AI Orchestration for Smart Cities and the Enterprise with Robin Braun and Luke Norris - #755

It is just my pet peeve, but I think the chatbot was almost the worst thing to happen to AI, like, period. What we're actually finding at mass adoption, whether it's the town of Vale or it's Fortune five hundred's is back office automation. The normal enterprise looks so similar at the finance area, looks so similar at the HR area, looks so similar at procurement. And generative AI can just knock all of that down literally almost overnight. You get those ROIs, and then you go on to the sexy of new use cases. Alright, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the TwiML AI podcast. I am your host, Sam Charrington. Today, I'm joined by Robin Braun, VP of AI business development for hybrid cloud at HPE, and Luke Norris, cofounder and CEO at Kamiwaza. Robin's been leading HPE efforts to build out its unleashed AI ecosystem with the goal of enabling partners to take advantage of the company's infrastructure to deliver enterprise AI solutions. Luke's company is one of those partners. Kamiwaza offers an AI orchestration platform that connects enterprise data and systems with LLMs and agents. Before we get going, be sure to take a moment to hit that subscribe button wherever you're listening to today's show. Robin and Luke, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having us. I'm really looking forward to digging into our conversation. You've both been working on some really interesting projects together, including a new AgenTic smart city deployment in Vail, Colorado that we'll be discussing a little bit later on. Before we dive into the details though, it feels like we're at a little bit of a moment where every company is trying to figure out how to connect AI more deeply into their operations. And the two of you have been right in the middle of this. Curious how you're both thinking about this wave of enterprise AI adoption right now. What's the mood and the conversations you're having? Luke, we'll let you jump in first. Well, thanks. And once again, excited to be here. So, I think the beginning of the year, it was an AI mandate, AI washer, AI do anything. I think it was coming down from boards, it was coming down from external, pressures. And now I think it's turned very sharply to AI ROI. You have to have this sort of return on investment. The investment dollars are there, and everyone's excited to put them in, but you have to be able to show some actual tangible reason for it. You have to take that baby step, and then you could take larger and larger and larger steps faster and faster. And I think we're right at that inflection where people are getting that first baby step then. They're starting to actually see maybe that first ROI, and they're willing to take the next large step. And, Robin, how does that resonate with what you're seeing? I completely agree. I think that there there were …