← B2B Agility with Greg Kihlström™: MarTech, E-Commerce, & Customer Success
B2B Agility with Greg Kihlström™: MarTech, E-Commerce, & Customer Success
#63: Marketing in a world of agent to agent transactions with Mathieu Dhondt, EPAM
00:23:41
What is the role of marketing when humans are taken out of both ends of the customer experience, replaced by AI agents talking directly to each other on our behalf? Agility requires more than just implementing the newest AI tools — it means being...
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The Agile brand.
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Welcome to the B2B Agility Podcast where we look at the factors that drive success in B2B marketing with a focus on the people, processes, data and platforms that make B2B brands stand out and thrive in a competitive marketplace. I'm your host, Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, marketing operations and CX, best selling author and speaker. Now let's get on to the show.
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What is the role of marketing when humans are taken out of both ends of the customer experience, replaced by AI agents talking directly to each other on our behalf? Agility requires more than just implementing the newest AI tools. It means being able to make smart strategic choices about which technologies are actually creating value for your customers. Today we're going to talk about how Genai is reshaping the way we think about customer experience, automation and personalization, and what it means for the future of marketing. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Matthew Dant, Associate Director of Experience Consulting at epam. Matthew, welcome to the show.
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Hi Greg. Thanks for inviting me. Happy to be here.
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Yeah, yeah. Looking forward to talking about this with you. Before we dive in though, why don't you give a little background on yourself and what you're currently doing?
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Yeah. So I'm Matthieu Dont. I'm from Belgium, part of epam, associate director of Experience Consulting. And I'm mostly involved in the strategic part of experience consulting or experience design, meaning that we have a look at what it is that we want to achieve, actually, and that's not always very clear. So clearing that out first and stating the objectives and then working backwards from there, having an idea of what technology can we use for this, what are the customers or the clients customers, Demands, wishes, what drives them, what motivates them, and so on. And we bring that all together to make sure that we have a roadmap that really fits the strategy and really brings the company forward. Yeah, that's what I'm doing. Yeah.
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Yeah, I love it. Well, so, yeah, let's definitely, let's dive into. We're going to talk about a few things today. First, I want to talk about what I touched on briefly in the intro to the show, the customer experience and AI interface. And you know, let's, let's start with how generative AI is redefining interfaces. You've said that, you know, we're moving toward experiences where the interface adapts to us instead of the other way around. So how do you think that this shift, how do you think that this Shift will change the way that brands and customers interact, especially in the B2B space.
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Yeah, well on the one hand it's, it's a logical evolution that's happening. I mean, I think it was, I think it was Bruce Sterling, the cyberpunk author of the, who said that technology is always coming closer to us and getting smaller. And he was giving the example of music, for example, where let's say a hundred years ago if you wanted to listen to music, you had to go to a concert hall and listen to the music and then you could bring the music in your home with a record player. And then in the 80s we had the Walkman and we had headphones, so that's even closer to us. And now today we have earplugs that bring the music to us. So it's always getting small and always getting more inside us, let's say. And that's devices, that's devices that play music. And we see the same in fact with software as well, where we see that the interfaces are really adapting to us. We had, I don't know what we had 60 years ago or teletypes or whatever they were called. And now we have screens and we have the mouse and we have touch screens and we have voice. And one of the big breakthroughs for LLMs for language models was a chat interface that you could just chat with an LLM instead of having to compile code or whatever. So it's really that the interfaces are adapting to us and I think that we're really moving towards a place where the interface even becomes quasi invisible, where there's a lot of the things happening that we don't see in systems and so on, and that just bring us the results that we need or the outcomes that we need. But that's in terms of interaction, it's very natural, very, very fluent, very contextual.
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Yeah, that's, yeah, well, and along those lines, you know, in, in, in addition to the interfaces, I mean even the devices, but the interfaces becoming kind of smaller and smaller and more immediate. The other thing that you're touching on here is sometimes the interfaces are interfacing with something else that's non human, you know, so you have these with AI agents and things like that, you know, if they're able to see what we see, hear what we hear, even interpret our emotions and then interface with other AI intermediaries. You know, what are, you know, are we, are we still designing digital experiences for people or are we also, you know, designing them for AI intermediaries?
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I think we are Designing them even more for people than we did before. Because to go back on the idea of interfaces, if you think as a marketeer, being able to be found in search engines or putting ads on LinkedIn, in fact, that's also an interface for discovery, for making it easier for potential customers to discover you not only talking about interfaces of the tools that people can use, who are your customers, but also if they're not your customer yet, how can they find you? How can we reach them? And that's also through, if you, if you look at it from, let's say, a meta perspective, very primitive interfaces. I have a certain intent and I have to use a clunky form, a Google Google input field to tell in a few words what I'm really looking for. And then I get a list of hundreds and millions of search results I have to look through to find what I'm really looking for. That's in fact, that's crazy. And as a marketeer, we have to cater for that. And that's in fact, it's a waste of time. And even ads are a bit of an interface in that same way that we have to create ads to make sure that we are noticed and found by our customers and so on. Those are also very crude interfaces. So if you're talking about agents who are much more capable of understanding what we need because they collect, they absorb the data about our surroundings and in a B2B environment, about our company and about my role in the company as well, they understand us a lot better. So they, they, we can parameterize. Is that the right word? Parameterize? Or yeah, tweak them, let's say. Yeah, tweak them to be, to be, to be more useful to us. That in fact means that as marketeers, we're talking more to the people who will be directing these agents than that, than that we are talking to these agents. These agents execute stuff. And so we have to make it easy for them to execute on what they are executing on. But what the intent is of the customer is a lot more clearer now. And so we can really cater to that a lot more as well. Which means that we are not only marketing to the agents, that's on an executional level, but on a, we are also working on a human level because people will be much more capable of telling the systems what they need. And those systems will talk into other systems that we as marketeers have created who will say, oh, if you need that, I've got something for you. And so that whole orchestration is really a human Being. Yeah.
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And I think that that also means that, I mean, right now humans are doing. There's so many interfaces for a human to have within the customer experience. Maybe the agentic approach minimizes some of the touch points and maybe some of the, you know, it automates against some of the, some of the touch points that are. We don't really need a human to, to do some of those steps. And yet, you know, we find ourselves looking at spreadsheets or waiting in lines or, you know, doing all manner of things that are not a great customer experience. You know, I think this is where the automation conversation can, can be brought in. I think a lot of the focus on automation is somewhat oversimplified as simply productivity gains and things like that. But you've talked about automation's ability to really reduce friction and even that some friction still serves a purpose. Can you talk about where you see meaningful versus maybe dangerous automation happening in customer experience today?
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Yeah, yeah. I indeed see automation as reducing friction, unproductive friction, let's call it like that. But there's also productive friction. Productive friction. Is, is this on brand? Is this, does this fit our strategy? Give me X, Y and Z and I'll decide. And they're giving me X, Y and Z. I shouldn't be looking through millions of search results and I shouldn't be looking at tens of our 20 websites, and I shouldn't be sending out RFPs or whatever. No, let the agent analyze that and just then give me. Okay, I think these three. For example, I'm somebody looking for a supplier. I am a building company. I need a concrete truck for a building site. Next Tuesday. Let's do something like that. You know, the idea alone is crazy.
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Right? Right.
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I would have agents that, that know me and that say, okay, you're not somebody who, who is somebody who says, price goes first. So price is a parameter, but it's not the most important one. You need reliability, you need local people, because you need people who speak the language of the people who are working on your site and they speak lang. All that, all that stuff. If I can give that all out of my hands and somebody else or somebody else does that for me, brings it back to me and said, look, these are three suppliers that I think are good for you, then I'll make that decision. And again, that means that as marketeers, there's two levels that we have to work on. First of all, we have to make sure that the agent finds us and says, okay, you're a match. And secondly, when that person that Human makes a decision. They too are emotional. People are emotional beings. They too can be talked to, communicated with, convinced with whatever messaging, visuals, experiences that we design. And we mustn't forget that. And that's also the friction part where there is that part where somebody has to decide or when the agents does their research, maybe come back and they say, okay, on a quality level, I'm not so sure that's a good friction point. That's a quality gatekeeping, for example, or security compliance gatekeeping, things like that. So there are levels of gatekeeping that we will still always have. Only the automation. The level of automation increases, but it doesn't mean that everything is out of our hands, neither as marketeers, neither as potential customers. Or customers.
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Yeah, because I mean that the, the bad scenario there is like the, the magic box where, okay, let's just feed whatever into the gen AI and we assume it'll be the right thing. But I mean, it sounds like what you're saying is the, the friction at the right points. Yeah, the friction actually not only helps us learn, but it, it gives consumers. Because I don't think, I think the consumers want to have things made more easy for them. They don't want to have to make decisions, you know, kind of like what you're saying about the search results. They don't want to have to make decisions that are tedious or where there's so many options, but they still want agency over what they, what they want. Right. So, you know, that's. How do you, how do you draw the line? Like what, what advice would you give to, to, to think through, like, drawing the line there of like, okay, just like again, throw it into the black box and, and we'll, we'll take whatever comes out ver finding that. Right. Kind of friction. Like what, what, what's the thought process there?
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Yeah, that's experimentation. Yeah. What we typically do is that, I think I said it in the beginning is that we, we start with where we want to end with and then we work back from there. And then we say, okay, this, we can automate that. And I always make the, the comparison with bookkeeping, with accountants. I, I like to read histories of technologies. Yeah, there, there was, back in the day, they had big paper ledgers where they wrote their numbers and so on. They made many mistakes and whatever. Then physical came and then Excel came and people would pour it all in Excel. But if you think about that, and let's say, okay, let's make a ledger of all the profits of all our subsidiaries or the Sales numbers of all our subsidiaries. And have a look at that. Why would you do that on paper? You can do that in Excel, and that's the idea. We want to have a good idea of the profitability of our subsidiaries, for example. That's the goal. Work back from there. Do we need paper for this? Does it, does this have to be made manually? No, we can just put it in Excel. Okay. Then there's decisions to be made on in terms of what are we going to do with the least profitable subsidiaries? What bonuses are we going to give to the most profitable subsidiaries? That's something that we would like to decide. Because you never know. There's been a crisis in a certain region. There's been xyz. Excel doesn't know that. And if you replace Excel with the agent, it's the same thing. It's. The agent doesn't know everything. So it's the level of decision making where you draw the line, where you say, okay, if we, if we get there, then I need to have my say as a human. Me or my team or whatever.
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Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, another part of this is, you know, we've been, we've been talking about personalization. I feel like we've been talking about personalization for decades as a, you know, and some personalization, you know, like replace first name with. With whatever. You know, that. That's been done for a while, but through, you know, segment of one, one to one, you know, whatever. Whatever you want to call it. I feel like we're, we're. We're there in some cases, we're almost there in others. But like, that, that true segment of one personalization is possible. Is that what customers really want, you know, in, in talking about all this or, you know, as, as it's about to become reality across the board? Like, is, Is that what they want?
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Yeah, it's, it's, it's. I'd say it's simply dependent on the value that they get out of it. And there's, there's also the, the, the. How do you say that? The, the, the creepiness factor where you. It's, you know, the story of people saying, yeah, yesterday I was talking about shoes, and today my whole Instagram feed is full of shoes. What's happening? They're listening to me. That's creepy. We don't know if it's true or not, but even if it, even, even if it isn't, it's creepy. So. And that, that's really about the exchange of value. It's the Very simple version is I give you my email address and you give me your white paper that you spent a few days on thinking about how you're going to make your case and so on. That's good exchange of value where you say, okay, I offer you a bit of my time in the future because you will be sending me some newsletter emails or campaign emails in return. But I get your white paper, that is valuable to me and that's the same thing but on a much larger scale. And that could be a bit more difficult, of course, in terms of how are we going to know what we're giving away and what we're not giving away. But it's really what I give away is value that I give to you as a company, as a marketeer. What the company or the marketeer gives to me should be in my perception equally valuable. And if that's a segmentation of one or of many, that's not really that important. In fact, it's okay. If it's hyper individualized, that's okay. But maybe that's not the real goal that we should be going for. It's really what's the exchange of value and how can we make our offering, our communication, our marketing, our products, our services. How can we serve this customer as valuably as possible? And perhaps they have to give us something in return for that as well. And if maybe there's a lot of data and a lot of things happening or a lot of things being collected and so on, that could be really something where we serve an individual customer on an individual customer's basis. Be that marketing wise or services wise. That could be possible. Indeed. So I think instead of making it the goal, it could be a happy accident that we arrive at the personalization of one.
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Yeah, like a, almost like an option among many to, you know, personalizing for one.
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Yeah, yeah. But it's not the goal in fact. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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And so, you know, I guess also going back to the idea of the necessary friction or the, or the beneficial friction and you know, it's, it's not that the marketers go away or you know, the consumers certainly aren't going away either. But you know, it's not that the marketers are going away, but their role certainly it seems like it's going to change and evolve. And in this, you know, when there are agents talking to agents and a lot of commerce being done, a lot of exchange being done, agent to agent, what's the, you know, what, what skills or roles or you know, how, how do marketers you know, how should marketers be thinking about staying useful and, and even, you know, irreplaceable in this, you know, in this evolution?
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because there's a lot of worry that it will be replaceable. That's true.
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Yeah. Yeah.
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You know, I, I'm, I'm 50 years old, so I've seen a, seen quite some things happening. And I have the impression that with the rapid evolution of technology, the Internet, the measurability of everything and so on, is that marketeers have painted themselves a little bit in a corner where they are too much dependent on the numbers. And I believe that with Genai and agents, a lot of the work of the marketing will shift back to the strategic level to really being like, you know, Theodore Levitt, where he said the role of the company is to serve the customer or to provide value to the customer. That's the marketer's role. And now there's a lot of things that they are doing today. Manual work, how many leads did we get? So let's set up another campaign xyz. They could all put that in a system with the right instructions, let's call it. Let's say that and look at things from a higher level and say, strategically, maybe I'm doing now campaigns through my agents to attract new customers, but I see that we are doing a very bad job at keeping existing customers. For example, I'm going to interfere here because this is what I promise and this is what we deliver. And okay, last year I had no say about what we're delivering, but today my customer's agent is looking at what we are delivering and he's not happy about it. And it's saying, don't go there. So I need to have my fingers in that part of the company as well. And that's what I really see the job of the marketer evolve towards where it's much more holistically, much more orchestration and where they have a lot more say about every touch point from the start of a customer relationship to the end and later, how that is going to be managed, orchestrated and so on. Yeah, so I really see that as a, as an opportunity. Again, the idea of the accountants, you don't see accountants writing in ledgers anymore. And there have, there haven't been more accountants, I think, in the world than today. And they've all invented stuff that they wouldn't, what about 10 years ago or five years ago? And that's because of technology, because they say, okay, I'm liberated from spending my time on this and now I can work on that. And the human mind is infinite, so they will find new things where they say, ah, finally we can do this, and we can. I don't even know what will happen. But I'm really, I really believe there, there's a, a liberating part there, there will be people who will be stuck and say, yeah, I used to make LinkedIn campaigns and now I'm out of a job because it's all being automated. That's true. But I truly believe there's an opportunity to say, thank God, I don't have to do this anymore.
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Right, Right. Yeah, no, I want to bring the world. I agree with you too. I mean, I'm an optimist when it comes to these. I mean, I, you know, I use the story. My first job out of college was as a webmaster, which was a job that I don't think exists anymore even, but, like, it didn't exist when I.
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Was in high school.
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Right, right, yeah, yeah, I'm, I'm right there with you. So, yeah, it's, you know, that was a job that didn't exist when I was in high school. And yet, you know, there it was a few years later or something like that. So, you know, I, I agree, like, we don't, we don't necessarily know what's, what's coming down. But, but what I'm hearing you say is there's the opportunity to actually elevate the role of the marketer. You know, AI is going to augment their, their work, but the role of the marketer could actually be elevated by all of this and have them do more valuable things. And I mean, to me, that's exciting.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There could be a period where the magic box thinking is there, oh, we can replace all marketers with Gen AI and then people will see, but everybody's doing that. So there's no differentiator anymore. We need marketers back who can think strategically, focus and position, think about positioning and value propositions. And how are we going to communicate these through every touch point that we have between the company and our, and our customers. And then marketeers will be back where in fact they started. I mean, they used to have a lot more say than a lot of them have now.
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Yeah, yeah. Exciting times. Well, Matthew, thanks so much for joining the show today. I've got one last question for you that I like to ask everybody. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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Well, I think it's training the curiosity muscles, really, staying curious, trying to understand what's happening, why things are done the way they are, and digging, just digging, asking stupid questions. So it's also very, also very helpful. And sometimes you have to say sorry for the stupid question. But yeah, I. Yeah, curiosity. It's really one word. It's really curiosity. Why is this happening? What is this? How does this work? I think that summarizes it best, in fact.
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Well, again, I'd like to thank Matthew Dand, Associate Director of Experience Consulting at epam, for joining the show. You can learn more about Matthieu and EPAM by following the links in the show notes.
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Thanks again for listening to the B2B Agility podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show more easily. You can access more episodes of the show at www.b2b adjacent agility.com that's b2b agility.com While you're there, check out my series of best selling agile brand guides covering a wide variety of marketing technology topics. Or you can search for Greg Kilstrom on Amazon. Until next time, stay focused and stay agile.
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The Agile brand.