This is the part of the third in our series of conversations about artificial intelligence. Today we talk with Grant Erickson from IntelliTect, our partner in these discussions, and Bill Kalivas, known for his work with LaunchPad INW in Spokane.
Here our entire discussion with Erickson and Kalivas here.
Bill Kalivas: I retired (from Google) in 2025 and I kind of took the summer off. And then in the fall of last year, I went around and met people like Grant from IntelliTect and told him what we were trying to do. Avista was already a founding partner, Washington Trust, STCU. I had all these great founding partners of Launchpad, but I said, this AI thing is changing everything.
So I went around and talked to every university I could speak with and several companies and I said, what is AI causing you to do within your company? Are you ready for it? Do you have a strategy? Not only were they not ready, they were confused. What does this mean for my workforce? What does it mean for my competitiveness? And the universities are scratching their heads saying, our enrollments are down, federal dollars are down because of funding from which administration. And so for whatever reason, they're struggling. And I thought, what if we connected all of them together?
I went to the universities and said, if I brought you industry to partner with you to tell you which curriculum they were most interested in for students, for a talent pipeline, would that be of interest? 100%.
I went to the startups and said, what do you need most? They said, partnerships with universities to do research on new products. Some of the companies like ITRON, Schweitzer and Hot Start, they said, we want to stay competitive. We would love to partner with researchers to look at building MVPs, most viable products.
So I saw this need to bring them all together. So we kicked off an initiative in December. IntelliTect was our first partner that signed on. It's called Innovate INW. It's a regional initiative to connect all of the industry, universities, and businesses that are involved and interested in learning more about AI, cybersecurity, advanced computing, to build strategies for their own companies, but also to further our region.
How do we grow our region? It's by building startups. It's by helping midsize companies. We created a program called Scale to help midsize companies.
So we're now getting ready to really kick off this initiative region-wide called Innovate INW. We help universities. We try to get interns involved in projects.
We had an event July 23rd where we brought universities and industry together to connect them, see that we can work on projects together. All I did was to get people to join us. Do you have an AI strategy for your company? And if not, would you like to participate so you can build one? They all have someone in charge of their AI strategy, but they need to talk to people who have experience and that's what we're providing.
DN: So Grant, your company is a little more advanced in the AI field. What's your role? How do you play here?
Grant Erickson: It's really interesting because we've gone through kind of what Bill is talking about ourselves, right? I was just talking to our marketing guy right before I came over here and his life has completely changed from what he does on a day-to-day basis from a year ago. It's completely different.
He was talking to me about this thing he's building to help keep track of the bedtime stories that he's telling his kids and he rolled out this whole app that would do that and it was such a cool thing. This is our marketing guy doing this just as a little side project and that's not even talking about the actual marketing things. He's our marketing manager and he actually ends up managing a number of AI agents that help him figure out what are the best moves for us in the marketing space.
Now, that's just kind of in marketing, but also for our developers. I mean, some developers are super excited. Like, hey, I can just build more stuff, right? It's great.
Other developers are like, hey, I really like to build the code and do the things. What does this mean for the thing that I loved now being and looking a little bit different than it used to? So that's for us and for the companies that we're seeing, everybody's kind of in a different spot.
Most people I think feel, oh, we're behind, we're missing it. I don't think that's where we are yet. We will be there. And if you're not starting to think about that and starting to move your organization in that direction, that's probably a flag that you should be looking and thinking about that.
But we talk about several different things, like, coming up with your strategy. We always recommend, you need to look at something small that is a core business process and not a moonshot. Like, don't think about this, don't try to hit the moon. Do something simple, do something that will scale in your business that you can use as quickly as you can, get some kind of business value from that.
So those are probably the main things.
You also need to have to think about, how do I get my data under control? Most people don't have their data house in order. It's like, hey, we have some over here in this system and over in that system and our accounting system has some stuff and the one that's running our floor where we're manufacturing stuff, that has other things. A lot of what AI is going to provide is the value of pulling that data together and being able to derive insights and then be able to drive your business process through that. So those are some key things.
There's usually some data, you can kind of get some value initially. Then you get some data work done, you kind of develop some governance and then you start looking at what are those things in each department where you can say, what's the value that I can derive from our engineering department if we have one of those, if there's manufacturing, if it's communications, or HR, or marketing, or even some of your executive leadership team. How can you really leverage some of the tools that are out there? Sometimes the solutions are simple and sometimes they're more complicated and it's just a matter of kind of looking at that and seeing what your organization can absorb and think about it as a journey, and not a, hey, I'm gonna do this, then I'm gonna be done, because this is going to be something that's evolving.
The way AI is changing. I thought we were kind of in a pretty good spot back in April, but then new tools came out and there's this whole Fable thing (Claude Fable 5) happened, and it does a lot of stuff.
They talk about AI, how good it is, based on the amount of time you can let it do something before a human has to come back in and get it back on track, right? Initially, that was really short, like 15 seconds. But now we have ones where I have agents that will run for several hours overnight, writing code, or doing some kind of process, or analyzing, and so it's significantly better. But I find now that it's limited by my ability to express intent to AI. I can't tell it with enough details, because it'll make assumptions, right? And that's how it gets off track. But if I can give it enough intent, give it enough detail about what I want to do, work with it as kind of a partner of fleshing out that stuff, and say, hey, let's work on this problem, what questions should I be asking? And what questions do you want to ask me? We can then work out a plan and move that strategy forward.
But as far as businesses go, I think there's so much opportunity at this point in time and as we look at our innovative economy and looking at ourselves as not just like a consumer of things that are produced other places, but how do we become people and really have a mindset as a community of being innovators and creators that are pushing things out from here? I think we have those, but they're kind of stealth. There's a lot of really cool stuff that's happening around the world, people using like ITRON meters, for example, all over the world. But it's a story that we just don't tell well.
Hear our other Inland Journal discussions about artificial intelligence here and here.