AI Insights to Power Your Business with Josh Schachter of Update AI | Episode 054

Matik's Scale + CS Virtual Conference: https://bit.ly/scalecs-aturkovic

Josh Schachter is the Founder and CEO of UpdateAI, the conversation intelligence tool built specifically for the customer success profession.  He sits down with Alex to talk product management, the unorthodox genesis of UpdateAI, and, of course, artificial intelligence itself.

Key topics:

• 00:00 - Introduction
• 02:50 - Josh's background in product management
• 05:17 - Joining Idea Lab and finding inspiration
• 07:52 - How UpdateAI got its name
• 10:25 - A different perspective as a product manager
• 13:02 - Commercialization and expansion of a product
• 15:51 - The value of customer insights
• 18:24 - Snackable & actionable insights for different stakeholders
• 23:17 - The future of artificial intelligence in the industry
• 28:50 - Human interaction in digital
• 31:37 - Robots on the front line in technical support
• 34:27 - The power of Chat GPT as a CSM
• 37:04 - Future plans for UpdateAI
• 39:41 - Shoutouts

Enjoy! I know I sure did...

Josh's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jschachter/
Update AI: https://update.ai

Shoutouts:

• Kristi Faltorusso
• Jon Johnson

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This episode was edited by Lifetime Value Media, a media production company founded by my good friend and fellow CS veteran Dillon Young.  Lifetime Value aims to serve the audio/video content production and editing needs of CS and Post-Sales professionals.  Lifetime Value is offering select services at a deeply discounted rate for a limited time.  Navigate to lifetimevaluemedia.com to learn more.

Chapters

• 0:03 Digital Customer Success Podcast Introduction
• 13:09 Leveraging AI for Customer Insights
• 17:07 Insights and Future of Customer Success
• 30:03 Empowering Human-Ai Collaboration in Digital

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

No, I don't think there's anything healthy about my life right now just to be clear, just working and eating like crap. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I just had lunch. It's three o'clock.

Speaker 2: 0:16

And, once again, welcome to the Digital Customer Success Podcast with me, alex Cherkovich. So glad you could join us here today and every week as I seek out and interview leaders and practitioners who are innovating and building great scaled CS programs. My goal is to share what I've learned and to bring you along with me for the ride so that you get the insights that you need to build and evolve your own digital CS program. If you'd like more info, want to get in touch or sign up for the latest updates, go to digitalcustomersuccesscom. For now, let's get started. Hello and welcome to the Digital Customer Experience Podcast. This is episode 54. I'm your host, alex Terkovich, and it's so great to have you back. Before we get into today's show, just a quick reminder. I'll be speaking on June 6th at Maddox Scale and CS Summit, which is a virtual conference that'll be happening. There's a link down below for you to sign up. If you do sign up and you're one of the first five using my link, you'll get a $20 Uber Eats gift card, because who doesn't like snacks during a conference? Lots of great speakers Go check it out and hope to see you at that event.

Speaker 2: 1:30

For today, I've got a guest on by the name of Josh Schachter, who isn't from CS. Right, he's got a background in product, but he's spent the last little while few years supporting CS indirectly via Updateai. So you may know Josh from, obviously, updateai, but also the Unchurned podcast that he hosts, as well as the BS and CS crew that crash the podcast once in a while for some really fun conversations. Anyway, josh joins us today, and I invited him on for a couple of reasons. Obviously, updateai is a fairly well-known tool in CS circles, so we do talk about that a little bit.

Speaker 2: 2:17

I wanted to have him on, though, because he does have such a rich background in product and there's such an importance in the relationship between product and CS that we wanted to spend some time talking about that. We also spend a fair amount of time talking about his own digital emotions for Updateai, because you know they're quite good from my own personal experience and having been subject to some of the emails that look like they come from him but don't. So we talk about that a little bit and, you know, get into various other topics, but I hope you enjoy today's conversation with Josh Schachter, because I sure did. Well, I mean, for those that don't know, which I don't know. I would imagine most of my audience knows you and Updateai, do you want to like say who you are and like what you do?

Speaker 1: 3:10

Yeah, sure I'd love to. I mean nice to meet everybody. I'm Josh. I did come from a background about 15 years in product management and product management, like CS, has evolved through the years. So, you know, started my career with my yeah, my first I had a startup and then my first official job in PM was at eHarmony. We were building an OKCupid competitor. Right, we actually passed OKCupid eHarmony this is back in. They had passed just like a year before I joined. So this is back in 2011. I joined but they had just passed on purchasing OKCupid for $30 million. Whoops, probably a mistake in hindsight. Yep, yeah. So eHarmony said you know, instead we think we can build it ourselves, we think we can partner with Yahoo Personals and I think they had some kind of JV thing going there and then they just decided to build themselves. So we built like an OKCupid type of competitor. This is right.

Speaker 2: 4:06

Tinder was probably in like its incubation phase.

Speaker 1: 4:07

It was probably like five people sitting in a in a we work type of thing at that point, so it was still not really out yet. Um. So we had our own kind of swipe type of paradigm and things like that, but we missed the boat on it. We were, we were part of like a more mature conservative um, and I mean that in every single aspect um, yeah, more conservative type of culture at e-harmony, and so we couldn't really do. We didn't have like some of the liberties to really like experiment the way like a true startup. So we were like the startup pod but tended a bit to, you know, the main um breadwinner is e-harmony still like around?

Speaker 2: 4:40

I haven't heard of e-harmony recently um, yeah, it is technically.

Speaker 1: 4:46

I think a pe shop bought it for pennies and it's, you know, like. So it's there, like you can like, the domain is around, let's put it that way. Um, so, so then did my rodeo with different companies, the nfl product management, intuit product management, all kind of in startups or for boss consulting group, building products for, for building startups, for their Fortune 100 companies, and I loved that experience. A lot of work, more slide decks than I would like as a pure product manager, but still really amazing opportunity to travel the world, build some cool startups. Half failed, half succeeded. A couple are huge now but then said, okay, great, I want to go back to my own entrepreneurial spirit. And so I hooked up with currently my co-founder, a guy by the name of Bill Gross and his incubation studio in Pasadena. It's called Idea Lab and it's actually the OG incubator, I think, like in the country on the West coast. I don't want to misstate that, but really they've been around for over 25 years and they've launched over 150 companies and honestly, this is not so much of like. It's not the same story you're going to get from Edward Chu a catalyst right, how he was inspired by like the Daily Toils as head of CS at his last company.

Speaker 1: 6:02

I wanted to work with Bill, yeah, and I went to Bill and he had his like top 10 list of ideas, all literally like one pagers, a 10 slide, one pager deck, 10 different ideas. One was, like you know, we kind of know Tony Robbins, so partner with him on some kind of like conference networking app. One was you know, a robot that delivers you like your Coke while you're watching TV on the couch. One was board meeting management, and that stuck out at me because what do you do in consulting, even on the innovation side? You're just doing steering committees and board presentations and pitches and stuff like that. So I took that idea. I said Bill, let me, let me explore this. I explored it for about a month and came back and said I don't really think like the opportunity size is there for this. But here's this other thing that I've been noodling on.

Speaker 1: 6:55

At BCG in particular, there's so much communication back and forth and every week as the GM, the team leader, I have to write these long briefs about like here's what the team accomplished, here's our plan for next week. You know updating, you know downward, laterally and upward facing, and you send that out on Friday afternoon, maybe a partner replies all with a plus one or thumbs up emoji. That's kind of the extent of it. So the original idea was how can we create like almost like a CMS for keeping the team on the same page, more efficient communication? And at that point, actually, ai was not on my radar. I was actually really just thinking about a workflow. And Bill said this is great, I love it, but if we're going to do this, let's shoot for the moon, let's develop our own AI to ease this communication. Let's shoot for the moon, let's develop our own AI to ease this communication. And so then we said okay, well, this is now September of 2020 when we incorporated the company I didn't want to call it Update AI Bill and I had very differing schools of thought on naming companies.

Speaker 1: 8:00

At the end of the day, you go with the name that the person who has launched 150 companies and about a dozen public companies um for sure, yeah, which is he's very literal. Right, you know he created. Uh, what was one of the literal ones, like city search, right, yeah, literal, you do a search for the city.

Speaker 2: 8:17

You know what. You know what the product is yep so update, because all that team updates.

Speaker 1: 8:23

Um, I wanted hubble because we were like the hubble telescope, which is now um I don't know the new one now that's replaced it, but we are helping you zoom in and get the information. But anyway, so the domain stuff didn't work out, but so we incorporated update and then then we just kind of went along our you know, like, user discovery, which I was really good at coming out of BCG because we did a lot of user discovery and I learned a lot of great techniques around design thinking and stuff like that, and that's actually been a little bit of a kind of a super strength for us now with the business, with, like some of the CCO club workshops and things that we were helping to get folks those skills. So I went around this is during September 2020, in the middle of COVID and so, like, what is at the heart of team communication? Well, the zoom meetings and we can all easily like forecast that there's going to be a million meeting note takers that are going to be out there. We didn't want to just be another one of those Um, so we did our our design research or our UX research and started talking to, like, the different types of stakeholders in these high performing, you know tech oriented, cross-functional teams, so marketing and product and sales project management.

Speaker 1: 9:42

And I had been in an incubator at BCG right, like we took companies from zero to one. Yeah, I had been in the silo of building products and in tech, but like under a major consulting company, so I had my head in the sand like for those five years, if it wasn't. You know writing slide decks and you know traveling across different airports right, it was. And I didn't know what customer success was. Yeah, right, traveling across different airports.

Speaker 1: 10:07

Right, it was, and I didn't know what customer success was. Yeah, right, I did not know. Three and a half years ago, I did not know what customer success was. Sure, I probably shouldn't confess that here, right I think it's a healthy thing, honestly, yeah, I mean so, not knowing what CS is or or or confession or both, no, but I mean both.

Speaker 2: 10:24

Sure. I mean, I'm sure your therapist would love the fact that you're confessing stuff or talking openly about it.

Speaker 1: 10:30

Yeah, oh, there's deeper things we can talk and confess about there.

Speaker 2: 10:33

Yeah, but like this kind of gets into one of the questions that I do have for you at some point, which is as a non-CS person or non-customer kind of you know, post-sale person coming in as a product manager, I feel like that's probably served you well in tackling this problem that you're tackling.

Speaker 1: 10:52

Yes, it's the again, in consulting there's like jargon and frameworks for everything, right. So it's like this inside out, outside in view. So I had the outside in perspective. Where that helped me was in creating allies, actually, because for so anyway. So let me let me, and alex tell me to move it on. Right, tell me to move along if you want to actually talk cs and other stuff. Right, I'm giving you the very long version. I can fax this into you later if you'd like.

Speaker 1: 11:31

So CS is the functional group that stood out as we were talking to all these other cross functions. We knew the nature of CS conversations through Zoom was not going to go away. Even after COVID. We knew that wasn't going to become like, oh, we're all back to like visiting our customers in person, and we just kept on hearing, meeting after meeting, underserved, underappreciated, stressed, and you have all these follow-ups to complete and these action items. And we were also trying to triangulate that with building out technology that could serve well, right. So we wanted to be specific with the technology. So we said, okay, great, we're not really going to go and try to build broad AI that tries to do everything for communication. We're going to really hone in on the action items that these folks are having on their calls and help them with that workflow so that nothing slips through the cracks where.

Speaker 1: 12:26

What you said where it helped me to having been naive and not having like past background in cs was that I actually approached a lot of these interviews very genuinely. I, because I really like now I wouldn't be able to go and have those same conversations and build the same type of like people helping me out and becoming my mentors, because I go and I wouldn't go to you, alex, and say, hey, so what's a QBR? I'm sorry, what are the synonyms for churn? Now I know, but then three and a half years ago I really was like pretty dumb in this stuff.

Speaker 2: 13:06

Like hat in hand kind of.

Speaker 1: 13:07

Built a good network and that served us really well. Now, what that meant is that it took us longer to find our direction. It really did so. Our product really has only been in a commercial state really ready for commercialization for the past six months, really, since like last December of 2023. Took us a while, but we got there. And so, long story short, 10 minutes later, to your question what is update AI?

Speaker 1: 13:34

We take your conversations with customers and we transform them into insights that give you knowledge about cross-functional knowledge about your key accounts. We're starting that with meetings, with integration with zoom and teams and google meet. Um, ultimately, you know, will bear the fruit of integrating with your email and with your instant messaging and things like that. But it's when you think of which is our beachhead. There is so much gold.

Speaker 1: 14:07

Mickey Powell, who you know worked very closely one of the leaders in our group. He used to use the analogy of all the conversations that CSMs have with their customers is like crude oil it's raw, unrefined oil, but that's valuable. Raw, unrefined oil, but there's, that's valuable and we are tapping into that pipeline and we are refining that oil into, you know, functional things and workflows. So what we're focused on doing is basically like unpacking, untrapping all of the insights that csMs and others like sales and support, other functions that talk to customers, analyzing those and helping to tell the story of the customer so that everybody, in a very snackable format, can digest the latest about each customer and, at the portfolio level, understand all the key trends across their customer base. And where that started was helping CSMs and others save time through like some really really good, accurate note-taking and a lot of people still know us as a note-taker but we're not actually a note-taking business, it's actually a Trojan horse.

Speaker 1: 15:20

We use the note-taking because we didn't want to be like Gong yeah, gong at the time was known to be really helpful for sales leaders and managers a little bit big, big brotherish at the time, yeah, and we we actually intentionally took the reverse direction. We said let's help out the ICs, let's save them time, let's be PLG, product-led growth, where you can self-sign up, and let's get a wave of engagement and adoption. The rest will come. But so we really appealed ourselves to ICs, saving them time, which I think has served us well, because people really like the product and now that we have that critical mass and the data from that, now we can do some amazing things detecting churn risks early and expansion. You know expansion signals and product feedback trends and then you can share all those insights with the different functions within your organization that need to hear those things. I wonder what the talk ratio, alex, for this podcast will be.

Speaker 1: 16:17

And I apologize very much for that.

Speaker 2: 16:19

It is extremely high on your end for now. It won't be for the rest of it, but I really appreciate that background and I also you know a couple of things that came to mind as you were talking about updates, specifically in your kind of mentioning of PLG, because I think you're one of the few kind of CS tools that have gotten PLG right, maybe the only one. You know you're really leading with the CSM and that has given you, I think, a're really leading with the CSM and that has given you, I think, a whole lot of juice to play with, obviously, a huge range of users that absolutely love you. But then you know that whole data layer that you've built up is invaluable when it comes to, like you said, leadership. But you know you got to get the inputs in first and I think that's kind of smart from a strategic standpoint. I had a conversation recently with Alok, who's the founder of Funnel Story. I don't know if you know him or have hung out with him.

Speaker 1: 17:15

Yeah, I don't know him personally, but I know Funnel Story.

Speaker 2: 17:17

Yeah, yeah, but he we were having a very interesting conversation about you know customer data and customer insights because he is also from a product kind of background and how the insights that CS leaders crave, for instance, are much different than what a product organization might need to drive their product strategy, where they need much more on the aggregate level and whatnot. I was curious to get your insights into that difference of how a CS leader might go about using update versus a product leader or perhaps somebody in support or another organization yeah, yeah, and I like um something you said there the insights that people crave.

Speaker 1: 18:06

I can just see it now our new h1 the insights that cs leaders crave cravable insights, craveable. I prefer snackable I prefer snackable.

Speaker 2: 18:15

I really like snackable.

Speaker 1: 18:16

What you see, yeah yeah, yeah, and it makes me feel like I'm gonna have. What is it like? Snackable snack pack, pudding or whatever.

Speaker 2: 18:23

I feel totally yeah, hungry for dessert.

Speaker 1: 18:29

But I think like one of the flaws and it's getting better for sure, right, but in previous conversational intelligence and things was here's a recording link to a 45 minute recording, like go watch, and you know the clip is at this time of the. So we want to make it really snackable so that people can actually consume these insights, otherwise what's the point? So there are different stakeholders that are in priorities. So your CS leader is looking for early indicators of churn. I think one of the things that the CCOs that work with us they appreciate is they claim that they can actually get churn risk signals earlier from our portfolio insights dashboard because they don't have to wait for the one-on-ones or for their reports to have one-on-ones with their reports to hear how things are going. So they can actually save some time, and time kind of can be money when you're pre-empting um churn, uh. So they're looking at that. They're you know they and sales and account management are obviously looking at that. They and sales and account management are obviously looking at expansion, opportunity signals, product wants, product feedback and requests and trends.

Speaker 1: 19:31

That's what I always wanted when I was a product manager. We'd have these voice of the customer. I forgot to mention that, but one of the startups I built, we'd have these biweekly voice of the customer meetings in person. You have 10 people around a small table and you'd have the ux researchers sharing their their insights every two weeks from these powerpoint slides like that's not a way that scales information and then marketing wants to know who are the advocates, who are the sqls? Who can I call on for for case studies? Where are people coming from? So different people have different like lenses, and one of the things that we've talked about is because here's the thing we're going to kind of get a little bit even more abstract and talk about ai and all that stuff. There are moats I believe there are moats with ai, but then there's also not moats like it is moving so quickly and becoming so accessible that there are ways that you create IP and we have that with your prompt engineering and things that you do behind the scenes of that. It's not just about having a list of 20 good questions, so there are things that you do with that, but generally it's not like a moat of big data like we would think about it 10 years ago.

Speaker 1: 20:43

Yeah, so I believe that the winners of these categories within AI it's going to come down to. What do you do with that data? What do you do with that intelligence? If the intelligence becomes a commodity because it's, who can afford to pay for chat or for GPT 5.0, right, coming out probably around August, september? Yeah, then the winners are really like what's the workflow? How do you make it actionable?

Speaker 1: 21:08

It goes back to the UX. So what we're focused on now is like we think we nailed it with, like the note-taking UX and the jobs, and for us it was always important. We always said we're not just a note-taker, but we were just a note-taker at the time, but it's note taking plus the jobs to be done. So, like, how do you help people with those notes? Push it to the CRM, help them prep for their next call, help them with the follow-up email, help them more easily like share content with their team? Right, that was the important part of our note taker. Now the important part of our insights the AI is like how do you create that same experience to let all those other cross-functional stakeholders consume that information in the way they want, so that the marketing leader gets the case study information delivered to them as they want it? Under that lens, the product leader gets the top 10 list of feature trends week over week, in the way they want to consume it, and so on and so forth.

Speaker 2: 22:03

Yeah, making that stuff incredibly useful and sticky and to where you know you, as a leader, really rely on that level of detail and those, those insights, those snackable insights that they're getting. That's, that's super cool. One of the things that I feel like you guys do really well actually is some of the digital motions that you have in place. Before we get into that, I do ask all my guests the same question, which is what is their own kind of personal elevator pitch definition of digital customer success, and I have a feeling yours is gonna be maybe slightly different.

Speaker 1: 22:38

I think it's ubiquitous. I mean, digital CS exists at all different segments, right? So it's like to think immediately what jumps to mind is, oh well, it's digital, it's low touch, but that's not true, right. Like we're digital CS in some way and we're helping you, like with your calls with customers, which is clearly not low touch. Let's play, like you know, jargon bingo. It's about enabling somebody through digital tooling.

Speaker 1: 23:03

I don't want to be scary, I don't know the answer, but it will be interesting to see where all this AI stuff, leading into true AGI or general intelligence, where that goes. I saw somebody I trust in the VC industry, but he's on, like, the academic side of things and he shared a deck recently and it also had some surveys from other smart people and most folks were saying that we'll be at agi within the next three to five years, which is real, and I think that the way they there was a, a label for it, but like it's like it was like level level one or level two AGI, I don't know, but that level represents the AI having intelligence of, like the median person, 50% of the population. I mean, digital CS today is pick your tool. It's all digital CS, really, right? But the interesting thing is, like, where is that going to go?

Speaker 1: 24:02

I think in any industry, with ai it's, you start out with augmentation and augmenting the role of the doer, the knowledge worker, whoever that is, and then ultimately it leads to automation, yeah, and I don't think there's going to be, like I, I don't think it's going to be just you know, don't think it's going to be just you know, ubiquitous job loss, but I don't know where it's going to go. Right, like I really don't. Like, clearly there's going to be some kind of shift.

Speaker 2: 24:39

Yeah, I think so too.

Speaker 2: 24:40

Thought process for a lot of people is like, hey, digital is how I'm treating my low-tier customers or how I'm engaging customers digitally and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2: 24:50

But the whole aspect of digital that a lot of folks leave out is the internal efficiencies and kind of resources and tooling that help your team perform better, help your team actually spend valuable time with their clients instead of writing recap emails or you know doing whatever.

Speaker 2: 25:10

And so I think part of the service also that update is providing to the CS community is just getting people used to working with artificial intelligence full stop, because I think those that do are gonna have an advantage over those that don't. In a few years time where artificial intelligence becomes a thing where, yeah, you could potentially have a customer issue or something like that being handled fully by artificial intelligence, but you're always gonna need that. I think you're always gonna need that human element to come in off the back end and really, you know, build rapport, connect with customers and do all that kind of stuff, because maybe it's me being naive, but I don't see Gen AI ever replacing human to human connection and you know tools that are coming along help us get out of the minutia of things and help us actually to drive value with customers.

Speaker 1: 26:10

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I don't I don't want to paint a doomsday picture and I think there will always be, there will always be humans there, right, yeah, now, less humans, right, probably A shift in in the labor force, in directions I don't really know. I mean, listen, I, we're not supposed to be political here, but, um, I well, I posted this on linkedin a few weeks ago like I, I do have like a, a moral conflict right with, like we're not trying to replace jobs at all, but we know that being part of an ai ecosystem is ultimately being a small piece of some wide movement. Right, that will go in that direction. Yeah, but clearly I'm an entrepreneur and like this is where innovation is and I support innovation.

Speaker 1: 27:01

But I also was a supporter of andrew yang in the 2016 election because he was the one that wrote the book the war on normal people that said that in you know, 15, 20 years, there's going to be no more truck drivers, and I think it's like 3 million again, I don't want to be quoted on that, but 3 million truck drivers, let's say in the States, and like what are they going to do? There's going to drivers, let's say in the states, and like what are they going to do? There's going to be more like chaos in the streets and you know, that's why he was advocating for universal basic income. So it's like, which I think is a really interesting thing, given like what's going on with ai. So it's this, it is this conflict. I don't know why I'm like. I'm like bringing a hot topic onto myself here. You're not even like grilling me with these questions, I'm like volunteering some kind of catharsis going on here. I think it's important um, but it's important.

Speaker 2: 27:52

I mean the. You know the this bus is moving man, you and I are but minuscule specs. You are much larger spec on that bus and it's gonna move, so we might as well get on. Basically is what I'm getting at.

Speaker 1: 28:07

Yeah, I mean there, you know there's justifications in all different ways and stuff like that. I've spoken to other founders about this and they push back that you're wrong. It will not result in major job loss. It will just shift things around and this has been shown time and time again in economies during different you know industrial revolution and all these different things that at the macro level, everything is fine.

Speaker 2: 28:33

Yeah, Right, right. So who knows? Yeah, who knows. I do want to get back to maybe a couple of more tactical kind of practical things, because you know, I like to leave my, my, my viewers or listeners with stuff that they can go like I'm talking to you, but I don't think I am talking to you. So what's behind that?

Speaker 1: 29:11

Probably customerio, okay, okay. So, yeah, you know, we connect the database to Mixpanel and to fire events based on usage, and then connect Mixpanel over, I think, to BigQuery, and BigQuery to Hightouch and Hightouch over to customerio, and then you set up the automation sequence. And then I know that Alex has onboarded, and so welcome Alex. How are you today? You know, thank you for joining. And so welcome Alex. How are you today? Thank you for joining. And here's a little bit about us. And then I know that Alex hasn't had a recap processed in the last four days. So, hey, just want to make sure of checking in to see if everything's fine. We can do things that like. It's not me right, it is the sequencing and the automation.

Speaker 2: 29:56

But it's very well done.

Speaker 1: 29:57

Yeah, I mean I can afford to do it now. Right, I can afford to like actually listen customer to customer. A lot of people say like wow, like your response time is amazing, like yeah, but you know, just wait.

Speaker 2: 30:11

No, it's cool. And I think that's cool because it does blend to, or it does speak to, a lot of things that I've been talking about recently, which is that whole kind of combination of machine and human Right, because, sure, a bunch of automations, you know, product intelligence is feeding these automations. It knows when you're not doing whatever, and so it fires off an email, but ultimately there is still a human in this case. And so it fires off an email, but ultimately there is still a human in this case, and for now, josh still there, you know, kind of responding and and and being in the mix, which I think ultimately is one of the ways to really drive success digitally, you know, making sure that your humans are plugged in somehow the human touch is so important to me, like on a personal level with the business the companies that I stay to that had done the research on.

Speaker 1: 31:24

Agi said that he was actually surveying folks about whether they would want to have a human salesperson take a discovery call or a robot salesperson take a discovery call, but that robot has all the playbooks and all the information embedded within them and most people not like a huge majority it was somewhat split but more people preferred the robot than the human because it was more like matter of fact and I agree like I'm.

Speaker 2: 31:55

I'm kind of right there if I'm having a technical issue. I would want to talk to a really intelligent robot. Two days later, a human reached out and said hey, I'm just making sure yeah, making sure there aren't broader issues and a human that can look at all the data and the snackable insights, so to speak, to make sure that you know customers are doing the right thing.

Speaker 1: 32:41

Yeah, I agree it's got to be a tag team, but this was salespeople. This was saying like if a salesperson even up front, not even support yeah, yeah. That was fascinating. That was fascinating.

Speaker 2: 32:53

Yeah, we'll see I get it. I don't like talking to salespeople. I don't like talking to salespeople. I don't like being sold to. I don't know. I make it my life's mission to avoid being sold to. I would much rather pay a higher price buying a car online than going to a dealer and dealing with salespeople. Sorry, that's just me.

Speaker 1: 33:12

That was the whole thesis behind what was the car company? Was it Carvana?

Speaker 2: 33:17

Carvana yeah, true Car, true Car, true Car car, like all of those you know, even carmax, I mean that's. You know that, like, the price is it and they've set that expectation, and so you still have to deal with somebody, but you know it's, they're not gonna make you sign an arbitrary piece of paper. I would imagine that as a product manager, you know a product management mentality and now a founder, you're probably always kind of looking out into the wild for, like, what are other people doing? What's a really cool kind of digital thing? What's cool in AI? Like, are there some examples of stuff that you've seen recently where you're like whoa, that's fucking cool.

Speaker 1: 34:00

There are like the. The cool stuff is the like the video. The AI generated videos and images we've known. But now it's coming to the video and you really can't tell that you can put a prompt in. And I'm blanking on the names of the services.

Speaker 2: 34:19

Yeah, like hey, hey, hey. Gen is one of them. And then um agent co-pilot is another one where, like you, you feed it your crm data and it like spits out, you know, a video for each one of your contacts that's personalized. Oh, that's cool, I didn't know about that one.

Speaker 1: 34:38

No, I can tell you, I use chat GPT every day, probably 20 prompts a day. I pay for the upgraded version. It's well worth it 20 bucks. There is that aggregator service that allows you to have premium to not only chat GPT but all the other ones too, so it's probably a better deal. But it's kind of one of those things for me. It's just like. It's simple, it works, so I don't need to like mess around with all the different versions. That's been game changing for me and not everybody you know like we know like 50% of people still are not really familiar with it. So we talk about it, but there's still so much more be made and so that would be my recommendation is like every important email goes through chat GPT, every piece of copy for the website goes to chat GPT, every tool tip copy, every. It's changed the game.

Speaker 2: 35:26

Yeah, um, I just posted about um chat GPT this morning because, and, and specifically like um, I don't know if you've heard of it, but the risen framework, which is a pretty well-known framework for like prompting, where you you know you give it sufficient juice to actually get a solid result, cause a lot of people like go in there and they're like write me this and that's where they stop and it's, of course it's crap.

Speaker 2: 35:49

You know it's not what you want it to be, right, so you kind of get crazy specific with it. But I think a lot of folks have asked me recently like you know, what are some AI tools that I should go look at? And I was like, well, as a CSM, you should obviously look at update AI. Then I say, go to ChatGPT or Bing Chat or you know Microsoft Copilot, whatever you have and like really learn how to work with it and learn how to prompt properly. Because you know, once you've done that a few times and you start saving your prompt and you kind of reuse those things, it becomes insanely powerful. And I think we're still in this weird period where, like I think at some point I'm guessing prompting is going to be an ancient art, right, but right now it's crazy relevant because we don't have a bunch of like bespoke tools and and you know, kind of neural nets like doing all the prompting for us yeah, you raised a good point, though, about the um.

Speaker 1: 36:53

Context is really important to have successful use and experience with ChatGPT and these other systems. The more relevant context I think you call the juice that you provide it. It's going to amplify your outcome by so much.

Speaker 2: 37:11

Yeah, exactly what's next for y'all for Update and for you it's busy.

Speaker 1: 37:18

We created a little bit of of buzz and branding around this thing called the cco club, where we go around and bring leaders together and and help them co-create ideas for the industry. We're actually doing a cs mental health awareness event in new york um the first week of may awesome. Then we're going to be doing an AI symposium in New York, also in June and we're doing a CCO leadership workshop in SF in June. I'm really excited about where the business is going. I mean, don't get me wrong, I was telling you before like I'm working like a dog, right.

Speaker 1: 37:52

You know, 15-hour days, you know, and half days on the weekends. But I'm driven by adrenaline right now because, like the vision is finally starting to come together again. Like it took us a while to to drudge through being considered the note taker, but now that that's there, it like it's operating well. Now we can bring in all the really cool stuff the portfolio insights, the account insights, the stakeholder insights and the most exciting thing for me with the product is we're building what we call this context ecosystem, customer context ecosystem, just based on what you were just saying as well. Like, so, to get the best insights at those different value layers we call them, um, you need to have not just like hey, here's a transcript, what's the list, what's the prompt to apply? It's, what do I know about my customer?

Speaker 1: 38:45

Like you said, like that service that pulls in all the information from Salesforce. So like, what's that context about the customer? What's the context about my own business? What products am I selling? What industry am I in, who are the stakeholders from my team, the CSMs and the leaders and whatnot. And then it's the history of all the conversations that I've had and then eventually, all the other emails and stuff, and so like being able to bring all that together, operate and orchestrate with that data to spit into the LLM and train on and then output these different use cases. That's what I'm really excited about, because that now is getting us much better results and we're starting to create some defensibility and kind of next-gen stuff with it. So cool, I'm excited.

Speaker 2: 39:30

That's exciting. Yeah, I'm exhausted. I'm sure you are. I can only imagine. Do you want to give any shout-outs to people who are doing?

Speaker 1: 39:44

cool stuff in digital or ai. Yeah, geez, you're gonna put me on the spot, I mean as a founder. You have like so many founder friends. Yeah, for sure yeah if I, if I choose one founder friend like an issue, yeah, I'm gonna give a shout out to my co-hosts of my, of our podcast that you've been on, alex. Well, you have not been on it, right, I've not podcast that you've been on, alex.

Speaker 2: 40:00

Well, you have not been on it, right? I've not. I'm in July. I'm joining you in July. You guys were on mine. Okay, I'm getting you on. Okay, you guys were on mine like almost a year ago or something like that.

Speaker 1: 40:09

So, so we need to catch up. Okay, I'm sorry, and I'm going to see my co-host in person tomorrow in New York. I'm so excited. So, john Johnson and Christy Falteruso yeah, they're awesome, we do Unchurned. Christy now has her own podcast called.

Speaker 2: 40:24

She's so Sweet, which is a great name.

Speaker 1: 40:25

Female leader in the C-suite. Totally, totally. We had fun with some alternative names for her, but she, you know, she wisely stuck with her gut and yeah. So shout out to my buddies john and christy yeah, awesome.

Speaker 2: 40:41

Where can people find you reach out to you? I mean linkedin, obviously, or yeah, linkedin josh at updateai yeah, if you don't respond quickly, you're just building shit.

Speaker 1: 40:51

That's what you're doing, yeah pretty much, yeah, but yeah, alex, thank you. Thank you for having me on again.

Speaker 2: 40:58

No, it was a pleasure having you on, like you're a baller, and I hope the CS community has embraced you as much as I think the CS community has, because you've really helped us to kind of embrace AI, helped CSMs, a lot of CSMs who love your product and all that kind of stuff and I can't wait to see update at the stage where it's like pivotal in the tech stack of every CS community.

Speaker 1: 41:22

So thanks man. That really means a lot. I appreciate it.

Speaker 2: 41:26

Yep, thank you for joining me for this episode of the Digital CX Podcast. If you like what we're doing, consider leaving us a review on your podcast platform of choice. If you're watching on YouTube, leave a comment down below. It really helps us to grow and provide value to a broader audience. You can view the Digital Customer Success Definition Wordmap and get more information about the show and some of the other things that we're doing at digitalcustomersuccesscom. This episode was edited by Lifetime Value Media, a media production company founded by our good mutual friend, dylan Young. Lifetime Value aims to serve the content, video, audio production needs of the CS and post-sale community. They're offering services at a steep discount for a limited time. So navigate to lifetimevaluemediacom, go have a chat with Dylan and make sure you mention the digital cx podcast sent you. I'm alex trukovich. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you next week.