Node co-founder Steven Baker on diagnosing broken workflows, the disappearing CIO role, and building an AI-native company from New Zealand | The AI Corner Ep: 53 Steven Baker

Join host Mike Bayly and guest Steven Baker, co-founder of Node (formerly Vendor Sage), to explore how he's building an AI-native company that acts as a CIO in your pocket. You'll hear why the CIO role is disappearing in mid-market, how Node's "curiosity loop" diagnoses workflows by connecting to Notion, Slack, CRMs, and HRIS systems, plus Steven's take on why 70% of software implementations fail (and 90% of AI ones), why shadow IT isn't the real problem, and how he's building a transparent, bootstrapped business with customers like Halter, Tracksuit, and Partly.

In this episode we discuss:
• 00:00 – Intro & guest bio
• 01:30 – From Salesforce to Vendor Sage to Node
• 03:00 – What Node actually does
• 06:00 – The curiosity loop and discovery
• 09:00 – Mapping business goals to workflows
• 13:00 – Data privacy and trust concerns
• 18:00 – Avoiding regression to the mean
• 21:00 – Customer base and growth
• 25:00 – Shadow IT, AI sprawl, and source of truth
• 30:00 – Multi-agent architecture under the hood
• 33:00 – Pricing strategy and bootstrapped growth
• 38:00 – Outro & next steps

STEVEN'S LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-baker-395855128/

MIKE'S LINKEDIN: ⁠https://nz.linkedin.com/in/mikebayly⁠

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