Guru's Rick Nucci on Building AI Your Team Can Trust

**Rick Nucci** (0:02)
A obvious statement to make, but I think many miss is that these models are wonderfully brilliant and they know nothing about your company by definition.

**Wade Foster** (0:22)
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Agents of Scale. It's the show where I sit down with execs that are turning AI from buzzword into backbone. I am Wade Foster. Today's guest is Rick Nucci. He is the co-founder and CEO of Guru, which is an AI platform for knowledge work that helps teams get trusted answers from company knowledge no matter where they work.
Now, before Guru, Rick founded Boomi. Boomi has a soft spot in my heart. It's the first cloud integration platform as a surface. It was acquired by Dell in 2010 He ran Boomi for Dell as the GM and helps grow it into an industry leader it is today. Rick brings over 20 years of experience building category defining software. He's a Penn State grad, former president of Philly Startup Leaders. His favorite Guru value is don't take yourself too seriously. Rick, welcome to the show.
All righty, Rick, let's kick it off with our rapid fire questions. First off, what's your personal AI stack?

**Rick Nucci** (1:22)
Oh, that's a good one. Well, let's see.
The thing is, I have to, I feel a sense of obligation to have my hands on a lot of these technologies, which is something we'll talk more about in Act 3 And so I've tried to slice that up at work. I'm using mostly Clawed and Guru. In my personal life, I'm Clawed up as of a couple of weeks ago, and ChatGPT-centric, mostly around really thinking through, especially with Chat. I feel like ChatGPT is really pushing the where MCP is going, MCP apps, and this idea of where is the front door to AI, and it's just something I'm using for personal use cases, but also with that kind of product hat on, to understand what is this opportunity, how does this translate into Guru. But yeah, I would say those are my dividing lines, have really been fascinated with, I think with OpenClaw, like really just taking a step back from the fervor and craziness and trying to understand like, what are these design patterns coming out of this agent that's really making people stand up and take notice? And I think I get it, and I think they have figured out some very cool and novel ways to make AI feel more like that kind of assistive, sidekick type person who can actually do stuff for you.

**Wade Foster** (3:01)
What's your most favorite recent use case that you've used or built for yourself?

**Rick Nucci** (3:11)
I am going to the New Orleans Jazz Fest later this month.

**Wade Foster** (3:17)
Nice.

**Rick Nucci** (3:17)
And if you have never been to that festival, which I've never, it's my first time, but it is the type of festival that has an enormous stuff, enormous amount of things going on during the day, and an enormous amount of things going on at night. Kind of a South by Southwest vibe in that sense. So completely overwhelming. So perfect thing for me to task to a AI friend to help me organize what's going on, when is it happening, where should I be going, what's happening at night, make me a plan, send it to my friends. I'm going with a group of friends who do not work in tech, which is like one of my favorite things. Do you show them this stuff and their like minds get blown?
As kind of our Jazz Fest concierge. And it has been immensely helpful to find the signal through the noise.

**Wade Foster** (4:07)
Is this, and is this on open call? It is. I love it. It is.
The flip side, is there anything that you still refuse to let AI do for you?

**Rick Nucci** (4:18)
Well, I mean, categorically, I, and I'm gonna give this as a work specific answer where the stakes are a bit higher in your question.
I am a pretty hardline believer in AI not being a replacement for expertise and for judgment. And so, I'm not gonna use it for legal work. I'm not gonna use it for deeper HR related things. I'm not gonna use it for deeper engineering work. Sure, vibe coding something from scratch that's new and is relatively straightforward. Yes, something that's like you'd be building for an enterprise. Like, I think my point of view is like, I wanna go to the human who's the expert in that. I want them to be amplifying their expertise with the AI, but I'm personally not gonna show up and be like, hey, team, look what I did and throw some slap at them at work and then wonder why it doesn't scale. That's sort of been my, at least today with the current state of the technology, I mean, that's just really been my, like bright line of what I do and don't do.