New format this week. No pub, just a straight chat with Milo Srdic from Mutexer.

Milo spent 10 years in industrial automation, starting at Omron building IoT technology for factories. The technology never quite fit the industry, so he built Mutexer to solve the problem differently.

Mutexer separates hardware from software. Traditional players like Siemens and Rockwell lock customers into their hardware. Mutexer lets manufacturers choose their hardware while running mission-critical software on top.

From there, we get into why manufacturing often runs 15 to 20 years behind other industries. Machinery lasts decades, downtime costs real money, and change happens slowly for good reason.

That same caution shapes how manufacturers approach AI. We talk about the risks of loose prompting, why isolated deployments matter in regulated environments, and what happens when getting it wrong isn't an option.

When you can't afford to be wrong, predictability wins over speed.

If you build technology for industries that can't move fast, this one's for you.

Thanks for listening to Drive by AI.

For more practical conversations on AI, technology and business, connect with Jon Wellman on LinkedIn and follow Vokke Software for the latest episodes and insights.

New episodes of Drive by AI dropping regularly.

Here’s a tension I see in a lot of businesses right now - Execs want AI to do more of the work.

But the people who actually understand the processes well enough to automate them are often the same people worried that doing it well might automate themselves out of a job.

And honestly, I understand both sides.

In this episode of Drive by AI, I unpack how I’m thinking about this as a founder and through the conversations I’m having internally with our own team at Vokke.

I cover:

• Why dragging your feet on AI adoption is probably the riskiest response
• The shift from “process worker” to “problem solver”
• How the people who lean in now will likely become more valuable, not less
• Which roles I think are naturally more protected
• What humans still consistently outperform AI at
• Why trust, judgment, communication and customer proximity matter more than ever

I also talk through the reality that AI is absolutely going to change the shape of work, but that doesn’t automatically mean humans become irrelevant.

The people closest to customers, closest to revenue, and closest to real-world decision making still matter enormously.

This one’s less about tools and more about mindset.

If your role, career, or industry feels uncertain right now, this episode might help frame the conversation differently.

Thanks for listening to Drive by AI.

For more practical conversations on AI, technology and business, connect with Jon Wellman on LinkedIn and follow Vokke Software for the latest episodes and insights.

New episodes of Drive by AI dropping regularly.

This is the first time I've sat down with someone for Drive by AI, and it's a good one. I'm in the studio with Ange Kallinikos, founder of AussieTel Technologies, who's been deep in conversational AI for the past few years.

We talk about the customer experience side of AI that doesn't get enough airtime, why some people love AI answering the phone and others reject it on instinct.

I share a story about a cafe that nailed the experience so well I didn't realise I was talking to a bot until they told me. And we get into what business owners are getting wrong when they think about AI as a replacement for staff instead of a way to free them up.

We also dig into the identity crisis hitting software developers, the difference between process workers and problem solvers, and why every "10x productivity" claim on LinkedIn misses how a business actually works. Speed up one step and the bottleneck just moves somewhere else.

This is for founders and operators trying to cut through the AI hype and figure out what's real. Thanks for tuning in.

Thanks for listening to Drive by AI.

For more practical conversations on AI, technology and business, connect with Jon Wellman on LinkedIn and follow Vokke Software for the latest episodes and insights.

New episodes of Drive by AI dropping regularly.