← Using AI at Work: AI in the Workplace & Generative AI for Business Leaders
Using AI at Work: AI in the Workplace & Generative AI for Business Leaders
61: Using AI for Seamless Workplace Booking with Khurram Sheikh
00:55:41
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- [00:00]
A
This podcast episode is sponsored by chiefaiofficer.com offering training and certification through the International association of Chief AI Officers. Interested in a new career or leveling up your value in the marketplace? Chiefaiofficer.com can help. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Daigle. Each week we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started. Hi everybody, and welcome back to another episode of Using AI at Work. Today we have a very interesting interview with Karam Sheikh. He is the CEO and founder of Sky CX AI. And I just got a demo of it and I haven't seen anything else like this out there. And there's huge application for it, certainly for the businesses, the larger businesses that have returned back to work and all that sort of thing. So crom, before we get started on talking about the AI journey, I guess share with the audience a little bit about kind of what led you to where you are today as the founder and CEO.
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B
Great. Nice to meet you, Chris, and thanks for having me on the podcast. Yeah, I'm Khoram Sheikh. I'm based here in Silicon Valley. I've been in the valley here, or I've been in the US for more than 30 years. And my journey is all about transformation. You know, right out of grad school at Stanford, I was hired as a summer intern at Sprint in 1996. And these were the times when the Internet was just coming up. And I worked on a project called Wireless Broadband. And at that time people said, well, you know, wireless and broadband don't go together. I mean, doesn't make sense, right? And, but I worked on that product and ultimately built the world's first 4G network as Sprint became the CTO for mobile broadband. And so that was my journey of transformation. And along the way I've been at large cap companies, I've been at startups, I've been at mid sized companies. And always the journey is about transformation. I was part of the mobile revolution, part of the Wi fi revolution, part of the, you know, cloud and software revolution. And now I believe it's the transformation with AI. And so my journey came from being a technologist, CEO, investor, had a SPAC that actually consummated with this company, CX app. And then we formed sky two years ago with the mission that the big transformation in the marketplace is hybrid work. You know, the pandemic changed the way people work. And for that we felt that there needed to be an application that will allow you to connect the dots between the employee, the employee and the experiences. And we talk about that transformation about people, places and things. So it's like a continuum of your life. And we felt like, you know, this is before the big AI push came out with generative AI. That AI was that transformational technology, but there was a real use case for employees. So that's the journey started two years ago. We, you know, so we are, we are a public company. We're on NASDAQ or ticker cxai. So everything I share with you is what's in the public domain. And the demo I showed you, we actually showed cased. We'll show it here as well. We showcased at our earnings call. But the mission we have is very simple, right? It's about employee experiences, right? There's no, there's no workspaces, there's no office buildings. If people don't go there, if people don't collaborate. And the challenge we've seen the market is, as you've heard, rto, the return to office is a big problem. Every CEO in the world is thinking about it, is worried about it, because outside of, you know, I mean, what is your biggest value as a company is the people, right? And naturally, initially it's about, well, office spaces are empty. People are only coming in two days a week or one day a week. Let's get them there five days a week. Let's put a mandate. Well, it's good to put a mandate, but you got to get the mind share, you got to get them engaged and collaborating. And the idea is not to just show up at the office and check in and have your coffee and badge out and go do whatever. It's about coming to the office and collaborating, engaging. So what sky does is we are a platform that allows you to engage as an employee with your workspaces. So you can book a room, book an office, you know, connect with your fellow employees. You can also order food, you can listen to a podcast. You can do all the things you could do at work. Or more importantly, you can do it from everywhere. It's a mobile app, so you can use it in the office and home anywhere else. It's an extension of your enterprise. It actually connects with the existing enterprise. So we in, we will, from the back end side, integration is with all the integrations of the employer, meaning it's their active directory, it's their exchange, if it's their SharePoint or if it's their door handles or if it's their sensors, everything gets integrated. Right. Just one application that connects all the workplaces. The magic that happens as well. It's very simple and easy, it's engaging, it's a UI that's very simple, very elegant. But more importantly, it's immersive. It gets you engaged, it gets, it gets your work done faster. So we've had this product for a while and then what we now building is the platform around it with AI. What means with AI is, it's the data. Because now think about, you're a company with, you know, one of our large clients has, you know, 50,000. Our clients are large multinational, the Visas, the Adobe's, the NBC, Warner Brothers, you know, large multinationals that have. So even with the small scale, we are deployed in 50 plus countries and 220 cities. So when Warner Brothers deploys LA, they also deploy Poland and Dubai and Singapore. And the use cases are different. You know, there are different kinds of employees and there are different things. I give you an interesting story about Singapore. So I went over there and visited the Warner Brothers site. It's a beautiful site. It's a, it's an office tower in Singapore, you know, very congested areas, you know.
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Yeah.
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B
And I had met the Warner Brothers team in la, which have a beautiful campus in Burbank. Sprawling, large, you know, lots of space. I walk into the building and the, literally the office manager and the real estate and IT people just said, we need to talk to you, we have a big problem. I said, what's the problem? Well, you know, we need your software to be even better than what it is. What's the issue? Well, we have 200 employees, we have only 100 spots. And the way your software works is people have to book a, book a, book a desk or something. Right. And there are two things happening. People wake up at midnight two weeks in advance to book a desk. Yeah. Because there are only hundred spots. But then the challenge is that then they don't show up, you know, and then the person who couldn't get the desk doesn't show up as well. So can we have check in? And I found out that actually we do have that check in feature. We just didn't implement it because LA had more descent than people. They didn't need it. But the point was. And then the next thing was, why two weeks? Why can't we do it anytime you want? Absolutely, we can change that rule for you. And also we want to know what are they actually doing when they're there or what are the meetings they're having or where they're engaging. Not from a fact of privacy, but more from a fact of collaboration engagement. If you're going to come to the office and spend all your time just on a zoom call or a teams call, what's the point of coming to the office? So this is the genesis of working with our clients. Skyview, which is the analytics engine which tells you what's actually happening in the workplace. Performance, space utilization, app utilization, user behavior trends. Now, why did all these people show up that Wednesday on June 12th? Well, because the CEO is in the office, right? Or whatever. Or the other thing that's very cool right now with our app is colleague booking. You know, Chris is in the office. He's sitting over there on the right side. I like to sit next to him. Hey, by the way, I really don't want to sit next to Chris because he's loud. I'm going to go on the other side of the building. You get to have that flexibility to see what's happening. So we engage with the map, the spatial awareness, the location awareness. So when we think about that application, it already has a lot of coolness in terms of being mobile and cloud first and spatially aware. Now we're adding AI to not only do what we call automation, that all these functions, one voice command, I can do all these things. I don't have to click five things over or more importantly with the data, the insights that you can get and then the things you can do to help you make this better. That's super important.
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A
So Karam, this, this whole activity of like, I'm an entrepreneur, I've got a small team, we're remote. It's been a long time. So I used to work with Anderson Consulting back in the day. Been a long time since I had to worry about the logistics of getting a desk in the Chicago office and then making sure that I've got a boardroom. Although I know that this is a big part of the day to day for anybody that's working in especially return to office environments in these bigger companies. What is that like pre AI? How is this being handled? It seems like a lot of work.
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B
Well, it's a lot of work, it's a lot of logistics and believe it or not, it creates a lot of confusion. Right. Because think about the pandemic gave one opportunity is remote. Work became, I would say normal. Right? It became the new normal. That's the way I work. And think about it, if you're an employee and you've got to decide, you know, we have a lot of clients in New York and I used to live in New York. And if you are an employee in New York City and you're going to take the train from New Jersey and you take the now and a half train and you show up and you don't have a desk for the day, that's a big problem. Why are you going there? Right. So knowing that you can get a desk and that you can get that. Right. Secondly, there's a lot of bad behaviors because some people may just get a conference room and there's one person sitting in an eight person conference room for the whole day. That doesn't work as well. Right. So managing that whole experience and then a lot of them will say, well, I went to the office, I couldn't find a desk, why am I here? Well, did you actually look at it? Did you book it properly? Did you, you know, plan in advance? So it's caused this kind of, you know, frustration for employees on the employer side. It's like, well, I've got this big real estate. Am I actually using all the space? And if people are only coming in two, three days a week, I'm already 40% inefficient. So what's the efficiency factor? And as we work with employers, they've figured out what's the optimization around space, meaning that, you know, not to have, you know, wasted space, but how do we optimize the space and also think about, you know, changing the layout, reimagining the space. Why do I need all these cubes and when people are in the shared space or why do I need so many conference rooms or what is the size of the conference room? And one of the things trends that's happening is people are coming back for a reason is the point I'm making. Right. They don't show up just to be in the office, check in. They could also start working from home. But the reason to come in is because there's a purpose. There's a team meeting, there's a project going on, there's something that's productive. And I think they're more, they more value their time now. Right? The time is the most essential value, especially if you're going to spend the time and commute. Is it worth it to be there? And honestly, there's a lot of value to being there, being in person. Because even when you think about functions that are like software engineering, which you think like, well, people just work remotely, but sometimes you're sitting there and somebody knocks you on the corner and say, hey, why did you do it this way? Right? Or we talk about, you know, you and I are from the old group, which knows about the water cooler moments or things that happen. You know, I think about this application for our next generation. Know, kids who grew up on the iPhone, they're already texting, messaging, all this stuff for them. This is natural, right? That you can have this multitask, flexibility. But the end of the day, it's all about engagement, collaboration, and productivity. Right on both sides, employee and employer. So that's where I think is where AI comes in. Because do all these things manually takes a lot of time and effort, right? You know, scheduling meeting. If it's taking you 30 minutes to schedule an hour meeting and get everybody engaged and then change, that's a lot of wasted time. What if you could do that in a New York minute, right? In a New York minute. You can get your meeting set up, you can get the caterer going. You know, your day. You plan your day in the morning. You wake up in the morning, you say, sky. You know, get me my. My desk, my. My locker, because I got to store something. My parking spot, and I need a meeting with Chris, and I want to lunch with Chris and Daphne, and I want this kind of food. And your life is automated right now. Things will change. As you know, you go to the office, you may find something else. Oh, by the way, there's a food truck here. Why don't I go get the food truck? Oh, by the way, there's actually a special event going on. A VP came in from outside, and he's presenting this. I want to join that. Well, how do you know? You've got thousands of emails going in. No, on the app, you get a notification and you're spatially aware. You've got a map that shows you exactly where things are at so you don't have to think about it. Or I'll give you another pedantic example. My doctor has told me, hey, you got to do 20,000 steps a day, right? That's what you got to do. Well, I'm at the office, I'm sitting down, but I've got to go to this meeting. Well, I got an extra 10 minutes. Why don't I just take a walk around the block and get there, right? Or take me. We have a little lake around our campus, and I do that all the time. So those are simple things that I think are necessary because employees want that, right? They want the flexibility. Or if I have to go home early because I got my daughter's Recital. Well, make sure my meeting ends in this time. Make sure my car is charged so I can go. So those are the things that as we look at our life, our life is no longer the 9 to 5. It's 247 in a lot of ways. Right? And in that 24 7, you want your moments of, you know, not wasting time on things that are just not, not worth it. But more importantly, make yourself more productive, make yourself more engaged and collaborative. I think that's the mission we have and I think AI is the perfect technology that's out there with generative AI that can help solve these problems.
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A
So I think about, you know, my experiences and doing exactly what you're talking about. Show up to the new office, oh, where do I go, who do I talk to, who gives me the badge, all that stuff. This is essentially, it sounds like it's putting that like almost an administrative executive in the pocket of every employee at every level of the company.
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B
Well, we call it a trusted advisor. Beyond that. So an executive assistant. Absolutely. It does all the tasks. But think about Chris, you invite people to the meeting and you say, well, these are the right people. But what if you're trusted advisor? The sky advisor said, hey Chris, you forgot about that person and that person was important because they were in the other meetings. So they actually know your history, they know the fact that you did these projects or you didn't forget something, right? Or, or it becomes more like, because, you know, people have, you know, as you get older, you get forget about things, right? You forget about what happened, what's good for you. So we think of it more as a trusted advisor as well as in a system that actually executes absolutely on command. But you know, the more important thing we feel is what are your preferences? What are things? Like if I aspire to say, look, I want to have x many hours of, you know, face to face time with my team, right. Assume I say that. Right. But then I don't know how many hours I actually did or not, right? Like, you know, our Apple watch tracks our activity. Why don't we have something that tracks our experiences, right? To say, yep, you know, I'm actually engaging, I'm actually collaborative. And then you can measure your productivity. So I think we live in a data driven world and I think a lot of the people have, you know, you know, we, we make our own judgments based on, you know, our experiences. And I think getting those experience to be more natural, you know, using AI will help make it more easy to engage and collaborate. But then also to track efficiency, right? If you're tracking your space efficiency, if you're tracking your employees productivity, your employee engagement, your morale, how they're doing what they're doing. Data doesn't lie, you know, when you see the data, see this is the user journey for the day, you can get a sense of what's actually happening. And I think is, is I think about every CEO wants to know what's happening with their company, what's happening with their people. And I think the sky platform, the app, is the engine to do it, but the real value is the sky view to show you all the analytics and insights and trends. And then what we call is do predictive analytics, you know, predict what's going to happen next week or the week after and plan for it better. And so we think of these things as a new sector in software called employee experience. We think this is such a big opportunity because it's at the core of how people work, right? And I think that is what's changing right now in the world. Because as you mentioned at the start of this, you know, remote was always there, right? But now the funny thing is remote was the person who was not in the headquarter, you, your headquarters, San Francisco, you're sitting in Sacramento. So you're thinking remote, right? Remote could be the same person in San Francisco. They just don't come to the office, right? Because the job function doesn't require them. But they still have may have the fear of missing out. They may, because always a remote worker said, hey, I wish I was in headquarter because I would get the access to the senior people or mentorship, right? I think those are the missed moments right now where you can be super productive. Remote, right? You can get all your work done, but you never ever met the person, you know. And it's funny, in the pandemic I had as I was going through the SPAC and I met lots of people, you know, lots of companies, lots of bankers and stuff. And for two years we never met each other. Actually my lawyers, I actually one of my lawyers I've never met for three years, okay, I've never met this person. And one of them, I saw them the other day, I'm like, I had a different impression, basically, you know, just, just a three dimensional view of the person and how they interact, although we're talking every single day. But it's different when you connect, right? So I think that's where I think the technology is there for remote. And remote is super productive. But the technology to enable remote and in person as these amazing experiences is what we're looking for. Right. And so I think, I think in essence what, what sky is trying to do is, is, is drive the human behavior towards productivity. And for us it's a tool that anybody can use. People have different needs, different requirements. And so we work with all our clients on that human experience and the culture of the company. Right. Some companies have a different culture. One of our companies basically said you have to order food through this app. Right. And what drives that is. Okay, well then we have people all over. So if somebody in India wants a mango lassi at 11:30am and it doesn't get delivered, we get a call and we're in California. Right. So now we gotta have a 247 operation, we gotta have our GCP infrastructure supporting that Google Cloud. And so a lot of these problems that we see, they're being created because of those new experiences where now you do everything remotely, you do everything on a mobile device, you do everything from everywhere, Right? Sure. And infrastructure is supported. So you think about our AI platform. I mentioned the Sky View, the analytics, I mentioned the automation of the app. But also the infrastructure has to be ready to support that. Right, support that 24.7, you know, x9s of availability. Going back to my Sprint days where it's like, it was used to be the voice quality, right. Voice was supposed to be like pin drop. Now it's about data and data inherently is never fully reliable. But I think the expectation with AI, once you get started using it, you're not going to lose it. You're not going to say, well, I don't want my assistant to do this for me. So to your point earlier, everybody gets this executive assistant or trusted advisor, they're going to be so hooked on it. We need to enable, make sure that it's available to them all the time.
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A
How much of this user experience, like the human side of this is part of the narrative of this app? Because I came on here, you know, interested in the AI side of, oh, that's cool, you got AI doing this and that. But, but you've really taken the conversation to the point to where you, the at the core of this is the experience of the individual employee, not necessarily, you know, the big corporation. How do you, how do you kind of marry the two of, hey, it's cutting edge technology, it's natural language, it's AI powered, but it's so that the individual can have that positive cultural morale boosting experience with their company.
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B
Yeah, no, look, I think when you think about why do people stay at a company? Right. And normally the answer used to be my manager, my colleagues, right, sure. That's more important reason and also the mission of the company, right. You got to have good benefits, all this stuff. But more importantly, when they leave, they leave because. And it's hard to leave when you have a really network, right. So I think we are also creating that network effect, right? Because think about if you are in a company of 60,000 people, right. How many do you know? 10, 20, 30. Now in the palm of we had, you have access to all 60,000, right. You may be a fan of. I'm a big sports fan, I'm a cricket fan. Right. I'm sitting here, but maybe there's a person in England who also loves cricket and I get a bond with that person. I'm working on a project on AI for it. But you know, we are bond as cricket, right. And we get together because we're working on common project. But now we know, right? So there was the idea of the intranet for employees. It never took off, you know, because companies ever, never built that user interface and engagement. So as I think about the future, everybody will need to be, I mean, to be really successful. You know, you want both for the employee and the employer, that there's affinity among the employees, there's bonds created that are outside, just like, oh, there's a work project. It's. They're all human beings, right. They need to work together, they need to collaborate. Right. So I think, I think that's the next dimension. And I think if we can make it easier and simple for them to connect with fellow employees, be more engaged and be more productive, they'll be very productive.
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A
Man, I don't, I don't know if you want to take it in this direction, but one of the, the conversations that happens around AI is what's going to happen to the workforce.
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Right.
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You and I both know once it, once it gets integrated into certain workflows, processes, departments, I just don't need as many humans pushing buttons.
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Yep.
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How, how will sky impact that? And is that something that gets discussed, I guess internally or on earnings calls?
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B
I think we're in a different dimension. But I would answer the question first to say, look, we ourselves, although we're a small company of 50 people, every one of our team members is using AI, right? Because I've told my team whether you're in sales, you're marketing, engineering or you got to use AI tool. So the future is an AI enabled enterprise. If you're not Using AI, you're going to be left behind no matter what function you are. So that's there. Now, in terms of the workforce, I think, like I said, we spend a lot of time wasted in time consuming things, that scheduling things take time, organizing things take time finding data. So all those things, I think we can make it easier. So my view would be we're going to be more productive now. Will it lead to less people? In some functions, maybe. But, you know, one of the new products we have is called Sky Kiosk. So you walk into any front office of a building, there's no more an assistant there. They don't have people there. Right. You walk in, you don't know where to go, you know who's there. You can't even call anybody. So we build this Sky Kiosk, which is like an interactive dashboard. You walk in, it's a touchscreen and with built with our app, so it connects so you can actually see who's in the office. You know, push a button and see whether they're at. Whether they're in a room or a desk. And you can actually also book a room and desk from that big kiosk and. And you can know what's happening around you. Right. When is the. When is the next train leaving? Or there's a thunder alert or something else? So I think that already we've seen, you know, a shift in terms of the fact that there's no longer a 247 assistant sitting in front of your front door. Right. But, you know, and even if they were, they wouldn't have all the information. Right. They wouldn't have access to that. So I think in some ways, I think we're supercharging that experience and at the same time retooling people. Because I do think that, you know, AI is transformative. If you're not using it, if you're a software developer or you're a admin or whatever, you're going to be left behind.
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A
Yeah, yeah, for sure. So let me just get some clarification there. In that kiosk environment, that would be perhaps the property management company that would have a listing of all the companies.
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B
Or just be enterprise. So if I'm. If I'm Visa office, I walk in and the front, I see this kiosk and all of a sudden, if I'm an employee, I'm a visitor, I have access to information that'll help me get to the next level. Whereas I ask an assistant or call somebody and nobody's there, or they don't know where they're at but providing that what we call just in time information, Right? Because I think part of this thing is really about productivity and engagement. And I think I look at facilities, they're not that fully. So the point is there's a lot AI can still do like a lot of, you know, hype and other things, but we have to look at some of these real problems. And so the way we think about it is the design thinking you mentioned at the start, we selling to enterprises, but our success is not to get a contract with an enterprise. We get that, right? The next is adoption usage. If people are not using it, it's not useful. Right? And like I mentioned, with the diversity of different environments, it's different if you're in a large sprawling campus, whether you're in an office tower and whether you're in Bangalore was a Singapore. There's local needs, there's local requirements, right? So this is where the value comes in that is localized for you. You know, it gives you things that are necessary for your environment plus also your profile. You're a sales and marketing team, you're an engineering team. You know, there's other things. So right now it's a horizontal platform. But as we move forward, we think there are a lot of vertical applications and very localized applications that would be very interesting for people in their environment.
- [25:31]
A
If you're enjoying this episode and want to learn more about how to start using AI at work, we've made it easy for you. For just $1 you can have full access to the Chief AI Officer community which will give you additional training, custom software, daily Training, calls on AI tools, using AI automations, getting more from your ChatGPT sessions and the business of being an AI consultant, simply go to chiefai officer.com insiders to accelerate your AI journey. Now back to the episode. So when you're approaching a prospect company, is this an AI conversation? Is it an optimization and productivity conversation? Is it a. What is that? What is that point of the conversation for them?
- [26:20]
B
Well, I think it starts with a lot of our. A lot of our clients are C level suites, right? CIOs. Actually some of them are CEOs. And I think the mission for them is, you know, how do I engage my employee employees, right? That's. It's kind of from that big level. Naturally real estate is a big function, right? Space optimization is a big function. Return on investment on that. Say, if I use this software, how much can I save on real estate? Which is pretty dramatic, right? And you think about right it could be hundreds of millions of dollars in terms of real estate that you could defer it or, or better. But then when they look at the engagement, their view is, we can put all these rules and policies, how do we enable them to be, you know, executed, number one. But more importantly, how do you get people to actually adhere to it? You know, because, you know, people, you know, there's got to be a reason to do it. So I think providing that, you know, a tool that allows that, that capability is super important for them. But the ROI initially is the space. And then the other part, I mean, people are the most important. Like, think about if, if you've seen the news that, you know, one CEO decided one day to change the RTO and 50% of the people left. Like, think about, if you, a small company, a hundred people, but think about, you wake up and half your team is gone. That's a big problem. Right? So then the question is, if you want to implement it, you can't just be draconian to say, and, you know, it's in the news. I think Amazon tried a year ago to implement it and they couldn't implement. This is a big Amazon. Right. And, you know, so there needs to be ways to engage with them so they don't feel like, oh, you're trying to, you know, push it on me or you're trying to track me. It's more to say, I want you to be more engaged and productive. Right. To do that, I think you have to change the way you present it. It can't be just be like, oh, is the tool that I'm going to monitor every morning. Did you actually check in? Right. Well, you have bad check in. You can check on Badge, but it's more about what do they do after and whether they're actually engaged and happy. So a lot of our clients do NPS surveys. And I mean, this is a. Pretty much the, the better companies are engaging the employees in the discussion. They're not just throwing it over the fence. Here's. They actually want to know what are you doing, why you're doing, what's working or not. So some of these ideas that we're getting on our product roadmap are coming from our clients, actually. Right. The colleague booking or delegate access, the things that you figure out. Well, that's super important for them because they actually want to know if their friends are coming to the office. There's nothing wrong about it. Right. I mean, it's, it's actually great. But it creates that environment where it's engaging versus it's more like a mandate. So I think that's, that's what I see. The CEOs that get it, the CEOs that don't get it, or the CCs are like, well, we'll see what happens, right? I mean, like, you know, they've kind of at a point where they can mandate it. They're more like, okay, if they don't show up, they should get fired. I think that's not the right approach. Or, or some of them are using it as a tool to say, well, if I, you know, if I put the four day rule, half of them will leave. Well, that's what I want. And, and that, that is also on top of mind. But I think most of them honestly just want their, their feeling is that people are not engaged enough. And actually the metrics are there. If you look at Gallup has surveys on employee engagement, it went down further in the, in the pandemic, but it's already been 35% or lower. So employee engagement across enterprises is still even in the best heydays with 35%. What I've read about and what I've seen also is companies that have 70% employee engagement, which based on service are the ones that are most successful, right? Where employees feel like they have ownership, they have accountability, they're engaged. And I think the reason I say sky enables it, it gives you access to information that otherwise you'd have to talk to five other people. The perfect example is onboarding, right? Where you're a new employee, you come to the office, you don't know where to go, you don't know who to talk to, and it may take you, it may take you weeks or months to figure out what you're doing. So one of the interesting applicants one of our clients came up with is called pre boarding, which is, you know, in countries like India, when you have a transition of an employer employee coming in, they have to give a six week or eight week furlough notice, right? So there's eight weeks of dead time. They're just sitting there waiting, right? So they created a version of our app that says it's a pre boarding. So now you feel like you're already at the campus before you join. You have access to the data that gets you onboarded to see where you would go, who would be your manager, some documents, but also the visual look and feel. You don't show up and say, where do I go? Yeah, that's been a very interesting app. So I think those are things that Seem like small things, but I think they're big in terms of like the impact. Right. Because think about if you're an employee, you feel so much like, wow, this is a great employer. They know they've given me access in advance. So you start day one excited versus after six weeks. I'm like, I'm still figuring out who my real manager is or where do I go to. Right. So I think those are ways that I feel like our app can be, can be impacting the whole organization. Not just real estate or facilities or it, but really human resources and help other functions can leverage it for their enterprise.
- [31:27]
A
I'm not running into a lot of, of AI powered tools that are kind of addressing a broad spectrum of all of those things. Yep, very interesting. So we're going to change it up a little bit. I'm, I'm always curious with individuals like you and I who are out there talking to companies who are finally interested in like, okay, we got to get serious about AI, the capabilities there, the risk has been mitigated, blah, blah, blah. How has the conversation changed or the awareness changed as you're talking to prospects over just say the past 12 months?
- [32:01]
B
Yeah, I think it's changed a lot. I think it started with a little. So one of the things that we actually pride ourselves on because we sell to large enterprise that are regulator in financial services, security is a big issue. Right. When our app goes out, it has to be pen tested. Security is high. So we have A, we already have that B and A and we actually, you know, take it very seriously and drive it. So I think this issue was security issue was on hallucinations, issues on data privacy and other things. So I think we already kind of do some of that because we have to do it today. And I think now the conversation has gone not to why should we use AI? It's more how do we use AI and what are the things? And I think for them the most better piece would be it's, it's invisible. Right. You don't have to think about it. Right. It just happens in the background. So for us, same in the ui, it's just like I'm going to show you the demo. Like it just, you talk to it, it just gets your stuff done. You don't have to open up a separate, you know, copilot or chat, gpd, whatever. It's embedded in the, in the application that you have and it's contextual, it's aware, it knows who you are, it knows your environment. I think that's where People feel like, wow, that's what I want. So now. But that's a great desire then to get it done is challenging because all of these enterprises as you know, have a larger legacy systems, a lot of things that they have to do. So they have. So the CIO has to be kind of willing to change things about. And I think I look at them, some of them call me like, you're a partner, you're not a vendor. I think that's the relationship that needs to happen because there needs to be some silos that have to be, you know, taken out and there has to be transformation, honestly. Right? You, you can't, you know, there's a lot of legacy technology. So for them the issue is, you know, where do they going to make the bet, right? Are they going to make the bet on a startup? It's, you know, for us, you know, we're a small company, but they're the ones that work with us, are the ones that understand the vision, are champions of the technology and willing to make the changes. Right. Some others may say we're fast forward, we're going to watch it, going to see the movie when it happens, will be the next ones, right. So we work with all kinds of, all our clients are really engaged, but the ones that are more, you know, like I said, have the vision, have the champion inside and especially at the C level, they drive the change. So it needs change management for sure. It's not going to happen by just somebody saying, well, let me go buy a bunch of, you know, Gemini licenses or Copilot licenses. It needs the full transformation of the IT infrastructure.
- [34:31]
A
And I think a big part of, at least in our experience with the change management, addressing that is that making it bite size, making it like, oh, this is AI. Well, this isn't bad. This is, this is right. And it seems like with what you guys are doing with sky for an employee, even though, like the experience isn't like, oh, I'm having an AI experience, they're seeing a tool that helps them in their day to day, but seeing how AI is integrated in it. Because in the demo you're going to show the natural language interaction, the ME as a user and the app. I think that's a like just it's baked in kind of with what you guys are doing is that you're introducing AI into the conversation without it being scary for the employee or them concerned about any technical gaps that they might have on using it. So before we jump into the demo, I want to ask a little bit, okay? Let's say I've got 60,000 employees and I've got, you know, offices and, and, you know, all over the world. What does the training of the app look like in that situation when I've got all these employees and roles and procedures and properties and all that?
- [35:38]
B
So that's interesting. So we, we have a customer success team and we have teams that are global as well. Because like I said, we, the companies launch at campus by campus. You know, they do first couple campuses, then they do, say 50. And it requires that, you know, that training at a local level too. Right. Then what's important to them, we do corporate training, but then we do local training and then there's engagement with the customer success engineers and customer success managers with those, you know, office leaders. Right. Because every enterprise has their own set of leaders there. So we do those kind of training. And I think, like I said with skyview, which is like an interactive tool that shows you all the data and what's happening and others, that lets those leaders know what's going on and then they can start creating content. So we have what we call sky bts behind the scenes, more like a content management system. So now if Pepsi is our customer and they have an event or summer salt is happening, okay, they can host the event on there, they can put a flyer, they can drive traction there. So there's a lot of localized content development that comes with this. Right. So that's where the beauty comes in, where, you know, you have base platform, you can do all these things, but then the usage and adoption is site by site based on their needs and requirements.
- [36:54]
A
Yeah.
- [36:54]
B
And so that's where the fun thing starts happening. We're also doing now Google Translate, where we're using them to translate in their own languages. We have. Because they want to do it in their language. But localization is just not just language is also things that they would like to know and do in their campuses. Right. So I think we're creating those little communities. So think about everyone is a little community that starts creating its own DNA. Say, this is how we do things. This is what policies are and culture. Right. I think part of the other part is a lot of employees pride. The app. The app is not known as sky to the employees. The app is known as Adobe Life or Red Carpet Club. So it's got the DNA of the company and it's powered by sky, basically. Right. So that's where I think the value really gets created is on the, on the human side, in the behavior is when there's A community. And there's an engagement on the community.
- [37:44]
A
I love that. So I would imagine that across the board, like before, if I was in an office, if I wanted to find out about the, the ice cream social that was going to happen, I had to go to the break room or maybe I got an email that I didn't check. I got plenty of emails. I can't read that. But this is a device that I'm carrying with me that like I will know about what's happening in the company as an employee. And I would imagine that engagement with, you know, company presentations and trainings and social events just gets lifted like crazy.
- [38:14]
B
Yeah. So we do it either with notifications on the app, but also since we have a multi d, multidimensional map inside. So it will show a notification while you're in the office to say, hey, by the way, you know, 500ft from you, this is happening. Or you went to a conference room. I mean, some of these campuses are huge campuses. They're like, sure, like we go to the Adobe campus or the Wanda campus. It's like miles away. Right. So you can be walking a long way and you find out, hey, by the. There's an event going on or what's happening there. Actually, I was at an office the other day and there was a hackathon going on and I'm like, what's this happening? And I'm a visitor. Can I join? Oh, yeah, maybe you can attend that. Right. But it's right in the palm of your hand. Notification comes up, you click on it, you put your profile, it's already. The profile is in. You get acceptance. So it's just those just in time moments. So we want to make it very spatially aware. And that's why the mapping technology is super important in this. Right. It's not just email that goes to you because, you know, you get hundreds of emails and you know, but, but just knowing that it's there and sometimes you're not thinking about it, but you got the extra 20 minutes, you'll go get a cup of coffee or get an ice cream social and make a new connection. And I think those are the, those are the moments we want to create. Right. Because then they will see the value to say, well, because of Sky, I found out about this event. Because of Sky, I met somebody else. I think that's what my desire is. That's where the usage adoption happens. Because it's not like they have to use the app for five hours a day. No, it's that 22nd 32nd interaction that may be useful for them. Right? Or the fact that, you know, I'll give you the other example with AI that we're especially, I mean, everybody faces this meeting is going on, you're getting right to two minutes to go and there's somebody waiting outside the door who's waiting for you to leave. Okay, yeah. What do you do? Do you find a way? You don't have time. You're on a call, you can call your assistant, whatever, but no, our sky assistant and say, hey, there's a conference room right next door, two minutes away, we can take you there. Or it could tell the other person, hey, by the way, this meeting is running long. Do you mind just going to that office? It's simple interaction and we could do it humanly. But if AI can do that for me, it makes my life so much easier. I don't have to think about it because it happens every single day. Every meeting doesn't finish on time, doesn't start on time. All these things happen in real world and you can't predict these things, right? You can never predict this. But this is where AI, but with the mapping technology, super important because you know, if you did it in Microsoft, you'll say, oh yeah, there's a conference room, but I don't know how far it is or where is it, right? You could do it in office, but it doesn't work that way. And I think that's the value that we see is the fusion of space, time and the environment around us to create this amazing experience. That's what we focus on because we're really in that indoor experience and making sure that is so solid. So. And by the way, some of our customers use beacon technology, which allows you to do very efficient tracking to within, you know, meters, right? So you know exactly where things are at. Now some of them don't want location finding, but the map has enough data points so you can easily go places. But the point is that, you know, that's the real value of AI coming in in those scenarios, in real world problems that we see today, we can't do that. You know, you really can't provide that spatial intelligence today.
- [41:26]
A
So before we jump into the demo, got one last question about the app. Have there been any uses of it that were unintended? But you're like, wow, like, you know, like when people release software, sometimes there's this little sub use subgroup that uses it for something that it wasn't intended for but is actually pretty brilliant. Have you guys had any situations like.
- [41:47]
B
That we've had many situations and one of the things was interesting was, you know, one of our sites in, in Irvine or LA had a lot of, you know, it was a sprawling campus and others. And, and one of the use cases came out is emergency notifications. You know, like, you know, you have, because now you have the app. I mean we're not 911 others. But like something happens and I'm in this room, just press a button, oh, I'm here, I'm in room 105. So God forbid there's a fire or whatever happens, you know, where you're at or alert, something like that. And then this could also be for weather alerts or other things. And these things you think that, oh, sometimes, you know, you may not have access to other emergency systems that are there. But this is just simple, easy, right? That you just say I'm here so you can communicate with your fellow employees. There's kind of multicast solution. Yeah, yeah, that. But we're seeing those kind of use cases coming just because people are starting using and they realize, yeah, we need this. The other one I would say to you is it's very interesting when we see that people, you know, people want to, you know, when we look at active directory sync, right. Like I said, the colleague booking thing is super. And the delegate access, right. The fact that, you know a CEO wants to use the app, right. It's kind of like, okay, everybody's equal others. But we know every CEO has a delegate. They're assistant and then the other C levels have their assistants and those assistants have to talk to each other. The opportunity to say the delegates can now delegate with each other sounds simple, but it was very complicated. But we found that use case to become important. So as we, as we go through this, you know, we're getting our roadmap driven by our clients because of these issues, right. And they become common across them, right. So one guy figures this out, becomes common across. Like I said, the pre boarding I think is a great opportunity. Everywhere I go, first issue is I don't know day one where to go. So as we didn't design all of these upfront, we just designed, hey, here's the ability to book a desk, book a room and engage with these guys. But now these other things are coming in inside of the enterprise. So it's very interesting. But I think the spatial location piece is the one that I feel and I mentioned to you like this whole issue of you get tired of the food in the building, what do we want to Do a thousand feet around. So we're now integrating with Google Maps. So now when you are there, like, okay, I can actually integrate with Google Maps. And the funny thing would be, is like, where do I go? Well, I need to know, where do I leave the building? Yeah, that Google Maps won't tell you.
- [44:25]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [44:26]
B
But we are doing that now. So those are things. As we move forward, I think it's more about finding the user journey and those users give us the feedback. Hey, I wish I could do this. And it sounds like, you know, the emergency notification was like, well, do you, do they really need it? Don't they have these complex emergency systems? All stuff. But no, I just want to know if I'm in room 8F. And that's all. We just push a button. There's a push notification that I'm here and you're there.
- [44:50]
A
Very exciting application of AI. I love it. And this is something that again, we haven't had any discussions about this type of thing. So the, the big reveal. If you want to share your screen, I think this will really kind of tie it together for everybody who's been listening when they actually see it.
- [45:04]
B
Yep, yep. Okay, I'm going to do the Sky Gentic booking.
- [45:08]
A
Okay.
- [45:08]
B
And I'm going to run this. It's like a minute for those who.
- [45:11]
A
Are listening, kind of walk us through what we're seeing on the screen.
- [45:14]
B
Yeah. So this is the front interface of the, of the sky app. So you can see this is our latest, greatest that has, you know, like tiles on top that you can press a button and do a booking or navigate or support, you know, connect to different functions. And there's a Sky button there which is like the Assistant or the Trusted Advisor. So this is the front end user interface for that. In the middle you'll see a 3D map of the building and the locations. You kind of get a view of where you're at. So if you're in demo headquarters, Silicon Valley is there. If you change it to New York or something else, it'll be different, but it's a standard, simple UI in front. And what I'm going to demo for you is how the Sky Assistant or Sky Agentic will work in terms of providing, you know, the things that you could technically go in a book a room or navigate or order food and stuff. I'm going to show it to you through the, through the Assistant. So I'm going to start playing it. Hey, Sky, I have an unexpected client drop in with at least 3 guests in 10 minutes need a meeting room nearby immediately. Just find the closest available space.
- [46:36]
A
So for those of you that can't see the screen, it, it looks very similar to a chat GPT or a Gemini dialogue. There's your interaction, there's the, the device. The app is returning information multimodal looks like there's image maps, there's restaurants to choose from that could feed the, the attendees. There's different selections for your conference rooms and then I guess if you were to click on one of those, you would see the directions to that room.
- [47:05]
B
You select and it will now book it and then it'll let you navigate to that place. So know that where you're at. So you can now go to that location.
- [47:14]
A
No excuse for being late to a meeting. Oh this is great. So what I'm seeing on, on the screen is a map of the campus and it giving me essentially what looks like directions. Yeah, yeah, like, like Google map directions directly. Take a turn here, walk 50ft and.
- [47:33]
B
Then put it on your calendar and send you that. So, so the idea here was, you know, I'm going to go back is that you saw at the start it was natural language processing. Either you know you can do, you know you can do voice or tax. But we had one of our top A engineers who's got a thick South Indian accent and you saw that, you know the one technique thought it was three years but he meant three people. So the system is aware that he didn't mean three years, he meant three people. And we do contextual awareness and basically it takes a multi agent approach where the one agent is doing the desk booking, the other is doing the navigation or booking the room and then also connecting it to Exchange. Integrate with exchange. So it's all in one place. But the idea is in one minute you could do all of that. Right. If you had to do it separately, maybe a couple of clicks more naturally. And, and also you know, you can do it with any interface. The beauty of this is that you know, this is to your point we are you know, not something uniquely different than what's out there. People are used to. Right. It's just getting those multiple functions in one. That's what the agentic part is to actually complete an action. Was it in a system where it just tells you oh here's, oh, here are some nice rooms to go to or here are some nice places to eat. No, it actually does the booking for you, it does the execution for you.
- [48:50]
A
Very cool.
- [48:51]
B
I can show you also a demo of a workshop where you want to host an event and you've got people coming in and they may have different food preferences or others. Let me do that quickly as well. Set up a workshop on March 1st and ensure our CEO is invited. Secure space that accommodates all 15 guests that are arriving at 9am Additionally, arrange refreshments for everyone. So it's going to know that I'm the CEO. It doesn't have to. So it's contextually where it knows what the preferences of the food that I like as well as the people that are coming in. So it's going to give us, give the user the options of the kind of food they want to order, how much they want to order. It gets them the conference room that is on that day, March 1st, the different times that are available. So you can pick and choose and how far it is and it's connected it and now it's put it onto your calendar so it's there. You could also do the directions like I said, it could also do all these functions. But the idea is that we're building this agentic infrastructure, you know, leveraging our partners at Google and others that we're not building our own foundational models. We're not kind of reinventing what's out there, but we are using. It's an AI application company, right? We're taking that and then the training of the data. That's the other thing that I wanted to mention is we're not hallucinating because the data is only the data of the client in the. In the real world. Right. So it's really focused on that. Now naturally we will do other things. Like example, if I came to New York and I said, I want a pastrami sandwich, right? What am I going to do? I'm going to go on Yelp and TripAdvisor and find 100 reviews of this. The best place, the worst place. But what if my friend Chris, who's a New Yorker, is going to say, here's the place to go to. Simple recommendation, trusted data, trusted advisor. Done. Right? So those are things. As we move forward, we'll do more. But right now, all the data is what's in the enterprise. We're not taking training outside. We're not. It's secure for the users and the use cases are very much tied to what are. So if you ask the our sky assistant make chicken biryani, you say, well, I'm sorry, I can book a desk, but I can't make chicken biryani for you. Can't give you the recipe. So we kind of Disclaim all of those other things that other apps do, but we're very focused on just that, that, that, that user experience for enterprise.
- [51:11]
A
So very cool. This has been an unexpected delight to see this because I can see all of the, how many minutes it would shave off of every single person in the company. And you think, oh, what, saved me five minutes? Saved you five minutes. But it also saved 60, 000 other people five minutes today. Right. Incredible. So if people want to find out more, kind of follow the journey that you guys are going on. As you continue to scale the company, what's the best place for them to plug in with?
- [51:38]
B
They can go to sky AI, cxai AI or they can email me horamxai AI or horamxapp.com or marketingxap.com we're always available and we look forward to engaging more with people like you in terms of sharing the journey, sharing the vision. I have one last demo, Chris, for you. Sure. One last demo, which we haven't talked about, but I'm going to talk about the analytics. Right? Because we talked about a little bit about that. And so one of the things that we talk about the analytics is what we call the smart analytics expert, right? So this is for the enterprise itself, right? So think about it. If you're an enterprise, you're looking at all the different analytics in the business, right? The department analytics, the return to office impact, the space optimization, what are the peak booking hours, what's the user behavior? Lots of different questions, right? And there's a lot of business intelligence tools out there that tell you all this stuff and all. But what I'm going to show you is something this guy will be doing with as an interactive expert, helping, helping enterprises. So when I see all this stuff, I can get all these charts. For example, I get this chart of booking, right? I got this chart. Or you know, everybody gets this booking chart. Well, it all looks flat, but when you peel the onion, you find out the trends inside. Well, guess what? Desk bookings were higher than room bookings and parking reservations were higher. Why were they higher? Which desk are higher? Why are they higher at that time? And what kind of people were booking desks or what levels were there. And from there I can create this heat map visualization that shows you where things are. What the red zones, the hard zones that we call the areas of Siberia where nobody's going, why they're not going there. Right? So pr, that visualization of the data, you could have a thousand charts, but a picture is worth more. And an interactive picture that allows you to give spatial insights. And then going further, this will be, this, this tool will say, well, your four day RTO policy spikes are on these days. Peak days are Wednesday, Tuesday, Thursday. Seems obvious, but then just seeing the data, you know, makes you more comfortable of what's happening. And so we're launching this with our enterprise clients who are using this to track the experiences, the performances around and then do forecasting, right? They want to know what's next, what can I do better? And so this is the other side of the business going to be one is the app, the other is the analytics, which I'm super excited about because as we collect more and more data, as you know, with AI, more and more data will get better results, right? So as we get more and more usage and so our mission in life is really to get the adoption usage and then with that, both for the employees and employers get better data insights, they can make better decisions for their business.
- [54:21]
A
Man, this is fantastic. I've really enjoyed the conversation. I definitely learned a lot and I love seeing all of these like, oh, that's a great way to use AI. That's a great, like all these new. It's just incredible. It's limitless. So thank you so much for being a guest on this. I'm looking forward to supporting you guys and sending business your way as we encounter our own clients. And for everybody listening, we'll catch you on the next episode. Everything that we discussed in this episode, the links will be in the show notes, so check those out. Thanks everybody. Thanks for tuning in to Using AI at Work. Don't forget to subscribe for more conversations about how to use AI at work. And a special thank you to our sponsor, Chief AI Officer for empowering businesses with AI education and training. Visit their website for a free AI Readiness Assessment and AI Strategy Strategy Guide to help you get started using AI at work. That's www.chiefaiofficer.com. so thanks to our producer Evan Desaunier for making this episode possible. Follow us on Twitter at the handle Using AI at Work and visit www.usingaiatwork.com for free resources to help you harness AI in your role.