Gabriel Carrejo: So, without further ado, Vinny, I’ll let you take over. Take it away, Vinny.
Vinny LaRocca: Yeah, you know, I’m the Director of Engineering for Lydonia Technologies. We are really a business transformation firm purely focused in AI automation. And where we differ a little bit is we tend to be hyper-focused on outcomes. And what I mean by that is really making sure that we’re going after the right types of processes, we’re deploying things that make sense, and quantifying it before we actually go and do it. And one of the core pieces to the way that we do this is our Agentic Accelerator program. And, you know, obviously we’re going to talk today a lot about the actual technology, which is a big piece of this, is picking the right technology partner to move forward with for success. But one of the things that we found is there’s a lot of other areas that you really need to nail to be successful here. And these are really the three pillars here that you’re looking at.
Identify: find high-value use cases with defined ROIs and level of, and creating a backlog so that we can, you know, programmatically sort of attack the highest to lowest ROIs.
Enable: letting the workforce know what’s available to them, what tools have been built or bought so that they can utilize it correctly, and even, in some cases, citizen development capabilities so that people out who are, you know, doing these processes every single day can start to build some intelligence against what they’re actually doing.
Manage: doing things like show-back models and governance, and what is the security posture of all of this, just making sure that you have a good program to continue to run this over time.
So the first one that I’ll really dive into is the identify piece of this. And the goal here, again, really is to go across, you know, different lines of business, figure out what everybody’s doing every day, find some high-value use cases that we can define ROIs behind, build that backlog. This is kind of an example on the screen of what you would see from an output perspective. And then again, just make sure that the use cases we’re going after is actually going to drive tangible business value, not just we’re building a shiny object because it seems fun, or somebody hates doing something. Right, so we really want to make sure we’re driving value back to the business.
The next area, here we go, is enable. Right? So, couple different pieces to this one. The first piece is going to be training, right? And that’s going to really be split into almost two different things. The first one being training on any sort of citizen development, as we’ll refer to it, which is giving the line of business no-code tools that they can utilize to start to automate mundane things that they’re doing, just to become more efficient at what they’re doing. The other piece of the training here is really more around the tools that are available to the teams out in the field, making sure that they understand what they can use, what they should be using to just perform their job quicker, faster, better.
And then the second piece of this that we see is really critical here is the community piece. So, especially when it comes to, like, citizen development, for example, we’ve found that setting up a citizen development group and then allowing the citizen developers to take out tickets with the IT team, what that ends up doing is we end up having our IT teams spend all of their time supporting citizen development and not being able to get their level of development done. So they end up with a massive backlog, and then everything stalls out. So this is one of those things that just over the years of doing this, we’ve figured out that actually the best way is to set up an internal community where citizen developers can talk to each other. They meet weekly, you know, they do internal trainings and knowledge transfers, and then that leaves the IT team to go tackle more difficult, higher level of effort type of automations without them getting bogged down. So it’s a sort of, you can have your cake and eat it too here, and we’ve kind of figured out how to structure that correctly.
The last piece is really mostly around setting up a program around all this stuff. Making sure that you have executive report, setting up a real structured center of excellence, show-back models, making sure that we have best practices installed, that we have ways of governance to ensure that those things are being adhered to and are happening correctly. You know, all of those things you really need to have a successful program over time and be able to scale it successfully.
And then, you know, what that kind of looks like from an execution perspective, if you flip to the next slide, is really these three steps. Right? So the first thing is we want to make sure that we’re setting up the program right. We’re scoping everything out of what’s going to happen. We have success criteria in place, we have different stakeholders who are holding different responsibilities, and everybody’s kind of firing in the same direction.
The second piece being execution, going and doing that discovery, finding somewhere usually between 100 to 200 high-value use cases that we can go attack. Putting those in an order that makes sense, working with the teams and the stakeholders to ensure that we are accurately ranking things based on what the value is and what their priorities are. Ensuring that we have things like governance models, and then ensuring that we’re building a program to continue to do that after we engage. So continuing to do intake, continuing to look at our governance model and update it and make sure that we’re being secure and we’re following best practices. And again, just making sure that we are set up to do that 2, 3, 4, 5 years down the road, not just at a point in time. And that’s really where we see this stuff be successful, is when we set it up as a program, not as a project.
And then, I believe there’s one more slide. Yeah, and then I’ve kind of touched on some of these, but these are really your core benefits from doing something like this. The first is going to be speed, right? Even just the use case identification part of this. This whole program runs 8 weeks. And in that 8-week time, we’re going to get in the ballpark of 100 to 200 use cases, we’re going to set up an entire program around this stuff, and we’re going to get everybody who you want involved trained and enabled. And so, really, this is a way to do it quickly and to make sure that you’re scalable in the future.
