Episode 5 Transcript:

Matt Hui (00:03.246)
Hey Scott, yeah, good to see you.

Scott Billows (00:06.471)
Here we are, it is, we're recording this and releasing on July 17th and episode number five, so excited for this one. I think we've got a couple of interesting topics to cover on the pod today and it's maybe just a quick recap. We're at episode five, so four, I would say, interesting conversations that we've had up to this point and.

It's just now starting to, in my eyes, at least starting to kind of open up in terms of just the ideas that we've got for podcast topics. So why don't we kick off today with the kind of topic that's been on my mind a lot, and I know certainly probably on yours, and I would say many, many people around the world, and that is artificial intelligence and

what it's doing, at least what it's forecast to do in the workplace. so a couple of articles that I was reading this week just talking about the impact, I would say, certainly in a negative way for individuals that worked at companies like Salesforce and Microsoft as they continue to...

really rely on AI to help drive their business forward. so, interested, Matt, I guess in your perspective, there's a few things we can drill down on, but just maybe before we do, give me your thoughts in terms of what you're seeing and what you're hearing from your friends and colleagues and what do people think about this and what the direction that we're going.

Matt Hui (01:59.426)
Yeah, well Scott, it's a loaded question and I know we introduced ourselves in the first couple episodes but this is the first call of the day for me. This is the first recording of day so you're getting my morning thoughts on AI, the most fun topic. you know what, the reason why I say it's loaded is that we've not seen a revolution like this. This is a pretty monumental revolution, the AI revolution and being compared to the industrial revolution.

compared to the development of electricity. And I think the reality is there's a lot of fear about AI, but there's at the same time a ton of excitement. Just the other day I was reading a article that, and maybe you saw this, Scott, Meta had hired, Zuck had hired somebody from OpenAI for $100 million. Did you see that? Did you see that article? Did hear that?

Scott Billows (02:53.091)
Yeah, I actually saw some clips. I think he was on a podcast. If I'm understanding it correctly, his brother hosts a podcast and he was on and I had heard him say that they've had some pretty key people on their team at OpenAI get recruited. And my understanding is a signing bonus, not the compensation, but just the signing bonus alone was in excess of 100 million.

Matt Hui (03:04.471)
Mm-hmm.

Scott Billows (03:21.413)
At the time he said that, I believe he said they hadn't lost anybody at that point, but boy you dangle big enough carrot, I'm sure somebody's gonna jump.

Matt Hui (03:33.262)
I think the timing is, and I'll tie it all back to AI shortly, it's a revolution in that you're seeing signing bonuses this size. This mirrors that of NBA signings or NHL, or maybe not NHL, more MLB. But I'm a big sports guy, and recently it's been the free agency, and you've just been seeing big money being spent around, but now you're seeing big money being spent on AI researchers, which is...

Perhaps one of the biggest opportunities here is that there's so much unknown right now, as it pertains to career opportunity, job market, new app development, new use case development. There's no clear-cut winner quite yet. So I'll start with the opportunities first. There's a lot of opportunities for, be it small businesses, startups, people who want to their teeth on AI. It's really, it's anybody can go and develop the next greatest thing.

Scott Billows (04:07.045)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Hui (04:32.238)
as it pertains to AI because these tools, I mean, it's fair use. Anybody can use these models as well. So I think that's one of the exciting parts is that there's no clear-cut winner right now. Anybody can kind of be the next big thing, and I think that's why you're seeing so much investment. On the flip side to that, how does it people and employees and, I mean, inevitably, you referenced in the news you see such and such company.

lays off X amount of people. And I think, again, it's a pretty loaded question in that there's certainly the increase in productivity. You'd be able to do more with less with artificial intelligence. And I think that is similar to the revolution aspect. That is not something that will be optional going forward. is something that will be a must-have going forward as the utilization or usage of AI in the day-to-day, because why not?

Scott Billows (05:14.317)
Yeah.

Matt Hui (05:30.35)
Why would you not use that kind of suite of tools that increases your productivity? For the employee side or the individual side, I think inevitably there will be a rebalance of work. You're going to see perhaps lower skilled work or more repetitive or administrative work transition to higher skilled work. And very similar to when things went to the cloud, things went digital, there's going to be a necessary change.

necessary upskill to the workforce as well. So I don't think it's all.

Scott Billows (06:02.455)
Yeah, well, let me just jump in even on that in terms of that, need for retooling or reskilling. I think that's an absolute given if you're in a large tech company right now, let's pick a meta Google, Salesforce, fill in the blank with other technology company name. if you're in that kind of middle tier, middle management.

man-on-man, like that to me would be a really risky spot to be in. So certainly retooling and kind of preparing for the impact that AI is gonna have not only on your career, but the impact it's gonna have on your family and just getting yourself ready for that. I think the flip side to that too is, it's interesting, just in the last week I had dinner with

woman that I met and she's a little further along in her career than I am, but she's founded and sold a couple of companies over the years in technology, so she's a technologist. She's working right now on an AI startup and this thing is really targeted at the sales organization within large enterprise companies.

And it was a very interesting couple of statements she made. First one was for decades, the engineers, so IE software company engineers have had total control and that's changed. She's like, I'm a technologist, but I'm not a software developer. I'm sales slash business executive and I can now build and we have our product in company, within a couple of...

Target companies right now. It's an MVP and they're just in a trial basis But like she's commenting like it's me and a couple of other people and we're gonna go and build a you 50 to 100 million dollar company with six employees and it's like that's absolutely insane and and so, you know the other statement she made was just the the the ability to go and do it and take back control which is again and not not for everybody certain individuals that are gonna really benefit from

Matt Hui (08:27.054)
Thank

Scott Billows (08:28.852)
from this, it is, it's totally doable now to go and start a company without the full complement of skill set, know, sales, you know, product team, marketing, you know, all the different roles, like there's just so much that can be done with a small team. one of the questions that she was asking me was, you know, what do you use for your accounting software, which, you unrelated to kind of our

our expertise, but certainly within our business, we use accounting software. And I told her the brand that we use and she's like, legacy tool. Like, why aren't you using an AI tool? She's like, I only want AI software within my business. And so I walked away from that dinner thinking, man, like this is incredible what's going on. it's, the opportunity is,

is right here right now and it's very exciting. But it's also very, I think for, know, maybe transition this into talking about, you know, even our business or that of our customers. I think there's a lot of fear, there's a lot of anxiety around what do I do? How do I actually go about doing this? And I think there's, you know, that's a really important.

discussion because you know it's one thing to hear about you know the sales force and you know Mark Benioff recently said 30 to 50 percent of their the work being done in the company today is now being done by AI. What does that even mean? Like how do you actually quantify what that looks like day to day? And you know if I was to take that statement and bring that in our organization or bring that in one of our customers like hey 30 to 50 percent of our

our work that gets done every day is being done by AI. What does that look like? And more importantly, how do I actually go and accomplish that? Like, what do I do? What tools do I need to go and do that? So I'd be interested in your perspective on that. And, you know, let's drill down on that.

Matt Hui (10:40.898)
Yeah, well I'll tie it back to a story I met maybe about a year, year and a half ago and this is when AI was, it's been around. Let's just call it fact to fact. AI's been around. It's really caught wildfire over the last couple years through the development of chat-based interfaces that, I mean look at the widespread use of something like a chat GPT or even its integration in tools like Gmail as an example, Gemini.

Google's doing a fantastic job at integrating that in. So it's been around and I was chatting with a CDO, a chief development officer. So she was managing a portfolio of major donors and this is one of our non-profit clients, major donors and there was big fear and this is a large 50, 60 million dollar organization, foundation that she had a lot of fear about, well, if I give AI this...

If I enable AI to take over this aspect, well then we lose out the entire personal experience side of major donations. And for the audience listening, major donations being high net worth individuals who are donating large sums of be it one time or an ongoing basis to a nonprofit organization. And in this case, there was a pretty significant portion of that. So at this dinner I was having with her, she shared a lot of fear.

We don't want to lose the personal, the experience side of this as well. At the same time, they knew that they had to do it because they looked to their left, they looked to their right, and all of these other organizations were using AI, or at least putting their hand up saying that they're using AI. So when I hear things like, we're doing 30 to 50 % of the work, I think of it as, let's just use a pie analogy. You've got 100 % of this pie is 100 % of your time. I think it's 30%, 50%.

Scott Billows (12:23.914)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Hui (12:37.294)
you can actually stack and increase the size of this pie that enables further capacity. And I think that there's often fear of, we're gonna replace a job. I think the counter argument to that is, well, maybe this is a job you probably wouldn't have hired out to begin with. If it's able to increase productivity by 10%, 20%, and in this case, major donors, if they were able to start an appeal or solicitation, 60 % of the way with...

Scott Billows (12:46.782)
Yeah, yeah.

Matt Hui (13:07.104)
AI, well, imagine how much more time they could spend in person, experientially, with their major donors, versus sitting in front of a notepad, writing out, and oftentimes a lot of that interaction happens in text. But imagine if you could, based off of AI or leveraging AI, suggest, okay, you haven't talked to this person in quite a while, these are the things that you've done in the past, here's a recommendation, you don't have to take it, but that's kind of my counter to the,

Scott Billows (13:13.949)
Right. Yeah.

Matt Hui (13:36.406)
not replacement, augmentation and increasing that cap of pie size, if you will.

Scott Billows (13:41.856)
Sure, yeah. Well, I mean, it's an interesting way to think about it, because I think for most, the default setting is, this is going to encroach on me, this is going to encroach on sort of my abilities as an individual within an organization. And I mean, there's all sorts of clickbait out there that suggests, and I guess would reinforce that type of thinking, you know, when we think about...

universal basic income and what are all these people going to do and you need meaning in life to live a highly productive life, which I totally agree with that statement. And if AI is going to replace me, well, where's my place in this? yeah, your summary I think is an interesting way to think about it. And certainly,

is supported by the way some others are thinking about that exact thing and that it's, if we think about the, say the overall GDP of a country or even an organization, like what is your capacity and what is your ability, if we use that term GDP within a business, could that be increased by 10, 20, 30 % versus cutting?

I think that's a really exciting way to think about that. And I think that's actually an interesting segue into just even talking about what we're calling internally at Belmar just accelerators. And these aren't accelerators that we're out selling and attaching to an implementation of Salesforce. These are more just accelerators or levers that we're pulling internally within our organization to.

expedite or to create more efficiency within the org. I know that we've talked about these a lot and we're certainly implementing and are now maybe better said executing on many of these and seeing real productivity gains as a result of it. further supporting your idea here, which is the net of AI hopefully will be more productivity with the same

Scott Billows (16:07.007)
unit of measure. So let's talk about a few of these.

Matt Hui (16:10.158)
Do you want to just unpack that? Yeah, unpack that a bit in terms of what are some of those accelerates for us and how have they impacted or how will they impact our customers.

Scott Billows (16:20.188)
Yeah. So a couple that are real low-hanging fruit things that we're using today, almost every day, is content generation. So content generation in many aspects is just the ability to produce a piece of copy or produce a piece of content that needs to get a message out, be that.

an email that we're sending out to a group of contacts, an individual message that we're sending, or even if it's documentation of some type that we're assembling for a customer as part of a project. It's just so easy now to use a prompt and put in your ideas. And maybe some of that is long form. In my case, I tend to think better when I'm writing out a little more long form than just bulleted,

prompts but you know taking ideas and I've kind of camped now on Google Gemini just in part because it's built so well into the Google stack and we use that. So I will often have multiple Gemini tabs open that I'm dropping ideas into and it's helping me in some cases just to produce an idea, to refine an idea or to just edit a copy that I've

that I've written, certainly seeing a huge benefit when it comes to content creation. Training and documentation. I don't know, Matt, if you've had any experience using any of these tools to help support in that, but give me your thoughts on what we're doing today around training.

Matt Hui (18:13.644)
Yeah, and I think it's myself, I think it's the team integrating AI into the day-to-day to increase, be it productivity, but ultimately I think of the same kind of tagline I've shared of why use Salesforce to a lot of folks. It reduces the admin time that you have to spend typing things out, increases the amount of time that you can sell. In the case of AI, it reduces the amount of stuff that you have to do that is just trying to fill out a blank page.

and increases the amount of time that you can spend in front of customers, building relationships, building experience, and as it pertains to training, I mean, I don't know many people who get out of bed in the morning and get super thrilled about writing out training documentation. Maybe our team, I won't rob them that, but training documentation, in many cases, there's a lot of similarities between the baseline of training documentation.

So if we can get 50, 60 % of the way there, well, we can spend the time that was allotted or the time that a client has enabled us to go after and do this to further enrich that training, be it through videos, be it through walking them through different elements, be it through step-by-step guides, be it through all of these different other things or different ways to interact with that said training. Again, on the flip side of training.

just as equally as exciting as it is to write training documentation. Think about somebody who's got this new brand spanking new system that they are having to use and they're just combing through training documentation. mean, I'd need 10 cups of coffee to comb through training documentation. Think about if I have 50 % of my mental space more to think about how I can deliver that said training in a different way through interactive activities, through interaction, through gamifying it. Well, I mean, then.

Scott Billows (19:53.35)
Yeah, for sure.

Matt Hui (20:06.702)
we're able to equate that to higher levels of adoption of that said system. So I think that's a big core piece of where AI can be used is getting to that baseline. It's kind of like, I don't know if you've heard the phrase writer's block or I guess author's block, where you just get stuck getting those initial ideas, but you know what you want to say, but you don't know how to get it on paper. I mean, I personally, in my day to day, I probably use chat GPT at least 10 times a day.

Not so much to give me ideas, but it is truly a secondary sounding board too in many cases. I've just, okay, these are the ideas I got. Synthesize this for me. I think training manuals, documentation, it helps you get to that baseline to spend more time on the experience side as well. Which maybe just to kind wrap up this AI topic, Scott, I saw in here, he's put Scott's AI antidote.

What would you share somebody who's maybe thinking, should I be scared? Should I be excited about AI and be at our customers? What is Scott's AI antidote?

Scott Billows (21:05.403)
Yeah.

Scott Billows (21:14.617)
Yeah, yeah. And this is an idea that I've been thinking about because, you know, again, just to frame the work that we do, we get invited into organizations to help them implement a technology-based solution, in this case, Salesforce. And it's often touching many aspects of their organization. this is, you know, in most cases, it's a pretty significant transformation that's happening within the organization. And so

sort of while all that's going on, now we have this new paradigm here of AI. so I'm putting myself in the shoes of a CEO or an executive director or a senior VP within an organization. I'm thinking about how do I address this? And I think we covered this maybe on one of the previous pods, just this sort of.

kind of accepted everybody in our business today is using AI and we don't have official policies around use it this way, don't use it that way. But I'm thinking about how does an organization kind of get from this maybe position of uncertainty, angst, they want to be very careful, they can't, to your earlier comment about

Matt Hui (22:16.344)
Mm-hmm.

Scott Billows (22:42.106)
interacting with donors, there's real sensitivity to how this technology gets adopted. So maybe rather than looking at it as like, how on earth are we going to do this? What do we need to do? Let's put a framework together. And this is something that I've been noodling on for a little while now. So a couple of points here. One is develop a digital strategy. just having a strategy, having a

blueprint that you can work with is going to bring some clarity to the task at hand. So that's the first thing. So develop a digital strategy. Number two is invest in technology and skills. know that probably goes without saying you need to continue to make investment but better said make your investment aligned to your strategy. So get your strategy locked.

and then make investment against that strategy versus being reactive, hearing what others are doing and jumping to try different things and nothing wrong with trying and failing fast, you will, breaking things just to prove out ideas. certainly in large categories of the business or the organization, you can't just go and break things. So number one, develop a strategy. Two is make an investment that's aligned to that.

Three is foster a culture of innovation. So enable your people to bring ideas forward and prioritize those against the strategy. then show execution. Demonstrate to the team that the organization will execute against these ideas. mean, one example, if our team that is working with customers directly

implementing a solution. I they're hearing things from those customers that I or you or others on our team would not ever hear just because they're in that environment, they're in that meeting, they're in that conversation. enable the team that's hearing feedback and coming up with ideas to bubble those ideas up to the surface and make a commitment to foster that.

Matt Hui (24:53.134)
Right.

Scott Billows (25:09.817)
Number four on the list here, I guess, is leveraging partnerships. Going at this alone is interesting, daunting, scary for some. Certainly, if you don't have a background in technology, how are you to navigate this on your own? creating a partnership or a collaboration with others who are in the same boat trying to accomplish the same thing. So maybe that's...

you know, an industry group that you participate in. Maybe you create and you bring others from your community into that. That certainly is an idea. And then lastly, is just monitor and evaluate the impact. you know, try things, implement, measure it, see what impact it's having, and, you know, start with the kind of that lowest hanging fruit, the things that you can go and win.

quickly with and see value, but are also not putting the organization at any form of risk. this is an evolving idea that I've got, one that we're talking to customers about. And so if anybody is interested in having that discussion, reach out. Let's have that conversation.

Matt Hui (26:31.98)
I love it, I love that, especially that last part. You don't have to go do this alone. There's, for those who are scared of AI, the reality is there's a lot of other folks like you at Swollin'. You don't have to go figure this out. I'm actually quite certain that nobody's figured this out quite yet. So you don't have to go cut your teeth on this yourself. There's a lot of others that have tried and failed. Let's learn together. And I think as it impacts our clients, you're not alone. You can go and...

Scott Billows (26:43.564)
Yeah, for sure.

Matt Hui (27:01.667)
tap those who have tried these things before. So I love the framework, Scott, and I see we've got a special shout out. you want to share the special shout out?

Scott Billows (27:09.836)
Yeah, it's, we have for many years, actually it's five years, just about five years now, we've had a really special partnership with an organization that's based in Vancouver, Canada, so the west coast of Canada, they're called Ally Global. They are an organization that their mission is to go and eradicate

human trafficking and support those that have found themselves a victim, I guess, to what's going on out there. And so we've been partnered with Ally now for five years. just, I guess we're announcing another year partnership. And for us, what that looks like is really just

supporting them as an organization. have an annual event called their Move for Freedom. It used to be a one-day event, it's now a multi-day event. It really is just designed to get out and get active and do something with your community. So we've done events in the past as a company. We've hosted tournaments. I think we did Spikeball, then we did Pickleball, and we've done just other activities as a company.

To get out and move and to be together, really the objective is to raise awareness and ultimately raise some money to help support the organization. excited to announce again we're doing that. And so if you want to learn more, you can go to our website. We've got some info there and we'd love for you to learn more about Ally Global and get involved in their mission.

Matt Hui (29:03.65)
Yeah, awesome. Well, hey, that's a great way to wrap and certainly a deserved shout out to Randy and the team at Ally. So maybe with that, Scott, great episode. We'll catch you on the next pod. We'll talk to you soon. All right, see ya.

Scott Billows (29:15.385)
Thanks for doing this.