How AI can enhance the customer experience and control costs — Kajabi’s Jared Loman and Zendesk’s Caitlin Keohane

We're going to see people spend a lot less time answering those repeat questions and much more time engaging on things that really matter and require that expertise that a machine probably won't have for any time in the near foreseeable future. - Hello, and welcome to the very first episode of the new Conversations Vizendes podcast. Each week we'll speak to customer experience innovators and experts to discuss the latest trends interesting ideas and what's new in our industry. I'm your host, Nicole Saunders, and when I'm not hosting this podcast, I serve as the director of community for Zendesk. There, I get to connect with thousands of Zendesk users and hear lots of things about the different challenges the businesses are facing with customer experience and customer support, and all of the interesting ways those customers are solving for those challenges. So I am very excited to bring that perspective plus the amazing insights from our guest experts to you through these conversations. Now, before we dive in, if you would like to learn more about the show and be notified of our upcoming episodes and Zendesk events, head over to zendesk.com/podcast or subscribe to Conversations with Zendesk on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. We'll also be posting the video of these recordings to Zendesk YouTube channel if that's your preference. Now, we all know that the hottest topic in business and let's face it everywhere these days is AI and how it's going to impact every aspect of business and life. I'm fascinated by the way that this technology is rapidly evolving and have had some truly intriguing conversations with business leaders of obviously. Today's conversation is the first of a two-part series that we're doing on the business impacts of AI, particularly around the ways that it can help to improve the customer experience, make customer support agents more efficient and help businesses to scale their customer service operations without adding significant costs. So to dig into these topics, say I'm joined by two guests. From Zendesk, we have Kate Cohane, head of customer advocacy. And my second guest today is the wonderful Jared Loman, VP of customer experience at Qjabi. Jared is an XCTO and engineer, turning CX enthusiasts. His technical expertise, combined with his passion for delivering exceptional customer experiences, has earned him a spot on several advisory boards, including the customer advisory board at 4.AI, a company focused on delivering artificial intelligence solutions for customer service organizations. During his four-year tenure at Qjabi as the VP of customer experience, he has challenged the scenes to be both early adopters and innovators of new ways to leverage technology to empower agents and to provide better customer experiences. So let's get on to my conversation with Jared and Kate. Ready to take your customer experiences to the next level? Build lasting relationships, the Zendesk complete customer service solution so that you can exceed every customer's expectations. Sign up for a free trial at Zendesk.com. - Hi everyone, and thank you for joining me with Conversations with Zendesk. I'm your host Nicole Saunders, director of Community at Zendesk. Today we're going to be exploring how AI can help rein in costs while maximizing efficiency for your business. I'm joined today with two excellent guests to speak about this topic. Jared Lomon, VP of customer experience at Qjabi and Kate Kahain, head of customer advocacy at Zendesk. Thank you both for joining me today. - Excited to be here. - It's for having us, this is great. - Absolutely, we are really interested in this conversation AI and maximizing efficiency and cutting costs are all topics that are really top of mind I think in the industry today. So we should have a really fascinating conversation. But before we dive into that, I'd love to have you each to see a little bit of an introduction of yourselves. So Jared, let's have you go first. Tell us a little bit about Qjabi and about your role and what you do. - Yeah, so my name's Jared Lomon. Qjabi is a platform for entrepreneurs and really anyone who wants to sell their knowledge online. We provide a variety of tools, such as a website builder, a course platform, an email marketing tool, a CRM, all as a complete all-in-one package that people, particularly in the creative economy space, can use to sell their knowledge. And I've been with the company for about four years. My role is I oversee all of the customer facing teams. So that's our support team, our customer success team, our knowledge and training team and our small ops team. And I reside on the beautiful island of Hawaii. - Very nice. I wish I could be there right now. (laughs) I wanna take it. - I wanna go to court here. - There you go. (laughs) - Hey, why don't you have an introduce yourself? - It's gonna say, I hope that invitation extends to myself as well. I'm on the first plane out there to Hawaii, but yes, thanks Nicole. So I'm Kate Kohane. I run our customer advocacy organization at Zendesk. That means I'm in charge of the team that helps with support. So breakfix, how-to, all that goodness. We also own the voice of the customer program and customer listening, which is awesome because that's a great way to get exactly what our customers need, both through support and through voice of customer and bring all those rich insights back into the business. I've been with the company for almost 11 years now and I work out of our San Francisco offices. - Great. - Thank you both for that introduction. So to start off, Kate, I'd love to hear your perspective on what are some of the key ways that you see AI coming into customer service organizations and where are the places that it can best help companies to maximize efficiency or maybe save on some costs? - Yeah. So you said it at the top of the podcast here, I think AI and cost savings are two words that are very use and anonymously, I guess, in the customer support space. We're all looking at our cost of operation these days and trying to find ways to scale even though our customer count and perhaps the amount of tickets we're getting is continuing to go up into the right. And so I look at AI as an opportunity to ensure that I can hold my cost steady even if we are seeing that customer count and those inbound increase start to increase. More specifically in our operation, I'm looking at things like the bot, how we can have a chat bot at the front of our messaging experience to help capture contact reason to help us with triage and routing. I'm also thinking a lot about our knowledge base and making sure that we have rich digital assets that our customers can consume without actually needing to contact someone in support. So I'm thrilled that the industry is moving in this direction and I'm feeling really confident about where we're starting to go. - Great, thanks. Jared, I'm really curious. Can you tell us a little bit about how Kejabi is thinking about AI and the role it's gonna play in support for your customers? - Yeah, I've always thought about AI and we've been on this journey for a few years now. I'd like to think that we are some of the early adopters in the space just because I'm personally a big, I guess, nerd, if you will, when it comes to new technology. So we always wanted to use this primarily. Like we weren't thinking about this as a cost-saver out the gate, but I was looking at this from the perspective of how do I give every agent a superhero cape? Like how do I make them more effective at doing the things that they do every day and ultimately drive us towards providing our customers a better experience when they interact with us. Now of course, as the economic conditions have changed over the last few years, like we are too thinking about this from a cost savings perspective as well. It's always going to be key when deploying these type of these technologies, but initially out the gate, it was all about how do we make the customer experience better and how do we empower our agents to do better and what we've seen as a result of being some of the early adopters is over the last three-ish years from when we started introducing these technologies to where we are at today. We've actually seen that curve flatten drastically that Kate was mentioning. Like our needs for hiring have drastically reduced. And I will also note just for what it's worth out the gate that like this has not been something that has been like now all of a sudden all the jobs are gone and there's no no option to customer service base. And I don't foresee us getting to that point anytime soon. My optimistic hope here is we're actually going to see this technology do more of out the gate I had this. I had big dreams and hopes for what the technology can do. It's only now that the technology is starting to really catch up to potentially be able to deliver upon some of the things that I'd hoped we could do. So I think we're still a ways away from like full on job elimination for anyone who is maybe a little bit concerned about that factor. - Yeah, no, I'm so glad that you raised that. And I love what you said about AI being like giving everybody the super hero cape. That's such a fun way to think about it. I would love to hear from each of you your thoughts on how you think that support agent roles might evolve with the implementation of AI. If bots are taking some of those tickets right off the top if they're helping answer some of the easier questions, obviously there's still going to be a need for human touch in certain kinds of interactions. Where do you think that's going to take those kinds of jobs? - Yeah, I can start if you'd like. I think first and foremost, like my pitch to the team from the get go has always been nobody wants to answer the same question over and over again. Like you can only answer that same silly question that you've had to answer so many times before it begins to be aggravating. And so like at the baseline, if we can eliminate just answering those repeat questions that we all get tired of, that's like a considerable success both externally and internally. Now one of the things that I didn't specifically call out but you may have gathered from the description of what Kajabi is. It's a fairly complex platform. There's a lot of different nuances associated with it, a lot of different expertise required to be effective with it and also a lot of different expertise required to troubleshoot some of the issues that we have. And so I think the biggest, I guess I'll call it a selling point because I'd like to think that our agents really would prefer to focus their time. And I think most would prefer to focus their time on issues that they're actually having to engage their brains and like really think through and do some troubleshooting to come to those conclusions. I think the first thing that we're going to see is we're actually going to see that come to life. That makes a lot of sense. It sounds like it's got some opportunities to maybe make some of those jobs a little more interesting and expand the skill sets a little. Kate, what are your thoughts? Yeah, and I want to piggyback on something that Jared said maybe came in a little too hard on the AI for cost cutting. You hit the nail on the head. It's absolutely about the customer experience and delivering a better experience and really an experience that meets and exceeds customer expectations. I think to answer your specific question around agent experience Nicole our agents deliver the best support when they have the information they need at their fingertips when they know why a customer is contacting us before having to say, "Hi, who are you? Why are you contacting us?" Being able to gather all that information, why they're contacting us, who they are to us as a business, it allows our agents to deliver a much more personalized experience which from the jump makes it better experience for our customers. I'm thrilled that we've been able to get more clarity about who customers are, why they're contacting us, what they've already tried, what they haven't tried because it will make our agents' lives a lot easier. They'll be allowed to deliver a much better customer experience as a result of it. I love that you brought up personalization because that's one of the things I know we called it out in the Zendesk 2023 CX Trends report. Something that we're seeing industry-wide is that customers are really expecting if customers or companies have so much information about them when they arrive into a support interaction. They really expect that the company is going to know who they're talking to, what their plan types are, what products they're using, all of that kind of thing. So it can provide a really individualized experience. How do you think that companies can really use AI to provide those personalized experiences? Well, balancing that with the safety around customer data and privacy concerns. Jared, happy to jump in if you want. Yeah, so great question, Nicole. So look, I think the questions that we ask upfront in our bot experience are mostly around the challenge the customers having. What we're able to glean in the experience through our own integration with our own backend systems is who they are, who are like agent, admin, who we're talking to, the company they're coming from, etc. And so I do think there's some baseline data that we're going to have on our customers that we should be able to point to and reference in order to start the experience with a baseline understanding of who they are. Once we start understanding more about their the reason for contacting us, that's I think where we can start to use AI to look more broadly. This is an area where we know we've got knowledge articles around this specific inquiry or reason. And then we can start to bring that in as it's applicable to that specific client. One thing that I'm sure you'll hear is you start to interview Maddie who runs our bot and self service part of the business is that more often than not customers, at least that context, send us don't actually know what they're entitled to or not. They might come to us and say why can't I access X or why might I be having a challenge with X and that's just basically because of a plan restriction or something they might not be aware of. And so what was frustrating was when we surfaced a knowledge based article or some piece of content that didn't actually. It wasn't relevant for them. They didn't have that component to the product. And so we need to be able to understand who they are so we can surface only what's relevant to them and not give them stuff that isn't applicable to their business or their need or what they're challenged by. Yeah, and Nicole you mentioned security which I will preface my statement with they guess the caveat that we have the luxury of not storing a lot of PII so like fairly low stakes when it comes to security. However, personal information and privacy is a big issue and also when you move to a global audience sometimes things that you would think were docile are actually not. And so I think one of the things that I would just throw out there and add on here is AI actually has the power to increase our ability to be more secure when we interact with our customers because it can do things like detect say credit card number or it can use pattern recognition to find points that are actually problematic for our agents to be involved with and eliminate those out the gate. And I know of course Zendesk has some of this functionality just built into it out the gate but there are a number of different use cases to where I think we're going to see that technology actually advance and we're even seeing some of that in the broader market to where there's like imagery like that we're now talking about in the greater landscape of AI multi model essentially meaning not just text but also photos that actually pretty introduces new risks into the flow that most of us probably I've not encountered. And I think AI hopefully provides us the power to detect things that are going to be potentially problematic in the future before we are exposing our agents and our internal teams to things that we may not otherwise want them encountering. That's a really fascinating perspective Jared I think when we think about new technologies we think about bots coming in there's this sort of immediate assumption that oh this is going to be dangerous and it's going to be the Wild West and there's going to be all this stuff but you're right that there's definitely an element to this that will help make things more secure more private and help us get ahead of maybe even human error that could expose information that we wouldn't want it to. Definitely I think of a conversation I was having with my wife one night well using chat GBT and like we were having a conversation that we'd probably only have amongst each other we were joking about some things and this actually is there's no big deal if we have this conversation in front of AI we can make a funny Valentine it was actually near Valentine's Day we can make a funny Valentine's Day home that highlights all of our quirks had we interfaced with a human being like that's stuff that you just wouldn't want another person to know but machines you don't really care about when it comes to just the personal things that might otherwise be afraid like even just a simple as an email address that's on the grand scheme of things these days maybe not the huge thing but maybe I want that private and I don't want agents if let's say I'm in a field to where like that email address is I'm a government official and I don't necessarily want that exposed to the person who's going to be a real person. The person who's helping me out that's another great way that I think this technology really helps us eliminate and remove some of those things while still empowering the agents to do their job even more effectively than they were able to before the use of that technology. Yeah that's great I've been managing communities for more than 10 years now and I've seen a lot of instances where users maybe thought that they were in a ticket interface or thought that they were talking to a bot and accidentally posted information over to a community that they wouldn't have wanted to be in a public forum and as you're saying this the first thing that occurs to me is how great it would be if there were some AI behind that sort of doing that moderation where it could jump in and say hey this looks like information that you might. I want to expose this is a public forum and either redact it for them or throw it in a moderation queue or all sorts of things so you write there's a lot of great actually privacy management things that AI might be able to do. I'm going to add one more thing to thinking back to the question around data and how in the future we might not have access to what we do or folks might not want to give access. I think the other key benefit or one of the key benefits of AI is even if we aren't necessarily who sure who they are when we're engaging with them through the bot one thing that we've been able to start to pick up on again using no data just using the bot is tone and sentiment something that I think again not knowing who someone is might be a reality of the future but hearing or seeing if a conversation is escalating if the tone is getting more hostile. So as the agent a really unique opportunity to react and provide an emotional intelligence that they might not have had unless they had that bot or that AI is part of their experience and so I do see a world where even without knowing who someone is without that data the email address that Jared just mentioned there's still so much we can do to react and give a better customer experience leveraging AI in the future. Absolutely that is also an excellent point so from your perspective Kate what are some of the biggest considerations that organizations need to take into account when they're starting to think about AI what are the things they need to be thinking about need to have some awareness of yeah. So I'll maybe reflect on our own journey and hopefully that will shed some light and insight into it for others that are starting on it. At Zendask we decided about a year and a half ago that we wanted to go all in on a messaging experience. We wanted to provide a rich conversational engagement with our customers so we started by looking at our holistic channel strategy how can customers contact us and we aligned on messaging as really the entry point with which our customers could contact support. When we thought about messaging we thought about supporting it as a live channel we thought about supporting that as an asynchronous channel and quite frankly we looked at the bot as a mechanism to hurt as I mentioned earlier personalize that messaging experience so instead of going to the next level of the conversation. through the old-fashioned triage where someone would have to come in, a human would have to come in and say, "Hey, what is it you're looking for? Okay, let me get you to the right person." We thought to ourselves, "Wow, wouldn't it be great if we could get that bot to come in, capture the contact reason, capture who they are, and then really eliminate that need for triage?" Again, not just from the cost-cutting standpoint, Jared will have one up to me on this by making sure it was about the customer experience, but really for the customer experience standpoint, knowing without a human having to ask. So I guess step one for us was look at our channel strategy and decide if messaging and that interactive mechanism was good for us, and we said yes. Then it was the introduction of the bot at the front end of the messaging experience, and I don't think we've looked back. We've loved the bot experience. We're really happy and Maddie and her team who you'll meet later in the podcast is phenomenal. They've trained the bot. We have hundreds of intents. They've made it a very smart part of our support organization. One key consideration that I'll throw out, because I think that was the original question of coal, was what should people think about? Making sure that the bot isn't too complicated on the front end, balancing that light triage to capture contact reason without overburdening the consumer or the end user with, "Can you answer this? What about that? What about this?" I think that there's a fine line there, and so that was a big thing for us as trying to come up with that abbreviated workflow at the front end that felt good for the customer as well as capture the information we needed on the Zendass side. That makes a lot of sense, all of those different aspects. One of the things that I love that you called out here too, all of the different things that AI means. I think a lot of people these days are thinking of AI just as bots that can interact with humans and take the place of a support agent or something, but there's a lot of other automations and detections and things that are included, things like you're saying with the automatic triage, picking up on sentiment, tagging, classifying things, surfacing data to agents to help make their job easier. There's all of those different pieces. Jared, I'd love to pass the mic over to you as it were and hear a little bit about how Kejabi has been approaching AI and thinking about it and what you've learned and what recommendations you would have for other organizations that are looking at implementing AI in their support workflows. Yeah, so first of all, key consideration out the gate is self-service strategy. This is a situation to where we are very truly calling into play the old garbage and garbage out philosophy. And so if you do not have a strong self-service strategy, your AI is going to be essentially useless as it relates to deflecting. Now to carry off of the deflection standpoint from a philosophical standpoint, I actually believe that the best route to deploying a strategy is to not think about a deflection strategy, but think about where you can add value because I think chances are if you are just starting, there's probably a lot of low-hanging fruit. So some of the things that Kate mentioned, we are actually right now live. If you were to engage with one of our agents, we actually have AI detecting sentiment in real time to properly escalate. So if we have a situation to where a customer is potentially getting angry and we don't want to leave one of the, especially say it's a new agent, but even if it's one of our more seasoned agents, we know we need to escalate this quick. We actually have it set up to detect sentiment as the conversation is happening, and fire off appropriate alerting to managers and leads so that they can come in and join that conversation and potentially correct an escalation before the escalation ever happens. That's just one of many examples of some low-hanging fruit that I know like the bad, the angry customer situation doesn't seem like adding value, but in the end, the sooner that you resolve that situation, the better experience that is for your customer. So I actually would again just encourage people to set deflection aside for a moment as they're planning their strategy and really think through how you can add value to the customer first and then your team secondly. And I think what you're going to see is the cost savings are going to come as a very natural result of those efforts. That's a great call out. I really love that perspective. Jared, you shared a fun story earlier about you and your wife doing with some AI and using that to put together some valentines. I would love to hear from each of you your thoughts on what you are most excited about with AI and what you're really most looking forward to. And also maybe what are you most concerned about what's keeping you up at night. And I would say let's start with the thing that you're worried about and on the positive note of what you're excited about and looking forward to using it before. I can just keep going here. So I think the concerns, I don't actually, I don't have a lot. I think it's just this is going to be new territory that we're going to have to navigate in like any new technology. Like they're, I suppose the only concern that I have is deploying an experience to our customers that ultimately just frustrates them so they give up on it. Like that's always the concern and that remains to be the concern even given the advancement of technology. Now what I most excited about actually plays off of that. And that's just the fact that the technology is finally catching up with my initial dreams and vision for what we could do. I think I came into this space with like rainbow glasses and I was like just because we can we mentioned this earlier, but AI is this term that synonymous with anything mystical that a computer can do behind the scenes. But the reality of it is like there is a certain level of scope even though it has broad coverage, especially as you begin to expand out to like machine learning and the powers that will provide your team potentially. So I am I'm excited like I think we are finally at the beginning of and I don't want to say the sounds cliche but really truly a revolution like in the same way that mobile phones were a revolution for us for anyone who I think most of us probably lived through that phase to where like our lives are going to be completely upended and changed by what this technology does for us. Some of the specific things I'm excited about are number one context. That's something that's been entirely missing from AI to date and that's something that I think is very much on the near term horizon that we could potentially deploy to our customers is just historical context when you jump in and begin to interact with a bot. Like it's now very technical fees of technically feasible for that bot to have context on who you are what you last spoke to it about. It's hard not to humanize the bot actually. I want to say it and give it a pronoun but it's really getting that good like it's really getting to the point to where we can have that context available to it. And then I'm also I am I could go on about all of the things I'm excited about for a while but like I'm very excited about the introduction of imagery and bringing that in because that represents an entirely new tool set for all of us that just did not exist in the past like for anyone who watched the most recent announcement from open AI to where they ran through GPP4. They used like a hand drawn sketch of a website and that was turned into a full like actual functional website from the sketch now just imagine a scenario to when a customer could share a screenshot which is not even a sketch but a screenshot of what they're doing and the bot can actually understand what's happening and provide answers to questions sometimes in ways maybe even better like I'm going to go on record and say this maybe even better than a human could because I can tell you that like me and my best I'm probably going to respond great and it's going to be a wonderful experience but you just never know like when it comes to humans we have all of the our emotions come into play some days we wake up and we're just extra tired and I may not be on top of my game the bots always on its game it's always going to be it's always going to do what it's trained to do so that's true it'll provide a lot more consistency right yeah yeah those are it's I'd like to think of it if that bot was me it would be like Jared out of 10 for the day but that's just a few of the things but I'll save some time for Kate since I've probably used up 10 minutes just on that no worries Jared we're going to have you back in another episode so I'll ask again and you can share some other ideas on that one okay jump to me yeah and I'm feeling pretty jazz just listening to you so I could you could go on for a bit longer and I would be very excited to keep hearing more about what you're excited about so I guess I'll start like you said Nicole with what keeps me up at night I will say I think and I want to watch this podcast back in years from now and I'll probably laugh at myself for saying this but the an over dependence on the bot as the sort of end all be all for the answer I think I just saw or not the bot sorry but even just artificial intelligence I think I saw an article that said that chat GPT was brought in to actually look at an x-ray and determine where the fracture or the break was and it wasn't exactly right like it got close but it didn't call it out and that it really needed an expert a medical profession to come in and do that diagnosis so I think using it to augment the power we have as humans that sounds awesome to me using it to completely replace scary concept for me I don't know if anyone listening or on the line has kids but my daughter just wanted to watch Wally and I had a little bit of a panic attack thinking to myself are we all heading to a world of Wally where we're all replaced by robots and the world is just covered a trash because humans have gotten totally negligent so I that scares me a little bit is that we put too much focus around AI and we don't keep that expertise that we need and want in humans now going to your next question around what excites me I guess I'm thinking about really in the confines of the support organization so what where do I get excited and being able to deliver customer support I would say that AI should really underpin every experience that we give in the support organization not just customers that are on call at the low end or low spend that need a quick hit digital experience everyone should be able to have a robust digital experience no matter how much they spend who they are as a client etc I think that is so powerful for a few reasons one at the end of the day. Sometimes people don't actually want to talk to someone. It's awesome if they're able to get what they need through self-service, through an interaction without having to talk to someone. If at the end of the day, every time I talk to a support organization at a company I shop with or that I do business with, they gave me exactly what I needed in 35 seconds. I would take that any day than waiting in a queue and talking to someone, even if that meant that person had greater expertise. So it comes down to making sure you meet or exceed that customer expectation. And if we can do it in a way that doesn't involve having to have a conversation, I think consumers more often than not would prefer that. And so I'm really excited about being able to meet the needs of all of our customers through a great digital experience leveraging AI, leveraging the bot. But again, it's really got to meet that expectation or else we failed and we haven't delivered on our promise. - Absolutely. Hopefully we won't have any of those post-apocalyptic futures coming at us with bringing this technology to the forefront instead. We will see all of the amazing things that you each just spoke about. It's so exciting to see where this can go. I'm someone who's always been very bullish on new technologies and very excited and interested in exploring them. So I just really look forward to seeing where this will all take us and where it will go. - Well, that brings us-- - Yeah, cool, sorry. I'll say one more thing. Teachers are gonna have their job cut out for them now when our future generations are submitting submitting book reports written entirely from CHATGDPT. I do think there's just something there where we can't lose. We can't as an organization as a human race to forget how important it is that we still challenge our own brains and that again, it's uses a tool to augment and not completely replace because I do get scared that dependency on CHATGDPT to run our day to day. That's kind of a scary idea. - Yeah, we've been talking about this a lot in the community management industry and what this is gonna do to communities, right? What if you end up with just a whole bunch of bots talking to each other on forums instead of humans and then you're bringing up things like school work I was just talking to one of my nieces who's applying for college and she, her mind was blown that some of her peers might be using these technologies to write their essays and really trying to figure that out. And I think that one of the really important things in addition to a lot of regulation and things like that around these technologies is gonna be understanding how we identify content that's been generated by a bot and how we can moderate for it in everything from school work to online forums to all of these different places we're talking about. So one of the things I'm actually looking forward to is the development of some of those tools that will help us wrangle this. On the flip side, I do think that it's going to make human interactions that much more important and more valuable just like we were talking about how agent roles may evolve so that they don't have to answer the wrote questions and instead they get to do in depth research or troubleshooting. I think it's also gonna bring the value of human connections really to the forefront and make it that much more important to be able to connect with a real human and talk about things so that you use the bots where it's appropriate and use AI where it's appropriate and then you're talking to other people where it's really valuable. - Said perfectly, we should be doing the interviewing Nicole. - Thank you. Any other closing thoughts or things that you would like to leave the audience with before we close here? - Yeah, I think I would just encourage everyone who hasn't explored it to start. Like, you're already, I think you-- - Go make a Valentine. - Yeah, this something. Like, right now I think we are on the precipice of seeing this industry evolve drastically. So never a better time than now to start that process of educating yourself. And as I mentioned earlier, start with that self-service strategy. Again, like thinking through AI from this perspective of text-based handling, I know that also is probably going to change very soon. But I think that will still ultimately revolve around the questions that you're able to answer through self-service strategies. That's usually the best place to start. Yeah, I don't know. I would just encourage everyone to not be too afraid. Like, I can still fool the technology not yet. We might run into some fearful situations down the road but we're still a long ways away from, I think, a terminator situation or anything too crazy like that. - That's good to hear. - I would just piggyback on, I love shared that you called out starting with your end-to-end strategy and looking at how you want that to look. And certainly if you're not at least querying AI or how that might augment your operations, do I think everyone is excited now, but I think that it's gonna creep up on us quickly. And if you're not ahead of the game, you're behind. And so I'm a plus one on that, even though I live in fear that Wally is gonna knock on my door. We're absolutely on our side thinking about that as a company and in our experiences. And we've got some great stuff in it's end-us that we're launching as well on that front. And we're thrilled to use that as consumers of our own products. Plus, one to what Jared said about getting that strategy nailed down and then thinking about how AI can augment. - You heard it here first, everybody now is the time to dig in and start learning about and experimenting with AI and thinking about how it might have an application in your life. And we're gonna continue talking about that throughout the conversations with Zendesk podcast. Next week we'll have Madison Hoffman, director of self-service and automation from Zendesk here and we're inviting Jared back to share some more insights and exciting ideas about AI. So Kate, Jared, thank you both for joining me today. I really enjoyed this conversation. - Thank you for having us. - Thanks Nicole. - Well, that was a great conversation and we have so much more to explore. We'll follow up in our next episode where we'll be digging deeper into how AI can impact self-service report. Sign up for a free trial at zendesk.com.