ABOUT JONAH BAILEY:
"As a kid, I wanted to be a public defender — to stand with people facing a complex system they didn't understand. The job changed. The instinct didn't. I love helping business leaders who are in over their heads. Today, these are the people I show up for:"
- Directors who said yes before they knew how.
- Founders whose company needs to go to the next level — or die.
- Product managers carrying their biggest budget yet.
- Technology leaders whose team is treading water.
"I'm here because the world changes one determined, hopeful, slightly terrified operator at a time. I've spent 25 years building custom software with leaders like these. As Managing Partner at Atomic Object, I help business leaders make profitable decisions about their software investments—not the cheapest ones, but the right ones. If you want a partner who will tell you the truth and chart a way through your situation — I'm your guy."
ABOUT ANDY LABARRE:
Andy LaBarre was first elected to the Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners in 2012, representing District 7, located in the eastern half of the City of Ann Arbor. Andy is a proud Democrat. He served as Vice Chair of the Board of Commissioners and previously served as Chair of the Board (2017-18), Chair of the Ways and Means Committee (2015-16), and Chair of the Working Session Committee (2013-14). Andy lives in northern Ann Arbor with his wife Megan (a teacher at Dexter Community Schools), son Declan, daughter Delaney, and dogs, Monster and Frankie.
Andy now serves as Executive Vice President and Director of Government Relations for the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Regional Chamber and is David Fair's co-host for "Washtenaw Business Lens."
RESOURCES:
Atomic Object — Ann Arbor Branch
TRANSCRIPTION:
Caroline MacGregor: This is 89.1 WEMU, and it's time for our monthly look at the business community in Washtenaw County. I'm Caroline MacGregor, and welcome to Washtenaw Business Lens. Each month, we partner with the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Regional Chamber to look at how the news of the day impacts the local business community. Andy LaBarre is Executive Vice President and Director of Government Relations for the Chamber, and he's part of each month's conversation. Thank you for joining us today, Andy!
Andy LaBarre: Caroline, thank you for having me! Good to be with you!
Caroline MacGregor: Today, we are going to be taking a look at the use of artificial intelligence and how it's transforming the way people do business, whether to improve decision-making through data analysis, enhanced customer service or operational efficiency, among other things. To look at how responsible adoption of AI helps companies remain innovative and achieve long-term growth, today, we are joined by Jonah Bailey. He is Managing Partner with Atomic Object, an employee-owned custom software development and design company in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Jonah, thank you so much for your time today!
Jonah Bailey: Caroline, great to be here! Excited to talk about this topic!
Caroline MacGregor: Jonah, your company specializes in software development across numerous industries. I believe healthcare, financial services, education and insurance, among others. Before I get into the nitty-gritty questions, I have to ask you about the name of your company. How did this come about?
Jonah Bailey: Well, I want to start by saying naming things is hard. It's really difficult. And Atomic was born out of the death of a dot-com company called DevMode. And that was not a good name. Again, naming is hard. And our founder, Carl Erickson, we were founded in Grand Rapids in 2001, basically got together with a bunch of employees. They wrote a bunch names on the board. I have seen the picture of the names, and Atomic Object was definitely the best one. And the way it was picked, honestly, was it started with an A, and we wanted to be at the top of the list.
Caroline MacGregor: Okay, interesting!
Jonah Bailey: Yeah, I mean, it was really that random. I mean, there's a couple of software engineering principles that are sort of nested in their object-oriented programming and atomic design approach to software architecture. But that's really in the weeds. But basically, it was because it started with an A, and we wanted it to be at the top of lists.
Caroline MacGregor: Yeah, I thought there would have been a bit more than going by the alphabet.
Jonah Bailey: Nope. That was it.
Caroline MacGregor: For decades, firms have gained the competitive advantage by observing customers through things like surveys, user groups, complaints, et cetera, usage data, all of which has increasingly been enabled by the rise of the internet. What's new today is that neither side of this relationship is purely human anymore. Tell me about AI in your company as far as creating that competitive advantage for your business.
Jonah Bailey: Well, I want to start off by saying that this incarnation of artificial intelligence is disrupting software broadly. If you can, in a weekend, build an entire platform, and if our core service operating is building those platforms, obviously, we're going to have a problem, right? Because either of you, Caroline and Andy, with no software experience, you could build something literally this weekend if you wanted to. Now, would that solution be scalable? Would it be secure? Would it even belong to you? Those are really great questions that I don't have the answer to. But for us, I think the reason we continue to be relevant in the market is that our core service offering has never really just been code generation. It's always been working with business owners to be able to understand how to leverage technology to create more value. And in that way, what I see is that we're able to give business leaders more ability than ever before. So, where a platform would take six to eight months to build, we can build it in six to eight weeks now, which means that there's much more demand for our services than there was before because there are many more people who can afford to work with us than could before.
Caroline MacGregor: You've just talked about leveraging businesses, but what businesses or business processes benefit most from AI automation?
Jonah Bailey: I would say the places that benefit the most are in data-heavy areas where it's really hard to figure out exactly what's going on. So, think about like financial forecasting or you have a really large customer base and you're a B2C or you're a retailer and being able to draw insights out of that data that help you understand what's going on in your business and what's to happen in the future. Those are really great places to partner with AI because AI's reasoning ability is not, like, great. It needs a lot of context to be able to make smart decisions, and if you don't give it the right context, it will make dumb decisions. But what it can do that human beings can't do is hold a very large data set in its head all at the same time and be able to draw pretty reasonable insights from that data and even make recommendations on what you should do about what you're seeing in the data.
Caroline MacGregor: Andy, as Executive Vice president and Director of Government Relations for the Chamber, you obviously are in communication with a lot of businesses. Are many people that you speak to using AI?
Andy LaBarre: Absolutely. Businesses in any number of sectors are, and that runs the gamut in terms of size. I think what has been interesting to watch from our perspective is the ways in which some of our small business owners have started to make use of AI to try and alleviate some of the logistical burden of being a small force. And we had a workshop for our small businesses last year with Atomic Object, and one of the things that was said, and I think resonated, was to almost view AI instead of as artificial intelligence as an intern. And that is it can provide some capabilities, but it doesn't necessarily have the requisite trustworthiness in terms of getting the content right. And so, businesses have, through iteration, found ways to make that sort of task performance work for them without seeding sort of the quality control aspect of the work. And it's happening in lots of different ways in real time. It is a fast moment in business development right now.
Caroline MacGregor: So, human beings are not being replaced just yet.
Jonah Bailey: I think that the one thing that I would say is that I do think that there are areas where people might get replaced. I would if you're a software engineer and the only thing that you can do for a business is generate code, you're in trouble. You might need to start thinking about a different line of work. But if you are a software engineering and generating code is part of what you've always done and what you really love to do is help people solve problems and leverage technology to give people superpowers, you're going to be good for the foreseeable future. I think there's plenty of other places where data entry, I think that one's really in trouble, bookkeeping and accounting. I'm not really sure what the future of that profession is. There are some areas where I would be concerned. But generally, I see AI being used as a really helpful tool that supercharges what human beings are able to do.
Caroline MacGregor: All right. Andy, how can small businesses adopt AI with limited budgets or what are you hearing from companies that are struggling to do this?
Andy LaBarre: Yeah. Part of why we put on the small business workshop series last year and featured AI as our April presentation was to try and connect folks to local trusted entities, like Atomic Object and others, that can provide some analysis of what they do, some thoughts in terms of how to sort of get started with it and to maintain a human connection in this total equation. What I wouldn't suggest, from what I've seen, is just go to Google and, and type away and hope it works out. What I would do is talk with somebody you have a real relationship with at a local entity, get their thinking and go slowly and sort of learn as you go, but don't get away from that notion that Jonah just said, which is the tasks may change, right, but the drive, the principle of why you're in business, what your passion is and what you do, that's got to remain in place. And so, going iteratively, I think, is how I would suggest to any small business that they go down that AI track and learn as they go and err on the side of comfort rather than speed.
Caroline MacGregor: Sounds wise! Jonah, would you have anything to add to that?
Jonah Bailey: I completely agree with Andy. I think talking with a trusted business advisor or someone within the local community is a great idea. The other thing that you can do, you can talk with an LLM about how it should be leveraged in your business. Like, literally, you can say, "I run a manufacturing business. Our core value offering is XYZ. This is my role within the business. How should I be leveraging you to be able to get more done faster?" For example. And the LLM will come up with a bunch of really good ideas. They're ideas that you should think about and that you can test out, but you should totally ask the LLM, Large Language Model.
Caroline MacGregor: And can AI accurately predict customer purchasing behavior, for example?
Jonah Bailey: It depends on what information it has available to it. If you have a lot of information about a possible customer, then, yeah, it can. And if it really understands what sales process within your industry looks like, it can. But again, that's the whole thing of putting guardrails on these resources. Because if you don't give it guardrails, what you're going to get is going to be wildly variable. Because at the end of the day, all these are probabilistic models, and that means I could ask it one question three times, and I would get three different answers. So, that's probabilistic. It's not necessarily deterministic, which is what we want if we're talking about a sales process. We want that answer to be correct, and we want it to be the same every time we give it the same information. So, what we do and what people have to do is really put guardrails on these things to really narrow down how it's going to be able to answer, so that it will give you the correct answer and a consistent answer.
Caroline MacGregor: Andy, what industries are being transformed the fastest by AI?
Andy LaBarre: My answer is all sorts of small businesses are being changed, but that's really in terms of how they're adapting to use it, rather than industry specific. And I'd be curious to hear Jonah's answer because a lot of the Chamber members that we have aren't necessarily at the same point as Atomic Object or others in terms how far along the cutting edge of technology they are.
Jonah Bailey: Yeah, I completely agree. I think this is going to be a shorter adjustment period than we had with the internet, right? I mean, I was in the industry with the dawn of the internet, and I saw a period of about 25 years where people really had to get on board with e-mail, having custom software applications, understanding e-commerce and being able to build websites. And this time, because of the Internet, I think we have a smaller time window, and I think businesses have about 10 years to get on board. And if they're not able to get on board and be able to leverage AI again to deliver more better faster to the market, they're not going to exist. But that's a long time period. I'll just answer directly. The places that I see AI hitting really hard are software as a service. But I also see a lot of medical bioinformatics, R&D, that's being radically transformed. Again, those big data sets. Also, I was at ReIndustrialize a few weeks ago in Detroit. The defense industry and the manufacturing industry are being radically transformed right now as well.
Caroline MacGregor: Do you work with the defense industry at all?
Jonah Bailey: No, I mean, I would say if there was something that could make human lives better, and we worked with the DOD or DARPA on that, we might do that. But we're not really interested in working on weapon systems or things that destroy human lives.
Caroline MacGregor: On that note, what about ethics when it comes to AI? There's a lot of questions here regarding human beings being replaced, not recognized for the work they do, et cetera.
Jonah Bailey: I would be open and honest and say that there are some ethical problems to be worked out here, definitely, in terms of how these large language models have been trained on the opus of human work and the people who generated that work have not necessarily been compensated, and that seems like a problem to me. I also think the ecological environmental impact of data centers, which are going be needed for this type of instrumentation to be valuable to the human race are going to have to be worked out. And the data center companies are going have to figure out how to coexist with the natural world and with the human race, or this isn't going to work for us. And I'm optimistic that they will figure it out, but I don't think that they have yet.
Caroline MacGregor: Andy, anything that you'd like to add to that?
Andy LaBarre: I would echo what Jonah said in terms of, it's going to take time, intentional effort, and a commitment to getting this right to get it right. I think one of the things that a lot of businesses, particularly that interact with the public, are trying to figure out also is to what degree does AI-generated content need to be proactively labeled as such? And to what degree does content generated by AI sort of be allowed to stand on its own? And I think there are open answers that can be found on that that depend if you're in academia, it may be one. If you are providing menu information at your restaurant, it may another. But there's got to be a process and an intent to do that the right way, both on the intellectual property side, but also, for customers, the notion that they're getting communication derived at some point from a human being attached to the business, not just AI unencumbered with that human connection. And that's going to be the work, as Jonah said, of the next 10 years here in terms of getting it right.
Caroline MacGregor: I've been speaking with Jonah Bailey with Atomic Object, an employee-owned custom software development and design company in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Jonah, thank you so much for your time today!
Jonah Bailey: Happy to be here! This was a great conversation!
Caroline MacGregor: And each month, we also hear from the Chamber's Executive Vice President and Director of Government Relations. That's Andy LaBarre. Andy, I look forward to seeing you again in August!
Andy LaBarre: Yes. Summer's quickly going by, but fun to be with you, Caroline! Thank you again!
Caroline MacGregor: This is 89.1 WEMU, Ypsilanti.
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