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Insights Unlocked
Your UI might already be obsolete as AI reshapes customer experience
00:38:23
How conversational and agentic AI are transforming customer experience, UX, and marketing—and what companies must do now to stay competitive.
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Transcript58 lines
- [00:02]
Nathan Isaacs
Welcome back to Insights Unlocked. In this episode, we explore how AI is reshaping customer experience. From conversational interfaces that change how we interact with products to emerging agents that can act on our behalf. Joined by Mike Mase and Michael Dominick, we unpack what this means for your ux, your marketing, and your business strategy, and what you should be doing right now to keep up. Enjoy the show.
- [00:29]
Podcast Host / User Testing Announcer
Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing, where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, doers and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world, from concept to execution.
- [00:49]
Nathan Isaacs
Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, principal Content Marketing Manager at User Testing. Our guests today are Mike Mase and Michael Dominic. Welcome, guys.
- [01:01]
Mike Mace
Thanks. Great to be here.
- [01:03]
Michael Dominick
Thanks for having us, Nathan.
- [01:06]
Nathan Isaacs
Mike Mace, you're a longtime industry tech industry veteran. Can you tell us what your role is here at User Testing and what you do?
- [01:14]
Mike Mace
Sure. I do solutions marketing, which sounds straightforward, but in practice, it's working with our customers on a lot of the big business challenges that they have using User testing and problems they can solve. And one of the big topics that's constantly coming up is how do we make our AI products be wonderful and successful and what should we be testing them and how is that different from what I do today for like, standard usability? And Michael and I have been going around and doing a lot of discussions with customers about this, and we want to share some of the stuff that we're learning.
- [01:50]
Nathan Isaacs
Yeah. Michael, you've been the vice president of AI Transformation here at User Testing, and that is the case as we're recording this. But when we air this here in a few weeks, you will be starting a similar role at a different company. But can you just tell us what does that mean? What does VP of AI Transformation mean and kind of explain your day to day?
- [02:15]
Michael Dominick
Yeah. So really what it means is I drive the kind of internal transformation around AI. I think many companies are recognizing now that AI is going to impact their businesses and many, many different and many abstract ways. And what we've been doing here at User Testing and what many other companies are doing is really kind of centralizing leadership around what that transformation looks like within the organization. And that is essentially what I've been driving at User Testing and what I will be continuing to drive in a new role at an AI company.
- [02:50]
Nathan Isaacs
The. And, and we're not trying to keep that secret or anything. You can look on LinkedIn if you want to, but we'll make you do the Heavy lifting there, listeners. You've both been having conversations with companies about how AI changes the way we interact with them or with their customers. Mike Mace, what's the headline on what you're telling them?
- [03:12]
Mike Mace
Yeah, so, you know, it's really that I think that the rules of successful products and successful customer journeys are changing in two ways. And we always tend to focus on what's the one thing that AI is doing. Like today there's a bunch of discussion about Agentix stuff that we're going to get into, but really there are two big themes in what's going on. One is AI is fundamentally changing the way you interact with technology products because you can talk to them. And that's fundamental change in user experience and customer journeys. And it has really big implications for your company. The second thing is what technology can do for you, tasks it can perform and stuff like that, which is what you get into. Agentic AI. Both of those things are critical changes. However, they're at different stages. One of them is much more, I won't say finished, but more mature, deploying now. And you need to be doing one set of tasks around it. The other one is much earlier. It's coming along really, really fast. But it's more like an exploratory area. You don't want to neglect one of them for the other. And so what we've been talking with companies about is how to navigate all of what are the urgent things you need to do now with one of them and what are the things you need to do to prepare for and start working with the other one.
- [04:39]
Nathan Isaacs
Well, as a follow up, let's start with the first one. How is conversational AI resetting the playing field?
- [04:46]
Mike Mace
Yeah, you know, to, to frame this, I need to talk a little bit about industry history. So one, one of the few advantages of being in the tech industry for a long time is I've seen a lot of big generational changes happen in the past and you kind of get to a point where you can spot some patterns and start to be able to say, okay, here's what's likely to happen next. And so during my time in the industry I've, I've had like a front row seat for some of these big transitions. One was the rise of the graphical interface. So I wasn't, I wasn't so much pre that stuff. I'm not quite that old, but I was at Apple when we were pushing that stuff really, really hard with the Macintosh and I saw bring in the graphical interface, changing the interaction paradigm for software. If you want to get technical, Drove turnover in all of the leading software companies of the day. There's a reason why you don't use Lotus 1, 2, 3 today for spreadsheets. There's a reason why you don't use WordPerfect for word processing. And that's because they fumbled the transition to the graphical interface and they were replaced by people who did it better then. I also was really heavily involved in the move to mobile. I was at Palm at the time, the guys who did the little handheld organizers. And I saw how that drove new categories of business. You know, you think of a company like Uber, they exist only because smartphones were available so that you could do your interactions with the Uber system. You look at a social media company like TikTok, they exist only because of the screen format and the interaction that people do with mobile devices. So these transitions don't just replace companies, they also create new industries or new categories of product that you can do. Same thing happened with the rise of cloud computing and how that led to Facebook and Amazon Web Services and so on and so forth. So in all these cases, these generational changes in technology and enable generational changes in the companies that are building with that technology. And it's not just tech companies, it's also everybody else. You know, Uber is not first and foremost a tech company, it's a transportation company. And that's what it's done to the transportation business. So we all need to be aware of these transitions because the new thing that's happening with conversational interface is going to drive similar turnover. And in particular, we're digging into how that's going to change things and what challenges that creates for the, for the companies.
- [07:31]
Nathan Isaacs
So what does that do to the companies?
- [07:34]
Mike Mace
Yeah, it's two things. The first is just the fundamental relationship between you and a computer or a tech product, because it's a smartphone too. The way you relate to technology is changing today. The way you work with technology is you give it tasks to perform for you and you instruct it. You use it like a hammer or some other tool. You use it very, very closely. You know, so I'm going to click a menu and tell it to do this thing and it does this thing in response to those commands. So it's really a sort of a command driven interaction. When you look at the conversational interface in AI, you talk with the computer and you ask it stuff and it responds back. You have a conversation rather than instructing certain actions that you want to perform. That's a fundamentally different way of Interacting, and it creates a different emotional relationship with the customer. They judge their AI conversations just the same as they judge their human conversations. So if you're testing an AI product that has a chat interface to it, and most of them do, you need to evaluate, do people trust it, do they like it, do they feel that it's credible, do they feel that it's being respectful? And most of us who develop and test products don't think in terms of testing that way. We test for usability, we don't test for personality. So it's a different set of tasks that we need to perform. And companies need to get their heads around doing that or they may well go the way of Lotus. One, two, three. The second piece is that it's also changing the way that companies go to market. So I'm talking about your marketing and sales process. You know, we are used to creating these very elaborate marketing and sales funnels that drive people through the sales consideration process. And, you know, it's awareness and consideration and conversion and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we create all of these deliverables to drive people through those things. And we assume that they're going to move in a certain order through that flow. And you look at the way companies market and the way they sell, and they've done a huge amount of work built around all of the. Those assumed journeys that people are going to take. Well, the way it works with AI is instead of going on that predetermined journey that you're able to drive them to, in a lot of cases, people are just going and talking to their favorite AI bot and saying, hey, I need to get a new dishwasher. Can you advise me on, like, how I should do that? And they have this really rich, lengthy conversation with the AI that takes them through much of the purchasing process before they even talk to you, before they even have an interaction with you. Now, usually at some point they will want to interact with you like, okay, thank you, AI, You've helped me narrow down the brands and now I'm going to, you know, I'm going to pick exactly, and I want to go to a store or I want to learn more from directly from the company. That's great, but you don't know what state of mind they're in when they come to you. You don't know what work they've done previously. It used to be that you could assume that you're taking them through something. You can't make that assumption anymore. So how do you work with the AI to do handoffs how do you fight the AI in some cases to get pieces of that interaction be on your turf rather than its turf. It really makes obsolete. And you're going to hear me use the word obsolete a few times. It makes obsolete a lot of your current customer journeys. So the news here is your user interface. I don't want to be alarmist, but the reality is your user interface is probably at least somewhat obsolete and you've got to rework it to take into account conversation that is not just throwing AI into the product, that is rethinking how people interact with it. And your user journeys are more or less obsolete, especially the online elements in those journeys. And you're going to need to rethink those things as well. Now that either can be really, really scary or that can be really, really stimulating and exciting. It's like, wow, we got a lot of really cool work to do. I tend toward the happy fun side because I like having interesting, challenging work. But either way, you need to get on it right now because these changes are happening in real time right at this moment.
- [11:59]
Michael Dominick
So, Mike, I have a question for you. So you were talking earlier about the way that users are reacting to these new experiences that brands are delivering. And that's like a really interesting thing for me because I have some context around this. So 10 years ago during AI Hype Cycle 1.0, when every company felt like they needed a conversational interface, I was the guy that was designing a lot of those conversational interfaces and also using a tool like user testing to capture feedback around the experience that we were delivering. And what we found is that, so a lot of these in that era were very like character driven experiences. So we were working with marketing teams to create a brand relevant character, right, that was going to deliver information to the user. And this was showing up in places like Facebook messenger and when Skype still existed back then, Alexa skills, Google Home, right? So like brands were really interested in building again these character driven experiences. And what we found when we were testing in that era was people really liked the character driven side, but they just overall hated these chatbots because they couldn't really do much.
- [13:15]
Nathan Isaacs
Right?
- [13:16]
Michael Dominick
They're all trained in natural language processing and if you've ever had to train like an NLP system, it's just like almost an impossible task to deliver the expectation of a general user, right? Because they just expect these things to behave like references and in like AI and movies like that has existed for, for many, many years. So I'm curious, what are, what are we seeing how are we seeing people respond to this now? Like our brands interest? Still interested in the character driven experience or is it more just let's make sure that the functionality is here and it delivers what users are expecting.
- [13:54]
Mike Mace
Yeah, it's a great question. So. And of course the answer is it depends because they answered everything is it depends. But, but let's try to give a more useful answer to that. I think, I think you're exactly right that the tree driven nature of previous language processing was its Achilles heel. So it over promised, you know, they gave you a character who gave you this impression that you were going to be able to have a conversation and then it was a terrible conversationalist, you know, and this even, this even applies still today. You know, interactions with Siri are deeply frustrating these days once you get used to interacting with ChatGPT. You know, Siri's a moron. It sounds nice, you know, sounds really friendly. The tone of voice is right. But man, it's like it's worse than talking to a dog. My dog is more intuitive than Siri is in a lot of cases. And so we created an expectation the product couldn't fulfill and it was immediate massive fail just because of that. The nice thing that's happened with Generative AI is I think the companies weren't thinking so much in terms of, oh, character, you know, or how do I do brand engagement or things like that. They were just thinking about, oh, what goes on with chat, let's try it. So they managed to make a much more human like interaction where we could have real conversations, but they hadn't burdened it with a lot of expectations. Instead it's just a command line that you type stuff into. So I don't think they necessarily planned it this way. I'd love to hear it if they did. I think it just kind of worked out. But they ended up setting expectations low and delivering high, which was the exact opposite of what happened with previous stuff. Now what's starting to happen now is you're asking what are brands thinking today? They're just starting to wake up to the power of conversation and the fact that, oh my chatbot is actually a corporate spokesperson. And so I've got to think through that personality. Does it match my brand personality? And I don't know about you, Michael, but in the companies I've talked with, they have not yet gotten around to asking these questions in most cases.
- [16:07]
Michael Dominick
Yeah, I would agree with you. I have not seen many companies really getting focused on what that experience looks like from end to end. For Their. For their customers. What's funny is like, that that was a big focus though, 10 years ago. And you're absolutely right. Like, I mean, all these experiences are just really bad. Right. Like, and I take some responsibility there because I was designing many of them. But you know, what I've been saying over the last couple years is that you go back 10 years to the conversational interface hype cycle is the technology wasn't ready for the moment and now the moment's not really, really ready for the technology.
- [16:46]
Mike Mace
Yes.
- [16:47]
Michael Dominick
So, yeah, and I, and I think that, like, obviously filters into everything that we're going to talk about today where, you know, companies are just not really sure yet what to do and even how to test the experiences.
- [16:59]
Mike Mace
Yeah. Yep.
- [17:00]
Nathan Isaacs
The. It brings up something that our CMO here at User Testing was recently talking about on a different podcast. I'll include the link in the show notes. But this idea and something you said, Mike Mace, that the customer journey's changing or evolving is that we've, like, companies and marketers have tried to pitch this message that was super tight, only a few words, because nobody had any time to kind of, they were getting bombarded and all this kind of stuff. And so we had short little messages, short little videos, short everything. Short, short, short. But with AI, it could be the college textbook, it can be the big technical document, and you're probably better off having that available for these AIs, especially agenic AIs, where they can engage and go, oh, now I understand how that product really works, rather than some tagline that kind of hints at something but really could be used for anything.
- [18:01]
Mike Mace
Yep. Yep.
- [18:02]
Nathan Isaacs
What are your thoughts on that?
- [18:03]
Mike Mace
I strongly agree. And you know, as a, as a marketer, a big part of my job these days, what I am working on, as soon as we finish our recording today, is I'm going back to figuring out what information I can feed to a, to a custom GPT that will be assisting our sales and marketing folks on engaging with different types of customers. And it's taking all those really long form documents, vetting them to make sure that they're really, really proper correct. You know, you don't want to feed a custom GPT junk food. You want to feed it the best reference information and then coaching that GPT on how it can help me do the job that I need to do. So it can be an assistant so that when a salesperson needs help with a particular conversation with a customer, they can go first to the GPT to get some coaching before they need to come to me and it's going to multiply my ability to work across a big sales team and give them all customized support. So, yeah, it's very much about, we are now enabling conversations rather than driving them. And that's a really interesting concept to get your head around. So this is part of what Michael and I have been doing when we go out and talk to customers, is, okay, what are your action items for dealing with this whole conversational thing? So I think one is, as you're developing your bots, you've got to be optimizing them for trust, for establishing trust and for personality. Is it likable? Not just is it usable? Does the tone of the bot, does its behavior match your brand personality? Do you want it to? You know, my favorite example is if you're in the U.S. you've got the fast food company Jack in the Box, which has a corporate personality, which is kind of snarky and cynical and snide sometimes. And do you want to reflect that personality in your spokesperson bot who's answering customer questions online? Maybe you do, because that's part of the brand personality you've established. Maybe you don't want it to be snarky when they're giving you a complaint about their food wasn't properly prepared. And so you gotta, you gotta think through that stuff. You want to look at issues of spoken versus written interaction. People tend to do typed interactions with AI bots when they're on their computer because they have a type keyboard. They tend to do spoken interactions on a smartphone. You'll see Google advertising people talking to their smartphones to do things. And there's a reason why they're doing that because that, that mode of operation is really, really common there. And you need to think through your journeys. You know, where will the handoffs be from the bots to your stuff? Can you work with the bot companies in order to help set up those handoffs? The answer is that you can, but you need to engage with them to make sure that they're getting the right information. And all of these, the big thing is all of these changes. The bot as your spokesperson, the conversational interaction with customers, the journey changes. Those are all happening right now. This is not like two years from now. It's going to be different. This is, things are being changed today. This is, there are startups targeting you who are using these approaches and if you're not aware of them, you need to be aware of them. And so this is a deployment. Ready? Do it right now. Make sure it's happening and if you're not rethinking your journeys and your interface today for what AI does to them, you're actually behind and you need to get after it really, really urgently.
- [21:49]
Nathan Isaacs
Michael and I kind of mentioned a little bit of a genic AI, like how can you talk about that sort of space? We talked about the bots where I'm going to your AI interface, but what about the bots that are coming to me and that what's going on with companies and how's that affecting experiences, customers or otherwise?
- [22:10]
Michael Dominick
Yeah, so look there, there are no really kind of like crucial learnings yet because this stuff is so new. But you know, I have talked to companies, you know, specifically retail companies that are interested in how are our customers using generators, using agents, right, to come to our website, potentially purchase things. So let's level set on capabilities right now you can use agents today to go and find product and purchase product on your behalf, right? You give it a little bit of instruction and then the agent goes out and potentially browses the web or browses a specific website that you've directed to, finds a relevant product that you've asked it to find, puts it into a cart, makes a purchase and makes some decisions sometimes on your behalf. You know, sometimes you're giving it, you know, more autonomy. Sometimes it's checking in with you to say, do you want to choose this shipping option? Do you want to choose this size option, this color option? So what I'm talking to companies that are aware that this is happening, right? They're aware that their customers are using these agents to do some of this. And there's again, like, I wouldn't say that there's a neat strategy to follow and a roadmap, but I think just being aware is probably the first step. So some of the companies that I've talked to, they're looking at the traffic that they're getting from telemetry, like Google Analytics, right? So their Google Analytics is telling them that, that the ChatGPT agent browser is on their website and it's doing these things on their website. And another thing that makes this a little bit challenging right now is that there's no set of design principles that you can follow to make it easy for these agents to complete these actions. The way that most of these agents are trained today is to use the web the same way that humans do. And what they're doing is they're taking screenshots of every page that they go to on a specific website and they're making decisions based on the information Presented. So I mean, that, that tells me that your information architecture probably needs to be like, pretty pretty well organized. I think that probably will help an agent navigate a little bit more fluidly through your website. But yeah, I think again, maybe the key thing to know right now is that this is actually happening. And being aware of the level that it's happening in any of your digital properties is pretty critical. And then you can start to sink your teeth into how much of an impact might this be having on our performance metrics, on our business?
- [24:49]
Nathan Isaacs
Well, and it may not have that impact now, but you need to have that conversation now. So when it does have an impact, you're not falling behind. Right. Because these things are not easy to roll out.
- [25:03]
Michael Dominick
So here's the bad news is anything that we learned today may or may not be applicable in a week from now.
- [25:10]
Nathan Isaacs
Right.
- [25:12]
Michael Dominick
We know the way that these agents work today. And yeah, like if I'm, if I'm in a digital marketing team and this is something that's, you know, pretty critical to my business, I'm going to be keeping my finger on the pulse very closely as to everything that's happening in this world because it is so new, because it's. The ground is shifting beneath our feet on an almost daily basis. I think like, that's the critical challenge right now is being aware of what these new capabilities are that these companies are rolling out on a daily, weekly basis.
- [25:45]
Nathan Isaacs
Something that bubbled up in my little brain here is how does this affect like GDPR and privacy agents? They don't have any privacy, do they? Or is it, is it your rights? I, I wonder how that's going to play out.
- [26:03]
Michael Dominick
Great question. I have no idea the answer to the question. Yeah, I mean, agents are obviously not people. I don't any like legislation to protect the privacy of agents yet. I'm not sure where GDP applies here. That's probably something you'll want to ask an attorney about. But yeah, I think all of this stuff is still very much playing out in real time.
- [26:27]
Nathan Isaacs
Yeah, I was just gonna make a joke. I, I think here in the US Our Supreme Court has said that companies are people. Right. We had a ruling a handful of years ago, so maybe, maybe agents are people too. Again, we are not given any legal advice here. Yeah, I know. Nothing.
- [26:45]
Michael Dominick
Yeah, definitely go talk to them about that. But they are working on behalf of people, so I don't know that it's that much of a stretch to say that like some of these privacy agreements extend to the agents that you're asking to Go do things on your behalf, because assuming that they're carrying some personal information, you can give them your credit card, Right. And they can go and use that information on a website. So again, like, all this still playing out real time. Like, I don't know exactly where this is going to go as legislation wise, but just being aware that it's happening is, is the critical thing to pay attention to right now.
- [27:25]
Nathan Isaacs
Michael, I'm just wondering, we were just talking about how quickly everything's moving. Can you just give us a pulse check right now? So again, mid March, forgive us if, if the whole world has changed in two weeks when the show goes out in early April, but can you just give us a quick check on what's going on out there?
- [27:44]
Michael Dominick
Yeah, I think the key thing to pay attention to is just the way the level of engagement now that people have in AI, we were talking about agents, right? And this is a capability. This is not a super new capability. You know, I was building agents a year ago. It was over a year ago that OpenAI launched the operator model, and then they gave it more capabilities and called it the agent model. And that model has been able to go and purchase things on your behalf on, on your website for over a year now. I think the big change is the level of attention that's being paid to these capabilities. Certainly the capabilities are growing at the same time. Right. And that's part of why people are paying more attention to it. So you dial the clock back maybe even three months ago, and it was probably only AI nerds like me that were really tinkering and, you know, vibe coding and building these agents. Now what we're seeing is that this is starting to hit the general public. That's probably a pretty critical thing for brands to be paying attention to, is that this is spilling out into the mainstream now. That to me feels like the biggest change that we've experienced in the past, maybe call it three months. Again, capabilities are certainly growing. There's a ton of attention being paid right now to what Anthropic is doing with Claude Code, with Claude Cowork. You know, even here in the business, I get people slacking me almost every single day saying, hey, I want to use Claude coworkers. These are all these use cases that I read about on LinkedIn or I saw a YouTube video about, let's bring this to life here in the business. So again, like just being someone that's living this every single day, that level of engagement, the change in the level of engagement has really surprised me over the Last couple months.
- [29:39]
Nathan Isaacs
Yeah. I definitely think that Claude Code has. And the other LLMs have, like we hit a, a pivot point or a turning point or threshold, whatever you want to call it. And, and we sell that with the valuation of all these tech companies. Right. And. And then what they did is they went to their employees and said, it's not next year. You're going to figure this stuff out. We are figuring it out now because we will not survive unless we, we do something different.
- [30:13]
Michael Dominick
Yeah.
- [30:13]
Nathan Isaacs
And so there's a different mandate. So with that in mind, as we sort of wrap up, you know, what are the takeaways that brands and others who are listening to this episode right now? What should they be thinking about? What should they be doing?
- [30:29]
Michael Dominick
I'll tell you what I'm actually really interested and I'm going to be paying very close attention to in the coming months is, you know, again, we're talking about how people are starting to tinker with these models and tinker with these new capabilities. I mentioned that people are coming to me every day and slacking me saying, like, hey, can I, can I build this use case here at work? I think what I'm going to be really interested in how brands are bringing these experiences to their customers. Right. Haven't seen too much of that yet. So, yeah, like, I think that every company should be thinking about this. We're a SaaS company. We're building out these capabilities within our platform. We've been doing that for years. Right. But even, like, if you go to, like, the consumer experience and how these new capabilities may impact consumer experience, I would say, like, if you're a company that is thinking about how this is going to impact the way that you interact with your customers, just try to be as creative as possible right now. Like, don't break anything. But I think the companies that are going to figure this out sooner rather than later are the ones that just say, like, hey, let's just, just be as creative as possible. This is the time to create.
- [31:43]
Nathan Isaacs
Mike Bass, what are your thoughts?
- [31:45]
Mike Mace
I. Well, number one, all the above. Yes. Number two, I would separate a little bit the conversational piece from the agentic piece on the conversational side that needs immediate action and execution. I mean, we've got enough evidence and enough clarity on how it's going to work out that we need to be doing those changes right now. So your. What do you need to change in your interface and what do you need to change in your customer journeys and testing your AI stuff for personality and trust? That all needs to be going on right now on the agentix stuff. Yes. All the experimentation, creativity that Michael was talking about, and I would say filter that by identifying what customer problems you can solve with this stuff, it is really easy to find experiences that feel really compelling, but that don't actually solve a big customer problem. And those end up being very spectacular dead ends. If you want a great metaphor for that, think about what went on with VR goggles. To this day, looking at images and interacting with some sort of experience through VR goggles is an incredibly emotive, emotional, profound experience. Like, wow, I've just stepped into another location. We have yet to figure out any useful mainstream purpose for that experience other than playing games. And I know they're vertical things. I get it. I've looked at that a lot. But it's easy to do stuff that is way cool, but that doesn't solve a problem, and that stuff is problematic. So as you experiment, as you try out these things that you can do, keep applying it back to does this improve something that the customer actually is going to care about? And then focus on those things, but don't focus on the ones where it's just the experience for its own sake. The other thing I want to share is just kind of an attitudinal thing for how all of us think about this stuff. Having lived through a lot of these previous transitions, they're actually really fun. It was fun to do graphical interface, it was fun to do mobile computing, even though Palm didn't survive as a company. And making these changes, enabling the stuff that AI is doing and improving people's lives and experiences, you don't very often get a chance to make this sort of fundamental changes and really dig into it and, you know, it's neat. Go into it with a sense of, wow, I'm really empowered and enabled to do some great new fun stuff. And this is going to be a great ride, because it will be, if you view it that way. What you want to be careful of is, I think, probably because of the tone of the times, but also just because there are people who are cautious about things you do want to be cognizant of. The people who are saying, oh, this is going to be a force for destruction and everybody's going to lose their jobs and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But number one, I've lived through a lot of these transitions. They always say that for every transition, and yet it hasn't come through so far. There have been changes, but, you know, pretty much we all still have jobs today. I need to see pretty strong proof before I'm going to believe that this time is going to be fundamentally different. So you know, don't assume that the worst outcomes will happen. Do be aware of them, don't ignore them. I'm not being Pollyanna. But balance it out and, and also view this as something where you can do new things. They're really, really fundamental. Fundamental and enjoyable. And enjoy the ride where you can. There will be people forecasting disaster and you'll notice that a lot of the disasters are usually, well in the next few years. Three years from now this is going to be really bad or something like that. We don't know what's going to happen in three years. Anybody who tells you otherwise is fibbing. The pace of change is so quick and the changes are so fundamental and they always have been that I've never seen in the tech industry a three year forecast that turned out to be accurate. So focus on what's happening today, be aware of what might happen several years from now, be cognizant of it, you know, plan contingencies for it. But if somebody gives you a disaster scenario, that's a possibility that you need to think about, not a certainty that you need to go hide from because it's easy to paralyze yourself if you focus on those things too much. We got tons of really fun work to do in the next year. Go make that stuff happen and have a great time with it because a year from now the landscape is going to look so different that it won't matter what they were predicting for the long term future anyway.
- [36:25]
Michael Dominick
Amen.
- [36:26]
Nathan Isaacs
Amen. Amen. As, as you mentioned there, I think OpenAI's chat GPT, whatever number was it came out, was it November of 23? Yeah, 20, something like that. So right. Not even three years ago.
- [36:42]
Michael Dominick
November. November 30th, 2022.
- [36:44]
Nathan Isaacs
Right. So the whole world has changed in that three year. You know, people, you know, if you think back, right, October of 23, they had a different future for everything.
- [36:55]
Mike Mace
Yep.
- [36:56]
Nathan Isaacs
And it's all changed. It's all been turned over on its head. We have user testing, has a ton of resources. You guys have been talking about this. You did some research on this. I will include links on all that in our show notes. So please come to the website and take a look. We have so many resources. If you have a question about this, what should and. And none of those resources answer those questions. What should a listener do if they have a question?
- [37:26]
Mike Mace
They can,
- [37:29]
Nathan Isaacs
hey, but we can't talk to Michael Dominic. He's no longer a user. Testing.
- [37:33]
Mike Mace
You can't talk to. Well, you can go look up Michael Dobbing, look him up on LinkedIn and ask him questions there. You can also contact me. I'm just iamikeusertesting.comm I k e Be glad to hear from you. I learned from those conversations, so that's absolutely fine.
- [37:50]
Nathan Isaacs
Yes. And with that, thank you both for your time today.
- [37:54]
Podcast Host / User Testing Announcer
Want to keep the conversation going?
- [37:56]
Michael Dominick
You can.
- [37:57]
Podcast Host / User Testing Announcer
You can find the show notes@usertesting.com podcast if you haven't already, don't forget to follow us on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Overcast, or Google Play, so you never miss an episode. And if you enjoyed today's show, please share it with a friend or leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And until next time, this is Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing.