The Aboard Podcast

By emphasizing the chatbot use case, are we missing the real communication powers of generative AI? On this week’s Reqless, Paul describes his recent journey to understand the 900-page, far-right master plan that is Project 2025—which he fed into ChatGPT and then asked for its contents to be summarized by “​a ​really ​cheerful, ​optimistic ​squirrel.” With the power to instantly change voice and tone—for humor, to accommodate different reading levels, to speak with different dialects, etc.—is AI’s future role a sort of universal information translator?

Are Meta’s ideas about AI the future of the technology? In the wake of the recent tech stock slump and with questions about newer AI companies’ true value, Paul and Rich look at Meta’s Llama and how the company is positioning its model in the broader AI landscape. Plus: They assess the recent decision in United States v. Google LLC—aka the Google antitrust case—and see if there are any real takeaways to be gleaned before what promises to be a lengthy appeals process.

It’s easy to make blanket claims about “AI taking jobs”—but what does AI mean for specific industries in the near-term? On this week’s Reqless, Paul and Rich run through five careers (musician, advertiser, teacher, therapist, and consultant) and assess the ways AI might—and might not—change work. Plus: Paul describes himself as the “slightly grumpy girlfriend” as he and Rich reminisce about going to see beloved indie band Low together.

On this week’s Reqless, Paul and Rich look at how AI might affect the dominant way people organize data today: The spreadsheet. With its low barrier to entry and ability for users of all sorts to hack together solutions, does the humble spreadsheet leave any room for an AI transformation—and does it even need one? Plus: Fresh off a trip to San Francisco, Paul reports back on our driverless car future. 

On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich look at how AI is going to transform a very special industry filled with the nicest people: The law. After laying out the specific areas of the legal profession that are ripe for AI transformation, they assess a few current startups and their application frameworks (e.g., document review, research, contracts), and propose a new segment for each industry-specific podcast: “Will AI take your job?”

Introducing Reqless—the new podcast from Aboard about how AI is changing software. In this episode, your hosts Paul Ford and Rich Ziade explain why this podcast exists, and talk about how AI is enabling everyone to start skipping steps—and why overall, you should embrace this, not fear it. (Although a little healthy fear never hurt anyone.)

A one-minute episode—we’re taking a very short summer break! But expect some big changes when we return…TranscriptPaul Ford: Hi, I'm Paul Ford, the co-founder of Aboard.Rich Ziade: And I'm Rich Ziade, the other co-founder of Aboard.Paul: And you're listening to the Aboard Po—oh, wait a minute. Oh, wow. Okay, wait. I think we're gonna rename this thing.Rich: Yeah? Paul: Yeah, it's time. We've received some high-level branding advice, and it is time for us to get out there and kinda own what we've been talking about, Richard. Let me tell you what we talk about. You know what we talk about?Rich: What?Paul: The incredibly rapid change that artificial intelligence technologies are bringing to the software industry. And sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, sometimes it's ridiculous. Often it's ridiculous. Rich: Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm. Paul: And we keep dancing around it, saying, we're this or we're that. But damn it, I think that's what we are. I think that's what we're doing for the next X months or years or decades.Rich: Great. Tune in next week. It'll be a new name. It'll show up in your same feed so you don't have to do anything. And it's fun. We still want to, like, share our ideas, thoughts, feedback to the world that is useful outside of our product.Paul: God help anybody trying to keep us on-script.Rich: Yeah. So world's shortest podcast this week. Have a lovely week, and we'll see you next week with a brand-new name and maybe a brand-new haircut.Paul: I could use one.Rich: All right, have a great week.Paul: Bye!

Your boss walks in and says, “What are we doing about AI?” How do you respond? On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich break down the problem with the question itself, and the way AI is being offered as an imprecise, ineffective solution to solve business’s structural problems. Who actually needs AI—and how do you figure out the best way to use it? 

Why do we try to explain tech concepts and processes with metaphors—and why do we choose the metaphors we use? On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich get philosophical, kicking off the conversation with an article about how the human is not like a computer, and travel through the history of personal computing to our present AI moment. Plus: How exactly should you handle the idealists in your organization? 

You’ve just shipped your latest release. Once you finish celebrating, how do you decide what to build next? Paul taps Rich, in his role as Aboard CEO, to set a course on a hypothetical product roadmap: Does he prioritize an enterprise-specific feature, another that might bump up broader user engagement, or the thing the boss tossed out because he had a vague hunch? Plus: Why is some industry-specific software beautiful, while other industries are left with clunky, uninspired “bureaucracy in software”?