In this episode of Born to Disrupt, Grant Niven and Mark Walker sit down with seasoned tech veteran Ulf Zetterberg to explore how AI is transforming industries, contracts, and business operations. Ulf shares his extensive experience in technology, founding businesses, and how new tools and approaches are reshaping the way organizations operate and innovate.
In this episode of Born to Disrupt, Grant Niven and Mark Walker sit down with seasoned tech veteran Ulf Zetterberg to explore how AI is transforming industries, contracts, and business operations. Ulf shares his extensive experience in technology, founding businesses, and how new tools and approaches are reshaping the way organizations operate and innovate.
Recording from the US, Dubai, and the UK, the trio dives into the next evolution of legal tech: moving beyond static contract management to dynamic performance tracking.
Ulf shares candid insights from his exit to DocuSign and his return to the founder's grind. He dissects the current AI landscape, warning against the "noise" of constant hype and emphasizing that AI is an enabler, not a psychic solution for undefined business problems. The conversation also covers the "Digital Mirror" concept—empowering individuals to automate their own workflows—and the potential for outcome-based pricing models to reshape vendor relationships.
Topics Discussed:
Timestamps:
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Connect with Ulf Zetterberg: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ulfzetterberg/
Intro (00:02)
Welcome to Born to Disrupt, brought to you by Disrupts and MingZhulu. This is the podcast exploring the forces reshaping the industry, where bold ideas shape the future. Join hosts Mark Walker, Grant Niven, and Simon Hardie as we delve into scale-ups, disruption, and the Middle East's rise as a global innovation hub. Let's dive in.
Grant Niven (00:19)
Well, welcome to Born to Disrupt. You've got Grant Niven here, and I've got Mark Walker with us this week. How are you doing, Mark?
Mark Walker (00:26)
I'm good, good. Don't sound so surprised! I know I've missed a couple, but you know...
Grant Niven (00:30)
I know we haven't seen you in a while. We are also joined by Ulf Zetterberg in the US. Welcome, Ulf.
Ulf Zetterberg (00:36)
Thank you so much, Grant. Good to meet you, Mark.
Grant Niven (00:38)
So, we're in season two. We had a great response to season one in 2025, and we brought a really eclectic group of people to our audience on Born to Disrupt, covering all manner of different topics. The other week, we kicked off with the lofty topic of AI, which I know we'll be touching on today because it's on everyone's lips.
Ulf, your career and businesses have spanned all kinds of different technology domains over the last few decades. So, you've seen a lot of changes. AI is just another wave that's coming through. But I think in particular, sitting in the US just now, you've got a great perspective on that US tech story that's been happening over the last few decades.
In particular, your own story and what you've been doing in the AI space now—we'll dip into what's currently happening in a bit. But you've got a wonderful career of founding businesses and investing in businesses. It'll be great just to hear a little bit about that to kick things off. Then Mark and I will jump in with some topics of discussion as we go through this.
Ulf Zetterberg (01:42)
Well, I think when you have success, you've got to be a little bit lucky. Lucky means you're going to have the right teammates, right? They're part of you meeting the right people on your journey, and that makes it a little bit easier. So, I was fortunate enough to meet a gentleman called Kevin Gidney early in my career. We worked together as salaried employees for OpenText and EMC.
That kind of led to restarting our previous company called Seal Software. In 2010, we started, then we were lucky to exit to DocuSign in 2020. And now, five or six years later, we're on the next journey. But in between that, I think I spent more time on the entrepreneur side building businesses and being part of that than being employed, so to speak.
But it is the team. It's the team. You've got to be lucky. There are some people that are fantastic single entrepreneurs and create great businesses, but I think it's kind of more fun to share with people, and then you get to complement each other as well—to challenge each other. I've been lucky with Kevin and others as a part of that.
Grant Niven (02:43)
And you obviously went from big tech to building your own. What stimulated that, Ulf, in terms of deciding, "Right, we're going to give this a go"? Ultimately, you founded Seal Software back in 2010. Was there a grounding point in time where you just went, "Right, now is the moment" for certain reasons?
Ulf Zetterberg (03:02)
Yeah, I think it was clearly a market opportunity. We saw there was a need that was not met and a gap that we could fulfill in the market. But I also think most big tech companies, even if the company is large, have a little bit of an entrepreneurial spirit because tech comes and goes. You start new product launches, go-to-market divisions, etc. So, there is a little bit of an element of entrepreneurship—of course, not the same as when you build your own business.
It is fortunate because you get a little bit of training. If you're lucky, you'll join a couple of the good ones. The journey with EMC was good. I was working for a software company called Legato. The software got acquired, and EMC acquired multiple software companies at the same time. So, it was a little bit like building a new business inside of a very large, well-established business. There was that feeling of being part of something big, but still very much entrepreneurial by spirit.
It's probably not a surprise that there are lots of businesses coming out of tech because the whole industry has a little bit of a gold rush mentality, right? There's always a new shiny toy around the corner. And like you mentioned, taking all the cycles—multiple ones that you experienced—AI is by far the largest, of course, that we've seen. But you are a little bit cool about it because you've seen this before. Even though it's moving fast, and it's probably going to be the most transformative we have seen, it still has the same kind of cycle. It runs faster than the world is prepared to adopt it. I think that's the disconnect always with tech, right? Taking it way ahead of what people are capable of doing or ready to do.
Mark Walker (04:52)
I think that's always an interesting one I've seen. I don't know if we're all giving away our age because you become a bit more cynical as you get older! It's kind of like everyone's saying, "This is brand new, I've never seen this before, this is amazing," and actually, it's like, "Yeah, kind of seen that before, and yeah, we've done a bit like that." I've always had this notion that everything's kind of cylindrical and we do tend to go around quite a bit, although we are whirling outwards at the same time.
Let's park the AI conversation for a minute. If you're thinking about the level of disruption, what do you think is the closest thing that you've seen like it before in your previous career?
Ulf Zetterberg (05:28)
When I get older... probably the PC or the modern phone, right? Or how we use our phones today. It's moving very fast. It feels like five years is an eternity. But if you think what you did pre-PC, right? What a PC allows you to do—how things changed dramatically—it was a big shift. My first kind of work was at Ericsson, and there wasn't even a hard drive on the PC, right? You had to upload the whole thing.
And then I would probably say the phone, the iPhone—all kinds of mobile smartphones—have probably had a profound impact in efficiency and how we engage. Not just good, right, but they changed society as well.
It will be interesting to see when we look back at this era and we talk about AI—is this really AI as defined? Or is this just machine learning on steroids still? But I would say the PC and probably the smartphone had that profound impact on everything we do, not just work, but personal life too, and society.
Mark Walker (06:37)
Yeah, I think you've got the right idea there. I think it's the bit of technology disruption that not only impacts what you do at work, it does at home. It's a fundamental habit shift of some description. Home computing really kick-started a whole new generation, and then effectively phones, where we could take your PC in your pocket and take that around with you. So again, it fundamentally changed things. I guess that's quite a good analogy. It does give our ages away though! So yeah, we won't start talking about 286s and 386s because that definitely gives our age away.
Grant Niven (07:20)
Well, everyone's still glued to their smartphones now. It's just become a function of life, and we're actually trying to remove them from our younger generation now so they can actually communicate and engage in a more normal way.
That whole point about human interaction, which you touched on at the start—we've all been privileged in our lives to work with phenomenal people, which has usually inspired us to not only stick around but do things that are really different. And I think that whole kind of human connection and technology is a lovely little thread to dip into. Because I think ultimately that's what spurred you probably on to do your next venture.
When we originally chatted when we first met each other, you've had a successful exit. Not every founder gets to that stage with Seal Software after 10 years, selling a business to DocuSign—it’s a major achievement. You then went into a period of investing and advising, but then you've decided to go back into building a new venture. So what was the whole reason for going through that cycle and going back to building something brand new again? Was it that you just wanted to bring a team together and get those people that you enjoyed being with in the room again and doing things in a slightly different way with new tech that was available?
Ulf Zetterberg (08:36)
Yeah, I think I always liked team sports. There's something when you do something together that is hard not to like, for me at least. When you invest and advise, you want to try to manage being part of the team, but you're still a little bit on the outside. It's not the same thing, right? The grind... because it is a grind.
Sometimes we joke about it daily. We tend to remember the good things and not the bad things. So now when you do it again, you realize that this is a grind. But then you remember everything, right? I think advising and investing was fun, and you learned a lot and met fantastic people. It's a great thing, but there's nothing compared to when you do something on the inside, for me at least. The building. Even though the grind gets tougher as you get older, because lots of energy goes into it, there's a satisfaction with it.
Sometimes you work with people that you really like. In my case, I think it was Kevin and two others, ex-Seal employees, who had already started thinking about starting a business. I was lucky enough to join them and get in early. So here we are again, founding a new business. But I like the grind also. It's like anything in sport: you're not going to win any championships without the hard practices and hard training and failing.
Failing is trial and error. Product-market fit is just an idea until you start to talk to real customers and get the input. That's the fun part. And I think it's easier when you do it the second, third, or fourth time because if you've been treating a customer relationship in a good way, it means it's easier to get access to the right customers. They respect you, and they give you honest feedback. Even when they decide this is not for them, they take the time to give that invaluable feedback: "Okay, what did we miss in our thinking?"
When you sell to customers, we don't always understand their reality. We think this is the most important thing, right? But most customers wake up Monday morning not going to go and buy stuff—they're going to "shovel shit," like one customer told me. They have a laundry list of stuff to fix. So it's a privilege to be able to talk to customers. They give you the time, and I think that's a fantastic part of that journey when you build something. The interaction with the team internally, but also with the customer, becomes like an extension of your team.
Grant Niven (11:21)
And is that what was missing when you finished up working at Seal? You exited the business, you probably had a four or five-year period where you were not in the wilderness, so to speak, or relaxing—you were doing special things, investing, I believe.
Ulf Zetterberg (11:35)
Well, I think it was harder, but it works for me because I am more extrovert than introvert. And then you got COVID in the middle of that. So, you sell the company, right? And in 2021, you get into COVID and all interaction kind of slows down, becomes just remote and Zoom and the whole thing. So then I probably felt more disconnected because you were really on the outside.
You hear the stories of people trying to find a new way to work, how to get remote work to work, all that stuff. So, I was sitting there, I made some investments, did some advising, some consulting, but you were on the outside. For me, it was like a double whammy. COVID just made me miss it more—to be a part of something. Building. Nothing beats it. Not for me. I get energy from this, and I had to work harder to energize myself when I was looking outside.
Grant Niven (12:41)
The change that we all saw was almost the globalization or the hybrid nature of being able to build businesses. Mark and I, and others we speak to, have built our own businesses with teams all around the world. There is a need to be physically together, but also you can do a hell of a lot with the tools that we've all become very used to during the COVID period.
I know in your new enterprise you've got team members probably scattered around various different parts of the globe, and it kind of works. You can get the right culture in place.
Ulf Zetterberg (13:15)
Yeah, absolutely. Remote work is fantastic. And I think tech has had it for a long time before COVID. COVID just made it a bit more structured in a way, because you hired people based on talent a lot. You can have a good developer sitting completely remote from any office, or a good salesperson sitting very remote from an office, and you met like once a week.
But I think when I talk about friends that you grew up with or people you met on your journey, we still learn a lot without knowing we're learning things. The office makes it easy to talk about stuff. I talk about the coffee machine and water cooler as one of the best knowledge pools in any organization. It allows people that maybe don't have the confidence to say, "Oh, I'm going to bother Grant on Zoom, can I take 10 minutes?" versus running into you at the coffee machine: "Hey, you know what? I have a question."
I think that small, ongoing spread of knowledge—I call it "tribal knowledge"—is underestimated in many businesses. You have things that don't necessarily sit in the onboarding guide or the training. Those things make most companies really click and make many companies special. You have these individuals that have golden nuggets that you probably aren't going to bother if you're remote all the time, but it becomes demystified when you meet in the office. So, the water cooler and coffee machine are great, underestimated places of knowledge and wealth in most organizations. It makes it easier for younger, junior people to talk to more senior experienced people as well.
I think a hybrid remote model is probably best for most companies. Now we see the pendulum swinging again. I saw in the FT this morning that Wall Street banks want everybody back in the office full time now again. I'm not sure that's the right way to deal with it, but like always, the pendulum has a tendency to swing.
Mark Walker (15:49)
Yeah, it moves around a lot. I guess I'm eager to get into... what is it that you're actually doing now then? What's the end game? What have you decided to have your next go at?
Ulf Zetterberg (16:05)
My God, we do something really boring that everybody wants to work, but it doesn't work. It's tying contracts to real-world performance. People think it's done when you sign a contract. You have an expectation of what's going to happen, and then life starts. And in the majority of cases, you are not following up in the level of detail or proactivity as you should like. Are we getting the right service level that was agreed? Are we getting the right price levels that are agreed? Is the quality correct?
So in a very simple layman world, it is connecting contracts to invoices and ticketing systems where the real business is happening, and making sure you can go and say, "Okay, this contract performs." But in most cases, there's a significant value gap between the expectations and the reality.
Contracts tend to get over-engineered a lot because it makes us feel safe. We have a false security in a way. When you don't really know, you add more stuff because it makes you feel safe, but you add complexity. You add more noise. Is it easier to manage because you have put in more guardrails in the contract? Sometimes yes, but most times no.
It comes down to simplifying business and being able to measure what really matters. We call it "Contract Performance Management," and it hasn't been done this way before in a simple way. Maybe using AI, machine learning, and that stuff to connect the dots and ultimately make it simple for people. But it really allows people to start to understand: How do we make money? How do we avoid margin erosion? How do we increase our EBITDA? What are the levers that we should play and push?
If you make sure you can measure everything in a simple way without lots of bureaucracy—which is the problem when you have manual processes and spreadsheets—it allows people more time to look at a business and see, "Why are we doing this? Why don't we do more of this, less of that?" An awful lot of time and energy goes into writing and negotiating contracts. And then the most obvious thing is, of course, they should execute as you expected. Why not be able to take proactive actions? So that's what we do in Simplement: tying the contract role to real live data performance.
Mark Walker (18:19)
Obviously, when we talk about contracts, you're talking about large, complicated contracts of delivery of works and that sort of stuff. Are you talking simplistic, straightforward ones or a combination?
Ulf Zetterberg (18:38)
Both. Well, I think it's a volume-created problem. Once any organization gets thousands of agreements or contracts, whatever you want to call it, it starts to become a data problem as well. Someone is going to have to track it, collect it, make sure everything is up to date. The sheer volume of things creates a problem. Changes in business, changes in market conditions... it's hard to future-proof a contract.
Tariffs are a good example. Before this presidency, there were not many thinking about having tariff provisions or contracts. Now that was a quick change. You guys, maybe back in financial services... when Libor disappeared, you had to re-reach a contract because you need another way to determine price. So there are always these external things that have a tendency to change how you view the contract. A contract is not static, right? Because the world around it changes. The contract is pretty much a living thing.
You need to be able to understand the context of the contract as it changes. Most systems have been very static—you key in the data and assume that's going to be the value for the foreseeable future. And then something happens, and you have to go back and revisit. There are lots of areas that, when you start to have large chunks of contracts, make it really hard to measure them.
The most important thing is not legal coming up with the idea to sign a contract. It's a business that needs something. There's a "why." Why do we need this service? Why do we need this partnership? So to be able to answer the question of "why" is also the expectation of the agreement. And I think that's where many organizations get a little bit lost. It tends to be, "Oh, a contract, yeah, we're going to talk to legal." Okay, but do they own the business part of this transaction? Or are they the ones that can answer the question: Why did you sign in the first place? Legal guardrails are important, but the "why" is the most important part of the contract.
Mark Walker (20:43)
Do you think that sort of "why" is why now is the right time for this sort of solution? What's happened that's required this solution to be coming into life?
Ulf Zetterberg (20:54)
Well, we ran into part of these conversations at the end of Seal. Seal was more about contract analytics as a way you can use machine learning and natural language processing to process contracts, make it easy to search and find what's inside the agreements. But at Seal, we had many customers that started this conversation about the performance part of the contract, the KPIs, not just the legal guardrails.
They were asking about real business performance—to be able to track rate cards, or if we can charge the right price for consultants, and being proactive. "Okay, I'm entitled to a rebate if I meet the next threshold. Maybe if I wanted 20 units actually makes more sense to me because I get into the next tier of discount." So at the end of the journey with Seal, there was already a conversation with customers about the performance piece. But we never got to that point to start building it out.
Then fast forward... Kevin, Thomas, and John started thinking of this and we started having conversations. It was obvious: "Well, nobody fixed it yet, so let's go and do it." So there was a learning curve from the Seal part. It was just a natural step to just take it on.
Grant Niven (22:14)
And Ulf, if you look at all the big ERP or financial players—your Oracles, your SAPs, all these large-scale manufacturing system software-as-a-service providers—do they not tackle this as part of their huge plethora of capabilities that they deploy into large businesses?
Ulf Zetterberg (22:41)
They do part of it. But then you get into very large businesses and multiple systems, multiple workflows, multiple business units, and then you get into the hardest thing: people. You gotta get everybody to use the system the same way consistently, update it the same way consistently, etc.
Flexibility in the systems they're built and designed for... look at SAP. They've been around for a long time. How many times have they re-architected the system to leverage all the latest technology advances to make it easier to use and easier to govern this kind of change? So I think it's a complexity of businesses, and most systems were not defined or designed to deal with this problem.
Look at systems today... they're 20-plus years old. When you design and start to build the lines of code, you know what you know today. Of course, you would have run things differently, but that's impossible. We are not psychic. AI isn't psychic. To understand what you need to do tomorrow is the hardest thing in anything because change happens so quickly. Future-proofing anything in business is really hard. It's probably the hardest thing when people talk to executives: "How do you prepare yourself for tomorrow?" Everybody's trying to do the best thing, but you don't know 100% what's going to happen.
Grant Niven (24:19)
This is where... obviously business people know their business, but actually in many cases, as you're highlighting, in the world of commercial contracts and large-scale operations, things get lost. How do you engage a business who thinks they've got it all covered?
We've seen multiple situations over the last year where people have gone in with some new tech that's enabled via artificial intelligence that allowed them to move much faster with some pilots. The clients then go, "My goodness, I never knew this." You can demonstrate things probably in hours, even minutes, if you've got things set up effectively with the right data. Do you have any kind of secret sauce techniques that you're using to engage that audience to get them aware of the art of the possible quicker and more effectively?
Ulf Zetterberg (25:32)
I think you need to show as fast as you can that you give them a "wow factor" in what is possible with new technology. But I also think you have to be pragmatic. Customers appreciate when you are pragmatic about what they can do. A pilot is something you do in a clean, small environment; they're rarely real production challenges where the real problem sits in the business.
They look great, but then they come to the problem: How are you going to implement that? How are you going to drive that change and get into all the systems that are in place today? If you're running a legacy business 20, 30, 40 years old, there's one thing you can do in a week, and one thing you can do in one year.
I think most successful executives are very pragmatic. They know they can pick a couple of things per year to go and fix. They don't fool themselves that they're going to have this laundry list of stuff they're going to fix and fly off to Nirvana anytime soon. So it becomes a priority. Part of it is to show them how new technology can be an enabler and help drive change, but drive controlled change.
You get surprised how many times you have to explain to people that they live their own life. They have lots of priorities. Even if you have a great solution to fix one specific problem, maybe they have two or three other problems that they need to fix more urgently. Any experienced executive knows they can only drive so many transformation projects per year. You've got to pick the right ones because you've got to defend your job too. If you're in a public company, you have a quarter coming. So if you screw things up that has performance implications, it's not going to save you to tell them, "Next year is going to be really good. Trust me."
So there's this level of wowing them to see what's possible, but also being very pragmatic and dealing with them in a realistic way. Set the right expectations. Everybody is looking for quick wins—that's how you build—but then keep that process in place. Don't try to jump too fast. The biggest thing is the people. People by default are against change. If you've done the same thing for 10 years, you've got to motivate somebody to do something differently.
Here's the crux: AI is really, really powerful when you know what you're going to use it for. But AI is not psychic. You need to apply it to something. You need to understand, "Okay, this is where it can really help us automate something that's very mundane and fixed," but you probably have a human endpoint somewhere still. This notion of agent-to-agent sounds great, but in reality... once again, create those small wins, demystify this, make it tangible. And that's when the journey starts.
I think AI will have a profound impact on businesses and will change operating models, but not just how you run legal or procurement. If you are a leader for a legal department or procurement or operations, this is the biggest testimony that you understand the business you're working in. If you can engage outside your domain and change how that business could look a couple of years from now, that's going to be the real transformation.
Understanding how you make money today and how you potentially can make money tomorrow, and then having a clear plan to go and do that... we've seen examples of that. It's easy to be disruptive when you start from scratch outside. But how do you drive change and become disruptive when you sit in something that actually is a decent business today, but you know you're going to change?
Grant Niven (30:08)
And that's where... what seems like a very dry topic of contracts and the commercial nature of that, ultimately, it's reducing cost. It's managing the cost of a business, which ultimately any business owner or PLC will look at.
For many years, I've been involved in discussions with clients: "If we deliver X to you, Mr. Client, you give us a percentage of the savings?" The amount of times you have that initial dialogue and people say, "Oh, of course we will." But then when they actually realize what that could mean and what that means to the payout to the supplier or you as the third party, people shy away from it. Do you think that this new wave of technology and the speed at which you can show results will maybe change that behavior a bit more? So you could actually engage commercially in a very different way?
Ulf Zetterberg (31:17)
Thank you for that lead-in, Grant, because we are offering outcome-based projects. But it comes with a catch, and it's been around for a long time that people want to have success-based projects or outcome-based. But if you expose something too much, it becomes a political challenge for somebody. "Why haven't you fixed this before?" So you come and present a great saving to the board, and they are like, "Fantastic, but why are we paying these guys a third of it?"
So there is a little bit of a political risk around this. You have to be careful. At first, everybody likes it because, of course, it's the best thing—I get paid on results. Think about footballers; they get paid on results. The salaries would be very different in most of the Premier League in that case! But so outcome-based pricing is a very natural thing to discuss, but to start to implement it gets a little bit hairy sometimes.
We have had success with it. I think you can do it in a very moderate way. And I think it's the right way to do it. It doesn't make sense to pay for something that is based on the number of users or employees or maybe consumption. There are other ways. I think that you can be a little bit more aggressive on your price models by offering it and trusting you're going to deliver value.
Mark Walker (33:02)
How do you balance that with your own organization then? Because one would imagine you have costs. Is it an investment approach where you put the money in and you know you're going to make the money on the success afterwards? That's always a stickling point sometimes on a success-only basis—how do you actually deliver these products and get the quality people working if you've not got the money?
Ulf Zetterberg (33:20)
Well, in one way, it's easier when you're a small organization because there are fewer moving parts. I think most of the problems in enterprises are the sheer volume of people, change, and data volume that create a problem in itself.
Of course, we try to think about how we build our company to be effective, looking at the go-to-market model. Compared to how you've done the last 10, 15, 20 years in SaaS, is that the right way to think about it now? No, there are probably things you can tweak.
Development is a big thing. AI and tools have changed how you develop products more effectively and quicker. You still have the right code, test, and security—AI doesn't write everything and fix it for you. It's easy for us when you're small, with some hundred people, versus being thousands of people. You're dealing with the sheer size of organizations.
Mark Walker (34:33)
I guess, does the focus on AI help a little bit? What happened quite obviously in software businesses... you started off with a heavy development team requirement. Then we kind of moved to more of an outsourcing environment whereby the main work was developed outside and then you just needed people to tweak it as you went. Is that a similar model to what you're looking at at the moment?
Ulf Zetterberg (35:08)
I think you can do more quicker now, for sure. Absolutely. But I also think there's a disconnect. Maybe we as an industry get ahead of the game a lot and talk about all the great things you can do, but maybe sometimes forget about whether this is going to work in an environment that has lots of guardrails, regulatory requirements, etc. People change, training stuff.
There's a little bit of a disconnect between what is being claimed you can do with AI versus what AI is ready to do today. Data is a big problem. You see that daily right now. Many organizations don't have the right data. You don't know what good data versus bad data means for you. And there's no AI in the world that can fix it for you.
I tend to keep it simple. Going back to reveal our age again... like the ISO certification initially. It just told you that you did the same thing consistently. You could shovel bad things in one way, and the bad thing comes out of it, but you consistently get certification for it. It's the same thing with understanding what good data means for the business—how you protect it, how you harness that. Then AI can be powerful because that's the fuel. Without that, it doesn't do anything.
Also, AI is not going to fix... it's not psychic, once again. You need to understand your business. If a workflow doesn't work today, why doesn't it work? It helps a lot to understand what the breaking points are, the bottlenecks are, and how you can fix them.
Mark Walker (36:42)
Yeah, I mean it's the same sort of thing as Excel spreadsheets. Excel spreadsheets weren't going to improve your maths—or they would improve your maths, but they wouldn't improve your numbers just by using a piece of technology. It's kind of a similar sort of thing with AI.
Ulf Zetterberg (36:54)
The pragmatic thing... I had two different conversations in a couple of weeks, two different industries, two different executives, but very much the same theme. They cannot even think about it—from their perspective, the AI bubble is something that makes them a little bit hesitant about how to invest in AI because they see, "Well, this week Anthropic is best, next week OpenAI is best again." Then it's all paired and now I'm going to pick a tool for me. God, if I pick the wrong tool, what's going to happen?
The noise level is higher than ever. Tech has always had a lot of noise—people claim what they do left and right—but it's never been more than this. And I think for many customers that are a bit pragmatic, have been around, and have seen this, it should make them go a little bit slower. They're just like, "Hey, listen, I'm not gonna rush into this because I've seen it before." Maybe they have some scar tissue as well. They maybe were early in other technology cycles and paid the price because being early sometimes is good, but you can also pay the price because you were not ready.
So I think there are lots of hidden objections that make people move a little bit slower. It doesn't mean they don't believe in AI. It's just that they've been around. They just want to make sure they understand it better before they just do stuff. Of course, it helps to do some piloting and learning along the way. But you shouldn't underestimate that. There's a big disconnect between the tech world and how everybody tells the customer what they should do. But they have no skin in the game. The customer has skin in the game because that's their employment. It's their business. So it has consequences if I make it wrong. We can do a better job on the tech side to understand that and bridge that gap and work with them rather than move in and just tell them what to do without a simple way to get there.
Grant Niven (38:57)
So Ulf, there's a lot of wisdom from over the years in terms of what you've been doing. Now you're moving into building a new business. Is there anything that you're not doing as part of this new enterprise, Digital Mirror, that you've learned from in the past? You've said, "I'm not doing that again." Is there anything you're doing totally differently?
Ulf Zetterberg (39:16)
Yeah, I think I probably have a tendency to move too fast sometimes. So I learned to slow down a little bit more. I think that patience is good sometimes and not getting too hung up about all the hype. It's kind of cool to read about and spend all the time on social media every day—X, LinkedIn, etc.—and see everything going on, and you can get very stressed by it.
But I think you learn right now that most of that is noise. Stick to your plan and be a little bit more patient. I think that's probably the number one learning for me personally. Just to be able to really, really stay with your thing, believe in what you do, and spend time with the customers versus spending time with social media and all the people that are "experts" and you want to buy all the experts.
So I think taking guidance... fortunate enough to work with a couple of customers that you kind of trust and have a good dialogue with early, it's great. Because it becomes that their operational reality is so important to understand. And then stick to that and help them be successful, and then you know you're building a good business. Because you have these world-class brands working with you, seeing value, then you do something that has a value that can be substantial and be something you can defend.
Grant Niven (40:58)
Yeah, and it seems such a simple statement, but it's so true. You said earlier, if you haven't figured out your own business, AI is not going to fix it for you. It's again just being really, really close to what clients are really struggling with and then how you can apply new technology, new methods to actually address that. And then fixing the problem for them and delighting them. And then ultimately then, you know, you can rinse and repeat that with thousands of more clients if you get it right. Mark, in terms of any closing comments from you? You've been around the mill a few times in setting businesses up.
Mark Walker (41:26)
Yeah, I think with what Ulf was saying as well... I think you always forget how hard it is. It's a bit of a naive, rose-tinted glasses look back on the world and you go, "Yeah, it wasn't that bad. It was fun, wasn't it?" And then you're stuck in it day in, day out. And it sounds as though that actually is half of the fun anyway, isn't it Ulf? I guess for you, getting yourself back stuck into it and moving forward with it.
And I think it goes to show... we joked a lot about age and all that sort of stuff. Age, as they say, is just a number. And we're here talking about AI and implementing AI. You don't have to be a 21-year-old just out of university to understand the basics of: You need to get a customer what they want and give them something that helps. And I think that's what I've sort of taken away from this—that enterprise sales doesn't really change. It's still about serving that requirement to those customers. It doesn't really matter what technology you're putting forward and what tools you're using, it's all about making that problem go away for them.
Ulf Zetterberg (42:32)
Okay, 100%. 100%.
Grant Niven (42:34)
And Ulf, I think you were earlier in the day than us. Have you got a busy schedule?
Ulf Zetterberg (42:40)
Yeah, it's a classic Monday. Start with some calls with Europe in the morning and stuff, and then I'm getting on the road. We're going to travel and meet customers this week, so I'm looking forward to that. That's the best thing to do. It's kind of good when you can go to a place and see three or four customers in one location. Then it's kind of worth making the trip still.
Solving real problems with substantial value... it still requires people to meet and talk. And I know some people are going to puke when they hear that, but that's reality. I think it's part of it. It's trust. As I said, I've forgotten who told me early in my career that you always communicate on the receiver's terms. So understanding a customer—their reality, what they're struggling with—even outside your scope helps a lot. To understand, because then there can be things you can help them with without knowing it. And then you can only do that by creating relationships and trust and communicating. So I love that part. It's a big part of building a team, but also fortunate enough to work with great, great customers who also become friends to you. You earned it.
Grant Niven (43:55)
And then my last question, Ulf: Where was the source of the name Digital Mirror for your new venture?
Ulf Zetterberg (44:01)
The concept is that we want... we believe that the individual is the best to empower the change, meaning like you're making a digital mirror of yourself. If you do something and you think, "This I can automate, this is mundane." Good example: I'm sitting with a spreadsheet, Excel spreadsheet today, tracking the performance of a vendor. Why can't I make a copy of my little workflow and automate it and let me be more effective? So I get the 24/7 "mini-me" of me. So the Digital Mirror is like simple like that. It empowers the people that understand what needs to be done to make the change and drive that. So that's where it comes from. So Digital Me is a mirror of me.
Grant Niven (44:43)
There we go. Well, we're looking forward to seeing how it all goes. You're back at the beginning of another journey. So we'll definitely be watching from the Middle East and do keep in touch with us because I know you'll be coming in and out of the region as well in due course.
Ulf Zetterberg (44:49)
Yep. Yep. Yep. I will do. Yep, it's good. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks.
Mark Walker (44:59)
Look forward to it. Thanks very much for your time.
Grant Niven (45:04)
Thanks, Ulf. And thank you, Mark. We'll speak again in the next couple of weeks.
Mark Walker (45:07)
We will indeed, if you're lucky.
Grant Niven (45:10)
Thank you.