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AI Solutions Digital Labor

Cutting Through the AI Hype

Our CEO and Founder, Aaron Godby, recently joined Jeff Mains on the SaaS Fuel podcast to share how Green Irony is helping companies unlock the true value of AI—not as a buzzword, but as a tool for real business impact.

From the early days of mobile app development to building a Salesforce consultancy, Aaron has always been driven by one mission: deliver solutions that make businesses more effective. Now, that mission is amplified through AI—helping organizations rethink productivity, scale faster, and free up their teams to focus on meaningful work.

Real AI, Real Outcomes

On the podcast, Aaron explained how AI can take on repetitive, time-consuming tasks—like answering common support questions, retrieving data from multiple systems, or executing routine actions—so people can focus on the work that truly requires human insight.

A great example of this is the AI-powered support agents we built for UNC Charlotte. These agents give students and staff instant access to answers and resources, while allowing the IT team to focus on higher-value, complex support needs. The result? Faster resolution times, reduced ticket volume, and a better user experience across campus. Read the full case study here.

“For us, it’s never been about the latest AI model or chasing hype. It’s about identifying where people are spending time on low-value tasks and figuring out how AI can remove that friction.” – Aaron Godby

A Practical Approach to AI

Green Irony helps organizations apply AI where it drives outcomes—cost savings, revenue growth, and better customer experiences. Instead of getting lost in technical jargon or trendy tools, we focus on the real-world use cases that make an immediate impact.

Lessons from Building Green Irony

Aaron also shared the story of starting Green Irony with just $6,000 and scaling it as a bootstrapped company—learning sales, leadership, and growth strategies along the way. Those lessons shape how we partner with clients today:

  • Focus on value first, not shiny tools
  • Build trust and accountability into every engagement
  • Create solutions that deliver real outcomes, fast

Looking Ahead

AI is changing how businesses operate—and fast. But success won’t come from chasing the newest tool. It will come from thoughtful, practical applications of AI that solve real problems.

At Green Irony, we’re passionate about helping businesses turn AI into actual intelligence.

👉 Ready to see what AI can do for you? Let’s talk.

Catch the full episode of SaaS Fuel below and to hear Aaron’s full conversation and insights.

Categories
AI Solutions Digital Labor Digital Transformation

I Filed Over 50 Patents in 5 Years—and AI Is Supercharging My Creativity

I haven’t been writing much lately.

But I’ve been building.

Over the past six months, I’ve been heads-down rethinking our entire business through the lens of Generative AI. Not hypotheticals. Not slideware. Actual workflows, strategy, code, delivery.

Writing’s always been a passion of mine. But my real obsession has always been this:

How can we use technology to do things better, faster, smarter than before?

The bigger the impact, the more lit up I get. And AI?

It’s the most transformative shift I’ve seen in my entire career.

Creative Thinking Doesn’t Always Land—Until it Does

I’ve always had a knack for looking at problems differently—and not always in ways people immediately understand. I’ve said things in rooms that earned more WTF stares than nods. Like the time I told a group of execs their Salesforce implementation wasn’t working because it ignored how Marc Benioff actually designed the platform to be used.

Didn’t land. But I wasn’t wrong.

That same pattern of pushing boundaries is what led me to average 10 patent filings a year at IBM. It’s what pushed me into mobile. Then into Salesforce and MuleSoft. And now?

Generative AI.

Love at First Prompt

So The first time I opened ChatGPT, I didn’t give it a sophisticated prompt. I just poked at it. And I immediately knew:

This wasn’t like anything I’d touched before.

Unlike traditional Machine Learning (ML) models or Salesforce Einstein, it didn’t need perfectly structured data. It didn’t need months of training cycles.

It just… knew.

It could reason. It could write. It could follow your thinking and even challenge it when needed. With the right context, it could co-create.

AI isn’t replacing creativity—it’s accelerating it.

Since then, it’s helped me do just about everything better:

  • Strategize faster
  • Write cleaner
  • Pitch sharper
  • Rethink delivery entirely

It’s like having an infinite brainstorm partner that never gets tired, never loses context, and never asks for a meeting.

Clearing Bottlenecks at the Speed of Thought

As a founder, my most limited resource isn’t money. It’s time.

Before AI, the thinking part—the storytelling, the big-picture planning—was the bottleneck. Not anymore. I’m shipping ideas faster, experimenting more freely, and scaling myself into parts of the business I never had the bandwidth to touch.

No other invention I’ve seen has unlocked that kind of leverage. Period.

We’ve Been Building Toward This for a While

People assume this all started when AI became the hot new thing. It didn’t.

At Green Irony, we’ve been building toward this moment for years:

📎 In It’s Groundhog Day, I warned that companies would trip over their own systems just like they did during the digital transformation wave—because integration was an afterthought.

📎 In AI-Enabled Applicant Screening, we showed how to combine OpenAI and MuleSoft to streamline real-time HR decisions.

📎 In AI Readiness and Mobile, I drew a straight line from mobile disruption to what’s coming now.

These weren’t side projects.

They were signs of what was coming.

We didn’t just start talking about AI when it hit the news—we were already shipping.

The Reinvention Is Here

This isn’t just a pivot. It’s a total reinvention.

We’re rebuilding how we deliver value. How we structure teams. How we partner with clients. Everything we touch now runs through the question:

“How can intelligent agents work alongside humans to 10x impact?”

And we’re starting to see answers.

You’ll hear more soon—about new offerings, smarter systems, and customer stories that show what happens when you fuse execution with intelligence.

We’re not just watching this wave.

We’re riding it.

And we’re inviting our clients and partners to do it with us.

Categories
Agentforce Digital Labor Digital Transformation Higher Education Implementation MuleSoft Salesforce Strategy

Higher Education’s Efficiency Crisis has a Technology Solution

I’m very passionate about Higher Education and its missions and outcomes because they’ve been really impactful in my own life and in the lives of loved ones.

I was always passionate about technology and did what I could to learn about it, but I didn’t have access to the resources of wealthier families from bigger cities nor the internet as we know it today. So getting the opportunity to attend a high-end computer engineering institution like Virginia Tech literally changed my life by getting me an opportunity to be a developer and architect at IBM in the middleware space.

My sister also does a lot of great work in infectious diseases at UNC Chapel Hill and they do really meaningful work that benefits everyone on the planet. But over the last few months, they are under unprecedented scrutiny to make massive changes, basically overnight. I know from personal experience that changing this rapidly is monumentally difficult for a startup like Green Irony that grew from one person to thirty in five years, let alone a massive organization like a 30,000 student university and research institution.

Higher education and non-profit organizations face an unprecedented budgetary challenge and these economic drivers force Higher Ed to prioritize at both strategic and tactical levels. And technology is the key to success.

The way technology is applied in these institutions resembles what I saw in industry in the 2010-2015 timeframe. By rapidly bringing the technology to what we see in the present day, Higher Education and non-profit organizations can equip themselves to navigate these budgetary challenges without sacrificing their missions.

Current State of Higher Ed Technology

Higher education has long relied on niche solutions and entrenched education-focused technology providers. While these providers have deep sector expertise, their technology stacks remain outdated, rigid, and cumbersome. Unlike commercial industries, which adopt at-scale, flexible technology solutions to streamline complex operations and manage data and systems at scale, higher ed institutions are frequently stuck managing fragmented, siloed systems that drive inefficiency at scale.

This situation is highly problematic because it spreads labor resources across a ton of different platforms while also making it more challenging to deliver impactful technology solutions.

In short, it costs way more to get lesser outcomes that take way longer to deliver.

This at scale problem surfaces itself with numerous symptoms. A few examples:

  • Disjointed communications with students or other key constituents in the form of text messaging and emails
  • Labor-intensive, time-consuming support services for financial aid, donations,  enrollment, IT helpdesk, and other table stakes areas of student success
  • Inability to understand the student and proactively detect issues despite having the information to do so
  • Working out of multiple systems that have disconnected copies of the same data, resulting in lots of error-prone data entry for key personnel
  • Large IT investments with lengthy implementation timelines and unclear ROI
  • Multiple copies of the same system (e.g. Salesforce) across departments, disabling their ability to deliver value at scale

These problems are all symptoms of the same root cause: not leveraging IT investments in a modern way that meets the needs of today’s constituents.

And this should come as no surprise: higher education and non-profits exist to deliver on their missions, like research and educational outcomes. They are not in the business of digital transformation.

But these problems were all solved commercially in the 2010-2020 timeframe, and Higher Education’s problems are exactly the same as those. So why not solve them in a proven way?

Using Technology More Effectively

So where do you turn? A stack comprised of #1 and #2 below was heavily leveraged by for-profit organizations who faced these challenges a decade ago. #3 is a new entry that simply must be considered because of its stunning outcomes:

  1. A flexible system of engagement and marketing platform (e.g. Salesforce) that enables you to address high-impact problems for constituents
  2. An integration platform (e.g. MuleSoft) that allows you to make your systems talk to one another, allows them to be accessible by AI Agents, and enables you to perform a smooth migration from legacy systems
  3. A platform for leveraging digital labor (e.g. Agentforce) that enables you to fine-tune AI Agents to help you accomplish tasks like student support services more easily and effectively so you can concentrate on your mission

Modern platforms like Salesforce are incredibly capable of delivering exponential operational efficiencies, higher constituent satisfaction, and helping do more with less. But they must be applied correctly in order to deliver value. So you need to make sure you have a very clear, granular plan to deliver value to the organization that starts to compound over time. And you need the right team to execute the plan.

I have boatloads of examples of how this type of thing impacts organizations at scale (positive and negative), but I don’t want to make this blog waaaaaay too long. I’ll share that in another one. The key takeaway is that it’s important to have a really good plan that lets your technology investment grow more lucrative over time through economies of scale with a skilled technology team to execute on that plan.

If you do this correctly, you can be like UNC Charlotte, who is experiencing around 50% deflection of IT cases with a simple Agentforce implementation. Or Spirit Airlines, who saw a 5X+ increase in time to value of IT investments after an API strategy unified its legacy systems from silos to a comprehensive solution.

Conclusions

Higher education must embrace robust, commercially proven technologies that offer scalability, integration, and flexibility. Migration and implementation may initially seem daunting, but the alternative—clinging to outdated systems—guarantees continued inefficiency and escalating costs. Numerous high-impact outcomes result in massive budget savings:

  • Digital labor to enable human labor to focus on higher impact work
  • Technology-driven efficiency gains the entire connected campus
  • Technology investment license cost savings
  • Technology investment labor savings

The technology approaches I see in Higher Ed and non-profit resemble those I saw in for-profit organizations in the 2010-2015 timeframe. By catching up, they can realize massive budget savings and increase focus on their outcomes that matter.

As I said in the opener, I’m passionate about Higher Ed and non-profits and I’d love to help. If you’re a higher education leader wondering how technology systems can help with your current crunch, drop me a line.

Categories
Agentforce AI Solutions Digital Labor Digital Transformation

Digital Labor’s Secret Weapon

DISCLAIMER: This blog is about the art of the possible given publicly available information at companies and as such is not representative of any forward-looking plans of any of these organizations. 

Digital Labor is here and I’ve already witnessed first hand the incredible results that it can deliver at customers like UNC Charlotte.

Most organizations are coming to realize that lack of AI adoption would put them at a competitive disadvantage unlike any they’ve faced before, so they know they have to move quickly. But they’re struggling to come up with executable plans because like an alien invasion in a Hollywood blockbuster film, AI Agents seemingly arrived overnight. So IT organizations are scrambling for answers; they need to better understand how to prepare their organizations to be competitive in an Agentified world.

We’re on the precipice of a huge technological revolution, and IT knows that if they don’t figure it out quickly enough, their organizations will be at risk of getting left in the dust.

So what is the #1 thing they could be doing RIGHT NOW to prepare their future digital workforce for success?

It’s Integration. Again.

MuleSoft Founder Ross Mason had a really interesting blog recently on the future of APIs and how the AI of the future would interact with today’s systems in the most effective way. It went through several sophisticated options aimed at solving tomorrow’s problems. 

But many customers Green Irony talks to don’t yet have a firm grasp on how to scale out their integration investments in a reliable, predictable way.

And this is a big problem for AI Agents. While you can put them to work on simple (by today’s standards, anyway!) tasks like answering questions accurately based on the web and a knowledge base, to truly put them to work for us, we need integration, and a lot of it needs to be real time.

And by the way, you also need to think about securing agents and the whole DevOps lifecycle by making sure they DON’T have access to data and actions they should NOT have access to. But that one’s a topic for another blog.

So you need scalable integration. Again.

There’s not an easy way out of this. 

Salesforce’s market leading agent platform, Agentforce, allows an agent to be grounded on data from sources like a knowledge base, Salesforce on-platform data, and data imported into its data lakehouse, Data Cloud. Fully informed by this data, the Agent is then allowed to perform actions either with on-platform Salesforce flows or through MuleSoft APIs. Because of this, your

In other words, your Digital Labor cannot solve the swivel chair problem. It needs APIs to access actions outside of the Salesforce platform. An agent stuck inside Salesforce’s blue cloud is much less capable than one that can interact with your entire company to perform value-added, cross-system tasks. 

Integrations must also be very well-tested and hardened, because a buggy API in the hands of a workforce of Digital Agents is a scary proposition.

So now is the time to REALLY address integration because even an army of digital agents won’t be able to get to work without it.

Companies like Spirit Airlines are prepared for an Agentified future.

As you can see in their video success story, Spirit has systems integration figured out in a way that is almost unheard of in an industry with so many legacy technology point solutions. Their systems work in harmony to enable seamless delivery of IT investments without having to reinvent the integration wheel with every project. They are a living, breathing case study for how to use MuleSoft effectively.

In the past, this investment enabled them to rapidly execute on IT investments like a brand new loyalty program, a legacy chatbot shootout, and operational tooling to turn their planes around more quickly. In today’s world, it means that they could stand up a platform like Agentforce easier than any company I’ve ever worked with and start realizing immediate, game-changing value from Digital Labor.

What can you learn from Spirit’s integration approach?

Spirit saw reliable, real-time APIs as an investment in everything else they wanted to do for their business using technology.

In 2020, they knew that integration was holding them back from value realization. So they rolled up their sleeves and addressed the integration challenge head-on, designing a scalable network of APIs to serve as the backbone for all future projects.

And there’s nothing stopping you from taking a page from their playbook. Every business has a set of core systems and actions within those systems that are really important to its overall function, and if these systems work in harmony, then AI Agents can leverage them to do work more efficiently than ever before.

But without clean, reliable access to these systems, you can’t train Digital Labor to work for you.

So get started today on putting Digital Labor to work for your business. Talk to us about how.