AICSS

AI and Its Implications for Team Leaders (AI + Customer Success Summit Session)

Bex Sekar
  -  
August 9, 2023
  -  
2 mins

AI and Its Implications for Team Leaders: The Job Needs to Change and You Do Too

AI is already having a significant impact in the way businesses of all sizes and in all sectors operate. Leaders (coaches) need to understand that their jobs must quickly evolve and the way they guide their teams forward will require them to call upon skills they either don’t possess or that they have until now rarely used. The people they lead need to see AI as a technology that can improve the products, services, and experience the company delivers to customers. Helping them make that mental connection between AI and improvements that customers feel, and the team’s vital role in ensuring that outcome is realized, is the job of the leader. That’s the premise of this session and attendees will come away from it with a framework and a few actionable steps for more effectively guiding their teams into the new AI-infused business landscape.

Speaker

Peter Armaly - Vice President of Customer Success at ESG

LinkedIn

Peter Armaly is the Vice President of Customer Success at ESG, the Customer Success as a Service® company. Through his writing and speaking engagements and his many years of experience as a practitioner and as a leader, Peter has become very well-known in the Customer Success industry for his visionary and substantive thought leadership. He previously held senior roles in both Customer Success and Marketing at Oracle, BMC Software, and Eloqua, and was the first Vice President of Customer Success Research at Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA). In his role at ESG, Peter enables Customer Success leaders to understand what it takes to transform their practices to meet the ever-evolving needs of modern customers in the subscription economy. In addition to his role as a client-facing executive at ESG, Peter serves as an advisor and board member for several Customer Success organizations, and has been honored with numerous industry awards, including being named a Top 25 Customer Success Influencer in both 2020 and 2021.

Peter lives in the heart of Toronto, Ontario with his wife, where they enjoy the restaurants, culture, and all the beauty the city has to offer.

Watch AI and Its Implications for Team Leaders: The Job Needs to Change and You Do Too

‍Transcript

This transcript was created by AI. If you see any mistakes, please let us know at marketing@matik.io.

Matik MC: Great. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Matik AI and customer success summit. You are currently watching AI and it's implications for team leaders. The job needs to change and you do too. I'm very excited to introduce our speaker. And as I introduce him, I'm going to have an answer our ice breaker question. What would you use AI to automate in your life outside of work? So leading today's, session is Peter Armaly, vice president of customer success at ESG.

Peter Armaly: I answer the question now.

Matik MC: Yes, please.

Peter Armaly: Thanks, Bex. Hi, everybody. I know not to be a bit of a downer but I thought of this and my dog has a condition at the moment where he has seizures and lots of seizures. And so we've got him under control, but the medication causes him to urinate a lot. So we've put him in diapers and it seems I'm always five minutes late to take them outside. So I would love it if AI could figure out and give me an indication before he PS his diaper that he's about to go. And then I could run him outside. So.

Matik MC: Sorry to hear about your dog, Peter, but I feel like all dog owners would probably benefit from that as well before we get started. Just a reminder to everyone. If you have any questions, please use the Q and a functionality. It can be found in the Zoom controls bar. But yeah, I'll hand it off to you Peter.

Peter Armaly: Thank you. Be again. Hello, everybody. I'm really happy to be here and I wanna thank Matik for organizing this summit. I think it's a wonderful way to introduce everybody to explore a bit more about how AI is going to affect and maybe enhance customer success. So the topic I wanna talk about is really around leadership. But even though I'm talking about leadership, it's appropriate for everybody to kinda pay attention because it will apply. Some of the themes will be very familiar to individual contributors as well. So… wait, I got to share my screen. Do… I have to share my screen?

Matik MC: Jay, do you mind stopping your screen share?

Peter Armaly: Yeah. Here we go.

Peter Armaly: There we go. Okay. So just really quickly about me, I'm not gonna go through this line by line. Everyone's going to get the presentation afterwards but I've got a long history in enterprise software and as well, you know, the take away from this is that I've been in customer success in a formal capacity since 2008. Prior to that. I was in sales organization as a solutions engineering management for a long time. Work my way up from individual contributor all the way to VP over in the last 25 years, a variety of companies and a variety of industries during the last 20 years. I've been consulting with a lot of different companies and a wide array of industries. And, and during that time, I just became confident that I had a voice. And so I just started writing a lot of papers, deep technical white papers, but also blogs and so just became a voice out there that people wanted to hear. And so I got it. I always get invited, often get invited to speak at conferences and podcast and webinars. And I'm really happy to do that. And finally, I am really proud to be the content creator and host for esg's monthly customer success unlocked webinar series ones very quickly. Es, is a consulting and advisory firm for customer success. We have all the abilities and capabilities necessary to build and operationalize customer success practices. We work with leaders, to help them strategize and put in place what they want to do to really fulfill their objectives. Some you see on the screen, a bunch of logos. These are passed in present companies that we've worked with. So let's get going. I only have 30 minutes to talk to you about a pretty deep topic. And I've got a lot of content but feel free as Beck said to put questions into the chat and then we can deal with them in the last 10 to 50 10 minutes. So I, I'd like to start this with talking about what are the imperative for business in the age of AI? And this is Peter, Emily's kind of view after reading a lot talking a lot, attending a lot of seminars and webinars in the industry around AI. So first thing, I think the, customers, businesses need to realize that every workflow in a company should be eligible for review and consideration in the age of AI, they should finally admit. And I say finally because a lot of companies pay lip service to the customer experience that's my observation. And I believe AI is gonna change that paradigm. And they will have to finally admit that the customer experience is the new fuel and that the old engines need to change within, their business models. In the age of AI, we should see a real further advancement of the democratization of data. And I believe leaders would be foolish to just look at certain kinds of people or areas for ideas. They should really be looking everywhere for ideas for how to improve their business including the employee base. Governance is back and fashion. And I say that because I was kinda fell to the wayside or retreated into the bushes over the last 10 years as cloud took over and they found themselves kind of without the kind of a prominent stage that they had up until like 2010. Or so. But, I believe that's gonna change and C, IO will kinda be welcome back to the stage and you've seen a strategic kind of voice in the conversation and they will be either leading or be really integral to the whole idea of governance. And that's going to be necessary in businesses around AI. There will be no excuses for the lack of a 360 degree view of a customer. AI is gonna change that it's gonna force a change there. We've people talk about it company say they can do it. We've not seen it. And so, I think that's going to change… they'll be clear and more transparent performance management of the employee base. And that should be a welcome thing. I think AI will improve the fairness and objectivity of performance management for the entire employee base. Companies or businesses need to understand that AI is simply the way it's a tool. It's a technology, but it's not, the destination prediction is the destination… businesses need to move assertively into the future of seamless horizontal business. And what I'm implying there and you can probably read between the lines is that for so long we've bemoaned silos within companies. I believe AI is going to be a catalyst to change this and kind of a road, those walls of silos, and finally investors will reward companies that accelerate themselves based on a use cases. We're seeing glimpses of that already in the marketplace where investors are rewarding companies that say they can do AI think that's a lot of like initial flash in the Pan, but we will see pretty quickly the companies that are good at it actually rise and they'll be rewarded more handsome Ly, going forward… Peter, Emily's prediction in 50 years. It'll be difficult imagining a time before artificial intelligence. If you don't believe me try and to imagine the time before electricity or before the printing press. I'm not being melodramatic here. I think it's true that AI will be a revolutionary change in our world and it'll be really interesting. I'm not going to be around in 50 years, many of you won't but it'll be fascinating to see in 2,072. If people can imagine what business is like before I really took root. Another prediction, five years, customer success will not be a formal business function. If it's leaders fail to embrace the power of AI. In my final prediction. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna do this whole presentation of predictions. In 15 years of companies successfully embrace AI. There will be only niche formal business organizations called sales and customer success. I think we're going to see the customers take over even more than they are today, the process of discovering what they want, learning what they want, teaching them what they want, what they want themselves, and then buying it. And it should be products will be better. The AI will improve a lot of the process that businesses have in place for serving the marketplace. But there will always be, I think there will always be a need for special attention. And that's why I say there will be niche organizations. So let's start with some honesty around customer success. We're all friends here, right? We've been in this community a long time. In one thing I see on LinkedIn, a lot of people are very honest about the shortcomings, and the tribulations about customer success. So customer success is struggle to achieve its mission to make an impact across large percentage of the typical customer base. Usually, it's only a small fraction of the customer base that's being impacted by customer success. They struggle to defend how it's processes and it's culture, place the customer at the center and why it should matter to the entire company. It's struggled to become a peer organization to sales. That's absolutely true. It's struggled to stand on its own. We see that a lot of like the ownership who owns customer success. In terms of the senior leadership team. It struggled to understand that it's value is two dimensional. I think too much of the conversation is all about what is customer success doing for the customers. Now, this might sound weird but I believe it's almost more important what customer success can do for its own company by leveraging customer data and customer, what customers behavior is, and they can teach the rest of the company, how to provide better products and services. That's what I mean by two dimensional. Customer success has struggled to prove empirically. Over time that the work it does in a programmatic way, it makes a difference to customers and to the company. I see this an awful lot. I see only a small percentage of companies actually getting good at this, proving empirically over time that the work they do matters. And this leads to the next one, they struggle to build a strong case for long term investment. Without that Proof. It's really hard to build a case and to present it to the board or at least the senior leadership team to ask for more investment… struggle to impact per organizations and help them improve the work they do, which ties into that two dimensional piece I was talking about. But a lot of that stuff isn't solely the fault of customer success. Customer success is in many cases been a puppet, of egos of changing whims of leadership senior leadership. And that's why we see a lot of a lot of kind of up and Downs within the customer success profession. And especially recently, there's been a lot of as we know in the last year or two, a lot of layoffs, a lot of risks, a lot of organizations completely dis, banded because a lot of, the responsibilities are the control of customer success. And it partly goes back to the very origin of what it is. So there's lots of definitions of customer success. And, and these are all good definitions I have on the screen here really good of August bodies of people who've said things what customer success is or should be. And I wanna just point out, in the middle of the screen is the graphic. This is how I see customer success as being in the middle of all the other organizations and the customers at the middle of customer success around it. All these other organizations need to kind of feed into this. And the, all these definitions are a little too loose though. And I think that sets up opportunities for these other organizations to define for themselves what customer success is. And that's when we find customer success treading water, trying to hit some, get some traction. It's because other organizations are defining customer success for themselves. There's an individual named Neil Shota who's a CEO of a kind of cognitive science company. And, and he put out this on the left the benefits of AI and business, increased efficiency and enhance productivity. You've probably seen these improve customer experience, better decision making, advanced fraud detection. This guy is not a lightweight. He's been, he's got 30 years of expertise with large companies like IBM developing these systems. And this is what he AI benefiting in business on, right? Is my interpretation of how that would apply in the customer success. So increase speed of service. I believe these are gonna come true. Improved accuracy of service, increase predictability and reliability forecasting churn in revenue, measurably improve customer experience, improved ability for orchestrating service across organizations, improved ability to attribute effort to corporate results. What I mean by that, we've always struggled in customer success to prove that the work we're doing is impacting the big rocks the KPI'S that the company is chasing. I think I will help us there. And finally it'll improve staff more, believe it or not. I think because even though people are always talking about AI is going to create a lot of layoffs and redundancies. I think there will be that. But I think the jobs that remain and the people that remain will be super engaged in the work they do because it will be more interesting. But none of that will come true. If leaders can't grasp the opportunity, they have to ask themselves. Two questions in my mind, whatever I need to do to optimize the power of AI in pursuit of our teams mission. And how can I help my team embrace AI with positivity and without fear? So, how are you going to lead into the future? If you're a leader? Basic truth of leading in the age of AI, AI is an accelerate. The key to AI success for humans is to be on the leading edge, leading instructional edge. The job of a leader is not to preserve the jobs or the roles within the organization. The job is to produce value for the company. This is highly critical thing to always remember as a leader. Your job is to produce value for the company. Upscaling and continuous learning are forever. This has been true for a while but it's going to be even more true. Going forward, I will accentuate communications is the highest priority skill for leaders. I don't know if that sounds kinda counter intuitive with generate of AI always being touted as a way to kinda shorten the path to creating content. I think, the true skill, the great skill will be leaders and even individual contributors can figure out how to be seen as ones providing the interpretation, being able to kind of communicate in a human way. The stuff that AI provides for you. Individual personality is more important and valuable than conformity. AI will create a ton of opportunity and a ton of wealth in our world. But it will also create a ton of blandness. I think. And I believe that your individual personality will be highly critical going forward in your success. So, what do we want from employees in the age of AI? I think I'm creating a picture for you a lot of attention and I think the employees, what we want from them in this age of AI is faster more full Ly formed work. What I mean by fully formed is, you know, AI will be a fantastic tool and a mechanism for providing quick and quicker answers and quicker insights. There will be fewer excuses for the work being less than top notch. And so I think as leaders, they're going to become a day where we'll expect the work produce will be really good high quality stuff. The first or second time around… we want workers to be employees being highly engaged, in their work collaboration with each other. This is key. I believe in the, I, that there will be more, it'll be more important for people to be talking with each other and working with each other and sharing with each other to really truly realize the power of a, we like a great morale. This is true for the last 1,000 years, right? Great moral climate of trust and support is by enlarging businesses. We've been okay at that. Not great. So I think what I'm getting at is AI will provide a lot more transparency. I believe to allow employees to feel like they're playing a fair game with their employer… and we'd like responsiveness to AI will create more immediacy and we want employees to understand that AI is gonna dictate speed and you have to kinda play that game and open this to feedback. This is true too, one of those things that's been around for a 1,000 years, but we're equipping CS leaders enough. Let's ask ChatGPT. So I asked ChatGPT, give me job responsibilities for a manager of customer success managers. This is what it came back with pretty impressive. I didn't touch this. I didn't edit this. This is what it came back with. I thought this is not bad. I wish I had this when I was creating job profiles and job specs back a few years ago. But what I want to show here is where what I've highlighted as I think these are immediate areas in, as a manager of customer success that would will be impacted by AI in the next year, two years, three years, we'll see a lot of improvement in the way customer success is affected by AI. And these areas that I've circled… I'm just watching the time so prominent CS skills in the age of AI business is what I'm talking about here is both for leaders and individual contributors, business process fluent. This is something we've been talking about in customer success for years, it's going to be even more important going forward and I don't mean to, you know, turn up the heat on everybody. But I think this is just reality. AI is going to accelerate… the information coming at you. It's going to shorten the cycle between discovery, and results. And you need to be able to figure out what it all means for your customers and what it all means for your own company. There needs to be a digital first approach. For finally, I mean we've been talking about digital for a long time and we see great examples of people employing digital first approaches. But I think every company needs to adopt this like immediately clever polished communications, curious and inquisitive process driven collaborative open, respectful talking about human characteristics. And these are things that will set you apart in the age of AI. We don't want blandness. I will do that on its own, but we want humans to take care of the interesting part of the equation. I'm not gonna go through this. This is something I grabbed it'll be in the source notes, this is just a table of classic archetype, leaders in the business world, authoritarian democratic and less fair. None of these characters will work in the age of AI. AI is gonna make these pure types of individuals struggle and probably go obsolete. We need more modern leaders in AI. We need kind of a blend of researcher organizer, accountant meeting comfortable holding people and processes accountable. I rather think I created this phrase mesh communicator. What I mean by that is someone is really comfortable communicating internally and externally leading in through communications connector of people with ideas, not people who have ideas but people with ideas. So ideas come up and that's where the discovery comes in. You want to be able to connect people to this new idea. You feel like, championing, confident investigative storytelling and a pitch person. And what I mean by pitch person is in the age of a, especially when I talk, I'm talking about customer success leadership here. We need customer success leaders to really be local in and providing inform formation to the other organizations to share the experience of working with customers, and what impact the practice is having on the customer base and be able to kind of tell it in an interesting way and in a way that's accurate and fulsome, it's gonna make the job of leadership more challenging as, and I just put a couple of graphs up here. On the top left is a chart from churn zero leadership study from last year. Just meant to illustrate all the different kinds of tech that customer success is employing is a typical mix and on the bottom is the number of or the amount of data sources that businesses have to deal with all the time. So AI is gonna make that even more complicated. But we could also see AI driving more consolidation, of tech too. So it should be interesting to watch either case. I think CS leaders job is going to be very challenging, be more there be more scrutiny because there will be an expectation over time that I will be more providing more accurate information and there will be an interest I think from high levels to at the business, of things like customer success and sales to really prove the effort on the pace of business and of change will increase. We already think changes happening fast. It's gonna accelerate. And there will be no information overload that's an expression. We've become comfortable with. It's. Gonna give me information. It's not going to be overload. It'll just be there pressure from the executive leadership team and from investors will intensify. I realize I'm painting a pretty bleak picture or a challenging picture, but I think it's just true that's going to happen. So what it means is leaders need to evolve into that new realm. That new state of being in the age of a, how do you lead an AI? Well, you have to understand that the real governance architectures of the past will actually time innovation. There'd. Be too much bureaucracy and AI will be best leveraged by more kind of open conversation and dialogue and testing closed large language models might inhibit progress towards achieving a potential. So, I know a lot of companies are dabbling and trying out their own kind of LMS and that's good people are experimenting but I would just kind of caution people to not be too close about those things because it's still early days. This next thing came from MIT salon, selection of the known. And what it means, is, this quote here is that you have to understand if you're actually going to be moving your business into this world of a, are you just kind of you're just creating the old business? And is that smart or does the old business threaten the new business? So you actually have to go through an examination of your business. And that's kinda going back to what I was saying at the busy at the beginning is that every process should be under review and consideration when in the world of too much blue sky can threaten progress, meaning that it's fine. You need to kinda brainstorm and think about things a lot, get your team involved, but it has to be more than that it actually has to move, have to find out what you need to work on, and do it and execute. And the, another risk of leaders don't evolve is the gradual detachment of the team from business relevance, meaning that the team won't evolve. And eventually there won't be a need for the team because something else will have replaced it. What are the rewards of CS, leadership evolution? If the leaders evolve, they'll be faster speed to market or customer consumer friendly products and services, and prove speed and accuracy of service, better targeted products, more precise marketing to it'll. Just be a better place to work. The leaders job is to understand the risks and rewards and guide codes team. Accordingly… Mckinsey come up with a framework that I kinda like and this is why I'm gonna kinda close this presentation with talking about it. So they say the business leaders need to be mindful of what they call the forces coding customer engagement and creating more personalized interaction, creative content generation and content synthesis. I'll talk a bit more about these things. But I like this quote at the bottom, generative Ai is becoming the virtual knowledge worker with the ability to connect different data points, summarize and synthesize insights in seconds, allowing us to focus on more high value, add a task. Now, this is something we should all take a pause and look at. This is actually the heart of the value proposition for customer successes, connecting the different data points, summarizing and synthesizing insights in seconds and allowing us to focus on more high value add tests too often to a success. We bemoan, we don't have time because we're searching for information. We're putting together information. Hey, I'm, gonna take care of that. So, ideally you should be able to focus on those high value things. You've always said you could never do. So, this is the promise of AI for customer success. How do you do that? You need to start examining the team, what the work the team does right now? And I really urge everyone to kind of involve the team in, this, not just for moral reasons but actually for intelligence reasons, you probably have smart people on your team. You'd probably have no idea how smart they are until you get them in the room, you talk about AI and the processes that they're running, the experts in the processes that they're running, and they should be having a voice into how improvements could be made. And then you prioritize the list of activities and tasks, what's the outcome of each task, who benefits from it, ask these questions, what's the customer value in each task. If there's no customer. If you can identify the customer value in a task even abstractly, then you should probably question whether the task is necessary. If this works, CS should be doing meaning or other organizations in the company doing something similar. Maybe they should be doing that task instead of you, what the group needs to be involved in our delivery of the outcome, and for each of these tasks, keep fix, replace or eliminate, be very brutal with this. This is my recommendation for leaders of the work you do. And then just focus on the three. This is a framework that I think will really work customer engagement, creating more personalized interaction. It's a lot of like buzz language these days, but it's really important. And what it means is that to do that, you have to get really serious about the customer journey. You have to get serious finally about data orchestration and data governance. I should help you there and get serious about doing all of this in concert with marketing and product who are trying to do something similar to your products. And, and again, I'm speaking to leaders here rise above parochial concerns about customer success. Sometimes it makes more sense for the business to surrender or relinquish responsibility for something if it makes more sense for another organization to do that. Number two create content generation, get serious about engineering prompts that are based on themes, meaning the themes should tie into a strategy. So don't just have prompts just to willingly trying to get an answer for something. Make sure that the themes that prompts map to some sort of a strategy for your organization in the company. Get serious about educating customer success creators about the three. I call the three legged stool a brand tone, corporate goals, and knowing the audience and finally content synthesis, get serious about value creation for the customer and, you know, and that's maybe just motherhood and apple pie. But I think it's important to point out that when you create your synthesizing content, make sure that what you're creating, you truly believe is valuable for the customer when they read it when they see it. And they, when they, something pops up on their screen, it has to be something that they value. I get serious about spreading the word throughout the company. I talked a little bit about that, but the content synthesis will be the piece that will allow you to turn around and share with the rest of the company. You know, kind of a way to evangelize the good work that, your organization is doing and, you know, this measurement thing is something we harp on a lot, and it's important. It's boring. I know it's boring but it has to be done, it's the only way to move from abstract to real. And it's the only way you're gonna approve anything to a CFO in a CEO is through measurement a, report and plug it all back into the LM. Make sure that the LMS always learning from the experience you're doing having with customers. And I'm going to kinda close with a quote, Clayton Christianson was he passed away a few years ago, but he was a very famous or business school professor and he said you may hate gravity but gravity doesn't care. You can probably understand what I'm saying here is that AIs here. We could probably be, choose to be afraid of it. I choose to be opportunistic about it. I choose to be excited about the possibilities and I trust that we'll get there. We'll all get there including governments. And finally, I just want to show, I just didn't put this presentation off the top of my head. I did a lot of research. I do a lot of reading and these are some of the books I recommend. These are all links. When you get this presentation, you can just click on them. These are books that I've read that some of them have helped me understand how business should be responding and reacting to artificial intelligence, and that's it.

Matik MC: Awesome. Thank you so much Peter. We're now going to open it up to Q and a. So just a friendly reminder if you have any questions, go ahead into the Zoom control bar and you'll see a Q and a button, click it and drop those questions in there. So to kick us off, Peter, how do I help team members who are resistant to AI, get comfortable with it?

Peter Armaly: Yeah, I think the best way to do that is to not be peachy and not put on your teachers hat, but actually direct them to external sources of information that this is probably your responsibility as a leader to find out those sources where someone's put together kind of good kind of class or even just an essay or article talking about. I think that's a good way to kind of help people understand from the beginnings and get more comfortable with it. I think the leader does themselves a disservice if they start dictating too much on these kind of new technologies because everyone knows even the leader is not an expert. And so to portray yourself as one we'd probably be compromising your kind of like position a little bit.

Matik MC: Next question, what are some of the potential challenges we should be aware of when implementing AI especially cross functionally?

Peter Armaly: Well, I think conflict, you know, redundancies in terms of everyone's doing the same thing. This is why I mentioned governance. I think that it's going to be become super important to have like some sort of governance in place around making sure that productivity doesn't take a huge hit. I mentioned this on LinkedIn today. In a conversation that I think it's already happening. It's great that people are experimenting. I'd like to see it. I'd like to see innovation kind of bubble up but it's probably already feeling I hit in companies around people spending a little bit too much time doing that. And I think there needs to be some sort of a framework so that not just customer success but marketing and sales, and product are, if they're working on leveraging AI in the interest of eventually kind of serving the customer through brought a better product and services, then they need to talk to each other and figure out, okay if someone's gonna work on this, then can we have some input into that? And, here's our point of view that you might want to influence AI to move in this direction. Here's. Why. So I think there's lots of opportunity for us for conversations between organizations. AI will probably enhance that.

Matik MC: You touched on this throughout your presentation, but how do you see AI impacting the makeup of the CS team and job creation in general?

Peter Armaly: Yeah. I think in the short term, they probably won't be much of an impact. I can't see leaders being that courageous at this time to say, well, I'm gonna just go with AI I'm gonna eliminate 80 percent of my team. I think that'll be kinda stupid. I think we're gonna see over time though probably a reduction, in customer success numbers. But I think we'll see a shifting, of the type of personality or person in the roles to be a little bit more. Let's use the word sent perfect to be more operational operation of mind. That's why I'm excited about CS ops. I think CS ops is a perfect area to start exploiting and leveraging a. I and I think there will be a growth in those roles and probably a reduction, in, the numbers of CSM that are dealing with a portfolio of customers. I think because AI is going to accelerate digital customer success really greatly, and quickly that inevitably we'll see the numbers of customer success managers probably reduced. But again, I don't wanna raise alarm bells. I think because the other roles that people can move into?

Matik MC: From a tactical perspective, how can I help my team up level their AI skills, things I can potentially start doing in the next few months?

Peter Armaly: Well, I would, I'm a leader, I would just kind of research myself and find either free or low cost kind of training that can be done in an interesting way, and, in bite size kind of portions because it can get pretty intimidating, I think and you have to understand that a, you don't have to understand AI to the extent that a cognitive scientists needs to understand. I think you need to understand AI and in terms of how it can be helpful in business. And, and so I would, as a leader, I would take it upon myself to do some discovery and just come up with some training that I would want my team to take. And unless your company is really already an AI company, you'll probably have to go outside the company to find that. But there might be if you're one of those companies and they probably people and I've done this at other companies for other reasons. I, I've tapped into engineering and had them come and speak to customer success about products and stuff because I want them to learn a little bit deeper about the reasons why the products are designed a certain way. And it's the same principle for AI, I think.

Matik MC: So, this is a three part question. Looking at your tech stack diagram in your presentation that's a lot to digest. I imagine the same for many companies. How can we use our current text stack to determine where AI should supplement? Leaders should probably look at this. Do you agree also what are your favorite AI tools for that customer predictability?

Peter Armaly: Well, I know Madeline she's asked that question. So that one, I'm not gonna answer that last one because I don't wanna choose any winners and losers and stuff at this point. But I mean, I do have some ideas on that last question, our own favorite I tools, but, you know, how can we use our current text stack to determine where I should supplement? I think that this text stack is a perfect kind of way to start and look at, do some investigative work, figure out and get other people to do it. Not just the leader and ask people to explore a little bit. What in that text stack? How are each one evolving? How are each of those tools evolving? Are they themselves becoming a, you know, tools or at least influenced tools? And does that fit with your strategy of how you wanna use a tech stack going forward? So, I think the text stack is a great way to start looking at that kind of a whole exam examination exercise, and work with the team because they're the ones again who are using it more than leader is, and they, the ones probably have ideas on how things can be made faster and more efficiently. I mean, everyone has an opinion about excel for example. So we could say the same thing for all the customer success platforms. And why wouldn't we want to start to, you know, accumulating these ideas and writing them down and sorting them, and figuring out, okay, let's support those companies and tell them, you know, you need to kinda change this because we need this capability and we know I can probably do it. And I think that was be a great way for the team to co here around a purpose and the leader can be demonstrating their ability to kinda that mesh communication they talked about externally and influence the direction of some of these companies that I think, these companies feel that they're moving in the right direction, but I bet you they wouldn't mind getting some input from some customers too.

Matik MC: And I think we have time for one more question. How can AI be used to get ahead from a CS perspective?

Peter Armaly: You sort of pause there a little bit. Can you?

Matik MC: Yes. How can AI be used to get ahead of competitors from a CS perspective?

Peter Armaly: Yeah. So I think that boils down to this is interesting because I think it boils down to the intelligence and the business astuteness of the leaders and even the individual contributors. I don't mean to ignore that piece, but I think someone needs to say, you know, I bet sure we could be better at this if we had these certain answers to these questions and why not leverage AI, to prompt it to provide you with some information that is otherwise gonna take you two months to investigate and find it'll. Probably come back with at least an opinion that you can kind of on your own in seconds. So that's how I would see if you understand how your competitors are doing their work in the, in their customers and everyone kind of if you're competing outside the company, you probably have an idea. And so, why wouldn't you try to kind of figure out well, how can we enhance what we think is our value proposition by getting AI to help us by suggesting some improvements? And, and that's how I would kinda leverage AI, by co opting it as a partner in this exercise by, you know, saying, okay, we have ideas but I think you have ideas that are faster than, and two answers and then we can do so.

Matik MC: Thank you so much Peter, with that, we are at the end of our session, just a reminder all this, the recording for this session as well as all other sessions will be available in our resource harp. All attendees will be notified when that hub is live. So thank you to our wonderful speaker for joining us today and thank you to everyone else for attending.

Peter Armaly: Thanks back. Thanks everybody.

 

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AI and Its Implications for Team Leaders: The Job Needs to Change and You Do Too

AI is already having a significant impact in the way businesses of all sizes and in all sectors operate. Leaders (coaches) need to understand that their jobs must quickly evolve and the way they guide their teams forward will require them to call upon skills they either don’t possess or that they have until now rarely used. The people they lead need to see AI as a technology that can improve the products, services, and experience the company delivers to customers. Helping them make that mental connection between AI and improvements that customers feel, and the team’s vital role in ensuring that outcome is realized, is the job of the leader. That’s the premise of this session and attendees will come away from it with a framework and a few actionable steps for more effectively guiding their teams into the new AI-infused business landscape.

Speaker

Peter Armaly - Vice President of Customer Success at ESG

LinkedIn

Peter Armaly is the Vice President of Customer Success at ESG, the Customer Success as a Service® company. Through his writing and speaking engagements and his many years of experience as a practitioner and as a leader, Peter has become very well-known in the Customer Success industry for his visionary and substantive thought leadership. He previously held senior roles in both Customer Success and Marketing at Oracle, BMC Software, and Eloqua, and was the first Vice President of Customer Success Research at Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA). In his role at ESG, Peter enables Customer Success leaders to understand what it takes to transform their practices to meet the ever-evolving needs of modern customers in the subscription economy. In addition to his role as a client-facing executive at ESG, Peter serves as an advisor and board member for several Customer Success organizations, and has been honored with numerous industry awards, including being named a Top 25 Customer Success Influencer in both 2020 and 2021.

Peter lives in the heart of Toronto, Ontario with his wife, where they enjoy the restaurants, culture, and all the beauty the city has to offer.

Watch AI and Its Implications for Team Leaders: The Job Needs to Change and You Do Too

‍Transcript

This transcript was created by AI. If you see any mistakes, please let us know at marketing@matik.io.

Matik MC: Great. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Matik AI and customer success summit. You are currently watching AI and it's implications for team leaders. The job needs to change and you do too. I'm very excited to introduce our speaker. And as I introduce him, I'm going to have an answer our ice breaker question. What would you use AI to automate in your life outside of work? So leading today's, session is Peter Armaly, vice president of customer success at ESG.

Peter Armaly: I answer the question now.

Matik MC: Yes, please.

Peter Armaly: Thanks, Bex. Hi, everybody. I know not to be a bit of a downer but I thought of this and my dog has a condition at the moment where he has seizures and lots of seizures. And so we've got him under control, but the medication causes him to urinate a lot. So we've put him in diapers and it seems I'm always five minutes late to take them outside. So I would love it if AI could figure out and give me an indication before he PS his diaper that he's about to go. And then I could run him outside. So.

Matik MC: Sorry to hear about your dog, Peter, but I feel like all dog owners would probably benefit from that as well before we get started. Just a reminder to everyone. If you have any questions, please use the Q and a functionality. It can be found in the Zoom controls bar. But yeah, I'll hand it off to you Peter.

Peter Armaly: Thank you. Be again. Hello, everybody. I'm really happy to be here and I wanna thank Matik for organizing this summit. I think it's a wonderful way to introduce everybody to explore a bit more about how AI is going to affect and maybe enhance customer success. So the topic I wanna talk about is really around leadership. But even though I'm talking about leadership, it's appropriate for everybody to kinda pay attention because it will apply. Some of the themes will be very familiar to individual contributors as well. So… wait, I got to share my screen. Do… I have to share my screen?

Matik MC: Jay, do you mind stopping your screen share?

Peter Armaly: Yeah. Here we go.

Peter Armaly: There we go. Okay. So just really quickly about me, I'm not gonna go through this line by line. Everyone's going to get the presentation afterwards but I've got a long history in enterprise software and as well, you know, the take away from this is that I've been in customer success in a formal capacity since 2008. Prior to that. I was in sales organization as a solutions engineering management for a long time. Work my way up from individual contributor all the way to VP over in the last 25 years, a variety of companies and a variety of industries during the last 20 years. I've been consulting with a lot of different companies and a wide array of industries. And, and during that time, I just became confident that I had a voice. And so I just started writing a lot of papers, deep technical white papers, but also blogs and so just became a voice out there that people wanted to hear. And so I got it. I always get invited, often get invited to speak at conferences and podcast and webinars. And I'm really happy to do that. And finally, I am really proud to be the content creator and host for esg's monthly customer success unlocked webinar series ones very quickly. Es, is a consulting and advisory firm for customer success. We have all the abilities and capabilities necessary to build and operationalize customer success practices. We work with leaders, to help them strategize and put in place what they want to do to really fulfill their objectives. Some you see on the screen, a bunch of logos. These are passed in present companies that we've worked with. So let's get going. I only have 30 minutes to talk to you about a pretty deep topic. And I've got a lot of content but feel free as Beck said to put questions into the chat and then we can deal with them in the last 10 to 50 10 minutes. So I, I'd like to start this with talking about what are the imperative for business in the age of AI? And this is Peter, Emily's kind of view after reading a lot talking a lot, attending a lot of seminars and webinars in the industry around AI. So first thing, I think the, customers, businesses need to realize that every workflow in a company should be eligible for review and consideration in the age of AI, they should finally admit. And I say finally because a lot of companies pay lip service to the customer experience that's my observation. And I believe AI is gonna change that paradigm. And they will have to finally admit that the customer experience is the new fuel and that the old engines need to change within, their business models. In the age of AI, we should see a real further advancement of the democratization of data. And I believe leaders would be foolish to just look at certain kinds of people or areas for ideas. They should really be looking everywhere for ideas for how to improve their business including the employee base. Governance is back and fashion. And I say that because I was kinda fell to the wayside or retreated into the bushes over the last 10 years as cloud took over and they found themselves kind of without the kind of a prominent stage that they had up until like 2010. Or so. But, I believe that's gonna change and C, IO will kinda be welcome back to the stage and you've seen a strategic kind of voice in the conversation and they will be either leading or be really integral to the whole idea of governance. And that's going to be necessary in businesses around AI. There will be no excuses for the lack of a 360 degree view of a customer. AI is gonna change that it's gonna force a change there. We've people talk about it company say they can do it. We've not seen it. And so, I think that's going to change… they'll be clear and more transparent performance management of the employee base. And that should be a welcome thing. I think AI will improve the fairness and objectivity of performance management for the entire employee base. Companies or businesses need to understand that AI is simply the way it's a tool. It's a technology, but it's not, the destination prediction is the destination… businesses need to move assertively into the future of seamless horizontal business. And what I'm implying there and you can probably read between the lines is that for so long we've bemoaned silos within companies. I believe AI is going to be a catalyst to change this and kind of a road, those walls of silos, and finally investors will reward companies that accelerate themselves based on a use cases. We're seeing glimpses of that already in the marketplace where investors are rewarding companies that say they can do AI think that's a lot of like initial flash in the Pan, but we will see pretty quickly the companies that are good at it actually rise and they'll be rewarded more handsome Ly, going forward… Peter, Emily's prediction in 50 years. It'll be difficult imagining a time before artificial intelligence. If you don't believe me try and to imagine the time before electricity or before the printing press. I'm not being melodramatic here. I think it's true that AI will be a revolutionary change in our world and it'll be really interesting. I'm not going to be around in 50 years, many of you won't but it'll be fascinating to see in 2,072. If people can imagine what business is like before I really took root. Another prediction, five years, customer success will not be a formal business function. If it's leaders fail to embrace the power of AI. In my final prediction. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna do this whole presentation of predictions. In 15 years of companies successfully embrace AI. There will be only niche formal business organizations called sales and customer success. I think we're going to see the customers take over even more than they are today, the process of discovering what they want, learning what they want, teaching them what they want, what they want themselves, and then buying it. And it should be products will be better. The AI will improve a lot of the process that businesses have in place for serving the marketplace. But there will always be, I think there will always be a need for special attention. And that's why I say there will be niche organizations. So let's start with some honesty around customer success. We're all friends here, right? We've been in this community a long time. In one thing I see on LinkedIn, a lot of people are very honest about the shortcomings, and the tribulations about customer success. So customer success is struggle to achieve its mission to make an impact across large percentage of the typical customer base. Usually, it's only a small fraction of the customer base that's being impacted by customer success. They struggle to defend how it's processes and it's culture, place the customer at the center and why it should matter to the entire company. It's struggled to become a peer organization to sales. That's absolutely true. It's struggled to stand on its own. We see that a lot of like the ownership who owns customer success. In terms of the senior leadership team. It struggled to understand that it's value is two dimensional. I think too much of the conversation is all about what is customer success doing for the customers. Now, this might sound weird but I believe it's almost more important what customer success can do for its own company by leveraging customer data and customer, what customers behavior is, and they can teach the rest of the company, how to provide better products and services. That's what I mean by two dimensional. Customer success has struggled to prove empirically. Over time that the work it does in a programmatic way, it makes a difference to customers and to the company. I see this an awful lot. I see only a small percentage of companies actually getting good at this, proving empirically over time that the work they do matters. And this leads to the next one, they struggle to build a strong case for long term investment. Without that Proof. It's really hard to build a case and to present it to the board or at least the senior leadership team to ask for more investment… struggle to impact per organizations and help them improve the work they do, which ties into that two dimensional piece I was talking about. But a lot of that stuff isn't solely the fault of customer success. Customer success is in many cases been a puppet, of egos of changing whims of leadership senior leadership. And that's why we see a lot of a lot of kind of up and Downs within the customer success profession. And especially recently, there's been a lot of as we know in the last year or two, a lot of layoffs, a lot of risks, a lot of organizations completely dis, banded because a lot of, the responsibilities are the control of customer success. And it partly goes back to the very origin of what it is. So there's lots of definitions of customer success. And, and these are all good definitions I have on the screen here really good of August bodies of people who've said things what customer success is or should be. And I wanna just point out, in the middle of the screen is the graphic. This is how I see customer success as being in the middle of all the other organizations and the customers at the middle of customer success around it. All these other organizations need to kind of feed into this. And the, all these definitions are a little too loose though. And I think that sets up opportunities for these other organizations to define for themselves what customer success is. And that's when we find customer success treading water, trying to hit some, get some traction. It's because other organizations are defining customer success for themselves. There's an individual named Neil Shota who's a CEO of a kind of cognitive science company. And, and he put out this on the left the benefits of AI and business, increased efficiency and enhance productivity. You've probably seen these improve customer experience, better decision making, advanced fraud detection. This guy is not a lightweight. He's been, he's got 30 years of expertise with large companies like IBM developing these systems. And this is what he AI benefiting in business on, right? Is my interpretation of how that would apply in the customer success. So increase speed of service. I believe these are gonna come true. Improved accuracy of service, increase predictability and reliability forecasting churn in revenue, measurably improve customer experience, improved ability for orchestrating service across organizations, improved ability to attribute effort to corporate results. What I mean by that, we've always struggled in customer success to prove that the work we're doing is impacting the big rocks the KPI'S that the company is chasing. I think I will help us there. And finally it'll improve staff more, believe it or not. I think because even though people are always talking about AI is going to create a lot of layoffs and redundancies. I think there will be that. But I think the jobs that remain and the people that remain will be super engaged in the work they do because it will be more interesting. But none of that will come true. If leaders can't grasp the opportunity, they have to ask themselves. Two questions in my mind, whatever I need to do to optimize the power of AI in pursuit of our teams mission. And how can I help my team embrace AI with positivity and without fear? So, how are you going to lead into the future? If you're a leader? Basic truth of leading in the age of AI, AI is an accelerate. The key to AI success for humans is to be on the leading edge, leading instructional edge. The job of a leader is not to preserve the jobs or the roles within the organization. The job is to produce value for the company. This is highly critical thing to always remember as a leader. Your job is to produce value for the company. Upscaling and continuous learning are forever. This has been true for a while but it's going to be even more true. Going forward, I will accentuate communications is the highest priority skill for leaders. I don't know if that sounds kinda counter intuitive with generate of AI always being touted as a way to kinda shorten the path to creating content. I think, the true skill, the great skill will be leaders and even individual contributors can figure out how to be seen as ones providing the interpretation, being able to kind of communicate in a human way. The stuff that AI provides for you. Individual personality is more important and valuable than conformity. AI will create a ton of opportunity and a ton of wealth in our world. But it will also create a ton of blandness. I think. And I believe that your individual personality will be highly critical going forward in your success. So, what do we want from employees in the age of AI? I think I'm creating a picture for you a lot of attention and I think the employees, what we want from them in this age of AI is faster more full Ly formed work. What I mean by fully formed is, you know, AI will be a fantastic tool and a mechanism for providing quick and quicker answers and quicker insights. There will be fewer excuses for the work being less than top notch. And so I think as leaders, they're going to become a day where we'll expect the work produce will be really good high quality stuff. The first or second time around… we want workers to be employees being highly engaged, in their work collaboration with each other. This is key. I believe in the, I, that there will be more, it'll be more important for people to be talking with each other and working with each other and sharing with each other to really truly realize the power of a, we like a great morale. This is true for the last 1,000 years, right? Great moral climate of trust and support is by enlarging businesses. We've been okay at that. Not great. So I think what I'm getting at is AI will provide a lot more transparency. I believe to allow employees to feel like they're playing a fair game with their employer… and we'd like responsiveness to AI will create more immediacy and we want employees to understand that AI is gonna dictate speed and you have to kinda play that game and open this to feedback. This is true too, one of those things that's been around for a 1,000 years, but we're equipping CS leaders enough. Let's ask ChatGPT. So I asked ChatGPT, give me job responsibilities for a manager of customer success managers. This is what it came back with pretty impressive. I didn't touch this. I didn't edit this. This is what it came back with. I thought this is not bad. I wish I had this when I was creating job profiles and job specs back a few years ago. But what I want to show here is where what I've highlighted as I think these are immediate areas in, as a manager of customer success that would will be impacted by AI in the next year, two years, three years, we'll see a lot of improvement in the way customer success is affected by AI. And these areas that I've circled… I'm just watching the time so prominent CS skills in the age of AI business is what I'm talking about here is both for leaders and individual contributors, business process fluent. This is something we've been talking about in customer success for years, it's going to be even more important going forward and I don't mean to, you know, turn up the heat on everybody. But I think this is just reality. AI is going to accelerate… the information coming at you. It's going to shorten the cycle between discovery, and results. And you need to be able to figure out what it all means for your customers and what it all means for your own company. There needs to be a digital first approach. For finally, I mean we've been talking about digital for a long time and we see great examples of people employing digital first approaches. But I think every company needs to adopt this like immediately clever polished communications, curious and inquisitive process driven collaborative open, respectful talking about human characteristics. And these are things that will set you apart in the age of AI. We don't want blandness. I will do that on its own, but we want humans to take care of the interesting part of the equation. I'm not gonna go through this. This is something I grabbed it'll be in the source notes, this is just a table of classic archetype, leaders in the business world, authoritarian democratic and less fair. None of these characters will work in the age of AI. AI is gonna make these pure types of individuals struggle and probably go obsolete. We need more modern leaders in AI. We need kind of a blend of researcher organizer, accountant meeting comfortable holding people and processes accountable. I rather think I created this phrase mesh communicator. What I mean by that is someone is really comfortable communicating internally and externally leading in through communications connector of people with ideas, not people who have ideas but people with ideas. So ideas come up and that's where the discovery comes in. You want to be able to connect people to this new idea. You feel like, championing, confident investigative storytelling and a pitch person. And what I mean by pitch person is in the age of a, especially when I talk, I'm talking about customer success leadership here. We need customer success leaders to really be local in and providing inform formation to the other organizations to share the experience of working with customers, and what impact the practice is having on the customer base and be able to kind of tell it in an interesting way and in a way that's accurate and fulsome, it's gonna make the job of leadership more challenging as, and I just put a couple of graphs up here. On the top left is a chart from churn zero leadership study from last year. Just meant to illustrate all the different kinds of tech that customer success is employing is a typical mix and on the bottom is the number of or the amount of data sources that businesses have to deal with all the time. So AI is gonna make that even more complicated. But we could also see AI driving more consolidation, of tech too. So it should be interesting to watch either case. I think CS leaders job is going to be very challenging, be more there be more scrutiny because there will be an expectation over time that I will be more providing more accurate information and there will be an interest I think from high levels to at the business, of things like customer success and sales to really prove the effort on the pace of business and of change will increase. We already think changes happening fast. It's gonna accelerate. And there will be no information overload that's an expression. We've become comfortable with. It's. Gonna give me information. It's not going to be overload. It'll just be there pressure from the executive leadership team and from investors will intensify. I realize I'm painting a pretty bleak picture or a challenging picture, but I think it's just true that's going to happen. So what it means is leaders need to evolve into that new realm. That new state of being in the age of a, how do you lead an AI? Well, you have to understand that the real governance architectures of the past will actually time innovation. There'd. Be too much bureaucracy and AI will be best leveraged by more kind of open conversation and dialogue and testing closed large language models might inhibit progress towards achieving a potential. So, I know a lot of companies are dabbling and trying out their own kind of LMS and that's good people are experimenting but I would just kind of caution people to not be too close about those things because it's still early days. This next thing came from MIT salon, selection of the known. And what it means, is, this quote here is that you have to understand if you're actually going to be moving your business into this world of a, are you just kind of you're just creating the old business? And is that smart or does the old business threaten the new business? So you actually have to go through an examination of your business. And that's kinda going back to what I was saying at the busy at the beginning is that every process should be under review and consideration when in the world of too much blue sky can threaten progress, meaning that it's fine. You need to kinda brainstorm and think about things a lot, get your team involved, but it has to be more than that it actually has to move, have to find out what you need to work on, and do it and execute. And the, another risk of leaders don't evolve is the gradual detachment of the team from business relevance, meaning that the team won't evolve. And eventually there won't be a need for the team because something else will have replaced it. What are the rewards of CS, leadership evolution? If the leaders evolve, they'll be faster speed to market or customer consumer friendly products and services, and prove speed and accuracy of service, better targeted products, more precise marketing to it'll. Just be a better place to work. The leaders job is to understand the risks and rewards and guide codes team. Accordingly… Mckinsey come up with a framework that I kinda like and this is why I'm gonna kinda close this presentation with talking about it. So they say the business leaders need to be mindful of what they call the forces coding customer engagement and creating more personalized interaction, creative content generation and content synthesis. I'll talk a bit more about these things. But I like this quote at the bottom, generative Ai is becoming the virtual knowledge worker with the ability to connect different data points, summarize and synthesize insights in seconds, allowing us to focus on more high value, add a task. Now, this is something we should all take a pause and look at. This is actually the heart of the value proposition for customer successes, connecting the different data points, summarizing and synthesizing insights in seconds and allowing us to focus on more high value add tests too often to a success. We bemoan, we don't have time because we're searching for information. We're putting together information. Hey, I'm, gonna take care of that. So, ideally you should be able to focus on those high value things. You've always said you could never do. So, this is the promise of AI for customer success. How do you do that? You need to start examining the team, what the work the team does right now? And I really urge everyone to kind of involve the team in, this, not just for moral reasons but actually for intelligence reasons, you probably have smart people on your team. You'd probably have no idea how smart they are until you get them in the room, you talk about AI and the processes that they're running, the experts in the processes that they're running, and they should be having a voice into how improvements could be made. And then you prioritize the list of activities and tasks, what's the outcome of each task, who benefits from it, ask these questions, what's the customer value in each task. If there's no customer. If you can identify the customer value in a task even abstractly, then you should probably question whether the task is necessary. If this works, CS should be doing meaning or other organizations in the company doing something similar. Maybe they should be doing that task instead of you, what the group needs to be involved in our delivery of the outcome, and for each of these tasks, keep fix, replace or eliminate, be very brutal with this. This is my recommendation for leaders of the work you do. And then just focus on the three. This is a framework that I think will really work customer engagement, creating more personalized interaction. It's a lot of like buzz language these days, but it's really important. And what it means is that to do that, you have to get really serious about the customer journey. You have to get serious finally about data orchestration and data governance. I should help you there and get serious about doing all of this in concert with marketing and product who are trying to do something similar to your products. And, and again, I'm speaking to leaders here rise above parochial concerns about customer success. Sometimes it makes more sense for the business to surrender or relinquish responsibility for something if it makes more sense for another organization to do that. Number two create content generation, get serious about engineering prompts that are based on themes, meaning the themes should tie into a strategy. So don't just have prompts just to willingly trying to get an answer for something. Make sure that the themes that prompts map to some sort of a strategy for your organization in the company. Get serious about educating customer success creators about the three. I call the three legged stool a brand tone, corporate goals, and knowing the audience and finally content synthesis, get serious about value creation for the customer and, you know, and that's maybe just motherhood and apple pie. But I think it's important to point out that when you create your synthesizing content, make sure that what you're creating, you truly believe is valuable for the customer when they read it when they see it. And they, when they, something pops up on their screen, it has to be something that they value. I get serious about spreading the word throughout the company. I talked a little bit about that, but the content synthesis will be the piece that will allow you to turn around and share with the rest of the company. You know, kind of a way to evangelize the good work that, your organization is doing and, you know, this measurement thing is something we harp on a lot, and it's important. It's boring. I know it's boring but it has to be done, it's the only way to move from abstract to real. And it's the only way you're gonna approve anything to a CFO in a CEO is through measurement a, report and plug it all back into the LM. Make sure that the LMS always learning from the experience you're doing having with customers. And I'm going to kinda close with a quote, Clayton Christianson was he passed away a few years ago, but he was a very famous or business school professor and he said you may hate gravity but gravity doesn't care. You can probably understand what I'm saying here is that AIs here. We could probably be, choose to be afraid of it. I choose to be opportunistic about it. I choose to be excited about the possibilities and I trust that we'll get there. We'll all get there including governments. And finally, I just want to show, I just didn't put this presentation off the top of my head. I did a lot of research. I do a lot of reading and these are some of the books I recommend. These are all links. When you get this presentation, you can just click on them. These are books that I've read that some of them have helped me understand how business should be responding and reacting to artificial intelligence, and that's it.

Matik MC: Awesome. Thank you so much Peter. We're now going to open it up to Q and a. So just a friendly reminder if you have any questions, go ahead into the Zoom control bar and you'll see a Q and a button, click it and drop those questions in there. So to kick us off, Peter, how do I help team members who are resistant to AI, get comfortable with it?

Peter Armaly: Yeah, I think the best way to do that is to not be peachy and not put on your teachers hat, but actually direct them to external sources of information that this is probably your responsibility as a leader to find out those sources where someone's put together kind of good kind of class or even just an essay or article talking about. I think that's a good way to kind of help people understand from the beginnings and get more comfortable with it. I think the leader does themselves a disservice if they start dictating too much on these kind of new technologies because everyone knows even the leader is not an expert. And so to portray yourself as one we'd probably be compromising your kind of like position a little bit.

Matik MC: Next question, what are some of the potential challenges we should be aware of when implementing AI especially cross functionally?

Peter Armaly: Well, I think conflict, you know, redundancies in terms of everyone's doing the same thing. This is why I mentioned governance. I think that it's going to be become super important to have like some sort of governance in place around making sure that productivity doesn't take a huge hit. I mentioned this on LinkedIn today. In a conversation that I think it's already happening. It's great that people are experimenting. I'd like to see it. I'd like to see innovation kind of bubble up but it's probably already feeling I hit in companies around people spending a little bit too much time doing that. And I think there needs to be some sort of a framework so that not just customer success but marketing and sales, and product are, if they're working on leveraging AI in the interest of eventually kind of serving the customer through brought a better product and services, then they need to talk to each other and figure out, okay if someone's gonna work on this, then can we have some input into that? And, here's our point of view that you might want to influence AI to move in this direction. Here's. Why. So I think there's lots of opportunity for us for conversations between organizations. AI will probably enhance that.

Matik MC: You touched on this throughout your presentation, but how do you see AI impacting the makeup of the CS team and job creation in general?

Peter Armaly: Yeah. I think in the short term, they probably won't be much of an impact. I can't see leaders being that courageous at this time to say, well, I'm gonna just go with AI I'm gonna eliminate 80 percent of my team. I think that'll be kinda stupid. I think we're gonna see over time though probably a reduction, in customer success numbers. But I think we'll see a shifting, of the type of personality or person in the roles to be a little bit more. Let's use the word sent perfect to be more operational operation of mind. That's why I'm excited about CS ops. I think CS ops is a perfect area to start exploiting and leveraging a. I and I think there will be a growth in those roles and probably a reduction, in, the numbers of CSM that are dealing with a portfolio of customers. I think because AI is going to accelerate digital customer success really greatly, and quickly that inevitably we'll see the numbers of customer success managers probably reduced. But again, I don't wanna raise alarm bells. I think because the other roles that people can move into?

Matik MC: From a tactical perspective, how can I help my team up level their AI skills, things I can potentially start doing in the next few months?

Peter Armaly: Well, I would, I'm a leader, I would just kind of research myself and find either free or low cost kind of training that can be done in an interesting way, and, in bite size kind of portions because it can get pretty intimidating, I think and you have to understand that a, you don't have to understand AI to the extent that a cognitive scientists needs to understand. I think you need to understand AI and in terms of how it can be helpful in business. And, and so I would, as a leader, I would take it upon myself to do some discovery and just come up with some training that I would want my team to take. And unless your company is really already an AI company, you'll probably have to go outside the company to find that. But there might be if you're one of those companies and they probably people and I've done this at other companies for other reasons. I, I've tapped into engineering and had them come and speak to customer success about products and stuff because I want them to learn a little bit deeper about the reasons why the products are designed a certain way. And it's the same principle for AI, I think.

Matik MC: So, this is a three part question. Looking at your tech stack diagram in your presentation that's a lot to digest. I imagine the same for many companies. How can we use our current text stack to determine where AI should supplement? Leaders should probably look at this. Do you agree also what are your favorite AI tools for that customer predictability?

Peter Armaly: Well, I know Madeline she's asked that question. So that one, I'm not gonna answer that last one because I don't wanna choose any winners and losers and stuff at this point. But I mean, I do have some ideas on that last question, our own favorite I tools, but, you know, how can we use our current text stack to determine where I should supplement? I think that this text stack is a perfect kind of way to start and look at, do some investigative work, figure out and get other people to do it. Not just the leader and ask people to explore a little bit. What in that text stack? How are each one evolving? How are each of those tools evolving? Are they themselves becoming a, you know, tools or at least influenced tools? And does that fit with your strategy of how you wanna use a tech stack going forward? So, I think the text stack is a great way to start looking at that kind of a whole exam examination exercise, and work with the team because they're the ones again who are using it more than leader is, and they, the ones probably have ideas on how things can be made faster and more efficiently. I mean, everyone has an opinion about excel for example. So we could say the same thing for all the customer success platforms. And why wouldn't we want to start to, you know, accumulating these ideas and writing them down and sorting them, and figuring out, okay, let's support those companies and tell them, you know, you need to kinda change this because we need this capability and we know I can probably do it. And I think that was be a great way for the team to co here around a purpose and the leader can be demonstrating their ability to kinda that mesh communication they talked about externally and influence the direction of some of these companies that I think, these companies feel that they're moving in the right direction, but I bet you they wouldn't mind getting some input from some customers too.

Matik MC: And I think we have time for one more question. How can AI be used to get ahead from a CS perspective?

Peter Armaly: You sort of pause there a little bit. Can you?

Matik MC: Yes. How can AI be used to get ahead of competitors from a CS perspective?

Peter Armaly: Yeah. So I think that boils down to this is interesting because I think it boils down to the intelligence and the business astuteness of the leaders and even the individual contributors. I don't mean to ignore that piece, but I think someone needs to say, you know, I bet sure we could be better at this if we had these certain answers to these questions and why not leverage AI, to prompt it to provide you with some information that is otherwise gonna take you two months to investigate and find it'll. Probably come back with at least an opinion that you can kind of on your own in seconds. So that's how I would see if you understand how your competitors are doing their work in the, in their customers and everyone kind of if you're competing outside the company, you probably have an idea. And so, why wouldn't you try to kind of figure out well, how can we enhance what we think is our value proposition by getting AI to help us by suggesting some improvements? And, and that's how I would kinda leverage AI, by co opting it as a partner in this exercise by, you know, saying, okay, we have ideas but I think you have ideas that are faster than, and two answers and then we can do so.

Matik MC: Thank you so much Peter, with that, we are at the end of our session, just a reminder all this, the recording for this session as well as all other sessions will be available in our resource harp. All attendees will be notified when that hub is live. So thank you to our wonderful speaker for joining us today and thank you to everyone else for attending.

Peter Armaly: Thanks back. Thanks everybody.

 

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