John Juricic: We are now live on YouTube. Oh, the great internet. How are you all gentlemen this morning?

Steven Harris: Good, good. You, John?

John Juricic: Well, I'm fantastic. I mean, for a Friday before Christmas, I think I'm doing okay, but I am feeling like I'm starting to ease into the holiday. Holiday fever, so to speak.

Steven Harris: Yes.

John Juricic: So thank you, all three of you, for coming onto our live chat. This is a function of the Sidney Breakfast Club now evolving into the Peninsula Business Incubator. More and more folks are really wanting it to be referenced that way. We had you folks on as a panel, I think two weeks ago.

Steven Harris: Right.

John Juricic: It was very well attended. That was, I think, our best attended session, so thank you very much for that. We find with some of those really fascinating panel discussions that we now have this sort of after hours thing where we can maybe dig into something a little deeper. Because we're live, if someone pops on, we will certainly ask their questions, and at this stage, just for your awareness, we do have 38,000 people waiting.

Steven Harris: Only 38,000?

John Juricic: Only 38,000. Sorry, I wanted to crack 40.

Shawn O'Hara: It's the holidays. We'll get more in January.

John Juricic: Exactly. So for our audience, I think we should introduce ourselves. I manage the Sidney Breakfast Club and I'm also heavily involved with advocacy and digital marketing, with all kinds of stuff that I love to do with Harbour Digital Media. Shawn, why don't you introduce yourself?

Shawn O'Hara: Besides the sidekick and the color commentary and monitoring the chat, which keeps me quite busy for all the thousands of followers, I'm also a marketer. I'm a direct response marketer, working with new and even the older style methods of print, which I love for a whole lot of reasons I won't get into here because you're the guests.

John Juricic: You and I, Shawn, go back to when I used to have some hair and when I used to be thin.

Steven Harris: I can identify with that profile, John.

John Juricic: That was in the nineties, maybe the nineties. So Shawn and I go back a long way, and I really appreciate his help on these live broadcasts. Steve, go ahead.

Steven Harris: I would comment that Rob and I have a similar sort of relationship in that he reminds me that at one point in time I was also slim, and I'm not so slim anymore. My name's Steve Harris and I run this company, AI for Enterprise, and essentially, at the core of what we do, we help organizations adopt generative AI.

Steven Harris: Over the last year and a half we've worked with over 30 organizations, either presenting training, executing projects on their behalf, or working with senior leadership teams and the various teams in the organization on AI adoption.

John Juricic: We are very honored to have you on the show today and on our panel last week.

Steven Harris: You're welcome.

John Juricic: Go ahead, Robert.

Rob Cooper: I'm Rob from PlusROI Online Marketing. I've been a digital marketer and in PlusROI since 2007 when we launched it, and I am exactly two weeks shy of being 25 years as a full-time digital marketer, which is crazy. I've seen a lot of parallels from when digital marketing got really strong to what's happening right now with the internet as well.

Rob Cooper: What's happening right now with AI led to some revelations in 2024 that made me realize that I had better get right on top of it. I've been spending all of 2025 embedding solutions in our company and creating new offerings for our clients that relate to AI. We were one of the first agencies in Canada to launch a dedicated AI optimization offering.

Rob Cooper: We've been having a lot of fun with Steve here. We've been running twice-monthly AI meetups down at VIATEC. These VIATEC AI meetups have been seeing a ton of amazing speakers and I have learned an absolute ton, as well as organizing the Prompt Victoria, the VIATEC Prompt Victoria Conference, along with Steve and the Victoria Data Society.

Rob Cooper: It's been a real year of learning, which has been really exciting. From what I can see, that's not going to slow down with everything that's happening.

John Juricic: I just want to emphasize these meetups. It's the only place in the region where a person can go and start to learn about AI and how to adopt it with their business outside of hiring you guys, which would also be an excellent option. So thank you for that. At our meeting at Sidney Breakfast Club last week, by the way, Santa Claus showed up for a while.

John Juricic: When he did, it was quite a lot of fun. Santa identified that the ChatGPT image capacity was not as strong as Gemini in a banana suit, and I indicated that Rob respectfully disagreed with me. I love that, or with Santa, sorry. I then stated that it's such a competitive landscape that this will not stay this way.

John Juricic: In fact, within the last 10 days, ChatGPT has now put out an image creator, which is extraordinary. I've been using it. This is where we're at, gentlemen. Someone does something over here, and the next day it's over there. By the time we do something again, maybe three months from now, the four of us, who knows what we're going to be doing?

John Juricic: Maybe mirages will be showing up.

John Juricic: Robert, what do you think? Have you used that feature, or have both of you used that feature? More broadly, when does the pace of change slow down, if at all?

Rob Cooper: I haven't actually used it yet. I'm looking forward to trying it. With where Gemini has been with the nano banana, it's kind of near perfect, and we've actually created solutions for clients to be able to create images that are just ridiculously good. Next stop, I'll try the same instructions there in ChatGPT and see what happens.

Shawn O'Hara: We'll see if the same kind of prompts work or if you need to modify the prompts for each one.

John Juricic: I've played with it for a week and it's creating great stuff. I find slide decks to be very powerful for business and video. For me to put, instead of B-roll, the slide deck over the video is extraordinarily more interesting.

John Juricic: It was able to create a slide deck that's comparable to nano bananas. By the way, I see that Erin Bremner from Cascadia Seaweed is online. Hi, Erin. I think, I'm not sure if you're being facetious or not, but she's saying print is making a comeback.

Steven Harris: Actually, that's not far off. I have brought back business cards in a simple way. It seems to be getting a little more popular to hand out business cards and a little bit more unique sometimes, John, than the LinkedIn barcode or QR code.

John Juricic: Yes. I know. I keep having to buy business cards, of all things. I was getting a little bit tired of trying to match my phone, so now I just pull a card out of my wallet.

Shawn O'Hara: That was some of the comments at the AI meetup. People were saying we're inundated with email. For years, we've been saying, even with everything coming on in social, that email is still a very strong, viable alternative for reaching people.

Shawn O'Hara: Some are saying no, we're overwhelmed. We still get too many emails, we're missing too much, and messages are getting blocked. Print, as long as we can go through Canada Post, does not get blocked, so that's a whole other topic.

John Juricic: Certainly, one of the purposes of being online is to communicate with folks online. I'm sorry if I interrupt anybody, but I'm putting some priority on our comments as they come on. Erin and I are now having a dialogue online, and her comments are that layered text is the future and video, John, so she's talking to me.

John Juricic: She was on a marketing trends call yesterday, and magazines and direct mail were talked about. She indicates that people are craving tangible things. What's your reaction to that, gentlemen?

Steven Harris: I'll take a stab at that, but to be quite honest, John, I'm probably the wrong person because for the last 40-plus years I've lived in an intangible world. I've been a technologist for over 40 years. Some of the more interesting projects I've been involved in, like being the project manager for BC Ferries for the build-out of the Atrium building, have been very tangible.

Steven Harris: I've done ship rebuilds and projects like that from a technology perspective. Being involved in those tangible projects from a technologist's perspective has been fascinating, because very often the technology we develop, to go back to your pace of change, is only understood by people who are in the industry. The depth and the complexity of what we develop is significant, and within about five years it's been surpassed by something else.

Steven Harris: I can understand the desire for something tangible.

John Juricic: I'd love to hear Rob's reaction.

Rob Cooper: I think it has to do with people craving personal experiences and in-person connection, which I think, between COVID and technology and social media, has been lost to some degree. There's been a loss of connection.

Rob Cooper: I think print probably relates to that. I don't think there's going to be a print revolution. It's kind of like vinyl in a sense. It is tactile and it's great to handle, but it's not going to replace digital, just like Spotify is not going anywhere. Definitely, I think the tactile and personal connection is more present in print than in digital stuff.

John Juricic: I think it has to do a lot with the pace of change. Honestly, I sometimes feel overwhelmed with the amount of content. It used to be that I would get some piece of content and I would be able to repurpose that content one or two ways. That's what we were selling to clients as a value add: if you take your core content, we can do these different things with it, reaching different markets and potentially increasing sales.

John Juricic: That wheel has just exploded. I can now take a piece of content and literally create a dozen things, and each of them is different and unique. A week from now I'll be able to do that differently again.

Shawn O'Hara: Right.

John Juricic: That is sometimes overwhelming, where you get fear of missing out. I fear that I'm missing out all the time.

Steven Harris: Yes.

John Juricic: Shawn, you're in this game selling directly to clients as well. What's your reaction?

Shawn O'Hara: There is so much out there, and any method will work. One of the big issues in the old days was that we had very few channels. We could do TV or we could do print. People had one or two newspapers in their community, and now it's hundreds.

Shawn O'Hara: You can have the same target market, but people in that market are getting all of their information from different sources. In one sense, we have to try to stay on top, but on the other, that's overwhelming. We need to narrow down exactly who we're after and then pick whatever channels we can stay on.

Shawn O'Hara: We'll see how AI can do in creating everything. It's interesting that on a talk on AI, we've been talking about print.

John Juricic: Right. Thank you, Erin. I love it. Another thing that Erin, Shawn, and I chatted about beforehand is that we're really down the client pathway here and their reaction. This is something we weren't able to do at the panel discussion.

John Juricic: People don't want to know how we make the soup or make the cake. They want to cross the finish line with us. To some degree, we can have these chats and a client will say, I don't really care. I need a 25% increase in revenue.

Steven Harris: Right.

John Juricic: They say, here's the money and I'll see you in three months, and meanwhile we're working hard trying to figure out how to cross that finish line. I still don't entirely feel there's a recognition of the amount of work that goes into crossing that finish line.

Steven Harris: Yes, I think, to go back to that pace of change and lead up to that point, some historical context is useful.

Steven Harris: Another thing Rob reminds me of is how old I am. I wrote my first piece of code in 1978 on a teletype with an acoustic coupler. That was with a rotary dial phone you put into a wooden box. I've lived through all of this change, and that's why I love the industry I'm in, because of the pace of change.

Steven Harris: One thing I've noticed is that pace of change over those decades has compounded. We're in a situation now where that compounding is just carrying on. What we are seeing now, to your earlier point, is going to increase over the coming years.

Steven Harris: I don't quite know what that means for the marketing component of this discussion, but we will see a compounding increase in the functionality of the software and systems that are coming our way.

Rob Cooper: It's interesting too, John, to your point about people and customers not wanting to know how things are made. I totally agree with that, but it's almost more important now than ever to have some understanding of how things are made because there's just so much hype and so many opportunistic solutions that have little value.

Rob Cooper: In the marketing world, we've seen that for decades now with SEO salespeople. If you're in business, you're getting an SEO pitch every day, and 99 out of 100 of those are companies that would literally just take your money and probably damage your presence versus actually help out.

Rob Cooper: It is really important to understand at least a bit of it. I'm seeing that right now. I just got off a call for a product demo for a content creation tool where there's some question as to whether it will create original enough content to be considered good quality. One of the big large language model executives the other day was talking about how, in terms of showing up in AI searches, he'd be really careful about having your site seen as untrustworthy or low quality, because it might be really hard to come back from that.

Rob Cooper: It's interesting, again, to see solutions being pitched to people to basically pollute the internet with content. For example, let's do 40 blog posts a month and it'll be great, we'll publish at scale, but nobody's ever going to see it and it's probably going to get you on the naughty list.

Rob Cooper: I don't think business owners can afford not to learn at least a little bit about this.

Shawn O'Hara: I just posted links to your article on LinkedIn, Rob, about why your ads aren't working, part one. I guess you'll address some of that in part two. Do you want to give a three-sentence summary of that, because it ties in?

Rob Cooper: It's kind of different from AI, but it touches on folks who are doing online advertising and not doing the right type of ads for where people are at in their purchase lifecycle. For instance, they're doing search ads for people who don't understand their problem yet, so they're not looking for the solution yet.

Rob Cooper: People who know there's a solution out there and are now searching for a solution are the sort of folks you should be targeting with search ads. I don't want to go too deep into that.

John Juricic: Folks will have a link, Rob, so that they can follow that dialogue. Steve, you were going to say something?

Steven Harris: I was just going to build on something Rob was saying, which is almost like first principles. Even though this technology is so new and very powerful, and will continue to grow in power and performance, there are still first principles that apply in implementing systems like this in organizations.

Steven Harris: You're still working with people. Organizational change management approaches, change management training, and, depending on the scale of the organization, some policy still matter. Those things still hold true, but to Rob's point, you still have to understand the impact of the technology to understand how to apply those within organizations.

Steven Harris: You still have to do those things because ultimately this technology is working with people.

John Juricic: Steve, I can't agree more. I've had numerous conversations with folks recognizing that I'm using AI in the business and promoting AI. Folks my age, so, okay, I know you all think that I'm in my thirties, but that is not the case.

Steven Harris: Twenties, John.

John Juricic: I am a post-60-year-old man. Therefore, I hang out with people at that age, and I've had numerous conversations with folks who are at that sort of early 2000s mindset, where we were just adopting web pages and debating whether businesses should or should not adopt a web page, whether they should be online, if you recall those days.

John Juricic: There are those stubborn owners and individuals who say they don't need to, never need to, and won't. I came across numerous people like that this past week.

Shawn O'Hara: Right.

John Juricic: They say they don't have to get involved with AI. My answer to them is to analogize to a red seal carpenter and think about their tool belt with their construction tools.

Steven Harris: Okay.

John Juricic: Believe it or not, there are maybe 20 tools on that belt. About every year or so, at least in that industry, those tools improved. You had to change tools because the other person down the street had the new tools and they were building houses faster.

Steven Harris: Right.

John Juricic: They were able to get ROI faster. The tools did not just magically appear on your belt. You had to analyze and understand the environment and how those tools were impacting your business.

Steven Harris: Right.

John Juricic: They did not just magically appear, just like AI does not magically take over. You have to analytically use it appropriately. Human beings are still the center of the wheel.

Shawn O'Hara: The first time I saw a framing nailer, I was amazed because in my construction days I knew what it was like to swing a hammer on a nail. When I saw a framing nailer, it was, wow, this is amazing.

Shawn O'Hara: I view AI like that. It's amazing. I still need to do stuff, but it makes things so much easier.

Steven Harris: I think what we're seeing is that progression step into a space that hasn't had that progression, which is knowledge management and knowledge use. That's what this tool does: it allows us to access knowledge in a conversational way as opposed to having to learn SQL, having to learn R, or these other more esoteric tools.

Steven Harris: It's made a lot of that more accessible. It's new from that context, and it takes time for people to get over the sense of, I'm cheating by using it. I had this exact question in a session I ran just over a week ago, and in that example the CFO was in the room.

Steven Harris: I was able to say, think about a CFO's role or an accountant's role and go back to the tool belt analogy. Logbooks were used in school, then slide rules, and then calculators came along, then Visicalc, then Lotus 1-2-3, and then Microsoft Excel. Nobody looks at an accountant and says, you are cheating because you're using Microsoft Excel to prepare accounting information.

Steven Harris: We're going to see that same sort of adoption hurdle dealt with in adopting generative AI, particularly when it comes to accessing unstructured data like voice, video, and documents inside an organization to be able to leverage that. There are lots of bits of psychology and all sorts of stuff in play in adopting these tools.

John Juricic: Rob, did you want to say something?

Rob Cooper: I do.

John Juricic: Rob and I go back, and in fact there was a point when we were thinking about merging our various services with, back then, Paul Holmes, if you recall, Rob, from the early days of Social Media Camp and so on.

Shawn O'Hara: Wow.

John Juricic: My point is that I have also been involved with digital technology and companies using it in their business and selling the products created by digital technology. Owning my own companies, I've always been on the front end.

John Juricic: I've never been the coder. I do not know how to code. I've been the person bundling the package, hiring the coders, and hiring the designers. I recall very distinctly, as we were creating online learning tools with eTraffic Solutions, a company I started a long time ago, that we had maybe 30 to 35 designers and 40 developers.

Steven Harris: Okay.

John Juricic: It took that many folks to produce these digital tools. I didn't know how to code. These days I'm creating micro modules on my own. One guy. It's gone from 70 to 1, and with the implementation and easier access to graphic creation, now I'm presenting myself as if I actually have a staff of half a dozen.

Rob Cooper: Right.

John Juricic: My AI staff member is a graphic designer. I have a content creator, because people don't believe that I can do it. They say that's impossible. Well, guess what? It isn't.

Steven Harris: It's going to be an interesting future for sure because historically I've dealt with the concept of technical debt in a very real way, where applications have been developed by citizen developers or people out in the community.

Steven Harris: Then we've had to spin up projects and spend money and a lot of time to bring those applications into a managed state. I think we could end up in a situation where there's a lot of technical debt that creates a lot of jobs in the technical space over the coming years.

Steven Harris: It will be interesting to see. We're breaking new ground all around. If you take a look at tools like Replit or Lovable that allow you to develop full-scale applications and then deploy them to production based on prompts, it's quite compelling. My coding productivity has gone through the roof using Claude, for sure.

John Juricic: Wow. Fascinating.

Steven Harris: Right.

John Juricic: So you are also going from a team of potentially a dozen or so staff members to one, and you feel like a team of six.

Steven Harris: I feel like a team of six, and to be honest, John, for the amount of money that you pay, like 30 bucks a month or whatever it is for each of these models, 30 to 40 bucks a month, and I have five that I subscribe to, I feel like I'm working in a team of six. I think the ROI is realized within the first two days of the month.

Steven Harris: That's been my experience.

John Juricic: That is amazing. What hasn't changed in this digital environment is people and people's attention spans. We're getting onto about half an hour here and they still have short attention spans.

Steven Harris: Right.

John Juricic: Why don't we shift to a little more in-depth discussion before we say goodbye to everybody?

Steven Harris: Sure.

John Juricic: Let's talk about what we can expect in 2026. Understanding that the pace of change is like a tsunami, give us a little bit, all three of you, of what you think this is going to look like next year.

Steven Harris: Based on the last 18 months or so, I think the low levels of literacy and adoption will continue. I think that's something we actively have to work on as a country and as a province. I think we'll start to see, just because of the maturity of the agentic frameworks, more agent adoption.

Steven Harris: 2025 was supposed to be the year of agents, but anybody who was developing agents in 2024 could see that the maturity just wasn't there. I think we'll start to see more agent adoption as opposed to just large language model adoption in 2026. Those are my two off-the-cuff observations. Thank you.

Rob Cooper: I think maybe we will finally see the adoption that I was expecting in 2025 that never happened. It does seem to be finally hitting that point, and we'll see continued improvement in all the tools. I think we'll have some new industries emerging out of it.

Rob Cooper: I don't know exactly what those will be yet, but I think there will be new industry categories created in 2026. I think you'll be able to create agents without using code by the end of the year, effectively.

John Juricic: Fabulous. How about you, Shawn?

Shawn O'Hara: I don't know if I'd say I'm not as optimistic, but I think the adoption won't be as great. I talk with a lot of people who just tell me the problems they have with AI, and they're afraid of it and concerned about it.

Shawn O'Hara: It seems to reinforce the pyramid that we've had for years and the Pareto principle, where the top 20% and the top 5% grasp something and use something. That was probably even reinforced by that study that was brought up at the Breakfast Club last week, with a small percent of companies recognizing an ROI.

Shawn O'Hara: People will try and then get scared. It certainly means there are opportunities for people to set them up and show them, but it may not be that they continue. We've given people the ability to create their own websites easily, for example, and they're just creating more garbage.

Shawn O'Hara: It will be interesting to see.

John Juricic: I'm going to challenge you folks, and let's do a little bit of science fiction talk here. Right out of the gate, people tend to evaluate the brand of artificial intelligence as something that actually has intelligence, that there is a sort of moving forward, taking pieces and creating new data.

John Juricic: In fact, fundamentally, that's not happening. We're using old data, managing that data, and creating product, but there's not a brain or a human function going on. I have heard something about regenerative AI, that there's some technology down the road that is getting to that point.

John Juricic: Am I just blowing smoke here?

Steven Harris: You're talking about AGI and ASI, so artificial general intelligence and artificial superintelligence. AGI is when we get to the point where artificial intelligence is equivalent to a human, and ASI is when you get to a point where artificial intelligence is equivalent to all humans combined.

John Juricic: What do you think about that? Is that actually being worked on?

Steven Harris: We had a speaker on the technical track at the AI meetup who was talking about a new approach to neural networks around biological neural networks using 3D ray tracing. Models that we have now are trained at a point in time on a set of data and they don't adapt over time, and they don't have an interface to the physical world.

Steven Harris: Biological neural networks were proposed as a way to have adaptive networks that modify themselves and adapt. There's research underway. The time horizon for that, John, I have no idea. There's one of the founders of artificial intelligence as we currently understand it, Yann LeCun, who left Meta.

Steven Harris: You constantly see him or his comments on LinkedIn. He doesn't believe we're going to get to AGI with large language models, but he should be looking five or ten years ahead. He's doing exactly what he should be doing as a researcher.

Steven Harris: Ultimately, could we get there? Probably. I have no idea on a time horizon. You can search online and you'll probably see anything from two years to twenty years to never.

John Juricic: Yes.

Steven Harris: If you take a combination of factors, the development in robotics, the developments in quantum computing, and you throw AI into the mix, we are in for an interesting ride over the next couple of years, for sure.

John Juricic: That's about all we can say realistically.

Rob Cooper: It's interesting that you suggested searching for it.

Steven Harris: I know. It's just become part of the vernacular. It's just a phrase, like Q-tips.

John Juricic: Right, exactly, like Kleenex or something.

Steven Harris: Yes.

John Juricic: I do recall, because it's interesting, that I lived before all this stuff existed. People ask me, where did the internet eventually start? Of course, it was in the military.

Steven Harris: Yes.

John Juricic: In 1979.

Shawn O'Hara: Yes.

John Juricic: If we think about this conversation within that context, it's entirely possible that things are going on in the military that are accelerating these developments and we don't even know it, around robots and other technologies. Look at how warfare has changed in the Ukraine-Russia conflict.

Steven Harris: Yes.

John Juricic: It's ostensibly now these drones.

Steven Harris: Right.

John Juricic: Drone warfare. This stuff is happening for sure.

Shawn O'Hara: From the defense and military perspective, it's considered that what the public knows is about three generations or three stages behind. They have stuff that is so much more advanced. Even what they were doing with space research and comet impacts and so on, that nobody knew anything about.

Shawn O'Hara: They were making fantastic discoveries they couldn't talk about. Yes, it's quite likely that certain governments and militaries have technology that's so much more advanced.

Steven Harris: The only thing I'd add to that is that technology, as I've seen it over the years, has a naturally compounding effect, which I talked about earlier. You'll get situations where, because the technology has advanced, we can advance even more quickly. That's what we are seeing now.

Steven Harris: We've had this major leap, so we can advance more quickly. Protein folding was a classic example that came out of recent artificial intelligence developments. We've made massive leaps and we'll continue to compound in terms of the way technology advances.

Shawn O'Hara: I was reading recently about science fiction authors. They get together and usually they place their stories about 35 years in the future, and they talk about what's going to happen. At this conference they were saying they can't do that anymore because they just can't see even 25 years in the future.

Steven Harris: Yes.

John Juricic: That's a fabulous anecdote. Gentlemen, we are going to end our conversation. I think it's going to be one that will continue throughout the year. I sure hope you can join us in the future.

Steven Harris: Yes.

John Juricic: A couple of things. Can you please emphasize again the VIATEC meetups? I think we should really broadcast and profile this as a place to go for anyone who wants to just dip their toe or more than that with their business.

Steven Harris: Rob, do you want to do the business side and I'll do the tech side?

John Juricic: Right.

Rob Cooper: For sure. The meetups occur on the second Thursday and fourth Thursday of the month. The next one we have coming up is January 8th. I'm actually presenting at that one, which happens every so often, on creative technologies for 2026 around content and images and that sort of stuff.

John Juricic: Where is the location and time?

Rob Cooper: It is at VIATEC, at 777 Fort Street. Coffee is on at 11:30 and the presentation starts at noon and goes till one.

John Juricic: It's a luncheon presentation.

Rob Cooper: Yes. Then there's a bit of time before and after to network and hang out. The main presentation is noon to one. Ideally, folks can register on Eventbrite. If you look for the VIATEC AI Meetup, it will show up there.

Rob Cooper: Steve, I think you'll have your new one posted shortly.

Steven Harris: Yes, I will, over the next couple of days. The next tech stream, which I run on the technical side, is on the 21st, same time slot and same place. We cover, on the technical side of things, anything from the underlying math, where we've had speakers come in and talk about the underlying math, to how to deploy multi-agent systems and what works in production.

Steven Harris: They tend to be more technically focused, but we still try to make things accessible. As Rob said, it's great for networking, half an hour before and half an hour afterwards. We've had situations where they've been so engaging that I think VIATEC asked us to leave because there was a group of people that just wouldn't stop talking to each other.

Steven Harris: It's been fascinating to watch over this last year.

Rob Cooper: To be clear, I think that was just to get us out of the boardroom for the next guests in the boardroom.

Steven Harris: That's right.

Rob Cooper: It wasn't because we'd been rambunctious or anything like that.

Steven Harris: Exactly.

John Juricic: Fort Tectoria is a lovely place to meet, just up by Fort and Blanshard. I'd love the meeting room. Do you have to be a member of VIATEC to attend?

Shawn O'Hara: No.

John Juricic: Okay.

Shawn O'Hara: I'm not and I attend. I just pull from the VIATEC site and Eventbrite the listing for the last one and the next one. I put that in the chat and I go, and I do recommend people go.

Shawn O'Hara: The topics vary. Some people will feel it's way over their heads, and others may feel that they can grasp it or barely grasp it, but the mind will stretch just being there.

Rob Cooper: I think the business topics are pretty accessible and the technical topics are often above my head, but I've enjoyed every one of them.

John Juricic: At the very least, people should entertain the fact that in 2026 they have to understand AI. They have to accept that it's in our lives and that it's going to, if not already, significantly impact everything we do.

John Juricic: Gentlemen, thank you so much.

Steven Harris: Thank you, John.

John Juricic: Have a great holiday season and Merry Christmas. From Santa, ho, ho, ho.

Steven Harris: Cheers, John. Thank you. Good to see you, Shawn. 

Links

• Steven Harris on LinkedIn
• AI for Enterprise
• Rob Cooper on LinkedIn
• PlusROI Marketing
• John Juricic on LinkedIn
• VIATEC AI Meetups at Fort Tectoria via Eventbrite – search for “VIATEC AI Meetup”
• YouTube video of this podcast originally recorded December 19, 2025: AI Adoption, Marketing Reality & the Pace of Change | SBC After Hours Live Discussion