Ben “The Automator” Christensen brings 20 years of IT security and automation experience, having obliterated over half a million hours of tasks and saved companies roughly $16 to $17 million in revenue. He specializes in making repeatable processes automated so businesses can stop wasting time on things robots should be doing.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-the-automator-c/
Website: bentheautomator.com
Host: Richard Lowe | Guest: Ben “The Automator” Christensen
Summary of Transcript
Richard Lowe: Hello, I’m Richard Lowe and this is the Leaders and Their Stories podcast. I’m here with Ben the Automator. Ben’s a regular now. He’ll be coming probably once a month. Ben, why don’t you give a short introduction of yourself?
Ben “The Automator”: Sure. Ben the Automator, 20 years of IT security and automation experience, over half a million hours of tasks obliterated, and about $16 to $17 million in revenue saved.
Richard Lowe: Not bad. I figured it’d be appropriate tonight to talk about digital transformation, because that’s kind of what you do. And I’ve led two digital transformation projects, so we can probably have a nice conversation.
What is Digital Transformation?
Ben “The Automator”: Digital transformation is really just getting out of the stone age for your processes. If you are still manually entering data, a robot has probably already replaced that. It’s about making your repeatable processes automated and transforming the way your business operates.
Richard Lowe: You said a key term: transforming. A common phrase pushed around is people, processes, and technology. People comes first, then processes, then technology. That’s why digital transformation projects should never be led by the IT department. What does IT want to do? Put in new technology. That’s what they do. But you don’t necessarily need new technology. You might need to change the mix of people. You might need processes changed. Then you might need new technology. If you start from the technology end, you’re probably paying homage to some vendor with a sexy new tool.
What you do is automate processes that people use. You’re starting from people. I doubt you rarely say “you need to buy this newfangled piece of hardware.”
Ben “The Automator”: No, it’s the exact opposite. I want you to use your existing software and make it suck less.
Digital Transformation in Practice
Richard Lowe: I’ve written three books on digital transformation and I led the digital transformation at Trader Joe’s twice. The first was from paper into the bronze age, and the second from the bronze age into modern technology. I think they did another one where they went into the cloud after I left. I created private clouds there. It’s been 11 or 12 years since I’ve been there.
Digital transformation could mean a lot of things. It doesn’t always mean transforming your entire company at once. You might just be digitally transforming accounting, or a sub-department of accounting, or the IT department.
Ben “The Automator”: If you save five minutes per day by automating or removing a process, that’s 1% of a headcount. If you can do that for an entire department, you’ve probably just fixed your budget issues.
The Digital Employee Concept
Richard Lowe: One of the ways I like to put it is you have digital employees and human employees. I have a digital employee called ChatGPT and it does a lot of work for me. I might throw a transcript at it and say, “make sense of this for me.” What did I commit to? What did they commit to? What are the deadlines we talked about? A lot better than note taking, except for the one time I lost the transcript.
Ben “The Automator”: Digital employees are a must these days. I’d take it a step further. You need a digital co-employee. If you’re an employee, you need the ability to use ChatGPT or Copilot to get your job done faster. Anything you hate doing, AI can probably do it better, as long as you give it enough parameters and instructions.
Richard Lowe: As long as it’s not beyond the capabilities of the AI itself. I wanted it to review an entire book and it just didn’t have the memory or resources. So I had to give it to it in chunks. It couldn’t read a whole 60,000 word book. But once I broke it down, it told me I had a couple redundancies. That’s the thing it’s great for.
Ben “The Automator”: Do you ever use a scratch pad when you interact with ChatGPT? If you tell it to utilize a scratch pad to keep track of its thoughts and movements, it’ll almost make a digital to-do list and then go back and double check it. You can also leverage second order and third order thinking, which is like having a peer review your work and then having an architect review your peers’ thoughts.
AR, VR, and Beyond AI
Richard Lowe: I had a project that I wrote about that used AR and VR as part of a warehouse digital transformation. They put on AR glasses, and the system would put arrows on the floor to guide them to the cases they needed. Dangerous areas had signs up. The worker could look at a box and it would show them what’s inside. This was all done through glasses and it was very successful at cutting wasted effort. That was a big digital transformation project that did not involve AI at all. It was just AR and VR.
Digital transformation does not mean AI. It could mean anything.
Ben “The Automator”: I specialize in SOAR technology: security orchestration, automation, and remediation. This is what cybersecurity companies use to create codified SOC processes, like investigating a phishing email. A lot of people are saying SOAR is dead, but you’d be surprised how many companies are still leveraging it. How would you handle a digital transformation for a single process that’s 4,000 steps?
Richard Lowe: In that case, your best step is probably to put all those things into an AI and ask: what here is redundant? What has bad flows? What can we optimize? Of course, the hard part is getting that all into AI because it’s probably not documented.
Documentation and Tribal Knowledge
Ben “The Automator”: A lot of your slow points and fatigue points are going to be tribal knowledge, the lack of documentation, the lack of artifacts, and then whether Timmy and Sally actually do the process the same or not.
Richard Lowe: Your first stage of digital transformation needs to be documenting what you’ve got. You don’t know what to optimize until you know what you have. And that helps solve the problem of what happens if Sally leaves. If it’s tribal knowledge, you’re screwed. Especially if it’s mission critical.
The old Apollo spacecraft is a good example. Every single one was hand built. The wire boards and computers were all handmade. They were programmed with wires. When the person who knows how to do that is gone, what are you going to do? That’s not documented.
Prioritizing Transformation
Ben “The Automator”: How do you prioritize? Do you tackle the most painful process for the business, whether that’s error-prone, risky, time-consuming, or impacting customer satisfaction?
Richard Lowe: You’re going to try and get a grasp on the whole thing first. Companies will say “digitally transform us” without really knowing what it means. So you interview people. You interview Sally, Joe, the comptroller, and the CFO. They’re going to have different viewpoints. Then you leave it up to the powers that be to decide which one has the best ROI.
I would say generally it’s customer-facing stuff first, then operational tangles, then accounting. Accounting is probably the least on my list, unless maybe you’re not paying creditors on time.
Ben “The Automator”: But accounting would be one of those repeatable things. You don’t require an entire staff of accounting people anymore. Really what you require is one to two people with a well-trained bot.
Cloud vs. On-Prem
Ben “The Automator”: Do you believe that digital transformation of infrastructure going cloud is still relevant? I see it bouncing back and forth, people going back to on-prem.
Richard Lowe: The cloud isn’t free. And if you don’t carefully watch the resources, it’s very expensive. Developers create lots of clones because it’s easy, and suddenly you’re spending a lot on disk space. So a lot of people say let’s go back to on-prem. But then you’ve got the heavy lift of hardware.
I think it’s going to go to a mixture of both. The cloud’s great for scalability. At Trader Joe’s, we would typically do three times the business on Christmas. You want that scalability. With on-prem, you’re wasting all that compute during the rest of the year. So you use the cloud for that spike and have your normal business on-prem.
What’s Holding Businesses Back
Ben “The Automator”: What do you think is holding businesses back from digital transformation?
Richard Lowe: Looking at it from an IT point of view is a big problem. It’s not an IT project. It’s a business project. It should be called business transformation. You’re transforming your culture, your finances, your IT, different components. You have to transform the culture because people are going to worry about their jobs. A lot of companies hate IT because IT is sometimes very pushy. We’ll ask for your input, but we’re really just asking. I was in IT, so I can say this. We cause a lot of problems. We help with a lot of problems too.
The Value of Transformation
Ben “The Automator”: What value does business transformation bring for a skeptical company?
Richard Lowe: If you’re in a competitive marketplace, your competitors are probably digitally transforming. If you’re not, you’re going to die. They’re going to put in something customer-facing that’s better than what you have. Digital transformation is bigger than AI. AI is part of it. VR, augmented reality, robotics might all be part of your digital transformation.
If you’re a trucking company, maybe you’ll get autonomous forklifts. But a great place to start? That paper manifest. Put it on a tablet. Think of all the time wasted writing down numbers that could be shared instantly.
Ben “The Automator”: Think about how hard it is to read the handwriting of some people. I don’t even write anymore. I write maybe once or twice a year.
Richard Lowe: Not only to read it, but to share it, to audit it. And that’s one of the base problems a lot of companies have: their data is in terrible shape. They’ve got silos. Marketing data in separate computers from sales data, from accounting data. Different databases, different programming languages. What you want to do is centralize or at least connect that data so it can all be looked at as a whole. That could be a big project. I’ve written reports for companies that do that.
Summary
Ben “The Automator”: The most important thing is you need to start with people. It doesn’t need to be an IT-initiated or IT-owned project. Digital transformation should be done from the business perspective. You should use AI to enable your business, but it should be carefully implemented. All businesses can benefit from it, from trucking to manufacturing to IT companies to consultants.
Richard Lowe: And what do you do with these people who are now getting reduced or out of a job? If you just say you’re out of a job, they’re going to start actively opposing you. That needs to be part of your cultural transformation.
Ben “The Automator”: You don’t want to replace people. You want to get rid of the stuff they don’t want to do or shouldn’t be doing.
Richard Lowe: I’m Richard Lowe, The Writing King. This has been the Leaders and Their Stories podcast. Where can they reach you?
Ben “The Automator”: Look me up on LinkedIn, BenTheAutomator, or go to bentheautomator.com.
Richard Lowe: If you look him up on LinkedIn, I guarantee you won’t have any trouble with the profile picture. It’s pretty obvious who he is. Thanks for watching. We’ll have another one of these in a month.