Transcript
Juan (00:00):
People think, okay, can I use AI to do this big thing? And the answer is no. And so they stay away from it. Yeah, people that start chunking it, dividing and conquer applied in that until they get to a point they can use it for all. Those are the ones that are going to start getting ahead and they're going to leave everybody else behind.
Mike (00:24):
Hey, retail fans. Welcome back to Retail oriented. I am your host, Mike Fowler. I am the VP of retail strategy here at the Sales Factory, and we've got some really special guests today to talk about the ever evolving and fast-paced world of ai. I've got Ged King and Juan Hernandez here with me. Guys, welcome to the show.
Juan (00:43):
Happy to be here.
Mike (00:43):
We're excited to talk about this today. If you guys could kind of start off by just giving us a little bit of your background in the company and then we're going to talk about your background and what you're learning about ai. So Ged, can you kind of talk a little bit first about your background?
Ged (00:59):
So I worked for a startup that I helped take public on nasdaq. I came here. I have an engineering degree and the science of marketing has always been what I am most interested in. So the AI thing has been pretty cool,
Mike (01:11):
Is a natural evolution for you for sure. Juan, how about you?
Juan (01:15):
I'm one of those Sales Factory boomers as you are. I started at Sales Factory back in 2011, tried to develop the customer insights practice. Now I'm kind of doing the same thing but with ai.
Mike (01:28):
So a lot of foundational work for both of you guys within our organization, so that's been really cool. Let's talk a little bit about how you guys are using AI personally. How are you using AI at home? How are you using it in your everyday life? Ged, I'm going to give that one to you first too.
Ged (01:44):
I'm using AI constantly. An example is I helped my wife write a letter of recommendation for a friend and she was struggling with writer's block. That's a normal thing for everybody. I wrote the letter in two minutes using AI and I gave it to her and I said, does this sound like your friend? And she's like, oh my God, how did you do that? And I'm like, well, let me show you. Right. So things like that. A lot of writing tasks for me. I'm not good at writing. And then analytic tasks too, I mean we're using it to look at financial performance. Economic performance. The tools are really fairly unlimited. It's the user that has the limitations.
Mike (02:18):
The writing thing for me as well has been huge. What used to take me two days to get started and two more days to actually write takes two minutes. It's a wild,
Ged (02:28):
And you still got to edit it and make sure it sounds like you, but it's a big help.
Mike (02:32):
Juan, how about you in the day-to-day stuff?
Juan (02:35):
Same thing, right? Yeah. English obviously is my second language, so every email I write, I use chat GPT. But to me, recently I actually built a meal planner. My son has a lot of food allergies. So cooking gets repetitive because there's so many stuff. So I literally said, this is the stuff I'm allergic to. Of course, I like Venezuelan cuisine, build me a meal planner and every week I can get different results and stuff that I didn't think about, I never thought about doing. In smoothies, that's easy to do. You can put peanut butter or something. So it just blew my mind how well it did it and it makes our life better because of that.
Mike (03:09):
That's a great idea. That's giving me some thoughts to take home with me. So listeners, you've already got something to take home with you. If nothing else, go plan your meals using ai, right? Yeah. Let's shift into really the heart of what we're talking about today, which is how have we started to integrate this into client work and to start thinking about client work? Juan, I'm going to give that one to you first.
Juan (03:31):
We believe the bigger opportunity is to offer our clients marketing agility. What we mean by that is the ability to react, even gain insights and react to them fast. So that's kind of our goal with a couple of tools that we're building right now and category expert and an tech platform is to really expedite the time so our clients can take action on changes, whatever those are. Economic behavioral retailers act on that and literally lift the competition in the rear view mirror.
Mike (04:01):
So speed and agility is a big thought process behind it. Ged, as we've kind of started using AI into client work and weaving that in daily, now hourly, every minute almost, I would say probably at our organization. Where did it start and how did you start thinking about, all right, this is where I can see leveraging this technology for clients. We've kind of talked about some of the very basic and obvious ones, but talk about some of the nuance that you've seen over the last year.
Ged (04:28):
I'm going to use a little bit of history to answer your question. The building we're in right now was where denim was first created for Levi's and then later on it became a printing company. So they had printing presses here. And when I was first in my career, I remember we used to do press checks because you couldn't actually proof color stuff without going on the press. So you walk into this room with a giant machine and if the client didn't like something, they stopped the machine and then you'd go back to work and it was incredibly wasteful. Well then came desktop publishing computers and that went away and we became much, much more efficient and better at our jobs. And then if you think about it beyond that, next was the internet, next was social media. These are major changes that have happened in my young lifetime.
(05:08):
So this is the same thing. It's just a big change that's occurring to everybody and it's allowing us to be more efficient and better at our jobs. So can it replace people? What I tell my students and also our employees, it can do some things people do. Having said that, if you're really good at using it and you're really good at being a marketer, you have nothing to worry about. It's just a new thing. So there's going to be people who are good at using AI and there'll be people who are not as good and just make sure you're one of the ones that are good.
Mike (05:36):
You want to be on the right side of that. Yes. Talk a little bit about the people and the efficiency and what's happened there. What's evolved in our workforce using AI for efficiency and how that's kind of opened up some doors for the people that are working here? Ged, do you want to start off on that one?
Ged (05:53):
Yeah. So an easy example is retouching a photo. 10 years ago, Photoshop was amazing, but it still took a lot of human input. Now you can go in and say, set the curves and remove the objects in the background. In seconds it's done. What that does for the person who that's their job is it gives 'em more free time to use their brain for creativity as opposed to getting that task stuck. And I think that's across the board. It also covers weaknesses. We all talked about writing, that's because that's not what we're all good at. We're all better at analytics. And so it's funny, I don't use it for analytics because I still prefer to use the ways I know how to do. That's interesting. And so I think it just depends what you like, what you're good at, what matters to you. And I think everybody has a different way.
Juan (06:34):
I like this kind of thinking is we are the last generation that's going to deal with a blank document. I mean we just get into that, but in the near future, if you're going to start using a Photoshop word or something, it's going to ask you what are you going to accomplish? You're going to say something and you're going to start with a draft. So that's going to take, I think you mentioned a couple of hours, writer block, whatever, blank page syndrome, however you want to call it. That's done.
Mike (07:00):
That's been a game changer for me, the person that has always had a hard time getting started. And then once I have something down on paper, and Ged taught me a long time ago, whiteboard everything and that's why I have a whiteboard in my office. Even at home, I just got to start writing something, get an outline down and then the ideas start coming from that. But this has been game changing for me. I can just put a question in, I'm prompting, but it's also prompting my brain to start thinking and to be creative. It's opened up a speed to creativity that we have not seen before, which has been really unique and it's really been cool within our workforce to see everybody just jumping into that and the ideas that are coming because of that extra little bit of time and capacity that you have to be creative have been important. So that's what I want to talk about next is how are we using AI specifically and then all of our people in conjunction with ai, think about some client wins and where AI and people have really integrated well to get there.
Juan (08:00):
I mean it goes from the really tactical stuff to the more strategic, so tactical kind of ours, they need to come up with the alt text from the WhatsApp, like the little text that shows up when you hover over a niche. They had thousands of images on the website and for some reason they migrated from one platform to the next and all the alt text was gone.
Mike (08:21):
Oh man.
Juan (08:22):
Going through thousands of images, this is a person using whatever the product in this environment, we just decided to charge GPT and did that in one day.
Mike (08:30):
Wow.
Juan (08:31):
So that's from a technical point of view, from the strategic point of view, as I mentioned, if you give our clients the ability to understand what's going on and they can react faster, then they can spend more time on developing the marketing plan, the action plan that is giving them a lot of competitive advantage.
Mike (08:48):
The example that you just gave on from a very tactical standpoint of getting images correct with captions and all of that, that makes a huge difference in dollars because they're so much faster to market. And having that on an e-commerce site ready, sellable and ready to go, that could take weeks. I mean that could take a month of manual editing. Ged. Any client wins that are kind of jumping to mind for you?
Ged (09:13):
I'll speak about one that's very recent. The idea for this client was their service they provided to homeowners was luxurious. It was a luxury service. And when you use these tools to have a conversation, not just write a prompt and take its answer. And so the staffer that did this work was asking you what does luxury mean? And it said like Rolls Royce and Fancy Hotel and a Fiji and that kind of stuff. And then asked it, well, what are other things that are luxury that are not physical? And it came back and it said peace, wellbeing, family. And that took the campaign in another direction. Had we not done that interplay with this kind of like a partner, we would've stayed on we're the Rolls-Royce of luxury and that would've been the wrong answer. So collaborating is an interesting thing. Now you can collaborate while you're sitting waiting on an airplane because you got your computer or your phone and you can do things like you would with that whiteboard in a group of people still need the group of people. We spent a long time after we got there working on it, but it helped us move again quicker and more decisively.
Mike (10:17):
And maybe that idea might,
Ged (10:18):
Who knows
Mike (10:19):
That idea would've surfaced. So that's been a game changer also, it's been an interesting thing in the agency life. We have always approached problems in a very scientific way to marketing, and that's going back to your dad's background, like how he founded the company, but this is trying to put a process to creativity and I've always thought that that's what kind of makes Sales Factory unique, but the creativity is still there and that's so cool about this integration. With that in mind, I want to talk a little bit about how do we ensure that ai, that our people, that our strategies are all staying aligned with our clients' goals. We've kind of got big goals out there. It can be a tempting thing to just start coming up with cool stuff because now we have all these new tools and the speed is incredible and we're kind of amazed by what we're getting. So how do we ensure that the guardrails are still there and that we're still really driving towards client wins?
Juan (11:21):
So to me the number one priority is context because the issue with Gemini to GPT is anybody can ask for a marking plan and it will give you that one. The issue is that you can do it for two separate, different completely different categories. I'm going to get a lot of overlap. So first thing that we do is, for instance, on our category expert service is we load up all the company knowledge, build this huge knowledge base that entails branding, marketing, sales, product information. And then on top of that we put all the Sales Factory marketing frameworks, economic data, retail data. So with all of that, we ground our category expert to give you specific answers to this question, we'll be more effective because of that. So that's number one. And number two is that's a challenge. That's why AI is not going to replace humans right now, to be honest. If you as a user don't prioritize and start playing with the cool stuff, it's going to do it for you and you're going to say No, no, that's not strategic. You have to be off back on strategy. AI is not a G, it's not going to do that. It's not artificial general intelligence yet. So that's where humans are going to be part of this, but the foreseeable future, because that kind of thinking is on the user side and you have to be disciplined about it.
Mike (12:35):
That's important. Ged, anything that you want to add on to that in terms of keeping us aligned with client goals?
Ged (12:41):
So I think the most important part is just continuous learning and if you consider the last 25 years, the main things that have happened in the last 25 years has been 9-11, the great recession in Covid and then since Covid, we're moving at this pace. That's crazy. And so right now, and this will change when the internet happen, things move fast and we're not going to stay at this pace forever. We will settle in at some point, but while we're in this mode of AI is this very freeing thing, staying very current and learning constantly is I think the most important thing for our clients and for us. I agree with everything Juan said by the way, but I want to make one little point. The data we're inputting is Sales Factory's data. It's not our customer's data unless our customer asks us and then we put it into a safe place where it could be accessed that way also.
Mike (13:27):
Yeah, that's an important distinction. Another important distinction or maybe call out here is what you just said about everything is moving really fast. You referenced when the internet started, everything was moving really fast and I remember in my college dormitory, my internet did not seem fast. So everything comes, it's all relative, right? You got to keep in mind and the pace that we're seeing right now that's going to change. This is going to seem slow in a couple years, maybe a couple months. It might be this afternoon at the pace that it's going, but the speed is interesting for us to keep in mind and we have to stay very adaptable to keep up with that.
Ged (14:03):
Well, and Mike, it's exactly the same. I had access to the internet, a version of the internet when I was in college. I'm considerably older than you. It didn't really do anything.
Mike (14:11):
Not considerably. Thank you.
Ged (14:13):
But my point is AI and machine learning's been going on in the background. We've just not been paying attention for a very long time and now it's suddenly available to regular folks.
Mike (14:24):
That's a great point. Before we move on to the future, let's put to bed any common misconceptions around ai? Are there things, we've kind of talked about 'em a little bit here today that humans are not replaceable at this point, but what are some other common misconceptions that are out there today? Why you want to start us off?
Juan (14:40):
Yeah, I mean one of my pet peeve about AI is when you talk about when somebody talks about ai, they start dropping acronyms, jargon and stuff like that, and they make it really, really intimidating. Sound more complicated than it really is. Any of these GNAI tools is really a glorify auto completion piece of software. Enter one sentence and you figure out what the best sentence is after that. That's really what it does In marketing, I think we have a great opportunity because that skill is good enough for most of the marketing tasks that we do, at least on the agency side. And so that's why we have a keep it stupid simple approach to AI because again, the key is the context. The key is not about retraining, deep learning. All of that is just like it makes it unaffordable, unreachable. So we have this approach that we put simple simplicity on the core so we can make it more available to smaller companies to and get it up and running faster for our clients.
Mike (15:43):
One of my favorite merchants kind of change the KISS acronym to keep it stupidly simple. And I've always liked that. That's just a good mindset to have and it fits perfectly here. Ged any misconceptions?
Ged (15:56):
So I'll talk about two things. One is privacy. So both my kids work for major companies, one on the brand side, one on the retail side. They're not allowed to use it and because they don't like at all, they're not allowed to put data in because the data's secret and the misconception is that there are not AI tools that are secure. There are. So I think that's an important thing that'll overcome shortly. Another misconception is that AI is evil and if you think about it in super simple terms, I drove here in a car and cars can be really dangerous if you don't operate them correctly, but nine out of 90, nine out of a hundred thousand whatever times we are perfectly safe in a car. The misconception is the machine is evil and we have a responsibility to use it nicely.
Mike (16:38):
It's a tool just like many other things out there that can be dangerous but are a tool. Those are important. I think the privacy one, that's still huge and very prevalent and I think we probably don't even see how prevalent it is in the masses because we're using it every day and we're already really involved in integration with ai, but I think most people out there still feel like, Hey, I can't put my idea in here because it's going to be stolen. That was my initial perception of it and so I think that I'm glad to hear you think that's going to be going away soon, but that's something that is not the case that we should go ahead and put to bed right here on retail oriented. Let's kind of talk about the future. How are we starting to prepare for the constant advancements that we're seeing every single day? How are we future-proofing if that's possible with ai? How are we preparing for evolution?
Juan (17:34):
I think whomever claims that knows what's going to happen, AI is kind of fool themself at this point because it changed by the week, by the month. I think last episode I joked, I listened to a weekly podcast. It's 90 minutes long just to summarize what happened last week and sometimes you guys go even to two hours and it's really a summary, but still what we do is really we have a team at Cell Factory and we meet weekly, we discuss what new tools we discover, we discuss what new use cases we want to see if AI is a good fit for, and we're just sharing that knowledge and making sure everybody is learning and keeping up with it. But I mean doing our big plans, thinking about what's going to happen six months from now about AI I think is sort of futile at this point.
Mike (18:21):
Ged, talk about it from a strategic standpoint. How are we strategically trying to think about constant integration and evolution of AI as it's moving forward?
Ged (18:31):
If you think about consumer behavior, branding work, creating campaigns, advertising, all the different things that big brands and retailers and companies like ours do every day, the techniques are going to change two years from now, we're going to be doing it like we did two years ago. And so as Juan said, we don't know what will be what because we've already gone through things we thought were awesome a year ago that we don't use anymore because it changes and gets better so much quicker. So back to the theme and that is agencies and brand people get paid for brilliance. We don't get paid for paperwork. We have to consider that we have to work on being the brilliant marketers that we can be connecting with consumers and making their day better and all the things that go with that and let the machine do the busy work. So I think it's a good opportunity for people who want to be in that space.
Mike (19:17):
You said something interesting there, talking about understanding consumers. So that's the foundation of our organization is we always talk about the four part process. If you've been on a call with any of us, you've probably heard about the four part process more times than you care to the foundation and the bedrock of what we started is understanding consumers, what makes them tick, why do they make a decision that they make a decision on and how do we influence that decision? And so this is a tool to help do that better, but it is only a tool to help do that better. We have to make sure we stick to our roots and understanding the consumer. And if it's built on the strategy of solving consumer problems, then success will be on the other side of it. The tools to get there, it may help us get there faster with more creative ideas, but it kind of always comes back to those foundational Drews.
Ged (20:08):
I'll take it a step further. I love technology. So I have the beta running on my phone right now. We got a Tesla pretty early, it's my wife's car. We were talking the other day and we never feel like we'll be housebound even if we're old and can't see and the things that happen as you get older, the car not yet, but very obviously will become, it'll just take me to friendly center. I want to go shopping and that's cool. So that's freeing in an easy to understand way, but all these tools are like that.
Mike (20:35):
Yeah, that is pretty interesting, especially considering, I remember very clearly when we had to tell my grandmother that she can no longer drive, it was devastating to her. And so all of these tools that are kind of come alongside of us, that's cool to keep tabs on and to keep in mind, I will say that she did drive her car onto the roof of another car in a parking lot. So it was the right thing to do.
Ged (21:01):
It happens.
Mike (21:01):
We weren't just being mean, it was the right thing for everyone's safety. If you could give one piece of advice to a manufacturer in terms of how they're integrating AI or maybe even how they're thinking about AI with their processes, what would you tell a manufacturer? We've got a lot of manufacturer clients, there's probably a lot of manufacturers listening right now. So Juan, what would be kind of just top thing or things that you would tell them?
Juan (21:25):
I mean I think people sometimes have the wrong framework to figure out if they can apply AI to something because my answer is you can always apply AI to anything because through a process, sometimes if you ask an AI tool to do the project, the project or the process end to end, it might not be a good fit for that. If you figure out what is the step of those process, I'm pretty sure you can use AI throughout those steps. And even though it's not going to be completely automated like one prom and get you the best answer ever, it's going to be one prom here, one prom here, one pro here, or whatever tool you use, but you can get there that way. So I think that's kind of the thing is people think, okay, can I use AI to do this big thing? And the answer is no. And so they stay away from it. People that start chunking it, dividing and conquer applied in that until they get to a point they can use it for all those are the ones that are going to start getting ahead and they're going to leave everybody else behind.
Mike (22:19):
Yeah, I like that. So would it be fair to summarize your advice to start small and just start using it? Right? It doesn't have to be able to complete the whole project. Just start somewhere and you'll figure out more ways to integrate. Alright, Ged, if you could tell a brand or a manufacturer a couple things, one thing to keep in mind as they're starting to think about AI or are using it already, what would you tell?
Ged (22:42):
So I would say be honest with what you're good at and what you're not good at and you take the things you're not as good at and invest the time into improving it with ai. I think that's a good way to go. We all talked about writing. I recently had to write a 40 page document that referenced 20 other documents, which to me with my skills and A DHD is the worst possible nightmare, and I spent 10 hours programming a custom GPT to do the task and so that's 10 hours, there's a lot of investment and then it did it and I still had to put 40 hours in it and I had somebody else helping me too that put in a lot of time as well. So it still was a hundred hour human task, but it probably would've been a 500 hour human task. And then the next time I have to do that, I'm way up on the learning curve and I'll go even faster. And so that to me is look at what your weaknesses are as an individual organization or a team and build things to cover those.
Mike (23:34):
Do you feel more confident that you haven't missed something when you do something like that? Right? That's one thing that I've noticed is I feel sure that I've gotten all the references, all the material has been read, which I can't do. I just don't have the hours in the day to read all the documentation memory. My memory's not good enough to keep it all in there
Ged (23:55):
And source it correctly and all those things. And we're in an organization's full of creative people and we happen to all the three of us be on the other side, not at all, right? So starting from scratch is nearly impossible, but these tools fix that and it's really cool. And I imagine if we ask them, and some of them are looking at us right now, here's SaaS jump and give me a cluster analysis of five segments. They're going to look at us and go the what are you talking about?
Mike (24:25):
Where do I start? Let's think about it from a retailer standpoint. Now, if you're a merchant sitting out there and you have got an unenviable task of keeping up with all these subcategories driving business forward, comping all the merchant headaches that they're dealing with on the day-to-day, what would you tell those merchants that are sitting out there to kind of be paying attention to in the world of AI coming forward? That's important when we're talking about retail. So Ged, I'm going to let you start with that one.
Ged (24:52):
In my career I've run across two people I think are exceptionally talented category managers and I learned a lot from those people. That's two out of, I don't know, thousands, right? So wouldn't it be cool if everyone was able to be that way and even in our own organization, our young staff, I see them coming along and I see my kids coming along, but you could supercharge that stuff and make it good so much faster. And if I was a merchant managing a retailer with 40,000 SKUs and a department of maybe some cases, some of the things you work on Mike's thousands, right? So how do you do that? Well, you have to trust your vendors. Well, like we just said, we trust our own work better when we're using these tools. So I imagine that would be the same with the merchant and the brand team. So that's what I think you got to try to do.
Mike (25:43):
Making sure things don't get missed. Juan, anything you would add to that?
Juan (25:46):
It's very similar to what Ged was talking about, but I was talking to a potential partner the other day about our category expert and one of his insights like this can be a great tool for a merchant because merchants are really appreciative of the cell factory way because we tell them, here's your customer, here's what they do, here's how they shop, here's all this wealth. So I'm assuming they don't have tools internally that can tell you that, but imagine if we give them our version of our tool that is loaded with information about their store shoppers. So now when a brand comes in and say, Hey, I have this product, this is going to be great. They can just turn around and double check if what they said makes sense with the data. They already, I mean they are doing a lot of that with experience with knowledge. I have gained through working in that company for years and years and years, but now potentially I can use AI to make sure that whenever you're bringing something you have a holistic view of whether that can be a good match for the store or not.
Mike (26:44):
That's so impactful. I've got folks on my team that kind of constantly come to me every day, sometimes multiple times a day for a sniff test. Mike, does this look right? Do those numbers feel right to you? They haven't been in it long enough to know like, Hey, is that 5% off maybe or is it 50% off? And we have a big issue here, I've been around it long enough where I can look at the numbers and just say, yeah, that's wrong. We're missing something. Let's dig deeper. We won't have to do that. We don't have to rely on Mike's gut and historical data and memory to do that. We will have the tool to be able to do it in a more sure way and that will be really impactful. So with that in mind, I want to give you guys both the opportunity to talk about, hey, what's coming down the road for Sales Factory AI.
Ged (27:34):
Since the pandemic, we've been tracking consumer behavior. We've done hundreds of studies with probably somewhere around a quarter million Americans responding and pro users and everything in between. We're going to take that information and we're going to use AI to make it much, much more accessible. I'll still align from Juan. One of the things that matters in the future is agility and speed. And if you're quick and certain, those are things that we don't have right now. So stuff that took 90 days might now take a day. So we're going to continue to build that consumer behavior database, which by the way, predicted the 2020 election electoral college. That's a good set of data, not many people did. And we're going to make it accessible to all of our customers and so forth. Now that sounds like it's going to be real easy, we're going to throw a switch and it's going to happen. It's not. And Juan has a lot of work to do.
Mike (28:22):
That speed and assuredness and quality. It's like price and quality. You can have one or the other. You can't have both, but you can. Now it's coming down the line. Alright, Ged, thanks so much for being here. We're going to let you step out. I know you got a bunch of things going on, but I've got one hot seat question for you. So this is first thing that comes to mind. What's one unpopular opinion you have about ai?
Ged (28:45):
I'm generally optimistic and I think there's plenty of people that think I'm a lunatic and that AI is going to, it's not good. And so I think it's really good. I think anytime you empower people in the aggregate, that works out. Great. Awesome.
Mike (28:58):
Ged, thanks for being here. Thank you Juan. So you kind of heard what Ged was talking about in terms of retailers and merchants and what they're thinking about. What do you think they should be paying attention to from brands that are using ai?
Juan (29:10):
I mean this is a technology related to ai, but technically speaking it's not ai. There's services out there that do semantic search. What that's going to allow you to is basically have systems with infinite memory. So a merchant has smaller category, have thousands of products. So how a merchant can think of their time thing without missing anything. That's where this sort of technology search vector databases and all of that came help them. To go back to one of the things you mentioned is am I forgetting something? You can do that with data now with symmatic search and AI using Iraq frameworks. So that to me is kind of the most exciting that this is just getting started.
Mike (29:52):
As you're thinking about how our jobs and we are selfish by nature, humans are just thinking about, we're thinking about our life and we're thinking about our job, but everyone's job is changing. So everyone that we interact with, whether it's a merchant or a brand, their jobs are all changing simultaneously with AI in conjunction with ours. And so keeping that in mind in terms of, hey, what might they be expecting and what might be helpful to them is a great way because it still comes down to building good rapport with your merchant. You're wanting to build this relationship where we're working together to grow sales and grow business and to help consumers. I love that. The idea of keeping everyone's interaction with it in mind. And that's a great point. So I'm going to ask you a little bit of a different hot seat question. Where are you seeing AI being integrated that is kind of surprising you that you didn't expect to see it?
Juan (30:48):
One thing we're considering, that goes back to building relationships. Again, kind of it back to this agility concept better than me about earning calls, reports, proxy management reports. Imagine if without you doing the actual work, you can send an email, an automated email to your merchant, say, Hey, I saw that based on this earning calls report, your strategic priority is X. Here are three things we would love to do with you to help you with that the next day, the next morning. Right? Going back to your point, you probably need half a day to go through the entire thing, then have a day to think about, okay, how can I action on this? Now you can automate that. Of course you want to read the email before it goes out, but you think about increasing sales being more efficient, but you can use it to build relationship that way. I think Ged was telling me an example of BCG using creating a big solution with the three years plus three years of consulting knowledge, that tool was able to predict an executive preferences about anything in life. So again, I can say, Hey Mike, it sucks that man you lost last night.
Mike (32:01):
It does. You're right.
Juan (32:03):
It always does. But as an example, so you can get really, I mean this is creepy to extent I understand that, but if you have that knowledge, if you feed it to your tool, then it's not like you're stalk to anybody, right? It's like you're using your knowledge to get more deeper connection with that person.
Mike (32:20):
It's a cool concept to think about, especially when you consider human behavior and patterns of human behavior. And we know that being first to market with an idea, even if it's not the perfect product, there may be a better product that's out there, but if they're second or third to the market, whoever captures share first is going to be successful. That is true with relationships. So if you come to your merchant with a good idea on how to partner together to drive sales, guess what? You're probably going to get the chance to execute and to action that idea. Whereas your competitor might come with the same idea two or three days later from the same earnings call, but if they're slow and they're late, a lot of times first market is going to get the idea pushed through.
Juan (33:05):
You reach two hands,
Mike (33:06):
Right? And so I mean that's going to the end result of that speed and agility is going to be dollars and it's going to be sales. And that's what we're always kind of thinking about is, hey, all these tools are really neat and fun and interesting to use, but is it impacting business growth at the end of the day? And so that's a clear example of one that it is. Well, Juan, thanks so much for being on the show. Really enjoyed the conversation and always love learning more from you about this ever evolving AI space.
Juan (33:35):
Thank you for having me. And I was able to plug soccer once more, so I'm good.
Mike (33:39):
That's always a good thing. All right, thanks ai. Thanks Juan. Alright everybody, thank you so much for tuning in. Hope that that episode was intriguing for you, that hopefully it sparked some questions for you and your team, maybe gave you a prompt that you want to enter into AI to kind of help think through future strategies. How are you growing your business at retail? How are you working with your merchants and how are you automating your processes? So hope that was really helpful. We always want to know what you guys want to hear about. AI is obviously huge right now and it's ever evolving. So it's a topic that is close to our hearts and we like talking about it, but we want to hear about the things that you care about. So if there's a topic or a guest that you'd love for us to have on, drop a comment in the comment section below and let us know.
(34:27):
We would love to hear about it. If comments aren't your thing, you can always email me directly at mike.fowler@salesfactory.com. We'd love to hear from you there as well. And we'd love to hear what you thought about this particular episode. So if you've got a counterpoint or something that you'd like us to go into further, you can comment that below as well and we will get in the comments and we'll answer you. As always, guys, remember like subscribe, hit the little bell icon. That little bell icon will give you notifications when there's new episodes coming out. We would love for you to subscribe and be a part of what's going on here at Retail Oriented no matter where you get your podcasts. We would love to connect with you there. And until next time, remember when we're thinking about retail, it's always about selling in and selling through. Have a great day.