# Kognitos at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023: Binny Gill Fireside Chat

> TechCrunch Disrupt 2023: Kognitos CEO Binny Gill and Century Supply Chain CIO Jim McCullen on humanizing computers — and why supply chain finally has a tool for its document chaos.

**Page**: https://www.kognitos.com/videos/kognitos-at-techcrunch-disrupt-2023-binny-gills-fireside-chat-with-jim-mccullen/
**Watch on YouTube**: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8xBRMIPvlA
**Length**: 21m 17s

## About this fireside chat

Recorded on the TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 stage, this 21-minute conversation features Kognitos founder and CEO Binny Gill in conversation with Jim McCullen, CIO at Century Supply Chain Solutions. The discussion ranges from the limits of traditional automation to the very specific pain of running global logistics — and what changes when business users can talk to the machine in English.

## Binny's framing — the “dark ages” argument

- **0.5% literacy**: only one in 200 people in the world can teach a computer something new — “the dark ages” despite 100% computer dependence.
- **Wrong direction**: seven decades of trying to teach humans to speak machine languages has not worked. The fix is to train machines to speak human.
- **The pilot's checklist analogy**: a pilot's flight plan is short and clear (in English). The troubleshooting manual handles the infinite edge cases. Today's RPA tries to encode the troubleshooting manual into the flight plan — which is why business automations get more fragile, not less, over time.

## Jim's pain — supply chain reality

- **No equivalent of FlightAware for ships**: kayak.com gives every airline the same answer for a flight. Three logistics sites can give three different answers for the same vessel.
- **Thousands of vendors, hundreds of carriers**: every bill of lading is technically a standard document, but every carrier has a different variant. Straight templated extraction breaks.
- **Offshore document teams**: until now, the answer has been humans in Asia reading the documents manually. Generative AI is the first realistic alternative.

## Where Binny and Jim agree

- Developers should handle the “happy path” (the first 80%). The complex last 10-20% (every edge case) should be handled by the business user in English, during runtime, with the platform learning as it goes.
- IT keeps governance, security, and the connection layer; business users own the process logic and the exception responses.
- The shift from punch cards → assembly → symbolic languages → today's automation languages is followed by a jump to natural language as the new automation language. Kognitos is built for that jump.

## The closing prediction

Binny closes by saying AI will accelerate innovation by at least 100x because today's 25 million developers are the bottleneck for all innovation. When anyone with an idea can “program” a computer the same way they'd brief a teammate, that bottleneck disappears — but only if the resulting program is human-readable, auditable, and runs on a deterministic interpreter rather than relying on a black-box LLM at runtime.

## FAQs

**Q: Who are the speakers in this TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 fireside?**

Binny Gill, founder and CEO of Kognitos, and Jim McCullen, CIO of Century Supply Chain Solutions. Jim has 30+ years of experience building IT systems for global supply chain and logistics.


**Q: What's the pilot's checklist analogy Binny uses?**

A pilot's flight plan is short and human-readable. The troubleshooting manual handles every exception — engine failure, weather, “land on the Hudson” — without the flight plan having to enumerate them. Traditional RPA tries to merge the troubleshooting manual into the flight plan, which is why developer-built workflows grow more fragile over time.


**Q: Why is supply chain especially hard to automate?**

Jim cites three reasons: thousands of vendors and hundreds of carriers all using slightly different variants of a standard document like a bill of lading; no equivalent of kayak.com for ships (three sites give three different ETAs for the same vessel); and the historical workaround — large offshore document-processing teams — doesn't scale.


**Q: What does Kognitos let developers and business users do differently?**

Developers build the happy path — the first 80% — in a platform that produces an English-readable program. Business users own the last 20%, the edge cases, resolving exceptions in plain English during runtime. IT keeps governance, security, and the integration layer.


**Q: What's Binny's prediction for the next 3-5 years?**

AI will accelerate innovation by at least 100x. The world's ~25 million developers are the bottleneck for all software innovation today. When natural-language interpreters let anyone with an idea "program" a computer — and the resulting code stays human-readable and auditable — that bottleneck disappears.