Is Your Business Actually AI-Ready? | The Disruptors #4

Show: The Disruptors Episode: 04

Publish Date: 09 June 2025

AI won’t save your business. But building AI-ready systems just might.

In Episode 4 of The Disruptors, Ritesh Shah and Julian Wallis break down the real reason most businesses fail to scale — and how it ties directly to AI system readiness.

If your operations still rely on manual work, scattered tools, or person-dependent processes, you’re not ready to scale — and you’re definitely not ready for AI. Julian explains what “AI readiness” actually means in practice, and how smart companies are systemising and digitising to create true leverage. .

Packed with real-world examples from Intuji’s own transformation work, this episode shows why systemisation is the foundation of both scale and successful AI adoption.

Timestamps

The Foundation – Understanding Real Scale
00:00:45 – Growth vs Scale – Why they’re not the same
One adds complexity. The other demands clarity.

00:01:08 – Why hiring isn’t a scalable solution
People add load — systems create leverage.

00:03:41 – The difference between digitisation and systemisation
True digitisation means structured, repeatable processes.

00:04:30 – Why AI alone doesn’t give you an edge
AI fails without the right foundation.

00:05:30 – How good systems reduce people-dependence
Fewer people doing smarter, better work.

Where It Goes Wrong – Scaling Without Structure
00:07:07 – Common myths about scale in mid-market businesses
Growth plans often ignore real constraints.

00:08:24 – Why throwing more people at a problem destroys margins
Headcount alone won’t fix broken ops.

00:09:24 – The cost of launching without digital readiness
No systems = duplicated effort and chaos.

00:11:01 – Why B and C players drag you backwards
Poor structure amplifies poor performance.

00:12:11 – Smart hiring: AI before headcount
Test automation before opening new roles.

How to Get It Right – System-Driven Scalability
00:14:17 – AI as an accelerator (not a replacement)
AI multiplies impact when systems exist.

00:15:13 – Case study: Building tools that scale Julian’s impact
Internal tools made leadership scalable.

00:17:16 – Structuring data to scale intelligently
Unstructured data blocks real scale.

00:19:16 – Infinite scale starts with solving for repeatability
Solve once. Scale infinitely.

00:21:52 – Owning your EdgeFactor™ and your data stack
Disconnected tools can’t deliver scale.

00:25:42 – Self-service processes that scale team performance
Empower people to act independently.

00:27:08 – Ritesh’s lesson: More heads ≠ faster outcomes
A bigger team slowed things down.

The episode reframes AI readiness as a business operations problem — not a tech feature. If your systems aren’t ready, neither is your business.

Key Takeaways from this Episode:

• AI won’t fix chaos — it multiplies it.
• Systemisation = AI readiness.
• Smart teams test tech before hiring.
• You can’t scale without structured data.
• Self-service is the future of ops.

Transcript

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:00:01:05 – 00:00:38:01)
Welcome to The Disruptors. The show for manufacturers, wholesalers, and industrial businesses building their EdgeFactor® through digital transformation that actually delivers. Every week, we unpack real stories, strategies, and lessons using PSV Thinking®, a practical framework focused on one thing: driving Profits, enabling Scale, and building long-term Enterprise Value. I’m Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji and your host. We’re here to challenge how you think about tech, operations, and what’s possible in your business.

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:00:38:03 – 00:00:45:03)
Let’s get into it.

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:00:45:05 – 00:00:46:20)
Hey Julian. Welcome back. 

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:00:46:22 – 00:00:49:11)
Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:00:49:13 – 00:01:08:16)
Thanks, Mate. We will be discussing a lot of things today as well as we have already discussed in the other episode, so I’m really excited about it. Today, we’ll be discussing about how do businesses fail while they scale like, what do they need to take care of when they scale? Firstly, let’s start with what’s the difference between scale and growth for a business, like how do you refer it to?

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:01:08:18 – 00:01:38:06)
Yeah, I guess to me it means that growth is, you know, you’re growing, you are moving forward, etc. but scale to me is the ability to infinitely scale the business, which essentially means that, you know, we might grow from whatever a certain amount of revenue to a certain amount of revenue, but can we scale and is there a linear process that where we’ve systemised and digitised our processes to a point where, yes, we may have certain restrictions that we can’t necessarily just digitise and systemise, just hiring people and getting people.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:01:38:06 – 00:01:55:19)
But outside of that, have we digitised and systemised as much as we possibly can? So that’s how I would break the two down, which is, growth is growing the business, it could be revenue, could be marketing, whatever it is, and it just happens, wouldn’t necessarily say naturally, but it happens over time. But you’re trying to turn that growth into scale.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:01:55:19 – 00:02:09:18)
Or at least that’s what we’re trying to do, where we can scale in the business very quickly. And there is processes and systems in place that allow us to do that without trying to duplicate, you know, a thousand people, right?

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:02:09:19 – 00:02:36:19)
Exactly. Exactly. You are there, mate like you almost nailed it, actually. That was the definition I was going through the internet while my research. And then I was like, this is the first time where I was like doing the research around growth and then scale, and then definitely it meant so. It had such a big difference I never knew, because most often we use both the term simultaneously here and there without thinking of

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:02:36:22 – 00:02:55:04)
Why are we using those forms? Now you already gave the definition. I won’t repeat myself, but you were totally right on that actually. So let’s discuss further into the scaling of the business like, what do you think you have already mentioned about like, hiring could be one of the thing that could like be a bad thing for the scale.

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:02:55:04 – 00:03:01:12)
Like, if we hire the wrong people, the scaling thing would go downwards rather than going upwards. So what do you think about it?

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:03:01:13 – 00:03:19:14)
Yeah, I think it’s not just about hiring the wrong people. Obviously, hiring the wrong people is going to hurt, but also further than that. It’s like, I guess we have to have really good people to fulfil the vision of any company, our’s included. And it’s, I guess, the biggest restrictor to, you can’t necessarily just scale good people, if that makes any sense.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:03:19:14 – 00:03:41:01)
So like, we have to have good people. We can scale the hiring of good people. Right? That’s one thing that even we can improve with what we’re doing. But that’s the hardest bit. Once we’ve got the good people in place, then the systems and processes should take care of themselves. If we’ve got the right people, in the right seats, right, the right people in the right seats, then, you know, the systems and processes would take care of themselves.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:03:41:03 – 00:04:05:00)
Where I do feel the biggest issue with scale outside of that, more importantly, in my opinion, is most businesses are nowhere near having fully systemised and most importantly, digitised businesses. So a lot of them are working in what they call digitised. But it’s like a glorified spreadsheet. You know, that they’re doing a lot of processes or even worse than that, they don’t even have a spreadsheet.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:04:05:00 – 00:04:30:00)
They’ve got customers ringing up manually asking for information, or customers have to do this specific thing, or employees have to do something this way, or there’s no structured roadmap of like, okay, here’s how we’re going to really scale this business and take, or really automate as much as we can of it. I actually wrote a LinkedIn comment about this today about AI, but I think that is the bedrock of the companies that will win with AI.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:04:30:00 – 00:04:55:10)
I don’t think in the long term, people that win with AI going to be people or companies specifically that use like ChatGPT style tools. Yes, they’re great. But more importantly than that is the fact that if you’ve digitised and properly systemised the business from a digital perspective, and you are digital first, you can then natively embed AI in those processes to allow you to do things that you would have otherwise never been able to do.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:04:55:10 – 00:05:14:05)
If your idea of being AI first and whatever else, is using ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity or whatever else. Yeah that’s great. Don’t get me wrong. But from a company perspective, from an enterprise value perspective, that doesn’t really give you any advantage, and that isn’t where you’re going to see the biggest shifts with what we’re doing with IntujiOS, for example.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:05:14:09 – 00:05:30:18)
That’s where we will see the shift in the organisation, and gains in efficiency and insights that we would have never otherwise got, at a scale that we would have otherwise never got without it. But that is the whole idea of digitising and systemising the business to that degree.

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:05:30:20 – 00:05:55:02)
Exactly. So now we are moving towards digitalisation. And I also totally agree that there’s no way we can’t replace the human aspect of the business, human resource and everything, but it’s still digitalising, it’s systematising actually. We are systematising the process, that’s what we are doing. So scaling is, I guess also relates to systematising this and systematising the process and everything.

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:05:55:04 – 00:06:00:22)
It’s not just about adding people and all, but it’s about systematising the process.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:06:01:00 – 00:06:25:22)
I would argue it’s more about systematising and I agree, but I would argue and say that like the biggest point about it is why businesses struggle to unlock this is, there’s two parts to it that are significant undertaking. Firstly, it’s the fact that systematising the business is hard. Creating repeatable processes, repeatable frameworks is hard. It’s not easy. And it takes, you know, experience and it takes a lot of time and a lot of work, but you have to have good people to carry out those processes, right?

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:06:26:04 – 00:06:44:14)
Especially in our business and what we do, you know, what we’re selling, etc., we have to have those top-tier people to actually work on those processes. But yeah, exactly what we’ve learned and what we’re doing going through at the moment, what we’ve done for a heap of businesses. But really, I just think AI has, not to make this all about AI, because I know

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:06:44:14 – 00:07:07:15)
It’s not, but what people, I do believe people massively underestimate the power of it to help them scale if they’ve got the foundation right, which is systemising, digitising the business, which is the whole thing of what we’re calling this, is your EdgeFactor®, you know this is what we talk about and everything else. It’s what we’re doing with Intuji OS, but we’re not going to reveal all the use cases that we have in mind for IntujiOS, what we’re doing quite clearly.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:07:07:15 – 00:07:25:17)
But we know ourselves that it will enable us to do things we would have never been able to do, and have never been able to do in a way that, you know, even do things it would have possibly even taken a week  in half an hour, an hour, and doesn’t mean it’s 100% complete? No. But has it taken out four and a half days of work?

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:07:25:23 – 00:07:37:11)
Yes. And we will not achieve that by just using, or firstly by not systematising and not digitising, and then secondly by just using kind of standard ChatGPT tools. You’re not going to get that.

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:07:37:12 – 00:08:10:03)
Yesterday itself, during our huddle, some of the team members were discussing few of the problems with me and then that just clicked into mind that, okay, this IntujiOS will solve out this rapidly like, and that very moment, I understood the importance of systematising and digitising things. It’s very important for any business. And the other thing I wanted to, bring here is like, while we are discussing this thing, I’ve seen businesses think about scaling is like only adding more branches or scaling with the people.

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:08:10:05 – 00:08:23:19)
That’s what the impression is of the businesses that I have dealt with yet til now. So, what do you think? Like, is it only about like scaling people? Or let’s clear out this thought process of everyone who’s listening to us.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:08:24:01 – 00:08:43:01)
Yeah, I would I certainly wouldn’t argue that it’s only about scaling people. You need, any for profit business will have as minimal good team members as they possibly can to achieve what they need to achieve, if that makes any sense. And sometimes that means adding more team members, right? If that, right, if you’re a for profit business, you’re trying to be as efficient as you possibly can.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:08:43:01 – 00:09:07:00)
We want to get it done with the least amount of people possible. So that isn’t just about having less people. It’s about having really good people as well. Right? Like they can actually do the job, that’s one part of it. But yeah, scaling is not just about people in my opinion. As a business, if you’re not looking at saying, okay, how can we do a 50 person job, with 25 people or 15 people? 

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:09:07:00 – 00:09:24:16)
Not, oh that’s not possible. How do we do it? How do we make it possible? Then, what are you, I don’t know, what are you trying to do would be my point. Like you should constantly be looking at that, like it’s like, how do we run the most lean, efficient organisation at the same time, have the systems and tools that allow us to do things we couldn’t have otherwise done.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:09:24:16 – 00:09:44:05)
And to give an example of this, like you might be a, lets say a distributor or even an industrial brand service brand or something like that there. And you might want to add on a new state or a new country or a new location if you’re digital first, where you genuinely, the vast, let’s say, 80 to 90% of your interactions, your admin, everything else is automated,

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:09:44:05 – 00:10:03:07)
it’s all digitised, it’s all systemised, it’s all done already, if that makes sense. And it’s done very well, eg.,  you’ve created your EdgeFactor®, it is a brilliant experience for clients or employees. How much easier is it to launch into that location? It’s just like, okay, yeah, all we need to do is essentially add them to the system, right?

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:10:03:07 – 00:10:18:01)
We just need to bring them on. And then when we got the customer on it, it kind of handles itself, right? That’s the most important thing. Whereas the opposite of that is like, oh, we’re launching into a new location. We have no idea what we need to do. We have to set all this stuff up. We’ve got to set up new spreadsheets.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:10:18:01 – 00:10:36:18)
We’ve got to set up like, yeah, it’s crazy. Now, I’m not saying that there’s not going to be things like setting up operations and all of that. It’s not what we’re talking about, right, specifically. But there are processes at least, you might need to set up the machines or the people and stuff, but the rest of it, the actual systems, should be able to be followed, right, at scale.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:10:36:18 – 00:10:41:12)
And I guess that’s the point, is the overall objective is, how do we do more with less?

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:10:41:13 – 00:11:01:15)
Exactly. When you’re a startup, you can do whatever you want to do. When you scale, you have to have a planned scale I guess, basically because like around, I’ve seen businesses go the other way around rather than scaling they very bad crash actually, the business could crash basically because they only thought that their hiring is one of the best thing they can go for.

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:11:01:17 – 00:11:21:02)
And then hiring is one of the best thing I get it, if only if it’s, there you could hire A players all the time. It’s very hard to find A players all the time. If you land up with B and C players, you will only increase the numbers, they will drag the team, They will have all the negative effects.

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:11:21:07 – 00:11:47:08)
So before even hiring, I would love to say that okay, firstly, systemise the process. If you have a proper system proper, and everything is defined, everything is explained to anyone. A self-service process, I would say. A self-service process for employee, for customer, for everyone, then even C player could perform because if they have a clear role, clear responsibility, everything and then they can go ahead.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:11:47:08 – 00:12:11:08)
The accountability is there as well. Like that’s where it’s systemised accountability. There’s systemised processes. There’s everything there to help that person perform. There’s companies already that are saying, that are pushing out kind of memos or, you know, kind of executive notes or whatever to say before hiring anyone, they have, the, whoever’s requesting the hiring, they have to demonstrate they’ve tried to use AI to solve this issue, before making a new hire.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:12:11:11 – 00:12:42:08)
Now, we’re nowhere near that, I would say, for ourselves in regards to what we’re doing. But I think the principle of the idea is that, there’s people that hate that, there’s people that get up against it and say, oh yeah, you just think AI can replace people or whatever. You’ve got to take it within context. There’s always a place for brilliant people and people on the team, but if you’re not looking at how you can use AI, where it is, where it is very good, and it is incredible, and it can do 80%, right, and you can do the final 20, then that’s just utterly stupid.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:12:42:10 – 00:13:01:23)
Like, it’s just utterly stupid. And even if you’ve got brilliant people, those people don’t want to be doing  hack work that can be done, what I mean is like, if we can, brilliant people want to be as efficient as they possibly can be, which means that, like the whole point, we should be leveraging AI with their help and trying to create the most efficient organisation we possibly can.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:13:02:00 – 00:13:22:08)
And that’s where, yeah, we’ve talked a lot about AI, I didn’t really intend to, to be quite honest, but I do believe it’s a big future around scalability of businesses and how, even smaller teams will outcompete much larger teams because of that. But then just in general, if technology is holding you back from scaling rather than helping you, then you’ve got a problem.

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:13:22:09 – 00:13:43:18)
I totally agree with you on the aspects of AI as well, because what I also believe is that AI is drastically going to change the efficiency. If someone used to do 10% of it, if he or she uses AI properly, then he can leverage out of that efficiency of like 80 to 90%. That is what I can see already in.

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:13:43:19 – 00:13:59:11)
But yeah, even saying that, they, whoever is using AI, they should, they need to know what quality is, what the output is, what the input is, everything. If you don’t know the input and output thing, then you’re not going to get the desired output. Actually. Yeah.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:13:59:13 – 00:14:17:16)
Absolutely. I’ve said it for a long time now, but if you’re crap or you don’t know what you’re doing, AI will just accelerate that and you’ll put out more crap and worse stuff. If you’re really good and you know what you’re doing, AI will accelerate putting out, you, it will just help ya right. It’s literally an accelerator. That’s how you should look at it.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:14:17:17 – 00:14:35:16)
If you think it’s a skill replacer, yes there’s things it can do where it can code for someone who doesn’t code for something small, and it can smash up a quick MVP and all of that. Yeah, that’s going to get better, but it’s never going to replace like large-scale, well I’ll will put it this way, I don’t believe it’s ever going to replace large-scale, complex projects with all these different stuff.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:14:35:16 – 00:14:54:16)
Can we aggregate the broken down smaller steps and, and help those really talented team members achieve, do more with less, right? Literally, that’s how simple it is. That’s where we’re going to get to. And yes, as it gets better and better, yes, it’s going to be, for example, we’re basically limited pretty much at a million tokens at the moment.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:14:54:22 – 00:15:13:11)
I reckon that’s probably going to go to 10, 15, who knows, 30 million, whatever in the next couple of years. And suddenly where, we are dealing with a much bigger context and all of that. But as we know, it’s not a silver bullet, but the idea is that, we’re proving this, the only reason, where I come from in a place of saying this is, we have proven MVP’s ourselves of this very thing.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:15:13:13 – 00:15:31:05)
I know, for example, the latest tool, I don’t even think I’ve discussed this tool with you, and I won’t discuss it here publicly. A tool I’ve developed in the last, I literally developed in a couple of days, but the data of it, has been, much longer than that, it’s been years collating the data. And it’s proving incredible. It’s doing stuff that I could never do myself.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:15:31:05 – 00:15:52:20)
And the only reason it works so well is because of the data and how well it is structured and how systemised it is, because if that wasn’t done, it would be complete trash, right? And I’m not saying this tool is perfect. Yeah, it’s not by any stretch of the imagination, but is it 80% there? Yeah. Wow, and is it doing something, the whole intention of it really is to make myself available at scale to the team.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:15:52:20 – 00:16:10:01)
Not in a crap way. I just want to be clear on that in a very, okay, well, that is exactly like he would do or, you know, that’s exactly like him, doing something that I could have never done. And yeah, it’s 80% there already. And it all comes back to the data and the structure of that, right? So it’s a, is it a game changer on its own?

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:16:10:01 – 00:16:24:10)
No, but this is where we start as a business. If we take that whole mindset and we’re building these little tools inside IntujiOS, etc., not that are disjointed, but it’s all kind of one thing. Mate, the powers there, like we’ll be able to do things we’ve never, ever been able to do.

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:16:24:15 – 00:16:48:06)
And now I want to stop you here because like, we are completely deviated from our today’s topic. So basically let’s come back to, the scalability, all right? Basically, I know, I want to continue with you, I want to discuss with you on the AI aspects of it, but let’s have a separate episode for it I guess, we can. It would be a great episode anyways, but right now..

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:16:48:08 – 00:17:04:20)
Yeah, I apologise for taking us off track, but one thing I’ll argue the only reason I’m coming from it from an AI perspective, absolutely, let’s get back on the scalability side. But I do believe that is the core. We’re not talking immediately, but most businesses are nowhere near even prepared for that because they haven’t put these foundations in place for scale.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:17:04:20 – 00:17:16:08)
That’s where I’m coming at it from, is that, from a scale perspective, it will allow you to do things you’ve never done, but you have to get those foundations right, eg. your data, your systems and your structure right before you can even think about doing that.

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:17:16:08 – 00:17:34:05)
I totally get you. We have been discussing to it now a couple of months now. We have been doing this for ourselves as well, structuring the data is very, very important until and unless if the data is not structured, is just a crap and you will invest more in structuring the crap data actually. It’s very tough thing, right?

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:17:34:09 – 00:17:53:04)
Finding out the good stuff from the garbage, is very tough thing. So yeah. Do you think we have worked on any of the clients that we have, scaled their business and then anything that has helped, with your experience? I just want to have a case study somewhere around scalability kind of thing from we and us. Let’s discuss some around that.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:17:53:06 – 00:18:17:05)
Yeah, there’s multiple case studies without getting into specific details. I guess that overall, the key points of it are; we’ve taken manual processes of heavy human input processes or human-reliant, not even necessarily input, so it might be quality checks, it could be inputting data, it could be moving it from systems, and completely remove the need for that and then automated it as much as possible.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:18:17:05 – 00:18:38:06)
And it’s from things like quality checks. So automating checks and balances if that makes sense, to just, for example, rather than, even just a very simple one and it’s an easy one, but it is like, customers emailing orders that get inputted into the system, because there’s no customer portal for them to place the order, and or just use AI to basically take a standardised format.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:18:38:08 – 00:18:54:01)
And okay, yes, it won’t be perfect to start with, but you could enter that. You could literally turn that into an order and put it in the system automatically. Yes, it’s not perfect. That’s not what I’m, not what we’re trying to say. But like, we can absolutely create technology there, it’s like, people just look at things completely the wrong way.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:18:54:01 – 00:19:16:09)
And as you, I think comes back to what you discussed about earlier, it’s just like, it’s easier in the short term to throw someone else at it, because people don’t want to try and spend the mental energy or time to solve the problem properly. So you just throw someone else at it, and they throw margin away with doing that, they essentially, you know, it’s better, not only is it throwing margin away, I guess is throwing someone else, but you’re not solving the problem for actual scale.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:19:16:09 – 00:19:31:22)
For example, as you double customers, you’re just going to have, oh, now we’ve got to add five more people on entering orders instead of just solving the problem back when you started. You now don’t even have to have anymore because it scales infinitely. How do we get as much of the business to scale infinitely as we can? That’s the simplest way I can put it.

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:19:32:00 – 00:20:02:00)
Yeah, I totally agree actually, on that. And then, I guess before AI or, the business was around, like from paper to digital. Now it’s not only digital getting into paper from, People were into paper, laser and then all that files and everything. Now the business was around or the job was around this, I think those things. But now it’s not only digitising those things, it’s all digitising to make it AI-ready, I guess.

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:20:02:00 – 00:20:13:12)
AI-ready data, that’s what it is very important now. That’s what your business or your EdgeFactor® will have a value from.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:20:13:14 – 00:20:37:10)
Yeah, absolutely. And I think when we talk about your EdgeFactor® or your operating system as a central system, we deal with and talk with so many businesses that even have so-called implemented technology or have got systems that help them scale and stuff like that there, but they’re running Google Sheets, SmartSheets, they’re running NetSuite, they’re running Salesforce, and then they’ve got another sort of half CRM thing over here as well.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:20:37:10 – 00:21:02:18)
And then they actually take payments through Stripe. But then the admin lady keeps track of that through a Google doc that is shared with two people. The point of it is there is no central system that you can actually rely on, and yes, they have systems, but they are all heavily human reliant because like, oh Jeff from finance knows how to do this or this person knows, oh, if I touch that button, the whole thing crashes.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:21:02:18 – 00:21:24:13)
So we don’t touch that anymore. Like, the whole point of it is they’ve tried to do digital transformation. They’ve got all of these decoupled systems. They’ve got data everywhere, as you said earlier, crap-in, crap-out basically. And I believe, like a lot of people are arguing, I guess the other way saying like, AI has, reduced the need for systems and like, it’s going to eliminate so much of this stuff.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:21:24:15 – 00:21:52:12)
I would say what it is doing is actually more than ever putting businesses in a position where they need to own their data, and they need a central data location where not only is it like data, where it’s like, oh, these are our customers or whatever else, but I’m talking like, the whole business is structured and systemised. So if you won a project, all the project management and that project is all stored, structured properly, every artifact, everything’s indexed, it’s vectorised, whatever else, is all in one spot.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:21:52:14 – 00:22:09:00)
You can’t do that when you use six different tools. You can’t. Yes, you can use, you can use AI within those tools or whatever else, not even just AI, but you can use whatever’s within those tools. But what do you do? Okay. So you’re going to create 16 integrations to try and pull it all out and push it in

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:22:09:00 – 00:22:29:08)
and everything else. This is the point where I think it’s actually ushered in more of an era where it’s like, we need to own our data, we need to own our system, and we need to have our own EdgeFactor®, which is our own operating system. Now, if we do that, that’s how we win. That’s how right, we talk about PSV Thinking®.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:22:29:08 – 00:22:36:13)
That’s how we increase profit, enable scale, which is what this is about, but also importantly, build enterprise value.

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:22:36:14 – 00:22:57:09)
I couldn’t agree more on that, actually. Basically, we have seen a lot of, lot of businesses with using multiple tools here and there whatever, and then no one is in sync actually, basically to get, be in sync, they require a lot of people. The operation cost is really, really high. And then it’s people-dependent rather than system-dependent, process-dependent.

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:22:57:11 – 00:23:02:08)
Exactly, you refer to Jeff. It’s Jeff. Like, no one else can do.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:23:02:10 – 00:23:18:08)
Yeh, no one knows apart from Jeff kind of thing. We have to ask Jeff and if Jeff’s not here, what happens? Right. Like this is we know this ourselves through our own experience. This is exactly what we’re why we’re doing IntujiOS, and everything else. But we know it even more from dealing with other businesses that we’re doing this for and,

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:23:18:08 – 00:23:39:03)
working with them. Yeah. I guess the key thing is that, how infinitely can you scale as a business? And I guess a key question is like, how much relies on a person rather than a process? And you can say that, yeah, we’ve got a process. It’s a paper process and it works and everything else. Yes. Okay. But how well does that scale without people, if that makes any sense.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:23:39:03 – 00:24:06:01)
Paper can’t do compliance checks and cross-references and reference stuff from other systems. The power of it is there, like if a manufacturer wants to create their own operating system, their own EdgeFactor® that replaces, maybe not their ERP, we’re not trying to replace that necessarily, but maybe replaces 90% of their tools and is the home of their business. The opportunities that are out there are endless, talking about integrating their machines, getting, pulling real-time machine data.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:24:06:03 – 00:24:23:03)
So much of this stuff lives in isolated systems and, has, this has been talked about for years, this isn’t new. But now I believe with AI and why I’ve talked about it so much in this scale thing, I believe it’s even more important now than it’s ever been. And people talk about the cost of it and how much it’s going to cost to build all of this stuff.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:24:23:03 – 00:24:42:11)
Look at the cost that its actually genuinely costing you not doing it, by inefficiency, and look at what it’s going to cost you in the long run without doing it by the people that do do it, that’s the biggest thing, because if you say, yeah, we would love to do it and it’s a no brainer, then you should be looking at least at how you get on to that journey, not just writing it off.

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:24:42:12 – 00:24:56:07)
Totally agree with you on that, we’ll keep this episode a bit shorter. I want you to summarise this episode. To scale, let’s have three points for the listeners. So, if you are scaling, the points that you have to focus. Let’s give them that.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:24:56:13 – 00:25:24:09)
Good. If I was trying to, for scale now, I would be focusing on a few things, which would be, yeah, as you said, okay, three points you’ve got to bring down to, but If I said, okay, is that, I’ll give from IntujiOS, if that makes sense, exactly what are we doing and why are we doing that, because this answers that question we’re trying to take what makes us unique and systemise it firstly, and make sure that the systems are incredibly robust and can be followed by anyone, that, when we say systemise, we mean digitise, which is another part of that.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:25:24:09 – 00:25:42:11)
We’re trying to bring all of that into one location so we can report on it, cross-reference on it, and it manages itself. Right. We’ve talked about self-systemise and digitised accountability, right? Metrics reporting, all of these kind of things that, for example, if we get a project we’ve got, we know the ideas and what we’re implementing into IntujiOS.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:25:42:11 – 00:26:03:00)
But we’ve had processes before, right, that have somewhat worked. But this is a whole another level of what we’re trying to do. But focus on systematising and digitising your processes and self-service for whoever the stakeholder is, as you said earlier, for example, as a team member, I should be able to self-service my whole job. That genuinely means, like how do we, now it’s not always possible to do 100% but what I’m saying.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:26:03:02 – 00:26:22:03)
How do we have the right mindset? How do we enable, whoever it is on the team to basically be as autonomous as possible and have more context than ever? That’s the point. Now, most people don’t do that. There, that’s the employees, the same thing with customers. Like, how do you make them to be as autonomous as possible, have more context and have the best experience than ever?

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:26:22:03 – 00:26:40:20)
But it’s all self-service. People go, oh, that’s not that easy. It’s not, but it is. It’s just you just don’t want to put the work and effort into actually figuring out how to do it. That’s how you then get, because if, that forces you to actually set things up properly and make sure the systems are done properly, make sure they’re digitised properly, because if someone’s going to self-service, you can’t afford mistakes right.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:26:40:22 – 00:26:48:12)
Like, you have to make sure it’s all done properly. And then suddenly, when you’ve achieved that self-service kind of idea, just scale it.

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:26:48:14 – 00:27:07:23)
So lastly, I wanted to add, as you were discussing, I had something in my mind. So I wanted to add lastly on this episode. One of my experience and one of our projects, what we did is, we allocated few resource team members initially, and then we wanted to scale it fast, complete the project faster, and then get there faster.

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:27:08:01 – 00:27:37:10)
We added more team members, but that adding team members didn’t create a solution to that. It more ruined the process, and then we had to add more managers to manage the team and all that. The management cost was higher and then project also got a bit sidelined and all that, but we solved it out and all that. But that experience I would love to share with all of you team members, all of you here, because always adding team is not a solution.

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:27:37:10 – 00:27:59:17)
It can’t linearly scale actually. There has to be a proper system while adding team members and then adding, because yeah, if the process is not defined properly and then everything is not clear, and then adding team members, adding people will have an inverse effect, at first. So that’s what I’ve experienced as well.

Julian Wallis, CEO at Intuji (00:27:59:17 – 00:28:04:07)
So more resource doesn’t mean a quicker resolution. That’s a process problem.

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:28:04:09 – 00:28:34:22)
Okay, thanks, guys. I guess we should wrap up this episode today, and then thanks for listening. We’ll catch up next week with similar kind of content, most probably AI, I guess. Let’s see. We’ll figure it out. Thanks, guys. Thanks for catching up. Thanks, Julian. Thank you. That’s a wrap on this episode of The Disruptors. If you are serious about unlocking your EdgeFactor®, the thing that sets your business apart and helps it grow sustainably.

Ritesh Shah, CTO at Intuji (00:28:34:22 – 00:28:56:16)
Don’t forget to follow, share and leave a quick review. We will be back next week with more real-world insights and no fluff conversations on how to rethink your systems, modernise operations, and build value that lasts. Until then, stay sharp, stay focused, and keep disrupting!