AI’s S-Curve: When the Hype Consolidates

00:00:07 Mark Smith
Welcome to AI Unfiltered, the show that cuts through the hype and brings you the authentic side of artificial intelligence. I'm your host, Mark Smith, and in each episode, I sit down one-on-one with AI innovators and industry leaders from around the world. Together, we explore real-world AI applications, share practical insights, and discuss how businesses are implementing responsible, ethical, and trustworthy AI. Let's dive into the conversation and see how AI can transform your business today.Welcome back to the AI Unfiltered Show. Today we're joined by our guest coming to us from California in the United States. All links for anything we discuss will be in the show notes for this episode. With that, Jeff, welcome to the show.

00:00:57 Jeff Mahony
Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure, Mark.

00:00:59 Mark Smith
Hey, great to have you on. And I particularly, I always like to start with food, family, and fun. What do they mean to you?

00:01:04 Jeff Mahony
Food, family, fun, love, family. I have five sons.

00:01:08 Mark Smith
Wow.

00:01:09 Jeff Mahony
My oldest is 30, my youngest is 21. They're starting to develop their own families. So very, very excited to potentially be a grandfather.

00:01:18 Mark Smith
Nice.

00:01:19 Jeff Mahony
Food, simple. Chicken nuggets and pizza.

00:01:23 Mark Smith
Nice.

00:01:24 Jeff Mahony
I grew up in a very, let's say, unwealthy background. So to me, it's food is a staple. It's not necessarily something that I focus on. And then fun for me, it's getting grounded outdoors. How do I actually get somewhere where I can touch the ground?

00:01:44 Mark Smith
And is that more mountaineering, forestry?

00:01:47 Jeff Mahony
Yeah, it's a lot of high desert, a lot of forest, a lot of backcountry hiking, those kinds of things.

00:01:57 Mark Smith
Nice.

00:01:58 Jeff Mahony
Yeah.

00:01:58 Mark Smith
We're at the early start of March, 2026. I feel so much has happened already this year. What's your lens on things? As in right now, what's top of mind for you? What do you see is in the roadmap for your year ahead?

00:02:13 Jeff Mahony
Well, top of mind for me might be a little different than my roadmap. So maybe those are two questions. Top of mind for me is I'm waiting for... the traditional S-curve in the AI market to hit. So all verticals have an S-curve. There's some kind of dip somewhere where we can see a consolidation and we start to see some really, really good and useful products out there, secure, regulatory, abiding, the whole thing. But right now we're not there. And so I'm waiting. I'm wondering, you know, I've been around for a while, wondering how long that's going to take before we see that sort of consolidation or that dip in the S-curve because That'll be a really exciting time for AI.

00:02:55 Mark Smith
Yeah. And Gen. AI, what are we, three, four years in now?

00:02:59 Jeff Mahony
Yeah. It might take a little longer. This is a very sophisticated platform that we're trying to build from something that I don't think I've seen really in the tech space. You're looking at a product set that could run away, right?It's based on the flaws of those that are I think we're using the word agency. To me, it's biased. So our little flaws, and this is where I sort of come from. So this is my fear, but there's a positive to this. My fear is very simple. Each of us has built-in flaws. I've been in the tech space forever. I've seen coders skip over buttons that they know are going to error. They don't even know they're doing it. So those subconscious things are in all of us. We all have those flaws, but our flaws don't touch too many people. How many friends do you have? How many colleagues do you have? That penetration, if you will, that flaw into society is very limited. But if I'm embedding it into an AI, if I've somehow biased that model, now my flaw could touch millions of people and it won't be so innocuous. So there's a workaround for that, of course, right? And that's larger teams. Get some folks to collaborate, make sure that you have experience and inexperience, right? Some of these unseasoned professionals in the space are spectacularly intelligent. They have some wonderful, amazing ideas. They don't know where the cliffs are. They don't know where they're going to fall off the edge, right? But that seasoned person does. So to me, I'm always looking for a mix. I want A lot of seasoned people, a lot of innovative ideas coming in. There's an energy to the younger folk in our generations that sometimes we lose as the sort of older generations, if you will.So I think the fix is going to be those collaborative, larger teams.And that will automatically happen at that S-curve. So I'm excited for that. In terms of what we're looking forward to, we see this new data warehousing system we call blockchain, distributed, et cetera, immutable. There's a lot of value to us. I see it as a new data warehousing system that can be used virtually anywhere. So we're looking for ways to bring the next billion users onto this, right? The days of SQL where I could change that at will. I can hack into a system. If you've been around for even a short period of time, you can rewrite all kinds of records in SQL. You can change financial records, everything. Blockchain doesn't allow that. So there's an interesting trade-off that's going on right now that I'm excited about. And that's how do you get that slow-moving blockchain that has that benefit of immutability into that fast-paced world that we call the banking and financial systems? while still maintaining the value points or benefits of the blockchain. So I'm excited about that. And that's the kind of work that we're trying to do is create that next generation that balances that immutability and some of the real benefits that blockchain brings with the speed that's necessary to actually interoperate on a real-world setting.

00:06:26 Mark Smith
Is blockchain all around authenticity?

00:06:29 Jeff Mahony
I think for me, it's around authenticity born through transparency.

00:06:34 Mark Smith
Yeah.

00:06:35 Jeff Mahony
Right, if I might. So I've got some friends in my little world, right? Some are wealthy, some are not, but everybody has the same problem. One of my friends is this, a female. Now, she balances her checkbook every month with a pencil to make sure that it's correct, right? One day she comes to me and now I had made her the original Word document forms.I'm like, hey, here's something you can use to actually make this a little bit faster. So she and I have some sort of rapport when it comes to that. She says, I can't find $67. I said, whoa, well, call your bank. And she goes, I did. And they told me I'm wrong. I'm not wrong. And I believe her. And so the transparency comes in. I said, well, that's kind of the last word. But if this were on a blockchain, I could find 10,000 other people to say, nope, she's right and you're wrong, bank. And that is authenticity born from transparency.

00:07:41 Mark Smith
Does an organization like a bank though, in their size, do they ever want to be held to account? So in other words, would they want to implement technology that holds them to account?

00:07:51 Jeff Mahony
How about do voting systems want to be held to account? Yeah.

00:07:55 Mark Smith
You know what blows my mind about the U.S. voting system? In our country, we've never had the concept of being able to vote without being able to identify yourself.

00:08:04 Jeff Mahony
Of course.

00:08:06 Mark Smith
It blows my mind that that's still a discussion point in the U.S., it seems.

00:08:10 Jeff Mahony
It's not only a discussion point, it's a point of serious contention. by neighbors. You might have somebody that's south of you and north of you on your street who is a totally different opinion. Now, fortunately, we live in a society in the United States and most of us in the rest of the world where we get to talk about these things, where the men and women in the armed forces have given us that right. And so we should exercise that. I'm open to the debate, but I have to admit on that particular topic, yeah, I'd really like to see a valid vote.

00:08:49 Mark Smith
Yeah, and why wouldn't you take something like that, you really do want a valid vote? I mean, that lends itself to blockchain like never before.

00:08:57 Jeff Mahony
Of course, right? So what we're finding is not only in the United States, but everywhere, because we have looked at this, because we do work with the sovereign, agencies out there, these big governmental agencies, et cetera. And you're finding double voting. You're finding people who are dead, who are voting. You're finding all kinds of anomalies in there. And it's difficult to point them out. What you end up with is the sort of same framework that my female friend ended up with. Well, it's your word against their word. On a blockchain, it would be very clear what the anomaly was.

00:09:37 Mark Smith
When I first looked at blockchain, man, maybe eight years ago, when I really like got my head round it, as you do, right? I wanted to understand it. And I just saw so many applications, manufacturing, I just saw, imagine me able to prove that what I'm eating came from X origin, right? The power of that. And it was funny, my wife and I were just having a discussion. She was doing a thing with India, a business trade thing with our countries. And Indian people in the middle class are really hyper-focused on authenticity of the food chain. And I was like, in my mind, this was yesterday, I was like, and I didn't know that I was going to have this discussion with you today. And the detail of it was, my gosh, blockchain solves that.

00:10:30 Jeff Mahony
It does. And you know what it does for every industry, right? Everything has some kind of raw material that's built into a finished good. That's where it applies. So you're talking about virtually every vertical that we have where it could apply. But corruption is another point, Mark, if I might make. You have an intermediary in here who is, to coin your word, unfiltered. who is doing whatever in the heck they want to do, and there's nobody who can see what it is that they're doing. So when you look at corruption at the sovereign level, when you look at it just in, say, commercial applications, et cetera, it's that intermediary that is the source of virtually all corruption. When we look at some of the sovereign states that we're working with that have a socialized medicine, for example, They have a simple problems in their scheduling systems. Oh, you'd like to have access to the socialized medicine? No problem. That'll be a year and a half before we can give you an appointment. Oh, unless you can bring a white envelope, then I have an appointment for you tomorrow. that's a small intermediary. That's a person, right? Now think about an organization who's an intermediary. Think about ride shares, for example. I should be able to get a cheap ride where I want to go, the best possible price through market conditioning. That driver should be able to get the best possible price, but yet we have intermediaries that sit in between jacking up the price, creating a margin, not necessarily connecting the right people, but connecting the ones that are profitable to them. So I won't say that they're corrupt, but it's a point where we have an intermediary in the mix that is otherwise. otherwise preventing the best possible market prices. There's a blockchain again. There's all kinds of places we could use that.

00:12:28 Mark Smith
But, and I go back to what I started with blockchain. I feel that the people that should implement it know that they will be exposed by the implementation if they carry on their behaviors. And I mean, look at it in any part of society. In New Zealand, there's a big outcry over finding that our chocolate, which had always been dairy milk made chocolate from a cow, the milk came from a cow, was to be found that it came out from palm oil out of Brazil. Right? The market cried out about it. Now, if you had blockchain running on that, those type of corruptions in our food chain, the market would respond way strongly. So why would a manufacturer put blockchain in? Because It exposes them. Now, it also allows them to identify risk in their own supply chain with it. But I feel like you take this to any level, take it at a government level, your elections, whatever it is, banking, they don't want. I think they would rather the citizen stayed in the dark, the consumer stayed in the dark, that they didn't get exposed to if you like, the integrity and the truth of that supply chain.

00:13:43 Jeff Mahony
And I would agree with you, Mark, in many ways. I think, though, you will find channels, if you will, for government deployment of services that lend themselves really well to that immutability, and the government has a desire to actually create that benefit. So some examples that we've run into right now in in the Middle East and in Southern Asia, those kinds of areas, you're having some challenges. I won't get into the political nature of those. I don't want to take sides per se. I don't know enough to actually take a side. Having said that, those folks we've noticed have been experiencing corruption in their visa system. And they're finding terrorists on their soil. And a blockchain would prevent that.

00:14:32 Mark Smith
Yeah, totally. Another great use case for it, right?

00:14:36 Jeff Mahony
Yeah, so there's a place where they're not so worried about having that visibility, that transparency, that authenticity. They want that, in fact, so they can actually make sure that they're protecting and securing their borders. when you start to see competitive nature in new business arrivals, right? So folks that are entering that market, let's take your chocolate market, for example. All right. What would be a competitive advantage to cut through the noise of somebody who might have been there for 150 years who's got a control in the market? Well, we'll show you in the end where we got this, right.

00:15:10 Mark Smith
Exactly.

00:15:12 Jeff Mahony
Okay. I don't know if that makes sense, but yeah, then there's, I mean, there's so many places where I can see Again, a lot of places where it's not going to work, where we're going to have resistance and friction, but eventually there'll be calls to action from the consumer base, the citizenship base that's going to say, we want this or we're not taking your product.

00:15:31 Mark Smith
Yeah, exactly. People will vote with their wallets. Where does AI into the mix with blockchain? Like, could it really be the unlock to get it applied at scale?

00:15:44 Jeff Mahony
I think it can be. I think today it's challenging. And again, back to that sort of flaws that are built in. We're seeing agents being deployed in our own businesses and in the enterprises that we touch. We're seeing agents being deployed to do simple things like read your emails. What we're noticing though is, yeah, you're giving me a great summary, but you're missing key points. And we're finding actually a reduction in productivity by those people that are using this. So the case for using AI was to increase productivity.It was to give me a summary, give me something actionable out of these. What we're finding is it's missing a lot of the actionable steps. So, you know, Mark, I'm old enough here where I remember speed reading courses. You might not remember those.

00:16:34 Mark Smith
Yeah, totally.

00:16:36 Jeff Mahony
And I'm reading 50,000 words a minute and on and on and on, right? And it was such a moment of pride. And then you realize it only works on fiction, right? or anything that's got some meat to it, a scientific article or anything along those lines, it was worthless, right? So finally, the same thing essentially happening in the e-mail with agents, right? Where else is it happening? Where are you missing things that you otherwise wouldn't have, right? And it harkens back to the days when we had personal assistants, right? Those personal assistants were effectively learning how to be seasoned. They were watching a seasoned person and do something, and ideally, that personal assistant grew, they came talented, they came intelligent, but they didn't come with seasoning, and they grew. And what we use our personal assistants for where we're using AI agents is to say, What should I pay attention to? What e-mail, whatever document came in do you think I care about? But then you'd go do the deep dive. You wouldn't let that person give you the synopsis and then act from it. You would actually take that deep dive, okay? So what that person did for you was an immense help to you in whittling down what you needed to pay attention to. But that's not how we're using AI agents right now. There's a lot of young folk in the mix that are using them to do it, right? And we don't, you can't have that, so. I think right now, to answer your question more directly, you're starting to see that movement of AI. It's not quite ready, but it will be ready soon. Layer that on top of a blockchain, and now you can do data analysis. Let me check through the chain instead of having a human going through a security audit. Let me go through this audit. I, for example, was talking to the oil industry just a few months ago. Turns out We're learning that the oil industry is losing a large percentage of the oil on the ocean. Nobody knows how and where. I suspect that players do know how and where. But the blockchain would give them end to end. But the myriad, just sheer volume of shipments that are made, both oil and any other commodity like that, That's where an AI can sift through all that, see patterns that we wouldn't recognize, see patterns that maybe we would, but they can do it much faster and with more volume less data. So that's going to be the first wave.

00:19:22 Mark Smith
So with the oil, you're saying that's been siphoned off somewhere along the way?

00:19:27 Jeff Mahony
Somewhere, right? So we're seeing this happen. The big carriers out there, the oil companies don't necessarily move their own oil.

00:19:36 Mark Smith
Yeah, exactly.

00:19:37 Jeff Mahony
They depend on an infrastructure that's logistically been around for decades or hundreds of years to move that oil. Yeah. It's not making it. No one knows where, right?

00:19:49 Mark Smith
That's so interesting. You know, you talked about the S-curve. Where do you think we're on it? And do you think 2026 we're going to get to that sweet spot that you discussed?

00:19:59 Jeff Mahony
No, I don't think we're going to get there in 26, 27 potentially. I think what's hindering us, though, Mark, is we could be there. But what's starting to hinder us in the S-curve is the regulatory environments. The regulatory environments are necessary. I'm 100% believer in accountability and creating a framework that we can all work from. But they vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and sometimes they're conflicting. And so when you're talking about worldwide ubiquitous deployments that actually bridge borders, which is the kind of world that we live in. Now you have a deployment that works really well in a particular region because you've built it from the ground up, hopefully out of security from the ground up, but also dealing with the compliance and regulatory issues. And now you find it being used, not necessarily because you pushed it, but because it was adopted by a consumer base in another region and you're not ready, right? And now you have some challenges there. So until those frameworks are more coalesced until they're more collaborative in nature. And in fact, I'll make a specific point, until they stop dealing with processes and are more focused on outcomes, you're not going to actually have the opportunity for that S-curve to dip and then see the consolidation that we normally see. So I think we're being hindered and helped. by the regulatory world, but there does need to be a bit more maturing of the regulatory environment so that we as developers can actually have a framework that we can use worldwide.

00:21:30 Mark Smith
Yeah, interesting. So what's your hopes for 2026?

00:21:36 Jeff Mahony
My hopes for 26 is obviously stability everywhere. I like to see political stability. I'm a firm believer, Mark, in the idea that talent is equally distributed. But opportunity isn't. So we want to see opportunity equally distributed to us. That means FinTech available to everyone. That means what we call high net worth products. Products are available only to the high net worth citizens of our planet should be available to everybody. And so the way that we are seeing the world is a bit more altruistic, but for the first time in history, we have an actual tool that we can use to create that equalization of opportunity. So I'm hoping in 26, that by the end of 26, we're starting to see real layer ones out there, layer one blockchains with actual AI built into this for meaningful use that creates A ubiquity and delivery of fintech.

00:22:37 Mark Smith
Yeah, so good. What are the typical customers you work with?

00:22:41 Jeff Mahony
We mostly work with sovereign entities. So we're working at a very large scale across the sovereign entity base. Having said that, we do believe in the commercial base as well. So that is a secondary market for us, admittedly. But we want to start to see some real shifts in value points to the citizens at large. And then we can add in commercial products that we don't necessarily create. but that we can actually help back and create that transparency and authenticity that you're talking about. So we want to see that migration happen sooner rather than later, but first we're focused on the sovereign solutions. It's our goal to help as many people as we can. well poised to do that.

00:23:32 Mark Smith
Yeah, awesome. If people want to carry this discussion on with you, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?

00:23:39 Jeff Mahony
Well, they can reach us at right.io, R-Y-T.io. I'm at admin at right.io. I like to take that spot just so, because I know people, when they can't find somebody, they just ping admin or support or whatever.

00:23:57 Mark Smith
Yeah. I like it.

00:24:00 Jeff Mahony
That'll be the place you can find me.

00:24:02 Mark Smith
Excellent. Jeff, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a, it's an interesting discussion.

00:24:07 Jeff Mahony
Mark, I appreciate the time. I really do.

00:24:10 Mark Smith
Yeah, thank you. You've been listening to AI Unfiltered with me, Mark Smith. If you enjoyed this episode and want to share a little kindness, please leave a review. To learn more or connect with today's guest, check out the show notes. Thank you for tuning in. I'll see you next time where we'll continue to uncover AI's true potential one conversation at a time.