One on One Interviews

When it comes to AI and machine learning and big data, there’s really no person I like learning from and talking with than Dr. Michael Wu, recognized industry expert and Chief AI Strategist for PROS, a provider of SaaS solutions optimizing shopping and selling experiences. And recently I had a great livestream conversation with him and my CRM Playaz co-host Paul Greenberg where we took a deep dive into where we are with AI and how it is helping companies make it through the last 18 months.

Below is an edited transcript of a portion of our conversation that touches on the role of ethics and inclusivity as more business interactions and transactions go digital – providing AI with the data it craves to predict and recommend things back to us.

I’ve been tracking the adoption of voice-first technology ever since I got my first Echo device around Thanksgiving of 2014 and started 20% of my sentences with “Alexa…”. And every so often I like to have guests join me for this series to see where things stand today with these devices, and how they’re being used. But I haven’t really focused on designing voice content before, which is why I was really excited to speak with Preston So. Preston is Senior Director, Product Strategy at Oracle, but more importantly for this conversation he is also author of the book, “Voice Content and Usability”.

Earlier this week Salesforce announced the launch of Salesforce+, their new streaming service focused on business content and programming. And seeing an enterprise software company launch what basically is an online broadcast network captured a lot of people’s attention, including yours truly and my CRM Playaz co-host Paul Greenberg.

So we were really interested in learning more about what Salesforce+ is – and what it isn’t – and were fortunate enough to do a LinkedIn Live conversation with Colin Fleming, SVP of Global Brand Experiences, who’s heading up the Salesforce+ rollout.

James Brathwaite is a 17 year old rising high school senior in real life, but on TikTok he’s Jeb the Boxsmith. And in about ten weeks, he turned his love of building things out of boxes into over 60,000 followers on the platform. That wasn’t his plan, but the plan has now changed because of the success he found in such a short amount of time and only twelve videos he posted on the platform – with one of those videos capturing over 900,000 views….and counting.

Recently I spoke with Jeb and his father (my friend Jeff Brathwaite) to learn how his passion for building things led to immediate success he found on TikTok, and to see what lessons could be learned for folks who would like to leverage the platform to connect with the audience they want to build a relationship with.

I may have mentioned before that I was a college DJ during the time when hip-hop music came of age. And one of my favorite songs of the era was Sally, by Stetsasonic. And years after my college DJ years (but I’m still a DJ…virtually at least) I had the opportunity to moderate a tech panel at Georgia Tech, and one of the panelists was Glenn Bolton, aka Daddy-O… co-founder of Stetsasonic.

It was great hearing Daddy-O talk about technology and his experiences in business and the impact modern tech has had on the creation process. But at the time he hadn’t picked up the mic in a while. But a few years ago I started seeing videos of Daddy-O rapping again. And then I was on LinkedIn one morning and saw that he posted a sneak peek clip of Daddy-O and the whole Stetsasonic crew teasing a new song. The fact that they hadn’t made an album/DVD is about 30 years but still sounding great really stopped me in my tracks. And the fact that I saw this first on LinkedIn – and not YouTube – really stood out to me… that is after I came down from the excitement of seeing them all back together sounding and looking great after all these years!

Almost a year ago I had an opportunity to talk with Craig Cuffie, EVP and Chief Procurement Officer for Salesforce. It was just a few months after George Floyd was murdered, and about 4 months into the pandemic-induced shutdown. It was a heavy time. It still is a heavy time. Which is why I was so glad to speak with Craig again to see hear how the plans Salesforce had begun in response to the social unrest inspired by the George Floyd situation.

Those who know me, know I’m a big Los Angeles Rams fan. Even those who don’t know me, but watch any of the LinkedIn Live conversations I do for this series know that, as I where at least one piece of Rams gear on every one of the convos I’ve done.

Needless to say I have a problem. But I’m not alone in this, as rabid sports fans of all kinds go to Fanatics.com on a regular basis to spend even more money on whatever the latest piece of gear is. Which is why I’ve been wanting to have a conversation with Carolyne Truelove, Head of Global Fan Experience for Fanatics.

During a recent LinkedIn Live conversation, Carolyne shared why Fanatics talks in terms of fan experience instead of customer experience, why employees are called athletes and managers, and why she feels employee experience and corporate culture are directly connected to the experiences fans have with the company.

When Google announced at the beginning of the year they will be phasing out the use of third-party cookies in their Chrome browser it provoked a strong reaction in a couple of ways. Some saw it as a nod to improving customer data privacy, as cookies allow companies to track where you go on the web and create opportunities for marketers to “stalk” you with ads wherever you go. And marketers who worried about not being able to stalk you wherever you go on the web.

And it’s those dueling positions – customer privacy vs marketers need to market - that is proving difficult to phase out those cookies, as Google announced a nearly two year delay in their cookie phase-out plans last week. The delay seems to be brought on by a hesitancy of some websites and tech companies to implement the tech Google is experimenting with as a cookie replacement - based on the Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) approach. This is supposed to provide a level of abstracting individual user information by creating groups of people with similar browsing habits and placing them in cohorts. And advertisers would have access to cohort data, not individual browser data. But there have been enough concerns about this new approach to slowed the timeline down.

Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist for Zoho and a thought leader in the area of customer data privacy, joined me for a LinkedIn Live conversation on why he feels Google had to delay the cookie phase out, and why this may be more about protecting ads-centric business models and marketing, and less about protecting customer privacy.

I’ve been fascinated with voice speakers and voice assistant technologies since getting my first Amazon Echo device in November of 2014. But I had been using a voice assistant since 2011 with the introduction of Siri on my iPhone. And with 2021 marking the 10th anniversary of the voice assistant in our lives, I was very excited to have a LinkedIn Live conversation with Bret Kinsella, CEO and founder of Voicebot.ai, the leading source of information on voice technology on the web.

Bret shares his thoughts on the pandemic’s impact on voice adoption, why enterprise business application vendors have been slow to integrate voice-first tech into using their software, and what kinds of use cases are on the horizon that will get our attention sooner rather than later.

At the end of May Salesforce announced their latest quarterly revenues of $5.96B, estimating they are on track for annual revenues of $26B this fiscal year – adding up to a 22% year-over-year growth. OK this ends the CNBC segment of this post, but I wanted to point out the big numbers because these numbers came while Salesforce has also been growing and deepening their efforts with corporate diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI).

So revenues continue growing alongside efforts to make the entire Salesforce ecosystem more equal and inclusive do as well. Which is one of the key points that Minea Moore, Ecosystem Diversity & Inclusion Director for Salesforce, made clear during our LinkedIn Live conversation from earlier this week.