Unlock the future of digital adoption with our latest episode of Banking on Disruption! This week, we sit down with Jeff Mayhugh, a renowned expert in learning and development, to uncover how AI and Digital Adoption Platforms (DAPs) are revolutionizing software training and user efficiency. Discover how WalkMe's AI-driven smart tips enhance data input quality on platforms like Salesforce, helping new employees navigate complex systems seamlessly. Jeff shares invaluable insights on the limitations of traditional training methods and the game-changing potential of targeted AI implementations in modernizing workforce development.

Then, we tackle the practical challenges of integrating digital guidance tools within desktop applications and explore how WalkMe stands out compared to native solutions like Salesforce Flow. From desktop-level instructions to AI-enhanced data validation, learn how these tools are elevating data governance and process compliance. We also discuss the organizational journey of implementing WalkMe, the critical role of internal champions, and the transformative impact on employee productivity and software adoption.

Finally, join our lively roundtable as we debate the latest tech announcements, including Apple's iPhone 16 and its implications for data security. We also dive into Google's innovative beta that turns complex papers into podcast conversations, and share our excitement for upcoming conferences like Macon and Dreamforce. Wrapping up, we delve into the ethical and legal dimensions of AI in content creation and copyright law, ensuring you're well-equipped to navigate this evolving landscape. Don’t miss out on these compelling discussions that promise to reshape your approach to digital adoption and employee training!

00:03 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

Everybody wants a Jarvis from Iron man that they can just talk to and say do my job for me and away it goes. But I don't think this is going to happen. So for me, where I see AI going in the L&D space and in the DApp space so, for example, with WalkMe, they're introducing AI capabilities, but in a really targeted kind of push model, only in certain areas. So let's say, we're looking at an input field that's free text. Okay, could be any kind of process in Salesforce. Maybe you're working with an opportunity. You need somebody to identify the next steps, right? Well, how do I ensure that that is getting filled out well? Can I make it a required field? Someone can put in one character? How do I ensure that that is getting filled out well? Can I make it a required field? Someone can put in one character? You're not really able to validate it that well.

00:54

So what WalkMe is doing is using a validation, what they call a validation smart tip, so you could type up as a subject matter expert. Here are the things we're looking for in this field. A good quality answer looks like this. A bad quality answer will only have this kind of information in it and then it can take what a user enters and process it and then suggest to them. Hey, in the next steps field you just typed in the word meeting. That's not really what we're looking for. You might want to think about da-da-da-da-da right Now experienced people. They may already be doing this, so it doesn't even come up. You know the new employees that just typed this in. Hopefully this is going to get them to kind of pause and think and produce a better quality response.

01:49 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Hello listeners and welcome to Banking on Disruption. I'm Fred Cadena, super excited for this week's episode. First up, we have my good friend, jeff Mayhew. Jeff is an expert in learning and development and in user adoption. He is full-time WalkMe consultant. He has a WalkMe consulting firm that helps organizations leverage WalkMe and Salesforce and other SaaS web applications, drive user adoption and really user efficiency. And our conversation is going to talk a lot about WalkMe, but it's also going to cover a lot of just general user adoption principles that can help ensure that we realize the return on the investment that we're making when we're standing up these various SaaS platforms such as Salesforce. From there.

02:42

Amazing Quick Takes roundtable today we recorded this Monday of the episode dropping Monday, september 9th, same day as Apple had their iPhone event, so we talked a little bit about the iPhone 16. We talked a little bit about a new beta, pre-beta offering from Google that is turning complex papers into podcast conversations Super interesting conversation on that. And then we talk about not one but two conferences. First up, we talk a little bit about Macon, which Eric is on his way to this week. In fact, by the time this episode drops, macon will be over. And then Josh and I talk about Dreamforce, which is, of course, coming up next week. So a lot to talk about.

03:33

Please, while you're listening to the podcast, I would love for you to go to Apple Podcasts, go to Spotify. Give us a review. It really helps drive those numbers. Also, please don't forget to subscribe and that way you get notified when episodes drop. New episodes drop every other Thursday. I'm really excited for the episode, so sit back and strap in and welcome back. I am super excited this week to welcome my friend, jeff Mayhew, to the podcast Now. Jeff has a broad background in technology, product design and business process improvement. Jeff's now an independent consultant in the WalkMe digital adoption platform. I'll be honest with you when I first heard about WalkMe, I was like why would somebody invest in this? And in getting to know Jeff and following him, I really got a great idea of the value that this type of technology brings to companies. In his role, he's helped companies in financial services and other sectors improve software adoption of Salesforce and other technologies by implementing WalkMe. Jeff, welcome to the podcast.

04:47 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

Hey, thanks, fred, for having me. I appreciate it.

04:50 - Fred Cadena (Host)

First, just to kick it off, obviously, walkme is a very different approach to traditional software training and adoption, and in a lot of your posts and a lot of what you say in social media you say that traditional software training is dead. Why is that? Why do you feel that way?

05:09 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

Yeah, yeah, great question. So first let's bound kind of what we're talking about here. Let's think about a financial institution who's upgrading a piece of software for their employees. This could be an all new system they need to use or a new process in an existing system. Let's say opening a new process in an existing system. Let's say opening account, creating a purchase order. Big companies that have Salesforce. You talk about disruption. This type of change is happening every day. Now, in the past, when the Salesforce team or your L&T team would make these kind of changes, how would they communicate this? How do we get it out there? You know, maybe create an annotated PowerPoint, email it to people In your past. Have you ever gotten one of these emails that says like hey, fred, there's a change.

05:55 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Here's what you need to do, and not only have I gotten them, I may have authored them in my career.

05:59 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

Yeah, yeah, no, I hear you, me too. And what happens with these is that you know you might not do the process right away, so you got to file the email. You hope your retention policy doesn't just delete it.

06:11 - Fred Cadena (Host)

I would say I always thought. I always thought what happened is people just went right to delete, so well, yeah, there's that.

06:17 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

Yeah, there's that, there's that too. If you end up with the attachment, the screenshots are invariably out of date, because the app has then changed. And then the question is what happens for the new hire next week? He or she didn't get that email right. So to me, worse than that, though, is when companies try to do like in-person, or schedule meetings for training. If it's a bigger software introduction, you're going to send a bunch of invites. So to me, what's wrong with this? Why is it dead?

06:49

So there's some companies for which the scale of that kind of training is not even feasible. You have thousands of a certain type of employee. You're not going to be scheduling sessions. That kind of stuff is expensive, it's time consuming, not everybody attends. Did you get the right distribution list? People that attend don't pay attention, and the people that pay attention don't remember. So when you try to do typical software training, you're interrupting people's work, the value creation that they're doing, and you're being like hey, everybody, stop, pay attention. I've got to tell you something, right? So other than that, it's really great. Have you ever? So you got the email? Have?

07:27 - Fred Cadena (Host)

you ever gone to any of those? How was the play, Ms Lincoln?

07:30 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

Yeah, yeah. Have you ever gone to any of those sat through software training, where they go through? Here's how to create an opportunity. Here's what you do.

07:39 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Oh, again, not only have I attended, I know I've hosted a number of them.

07:44 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

Yeah. So for me, digital adoption platform is a matter of let's just step back for a minute and think about what we're trying to do. We've got a system we want people to use. We've got a change we want to introduce. We just want people to be effective in the software. So that's really the whole thrust, or the whole idea of the time, the training or the documentation anyway. So basically, it turns out that in the last 10 years, there's been a completely new technique to help companies accomplish that goal, and that's called a digital adoption platform.

08:19 - Fred Cadena (Host)

So it's a good segue. Why don't you give the audience a little bit of idea about exactly what a digital adoption platform is? It's hard for me to picture. Is this like a different system I'm logging into when I want to go look something up, almost like a wiki, or how does it work?

08:35 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

Yeah, yeah, great question. So, basically, a digital adoption platform. There's a lot of them out there now. If you go on G2 and look at the category, there's a bunch of different entrants, but it's basically the concept of a web overlay. So, fundamentally, you're thinking of something. You're not separately logging into it, you're not going to another knowledge base and looking things up. Basically, what we're doing is we're taking what our subject matter experts know, like Fred knows how to create the purchase order. Gene knows how to run the report and know, like Fred knows how to create the purchase order. Gene knows how to run the report and then we've got our app that we want our users to be successful with. So what we're going to do is get the knowledge out of the SMEs heads and overlay it directly on top of that application. So a good way to think of this is like for consumer apps or apps on your phone. Have you ever used a good consumer app that has like an automated tour, helps you get set up, points out where different functions in the systems are?

09:30 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Yeah, I'm probably the wrong person to ask this, because I usually find that annoying. I look for the first way to dismiss it and check when. I explore the app and do what I want to do. But I definitely see what you're talking about.

09:41 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

Yeah, I hear you. So in general, the problem is with back-end employee-facing apps. They don't have this and fundamentally they can't have this. So you could see how in Salesforce they have in-app guidance. Different enterprise resource planning ERP systems have their own integrated help system. But because these are so big and so configurable that basically that last mile of how do I actually use this thing, how does this company implement it, that's always left up to the company themselves to implement. So, basically, a digital adoption platform on top of one of your back end applications can take various forms guided series of balloon steps to help you perform and automate tasks, context sensitive tips, explain features and fields. Onboarding to help you get set up. So, yeah, you may have seen that kind of thing on a consumer app and you may have just dismissed it because, like, oh, I know what I'm supposed to do here, but really the digital adoption platform, when implemented well, helps bridge the gap between what you're trying to get your employees to accomplish and the employees in the app themselves.

10:55 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Well and frankly, you know what's the cost when I'm on my phone and I've downloaded a new app and I dismiss the guidance. Number one, there's usually a way for me to recall it if I really want it. Number two if I do fuck something up, what's the real cost? Maybe it's a few minutes of frustration, maybe I post something incorrectly. If it's a social app or I don't quite get the functionality I'm looking for, there's no real cost. If I'm in a work situation and trying to do something for a customer, obviously you don't want to process it incorrectly. There could be a financial implication, certainly a service implication, and I recall it's funny when we were catching up before we started recording, I mentioned I was in Boulder. Today I'm in Boulder visiting a client. I was here years ago visiting a different client and we were doing some Salesforce work for them.

11:48

One of the things that we were looking to tackle was their contact center, and it was a financial institution. They had a contact center where it was primarily generalist. There was some level two stuff, but mostly the contact center was filled with people that are. Anytime a customer calls up, they were expected to kind of field what it was and there's, you know kind of the 80-20 rule. And that's actually what my team was there doing was right along listening sessions figuring out like what is 80% of what this you know customer service rep deals with day over day. And then there's that 20% and that's the rub, right.

12:26

So I happened to be standing next to somebody when a call came in for somebody that had an auto loan and was looking to do some specific type of modification to that auto loan. It's one of those things that might come up for a contact center rep once or twice a year and that person literally had to like get up, reach into a cubby and their cube pulled out a binder, like flip through the binder, like figure out what the right process was. And it was in a different system that they didn't even have the right login to. So then they had to like get the login reset. Horrible for them.

13:03 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

Their uh, their call handle time is that why I'm on the phone so long? Yeah?

13:09 - Fred Cadena (Host)

exactly that's why you're on the phone so long and horrible customer experience. Right, and and I mean in in all fairness they did come back to the customer and say, hey, let me give you a call back in 10 minutes. You know we're having an issue, kind of an excuse, and so it's a little bit better for the customer, but it wasn't a great experience overall for anybody. And so is it edge cases that you think there's a lot of value like that, or is it, you know, just kind of in general, like where? I guess for me one of the things that I wonder is when I think about all the things that I've built for clients and you know clients in and around the Salesforce ecosystem.

13:49

There's a lot of there there and doing in-app guidance feels like a lot, and I will say that clients frequently underinvest in a few critical things, one of which is adoption and reinforcement. And so do you find clients typically building in-app guidance for everything, for kind of those weird edge cases that come up only every once in a while, Like what's the sweet spot? What do you really see out in the wild?

14:17 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

Yeah, yeah, no great question and I would say a lot of. First, just on contact center, I know that, specifically with WalkMe, t-mobile has really invested in this and has that exact kind of situation handled through in-app help menu how do I modify X kind of thing? Contact reps are always toggling between multiple systems. Another place digit option platforms really shine is where you have branching. If, then logic, multiple systems to toggle through Because it's in a web route, it's because it's delivered through an extension.

14:51

You can take people to other systems and point out what they need to do over here and get that information come back over the first app. But yeah, in general, in terms of how companies approach this, a lot of companies still come at it from the perspective of it's onboarding. So I'm going to make these 10 different things and that's going to be everything that anybody needs to know. What's a better approach to it is if you are able to use the analytics capabilities of these applications to first kind of instrument and understand people's performance on processes, then strategically put in the content where the user friction is occurring. So there's two different models for it kind of a kitchen sink and kind of a surgical approach, and I favor the surgical approach for sure.

15:39 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Got it? No, that makes a ton of sense. So, out in the wild, you work with a lot of companies on in-app guidance. What's the payoff, you know, is the juice worth the squeeze? What kind of results are they getting? Yeah, yeah.

15:50 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

So my first answer here really depends. It depends on the quality of the implementation. But overall, companies can get significant ROI with these tools and that's something that is a big focus of the dAP. Providers is trying to be able to say we know you had this friction in the application that resulted in these issues that cost you this money. Here's the usage of the in-app guidance so you can see improved process completion, reduced manual training time, reduced number of IT tickets and volume of IT tickets, increased process completion, things like that. So I'm most familiar with WalkMe, which was a company originally out of Israel, now a global company. Recently, sap announced an intent to acquire WalkMe for $1.5 billion, with a B dollar. So there's definitely something to this approach. But most of these DApp platforms are going to have some kind of a back-end analytics capability which is going to let you understand how Salesforce is actually being used and if you're getting the results you're after with them.

16:58 - Fred Cadena (Host)

That's great. So it sounds like there's some value to be gained from a measurement perspective. Certainly, I think the productivity gain is something that people were probably already kind of thinking about. And then you know you get to offset some of the costs by potentially investing less in other L and D you know specific to to software training. I mean it's not going to, you're not going to cut in your L and D budget for other learning investments, but you know you can reall learning investments. But you know you can reallocate what you were, you know, potentially investing into other adoption training.

17:32 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

Yeah, yeah, To ultimately get to the point that the stuff is just there on the system, it's running, it's live. You know, a new rep goes in and there is a welcome to them, a series of things they need to do, and then we're always monitoring to see you know how effective is the material that we're putting out there.

17:51 - Fred Cadena (Host)

You're saying, toss out your laminator for those laminated job aids.

17:55 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

You don't need those anymore Right, yeah, yeah, for sure so let's talk a little bit about.

18:00 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Like the mechanics I think you mentioned, you know it's delivered in a browser extension salesforce, lots of other technologies. You know web applications. You know thinking specifically around financial institutions, banks, credit unions. A lot of what they use is still not necessarily a web application. So I know institutions frequently try to get people to work in a single pane of glass. Tends to sometimes be more of a journey than a destination and a lot of people have to go back to core and other green screen system or systems that may not have a web interface option.

18:40

So talk a little bit about how WalkMe works in general, and then you know how would it work in these types of environments where maybe I'm starting in a Salesforce and then flipping to you know a heavy desktop terminal or something like that to do some of my work.

18:55 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

Yeah, so how it works. In general, I would say, like with everything, like with Salesforce or any other application, you know, implementing ADAPT like WalkMe is really kind of an organizational change initiative unto itself. So you've got the technical and then you've got the organizational. At the organizational level, you're identifying a team maybe it's your core Salesforce team, process team L&D. They're the ones that are going to be creating the content inside of some kind of editor application. You're taking a process, breaking it down, identifying the friction. You're building the on-screen guidance, how it engages with people, how you measure it all of that.

19:33

Then, on the technical side, you typically implement it through a web browser extension where once it's published up, you know the end user doesn't pardon me my dog barking, but once the content is published up, you know the end user doesn't have to download anything. They're just kind of seamlessly using application and the content is coming up on the screen. Now it's delivered through web applications. So if somebody is toggling to like a thick client or green screen kind of thing, the technology is just not there to get that kind of guidance inside of that particular thick client application. There's things you can do. Walkme has a desktop app, so there's things you can do at the desktop level around it, but still, fundamentally, this is the thrust of the dApps are for cloud based and web-based applications.

20:24 - Fred Cadena (Host)

So how? It's great, I appreciate that. How have you helped companies that have that situation? You know, do you have ways that you maybe have a lot of the instruction, live on the website and say, hey, now you're going to flip to this client, you're going to do X, y and Z and then hit that button when you come back, or are those processes just not great? Use cases for Walkable.

20:49 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

If primarily where it's, if it's toggling to a thick client, that's not. It's not a great use case, but you have the ability to have a flow that's going through and it's basically the way to think of ADAPT. Is, what would you if you were sitting over somebody's shoulder and you were guiding them through that process? Somebody called you on the phone and said hey, fred, how do I do this thing? That's what you're going to get out of your head and put in the on-screen guidance, even if we have to have a pop-up that says okay, now you're going to go over to the desktop app and do X, y, z and there's an image of it. Still, you know, I'm getting a lot further toward automation and process completion, rather than having the you know, the binder in the filing cabinet, right?

21:32 - Fred Cadena (Host)

No, it definitely sounds like a significantly better option. Earlier you mentioned technology. You know Salesforce specific called Salesforce in-app guidance. There's also Salesforce Flow with the guided flows. Curious, and again I understand. Walkme works for a number of different. Basically, it sounds like almost any web-based technology, but let's assume we're talking about somebody that is a Salesforce forward type of institution. They want their employees working in Salesforce most of the time. Why aren't some of these Salesforce native features the right answer?

22:10 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

Yeah, yeah, no great question. And for sure, with Flow, there's a ton of use cases for it and there's overlap between these things. So like, let's say, if we're just explaining an individual field, you know I've got field help and Salesforce, but I can't. There's things in WalkMe you can't do inside of Salesforce. I can put images in it, put hyperlinks in it. I can conditionalize it to come up for certain user profiles and not user profiles.

22:37

Really, where WalkMe and Digital Option Platform shine is where you need to go cross application from one system into another. You know, fundamentally, that it's the same right now, in my opinion, with AI kind of approaches, where every application is going to ultimately have its own internal system, ai or it's, they're going to try to develop their own internal help system, but companies always develop their own guidance, they develop their own ways of using these, this back and forth between different systems, and that's where really, the digital adoption platform. It shouldn't be seen primarily as a competitor to your existing Salesforce dev team, but it should be seen as a way to augment them or offload some of the things that you would otherwise have them do. You know, a typical Salesforce dev team will have a backlog a mile long. So when I'm working with companies and when we introduce to them what can be handled basically in the browser at the user's level, that will offload some of the stuff that leave them to backend database API calls, the things that only that can handle. We then just extend their capabilities with WalkMe and the Digital Option Platform.

23:51 - Fred Cadena (Host)

It sounds great, so you made it 19 and a half minutes. This podcast frequently will veer into the AI topic du jour, so I've got to kind of continue down that for a minute. You know, obviously everybody's excited about AI. Everybody in their earnings report is now an AI company and then they get a 20% boost. How do you see AI impacting the learning and development world generally and then specifically around the you know? Are you seeing them leverage AI and, if so, in what way?

24:28 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

Yeah, yeah, great, great question. I knew we would get there as well. So for me, if you're familiar with the Gartner hype cycle, in my opinion I've always trended a little bit more toward the skeptic side for AI. I definitely think we are at the peak of inflated expectations right now with AI which will drop down and ultimately settle into where the use cases really make the most sense. So everybody wants a Jarvis from Iron man that they can just talk to and say do my job for me and away it goes. But I don't think this is going to happen.

25:02

So for me, where I see AI going in the L&D space and in the DApp space so for example, with WalkMe, they're introducing AI capabilities, but in a really targeted kind of push model, only in certain areas. So let's say we're looking at an input field that's free text. Okay, could be any kind of process in Salesforce. Maybe you're working with an opportunity. You need somebody to identify the next steps, right? Well, how do I? You know, how do I ensure that that is getting filled out? Well, I make it a required field. Someone can put in one character. You know that's. You know you're not really, you're not really able to validate it that well. So what WalkMe is doing is using a validation, what they call a validation smart tip, so you could type up as a subject matter expert here are the things we're looking for in this field.

25:54

A good quality answer looks like this A bad quality answer will only have this kind of information in it and then it can take what a user enters and process it and then suggest to them. Hey, in the next steps field you just typed in the word meeting. That's not really what we're looking for. You might want to think about da-da-da-da-da right Now, experienced people. They may already be doing this, so it doesn't even come up. You know the new employees that just typed this in. Hopefully this is going to get them to kind of pause and think and produce a better quality response.

26:27 - Fred Cadena (Host)

As someone that's led a number of sales and revenue teams, I will tell you the experienced people put meeting in as well, just so you know.

26:34 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

Yeah, yeah, so you do what you can right. But yeah, basically to me, with AI, I don't see the vision of this as being like kind of an open search interface where people are just going to type in questions and it gives them back answers. I think that there's also for companies that are not ahead of this. There is some IT security risk with things like that. So you can use ADAPT to redirect employees away from not preferred sources of AI, like if they just go to chat GPT but you've licensed Jarvis or something like that. You can use a WalkMe to make a pop-up and say, hey, we actually don't just paste in company information here, you're going to go over here and then automate taking them to the right of the approved place. So that's another use case for digital adoption platforms as it relates to AI.

27:30 - Fred Cadena (Host)

That's fantastic. It kind of brings up a couple of questions for me around. Specifically, I'll use the word in, you know, enforcement, and what I mean to say is is the app able to merely suggest, suggest? I'm assuming the app cannot obstruct somebody's navigation if I just want to go through and put meeting, meeting, meeting in every field, just to get through a process. I'm assuming, like it'll, it could flag some exceptions, it can maybe log, maybe log those exceptions, but tell me, like you know how much, how much can this really be used to change behavior or to prevent bad data or bad bad things from happening in the case of somebody maybe pacing company information where they shouldn't?

28:14 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

Yeah, yeah, you got it. So this is where the this is where the art of developing these things really really comes in and, honestly, why there is a role for partners like me in the WalkMe and the digital option space. So, basically, when you look at trying to get to process, compliance or enforcement or just nudging behavior, there's kind of a spectrum here. You know you can suggest information to people. You can strongly suggest it or, depending upon the consequence of what it is you're trying to help them with, you can literally cover up and I've done this cover up buttons on the page. So you know you can't click that because you haven't filled out this field.

28:53

In that case you're using the DAP as a kind of an additional form validation on top of a system. So we've had I've worked with clients that have had, you know, like a supplier registration type workflow where they have a form that's open to the world and because of this they were getting a ton of, you know, errant entries that was producing bad data, it tickets, a ton of rework on the downstream. One way to do it would be to have the vendor completely rip out and replace that form. The other way to do it, which you can do much, much more quickly in a digital option platform is just put the guidance and the you know button blockers on top of the system to validate that data and get get good quality downstream.

29:37 - Fred Cadena (Host)

That's really neat, that's really powerful. I can definitely see a lot of use cases for that and really help with. You know some of the things you mentioned and just data quality in general. You know it's one of the things that I think pains a lot of Salesforce admins and a lot of data governance and really business in general is, you know, bad data, incomplete data in various business processes. So that's a really powerful thing. Yeah, for sure oh, go ahead.

30:07 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

Yeah, I was just going to you know thumbs up on that. I mean, I was just working with a client the other day where you know we've got an account and the account has various owners and various contacts on it, but then to make the DocuSign integration work, one of those people need to be identified as a different contact role. So you look like you've got the thing all filled out, but oh, we didn't flag somebody this way, so that integration is not going to work. So, yeah, that's a place where, seamlessly, you just targeted have WalkMe come in and go. Oh, hey, in order to make DocuSign work here, pick which one of these people should get the document emailed to them.

30:48 - Fred Cadena (Host)

No, that's fantastic. Going back to the AI for a minute, one of the things I kind of envisioned AI potentially doing and I'm certainly not the walk me or expert in any sort of way is, you know, basically like the inverse of the user. So whether it's somebody from L&D or whether it's you know, a tester, somebody you know kind of in a UAP process, going through and walk me, recording kind of the proper way of doing something and then using that as maybe not your published final process but to help shortcut the development, because it sounds like still there's a fair amount of effort that goes into building these out and I can certainly see that significantly adding to the hours of development that it would take to roll out a new feature. So is that something that you think is on the horizon or what do you think about?

31:48 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

Yeah, so for me it's not. You know, it all depends on how capable your DAP team, your WalkMe team, is. There is a little bit of a learning curve, like there is with anything, but with WalkMe it's all an on-screen editor and most of these are on-screen element selectors. So here's a balloon that goes to this step and it advances, has this text and advances when someone clicks it and then the next step is over here. So you're building them out through the GUI without coding. It starts to get a little advanced when you want to do fancier things, tying into AI branch logic. Maybe you have to know a little bit of jQuery here and there if you're trying to search through a database table for a certain piece of text. But they have pretty good help and training out there for how to build these and as you do more of them you become more proficient with it and it doesn't have to take a big lift to build something up.

32:46

I was working with a client here yesterday where they just added some new required fields in Salesforce and then said oh hey, can you update the WalkMe for this? And I mean it literally took me about a half an hour to go in and add in the one balloon and add in this other tip publish to prod and there you go. So the other great thing. And just to come back to this real quick, the other really great thing about the digital adoption platform because it's delivered through an overlay and this kind of blows people's minds a little bit. But we're not publishing into Salesforce. We don't have to be on the same cadence as the dev team. We're publishing up to a cloud which is going to be instantly pulled down. The very next minute a user goes to the site. So, just like if you would make a new PowerPoint and put it on SharePoint for guidance for people, we can update the WalkMe content and it's available for people immediately.

33:39 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Yeah, no, that definitely adds a lot of flexibility. So it sounds like it wouldn't necessarily take an extensive amount of resource or a lot of technical resource to stand something like this up. Now obviously I'm sure you want everybody to call your firm and get and hire you and hire your team to build these out. But in general, for those that are going to go their own route or maybe might use you to begin with and then you take a lot of this stuff internally, what does a typical team look like? I'm sure it's something that scales up and down with size, but just kind of assuming you know a typical, you know we'll say you know 50, 100 person organization. You know what does a support team look like for this?

34:24 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

Yeah, yeah. So with a small one system, Salesforce once you get over an initial maybe two or three month engagement to try to get the initial content built out, you can have it be a part-time job for a Salesforce admin for maintaining the content, putting the content in place. But as you scale up to more and more users, more and more applications, eventually, if you're on multiple systems or you're, you know, say, beyond 500 or a thousand users, you're going to get to the point at which this is going to be somebody's responsibility for building out the content, maintaining the content, putting in a new systems. It's something that once people see it in an organization, they can't go back. They don't want to go back to the old way, so they only think of more and more use cases.

35:14

Can I get WalkMe on this application? I know we're doing this new travel and expense reporting system. Walkme would be great for that. So once these dApps get going in a company, it really spreads. So my job really is to help companies get the initial infrastructure stood up and get their own processes and teams stood up so that they can get the idea and ultimately become effective for them. Yeah, just one last example If you look at the size of the team, like I said, a really smaller size. You can have it be a part-time job for somebody. But WalkMe just had their own realized conference, annual software conference and they said, oh, this team, this is the best WalkMe leader of the year. A friend of mine named TC from Aetna CVS and he has a team of I think there are a half a dozen or 10 people that are the WalkMe team at that organization and that's their role is to build this content out across applications.

36:10 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Wow, so that sounds fantastic. It sounds like they're doing it for more than one application, for sure.

36:15 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

Yeah, yeah for sure. So when you ultimately and it typically starting with one company you might have one internal champion that sees it and goes, man, we need it on Salesforce here, and then it'll go to another adjacent app and another adjacent app and eventually you get to the enterprise, the enterprise license, where you could put it on anything, and at that point the company needs to have internalized, like this is not just another thing. This is how we introduce and manage change for people. This is how we introduce new software change and handle this, and at that point you're looking at having a COE and having a department that recognizing that as its own function.

36:54 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Really, yeah, you definitely really described something that's kind of a journey, a maturity journey, and definitely have seen it across a lot of other SaaS technologies At the very beginning of that journey. I'm sure you're there at the start for a lot of these. What do you typically see as the biggest hurdles whether it's technically, organizationally, culturally for organizations to even start going down this path?

37:19 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

Yep, yeah, yeah, Great, great point. And when I was at, I went to Dreamforce a couple of years ago and saw a great presentation there where they looked at all of the. They'd done a study on hundreds of different Salesforce implementations across the globe, took all of the reasons for success and for failure and basically broke it down into technical and organizational, and definitely the same applies to WalkMe. So at the technical level, I mean, it is just it's a new way of getting content in front of people. People are really used to just emailing, really used to PowerPoint.

37:52

So, in general, status quo, resistance to change. You know that is always the thing that you're going to run into. In addition, just you know communication. You've got to have a way of making it clear what WalkMe is and that it's something that's available for other systems. A lot of times you can implement it but be so subtle that people don't even know that it's there or don't even think that it's something different than the application itself. Where really to get it going, you've got to kind of push it in an organization like it's its own initiative as well, as it's not just an app that you buy. It's a new vision, it's a new thing you're trying to accomplish.

38:32

I guess the last thing that I would say that I often run into with companies is that they think their documentation, their current starting point, is better than it is, and they think that their processes are more figured out than they actually are. And then you'll go okay, great, I'm here to help you with WalkMe. So how do you guys do this? And they'll go. Well, I don't know. Sometimes we do this, Sometimes we do that, these guys do this, but those guys do that. And it's like, if you can't explain how you want people to use the system, I'm going to have a hard time automating, helping your employees use the system.

39:12 - Fred Cadena (Host)

You don't want to have 12 different walk-me scenarios for 12 different individual ways of doing something.

39:19 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

Right. Right, although I mean but that's another thing that people run into is that you could right so walk-me. Let's say you're implementing on Salesforce, we're connected in through an IDP. Whether you're using Azure or Okta, I can tell what departments people are in so I can give different process guidance to different teams of people. So sometimes the thing you run into is people making it too complicated where really you want to you effectively. Then use WalkMe as a way to coming back to your business process people and really saying like is this how you want it to work? And that can drive kind of a standardization across teams. I've seen that a number of times.

40:01 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Yeah, I'm sure that would be very valuable in just kind of overall driving productivity. Well, jeff, this has been a great conversation. I hope people have gotten a lot of ideas about how they can use the technology in general, walkme specifically, to help with their adoption and, ultimately, the efficiency of the organizations. I'm sure people would be interested in connecting. What's the best way for people to get a hold of you?

40:22 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

Yep, yeah, two ways. One, just search me out on LinkedIn. I post regularly on there as well. My website is just jmayhewcom, that's J-M-A-Y-H-U-G-Hcom, and I'm always available to chat about digital adoption or walk me.

40:37 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Sounds great. Well, Jeff, really appreciate your time this morning. Have a great day.

40:41 - Jeff Mayhugh (Guest)

Cool. Thanks, Fred. Talk to you again. Talk to you again.

40:47 - Fred Cadena (Host)

All right, and we're back. Excited here Early not really early early in the week of the week that we're dropping this podcast. We're here Monday for a podcast dropping Thursday with some fresh quick takes, really excited to have the whole crew together, even though, eric, it took you pulling over halfway to your destination.

41:08 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

Yeah, so thank you for the call. En route to Cleveland, to Macon, which we'll talk about here in a little bit. But I am in one of the lovely little roadside oasis rest stops, so good people watching, I'll give you that.

41:22 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Nice, fantastic, and Josh coming from your normal home location and I am in beautiful detroit, so that's what we have going on. Well, today, monday, you guys know. Uh, we talked about a little bit of show prep, but was the big annual apple iphone announcement for pre-order this Friday, the 16. So I guess I'll just ask like initial reactions.

41:53 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

Why do I have to spend more money on another phone? I just got the 15 Pro Max and it's been working really well for me. But with the advent of AI and the new chipset and who knows what's going to be doable, I don't know. We'll have to see. I'm going to wait. I'll let you buy one and you can tell us if it's worth it. I'm definitely buying one.

42:12 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Go ahead Josh.

42:14 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

I've got the Pro Max also. I really don't know what else I need from a phone. I mean, the thing's fantastic. It does everything I want. I'm probably going to get at least three quarters of whatever the new software can be done on this phone. I've already got the action button, so I am not going to be looking at new phones for at least one to two years. But yeah, I think it's good that they're constantly creating new innovations to push stuff out. I just wonder is someone going to spend $1,000 a year on a phone? I know they're out there, right?

42:48 - Fred Cadena (Host)

They'll buy a new one every single year, no matter what I will say and I did go to the website today just to check it out and see. I saw the pricing report, but I just want to see what the different options on the pricing are. If you do have a newer phone, you'll get about half of it back if you turn it in. A newer phone, you'll get about half of it back if you turn it in. So if you have the 15 Pro Max I think I saw they'll give you $600 off the $1,200 or $1,199. So it's not like it's $1,000 a year. So I'm definitely upgrading. Josh. I'm on the other other side of where you are I usually don't do anything.

43:29

You know I don't usually get a new phone year either. I'm usually on the two to three year cycle. But I've got a 13 pro max and, yeah, I've actually been biding my time waiting for this because I've kind of wanted a new phone for the last six months or so, but I knew this was coming. So I'm definitely getting one, uh, and even for mine uh. No, pre-order is still Friday, but I at least figured out what I'm pre-ordering and they'll even give me $400 for my phone. So it's a couple three years old now. So I don't know. I'm excited. We talked a lot about the Rabbit when it came out. Obviously a little bit disappointing. I was waiting for that.

44:11 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

This is the new iPhone 16, when I've got the Rabbit.

44:15 - Fred Cadena (Host)

That's true, this does cost a couple more bucks than the Rabbit, but I am excited on the 16 that you won't get on your 15 is the new chip apparently is going to have the ability to do a lot of local on-device AI stuff and so for things that you might be worried about sending to whoever it would embed with OpenAI or Anthropic or whoever is hooked up, apparently some of that stuff will be done natively on the phone, which is kind of cool, and I don't have the action button, so that's new, and I guess there's a new camera control button, so I don't know how it is that after all of these years we get excited about putting buttons on the phone.

45:05 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

Yeah, but is there a headphone jack?

45:07 - Fred Cadena (Host)

that's what I want to know there is no headphone jack, although I'm very excited that I will. I will get to throw away all my lightning cables and only carry usbc.

45:16 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

Yeah that's nice welcome to the world of c well, I I will.

45:20 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

I will say the, the thought, or the premise or the idea of on-device AI. You know our audience. If they're not Salesforce nerds, they're probably some sort of banking nerd or maybe it's a little bit of both. And in the world of banking, when we're talking with institutions, that's a lot of their concern is where's the content going, what is the exposure level and who's got access to it? Is it up in the cloud? Is it being used to train the language model and the thought of an on-device secure.

45:53

You know, when they did their other, the WWDC or whatever that's called, they made a big deal about how, from a privacy first perspective, it's in their ecosystem, it's on their device, it's not being shared, it's not making its way out to the cloud.

46:08

So I suspect that there will be some institutions, technology departments, compliance, audit whatever taking a hard look at this to determine because a lot of organizations have standardized on mobile devices and if you can figure out a way to give this some sort of universal I don't want to say approval, universal, I don't want to say approval but understand what's being done and might make it a little bit easier to employ AI technology in an environment where maybe you haven't figured out the cloud security data sharing puzzle to the extent that maybe you should, so it'll be interesting to see what the approach for the on-device AI and then, if you're really drinking from the Apple Kool-Aid, is there some legitimacy with regards to your calendar and your email and your schedule and your messages and your phone conversations to be the true AI agent to help with all of your productivity that runs through this mobile device that we have with us 24-7, 365?

47:08 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Yeah, that'd be go ahead, josh well, yeah, I like.

47:11 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

I pay I don't know 80 bucks a year, maybe for a product called fantastical. I think it's only available on iphone. I love it. It's great because it's had the ai, since I've had it right so I can just talk it. Book me a meeting at four o'clock, 4.30 with Fred and Eric, you know, for 30 minutes next Thursday, or something like that, and it'll create the calendar and send out the invites. It's awesome, right? So I've already got that. I haven't seen Apple do anything like that, so maybe this new system will replicate that. They'd be smart to buy that company and just integrate it. Integrate it in.

47:48 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Yeah, I don't know. I'll be the first to admit I was multitasking a bit and navigating a bit during the session, so I may have missed out on some of the details, but from what I recall, the details were a little thin but kind of one of the use cases we talked about. I remember talking about what we wanted rabbit to be able to do. This is what I kind of want the iphone to do, or at least the use case that to me feels like it could be a win. And again, eric's your point, especially for people you know working inside a bank is for things like they. They promise, they promise, they say they're going to generate AI summaries for your messages, like your iPhone messages or your mail and notifications and like.

48:35

I think about times like today my second flight, no Wi-Fi for whatever reason. Kind of early mid-morning on Monday I land, I turn it on, I've got 20, 25 emails that are legitimate emails, right, and I'm also trying to navigate through the airport to get to the rental car so I can get on my way. You know, it would be great to have Apple or somebody you know just read me a summary like here's the messages, right, I don't want the full text, but just like here's the the messages. Right, I don't want the full text, but just like here's the essence of what's coming. And if that can happen on the phone, especially if you work in a place that's pretty, you know, security conscious, I think that could be a real value.

49:19

I'm sure there's a lot more use cases, but you know it'll be interesting to see. It also interesting to see if apple's opening it up to. You know, third parties like I don't use apple mail for anything. You know all my, all my mails on gmail or or I have one outlook account. So if, if it doesn't play nice with these other third parties, then I'm probably going to be disappointed and yeah, agreed, well, agreed, yeah, I.

49:45 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

I like what you're talking about with the email stuff. I'd like to be able to say delete and unsubscribe from any emails that originate from a marketing company based in India, for instance. That would reduce my inbox by 70 per day. That kind of a thing would be awesome. Or just say, hey, group it. Hey, we think that these are sales pitches. We think that these are real emails. I know Google does a pretty good job of that with certain things, but I'd love to see some more advancement. If people want to keep using email I get 400 a day it's like if people want to keep using email despite me using Unroll Me and all these other things, it's like you know, it's a real problem and AI can solve it, and I haven't seen it do it yet, so I'd be excited to see what they produce.

50:37 - Fred Cadena (Host)

I think so far AI has only helped people send more emails.

50:42 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

It's not helped people. Ai has been the cause of the emails.

50:44 - Fred Cadena (Host)

yeah, it's not helped on the other side, but I'm with you on that. I do think, like you know related, you know unrelated as well, but you know kind of you know tied in with cool things that AI is doing. I know, eric, you shared with us Google Illuminate, which seems pretty phenomenal from the like five minute preview. I did reading in on it.

51:06 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

Yeah.

51:07 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Something like that would be awesome for my email box as well. You want to talk a little bit about it?

51:11 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

Absolutely. I love it when I pick something that you've not heard of. That makes me feel important, even if it's only for a brief moment in time, and I'm going to have to give a shout-out to our chief AI officer. Here in WSI, we do these AI roundtable kind of quick. Take Monday, half an hour blitz sessions every week and Robert and his AI crew drop all sorts of amazing AI stuff on us, and so this is how I got in touch with this.

51:40

I've been playing around with Google Labs, which is where the AI assisted search was originally dropped in Gmail and then is starting to gradually roll out. But this is where the Illuminate has come from. So if you go to illuminategooglecom, you can't sign up for it yet. It's still in a wait list so you can submit your request to see whether you can get access to it. But essentially it is a platform designed to allow you to upload larger documents think research reports, books and publications, maybe trade articles, those sorts of things and it takes the information and we've talked about 11 Labs Reader, I think on a past show where you could upload a document or copy and 11 Labs would read it back to you. One of the voices I think we mentioned was Burt Reynolds. This actually takes that to the next level, where it turns he used to live in my town.

52:31

Actually there's a Burt Reynolds park up the road, Really so yeah, so reader, you can have the old bandit himself read you back information, whether it's copy paste, document, a URL.

52:44

What Illuminate does, though, is it takes a really large document that might have a lot of complexities to it, and, rather than just reading it back to you, it re-imagines that document in a podcast format with at least two sometimes more voices discussing the document and more of a conversational tone, and I would suspect there's probably some sort of reading comprehensive theory behind this that would allow for you to get a better sense of the document or the book or the journal article by having people discuss it versus it just being read back to you, and so one of the first ones, if you go to illuminategooglecom you'll see, is the white paper.

53:25

Attention is all you need. I believe that was originally kind of the one of the first papers from Google DeepMind that really set the stage for the generative pre-trained transformer and other sorts of things that we now are taking for granted. But you can also go to the books from the research paper area, and you can listen to Charles Darwin's a five minute podcast summary of the origin of species, or Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or Moby Dick, and it's truly a remarkable experience to hear two people, completely AI generated, have a discussion about something and the level of understanding that you have because of their talking about it just in the little bit that I played with it is really quite impactful, so super cool.

54:16 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

Yeah, that's really awesome, man. I think it's going to be incredible when research papers are based on AI research and then AI is taking the information that it wrote for a student and then turning it into, you know, an acted out AI podcast or maybe a play on. Broadway, the basis screenplay on it using AI, and then generate more voices and even generate the visuals for it too, yeah, and then maybe it can create some an audience to actually pay attention to all of it.

54:50 - Fred Cadena (Host)

That that is going to be the rub is that last part I, yeah I.

54:55 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

I sense a little bit of sarcasm dripping from that statement well, it's, it's, it's a little bit.

55:01 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

Yeah, you're right, there is a little bit in there. Yeah, I, I don't know. Valid, I think. I think it's valid it is it is.

55:08 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

I I'm still more impressed than scared or disappointed by something like this. I I can see where, because this isn't necessarily changing or fabricating information. Now I could certainly see where you could go down a slippery slope very easily and and the next thing you know, it's feeding itself content. But for some things that are really long and really complicated, this is a good way to at least get your I guess, get your feet under you. And I've used the advanced data analysis capability in Chad GPT for some pretty sophisticated FDIC statements. You know Silicon Valley. When they were closed, I took the consent order and stuck it into Chad GPT and said, hey, give me a summary of this. What went wrong? How did things go sideways? If I'm the manager at a financial institution, what do I need to do to make sure this doesn't happen to me? And it talked about vendor due diligence and all sorts of other things that did not happen at Silicon Valley Bank. But this is kind of skipping right over that and just having a dialogue that you can listen in on.

56:14 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

I actually think it's awesome. I also think, too, there's a handful of very different and unique learning styles that humans have. People have learning styles that humans have right People have, and some people would greatly benefit from being able to tune into a conversation where it's you know it's different than listening to an audio book, as you mentioned. It's just a different way of digesting and a different way of learning. We have a friend who is blind and it's incredible how capable she is, you know, in the world because of all the tools that she's got. I could see this being a really cool way for her to access more complex information in a way that was actually enjoyable.

56:59 - Fred Cadena (Host)

Yeah, I mean. Two things immediately come to mind. One is I will forget now which of you said I think it was Eric this is not generating stuff, but I don't think there's a way that we can be certain of that. I think, just knowing how we all do, how generative AI is working, especially once they start doing this in volume, they don't know that we can dependently say, especially if it's producing something for a work that we haven't read, that everything that's coming out of the summary was actually there in the source material versus something that's being imagined.

57:43

The second kind of part of that is and again, this is not even a tool that we can access. I'm guessing that they probably picked some very, very short examples for the preview and you can find it at illuminategooglecom, but I was going through some books on here I definitely plan on checking out because I'm pretty familiar with them. One that I'm less familiar with, because I only read it once and it was a pain, is War and Peace, and they've got a five minute podcast on War and Peace. Now I looked it up because I remember taking me a long time to read. The audible version of War and Peace is 61 hours and six minutes and, again, I'm not going to claim to be some great appreciator of literature, but I got to imagine there's probably more than five minutes of stuff that you're supposed to get out of War and Peace.

58:40 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

59:07 - Eric Cook (Co-host)

You know, crammed in, how thick is it when it sits on your desk? I mean, how many, oh, how many inches?

59:12 - Josh Matthews (Co-host)

you know it's like I mean it, it's, it's like, it's like that. I've got big hands, so it's like that. And you know, it's like a brick, it's like a big brick. Anyway, I said I think that's too long for me, man, I know how my attention is. And and he just looked at me very serious, dead serious, and he said josh, it's not long enough. And I'll tell you, I was so freaking bummed out when I finally finished the thing. However, two months later, or what, how? Three months, however long it took me to get through, I was so bummed out because I knew there's no sequel. This is it, man.

59:51 - Fred Cadena (Host)

I will say this it's probably worth revisiting because I read it in high school and probably 16-year-old Fred did not have the appreciation with everything else that was on his social calendar. But back to the podcast idea. One of my favorite podcasts, obviously other than this one and the Salesforce Career Show and the Link Banker Show, which is not technically a podcast, I don't think yet.

That's just a happy hour Coming up this Thursday at 6 pm Eastern time, just in case you're wondering.

But one of my favorite podcasts that I've enjoyed this year, 99% Invisible has done a whole series where they've read and they're discussing month over month the book the Power Broker, which was written like in the 1960s, about Robert Moses, who is, if you're not familiar with him, kind of the guy behind all of the parks and stuff in the state of New York, like the reason why everything in New York is a parkway when you drive from, like LaGuardia to Manhattan.

It's because of him and I'm not going to get into it that much. But similar to War and Peace, it is a book that is stupid thick and each episode is like 90 minutes and I think they're planning 12. Each episode is like 90 minutes and I think they're planning 12. So, like you know, I can see, like if you take this Google tool or some other similar tool and like crank it up so you can actually get some detail and some incitement and like some you know analysis, I think it could be really cool. Like I like the idea of it. I just, you know, I worry about the execution.

Well, like with all things Google, that should always be a concern.

Yeah, absolutely.

Google.

Yeah, I am not disputing that in the least. Yeah.

Yeah. What if you find out that they're behind the rabbit, I wouldn't be shocked.

They probably, they probably did, they probably funded it all, yeah right, well, I mean I'll say this and I know, eric, you and I have talked about it because we talked about it on one of your Linked Banker masterminds and Josh, I don't know if we talked about it or not, but I've started putting out hopefully some of my listening audience is aware Banking on Disruption Daily, which is a news.

It's a five-minute or so news podcast that talks about banking headlines or news headlines with a banking slant every day and I'll be honest, I couldn't do it without AI. So I mean, I'm in the middle of all of the steps, but basically I will go through and I'll read news sources from 15, 20, 25 different places. I'll pick articles that I like, I send them using automation to OpenAI through the API to summarize them, put them in a script format and then I do some editing in the script and then I send it to 11 labs to read it back in my voice and then it posts automatically to Captivate, like literally, other than the editing. It's just a few buttons I have to push here and there to make the whole thing work.

You're not even actually doing the reading.

I'm not even actually doing the reading. 11 Labs is doing the reading, because frequently I'm pushing the button as I'm boarding a flight, like I can't guarantee every day I'm going to be someplace quiet long enough to to do this, um, and so it's really cool, but again there's a lot of me in the middle. But you know, could I see a future where, you know, somebody's tied a lot of these tools together and and done that in a way that you're bringing more to the table in real time? Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's definitely something to tell you this. I've already signed up for the waitlist in two of my Google accounts. We'll see which one gets it first, but I'm excited to try it.

Yeah, I just signed up too for the wait list.

We can all race and see who gets it first.

There we go. I think I'll get it last, because I just did it Well if it's anything like the rabbit.

I think I went in first you guys all got your confirmation before mine, so I'm prepared to be at the end of the line. It's all right.

You only beat me by like 20 minutes, so don't don't worry about it.

Um, so let's, let's transition. Uh, two, two big conferences two weeks in a row. Uh, this week maycon. I will have to like do a mea culpa here. I did mention on one of the previous podcasts, or maybe a couple, that I was planning on going and, in all honesty, in my mind I was planning on going. And then Eric texted me on Sunday and he's like oh hey, I didn't see you on the app, are you going? I'm like oh yeah, that's coming up this month. I need to take care of that. I'm like what is that? And he's like tomorrow, I guess. So I am not going to be at Maycon, but Eric, you are so tell us a little bit about what you're looking forward to.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to all of it. To be honest with you, I've not been able to attend the event. For those of you, I think it's their fifth annual. It is put on by the Marketing AI Institute, so Paul Reutzer and Mike Caput and Kathy McPhillips, who's their COO, mike is their chief content officer and Paul's the CEO. The AI Show is a podcast that I listen to religiously. It drops every Tuesday, so they will have an episode dropping tomorrow, which I'm really excited about as a pre for the event.

But Tuesday is going to be just an afternoon deep dive. There are three options to select from, and I'm going to sit in on the strategic leader track with Paul, designed to really focus around getting those that are in leadership positions within an organization understanding the value, the benefit and deployment of AI within an organization and how to track it, measure it and enhance it. And then, wednesday and Thursday, there are close to 70 individual main stage breakout tech demo sessions to pick from. So talk about a fire hose sessions to pick from. So talk about a fire hose. And one of the things that I have started doing for our Linked Banker community is when I go to an event, and the last time I did this was at Social Media Marketing World in San Diego. I'll pull up a Google Doc and I'll actually live, scribe my notes and make that link available to our community members as an added bonus or a perk for them to be able to just get a sense of what is going on and what sorts of things I'm capturing. I did some of that when I was at the Financial Brand Forum and got to spend some time with you in Vegas, fred, and so there's going to be a lot around leveraging AI. I've seen a number of sessions related to agents as well as avatars.

There are a couple of sessions I'm going to sit in on, as it relates to AI's impact on SEO and search visibility with search GPT and we're all familiar with perplexity. What does that mean for businesses, banks which is obviously my chosen target area and it relates to their content strategy, visibility, how to get found for things like mortgage loans and checking accounts and business banking, and how that's going to shift the SEO landscape to get visible. There's a really good session on copyright law and the legal implications of AI, because the law has not caught up with it. So can you or can't you copyright? Where's the the line that you shouldn't cross the importance of human in the process.

And to the point made earlier with regards to illuminate and when you were talking, fred, I was thinking should it still be the human's responsibility to consume that content legitimately, so that you know whether or not it's making stuff up? Just because Illuminate, or any platform for that matter, tells me what the paper is about or what it is, before I dive in and cite that in a presentation or use that in any sort of research that I'm going to do, it's my expectation as a human to validate that and to make sure that the AI didn't hallucinate and make stuff up. And I don't know how many people really think to that extent, or if they're just taking AI at face value. So I think there'll be some discussion around that taking AI at face value. So I think there'll be some discussion around that.

And then the closing, kind of bringing it all in. They are going to and they talked about this on the last podcast use some examples of some of the Gemini tools and a few others to do kind of some hands-on gee whiz kind of wow kind of stuff, and I'm not sure exactly what that's gonna do or mean. But I'm really excited because they they're they've got their hands dirty and a lot of stuff, so it's gonna be a firehose and we'll definitely have some follow-up conversation about it. But I was thinking also of a lot of the things, josh, that you had shared in your here's how you get ready for dreamforce, and you know, hydrate and make sure that you get plenty of sleep and um.

so I I referred to that, even though it didn't have anything to do with maycon, but if you've not gotten that resource from josh, I would strongly strongly suggest you pick that up, because it can help you prepare for pretty much any event, because there's going to be after hours and meetings and other sorts of things that your little how-to guide was super valuable for.

Well, thanks for the plug and that all sounds great. And, by the way, we just released the podcast version of that article that just dropped, I think. On Thursday morning you can just go to salesforcecareershowcom or your favorite platform. It's the most recent episode.

Did you record it yourself or did you use Google Illuminate? I did not use Google.

Illuminate. I did not use 11 Labsate to. I did not use google illuminate. I did not use 11 labs. It was actually me it wasn't.

You know, it wasn't burt reynolds, come on it wasn't burt reynolds, although that would have been better he had a good, good smooth voice there.

So yeah, just little josh yeah, so I I took some time. We've We've got four of us from WSI that are attending and I've got a handful of other people that I know. Plus, I'm familiar with some of the speakers as well, so I've reached out. The app has got some pretty nice networking capabilities, which I was very surprised and glad to see. Not that I wouldn't expect that from the Marketing Institute, ai Institute. They've got some pretty good stuff, but I think it's going to be really easy to keep in touch with each other and to interact and to just keep your hands into what's going on and making sure you don't miss something. I have gotten into the habit of putting together that Google document just to take notes, but I'm also going to be leveraging my Plod Note on all of my sessions to be able to listen and digest and to transcribe that into some lecture GPT summaries and so that I think will also help. Which tool was that? My Plod Note? So the little your.

Plod.

Note.

So the little your.

Plod Note the little. That's the thing that attaches to the back of his phone. Oh nice, the back of my phone.

Yeah, so I've been using that on a regular basis. When I was in Seattle a couple of weeks ago for the Pacific Coast Banking School, I recorded a couple of my sessions and we had a Google Think Tank fellow do a session for everyone and recorded that, thankfully, cause I didn't understand what the heck he was talking about. Um, but the the AI summary gave me a nice cliff notes version and, uh, understood it a little better. So, um, but trying to use some tools and some tech to make it easy for me to understand, but also to stay engaged and also be respectful of the speaker's intelligence and their intellectual property. I'm not going to be shared, but I'm going to be careful about not violating that, because that's the last thing you want to do is find somebody that you've leaked some of that out and that'll get you banned from conferences pretty quick, and that's definitely not my goal.

Yeah, that happened when I shared an early release copy of the Matrix before it hit theaters.

Did it. Yeah, it was a real yeah it was a real mess. Probably got a phone call from Keanu. I'm suspecting. Did you, yeah, did you did you share it for?

$15.95?. One time charge Bitcoin only.

Yeah, the matrix, the matrix there there you go.

So yeah, but more to come. It kicks off tomorrow and it's going to be amazing. I'm really really looking forward to it.

Well, good luck there, Eric, for sure.

Yeah, bummed that I'm not going to be there, but excited that you and I will get to catch up on it and I know we've texted about it a little bit. We'll work out all the details. But I definitely similar to social media marketing world, you know get you back on the pod to kind of do a recap and bankify the, the learnings and stuff. So hopefully you get that scheduled. Sweet, you know, it's not, it's not by the end of the week, next week sometime. Yep, happy to. And then, and then, josh, the conference I did not blow off. I will be in San Francisco next week for Dreamforce. This year I did not plan ahead to do a Banking on Disruption networking event, although I am hosting a couple of small private networking dinners for bank leaders. So if you're a bank leader and you're going to be at Dreamforce and you'd like to get together with myself and some of your peers, definitely reach out. I still have a couple of seats available and excited to be out there. And, josh, I know you've got some plans as well for Dreamforce.

Yeah, man, I really enjoy it. I always leave really wiped out. So I'm going to hunker down for a couple days at my aunt and uncle's house up in Marin for a little bit afterwards. But yeah, I'm stoked. Look, when I go to Dreamforce, I approach it differently than probably a lot of people do. I'm there to say hi to clients, networking and then also doing a fair amount to capture some good quality content for the podcast as well.

Nice, so I don't go to a lot of sessions. If I can read about it online later, I probably won't go to the session, but I do support my friends' sessions. If they're having something, I'll go there.

Yeah, that's kind of my rule of thumb as well. Unless it's a roadmap session which are not recorded, or if it's a client or former client or friend or somebody like that that's speaking. I'll make time to go to that, but 90% of the sessions are recorded and available afterwards for free, or at least for for free, or at least you know, for free if you registered to be a dream force. So my, my priority is always to network and spend time with the people that are, that are there in person, so excited and looking forward to that, looking forward to being out there and also be a lot of recaps going on. We'll have to do a Dreamforce recap as well.

Yeah, that'll be good. That'll be good. In fact, I'm going to have a post-Dreamforce recap on the Salesforce Career Show with my friend Brandon. He's a former RVP over there and I'll get to hang out with him a little bit and we'll get a few different perspectives. It'll be good. You're, of course, welcome to join us on that show as well.

Fantastic, I will. I will definitely try to be on. I've been very remiss in making my my guest appearances on the show lately, but I I need to get better.

Well, you're traveling a lot, buddy. You're a very busy guy and one of the busiest people I know, and and that's a good thing.

You just keep up all the good work you're doing for all of your clients. I'm trying to. I appreciate it, Josh. Well, gentlemen, I know we're nearing time and, Eric, you've got another hour and a half of driving ahead of you to get out and hopefully, hopefully, do some networking tonight, uh at the, uh at the conference conference.

I don't know how many people are going to be in this evening. It starts midday tomorrow, so I think a lot of people are rolling in Tuesday early. It might be just me in my running shoes taking a little spin by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Which isn't all that bad either.

Definitely worse ways to spend an evening. Well gentlemen, take care and we'll chat soon. Thank you much.

Have a great week, guys. I'll see you next week, Fred. Bye for now.

Well, everyone, I really hope you enjoyed episode 33 of Banking on Disruption. Don't forget, visit bankingondisruptioncom to get show notes and a full transcript of the show. Also, new episodes drop every other Thursday, so we'll see you here in two weeks and in the meantime, please don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram at at bankingondisruption. Until next time, this is Fred Cadena, wishing you success in your digital pursuits.