Real AI Transformation Costs HALF of Everyone's Salary for 2 Years | Chris Blackburn, Liatrio
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Why do most enterprises operate at only 5‑6% efficiency and how does Toyota’s 70% benchmark illustrate the AI opportunity?
So it turns a software and building digital products into a team sport rather than an individual sport. It brought culture and process into the thinking a lot more and really just had this hyper focus of looking at the end to end of everything that's being built.
You're a big believer that AI isn't just going to change jobs, it's going to change life. I believe that too.
We believe that because things are moving so quickly right now and how hard it is in change management for these large complex organizations to truly operate in a new way is what we try to do is strangle away a part of the organization. transformation cost to transform an organization into modern ways of working with AI is you are likely going to spend the equivalent of everyone's salary over a two-year period. So if the average employee is $150,000 a person, take that and divide that over two years, everybody inside the organization.
So efficiency, as you say, is the means, not the point. And there's a lot of talk about efficiency, but as you say, that's not the destination, not the first step.
So, Chris, why don't you start by introducing yourself? So I'm Chris Blackburn, founder and CEO of Liatrio. Started Liatrio a little over 10 years ago after having a long history in contracting and consulting in the technology space. But really, everything goes way back further than that. My father ran a software consulting company. Nothing like what we do at all today, old digital VAX VMS systems and all that. But I really got to see what it was like to run a small business, be an entrepreneur and all of that. And I just knew that that was going to be the future for me. I have a degree in computer science, so I come from a technology background. And part of my early kind of transition was I found out that I do not have a huge passion for writing code.
I am not the person that can be put in a corner. The old days with when I started, it was like give them a pizza and a two liter of Mountain Dew type of thing. And that just wasn't for me. I'm a systems thinker. I'm a huge efficiency freak. And I think that really led into a lot of the stuff that I do. So early in my career, I actually got into like system administration, both Unix, Solaris, as well as the early days of Linux and the network administration and all that type of stuff. I really liked hooking computers and systems and all of that together. Ultimately, really, that led right back into software development space, but kind of the stuff around it and what we now call software delivery. So source control management, build automation and all of that, which turned into continuous integration and continuous delivery.
And then really when the DevOps movement happened, I feel like I found my space. DevOps was such a huge part for me. I think it aligned a lot to how I think about efficiency and not just efficiency for efficiency's sake, but efficiency of a system, the end-to-end system. DevOps brought a lot of thinking around value stream mapping, lean techniques, systems thinking, and all that type of stuff. And I got real deep into it and super nerdy about it and just love everything there. It turns software and building digital products into a team sport rather than an individual sport. It brought culture and process into the thinking a lot more. And really just had this hyper focus of looking at the end to end of everything that's being built.
So we talk about that today. We call it the from aha to cha-ching, the entire value stream and looking at everything that connects in there. So ultimately that became the beginning of my, you know, real part of my career was kind of the DevOps movement and the purity of DevOps. I live in Sacramento, California. Sacramento is the state capital and really all the work in the area is state and federal government work. And we all know how slow that moves. And so I wanted to find something faster and better and more awesome. So I spent all of my career in the Bay Area, a lot of that in San Francisco and all the surrounding areas.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why do most enterprises operate at only 5‑6% efficiency and how does Toyota’s 70% benchmark illustrate the AI opportunity?
0:00–4:02
2
How does Chris Blackburn’s personal background in systems thinking and DevOps shape his view of AI‑driven transformation?
4:02–10:46
3
What is the difference between individual productivity gains and system‑level improvement, and why doesn’t saving an hour automatically boost the bottom line?
10:46–18:47
4
How does the “strangle the enterprise” (strangler‑fig) strategy create a low‑bureaucracy AI‑native unit inside a large organization?
18:47–26:18
5
Why is value‑stream mapping essential for uncovering bottlenecks and waste in complex software enterprises?
26:18–34:01
6
How should CEOs and C‑suite leaders spend time on the shop floor to truly understand transformation challenges?
34:01–42:18
7
What does real AI transformation really cost – roughly half of total compensation over two years – and why are CFOs uneasy about it?
42:18–52:27
8
How can small, autonomous teams, continuous learning programs, and strategic partnerships accelerate AI‑first modern work?
52:27–1:05:34
Speakers
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