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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#706: Building more connected digital experiences with Eric Stine, CEO of Sitecore
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- [00:01]
Commercial Narrator
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- [01:01]
Greg Kilstrom
Foreign. Welcome to Season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the 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. And now onto the show. If the web is no longer one size fits all and instead geared towards segments of one, how do brands avoid creating a thousand disconnected experiences and manage each experience effectively? Agility requires embracing both technology and customer behavior shifts at the same time without losing your brand voice. Today we're going to talk about how AI and more connected digital experiences are shaping the future of the web. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Eric Stein, CEO of sitecore. Eric, welcome to the show.
- [02:41]
Eric Stein
Hi Greg. Thank you so much for having me here today. I'm delighted to be with you.
- [02:45]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. And Congrats on your new role as sitecore CEO. That's, that's great news.
- [02:50]
Eric Stein
Thank you. Thank you very much. I feel really, I feel really humbled and honored to lead a company that I care a lot about and to be the steward of customers whose brands I feel a real sense of responsibility towards.
- [03:05]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, I love it. Well, so before we're going to get to a few things here today before we dive in though, why don't you give a little more background on yourself and kind of what led to your becoming CEO of sitecore. Sure.
- [03:18]
Eric Stein
So I have been broadly in the technology industry for just about half my life. Just about a quarter, quarter of a century at, at this point it's not how I started out. I was trained as an attorney. I worked in Washington D.C. and then found myself after the end of an administration working in public policy and got recruited by a big technology firm called SAP.
- [03:44]
Greg Kilstrom
I've heard of them.
- [03:45]
Eric Stein
Yeah. And over the course of the last 25 years built a network in the industry which included working, working alongside our now chairman of the board when we were both executives at SAP together about 10 years ago. And he called me up about a year ago and asked me if I would be interested in joining the team here at sitecore. I have always had the opportunity to work with great brands. My very, very first job was for one of the greatest brands in the world, Procter and Gamble. I got all my training in, in customer account management from procter and gamble 30 years ago. I'm a big consumer brand geek and have had the good fortune of doing supply chain and other transformations for organizations like Nike and PepsiCo. And the opportunity presented by Sitecore was unique and it also came at a really, really good time. A year ago when I was recruited to sitecore by our chairman, I was also one of the producers on a Broadway musical called the Outsiders. And one of the things I worked on was our digital marketing and social media strategy which I personally credit to the reason that we won last year's Tony award for best musical. And so I also come to this role as someone who knows the power, the potential and the possibility of using digital content to tell a great story in a digital channel and having that drive, engagement, commercial activity and the connection that you can build with an audience.
- [05:41]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, I love it. Well, and congrats on the Tony as well. I bet that's a relatively rare combo of Martech exec slash Tony award winning producer. So yeah, congrats on that honor as well.
- [05:53]
Eric Stein
To your point of a segment of One. It may only be a segment of one, but I think that's the beautiful thing about digital storytelling is it gives you the power to shape your brand value proposition to every audience member you want to reach and allow them to experience it in the way that they're ready to receive it.
- [06:17]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. Love it. So in addition to the announcement of you as CEO of sitecore, there's also been some other announcements from the company. One of those is sitecore AI, and it describes the future of digital as agentic, certainly something that we talk about quite a bit on the show, with real time personalization, intelligent automation taking center stage. From your perspective, what does all this mean for how a brand should think of their web presence when every user wants to create their own version of a. Of a brand experience?
- [06:52]
Eric Stein
So I think it starts at an even higher level. And brand marketers would say this far better than I would, but it starts by defining what is your brand strategy? Right. What is the brand promise that you are making to customers and prospects? We at sitecore have a vision of digital experiences so powerful they connect the world. Experiences that are effortless and impactful, experiences that are personal and predictive. And we believe AI is fundamental to delivering on that promise. Our mission is to simplify how marketers reach, engage, convert and serve their audience. Audiences that have become, to your point, fractured, fragmented, disrupted, distracted. AI has taken a lot of power away from the marketer. And we are committed to the power of AI put back in the hands of the marketer, giving that power back to them. We do that by delivering the best agentic experience platform in the industry. A born in the cloud AI native solution that was built to unlock the promise of personalization at scale. So that once you know your brand promise, your brand value proposition, your brand strategy in the digital channel, wherever your audience member is, whatever channel they are on, your story can break through. And that, to me, is a really powerful value proposition.
- [08:30]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah.
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Eric Stein
For us to be able to offer our clients.
- [08:33]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. I mean, it sounds like this is more, you know, I think we're so used to thinking in terms of products and sometimes narrowly defined products. This sounds more like an operating system than, you know, just a single Martech platform or something like that. Because, you know, it does have that agentic reach. It has the omnichannel, all, all of that kinds of thing. What kind of mindset for those marketers that are used to thinking of, okay, I use this tool for this thing, and what kind of mindset shift does that require? To think of this as almost like A hub, so to speak, of things.
- [09:11]
Eric Stein
I forget what the psychological principle is, but you have to repeat it five times or something for it to become a habit. Right. I think there's a certain amount of discipline and we have certainly seen that within our own organization. Right. One of our guiding principles is to make AI our operating model. And that means a fundamental change. We issued a copilot license to every employee in the company as an executive leadership team. Before we lock down on a document, we run it through our platform and the LLMs. We've trained with our brand voice and our brand message. Because anything that we use from a marketing and communications perspective before we ever deliver it to a customer, we want to use it ourselves. We are completely imperfect. I'd be happy to share with you the trials and tribulations of how we replatformed our own site on sitecore XM Cloud. I'd be happy to share with anybody out there listening the challenges that we have experienced around ethical AI, AI governance, the hard decisions and the level of discipline that it's taken to get to this point. But I also believe, and I've seen firsthand, that on the other side of it, when you integrate artificial intelligence into your operating model, you have the ability to unlock the unlimited potential of your brand story. And we created sitecore AI to share that experience, to provide a place for exploration so that organizations that are interested in how do I use context aware content, content that has been made brand aware, channel aware, Persona aware by AI, how do I then channel that into the next generation of abm, what we call agent based modeling, to do dynamic segmentation or targeting by orchestrating agents not just across your digital platform from sitecore, but across six Sense or Salesforce, so that based on intent, data win rate, you can consistently update your segmentation and ICP and target your most likely buyer. How do we deliver adaptive multichannel content so that anybody with a consumer product they want the world to see like the outsiders, you can adapt to a social media universe that is ever changing, a search universe that lives in the TikTok algorithm and ChatGPT and no longer in SEM that you are search ready for the Gemini summary and you are encapsulated in a zero click world. We believe that we have the power to deliver that to our customer and to our prospects.
- [12:13]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, I mean, it sounds like, you know, adaptability is kind of the name of the game. Not only, I mean hearing, you know, you describe the process internally. There needs to be experimentation. I mean, I think there has to be experimentation in order to get to good results. Otherwise, you know, you have to iterate and learn. But also you need that adaptability on the customer end as well, just because, again, they're going to hop from device to device, they're going to be coming in from channel to channel. So, I mean, it seems like adaptability, again, is kind of the name of the game as well as composability. Right. Can you talk a little bit about how does this work in a world where there's whatever model you use, there's some element of composability needed these days?
- [13:01]
Eric Stein
Look, I honestly think, Greg, it really comes back to, are you doing everything possible to tell the story you want to tell in all the channels where all your audience members are going to show up? Have you continued to optimize for search? Are you personalized at a cohort level, at an individual level? Do you understand what your data is telling you? Are you capturing the information that matters? I would argue that the digital channel has always required adaptability and composability. We're just living in a moment now where the immediacy and the urgency of it is underscored because the tools we're using to do what we've always done have changed and the results that we have been getting have eroded. And so we need to learn new skills, skills that will, will work today. When I was 17 years old, Greg, I was 265 pounds, 265 pound teenager. My senior year in high school, I lost 80 pounds. And I remember I started in August, August 20th. Don't ask me why. I remember this. August 20th, 1993. And March was indeed the cruelest month. My weight plateaued week over week. No matter what I did, I wasn't losing any more weight, but I was doing everything that had gotten me to that point and I needed to change it. And sometimes when you invest so much in systems and tooling and processes and they're only getting you to a certain point, the urgency and the immediacy of that change is forced upon you. I have been fortunate that I get to work with some of the greatest brands in the world. Companies like Hexagon ab, the measurements company that just launched their new brand on our platform, which on June 15, in advance of their conference, Hexagon Live, a series of new sites for the big industrial manufacturer, the energy company Regal Rexnor that builds the engines and motors for H Vac systems. We're about to have a financial and risk advisory firm go live on the platform come Monday. And in every case, what I am seeing are marketing and technology leaders meeting the urgency and the immediacy of the moment fearlessly, with strategy, with discipline and with embrace of the fact that telling your story has always been an exercise in adaptability.
- [15:38]
Greg Kilstrom
And so, you know, to the point of immediacy. You know, another thing mentioned in the announcement is that, you know, campaigns can go from concept to launch in minutes. And you know, that sounds amazing and I, but you know, how do brands still, you know, for those listening out there that are like, yeah, that, that's great, I, I love that. But what about the, you know, whether it's maintaining strategic focus, maintaining brand identity, all of those things, like how is a marketer reassured in that, in that process that their, their, their message is still getting there in the right way.
- [16:15]
Eric Stein
You should come see it because we can prove it. In July in Orlando, we will share with our company and then on November 3rd again in Orlando, we will share with the world how we have taken what we built in brand aware AI, the ability to create smart briefs and brand aware campaigns, what we are doing in terms of personalization and building the next generation of ABM and, and adaptive multichannel optimization of content for the B2C marketer. We're going to show you how all of that comes together and how the future of context aware content is this. We will show you how from a single prompt you can design, launch, execute and measure a campaign. With a single prompt, marketers will be able to define the campaign contours, build the target market, create the assets, launch and deliver the campaign, and then start measuring and optimizing the results. I saw it for myself yesterday. It is truly amazing. The power of the technology is going to change what the marketer does and more than anything else, put them back in a business that is 500 years old because it's the art form that I get to spend a tiny sliver of my life in and that's storytelling, marketing. As we said on sitecore, AI marketing has always been about moments, creating great moments, moments that matter.
- [17:47]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, love it. And yeah, I plan to be there in November, so looking forward to getting my hands on some of this as well. So to me, what I love about this is that there's so much that goes into a campaign and yet there's nothing. There's a lot of pieces that humans are doing right now, but they don't really have to do. Right. But so to me, what I like about this is that it elevates the role of the marketing in my mind to, you know, there's I look at it as, there's kind of like the bookends of, you know, there's planning and the strategy behind, you know, what goes into that prompt that you describe. Right. And then what do we do with the results? And you know, AI and, and things can definitely help us with the results. But if humans are kind of at the, at the bookends of that process, like then, because we need to create these campaigns for segments of one, one person or one team, even, even at the largest companies in the world, like one team can't possibly create all of those things. How should marketers be looking at that shift in roles? Because it does kind of, it does shift what they're doing and how they're thinking. Maybe. How should CMOs be guiding their teams to, you know, be thinking, thinking a little bit differently about what they can do?
- [19:08]
Eric Stein
I think it's such a great question, Greg. You know, over the course of my career I have watched functional leaders and functional experts, from finance to supply chain to sales to marketing, also become technologists. And I think that the lesson here, what I have seen work time and time again, is the power of collaboration and the power of networking. We, and part of the reason we launched sitecore AI was to create community. We have been fortunate. We've got hundreds of members in our MVP community. Their Slack channel lights up 24 hours a day. But the degree to which the brands running on sitecore openly share information with each other, obviously not about brand strategy, that's confidential, but about how they're telling their story in market, how they're using tools in new ways. And our partner network, which now has more than 500 partner organizations out there actively building on the extensible cloud platform that we've created with XM Cloud, the expandability and extensibility of what we have done on our SaaS platform with XM Cloud and our AI fabric is enabling a partner community to co innovate with us, to co innovate with customers and to allow them to take ownership of how they tell the story they want to tell and the speed with which they're able to do so.
- [20:39]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. So you had mentioned, you know, a lot of the, the hyper personalization and you know, it requires not only good data, but it requires a fair amount of information about an individual to do that. So you had mentioned a little bit about the ethical and the data privacy things as well. I wanted to kind of come to that as well is how should brands be thinking about, you know, when using a platform like this, you know, how do they balance those things of, you know, we want that segment of one, but you know, we also want to respect privacy and everything like that.
- [21:14]
Eric Stein
First of all, you should always start internally with what are your own policies and procedures and what is your own comfort level with the types of projects you take on? Because risk is always an internal assessment first and foremost. The things that I have seen that have impressed me and I'm fortunate enough to be able to have voices that I listen to like James McCormick at IDC, like Joe Sisman and Chuck Gahoon at Forrester, certainly the team at Gartner. I've been advised by a series of folks at Bain and at bcg. And the consistency I see across is a simple two box which is what are those things that are low value, low risk, what are those things that low value, high risk, what are those things that are high value, low risk and what are those things that are high value, high risk? Organization should always focus first on the stuff that is table stakes, where is the risk low and the payoff moderate to high. That it's easy to do and you need to do it because everybody else is doing or is going to do it if they haven't already. And then as you move into the things that are higher complexity, effort and value, how high is the risk associated with them? And are you dealing with copyrighted content, protected intellectual IP customer data? You really need to have a rubric or a framework that as you get into govern data and protected content, what are you doing to put in place the safeguards necessary to know that you are not breaching ethical and legal boundaries? We at sitecore have set up and we encourage our customers to set up. We have a series of ethical AI policies in the governance council. I believe every organization should have policies and procedures that help them set their own risk framework of how they think about the risk, effort, complexity and value associated with any usage of any technology.
- [23:18]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, love it. So getting back to the management and kind of the creation of the digital experience as we kind of wrap up here, I mean we are talking about this segment of one and this, this idea of hyper personalization, it is a bit of a paradigm shift from those that are used to managing those, even if they were a little bit dynamic, I mean relatively static digital experiences. And so I know you've touched on, on this in a couple ways but you know, for those, for those brands that are kind of used to that, that old way of doing things and really entering into this idea where you know, it's everyone is going to See something slightly different. How does a team start to like, what are some of the things that teams need to do to kind of get out of their old ways of thinking and really not only understand it, but embrace the full opportunities? Because there's, there's a ton of opportunity here.
- [24:15]
Eric Stein
I think that they need to experiment with it. I think they need to start integrating it into their, their daily flow of work and I think they need to test the boundaries of what's possible for them. We have created a space that we call the AI Innovation Lab. It's part of our partnership with Microsoft. We announced that about two months ago at this point, and we partner with clients who are looking for ways to experiment with AI and marketing and integrate it into the flow of work. There's so much about AI that we just accept as happening every day. Whether it is Outlook, auto populating a name in an email you're about to send, or the degree to which we've just retrained our brains to consume. The Gemini summary. And so I really encourage marketers to find those moments that they can integrate into how they are doing business today. We have set up a space where we are happy to explore and co innovate those ideas with them.
- [25:20]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. And you know, two more things for you before, before we wrap up here. Just wanted to talk a little bit. You know, obviously there's a lot of, a lot of platforms out there making a lot of announcements about, about AI. I think you've shared some really, some really interesting things about, you know, not only the speed but also the, the breadth of what's able to be done. How do you see sitecore's vision of AI as, as different than, than other organizations.
- [25:46]
Eric Stein
It's real. You can get it today. We're not selling anybody a roadmap. We're not selling anybody a vision. Whether it is having a true SaaS platform with hundreds of customers on it, as opposed to just a handful, or a true AI platform that we can deliver tomorrow and have some of the largest customers in the world, like Nestle actually using. I forget what that in God we trust, all others pay cash. Yeah, yeah, that's the saying.
- [26:17]
Greg Kilstrom
Got it. Nice. Well, Eric, thanks so much for joining today. One last question for you. I like to ask everybody here, what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
- [26:29]
Eric Stein
I run about 30 miles a week. I run anywhere from four to six days a week. I make sure that it is pretty much the first thing I've done when I get up in the morning. I have seen the world from the canals of Amsterdam to the seawall in Vancouver to the wildlife Reserve park in Sydney on my feet. I think it is the I think it is the best way to see the world. And it ensures that every single day I will get a different perspective because there's no such thing as doing the same run twice.
- [27:09]
Greg Kilstrom
Love it. Love it. Well again, I'd like to thank Eric Stein, CEO of sitecore for joining the show. You can learn more about Eric and sitecore by 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 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.gregkilstrom.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.
- [28:13]
Commercial Narrator
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