Welcome to Master b two b, our annual predictions webcast where we dust off Nostradamus once a year, Andy, and we introduce what we think is gonna happen in the coming year. We also hold ourselves accountable a little bit to our predictions from last year. Folks, my name is Brian Beck. I'm excited to be here with Andy Hoare. For those who don't know Andy, long time, industry veteran, seven years at Forrester Research running b to b ecommerce there, a CEO of Paradigm b to b where he does all kinds of analytics work, and analysis for the industry, in b to b and just a long time veteran. Andy, awesome to be here with you again for predictions. Exciting time. Yeah. Welcome. Good to be here as well. So welcome to you. Well, thank you, Anthony. Do you know so much younger we looked in those, people? That was only four years ago, man. What the hell happened to us? Anyhoo. So, yeah, for those who don't know Brian, so, Brian's my partner in the thought leadership series. Brian has been a systems integrator. He's been a practitioner. He ran b to b commerce for Harbor Freight Tools, also for PacSun. So he's done b to b and b to c. He's also the author of a book called Billion Dollar b to b e commerce. And, in his spare time, he has another job as managing director of, Inceba, which is an agency that helps, b to b companies sell on Amazon. So I can see why you've aged so well, Brian. A lot of things going on. Yes. Exactly. Well, folks, thanks for joining us today. We're gonna reveal our predictions for twenty twenty five. We have six of them, and excited to share those with you. Folks, this is a webcast. We'll it is recorded, so we will be going through that. But before we jump into our predictions for this year, we wanna go back through our predictions from last year and see how we did. So last year, meaning twenty twenty four. We put out some bold statements, Andy. How did we do? Take us through them. Yeah. So let's go through them each individually. So first of all is, will Generative AI finally pay off in b two b in twenty twenty four? So we did this in December of twenty twenty three, so exactly one year ago. We said yes, but only by fifty four percent. We're actually gonna talk about this one again today. So, but I think the short answer on this is to some extent it did. Well, I But it was also overhyped. And to clarify for folks watching here, those percentages are the number of people that agreed with us last year. Right, Andy? The pope the folks that agreed with our prediction. So a little more than half said, hey. We think that twenty twenty four will pay off, and we're gonna talk more about AI a little later. We'll save that for later in the later in the in the broadcast. Yeah. We're also gonna vote again this year to see in real time if people agree with our predictions. And so these were the results of last year's real time voting. We'll do it again this year, and we'll do that again next year. So second prediction from last year was, will the chief digital or chief data officer emerge in b two b in twenty twenty four? Remember when we were talking about how there were CDOs, and historically, the CDO was the chief, I even said it myself, digital officer, but we think that the data officer would emerge. No. Sixty two percent of people said that they would not that person would not emerge. And I think the people had it right, actually. Yeah. In the last year, although, you know, we've been aspirationally in favor of this, I haven't seen too many companies do this. So we're a little bit ahead of the curve on this one, maybe over our skis a bit. But this does does need to emerge. It just didn't as the people voted in twenty twenty four. Number three, one that's near and dear to your heart is, will Amazon business begin to steal the b two b mid market in twenty twenty four? Overwhelmingly, you said yes. Ninety three percent. Yes. So did it, Brian? Absolutely. No question. I mean, over fifty billion in revenue is what I see as the estimates for this year. Amazon business is enormous. It is across many categories, and, you know, it's it's it's really taking share. You know, and and a lot of it's a lot of it is, you know, the long tail, but they're getting more into to to to to heads you know, plan spend and things of that nature. So, yeah, this is gonna continue to go on. Absolutely. So one of the, terms that's been around for a while is headless. And so we said last year that, we thought pure headless would be replaced by the word composable in b two b in twenty twenty four, and, sixty seven percent of the people on last year's broadcast agreed with us. I think everybody was right on this one. You don't hear headless at all anymore, actually. You do hear composable and hear from everybody. So that one, I think we got right. Two more. Will b two b companies see the ROI of digital as, omnichannel or mostly still online only? So a yes answer said that people would see ROI as mostly omnichannel. Last year, people up to seventy five percent agreed that they would see the ROI of digital as more omnichannel versus online only. I don't know about this one. We're gonna talk about this one as well in another form here today. I still see companies personally that are not bringing the channels together. But we'll talk about that here, in about fifteen, twenty minutes. And the last one is, will hiring challenges ease in b two b in twenty twenty four? And this by a very narrow majority was no and that people will still struggle to hire. That's probably still true, although I think the labor market has softened a bit. Yep. So I would probably flip that myself and say it has gotten easier to hire people in b two b in in twenty twenty four, but this was close no matter what. Yeah. I think it's still still a challenge. So I think our our we I think our prediction holds true. Alright. So those are our predictions from last year, folks. We need to get into our predictions for twenty twenty five. So let's go ahead and talk about what prediction number one is. Can we roll our Nostradamus? Where is he? Let's let's go to prediction one. Prediction to kick one. I still love that stinger, man. That is so fun. Okay. Prediction one has to do with exactly what we're just talking about, which is hiring and really about entry level roles. So our prediction our first prediction for next year is that entry level roles will morph into apprenticeships. Interesting. Now this came out of some of the conversations we had this year with practitioners and some of the research and some of the other things we did related to hiring and how successful or unsuccessful companies have been related to, hiring hiring entry level employees. In fact, if we go to the next slide, you know, we one of the one of the questions is how many of the recent college grads that you've hired this year have been successful at the company? This is from intelligent dot com. And look at this, Andy. Only some, right, or a few. The the majority did not say all. Right? So we've got an issue where people are hiring out of college and they're not finding success. In fact, six in ten firms if you go to the next slide, six in ten firms have had to fire a recent college graduate this year. Sixty percent. What is this saying about our, you know, the preparation that we're being that these college grads are being given? In fact, when we added asked our community how recently how prepared our recent college graduates to work in b to b ecommerce, sixty four percent said not very. Now we have this community, in LinkedIn. We have our own private, forum as well. But when we pulled our community on LinkedIn, which is tens of thousands, you know, this is what they said. And my goodness. So, you know, we've got and a lot of those folks are hiring managers and executives. And we even got some comments in from folks, about this. If you go to the next slide, you know, from this company called VTechs, which is an ecommerce platform. Robert Perotti is director of product marketing said, this is exactly why VTechs launched its DCS or digital commerce specialist program for recent college graduates. They hire and train participants across disciplines for eighteen months and then place them in positions that align with their skills and interests or interest and skills. And, you know, there there's reasons that companies have to do this, and and and we're really seeing this emergence of apprenticeships. We got a comment from, from Dave Allen, from folks who, if you go to the next slide, who are in the industry hiring. So Dave is the director of e business from Sager Electronics. And he said at Sager Electronics, Electronics, we can attribute much of our own success in recruiting to our internship program. He was commenting here on a similar program that Zern Elk has, that where they said they had a similar program. He said another thing that helps is that being an industrial components distributor, many of the parts we see we sell end up in something cool like robots and race cars or something useful like advanced medical devices. So, you know, they're leaning into that sort of importance of of the coolness factor or the, you know, the interest level of the younger employee. But, hey hey, Andy. You know what? I I happened to be, hanging out, the you know, earlier before our webcast started. I happened to find mister Dave Allen. He and he agreed to jump on. Here he is. Mister Dave Allen has decided to become a part of our webcast here to comment on whether or not he agrees with our prediction. Well, what do you think, Dave Allen? What do you agree with us? Are these becoming apprenticeships or not? Well, yeah, I think we all mostly agree that that our new hires and people coming out of college are really not prepared for the complexities of b to b ecommerce. So, yeah, to a degree, you're gonna need some type of apprenticeship. And I what I mentioned before is our internship program. Our company, being in the Boston area, has a lot of nice schools around. So we we bring in some, some summer interns and, you know, let them have some exposure to the business and stuff. And it's been success. Some of those have turned into actual employees. Like, there's a guy on my team that was a summer intern for a, an adjacent department of mine who worked a lot with my team. He went back to school after that summer, adjusted his curriculum to be more focused on what my team does. And he came back the next year. I had a job opening, and he got hired. He was the one that we selected. So and he's crushing it. And he's, you know, he's really doing a great so great job. And we have other success stories with other summer interns turning into successful employees. Interesting. Is our is our educational system failing us, Dave Allen? What do you think? I mean, it it's you have to basically do the job of the college, it sounds like. What's going on? Yeah. Well, that's a whole different educational system. I don't wanna We'll run a separate webinar on that one. Right? We're not we're not gonna fix the educational system. But But it sounds like if you're doing some of that You can work with it. You can work with it, and you can and you can make it successful for your company if you if you align. Gotcha. So well, check this stat out, Dave. Fifty seven percent of Gen Z ers wanna be a social media influencer. How does a b to b company that I mean, that's that's, like, legit research. I can't remember the source, Andy. Was it McKinsey or something? There was somebody they they pulled Gen z. Gen z is, you know, early twenties. And my goodness, you got folks that are, you know, that wanna be social media influencers. How does a b to b company like Sager Electronics compete with that, get people into these into these jobs and make it exciting and interesting? We don't have any media in or social media influencer jobs in our company. But, so we don't I don't know. We don't compete with with that. If they wanna be a social media if not everyone can be a not that many people can be social media influencers. Right? I guess, some of them can be small niche influencers, but you only hear a handful of the big media social media influencers. When I was in my twenties, I wanted to be a rock star. That didn't work out. So so I guess some of that maybe is okay. Twenties, Brian? Hope people do it within their teens. You're in your twenties been doing that? Yeah. I mean, in my teens too. Come on. I've got a comment coming here from Samir Shahadov. Thank you, Samir. He says, you see those internship apprenticeships are mostly focused on sales, marketing, sales ops, IT, but not as much on digital commerce. That's what Samra just said. Thank you, Samra, for your comment. Dave, any any thoughts on that? I mean, you the internship you designed for these folks, it sounded like it was on digital commerce, wasn't it? Or was it more marketing? We we do have marketing. We have digital commerce internships. The example I had before was was a guy in a different department doing an internship, more related to to product and supplier management. Yep. And, he decided that he when he saw the the business, he decided he wanted to kinda change and focus in a different area, which happened to to be my area, our ecommerce and digital marketing area. It's awesome. Yeah. So they're very practical. They're in there. They're they're learning what practically they'd be doing, and they they're able to pick their, kind of, their field as fit Which, by the way, we know this has always been the case. You don't graduate from college, and you can't walk into a job and suddenly go do the job. This is a question of course skills and interest, though. And I think this is the area where we're struggling is that a lot of the college grads don't have the core skills of writing, analysis, you know, being able to interact with teams. They can interact with, you know, phones, but people, a little bit of a challenge. But that's the bad news. The good news is they're pretty facile with technology. Right? And they like change, and they know their generation, which is the new generation that's emerging here as b two b buyers. So some good and some bad here, but an apprenticeship is a great way to solve that problem because then everybody gets to test everybody else. Yep. Exactly. So, Dave, any any final words of wisdom for our our group here about creating, you know, practitioners creating apprenticeships? I mean, is it something you'd advise other companies to do as a way to kinda get qualified people into the workforce and avoid having to fire people? Sure. Sure. I'm I think it's worked out well for us with our internship program, which is similar to an apprenticeship. If you can do it and and you can get the right people involved and yeah. I think it's great. Alright. Well, let's go ahead and post our poll question. Gabe, you get that up there, and there we go. Well, entry level roles morph into apprenticeships. Do you agree with our prediction? Mister mister Dave Allen does. Let's see what you have to say. We'll leave that up for just a second here. You know, what's interesting about all this too is that the differences in the younger employees and what they prioritize, things like work life balance, mental health awareness, clear, career progression. I think through an apprenticeship, they can start to see those things are real and then make a choice that a b to b company is actually a good option for them rather than a social media influencer job. Well, keep in mind too, by the way, as a final note here, the pandemic threw all this up in the air because it's really hard to do an internship or an apprenticeship remotely. Right. Well It's because if you've never worked there and you don't know the people, so that creates another dimension here. Another reason why an apprenticeship or an internship is really, really critical to that. Alright. Well, mister Dave Gillespie, thank Dave Gillespie. Wrong. Right. Dave Allen. My goodness. I'm getting my name is mixed up here. Dave Allen, thank you so much. As usual, awesome insights. Thanks for joining us today. Have a great holiday. Alright. Let's get to our next prediction. Prediction number two, roll, Nostradamus. Here we go. Prediction. This one has to do with customer experience and whether it is owned, not owned. It's a hot potato in a carb free world. Yes. Andy, you wanna take take this one? Yeah. So the big question about customer experience, and we've run into this quite a bit in the last year, is who the hell owns it? So, you know, I maybe a good way to start is to define what customer experience is. And, by the way, this is not gonna be a great definition, but it is a definition, on the next slide. So you can see that, basically, customer experience is how customers perceive their interactions with the brand or company at different stages of the customer journey and in various touch points. Thought that was a pretty good one because it's fairly broad in terms of it it argues that you're gonna find people everywhere. Yeah. But it's also narrow in that. It says, okay, there are specific points along the way in the journey map where people interacted with you. But the challenge of the customer experience is that everybody owns it, and what we found increasingly is that nobody owns it. So here are some of the comments we got from people in our various roundtables. So this is one from Atlanta, and these are actual comments that people said when we said, who owns the customer experience in your company? The chief revenue offer officer, of course, the VP of ecommerce, the CEO. We're gonna talk about that one in a moment. The head of digital product website and mobile experiences. Well, at least that's a little more specific. The other one said the marketing executive. And the last one, my favorite, is everyone. Everyone. Everyone, which is hilarious. So so what's the challenge here? Right? Well, for the I'm gonna walk through the kind of the critical ones here. So the first one was when people say the CEO, the question was not who runs the company or ultimately makes the most important decisions. The question was, who owns the b to b e customer b to b commerce customer experience? There's no way the CEO can own can own that. But how many people do we hear that from, Brian? A lot. I heard it from several. Yes. And and that worries me because you start thinking, well, wait a minute. Why are they saying this? Is that because they literally can't make these critical decisions, or is it big requires so much change management that the CEO's gotta be intimately involved? Yep. Or is it a change of the business model, which it is, and the CEO's gotta weigh in on that? But Right. You know, in those racy charts where you have, like, responsible, accountable, etcetera, involved, the CEO cannot be responsible for this. Maybe involved, but not responsible. And we were very clear on what we meant by that, which is kind of amazing. So another one another answer we heard was, our customer is in charge of the customer experience. Really? So your customer is in charge of your customer experience for that customer, which, you know, we think that this is a common refrain because it often refers to people. It makes them feel like they're a customer centric organization because the customers is driving They're trying to sound like Amazon, Andy. They're trying to sound like Amazon. Right? Yeah. Yeah. The point Right. Customer makes the decision, the customer's at the center of the decision made by someone else in your company. Right? So So we know this one ain't true either. Yep. So who is or who should be? Well, we actually did make a call on this in our predictions document, and it's based on kind of our own experiences. We believe that in most companies, it should be something like a product manager, which is we see on the next slide here, which is I used to be one of these people, and maybe I'm a little bit biased. But this is somebody who has an external view of the customer and also an internal operational role. You need both. Right. Oftentimes, I find that companies see one or the other, and they don't do a very good job of giving it to somebody who has both because oftentimes, they don't have anybody who has both. Right. But more important of the two is you've gotta be have an external focus. You have to represent the voice of the customer. We all know famously that Amazon has a chair at every of every discussion, and it says customer on it. And it's unoccupied. And they wanna know that when they go around the room, that at least somebody remembers to ask, hey. What does the customer really believes here? And, you know, it's actually a pretty helpful little tactic. I've tried it before with clients, and it does help because people get very inwardly focused. And all of a sudden, you go, oh, wait a minute. What does the customer actually think about this? It's like, oh, yeah. That damn customer always gets in the way. So Yep. There's that. And then, of course, you can represent the voice of the customer, and you can tell people internally what that is. But unless you wanna just be an internal evangelist, you actually have to have some capability here. And so there has to be a dimension of requirements development. You've gotta be working with development teams. You gotta build products and services that people want. So you gotta go in both directions, which requires somebody who has kind of hard skills and soft skills. So this comes out of the software industry. This is where I worked. This is where I developed this. I was actually this person. I saw the value in having somebody who could see in both directions. Yep. But our special guest today actually has even more experience with this. So let's go ahead and bring him in. So it's Brian Gillespie, who's the VP of product at HCL Software. Welcome, Brian. I know you work in the software space. You have an ecommerce platform you guys, produce. So we'll just ask you very quickly. You can agree or disagree, but what do you think about this whole argument about who owns the customer? Who is it in the companies where you've worked? Yeah. So, by the way, thanks for having me. I hundred percent agree that the the shift has been predominant in the last couple years. You know, years ago, it used to be IT. Then, you know, we saw it shift to I know I saw VP of ecommerce on there. I saw, you know, business owners on there. And what we what what what I'm seeing now is the decision has to be taken, and and you have to take multiple facets into consideration when making a decision on that experience. And by the way, I wanna be very clear. In b two b, it's both the end consumer experience as well as business the business experience. Right? Especially we'll get into the topic maybe a little bit later, another topic. You know, how do you how are your business users, leveraging the solution? Hundred percent agree with you. What I'm seeing now is you have to have a a center of excellence or have a sir a specific person that owns and can consolidate all of those requirements or those suggestions or those ideas. Right? If you listen just to the customer, in my opinion opinion, it's very reactive. This is how I bought it over here, Brian, to your point. This I wanna just do what Amazon does. It's not cons taken into consideration. How are you gonna differentiate yourself? How are you gonna beat Amazon? How are you gonna leapfrog your competition? So you gotta, you know, shy away from the customer, but you gotta also listen to them while taking into, you know, consideration some of the the elements of the differentiation, portion of that. But so I agree with your prediction. I think you're gonna start seeing a single person or a center of excellence that, comes around experience. So while while while you're if I ask the next question, Andy, hold that. Let's let's actually post, the poll so we can ask people while while we're interviewing here. Will your customer experience continue to be a hot potato, or will there be, you know, as a clear assignment of it? Go ahead and answer that. But, Andy, go ahead and, and ask your question. Yeah. I think the as the poll question points out, one of the challenges here is in a lot of b to b companies, they've never been faced with this before because it was always like the sales team owned the b to b customer, and there was no digital experience. Right? Or the customer, support group talked to the customers, but it was always somebody who was deeply involved with the customer on a daily basis, taking orders, resolving customer issues, etcetera. Then all of a sudden the website comes along, and they're like, oh, wait a minute. The salespeople can't really run the website, nor should they? The CSRs, they don't really have anything. So who does own this now? Are we gonna take it away from the sales team and away from the customer service reps? I hear this all the time in the clients I work with. They have not made that mental shift yet toward another person in the organization who can speak on behalf of the customers, which, by the way, involves interfacing with salespeople, interfacing directly with customers, interfacing with the CSRs, and then taking all that information in. And here's the key thing, building products internally that match that. Now I've seen people do the first half of that or the second half of that, but not the two together. And so Amazon does have it right. In the meetings, you gotta have the customer there represented. But, yeah, I think I continue to see people passing this around. Everybody owns it. Nobody owns it. This person owns it. I just know that I think we're moving toward the software model. I think the Microsofts, the Googles, they don't have everything figured out, but they got this one figured out because they had to build digital products. Right? What have you found? Like, where have you made the right decision, Brian, and the or the wrong decision in your, development career as a, you know, the head of, development team? Yeah. So the right decision we made is we actually do have with it's funny you brought up product management. So the owner of the experience is in my product management group. However, it is a an experienced prod product manager. So we have centralized that. Where we've gone wrong in the past is it's easy to say, I'm just gonna listen to the loudest voice. Right? You have to who's screaming the loudest and who's causing the most, drama in the organization or amongst the channels that you're listening to? You have to, kinda mute that a little bit. You have to really, focus on all of those different channels influencing your experience. So where we've struggled is you gotta say no sometimes, and you gotta just say, you know what? We hear you, but you have to take in consideration not just one particular channel or one particular influencer. How are you looking at everybody? You are totally right about that. It's often the person you know is the loudest or the person who has to do the work. Oftentimes, it's the IT group, and they always find the hard stuff is the stuff they don't wanna do, and the easy stuff is the stuff they will wanna do. Right? I'll say the least the least path of resistance is what they'll tell you. That's right. But what was lost in that whole description was what does the customers want? So, Brian, we're gonna say goodbye to you for now. You're coming back for a later prediction to weigh in on that as well, but I think it's time, Brian, back to head to Yes. We gotta go to our next prediction. Prediction number three, roll Los Jerdallas. Where is he there? Prediction. Prediction. Alright, Andy. We were talking a lot about ROI and other things in our predictions for this year. Well, this is foundational, and we believe that there will be a new found emphasis on analytics in twenty twenty five. It's not where it needs to be, and this is really clear from the data. And let's define it real quick from the source of all things chat g p t. Source of all truth. New source of all truth. Ecommerce analytics refers to the process of collecting, analyzing, interpreting data related to online shopping activities, includes tracking and understanding various metrics and KPIs that reflect user behavior, sales performance, marketing effectiveness, customer preferences, and overall business health for an e commerce platform. That's the traditional definition. But does that truly capture, you know, what what we see? Now here's here's an example, Andy, on how we traditionally looked at it. Right? This is Google Analytics. How we traditionally looked at it, it's a one channel thing. We're just looking at, you know, users and new users and sessions and conversion rates, and I lived and died by this stuff for seventeen years. All online. Yeah. All online. Only online. Right? This and so you get this picture, and you wonder why people think in silos. Well, we look at things in silos, and that reinforces it, but it doesn't tell the full story. And that's, you know, then on the next slide, you know, there's, you know, this is this is fascinating. Yours says from BCG. You know, did you make your purchase online or offline? Was your purchase decision significantly influenced? What this talks about is that over two thirds of purchases were influenced by digital, but were not transacted via ecommerce. So we're just looking at ecommerce, we get a very limited view. Right? And this is for b to b. Right, Andy? This is specifically data for b to b channels. Yeah. And so that that just describes the beginning of the problem. It the the problem actually is emerging on the next slide, which is something that, HBR put together. It was really helpful to think about how to do analytics. And there really are three different states as they describe it. And I agree with this a hundred percent. There's kind of like the descriptive state, the predictive state, and the prescriptive state. So the difference is the descriptive state is, did the analytics tell me what happened? It's mostly backward looking, mostly historical. The predictive one is, what will happen. Using analytics from before, is it likely that somebody will buy this product, you know, next week or whatever? The most interesting one is the last one, which is prescriptive. And that's in stark contrast to descriptive. But prescriptive isn't just what's what will happen. It's what should happen. And do companies have the ability to decide, well, this person will buy this product next week, but why don't we actually sell them, cross sell them, or upsell them into a different product that gives us more margin and actually will give them a better experience? So this is what analytics is intended to do. It's not there just to describe the world as it is. It's really there to prescribe new insights and new more profit maximizing behavior. But you need data to do that, and a lot of companies don't have that. Plus that misalignment Yep. Which you see on the next slide, is, companies that don't have this, in order, the ones that do perform much better. And this is also from HBR. You can see companies that have better alignment between their actions and their insights performed an order of magnitude better than those that don't. And so there's a real cost to not getting this right, but you gotta start with capturing data, then you have to have the right tools in place, the right people to interpret it, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So we actually discussed this once earlier on our Friday fifteen, and we actually did a poll about this. And we said, hey. Does your analytics dashboard give you too much, not enough, or just the right event amount of information to make these actionable decisions? And, overwhelmingly, the number one answer was not enough information. Not too much, not too little, or the right amount or I'm sorry. Not too much or the right amount. The majority answer, fifty six percent said not enough information. Now I'm not sure I believe this because I don't think the issue is having too little information. Maybe you don't have all the right information. That's possible. Right. But there isn't a dearth of information out there. There's a dearth of insights, and that requires all those things I just mentioned about having people and processes and technologies in place to interpret. Well, what jumps out at me about this poll we did and, yes, we talked about this during the year. And this reason we made this a prediction, guys, is because, ultimately, you know, this is a foundational item that needs to be addressed in order to take advantage of your your opportunity in digital, period, no matter where the sales are materialized. Twenty two percent is here to this question said the only twenty two percent said they have the right amount of information. So, you know, that that's speaking to, sort of a, you know, hey. Maybe I have too much, maybe I have too little, but I don't know what to do with it. And I dealt with this in my career as an ecommerce executive, as a VP of ecommerce, Andy. It was it was often that, you know, oftentimes, I find myself with so much information. How do I draw inferences out of it? How do I take action on it? And so let's, let's go ahead and pull up our poll question, Gabe, and ask ask our audience if they agree with us. We think there's going to be a refocus on analytics this year, And it's not just us making this up. I mean, we we heard this consistently in our round tables. We ran we were at ten in ten cities across United States in the last few months talking to people. We polled them, about their their priorities for this year. And one of the top ones was this, analytics and then product insights. It was consistently the number one response. And then we'd ask, what do you mean by that? And it would kind of descend into a discussion about insights. That's really what it is. I'm looking to learn from customer behavior to make better decisions in the future. Analytics and reporting kind of is the catchall category for that. The reason why we think this one's gonna turn a bit of a corner is because of AI, gen AI. And the reality is now that you've got all this information in the system, first of all, it's getting the information in there, and then it was interpreted like you pointed out. You say you didn't have time, maybe you didn't have the expertise, whatever. But now you can run a lot of this stuff through AI and just say, you tell me what the insight should be. So that's one of the benefits of all the focus on AI in the last couple of years despite a lot of it being overhyped. Many companies incorporated AI into the insights generation portion of their capabilities. So they would say, hey. Here are the results. But, brother, do you want us to interpret those for you and make some decisions? Yes. Yeah. Yes. And now is we're starting to see this emerge. Yep. Okay. Well, speaking of AI, we should move to our next prediction, which has to do with AI. Number four, let's go ahead and roll Nostradamus. Where is our friend? There he is. Alright. This one has everything to do with generative AI tools, and we believe that they will be a seventy percent, not one hundred percent solution. Why seventy percent? Because it's actionable. We can do things with it, but it won't solve the whole problem. That's our opinion on it. And, Andy, you wanna take us through some use cases here? There's a couple things that we we're so we are seeing emerge. Yes. So the point of this is there are lots of use cases that are emerging and more emerging by the day. There's not a shortage of use cases, and you can see some of them here on the screen about mostly data related, writing, job descriptions, you know, some of the insights we talked about, tell us what else people should be purchasing, etcetera. There's no shortage of use cases. And in fact, there are some success stories. So we'll show another one here, from Mark Vasquez from IdealClint products. So he told a story at one of our events where he said, look. We are trying to create this. We had a screenshot of a table. I wanted to turn it into a file. We had ninety four percent accuracy on this, and it only took twenty seconds to do it. We did a quick spot check. Took less than two minutes or fewer than two minutes for them to do this. If they hadn't used AI to do this, it would have taken at least twenty minutes. Again, it's a simple example of something we're starting to see here where people are realizing that there are shortcuts that you can take. Some of those things hallucinate, which is why the spot checking is critical. And I wouldn't do this for products that could kill people, let's say. But but everything else, fair game. Plus, I think if it moves you along the curve and gets you closer to the solution, that's why we said seventy percent because what we're seeing is that it can start things for you. It can get you there. To the hallucination point, you know, we showed this almost two years ago now, and it's still so highly relevant. This is some Tim Lavender of Beacon Building Products who said he asked Chat GPT to come up with a realistic image of a charcoal architectural shingle. And for those of you who can see this, the real thing looks like your standard roof. The other one looked like something from Harry Potter. I mean, it just doesn't look real, But that's what it hallucinated. That's what it imagined. So you gotta be careful about these things. But I'll bet even now, if we looked at this now, I'll bet they've found a solution for that. But it does create yeah. But it does create this problem, which is the one big detraction associated with AI. It is the trust issue. We've seen this in our research. On screen, we're showing a, McKinsey report about this and that what is the number one risk associated with AI? It's inaccuracy. Just like we saw with the, the roof tiles there. And it's fifty six percent of people are saying, we love this thing, but we're worried about the inaccuracy. So there is a trust factor that needs to be brought in, which is why it won't ever be a hundred percent solution. Yeah. Arguably, though, it could get a lot closer to that as it gets better and better and better. There's also the issue of not everybody's admitting they're using AI. And so the challenge here is, has it gotten the acceptance it needs? And if people are hiding things, that's usually not a good, indication of whether it's gonna be successful. This is a study by Slack. We talked about this on a recent Friday fifteen. Ninety nine percent of b two b executives plan to invest in AI. Okay. But nearly fifty percent of employees are uncomfortable with meeting AI use due to fears of being perceived as lazy. Yes. Confident, etcetera. Yeah. And so this is what we're gonna have to overcome. Is it does it make you appear to be lazy, or does it make you more efficient? I mean, we talked about on the Friday fifteen about, but that's the way it went with accountants and calculators. Right? At first, the old school guys were like, well, you're using a calculator? You're cheating. I think it's the same thing now. People are using AI to do their jobs. In some cases, I think their bosses think that they did the work. In other cases, their bosses should say, I don't care if you did the work. If it's right, it's good, and it works, and you can get more done. Hey. It's all about productivity. Right? Yep. Yep. Well, it's kind of it's it's interesting because peep they have to share. This is a process issue, change management issue where if people are doing things with well intentioned for the better of the organization, they need to be able to communicate that up. And that's a failure of the of the structure of the organization, I think. But it'll it'll catch up, Andy. It'll I believe it'll catch up. Well and to that point, on the next slide, we see why it's inevitable. And it's because Gen Zers are using this stuff constantly. In fact, we saw this, I had to laugh. Young people are using Gen AI to overcome issues like, quote, unquote, task paralysis. So that is, hey. I need you to go do something. And they go, oh, I don't know what he means or she means by that. So let me go ask chat GPT what I'm supposed to do. And we joked on the broadcast, otherwise known as thinking. But That's right. You know, they're starting all their projects by going to chat g p t like it's their personal consultant. I was on the phone yesterday, Andy, with somebody to say. This is really funny. They said they were screen sharing, right, with someone who was who was talking to them about, a solution. And the person there they didn't realize they were still screen sharing, the person they were talking to. He asked a question of her, and she went he saw her go on chat g p t and type his question into chat g p t to get the answer. Isn't that funny? So yeah. Right? There you go. There's task paralysis for you. I've seen videos of people using chat g p t to do interviews. Right? Remote interviews. Like, they have it right in front of them. And if somebody asks them a question, like, hey. So, you know, what's your strategy for the company? It's like, they're typing. It's like, that's a good question. Typing. I think what I would do is it'd be a three pronged strategy. They start reading what ChatGPT just returned in real time. So Yep. I don't know. We'll we'll have to see how this all works out. But there are some legit technologies, though, that younger generations are embracing that are AI driven that I think will revolutionize significant parts of how we work. And one is customer service. And so this is something we talked about before. It's called Hume. There are many of these now. It's an AI driven chatbot that actually feels empathy and understands when you're excited or upset. We've used this before, and this is getting better and better and better. And and you can just you can just draw a line between two points and say, oh, I see where this is going. Where first level customer service will be driven by a lot of this. You won't talk to a human until it's an escalation. You'll talk to one of these chatbots, and not today's chatbots, but chatbots that really sound like humans and really understand you and don't have to go look something up, you know, like we often get. This is real. This is happening. Again, you gotta make sure they don't hallucinate, though. So which is why it won't be a hundred percent solution. But imagine and I'm not for eliminating jobs despite we always joke with me about, you know, death of a b two b salesman. But I predict in that report that inside sales and, and also what's what we're gonna be talking about here in a moment. And also CSRs were gonna be displaced by this new technology. Yep. Well, we ran a poll, and we asked we asked folks also when it comes to solving the data problem, which is one of the biggest problems in ecommerce, you know, is AI ready for prime time? And sixty percent felt like it, you know, it was ready to be used, today. So so folks, we think that that AI is going to be a seventy percent solution next year. Why don't we pop the poll question, ask the audience? You know, it's interesting. Brian Gillespie, one of our special guests here, posted something, was talking to us a little bit about something that is really interesting. AI writes twenty five percent of the code at Google, Andy. So, you know, it's it's and and Peter Kuran, who's gonna be another guest of ours, joked, hey. AI writing code for Google gives Googlers more time at the cafeteria. Their famous chef created lunches. Love that. I think, you know, it's but it's but seriously, I I heard one, one and, again, this is anecdotal evidence, but, you know, one of the practitioners I talked to at b two b online just last month said, hey. You know, I went from four coders to one. Right? And now I just that coder, what they do is basically check the quality of the code that's being produced by AI. So there are real solutions here, you know, that are occurring in the market that make people more efficient. And to your earlier point, Sandy, a new a new job Brandon Cameron, thank you, Brandon, for your comment here. Twenty twenty five will open up the new job role of the prompt engineer. I agree with that, that prediction. You're making predictions on our predictions. I love it, Brandon. Thank you. So, yeah, I think the prompt engineer will be, will certainly be an emerging role. And if my son as he's going into high school and college, you know, a good career for him might be that. Right? Any thoughts? Yeah. Well, until the prompt engineer is replaced by AI. So, I mean, I just thought that's a setting. But, you know, twenty five percent of the code is being written at Google by AI. What what's holding why isn't a hundred percent of the code be written by AI? I mean, let's be honest. It's just because probably what it's capable of doing right now, but that number is not staying at twenty five. Yeah. No doubt. Alright. We got fifteen minutes, two more predictions. Let's go to prediction number five. Alright, Andy. We're staying with our theme here, which is all about AI and the our belief is that AI enabled ecommerce will begin to noticeably steal share from inside sales. So let's talk about inside sales, you know, and the function. So what is the traditional role of inside sales? Well, it has several functions. If you go ahead and go to the next slide. You know, it's it's really about lead generation, prospecting, handling inbound leads. Right? Transactional or one time purchases, purchases that occur, you know, when they, you know, the the customer already knows what they want or reorder versus a more complex solution sale, serving long tail or smaller customers that the Salesforce can't necessarily reach the outside Salesforce, handling simple problems or questions. All these things feel like, items that, AI could potentially handle. And inside sales can be, you know, can be a as it relates to productivity, you know, here's some data from McKinsey that shows that inside sales actually covers can cover more, you know, sort of more ground. And and so this when we think about how AI can also be used in some of these scenarios, Andy, you know, it's it's empowering ecommerce to take some of these, some of these traditional roles. You know, eighty inside sales, you know, this it gets eighty inside sales, you know, this again, replace inside sales with a AI enabled ecommerce. And, for example, eighty percent of accounts reached. Inside sales can account can touch eighty percent of accounts and fifty percent of revenue. Well, why can't ecommerce do that? Right? And so, you know, feel the inside sales. This is kind of this this this model kind of implies, heck, some of these roles can be well, replaced. So, anyway, your thoughts? Yeah. And there's also a challenge here, which is that younger generations and more digitally digitally native generations, as you see on the next slide, they actually don't wanna talk to people. Right. They avoid these things actively. This has been well reported. Seventy four percent of millennials avoid sales calls and outreach efforts. You know? So they wanna handle these things on their own. I think James Wallen from Credit Key, you know, a friend of, Master B2B, said it really well. A lot of accounts that would have been assigned field sales reps are now covered by inside sales, period. And then many accounts that would have directed to inside sales are now being pushed to ecomm. So, basically, you can see the transitive property here. It goes from outside sales to inside sales to ecom and not in a direct identity. But the reality is there are a lot of people who would just handle this on their own, especially for reorders and replenishment stuff. And then, of course, then there's the emergence of chatbots, and there's some really interesting data around this that people are going very comfortable with chatbots. Eighty eight percent of users engaged in at least one conversation with a chatbot. Only nine percent of consumers, and it all starts in b to c and migrates to b to b, oppose companies using bots. And forty percent of millennials engage with digital assistants daily. You know, I think Gartner said that by twenty twenty seven, chatbots will become the primary customer service channel for roughly a quarter of all organizations Incredible. Which leads you to this kind of last slide on this, which is sixty two percent of people surveyed, by Tadeo, said that they would use a chatbot. And so we had to overcome that barrier. When people actually do this, talking to a robot, talking to software, well, they get better and better and better. They answer their questions. Frank, I use them constantly. I'd rather do that than talk on the phone. Well, let's bring in our special guest, the return of our special guest, mister mister Brian Gillespie here, from HCL, who can comment on this. Do you believe that this is going to happen, mister Gillespie, this in twenty twenty five? Partially. So and this is where I I'm not gonna agree with you completely here. The answer is yes. However, I don't think the inside sales needs to be worried about staring stealing share, and they're just gonna go away. I think what this is gonna allow inside sales to do is focus primarily on more important tasks. You know, I I I like the concept of, you know, the outside sales going to inside sales to go into chatbot. We have customers right now where they're trying to get away from their their their customers calling inside sales, and there's an acronym, WMS. It's not warehouse management system. It's where's my I'll say stuff, but you guys can understand what that says. Right? Where's my stuff? And, you know, fifty percent of the call center calls being made years ago were WMS. And they they they wanted to actively try to get those users to go to e com to get the WMS information that they needed. I think that's what's gonna happen, but none of those inside sales or the call center agents will let go because fifty percent of the call volume went down. They were able able to focus primarily on more complex use cases. Yep. Right. So I I I think it's a kind of, but I I'm not also sure you're gonna have to worry see reduction in headcount because of the AI driven through this. I think it's gonna be how do we leverage those people more effectively? So you sort of agree. It's gonna take some share, but it's not necessarily gonna replace people because they can be put to use at higher and better tasks. Right, or more Absolutely. And and I'll even go one step further, and then this is the plant little c number one's mind on the on the on the web here. And that is how do we not only just look at it from a chatbot perspective or just a phone call, but how are we enabling the sales reps? Not just to you know, because we're we're we're taking things away and but we should be empowering them. Right? This is really gonna take away the silos. I know you guys talked about the silos in between, you know, when you're talking about omnichannel. How are we bringing data together so sales reps have more information that they need to do their jobs more effectively? So I think there's I'm gonna leave it as a teaser there, but we're tripling down on this space at HCL. We firmly believe that especially in, when you combine outside sales, inside sales, and call center with ecom, it's gonna be a major disruption, in the industry in in, twenty twenty five. Yeah. The industry really isn't there now. Why don't we go ahead and pop the question I gave? If people agree with this, will AI enable the ecommerce begin to notice so they steal share from inside sales? Brian Gillespie doesn't agree with us. Of course. Maybe he's going he's probably you know, he might be kinda right. I don't know. We'll see next year, Brian Gillespie. But, yeah. No. This is an interesting fact. And, you know, I think I think you're right on. You know, these things together can be incredibly powerful. And we've actually seen that bear out in in the data where, you know, customers want to interact with multiple channels. It's not a hand off. It's not a, hey, I looked on webs on the website. Now I wanna just work with inside sales or outside sales. It's an interaction. I have case studies on my book that talk about, you know, million dollar shopping carts being transacted on ecommerce, but there's been so much interaction with the sales team prior to that ecommerce transaction. They're working together. Right? The channels are working together. And so it's incredibly powerful, you know, combo. And especially when you talk about the millennials. Right? Because the millennials, you gotta pivot. You have to pivot based on the audience. And this again goes to my my previous assessment of you have to listen to your customer. You have to listen to so many different, streams of information coming in. So interesting topic. I think you can do a whole webinar just on this. Alright. Well, thank you, Brad Gillespie. Happy holidays, and thanks for joining us. Too. Gotta move to our last prediction. We got a few minutes left here. Let's go to prediction number six and Nostradamus, please. Prediction. Alright, Andy. This is the long tail. We're talking about the long tail and advancements in search will supercharge the sales of long tail products. Andy Hore, I have one word for you. It is Amazon doing all this volume, fifty billion dollars in long tail search. That's where they're getting all most of their revenue today. What is the long tail end? Do you wanna define it for us? Yeah. We'll just do this quickly and then get, our special guest in here. But, you know, there's the Pareto principle. Right? Eighty twenty, that eighty percent of your business comes from twenty percent of your customers. Well, there's an argument too that eighty percent of your volume, your revenue comes from twenty percent of your SKUs. Some are even more pronounced. It's like ninety percent and ten percent. Well, the question is, if it's like eighty twenty, eighty percent of revenue comes from twenty percent of your SKUs. What are the other eighty percent of your SKUs doing? That's the long tail. These are infrequently purchased items. They're niche products, etcetera, etcetera. Well, on a website, it's hard to put all that stuff in there. You get too many too much clutter, so to speak. Yep. And so companies really struggle with that, but now we believe that search engines are capable of addressing some of this. So on that note, let's bring in our special guest, Peter Curran, from Coveo. Peter also, spent a lot of time at, Lucidworks, and so he's pretty steeped in, the search space. So, Peter, tell us, how are search companies dealing with and helping companies deal with the long tail product problem? Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of, b to b distribution is already all about the long tail, in particular because for the most part in that sort of segment of b two b, people are searching by SKUs. And so when you search for a SKU, you're asking for a very particular product. But try to think about any other part of your life where you ask for something with a number. One I need a one, two, three, four, five, six, a, b, c. Like, that is not a normal human behavior. We've taught people to act like that because software couldn't deal with a normal question from a human. So, I mean, I think you're right. Search advancements, understanding what people are talking about, even when they're talking about complicated b two b, you know, type products, they may be using specifications and codes and, special industry language that's unique to that industry. Search being able to understand that and give a natural set of results is absolutely gonna expose the long tail. And, companies who adopt search platforms that, support semantic search are gonna, take advantage of that, and those who don't, you know, won't. They'll continue to, require their customers to search, like a like a robot. So why don't we Brian, while we're, talking to Peter, let's pop up the poll question. Oh, yeah. Pop up the poll. And let's ask this. So the question is, will Advanced Business and Search supercharge sales of long tail products? Yes or no? You know, you make a really fascinating point that we have trained people perhaps to do this the exact wrong way. I mean, there are a lot of shortcuts that people use. Like, I know in our research, we found things like people using facets to kind of expose some of the long tail because they can't avoid clutter by if you ask a question, it says, well, maybe you meant this, and here are some ten other things that you wouldn't shove into their face right away. It's also, you know, showing it for only specific search terms. And then the last thing is building pages that are specific to these long tail products to make them more discoverable. But what, you know, what are the shortcuts are people using that are actually effective? Yeah. So facets are a great, sort of in between. If you can't support a really good semantic query, but you can support a basic query and then let people use facets as kind of your search concierge to get you where you you wanna go, that's a decent kind of, well understood solution. But I love the point about long tail landing pages. I mean, being able to use, and this is kind of what we we do at Quoveo, we use generative AI agents to act as humans and look at long tail landing page opportunities, and then identify products that should go, onto those pages, and then use, sort of, different prompted AI agents, agents that are prompted to be critical and skeptical to look at those and say, hey. I don't think that is actually, you know, left handed thermocouple or I don't know, some nonsense right thing. And, and that doesn't really belong on that page. So kind of using agents to make those kinds of decisions, build out pages that are specific to long tail interest, definitely, I think a trend you're gonna see next year. Well, Peter, I think this is a discussion a long discussion for another day because then we could probably do a whole discussion about just this. That's fascinating what you shared there. But, I think, Brian, we have to go to our decision at this point. We we do. Peter, thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate it. Happy holidays. And Thank you. Let's go ahead and and move on. Well, it's not the decision, Andy. It's whether people agree. Oh, that's right. Yes. We're gonna see. You have this It's still a decision, though. It's a decision by heart. Okay. We said it. You said it. We made it. It's a decision. That was pretty emphatic. Okay. Fine. It's a decision. First, will entry level roles morph into an apprenticeship? The audience says, yes. Interesting. Do they forty six. Yep. It's pretty close, though. Okay. What about prediction two? K. Let's go to that one. Will customer experience continue to be hot potato? Yes. No clear owner will emerge seventy two percent agree. Yeah. I this is gonna be a saga, man. It's gonna keep going. Alright. Prediction three, analytics reassert itself. Yes. Alright. People are agreeing? Pretty overwhelming. I like that. I think people are becoming kinda convinced that, analytics is an opportunity. Yep. Huge. What about prediction four? Will GenAI get b to b execs seventy percent of the way to solving a problem? No. Interesting. They don't agree with us. Interesting. You know, maybe maybe people are you know, it's kind of that hype cycle we talk about in the report, Andy. Right? You know, maybe people are kind of, like, sick of it. Like, I don't wanna hear about AI. I don't got it backwards, though. It was overhyped before, and I think it's been under hyped now, My personal That could be what's happening. Interesting. Okay. Well, we'll see how the year plays out. Prediction five, will AI enabled ecommerce begin to noticeably still share? Interesting. Fifty three percent says yes. Okay. So it's pretty close. Okay. Alright. And our last prediction, advancements in search supercharged long tail. Yes. Yeah. I mean, I think this is a real thing. It's a real opportunity. Extended assortment on websites and and being able to bring more value and more share of wallet, win more share of wallet is a key thing. Alright, folks. We got a couple quick announcements. We had a great, and long and involved, session today. Appreciate you all joining and sticking with us. We, wanna remind you that we have our forum, which is an invite only or excuse me, practitioner only, community, online community. It's like a mini LinkedIn just for practitioners. We got hundreds of people in there, conversations happening every day about things like we just talked about, solutions and other things and people looking for advice from their peers, I encourage you to join. Free for practitioners. Go to our website, Master b two b. Click on forum and you can submit an application. We've also released our roundtable locations. Here they are in calendar order, Andy, so that people can understand sequentially through the calendar where they fall, starting Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Dallas. Those are now up on our website. We're taking registrations. They're in yellow. Atlanta is almost full. Unbelievable. Three months away. Dallas, Los Angeles, Denver, NYC, Cincinnati, Charlotte, Cleveland, and Saint Louis. The new markets are in italic. We're excited. Go to our website, master b two b future events. You can That's February and April. And then in March, our big this. Signature. Barca twelfth, a fabulous, event, hundred and twenty plus people, leaders in the industry, almost all practitioners. Eighty percent of the folks there, eighty five are are practitioners at the University of Chicago. Go to our website for more information. You can sign up there, submit an application to join us. We are more than half full already. And then finally, folks, we do a weekly Friday fifteen, on LinkedIn live, and we put that into a podcast format. It's available on Spotify, Google, Apple, or on our website. You can come in and listen. It's attempted we attempt to do fifteen minutes talking about issues like we talked about today. Always goes to twenty. Anyway, folks, we're out of time. Andy Hoare, great session today. A lot of fun, a lot of good content. Hope you all enjoyed it.