AI has dramatically increased the output. It's cre- it's increased the output of content.

It's increased the output of code. It increases the output of everything we point it towards, which just-Publishing a lot more content. We're making a lot more code.

We're doing a lot more things. And not all of it's bad. Most of it's really good, and that's a good thing.

It's a good thing for us, quite frankly, because the amount of AI-related content out there has forced us to widen our aperture to cover all this stuff. It's insane the amount of news coming out that we gotta keep up with. So without leveraging AI and some of these tools, we couldn't keep up with it.

And that was fine up until a couple of weeks ago. With the launch of OpenClaw, another switch flipped, and this might be a bigger switch in the long run, and that's agentic AI, right? Up until that point, agentic AI was a tougher sell, let's face it.

You know what? Up until that point, my attitude is, you know, agents s**k. They did.

They were hard to use, didn't do what they promised. I just didn't see it ready for primetime. Look, what they say they claimed to do sounded incredible.

Autonomous agents and software that could do tasks for you, not just prac-- chat. But they did. They, they s****d.

So we spent some time babysitting them more than they... You know, the time they sa-- that you spent babysitting was more time than they saved you, and it wasn't good. It's just easy to do the work yourself.

But it's part of our charter here at Techstrong, right? It's news. We covered it.

We told you about it. But internally, I couldn't sell that. It was like, you know, selling ice to Eskimos.

I couldn't get that out the door. But as I said, OpenClaw came in, I guess maybe a month and a half ago now, and that really was the "oh, God" moment. Suddenly, these agents became usable, accessible, dangerous, but in the best possible way.

" It re-energized people. And that's the thing I've seen. You know, the people who are in on this agents thing, they have like a look in their eye, like they're almost manic because they...

It-- the, the, the promise of what it does and what they're doing with it has them like-- i-it's almost like a, an endorphin kinda or a caffeine kinda hit. So for us here at Techstrong, though, it really started with me pushing one of our producers to try it. He was a smart guy, somewhat security aware, not easily impressed, jaded even.

He resisted. I, I get it. Giving an autonomous system access to your machine should make you a little nervous.

But I pushed him. " And eventually he got-- he went out, he did it. He put a Mac Mini.

We got him a Mac Mini. He installed it. And that one machine here triggered a tsunami.

Within days, we had the next team member getting their own Mac Mini and setting their own agent set up, their own instance set up. Before you know it, more Mac Minis starts popping up all over the place. Before you know it, you can't buy Mac Minis.

They're hard to get. We experimented, this is pure open source, learning how to lock 'em down, how to manage permissions, what APIs you're gonna need, what could it do, what could it not do, how to connect them to the tools that we're already using. Do we need MCP servers?

And then the magic moment happened, another magic moment. These agents, they started talking back. They started doing real work.

They were reading transcripts, watching videos, pushing buttons, drafting posts, editing content, publishing articles, scheduling the updates for us, summarizing the meetings. And I'm not talking about demos or toys. I'm talking about real production work here.

Our newsletter's being published like this. Our content is being posted. Here's the key point, though.

This didn't mean that no-- everyone stopped working, sat back, and let their agents do their job. No one got laid off. People just stopped doing these roto tasks, this mind-numbing stuff that used to eat their entire days.

The copy-paste workflows, you know what I'm talking about, right? Formatting, uploading, cross-posting, admi-- pure administrative overhead kinda stuff. The work that makes you busy but not valuable.

And the agents, that's the first thing they ate, that busy work. But then came yet another wave. And the, and just to show you the timeline, all these waves came in the last two and a half weeks.

We all started reading about Perplexity and this Perplexity computer. Truth be told, we wanted the Perplexity computer personal that runs on its Mac Mini, but that's not available yet. So we shelled out two hundred bucks a month and started giving people their own Perplexity computer accounts, those who didn't already have OpenClaw on Mac Mini set up.

" And I hear it, but I say to you, compared to what? Compared to the fully loaded monthly cost of an employee, like if I hired a coworker? Compared to outsourcing it to somewhere in who knows where in this war-ridden world?

Compared to lost productivity of people doing mind-numbing work? Two hundred dollars starts looking like lunch money to me. Forget lunch money.

Two hundred dollars a month isn't gonna buy me lunch all month. So I made a deal with my team, and I encourage every CEO and executive out here to make this deal. Anybody who wants it will pay for your Perplexity computer for a month.

But in return, this is what I asked of my employees. Give me a weekly report. What did it do for you?

What, what tasks are it doing? How much time did it save? What changed in your day or as a result?

As a result of it doing those tasks, what other kind of work were you able to do that you haven't been able to maybe do as well before? We'll look at the three weeks, three and a half weeks of you using that, and at the end of the month, let's decide together, is it worth the two hundred dollars a day? For some, it may be worth three, four hundred because they're gonna use a lot of credits.

And I thought, look, half are gonna use it, and half probably it won't work out. But I gotta tell you, it's only been about a week, and the results are already ridiculous. As I mentioned before, we've automated our newsletter production.

Our video descriptions get generated. Social posts are queuing up. Articles moving through our publishing editorial process so much faster.

Whole web pages, forget it. Websites designed and deployed being done. We got something for next week in RSA that you're gonna love on Security Boulevard.

Meeting agendas are being summarized before the meetings even start. And we're just warming up. This is just a week.

How sales is using it, marketing, operations, video, editorial. We're looking at learning events, the webinars, our internal ops. Everything is being rewritten, rethought, redone in, in lightning speed right now.

We're looking at stuff we haven't questioned in years. You know, some accounts that haven't been changed since twenty thirteen. And you know what?

We're looking and saying, "They're optional. " Our whole sorta zap system of how we integrate stuff, is it something we're gonna use going forward? I don't know.

Personally, myself, I'm using my agent to triage my email, manage my... the chaos that is my calendars. I'm streamlining the workflows that used to drain hours out of my day every day.

Now they're all going on in the background. When I check my, my email at six, six thirty in the morning, I have everything all taken care of here. But let me, let me stop here for a second.

I know what a lot of you say. "Shimmy, this is great. " No, absolutely not.

I didn't-- we didn't lay anyone off. We didn't fire no one. Let me be crystal clear here.

This really isn't about layoffs. It's about leverage. It's leveraging good employees to ten X themselves.

You-- 'cause a lesson I've learned in my career is you give smart people tools that multiply their output and then just stand back and watch what happens. Instead of grinding through ten hours of routine work, they spend those hours on strategy, creativity, problem-solving, thinking of new and better ways of getting stuff done. That's the stuff humans are good at, and it's actually gonna be the stuff we continue being good at.

There is a flip side. I'm going to acknowledge it. Not everyone is thrilled.

Some people are uneasy. Some people are skeptical. Some people are just so stuck in their ways they don't want to accept new things.

They just don't wanna learn something new. They're very happy in their little routines that they live in. And I get that too.

Change is scary for people, especially if you've been doing the same thing over and over for a while, right? Especially when it feels like the ground under your feet is shifting and it, it's all you can do to just stay up without falling down. But I'm gonna be really honest with you here as a CEO founder of a company multi-time.

If your job can be dramatically enhanced by these tools and you refuse to use them, you're making yourself very much less valuable, very much an optional person or an optional part of the organization. Not necessarily because the company wants fewer people or less salaries. I mean, there are some companies that'll do that.

But it's because the world outside the company is moving just as fast as we are here at Textron. You can't freeze time by ignoring it, wishing it away, or closing your eyes. Let me tell you about my favorite moment so far with this whole experiment.

We've got a young editor here. He's been here-- He's worked here forty-five years with us. I called him and told him I wanted him to use this, and he told me flat out there was no way that AI could publish directly to WordPress.

He's tried it. It doesn't work. It'll never replace him.

Forget about it. Too complicated, too many formatting issues, not feasible. We debated, and a, a healthy argument, and I say that it was a argument.

I don't know how healthy it was, but we banged heads and, you know, I said, "Well, just do me a favor. Try this anyway. " And that's when I knew how big this was.

That's when I knew this was real. That's when I knew this is gonna stick. What we're doing here goes beyond that.

We're not just eating this dog food. Our people are howling at the moon. Because once you see what's possible, you can't unsee it.

You start looking at every process, every task, every meeting, and you're asking the same question of it. Is this something I should be doing? Is this a job for a human, or can I get the agent to do it?

Again, not in a dystopian, let's cut jobs way, but in a practical way. Humans should be doing work that's worthy of humans. So my friends, here's the deal.

If Techstrong is any indication of what's going on out there, these next, these next few months are gonna be wild. Entire job descriptions will shift. Entire ways of doing business will disappear and reappear.

New roles will appear. Old workflows will disappear. Companies that adapt are gonna accelerate through this and, and really take off.

But companies that hesitate are gonna feel like they're standing still while everyone else is moving at warp speed. And this is the thing, this isn't hidden. It's not theoretical.

It's not ten years away. " It's sitting on your desk right now. Right now, you can get started, and every day you don't get started is a day you're wasting.

So here's my advice to you, especially if you're in leadership. Stop debating whether this is real. It's real.

It's not perfect, but it's real. Stop waiting for permission. Stop assuming someone else is gonna figure it out first, and you could piggyback it.

Start experimenting right now. Start learning right now. Break things, build things.

Push the tools they, they... until they fail, and then learn why and fix them. Because the people who master this early, they're not just gonna be a little bit ahead.

They're gonna look like they were teleported into the future, and you're riding a horse. 'Cause the future doesn't always arrive with fireworks. Sometimes it just shows up quietly and logs onto your computer and waits for instructions.

Don't miss the knock of opportunity here. Embrace AI. Embrace agentic AI.

We're doing it, and I, I'm really, really happy we are. I'm Shimmy, and that's what Shimmy says. I'll see you next week.

I'll be live at RSA for Shimmy Says. Shimmy says, Shimmy says, Shimmy, Shimmy, Shimmy says, ask me almost anything.