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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#666: Balancing AI-driven efficiency and responsibility with Pasquale DeMaio, Amazon Web Services
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- [00:00]
Unknown Host
Your brand may be staying on top of current trends, but are you agile enough to stay relevant, resilient and successful as customers, competition and the world continues to change at a breakneck pace? I'm thrilled to share the newly revised version of my first book, the Agile Brand. I'm calling it the Agile Brand Revisited. It's been updated to reflect our continually changing world, and it provides seven principles that form the backbone of an agile brand, offering detailed insights and actionable steps for incorporating them into your business strategy. This is the book that started it all and I'm excited to share it with you. It's now available in print and digital formats and available everywhere. Learn more by going to the Agile Brand guide website at www.agilebrandguide.com.
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Pasquale Di Maio
The Agile Brand.
- [00:55]
Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trend, trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and Martech platforms as we explore marketing technology, AI, E commerce, and whatever's next for the Omnichannel customer experience. Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand Podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes. Please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. Now onto the show. For many brands, AI is revolutionizing customer experience. But with increased adoption comes widespread concerns of about job displacement, ethical risks and trust. Is AI truly enhancing human capabilities or is it simply replacing them? And how can companies balance efficiency with responsibility in AI driven cx? Joining me today is Pasquale Di Maio.
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Unknown Co-Host
Vice President of Customer Experience Services at aws. Pasquale, welcome to the show.
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Pasquale Di Maio
Thank you so much for having me. This is great.
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Unknown Co-Host
Yeah. Looking forward to talking about this topic with you. Before we dive in though, why don't.
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Greg Kilstrom
You start by telling us a little.
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Unknown Co-Host
Bit about your background and your role at aws.
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Pasquale Di Maio
Sure. I'm the Vice President for Amazon Connected aws. Amazon Connect is our contact center in the cloud that's designed to make it easy to deliver exceptional customer outcomes for business of all sizes. And one of the interesting things about it is one of the reasons why I got into this is because of my passion around AI. And from day one, when we launched eight years ago now, we've had AI natively built into the solution. But now this moment in time with the generative AI becoming such an interesting aspect of almost every part of people's lives, I feel like, you know, even though we're so nascent, it's really already starting to happen. It's just an incredible time to be involved in this.
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Unknown Co-Host
Yeah, yeah, Love it. Well, yeah, let's, let's dive in here. And first topic I want to talk about, you know, there's certainly a lot of, let's say, concern or a lot of dialogue about this idea of AI replacing humans and replacing jobs and all of that. But you know, there's a different perspective of AI with humans, not AI versus humans. And you know, as an optimist in these things myself, I think again, there will be some of, probably all of the above, but I think this is the right way to think about things. So, you know, where is generative AI making the biggest impact in the customer experience?
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Pasquale Di Maio
So the interesting thing about generative AI is that we look at it as very much a revolutionary technology that's going to make evolutionary change to hopefully make every touch point you have a little bit better. I think the first place where we're going to see it is going to be in agent productivity, where we help agents improve their performance. I believe it's also going to have some big impact in being able to self service some types of questions that are very hard to answer before for people or computers. And then of course, when you think about understanding what's happening in a contact center and engagement, you're going to do a lot of analytics and insights and those analytics and insights are going to be greatly enhanced by generative AI. When I think about what happens at the beginning of the experience, a chatbot can now deliver a much more natural, intuitive conversation and it can save customers time in that experience. And there's a lot of things you don't really want a human being to be involved in there because they don't really help. If I think about automation, I think about something like a password reset or a bank balance. I don't necessarily want a human being to go have to scroll, look at my bank information. I honestly want them to know about it. But having a very quick answer there is great and no one likes to wait on hold to get it for something very basic answered. At the same time, for agents, they're dealing with really complex problems. Often things aren't working the way they hope they would be or they should be or have worked every other time. And the agent wants to answer that question. They also want to build an empathetic experience for the customer. They want to, and they want to. Most people go into this business because they love people. People, they want to actually express real human empathy and share that moment with the person. But if they're battling technology, that's really hard. And so we want to make sure that generative AI is then driving experience for them that's showcasing that, showing them exactly what they need to answer the question much faster, get out of that experience of having to move between different tools and trying to figure stuff out. If you've called someone and you've talked to them, sometimes you can hear in their voice that they're not really focused on you because they're really looking at their tools and all tapping between things. And obviously that's not a good experience for either side. And so we see that as a big opportunity there. If I look at someone like National Australian bank, they've automated 95% of their voice interactions with their IVR, but that 5% that they're handling with people are the ones that are really matter for the interesting communications they want to have. And those are the ones that are probably much longer. They're much more personal. They also are much more complex. And the human beings there are able to focus better at having a great outcome with their customers.
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Unknown Co-Host
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, all, all of this makes, makes a ton of sense. I mean, we're talking about efficiency gains, we're talking about making employees jobs easier, potentially more, more valuable. And so, you know, we have been hearing about AI and customer service for several years. I mean, AI has been around for decades, of course, but generative AI and its, its capabilities, we've been talking about this for a few years.
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Greg Kilstrom
We.
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Unknown Co-Host
Why aren't more businesses adopting it? You know, what's holding them back?
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Pasquale Di Maio
I think it's a great question because obviously the promise of AI is so bold, but the thing that we've seen is there's been fits and starts here and there, and customers have been using it more and more this past year as we've made it easier to use it within Connect. The two biggest things I've seen that have stopped people from using it is one, it's still been way too difficult to implement. And so folks are trying to get good results, but they spend themselves fighting with the technology instead of delivering the outcomes they want. And two, I think that also folks have been concerned with the cost because, you know, we can sort of spiral and the pricing of the stuff has been complex and confusing for folks. And so I've talked to a ton of customers this year about what would help them go faster. Number one, make it easier. So actually we've just very recently released new tech, new capabilities inside of Amazon Connect that allow you to turn AI on for every contact from end to end with just one click. And by doing so you're now able to get the benefits of everything from an automated experience up front to passing the right information to the agent, to having the agent be empowered to be superhuman with the powers that AI gives them while they're working, getting them out of that mode where they're all tabbing, moving back and forth between their tools, but instead just getting the information they need right. Then understanding what's happening, even taking actions on their behalf, like saying if the customer says, you know, hey, I'd like to do this with your product, you know, note that, bring that out, take a task to follow up on that with that customer outside the call so that agent's still focused on the customer problem. And then after the call, helping the agent wrap up everything, summarizing everything and then turning it into a nice bow, getting all of the things that agent said, pull through drop downs and try and categorize a call, which they're not good at anyways. It's not fun for them. It's, you know, for them. They're being told to do it faster and it's not, it's not, it's the wrong, it's the wrong use of their time. They're not being a human being and we get them into, into that stuff, all that stuff packaged up in one nice, easy to use solution that now that they can just turn on and use on every contact. And we've done that with a really, really simple pricing model. So you can have, it's basically all you can eat for the AI in the solution. And that makes it so that you no longer are worried about how much you're spending here, but instead you're saying, how do I get the most out of every experience? And that's a huge win for customers to be able to just say, hey, I bring this to bear in every contact everywhere, and I'm spending less to do that.
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Unknown Host
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Unknown Co-Host
So I mentioned the idea of AI with humans, not AI versus humans. You know, this is something that AWS embraces and approaches. How does this approach of AI with humans address some of those concerns that you touched on earlier? You know, things like job displacement or even job dissatisfaction.
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Pasquale Di Maio
Well, I think we both agree that when you're, when the tools you work with every day get better, that often it makes your job sort of more reliable, more enjoyable, easier to do, and something where you're happier to be there. Right? And, and so I think that honestly is the very first step in all of this is people do better at jobs they like and people enjoy their lives better when they're happy at work. And so when I think about what we're doing here, I start with the, I start with the agent and work backwards, knowing that that's really the way you start with the customer and work backwards. It's sort of a strange statement. But if the agent is engaged and happy, then the customer outcomes are going to be much better. So that's, that's really where we start. And we actually, when we were testing some of our tools, we actually used our Amazon agents that, that we, that are helping all the customers@Amazon.com and we gave them some new tools that we designed to make their lives easier. And we actually looked at their pulses while they were using the tools and we saw actually a reduction in pulse, which we interpret as a reduction in stress. And it was a great indication. We thought that the agents were having a great experience and they were really excited to be able to take part in something fun like understanding how their tools help them. So these are the types of things I think as good leaders we need to be doing every day. If I think about how we want to make sure that we're making a better world with AI. I think that the other aspect of this is to remember that when we're building out these capabilities, at the end of the day, your customer experience and your engagement with your customers is going to be one of the key differentiators of what people think about your company and your brand. If you're not delivering a great experience there, you're making a huge mistake. And the aspect of that that I think is really interesting here is you really want to have a human connection there. And this may be the only opportunity, especially in today when people are spending less and less time, you know, driving to the store, doing other things with you and interacting with your business potentially, or maybe your business is always online. These are the few times you have to actually engage with people and have an emotional experience. And so from my standpoint, I think naturally if you're thinking about this the right way, you're going to bring more and more experiences that are human to human into the mix. But you're going to do it at the right time and you're going to use AI to make that a better experience and not a worse one and make it better for both the customer and for the agent. And that I think is the win win here. And I do, I see the most thoughtful and forward thinking companies and the ones who are often the most aggressive technology wise, also being the most aggressive and thinking about the human aspect of what makes their customer engagement so personal. And so I do see it's happening already, which I'm very excited about.
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Unknown Co-Host
Yeah. And to build on that, how can those businesses that want to enhance and not erode the personal connection by using AI, you know, there is that danger there. You mentioned the old days of chatbots and you know, it reminds me of the phone tree like doom loop that you could get into or whatever. So certainly that may be something in people's minds, even if it's from years past. But you know, how should these businesses be thinking about this idea of enhancements of the customer experience?
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Pasquale Di Maio
The first step is you really want to get proactive and personal. And I think this is an area where a lot of marketers have in some ways been ahead of folks in the customer service space because they've been thinking about who the customer is that they're trying to target and engage with in the world of customer service and engagement more and more as we move from a melding of those two areas, certainly in my opinion what we've seen is that understanding your customer before, during and after the conversation is just an incredibly important part of this. So we're actually building technology and about and now offered in tech, in, in connect, the ability to proactively engage your customers. And that's seamless back and forth. So instead of the world of the marketing department saying, hey, I got to get this offer to this person for the object and the customer service Person saying, they're on the phone with me returning that thing, don't sell it, and they think you're an idiot.
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Unknown Co-Host
Right.
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Pasquale Di Maio
Instead of having that, now we have a world where both those folks are able to use the same tools to engage. And the thing that's really great about that is that it's not just engagement about saying, hey, I want to get this ad in front of you. Obviously, advertising is going to be, I think, a very important part of business for a long time to come. But if we think about also proactive engagement to say, this is something I think is likely to happen to this customer, I want to get in front of them before a bad thing happens. I want to help them solve a problem proactively before they even know it's a problem. And then when someone is engaging with you, be ready as soon as they make that contact to you to have a good understanding of why they're doing it. And so the example I always use is, you know, when you've ever missed a flight and you're at the airport and you're freaking out, you call up and it says, please hold. Or it says, hi, how can I help you? Your immediate answer is, operator, operator. And you're scared to death you're going to end up in that doom move you talked about. But instead it's, why not just say, I see you've missed your flight. Can I book you in the next one tonight? And with that answer, you've relieved so much stress for that customer. A, you're talking directly to a problem you know they're having, they know they're having. No one's confused you to understand. And there's immediate connection there that I says, this understands, understands me. So you're more likely to want to engage and solve the problem. 2. If it's not the right thing, it's incredibly easy to say no. And if the, if the challenge is the person wants to talk to a human being, you can obviously put them through. And if the problem that they do want to solve is more for human being, you can put them through. And you already know what the issue is. So by the time the human being is picking up the phone, the person should be authenticated. You should know who they are, you know what their problems are, you know why they're calling. And now you can actually provide that human being with that information immediately to solve the problem. They're not trying to guess. They're not, you know, you, you don't hear them in the background as a customer reading through some stuff or moving around, those experiences become magical. And again, if you've talked to someone on the phone, you've probably had same experience with your family. I'm sure you've had it with customer service people. If they're engaged with you, they sound a lot different than they sound when they're engaged in doing something else.
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Unknown Co-Host
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah. And you, you bring up another, another thing as well, which is, you know, well intentioned marketers trying to reach and sell the, sell the product or upsell or cross sell but not knowing to, you know, to use your example, that that same customer is literally on the phone complaining about the service they already bought. So, you know, and so one hand not knowing what the other is doing and yet both trying to be offering personalized customer experience. So connecting those dots there is, you know, is incredibly valuable and saves so much frustration.
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Pasquale Di Maio
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And there's another aspect of this that I think folks aren't thinking about yet, but will be thinking about a lot in one or two years. And we're going to help them and connect to it right now, which is. And sometimes some of these things take the human aspects of these. For us to learn and figure out how to use things takes time sometimes. And that's the journey we're all on together. I think right now is people figuring some of this out. And that's what I find really exciting. But when I think about one of the examples here is if someone calls in with, let's say, a problem about something and they're talking halfway through the conversation, they may say something very insightful or very interesting. The person on the other end of the line is focused on solving the problem, not the other aspect of this conversation. And you can miss some incredibly valuable stuff like, you know, in the bad side. It could be I was going to cancel the service anyways. It probably will next month. The agent's not going to stop and say, well let me try and retain the customer right now. They're still hopefully going to say let me solve the problem right now. But holy cow, did they just give you an interesting piece of information? The next one is maybe they say something like, oh yeah, I was thinking about buying this. I also thought about buying this other thing and all that typically falls on the floor today. And, and to be clear, they're not going to say that if they're in an automated experience that's clunky and something like that, they're going to say that to a human being because they're having this Human interaction. So you have this moment in time to have a real powerful interaction with your customer. They're probably going to tell you stuff. And especially if you're engaging with them as a human being, as the agent, they're going to start telling you stuff. You want to understand this stuff. You can actually use Connect to start pulling some of these things out and creating follow up actions, changing the way you're thinking about this customer. And so we can automate that so the agent doesn't have to stop and say, oh well, let me make a note, they were interested in this thing. Instead it just happens and then we can follow up with that afterwards. So you solve the problem, you have a more personal experience. The customer hopefully is now more loyal because they had a great experience and they feel like your company cares about them and you learn more about the customer than you ever could have. Like any other way. Well, this is a wonderful win win. So that's, that's why with Connect we're pushing so hard to say let's, let's engage AI in every conversation, but let's keep the human elements of those conversations where they belong. And AI can really help make those better and more valuable.
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Unknown Co-Host
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, It's, I mean, picking up on those little signals that, yeah, that would typically get missed. One thing I want to get back to, you had mentioned earlier on, you know, the importance of ethics and AI and that's certainly something I talk about a little bit here. You know, AI is only as good as the data that it's trained on. But that also introduces risks like bias, privacy concerns. How is the AWS approach to responsible AI adoption in cx?
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Pasquale Di Maio
Yes, absolutely. From the very beginning, we at AWS and Amazon Connect specifically have started with responsible AI as the foundational principle of what we're building. And as you noted, you know, it's really is about transparent fairness and privacy protection for the customer. And that has to be your top job. You have to monitor and think about that in everything you do. And we certainly do. One of our most recent releases around that has been guardrails in our queueing Connect and it's a great example of how we think about this. And the whole point of this is it allows a business to really think about how their AI behaves in their environment in ways that they can control it and prevent it from making errors or doing things it shouldn't do. And one of the interesting things it can do specifically is to filter harmful, inappropriate responses out and redact sensitive information. This really helps limit the Information that shouldn't go through to a customer. And also to avoid things like hallucinations. I think it's really important that both we and the customer start working back from that. Our business, you know, when we work with a business, start working back from, let's answer the right questions with AI. Let's make sure AI is used in the right ways and then also let's put the right tools in place to prevent it from making mistakes. And we're going to be doing this as part of our core value proposition for, I believe, for the rest of our lives. Honestly, I think as AI becomes more and more involved in everything we do as a company, aws, as a product, Amazon Connect, it's going to be core to, to, to my workday every day. And I think about things like privacy protection where, where our partners have and our customers have a responsibility to prevent things that shouldn't happen at a regulatory level while still delivering the benefits of AIs. And these guardrails are a key way to help do that. It's just incredibly important that we work on that together. I think this is a conversation that we need to have regularly and we need to continue to have. And that's why one of the reasons why I'm excited to be in this business is these interesting challenges. The opportunity to go do things in a way that is ethical is something that gets me really excited.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah.
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Unknown Co-Host
Want to talk a little bit about your thoughts on the future of AI and cx? What are you seeing? What's on your radar? What are some emerging AI powered trends that business leaders out there should be paying attention to?
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Pasquale Di Maio
The thing that I think is going to happen here that's going to be really interesting is there's going to be two places where, where we see incredible change. The first one is that as people use more and more tools like Amazon Connect, where AI is seamlessly part of the configuration, the use of the product is going to be incredibly easy. You're going to stop thinking about it as being AI and generative AI in two years. I don't think anyone will say generative AI anymore. It will just be AI again. Right. And the reason that is is because we're going to make it so seamless and easy to do. But then you really want to take it to bring it to bear to say, well, what are the problems I'm trying to solve? Or how do I work back from my end customer, deliver the great experiences? And the answer there is just so, so incredibly nuanced. But at the highest level it's use AI where it's helpful and maintain, and that may be to directly interact with the customer. It may be to predict what a customer needs and get ahead of that. It also is very much going to be how do I bring my human experiences, my interactions with my agents or with other people in my business into a space where they're being helped by AI? And that part of it is a part where I think we're starting to make some really great inroads with things like agent assisted. I have a customer orbits energy who's improved the performance of their agents by 10 or 15%. But more importantly, they're getting the right answers and being more focused on the customer. I see those things as being where the big change is going to be. This is a business where you're going to have to prove it and the data is going to show it's right. And so my customers are incredibly engaged on understanding and proving what they're doing is working and measuring it. We're going to see massive improvements as folks start to really get their hands around this this year. And Amazon Connect is going to help them do it because it's going to be so seamless and easy to implement. And once the people get good at it, just like any other tool, you're going to see this massive change and shift in experience for the end customer as well. It's so much better. So those are things I think we're going to see big changes in.
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Unknown Co-Host
Great, great. Well, thanks again for joining the show today. One last question before we wrap up here. I'd like to ask this to everybody.
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Greg Kilstrom
What do you do to stay agile.
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Unknown Co-Host
In your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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Pasquale Di Maio
So I have to say I think there's two things I do in my life that make my life really enjoyable and I think they also make me much better at my job. The first thing is I love to learn. And that means reading. It means. It means, you know, paying attention to what's happening. I could, you know, and that can be something that involves like, understanding how the newest AI models are being trained. It could be, you know, learning about, you know, animals. I love to watch animal shows and things like that, but I think you got to keep your brain moving all the time. And the other thing is surround yourself with great people. I've been incredibly blessed in my life to be surrounded by wonderful people, whether that be my wife, whether that be the people I work with and my friends and then do new things and fun things with them. They'll just keep doing the same things over and over again. So you're always changing that conversation. To me, those are things if you keep your mind moving, you're just going to learn so much more. Some of the best insights, I think come when you're not focused on trying to solve the problem at hand, but you give your brain a second to process and do something different. And the best way to do that is by having new stimulus. So that's what I think about when I think about how I get better.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, Love it. Well, again, I'd like to thank Pasquale.
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Unknown Co-Host
Di Maio, Vice President of Customer experience services at AWS. You can learn more about Pasquale and AWS's approach to AI and CX by.
- [24:30]
Greg Kilstrom
Following the links in the show Notes thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagilebrand.com that's the agile brand.com and contact me if you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.greg kilstrom.com that's G R E G K-I H L S T R O M.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
- [25:27]
Pasquale Di Maio
The Agile Brand.
- [25:32]
Unknown Host
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- [26:28]
Greg Kilstrom
Before we continue, I wanted to share a key strategic resource that a majority of the Fortune 500 are already aware of. Finding the best technology, business and talent solutions is not easy. With business demands and competitive pressures mounting, you need to be able to design, deploy and optimize your technology to provide leading customer experiences while driving business growth. Those of you that have been listening to this show for a while know that this podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, a global provider of technology, business and talent solutions for more than 80% of the Fortune 500. Tech Systems accelerates business transformation for their customers. Whether you're looking to maximize your technology ROI, drive business growth, or elevate customer experiences, TechSystems enables enterprises to capitalize on change. Learn more at techsystems.com that's teksystems.com now let's get back to the show.