On the 45th episode of Enterprise Software Innovators, hosts Evan Reiser (Abnormal Security) and Saam Motamedi (Greylock Partners) talk with Jonny LeRoy, CTO of Grainger. Grainger is a Fortune 500 industrial supply company, ensuring seamless operations for a broad range of customers, from hospitals to manufacturing plants and everything in between. With over $16 billion of annual revenue and 26,000 employees, the company provides over 30 million products to support its four and a half million customers. In this conversation, Jonny shares his thoughts on how AI transforms operations at Grainger, quick wins for AI applications in the enterprise, and realistic expectations around today’s AI capabilities.

Quick hits from Jonny:

On AI’s transformative potential: “We’ve got 2 million SKUs in our Grainger brand and 30 million products across the whole portfolio. AI helps us match the right product to the right customer, and that's where it starts to get really powerful.”

On the importance of continuous improvement: “It’s all about solving small problems, one by one. That’s how you unlock AI’s potential—not by waiting for the perfect solution, but by making progress now.”

On AI’s ability to improve the customer experience: “A lot of the customer software we're building is to empower, whether it's our merchandising agents or customer intelligence people, to do their work that drives the business, but produces better data. That data then feeds into potential machine learning AI systems. We can put that into motion, get that in front of customers, and improve that data feedback. We understand the direction we're going, and that's not changing. Understand products, understand customers, bring them together super easily.”

Recent Book Recommendation: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

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Enterprise Software Innovators is a show where top tech executives share how they innovate at scale. Each episode covers unique insights and stories that will help you succeed as a technology leader. Find more great lessons from tech leaders and enterprise software experts at https://www.enterprisesoftware.blog/

Enterprise Software Innovators is produced by Luke Reiser and Josh Meer.

On the 44th episode of Enterprise Software Innovators, host Evan Reiser (Abnormal Security) talks with Mike Hamilton, CIO of Cloudflare. Cloudflare is a cloud connectivity company that helps businesses deliver content and applications worldwide while keeping them secure. More than 20% of all internet traffic flows through Cloudflare’s networks, making them an indispensable part of modern internet infrastructure. In this conversation, Mike shares insights into how AI helps filter the noise in cybersecurity, the seamless integration of AI in business operations, and the power of AI to automate the mundane.

Quick hits from Mike:

On AI's role in the future of business: “Artificial intelligence as a technology goes back decades, back into the fifties, starting with academic papers. But the scale of how it gets delivered has been one of the challenges. We're at this interesting turning point now where we've developed something that can actually support this incredible technology to take off.”

On the future integration of AI in business operations: “The area that I want to see worked out the most is around the integration space and how we get business systems to talk to each other, [for example, how AI] technology can read API specifications and start to understand how to create automations based on those specs.. That’s something the AI industry has to nail."

On the impact of AI on human life: “I think humans will live longer as a result of technology, and I don't think we're necessarily going to draw the connection. Just in the same way that technology, like computers, has improved our quality of life, there are going to be many little ways that AI will extend human life. We probably won’t think about it as AI’s doing, but it will be, and it might not even get the credit it deserves.”

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Like what you hear? Leave us a review and subscribe to the show on Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Enterprise Software Innovators is a show where top tech executives share how they innovate at scale. Each episode covers unique insights and stories that will help you succeed as a technology leader. Find more great lessons from tech leaders and enterprise software experts at https://www.enterprisesoftware.blog/

Enterprise Software Innovators is produced by Luke Reiser and Josh Meer.

On the 43rd episode of Enterprise Software Innovators, host Evan Reiser (Abnormal Security) talks with Jack Tam, SVP & CTO of Intuit Mailchimp. Intuit Mailchimp is a comprehensive email marketing and automation platform leveraging advanced AI-driven tools to create personalized, data-driven marketing campaigns. In this conversation, Jack shares insights into the evolution of email marketing in the AI era, the transformative impact of AI on customer engagement, and a glimpse into the future of AI-enabled business growth.

Quick hits from Jack:

On the ability of AI to help small businesses with marketing needs: “Imagine that you can run A/B testing on these marketing experiments. Today you have to watch it, you have to monitor it. We want to be able to let this automate itself, ultimately the owner is still in control, but removing as much of the friction in the experimentation to find the optimal ways to market.”

On how AI might continue to improve the user interface: “If you look at Mailchimp today, it's very much a sort of menu navigation. Click this and click that. I can imagine that it can be a much simpler interface. For example, it could literally just be a Google search bar. And you type in this is what I want to do and all the automation happens behind it."

On AI roles that will become necessary for enterprise businesses: “Over the last year we spent a lot of time talking about LLMs. Now you're seeing much more specialized LLMs based on industry and data. And so I also think there could be roles around how you get the right data into the right LLMs that are necessary for the types of industry that you're working in.”

Recent Book Recommendation: Benjamin Franklin by Walter Isaacson

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Like what you hear? Leave us a review and subscribe to the show on Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Enterprise Software Innovators is a show where top tech executives share how they innovate at scale. Each episode covers unique insights and stories that will help you succeed as a technology leader. Find more great lessons from tech leaders and enterprise software experts at https://www.enterprisesoftware.blog

Enterprise Software Innovators is produced by Luke Reiser and Josh Meer.