101: How to Audit Your Dev Partner in the Age of AI with Matt Strippelhof

**Matt Strippelhoff** (0:00)
Forever, CIOs have been saying buy, don't build, but that's changing.

**Chris Daigle** (0:03)
If I'm not a technical person, what are some of the foundational things that I should at least be conversationally aware of when I'm approaching developers for some stuff for our company?

**Matt Strippelhoff** (0:14)
The conversation when you're evaluating vendors for software engineering projects should really start with, what's your experience been like using AI in your software development lifecycle over the last year? Tell me that story.
How it's impacting the way that you do things and let them respond. If they're getting excited and their energy is coming up and they're talking about the wins and efficiency gains, that's probably your guide.

**Chris Daigle** (0:36)
What's your thoughts on the CTO leading a generative AI effort within the company?

**Matt Strippelhoff** (0:41)
If that effort is specific to affecting or improving the bottom line for that department, then they should be in charge of that.

**Chris Daigle** (0:49)
There's a lot of tools out there. What's leading the list for you as far as the tech stack or the tools that are available for somebody like me?

**Matt Strippelhoff** (0:56)
Well, one of my favorites is Google Firebase Studio for generating clickable prototypes. We're all still trying to figure out how much of the code we can trust.

**Chris Daigle** (1:05)
Matt Strippelhoff is a technology leader at Red Hawk Technologies, where he helps mid-market companies gain predictable, scalable software development and technical support through an award-winning fixed-fee service model. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Daigle. Each week, we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started. Right now, every business leader is asking the same question. What are we going to do about AI? If this is you, chiefaiofficer.com has the answer. We'll give you a simple path forward where we provide executive and team training so your people know exactly how to safely use Generative AI in their day-to-day.
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We'll also guide company-wide transformation, so AI becomes part of your operating system, not just another shiny object. The companies that act now will increase productivity, cut costs, and grow faster than their competitors. Those that wait will get left behind. So if you want to make AI work in your business, visit chiefaiofficer.com and see how we're helping companies of all sizes finally get results from AI. Hi, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Using AI at Work. My name is Chris Daigle, and I'm the host. And our guest today is Matt Strippelhoff, the CEO and CRO of Red Hawk Technologies. And today, you know, Matt and I had the opportunity to connect a few weeks back before the interview. And based on the conversation we had, I'd like the conversation today to be for us to be able to access Matt's expertise and find out, how do we audit our dev partner in the age of AI? Now, what I mean about that is, like, just like an attorney, the pricing model is going to have to change.
If we just saw the story that came out with the big law firm, that $3,000 an hour law firm, and they got busted using Claude or Chad GPT to write up their brief, referencing hallucinated case law, right? Now, obviously, that's a poor use of the tool, but we know that generative AI is being introduced into the legal environment. And this whole idea about paying a lawyer by the hour, when maybe they're not using the hour, maybe they're using five minutes because they've built something in the models, that's something that we're all used to. Now, if you're a business owner and you're exploring generative AI, the reality is there's going to be the access to be able to get bespoke, custom software created for you quickly and easily, maybe not replacing Salesforce but small applications to start for sure. That's already on the table.
So if you don't know how to do this, how do you make sure that when you're talking to potential developers to create these things, that you're not in the attorney situation where they're like, oh yeah, it's going to be 50 hours of development, but they're actually using tools that you and I have access to. So that's kind of the theme I'd like to take it in Matt. But before we go there, why don't you tell everybody about why you're the guy to talk about this?

**Matt Strippelhoff** (4:13)
Well, I've been in this line of work for 25 years and started Red Hawk Technologies 18 years ago, and all we do is custom software engineering.