Rich has been a Customer Success Manager Level IV for Salesforce for 13 years—and he's panicking. He heard a cable bill got renegotiated by a robot and now he's convinced the robots are coming for his job. Paul unpacks that with him and helps him see that there could be new ways of working and doing things for him and his team, and then Paul and Rich demonstrate the absolute state of the art in AI technology.

Whoa, Rich.

Whoa.

Man, you look exhausted.

I'm, having a hard day.

I'm having a hard hard day.

What's wrong?

You sick?

What happened?

No, I'm fine.

I just, as, as a leader?

Yeah.

My career is

Oh, well, what is your career exactly?

I am.

The customer success manager, level four, Roman numeral four

for Salesforce for 13 years.

I manage a team of people that make sure our clients are happy, and I'm done.

I'm done.

13 years of building knowledge and expertise swirling down the drain.

this because people finally figured out that Salesforce is unusable?

Okay.

that's not why.

I'll tell you why I turn on the internet box like two days ago

and someone wrote a robot, I, I don't even if I'm saying it right.

They wrote a robot that like renegotiated his cable bill.

So he had this thing message, customer service at like Comcast or some nonsense,

and he starts arguing about his bill.

I don't think it was even founded cause it was just a, it was just a machine.

It was ai.

and

I think another robot was responding from like call center place.

And the two robots were talking to each other and the guy's bill went down like

28 bucks and I was like, oh my God.

We're done.

I'm done.

My team is done.

I work so hard to make sure customers are happy.

I, I solve problems for them.

I, I, I unlock data that they put in the wrong place.

Sometimes I reach out.

And I'm done.

Why?

Because you can spit eight words onto the internet and it, it comes back with a Bob

Ross painting of like unicorns dancing.

Rich, Rich, calm down.

You need some advice.

So now, all right, Rich, let's talk about this.

Let me give you some living in the world of AI career.

First of all, let's talk.

Let me, let me tell you about your job today.

You tell me if I'm right.

You're a customer success manager, level four.

You've been at Salesforce for 13 years.

You run a team, let's say five people, could be more.

Yes,

and over the years many companies have bought

installations of Salesforce.

It's a tool that lets them manage customer relationships, canned band boards.

They move cards around and they say, this one looks like they might actually buy.

That's what Salesforce does.

So you sell that to

does a lot of things, but yeah, that's

that's the core.

Let's start there.

That's where you started and now

started.

And we sell all kinds of clouds.

There's a lot of flavors of clouds for Salesforce.

I don't want to get, this isn't a Salesforce

podcast.

Doctor's office, not-for-profits, whatever.

And so what happens is you would walk in and you'd say, Hey, what do you need?

You need Salesforce?

And they'd be like, whoa, yeah, I didn't even get to say anything yet.

And you'd go, no, no, you need Salesforce.

And then you would write up a contract and they would sign it, and then

people would bring, they'd get a login to Salesforce, all sorts of stuff.

That's what you do.

And they would say, look, we're having trouble scheduling dental

appointments in our health portal.

And you'd go, Mike over here is gonna help you out.

Yeah.

And sometimes we share our screen, sometimes we send them a demo.

Sometimes we just write up what they should do step by step.

We, we make sure people can use the tool.

And what's been what you're worried about is that now a

computer can come in, index all the content that anyone's ever used.

you seen this shit?

Yes, I have.

We're gonna talk about that in one second.

But you're worried about the fact that somebody can come in and say, I

need help with dental appointments.

Can you give it to me in the form of a video tutorial?

Absolutely.

And now the computer replies and says, I got it all right here for you.

And it's pretty.

It.

It's pretty good.

It's pretty good.

I, I, I mean, love my team.

I've seen this chat, G P T thing, it writes better than like half of my team.

That's true.

It does.

It's pretty good.

Punctuation's.

Good.

Full sentences.

Looks legit.

We're done.

Dude, this thing came out like Wednesday.

So look, let's see how bad this is.

I just went over to chat.openai.com/chat, and I typed in "write me a customer

success script for a user who's having trouble logging into Salesforce."

Rich, let's take a look at that.

Okay.

Here's how it starts.

"Hi there.

I'm sorry to hear that you're having trouble logging in the Salesforce"

empathy.

"Can you please provide me with your username or email address

so I can look into this for you?"

Then it, it sort of continues and it actually tells you all about how to

make sure you're using the correct login URL that you're entering your

username to clear your cookies,

forgot password,

all that stuff.

It's pretty thorough, pretty good.

This is not a bad customer service interaction.

Not only did it do a good job, I've never met this robot before.

They didn't go through my training process.

You know what the robot never does?

never asks for a commission.

Oh,

Here's the coaching you need.

You actually don't know what you do.

Okay.

So what you actually are doing there is interacting with sets of

human beings to create a software solution that's aligned with.

Now if, if Salesforce was a true consumer product focused on, um, just giving

everybody exactly what they wanted with no human interaction, this is a great tool.

Like you could start to write tons and tons of documentation much more

quickly.

We do, sometimes we have a knowledge base and if people want to look up the

answer there, we'd love for them to do that cuz then they don't bother us.

are some issues with accuracy and so on and so forth

with, with tools like this.

So they're not quite ready for that.

But yeah what's nice is they can help with translation, they

can help with issues of tone.

I'd like this to be, you know, can you write, they can write you a poem.

If you want a, a poem about logging into Salesforce, they'll write you.

that, that's very upsetting as well.

I want you to think about this tool more like automatic translation.

What do I tell my team?

Are there jobs done for?

People are nervous.

Call center is vulnerable, things like that.

Things that are scripted and so on and so forth.

If their job is to translate something from one language to another or from one

discipline to another, they're vulnerable.

So, so those sort of tasks are at risk.

, let me, let me reset your brain for a minute here.

Okay.

There are a set of new technologies that generate content from prompts and

they generate it in such a way that it's grammatically correct, pretty positive,

uh, can look really good or pretty good.

There's a tendency with the images to have too many like arms, so that's tricky.

You don't wanna send somebody a, don't want to go in the company picnic and

send a picture of people with too many.

arms.

Mm-hmm.

but you can ask it to draw you.

Diagrams, illustrations, all kinds of things.

Now you're, you're a person who, you have a sales role, you have to get

people to buy into your product, correct?

Well, I mean that's part of it.

First off, contracts end and when the time comes to renew, we want them to renew.

Ideally, we want them to like upgrade and spend more money.

Like the sales process never ends.

right.

But your success is that you bring more revenue into Salesforce than you would

if, and Salesforce makes more money than it would if it didn't have you.

so.

Okay.

So you're worried that Salesforce will go get to make all that

money without you in the loop?

Yeah.

They'll replace me with a beige com computer tower.

Did Stack Overflow ruin everybody's engineering jobs?

Not as far as I can tell.

There's 20, 30 million engineers out in the world, casual and otherwise,

and they all use Stack Overflow.

And what, what ha what it actually does is it makes certain things more accessible.

Right.

Okay.

Okay.

So in you go to you, it's, it's time to renew the contract.

Yes.

So now there's an interaction that you need to have and

it needs to fan out to your group.

What kind of communication do you normally do?

You send an email, say, I want to have a phone call, right.

Well, first off, relationships matter.

Of course.

People like to see you.

People like to see me and I, I, I like to connect with them

on a personal level because that's part of getting people to commit.

Right.

Okay.

Um, but also you wanna show them that, look, we, we, we, we produce

these decks where like you got 92% of your feedback was five stars.

But there's more to it than that.

Sometimes we know where their pain is, they're annoyed about something,

and we wanna get ahead of that.

Now what's gonna happen is they're gonna get on a video call.

A giant talking fish is gonna be on the other line, and it's

gonna say, hi, my name is Willie.

Calm down.

This is, first of all, that's been Salesforce marketing

for the last 20 years.

So relax.

They love a good talking fish.

They do.

You're just seeing this wrong.

Let's frame it.

First of all, your customers have the same concerns that you do.

They have call centers.

They don't wanna fire all their people tomorrow, like they're trying

to figure out what this means.

You are in a position.

Look, just take it as a given for one minute that you're just relax.

I want you to think to yourself, how can I use these tools to help

out of character for one second and point out to

the audience that you tell me to relax six to 12 times Continue.

Um, okay.

That's a nice

Yeah.

I don't, I don't even want to go into it.

Let's, okay, so relax.

Rich r I want you to make.

The best dashboard and the best deck possible.

Now you've already got this automated output that comes out of

all the Salesforce tools and you can go, I've seen everybody do it.

You kind of generate your PowerPoint and you go and you say, here's how

you're doing, and here's our roadmap, and here's where we're headed.

Yes.

Okay.

Now you have tools that could.

Create a knowledge base specifically for that customer and all their users?

Yes.

Okay.

You can do something that's custom just for your people.

You can customize imagery, you can enhance diagrams.

You can draw pictures of a bold new future in ways that you've never imagined before.

Okay?

Because you keep these tools at hand, you treat them as tools, not as threats.

What I'm hearing is retrain, learn, keep learning.

Don't assume that you as a.

Cog in the assembly line can just keep doing the same thing because

innovation and technology marches on.

value that you actually have in the role that you have is through

your relationships, not in, not because you can produce certain statistics

and information about Salesforce installations at any given moment.

You have to do both.

Yes, but the most important thing is that they know you're a person they

can call and that you will give them reliable information so that they don't

increase the risk in their organiz.

Not only that, Paul, um, the relationships really come

through when things go bad because I get to pick up the phone and say,

Hey Diane, I wanna get ahead of this.

about we were down for three hours last night and I wanna make sure you're okay.

Think about Amazon Cloud.

Okay.

Amazon Cloud should never have any customers in the loop ever.

I should just be able to buy access to services, run

servers, and that should be it.

But there's a premium tier and what do I get with that?

Premium tier humans.

That's right.

So it's worth money to people to know that if something goes wrong, humans will

take personal responsibility and account.

Relationships still matter and they will continue to matter.

We're never gonna be done with that, I don't think, in our life.

I gotta be frank, I'm most worried about the junior people.

I've built relationships.

I have an important Rolodex I rely on.

I'm also, I think, pretty fast on my feet.

Like I'm not too worried about the computers coming

to get me, but I am worried.

Some of the lower skilled people who, frankly, it's a thick binder

of scripts, they go to page 83 when someone asks this question,

actually it's software that does it.

In fact, it's Salesforce, uh, service Cloud.

But we won't get into that, that we're not marketing Salesforce here, but they are

the ones that seem most vulnerable to me.

What advice would, should I give them?

Okay, so good on you for, for chilling out for a second.

Okay.

You wanna take care of those people.

You wanna be responsible towards them.

I did shrooms 20 minutes ago.

That's great.

You want to take care of these people?

Yes.

Okay.

That's right.

A lot of people start like in a call center capacity.

They're kind of running the script, so on and so forth.

You now have a set of tools that will empower these people to have

better English, better visual communication, and be more productive.

Wait, what you're saying is don't go to war.

This isn't your.

Take it in, become an expert at it, and let it enhance and grow your

Here's why.

Okay?

If you are expecting to continue to, to deliver at the same pace,

but someone else has access to these tools, they will be faster than you.

If you train the junior employee, 25 year old, young woman comes in and you say,

Hey, I need you to make a PowerPoint.

You ever seen a, a new employee who's never worked with this stuff kind

of struggle through the experience?

Yeah.

They just don't get the basic form in any way.

But I can say to her now, Tell the computer to make you a PowerPoint, Tell

her, tell the, you gotta give her the

And they learn from that.

she'll learn the form.

You know what she can do now?

One, make PowerPoint.

She learned it pretty fast.

She learned it from the computer.

Mm-hmm.

two and, and she's, and when I say PowerPoint, gimme the bullets and then

she has to put it into the PowerPoint.

We're not at the point yet where it'll make you the PowerPoint itself.

Okay.

Now.

Great.

Thanks.

I You made that PowerPoint.

That's really helpful.

It's on my desk.

I didn't have to think about it.

And it took you a day to kind of get it all trued up and where it used

to take you a week as a really new

employee.

Right.

That's cool.

Now you can make five of these a week, so I can talk to five times

as many customers, or I can do five times as many things for my clients

and my skillset is

My

skillset.

No, hold on.

We're not done.

I can have you do more of this faster.

I can have you be more creative.

I can have you make it more visual.

I can have you make deeper, more intense things for the customers

to think harder about their stuff.

And I can have you make it, uh, I can have you use these tools to research and

think, so it becomes an outboard brain.

Paul.

good and I see the potential of a lot of the people I hire, but for some of

the people that I hire, I can also see the limits of what they can learn do.

Um, their, their skill sets are, let's just, I'm trying to be as kind as possible

kind of bound to a more sort of rote, scripted day-to-day work life, right?

I saw somebody online and they have very, it was, they were talking

about how they mentor someone and that person has very, very poor English and

very poor written communication skills.

So a challenge for them cuz they have like a lawn mowing business.

A challenge for that person is communicating.

Mm-hmm.

. Paul Ford: Okay.

And they're, you know, cuz the emails will start like coming Wednesday and that's it.

That's the whole email.

I've received many emails like that.

Yeah.

Okay.

And you learn to kind of parse that, but it, it definitely doesn't make

you feel secure that the person's actually gonna show up on a Wednesday.

Yeah.

This person can say, write me an email, letting them know I'm

going to be there Wednesday.

And it'll write a

in, in, in Albanian.

That's right,

it'll write it in English and send it

You can get there, right?

You can get a nice, formal, clear communication

the tools that can empower you.

It's an enhancement to somebody.

Now, if you, if you have somebody who is just really confused about

why they're there in the first place.

You might have a different issue.

You have to educate and help them along the lines there

if you want them to stay around.

But if you, this isn't, this is if you have low English or,

or challenges with writing.

I mean this is actually, you know, we, yeah.

People are very focused on the threat.

This is a tremendous enhancement for people who want to communicate in the

larger world and don't necessarily have the tools at hand at this moment.

History has shown.

Technological

innovation or innovation in general, frankly, uh, creates

more jobs than destroys.

It's, it has been proven out time and time again.

Um, I wanna, let's let, let's, I wanna share a thought

Hold on.

I want to just like, I want to, I want to like complicate that for

people to think through for a minute.

Cuz I think it's important not to just be like, more opportunity orchestras.

They were great.

Everybody loved orchestras.

For a long time you needed to have one for every TV show.

the synthesizer comes in.

There's actually unions that, that were like, we, there will be no synthesizers.

Can't fight the synth though.

Synthes is good.

You get the pep shop boys, you get new order.

So anyway, the synth starts taking over.

Not great.

I would say the last 50 years, not the best for orchestras.

tremendous flowering of enormous ranges of musical expression.

That's really the outcome, right?

The orchestra was able to protect its territory, but all

this new terrain was created

at the same time.

You get all this new music, you get labels, you get Spotify, and

so artists don't get rewarded.

So it's this very, very complicated ebb and flow and you know, but if.

What I'm gonna say is that like you can't solve the macro economy.

Neither can I.

My opinions about the macro economy don't matter.

but you can create new

You should do that for your people.

You should say, here's a set of new tools we should get to them and we should master

them in order to help our customers.

And in doing so, they'll have more optionality, and

that's the right thing to do.

Well, wait a minute, Rich.

Wait a minute,

What?

I went to the AI and I said these words:

please provide the transcript for a podcast with two hosts.

The hosts are named Rich and Paul.

The podcast is five minutes long.

The host introduced themselves and then explain how stable

diffusion and AI technology works.

The host provide examples of software that people can use to explore

and understand stable diffusion.

They make some jokes and have witty banter.

Both of them are in Brooklyn New York.

So let's do it.

Hey everyone, my name is Rich and I'm here with my co-host Paul.

there Rich.

Thanks for having me on the show.

So today we're gonna talk about something called Stable Diffusion.

That's right.

Rich Stable Diffusion is a type of machine learning algorithm that's been

gaining a lot of attention lately.

So what exactly is stable diffusion and how does it work?

stable diffusion is a type of algorithm that's used

to process and analyze data in a way that's more efficient and

stable than the other algorithms.

It works by using a technique called diffusion maps to reduce the

dimensionality of the data, which makes it easier to analyze and understand

That's really interesting.

Paul, can you give us some examples of software that people

can use to explore and understand

stable diffusion.

There are a number of software packages that people can use to

explore and understand stable diffusion.

Some examples include psychic Learn, TensorFlow and Pie Torch.

Thanks for that, Paul.

It's always good to know what tools are available for people who want to

learn more about stable diffusion.

Absolutely Rich, and if anyone out there is interested

in learning more, there are plenty of online resources and tutorials

available to help them get started.

That's great to know, Paul.

And just for our listeners out there, we're recording this podcast

from beautiful Brooklyn, New

That's right, rich.

It's a great place to be, especially if you're into machine learning and data.

Definitely Paul.

Well, thanks for joining me on the show today and for sharing your

expertise on stable diffusion.

No problem, rich.

It was great to be here, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Sounds good, Paul.

Thanks again and have a great day.

You too, rich.

Bye for now.

Okay, so calm down.

Yes, it was terrible.

It had no soul.

It was robotic.

It's, it's a, it's a robot.

It's a parrot.

It's madlibs.

Very helpful, Paul.

You've calmed me down.

You've taken me to a more peaceful, relaxed place

Go play with chat.

G p t.

Go play with the image generators.

You owe it to yourself.

And frankly, they are good tools for, for business.

they're fun.

They're all also fun, and you should look into them.

I mean, they're coming.

Don't, don't look away.

Don't forget computers used to be people who did math

Right,

now, now they're machines.

Now they're machines.

ZiadeFord.com.

You'll find all our podcasts.

The, uh, Ziade and Ford Advisors podcast is in all the

usual popular podcast places.

Spread the word.

Reach out.

How do they get in touch with us, Paul?

We love topic ideas.

We love giving advice.

Send an email to hello@ziadeford.com or check us out

on Twitter, et cetera, et cetera.

You know how to get in touch.

Have a lovely day.