How not to be boring in B2B, AI agents and lessons from F1 - Colin Fleming

(upbeat music) Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to YoungSense.com. In this episode we have a returning guest, none other than Colin Fleming, who's one of the most popular guests of all time on the podcast. Now for those that don't know, Colin used to be a racing car driver and it even made it as high as Formula One. And then went on to become the chief brand officer at Salesforce, so he really, really knows all about B2B Marketing. He is now the GMO of ServiceNow, and I'm here to talk to him at Adobe Summit in Vegas about what B2B marketers need to know that they don't know and also how to use AI. AI has transformed marketing in the last year and the development has been astonishing. So I'm gonna find out where is AI impacting on marketing and what should Marx has been doing to use AI more effectively in the future. Here it is. Colin, welcome to the show. - Yeah, great to be back with you, John. - I was going to be welcome back to the show I should say, goodnight. 'Cause last time we were a few floors up in Salesforce Tower, weren't we? - I was thinking how's the area that day? - It was, like, yeah, for the time of Francisco. It was a beautiful day. But since then, you've moved on to ServiceNow. - Yeah. - So how's it going? - It's amazing. After 13 years of another company, it's always a daunting thing to jump and think about a different organization. New challenges, new problems, new people, new products and services. So it's been intimidating, I'm not gonna lie, but I'm about 10 months in now. I love it. I love it when I remember it. I have it. New challenges, first things to take on. And it's a bigger role too. 'Cause when I was with you before, sort of a chief brand officer role now, and now it's a CMO role. So it's a before-mortem option. - Yeah. Now if anyone listening and watching that doesn't know what ServiceNow do, you say he's like, "I haven't been asked that question before." (laughing) It's one of those companies, isn't it? Well, you look at it, I'm like, "Oh my God, you're everywhere," and I didn't know. But yeah, explaining a bit about what ServiceNow does. - You know, it was actually the allure of joining the organization, 'cause they've built this incredible product that is everywhere. You know, the tagline is the world works with ServiceNow, because it literally powers so many IT departments and customer service departments and HR and finance and you name it, but nobody knew what they did. And to, let's be honest, we still don't. And so that was part of the allure is to solve that problem. And we call ourselves the AI platform for business transformation. Basically, we plug in on top of all of your hundreds and hundreds of systems. The average company has 385 different applications. - Wow. - We plug it on top and make it a, almost the iPhone of the enterprise, we make it as clean as glass, one-aguser experience. I don't log into any of those 385 applications, I log into ServiceNow from HR, for finance, for marketing, for sales, for customer service, things like that. So it's a bit of a new take on enterprise software. - Wow. - And did I, am I right in saying it's from like 85% of fortune 500 companies use, I mean, that's a lot of customers, you're surfacing. - Yes, it's a big business. I mean, we're now in the Fortune 500, top five enterprise software company in the world now. And so it's a big story, but we haven't been able to capture that sort of market interest yet. And so that's what we're doing, it was obviously honest, humanizing the brand, finding new ways to tell the story. - Now, fascinizes now what the role of marketing is like in ServiceNow, because like, I mean, we've also had this debate about B2C versus B2B, kind of what the role of the marketer is. How well it understood is it in ServiceNow? - Thankfully, one of the reasons why I joined the organization was Bill McDermott as a CEO. And if you look at the work he did at SAP, building an unbelievable brand at SAP, I sort of knew Wachie and that I had an evangelist for marketing in the C-suite, right? To make sure that the CEO was gonna be on our team. And that's exactly what's happened. He is the biggest evangelist and the biggest supporter. And so it's made the transition really rather straightforward because we've got the support of the board and the support of Bill to really build this to be what we call Desco 21C, which is an intimidating acronym. We call the defining enterprise software company of the 21st century. And we've got this massive ambition and we're gonna need marketing to get there. So moving from a product led company, which is historically where it's been 20 years old now, started in San Diego, lots of IT, lots of product orientation to now, almost to brand that organization that's trying to make its mark in the enterprise, which is a fun little journey. - Now, I can I grow up in FMCJ, which is very kind of marketing led, tech and financial services in particular, tend to become a product or service led and marketing is often seen as the sort of like, you turn up the trade shows, you do the brochures, and it's kind of a service, isn't it, rather than the leadership role. Any advice for anyone listening about how you kind of position marketing and then more of a leadership role in the organization, rather than the sort of service function, which I'm sure a lot of people listening are resonating with this. - You know, I've been so blessed to have incredible executive teams that do support marketing, but I will say it was a bit daunting walking in because it did suffer from a little bit of that. Marketers were subservient to other departments and felt like we didn't have a seat at the table or an opinion or a point of view on what it should be. And so the biggest shift we made was we stopped asking others to speak our languages marketers, CTRs, and you know, CAC and Lifetime Value, and start to think about what language does the business speak? And so things like putting the brand on the balance sheet, really thinking about shifting and speaking their language, really helped us lower the sort of the guard down a little bit. - Yeah. - And also showing how much value we can bring. So talking about the 95 rule, talking about things we've talked about in the past to really influence how long-term decisions are going to get made and the role of marketing within the organization is pretty critical. So we're on that journey, like I mentioned, we're just 10 months in, but we've got a one welcome for the entire organization. - I mean, when we talk about this, when we last caught up about how buyers make decisions, how infrequently they make decisions compared to your perception, that kind of thing. I don't think this is that well known generally. I mean, what's your thoughts on how well-educated most markets are about how buying decisions might? - It's not there. - It really isn't there. I think it's a small few percentile of people that really understand the buying journey. And one of the things that I have found is the company's done an incredible job building a digital footprint with our partners with Adobe and so many things like this, a world-class, B2C digital marketing engine. And it was fantastic. I walked in like, what a gift to walk into something like this. But it was disconnected from the way actually people buy our product. It was high transaction volume. But reality is, this is a 400-place deal cycle. We've got 15 members of the buying committee at least. - Wow. - And so the strategy was disconnected from the actual outcomes. And so we've tried to bring those two things together by bringing things like buying groups and buying centric or what we call opportunity containers to really think about, I'm not going to send this lead to sales until it's really ready. And I tank lead volume by more than 50%. - Did you? - Oh no. - New CMO comes in, tank lead volume by 50%. They're going, what's going on? - Yeah. - But I tried to combine that language with, look at the lead conversion and look at what's happening. And so we were able to make up the difference and more by saying these are ready for sales. And they're ready for prime time. We know who the buying group is. We know who the influencers are. And that's a big shift. - That's really right. - Because that's not the spoken truth in B2B. But the reality is there is known buyers and there are unknown buyers, the procurement folks, the finance folks, the people that are the whispers and the audience, you kind of know those folks too. So number one was just like finding the buying groups and like shifting the mentality of what it means to generate a lead. - Yeah. - And the second thing we've moved then to obviously building more of a brand. So it's been a high transaction volume, lower funnel, lead volume narrative, which we've built an incredible business on. But we all know the AirBigBast Institute and numbers like 81% of the buying decisions made upon first thought. So we needed to build the brand. And so hopefully you've seen some work from Idris Alba and us in the past. Recent past that helps us kind of really establish service now. There's a little bit more of a household name. - Well, we're getting to the average size. It's fun to talk about the leads. I think that's quite interesting. So 50% dropping leads. - Yeah. - As in how did you define what a lead was then in that case? Because I mean, that's, you know, sales effectively are living off your leads. - Of course. - Yeah. - That's what you're here to do. So if you're dropping them by 50%. - How did you define that? - It was an intimidating scenario. - It's like meeting with the executive team. - Sorry, we got a lead volume. - Hockey stick in the wrong way. But again, speaking of the leads to the business. So yeah, lead volume is down, but conversion rates up 60, 70%. So we're sending quality leads. - Yeah. - And really just thinking about preparing the interest inbound interest for the company for prime time. And I do think that that's just a mindset shift. And so I did ask for forgiveness. As I walked on the door, I said, I'm gonna do this. And if it doesn't work, we'll turn it back. We can reverse this, no problem. But let me go. And the company had the trust to let us go. And it's been amazing to see the transformation as a result of that. And now marketing is so much closer to the transaction. And so much more strategic. And almost at the table with sales as business partners, instead of some subservient nature. - Yeah. - Which is an amazing place to be. And every marketer wants that. And so again, putting language, and putting, speaking their language, and really helping be the best business partner possible has really enabled that. - So just putting in kind of funnel terms. You do more of the kind of middle funnel bit than getting the lead ready for, you have the conversation rather than just chucking loads of contacts out there. - Well, the idea of the lead or an MQL is that. - Yeah. - That doesn't exist anymore. I mean, it can. Some companies still operate from like that. And but really thinking about grouping leads together of relevant interest areas. So we may have the CFO and HR leader and IT leader. And we'll bring those together before we send it to sales. To say, do we have the right signal? - Oh, go ahead. - You know what's interesting? - Yeah, I'm gonna have one lead. And I'm gonna send it over to sales and it's gonna convert, and everybody's gonna make their quarter. That's not how it works, is it? We need to be thinking about establishing that buying group and really thinking about the long term, right? And so really thinking about how are we connecting the dots between all these buying groups? Because one of the things we were doing is, We weren't. thinking about different departments. We're a single product company, but now we've got to make sure that we're establishing the right amount of interest and sending it only when it's ready. That means conversions up, we can establish the right humans and make sure that we're building the right momentum into the business. - Yeah, and makes a lot of sense. You can do the long term bit then, and then when people are ready to buy, boom, there you are, the team are ready to have the conversation and convert them, right? - Right, exactly. - Makes a lot of sense. So talking about how are you going about building the brands then, because we start the conversation about how many people understand what service now do you work there? - Right, so you got a bit of an education job, so I was a proud job. So have you approached that? - Yeah, of course. Well, look, I mentioned the company's ambitious, and so the company wants to be that defining enterprise software company. So I didn't have to convince the brand or the company to go big. So it was already in the DNA, but we needed to find the right way to do that. And you know, enter Idris Elba, enter a simpler story, we talked about this just before, where the company was really set on selling products to different audiences. And that's a good, there's a lot of companies that operate in that way. We wanted a sell a vision, and that vision happened to coincide with, obviously artificial intelligence, entering all of our lives. And we were the company that can help put AI to work. And so initial tagline was put AI to work, which is an incredibly simple thing. We can put it into your business. We edited it towards the end, though, put AI to work for people. And that for people was really, really, really important for us, because we wanted to be in service of you and I, right, we wanted to be a more approachable organization. So establish a good message, a good narrative, we hired Idris, who's been an unbelievable brand partner for us. I didn't know a ton about Idris getting into this candidly, but what an, he's a serial entrepreneur, super approachable guy, wicked creative, and we fall in love with them. So, you know, matched with a more human story, telling that with a great brand ambassador and building out a cast, which I'm sure we'll talk to. Yes. Has been a really good formula for us. And so, really establishing that with identifying an ownable narrative and making sure that the world sees it. Yeah. One of the interesting things I think about how you've approached your advertising as well, is you can even see the personas of buying groups, actually appearing in the ad itself. Was it intentional? It was. We've talked about distinctive assets in the past and how important that is. For us, it was a really interesting sort of prompt that we actually, relatively junior member of our team challenges with, is you're pushing the organization to buying groups and how we think about our lead flow and operations. But what if we thought about buying groups in our ads and in our communications? And that was a big on-logs. If you look at our recent advertising, you'll see Idris Elba, who is the face of it, of course. But you'll see characterizations, a personification of our buying groups. You've got Patty and IT and Kate and HR and Jim and IT and Dusty and Abdev. And then you've got this aloof character, Nick, which is a lot of fun. And so, you've got a little bit of something to poke at. Nobody knows what Nick does. We still don't know. And maybe at some point we'll find out. But it's really bringing this idea of these buying groups to life. And so, our distinctive assets are very different than distinctive assets I've had in the past. But we're building their personas and building their personality so that whenever we go to market in the different lines of business we do, we've got a character that we can rely on and tell that story with. And I think it's time to presume that his catch is going to turn up in different scenarios. And you know, you kind of continue the way we have to live out. We're just going to start with. We're just getting started with these characters and so much fun like our product marketing organization is taking Patty and IT, for example. And she's in the demo videos. And she's in the persona campaigns. And we're really utilizing those characters for a lot of fun. So I think we don't know where we're going with it candidly. And that's OK. We're just finding new ways of asking the questions and kind of playing the handsome part. I did smile at Nick actually, because it just gets in there at the end. And you can see Nick is least impressed person in the entire film. Ironically, it just created Nick, the character. So Idris is a funny one. We love Idris the death. And he's got such a wicked sense of humor. And we're on set with ironically my vice chairman, Nick Zitson, who's an incredible leader inside the organization. And Nick had a harder time explaining what he did, because it's such a vast role and such a unique role. And so we had a character, this individual, who was going to be called something else. And Idris goes, call him Nick. We're going to make fun of him. And so now we've got this character who will adore. And we have a little bit of fun with him, yeah. Amazing. I mean, just talk through-- I know you've got lots of different versions of the ad, but just talk through one of the typical ads, because it really simply communicates the role of an AI agent in the kind of process, doesn't it? So the whole premise is every corner of your business. So what's unique about ServiceNow is we service nearly every aspect of an organization, whether it be custom relationship management, or of course IT, which is our strength in our business, HR, finance, you name it. And so we really kind of traverse every corner of a business. And so a lot of the ads just actually follow Idris around every corner of a business and talk about the impact that we have with order within each of these departments. And there's a wink and a nod. There's a little bit of humor and bringing some personality to the company. And one of the things that I found when I joined the company was there was just intrinsic big culture of humor and fun. And the company was founded in San Diego, so it's got a bit more of a relaxed vibe. But that culture in DNA wasn't translating to the work. And a lot of our jobs at CMOs is just find what's unique about the company and put a spotlight on it. And so we try to bring some of the humor and the personality out of the company and into the work. And I think we've been pretty successful at that. It's crazy, isn't it? Why do we think that we have to leave our personality out at the door when we go to work, or make work? I did this thing last year in Canada, actually, called with a colleague at Morgan called the Extraordinary Cost of Being Dump. Yes. And we actually worked out-- Which, by the way, I loved it. I did see that. So it was like 50% of the emotions we've measured at system 1 over 100,000 ads or something. 50% of emotions in B2C ads are nothing at all. I mean, imagine all that money, all that effort, and people feel-- So that nothing-- --no impact on them? No, nothing at all, right? In B2B, 60%. So 6 out of 10 emotions reported, having seen-- and you know how-- you know, better than anyone, how much work goes into this, and how much investment, and the organization that goes into making stuff happen. And 6 out of 10 people feel nothing at all. It's just insane. Well, you obviously think field-do method, right? So obviously, the big push for us was finding way to take-- what is it sort of a scary technology? Obviously, autonomous AI agents and artificial intelligence and multi-agent organizations, and all these crazy things, like the IT nerd in me gags out. But it's not an approachable thing. And so in some of the ads we brought in, the idea of a metaphor of personal minions, softening the idea of agents into personal minions, we even dropped an F-bomb in one of the ads, which took us a long time to get the courage to do something like this. But just making the stories more approachable. And I do think like we are at the believing edge of technology. But instead of just using that, using the humor, using the personality, softening the technology a little bit, can hopefully capture some of that emotion you talked about. It's so key for Marxist, because we get so wrapped up in what's possible, technical, rather than what actually the inner of the audience wants. I mean, we were jagging before, but we're here at a day, be summit, and I was at a brain-stalling dinner last night. And they kicked it off with a right. We have a brain-stalling about agente AI, and how you're using it in your business. And I was like, I felt really awkward going, can I ask this stupid question? What are you talking about? And once it took me about half the dinner to unravel exactly what they meant, I'm like, oh, I see. So you have AI agents that go and think autonomously and make decisions and make things better without being prompted. I'm at our get it. But I'm just like, I'm reasonably intelligent and well informed. I don't know what you're talking about. Certainly a year ago, no one was meant to do this. We're talking about the last six months. And this is the speed of our industry right now. And there'll be moments when I feel like we're at the cutting edge, and we've nailed the message or nailed the differentiation. And then literally two weeks later, another company has done it. And so we're just in this absolute race to find differentiation and unique path for ourselves. But yeah, it's moving faster than ever. And it's our job to find a way to keep up and get in that differentiation. So if everyone listening now, like break down what an AI agent does, for everyone in case anyone like me, maybe I'm the only person out there, but I was just like, oh, this is a whole new thing. How will geeky do you want to go? Because then go geeky. OK, come on, give us the profile. Give us the sheep dip into how this thing works. So there's sort of phases of agents, right? So we start off with the idea of generative AI co-pilot. Like some extra stuff. Co-pilot, we got open AI, I got all these things. And those are amazing technologies. But it requires a back and forth. I prompt a question. It returns it back to us. And obviously we built incredible businesses and incredible capabilities with that. We then moved that into like single agents. It could do functions really well. And I could do this repeated task in a repeated way and automate that really nicely. And that's a deterministic path. We call it-- it does what it says it's going to do. We're now entering to what we call multi-agent autonomous agents, which are non-deterministic, which means they reason and they find their own paths, which is a really interesting path. And this means you can set it down a workflow that you may have established or some sort of scenario. And it may find a better path for you. And they can edit the path and really reason and think through and modify and adjust on necessarily. And this is the new world we're finding ourselves into, which-- and then we're going to go to productive autonomous agents, and it's going to keep going. But in a real short period of time, you can see how the nerdiness comes out. And how do we apply that to a simpler marketing phrase, where you don't scare your audience? Because those of us that live in technology every day, I can talk about deterministic and non-deterministic workflows all day long. But we know that our audience isn't there, and we need to meet them where they are. So how do we soften the technology? How do we make it more approachable? And that's what we're trying to do with our marketing. Where are these agents most apply? Where can you use it for kind of maximum impact? Yeah. We've seen a lot of momentum in customer service. And you see a lot of company companies. You're looking for repeatable tasks. We like to say that the AI agent do the small stuff so we as humans can do the big stuff and that's the big trade-off we're trying to make. So trying to bring more authenticity and more, you know, weird world scenarios to the humans ever and automating them one day. So you see customer service, you see IT service and operations, you see an HR, you see in finance, you see an app development and if you think about like computer science degrees, which was, you know, if anybody coming out of school 10 years ago, you'd say computer science all day long. Well now a lot of that is kind of repeated and AI agents can handle a lot of that. So the types of roles that we're entering into is a very different world. That's really interesting. Fascinating. Yeah. Because I guess, I guess human instinct is to fear that change isn't it? Well, of course it is. If the agent can do this, like what am I employed to do, theoretically then if the agent can take care of the mundane, you can do the interesting. There's an up-compressive upside there because then you can focus your, you know, mind on strategy, creative, whatever sort of thing. And those that are successful will be the more curious ones. Like I truly believe that we're only limited by curiosity and the more creative marketers have an incredible opportunity in front of us, don't we? Because we're going to be the ones that find the differentiation, find a way to take this technology in harness it in the right way. You know, there is that fear that, you know, AI is going to take jobs and of course there will be some of that. Every technological revolution has, has taken jobs. But it's also created and incredible amounts of new ones too. Yeah. Right? And so AI won't take your job. It's going to be people using AI that will take your job. And so those that are curious, those are people that are embracing out of the ones that will be ultimately successful. I think that's something because you got, I mean, without over kind of, you know, stereotyping it, but you got the kind of more creative kind of marketers that like have the ideas join the dots, come out of the thinking. Then you've got the more technical kind of execution ones that probably understand AI better. But you want to be over on the kind of creative one as well. So it's like, there's that kind of tension between people using AI probably more efficiency minded. And the ones that need to be using it are the more effectiveness minded probably. And then the middle is just curiosity to experiment and embrace. And I do think that's what I'm trying to teach my team and work in myself. It's just like ask the questions, think about where we're going. What could we be doing? Because I think that that curiosity and the imagination is what will bring those two sides of the brains together and create a space where marketing can ultimately find the best differentiation possible because that creativity is going to be the unlock that we have kind of pushed aside with the idea of performance marketing and things like that. Curiosity and creativity are going to be the unlock. Yeah. That's quite amazing, isn't it? I mean, is there any part of the marketing plan you can't apply that to? I mean, presumably you could look at, you know, agent media planning agents, you know, go and optimize my media for these objectives and go for a research agent, you know, go and tell me my buying personas that I should be talking to and what messages to give them, you know? Yeah. And we're doing things like that already. Like we identify and we talk about category entry points all the time. Yeah. We identified 76 category entry points that we didn't know existed. Wow. Through the use of synthetic research and artificial intelligence and so that's just it's making us smarter. But we had to be curious enough to ask the question. And I do think that's going to be the mental shift we have to make. I like, I like definition curiosity because that's what's going to get you there, isn't it? Yeah. What about the risks? Because like, I suppose if you're delegating to an agent, right? What happens when it goes wrong? Or do you mark the agents how it worked? You have an like a quality control step where you can intervene or? Well, that's the next frontier for a lot of us. And you know, service now has a leadership position in both orchestrating agents and also governing and we call it our AI control tower, which is essentially being able to keep tabs on who's doing what? Using the best agent for the best job and of course keeping a human in the loop. Major decisions, things like this always have a human in the loop, these approval cycles, things like that. That's going to be important. And so, you know, having a platform that can really think end to end is where our differentiation is, our ability to sort of orchestrate against agents that are within service now, but also Adobe agents in my subversa, right? So I think that the idea of orchestration, again, something we weren't talking about six months ago, is the new frontier for these kind of third tier of. You're right. So a whole lot of words, I've just learned in the last 24 hours. Orgustrations, another one. Welcome to Silicon Valley. Exactly. We weren't talking about this six months ago, but how then, well, go talk about orchestration, then how then do you kind of make them work together? And potentially as well, like when we were at Adobe here, you know, you were very close to Adobe, how do you integrate your technology, their technology? How do you orchestrate all the moving parts to play the right music? Yeah, I mean, that's what we're all developing for, right? And so Adobe is clearly going to build agents for their specific use cases around marketing specific use cases. We'll build them for customer service and IT and HR and finance use cases. And the question is, how do they query each other and work together? And that's the technology we're building now, which is that orchestration layer. And, you know, I do think that's, if you listen to any larger technology company, that's the ultimate race that we're trying to make right now. Make sure the human in the loop, make sure we can orchestrate this into the business. And ultimately the companies that will win will have the most data. Because, you know, artificial intelligence is only as good as the data that it's being trained off of and actually has access to. And so the larger platforms, the service now, the Microsoft, the world, the Adobe's of the world, do have an ultimate adventure. And the question is who can race the fat, the thick of the fastest? Wow. Is there going to be a CMO agent or a CEO agent, you think? Of course there will be. Because if you think about it, like your job is to oversee all the various activities into end, right? So presumably you need an agent to go right, we need more of that, less of that. We need to change this, change that. Again, like automating the mundane so we can focus on, you know, what a blessing would be to be focused on the more strategic elements of the CMO instead of thinking about media segmentation and lead flow and buying groups. What if I were to focus on what's our narrative and our, you have to unlock your brain to really identify what, what unlocks when you can automate those things. And I think that's the channel that I'm trying to make is what will this allow me to do? And yes, of course, I will rely on, I still today already rely on agents to do much of my work. Now we got to think about what it allows us to do. It's like kind of, wow, doesn't it? How much has changed in such a short pace at the time? What do you think of the kind of skills required for CMO like yourself? What skills are now going to be required to win in the next kind of five or 10 years? Given the direction of travel where this is all going? Yeah, I mean, I think the last six months has changed that perspective quite a bit. So it's hard to think about too far. It is. I go back to that word curiosity. I do think that that's going to be the curiosity and creativity or ultimately the differentiators that will separate the ones that do a great job from the ones that do a good job. I think that's going to be a big, big push. So I'm, you know, I'm bringing in outside speakers, outside perspectives into my team just to open up the curiosity. And with myself too, like I just don't sometimes I'll not be curious enough in a scenario and realize later I should just have done this. I think that's an unlock that we all can make. So I think creativity and curiosity, you know, the hardest part about a CMO gig is the contact shifting that you've got to make. And even moving from a brand role at a prior company to CMO now, I'm often intimidated by the contact shift that I have to make throughout a given day. And I do believe that that will become less so actually. And allow us to prioritize the things that are strategically important for the company. Yeah. And maybe automate some of the things that might not be as strategically important. Yeah. Yeah. Now you're doing a keynote speech on the, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a summit. So what, what are your big messages for, uh, for the world to be to be marketing? Uh, well, give it a little of this change, right? It's amazing to be here at summit. Actually, I feel like I'm with my people because first, uh, time I've been, of course, yeah, I've got this. Of course, you'd have been a dream force that I was competing with Adobe for the last 13 years of my career. So just to, I bet it wasn't lost on the organizers to get your logo either. Just to have a badge and walk in the door was a intimidating thing. Um, but no, there's a couple of messages. Number one is, you know, we talked, we've talked about this in the past, but my background is a, as a professional raceco driver. Yeah. And there's really interesting context shift. So I don't come as a career marketer per se. And so I'm going to shine a light a little bit on what I think is flawed in B2B marketing, right? I think that we've talked about playing the long game, um, Peter and Les and their work and things like this. And how do we really shine a light on really how to make that strategic place inside an organization? So I'm going to call a little bit of bullshit on marketing if for a little while. And then one of the companies that we, one of the things we do at service now really well is we rely on our partners and Adobe is a fantastic partner. And so much of our transformation is on the back of Adobe's technology. Yeah. And so we'll showcase how we're thinking about buying groups, how we're thinking about, uh, journey optimization and personalization at scale. So we've been talking about personalization and marketing for 30 years, right? For the first time in the last six months, I see it. It might actually feel real and I see it and we're doing it. Service now is an I has been historically an IT company. We sell it in IT. We're now entering into HR and finance and CRM and all these new technologies in new areas. We can't take what worked in IT and apply there. So we're using technology to help us do exactly that. So I think there's a little bit of hopefully lessons I've learned and then a little bit of how we use Adobe technology. Yeah. Well, I love that. And you really are flying the flag for the whole kind of brand building, understanding of buying audiences, all those kind of things, which is really good. The thing I think about personalization is that it's been a joke for so long. They're actually now it's possible everyone's going to be like, really? Yeah. Like, you know, how are you using the service now in terms of personalization? Yeah. What effect is it having? I think of course we're able to get to one to few. So there's always the promise of one to one. And I think it's challenging with, you know, some of the data changes we made, but getting one to few is a really important thing. So, you know, obviously I'm going to speak to a CHRO at a Fortune 500 company. differently than I'm going to speak to a middle market company or something to this effect. So there's levels of maturity. There's levels of AI readiness. And so we actually have spectrums of AI maturity, AI readiness, spectrises of the company. And we'll tailor the message [BLANK_AUDIO] deliberately by that. So our journey optimizer helps us do that, which is fantastic. And then of course, obviously some new agent announcements here from Adobe, which is awesome to really help us think about kind of real-time optimization of that as well. I mean, it's quite crazy, isn't it? I mean, just listening to the folks that are there to be talked about, I think they've 10x reduced in terms of speed of making things. And then increased kind of click-through rates on messages by about 30%. That is an incredible shift in a short amount of time, isn't it? I mean, we're all seeing it. And I think that again, we can even go more. We're just limited by our curiosity. Are we asking, we talked about events earlier, like how do we think about generative AI and these new agents in our events? How do we personalize the context of the experience for those that might be dialing into knowledge from India or for the Philippines or something like this? Like this, you just unlock all kinds of opportunities for us. Yeah, even things like positioning. Yeah. I have the best positioning person I've never met right next to me. It's called Chachypt and it's fantastic. And so just being curious about that, the question is quite fun. I mean, I think that struck me this morning, actually, the compliment, thinking about agents AI's is that we, you know, personalization scale allows you, obviously, to change the messages for the person with the data you have, right? But with the agents, they can be almost going back and forward and going, well, actually, I've got this bit of feedback. I'm going to change it next time. And they can think independently without you having to do anything. And I thought that just takes it on to a whole not a level really. The phrase reasoning, you'll hear a lot about. I saw what it is. Yeah. Right. So the reasoning. So, you know, the models and it's funny. We went so crazy on models and large language models were all the rage. Now it's almost become a commodity to a degree and looking at reasoning and orchestration and agents and things like this. So just literally in the last year, it's completely pivoted. But now we have to be thinking about automation really reasoning and really thinking about trusting these scenarios to help us get to this next level of kind of marketing transformation is pretty exciting. Yeah. So agents, orchestration, reasoning. Is there anything else you need to know about? Data. Yeah. Actually, I think the job of CMOS will run towards more of a data conversation when you think about it because you point the world's best AI at the world's worst data source. Yeah. You got nothing. Yeah. And so I do think that the integrity of the data and the quality of the data is something that I'm challenged with right now. Can you? We all are. And we're working through it now, of course. But we are limited a little bit by our data today. And so I do think that I find myself and I'm sure many CMOS do as well thinking through how's my data? What's the health of my data? That's a very, very good point because you can have the veneer of efficiency. If it's based on bad data, just be hugely efficient doing the wrong things. And that's where you get hallucinations with some phrasom, I'm sure you've heard. And then like this, bad data leads to bad AI. And so the relationship between AI and data is one to one. Yeah. And you've seen a lot of bleeding edge companies thinking about artificial intelligence. Companies like ServiceNow and many others are thinking about how do I build the data foundation yes, so that we can allow for that great idea. That's so interesting. I mean actually it's system one. We've been kind of grappling a bit with this because we've built a 100,000 database of emotional responses for the humans, right? Which is brilliant. And we're trying to train the AI on that, right? Because if you train the AI kind of on the kind of, you know, everything on the internet, you basically deviate to the norm, you know, you basically averages. So we've been looking at the difference between it's quite wild. The difference actually we're trying to teach it on actual human response. When you do, can I play with this? Because obviously we use system one quite a time for a lot of our message testing. And so just being able to query that level of databases. It's really interesting. It is literally like going to school because it's like, you know, you can see it get better and better, but it's not quite there yet. So we're trying to see when can we get AI to kind of replicate the kind of human response? Because I guess it's the ultimate thing because our human responses are emotion and feeling. So you can't, you know, different to sort of rational, you know, it's my logo in in shot or whatever, you know. Yeah. It's it. Which is easier to do. You've seen gardeners hype cycle like the peak of the hype cycle on the trough of disillusionment. We're sort of in that trough of disillusionment because enough people have experimented with AI. And if your data's not great, you're going to get some hallucinations in your little faith. But we have to realize that when you get those two things working together, you're back at that. Yeah, you're back in. So more work to be done. But I think that's the side of the need. That's obviously spot on. Now we're in Vegas. And the F1 comes to Vegas. And because I got to ask you about your former career because if anyone who doesn't know, you've had a very, very interesting kind of a very unusual path to marketing as well. But just to explain a little bit about where you started life. Yes, not only in your career journey for sure. I joke that I've been sort of powered by thick it to you make it since I was eight years old. So I started an age of eight years old racing go-karts here in the United States, trying to make my way into a European dominated sport of Formula One. And I was able to. And so I spent majority of my early career driving race cars. And so Formula Three and Formula Two. And then ultimately a test driver into Formula One. And somehow I was able to find that contact shift in the two race zero. It's one of those software companies. But it's funny how many similarities between those two roles. Why don't you ask you that? Because on the surface of it, you probably can't get more distance really between those two disciplines. But what can you take in terms of about lessons from one end to the other? You know, we've talked about this before. But one of the things that is quite on the surface is it's a very expensive sport. A lot of the racing drivers raise a lot of personal sponsorship. And so you end up pitching CMOs. I was pitching CMOs at the age of 13, raising almost 20 million dollars in personal sponsorship. And I learned a lot about what CMOs cared about. And more importantly, what they didn't care about. Things that you thought CMOs cared about. They were like, "Oh, I'm gonna put your logo on the car." CMOs actually don't care about that. CMOs care about the hospitality and the storytelling. So I learned a lot about what they cared about. So it actually made the transition to the world of B2B marketing a lot easier because I sort of knew what to fall upon in terms of what mattered. And so I do think that's helped the transition. But also the pace that we're moving. The differences between driving the car at 230 miles an hour and leading a large marketing organization. It's not that different. And it might seem crazy to say that, but really generally isn't. And you're involved again in F1, aren't you? Because it sort of follows you. I can't see the height from it just. Well, I am a massive fan. A massive fan of Formula One. I always have been, of course, and I spent my life chasing that dream. So yeah, ServiceNow was a wonderful partnership with Aston Martin. In fact, we just renewed it and increased it as well. We're the entire Aston Martin factory building these Formula race cars, runs on ServiceNow's IT and HR and finance all these departments run in the most beautiful way on ServiceNow. So it's fun to tell that story. Now I love that because like because in your head, you just assume they've got money, they put their logo on the car. But actually if it's legitimately embedded into the company and making the team better. We can't. The job's not done if you just slap in the little car. That's not you know, you're not going to do the job there. You've got to think about what's the story I'm telling? How am I using this experience, this story to generate great experiences for in hospitality scenarios. Yeah, look, if there's a little bit of branding on the car awesome. Yeah. But when it's driving by 230 miles an hour, nobody can see it anyway. So did you think you could attribute some of the performance of Aston Martin back to some of the, you know, software changes you've made? 100% in the organization. 100% pretty cool. If you haven't had a chance in obviously you're in the UK as well, go see their factory and some of our stuff. I'm available. We'll get you an address up there. Yeah. But it's a beautiful operation. They've built the most modern form one facility as well. So we're now on all the screens. It's amazing to see building, you know, what they hope to be a top team in the future as well. That's pretty epic. And you bring your customers there to show it off to you. 100%. 100%. And that's again, part of the storytelling is bringing executives into their factory to kind of show it off. And which is a pretty cool story to tell. That's pretty amazing. Well, I could talk for ages about this and I don't know if you haven't got too much time, but maybe to end up what's been the biggest, maybe most surprising kind of lesson for you in the last 80 months since you've since you've left, you know, left sales for us to take on this new role. And since you last, but what stood out to you? Well, I think, you know, I built my career as a brand marketer, you know, product marketing and the brand marketing. And so, you know, I think the context shift into being a CMO is so much fun. And just really trying to both learn and internalize and also find a common vision for a thousand plus person marketing organization is a lot is a lot there. So I've really enjoyed that. And it's been met with such an incredible rapidly evolving period of time with artificial intelligence, right? So like it's learning, learning the context shifting while the world is changing literally every day. Has been this unbelievable like research and energy for me. And I just, you know, you don't ever, I was at a company for 13 years. Yeah. You don't really realize that you're not learning any longer until you kind of exit it. And you're like, oh my gosh, I'm learning things for the first time. New challenges, new environments. And I do think that's a lot of fun. So I do think that the pace is keeping us on our toes like I've never seen before. So it's always, it's always a fresh problem to solve. I love your point about vision actually because it's so easy in any kind of sit, where any role, but any scene in marketing role is you end up just in the execution, don't you? But actually of all the C sweet roles, roles, it's the one where you've got to be looking ahead where, you know, where does the ball bounce next and where do we need to be going? And it's dangerous. If you do the role for too long, you then become such as the execution and this is what we've always done. But you job to stay out of it. Well, well, out of it as well. But to be looking ahead and seeing where particularly like you say, we didn't have a change. If you're not like, hey, hey, hey, guys, it's going over there. We need to be. My team is in that direction. We're sharing this because we spent the first two weeks writing out a two paragraph vision statement. Because if we didn't have that, what do you have? What is anything that you're doing in service of? Exactly. We spent literally two weeks writing out a vision statement and five priorities. And everyone in the marketing organization knows those priorities. They all ladder up their priorities to those priorities. And that vision statement is the proverbial on the wall. Yeah. For every single thing we start every meeting with it, we start every town hall together with it. and everything we do is in service of that vision. And I think that's really, really, really important. And I do think that if you don't have that, all the tactics are in service of, frankly, not much. Totally. And in my decision making much easier, 'cause if it fits for that, we do it if it doesn't, we don't. And then suddenly it's strips out a whole lot of debate, a whole lot of dead ends and details along the way. That's exactly right. Amazing. Conor, thanks so much for doing this. It's great to see you again. It's like, I'm delighted to see where, where your career's gone next. And it's good to see the energy and passion you got for it. Thanks for teaching me a bit about AI. That's fine. This was fun. This is a journey, right? So it's good to be here. Great to be with you, John. Yeah, next question. Thank you. Thank you very much for listening or watching Uncensored CMO. I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, please do hit the subscribe button. Wherever you get your podcast, if you're watching, hit subscribe there as well. I'd also love to get a review. Reviews make a big difference on other people discovering the show. So please do leave a review wherever you get your podcast. If you want to contact me, you can do. I'm over on X at Uncensored CMO or on LinkedIn, where I'm under my own name, John Evans. Thanks for listening and watching. I'll see you next time.