Well, we have a very full agenda today, so I do wanna go ahead and get started. My name is Juanita Olguin. I Lead Product marketing here at Coveo, and I am thrilled that you are all joining us today for what is gonna be a very insightful session. As a product marketer, I get to do a lot of different things, and being able to connect experts to you all is one of my favorite things to do. So really excited for today. I have a few housekeeping items before we jump in. The first is to please use the Q&A box. We do wanna hear from you today. As we go through the today's session, if you have questions, please feel free to put those in the Q&A box. We'll be monitoring it, and we will we will have time towards the end of today's presentation to go through through your questions. We are also recording today's session, so you will get access to this in the next twenty four to forty eight hours. Now I wanted to give a big thank you and a welcome to Blake Morgan, who is a CX thought leader and futurist. Blake's been called the queen of CX by Meta and is the author of three books on customer experience. Her new book is called The Eight Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership: The New Rules for Building A Business Around Today's Customer. Blake has taught courses at Columbia University, Rutgers executive MBA program, and UC San Diego. She's also an instructor for LinkedIn Learning. Blake is the host of The Modern Customer podcast. She lives in LA with her husband, their two children, and two dogs. Blake, thank you so much. Excited to hear from you today. Anything I missed? Wow. No. I I think you've got everything. Thank you for having me, Juanita. And everybody, hello, and welcome, and good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Let's do it. Are you ready to dive in, Juanita? Let's do it. Alright. Sounds good. So today, we're talking about something that's near and dear to my heart. We're really talking about making customers' lives easier and better. That's really the name of the game when we think about technology and customer experience. The goal is to really reduce stress for customers and for employees. Before we get into the meat of our conversation today about AI and customer experience, I wanna take you back in time. Before we go forward, we need to look back. There's an old legend about King Edward the seventh. Now King Edward the seventh lived in London, but he liked to frequent a very customer centric hotel in London. And one day, King Edward the seventh went over to his favorite hotel to stay the night, and he decided to take a luxurious bath. But to his shock, he actually got stuck in the bathtub because king Edward was really a man of size and he was so upset he got stuck in the bathtub. He called the owner of the hotel who was a friend, and the owner's name was Caesar. Caesar was so mortified that his customer had this terrible experience that he called his architect of his hotels immediately and said, we need to change all the bathtubs in all the rooms. Every bathtub should be fit for a king. Now this hotelier was none other than Cesar Ritz of Ritz Carlton, and he actually was the first to say that the customer is always right. And he was so ahead of his time because he believed that if a customer felt the food wasn't good, the wine wasn't right, you should immediately remove that food or wine, no questions asked. So he was a legend ahead of his time, sharing many of the values and beliefs about a customer centric culture like the greats today, like Jeff Bezos. And we'll talk more about some of the more customer centric companies today and some of my examples. But, essentially, what Cesar Ritz was doing over a hundred years ago was creating a customer centric brand. And I've been studying customer experience for almost twenty years now. I've written three books on the topic. I interview tons and tons of executives on my podcast, The Modern Customer. And what I've learned is that customer experience is not a discipline. Customer experience is not a division at your company. Customer experience is just a decision, but it's a decision you have to make every single day because most companies make the mistake of being product centric over being customer centric. We build experiences based on what's better for our own company in the short term rather than investing in the long term relationship with the customer. And when we think about building a brand, building a brand and building a customer experience are truly one and the same today. Think about Louis Vuitton. Why would anyone go to a store today and purchase a leather bag that costs five, ten, fifteen thousand dollars? You can get a free bag from the grocery store. So why on on earth would you buy this bag? It's not the quality of the leather. It's really about the way that Louis Vuitton makes the customers feel. Louis Vuitton is not just selling a bag. They're selling a dream because the way the customer feels when they walk into the Louis Vuitton store, when they go on the website, when they carry that bag out with their friends and family, it transports them, and they are living the dream. So think about your own brand. What is the dream you are selling the customer? Because today, experience is the brand. And so we'll talk about the role that AI and technology plays in building a brand, in building a customer experience that everybody watching this webinar can be proud of. But it's been an interesting time in customer experience, and I told I told you I've been studying this for so long. I I eat, breathe, dream customer experience. And what's interesting is that during COVID, we saw an explosion of digital transformations. Some of you might work in industries where in the past, you couldn't imagine doing anything remotely or letting employees work remotely, like banking. Banks had to go through digital transformations in three to six months, and to all of our shock, they did it. You didn't have to go to the bank anymore to transact. And so you saw a lot of money being poured into digital customer experience, also employee experience, remote work, hybrid work. But now fast forward four years, and a report came out, an article came out in The Wall Street Journal over this summer of twenty twenty four that, unfortunately, customer service and experience is at an all time low. Because of the uncertain economy, and companies had spent all this money investing in digital, and they got tired of investing in customers. Customer experience is at an all time low, and you can probably feel it that as a customer, you're experiencing shrinkflation, that brands are putting less cereal in the cereal box and more air. They're charging the same or more for experiences, products, and services, but they're not adding more value. So this is a beautiful opportunity for all of you watching this webinar. When everyone goes right, you can go left. When we're in an in an uncertain economy, in an uncertain time, this is actually the time to invest in customer experience, not to shrink or be afraid. It's a time to invest and double down on customer stand out. So when we think about artificial intelligence, in the last six months, we have seen incredible advances in this technology. Many are afraid, though, as with any new trend. Like, remember back when, this was before my time, so I don't necessarily remember it, but I read about it, in the nineteen sixties when banks brought in ATMs. And people all over the world thought that ATMs would destroy bank jobs, that there would be no more people working in the banks. But the ATM just changed the industry. You can now transact and get cash out, but for more complicated matters, you had to go into the bank. And most of us still do have to go into the bank even all these years later. And so that's what people are saying today about AI, that there's a parallel now that AI is not going to completely get rid of jobs and people because research from Deloitte shows that customers don't want more technology in the future. They want less. They actually want that human experience. I mean, all of your customers, think about the most incredible customer experience that you had recently. It probably involves some element of service recovery or personalization, someone caring about you, remembering your name, knowing your kids' preferences. So these are the experiences offered by a person. And I've been thinking a lot about these human to human experiences because I've been working across industries, most recently working in hospitality, and just thinking about what are the most delicious beloved customer experiences we have. They're often involving some element of a white glove customer experience, a personal touch. But we can definitely improve efficiencies with technology. There's no shortage of work to be done. So when we think about the future and we think about technology, many predict that in the future you know how in the past, if you needed a meeting, you might hear you might say, okay, Have your assistant call my assistant. In the future, you'll just say, have your AI contact my AI. So AI will literally be talking to each other, making people's lives easier and better, creating more efficiencies, making work easier. And so we're seeing that there's a huge amount of excitement around AI. And as of twenty twenty four, almost eighty percent of businesses are using or exploring AI to enhance customer experience, and some of the key areas in customer experience are response time and personalization. And many predict and have high hopes for AI, and they they believe that AI has the potential to make employees forty percent more productive, and that's according to Zendesk. Think about your own life and your own use of AI. Have you installed Chat GPT on your phone? Have you made the switch from using Google search to using Chat GPT for research? Or even if you don't even know what to eat, you could put that in you could put what you ate throughout the day and then actually tell and ask ChatGPT, what should I eat? And so we're exploring three areas today, AI and customer service, empowering employees, and then key metrics for success. Part one, customer service. Customer service is set to explode, and AI is really set to disrupt the customer service world in general. AI enhances customer service by automating routine tasks, providing real time support, and improving overall service efficiency. Chatbots and virtual assistants provide faster response times and ensures twenty four seven availability. And, of course, we have sentiment analysis offering suggestions for more effective interactions, improving service quality. Now many of us are using chat GPT and AI in our personal lives. Many of us use Amazon Alexa or Apple Siri. I personally love using Alexa, and my kids use it too, but Siri has a hard time understanding what I'm saying. But as of May twenty twenty three, Amazon has sold over five hundred million Alexa enabled devices, which basically means almost double the amount of people in the US have an Alexa in their home and a hundred million active Alexa users are talking to Alexa every day, asking for things like "hey, Alexa add more apples to my cart." Or "Alexa, what's the weather going to be today?" So in the future, there'll be much more audio AI, and we'll just be talking to the AI increasingly. Now many companies are exploring the use of AI and not doing a great job because it's still the wild, wild west. For example, Air Canada, Air Canada got in a little bit of trouble with chatbot. Air Canada had a customer whose grandma died, and the grandma, and this customer was very, very sad that his grandma died. And so he needed to attend the funeral, and he contacted Air Canada through the chatbot and said, I can't afford this seven hundred dollar flight to get to the funeral. Will you honor a cheaper rate for me through your bereavement policy? And if I attend the funeral, when I come back, can I get a refund? And the chatbot said yes. However, what happened is the customer returned from the funeral and called the contact center, and the contact center, the agent said, actually, no. That's our chatbot. It gave you wrong information. You have to pay the full rate. If you wanted the bereavement policy, you should have contacted and bought the ticket through a special way before you left. Now the customer was so upset that he took Air Canada to court, and the court told Air Canada they had to pay the customer. But this isn't just about the money for the ticket. This is embarrassing for Air Canada because they had tried to shirk responsibility and say that's our chatbot. Our chatbot hallucinated. That's not us. This is not a customer centric approach to how we should be treating our customers and run our businesses. And so we cannot release chatbots or AI for our customers and our employees until it's finished baking. We wouldn't want this to happen because if you remember, this PR nightmare was all over the news making Air Canada look very bad. So you see that today, customers become very frustrated when our technology actually makes their life harder when we're not delivering personalized interactions. And almost all of our customers will, over time, dump us because customers might not even tell you when they dump you. They'll just ghost you because I because I can assure you that that customer that had to take Air Canada to court is gonna think twice before booking on Air Canada again. Personalization is an exciting time, with advances in AI. If you go to Germany now, you can use the virtual influencer AI, Emma. Emma is the first AI influencer from Germany's national tourist board, and you can actually see if you go on my LinkedIn or my Instagram. I have the video of Emma who literally, she is not a person. She is a full video AI but it's exciting to see these technologies come to life and how the the AI can add value to customers' lives. Or even we'll talk about some examples of employee experience and how how AI is helping employees at work. On the third part of customer service, we talked about we talked about personalization. We talked more generally about customer service, scaling interactions. And in my research, I have found that the most customer centric companies, companies like Progressive Insurance or BarkBox, they're using more of a white glove customer experience, but they are using AI and digital to scale interactions, but also sometimes doing things that don't scale. BarkBox is a dog subscription service that sells two million boxes every month. They make a habit of talking to a third of their customers every month, and they have a policy called "No Dog Left Behind". So these dog subscription boxes that involve treats and chew toys, if a customer has a specific request, they have to fulfill on that promise. They have to actually figure out what the customer needs and and offer it to them. So the customer happiness team one day got a call. Actually, it was an email from a customer that was very upset with what they found in the box because the box contained a, pork chewy. Because the customer was actually not a dog. It was a pig, Peppa the pig. And the owner said, we don't want any pork in our subscription boxes. And so this is just a fun example of how BarkBox uses personalization, to talk to a third of their customers every month and to scale using AI. And, actually, the founder of BarkBox, I just had him on my own podcast, Henrik Werdelin. He has his own AI podcast now called Beyond the Prompt, which I encourage you to check out, and he listened to customers and discovered they actually wanted not just a dog subscription service. They wanted a whole airline for dogs because many of these pet owners did not wanna put their dogs in the cargo of the airplane. So today, you can literally send your dog from Los Angeles to New York on a first class flight in a seat on Bark Air, the first airline for dogs. I am not kidding. This is a hundred percent true. You can check out their website, Bark Air. And so scaling customer interactions is so important, but many companies still are just awkwardly doing this. So we have to figure out what our customers are comfortable with, what privacy issues do they have, what are their concerns, how do they wanna be treated. And there's a few companies using AI to help them scale customer experience and service. Royal Dutch Airlines, KLM, uses WhatsApp to send flight updates, check-in notifications, and boarding passes. Domino's Pizza, very popular here in my house. They have a voice assistant called Dom that takes phone orders at scale, improving order accuracy and speed. So they're using voice recognition. And then Airbnb is my last example that are doing real time language translation for hosts and guests when they're speaking different languages. So there are a million examples of how companies are testing the waters with AI. But, essentially, customers are really looking for that smooth experience as they always have been. And now AI can help you deliver that efficient, personalized, scaled interaction, can help you reduce costs and enhance operational efficiency. Seventy three percent of customers expect to be able to start on one channel and continue on another without restarting. So this is stuff we've all been talking about for over twenty years. But now with AI, we're actually able to make these things happen in an incredibly seamless and beautiful way. I'm here today with Coveo. They have some really interesting case studies on their website, including their client SAP Concur. It's a Cloud-based travel expense and invoice management company. They have an incredible ROI story where using Coveo, they saw a thirty percent decline in cases for every one thousand search sessions. So SAP is using Coveo to basically help get customers their questions answered more easily without having to create a case. And so for many years, people like me, thought leaders in the industry have been talking about ROI, have been talking about how sometimes the best customer service is no service. And just think about all the money you could spend that you save on reducing contact center volume. Where could you put that money? Maybe on adding value, on educating customers. We know that today, customer experience, so many of our products and services are commodities. So if we're saving money by reducing contact center volume, think about the endless possibilities of how we can add value to customers' lives to create more products and services around the product that we sell. And an exercise I actually really enjoy doing with customers, Imagine if you could no longer - let's say you sell toothbrushes. Imagine you can no longer sell toothbrushes, but you could only sell the experience around the toothbrush. What would it be? It's an interesting exercise and workshop you can do with your colleagues when you finish this webinar today. Another fun Coveo example is United Airlines. Love United. I'm a longtime customer over thirty years. I've recently had the opportunity to interview the Chief Customer Officer Linda Jojo, and they're doing a lot of cool stuff with their app, with digital, with AI. They are a Coveo client as well. And Coveo helps United by helping to make United look good, basically. Because sometimes customers are trying to gain the system. They're trying to see how accurate United can be. So you can see here in the search box, it says, "can I fly with my kids in a checked bag?" Well, I have two little kids, and while they weigh, like, thirty pounds because they're still so tiny, I probably wouldn't wanna fly with them in luggage. So you see here, Coveo is protecting United against hallucinations or basically mistakes that the AI would make, and it basically understood what the customer was saying even though it was worded in a really funny and tricky way. That's how good AI has gotten. So customer service is incredibly important. It's an exciting time for customer experience leaders everywhere because now with AI, we're learning to scale white glove customer experiences, to personalize interactions, to create better, more efficient processes using AI. I mean, so many of us are already enjoying personalization. Even this morning, I got to run on my treadmill and listen to Spotify music, the "Discover Weekly", that is based on AI through my preferences, and I didn't even have to change the song. I just let all the songs play because Spotify through AI knows me so well that they know how much I enjoy running to Metallica. Part two of our AI customer experience class today is about employee experience. Now, it's not a coincidence that so many companies that are customer centric, I just send people over to the great place to work list because so many companies that are customer centric are also employee centric. And, actually, my husband wrote a book called The Employee Experience Advantage, and his research showed that companies that invested in employee experience were four point two times more profitable than companies that didn't. So you often hear people talking about employee experience and customer experience being married. Speaking of being married, I'm married. I told you my husband's an author also studying experience. And I clearly remember when we got married. I was working at a Fortune one hundred tech company in Silicon Valley, and I lived about over an hour in in traffic from the headquarters. And I remember when I got married, I wanted to change my name from Landau my maiden name to Morgan. But upon doing so, the company I worked for, the intranet, the computer was so confused by me making the simple change of my name that I literally got locked out of my computer, and I had to drive over an hour and spend a whole day just sitting in IT at the headquarters to get my broken computer and intranet fixed just from a simple name change. So why am I talking about this? Because when an employee has a frustrating onboarding experience or they work in the contact center, and there's forty different desktop windows they have to flip through to help the customer, these are huge dents in the employee experience. These are bruises in the employee experience. We know that people are your greatest asset, and so providing beautiful white glove employee experiences is is actually such a connected piece to customer experiences. And so, I mean, I'm sure you had an example of a terrible employee experience that you even had similar to mine where something stopped you from being productive at work, something silly that shouldn't have gotten in the way of you being more efficient. When we think about AI and employee experience, we're really talking about improving employee satisfaction, productivity, and overall work experience. We're talking about removing friction, like when you change your last name and you have to drive to the headquarters. We're talking about empowering employees and improving decision making. And now you're just seeing even, like, the product Copilot just empowering employees with the AI serving up the next best action to the employee to better serve the customer. And this is a beautiful thing for employees, especially in sales or in the contact center when they often have to sift through so much information to figure out how to best serve the customer. I'll give you an example. The other day, my husband, his Apple Watch broke, and he had to change the service to put to be able to make calls on his watch. It took him two hours to do this with our telecom provider, this simple switch. First, he called a contact center abroad, then that didn't work. He had to call in the US. And so you see, so many of these large companies that are are really the big the biggest companies in the world, they still stink at customer experience with contact centers and removing friction. So customer experience is the best marketing opportunity that money can't buy. It's really about reducing back end complexity, creating operational efficiencies. AI can now help us to improve productivity, which helps customers. And AI integration companies are seeing up to seventy two percent in productivity boost. We're talking today about supportive AI cultures. So employees can experiment with AI, and these employees that are encouraged to experiment have higher productivity, creativity, and job satisfaction. Of course, they do. And I actually released a course on LinkedIn on change management. So how do we manage employees going through these changes, getting used to these new technologies? And I was so excited to see in just six weeks' time, ten thousand people took this course on change management in the contact center. So I know it's not just me thinking about what is the management reality and management side of bringing AI into the workplace. The same course, the research I did found that when employees were trained in groups on the AI so they weren't just the lone ranger doing AI. They had a group like a support group so they could not just experiment, but they could do it in a supportive environment. They had better success. Studies also show that sometimes your employees, if you don't have a supportive AI culture, maybe they're rejecting the AI. It could be because of things like, for example, in a contact center, now with AI, the AI does the call summary for each call. Well, in the past, the contact center agent got a two minute break after each interaction to do a little write up and do the notes about the call. Well, that write up didn't always take two minutes. So the contact center agent was getting a breather in between the calls because of the need to take notes. Now the AI does it. The agent gets no more breaks. And so the AI removed the agent's fake break. So when the agent says, no. I don't like this AI. I don't wanna do this. I don't want this. I'm rejecting. They actually were more upset that they didn't get a break anymore. So, again, change management, talking to employees, understanding what the key issues are, that's going to help you have better success with AI implementation. In so many companies, it's just the wild, wild west. Sixty percent of companies lock a clear AI vision. And so we have to start thinking about AI. We have to embrace these new technologies and figure out what our approach is. The Chief People Officer of Walmart is Donna Morris. I knew her when she was at Adobe, and she's an interesting person because she was one of the first C level executives that owned both HR and customer experience. When she was at Adobe, she was Chief People and Employee Experience Officer. At the time, eight years ago, nine years ago, that was really unheard of. So now she's at Walmart. And today, we're talking about Walmart and their employee experience and the cool ways they're using AI inside the company. They're using AI for scheduling to help optimize work shifts of employees at Walmart. So employees have better schedules that align with their preferences, improving work life balance. They also have autonomous floor scrubbing robots and inventory scanners deployed in the stores to help remove repetitive tasks from employees. And so you're seeing whether it's Walmart or their company Sam's Club, there's a lot of cool use cases of how they're using AI. They have an app called the Academy App that uses virtual reality and AI driven scenarios to train employees in customer service, operational processes, and leadership skills. So when we think about AI, whether it's at Walmart or in the contact center, you're hearing a lot about these coaching tools that help even in sales or customer service to look back at the interaction and say, here's how you could have handled it better. Walmart is using AI in operations for better workflows, for inventory management, analytics to streamline supply chain, predictive algorithms that ensure shelves are restocked, and employees can avoid manual stock tracking. And then well-being. I mean, well-being is a huge topic after COVID. So Walmart is using AI to personalize benefits for employees recommending health care plans or financial wellness tools. So that really is part of your employee experience offering. How are you empowering your employees using AI? Maybe you need to help them with their financial health or helping them find time for rest and getting breaks or an a healthy walk outside. So the technology can help create a more beautiful and human experience at work. And lastly, our last example from Walmart is the Ask Sam voice assistant app, which provides quick answers to store related questions, improving efficiency and reducing stress during busy shifts. So, the more you empower employees, the more you give them tools to do their jobs, the better they can help customers. It makes the employee feel good, because I can assure you, nobody watching this webinar wakes up in the morning and goes, I wanna deliver a subpar customer experience. I don't wanna have what I need at work to do my job. I want a slow, frustrating, cumbersome employee experience. No. Nobody says that. Everyone wants to do a good job just to provide an experience they can deliver to the customer that makes them feel proud. Now AI just helps us in a beautiful way to create these efficiencies. So by integrating AI in ways that enhance both operations and employee satisfaction, Walmart is an example of a non-tech company that really is creating that that culture that lends itself nicely to AI. You don't have to be a tech company to start to look at AI. Metrics is always a hot topic when we think about customer experience. Coveo has seen really good customer experience metrics from their clients with self-service, case deflection, lowering case volume. Obviously, that's money saved. Where could that money go to, again, create an experience around your product? I like to say if you treasure it, you'll measure it. What's measured gets improved. But we have to be careful in the customer experience world because so many of our long time metrics that we've been talking about for so long are just flawed. I had a client that built new construction, new construction home builder, and all the division presidents across the US would compete. And they were all in a competition to go to a trip at the end of the year to Martha's Vineyard, which is a beautiful place here in the US with the CEO. And if they hit high marks on net promoter score, the division president could spend this time at Martha's Vineyard. Well, what happened with net promoter score is all these presidents started gaming the system. They started whining and dining customers and asking for the score. How many times have you heard about examples of employees trying to beg the customer for the high NPS score? So we have to be careful that we're not working toward a metric, that the metric actually makes sense. And that's why qualitative data is still really important. I recently interviewed on my podcast someone from Samsung, the head of service there, and he was talking about how much he loves reading the verbatims from customers through the contact center. I call this flipping burgers next to employees. In my book, my new book, The Eight Laws of Customer Focused Leadership, CEOs and presidents like Lynsi Snyder, the the founder of In N Out not the founder. The granddaughter of the founder of In N Out. She actually flips burgers next to employees. And so again and again, you're seeing these customer and employee centric leaders are willing to get out and do, like, Undercover Boss. Remember that show? I had the chance to interview the CEO of Verizon Consumer, and he was talking about all the cool ways he is implementing AI. And this year, Verizon, in an effort to prevent a hundred thousand customers from leaving the service, started using AI, generative AI, to improve customer loyalty by predicting caller reasons, matching customers with appropriate agents, and reducing store visit times. Telecom, what a great example of such a huge industry that is still so backwards because you need a new phone line or you need to make a change on your phone or perhaps you have an Apple Watch like me. I mean, these wait times and the time it takes to get something done, it can still be going to a store and spending five, six hours in a retail store. And so, again, if you are willing to put a stake in the ground on customer experience, you are different because, again, now companies are making cuts to the customer experience. Shrinkflation. They are raising prices on customers and watering down the product or service. Customers will remember how you treated them during this uncertain economy, So let's help customers. Let's lend a helping hand no matter the industry. One of my favorite examples of a leader that embraced digital disruption and technology is John Legere. John Legere is the former CEO of T Mobile. In twenty twelve, T Mobile wasn't doing that great. Out of all the carriers in the US, they were last. They were in fourth place. And so John Legere decided to change things. At the CES Technology Show here in Las Vegas in the US, John Legere got on stage in twenty twelve and said, our industry treats customers really badly. In fact, we're gonna stand for something different. We're going to be the uncourier. He announced that day that things were going to change. He took the company through a complete transformation. He said all these things that our industry does to customers, charging them crazy roaming fees when they travel, charging them exorbitant fees for streaming video content, locking them into contracts that are so horrible. It's like signing a prenup. We're doing away with all that. We're gonna make customers' lives easier and better. And as the company went through this transformation, he, John Legere, the CEO, went through a transformation. You saw it. He looked like a normal corporate CEO in twenty twelve and then went through his own rebranding. He was wearing magenta and leather jackets. He grew his hair long. He would go to all the retail stores and the contact centers and take selfies with employees. And he even is quoted as saying that his job was to basically tell everyone, this is what we stand for now, communicate it like crazy, and be really present, flip burgers next to employees. He even had a slow cooker show on Facebook that made him more relatable and approachable. And T Mobile grew their stock price like crazy, and they went from fourth place to first place. And so you see, when we're committed to trying new things, when we ourselves, as business people, are willing to transform, to make ourself uncomfortable, to get out of our comfort zone, That's what's happening with AI today because it is the wild, wild west. But by partnering with companies like Coveo who can help you, who can walk through this new jungle with you holding your hand, figure out how you can reduce contact center volume, how you can achieve productivity gains. There's really no limit to what you can achieve as a business. And so we talked about AI and customer service. We looked at employee experience and Walmart and how we can help make employees' lives easier and better, and by doing so, improve the customer experience. We've talked about scaling interactions and looking at companies like BarkBox that really are scaling white glove customers experience through AI. There's really no limit to what we can achieve. Customer experience is not a discipline. Customer experience is not a division. Customer experience is a decision, but it's a decision you have to make every single day. And I hope today you will make the customer experience decision, and AI can help you do that. Thank you so much for listening. And now we're gonna do a little bit of Q&A with the audience. Amazing, Blake. I took so many notes personally, and I hope that those of you listening were also given ideas, things to think about, really love the content. I do have some questions here for you. And those of you that are still listening in, you can, submit as we go here. And we'll take them one by one if that's alright with you, Blake. Yeah. Sounds great. The first question is, first of all, you covered so many different types of real use cases from brands we all know and love. But AI still seems to be a little bit of a buzzword, sometimes a little bit hard to understand where to get started. How are you seeing companies prioritize the different types of AI that exist and think about the types they want to use. What are you hearing out there? From what I know, I recommend you create a digital sandbox where you can have an area of the business where you literally just experiment, and you can even create an AI task force that identifies opportunities to bring AI in. Just like with customer experience technology, it can't just be owned by, let's say, the CIO who doesn't go out and talk to different business units. Like Sephora is a great example of a CTO that in his first six months on the job, his name is Ali Bouhouch. He went and just did a listening tour and met with all the business units and understood where the gaps were. Of course, he has the technology savvy and know how, but first, he was looking at where are the gaps in the business, how do we reduce back end complexity. He discovered that all the different departments and channels at Sephora were competing. The retail store was competing with the, digital and mobile groups, and he decided to basically bring the walls down and change the way that employees were incentivized, to make them want to collaborate with one another. And so I think this approach from the former CTO of Sephora is very interesting. And if anybody's interested, I can send them more information about that case study. But, again, an AI task force can be a great solution, bringing in technology experts that are willing to go out to the business units and look for opportunities. Amazing. Thank you for sharing that. Another question here. So you showed the trend in CX and how it it's on the decline. You also talked about EX a bit. Do you think that there might be a decline in CX due to a gap in EX focus or prioritizing EX? Are you seeing that anything about that, in the market? I think right now, it's just been a hard it's been a hard year, I I believe, that even we're seeing B2B companies impacted by inflation. And, I mean, obviously, at least in tech, I mean, there's a lot of layoffs, and it's just been a tough time where many employees are doing more with less because of the layoffs. Now people are going out for jobs. Like, maybe you were a VP. Now you're going after, like, a manager job. And so you're just seeing a lot of almost chaos in the market when we think about hiring and HR and employee experience. I think that employee and customer experience are very much linked. I love Trader Joe's, the grocery chain in the US. They do a great job with employee experience. They're an example of a company that doesn't really change or shrink depending on what's happening out in the economy. They'll actually remove an item from the shelf if the raw material has gotten too expensive rather than raising prices on customers. They are a thirteen to fifteen billion dollar a year grocery chain that treats employees really well, offers medical and dental and vision. They do not make knee jerk reactions. And they actually are a little bit behind in technology, but because of their mission and values, they have just retained customers and their employee retention is very high. I actually read the memoir of the founder of Trader Joe's, Joe Coulombe, and he said, "why do you think no one has been able to disrupt our grocery business?" Well, it's because we treat our employees well. We pay them well. We retain them. And, sixty years later, Trader Joe's is still still has not been disrupted by anybody. That's a fascinating example. Definitely something to learn there because you talked to earlier about how some kind of invest and then pull back, and it sounds like Trader Joe's. There's something there to understand. How do you continuously make sure you're making that investment and not lose sight of that focus? Mhmm. We do have a question here, from from Mike. Thank you for that, submission. Mike says AI NCX does offer personalization, efficiency, and twenty four seven support. However, a major challenge is maintaining a human touch, ensuring that AI interactions feel natural, empathetic, and avoid coming across as robotic or impersonal is crucial. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah. I would say to not have robotic AI. I mean, obviously, with machine learning, the more you feed the machine and the the more the better it learns. I think that for us to be experts at AI, we have to play with the AI ourselves. That's why I encourage everyone to check out Henrik Werdelin's Beyond The Prompt podcast because even I interviewed him the other day. He's the founder of BarkBox and Bark Air. He was talking about how he he has AI on his phone, and he's playing with it all day. He says it's made him forty percent more productive. He's using it. He's testing it. And I think that if we want to create less robotic customer experiences with AI, we have to play with the AI and figure out where are the gaps. So when is the AI hallucinating? Like, the example from Air Canada. Now if employees had tested their own customer journey, that probably wouldn't have happened, but there's a distance. So I think you need to have people at your company that like risk, that like to play with these technologies. Again, I mentioned the digital sandbox, that we have to be able to play with the technologies to figure out where the gaps are. And, again, the more we feed the machine and teach the machine, the less robotic it will be. That's fair. That's fair. For those of you listening, again, you can still we still have a few minutes to submit questions, but we did just wanna highlight a few assets with which Tracy's, posting here in the chat that can give you some guidance around how to think about AI, the different user interfaces, and also hear, again, more real customer stories on the B2B side. Blake, you spoke about some of these a little bit earlier. So just wanna make sure you get those resources, to help guide you in this journey. Blake, another question for you. Kind of going a little bit under the hood of AI. Of course, you know, again, AI is big, broad, a lot of different types there. But I think a lot of people are finding that, there's a lot that goes into making it work, things like data management, knowledge management. Are you hearing companies come up against that, and and what are they doing to maybe do better data or knowledge management, which eventually leads to great AI and Gen AI output. Yeah. I think that having your your data officer very involved again in various business units to really understand the gaps, to get to bring in more experts in your company that might not not necessarily be AI experts to help understand what a good experience is with the AI and creating a task force and advisory board would really, really help. But, Juanita, let me let me put that question to you. I mean, you're an expert. What do you have any advice for our audience? Yeah. I mean, I think given that AI is so big and so broad, understanding, what you're going to feed the AI is very important. Meaning, you know, as as large enterprises, you might wanna say, send it all my content and information, and it'll figure it out. The fact of the matter is AI doesn't work that way. It really is processing the things that you're feeding it. So I think understanding the content or the the knowledge sources that your customers or employees are interacting with and and using tools like intelligent search, semantic search to, again, refine that that information and body of knowledge and then feeding that to the AI are, kind of base baseline fundamental things that you need to be doing and you need to have in place. We see a lot of people overlook it. This is what leads to those hallucinations that you alluded to, Blake. Mhmm. You're not feeding the right data that's been validated. And by the way, data and content is changing all the time, especially if you're a company with a lot of products, and a lot of content. Right? You're constantly changing it, responding to customer needs. So you need a solution that can best retrieve the most relevant information sources before passing that to the AI. That would be my my two cents or what I would, you know, I would say is a fundamental need. And then beyond that, I think maybe thinking through agnostic solutions that aren't just limited to one user interface or one platform. Because I'll tell you, we hear some platforms that are out there that have you know, there's a there's copilots and summaries and this and that, but usually, it's limited to the knowledge and content that resides in that particular database. And so, again, you're being limited to certain, silos, data silos, information silos. So thinking through data cleaning fundamentals as well as all the different new eyes and interfaces you have, taking that agnostic approach, I think, are, again, helpful and fundamental things. Mhmm. I love that. It's a great answer. One question for you. I mean, you've shared so much. Again, I I took a ton of notes myself. Really great session, so thank you. So there's a lot of great and exciting stuff happening with all the different companies you mentioned. What are you excited to see or learn more about in twenty twenty five? Like, what what do you think are some of the most exciting things upcoming that we should keep an eye on? I mean, I think that voice and video is really interesting and really exciting. I will admit I am somewhat disappointed by some of the AI that we've been using for the past five years. I think Siri I don't know if it's my voice, but she often can't hear me when I say, hey, Siri. Hey, Siri. I don't wanna say it. But, I mean, even just using Alexa, I mean, this is more of, like, a personal, like, fun story, but, you know, the potential for, like, making people's lives better. Like, when I talk to Alexa and say, hey, Alexa. Can you add more gluten free cereal to my cart? Just like, what are the ways through voice we can make people's lives easier and better? And the world is sort of a it's a messy time. There's a lot of noise and complication. So I'm always a fan of simplicity, of elegant experiences that help people be more productive, get more done, find more joy in their life. And I we've talked about this. I'm a working mom. I have two little kids. If I didn't, like, live in a time with social media, smartphones, and digital technology, I would not be here. I would not have this job. I would not be able to go travel the world and have this podcast and be there for my kids. It's like, technology, it doesn't just help us be more productive in the contact center. Like, it helps all of us to live more enriched lives and solve problem all kinds of problems. So I think it's a really exciting time to see voice and even just technology across the board just get better, which allows us to create more beautiful human experiences. And I actually was recently talking to an entrepreneur who has an AI company who was saying, you know, so many people are afraid of being replaced by AI. But I believe there's so much work to do, even just having little kids, like, just seeing how the daycares are run and how many moms with little kids and parents need help with their kids. Like, what if we redeployed the people that were doing jobs that we are not gonna need anymore because of AI? What if they helped now, like, in society, children and old people? It's kind of a zany or, like, funky worldview. But I just feel like there's so much work to be done in the world to help people that if AI is solving all these problems for us, what what else who else could we help, like, with all this new energy and time that we have? There's certainly a lot of people that need help and work to do. I love that. I don't think it's a I think it it makes a lot of sense. I really love your message around around redeploying that Yeah. Thank you. That time. And leading into I love also leading into next year. I think what I heard from you say as well, it's like having that just in time, using AI for just as well. So, speaking of just in time, we are running out of time in today's webinar. So I really wanna thank you. I hope those of you still with us enjoy today's session. As a reminder, it is being recorded, and we will share this out with you. Blake, wonderful to hear your thoughts, your perspective. Thank you for your time. And those of you, we look forward to continuing the conversation. Thank you.