This week's episode of Automation Unplugged features our host Ron Callis interviewing Tom Doherty. Recorded live on Wednesday, September 27th, 2023, at 12:30 pm EST.

About Tom Doherty

Tom has more than 40 years of experience in the consumer electronics industry. Throughout his career, he’s consistently identified and taken advantage of growth opportunities, starting with his own integration company and co-founding CEDIA in 1989. He has also played a key role in the success of companies like Escient, Gracenote, and Lutron.

In 2001, Tom received the CEDIA Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2008 he was inducted into the inaugural Lutron Hall of Fame. In 2017, he joined the Home Technology Specialists of America (HTSA) as Director of New Technology Initiatives, where he has helped drive growth in the lighting category for the custom installation industry.

Interview Recap

• Tom’s rise to prominence in the CI space, starting with founding his own AV business in 1985
• His work toward growing industry-wide education and awareness in the lighting category
• The very first AI Symposium at CEDIA, and the meteoric rise of AI since Nov 2022

SEE ALSO: Home Automation Podcast Episode #249 An Industry Q&A with David Kitcheners

Transcript

Ron:

Hello, hello! It's been a little while, but we are back with another episode of Automation Unplugged. Today is Wednesday, September 27th, and it is just a little bit after 12:30 p.m. ET. And today's a big deal, because today is our 250th — believe it or not — show of Automation Unplugged. So today is show 250. I will — not that I need to defend it — but I will let you all know why it's been a little bit since we've had a show and that we had CEDIA. And then I was off in London for the EI Live show, and that was a lot of fun. Great learning experience. And then I was actually in New York last week for some HR training. We're incorporating some new assessments here at One Firefly in our hiring practices, and kind of the way we work with our team. And I'll actually share with you what I was getting trained on. I was getting trained on something called Culture Index. And I was out there with a few members of my team. It was awesome and incredibly enlightening. And here we are. We're back into our flow. And I have an awesome guest, because this gentleman was someone that I've been actually collaborating with a great deal over the summer, leading up to CEDIA, because he invited me to at least help brainstorm, while he captained the effort around what became the first AI Symposium that took place on Wednesday, the day before the CEDIA trade show, or the expo opened up, before the floor opened up. And it was a blast, both developing the messaging and the content for that, as well as participating on that day. So we're going to talk about Tom. He's a legend in our industry. His reputation is well known as one of the founders of our trade organization and our industry at large. And he stayed involved, playing different roles over the years. And here he is again leading the way and trying to bring our industry into the modern age and understand the role, not only of AI, but he's also the man behind Lightapalooza. So you all may recall that I actually had Tom on and a few other industry professionals. Maybe, I gotta look at it, actually I'll have Rebecca on my team drop me the message. But I want to say it was maybe back in December or so, as we were gearing up for the Lightapalooza event, which took place in February. And if I got those dates wrong, I'll bring Tom on and he'll set me straight here and let me know exactly those dates. But without further ado, Show 250, Tom Doherty. Tom Doherty is officially the Director of New Technology Initiatives at HTSA and my co-conspirator, along with Alex over at Josh AI, in putting on what was the AI Symposium. And we're going to be talking about all those fun things. So let me go ahead and bring on Tom. Tom, how are you, sir?

Tom:

I'm great. Good to see you. Thanks for having me on the show.

Ron:

Oh, man, my pleasure. Where are you coming to us from?

Tom:

Palm Desert, California, my new home.

Ron:

How are you liking California from where you're from, which is Indianapolis, correct?

Tom:

Yeah. Yeah, I like it a lot. They have airplanes that can still take me back to Indianapolis to visit family and friends. And, of course, over my career, you know, I have colleagues and peers that I've closed friendships with all over the country, and a lot of them are concentrated now just a drive away instead of an annual conference away.

Ron:

I see we already have some comments coming in. Here, let me try to put that. You got Keith, your teammate over at HTSA, says it's an honor to be his teammate at HTSA. And I've had Keith on the show, and Keith is a rock star. And, oh, what else is Keith saying? Keith says, hello gentlemen, Tomapalooza is an industry legend, not to mention a real driver of results. Amen. Tom, for those that may not know, I'm gonna read a couple of your stats in that you were the co-founder of CEDIA back in 1989, and you also were behind the companies and you played a role in Escient and Gracenote and you had some, some responsibilities. I don't know if it was with Lutron or around Lutron, but I'd love to hear that. You also had the CEDIA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001, which is, it doesn't get much bigger than that, that's a pretty big deal. And you were inducted into the Lutron Hall of Fame in 2008. And in 2017 you joined HTSA. So maybe, in your words, give us kind of like, what has been your career the last 40 years? Take us back in time.

Tom:

Like a lot of people in this channel, I started off in, you know, I like to say my career spans eight tracks to apps, so when there was eight tracks, it was really primarily just audio, and the quick story is I went and worked at some of the very first video stores, so when the Betamax and those things came out, and when you could rent a tape and take it home and watch a movie, that was pretty magical in 1979. And that introduced me to a client base that, you know, in the early days when you're working at a hi-fi shop, people are interested in total harmonic distortion and watts per channel and they're all nerdy, but the people that bought and rented videotapes were just interested in the entertainment, didn't care how any of this stuff worked. So, I noticed that. And since I was young, I was like 20, a lot of them couldn't hook things up, so I would volunteer and hook things up or go to Radio Shack and buy some parts and do things for them. And people, that's when I learned how much value certain people placed on service. And so, you know, I started my own, you know, I was moonlighting at the hi-fi store doing that sort of stuff. And then I met somebody that liked my chutzpah, I guess, and he backed me and helped and mentored me to start my own business in 1985, called Tom Doherty's Custom Audio and Video.

Ron:

That was early. There weren't a whole lot of custom audio video shops back in 1985.

Tom:

Well, and there were fewer companies that manufactured any kind of products. So, yeah, I was the only store or operation in Indianapolis that offered that, you know, working out of an office park and doing it by appointment and meeting builders and that sort of thing, and learning that. And so then I just started going to the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas and Chicago, and like I mentioned, you know, there were just a handful of companies. Audio….ADA, Audio Design Associates, which is no longer. Niles made volume controls. Zantech made IR repeaters. Audio Access made multi-room audio and Sonance, and all those were companies that specifically made things for this and the rest of it was, you know, regular traditional consumer electronics that weren't necessarily made for the CI channel. So we had that customized. So, to speed this up, that's when I started meeting other people that were doing what I was doing, you know? It's like, so, you would meet, you know, in small little hotel rooms at McCormick Place, or in Vegas, we weren't on the floor, and you would, you know, meet fellow Sonance and Audio Access dealers, and that's where we created these kind of, you know, friendships, And we also were able to be commiserate with the challenges that we were all having. And that ultimately led to us, you know, there was a lot of pushback from the traditional channel. We were becoming disruptive. Traditional retailers, especially retailers, were not liking that, you know, their vendors, who they had exclusives on in their territories, were willing to sell to somebody working out of an office park. And so that's when we, myself and Chris Stevens, who started Audio Access, he and I started brainstorming about the need to kind of form an association so that we could demonstrate to the channel that this was a real new vertical. By bringing people together and showing mass and having them kind of, having the industry kind of understand what is the size of this business and what is the growth. And then also by putting that together we could, you know, start sharing best practices, start educating one another. I mean, this is the dawn of home theater.

Ron:

You needed products to talk to each other. What was the state of the ability to integrate or get the right, whether it was, I'm assuming most of it was IR commands, but to get these products to talk to each other, was that one of the impetuses?

Tom:

Sure, I mean, that was that, and there wasn't a library of it. You know, RTI and URC did not exist, and so, in fact, the early controls were contact closure. Like, Audio Access, you would literally take apart a Sony CD changer, get to the back of the panel where the buttons were, and hard solder wires to short the contact, and it would connect to a relay, and so when you pressed a button on a keypad, it told the processor to short that and put the CD player in play, or push another button and it would short the advanced track. And so, we would modify FM tuners, cassette decks, VCRs...

Ron:

Might have voided the warranty on those gear when you were opening them.

Tom:

Maybe, whatever. Then, you know, if it broke, you'd then take it apart, undo all the stuff, put it back together, and turn it in. It was like, no one was concerned about that. It was magical, though, because Audio access allowed you to have different music in different rooms. This is like 87. I know it was really powerful and it was something that no other part of the channel could offer. So the closest thing then was Bang & Olufsen and especially dealers being able to sell their remote control multi-room. But it was only proprietary to B&O and you couldn't have different music in different areas. And I was able just to slay the market and, you know, I'm not bragging or anything, but for a few years I was the largest Sonance in the United States. I was either top ten or number one from like, 87 to 91. Still have the plaque somewhere. That's what kind of got me some notoriety, because, you know, people in New York or in Florida or California, the big dealers of the day, you know, I got to know them and they were kind of, like, surprised that some hick from Indiana, you know, was successful. So that kind of helped me. It's always been good to be a big fish in a small pond, and I kind of lucked out that way.

Ron:

That's a fun thing to do. What is it like? You founded CEDIA in 1989. How have you seen CEDIA evolve from that beginning to the present?

Tom:

I think that, you know, most of the rapid growth happened in maybe the first decade.

Ron:

We have a very important person tuned in today, and that's David Weinstein on a plane with the Mazeman. I'm tuned in. He's on an airplane. He's watching. Hey, David. Good to see you.

Tom:

Great to see you, David. I'm going to see him tomorrow. I'm going to attend….one of the members of HTSA and also a member of the Guild, ATI, is hosting a grand opening at Park City. And I know David's going to be there, and I'm going to be there too, so I look forward to seeing him. You know, CEDIA has, you know, grown really well. I could not have imagined that it would become a global organization. I remember the first couple years, you know, and even prior to CEDIA, there were people internationally that would come to CES that were doing custom. There's a guy in Brazil, there's some people in France, there were some people in the UK, and there were people in Australia. And Chris Stevens, who was the other co-founder….I served president for almost three years. The first two years and nine months, and then Chris was the next one. And it was during Chris's — so it had been 92 — that we decided to open up our first chapter. Our first chapter was actually Australia. So, you know, the organization has evolved very well. I'm very, you know, there was a period of time when I was a little disappointed with kind of where I thought things had gotten. But since the organization, and I'm not just saying this about David, you know, he has provided real leadership in that chairman position, and it was during his time, and he's still the chairman, that they found Daryl Friedman, who I have huge respect for, and he's kind of reinstalled my faith in what the organization can be. What needed to happen, and has finally happened, is for the board of directors of CEDIA to really be a board and provide strategic, but not day-to-day, and they've allowed Daryl to really be a CEO. So, I think that CEDIA is in really good hands and is making some, you know, good moves today.

Ron:

No, I agree. You made the move in 2017 to HTSA. What was your vision in joining that group? And for anyone, if they live under a rock and don't know what HTSA is, why don't you maybe describe that and then describe kind of what your vision is. But before we go there, I've got...David just gave us a comment. He says, he's on an airplane, David, you have no worries about...you're not getting a straight feed, but he says, glad to see you, Tom, today.

Tom:

Yeah, he can stream it later.

Ron:

Yeah, you can see it in post, David, no worries. But yeah, what is HTSA, what was your vision in terms of what you wanted to do by joining that group?

Tom:

So, to back up this a little bit, and not to make the story long, because I could talk about this for a while, but I had….. so, I got this Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001, and I had a liquidity event. My interest in Gracenote CDDB allowed me to take some time off, get to know my kids' teachers' names, travel. And then I got back in the business, started in another company in 2003, and a lot of people were excited about me coming back. And a lot of manufacturers were like, oh, you're going to start another custom install business? Because my previous one had merged with Escient. It was one of multiple companies under the Escient umbrella, my former custom install company. And I said, actually, I'm starting a company that will exclusively only sell one thing. I'm only going to sell Lutron lighting control, and I'm going to evangelize lighting control, and that's the only thing I'm going to sell, one product. And then I said, well, actually, it's two. I'm going to sell Liberty Wire and Lutron Lighting Control equipment and evangelize that. And everybody was like, you can make a business out of that? I said, absolutely. It's undersold, under-executed, often not properly delivered. You know, back then, a lot of installations still had paper tags on keypads, waiting for the customer to decide what they wanted engraved, and it was confusing. But I had put one in my house and lived it, and saw how reliable it was. So I saw that as an opportunity. To speed things up, I started to learn about lighting, because I was starting to do work around the country, just doing Lutron systems, and I was exposed and noticed such a disparity. And similarly priced homes, some people had fantastic lighting, better fixtures, you could just tell the feel of the room, and then others were, like, just contractor gray. And so I was, you know, trying to figure out why that was and then I was kind of inspired that I want to learn about it. So, I started learning about it. To speed things up, I learned about it. I then built a lighting lab. For the purposes of demonstrating, I learned, like, in the AV world, all the growth in categories and products and spend is awareness. So, in 1985, when I put in a home theater for somebody, because the client had been in New York City, had seen a 10-foot screen and wanted that. And I figured out, oh, that's a commercial Sony projector. And I figured out how to buy that and install a screen. And it was, like, ten grand. And the builder was like, who the heck would spend ten grand on a home theater when you could buy a Sony 45-inch rear projector for $1,500 or whatever? Well, after somebody saw that, somebody bought a $25,000 theater for me, and about 18 months later I sold a $100,000 home theater, and it was all awareness, and that's how our industries grow. Lighting, on the other hand, has been driven primarily by lighting showrooms. So when somebody's building a house, the builder sends them to the kitchen store, the gravel store, the granite store, the flooring store, the lighting store. When they go in there, it's nothing but decoratives, there's no education about architectural lighting, there's no lighting design. And so most of the country just gets with that and lighting showrooms, for the most part, have not changed since 1980. You go in a time machine in 1980 and go in one today, often they can look pretty similar and the experience is similar. So I decided to build a lighting lab to educate people and expose them. And I did it in the same way, the way I would do a hi-fi store back in the day, where you go in a speaker receiver room, there's shelves of speakers, and you have a switcher, and somebody tells you that they don't know anything about audio, they can't tell the difference, and then you start playing their music, and you switch your speakers, and you explain what they're hearing, and then they pick something that they didn't expect. But at least they can contrast. So I built a lighting lab to demonstrate pre-LED. I mean, LED was beginning, but I would turn on a halogen, an incandescent, a compact fluorescent, an LED, just downlight to then show them adjustable, or wall washing, or lighting art, and then introduce them to layering and turning layers off, and they were all mesmerized. And they were like, wow, no one's ever shown this to me. What's the next step? How can you help me? Well, I can do a lighting design, and I can do a spec, and I can do a budget, and I had resistance from the builder. Hey, we sent them to a lighting showroom. Hey, you know, I only got $50 a can allowance, and, but I'd have a couple customers go, no, we want this. And none of it was budgeted, really. And then I would complete projects and the client was blown away. The builder was like, they'd see the client blown away. And the one builder in Indianapolis used to just have, like, a $50 allowance, and now he has a $350 allowance. So if it's like there's a hundred cans he thinks is in the job, he's quoting $35,000 instead of $2,500. And if I did the math right there, $5,000 versus $35,000. So, I did that. Now, just like what I learned from the early days of CEDIA where there was resistance, and back then it was dealers not wanting custom installers to have product, here it was a different thing where the manufacturers and the rep agencies kind of have a way of doing business in the lighting spec world. And I figured all that out. And again, having the advantage of being in Indianapolis, where not much spec-grade stuff was being sold, I was able to find the Sonances, the Niles, and the Audio Accesses of the lighting world, meaning family-owned, niche, high-performance, relationship people, talk to them, show them my lighting lab, and convince them to sell to me direct so that I could then start quoting it. And so I was doing that for a while. There's more to the story, but the next step was, it was weird, around 2016, I started getting calls from other dealers because LEDs were starting to be really prevalent, and people were having trouble with them because the dimming compatibility and the drivers and things were flickering and customers or builders are pointing their finger at the Lutron or lighting control person. And they knew that I've been doing this so they were calling me and saying, Tom, you know, how did you get into that? What are the fixture brands? What's the margins? How do you charge for lighting design? And simultaneously, coincidentally, I probably got four phone calls from different people that were not connected asking me all this. So I started to think that maybe there is another opportunity, not to start another CEDIA, but maybe there could just be this consortium, if I could bring a number of dealers around the country together, that maybe I could convince the lighting manufacturers that this is a new vertical, that the CI channel can be a new vertical, and we can get people higher quality lighting and expose them to customers that otherwise would never own their product. And I started to have some traction there, but then ultimately, you know, got some resistance. In the meantime, I had a number of peers say, you know, maybe you should, you know, approach HTSA, they might be the way to go. And at the time, I was like, I don't want to limit myself to just working with, you know, dealers that are part of one group. You know, I'd like to be able to pick whoever. But the resistance on the lighting side was way even stronger than the resistance that I felt in the CEDIA of days. Even having the benefit of all that knowledge, of how to maybe maneuver it. So, Jon Robbins called me one day and said, hey, we'd like to talk to you. Our members want to learn about lighting and add lighting as a category. But we don't know anything about it, you do, what would you think about that? And I, what I had done, I had kind of wound down my business. Short story is, I decided to work more closely with an integrator in Indianapolis or Carmel, Indiana that I referred a lot of work to over the years. Uh, Robert Hacker of Tri-Face and Carmel. And I approached Robert and I said, hey, I'd like to merge with you, which just means, I just want to bring myself to your...I just want a desk at your place. I want to build a lighting lab in your showroom. And I want to operate out of here. You pay my health insurance and, and I'll get you in the lighting business. And I'll bring all my clients I've had over the years and I can, I'll spec and sell AV and you guys can install it. So we did, and at the time I said, you gotta bring my daughter with me because she worked at Lutron. Now she works with me. She knows lighting design. She can do the lighting design as well. So that's what we did. We did that for a couple years, and so I had the ability to consider the offer from HTSA. And I looked at it, I got to know Jon, and I finally figured out, okay, at the time they had 70 members. I thought, okay, I can maybe go to these manufacturers and paint a picture. And so I accepted it, and I started at the CEDIA San Diego in 2017. We really didn't tell the industry what I was doing. Everybody was wondering, what is Tom Doherty doing at HTSA, and it wasn't until the fall conference a month later that I showed up in front of our members, and by that time, I had my friend Jan Dostrovsky turn me on to Ketra, because he was working with Delos, and Delos was using Ketra, and so I met with Ketra and convinced them to be a member. I met with DMF. I had discovered DMF and a guy named Andy Wakefield, who I knew from Lutron, had went to work for DMF. I told him what I was doing. I told him I wanted him to be a vendor partner he joined on. There was, uh, Lightology with PureEdge was somebody that I was doing business with, and Q-Tran was a company I was doing business with at the time. And so we showed up at the CEDIA conference and I unveiled what my strategy was for the membership and why they should be doing this and, you know, introduced it all. I guess that was a long story, but that's, that's how this journey has kind of gone and that's where I am and HTSA, for those that don't know, the industry thinks of them as a buying group, we’re actually legally set up as a co-op, but like the other buying groups, integrators join to be with peers and share best practices and purchase a lot of their needs through vendor partners that are part of that group for some financial incentives. HTSA, I think, is unique in that they have Keith, who is an incredible trainer. They have me that has, you know, all this experience in the channel and has been in these integrators' boots and knows this lighting game well. Jon Robbins, you know, ran a big company and has been in this business a little bit longer than me. We have Jordan and Nicole that keep everything running, and so we're a lean, mean machine with, I believe, to be the Formula One of the best integrators in the channel. So, I really like this job.

Ron:

One of the things that you've been active with, Tom, in recent years is Lightapalooza and that event. Now, I'm going to point our audience to show 231, which you and I recorded back in December of 2022. So, you know, maybe nine months ago, nine, ten months ago, something like that, to learn about Lightapalooza and that in detail. But I'm mindful of time, and I want to get to the AI kind of focus that you've had for a portion of this year, and specifically to the AI Symposium, which just took place a few weeks ago. And so I'll give you a high-level question. Kind of, what is your journey in AI? What has it been? And maybe for those that aren't informed, like, there are going to be some people listening, who don't even know what we're talking about. So what is AI and what has been your recent journey? And then we'll transition into this symposium that just took place.

Tom:

Yeah, AI, artificial intelligence. Working with Scott Jones at Escient is the first time I heard about AI, and some of the challenges that we were trying to figure out how to identify, you know, the compact disks that people were ripping on our Fireball systems and such back then were using some AI components or machine learning, really. But, you know, like, anybody that's kind of in this, it was November of just this past year, 2022, with ChatGPT that my friend Shalom allows from Powerfull Systems, we're talking and he said, have you seen this yet? And, you know, I heard about it, so he just had me, you know, open up, you got your browser open, you know, registered, you know, type this in, and I'm like, oh my God. And I just started playing with it and I was really amazed with it. And I instantly started using it to tighten up my bio. As I was planning Lightapalooza, I knew the titles of panel discussions I wanted to create, but I had it help me create the descriptions. And I had it help me create the questions that the moderator would ask the panelists. I mean, it was just, I was blown away. And so, shortly after Lightapalooza, we had our spring conference, and I learned a number of our own members have been digging into this. Uh, Alex Lelchuk, Shalom, Navot, had been doing it, and Navot was doing some incredible things, and so we did a presentation to our membership, I did some live demos, and it was the buzz of the conference through the rest of the week. And then, you know, I can keep going here, then I started thinking about the CEDA AI Symposium, and then you turned me on to the fact that there was an AI conference in Cleveland around marketing called MAICON. I registered, went to that, spent time with you there, and that was really what blew my mind, because, you know, I only have a certain perspective on it, and hearing people speak about it, and then hearing use cases, and then ultimately meeting this man, Isar Meitis, who we brought to the CEDIA symposium got me to really start thinking about it more deeply, and then subscribing to podcasts, and listening to podcasts, that it became way more than I had imagined and that it instructed me on maybe how I should go about continuing to dig in on it. So that's been my journey. You know, I went to the AI conference in San Francisco yesterday and heard more speakers, and I'm, you know, further inspired, but I've been pointed in, you know, more directions to dig into this. I think it's, you know, I've seen lots of technology occur. And, you know, I know history, my father's a history professor, I know about, you know, the evolution of man and all that, and this is big, important stuff. And at the same time, for people maybe in the audience that haven't dug into this, when you say the word AI, everybody has a different interpretation of what that might mean. And so I understand that, but it's important for people to really put some time and effort into really having a better understanding than the sound bite that they hear or other uninformed people that are telling them what to think about it.

Ron:

Yeah, I mean, the audience should know that AI has been in development for 60 plus years. I mean, if you use Google Maps, it's selecting your route with AI. If you talk to Siri, that's AI. If you talk to Google, that's AI. If you talk to, if you use Josh.ai, that's AI. So, it's really that the coming out party was ChatGPT coming out last November. That's this surge in this, these things called large language models and whatnot. Just for the audience, you know, to give a little bit of background here. It's not that AI was born in the last 24, or the last 12 months, it's that something changed. And I've got some pictures here, Tom, of the event, which is that Wednesday before CEDIA. Maybe if you want to kind of talk us through what we're seeing, keeping in mind we have people tuned in to the podcast and they're listening so they don't see what's on the screen.

Tom:

Yeah, so the third person, you know, Alex from Josh AI, who brainstormed and contributed and helped plan some of this, he was our opening presenter and essentially went over a brief history of AI, but helped kind of, at a pretty technical level, kind of understand the different elements of AI and how it's built and how it works and gave people to the extent that they could, you know, comprehend the highly technical stuff that he was sharing, you know, a good kind of foundational understanding of what AI is and some of the different models that exist or the way it actually functions. So he kicked it off and we were really glad to do that. This is, on the screen here, is Isar Meitis that I met at the Cleveland event. Isar is an amazing man, former F-16 pilot in Israel, born in Israel, lives here, is a U.S. citizen. And he is a CEO, former CEO, tech startup guy who has a podcast called Leveraging AI, which I learned a tremendous amount after the MAICON conference.

Ron:

I'm an avid listener. Thanks to you turning me on to that podcast, Tom.

Tom:

Yeah, so it's great. And so, I reached out to him and told him we were putting this on and asked him if he is available to speak. Does he do that? And it turned out he is, and I said, okay, well, are you available on these dates? Because I said, I'd like you to participate in the CEDIA AI Symposium, but I also want you to participate in my upcoming fall conference in October in Dallas. And so we've got him booked for all that and he came and he had a little bit of an understanding of our channel, but he was blown away. He had no idea how wide and deep what we do as an industry is.

Ron:

He walked to the show the next day, right, on Thursday?

Tom:

Yeah, we had him, I paid for him to be there a couple days, you know, he had a real impact on his presentation here. He was the next presenter and he was talking about, you know, giving people also a foundation, but also really getting into use cases and talking about incorporating AI in your businesses. And that's him there. So that was great. There's the crowd, there's Alex and Tim from Josh AI in the audience.

Ron:

Let's talk about, for a moment, Tom, who's in the audience? Was this open to everyone at CEDIA? I mean, I know the answer to this question, but just kind of, what was the thought process of some people to put in the room?

Tom:

Yeah, so the quick idea was, you know, this is early, early, early days. It felt like early CEDIA, the early days of home theater, and talking about that, the early days of automation and control systems. And I felt like for people that were already going to be traveling to Denver, that if we could reach out to, you know, if we could get a hundred thought leaders in a room and hear presentations and share information amongst each other, that's what CEDIA is there for. That at least was the foundation of it. And I thought that this was a very important topic and there was a lot to learn from one another. And so that was the initial concept. I felt, okay, if we can get a hundred thought leaders in a room and we can have some presentations, some panel discussions, some round tables, that the four or five hours spent Wednesday afternoon, have some lunch, get together, have a little cocktail reception afterwards, that would be well spent time. And would be a great way to kick off the rest of the week for some good dinner conversation and such, bar conversation. So that was a concept. I pitched this to Daryl at CEDIA. I said we ought to have a CEDIA AI Symposium and CEDIA can take the lead since they're the leader of the channel. And that, yeah, I'm with HTSA, so let's have, let's invite the other groups and let's have the other groups, you know, invite, you know, the 20 people they'd like to have invited. So that was the concept behind it. And it turned out well. We had, you know, a lot, since it was kind of planned late, and not everybody knew about it, you know, we ran a press release, and then, you know, the groups did their individual promotion to their members. I was obviously very active in that, and we had, you know, a large number of HTSA people came, you know, ultimately, we opened it up to whoever wanted to come, and so that's what the thought process was, and that's what we did.

Ron:

And on screen, I'm standing in my suit, I'm presenting, so what's your take on the content that I was delivering? Like, the subject matter coverage.

Tom:

Yeah, so, you know, yours was really powerful because, you know, marketing by the integration channel could and should always be better. And, you know, you've been providing these sorts of services to a lot of integrators over the years and still do. But, you know, you were able to, you were very generous in sharing how you are incorporating AI with One Firefly and strategies, so that was really fascinating for the kind of use cases that you were sharing with the group.

Ron:

That was fun. Then we see some more. There's Shalom there on the left. You mentioned him?

Tom:

Yeah. Yeah, Shalom and Isar, my daughter there, Ellie, who works for Powerfull Systems, Shalom and Ofer, they are in LA, attended. And I think that's David in the background.

Ron:

That looks like David there in the background.

Tom:

Yeah, there's David Weinstein in the background.

Ron:

Yeah, I think that's it. And then what I was going to do, I was going to put a couple of, kind of, slides here. Let me pull this off. Let me do that. I'm going to put this on. Bold statement from my presentation: AI, we're at the dawn of the biggest technological shift in human history. This is a statement from me, so I'm not attributing this quote to anybody. Do you agree with that? Is that too profound a statement?

Tom:

I don't think so. I don't think so. I think this is wheel and fire kind of stuff. Some people, you know, look, that's my opinion. That's yours in some way, in many ways. Some people absolutely disagree with that, but, there's a lot of pretty intelligent people, you know, this thing I attended yesterday, you know, Stanford, MIT, professors there, the conversations and the framing of it. And people that are really using these tools are amazed. And any time in history where technology can augment a human, is how we advance. And, you know, some people are going to adopt it and really take advantage of it and get good at it. Some are just going to be a little later to the table.

Ron:

Another big statement, this is from Sundar, CEO of Google, he says: I've always thought of AI as the most profound technology, more profound than fire or electricity, or anything we've done in the past. I mean, that's again, another just incredibly big, bold statement from the founder, or not founder, but the CEO of Google. Does that, does that resonate with you, again, in a way?

Tom:

That resonates with me, and I think that, you know, part of the challenges, or maybe perceptions of people that are kind of doubting that sort of stuff, or thinking it's over-hyped, there are people like that. You know, people just have, I don't know what's in their head, what they're thinking about or their perspective. But anybody that starts working with it, you know, if they've got some imagination, can kind of see that there's all new sets of possibilities out there. And, you know, it affects everything. It affects, from a business standpoint, it affects every part of the organization. And I think that with understanding and then starting to use it, that it can really augment. And, you know, I don't know if you're going to share this quote or a slide, but the woman from Google at MAICON, you know, this concept of thunking and thinking, you know, there's a lot of things, you know, one of the comments yesterday from the man from Stanford was, you know, 80% of tasks are something that AI can do. And so that just means that you're freed up to be more creative and to think and to analyze and assess. But a lot of stuff that we do is kind of repetitive and a machine can do it for us, and just frees up bandwidth for other things. And it can just, you know, it ideally leads to more leisure time, you know, maybe not putting in 70 or 80 hours a week sometimes when you have to.That's what's possible. But, you know, unless people are really playing with this and learning about it, yeah, you can only expect for them to kind of be pessimistic or doubtful.

Ron:

Do you mind sharing, Tom, an example that you gave on the panel discussion at the symposium, and it was your need to analyze survey data from the members of HTSA, and you actually used Code Interpreter within ChatGPT, or what was formally called Code Interpreter. I know that it's, what is it, Advanced Data?

Tom:

Advanced Data Analysis or something.

Ron:

Yeah, they've given it a new name. But what's a use case? Because I know that connecting AI, or just talking about it, it feels like it's up in the clouds for a lot of people, but what's a real, like, case where you've implemented it and you've had success? Any examples that come to mind?

Tom:

Well, actually, the SurveyMonkey. So quickly, Lightapalooza, there's a little over 700 people that showed up. The first one had a couple hundred. The one that we just did benefited from the survey that I did from the first one. So I sent out a survey. I sent out 700 surveys. I got 200 back and each of these surveys had about 13 multiple choice answer questions, right? And it also allowed for people to comment. And so I got a tremendous amount of data, and typically with SurveyMonkey, you can, you know, read all of them, which I did, but also you can export them in a spreadsheet form. So, all of the data is there, and that can be a way to share that with other people. And so, for this year, I wanted to be able to share the insights of all these surveys with additional people that I could bounce ideas off of, and they would have context. Well, I, you know, putting that and summarizing that in a report would take me, with interruptions, probably a week to put the document together. And I was able to load all of that information, that raw spreadsheet-formatted data, into ChatGPT Code Interpreter and then have it analyze it and understand the structure. And then I was able to start asking questions and saying, like, tell me what were the positive feedback about the education, lighting education specifically? And then what are some constructive suggestions that people had? Give me, you know, strategy or tactics or things I should do to improve it for next year. And I did that with all of it. And it generated about a 28-page organized report that broke down what the manufacturer's survey said, what the rep's survey said, and what the integrator's survey said. And put it in a beautiful report that I probably invested a total of four hours loading all that data, asking it those questions, reviewing it, cutting and pasting it in a Word doc, and you know it was just beautifully done, great insights. I knew some things to do automatically because I had read them all, but there were some things and approaches that it came up with that have been really helpful. So that's just one example. We had, you know, we had a panel discussion with some members that were sharing actual use cases. Alex is an iPoint user. I'm sure some of your viewers here use iPoint. And there's some things that he wants out of iPoint that are a little hard to get, but he can get them. And he figured out how to connect iPoint to ChatGPT and extract information and generate reports and insights in seconds that otherwise is just really time-consuming. Another guy, Paul, who you know, from Hermary’s, yeah, he had utilized and leveraged the API in D-Tools that exists and connected it to ChatGPT to extract information from proposals that he has in D-Tools and help generate scope of work documents. And then finally, Ari at Sonance was using it to load in job openings, job descriptions and resumes he's getting, and being able to cross it in a way to help generate, you know, specific relevant questions for the interview process that also map to their culture and how they look for people to have certain attributes. I mean, so the creativity, that's the whole thing, is as you use this, you start thinking and then you can try stuff out and you're leveraging, like, there was a presenter from NVIDIA yesterday and he said, you know, a lot of us, a lot of people think we're just like a hardware manufacturer, he said the majority of the company, vast majority is software and we are running software to optimize our machines and then he showed, like, the amount of processing power and how they build these things. And we're able to leverage all that through our browser. I mean, it just...and we're just starting. This is, like, the early part, so it's good to have some kind of context and follow things along and be able to understand what the next thing that's coming and know its relevance and where to pursue. There's a lot to know about this stuff. We are early, early, early.

Ron:

I was listening to a podcast yesterday, Tom, and it was Paul Roetzer's podcast, and we'll drop a reference in the show notes, and in that podcast, he's giving at a super high level, and maybe this will give perspective for those tuned in, like, why now? Why is all of a sudden the buzz happening right now? And the perspective was, well, in order for it to happen right now, we had to have the invention of the computer. And then we had to have the invention, we had to have Moore's Law increasing the horsepower and lowering the cost of silicone. And then we had to have this thing called the Internet. And then we had to have the ubiquity of content across the Internet. And then we had to have the processors by NVIDIA and others capable of processing this. And then we had to have all the data on the internet that could be consumed and learned into large language models. You know, and he runs through this sequence such that today there's enough data and enough processing power and we all have supercomputers in our hands in the form of our phones and our desktop machines, that AI at scale is possible. It wasn't possible five years ago at scale, and now we're just at the beginning of the beginning of it being possible. Does that make sense?

Tom:

Yeah, 100%, yeah, very much so. As well, that podcast is well worth listening to, and he's got it right there, I think.

Ron:

I'm gonna grab the name of the podcast just so I can give credit where credit is due. It's called The Marketing Artificial Intelligence Show, the Marketing AI Show, with Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput. Those are the fellas that put on the conference that Tom and I attended in July. So, another piece of content we did, I'll just, I'll give a quick peek at it, Tom, and I was just curious. I guess that what I'm going to be showing on the screen here, folks that are listening, is a lot of the different tools. This is a lot. These are, like, 15 or 20 tools that we talked about at the conference. But the reality at a super high level, Tom, is there's been 3,000 or so pieces of software that have come out just in the last 10 months. How does, what is your approach to thinking about all of these different pieces of software? Maybe I'll leave ChatGPT up on the screen. That's a good place to start for folks. How should people even think about understanding how to drink from the fire hose, which is all of this stuff?

Tom:

Well, the most effective thing for me has been, you know, the acceleration of my understanding and experience and increasing skill level has been a result of listening to podcasts like Isar's and Paul's and some others where they, you know, have guests talk about specific things and there's just a lot of knowledge there. I, you know, the majority of my time is spent in the ChatGPT world just because, you know, it does what I need it to do right now. And I'm just trying to get better and better at that. And so ChatGPT is essentially, you know, an AI, generative AI tool that runs on its own large language model. And there are lots of different large language models, and there's a large language model race, and you know all this stuff, maybe, I'm sure not everybody in the audience does. This is a function of training the large language model on data and information that you want it to know to better assist you. So, I spend a lot of time on trying to learn how I can train ChatGPT and what it can do or not do. The thing about these things is there are no owner's manuals and the people that produce them don't even know what they can do. So, all that's fascinating. I do play around with Midjourney because I'm fascinated by generative image creation.

Ron:

Although the latest breaking news from this week is that now ChatGPT Plus is going to include Dall-E 3.

Tom:

Right.

Ron:

Generative image creation is now going to happen natively in ChatGPT.

Tom:

Right. And they have things like, you know, being able to just show it an image and start to interpret this thing for the blind that they created called, you know, Be My Eyes, or something like that, so that, you know, the camera can look at things and it can describe what it is. They've kind of held some of this back because it could figure out, you know, the CAPTCHA items on its own and, you know, kind of take its way through. And anyway, so I'm kind of staying in a couple silos. I do use a tool that I learned called Fathom on Zoom calls that automatically transcribes the calls and then can summarize the calls and it has a lot of features, and I learned about that on a podcast and shared that with you and other people who use it. So that's what I'm in right now. Now, I'm really trying to figure out how to maximize the code interpreter and doing the data analysis and getting good at that.

Ron:

Yeah, I'm gonna put a slide up. I'm mindful of time. This slide, you'll recognize it, Tom, and I'll kind of, like, maybe tell me what, how you think about it. And this is from Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput at the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute. And they give five steps for a business, not just marketing agencies, but for any business, to think about how to start incorporating AI into the business. And step one is focusing on education and training. Just listening, watching, learning, and I believe hands-on, I try to use AI tools, you know, typically ChatGPT, but others, I try to use them every single day. Like, even if I force myself, like, thinking about a task, how could I use ChatGPT to help make this task better and more effective? I'll run through them and then tell me what resonates for you or what you advise for the integrators or other people in our industry that are listening and watching this. How do they get started? Because you and I were chatting before we went live, still the vast majority of our industry and, frankly, business at large, businesses, are ignoring this, this sea-changing technology. So, it's a very small minority of businesses that are paying attention and that have an ability to get a leg up. But one was education. Two was to create an internal AI council. Three is to develop responsible AI principles and generative AI policies, because there's copyright issues and client data protection issues around that. Four, develop AI impact exposure assessment for your team. In other words, you can't just tell your whole team, just go at it. You have to give rules and boundaries or otherwise you could get in trouble and then build an AI roadmap, i.e., how to eat an elephant, you do it one bite at a time, like, you figure out where we want to go and how do we systematically work through it. What would you want to add to that term in terms of advice for the folks tuned in?

Tom:

So the people in the CI channel, I mean, you know, the number one is education and training. You know, this makes a lot of sense, especially if you're a big corporation. This is absolutely what you have to do and you have to, you know, enforce it. It has to be exactly like this. I think, you know, with the smaller integration companies, you know, the owner principal or some leader in the company needs to be the champion of it and needs to help organize, you know, a committee from the different departments to begin educating those leaders of those departments, the project manager, the technician, the person that answers the phone, all the different elements of the company need to be organized in some sort of committee by a champion that chairs it that starts introducing them and bringing them up to speed so that they at least have some real context for what's possible, what this technology is. One of the things that was said at the AI conference was, to then kind of encourage a hackathon, meaning then turning all these people loose to start really playing with this stuff and, you know, without doing it in a way that actually affects the business, but starts experimenting with elements of their job and seeing what it can do and bringing those folks together and a lot of this is group learning and discussion. But then, you know, ultimately,you know, what Isar talks about is the group can start figuring out, okay, what thing in our business, whether it's the marketing or the design or the quoting or the customer follow-up or whatever, is something that we think that this can be applicable to, that we can experiment with in a way that we can be assured that if things go wrong, it's not going to burn the house down kind of thing. So, it's, you know, a lot of it is, what we're saying is, you gotta get in the pool, shallow end, have somebody that's really a champion of this, and start educating the company, the leaders of the departments, and start on this journey. And then, collectively, kind of come to some sort of conclusion of what could be worked on. It might be something with the hiring process. It might be something with generating better work orders or scopes of work. At the same time, you know, there are elements of this where, you know, without it being organized and overseen and treated, you know, as a process, and you just let renegades turn it into the Wild West, you can just do this really poorly. And so that's, I think that's where you start. You know, the boundaries and the ethical parts of it, those things are important. You know, we're not running a healthcare business, we're not giving legal advice, but definitely in terms of, you know, one of the use case that Midas came up with was teaching it all about a builder that you're not doing business with by scraping all the information off their website, and then describing to ChatGPT what your company's about, and start developing, you know, direct kind of messaging or some strategy or tactics on how to maybe get that builder's attention and get an appointment and so on and so forth. I mean, the possibilities are endless, but I think from the marketing standpoint it’s clearly an area to be working with your company to figure out, you know, how they can maximize this.

Ron:

Yeah. We're leveraging and experimenting. We're operating in our safe sandboxes, but there's lots of invention, there's lots of immediate applications, and I'll just add a comment to your idea there, is that the human, and it was one of the quotes from Paul Roetzer, but the human plus AI is more powerful than the human alone, or the AI alone, right? So the AI doesn't necessarily replace the human, but it will, AI, humans that are using AI will probably replace humans that are not using AI in many job functions, not all. A surgeon still needs to go do surgery with their hands. AI is not going to necessarily immediately replace that surgeon, but for a lot of job functions, the tools make us much better. What's your future, just, if you were to look in your magic 8-ball and look into the year ahead, where do you think our industry will be able to continue to rally around education? Is there maybe going to be AI stuff at Lightapalooza? It sounds like you're incorporating some AI stuff into HTSA training and events. What do you kind of, what do you see ahead?

Tom:

Yeah, well, immediately ahead is our fall conference for HTSA, and we have Isar coming, and we have a presentation and a couple of workshops during our conference. I am definitely going to have AI, some AI education, during Lightapalooza. I haven't figured out, you know, how I'm going to tie that in, but there'll be interest and there's going to be, you know, while people are there, you know, I'm hoping that I can, you know, show some use cases on the lighting side, the design side, or the lighting side of the business. But we'll have that in there. In a year, I'm hoping that AI can be used to make the design or the building of fixture specification for projects or leveraging large data sets in a way. Lighting is, the part numbers are a mile long, there's, you know, the spreadsheets and the pricing sheets and the spec sheets are enormous. I was playing with things by loading DMF technical data and manuals and their marketing stuff into ChatGPT and experimenting with having it tell me what are the top three features of this set and then contrasting it with a contractor grade, you know, Lowe's Depot fixture and, you know, coming up with cell sheets and things like that. So, I'm just seeing all kinds of possibilities, and that's why I'm trying to practice and get really good at the data analysis tools that are out there.

Ron:

Awesome. Tom, folks that want to get in touch with you directly and or learn more about HTSA, where would you send them?

Tom:

So, I have a simple email. It's This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., so that's the best way. I am on LinkedIn, so you can find me on LinkedIn. I don't know what my number is, but search Tom Doherty on LinkedIn. Those are probably the two best ways.

Ron:

I'm going to...let's see if I can get this to work. Did I get that right?

Tom:

Yes.

Ron:

Perfect. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., folks. Well, Tom, you joined me on show 231, and here you are already back on show 250, and it was awesome having you on the show, and for our audience to learn about your background, which is impressive. You're one of the founders of our industry, and also all the way to the present, where you're on the latest in cutting-edge technology. So thank you so much for joining us here on the show.

Tom:

Thank you. Thanks for having me. Take care.

Ron:

All right, folks, there you have it, show 250. As you probably could tell, we only scratched the surface, or maybe we didn't even scratch it. Tom and I could, frankly, nerd out on all things AI for hours, and, in fact, we do nerd out on all things AI. I'm an avid learner. I love to listen to podcasts. I'm watching YouTube videos. I'm reading blog articles. Our team here at One Firefly is incorporating AI methodologies, tools, and capabilities into our product stack, service and tech stack up and down the company, both on product delivery and in just running the company. There's applications in sales, marketing, project management, organization, client communications, graphics, design, I mean, you name it, A to Z in a business, these tools are there. My CFO is utilizing various tools in terms of financial data analysis. Think of incorporating, and there's ways to do this in a safety zone where your data's protected and there's environments to do that where if you put it out there, you better be careful because other people can see it. But we're mindful of that. But where there's a lot of testing and experimentation. And if you're listening to this and you're not experimenting, then you risk getting caught behind. And this is, if you listen to a lot of the folks that are kind of mindful about trends, this seems to be a big deal. And it's already saving me personally and my day-to-day activities. It's saving me significant amounts of time. Tom gave a great example. My quick example would be I was developing a contract for a custom website and what normally would have been a five-hour project became a 45-minute project by utilizing AI to help with some of the prompts and interpretation of the RFP. And two days later, when that was presented to a client, I signed the contract, it was $30,000 in business, and there were no edits or changes to the contract. And so that was utilizing the tool to allow me to, in my case, I was doing it on a Saturday morning, so I got to recapture my morning and spend my time with my family. And it helped me deliver a great contract, although ChatGPT is very quick to say it is not, you need to run everything by your lawyer, but I wasn't asking it for legalese, I was asking it for interpretation of RFP language into deliverables that were within the capabilities of One Firefly. So it helps to do that translation and synthesis more effectively than me doing it on my own, which has been my process for the last 20 years. So that's just one quick example from my own personal experience. Anyway, we have shows booked out through the rest of the year, so thank you for joining me here on episode 250. This did run long, I'm mindful of that. If you have not already done so, subscribe to the podcast. If you're watching either in replay or watching the video, we do put this out as a podcast, just search Automation Unplugged. And I appreciate y'all tuning in. Thanks everybody.

SHOW NOTES:

Tom has more than 40 years of experience in the consumer electronics industry. Throughout his career, he’s consistently identified and taken advantage of growth opportunities, starting with his own integration company and co-founding CEDIA in 1989. He has also played a key role in the success of companies like Escient, Gracenote, and Lutron.

In 2001, Tom received the CEDIA Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2008 he was inducted into the inaugural Lutron Hall of Fame. In 2017, he joined the Home Technology Specialists of America (HTSA) as Director of New Technology Initiatives, where he has helped drive growth in the lighting category for the custom installation industry.

Ron Callis is the CEO of One Firefly, LLC, a digital marketing agency based out of South Florida and creator of Automation Unplugged. Founded in 2007, One Firefly has quickly became the leading marketing firm specializing in the integrated technology and security space. The One Firefly team work hard to create innovative solutions to help Integrators boost their online presence, such as the elite website solution, Mercury Pro.

Resources and links from the interview:

• HTSA Webpage
• HTSA Facebook
• Tom Doherty LinkedIn