A New Era of Disruption: How Affinity Group Is Redefining What’s Possible in the Food Industry

Welcome to Bridge to Local with Affinity Group. The podcast that connects manufacturers to local operators. With deep industry experience and a proven track record of successful partnerships, Affinity Group is your bridge to driving growth and seizing opportunities in food service. Let's build success together. One connection at a time. Hey everyone, welcome back to your Bridge to Local. I'm your host Mindy Copaz. Today's a big one for us here at Affinity Group. We're here to talk about an exciting milestone for our company. We are introducing our partnership with Mascary, NXT, and Affinity Group company. And what it means for our team, our partners, and the future of food service. We'll break down why this investment matters, how the technology is going to disrupt the industry, and the new level of sales enablement it unlocks for our manufacturing partners. There's lots to cover and big news ahead. Joining me today is our panel of experts. I'm George Monahan with Mascary, NXT, Matt Ward with Mascary, NXT, Neil Gladstone, Affinity Group. Thanks for joining us everybody. We're going to talk about AI today, the new frontier, if you will. But let's start the conversation with maybe some myth-busting around what are we hearing, what has been the fear around it, and what have we seen that we've reversed it, or unlocked some of that potential? Yeah, I mean, I think the big, I guess, the fear or threat that we've heard throughout our organization is just simply the replacement. Right. You know, what does that mean? And we've really tried to take the approach of, it's simply help. And we're trying to augment what we do as an organization. And I think AI can play a pretty big solution in that. Yeah, if you look at where we've been successful and other people have been successful, I don't think it's successful to think that it's going to completely replace all the jobs and things like that. What it's really good at is replacing tasks. Some tasks that people do can be better done by machines. And those tasks tend to not be the creative, strategic things in our world that sales people do. It's not selling, but it can do a lot of stuff to get people ready to sell and make them more efficient. Yeah, that's kind of been the sales gripe, if gripe is the right word. But a lot of the admin tasks that digging, the finding, the admin work on the computer, they're relationship builders and connectors, right? They're using those strengths to turn their people skills into sales. And that's where they want to focus. And this is an avenue for them to do just that, right? Automate some of the quote unquote admin work and allow them to maximize their relationships. Yeah, give them time back, right? Give them time back to that, like Matt had said, spend more time with customers. Yeah, and in fact, I think when we started, we kind of bought into the myth a little bit ourselves. And we thought that maybe AI could do more than what it could do. And what our big learning has been in this past two years working with a affinity group is that, you know, cold calling with AI, there's a role for that. But really when it's put together with someone who has really good relationships and they can kind of be the concierge and introduce it, it's just as a multiplier of that person's effectiveness. So with people, it's a home run. We've said on this podcast a bunch of times too, when we talk about the business, more than anything, it's a relationship business. And we just happen to sell food in this relationship business. And I think when we frame this conversation around AI, that we should be keeping that in mind, right? It's all about empowering the salespeople to use their skills to drive sales. I think that's been the real key with the success we've had with a affinity group with it. I think from the onset, the approach has been we have to engineer it to work in the working life of salespeople. Right? So it's got to be simple. We can't start selecting people so that they can work with AI. We have to make the AI work with salespeople in a seller's environment. And what we've really found is that sellers are competitive people. And if you can give them an edge, they will take up the spool. Right? So a top-down mandate that you're going to use this technology is not going to be a successful strategy. What we've led with is finding ways, like you said, Neil, provide help and let them organically take it up. And so our success here is really about salespeople asking for more AI opportunities, more features, more occasions. And we couldn't be more thrilled with how it's going. I kind of reflect back on when we first started the conversation with George Matt and Chuck around what this could potentially be. And part of the equation and a big part of the equation is people. Right? And they've created a great platform and opportunity to, you know, again, reduce some of those administrative burden and time savers for our sales team, but also create interest to operators in a very personalized unique way. But you still need someone to help kind of tip that over the edge and close the sale and have that conversation. So I think the combination of both in making sure that we have a good adoption strategy within the organization is what's really going to make this thing take off. I think we've plunged into the deep end pretty quickly here. I wanted us to take a step back just for a second and introduce George and Matt, maybe a little bit deeper in our relationship with mask area NXT and what that means. Do you guys want to start kind of unfolding how that story came about? So there's three founders of mask area NXT. We were all kind of industry veterans. And we started this about two years ago, probably close to two years ago. And what we sort of the founding premise of this thing was coming out of COVID manufacturers were left with a lot less ways to access the market. So you had less sales reps on the street, food shows weren't happening. You had category management shutting down slots and you were creating a winner takes all environment where the reps and the market access that was left it was all going after the few big operators and who got left behind in that was the independent. And our third partner Chuck owns a bar and he likes to tell a story that after COVID he never got a sales rep to come in there. And so all of us were seeing this from slightly different angles, but we just felt like there was a way to reach independent operators that we had not figured out yet. And then chat GPT happened. And I think it set us all on fire because we immediately kind of saw the possibilities of how you could take this underlying technology and scale it to a problem that we all saw and felt every day. And so we started to piece this thing together and you know we go back and we look at what we were doing two years ago and it's embarrassing now because it was just so rudimentary. But it was it was probably pretty groundbreaking at the time we started meeting the manufacturers. We had a little bit of luck selling it we sold lots of little pilots and executed a lot of these things. But what we quickly realized is that we needed a partner you know we did not want to sell to 100 individual clients. We were bootstrapped so we didn't want to raise money we looked into that but we just we felt like it was better just today revenue driven. And we wanted to find a partner and every other company that we were working with was afraid of what we were doing the affinity group or the only company that saw the potential and saw it as a compliment not as a threat. And that was what attracted us to a affinity group very early on was just a shared vision a shared culture as George was saying their sales people were buying in. And we're what we were getting everywhere else which is kind of you know stop signs you know this is a threat you know we don't do this we're gonna be stubborn. And so I think we said a really good fit with these guys and it sort of fit what our vision was which was look we want to partner with the biggest and the best. You know that that's the way that we're gonna grow rather than you know this kind of one one client at a time thing that we were doing. So it kind of progressed a meal I guess up until the last four or five months and then the conversation started to shift to like why are we just why are we just a client of yours you know what what could why is this not a bigger core piece of what we do. And that's kind of what's happened over the last six months and we've you know announced now that we've become part of the affinity group we cannot be more excited about it. Us too I think our whole organization is very excited by this partnership very very excited I think we're going to be very excited. I think there's and you know one thing Matt had said there is and it's a simple thing is the possibilities and I think every day new possibilities come across when we have conversations there's a lot of different challenges that we face in the industry and this can help solve a lot of them. So you know again I think the partnership is that Matt George and team they come to the table with a lot of expertise in the food service industry which is another really really empower you know powerful tool and resource because they're not looking at this is just a tech scenario it's really how does this resonate and how does it how is it. and how does it help us? more relevant in the food service industry, which I think is very powerful. So, I think the combination between what they're creating, the culture of the organization, coming from the top, from Enzo, and how AI adoption and strategy is going to be a part of the Finney group moving forward. So, yeah, and we've been really fortunate to work with the team that is willing to take a good risk, right? Early on, Affinity Group really gave us some pretty unfettered access to their sales team, and we had some failures in public with them. But people understood what it was. There's a lot of trust in the leadership, and then the other trust factor we have is with the clients. The Affinity Group was pretty quick to help introduce us to some of their most enlightened strategic partners, and they've taken risks along with us, and we've been doing a lot of work with clients, and a lot of the veil that can happen sometimes between a vendor of a sales agency and their clients. A lot of that was pulled back, and being able to work with them directly and cycle through and learn things quickly together, it's been a great partnership. And just like Matt said, it was one of those things where we've already taken 90% of the risk together, and we've learned a lot. So coming together and looking at having an even closer integration together, there's less risk in that than what we were doing two years ago. So we're fired up to be. I really think that's a great point, George. Our people obviously in the adoption and the learning and all the things that we took away from the last year and a half of trying some things, but also the openness of our clients to try and engage in that way and be vulnerable in some scenarios and be willing to try and invest in some things that we're trying to do to help again reach more customers and hopefully drive more sales and growth. Yeah, and there's not a lot of failures, but a lot of learning. This is all brand new and it's changing so rapidly that we're keeping up with technology, we're keeping up with potential, we're trying to build process, we're trying to engage our team, there's a lot happening all at the same time. And I think where we've stumbled or where things don't always work, maybe as we designed them back in the playbook, we've learned how to adapt and and come at things from a different angle because of the trials that we've had. I think that's a really important piece to this whole thing. Yeah, we always say, I mean, we're the worst we're ever going to be today. And it's a really true statement. I mean, if you look at AI, big picture, and you go back to like, you know, 2000, you go back to these big moves in the market where we have, you know, self-impeh technology, you get digital, you get high speed internet everywhere, these big things. None of these come close to matching the scale and speed of AI. The speed with which it's changing, the degree to which the cost are coming down, the access is getting greater. We, what we're doing today is going to be just as embarrassing as what I look back two years ago because it is, it's just moving so quickly. And, you know, again, Kudos to affinity group because the guys that win at the end of the day are the ones that are willing to take the risk. The affinity group was willing to take the risk when everyone else saw it as a threat and really wanted it to, you know, go back in the box, put the genie back. And I just don't think that's the right strategy. I mean, you cannot stop this, this AI train. And so it's better to, as you say, experiment with it, learn from it, fail if you, or whatever it is. And then try to figure out how to make it work for you. I really look what you said there, and it's the playbook is constantly evolving and changing as we go and learn. And I think that's kind of the mindset that we have to take moving forward as this continues to evolve. So, yeah. And, I mean, there's a lot of like mental agility that's required for this because a lot of the things that we've thought about in the past, you know, the way that you think about segmenting operators, you know, casual dining operators. That's not really anything in the world of AI, right? Well, we do as we look at, you know, operators that have a happy hour that serve, you know, chicken sandwich, where guests are complaining about it. You know, that's the level of segmentation that AI allows us to do, which in turn makes us give every operator a very personalized message, which speaks directly to a pain point. And I think that's the reason that we've had the success that we've had. Tell me a little bit more about the operator response to all of this. They're the ones receiving a lot of the data, right? They're, they're, they're, we're giving them the bait and we're asking them to bite, I guess, I don't know what the right of fishing terminology is, but what are we learning from the operator side without giving everything away? I think that's a great question because what, you know, what's in it for the operator is what you're asking. And I think most of us in our everyday living, our experience with AI is a call center. And what you're experiencing is someone trying to use AI to cut costs. And, and it's certainly good at that. And that's where probably 90% of the energy has been, especially in food service, is using AI to cut costs or be more efficient. What we want to do is we want to use AI to make ourselves more relevant with operators, right? So a lot of the AI that they're going to experience, they won't even know has been, and that's in the preparation, right? It's first in selecting the right people and having the right people to say the right thing too. So AI is being used there, but it's using, being used in a way that has the experience in mind. And then the other part of it as well is, is then demonstrating that you've done your homework. Use the AI to, we call it hyper personalized the message. And that's where Matt was going with how it's changing marketing. There's been so much time where we've spent energy on segmentation models. What we're finding is that AI really is blurring that sales and marketing line to where we can segment at scale. I mean, the ultimate segment is the individual operator. And we're finding AI can bring a relevant conversation, get it started with that operator and not waste their time. So that's what I think the big breakthrough is. One of the things that we heard early on is, you know, from the pessimist would be like, everybody is going to know it's AI operators are going to ignore it. They're going to reply back to you and, you know, tell you to go away. And we track every bit of that. And the amount of feedback that we've had, I don't even think I need two fingers to count them. We've, we've, we've, funny enough had, I can remember one operator who replied back and said, Hey, I can tell this video was AI generated. It's super cool. Can you guys tell me how you did it? That's, that is the only thing I can ever remember of an operator recognizing that it was what we get 99.9% of the time is the operator replying, thanking the rep for reaching out and communicating just as it's a human. Because it's gathering and targeting and segmenting in real time, right, using the most current information available, referencing something hyper personalized to their business makes them like, Hey, this knows me. Yeah. And there's also, there's a tremendous amount of, of training that goes on to make the messages that we send out less and less robotic and more and more human like. And, and you know, you constantly feed back into the machine messages that work, to messages, messages that didn't work. And over time, which is what we now have behind us, you're able to produce really high quality content at scale. And that's, that's a core capability that, that we've been building over the past couple of years that's, that's starting to pay off pretty well for us. I think the other piece is, if we think about the operator, they're constantly changing, right? They're more likely to engage digitally now more than ever, right? And if you think about what they do in their daily lifestyle, Amazon, all these different things that they're constantly using, this is not a, they're not scared. So the openness, the engagement has been there. That's what we've seen. I think the other big pieces coupled with our team and being able to personalize their own message, leveraging some of the technology is going to be, I think, game changing for us in in the industry. Yeah, that's really important. I think, I think giving, putting the power in the hands of the individual rep to determine, you know, what's the appropriate opportunity, right? We can, we can certainly recommend and give them better targeting than we've ever done before using AI. But really putting those opportunities in the hands of reps and let them call the ball, right? So one of the big difference that Matt talks about, you know, one of the things that has evolved in the two years is we've gone from top down where we're getting their permission to send emails and videos and text to their customer base to now where we build it and they can call it and send it on the fly, have the AI develop the message, personalize to their sales, to their sales opportunity. And then to Neal's point, they can cost, they can go in and step in if it's not the tone they'd like, if it's not the timing they'd like, they can change things and make it, you know, their own. And by the way, keeping it very, very simple. Like anybody can use it. That's how we want to activate it. But again, going back to the operator, people, piece, making it personalized and irrelevant to them, I think is what we've been doing. We've seen some awesome responses from customers willing to try new products. You think about innovative ways to introduce products to the market. This is, I don't think there's a better way. And being able to personalize it based on their menu, their needs, I think that's how it's being more relevant. That's how we're seeing that engagement. And again, trying to think about on our end, the time savings, the speed to market. So there's a lot of solutions that this technology can help provide. Yeah, Neil, if you think about new item launches, right? This is a great one. If our desire in a new item launch is speed, if the kind of standard model might be, we got to make that efficient and work it into that trimester plan, right? Where someone's going to have that item in the bag and they're going to take it across all their customers for that trimester. And on average, you're going to have about two months before everyone sees that new item. Now we can use AI and find out the people who are most likely to be most excited about that item and get it to them in the first week. And the winners are everyone in that situation. It's the rep who's uncovering opportunities and capturing sales earlier. It's the distributor because they're not sitting around on a bunch of stuff in their warehouse. It's not moving. And it's the most importantly, it's the operator because they're competing as well and they get to see new items fast. And now it's kind of more of a democracy, right? Everyone's exposed to the information at the same time. And then they can all make decisions based on that. And that based on when it can be physically brought to them. Yeah, the other winner in there is the manufacturer because in the case of a new item launch and not unlike other things that manufacturers want to sell, what they want is feedback from the field. They want insight. And that is oftentimes hard to come by. So another big application of AI, we've talked a lot about kind of the outbound operator communication, but is that we've completely revamped the way that the affinity group does their sales reporting. And so we're starting to use more voice activation. We're using more camera, more pictures. But the end result of all that is that the manufacturer gets insight from the field, the voice of the customer like they've never gotten before. And I think that is another gigantic piece of a new product introduction because what the manufacturer needs to know as quickly as possible as what is the market, think about this item. And that's very hard to do it in a vacuum and this allows us to do it at scale. Right. Gaining trial, gaining insights, learning what's working, what's not, and then how can they change and adapt that strategy to introduce that product to the field. I think that's a huge, huge learning and win in that scenario. And it's again, it's one of these mine shifts that AI enables, which is this world of little bets. We can try a lot of different things at the same time, figure out what works and then put all the chips behind what works. We don't have to make a big bet without good data to back it up. Another interesting thing too is we don't have to pre-think through what we want to test. In the old days, if you wanted to run a market test, you say, "Okay, what does better? Wednesday sales call or a Thursday call?" Right. And then you design, "Okay, well, I'm going to have this many people do the Wednesday call and this many people do the Thursday call." And yeah, we need some veterans and we need some newbies and we need to kind of design that and run it and think about it. So the AI, what we have is we now have all the inputs and we have the results coming through. So the AI is just looking at all of it. And some of the stuff, it's connections is trying to make our nonsensical and will never make sense. But then it finds these little insights that are amazing. We had a campaign that we were running where the AI, we didn't tell it to do it, but it looks at every aspect of the campaign, all the variables, thousands and thousands of them. And it said, it came to the insight to us of saying, "You know what? When you say reply now or act today, we're getting a worse response than when you either just give them a fixed deadline or you don't say anything at all." So the AI was kind of telling us, "You're sounding like a carnival barker when you're doing it." The hard sell is too much. Well, the really hard sell is great and the soft sell is great, but don't be in that middle part. And we would have never run a test for that. So the campaigns we've done since then, it's like, "Okay, we got to redline that, get that out of there. We're not doing that anymore." And that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's going to be so many more insights like that. I think so. You hit on something that kind of just hits something there. And I think to make these things all so successful, it's finding the right partners that are willing to collaborate and share information. So if you think about, Matt had talked about the manufacturer, George kind of mentioned the operator and the distributor, and then a affinity group trying to pull all this in together so that we have a shared strategy, the same direction, same things in mind that we all want to try and accomplish, which is really trying to fit the need for the customer and the operator, create the demand, create the interest and help drive growth. And I think finding those right partners to make sure that we can pull all that and some that are willing to try like Affinity Group has with NXT, I think is, that's how we're really going to help unlock the potential, right, and help gain share and gain mind space of operators. I think that really goes back to the strength of the partnerships Affinity Group has tried to cultivate, right? We're looking for partners with similar thinking, with similar planning and foresight, with an interest in trying and learning and growing. And I think we're seeing it happen in real time that everybody's coming to the table with similar goals, similar ideas and a willingness to maybe fail, hopefully learn and get better and see if this is worth a bigger investment into the future. And I think it is and we're seeing really positive responses on all sides because of the partnerships we've tried to build, not to tutor our own horn a little bit, but the culture that we've built goes beyond the walls of Affinity Group and really extends to all of our industry partners in like, hey, we can only do it if we do it together. So best idea on the table wins, who's got it, let's try it. Yeah, then you talk about that fit. It's, you know, mention that Matt and I both come from food service, right? We're not techies, but we're super excited about the ability of this technology to improve what we do in food service. And so finding a partner who wasn't distracted by all the amazing things that AI can do, Affinity Group and Enzo, they really believe that this is not an investment they're making in technology. It's a double down on their people because it's about having a force multiplier or a sales force multiplier, right? Arming your best people with the best tools, stripping it down and making their job more about their relationships and their selling skills and less about everything else that goes with it. And that's where our unlock was as well. And so when we had a partner like that who loved our technology, but loved what it could do for their people, we knew we had a fit. Let's zoom out a little bit. We've been laser focused on the food service industry. Let's zoom out a little bit and talk about the food industry in general. And is there application for some of these AI advancements in totality on the food side of the industry, the food business itself? Yeah, I mean, we have demonstrated that a bit so far. There's still a lot more to go. If you look at the food industry sort of at large, the one thing about it is that it's getting more complicated. If you look at taste, taste are becoming more diverse, more ethnic, flavors are entering. And a lot of things, the sales reps aren't used to selling these sorts of products. And so one of the things that the AI has been very, very good at doing is getting people smart faster. And so if you look at it from a tactical level at what we do with the affinity group and with their reps, if we have a new item that a rep is having trouble selling or category or brand or something like that, we can produce a completely personalized training regimen just for that rep that takes their deficiencies, their capabilities in selling it and creates something unique to them. We have things like little AI chats, where if they're in a customer, they can immediately ask a question and get an answer. A rep, what we've seen is that if they're faced with a selling an item that they're afraid of getting a question, they're going to have a hard time answering it, they're less likely to show that item. So what we want to do is help the rep ahead of time with what are the objections questions that I may get so that I'm better prepared to answer them in real time. The places that we can help is going to grow as well. So you think about the lane that we live in. It's typically a sales lane. It is merging into more of a marketing lane because of these different things that we've talked about already. But it can go far beyond that. So one of my favorite things that I'm going to do is to get a new item that I'm going to moments that we've had in this whole journey was we were with one of affinity groups clients not too long ago and we had taken a bunch of pictures and loaded them into our app and we have a little feature in our app where it can take a picture, it can identify competitive opportunities, it can show the rep, here's what's on the shelf, here's what you use to sell against that. And we just loaded in a bunch of pictures from different places and different people. And the AI on its own raised an insight to us and it said, hey, I'm seeing that your clients pouches of product are oftentimes lying on their back and when it's lying on their back I can't tell what product it is. Their competitive product is also in a pouch and it's also lying on its back but they print the brand and the product in the bottom of their packaging. So maybe your clients should think about adding the brand information to the bottom of their packaging. And I just thought that was such a brilliant encapsulation of what AI can do which is that it can look at thousands of little pieces of pictures and put it all together in a way that really it would be very difficult for a human to do. Humans stumble upon creative insights all the time and everyone says AI is not creative and I don't know if that's creativity or not but it's very astute. It doesn't miss a lot. And so I thought that was one of the coolest things we'd seen and to me it just opened up a whole world of applications that we had not even considered. And I think like everything we just talked to Urgent Man talked about I think about the scalability, right? The ability to do more as an agency, right, with clients, with distribution, the training, right? The ability to listen, I make a mean peanut butter and jelly sandwich. AI will now let me and support me in kind of developing different culinary solutions. And how it's applicable to so being able to do that at scale and at speed, the knowledge, the learning of products, right? We're never going to master all of the things that we have today, but how can we do that with a handheld device that might support our sellers in the field? And I think that's a huge component of what we want to continue to accomplish. Yeah. One thing about AI that's been our experience is that AI is never without something to say. If you ask it a question, at least our AI, it will always give you an answer. And it does not ever replace the salesperson's demand for judgment. You may remember the example better than I did, but we were doing a demo early on with a client and we were showing them one of our tools, which was some sort of, it was a menu analyzer. And it recommended us, was it a sardine sandwich that is, is that a ground beef and a hamburger ground sardine? And so you do get some ground sardine burgers out of AI. So there's no question about it. Now stick to my PB and you know. But as for the human lens, it continues to be important. Yeah, and it can't just take it and pass it along. So we always, so like, as an architectural statement, we always call it like human in the loop. So what we do is we have to AI do as much of it as it can, but ultimately a human has got to present a guard, a ground sardine burger or not. They have to make that decision. And we talk about that as an organization humanizing the data. Now it's really humanizing insights and having a partner like AI to help support in that journey. So I'm, I'm really excited about this, the possibilities here. And it doesn't sound like from all this conversation that it's channel specific. So everything we've talked about doesn't have to only be isolated into food service. There's applicability in convenience in military in K 12 in retail, right? Can you, are there any other learnings that we found or potential possibilities in other segments where this could also play? I think Matt has just shared about a little bit about the imaging. I love to hear more about that on the retail applicability. We partnered up with NXT and again, it really came from the field around K 12 and there was a challenge, right? A administrative task or burden that was on our sales team. And we're able to drive a deliver a solution that can mitigate that administrative work, deliver value to the customer, which by the way, we didn't initially think about. It was more about how do we become more efficient in some of the tasks that we're asked to do. But then it created a value for the customer to give them good information at their fingertips on a consistent cadence, informing them of, you know, in this case, in the K 12 segment around commodities, balances, allocations, and how to maximize their dollars. And it's been a great, great learning. And I think of any segment, it's been super engagement, right? The age of the level has been on the chart. >> Yeah, the K 12 people are just wonderful to work with. You know, this report is in theory, it's something that customers have a report that they're getting. But, and we used AI really just to cut out all the noise and show people are they on pace or not with their commodity usage. And to send that in a regular cadence to the operator. And you know, that's the perfect thing, mask, mask, mask, where you said we're taking tasks away, right? Because this is the kind of, a little bit of a drudgery of reporting to have to remember what's this time of the month. I got to get this together. I got to send it. I got to make sure it's right. I got to put it in. And we've automated that and minimized it. And so what we're finding is every time we go through this cycle, the people in K 12 are so responsive, they're calling in, we're adjusting balances. There's thousands, I don't know hundreds of thousands of pounds possibly that would have been lost, right? That we're sitting in some banks somewhere. And our K 12 team now is on the regular. They're going after and adjusting allocations, pulling more from banks. And so for the K 12 user with a tight school budget, they're having a better way to feed their kids. And for our client partners who've made this huge investment in this commodity program, they're actually getting the utilization of the pounds that they've put into a room. And I think this is a great example of not just saving the time, but redeploying our time to leverage those relationships. I don't have to do that. Now I have more about a conversation and value that I can bring. It's now talking about actual features and benefits of products or how else can I help you rather than this. And I think the biggest thing that I really appreciate and love about this whole example is that the problem came from the field. And that was the collaboration and partnership with the team, our people, and then the balance of how do we leverage technology to support it along the way. And I think that was the biggest thing. And those are things that we're trying as an organization, George Matt and team have been awesome about working with the group, trying to uncover some of those. I don't want to say problems, but maybe things that we think we can help. Pain points, yeah. Yeah. There's an adage around AI like in the entertainment industry. Well, I don't want it to do the writing and the drawing and the creative stuff for me so that I can spend my time vacuuming and doing the dishes. I want the AI to do that. For sure. So I can do the fun stuff. And that's I think what we're saying here. Yeah, and I just want to like a huge shout out to our team and our people and our for being open and willing to try and learn and do things differently. I think that adoption is going to be very critical to make this successful moving forward. So I'm like overly excited about the possibilities and what we can really unlock together as an organization. Every time we have built a solution that looked for a problem, we have we have been so wrong. I mean, the amount of things we have built that never got any usage is you could it's a tall tall stack. Where we've been successful is whenever we had a nugget of an idea and a sales rep made it better. That's that's the only time that we've been able to kind of get traction behind this stuff. And I think it goes back to kind of our our founding is that we were in this business. We were industry veterans. We didn't come to it from a pure tech play or from something outside of the business. And so we've been able to build connections and Fendery group has been great about giving us access to their people so that their people could give us feedback because none of the stuff that works would work without their people period. And you know, it's it's taken courage from the sales team too because you know, we've seen the same reply come in from two different customers, right? Hey, is this an AI message? And you have, you know, sales rep a say, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. I'll get you off the list. You know, just just kind of presumed that they were that it was a negative that it was a negative and you actually had to reply back. No, I thought it was really cool. You know, and then sales rep be their response is, yeah, this is a something that we're doing. It's a way where I'm trying to save some of your valuable time. You know, it wouldn't come to you if I didn't think it was appropriate. But if you'd like it's the tailor the message going forward, just let me know. Embracing the opportunity like embracing that was a, again, it was a learning, right? And I think as we get that our team to really think about how it can help them and help those conversations. Whatever the response is, you're now having a conversation. I think that's the battle. Having that at least trigger the initial conversation around, "Hey, I'm either whether it's AI," or they think that the sales reps did it. It's starting the conversation with the customer. Part of our goal is new customers. There's a lot of operators and customers out there that maybe we're not touching, and this can help exploit that and give, again, another opportunity for our sales reps and our sales teams. One of the things that Enzo talks about is this is going to create more demand than ever for our sales team. It's going to create more conversations with customers. I think that's going to be the power of this is really the sales team that embraces it most. It really looks at this as an opportunity to help them. You asked about different segments. The applicability of this, if you think about core capabilities of what we do, there's a few. One is the ability to do research at scale. The way we research a convenience store, a regional chain, a school, an independent restaurant, those are all wildly different. We built up these agents that can get inside about each of those segments. The second thing we do is we create really personalized content at scale. That might be videos, it might be text messages. Increasingly, it's WhatsApp. They may be in multiple languages, right? All kinds of different things. The content that we create in those segments is different. Within a deli bakery, the content that we create may be personalized recipes or video cards. That's going to come out a little differently than something that we do in a cafeteria setting in non-commercial environment, which is going to be different than what we do for a restaurant. What we do for a chain is going to be wildly different. We've had success in each of those. One of the things that we've found early on was that there's no relevance for AI in big national chains. That's just not true. A lot of these same capabilities can be massaged to work differently in national chains, but they give the affinity group the chance to get into the chain space in different ways and their competitors can get in. Yeah, I think that's another dimension of reach. A lot of times, we have a great headquarters relationship, but people get frustrated about the ability to drive a desired change at the location level. Again, AI, the reach people always think about is, "Well, who are those independents I'm not calling on?" Reach can also be, "Who am I not calling on frequently enough? How can they get more of me by augmenting what I do with AI?" Then a third dimension of reach is this location reach. I've got a great top-level relationship, but I got to reach that customer. You're not lining areas. They need to hear about it as well. Those are all to math point, depending on which dimension of reach we're targeting and what segment it's in, it takes a different approach. I think there's another value Matt talked about the chain piece. We were in a meeting not too long ago where a sales associate suggested, "How can this help I have a chain that has 30 units, they're reluctant to change because there's a task of training." That is another platform and opportunity for us to say, "Hey, we could have a solution here." That's what I love about this most is that as we start to learn and unpack different ideas, I think the solutions are endless on what the technology can provide. Knowledge-based training information is a big part of that as well. That's something that I think we really try to tap in and lean in a little bit more as we go into the future as we think about new product launches. How do we train our people? How do we train the distributor community? How do we inform the customer? How that product can help be a solution for them in their menu or operationally or whatever it might be? I think there's a huge unlock there and again, I can't be more excited about it. This stuff looks like magic. It looks like magic to me. It's not magic. It's all built on data. It's all built on training models. The affinity group has a two-year head start and that is hard to overcome. That is just a fact. We talk about it and I probably, and too casual about how I talk about it. There's a lot of work that goes into making these models do the things that we want them to do. I think that from a competitive standpoint and what you guys can deliver to the market, you're easily two years ahead. There's a lot of work in the models, but there's just as much if not more work in activation in the people. Right. Having the training come out the right way is one aspect of it, but having the team understand how to access training is now different. The old model was you sit everyone down in a room and you give them knowledge just in case they might need it. We don't need to work through that parameter anymore. We can hit them with just what they need to know to basically understand the product and then arm them with AI agents that when they really get pinned back and they get asked, do I qualify for this rebate? They have an AI agent that can tell them right there in front of the customer. Yeah, you do. Here's why. Here's the rules because we need to have it done. We need to remember some training they had three weeks ago throughout the journey here. Like George had mentioned something like we did some pulse checks throughout as we were trying this this work and training what that could look like and our team appreciated it right. It gave back them time, which I think is a huge value right. If anything we're selling it's our time. How can we give it back to them and I think this could be an opportunity to help do that throughout the organization and how we think about you know that training space. So a big challenge in training is a lot of times people are busy and they always think you know when I need to use it I'll learn it then right. So what we can do with our training is not only can we have the training there when they need it, but we can use the AI to go in front and plant the seed now where the customer is asking them a question or then they have to go in and get that you know training seed and know the product and be able to tell it to them. So now you've got an environment where you're pulling that training through instead of you know maybe someone just in case someone asked me I'm studying and learning. It's kind of really reversing the flow and trainings one dimension of that where it's changing but all of these old solutions we have we find that it's really changing the order in which you do things. So training is now pulling it through because we can do that now. Another one is people always ask us tell us about your database how many emails do you have and we've totally skipped that. You know having a database of emails especially among independent operators it's only as good as the day you got that email and so now having this idea that we're not going to have you know a dusty shelf of emails anymore but we're going to go out and get them when we need them and use them fresh. It's huge and it's as big of a change as we always compare it to when the third world made a leap ahead and they said we're not going to have telephone lines we're all going to have cell phones right and that's where this is going. So whether it's training or whether it's having the right data at your hands when you need it we're finding AI is really forcing us to change how we do our work. And again helping our team you know with management of customers and CRM in the traditional way right because those things are constantly changing. Managing that contact information is a challenge today and this is a helpful solve for it. Yeah. I think that something else that we're seeing is it allows affinity group to more competently sell complex products. So if you think about like the old world of the brokerage it's friars right so like if it goes in a friar we've got horses for courses they can sell that and that's the way that the industry has grown up. So if you have a manufacturer that launches a complex product or something that's not familiar to the world they view that as it's going to be very challenging. What we can do with these new training models is really get these reps up to speed to sell something they've never seen before with very little time investment because you're tailoring the training to specific opportunities. You're going to go into this Delhi bakery and we're going to talk about this product it's got these characteristics you've never seen it these are the questions you're going to get let's go give it a shot. I think what George had said there to just a couple of that training when they need it. I think that's another. Yeah and I mean that's been an insight that we've had is that sales reps willingness to engage in training is higher the closer it is to a sales opportunity. So if I'm going to sit you down in a meeting in a cold competition on Monday morning I may be more reluctant than if I'm getting a bite size bit of training right before I go into a sales operator basis sales call. So let's pause here for a second and talk about the impact for training. from the manufacturer's lens. What do they get out of it? How should they be planning differently? What are the benefits for their team and for our team collectively maybe? - I mean, I think, from my perspective, I think there's a ton of benefit. Number one, if you think about speed to market, oftentimes our clients are challenged with resource. And so if they have a handful of people that's asked to go out and introduce products and train our sales team throughout the country, it's a challenge. And there's a timestamp on that, right? That could take months to get across the country. And so I think speed to market, being able to do that very quickly in a different platform and a different manner that's effective, right? Making sure that we are capturing the right things that we need to know about those products to be successful in front of a customer. So I think that's one piece. I think there's also a cost effective piece to it. - Yep. - You know, it's gonna save them time. It's gonna save them the expense of traveling throughout the country, flying on planes and hotels and all the other stuff that goes along with it, where we can do that pretty efficiently and effectively throughout this technology. - Yeah, and I think the other thing that probably is always in a manufacturer's, the back of their mind is, okay, I did the training. I talked to several hundred people over this many weeks. What's the half life on that? - Right. - How many reorganizations or promotions or just retirements or how long is that population still able to retain that knowledge and still selling it and when do I need to go back in there? So by getting rid of this reliance that we have on this big event where you're dumping a lot of information on a lot of people and making it more nimble and being able to keep a sales team that always has the knowledge they need. And aren't waiting for these big events when you can fly in and hand it off. I think that should give a manufacturer great comfort as they look out across the population of hundreds of sales people that all of these people can sell my product. - Right, it's not just get trained, it's continuous support along the way in training these agents and these apps and AI to help support us throughout the way. I think is a big piece. - We've talked a lot about the importance of feedback and the feedback loop to enhance the process, to enhance the tools. Is there any more that we wanna share on what that feedback loop should look like or who is adding to it? - I think it's been one of the, not even surprising, but just reinforcing things that we've seen is manufacturers just because of the go-to-market system that most of them use going through a broker, having some of their own reps, the voice of the customer stuff that they get actually hearing what a customer said about your product is limited. And what this new go-to-market model does, is it magnifies it. And so we're able to deliver back to a finity group, clients, specific emails, voice of the customer of what an operator said about the product. It was, I loved it, but it was too small. The flavor profile wasn't right. And you get that at scale. And whenever you can feed that back into manufacturers, sales and marketing departments, it's just gold to them. And it unlocks a whole new set of value that they had really probably struggled with to get in the past, because you get a filter down version of it, you get, you know, the way that software has worked over the last 20 years is you figure out what items you put in the drop down and you ask the rep to pick the right one. AI does not work that way. It is completely ad hoc. The guy talks into his microphone and then the AI analyzes thousands of those at a time. I mean, so the level of insight that we can give back to manufacturers is just, I think, it's where whenever we look at our roadmap, that's a big, big piece of what we're going to be doing over the next 12 months is how do you deliver more and more value back to the manufacturers? And when you talk about value, I think one of the things we've really, you know, what brings people in is reach, right? What kind of value can we provide to manufacturers by giving them more reach? So, you know, Neil, I don't know if you have the stats or not, but a big thing we've done is reaching new customers, right? So, the number of new customers that we can now reach when you combine the digital with human has been a huge expansion. - Yeah, we're so far, you know, our partnership, we're close to a 50% increase of reach. And that's new customers and existing customers. So it's been, it's been real successful. - And that's just new customer reach. There's also the other dimensions we talked about, right? Being able to reach deeper in an organization, to cover more locations, the ability to reach across more segments and with the right tailored message for them, and then also, you know, the ability now that with these trainings and things like that, more of our salespeople can cover more items with expertise. There's just a lot of reach and the clients are ultimately the benefactors of all of that. - Yeah, and you look at, you know, many, many manufacturers, they're all trying to figure out, all right, we've got to grow where are we going to get growth from? We need to find growth in new segments we're not getting after today. And so you're going to find things like a seastore. You're going to find things like, okay, we're going to get into specialty distribution, that sort of stuff. One of the things the AI allows the manufacturers to do is get into those segments very, very quickly, right? So like if there are within certain channels, language barriers, or some sort of other cultural barrier, the AI allows you to break those down way, way faster. We don't have to hire and train a new sales force. We can use our sales force with the AI to get into spaces that they otherwise would not have been able to get into. You know, we've talked a lot about authentic Mexican restaurants, right? So authentic Mexican restaurants are historically a difficult segment for brokers and manufacturers to reach for a lot of different reasons. With AI, we can get there very quickly and we have gotten there very quickly. - I think the one other thing I'd like to double down on what Matt had said about the feedback loop, back to clients and manufacturers. And you know, if you think about the traditional way of like sales reporting and some of the challenges are like again, time consumption and hey, I got to go back to the office and do these things. The ability to track and record conversations through voice recognition, I think is going to allow to capture more information and more conversation. And then we can get a lot of conversations with customers, because we're making it easy for the sales team. And I think that's going to provide a good value to the back to the client. And that's as an agency to figure out what, you know, again, there's some other insights that we might want to look at. Segmentation wise or all the way down to a customer level. - Yeah, I mean, for a manufacturer, it's a beautiful flywheel. Because the more that we, the more that the affinity group can say, because you'll never have to touch a keyboard. Because it's all done through your phone. You're going to get the best sales reps. You're going to get better reps that are better at selling manufacturer products. You manufacturers are going to want to be here because you've got the best reps. So all of this stuff kind of feeds together. - And by the way, spending more time with the customer. - Spending more time with the customer, not getting stuck in an office. And that's really what we're trying to accomplish. - And capturing that feedback back to feedback in their voice in real time and not having it filter four days later and make me select what I think from the drop down list. They said, right? It's their words, let me just. - No, knocking down some of those barriers to just make it easy and be transparent. We want to share the feedback and learn from it just like our clients do. - Yeah, we talked to early on, George and I talked to a bunch of affinity group reps. And we talked to them about how they do call reporting. And they all have their own system. Some of them do it at night. Some of them do it on Sundays. Some of them do it on Friday afternoon. All of which suck, right? It's taking time away from their, what they really want to be doing, which is selling. And it's impeding on their family time and just everything else. And so what George and I always talked about was we want to deliver them a tool that they can use parking lot to parking lot. So right before they walk in, let me get a last minute briefing on what am I likely to encounter with this customer. And as soon as I walk out, let me record exactly what happened while it's fresh. And let me do it. So it takes me 30 seconds, 90 seconds, something like that. And minimize the reps touching a keyboard. - Yep. - Oh, and by the way, helping them have the time to be professional and crisp, right? It can take that same recording that it's using to give insights back to the client. It can use that same recording to build an automatic follow-up, right? That's on their calendar. One common thing from the industry, maybe in general, is data. And we've all been very data hungry. We've talked about insights starved. We have a lot. We don't always know exactly what to do with it. How can AI help manufacturers, the agency side, distributors, synthesize all of that data and make it actionable? - Yeah, I mean, AI's ability to do analytics like that is pretty impressive. It's funny. AI is very counterintuitive. If you go into chat GPT today and you say, "What's bigger, 9.11 or 9.2? It will get the answer wrong." We do not use AI for doing our math, but what it's very good at doing is distilling a lot of information down into what do we have here. So, we, George was mentioning earlier, with the analytics that we do around emails. The AI looks at thousands of different factors in order to come up with these insights. We do the same thing with GPO data, the same thing with the contract management data. If you get noncompliance from a partner, so the AI is just able to distill millions and millions of rows of data down to very, very small chunks, which is what we really want it to do. We welcome all forms of data that a client can share. Obviously, the data that they have the access and rights to share, but any piece of data helps us potentially personalize the message more, make the message more relevant. So, even if they don't have that data perfectly for every customer they have, we can use partial data to tailor our message. So, that's all welcome. So, it's a really a great way to help clients leverage an investment they've already made in that data and collecting that data. Another source of data, who attended a food show? What did you talk about at the food show? We're finding clients are taking different kinds of notes at food shows, knowing that maybe the AI will be the one sending a thank you note or follow-up. And that's another thing that we really liked about the affinity group is, in addition to their investment in this NXT solution, they've been doing a lot behind the scenes with their data management, data collection capabilities, and their ability to take data streams from different clients and meld them together for insights that we might have across them that you wouldn't get from one client. And that, to me, that's what I'm very, very excited about. We've talked just recently, maybe a week or two ago about how do we put this all together so that we can inform our sales team with the right insights based on what their day-to-day tasks are or what their goals are or how do we leverage our sales information, our invoice data, couple that with insights and the culinary team brings a lot of different insights and solutions to us as an organization. How do we put that all together? And I'm excited to see what that journey looks like with the team. One of the things that we pride ourself on is we're data recyclers. We do not ask clients ever to create new data for us. And the line between data and content blurs. So early on, I remember we were sitting down with a client and they were sharing with us recipe videos that they had created. And these recipe videos had like 13 views on YouTube. And so the question was like, well, what was the ROI on that? Well, we were able to take those videos and use them to train our AI because that's a really good source. If you have a corporate chef who's talking about your products, that is that's gold for us training a team. And so we were able to ingest those videos into our models and then distill that down to insights that go to the sales reps. We did the same thing with things that manufacturers invest in. We always want to look for ways to to repurpose them and add some scale to them. Product detail pages on websites, recipes, videos. Any of that content that manufacturers create, we're going to get more use out of it. Well, I am super excited about what the future looks like and how far we can go. What new learnings will uncover as our team gets more involved in it as clients get more involved in it. And that feedback loop continues. The more we learn, the more we know, the more we can try new things and offer a new solution. So welcome to the team. Thank you. We are very glad to have you. Thank you. We're very excited. We're pumped up. Thanks for having us. You've been listening to Bridge to Local with Affinity Group, where manufacturers and local operators connect for success. Stay tuned for more insights and visit AffinitySales.com to see how we can help drive your business forward. See you next time.