AI First, People Led: What It Really Means Inside Omegro

Troy O'Connor (00:00)
AI won't replace you. But AI will replace people that don't use AI.

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Troy O'Connor (00:04)
Any founder or CEO that's considering selling their business should be asking the buyer how can you help me with my AI challenges and how is that going to help my business improve?

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Akshay Kalle (00:12)
We're very customer-centric, very market-driven and focused. Those types of behaviors, when you arm them with AI to help you develop products to be able to amplify with that data, end up giving you tremendous results.

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Lynne Salmon (00:36)
Hi, I'm Lynne Salmon, CMO at Omegro a specialist acquirer and long-term operator of enterprise asset management software businesses, also known as EAM. And this is the Omegro Effect, a podcast for founders, CEOs, and business leaders navigating exits, carve-outs, and what comes next. In the last episode, we talked about financial and people readiness when considering selling your software business. What to clean up before you sell, and what buyers are really looking for. Today we go deeper into how Omegro is evolving as an AI-first people-led portfolio. The question is not whether AI will change EAM, it is how you make that change practical, grounded, and human. Omegro positions itself as an AI-first people-led portfolio. But what does that actually mean in practice? To discuss this further, I'm joined today by Akshay Kalle AI expert and transformation specialist who helped Omegro embark on its transformation journey into AI and we welcome back Troy O'Connor, CEO from Omegro. Akshay, Troy, great to have you both here.

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Troy O'Connor (01:49)
Thanks, Lynne. Looking forward to it.

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Akshay Kalle (01:50)
Excellent. Great to be here.

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Lynne Salmon (01:52)
Akshay, before we get into the episode, can you give our listeners a quick sense of how AI transformation fits across Omegro.

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Akshay Kalle (02:02)
Yeah, it's a it's a great question. And my job is to bring in tooling, methodology, and practice to see how we can amplify So we've got some great products that have got some great reach. How can we amplify that reach? We've got some great data that we've sat on as moats for a long time. You know, how can we use that data to make really actionable insights? So it's really about taking the data, the people, the platforms that we have and really being an amplifier. And AI is just the tool that we use to be able to do that multiplication and force amplification.

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Lynne Salmon (02:28)
And Troy, for anyone new to the podcast, you lead Omegro as a CEO and have been closely involved in shaping the AI first people led direction across the portfolio, can you briefly set the scene on why this matters now?

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Troy O'Connor (02:42)
Yeah, I think Lynne you know, the technology itself is a generational kind of change, right? Like it it's enabling us to compress product cycles, product development cycles, it's enabling us to streamline workflows in in ways that we've never been able to do before. So, for us it's a form of transformation and the technology itself is great, but the transformation comes with I guess an operating system change, you know, the way that we think, the way that we work, the way that we develop our talent, the way that we look at software development, the way that we look at efficiency. So with that comes knowledge sharing, it comes with communication, it comes with change management, all of that ties together to try to help our portfolio of businesses continue to improve.

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Lynne Salmon (03:23)
So if we get a bit more specific, when we say Omegro is AI first, what does that change in how the portfolio operates and how it makes decisions and builds capability?

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Troy O'Connor (03:35)
Yeah, it's a great question. And I'll let Akshay follow on. But if you think of you know, AI first is easily misunderstood to be a selection of tools, you know, like we're gonna use these tools. And in reality it is a software tool, but that's not what we're saying here. We're saying it's a way of working. You know, AI first means that everything that we do, we should be considering how might AI help improve this process.

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And there's lots of different AI tools, so it's not like there's one shoe fits all. but it's a it's a mindset shift. and that's what we're wanting from our senior leaders is to be thinking about how AI might transform their business, their workflows, their product development cycles, their relationships with their customers and if we can get that transformation right, it's amazing what we can achieve.

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Lynne Salmon (04:21)
Akshay?

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Akshay Kalle (04:22)
Yeah, I think kind of going off what Troy said, we have to look beyond just the tool of the day. And it's really in how we think about how we're amplifying and multiplying things. And we also have to be careful of certain traps. So it will certainly amplify all the good things that we're able to do. Like I said, we've got some fantastic people and products, a lot of data. It can amplify reach and help make decisions. But we can also end up amplifying some of the bad habits, so some of the bad habits can be, you know, you don't go out and keep in touch with your customer.

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You know, one thing I think we are very good at doing at Omegro is in keeping in touch with our customers. We're very customer-centric, very market-driven and focused. Those types of behaviors, when you arm them with AI to help you develop products to be able to amplify with that data, end up giving you tremendous results. And we've already started to see the results of some of those actions that are coming in. So in the hands of highly customer and market-centric people, human-driven, yeah, ends up being a tremendous force multiple. And so I think you know, for those reasons, you know, Omegro is actually very well positioned because it's already got some of the key ingredients in place to be able to leverage AI.

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Lynne Salmon (05:22)
So how is AI changing the way our business units are operating? For the time you were with Omegro, where did you see the biggest impact so far?

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Akshay Kalle (05:31)
Some of the big impacts that we're seeing initially have been from the development teams. And these things are, you know, very well publicized. So, you've been able to get anywhere from five to twenty times the level of productivity that you know typical developer would be able to have. And it's not just in terms of output, right? We also create things that are safer, cleaner, more transparent. Some of the technologies might be older or some technologies might be so new that our developers and our engineers may not know how to use them particularly well. So if we look at AI like a good augmentation to our team, we have to look at it like, you know, you're adding, you know, staff at a very low cost rate by comparison. If you want to hire a high-tier engineer, that's a lot of money to be able to do that. But now you've got that at your fingertips to be able to do that collective knowledge to be able to execute on these high-tier skills.

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So in the development area and the RD, you know, coders, it's been of tremendous impact for us right now. And so we really leaned into that to become, you know, AI first. But it's also about, you know, how do we delegate to that in a safe way? But certainly, I mean, it's not been limited to the development area. Our legal teams, our people teams have been using that to make things more fair, more consistent, so it reduces risk for you, liabilities. So we're seeing value in a lot of different business functions, right? And we've also encouraged our different business functions to lean into AI. And they have actually been internally innovating a lot of solutions to help themselves. And, you know, we've kind of made that a mandate for them and encouraged them. So you know, lots of good things have been coming out in the past few months.

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Lynne Salmon (07:05)
And Troy, how do you scale across a portfolio without losing the domain depth that makes EAM different?

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Troy O'Connor (07:13)
Yeah, I mean I think the beauty of I mean the Constellation model of decentralization, is set up perfectly to be able to scale in this way. So we don't have, as you as you well know, we don't have a head of R and D or a head of sales across Omegro. We have twenty five heads of R and D and twenty five heads of sales. And in the same way that that we roll out other technologies, we have now twenty five leaders of AI transformation in our businesses. So you know, there's no one choke point.

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Akshay's role is to empower those teams and educate them, teach them, guide them on the journey, teach them the art of the possible. But ultimately we have twenty five independent businesses all scaling at once and that's a beautiful model. We can do that very quickly and we've seen that now, you know, in just the last six months, we've seen an exponential increase in the number of AI initiatives that are running across the portfolio. Some of those are internal, some of those are product facing, some of those are sorry, some of those are customer facing but ultimately the rate of change is phenomenal and it's the Constellation model that allows us to do that. So decentralization is very powerful when we're rolling out something like this, a new technology, a set of technologies, a way of thinking, that the businesses are able to embrace it really quickly and they're able to roll it out and we can start to see meaningful change in a very short period of time.

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Lynne Salmon (08:33)
Akshay how do folks avoid the trap of AI becoming a distraction rather than an accelerant?

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Akshay Kalle (08:39)
Well, I think there's plenty of sources of distraction. we can open up LinkedIn or the news or anything like that. You're gonna see a lot of kind of cool toys and distractions that are gonna tell people, hey, try this out. In my experience and this is what I think being customer centric really helps you, is if your customer and your market is a North Star, then those distractions are less likely to enter into kind of your field of view. Right. So we have to get out to the market. And one of the things I think we're doing well and executing is spending time with the customer at the customer site and saying, you know, how's this workflow doing for you right now? How can we make that better or faster? You know, how are we solving that problem? And in doing that, you know, you end up discounting a lot of the other methods that might sound cool. And then you kind of go for the things that are actually the true enablers. And one of the things that we're doing here is a lot of you know what we refer to as problem solution mapping is to find it from a customer.

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You know, they've got a bunch of problems. How do we identify that? And then we find the right tool to solve that job. Right. We don't want to approach it the other way where we try and have a tool and then we try and find a problem to solve. We're really kind of using the customer and that experience to guide us. And that's leading to some pretty innovative solutions. I mean, illustratively, we've had some, very interesting, you know, proofs of concept come up in our marine space, in our fleet area, in our prop tech areas but those have hundred percent been guided from the customer side. And so that really kind of filters out a lot of what's cool and you go towards a north star of the customer.

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Lynne Salmon (10:02)
And can you give our listeners some examples of some of those cool concepts where they have used AI to help their business?

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Akshay Kalle (10:09)
Yeah, so I think cool and useful would be things like say, you know, contact center technologies or text to speech, right? So if someone's gotta set up a 24 by seven call center or a twenty-four by seven helpline and you wanna have that operate in a dozen different languages, well rather than going out there and hiring a dozen different people who speak a dozen different languages, you know, what if we could triage even just say thirty percent of those? Right? And so that's thirty percent less cost you have to do, and you don't have to have the full-time loaded cost to those people.

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And so that's a cool example and an application of generative technologies of text to speech, speech to text that we can use to interface with human beings. so that ends up being a really cool application of it. Another portion of it might be something like object recognition, where you've got the ability to recognize assets that might be broken, that might be presenting a risk somewhere in terms of for example, a vessel, someone is going into the engineering room and you want to be able to analyze what's going on in the engine room and to be able to take pictures of that, find out if something's broken, what is the failure rate of this. So that's a great application of vision technologies, you know. And so we've got a lot of these types of cool things that you know in isolation would doesn't sound kind of, you know, terribly useful, but it sounds cool. But we found a way to apply these to very specific microverticals and applications within our industries in EAM.

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Troy O'Connor (11:30)
I would add to that, Lynne before you go, the decentralized operating model that we have is very powerful that we can scale quickly. But what AI has enabled us to do is to start driving synergies across those businesses. So, we're very focused on being in verticals and we're in vertical markets. So for example, you know, Akshay mentioned that we have a number of marine businesses and so we are now experimenting with taking data from those businesses and sharing them across a lake and looking at the insights that are driven from that, you know, and obviously working very closely with our customers in that process. But the insights that we're seeing from machine learning and taking data across multiple businesses in an industry is very powerful. And we're starting to now look at that across different verticals, as we mentioned, fleet, property management. How do we drive customer value from shared experiences? And that's something that we haven't been able to do until this technology arrived. Not in a meaningful way. So very, very interesting early days, but you know, driving real customer value across businesses is something that is in my mind cool.

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Lynne Salmon (12:32)
Mm-hmm.

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Troy O'Connor (12:32)
For sure.

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Lynne Salmon (12:33)
We might just take a short break now and hear a word from one of our business units.

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Lynne Salmon (12:45)
Before we get back to the conversation, here's a story from one of the businesses in the Omegro Portfolio. In every industry, independent businesses face the same question. How do you compete with companies 10 times your size? That's where Intempo comes in. For decades, Intempo has helped equipment rental businesses manage inventory, maintenance, dispatch, billing, and operations, giving smaller operators the tools to compete with confidence.

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When Intempo joined the Omegro portfolio in 2015, the goal wasn't to change the business, it was to support its continued development. Today, CEO Matt Hopp continues to lead the company, working closely with customers to ensure the platform evolves alongside the industry. As part of Omegro through the Omegro Operating System, that experience is reinforced through shared learning across other businesses facing similar operational complexity. Because great software doesn't just support growth. It gives businesses the confidence to compete. That's the Omegro effect. Now let's get back to the episode.

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Lynne Salmon (14:03)
And we're back. Prior to the break, we were talking about some of the cool concepts that businesses are using AI for. Let's pivot now about something that is top of mind for many companies embarking on their AI journeys, and that is fear in the market. And folks thinking they might be made redundant once AI really kicks in. Let's have a discussion about how we address those fears. Troy?

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Troy O'Connor (14:25)
It's a marketplace driven thing and we've seen evidence of some pretty large scale redundancies in some certain sectors. So I think the fear is real. You know, our approach is not about driving you know, cost out or cost reduction through AI. We're about empowering our people to be more effective. So I think, you know, for people that are out there that are listening, we have a saying internally that, you know, AI won't replace you.

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But AI will replace people that don't use AI. so, you know, we'd really encourage people to learn and have a learning mindset. And I think if you can educate yourself, be okay with failure, experiment, you know, you'll find that these tools are very powerful and ultimately that will set you up to be a more effective team member. And that's what we expect of all of our leaders is to have a, you know, a learning first mindset and embracing something new and not being afraid to have a go ultimately.

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And, you know, in saying that we try to then put people around you to help you. So Akshay and his team are there to help and support and drive that change and you know try to remove some of that that fear factor. But we certainly understand it and you know our talent teams and our senior leaders are all on point trying to make sure that we bring people on the journey 'cause it is a transformation time.

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Akshay Kalle (15:40)
I think kind of adding to Troy's point there, it's you know, we need to acknowledge that there is a change in the market. We have seen a lot of news about, you know, kind of mass layoffs, things kind of occurring, but we also have to understand the causes and the circumstances under which those, you know, job cuts were done. You know, we're not in the exact same context, right? For example, Omegro or CSI in general has not over hired or we're not trying to show the market that by you know cutting costs that we're gonna achieve gains. That's not our objective and we, you know, kind of don't buy into that thesis. That's not our context. Our talk our context is really about how do we take the capacity that we're creating and start becoming, you know, to the earlier point, continually relevant to the market. So, you know, earlier I'd kind of used an example where we can take a contact center, you know, run it 24 7 in a dozen different languages. Now that may sound like a threat saying well, you I'm going to lose my contact center job. Well, how can we take that human that was working that manual job, get rid of the basic drudgery, and how can we put them towards higher value work that is now going to allow us to get much deeper with the client's more complex problems that they need to solve? So rather than solving the basic things, you know what? Let the computer handle that. Let the AI handle that. We can make some API calls to automate those portions of it.

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But let's redeploy that capacity that we freed up now towards a really complicated work that requires a human touch, where the machines either cannot or should not touch those aspects of the workflows. So there are a lot of things that you and I know in everyday work where we'd want to have a machine just handle it, but there's other things where you just need and want that human touch. That's the approach we've taken. Now that does a couple of things for us. When we say we want to redeploy to go upmarket and start charging more.

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That does a couple of things. One is it assuages a fear of, you know, job loss to say, you know, we want to help you move up the ladder. But it's also incumbent upon us to figure out, you know, get closer to the client to figure out what that complex work is so that the clients downstream feel better served. we can charge more for the services, they can charge their downstream clients more services, and the companies themselves end up growing. And that's more money for everyone in their pockets at the end of the day. So I guess in a long way what I'm trying to say is we have to think like optimists in this sense, rather than being short-sighted and saying this about a cost cutting exercise. Let's be optimists to think of what is the harder problem that humans should tackle when AI frees us up from the drudgery of it.

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Troy O'Connor (18:06)
Yeah, I think that's a really good point, actually. The ultimate goal here is to help our businesses to grow, right? That's our purpose. It's it underpins what we what we try to achieve with any new acquisition and with any of our staff. We want our people to grow, we want our businesses to grow and you know, if we can arm them with new technology that enables that, then everybody wins, it's a great opportunity. I would see it as a great opportunity for all of our people to move away from some of the more mundane tasks that can be automated, digitized and focus on really value added activity that that helps us to achieve that ultimate goal, which is to grow.

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Lynne Salmon (18:43)
Yeah, that's a really good point because there is genuine fear out there, but I really like the value creation piece that you're saying that eliminates the mundane work and gets people to do people work. So how do you drive AI adoption across Omegro's portfolio businesses while overcoming employee resistance and that fear of change?

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Troy O'Connor (19:03)
So first and foremost we bring in domain experts not to do things for our businesses but to help them to learn as fast as we can. I think as a philosophy and as a culture we like to enable our teams rather than mandate, right? So again, we encourage experimentation, knowledge sharing, communication, the portfolio effect of having multiple businesses come together and share those experiences, share those learnings and drive knowledge transfer is how we keep the people engaged. and we're seeing a a lot of a lot of benefit from having that approach. Akshay, you're closer to it than I am but your experience.

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Akshay Kalle (19:38)
Yeah, I think also it goes you know, Troy to your point, we ultimately don't want to be the single point of reliance and failure, right? Or the single point of absolute truth. 'Cause there are there's several, you know, benefits and like I think in my mind, that's a negative thing to do is to try and leave, you know, an AI team as the center of reliance for everything. You know, if we do our jobs right, the transformation really will be culturally where people feel enabled, they feel empowered. And our job, one of the biggest things I would say, you know leaves me happy at the end of a week is if I can take one or two people and they feel more confident than they were at the beginning of the week, that they feel more empowered than they say, you know, I was able to do something there that I wasn't able to do before.

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I automated something or I understood a concept and it's less fear kind of inducing for me now. And I was able to put that into a product, that's a huge victory because that is sustainable change, right? That's a change that doesn't come to me, it doesn't come to my team. We're not going to be you know, the single point of reliance for them. That type of institutionalization, we raise them to that level. And then once everyone is at this level, then we start pushing the boundaries to start going up higher and higher. So it's really about giving them that agency, that sense of confidence. And sure, they'll have fear. They'll have, you know, there is fear of, you know, job displacement. There is fear of being left behind. But one of our big components of my job is to address that fear. We've got to be able to talk about it. We have to be able to address it.

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And we have to say, you know, it's okay to feel lost and afraid. And this is something that everyone is going to feel with massive technological, you know, kind of sea changes. I think as Troy mentioned, we are in a very transformative time. So my job is not just making sure that we're handing out tools. It's really to listen to the people and say, you know, what are you afraid of? What are you, you know, confused by? Let me help you with that. And then we build our education, our training, our upskilling programs, our change management programs to help them along that route, right? We want to be able to take them on that journey.

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And then leave them along the way and say, okay, now you've built up some confidence. You know, now you can kind of go into deeper waters and tread and you know truly be independent. And we've started to see that. I mean, things that even just in the short time that I've been here, we've seen people become far more independent you know, as since when they started off. You know, they're making things that they hadn't thought that they were able to do before. And for me, that's really kind of the transformative route. And you know, credit to Troy, I think, you know, he's also set a culture of experimentation and allowing people to have the room to do things, and be able to fail in small ways. And really I do think it begins with the top and you know, it's it does come down from the leadership side. So I think, you know, Troy's definitely helped to set that tone.

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Troy O'Connor (22:07)
I would add Lynne too from a you know, from an MA point of view, we're talking to obviously a lot of a lot of founders and CEOs at the moment and it's one of the real value propositions of joining Omegro. You know, you as a CEO or a founder it's a pretty lonely place. And this is a transformative time where you're looking at your business saying, well, how do I make the most of AI? Which tools should I use? How should I use it? How do I manage change? You know, I'm reading so many different things, what should I do?

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Lynne Salmon (22:35)
Hmm.

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Troy O'Connor (22:36
I think the value proposition of joining us is coming in and getting that thought leadership, getting best practices, getting access to all of our experiments and lessons learned over a period of time, overnight. So it's a step change in in what you can do and how quickly you can do it and it's an environment that, you know, obviously we buy and hold forever.

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Lynne Salmon (22:59)
Mm.

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Troy O'Connor (23:00)
So you know, we're interested in you developing and learning and you know your team developing and learning over a period of time because that's how we get better long term outcomes. And so again, there's a really strong reason to join Omegro when you think about how do I embrace AI across my business. We're here to help, right? You know, we wanna help the business grow, we wanna help it learn and we wanna see its revenues grow, its profitability grow, and we can we can leverage AI to do that.

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Lynne Salmon (23:26)
Mm.

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Troy O'Connor (23:27)
So it's a really interesting time and it's something that any founder or CEO that's considering selling their business should be asking the buyer how can you help me with my AI challenges and how is that going to help my business improve?

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Lynne Salmon (23:38)
So Troy, where are you seeing the biggest impact from AI across the organisation today?

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Troy O'Connor (23:43)
Well, I think obviously I mean product development R and D is where we've seen the biggest changes. you know, and actually can talk about the accelerators a little bit, but we're taking people that have been extraordinarily talented at what they do in in terms of developing code, developing product and doing it in a secure, robust, scalable way. And now we're arming those people with a new set of tools that can help them to do it faster than ever before.

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So that's you know, that's the obvious one, but it's not just limited to R and D. We're seeing, you know, the adoption of AI right across our business, both from internal workflows and our product development teams. So, it's an extraordinary time that's comes with some trepidation, but you know, we think we're in good position to support our teams through it. Akshay, maybe you can talk a little bit more about the accelerators you've been a huge part of that process for our development teams, our product management teams and seeing the outputs of that as being exciting, you know, is the best way to describe it.

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Akshay Kalle (24:46)
Yeah, you know, happy to. I mean, this is one of the things that has been really kind of a an accelerant in that sense. We've held these accelerators for a whole bunch of our business units. And this is something that is happening, you know, certainly constellation wide, but I think certainly within our teams, every

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Troy O'Connor (25:04)
Yeah.

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Akshay Kalle (25:04)
One of them has been encouraged to attend. I mean, it's only been a few months, but the change when you attend one of these accelerators, they teach you about you know, how to apply AI to development, but it's really about tearing down the process and learning how to delegate. So, you know, if we think about what makes for a great leader, you know, great leaders will find great people. They'll have a great sense of mission and objective. They'll know exactly the direction they want to head in. They'll give their staff boundaries and controls, and they'll tell them what's in and out. You know, what are you allowed to do and not? But if you think about it, that's exactly the way you need to manage agents in AI. So when we've send people to accelerators, we're actually teaching them to be people leaders.

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We're also not just, you know, agent leaders, because agents are a lot like people in that sense. You have to guide them in a kind of a bounded way. So some of the bigger mindset shifts that we're seeing is people are starting to act more like people, good people leaders, even individual contributors. And that's part of the skill that we're trying to get them to develop because a lot of effective use of AI is safe and bounded delegation. So when we talk about, you know, working with AI, I I'm personally less concerned about people memorizing the mechanics of how a language model works.

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But I want to be able to teach them how do you safely delegate off to it? How do you set goals for it and what's a target that you want them to hit? The same way that the portfolio managers in our in our group would be managing the business leaders and so on. That's one of the bigger mindset shifts that we've seen that has also built confidence. And bit by bit you let go and you kind of see the code kind of getting better and better. They start to see more interesting things kind of popping up from there. But that's been a big push for us too. And it's not limited just to product. I mean, you know, next week we'll be holding another session for the people team. There are going to be sessions we're holding for legal, for the different functions, et cetera. and in in September of this year, we'll be holding something dedicated just to product itself as well.

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Lynne Salmon (26:54)
And just for our listeners, the accelerator is the naming convention that we're giving for the AI programme here at Omegro.

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Akshay Kalle (27:02)
Yeah, so we we've got these on-site and sometimes remote sessions where people will send pods from their business units, you know, five, six people at a time. And there will be a preparatory curriculum that they'll have to study about, you know, learning the basic concepts. But once you arrive on site at these accelerators, you'll have be, you know, you'll have a business context, you'll have a problem, and your job is to be hands-on. You're going to build, you're going to you know, stumbling way forward and learn about the tools and how to use it. And you learn how to delegate. You'll learn, you know, what to do, what not to do with these tools. So the point is to build up that confidence by really being hands-on. And it's not a theoretical exercise. This is very practical. It's very applied. And so they'll spend, you know, sometimes four to five, you know, intense days. And these are full days that people spend at these AI accelerators, where they learn not just concepts, but they learn how to teach themselves and their peers.

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And so their peers will also battle test their ideas, they'll take them apart. And no function is exempt. Even the business leaders themselves, the general managers of these businesses, are required to attend. Because we don't want this to just be an isolated concept saying, well, you know, the RD team will figure it out. They're very much in the thick of things. So, you know, we take it very seriously to have full engagement from management right to individual contributors, because everyone has a role to play. If we're gonna say we're AI first, that's not something you can kind of do on a partial basis. You really have to have belief from the developers and all the way, you know, into the individual contributors and the management itself as well.

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Lynne Salmon (28:33)
So it sounds like AI is making people more effective, not redundant, which is the big fear in the marketplace.

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Troy O'Connor (28:40)
Yeah, would say, Lynne, we've been very, very vocal on this from the get go. we see AI as enabling efficiency gains for sure. you know, anybody that's used AI would appreciate that. But we don't see it as a cost reduction exercise. We see it as a productivity gain. So, you know, if we can help our people to be more productive and more efficient in what they do, we should see exponential improvements in output. you know, that gives you more time to do value added things, spending more time with customers, solving real problems.

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Driving value for our for our internal processes. So it's absolutely for us not about cost out. it's about driving efficiency and productivity gains to see greater output and hopefully that translates into more organic growth. You know, that's what we would expect is the ultimate measure for Omegro.

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Lynne Salmon (29:27)
And Akshay any final comments?

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Akshay Kalle (29:29)
Yeah, I would say the you know, there is rational and understandable fear and trepidation and a lot of things that are unknown about AI. but you know, if we look at it like a multiplier of effort, and we look at it like an enabler that you know, when you delegate to it in a safe way, it can be massively force multiplicative for you. I think to Troy's point, we don't look at this like a cost cutting exercise. We look at it like, you know, how can you actually grow? So if you're saving time.

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You're saving on capacity. How can you redeploy that capacity to liberate yourself to, you know, look work more deeply with your customers to go and get more target markets, or even look at segments of the market that you weren't previously able to get before? And these days we have to continually innovate. You know, we can't, we can't just presume that what got us here in terms of the way we approach the products before is going to get us to the next, you know, kind of 10, 20 years. We've taken a longevity-based approach.

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Everyone knows Constellation is in it for the long term, but in order to do that, you have to continually innovate. And AI, in that sense, allows people to continually innovate without worrying about how you get there, without worrying about the coding technologies of the day. And I think that's the transformative aspect of it, is it allows us to be continually relevant to.

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Troy O'Connor (30:46)
Yeah, for sure. I mean we've got hard evidence now, Lynne. You know, we've been at this for some time and you know, we're seeing teams eliminate technical debt at a speed they've never done. They're innovating with new products at rates they've never done, they're bringing new products to market faster. our internal teams are operating more efficiently, and being able to get more throughput, so doing more with less. So, you know, all of those are real examples and it's in its infancy, you know, the journey really is just beginning.

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So you know, it's an exciting time to be around and using that the technologies. The technologies are still evolving at an incredible pace. So we absolutely believe in in being AI led and you know, by people first we've always focused on our people and you know if we can help our people on this transformation then you know we set ourselves up for again long-term success.

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Lynne Salmon (31:38)
So AI-first, people led, it's not a slogan. It's something that Omegro is actively encouraging, helping every team member to be a better version of themselves using that technology. I think the whole AI First People led has been really demonstrated today with what we've chatted about. So I really appreciate you guys joining us and sharing the AI First, people led ethos at Omegro Thank you both very much.

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Akshay Kalle (32:02)
Thanks for having us, Lynne. Yeah.

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Troy O'Connor (32:02)
No problem. Thanks, Lynne. Thanks Akshay.

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Akshay Kalle (32:04)
Our pleasure. Thank you.

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Lynne Salmon (32:05)
Thank you to our listeners. We hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Please like and subscribe to stay up to date on the latest developments in MA. Until next time, I'm Lynne Salmon. This has been the Omegro Effect.