Matt Fitzpatrick: Who Wins the Data Labelling Race & Why Al Needs Forward-Deployed Engineers

MIT just released this report that 5% of gen AI deployments are working in any form. You've seen Gartner saying 40% of enterprise projects will likely be canceled by 2027. And I think the reason for that is, externally driven builds are 2X as effective as internal team builds. I don't think that that discipline exists in the same way in internal builds. They spent 25 million bucks building this agent. And what ended up happening was a couple months later, they shut it down and moved back to a deterministic flow. We don't actually sell anything. When we meet a customer, we say, "We will do it for free for eight weeks and prove to you the tech works." The minute you had to bring in FDs in a SaaS context, your economics broke im- instantly, right?

Are there any other big misnomers that you think are pronounced in the industry?

Look, I, I think the biggest one is just the view that synthetic data will take over and you just will not need human feedback. It's interesting, from first principles, that actually doesn't make very much sense if you think through it. In the AI world at least, strategy is a somewhat overrated concept. And what I mean by that is, it-

Ready to go? Matt, I am so excited for this, dude. I think Invisible is one of the most incredible, but also, I'm sorry to say this, like under-discussed businesses when I look at the incredible achievements that you've had over the last few years. So thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you for having me. I really enjoy the show.

Can you just talk to me about how does like a 10-year McKinsey, uh, stalwart warrior-

(laughs)

... become CEO of like one of the fastest growing data companies in tech? How does that transition happen?

Yeah, so, um, I would say my McKinsey journey was non-traditional. Um, I spent 12 years there, I was a senior partner and I led a group called Quantum Black Labs, which is the firm's global tech development group. So about 10 years ago, McKinsey actually started hiring engineers, like, and I was a, a big part of this and a pretty big quantum. And I think we went from, I, when I started, we had about 100 engineers total in the firm. By the time I left, we had 7,000. Uh, I oversaw about a fifth of that group, uh, and all the application development, all of the data warehouse infrastructure and all of the, uh, gen AI builds globally. And so, uh, that journey was, was really interesting and it, and it, you know, over the course of it, spent a variety of my time competing with other large enterprise, um, AI businesses. And I got to know the found- the founder, Francis, really well, um, about three years or four years ago now. Uh, we actually met totally not work-related in a, uh, kind of social context where we were discussing... It was a, it was basically a forum called Dialog. I don't know if you've heard it, but you-