Where AI Meets Legacy Systems 

Tom Stoneman:

Hi. I’m Tom Stoneman, and this is The Intelligent Enterprise, where every two weeks, we take a break from the chaos of enterprise life and get inside a big idea by getting outside of it. Each episode, we meet an industry expert who helps cut through the noise from all the updates and rollouts while exploring one of their favorite break time activities. It might be over a coffee, a walk, or even a game of ping pong, something that gives them some head space when they’re deep in a problem, although we do try to avoid things like skydiving or whitewater rafting.

This week, I’m joined by fractional chief technology officer and chief information officer at Pet Madness, Yael Gomez, the fractional part meaning he gives high level leadership advice when needed to help companies achieve their technology goals. Before this though, Yael spent 21 years at the juggernaut that is the Walgreens Boots Alliance, working across two continents and three countries. Today, I want to talk to Yael specifically about a tension I’m sure every enterprise is wrestling with right now, how to integrate AI with legacy systems.

Yael Gomez:

It’s more than a piece of kit. It’s changing processes, it’s changing how we think about business performance, how we think about our product performance on the market. It’s not about changing tires on a car. It’s about changing the chassis of the car.

Tom Stoneman:

We discuss the tension of innovating but staying pragmatic, the role of leadership in this transition, and how Yael steps outside, no matter what the weather, to keep his head clear for those big decisions.

Yael Gomez:

Now I can go out to minus 25, minus 30 Celsius, so usually, there’s very little that prevent me from having the work.

Tom Stoneman:

So let’s get inside the future of enterprises by getting outside of them.

Yael, first of all, I’d like to welcome you to the Intelligent Enterprise. We are just so grateful you took the time to meet with us today.

Yael Gomez:

Hey, Tom, thank you very much for having me today.

Tom Stoneman:

It’s our pleasure. And we’ve spoken before, we had a great conversation. I know it’s going to be the same thing today so I’m looking forward to it. Yael, real quick, what is your break time activity that you go to when you’re deep in a problem?

Yael Gomez:

I have two break time of activity. So for me, it’s walk, when I need to let the brain wander, thoughts you face bubble up, and connect the dots. So walking is usually the approach here. Other problem to solve, the one I am really, really stuck with require usually running or getting on the bicycle. It’s sort of hard reset. It needs more energy, it needs to empty the brain entirely. Just put a lot of oxygen in it and see what the result is.

Tom Stoneman:

So we’ll get to that in a little bit. We’ll talk about your break time activity. But Yael, just to jump right to our main topic today, I’m going to start with a question. Are you an AI lover or an AI hater?

Yael Gomez:

Neither of those. I am really much pro outcomes. I don’t think that genie will be put back in the bottle. I don’t hate AI. I welcome, I embrace it. I don’t overly love it. I think it needs to be embraced with making sure we keep people at the center of it, so I really much believe in human-centered design and those type of things and how do we bring technology into our lives in such a way that it is helpful to us and it gets us to positive outcomes as opposed to anything else. That’s how I describe it, and really believe, however, that this is a game-changing technology numbers.

Tom Stoneman:

Like it or not, AI is here to stay. The question isn’t if large organizations should adopt it’s how. It’s like Indiana Jones. You know the treasure is there but there’s a lot you got to get through first to reach it. And most enterprise companies aren’t starting from scratch. Their systems have been built and rebuilt over decades, which means every step forward has to happen while the business keeps running.

Yael Gomez:

To me, the biggest tension is really how do you run the bank versus change the bank, if you like, fly the plane versus replace part of the plane. And the reality is some companies, the vast minority are getting born into today’s day and age, so they start with that. But for everybody else, you have an existing estate, and sometimes you have three generation of stuff in your solution system or architectures, and that’s the tension you have to reconcile. How do you keep doing what is required for the business, and at the same time, drive that change?

It’s not about changing tires on the car. It’s about changing the chassis of the car. It does require people to change their habits. It’s more than a piece of kit. It’s changing processes, it’s changing how we think about business performance, how we think about our product performance on the market, and nonetheless, you still have to run the business and you still have to perform against the old sort of performance metric, which quite often, the Wall Streets and the analysts are measuring you onto. They want you to be visionaries, but super pragmatic visionaries and deliver on the number every quarter.

So I think this is really the key tension. We did some work at Walgreens at re-engineering entirely our mobile app for the US customers, and part of the idea into doing that re-engineering was to really lift up the experience for you and I as customers and bring more meaningful data into the app, and to do that, my team and I basically had to plug between our legacy system running 10,000 pharmacies in the US where every day, thousands of customers at the counters picking up their prescription and doing a huge amount of transactions happening there. And we had to invent and plug something between that thing, which was core and vital to the business, and a new app experience in such a way that you as a customer could be notified that we’ve received your electronic prescription. Now we have somebody preparing it, and you have to do that against an existing legacy system, against expectation from the customer.

That tension, you feel it there, because on the paper, the upside is customer is satisfied. Hard to put a metric and a number on that until you measure it and see it happening, but you can clearly see the downside of having it wrong. So it feels like you’re standing on a bridge. You clearly see the downside, you’re not sure that the sky is the upside, and that’s what you’re working through.

Tom Stoneman:

I’m going to go a step further then. I’m wondering if there’s a kind of a FOMO, the fear of missing out. “Hey, they’re doing it, so we should be doing it,” and so companies are rushing into it sometimes. Do you see that happening?

Yael Gomez:

Yes. A little bit less now than two weeks after the release of ChatGPT where everybody was worried of missing out about something that they had no clue how to use anyway, but I think this is still there a little bit, and this is mostly there in organizations that are struggling with clarity of strategy. And what I mean by this is when you are not too sure about where you are going, what is your product, who is your customer, then you are much more inclined of being worried of a new technology, especially one like AI that is so revolutionary and can be applied to practically any part of your business.

So usually, when I have those conversation, you tend to reset the conversation into a, okay, let’s take it back to the beginning. What is important to you? Because once you know what is important, then you don’t have to say yes to everything. Saying yes to everything is basically saying no to everything, but I think a little bit less. I think there has been progress. People understand a little bit more the technology, and understand that the technology is there but deployment time will be over a couple of decades.

I would also say that if you believe that it will take time to deploy, that doesn’t mean you should be doing nothing, because wholesale deployment of a technology like AI mean basically that this is table stake for everybody. If you don’t have it, you are underperforming, but if you are having it, you are just performing like the rest of the pack. You still have to go back to the, what is my product? Where is my customer? Where can I apply that technology where it really makes me outperform my competitors, and not worry about the rest. The rest will take care about itself.

Tom Stoneman:

I want to come back to Yael’s break time activity of going for a walk or a run as I’m curious to know if there’s any ritual to it. These aren’t just random habits we’re interested in. They’re often like the invisible bits of architecture behind big decisions. They give leaders the space to step back and reset, and when you’re rolling out new systems across two of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, you probably need a breather or two.

Yael Gomez:

The walk is a ritual. I try as much as possible to start my day with 30 minutes plus walk. That’s me getting nicely into my day, and as I walk, empty the mind and then the important things start bubbling up, and towards the end of the walk in general, things are organized or there’s a shape around it. It usually leads to grab a coffee, write down what is your priority stack for the day. I am lucky enough to be living close to one of the Great Lakes, the Michigan one by the way, and that makes the walks even more nicer, to be clear, but yeah, it’s ritual. It’s how I start my day and how I get into my day.

Tom Stoneman:

And how do you solve that in the winter? Because I grew up around the Great Lakes and I know what it’s like.

Yael Gomez:

I have to be, number one, super thankful to all the folks that have made so much progress in the textile industry, because now I can go out up to minus 25, minus 30 Celsius, which is probably around the zero Fahrenheit, so there’s very little that prevent me from having the walk. The coffee on the way back is even better, by the way, is even more enjoyable. And when this is really not possible, I have the cheat code. The treadmill is in the basement and 30 minutes walking on the treadmill does the trick. Not as pleasant in terms of landscape, but it does the trick nonetheless. So every morning, the walk is there, no matter what.

Tom Stoneman:

Yeah, I remember all too well. I grew up in Northern Michigan and going out and trying to walk in zero or sub-zero weather is a challenge, and things have progressed, things are much better now. But I live out in California now, so I’m quite spoiled.

Yael Gomez:

Yeah, you can only remember it, but don’t show off, Tom. All right?

Tom Stoneman:

You’ve been in leadership roles for quite a long time. What do you think is the leader’s role in all of this, everything we’ve been talking about?

Yael Gomez:

I think it boils down to the things that have always mattered to a leader actually. I don’t think the type of technology has any bearing into leading, because we are leading people. So I think leadership is, number one, very much a human activity and experience. It’s done for, to and by humans, so in many respects, the nature of the technological age is irrelevant. To me, what I am trying to do as a leader, and I occasionally succeed and occasionally fail, is super simple. I’m trying to do always the same five things, and I think my role is to make sure that there is a vision and a direction. That’s to the discussion we were having a little bit earlier. When you don’t have vision and direction, don’t expect people to do a miracle or to perform well, that’s the first thing.

The second thing I think is super critical for me is once you’ve done that, well, you need a team. On your own, you are useless, so you need a team. That’s the people that are agreeing on your vision and your plans, so that’s the team, the broader team, and you need to make sure that team has the skills, the knowledge, whatever they need to do their work, and that’s your job as a leader, to make sure that they do have that.

And the third thing is once you have that, you get out of their way. You have to empower those guys. They are the guys that are doing the work. They are the guys that are making the right decision at the right decision points, that are having the true impact on what you’re trying to do, so get out of the way.

So those are the three key things, and I usually add to that two things. I make sure I manage the clock, so I set the pace and the routine, and what I mean by this is I hate when I see people going into a tunnel effect and they work, they work, they work, they work, and six months later when they get out of the tunnel, the market is no longer there. Well, you have an amazing product but you don’t have customers anymore. Well, what a waste of energy and time. So I think the job of a leader is to own the clock, set the pace of the work, pause, assess the situation, recommit to the work, change direction, work, pause, assess, recommit, and making sure that that pace is cranking always, and those pause to reassess the situation is there.

And the last bit, which I believe is 100% leader responsibility, is to making sure that whatever we do, we move forward. And there’s a huge difference in my mind between spinning very, very fast and it gives the feeling and the impression of doing a lot of stuff, but this is not forward motion. I’m telling people, it’s just like get in your car, put the gears in neutral, rev the engine as high as you can. I guarantee you, you empty the tank, but I also guarantee you, you are not moving by an inch. My job as a leader is to make sure that the car is moving and is moving as fast as possible with whatever fuel I have available. To me, this is what leadership is, and that’s not the technology stuff.

Tom Stoneman:

I think when you were talking earlier on, I was thinking of, and I can’t remember who said it, there’s the saying, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there,” so having direction, really important. So Yael, I’m going to ask you one last question here. Is there something out there that you think AI could do that has never been done before?

Yael Gomez:

Well, the answer is yes, yes, 100th time. I believe what is important is to qualify the last part of your question, which never been done before, and what I mean by this is there’s no humans that have been able to predict the market thousand times per second ever, and AI and all kinds of algorithms are already doing that today. Now, if the vector of performance we are thinking of or considering is about a certain type of decision making, creativity, inventing completely new things, I don’t necessarily think AI will ever be able to do some of those activities, and I’ll give you an example.

Do I believe that AI in five years from now will write, in French, we call that the train station novels, the one that are selling during summertime. Everybody, you get on a train, you buy one of those pocket book for the reading during the journey and you have massive success, and the stories always tend to be the same. So you have true-crime stories, you have the romance stories. The structure of the story is fairly well known. It’s enjoyable, it’s not killing your brain into massive depths of reflection. You’re not changing the world but you are enjoying the moment, you are enjoying the trip. It works for you, it works for me.

Do I believe AI in five years from now are able to write those books? Yeah, I think that AI will produce 400 books of those kinds a day. Does that means as a result of that, author playing in that market are in danger of disappearing or being irrelevant? Yeah, I think this will happen clearly, but I don’t believe AI will write the new Harry Potter or the new Lord of the Rings, because AI learns based on the past and the past is what has been produced before the point of training. So for the things that have never been produced, that the AI has never seen, the only thing it relies on is basically randomly trying stuff out and hoping for the best. I am not sure that the best novel ever written are falling in that category of creativity.

So to your initial question, do I believe AI will do things better than us? Yeah, 100%. Do I believe AI won’t do things better than us? Yes, 100%. Just pick what you are talking about, and I think this is okay for us as human. That means we still have places to go and explore where we have a lot of value and a lot of human value to bring, which is the most important thing.

Tom Stoneman:

So good at recreating the past, not so much the future maybe.

Yael Gomez:

Yeah.

Tom Stoneman:

Okay. That was a great way to cap things off. Thank you again for being on the Intelligent Enterprise.

Yael Gomez:

Thank you, Tom. It was a pleasure to talk about coffee and many other things with you. Looking forward to the next time.

Tom Stoneman:

Same here. Thank you.

After talking to Yael, I’ve been thinking a lot about his daily walk by Lake Michigan. What stuck with me is that for Yael, the walk isn’t a break from the work, it’s a part of it. It’s where ideas start to take shape. So many of us are focused on updating legacy systems, meeting performance targets, and keeping pace with the AI innovation. It’s no wonder we rarely leave room for our subconscious to do its work. So if you’re feeling that tension between keeping the business running and transforming it, maybe take a cue from Yael and step outside. Yael reminded us that real outcomes come from clarity, not just urgency, so let your thoughts breathe. You might be surprised what starts to come into focus.

Thank you for listening to The Intelligent Enterprise, a podcast where we get inside big ideas by getting outside of them. I’ve been your host, Tom Stoneman. Please remember to follow the podcast and leave a comment or review wherever you get your shows. See you next time.