← The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#733: Agentic AI delivering business value with Rupali Jain and Kevin Li, Optimizely
00:30:22
Loading summary
Transcript46 lines
- [00:00]
A
If you love podcasts, and obviously you do, you need to check out Castro. It's a podcast player designed for people who subscribe to a lot of shows but don't have time to listen to everything.
- [00:10]
B
Castro helps you cut through the noise.
- [00:12]
A
Manage your shows, and simply enjoy listening. It's the podcast player built for podcast enthusiasts. So download Castro and start listening today. That's Castro. C A S T R O Enjoy.
- [00:25]
C
Listening the Agile Brand Foreign.
- [00:36]
A
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. But 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.
- [01:33]
B
Marketers roles are changing, but their goals are still the same. Reach and engage customers, meeting them where they are and for better or worse, often needing to do more with less while delivering greater value. Agility requires both adapting to change quickly while also having the wisdom to know which changes truly matter. It demands a delicate balance between embracing new technologies and staying laser focused on core business objectives. Today we are here in New York City at Opticon 25. We are here to talk about the growing role of AI for both marketers and consumers, and how marketers can do more with less while delivering exponentially greater value. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Rupali Jain, Chief Product Officer, and Kevin Lee, SVP Product at Optimizely. Rupali and Kevin, welcome back to the show.
- [02:22]
C
Thanks for having us. Greg, Good to be back. Good to talk to you.
- [02:25]
B
Yeah, I think you're both at least on episode two here at the show. So glad to be talking with both of you have the brain trust in the room here, so love that. So let's get started with just There are plenty of announcements this morning here at Opticon, so let's start with some of the big news here. One of those was around agentic AI, which is lots to talk about that increasingly showing promise in a number of of areas of marketing. So why don't we start by talking about some of the out of the box agents that optimizely announced.
- [02:58]
C
Yeah, so what we really announced was the agent orchestration platform for marketing and that has two lenses to it. So it has the out of the box agents that you're referring to. And there's also a platform component which is super, super important as part of this announce. So on the out of box agents that we talked about for cms, we announced what we are doing with the creation of a page and the creation of a site. And not just the facade of one that you can get from any of these prototyping solutions that exist, but a fully formed enterprise ready website which includes your content model, it includes all of the components that you create, all of that's available and then it's optimized 4G or through another agent and then you can get the analytics on it. So that was the big announce in the CMS out of the box. On the experimentation out of the box we have five agents that basically automate your program end to end and take the cost down to setting experiment pretty much down to zero and really allow users to focus on velocity and outcomes. And so we have agents all the way from ideation to setup to what I call the don't run dumb experiments. We probably have a more formal answer for what that thing is called and also create it live without developers and then summarize. And so basically the entire life cycle and the platform's where it gets really interesting because what we want is a true ecosystem in the market where marketers have all of the tools and the capabilities they need in one place. So we announced an agent directory where you can find all of the agents that exist. We have out of the box agents. Customers can build their own agents, don't need to write any code. We also have the ability to sequence these agents and tools as workflows and an open ecosystem for workflows so you can take action. Like to me, as a product leader, so important to take action because that's where the magic is. It's not just the hey, I chatted, I know what to do. It's the now let's please get it done. That's 80% of the work.
- [04:53]
B
Yeah. And I mean seeing it in action from the stuff on stage, it was, I think a lot of people are used to, they go to ChatGPT or Claude or something like that. Copy paste back and forth. And it's like, yes, it's very cool to be able to do that, but it's also disruptive and inconsistent and all those things. So to be able to see it in action and somebody literally chatting with their webpage to, hey, do this different or make this thing. That's a pretty, pretty cool development that it's all there.
- [05:24]
C
And that's the point. You want it all there in the moment. Because to your point, I've gotten distracted every time I go to ChatGPT, I'm like, wait, what was I doing?
- [05:31]
B
Right, right, right. So, Rupali, you mentioned a bit about building that underlying platform. Kevin, maybe talk a little bit more about what that means and what that means for both partners as well as customers.
- [05:46]
D
Yeah, for us, the platform is super important. I mean, if we were to think back maybe a year or two, when everyone in this is purely building sort of embedded AI sort of AI features, I think a lot of our competitors are still sort of going down that path. To us, it was a deliberate strategic decision to build Opal as a platform in and of itself. And this is important because, like, at the end of the day, I think there's a couple of sort of context elements driving this. So at customers, for example, they can't start from a blank slate, so they need AI to plug in into their existing systems. So without having a platform to do that, without having the tools and the openness of the overall platform, that's going to be really hard and that's going to fundamentally hinder AI adoption. The second thing is really there's so much like, at the end of the day, yes, we're a cms, yes, we have experimentation, yes, we have cdp, yes, we can do collaboration, et cetera. But no customer runs their entire stack on optimizely. So they need, you know, they might have analytics on Google Analytics, they all have Salesforce. Like, it's different categories altogether. So without a platform, it's also very hard to do agentic orchestration across entire workflows. So that's the thinking sort of behind that. Like, could it have been faster, cheaper, easier for us just to do CMS specific use cases? 100%. I think we're probably like, we could have taken the easy way out this. We just said like, hey, you get this thing in cms, you get this thing experimentation, we high five each other and call it a day. But that's not what customers actually want. They want to orchestrate things to say, how do I grab a thing from GA4 how do I look at a thing from Salesforce? How do I take those things and actually then build a much better experience? Like, you can only do that with a platform. So for us, that's a key, key, key strategic decision and I think it'll pay off dividends. We have partners who are very excited about the openness of this. That was the number one question that we got is this. I want to bring my own agents how to do that. You can do that with platform. Like, oh, I want to bring in extra. I want to connect Optimizely to Zendesk. Things that we don't sort of think about. How do you do that? It's like, oh, you can do that within the platform. The flexibility and the openness of it is what's driving it. And we're getting very good feedback from customers and partners about this.
- [07:57]
C
I mean, the mic tech landscape isn't shrinking anytime soon. Right. So our customers have a bunch of tools and so to Kevin's point, and the ecosystem is the only path forward.
- [08:07]
B
Yeah, well, and the flexibility plus the speed too. Right. It's, you know, because, I mean, I've been involved in API connections and all the, you know, all those things that can take weeks, months, all those things to do. And now we're talking about a platform that pretty, pretty quick, right, to be able to do some of this stuff, right? Yeah.
- [08:28]
A
Want to learn more and join the discussion About Marketing and AI? Attend a premier conference dedicated to marketing and AI. That's Meacon, the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Conference. From October 14 through 16 in Cleveland, Ohio. Meakon brings together the brightest minds and leading voices in AI. Don't miss this opportunity to connect with a dynamic community of experts, visionaries and enthusiasts. The Agile brand is proud to be the lead media sponsor of this important event. Register today@MarketingAIInstitute.com that's MarketingAI Institute.com and use the code AGILE150 for $150 off your registration fee. I can't wait to see you there.
- [09:21]
B
So let's talk about this from the marketers, the marketer's role, you know, how does all of this, I mean, very cool stuff to be able to integrate and do things a lot more quickly. How does this change the role of marketing over the coming months and years? And you know, even based on how, you know, I know Optimizely uses your own tools to do the, to do this stuff, so you've got some firsthand knowledge as well. So, you know, what does this look like for marketers in the months to come.
- [09:50]
D
Yeah, I want to piggyback off of the point you just made Greg, which is the one around sort of like integrations. And to reply's point like we're not. Marketers aren't going to be dealing with one or two tools in the foreseeable future. Right. They all have dozens, hundreds or whatever they're dealing with. So this integration piece of it is actually a really important point which is like marketers can now actually use Opal as a very powerful integration layer to get workflow done, but not actually be dependent on development resources to do that. So we're sort of seeing this. You know, LLMs are great for chatting and whatnot. Everyone's like, yeah, obviously using it for that. But like the shift from fine grained API spec'd out integrations to stand up marketing workflow use cases, we're now moving to just like, can you just talk, like type out what your intent is and the workflow actually gets done. So I think the biggest thing is marketers shifting their thinking for how work gets done is probably the most important point. And I think we're still in the early stages where a lot of folks in the market still don't quite understand that that's the big unlock here of how do we get use cases done without getting bogged down. And I think we were talking about this yesterday, like everyone, everyone's seen the 78 page API spec doc to do one use case that takes three months to do, right? Like how do we get out of that type of a hamster wheel and actually get more done? I think that's kind of the key thing. So the marketers are sort of changing from a execution spec writing type of a role to just like, if you can describe your intent of what you're doing, just let the software do it for you. Right? So that's where we want to meet the marketers.
- [11:33]
C
I think to pick up on that last point about intent, to me it's a very marked shift from marketers need to think about the strategy and the outcomes that they're trying to drive for the business. At the end of the day, right. I use the term that agents AI is giving you the ability to move fast. What is the ability to move fast? It's really agility. And then if you move fast and everyone's moving fast but you're going in different directions, that is pure and utter chaos. Now what that translates into in organizations and for marketers, especially in our worldview, is that marketers need to get really clear on what their strategy is and really align execution. Because now you can trust the execution. It's no longer a crutch of the. I'm focused on execution so I no longer need to know the strategy because execution will happen if you don't have a strategy, the execution will not deliver the things you want. And so to me it's so, so important to define the key goals that you're trying to achieve and validate those as a hypotheses. Bring testing early into the game and really align. And this is not just an agent piece, this is aligning people and agents. Like that part's going to come into play. But the strategic focus is non negotiable. Like AI can't do that for you. AI is not creative. AI is not going to think for you like yes it can reason, it can help you be that sounding board. You got to keep control of the car.
- [12:55]
B
Yeah, I mean I agree there. I think a lot of the focus is on efficiency and for good reason because I mean man, it can do things very quickly and very well, very quickly. But to your point about strategy, I mean what would your advice be to keep that in mind? Because I think it's a really important point and the moving quickly, whether it's parallel or disparate paths, it could be chaos. So how do you kind of keep that strategy in mind?
- [13:28]
D
Yeah, I think one thing to keep in mind about AI systems in general is still it's just like any technology, I think garbage in, garbage out, still is the case. So context is still super, super important. That's one thing we spend a lot of time thinking about in terms of organization wide, enterprise wide context. One thing, how do we do retrieval augmented generation in the right way for enterprises? How do we think about use case specific context? You know, I sort of have the example if you're familiar with sort of the Wendy's social media account. That's a different context that we're putting in there. Right. Than the overall Wendy's global brand. And then how do we think about also like user specific context as well. So like that's the big thing of if, if we get the context right, the output becomes better and if the output becomes better it's no longer just sort of this efficiency thing or sort of moving faster in the wrong direction side of it. I think there's another piece of this which is with AI and I've been using sort of maybe the iceberg metaphor that like marketers, they only have time to optimize the visible stuff in an iceberg and so much of the things that's actually valuable but not getting done today is below the waterline. Right? Like, they don't get to it because they don't have time, not because it's not valuable. Should you be updating your pages every single week or every single month to remain fresh and rank well for aeo, GEO and SEO, et cetera? You should absolutely do that. Should you do competitive research for every single brief to increase the quality of your campaigns? You should absolutely do that. But no one's thought about it before. They're like, yeah, I should, but I would never have the resources and budget to do that. I think that's the other piece, which is how is it not just about efficiency of existing things that you can see today, so the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, but also really get at how do you fundamentally change the way that you operate as marketing and doing the things that you literally, honestly is like, well, I didn't think that was possible. How do I actually start getting that done?
- [15:22]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And some of that may also play into just how consumers, I mean, consumers are always changing. We could say that at any point in time, but consumers are using AI as well. And that's also affecting how marketers are approaching anything from, you know, SEO. You know, was dominating the way that a lot of website owners really thought about their websites. And now, you know, we've got lots of names for it, but we've got geo that is, you know, people are finding content, interacting with content, even in very different ways, through perplexity, chatgpt and so on and so forth. How should marketers be looking at this? And so what's Optimizely's approach to geo?
- [16:09]
C
I think before I get into Optimizely's approach to geo, you were starting to get at, like, you know, how should marketers think about it? I think it's a little bit of, like, go down to the fundamentals, because what you're trying to do as a marketer is you are creating brand differentiation and content is driving a lot of the behaviors. And these engines, whether they, you call them answer engines, geo, SEO, perplexity, what have you. Like, all of us are using them, so we know exactly what it feels like. This is not a, hey, something's happening to us far off in the distance. Like, we know this up close and personal, and so get familiar with what's happening. Right. At the end of the day, if you get down to the fundamentals, it comes down to, like, your content is still at the heart of everything you're trying to achieve. And so creating that content, differentiating that content, super important. Now, what it means is that you now have a new audience because remember, users are now going to these AI engines or to AI to basically answer the questions. And so you're losing that user directly and you have a machine in the middle and you also have users coming to your website. So you have that dichotomy of machines and users and you're optimizing for both if you squint hard enough. That looks like cohorts to me, just slightly different behaviors. But I think, you know, jokes aside and all of that aside, machines can read structured data. So you're starting to get into a worldview where your content starts to look like structured data so you can feed it into the machine. And so the machine can do a good job in answering the question for you and representing you well. And you need to treat this as an opportunity because as I talk to some customers that have done a really good job of structuring their data in the past, they did it for search engines, but they're showing up with these answer engines really well and they're seeing really good bottom of the funnel conversions. And so the people that are coming to your website are coming with good intent. You know that they're coming with intent and, and so you can convert them. And so it's a shift in how you think, but again, the foundations don't go away. It's not a. Let's toss everything we know and let's start from scratch. Right. The customers that are doing well with GEO are the ones that are starting with what they have as strength in SEO and building upon that with whether it's Q and A style answers. How do you educate the machine? At Optimizely, we're just building all of this seamlessly into the cms. You create a webpage, we structure the content for you, we understand exactly what it looks like so we can read it to the machines. We can also create the Q&As for you. We create the machine readable text files that tell the machine how to translate and how to read the pages. And plus we give you analytics on the visibility or will shortly. And so that's the end to end for what's happening. I think fundamentals matter and bottom of the funnel really comes into play.
- [18:55]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it sounds like it's always going to come down to good content is, is going to drive that, that good experience like details are, are going to evolve over time or Whatever. But good content is still good.
- [19:10]
D
Yeah. And I think just to add to that, I think we're still, it's also important to keep in mind we're still in the super early stages of AOGO to the point where no one can agree on what this thing is actually called.
- [19:21]
B
Right, right, exactly right. So we're in the acronym kind of.
- [19:24]
D
Let's just keep that in mind. If you were just tossing as an answer, engineer answer is aog aio.
- [19:29]
B
Like.
- [19:29]
D
Right. So, so key thing to keep in mind, it sort of reminds me of like, you know, back, back in the early days of like SEO, people were like putting white links on white backgrounds to try to like stack their rankings on, on Google search back in the day. I think we're still in that like and, and fundamentally the thing that really companies are, are, are looking at, it's like, you know, we're making moves to, to help customers really understand what that is and we'll keep on innovating on features, but we're still like as an industry, we're still very early in this. You know, fundamentally what do the LLM vendors decide to do? Is one of those things like are we going to have the equivalent of search console data for LLMs? Maybe, maybe not. It's one of those things where I think the market itself and the players are rapidly shifting and obviously we're keeping pace and really leading in terms of how brands should really think about it. But it's important to just keep in mind that this is, you know, baseball analogy wise. Like we're the bottom of the first inning, right? People just got to their seats and they're still on their, like they just opened up the bag of peanuts. Right. Like that's where we are right now. So.
- [20:40]
B
Yeah, well, and to that point too, you know, I feel like the, you know, a year from now we're probably going to be, you know, lots will have changed, as it always does. But you know, mainstream usage of AI by consumers again, they're using ChatGPT and stuff like that. But you know, we have had announcements from you know, like PayPal and MasterCard and you know, to have consumer buying agents and things like that. So you know, how do you like should marketer. How, how close attention should marketers be paying to this? And how does having like an agentic platform set a marketer up for these changes to come?
- [21:17]
D
Yeah, so, so I think that almost back to Rapali's point, like it goes back to first principles, like at the end of the day, you know, it's Always been about buying and selling. It's, it's the basics of trade. Right. So you could have a buying agent on behalf of a consumer. Then what is that on the other side in terms of brand? It's a, it's a brand selling agent which is really just like, well that's a website. Yeah, that, that's right. Like a website is today a, a one too many. And then we do personalization, we do a one to a few, etc. Etc. So like the next evolution of this is just, it's still a brand selling agent. But I think the details is then how is this going to play out sort of technologically. So for example, is there a Future where maybe ChatGPT opens up an ability for brands to list their own brand agents inside of ChatGPT, in which case great, like optimize. We would love to be in that position to help our customers get surfaced and found and so on and so forth. So yes, consumer agents, but at the same time, like it's still about buying and selling, supply and demand. Like for everyone on the other, like for everyone on one side, you're going to have the corresponding thing on the other side and then, you know, the middle is where the magic happens. Right. You have a good or a service that someone needs, someone else needs to articulate what that need is and their intent is and let's see how the transaction actually happens. So it's a super exciting time I think, for how information flows, for how, you know, people's needs are discovered, how transactions actually happen. But like the fundamentals don't change. This is still all about, you know, some people having specific needs and then a provider meeting that needs in some way, shape or form.
- [22:56]
B
Yeah, I think that abstracts things in terms of like building that platform that, you know, we've talked about, the agentic part of that. You know, how do you see optimizely as, you know, your position in the market? I mean, you know, I think I've stopped paying attention to the like Chief Martech graphic with the 18,000. I think we're up to 15 plus thousand or whatever.
- [23:18]
C
But they stopped counting?
- [23:20]
B
Yeah, I think so. They had to, they like fell off the edge of the page or whatever. But you know, given all of this, given you know, challengers that coming from different areas as well, you know, what's optimizedly is really role and position in this space.
- [23:34]
C
I think it goes back to sort of like at the end of the day we're in it for the user and we're in it to help businesses live outcomes. Content is at the heart of a lot of what marketing does and that's not changing any anytime soon. So for us, with what we are doing with AI and really leading the charge, setting the bar for what good looks like and creating this platform for the ecosystem is super, super important. Right? As we think about the agent orchestration platform, that is how we stay in the market and really enable our customers to achieve end to end. And I think, look, we're the leaders on the DXP side, we're the leaders on optimization. People look to us to set the bar and rightly so, we're doing that. So to me it's about maintaining and taking our customers with us. Like at the end of the day, like you talk about startups starting out of the woodwork and you know there's a new one every night or more than that. The biggest advantage we have to that party is our customer base. The thousands of customers we have, the thousands of conversations we can have with them, understand the real problems because the problem set has not changed how we solve them. Completely different. And so I think Paul Cuzno today said fall in love with the problem and that really rings true. And so for us, that's how we're doing it. We're staying agile in terms of how we execute. We're setting the bar for what good looks like and we are enabling the ecosystem so the rising tide can raise all boats. Because at the end of the day, the customer is who needs to win.
- [25:01]
B
Yeah. Love it. Well, as we wrap up here, just a couple last things here. It's always great to get together at events like this and see lots of people that we don't always get to see. What's been a highlight so far for each of you?
- [25:18]
D
For me, it's actually just, just get telling of our customers on the capabilities of Opal, the changing of mindset for how to think about agents. You know, people hear about agents and AI all the time, but the being able to put, have it, have a stage this big, have all of our customers here, partners here to be able to share with them. It's like, hey, this is now what you can then do. And then see their eyes light up. That, that's, that's been the biggest highlight.
- [25:40]
C
My biggest highlight was we were in the cab yesterday and two separate sessions I was looking at customers are doing with AI and in one of them we did a Shark tank style and the other one was just walking around looking at what everyone had done and man, it's so amazing to see how far the bounds are getting pushed and the excitement on someone's face when they use AI and it takes them closer and closer to outcome. That was phenomenal because it's sort of like in the past you were limited by technology. Now the world's your oyster. Is just incredible to watch.
- [26:14]
B
Love it. Love it. Well, one last question for each of you. I'll start with you, Kevin. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
- [26:23]
D
It's really hard because the overall space is moving so fast. I think the key thing is about just getting hands on with it. So 5 coding is obviously sort of all the rage. I dig into it, I start doing that, I start building on opals, start building agents. That's the key thing. I think there's so many things that were still early that unless you do it yourself and feel that pain and kind of going through it, it's hard to think about the larger strategic implications of what's to happen. Unless you go to like, oh, memory didn't work here. That's not elegant. How do we solve memory for enterprises? That's not a thing that you just can read about or sit there and think about unless you're actually sort of in the weeds. So I think that's, that's the key thing.
- [27:07]
B
And Rupali, what's your advice to aspiring leaders to stay agile?
- [27:12]
C
I think my advice, Kevin gave a lot of suggestions for staying agile. I think for aspiring leaders in this world of AI, I'd actually say don't just focus on the bottom line. Yes, efficiency has been, you know, the word of the day we talk about. Workforce is getting replaced supplemented with AI. I think to me the biggest opportunity is actually on the top line because this AI is going to change the world GDP as we know it. And so how do you want to be a part of that? Growth is the thing that I would think about as a leader. And so yes, it's about agility, but it's also about the future and being ready for that and not just the world that you see today around you.
- [27:53]
B
Yeah, love it. Well, again, I'd like to thank Rupali Jain, Chief Product Officer and Kevin Lee, SVP Product at Optimizely, for joining the show. You can learn more about Rupali and Kevin and Optimizely by following the links.
- [28:04]
A
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 theagile brand.com and contact me. If you're interested in consulting or advisory services or 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.
- [29:01]
C
The Agile Brand.
- [29:06]
A
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. TechSystems accelerates business transformation for their customers. Whether you're looking to maximize your technology roi, drive business growth, or elevate customer experiences, Tech Systems enables enterprises to capitalize on change. Learn more@techsystems.com that's teksystems.com now let's get back to the show.