Reqless Aboard

On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich look at how AI is going to transform a very special industry filled with the nicest people: The law. After laying out the specific areas of the legal profession that are ripe for AI transformation, they assess a few current startups and their application frameworks (e.g., document review, research, contracts), and propose a new segment for each industry-specific podcast: “Will AI take your job?”

Introducing Reqless—the new podcast from Aboard about how AI is changing software. In this episode, your hosts Paul Ford and Rich Ziade explain why this podcast exists, and talk about how AI is enabling everyone to start skipping steps—and why overall, you should embrace this, not fear it. (Although a little healthy fear never hurt anyone.)

A one-minute episode—we’re taking a very short summer break! But expect some big changes when we return…
Transcript
Paul Ford: Hi, I'm Paul Ford, the co-founder of Aboard.
Rich Ziade: And I'm Rich Ziade, the other co-founder of Aboard.
Paul: And you're listening to the Aboard Po—oh, wait a minute. Oh, wow. Okay, wait. I think we're gonna rename this thing.
Rich: Yeah? 
Paul: Yeah, it's time. We've received some high-level branding advice, and it is time for us to get out there and kinda own what we've been talking about, Richard. Let me tell you what we talk about. You know what we talk about?
Rich: What?
Paul: The incredibly rapid change that artificial intelligence technologies are bringing to the software industry. And sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, sometimes it's ridiculous. Often it's ridiculous. 
Rich: Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm. 
Paul: And we keep dancing around it, saying, we're this or we're that. But damn it, I think that's what we are. I think that's what we're doing for the next X months or years or decades.
Rich: Great. Tune in next week. It'll be a new name. It'll show up in your same feed so you don't have to do anything. And it's fun. We still want to, like, share our ideas, thoughts, feedback to the world that is useful outside of our product.
Paul: God help anybody trying to keep us on-script.
Rich: Yeah. So world's shortest podcast this week. Have a lovely week, and we'll see you next week with a brand-new name and maybe a brand-new haircut.
Paul: I could use one.
Rich: All right, have a great week.
Paul: Bye!

Your boss walks in and says, “What are we doing about AI?” How do you respond? On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich break down the problem with the question itself, and the way AI is being offered as an imprecise, ineffective solution to solve business’s structural problems. Who actually needs AI—and how do you figure out the best way to use it? 

Why do we try to explain tech concepts and processes with metaphors—and why do we choose the metaphors we use? On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich get philosophical, kicking off the conversation with an article about how the human is not like a computer, and travel through the history of personal computing to our present AI moment. Plus: How exactly should you handle the idealists in your organization? 

You’ve just shipped your latest release. Once you finish celebrating, how do you decide what to build next? Paul taps Rich, in his role as Aboard CEO, to set a course on a hypothetical product roadmap: Does he prioritize an enterprise-specific feature, another that might bump up broader user engagement, or the thing the boss tossed out because he had a vague hunch? Plus: Why is some industry-specific software beautiful, while other industries are left with clunky, uninspired “bureaucracy in software”?