Empowering Customers and Innovating Forms With Richard Walker
- Quik! News Team
- 5 minutes ago
- 25 min read
Richard Walker is the CEO of Quik!, a provider of forms automation and management solutions for companies looking to maximize efficiency and productivity. He started Quik! in 2002 to help people spend less time on paperwork and more time on what they do best. Before Quik!, Richard was a business consultant with Arthur Andersen. He is also a published author of two books and a father of three boys.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
[2:31] Richard Walker discusses how Quik! empowers people to do their best work by eliminating paperwork
[4:35] Richard’s entrepreneurial journey and passion for empowering others
[10:12] How Quik! evolved from packaged software to an API-focused company
[14:17] Quik!’s vision for transforming the forms experience with AI-powered Form Stream
[18:04] The potential for conversational AI to collect and process form data
[20:32] Richard shares lessons from immersing himself in AI since ChatGPT’s launch
[26:05] Why software should harness and control AI’s judgment capabilities
In this episode…
Inefficient paperwork, fragmented data collection, and the difficulty of implementing AI without compromising accuracy, security, or compliance are common challenges for many businesses. With AI accelerating software development, organizations also face unpredictable behavior, rising maintenance needs, and concerns about trust. How can businesses harness AI while keeping their systems reliable, controlled, and focused on better customer experiences?
Richard Walker, an entrepreneur and AI-focused software leader, advocates using AI in a focused, controlled way rather than expecting it to handle everything independently. He recommends giving AI only the context it needs, using software to constrain its judgment, and designing systems that minimize hallucinations and behavioral deviations. Richard also explores transforming forms into flexible data streams that can power web-based and conversational experiences while streamlining and standardizing data collection.
In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker shares his perspective as CEO of Quik! on entrepreneurship, AI, and the future of forms. Richard discusses empowering people to do their best work, controlling AI behavior, and building laser-focused AI solutions.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
Quotable Moments:
“I think our fulfillment in life comes from how we serve and how we help.”
“You find a problem, you solve it. I wanted to solve my own problem.”
“I get fulfillment from helping people. And in fact, what I've distilled it down for myself is I have to empower others.”
“I think when we talk about forms, we're going to create more of an interactive experience faster and faster.”
“I don't think of sales. I think of solving problems. I want my customers, my partners to have the highest quality outcomes.”
Action Steps:
Identify the problem you want to solve: Richard’s entrepreneurial approach starts with recognizing a real need and finding a practical solution, which can create value for both customers and the business.
Use AI with focused, relevant context: Give AI only the information it needs rather than overwhelming it with unnecessary data, helping to produce more reliable results while reducing wasted resources.
Build safeguards around AI behavior: Use software and clear rules to control what AI is allowed to do, helping prevent deviations from its intended task and improving consistency.
Design technology around the customer experience: Give users flexible ways to provide information instead of forcing them through cumbersome forms and paperwork, making transactions smoother, faster, and less error-prone.
Empower people to focus on their best work: Automate repetitive administrative tasks so employees can spend more time serving customers and solving meaningful problems, creating greater fulfillment and value.
Sponsor for this episode...
This is brought to you by Quik!
At Quik!, we provide forms automation and management solutions for companies seeking to maximize their potential productivity.
Using our FormXtract API, you can submit your completed forms and get clean, context-rich data that is 99.9% accurate.
Our vision is to become the leading forms automation company by making paperwork the easiest part of every transaction.
Meanwhile, our mission is to help the top firms in the financial industry raise their bottom line by streamlining the customer experience with automated, convenient solutions.
Go to www.quickforms.com to learn more, or contact us with questions at support@quikforms.com.
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Episode Transcript:
Intro: 00:02
Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast, where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and, in turn, grow their business.
Richard Walker: 00:16
Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how they're focused on customer experience leads to growth. Some of my past guests have included Dan Lievens of Share One Dr, Kara Hartl of Troy Medical, and Bob Serling of Licensing Lab. And today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms.
Instead, get Quik! using Quik!. You'll be able to generate completed forms and get back clean, context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of 1000 submissions. Visit quickforms.com to get started. All right, before I get started today, I want to give a big thank you to the team at Rise25, who produces and distributes my podcast. Without them, this podcast would not exist because it would have been a hundred times harder to launch and run it myself.
The founders, John Corcoran and Jeremy Weisz, are amazing people and have built an awesome company. So check out rise25.com for yourself. Now, if you haven't heard my podcast before, I love to talk to business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they built and deliver a great customer experience. And the challenge is to growing their own company. However, on this episode, I want to do something a little different.
I just want to talk with you, my audience. Now there's several topics I want to cover, but mostly I thought this might be a good chance to show you more of who I am, since every interview starts the same way with the same question. I don't know if you've noticed. How does your company help people? I'm going to give you two insights about this.
So first, I asked this question because I don't want my guests to have pressure. I don't want them to feel like they have to sell or market themselves. And second, I think when we talk about helping people, that's where we find fulfillment. I mean, I didn't make my own shirt. I certainly didn't make this microphone or anything else I'm working with.
So I depend on other people in this world. And I think for our fulfillment in life comes from how we serve and how we help. So how does my company Quik! help people? As you might know, we help people fill out forms or maybe below that, we empower people to do their best work. Do you think forms are anybody's best work?
I certainly didn't think so. And when I became a financial advisor after being a technologist and I had to handwrite forms for 40 minutes, I thought, man, this is dumb. I'm never, ever going to do that again. And so I wanted to help myself. And actually, isn't this what entrepreneurs do?
You find a problem, you solve it. I wanted to solve my own problem, and I really didn't even think about how many other people had this problem. It wasn't until I started turning in really clean paperwork that people started asking me about it, and I realized I can help more people than just what I'm doing for myself. But, you know, there's something else going on here that is harder to talk about or see. I should say, what is Quik! fundamentally doing?
Well, we've realized that all of the companies we work with are in a regulated industry. They all have high risk and compliance. They also have to have their forms filled out very specifically because their forms contain the data the way they want, in the order they want to complete important transactions, financial transactions mostly. We also do work with the government and e-commerce and healthcare. So yes, there's a lot of regulatory work being done.
But I think fundamentally how we're helping people is: We're making it so that customers can deliver their data to their advisors and professionals they work with in a trusted manner. And two, that data that's being collected is more accurate and can be transported more easily to the systems that need it, which creates another layer of trust. The systems can trust the data collection process, which then means we're helping transactions go smoother, faster, and with fewer errors. So if you really want to ask how we're helping people, it ends up giving advisors more time with their clients, for example.
But I think fundamentally, we're helping people gain trust when they have to fill out forms. I don't know about you, but when I filled out forms, even when I was a client of other advisors, I knew my data was seen by the advisor, the staff person, the back office compliance operations. And I've been asking this question for over 24 years now. Why? Why does everybody have to see that data?
Why can't we hide that data until the system that needs it gets it, and only expose it to that system? Well, that's a vision that I have for Quik!, frankly. So let's talk a little bit more about Quik! in the sense of, you know, why am I an entrepreneur? Why did I feel so compelled to build Quik!? And what do I care about most here?
You may have seen some of this in my other episodes when I've talked about Quik!. But I started my first business at age 12. I was very poor and grew up in an environment where I moved a lot. I didn't have stability. And I saw that if you give people what they want, they'll pay you money for it.
So whether that was bracelets I was making back then at age ten and 12, or the water toy that I created that sold over $1,000 worth in one day and was able to buy my car when I turned 16, or just realizing there's a need and we can fill it. This is what entrepreneurs do. But I also realize it gets my juices flowing. I get to be creative. I get to be independent.
I get to change the things that I work on over and over again. But more, I think the biggest thing is I get fulfillment from helping people. And in fact, what I've distilled it down for myself is I have to empower others to be their best version of themselves. And if you ask me to do something that's not aligned with that, I can't do it. So now I can answer, well, how does that work with Quik!?
I'm empowering people to do their best work, which is not paperwork. It's to work with their clients and serve their clients needs and free up their time. But also with the two books that I've written, one book is on personal growth, on how you change yourself, and the other one is on how to get the job that you love. Both of those books are about helping people be their best version of themselves. So fundamentally, I think if anybody can figure out their lightning rod- what really makes them work?
What makes them think about what gets them up in the morning and fulfilled. You're going to have a better life. You're going to be driven towards the things that excite you, and then you'll get to fulfill those passions in the work that you do. So another thing that I really, really care about is people. As you can tell, I want to empower people to be their best version of themselves.
But it's also about how people do their work, how people are led, how people go through management, how people's careers develop. I've even said to people that if I wasn't such an entrepreneur, I would have been a headhunter; I would have been a recruiter. I would have helped people find their career path and move up in that career path. But you know what? I didn't have to have that career path in order to do that.
I've helped countless people, and I'll continue to help people find their next job or figure out how to go after that job. So I'll share a fun story with you. My wife graduated from nursing school, and at that time there were very few nursing jobs available compared to the number of candidates coming out of school. There had been a drought of nurses, so everybody got pushed into nursing, and suddenly there were too many nurses coming out of school and not enough jobs. The job that she wanted was in the E.R., a very coveted, hard-to-get job right out of nursing school, at least at that time.
And when she went to apply? No joke. There were 8 to 900 candidates applying for that one job opening. And she knew that. And we saw it, and she didn't have it with friends or having worked in the E.R. with some other hospital, etc., like some of her friends did.
So what do we do? Well, I said, hey, we've got to stand out here. So we got FedEx boxes, the full-size box, not just the envelope. We bought big packets of M&Ms, and we put together a letter that said finding the perfect M&M must be really hard, or finding the perfect candidate is as hard as finding the perfect M&M in this packet. Well, let me help you.
Here I am, and we had an image of the perfect M&M there saying, I'm here, I'm your candidate. So imagine you are a director of a nursing ER unit and you're trying to hire people, and you get resume after resume or online now, but instead you get this box. Well, who's not going to open a FedEx box? And when you pick it up, something's sliding around inside of it. And so that caused people to open her package.
And then this big, colorful, you know, M&Ms showing there with this message about hiring the perfect candidate and saying, here I am, come interview me. That caught people's attention. So what did that cost us? We spent, I think, $150 to send out 12 packages. Now prices have changed, obviously, but 150 bucks 15 years ago with a dozen packages.
And she got, I think, for interviews out of that. So it didn't work for everybody, but enough. And one of the interviews, she got the job; she beat out 900 other candidates for that job. So when you ask me like, what do I care about? I love seeing people excel, especially when it comes to their job.
Because jobs are fulfilling- we, we, how we earn our keep and how we get to help others more and more. So if you really ask me, why do I keep building Quik!? I mean, 24 years now I've been building Quik!. It's because I keep finding new ways to help people, and it excites me. I love hearing from customers how their workflows are better, or hearing from recipients of forms where they just didn't have to do the forms.
In fact, recently my mom has an advisor who works for one of our customers, and all her paperwork is filled out by our software. My mom's my co-founder, by the way. It's her software, too. So can you imagine? She's the beneficiary of our own system, which I love seeing.
So where does that take us? And we've had 24 years of building this company and watching this industry change. The wealth management industry has changed so much. When I started in the early 2000s, everybody was building their own systems. And it was hard actually to sell packaged software to companies because they just had this mindset of, we can build it ourselves; we can do forms.
It's no big deal. But it was a big deal. In fact, the company I worked for, which was Financial Network Investment Corp or FinTech, now owned by Cetera, I went to them and said, hey, you've automated three of the forms that I use: the new account form, the order ticket, I don't know the trade confirmation, something like that. And I said, that's great. I can pre-fill three forms, but what about the other 207 that you have?
And they said, oh no, no, we can't do that. That's too expensive. It takes us six months to do one form. How would we ever do 200? Well, I saw a different way of doing it, and it was still they didn't want it for me.
They didn't want to actually adopt my product because they had this mindset of, we built it ourselves. We'll keep doing it ourselves. So that was a really challenging time for software. I think when packaged software was, it was kind of pushed away, or it was left up to the individual advisor to make a decision to buy it, which was also really hard because how do you get in front of all those advisors? So we pivoted.
We pivoted to become an API based company where you could get our software as an engine and build it within your own framework. So all these companies that were building their own systems suddenly wanted our product because they could build out their idea of a workflow, their version of what a user experience looks like. Keep control over the entire system, especially the security and sanctity of data, yet still get the capabilities of our product. So we became an API focused company back in 2004. And honestly, that's where we still are.
We have a turnkey product, but we have been so focused on delivering API based solutions behind the scenes. White labeled it so much that most people don't even realize how many customers use Quik! today. We have something like 70% of the broker-dealer market, and around 4,550% of the RIA market who all use Quik! in some form or fashion, whether it's with partners or not. But where do I see the future going? So if the 2000 were about build, 20 tens were about BI, and we partnered with customers where they could buy these solutions like Docupace and Science and many others.
But today, man, with AI, it's changing the whole dynamic. Again, everybody believes they can build things very fast with AI. And I don't mean just believe it. They're seeing it. They're seeing prototypes come out really fast.
They're seeing coding going really fast. And that's shifting the equation a little bit, because now companies can go back to this, build it themselves at a much lower cost and speed, and get exactly what they want. But there's something else going on. They're finding the cost of maintenance going up. And the challenges of managing an AI solution are really, really hard.
So I think where people really want is the best of both worlds. They want to buy it off the shelf and make it configurable and manageable and transform how they need it to transform. So in other words, they want software to be a lot more malleable. Okay. But look, we're still in a regulatory environment.
We're still dealing with compliance and trust. So how do you answer the questions about what's happening to your data when you're using AI to run things? And how do you share data more and do it securely? Especially, my gosh, the other part of AI that we're seeing is hacking. There's a lot more threats on the horizon with AI as well as opportunities. So with the forms, one of the things I'm really excited about is a new product that we're launching called Form Stream.
We are looking at the world of how do we transform the experience of forms using AI, but not putting AI in the front end of the process, meaning we're leveraging AI to build better systems, to build better data, to build capabilities we couldn't dream of before, but we don't think we should put AI in the user experience or put it in front of the end user. So AI for us is empowering us to go faster and build things we couldn't have built before, versus trying to put it in front of the actual product itself. So Form Stream answers a question that I've been asked for over 20 years. The question is, Rich, can you give me TurboTax? Meaning, why are you showing me the form?
Can you just show me the questions? And man, that sounds like a dream, right? And I always had kind of a flippant answer. Sure. Give me 3000 developers and all the money that Intuit has to build.
TurboTax. Sorry, I'm thinking about QuickBooks as well. And you're sure I could build it if I only had 100 forums to worry about? But we have 45,000 forums here at Quik!. So how would we do TurboTax across that big of a library?
Well, it comes back to a few things. And we are doing this, by the way. So we're not going to do TurboTax with the pretty graphics the same way that they're doing it. We're not going to have that well refined in terms of a user experience. However, what we are doing is giving our partners and our customers the ability to create that kind of user experience where the form is not needed to show the actual form artifact, but instead show the questions from the form.
So Form Stream. The first part is to deconstruct the form that we got and turn it into all the data elements that are representative of that form. So think about what a form is. It's content, right? It's a title, instructions section header.
It's fields with labels and field placeholders. We deconstruct all that information to create a data stream that our partners and customers can then use to generate the user experience. I don't know if this is getting too detailed, but when you think about it, a user experience- a website is just how you lay it out, do you want username and password like this, or do you want username and password left and right of each other? It's your choice, right? But it's still the same data elements.
So when we talk about complex forms like opening an account with 180 fields on it, what if you could build a user experience that's completely web-based but logically organized the way the original form was, yet give you total control over how you show it. Want to show just section one with contact information, and then when they're done with that page, hit next and then show the next section like employer information and then the next one investment information. Or do you want to show it as one long stream? Do you want to do it one question at a time? What if you have most of the data and you just want to show the questions that are missing?
Well, Form Stream gives you all those capabilities and more. So Form Stream is the product focus of Quik! going forward. It's the platform in which all of our customers can now ask for the data, regardless of what the form looks like. And yes, you can always take that data and get it into a PDF on the back end for signature, for wet signing, for printing, for storage; whatever artifact you need at the back end will be perfect. But we've now enabled our customers and our partners to represent the experience in any way they want.
So now let's talk about this from another perspective. Haven't you ever thought, why do we have a new account form for every company in the world? I mean, mutual funds, a mutual fund, right? Custodians, a custodian. Why do they all have their own forms?
Is it really just their logo they want to show there? Well, of course they have their own legal language, their version of legal. Their systems may have different data attributes they want, but really not that many differences. The Schwab new account form versus the fidelity new account form versus the Pershing New account form. They're by and large the same.
They just look different on paper. So what if Form Stream could say, here is the custodian new account form or here is the mutual fund new account form. And now you don't care which company it's for. You know it's the same experience every single time. Well that's something that Form Stream is going to enable.
What if you wanted to go even further? And I don't know how fast financial services will be willing to do this or if it's the right use case. But in certain cases, like going to a doctor's office, I think you'll agree this would be nice. What if the form was a conversation? Could you imagine driving down the street?
You pick up a call and you hear this. Mr. Walker, this is the AI assistant for Doctor Smith's office. We know you have an appointment next week. We need to do intake information. You can either come to our office and fill out the forms, or I can interview you right now on this phone call.
Would you like to be interviewed? What if I could just say yes? Okay, great. Let's start with confirming the information we have about you already. Do do do do tells you that.
Okay, now tell me this information or that information. The question is how would I how would a voice AI agent know how to do that? Well, that would take a lot of programming, right? Not with Form Stream.
We feed it the data elements from the form, including any disclosures or statements that have to be read, whatever the form said, the AI agent can read, and now it knows exactly how to request and then assemble the data to be married to the document that you're going to sign. When you get to the office or sign with your voice, I don't know. So I think when we talk about forms, we're going to create more of an interactive experience faster and faster. But with this tight control over how we collect and share the data, and that is going to create a smoother experience for everybody. And it's going to mean that the data works more consistently through the systems that are using that data.
But what about AI further? I gotta tell you, I have spent the past. What is it, four years now playing with, figuring out and immersing myself in everything that's AI. I was I was astounded, like you all were when ChatGPT came out at the end of 2022. In fact, I said to my company in January of 23.
We have two things we're going to do. One, we're going to be an AI-first company, and we're going to find anything we can do with AI to make our jobs better, faster, etc.. And two, we're going to build products with AI. And so we did. We built our first product called Form Extract, which leverages AI to get the work done.
And here we are now in 2026, going into 27 with even more AI-driven initiatives that are changing how we do things. But along the way, I've had to learn a lot about what is AI, how it works and what it's not doing well. Have you seen ChatGPT not do what you Want or Claude not do what you want? I mean, isn't it kind of crazy to say do this and it won't? One of my favorite examples is you ask it to write you a document, and you're feeding it all sorts of context and information so it can write the document.
And ChatGPT will say, okay, I've written your first three sections. Sections four through eight follow in the same pattern. Just repeat. And I'm like, what? What do you mean repeat?
No, you write it. I asked you to write it. And so I tell it further, hey, you didn't write section four through eight, so go do that. It erases section one through three and writes section four through six. I'm like, wait a minute.
Why? Why did why did you just erase the first part? Why didn't you just add to it? It's like you're struggling to get it to do what you want. Why is it doing that?
So I had a couple of awakenings over the past, really two years and more so in the past one year. Over the past two years, I realized all the different. I have behavior and personality and quirks. ChatGPT is an amazing product for brainstorming and kind of like a Swiss Army knife. Claude, I think, is way more detail-oriented.
It'll build that document the first time the way you want it. It's amazing at software development. And look, they're all converging on the same capabilities, but they still have their own biases, their own personalities. And so I find that really fascinating. And in fact, I looked at it more as a human than as a technology.
You know, we think about technology as deterministic. If I push this button, it prints a paper out or if I have one plus one in Excel, it's always going to equal two. But with AI, it has felt more like we're working with people because of its behaviors and its quirks. So I started to think about it that way and treat it that way to try to get different results. And I'll even argue that there are two really, really hard things to overcome when it comes to working with AI.
First is context. If you haven't heard that term, context actually means two different things here, and they're both important. One, the technical idea of context is like memory. So how much context an AI can hold is how much memory it has. Your computer has the same problem, and it uses RAM, which is random access memory.
So when you think about how much information it can hold right now, it's like this conversation. How much can I remember about anything that I talk about with somebody at that moment? So that's the first part of context. The second part of context is the actual information. Can you give AI enough information to make decisions or write the document, or do the things you need it to do?
So part of what we have learned with AI is how to give it context and also how to manage its memory, called context. So that's the first problem. How do you manage that memory? Because you only get so much and you can't give it everything in the world. The second thing is behavior.
How do you manage behavior if behavior is probabilistic, meaning it's predicting what it should do, then it's going to deviate and be different over and over again. And I've actually laughed. People have said Rich AI, it's going to put forms out of business, right? Because I can do forms, I'm like, sure, I can do that form once. Can it do the same form twice?
And I mean, can it define the same fields twice every single time? Ten times. Can it do it at scale? Can it do it for 45,000 forms? The answer is no, because it's probabilistic.
You have to think differently about how you're going to do it. So I want to offer a prediction. You may have heard me say this in a prior episode. Even the way I see AI forming over time is that software companies are going to build their software to include AI to do judgment. So AI, in my view, is going to be software with judgment capabilities.
Whereas today software has automation and has decision-making with certain branches. AI enhances that to create decisions with judgment and more information or less information, depending on the scope of the problem. But the trick here is this: You want the software to harness and control the AI. You want to make sure it can only do what is necessary or intended, and don't let it go out of bounds. And that's one of the biggest problems we see today is everybody who's working with AI and building with AI.
They're finding this behavior problem where it goes off and does something you didn't want it to do. So how do you rein that in software? You bring in software to control what the AI is allowed to do. Now it's way more complex than just saying it's software. I've been solving this problem for the past year, and there are certain things I don't even want to say about how it works, because it's actually quite complex.
But I have figured out how to control the AI to only perform the job I want it to perform with no hallucination, no deviation from the path. And to get the results I want. It's complicated. So I think there's also another philosophy here, which is, AI brute force, or is it laser focused? So when I say brute force, what I'm getting at is a lot of people treat AI like it can do everything.
So just give it everything and say, go do it. And that's putting a lot of trust in the AI. Like, hey, go read all my emails, figure out who to write to. How do you know it knows how to do all those things? So, I see the majority of people going down this road of, oh, AI is so smart.
It can just do everything. So they follow this brute force method of just giving it more time, giving it more memory. And I think AI companies are even doing this. They're saying, oh yeah, just spend more tokens. We'll keep improving the model so it can do more and think harder, etc..
But don't forget they're in business to make money. They make money from token spend. Meaning how many trips do you use with them? How much compute power do you use with them? So if they get you thinking that you should just send them more stuff and let the AI do the work for you, they make more money.
I have a different approach. I think we should be laser focused. This comes back to the context and behavior problem. By the way, if you're laser focused on what the context is that matters and only that which matters. And if you keep using software to control the judgment aspect, that laser focus spends less time with AI and gets you better results.
So as I see the future, I'm seeing that we're going to start buying more and more software that companies make that have included AI as part of the package. And we don't have to build our own things as much. We're still going to build things. Don't get me wrong, it's incredible how fast you can build things, but are you thinking about how to build them with this laser-focused mindset? All right, look, I'm generally not a long-winded person, so I find this a little bit strange to have this dialogue without someone else to banter with.
So I'm going to wrap this up in two ways here. So first of all, how can you find and connect with me? My best way is LinkedIn. I'm Quik! Form CEO, and you can send me a personalized message there. Don't just connect with me because I don't just say yes to everybody.
I like to know why I'm connecting with you. Or email me our walker@quickforms.com. Okay. Second, I want to end the show with a question I would love to ask of every CEO since I was a kid admiring CEOs. I've always wondered, how do you spend your day at work?
So I'll tell you my answer. My day is filled with a couple of different facets. One, I meet with my team members regularly. I have a cadence of meetings where I'm making sure my executives are happy and doing the things they should be doing, or we do a weekly stand-up on Mondays with my entire team and hear about every department and what they're doing. So there's a series of cadence, sorry, there's a cadence of meetings so that I can hear about what's going on in various areas and have my input when I'm needed.
So that could be product, customer service, finance, HR, etc., and I do get pulled in a lot of directions. But the great thing is I have delegated out most of these things. So I am not actually needed to answer most questions. I'm not sure I need to answer any questions at this point. Other than vision and strategic direction.
And my team is doing a great job with running their departments and making sure we've got the right things in place. So the other way I spend my time is I love talking to customers. I love talking to partners and hearing what's going on and sharing our story and helping them solve it. And by the way, I mean, when it comes to sales, I don't think of sales. I think of solving problems.
I want my customers, my partners to have the highest quality outcomes. Therefore, they need transparent information to make the highest quality decisions. So a lot of my time is spent just talking to people about their needs and how we can solve those needs. And I'm always hands-on. I've been an entrepreneur since age 12, so I tinker; I have to play.
And that's why I'm so engrossed in AI right now. I spend a lot of time figuring out answers to questions with AI and my questions. I'll tell you two of them. One is, what's the definition of a software engineer? I mean, AI can do a lot of stuff.
What does that actually mean? That's a question I've been working to answer for the past year. And two, the second one is how do you build the rules and guidelines so that AI does what you want? And when you have people using the AI, they all use it in the same manner, right? We would set standard operating procedures for certain types of, I don't know, meetings with customers or interactions with customers or how we spend money, etc. So why not do the same thing when AI is involved?
And that's where I spend a lot of my time. I've been developing software with AI, learning how to code with it. I don't personally code, but I've been learning. How do we answer this question of the engineer's role? And how do you get AI to do the work reliably, consistently, so that it follows core principles and has great outcomes? If you want to talk to me about that, I'll talk to you all day long.
So reach out. But you know, at this point, I'm going to wrap it up, and I want to thank you for being on my first and maybe only solo episode of The Customer Wins. So don't forget to check out Quik! At quickforms.com, where we make processing forms easy. And let me know if you like this discussion. Maybe I should do more.
I don't know. But go click the like button, share this with someone, and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins, where I talk to more really amazing guests. Hey, thanks for joining me on today's show.
Outro: 32:52
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