With Gratitude

Allen Debes   00:00:10

I think we’re on, Stephanie.

Stephanie Hogen   00:00:11

Are we on? Yay.

Allen Debes   00:00:12

I think we’re on. This is us.

Stephanie Hogen   00:00:14

So Allen, do you know we have known each other for 12 years and we have never got a podcast together. And so in the spirit of gratitude, I am grateful. This is our first chance to do a podcast together. So welcome everyone. Welcome to the Vervint 10,000 Feet Podcast. Today, live with you all, we’re excited to launch our brand new special series with gratitude, where humans and AI take us next. At Vervint, we believe that the best technology doesn’t just work. It creates lasting human gratitude for the people who use it, the teams who build it, and the customers they serve. So over the coming episodes, we’re gonna sit with visionary leaders like Allen and others across different industries. who are proving that thoughtful human and AI collaboration can build technology so good that you aren’t just satisfied with it, that you’re genuinely grateful. So I’m your co-host, Stephanie Hogen. I’m the Chief Consulting Officer here at Vervint, and I’m joined today by the CEO of Koniag Capital, Allen Debes. So Allen, every great adventure needs a good origin story. And so as we think about gratitude, can you, Take us back to a time when you first started thinking about technology.

Allen Debes   00:01:35

Yeah, so I think, first of all, thank you, and excited to be working with you again. Twelve years is a long time, and somehow we keep making it work, which is a lot of fun. And I’m excited to dig in today on the topic, right? It may seem a little weird, and a little cheesy, kind of the notion of gratitude as a centerpiece. or even overused or even toxic in some ways, but I really think it’s profound and certainly from a gratitude standpoint, for me, the journey around gratitude has been significant. It’s in my life. Figuring out how to center on gratitude has been transformational, probably all the way back to late 2018 in terms of a very specific time when things were not going well, and I get some great advice to center on journaling and on gratitude as a subset of journaling and the brain science behind it from the research that I did and that’s out there that you’ll talk about a little bit later, set me off on this journey. of staying centered on that. And it led to starting to use AI in our daily work. And for me, it was like, I put it, for the first time I tried Claude as a tool, and I prompted some personal thing, not even a work thing. And the answers that came back were so significant, it’s kind of so on point and helpful that I typed back in the Thank you, Claude, which was like a very strange thing to do, and I immediately caught myself thanking technology in a in a in an overt way for the first time in my career, and I’ve been in tech since. 1995. Never would I have thought to say, Hey, thanks, I don’t know, Excel, or, Hey, thanks, ERP system. It’s like your stock Teams. Right, thanks, Teams, right? I would have not written it down and said thank you to the software ever. And so here I am interacting with this profoundly new technology and saying thank you to it as though it was an experience with another human being. So that got us thinking again about lasting gratitude as a meaningful brain science center way of focusing our organization here at Koniag Capital and Vervint and with our customers so that we are intent now on how do we create lasting gratitude through great technology for our clients in a way that also positively impacts our employees. And so that will lead to us thinking about and the team thinking about a podcast like this.

Stephanie Hogen   00:04:23

Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if it’s because Claude has a one syllable person name. Like you feel a little bit more obligated to like thank it for what it’s doing for you.

Allen Debes   00:04:33

Right.

Stephanie Hogen   00:04:33

It could be in the in the spirit of silliness. But now today we can’t imagine doing our work without it. So I you know me. I love PowerPoint. I’m a sucker for PowerPoint. Yeah. When I have Claude help me with PowerPoint now, it makes me a little bit sad because I actually enjoy doing that work, but it does the tedious parts of it for me. And I’m really grateful for that because then I can tweak, I can dream something bigger within the slides that I’m creating. And so what do you think the biggest, what do you think the biggest shifts are for us as practitioners in the services business leveraging this technology that we need to be aware of?

Allen Debes   00:05:12

Sure. I think there’s three structural changes happening here. For those of us that have chosen to dedicate our career to services and serving clients through billable time and through value-add services to enterprise, mid-sized clients, healthcare, whatever, pick an industry, but for those of us that have dedicated our lives to that industry, there’s three structural changes. One is our own relationship with the technology itself. and in co-creation, co-thinking, co-authoring. And the second is the service relationship itself. So getting real work done for the client structurally changes in the way that we get that work done in service to our clients. And it puts us in a position where things that used to take weeks take minutes to create and provide us drafts to add more value. To your point, you’re editing on top of that, you’re co-creating with it, but the work acceleration is substantial, which then immediately leads to the third structural change, which was that technology with our clients, they’re having the same experience themselves in their own work, as well as their expectations now change of a service provider fundamentally. pricing changes, they know we’re using these tools, our software engineers better be using these tools to develop software for them, for our client. And so pricing changes, the longevity of the work changes, it all shifts in ways that we’re still sorting out actually. But all of that can actually lead us things that aren’t gratitude centric. It can lead to fear, it can lead to anxiety, anger, frustration, and those things, as you’ll describe, they narrow the mind and don’t allow us to see the possibilities versus that centering on gratitude. But those are the three structural changes that we’re faced with right now in our industry, and it’s a really hard problem to solve.

Stephanie Hogen   00:07:23

Yeah. The word I heard you say, a bunch, which is what we What you alluded to before is really that science. The science behind gratitude is that it’s relational. Rarely are you saying like, I am so grateful for myself. I’m grateful that I showed up today. You’re usually grateful that your coworker brought you a coffee and you didn’t have to go get that yourself. Or you’re grateful that your nanny thought to take the kids out for lunch versus bringing them home when you’re trying to get work done. So that relationship, gratitude also is something that’s very vulnerable. When you allow yourself to be grateful for something someone else did, you’re creating a vulnerability that says, I couldn’t have done this thing by myself. And so you said, you know, individual relationship, the services relationship, and the client relationship, that question that we all sat with. So Allen, you brought that concept to us in our sort of vision setting for marketing and messaging, our go-to-market strategy for the year, we kind of joked about you thinking Claude. But that was the thing that really stuck with us. So for a really long time, there was research and there was this essence of delight out in the marketplace. So experiences that create delight for customers. So Domino’s, you know where the pizza, you ordered the pizza, it’s you know he’s on your street and you’re going to get dropped off and now you have a pizza and you’re happy. But you close the app and that experience goes away until you buy another pizza. And so we started to ask ourselves what happens next? What happens? What happens after that moment of the light?

Allen Debes   00:09:01

Right. Yeah, exactly.

Stephanie Hogen   00:09:03

Let’s talk a little bit about that. The opportunity for us. Go ahead.

Allen Debes   00:09:12

No, please, I think some ideas that we start to connect with that are this notion of other industries, retail or the restaurant industry where there’s a lot of focus in some pockets about unreasonable hospitality and how can we take some of those constructs and weave them into our business in a way that adds a lot more EQ and IQ value, both. into that, and so we can serve our enterprise clients structurally differently because ideally we have more time to think about how to be unreasonably, just provide unreasonable hospitality in our industry, which would be, I still think transformational, but yeah, go ahead.

Stephanie Hogen   00:09:59

Well, and you just spoke on something, the IQ versus the EQ. AI is inherently IQ rich and EQ deficit. So speak a little bit about, can you pull on that thread a little bit more and talk to us a little bit about that interplay between this too?

Allen Debes   00:10:17

Sure. Certainly. I think, as I understand it, we’re all still learning AI, I think, or many of us are, and it is gonna give you that next best answer. It’s gonna connect a lot of dots. It’s gonna think things through in some ways that maybe you wouldn’t have, but that creates space for us in the consulting industry to really think through the audience, for example, and also think through additional experiences that we could help them serve up to their employees, their customers, or their stakeholders in their business. Really studying an AI-centric or an AI-adjacent experience experience. And then what that ought to do, in my view, is in your world in design, it should deepen the persona examination a lot more. And it should create space for us to really think about the EQ and what’s going on inside the head, heart, and gut of our client.

Stephanie Hogen   00:11:21

That’s an excellent and expert way of describing what we’ve I don’t think we came up with this, but it’s what we’re calling it, the human AI partnership model, which is where we think, hey, humans and AI working well together is the way to unlock that notion of gratitude. And so, like you said, the. AI can do some of the IQ aspect of it, but it’s going to take deep human refinement and judgment and expertise and nuance and me noticing that, hey, that person in the room has been hunched over the whole time. AI is not going to pick something like that up, but a human in the room is going to be able to say, hey, so-and-so, why don’t you talk about your feelings on this or your perspective on this? to circle us back to gratitude, those two things working in harmony together are what allow us to create some of those grateful opportunities or experiences. The other thing that’s interesting, and I don’t know in your research if you came across this, as we think about that new aim that gratitude has sort of beyond delight is the things that happen in your brain when you’re really grateful to somebody. You were telling me about it the other day. Can you tell everything about that?

Allen Debes   00:12:39

Yeah, sure. Just briefly, the 2008 study showed that they did MRI studies of a person’s brain and different thinking patterns while they were in the machine, basically. The hippocampus just lights up very differently when a person is focusing and centering on gratitude And what the thesis is that actually frees up our brains to be more creative, to be more relational, and activate the EQ in a way that we can be more attentive. And our working thesis here, as you’ve already said, is that’s going to create better business results. That’s going to lead to better outcomes as we’re in service to our clients. And we think that that’s value add that we can even bring to their own thinking about serving their customers, even manufacturing companies. So B2B, it’s going to, we think, transcend all sectors. But you think about how meaningful that could be in health care, for example, and to nurse practitioners helping a patient in the ER. It’s going to be there, and it’s going to add, create space for more value. And we think, or at least I think, that though the fear of job loss is, of course, a real fear. And it is, as I’ve said before, maybe I haven’t said it here yet today, but this is really structural in terms of moving from the horse to the car. So jobs are going to change. People are going to have to redeploy themselves differently, just like they did going from the horse to the car. It’s structural, really substantial change, where jobs have to change. But the net number of jobs doesn’t necessarily have to go down. In fact, when this nets out, I think most enterprises will end up deciding to do more with the same or more human beings once this settles down, which it just takes time to cycle that through. But that more work will be different work. And I think that’s yet to be discovered. But I think if we’re out there with the right frame of mind, we’ll be able to discover that together much faster than sitting in fear or angst otherwise.

Stephanie Hogen   00:14:59

Two points. One, to rewind us a little bit about the brain science and the hippocampus, gratitude anchors emotionally positive memories in most cases. So I also think if we are practitioners of creating great digital experiences or technology that actually wires and programs a person’s brain to feel happy when they’re doing that, they take that back to their teams, they take that back to their desks, they take that back into their lives, and it’s sticky beyond just what that experience did for them, and it has real effect in their life. You’ve talked about your journaling a little bit, and we can dig in on that a little bit more. But our good friend, our pediatrician, she used to spend 12 hours every Sunday. She would sit down at the kitchen table with her laptop, dictating notes from the week. About eight months ago, I’d taken both of my girls in for a visit and she said, yeah, I’m trying out that. I’m trying out that AI. I got that AI now. Because she knows I work in tech. And so she was sharing her experience with me and she said it’s taken me from 12 hours every Sunday where I can’t be with my family. She’s got, you know, a husband and a daughter. She can’t be with her family. She can’t be. out on the golf course. She can’t be thinking about how she’s going to serve her patients differently because she’s committing 12 hours of her week to paperwork. Now through AI, she’s been able to drive that time down to about two hours every Sunday. She does it right away in the morning, now freeing up her space to do whatever she wants on Sunday. And she said she’s showing up better on Monday morning because she’s ready to take on the day. She didn’t just work a 60 hour week to show up and work another 12 hours and then to show up Monday morning. It’s created very material impact for her, for her life. And sort of in the spirit of gratitude, she’s deeply thankful and she’s showing up differently at work the following day.

Allen Debes   00:16:59

Right. Better rested, more thoughtful. Yep.

Stephanie Hogen   00:17:02

Exactly.

Allen Debes   00:17:03

That’s a great story.

Stephanie Hogen   00:17:05

And like any relationship worth investing in, there’s an author out there, Noelle Russell, she writes a book about scaling AI responsibly. She talks about AI being like a baby tiger. And it’s cute and it’s fun and you’re like, hey, AI, make a meal plan for me. And you’re experimenting with it and you’re doing cool things. But if you don’t raise it right, at the end of the day, you’re going to have something that can eat you. So you have to be really careful about what you’re doing. And then that relationship becomes really important. Like all of the relationships in our life, if someone treats us nicely or treats us poorly, it creates these chemical things that happen in our brains. And our goal, you know, at Vervint and together, you know, as part of the broader Koniag Tech family is to use that feeling for good, create technology experiences that empower goodness. Sure, there are bad actors out there that have nefarious agendas and want to do bad things with this technology that’s unlocked. So I think it would be interesting, Allen, for us to talk a little bit about some of those risks, some of the risks that AI brings. And I think one of those things is cognitive surrender. There’s research. Google it. There’s research out there. Don’t AI it. Google it. Google’s still a real thing. That talks about people sort of just not plagiarism, but like forfeiting their own thoughts. on the IQ/EQ topic, forfeiting their own thought over what AI generated because it was just faster. And what it’s creating is sloppiness, it’s creating a lack of creativity, it’s creating everybody looking the same out there. What are your thoughts on that?

Allen Debes   00:18:55

Certainly, I think you’re onto it. I think my biggest concern is the one you initially raised there, which is a cognitive surrender and dumbing down the whole system. That is a valid concern, because the downstream effect of that is significant across the board. On the other hand, we have a very strong, as you’re a part of this, we have a very strong intern program here at Vervint inside the Koniag Capital Companies. And it’s really interesting to see the interns themselves nodding their heads about this cognitive surrender issue and saying that they believe that they got hired here for internship programs, so they weren’t doing that. And our team that did the interviewing says the same thing. We’re finding people who are determined to stay intelligent. and not be lazy, if you will, or take the easy way out and understand the proof behind what’s being said. Like, oh, why is X, Y, or Z? Why is that the calculus? What’s the proof behind the theory? And then understanding that just makes them smarter and able to tap into the other things we just described. That’s the way that we avoid the risk of the trap right now, which is No question, the new hiring market out there for college graduates who are not even college graduates is very tough. It’s awful, and mountains of empathy for young people trying to find jobs right now. I would never want to come across as saying that those people are doing something wrong, ever. It’s really hard. To say, though, that these large companies aren’t hiring because of AI, I don’t necessarily think that that’s accurate. I think they’re just cutting costs, frankly. When they’re just cutting costs and using AI as an excuse when I’m talking to these same leaders who aren’t using AI inside their companies because they can’t get out of their own way to roll it out, then we know they’re simply cutting costs right now in a down economy, which just means that’s probably cyclical and not permanent. Getting through that, though, when things do start to pick up, the hiring discernment is going to be different. So as we apply with our intern program, that determinant is going to be different. The expectations are actually going to be higher of someone who can use these tools and be uber productive and maybe do two or three things versus one thing, which frankly, I think that’s cool. I think if I can do two or three things inside of a company instead of one thing, I love that. And versus a narrow role and people will thrive that take on, I think that. that approach. So I’m going long on something that you didn’t really ask me, but that back to your point, other risks are things like. For example, on the investment side, when we’re receiving content from a company that’s considering selling their business, or looking for investment in their business, you can totally see where the AI slop is and the crap that was not written or even touched by a human and just let ride through the PowerPoint deck. It just diminishes or hurts the value of what you think of that business when you’re trying to evaluate buying it or not, and that’s not unique to me. see that everywhere. And that also pervades our presentation skills to our own customers. We cannot show up to a customer and then present something that was not thoroughly absorbed as though you wrote it yourself. And you can’t sort of sit there and say, well, hey, I wrote that, so I didn’t memorize that one. You’re dead, right? So that’s a different, it’s just a different kind of discipline, you know?

Stephanie Hogen   00:22:54

Well, and I, in that last example, I think it’s both discipline and surrender, right? Like I’m just like, can I do it? And then it was wrong. So it’s like, hey, that wasn’t me. Like it just sort of absolving yourself.

Allen Debes   00:23:05

All your work, you know, right?

Stephanie Hogen   00:23:08

I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I’m gonna. tease you a little bit, not tease you a little bit. Because we’ve worked together a long time in my PhD in the School of Allen Debes.

Allen Debes   00:23:16

You’re gonna give me a hard time here. You’re allowed, it’s all good.

Stephanie Hogen   00:23:20

You talked a little bit about sort of the invitation that exists in the market for organizations to step up and use both their human capital and AI in the best way. And as a CEO, as you as CEO and me, the Chief Consulting Officer, I also experience pressure, as we all do, from our CEO to say, You have all the tools now. Do it better and do it faster. There’s sort of nothing holding us back anymore. And so is there any guidance or advice that you would give to business leaders or any vulnerability you would want to share that sort of has changed the expectations that you now have as a leader of your team to be able to do those things at that higher level of discipline?

Allen Debes   00:24:09

You know, so one of the things that is generally true about people in my role is that we have an obligation to be a visionary for the business, right? And that when that hat gets worn and it’s very comfortable, which it is for me at this point, the habit for many of us is to oversimplify everything else. And so in an effort for us to keep it simple, and digestible for our customers and our employees in terms of a vision and in terms of an execution path forward for the business. Absolutely, the use of these AI tools, because I’m using it every day for fairly simple tasks, it makes my job go faster and easier. I’m expecting everybody else’s very dialed into that. and is also doing the same thing at the same speed, which causes me to hand wave in the way you just described. And so my advice is to do a little bit of what we’ve done here, which is to actually invest in the tools that are available. Make sure that we- We govern them. Check all the boxes security wise, and don’t expose our clients’ data or personal data. into the large language models, absolutely, which we’ve done, and then really invest in it and make it available for people to use. Honestly, it’s easier for us as a smaller business. We are not a huge business and we don’t have that many employees until we buy more businesses and grow organically. It’s easier, it’s simpler than a huge multi-billion dollar enterprise that’s one of our clients, for example. Absolutely. But putting the power in the hands of people so that we can actually stand behind the request to go simplify your job and make your job go faster, do things more quickly for clients and internally to reduce friction to get work done. We had to make the investment. Otherwise, It’s just hypocritical.

Stephanie Hogen   00:26:24

And I like that you said that because you also, as you’ve shared, have stepped into the journey. I’ve stepped into the journey. Again, I don’t have little friend robots doing all sorts of things for me on my computer. I’ve not reached that level of sophistication yet, but there’s certainly a lot that I’m able to use. And then you mentioned them before, sort of on the opposite end, either interns or early career folks. I think investment means a little bit different. So investment for us is making it available so people can use it, supporting it, and setting up the governance so that it works. For an intern or somebody new in their career, I think it’s investing in the time to do the research, to learn it, to showcase all the ways. Like part of your portfolio and your resume could be, here’s an AI project that I self-taught myself. Show that you’re diving in, show that you’re accepting it, because while it might be a really tough market now, there’s a subset of folks in the market right now, or not in the market right now, in jobs right now that aren’t going to embrace it. And it to your to to anchor back to the the car, like the horse and buggy people were kind of worried and we joked earlier, then they, you know, some of them died of dysentery, but maybe if they get to the hospital faster. We’re in sort of, I think, the valley of that pivot right now. And those that choose to invest are going to be the ones that survive this wave, I believe.

Allen Debes   00:27:50

I think you’re exactly right. It might inspire those same people to go start their own business versus work for a company. Those are the kinds of things you won’t know until you dig in and go exploring the little robotic things you were mentioning that are called agents, Stephanie, they’re agents. Yes, that is where this is going, building agents and workflows to be able to pass work off to your AI coworker, if you will, to get more work done under the thesis that we have. And programming those kinds of workflows and building those kind of workflows in the world that we’re getting into, which is temporary code, where the AI models generate temporary code and the code is gone. That’s a fascinating world to live in, but that is the world we’ll be in, assuming some things. I mean, Assuming, let’s assume that we can find enough water and energy to run all the data centers that are necessary to pull all this off. Let’s assume that our clients, large enterprises, when they invest in this, are gonna be able to find it affordable and manage vendor lock-in, because in some ways, this is just another wave of technology vendors that are gonna seek to get vendor lock-in with enterprises, right? ERP, CRM, you name it, it’s been out there. And so this is another wave of that, arguably. And so as the industry strives to get to that, what Gartner tells us is that $1.8 trillion in revenue to pay for all of the investment being dumped in on the bAllence sheet into these data centers, there’s going to have to be a lot of interest in B2B not just B2C, the consumer, but B2B, and then that leaves the vendor lock-in. So that’s all that has to shake out. We don’t know what that part of it looks like yet. And in the meantime, getting busy and using the tools for your jobs just seems like an obvious thing to do. To.

Stephanie Hogen   00:29:52

Take us down a little bit of a different path, and in the spirit of of bringing us back to gratitude, where do you draw your own line? And I am happy to share mine while you think about it. What I don’t want AI doing for me. I think one of the other risks that we haven’t mentioned yet, there’s this surrender and there’s this needing of discipline. But I think another element is this mental load. So if we’re delegating all of the easiest work we have every day, because our CEO is bugging us to get stuff done faster, if we’re delegating all of this stuff, to AI robot thingies, it’s doing the easiest tasks for us. Creating this place in our brain that everything we have left to do is the hardest thing we need to do. And it creates this low, you know, cognitive load, mentally cognitive load on our brains that we have to harness things. And so for me, every Friday, I set aside some time in the afternoon to just look at my emails, clean them out, and do that. I recognized an agent could do that for me, but it is a thing that allows me to sit back from the work, take a look at the things, get back to the people I need to get back to, organize my list, set myself up for the week. But it’s a thing I’m unwilling at this point to delegate. Do you have thoughts for you?

Allen Debes   00:31:15

Certainly. Yeah, absolutely. I think knowing your own brain and what’s gonna help it make sure it sticks in your brain. What you’re saying there, I think, is if I had an agent do that, that would be too far away from my relationships that I have through e-mail, for example, right? That’s really what you’re saying, is that you want that relationship to be heartfelt and real. And so you’re not going to ask an agent to automatically respond to these emails or create drafts that may just be weird. And so I think that’s really important. Back to the gratitude and relationship extension, right? So you’ve made the argument successfully that Gratitude is relational. And so in order to keep interpersonally active, I wouldn’t want an agent treading there any more than you would. I also think when it comes to writing my own speeches for the all company meetings, I tried out. Honestly, I tried to ask like, Hey, Claude, write me a little speech based on this core value. And it’s just like, I couldn’t get attached to it. I couldn’t make it my own, even by editing it, and simplified it, wrote my own. It just didn’t help me stay attached to the work. I think that’s an important filter for everybody to look through, what is going to help you stay attached to your work, and don’t outsource that to AI. Assuming you want to stay attached to your work, and I think the best employees are going to want to stay attached to their work, they’re going to be hungry, humble, and smart teammates, and they’re going to want to do that. So that’s my best answer, yeah.

Stephanie Hogen   00:33:00

Yeah. So to sort of bring us home, ’cause I know we wanna open the floor for any questions for folks out there. We believe a couple of things. One, that we can use technology for good, not for bad. That in doing so, we can create opportunities of gratitude that are individual to ourselves. in relationship with the customers we do work for and in relationship just with others as a whole. And we believe that we have to examine the risk and do it in a smart way to avoid surrendering our brains to do it all. I had someone recently say to me, Well, I put it in Claude and it didn’t get it right perfectly. And I said, I am so grateful it didn’t because I still have a job because it requires a face. It requires a face to do the work. And so we need to be safe, do things without surrender, have discipline for ourselves, delegate the tasks that make sense. use human judgment and refinement on the things that we need to. And again, those are the things that excite me. And then lastly is not just passing things off of our own, having slop, and then acknowledging where our edges lie, just like anything. ER doctors don’t work 24 by 7. Teachers don’t work 12 months a year. Like we have to recognize that in using and doing AI all day, every day, there’s gonna be a consequence to that too. So it’s doing that in a way that honors, you know, what we’re trying to do for ourselves and what we’re trying to do with customers. So do you have any other closing points for folks as we close this out today?

Allen Debes   00:34:45

I just think we are reorienting to that. Again, what is the next aim? If we agree that these structural changes, right, or if we agree that those three structural changes are the structural changes, and there seems to be a lot of events that says that we’re right about that. Some of it isn’t even our original idea. It’s sourced, right? So if we agree to that, then what is the next aim? If we still believe that tech services and services businesses are going to be around, which I do, we all do, I think, what is the next aim of that? And it has to be, we think, in some ways, creating lasting gratitude for the technology we help our clients create and implement, and have it really be sticky in such a way that not only is the experience better with the consulting firm and our people, that experience is amazing because there’s more time to put into that experience, and the output of that is something that really changes the trajectory of a business or the people in the business who have to do the work every day. Yeah. That’s the new aim. And that is a virtue for good, we think, and it’s a bet we’re placing.

Stephanie Hogen   00:36:00

Yeah. And we talk about this a little bit in our ebook, and we’ll talk about it in upcoming sessions. And you said it a little bit at the beginning, but we recognize this could be something really cheesy. We’re Midwesterners who love our spouses so much, we almost tell them, right? Like it’s this fluffy idea that we would think technology Right. And naturally, you know, folks might have their moment of skepticism, but I think what Allen said kind of brings it back is having like opening your eyes or starting your day with this inherent sense of gratitude, like having that be part of it. And as we are working with our customers in, you know, healthcare or manufacturing that we look for those opportunities to make lasting gratitude possible in what we build and having that just be an aim. Again, Microsoft Teams, we love Microsoft. Microsoft’s great, but I don’t wake up every day and be like, Yay, Teams! I’m so excited to launch it! But I am grateful that it creates an opportunity for me to engage with you 3,000 miles away. I don’t know, I didn’t Google Map it. However far away you are, or have productive meetings, or have Copilot recap the meeting for me, and so it’s just, it’s an invitation It’s a posture and it’s the aim, the aim of where we’re going.

Allen Debes   00:37:23

Right on. Yeah.

Stephanie Hogen   00:37:24

So finish one sentence for me and then I think we can open the floor to questions.

Allen Debes   00:37:28

Sure.

Stephanie Hogen   00:37:31

Lastly, go ahead.

Allen Debes   00:37:33

Oh, no, you’re, oh, you want me, I see.

Stephanie Hogen   00:37:35

I’m gonna do a thing. I’m gonna do a thing.

Allen Debes   00:37:37

Got it. I understand.

Stephanie Hogen   00:37:39

We also interrupt each other, friends. We interrupt each other because we’ve known each other for so long. But lasting gratitude is possible when, dot, dot, dot.

Allen Debes   00:37:52

When we intentionally build that muscle. I.

Stephanie Hogen   00:37:59

Like that. I like that.

Allen Debes   00:38:08

There’s a lot behind that, but yeah, that’s a thing. Choice, choice we can make. Yeah.

Stephanie Hogen   00:38:16

So with that, our moderators, who I don’t have access to see, we would like to open the floor to questions. We’re grateful for the time you spent with us. Thank you. What questions do you all have? We are getting, we are getting a question in the queue.

Allen Debes   00:38:56

I see a, I see a dot dot dot happening there in the lower right hand corner.

Stephanie Hogen   00:39:07

Love the concept and the aim discussed today. How do you apply it to client work? Can you give an example of how it comes through for them? So I’ll give one example, Allen, if you want to think about one as well. So in again, I’ll go back to healthcare because I think it’s just so relatable to all of us. We all have to go to doctors at some point. If we think about gratitude, I gave the example of our pediatrician. I think another example in some of the work that we do is around disaster recovery or isolated recovery environments. What that means is sometimes technology is not working at a hospital. Maybe there’s a tornado that went through the area or something happened and they had to take a system down. They had to take Epic down or they had to take something in their network down. Technology blips in healthcare have actual life or death consequences. So if you’re bringing somebody who was just in a car accident to a hospital and their ER is shut down ’cause their technology doesn’t work and you can’t communicate that to the police or the paramedics or to the ER staff that that’s happening, there are dire consequences. So I think an example of how gratitude comes through in the work is in creating scenarios where our technology or the things that we build creates an opportunity for ERs to have clear communication with the field so that patients get to the right place is an opportunity of where that shows up. And so it might not seem really fun to say, we have this environment sitting over here in Azure and we’re ready to, you know, it’s like a news feed, you know, cut over there, something went wrong. But it is very, very important to the work of that hospital. that staff and the people who are impacted by something like that happening. Can you think of any kind of other example, Allen?

Allen Debes   00:40:58

So I think when it comes to… the interaction with the client during discovery phases or again, or even in sprints, in building something for our clients, whatever that happens to be, or implementing a brand new ERP system, which we can do for our clients. I think that interaction is where the aim can really come through with our client. Meaning, for example, if we’re using these AI tools to help us coalesce all the input we’re getting from discovery phase work or requirements gathering and all that, and coalescing it differently and faster than we’re ever able to before, we’re able to use our brains differently, I think, really get in there and soak in that information that AI has helped us coalesce. and not make the client repeat themselves as much, for example. Like if a client just doesn’t have to repeat themselves or when the team changes or a team member changes or we bring in a new team member, if we really use these tools intelligently and the people lock into that information differently than they have before and because they have more time to, to your point about the doctor having more time, Then the client doesn’t have to repeat themselves, and that’s a delighted experience. The client’s like, yay, I didn’t actually have to repeat myself four times before this got done. That’s an incremental example where we can really structurally change the experience that our clients have with us.

Stephanie Hogen   00:42:34

Yeah, I think another cool example of something that we’ve done that’s very client specific is one of our customers works with folks that have prosthetic limbs.

Allen Debes   00:42:47

Right.

Stephanie Hogen   00:42:47

And so you enjoy golf. Imagine if you were missing a leg or part of your leg and you were on the golf course and you have your Apple Watch on and you said, you know, I’m golfing. Here’s the circumstance. And you could plug all of that information into your watch and it made your leg do the thing. Right. Your other human leg does. You are deeply grateful that technology exists so that your golf game didn’t change when you were impacted by a loss of limb. And so one of our teams worked with this really cool customer. They were able to create the interface of that app, the interactions between the prosthetic limb and what happens on the user interface. And so I think those are some of the things like. out in the world actually changing people’s lives and creating grateful experiences.

Allen Debes   00:43:37

For sure.

Stephanie Hogen   00:43:39

Another question, how do you design experiences that sustain gratitude even after a client closes the app or leaves the platform? I think the example I just gave is a really good example of that. I think, again, even in the case of our pediatrician, I think that that’s another great example.

Allen Debes   00:44:00

No, I think it’s a good question. So if you think about the future of interacting with an ERP platform, for example, if you’re a regular employer manager instead of mid-market manufacturing company, and you’re sort of saddled with using an ERP system on a daily basis, I think With the acceleration of implementing ERP systems and having AI native ERP systems, what that will do is allow for our implementation teams to spend more time on additional experiences, either on the mobile, on the phone, for their work phone, or on the desktop app that really leaves, weirdly, the AP clerk super happy to have that ERP system versus annoyed by all the fields or whatever. There’s real work that can be put in to automatically deal with doing some of the more mundane work with an agent or AI coworker to create more capacity for that AP clerk, not to get outsourced, but to do more value-add work and expand their career. That is a source of gratitude, I think. Pick a role in a mid-market manufacturer, and there’s that huge opportunity opportunity for us as consultants to focus on that experience all the way to the to the most basic of work and worker that is that that it’s just it’s it will change the way that work gets done and and we believe it’ll do so in a way that makes them really happy that they have the AI tools available to them.

Stephanie Hogen   00:45:42

I think more generically, I love that example, more generically and holistically, I think as you mentioned, as consultants, as designers, as practitioners, we have an opportunity to tap into that idea with customers now. So what would make your, what do you think would make your customer deeply grateful? And so it’s not to use your example, turn on ERP for me. That’s not the thing that’s going to make them happy. What’s going to make them happy is that they have greater employee satisfaction, that there’s less days in between when client invoicing happens and when they get paid. There’s all of those things that are gonna have a ripple effect if customers are thinking about ways they can create those lasting experiences in their organization.

Allen Debes   00:46:26

That’s right.

Stephanie Hogen   00:46:27

Yeah, it’s what carries into their evening. So in the case of our pediatrician, she can now have dinner with her husband on Sunday, which seems like a luxury, like not a luxury for most of us, but that’s luxury now for her.

Allen Debes   00:46:42

And so now she’ll take that, that’s the new expectation. By the way, that becomes the new expectation. And that’s happened throughout human history, you know? Yes.

Stephanie Hogen   00:46:50

Correct. Like if Amazon didn’t tell me where my stuff was, I would be angry. They can’t take that away.

Allen Debes   00:46:55

You can’t do takeaways, can’t go backwards. Exactly.

Stephanie Hogen   00:47:00

Exactly. So did you see Midjourney announced Midjourney Medical and have now applied their tech to full body ultrasonic CT imaging? No radiation, no magnets. Thoughts on the peer innovation on top of AI progress and work? I love this question. It’s not one that I’ve thought about super deeply. However, a gentleman on my team, his mother. recently passed away this winter, and she was in and out of hospital experiences. And he came to me with this really interesting idea that we want to turn into a product offering for some of our customers. But he said, As I sat there with my mom, she’s ailing, she’s ill. I saw this slew of people come in and out of the room, and they have to scan the badge, do the thing, figure out where they were in the journey. And he had shared with me that her diagnosis is something that could have been caught sooner. If they were to use imaging, if they were to find things sooner, it’s something that could have prevented her, possibly could have prevented her death along the journey. And so we do have teams of experts who are thinking about that type of innovation. So how could we take AI in an environment that’s highly scrutinized and regulated and use that to actually create better patient outcomes for individuals? You know, I think it’s, it’s, It’s deeply nuanced. It’s very personal and dependent on sort of if your customer base is clinicians or patients or what have you. But I think there’s great innovation to be had. Again, in the spirit of using technology for good.

Allen Debes   00:48:37

Totally. Great answer. I hadn’t heard of it, hadn’t known about this fact until now. You’re right, it’s a great question. I think that this is why I said much earlier in this conversation, it’s going to lead to more startups and businesses with new ideas than any time, I think, in human history, and I believe, fact check me on this, somebody, I believe there’s good evidence that that’s already happening. And this is a great example. This is probably an existing company that did this, so it didn’t create maybe a new company, but the pace of innovation is changing so fast. That’s why in our industry, we actually don’t want to be in the horse or the car business, we want to be in the transportation business. We have to be in the transportation level thinking now to be able to keep up with helping our clients. Similarly here, innovation is going to prevail, especially in smaller businesses that don’t have to get out of their own way. Larger companies do struggle with all of the internal challenges that we’re aware of in large companies, and we’re here to help with that, of course, but startups don’t have any history or baggage and they can do things like this and very, very disruptive. to the longstanding CT scan machine builders of old that have huge businesses that are now have to reconsider and try to get out of their own way to compete with this startup. It’s structural.

Stephanie Hogen   00:50:11

Well, this opportunity, and to your point, just in general, we don’t have a time to get into my healthcare journey. But healthcare is gonna become entrepreneurial, I believe. People are gonna have to find, people are feeling that they have to take that into their own hands. And as they gain more knowledge faster than they’ve ever gained it before, as they understand their body, as more research is available, people are gonna start to pass like… It’s WebMD on steroids. People are able to ask questions. They’re able to put things in like, I have a this and a that and a that. And Claude could try to give you some kind of diagnosis. I think that if companies don’t sort of accept that invitation, like you said, other companies are going to swoop in and be fine.

Allen Debes   00:50:58

Right. Just going to get beat on a different level. So in the context of… my context of interacting with clients, providing value, I think gratitude, counterparts, listening and empathy. Yes, that’s a great point. Agreed. Totally. It’s a great point. Love that. Exactly right. Well, Stephanie, great job today. Pleasure to work with you on this. And the next ones we’re going to do, we’re going to do some more of these, I think. And go ahead. Oh, please. Yeah.

Stephanie Hogen   00:51:28

Our next, our next episode will happen in about a month. We’re going to be meeting with Alpaca. They are in the education industry, and we’re going to talk about some really interesting things that they’re doing that is creating gratitude in the teaching industry that is showing up as happier staff, happier administration, and happier students. So really excited to have them. With that, that concludes, unless there is another question that sneaks in in the next four minutes, but that concludes the podcast for today with gratitude from 10,000 feet. So thank you, everybody, and have a great afternoon. Take care.

Allen Debes   00:52:09

Thank you. Bye.