Why AI Still Needs Human Judgment with Galina Barengo

Foreign. So welcome to It's Not all about the Numbers, the leadership podcast that doesn't just focus on the bottom line. Hi, my name is Chris and that is Mike. Hi everyone. And our co host this week is Galina Barengo, who is the co founder of Legendary. Welcome, Galena. Hello. Hello. Thank you for having me. No problem. Great to have you here. And if you love what we're doing or even like what we're doing, why not hit those five stars? It's always good to get that feedback. Hit subscribe and we will appear every Tuesday morning into your feed and as we said, it always helps the motivation as well as the algorithms. So let's crack on. Mike, how has your week been? It's actually been a week this time. Isn't has been a week this time. I was actually thinking people can click the five stars if they love we're doing as well as if they like what we're doing to be perfectly. I mean even if they listen. Click the five stars. Yeah, exactly. Right, so week's been good. It last week was ridiculously hot. So I think that everybody was working in the UK with fans blowing on them for the whole. The whole week and. But now the sun's gone and actually I think we've already hit autumn. So I'm stand standing here at my desk looking at the pouring rain. So yeah, it's been a bit of, bit of bit of that even work was hard last week in the. In the he. But you know, into autumn. But the most important bit is I think I mentioned last time that I was getting ready to go scuba diving. All my dive kit is ready, I have it all and I'm going out on Saturday with my eldest son to do some diving in, in and around Weymouth. So I'm looking forward to that this week. Amazing. Amazing. I love the scuba dive updates. Actually. It's a very different world. I haven't explored it for quite a while, as you know, but that's a whole other story. I didn't even know you scuba dive in the UK to be honest. Well, who would? I mean it's not like you can see anything. That is not true. But you definitely need to have the right kit because you don't just plop in with a 3 millimeter short wetsuit on. That is definitely for sure. It gets chilly. My husband loves to scuba dive, so maybe I should give him some tips. Maybe we can get offline, he can show some locations. Yep, definitely you can do that. You could. We could do a. It's not all about the numbers. Scuba trip. How about that? Team building. Yay. Excellent. So how's your week been? Busy, actually, I am. We are preparing to welcome our second daughter. I mean our second child who is a daughter. The day that you actually gonna be handing the rewards at Genco Awards, that's the day when we're having our girl. Wow. Congratulations. Thank you. Other than busy work, it was busy washing laundry, building the crib and whatnot. Especially with this heat. It was extremely difficult. I can imagine. Yeah, I was busy. Not. I was, I was busy trying not to give birth. So let me tell you that it's proper. That's not like, not like this kind of computery joke work that. I think this is the first. This is the first as well. I don't think anyone can trump that in terms of personal or work life balance. Yeah, that's kind of one thing. Like I don't think I'm a traditional startup founder based on my profile. So I already have a toddler who is under two, so I'm going to have two. Under two. And I'm not sure what's more handful is building a startup or looking after a toddler. So definitely not your classic startup profile. I'm intrigued as to the similarities actually. Is like the third toddler, is that basically what you describe? Exactly? Yes. You see like every day you never know what to expect. It's either going to be really good or really bad. And like every morning you wake up like, what is it going to be like today? Well, it's a ride. Right. I think that's the best bit about the whole thing. And we're going to dig into that, no doubt across the next half an hour or so. My week. Well, I. I came back from our beach hut which was blissful in the sun on the south coast. Managed to fit in a webinar for the US as well, remotely. You'd be proud of me, Mike. As a digital. What did you call yourself? Nomad. Nomads. That's it. Not native. Yeah, I had the chair up on the desk, I had the laptop hanging over. I had lots of bulldog clips everywhere for the wires. It was all, you know, very startup, but managed to deliver it and no one would ever know. Apart from the behind the scenes photo that I did and apart from everyone who listens to this podcast. Well, yeah, exactly. Damn it. My. My secret is out. But it's really nice to. To do that actually while I was down on the beach and yeah, it was. Was a simple in and out and there you Go. Perfect work, life, balance, situation. But the biggest thing on my list at the moment is very much looking forward to our Gen CFO Awards which. Thank you for bringing that in there Galena. I cannot wait. We've got a couple of hundred people coming to the Ministry of Sound. The, the list looks amazing. Some fantastic companies in there. Jlr, Octopus Energy, massive companies that I've never even heard of but they own a lot of brands that I have heard of. But as well also lots of, you know, mid sized companies as well who are amazing in their own right. You know, not necessarily high street names but I mean just doing amazing things. So really looking forward to celebrating because come the 18th all of the hard work will be over and I'll be able to enjoy it and I'll be thinking of you now Galena. The, the irony is actually come the, come the 19th all the hard work will be over from myself, everyone. Well, because it's my, it's my youngest son's 18 of the day after the awards so, so literally the front door will be open and he'll be kicked out and that'll be it. Done. Parenting done. You're passing the baton on to 18. Done. But one coming in. Well, look I'm. That was fun. So look what's been happening this week, Mike. We, we've been doing our usual and I love this subject. It's a, it's a fairly new phrase to most people but we're going to talk about Vibe coding for a bit. Well, well, yeah. So I, what we always do at this point it feels like we've drifted into a new tradition which is I go onto people's LinkedIn profile and I pick out something that somebody's posted recently and you posted recently, Galena, about Vibe coding an app over the weekend and it's that classic LinkedIn thing where you read the one line then you click the see more and you've got a massive post about. Exactly. Well actually what I think is really interesting was really interesting about it was everybody talks about AI and Vibe coding as if it's really, really straightforward and easy and you can just do it. And what I loved about your post was it kind of on some of the more complexities of it and the fact that there's more to it than that. So I just wondered if you could sort of like talk us through a little bit like your experience of doing that. Yeah. So yeah, it was a completely sort of not, not work related project. Something I was passionate about before and just wanted to do it and literally I spoke to my technical co founder and he was like oh just try this thing called emergent. I was like okay, I'll do it. And like as I wrote in a post, like I put one sentence in and like 30 seconds later it gave me beautiful app but it literally did nothing. So I think so I learned less than the hard way but it also an incredible learning opportunity for me. I think we're nowhere near enough from shipping as a non technical people shipping some usable products without heavy involvement and understanding what you're getting yourself into. And I think that's sometimes a mistake of what industry promises at the moment is you just put in a couple of words and you get something incredible out. Right. Without realizing all the possible drawbacks, all the possible flaws that might come up. Right. In the personal app there was not that much downside really. It was something lifestyle app so I couldn't really, you know, there was not much to lose there. It was just for, for me and my friends to use. Whereas if you think about it and kind of make a, make a translation into the business world again this promise of just sort of drop it into. Into an agent and then you're going to get some incredible information. It's a bit of a dangerous one. Yeah. So in my post I try to outline more of more of specific things of what went wrong during my journey. Happy to go over them but very much technical I would say. Right. So what I like about what you've posted there is that a lot of the time this, the messaging around or any new tech actually is like hype driven. Right. But what you are doing and what we always try to do is kind of talk about the realities, you know, almost burst the bubble. You know, not to spoil anybody's fun and not to stop the inspiration which comes with some of this stuff. But I mean just to be realistic and what I love about what you said there is, you know, it was a journey. You did have to learn stuff. You know, this isn't straightforward and there is a. There's a difference between prototyping and something that's going to be some commercially viable and I think it's really nice to be, be able to commercial sorry to prototype something really quickly which is, which is relevant in a leadership context. Right. But if you're going to start thinking about it as a product for the organization, it's a totally different thing. Right? Absolutely. Yeah. And that's also something I like about your community. Right. You kind of see, you see the opportunities for progress and to making things better and you very much embrace the change. However, you're being on the cautious side to be like, okay guys, let's just not go crazy and be like, oh my God, like what? Ten years ago we said the blockchain is going to solve everything, right? And now we're saying AI is going to solve everything. And we remember the conversations back then about application of blockchain and finance, right? Like the ledger that you can never change and everything is traceable and all that, which had a great premise. Where are we right now with those particular applications of blockchain? Not really far. Right. So seeing opportunities for growth and being able to be agile in what you do and seeing opportunities to change workflows for the better, while also being mindful of overhyping something and promising things that cannot be delivered. So I think it's pretty much in line with what you guys are pioneering as well. I think that's just really interesting. Bring it. It's really is really interesting because I suppose one of the things when I remember that sort of like bouncing around on the periphery of the work that I was doing and thinking, don't really understand it, don't really know what it is. I don't need to engage with it until somebody tells me what it's for. I think the difference now though, and this is why sort of the work, the post that you put out and the kind of information you're sharing is it's not the same with AI. Everybody's engaging with it. Everybody has like Gemini on their phone or Claude been playing with GPT to make silly images or whatever it is. So it's so much more as a technology, it's so much more accessible. So the hype actually feels more real. Even though it's still hype, it feels real now. Whereas blockchain was just almost like mumbo jumbo to most people, there was no consumer application on blockchain that you could actually touch. Here you actually can touch and see the benefits and you get so excited you don't know how it actually LLM works at the back. And then you're like, oh my God, I can actually do X. And it's going to give me a confident answer and I'm going to be 100% sure in this answer, but in reality, no, you have to double check the work of your LLMs because it's usually without proper guardrails. It's very tricky to trust those. I'm going to get a T shirt with that with which says in reality no. Do you think that there's this sort of, you know, with this hype braced approach, there's almost another nasty side to it, which is almost like shaming. It's like vibe code shaming or, you know, AI prompt shaming. It's like. It's like, if you're not doing this, you know, and because it's so easy and it's so valuable and you should be, you know, sort of, I don't know, serving all of your functional needs with these tools, then you're behind the curve. You're behind the curve. Do you feel it's sort of. Because it's so accessible, there's also, you know, a very specific kind of personal shaming that's almost going on because you could just ignore it and say, that's technical. But with this, it's almost like, well, I can engage with it and I don't want to. Yeah, I think it's about. I agree with you that it might be prob. The probably. Probably exists out there. Right. Like. But I think it's. It's very important to understand what are the things that are appropriate to be automated via LLMs and what are the things that are not. I'm a strong believer that there are processes that absolutely essential and should be optimized with LLMs, but they're also things like judgment, human judgment, which cannot be possibly automated with LLM. Right. Like, in my ideal world, and this is what I try to do as a busy mother, and I'm sure you gentlemen do that as well. I try to automate as many processes as I can that actually don't bring me joy. Right. And I want it to be run on the sort of autopilot, but I do want it to circle back to me. Things that I do do need my attention and do need my judgment. Do I trust LLMs and agents to make a judgment for me? Not yet. I want to still be able to own the judgment call myself. But I do want repetitive processes that I don't enjoy to be run automatically. Right. To which I actually think that. And I think that's kind of what some people fall victims of. They try. They automate it to 95%. It doesn't work. It just creates another. It doesn't eliminate the existing process. It just shifts the type of a process that they need to do. So instead of doing the actual process manually themselves, something they've been doing for years, they now create this. This sort of babysitting the machine process instead of what they used to be before, just to make sure that things work properly. So. And that's where a lot of frustration grows with, with the automation as well. Right. So I feel like a understand what are the things that you can automate like automate and the things that you can't or you don't want to automate. Right. And there could be example of process is something you. It's wonderful to be automated with with current agents judgment probably not so good to be automated with agents. And also when you get invested into automating something make sure you see it through until 100% because unless it's 100% it's not really automation. It just creates another workflow for you. So I think we're in firm agreement here. I suppose people listening though we've introduced you and we know you and we've invited you along. Why should people listen to you about this? And you know you're a co founder of legend legendary. You know what are you, what's your expertise there and what are you doing on a source? It's just as a baseline. So we are revenue integrity platform. So we automate the processes of revenue recognition and pretty much make sure that your revenue numbers are all traceable without sort of getting involved in lots of manual revenue processes. This podcast is sponsored by Generation cfo the community for progressive accounting and finance leadership in a changing business world. Want to level up your career gen CFO membership gives you exclusive access to expert insights, events and a thriving community of finance leaders just like you Search Generation CFO today and be part of the future of finance. So we're focusing on the revenue side of things and we automate it with. With the agents. So which is revenue recognition can be a nightmare. I know as someone who's worked in sort of subscriptions and long term contracts and things like that, I think you, you hit the nail on the head especially becomes relevant with multi year with usage based and complicated business models. Yeah, I'm really so I'm really intrigued in that. That sounds like a. It's like quite, quite a technical business. You've got quite a lot going on there. You've already described obviously you've got a small child. Another one, another one, another one due. How have you ended up being like a co founder of a company at this, this point in your career? What was, what was the kind of steps to get to that point? Yeah, frankly. So I come from. I'm a cfa so I have a finance degree. I'm financed by training. So I was a corporate banker back in Canada for about five years and then I went fell into the tech Rabbit hole For me it was blockchain. I got really passionate about it back in 2016, 20 to 2017 and I decided to. I hope we didn't offend you earlier. Slagging off blockchain. Being a founder you have to be really agile with your thinking and with your ideals. Right. Like you can be really passionate about something but then you, you have to quickly realize if something is not working and adapt your mindset unless you're first and founder. If you're first time founder you, you're allowed to be romantic about your business idea. So I'm quite okay with things changing and my opinion can also change about things. So yeah, I mean after being a corporate banker I wanted to move to tech. So I did my MBA and then moved to Europe, joined very early stage startup first and really enjoyed it frankly is just environment where I strive the most. I, I really loved it. Worked with some incredible people, got experience in startups. So I think that's kind of where the seed went into my heart and I was really passionate about. I then went to work for a scale up Oak North. I was a chief of staff there for a founder. So very much different challenges, different like you know, if startup is zero to one, Oak north was very much from one to a thousand. Right. Scaling up large organization is different and I realized that no, my heart is still in startups and that's why I decided to co founded one company. Unfortunately it didn't work. We couldn't find a proper distribution channel and then now I'm on to my second one. It sounds like a real journey that you've been on and it, and it's, it sounds like that's quite a stark contrast from quite a formal start to your career. Right. So was there a sort of a turning point or did you sort of feel that, that you know, traditional corporate finance ladder just wasn't for, for you, you know what happened? Yeah, I think, I think working for a large bank and in Canada we have oligopoly so it's like, it's like four or five large banks which control the market. Right. It's not like us where we have hundreds of banks and it was very much, it was a safe and an incredible job. Right. Like you can grow in a corporate ladder and become successful but as a young sort of ambitious person you start seeing problems with processes and with the legacy systems. I think that kind of was a turning point for me as blockchain was emerging as a new cool thing. It kind of prompted me to start thinking about different Ways of doing fit finance. So pretty much fintech. Right. Um, and I think that was kind of turning point for me, seeing how legacy systems work and seeing the promise of what could it be, right? Cheaper, better finance for, for everyone. That's kind of what drove me to start looking into fintech as a career shift. And what, so you mentioned that you started in Canada and you're now now in the uk. What, what, what was that, that move, Was that move for work or for other reasons? Yeah. So I did an MBA program between Asia and, and Europe called insead. So initially my plan was to move to Asia. I was completely fascinated with, with, with China. I was learning Mandarin all my life. I don't speak anymore, but I was learning it. So that was initially the plan. But after doing my mba, kind of leaving half, half between Asia and Europe, I realized that Europe is actually a great place to be and I decided to move to, to the UK for the job at the early stage startup. And was that always that like at that point, was that like a per. In your head? Did you think that's a permanent thing? This is going to be, I'm going to settle in this bonkers place. I mean frankly like I've been. I left originally, I'm from Russia and I left Russia when I was 18. Then I lived in Canada, then I lived in Asia, I lived in China when I was a teenager. So I lived across many, many places. Wow. I don't think anything really seemed like permanent to me. I don't know if it still, still is. Right? I love UK and I feel like it's incredible opportunity. Like it's incredible, like incredible place and people and community of fintech entrepreneurs, of just business people is, you know, incredible. So I definitely see myself staying here. But can I guarantee that we're forever going to be in the uk? No. Can we get, can anybody guarantee anything? I just, I was just thinking my career's bounced around England so I've moved quite a lot within England. But that, that's Russia to Canada. Russia. It's not quite the same. Do you think that that kind of, you know, you said nothing's permanent. It's like the rest, a restlessness kind of helps in a startup environment. Like seems like a good match in a way. Yeah, I think it probably is. I mean I just, I just gave probably example from my personal life. My husband consulting so very much in traditional industry and our approach to things is just, could not be more different. Right. Like I'm always up to, you know, move somewhere, do things and, you know, explore something new. I always have business ideas and I think about opportunities to improve if I'm unhappy about something versus like traditional industries is. Is more kind of settled, more defined, which is, again, it's not bad. I think it's exactly to your point, Chris. It depends on personality. I feel like I found my passion in building something from scratch, operating in uncertainty, solving issues that have never been solved before, thinking about things that people haven't thought before versus for other people. They're more comfortable with things that they know, and that's where they strive. Again, like what Ray Dalio wrote in his book. If you understand the strength of a person, you should nourish that. You can't judge everyone the same way. People are different and then they strive and then they perform best in things that make them strive and perform best. Yeah, yeah, because I, I almost recognize that trait now. And I've spoken to quite a few founders over the years. You know, people who are, you know, want to get in front of a finance audience, people like that. But they're also developing a product. They're also doing it, you know, with VC pressure. They're doing it on a shoestring. You know, they're, they're sort of making it up as they go along as well, you know, like that. But that sort of restlessness, I think really is something that they, they love. So it does sound like a real strength. I'm conscious of time. And we always ask a question as part of our podcast, and it's at this point, if you'd like to ask questions, send them into podcastenerationerationcfo.com who produce the podcast, or reach out to Mike and myself via LinkedIn. And this one is linked to something that I'm sure we all understand intrinsically, but I wonder about your sort of personal experience on this. The question is, how do you approach burnout prevention, stress management, and practical recovery tools as a leader and obviously in the current case, you know, a new parent and a leader. And this has come up a few times. We do a research report every January, and it was the biggest non technical challenge that the leadership team had at the moment in our space was burnout. What do you think? To be honest, like, I'm quite lucky and I don't know how you like, what are the chances? My sister, she's actually a burnout researcher. She writes articles, she gets published. She was published in her business review. She does a doctorate at Bocconi now. So she actually studies those things, literally burnout. And especially in entrepreneurship we should get her on. There you go. So she is definitely there to, to make me aware of things that I might not be aware of. I feel like it's a very underlooked topic in many ways, especially as entrepreneur. You tend to judge, you tend to identify yourself with your business. You cannot separate the two, and then it's a very dangerous path to go. But I think it's not only entrepreneurs. It's probably anyone who cares deeply about what they do. So a. I, I don't think people actually aware of the burnout and the symptoms of it. And when they are aware, I don't know, I don't think they know what to do with it. So educating yourself on what burnout is, how does it feel? It's not black and white. It's a, it's a scale. It's usually you develop it slowly. There's a degree of a burnout. So being able to identify where you are on the burnout scale at a particular point in time and what are the techniques to help you deal with it is, Is definitely a way to go. And I, I agree with you. I don't think we talk about this enough. It's. It's really. That's really interesting that. I really like the way you describe. You said two things there which are really interesting. So burnout is a scale, but you also said it, you need to recognize how it feels. And I think that that's a really important point is that like some medical conditions, you either got it or you have it. So it's like I've either broken my leg or I haven't broken my leg. Whereas actually what you're describing is like, this is a great gradation, isn't it? And it's actually almost recognizing symptoms of something or how what that feeling is, what that tension is, and actually educating yourself that you don't just have it or not. There's, there's like a. There's a progression through it. I think thinking about, like times in my career. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not sure I'd ever say I've been burnt out per se, but where under extreme pressure and felt it. And I think that once you've experienced that, it's then learning from that and then being able to recognize it as the, as the feelings are coming back when you're getting. Getting pulled into something. And I think I do wonder how much comes down to experience as well. So you need to be able to. You need to be able to treat the symptoms and Hope that your people, as you said, you said earlier, you don't want, you want your people to feel empowered and do the things they like doing. But also how do you help somebody who's never experienced this feeling make sure they never do feel it? If you see what I mean. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And honestly, the, the symptoms are so like, I had no idea. Those are symptoms of burnout, right? Like fatigue or, you know, when you don't feel excited to go to work on Sunday. Like all like, there's literally like a number of properly studied symptoms of a burnout. Then you can, you can plot yourself on the scale where you are. But yeah, you usually tend to just be like, oh, it's just a bad day or it's just a bad week or whatever. Uh, but in reality the problem, it could be just a bad day, but the problem could be there that you just overlooking and ignoring it for longer will just lead to a bit worse result than, than if you were to catch it earlier. Like, I'm not an expert by any means, but I, but I was actually asked to talk at a conference once about resilience and it was more about, you know, how, how the world's changing and how we need to sort of lean into change. But actually, you know, I did burn out in one of my roles in my career when, and sorry to the listener if you've heard this before, but, you know, I. There was a fraud and it completely sort of changed. I had like three jobs in one one year. And I think there is something around experience when it comes to burnout. So if you've been through it once, you can definitely recognize the signs again. And I think that does build some, you know, some, you know, experience is a good thing. It does build some level of resilience. But what I don't like the idea of is that people go on resilience training to be more resilient because actually I don't think knowledge really works, you know, in that sense. It's like you, you have to be proactive to manage your mindset around things and you can't always do it by yourself as well. So it's not like a sort of self help book approach. Yeah, you know, you have to, you have to be much more kind of practical about it. But, but, and I'd never suggest that anyone should go through it, but I do think as someone who's been through a level of burnout in the past, you know, I'm much better at managing it now and I'm happy to talk about it and I'm happy to sort of try and manage it in other people as well. And I think we all need to as a topic for another time. But I think the remote world that we live in is also exacerbating it a bit because we're not kind of getting the same interaction relief, you know, sort of human side of things, you know, to enjoy our roles. But as I said, that's. But that's a whole nother thing. Just sort of linking it back to a previous podcast though. I think it was, was here that we were talking to last time around her personal board of directors and actually just sort of linking the two things through having that kind of like group of people around you as an individual that you can talk to, lean on actually is part of that coping, coping strategy and being able to identify those things. It's not a self help, it's not a self help thing but I think it's amazing that you bring it up to a wider community. The more people. We'll get your sister on. We'll get your sister on, you know, let's. And we will tell, you know, the millions who are listening every week, you know, share it on LinkedIn widely and yeah, make sure we're changing the world one guest at a time. It sounds like you're doing some great stuff. Sounds like you're going to be busy for the next couple of weeks, maybe a bit longer. But if people want to reach out, learn more about legendary and the work that you're doing, where can they find you? Galena Legendary Tech. So that's my email also. I'm on LinkedIn. Yeah, super happy to send some content details and it's legendary. Legendary, yes, yes, legendary. It's like legendary, but legendary. I see what you've done there. I was so proud of the name, Chris and I. No, I like it. Like it. I'm just, yeah, I just haven't got my teeth in. I know it's a bit difficult to pronounce right. It's memorable though. It's memorable. It's also because people see the ex. See the words spelt as legendary. That's what, that's. Even though you can see it and read it, it's like, oh, your brain tells you something different. Legendary. Legendary. I love it. I love it. See, the name of a startup is the least of your concerns. When you're building a startup, you honestly, like, I do not care what it's called, just let's make sure it works. Yeah, exactly. You know, it's not like Spotify really has anything to do with music as a name. Right. I'm sure there's lots. There's lots of other examples out there, but. Great. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Really great talking to you. And, you know, I suggest everybody, you know, go and check you out, and we wish you very well the next few weeks as well. Good luck, new parents, you know, all that DIY to do. Still enjoy that. So, Gina, thank you for today. I hope you have a good rest of the week. Thank you very much. You enjoy your travels. Chris, I know you're going away, so thank you for having me. Thank you, Mike. Thanks, everyone. And remember, it's not all about the numbers.