Podcasts about Gartner

AI, tariffs, shifting consumer expectations, and new delivery models are creating fresh challenges and opportunities for supply chain leaders. In this episode of Supply Chain Now, Scott Luton and Jake Barr sit down with Gartner's Noha Samara to bust some of the biggest myths surrounding AI in supply chain planning. Then, Scott talks with Wall Street Journal reporter Liz Young about the forces reshaping retail and logistics, from product assortment and tariffs to trucking, last-mile delivery, drones, and returns.Noha challenges the idea that AI success is simply about doing the same work faster, emphasizing instead the need to redesign jobs, rethink processes, build trust with planners, and focus AI investments on a smaller number of high-impact use cases. She also explains why productivity gains should be measured by the higher-value work AI enables, not simply by workforce reduction.Later, Liz brings a reporter's perspective to the rapidly changing retail supply chain. She shares how companies are reducing product variety to manage tariffs and complexity, building greater flexibility and resilience into their networks, and navigating increasingly diverse consumer expectations around delivery. The conversation also explores rising trucking costs, the potential of drone delivery, generational shifts in shopping behavior, and the costly challenge of product returns.Key TakeawaysAI productivity requires redesigning work, not simply accelerating existing tasks. Organizations need to rethink workflows, roles, processes, and decision-making to unlock AI's full potential.Trust must come before adoption. Planners need to understand how AI reaches its conclusions and how humans and AI will work together before organizations can expect meaningful adoption.AI productivity doesn't automatically mean workforce reduction. The greater opportunity may be redeploying saved time toward scenario analysis, root-cause analysis, inventory optimization, and other higher-value work.More AI use cases don't necessarily mean more value. High-performing organizations are selective, concentrating resources on fewer, higher-impact initiatives and building capabilities that can support future use cases.Retailers are using assortment and sourcing decisions to manage complexity. Reducing product variety can help companies concentrate on best sellers while simplifying sourcing and tariff exposure.Flexibility and optionality are becoming essential supply chain capabilities. Companies are diversifying sourcing, improving visibility, reconsidering inventory strategies, and preparing for disruptions that may be impossible to predict.The last mile is no longer just a race for speed. Consumers have different expectations around delivery time and cost, forcing retailers to get smarter about inventory placement and fulfillment choices.Returns and emerging delivery models remain major questions for retail. Drone delivery is expanding while retailers continue searching for better ways to manage the cost and complexity created by online returns.Tune in for a wide-ranging look at what supply chain leaders should be thinking about now and what may matter even more in the years ahead. From separating AI reality from hype to preparing for tariffs, transportation shifts, changing consumer behavior, and new fulfillment models, this episode offers practical perspectives for building supply chains that are more adaptable, focused, and prepared for the unexpected.Additional Links & Resources:Connect with Liz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bylizyoung/Connect with Noha: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noha-samara-4864863/Upcoming Live Programming: https://supplychainnow.com/upcoming-live-programming/Supply Chain Now Resource Hub: https://supplychainnow.com/resource-hub/Learn more about our hosts: https://supplychainnow.com/aboutLearn more about Supply Chain Now: https://supplychainnow.comWatch and listen to more Supply Chain Now episodes here: https://supplychainnow.com/program/supply-chain-now Subscribe to Supply Chain Now on your favorite platform: https://supplychainnow.com/join Work with us! Download Supply Chain Now's NEW Media Kit: https://bit.ly/3XH6OVkLearn more about Blue Yonder Cognitive Solutions: http://blueyonder.com/cognitiveWEBINAR- You Can't Manage What You Can't See: Using Visibility, KPIs, and AI to Optimize Logistics Operations: https://bit.ly/4ql6iemWEBINAR- The Four Eras of Freight Audit: How we got here, and why the Control Era (finally) changes everything: https://bit.ly/4yVXPBxWEBINAR- The Real ROI of AI Analytics in the Supply Chain: Better Answers When Everyone Starts Asking: https://bit.ly/3TpCX6uWEBINAR- The Cost of Skipping the Audit: Why Site Scans Should Come Before Every Pallet, Crate, or Wood Packaging RFQ: https://bit.ly/4AJzReAWEBINAR- How to Stop Losing Margin After a Package Ships: https://bit.ly/4An41UxWEBINAR- Rethinking the Supply Chain Management Classroom: https://bit.ly/4xJIkM2This episode was hosted by Scott Luton and Jake Barr, and produced by Trisha Cordes, Joshua Miranda, and Amanda Luton. For additional information, please visit our dedicated episode page at: https://supplychainnow.com/from-planning-retail-where-supply-chain-heading-1641 The content in this episode, including all audio, videos, visuals, and graphics, is the property of Supply Chain Now and is protected by copyright law. Unauthorized use, reproduction, distribution, modification, or re-uploading of this content in any form is strictly prohibited without explicit written permission from Supply Chain Now.For licensing inquiries or permissions, please contact us at production@supplychainnow.com© 2026 Supply Chain Now. All rights reserved. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

CMOs are putting more than 15% of their marketing budgets into Al. But 70% say their own marketing processes aren't ready for it. Where Does Your Next Marketing Dollar Go? Before you spend your next marketing dollar on Al, look at what Gartner found when it asked 401 CMOs about their budgets this year. They are putting more than 15 percent of the marketing budget into Al, and 70 percent of them say their own processes aren't ready for it My guest on this episode of The AI Marketing Companion has an explanation for that gap. Marie Bahl is the CMO of Uptempo, whose software helps marketing teams at companies like IBM and IKEA plan and track every dollar they spend. She has marketed enterprise software for 30 years, and she writes for both CMOs and CFOs. Who Wires Together Every Marketing Dollar? A quick primer first. A point solution is software built to do one job: send email, run webinars, score leads, report attribution. Marie counts more than 15,000 of them sold to marketers. A large team might run 50, each bought at a different time by a different person, and few of them share numbers. In finance or HR, IT or a consulting firm connects the systems. In marketing, that wiring job landed on the CMO. Marie's description of the result: "We've allowed this crazy patchwork quilt of solutions to ineffectively represent us, and what happens in the mix is we lose credibility." Her one-line summary of the job today: "The CMO job today is mostly defensive. We're playing defense instead of offense." Marketing Is a Business, So Defend the Marketing Dollar Like One Marie argues that marketing is a business inside the business. Marketers build the market, and they create a series of products that deliver that market on behalf of what the company sells. Running it that way means trading impressions and clicks for measures a CFO already uses. She told me the story of IBM seeing its entire marketing budget in one view for the first time. The Kentucky Derby sponsorship couldn't justify itself next to everything else on the page, so IBM walked away from it. Could your biggest line item survive that same view? Play Along: Keep, Kill, or Hand It Back I asked Marie to sort five tasks that sit on a typical CMO's desk: Choosing and wiring the marketing software Reconciling the budget with finance Buying AI tools for the team Cleaning customer data Building the attribution report for the board Sort them for your own desk before you listen. Then hear which one Marie still owns herself, and the sentence she thinks every marketing leader should say to their CIO this week. Her challenge to all of us: "It's time to stop and ask for the underpinning that you need in order to be credible on behalf of your business." [Listen to the full episode] Hear Marie out, then decide where your next marketing dollar goes.

Technology enhancements, Amazon.com and a growing roster of carriers are reshaping the US parcel market. At the PARCEL Forum 2026 conference, a panel moderated by Bloomberg Intelligence’s Lee Klaskow, Gartner’s Chris Kina, Deloitte’s Joanne Strong and Pharand Advisors CEO Andre Pharand discussed how AI and dynamic routing are shifting competitive advantage away from physical networks alone. Shippers increasingly use multiple carriers to balance cost, service and reliability, with Gartner noting some retailers now use 10-20. The panel also explored Amazon’s growing third-party delivery ambitions, rising consumer expectations, parcel lockers and why reliability is becoming more important than speed as technology helps shippers select the best carrier for each shipment.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

CX budgets only grew about 2% this year, yet AI spending inside those same budgets jumped 38%. That math forces a hard question: if the total pool barely changes, where does the new AI money come from? We walk through why the “somewhere” is often customer service headcount, and why that shortcut can quietly create a bigger budget problem later.We unpack Gartner's prediction that many companies cutting support roles due to AI will need to rehire by 2027 and beyond, often at a higher cost than keeping and reskilling people in the first place. We also talk about the trust gap showing up in channel value: leaders still rate live chat and phone as most valuable today, even while expecting generative AI chatbots to take the top spot soon. When spending moves faster than trust, customers feel it through inaccuracies, frustrating loops, and a lack of empathy during complex moments.If you care about customer experience, customer service automation, and making smart generative AI decisions without breaking trust, this one is for you. Subscribe, share with your team, and leave a quick review so more CX leaders can find the show.Article Mentioned: Gartner Predicts Half of Companies That Cut Customer Service Staff Due to AI Will Rehire by 2027 (Gartner)Resources Mentioned:Order your copy of Experience Is Everything -- http://experienceiseverythingbook.comLearn more about CXI Membership™ and apply -- http://CXIMembership.comWant to ask a question? Visit askjeannie.vip to leave Jeannie a voicemail! (And don't forget to follow Jeannie Walters, CCXP, CSP on LinkedIn!)

Laura Padilla, senior vice president of global partners and alliances at Okta Okta is rebuilding its partner program from the ground up. Speaking to In The Channel at Oktane 2026 in Las Vegas the day after the event’s Partner Day, Laura Padilla, head of partners at Okta, confirmed the company has unveiled the Okta Partner Accelerator, a re-architecture of its Elevate program that goes live in early 2027. The headline change is structure. Where Elevate leaned on revenue and transactions, the Accelerator offers three tracks – sales, services, and technology – that partners can join individually or in combination, with a referral option available across all three. MSPs and MSSPs land in the services track, which will now distinguish between different types of service offerings. Each track has three tiers – membership, advanced, and elite – and gating varies by track: net new logos for sales, deployments, go-lives, and CSAT for services, integrations for technology. Most current Apex partners will be grandfathered into elite, Padilla said, though some will map into the middle tier. The philosophy shift runs deeper. Elite-tier status will require a customer experience process, as Okta weights retention, adoption, and churn alongside acquisition. Okta is also expanding its services priming motion – previously applied to deals over $100,000 – to every deal, with account executives required to engage a specialized services partner early in the cycle, and new-logo and deployment incentives added. Padilla cited 2-3x services revenue on top of license for partners attaching governance, Auth0, and AI. On agentic AI, Padilla pointed to the Blueprint Alliance – which Okta formed with AWS, CrowdStrike, Google Cloud, Salesforce, and ServiceNow to standardize AI agent security – as a coming delivery opportunity, with a partner certification and specialization rolling out shortly, and agent registry and kill switch capabilities demoed on the keynote stage. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. My guest today came to the top job at Okta’s partner organization earlier this year, and spent her first seven months doing what good channel chiefs do: listening. What she heard was that Okta’s Elevate program was forcing partners of very different shapes – resellers, MSPs, boutiques, global SIs – through the same revenue-shaped keyhole. So last week at Oktane in Las Vegas, on its Partner Day, Okta unveiled its answer: the Okta Partner Accelerator, a rebuilt program with three distinct tracks, new customer outcome metrics, and a much bigger bet on partners delivering – and profiting from – professional services. We also get into the Blueprint Alliance, securing AI agents, and where she sees the biggest untapped opportunities in identity. Let’s get right into it, my chat with Laura Padilla. Robert Dutt: Laura, thanks for taking the time. I’m sure it’s been a busy week. Laura Padilla: Thank you so much for having me, Robert. I’m excited to talk to you today. Robert Dutt: Yesterday was Partner Day here at Oktane. Can you give me the elevator pitch? What was the message? What were you taking to partners for that? Laura Padilla: There has never been a better time to be an Okta partner than there is now. The company is all in on supporting our partners to really take us to the five and ten billion dollar level. We know we will not scale without partners. And so we announced several investments in areas where we’re going to support partners even further next year. The first is we announced our new partner program, called the Okta Partner Accelerator. What we’ve done is re-architected our previous program, Elevate, to align closer with the way that partners have their businesses and their business models. There are three distinct tracks now: you can be in the sales track, the services track, or the technology track – or you can be in two or three of those; you don’t have to just be in one. What this does is allow us to support partners even better in the way that they want to do business with us and our customers. We know that partners want to support our customers in different ways, and we felt that the previous program didn’t allow us to go to that next level of depth in supporting partners through enablement and programs and demand gen, in the ways they wanted to approach our customers. Robert Dutt: So that’s the individual level, it sounds like, the sales, services, that kind of split. Is there any recognition of a split for reseller versus managed services type partner, versus folks who influence a deal but don’t necessarily take paper themselves? Laura Padilla: We have a referral track across all three. So if a partner wants to just refer a deal in, they could actually even be a sales partner and just send in the referral if they don’t want to paper it. Referral is for all three tracks; anybody can refer a deal in. In regards to MSSP or MSP partners, that would be part of the services track. We are going to start distinguishing within the services track the different types of services that partners may offer our customers as well. Robert Dutt: What’s the timeline for the rollout of the new program? Laura Padilla: Early next year. We announced it yesterday, so that gives us six months to further define it and also grandfather partners into the right level, and give partners a timeframe to be able to get into the tier that they want. There’ll be three different tiers within each track: the membership tier, the basic entry tier; kind of an advanced or specialized tier; then an elite tier. Just three different levels within each track. Robert Dutt: And what’s the gating there? Is it revenue? Is it certifications, specializations? How does one move up? Laura Padilla: It varies by the track, which is why we split them out. Sales will be heavily weighted towards sales revenue – net new logos, also just book of business, growth of the book of business. We’re also going to focus on our different product sets, as well as competency and skill set. The services track will be heavily weighted on customer deployments, specializations, go lives, CSAT and delivery – those will be the main things we’ll be looking at, and revenue and the book of business that they’re supporting in delivery as well. And the technology track, we’ll be focusing on integrations and working with things that matter to us, like Cross App Access. Robert Dutt: Have you done any modeling on where your current partners are and where that projects to? Any feeling for how the tiers are going to shake out – current tier versus future tier? Laura Padilla: We do have preliminary mappings. A good majority of our Apex partners today in our current program would probably align into our new elite level. Some might even fall into the second tier, because we do have three distinct different categories of what we’re looking at to reach the elite level. But the majority of partners that are Apex will probably be able to be grandfathered into the elite level of the new track. Robert Dutt: I imagine this has been the big project of your first seven months or so at Okta. It must feel good to get it out there in front of the partners. What’s the early feedback been from the folks you’re talking to? What have the questions been? What’s the commentary been? Laura Padilla: Partners are really excited, because they feel that we were putting every partner type into just one type of program – really, we were just looking at revenue and transactions before, which we know in the new world doesn’t really fit what all partners are doing, their specializations. We also want to be more focused on customer outcomes moving forward, versus just transactions at the beginning of the lifecycle of a customer. The new program aligns to that, because there are other metrics – minimizing churn, customer retention, customer adoption – that we’re going to care a lot more about moving forward. Bottom line is we want our customers to be happy, and we know that partners are going to be at the heart of making sure those customers are satisfied and want to stay on Okta as their key platform for identity. Robert Dutt: And that’s all captured via a CX process, I’d imagine? Laura Padilla: Yes. We’re going to have a process both in our CRM and in the portal, and we’ll be able to track those metrics and data points as well. Robert Dutt: Do you have a feel for where your channel is at in their own journey towards CX and doing that sort of thing themselves? Is this going to be a lift and shift for some, or a lot of partners saying yeah, this maps with what we’re doing? Laura Padilla: It’s a mix. Some partners already naturally have kind of a CX or CSM type group that already looks at post-sale metrics. And then we have some partners that don’t. I think it’s going to be up to us to develop a standard – really define what we expect good to look like – and then work with partners to make sure we get them there, especially partners that really want to invest with us at the elite tier. That will be a requirement for them. Robert Dutt: What are you really looking at with this program? If we were to get together at Oktane next year, you’ll have had roughly six months to formalize the program and get it out there, and it’ll have been in market for about six months at that point. What will be the metric or two that you look back at and say, yes, this means that the launch of this program was a success? Laura Padilla: A few things. One, we want Okta to be introduced to new customers – new logos are really important to us. Second is services delivery. We want more partners who are specialized and trained on Okta globally. As we think about scaling the company, this is really important, especially in international markets, where we will not have really any delivery people. Getting them trained and specialized, and having awesome CSAT – customers really happy with the experience – we’re going to look at that extremely closely. And then the third is product adoption. We think about Okta expanding to Auth0 – our governance product has become even stronger – and then AI. Those three areas are really key. We want partners to help us expand into existing accounts and also introduce those products into new accounts. Those are the three things I’d be looking at. Robert Dutt: To what degree is this program global versus fine tuned for the peculiarities or scales of local markets, especially as you’re looking internationally? Laura Padilla: It will be a global program, and we are going to have different zones for different markets. Smaller markets or emerging markets – if you look at Europe or Asia – will probably have different needs, especially around client size, and logos and go lives will be very different than the US, which is the majority of our business, and where we’re extremely strong. Growth percentage-wise, we expect our international markets to grow faster than the US, just because we aren’t as penetrated. But if you think about the depth of installations of customers, the US is definitely where we would see product adoption grow within our install base. Robert Dutt: Just wanted to make sure there was some recognition of that, because something that Canadian partners run into frequently, depending on the nature of the program, is if things are looked at through a US lens. Obviously a much smaller market and a much more SMB-heavy market. Laura Padilla: Of course, yes. And the thing is – we had our professional services leader, Joe Castro, with us, and he and I have been spending a ton of time re-imagining what services for our customers looks like with partners. His team is going to evolve into becoming more Okta PS experts and product experts to support our partners in their delivery experience. And we’ll be pushing partners to be at the forefront, prime with the customer, as we support that experience and their educational needs moving forward. Robert Dutt: That was something you guys threw out in – I want to say March-ish, but spring – the move towards partners managing more of the professional services side of things than in the past. How has that landed, and how have you seen partners react and fill the needs that created? Laura Padilla: Excited – they want more of it. That piece landed extremely well yesterday. Partners were really excited, because we already started that about a year ago. At Oktane last year, we talked about every deal over $100K moving towards a partner to deliver that deal. Now we’re doubling down even more and saying every deal – early on, we’re going to have a flag within the account to have our AEs work with a specialized services partner early in the deal cycle, so they can partner together and make sure they’re scoping the right amount of work that a customer needs to effectively deploy Okta. We’re leaning in even more, and we are asking partners to make sure we have enough partner capacity globally to fulfill those needs. We will be handing leads to those partners proactively, versus our professional services team taking that on themselves. Robert Dutt: Who have been the partners who’ve stepped up and filled those spaces? I’m curious about the balance between the big SIs and those types of guys versus the more boutique-focused, deep-expertise, smaller shops. Who’s been picking it up? Laura Padilla: We’ve had a mix of both, and both have been awesome. Large partners like Deloitte – who really was our global delivery partner of the year – have really leaned in and been super innovative, working with us on AI assessments and labs and on the governance side. They’ve been really training their teams and becoming super competent on Okta and the complete suite of products. Then we have awesome regional SIs too that have leaned in – in the US, Active Cyber, AppEvents and BeyondID are three great partners that work with us really closely that are more regional partners. Then there are our award winners yesterday in Latin America – Livok, Intergen – awesome partners in that region that know us in and out and have really dedicated their businesses to working with Okta. And in APJ – if you think about Japan, partners like NEC and CTC are really great partners, and then we have partners like Versent and Knowledge On Tap in Sydney. So we have awesome regional as well as global GSIs that have really leaned in. Robert Dutt: How have the margin models worked for that switch to professional services? Especially when you’ve got both larger and smaller partners involved, what’s the feedback been there? Laura Padilla: It’s been good. Since we’re now moving to partners priming, they will scope their own work and obviously determine their own margin for what that looks like. But if we look at a governance deal, or Auth0, or AI, partners can look at anywhere from two to three X revenue more on top of the license revenue if they’re adding on our other products. That was my big message yesterday: you really need to look at us as a platform story. You can land with MFA, SSO or core Okta products that everyone’s familiar with. But the key part of how partners are going to make money is if they add on to that, and make sure customers can really realize the full Okta platform – governance, PAM, IAM, and then AI on top of all that – so customers don’t need other disparate products to do all those things. Then the partner can really own that full customer lifecycle experience. Robert Dutt: Obviously one of the big announcements this week is the Blueprint Alliance. That’s more on the product roadmap and strategy side of things. How does that fit into go to market and partners? What does it give your partners, and how does that play out in a multi-vendor environment? Laura Padilla: The Blueprint Alliance concept started with the need to have a standards-neutral base to define what AI agent security should look like. Todd and the product leaders went with other technology companies and said we should have a consortium to be able to define this for our customers, to relieve some of this confusion. It started with the product. However, what you’re going to see is a lot of our delivery partners are going to join the Alliance as well, and that’s coming. We’re talking to our GSIs and some of our strong regional SIs as well, who would join this Alliance of technology partners to define what delivery looks like as part of that. It will go hand in hand. We will also be training our delivery partners on the Blueprint Alliance and what that standards and framework looks like, because they’ll need to know that when they do their delivery with Okta. Robert Dutt: Any timeline on when we can expect that? Laura Padilla: I don’t have that ready off the top of my head. As you saw, we just announced the white paper today with the QR code, and we’ll be working on what those training modules look like moving forward. Robert Dutt: I wanted to get into the whole AI agents thing. Especially with Gartner predicting that the average Fortune 500 will have 150,000 or more agents in a couple of years – and a little over 10 percent, I think they said, feel they have proper governance today. That speaks to a pretty big services opportunity. Are you building a specialization around that, similar to what some of your partners have done internally across the program? Laura Padilla: Yes, we are. Absolutely. We already have some trainings today for our partners, and we’re in the middle of finalizing a formal certification and specialization around that as well. That’ll be rolling out shortly for our partners to get trained and specialized on how to secure these AI agents in an effective way, according to – well, the Alliance, but also just our product roadmap and platform. That should be coming shortly. Robert Dutt: On the product side of things, from talking to a couple of partners, the idea of the kill switch has resonated large – the comment being, this is the kind of thing that customers have been looking for. Can you talk about the opportunity you see around that, and getting that fourth layer – the “what do I do, how do I respond”, as the language was used? Laura Padilla: The four questions around the Blueprint Alliance are all interrelated and necessary, but the first thing is actually knowing you have these agents. You first have to be able to identify them and then put them in a registry – so you have an agent registry. Once you know where they are and what they’re doing, then if they’re doing bad things, you can deactivate them. We had a demo today on the keynote stage showing how you could do that in a pretty simple way: your IT admin, within a console, can look at what these agents are doing once you identify them and they’re in the registry, and just quickly deactivate them if necessary. It’s pretty mind-boggling how simple we’ve made it. Robert Dutt: What do you see as the big services opportunities to wrap around the next generation of agentic security? Laura Padilla: What we’re hearing from our partners is that customers are coming to them and asking them to first build their agents for them. So they’re working with Anthropic or OpenAI, building the agents and then securing them at the same time – and that’s probably best practice, instead of having rogue employees say, “Hey, go have some fun, here’s Lovable, go ahead and get some” – and then your token usage is going nuts and all this stuff is going crazy, which is unfortunately what a lot of people are doing now. What our partners can do is come in with a plan and say, look, let’s do this the right way. I’ll build your agents for you, we can define what they should do, and I’ll secure them at the creation point as well. Then we can put them into a registry, we can manage them, and we can also define what we give them access to. That way, if they’re not doing good things, we can deactivate them. Partners are already telling me that they’re doing that now. I also think it’s a big opportunity for us to partner even deeper with the Anthropics and the OpenAIs of the world. That’s something we’re already talking to them about, because on the services side, we want the same partners who are building those agents to work with Okta as well. Robert Dutt: I was just going to say – how does that change the focus, and give even more prominence to the development side of things in the channel? Does it change who gets invited to the party – who is the ideal Okta partner going forward? Laura Padilla: Look, there are partners that are more development-forward, and they have that arm and are embracing it. I talked to one of our advisory councils; he was telling me that he was doing just exactly that. And then we have partners who maybe aren’t doing the development work, but they have a slew of customers saying, I just need your help figuring out how do I do this – how do I actually embrace AI, but in the right way? So they’re coming in a little bit later, or maybe they’ve already rolled out a bunch of agents and they’re already rogue, and they’re using Okta to identify those agents and put them into a registry, and do it that way, which is a little bit tougher. We’re seeing both sides of it – partners who do have a developer arm, and some that don’t. Robert Dutt: I think that speaks to an ecosystem opportunity for the multi-headed partner kind of arrangement. Laura Padilla: Absolutely. I do think this whole channel area is evolving even faster. You heard me talk about the $350 billion AI services market for channel partners. The partners that evolve and know how to actually code and work with the LLM providers, as well as the application providers and the security providers, and can provide that full lifecycle for their customer, are probably going to be able to capture the most aligned share of this market. And I’m seeing partners really figuring that out now and evolving their businesses. Robert Dutt: Is there a strong indicator for success there, in terms of coming at it from the coding side of things versus coming at it from the security side of things? Because either way, you kind of have to add something to round the story out. Laura Padilla: I guess I’m a little bit of an operationally minded person, so I would say a customer is smarter if they start off with: someone to build my agents and secure them at the creation stage, then manage them, and then roll it out in a systematic way – versus saying, hey, here’s tokens for Anthropic, go to town. I know a lot of companies that are doing that, and employees – some are more adept at doing that and much more curious, and some that aren’t. Then you kind of run into issues with data – we see in the news whether there’s data leaks, or rogue agents doing things they shouldn’t have been doing. So I would advise companies to start off by engaging a partner to help them do an assessment, define the right strategy, and build that out for them. Robert Dutt: How are you seeing or thinking about agent security, especially as you start introducing things like the kill switch as a managed service from your partners? What kind of opportunity do you see there, and what does that look like? Laura Padilla: I don’t know about just the kill switch piece being an opportunity from a management perspective. I think what customers are looking for is the whole thing – managing my agents in general as a managed service. There’s a huge opportunity around that. That way, they can actually present a business case: hey, maybe I need a few more agents for this specific use case, whether it’s for HR or marketing or product or whatever that may be. A service provider could create those, manage those, put them in the registry, and if needed deactivate them if they see anything bad going on. And they could probably produce dashboards around monitoring what they’re each doing, so we can get a signal right away if they’re not doing what they should be. Robert Dutt: It feels like there are some partners who are a fair ways along to that vision. But looking broadly across your channel community, how realized is it today? Laura Padilla: Very beginning. We’re not there yet. Some of these things are just ideas, or things that I’m hearing people talk about. But the good thing is there are a lot of conversations about it, and everyone has pieces that I see they’re starting. There’s just such a huge opportunity for someone to be able to really build a practice around this. Robert Dutt: Things will continue to evolve. Laura Padilla: They will. They will for all of us. Robert Dutt: Should be very interesting, needless to say. As you’ve had this time to look at the partner base, acknowledging there are different strengths and different skills across the channel – what’s the one thing where you’d like to see partners step up, do more, support more? Where do you think Okta would benefit from getting more support or help from partners than you do today? Laura Padilla: I do think there is a bigger opportunity for partners to look at us as a platform. They’ve kind of looked at it as Okta Workforce, and then Auth0 kind of separately, and not really looked at the other features and products we have. We’ve pulled data to kind of see this. That’s why my big message yesterday was: there’s so much more that you can help your customers realize when you look at us as a platform. Adding on different features, making sure they’ve moved from Okta Workforce Classic to the latest version, do they have governance and are they using it, have they embraced Auth0, and now the AI products. There’s just so much opportunity also in our existing install base, and partners at the forefront to do that – and then they’ll get services revenue when they do that as well. We have 20,000 customers, and I think a majority of them could use a lot more pieces of Okta. Robert Dutt: That’s kind of a classic channel chief problem, or want, in a multi-product or multi-platform organization – getting that cross-sell going. What do you feel unlocks that? Laura Padilla: I’m hoping the story we told them this week – the incentives we’re rolling out, more enablement, saying hey, we’re now going to look for you to do this delivery, we’re not going to take any of this in house, we reorganized our team to support this motion, all of the investments we’ve made, and the new program rewarding that as well – I hope it gives them a light bulb moment to go, oh wow, now is the time for me to really look at this further, in a different way than I’ve looked at the Okta business in the past. Robert Dutt: Can you elaborate a bit on how the rewards and incentives change with the partner program, and specifically how they support that cross-selling motion? Laura Padilla: We talked yesterday about a new logo incentive – customers that bring in new logos, and also migrations from a different vendor to us, will be rewarded for that; we have an incentive around that. Then we’re going to lean in with deployment incentives as well – we’ll be looking at partners who are able to deliver services and deploy and go live with certain products and certain customers, and rewarding that behavior as well. We’re also going to be giving leads to partners that are specialized even more so than we have in the past – partners that are specialized with certain product and delivery specializations will be actively given leads, and our AEs are now required to bring in a specialized services partner at an earlier stage in the deal cycle. That is now embedded within our CRM. There are a ton of opportunities for partners to really take advantage of now that weren’t there before. Robert Dutt: Other than getting the program finalized and out the door, what’s on your list? What are your priorities for the back half of 2026 and into 2027? Laura Padilla: I spent my first seven months or so here really evaluating the business, spending time with my leadership – John, the CRO, and Todd and Eric and everyone – understanding where the company is going, what our company strategy is, how partners can really help amplify that. We took a ton of feedback from partners too, and that was the result of where we came up with the program. So now that I feel that structure is there – there’s still a lot of work to get it out the door – what I want to spend the second half of this year on is now with the partners, getting them to really lean in and understand why this is important, why it’s different, why there’s never been a better time to be an Okta partner than now, and really go all in. I talked about that in my presentation. So the second half will be spending more time with the partners to make sure they understand all the investments we’re making. Robert Dutt: Whether it’s something we’ve touched on or otherwise, my last question for you: what’s the biggest untapped or under-realized opportunity for Okta partners now? The kind of thing that maybe isn’t burning down the world today, but you’d bet that if we’re coming back and talking next year at Oktane, it’s going to be a big opportunity. Laura Padilla: I really think there’s a huge opportunity in governance for us. That isn’t an area that we’ve pushed on too much as a company – there are other competitors, much smaller than us, that have pushed harder in this area. We think that’s a huge opportunity for our partners: to lean into existing customers, or to migrate from those siloed, one-off companies where customers have bought those products. Those products aren’t really platforms; they’re just kind of one-off solutions. We can do much better with what Okta is providing. So governance is a huge opportunity, and we’re going to be spending a lot more time with our partners on training and specialization around that. And then Auth0, and AI. Those three are the things we’re talking a lot to our partners about. Robert Dutt: All right. A lot going on. I appreciate you taking the time to explain the new program and where things are going. Laura Padilla: It’s been great spending time with you. Thank you so much. Robert Dutt: There you have it – Laura Padilla, head of partners at Okta. I’d like to thank Laura for her time, and of course, thank you for listening. Three things worth taking away from this one for me. One: if you’re an Okta partner, the grandfathering window matters. Apex partners mostly map to elite, but some will land in the middle tier, and the tracks let you opt into the one that fits your business rather than the one Okta’s revenue spreadsheet favors. Two: the services priming move is now program-wide. If you have delivery capability on identity, the flag Okta’s AEs are required to pull early in the deal cycle is your pipeline. And three: she flagged governance as the biggest under-realized opportunity in the portfolio, with an AI agent security specialization coming. Early positioning there looks like the smart money. If you’re finding value in the show, please do follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You’ll find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, most of the major directories. And if you’re feeling generous, a rating or review genuinely helps other folks in the channel find us. Til next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Supply chain planning is changing fast, but technology is only part of the story. As AI capabilities expand, procurement becomes more strategic, and planners face an accelerating pace of change, organizations must determine how to embrace innovation without losing sight of the people who make supply chains work.In this episode of Supply Chain Today and Tomorrow, Scott Luton sits down with Mike Griswold, Vice President Analyst at Gartner, to explore some of the biggest trends shaping supply chain planning and leadership. Mike breaks down the top barriers preventing planners from performing at their best, including the pace of change, digital skills gaps, and the continued need for strong communication and collaboration skills. They also discuss the debate around slowing AI development, the emerging role of AI agents, procurement's growing strategic influence, and how automation can give employees valuable time back. Plus, Mike shares what makes the Gartner Supply Chain Planning Summit a valuable opportunity for planning professionals.Key TakeawaysSupply chain planners remain essential. Technology may change how planning gets done, but organizations continue to invest in both planning technology and the people responsible for making critical decisions.Change management is becoming even more important. Leaders need to clearly communicate how AI will affect planning roles and help employees understand where they fit into the future of the organization.Soft skills still matter in an AI-powered workplace. AI can help teams arrive at an answer, but influencing, collaboration, conflict management, communication, and consensus-building remain human responsibilities.AI agents may reshape supply chain teams. Future planning organizations could include both human planners and AI agents, making governance, oversight, and human-machine collaboration increasingly important.Procurement is becoming more strategic. Procurement's influence across the broader supply chain continues to grow while AI creates opportunities to automate repetitive and transactional activities.Automation should give people time back. Removing repetitive work allows employees to spend more time applying expertise, solving problems, being creative, and performing higher-value work.The future of supply chain isn't simply about adopting more technology; it's about figuring out how people and technology can work together more effectively. Tune in to hear Scott and Mike unpack practical ways leaders can support planners, approach AI thoughtfully, rethink repetitive work, and prepare their organizations for what's coming next.Additional Links & Resources:Connect with Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-griswold-6a68922/Learn more about Gartner: www.gartner.comUpcoming Live Programming: https://supplychainnow.com/upcoming-live-programming/Supply Chain Now Resource Hub: https://supplychainnow.com/resource-hub/Learn more about our hosts: https://supplychainnow.com/aboutLearn more about Supply Chain Now: https://supplychainnow.comWatch and listen to more Supply Chain Now episodes here: https://supplychainnow.com/program/supply-chain-now Subscribe to Supply Chain Now on your favorite platform: https://supplychainnow.com/join Work with us! Download Supply Chain Now's NEW Media Kit: https://bit.ly/3XH6OVkLearn more about Blue Yonder Cognitive Solutions: http://blueyonder.com/cognitiveWEBINAR- Demand Volatility Isn't a Forecasting Problem: How One FMCG Distributor Released Capacity Without Capital: https://bit.ly/4r94YM6WEBINAR- You Can't Manage What You Can't See: Using Visibility, KPIs, and AI to Optimize Logistics Operations: https://bit.ly/4ql6iemWEBINAR- The Four Eras of Freight Audit: How we got here, and why the Control Era (finally) changes everything: https://bit.ly/4yVXPBxWEBINAR- The Real ROI of AI Analytics in the Supply Chain: Better Answers When Everyone Starts Asking: https://bit.ly/3TpCX6uWEBINAR- How to Stop Losing Margin After a Package Ships: https://bit.ly/4An41UxWEBINAR- Rethinking the Supply Chain Management Classroom: https://bit.ly/4xJIkM2This episode was hosted by Scott Luton and produced by Trisha Cordes, Joshua Miranda, and Amanda Luton. For additional information, please visit our dedicated episode page at: https://supplychainnow.com/think-different-planning-challenges-ai-procurement-leadership-1640 The content in this episode, including all audio, videos, visuals, and graphics, is the property of Supply Chain Now and is protected by copyright law. Unauthorized use, reproduction, distribution, modification, or re-uploading of this content in any form is strictly prohibited without explicit written permission from Supply Chain Now.For licensing inquiries or permissions, please contact us at production@supplychainnow.com© 2026 Supply Chain Now. All rights reserved. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

SummaryMike Sullivan is co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at OneDigital, an insurance and financial services organization with roughly 6,000 people across the United States and Canada. He is also co-author of the bestselling book Workforce Intelligence. He came on to talk about what three years of deploying AI inside his own company actually taught him, and the answer is not what most executives are being sold.The turning point was a single sentence. When OneDigital stopped thinking about AI as technology and started thinking about it as talent, and began hiring it, everything changed. Their people mentor the AI, teach it the job, and then hand it the work it genuinely does better. Each AI coworker has a name and a personality, and it becomes the repository of institutional knowledge that used to walk out the door when a 35-year employee retired.Mike is direct about the condition that makes any of this work, which is trust. You cannot lay off ten thousand people in the name of AI and then tell the survivors you are all in on them. He also names the question almost nobody has answered yet: when a growing share of your workforce is AI talent, who manages it, and how do you measure a blended workforce? Michael and Mike also get into the disappearing bottom rungs of the corporate ladder, why Gartner expects a wave of companies to table AI projects over missing ROI, and why Mike now jokes that his father, a union ironworker from Buffalo, would finally call him pro-labor.What you will learnThe reframe that changed everything at a 6,000-person company: stop treating AI as technology and start hiring it like talentWhat a capacity dividend is, and the question to ask once AI hands your team their time backHow to build AI coworkers that capture institutional knowledge before your longest-serving people retireWhy trust is the precondition for AI adoption, and how layoff headlines destroy itThe management gap nobody has solved: who owns AI talent when your org chart only knows human capitalWhy the bottom rungs of the corporate ladder are disappearing, and what that does to early-career hiringWhy AI projects stall on ROI when leaders expect an immediate return from something that needs cultivatingAbout Mike SullivanMike Sullivan is co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at OneDigital, an insurance and financial services organization operating across the United States and Canada with roughly 6,000 employees. He is co-author, with Vinay Gidwani, of the bestselling book Workforce Intelligence, written deliberately for non-technical leaders who are trying to run companies through AI adoption without losing the trust of their people.ConnectOneDigital: https://www.onedigital.comWorkforce Intelligence by Mike Sullivan and Vinay GidwaniBreakfast Leadership Network: https://www.breakfastleadership.com Note: The Breakfast Leadership Show includes occasional paid partner episodes, in which the guest has paid to appear. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Neste episódio do Performa Q. Pod. na CBN Campinas, recebemos Alex Bermudez, Sales Leader na Airia, plataforma de agentes de inteligência artificial parceira da Performa_IT, reconhecida pelo Gartner como visionária em seu setor.A conversa começa pelas diferenças culturais de tecnologia no Brasil e nos Estados Unidos, passa pela maturidade regulatória brasileira e chega a adoção de IA generativa nas empresas. Alex traz de primeira mão as discussões do Gartner CIO & Executive Conference 2026, incluindo o alerta sobre projetos de IA sem intenção de negócio definida e os riscos reais de segurança e custo, token pode escalar rápido e inviabilizar um orçamento inteiro se ninguém estiver de olho.

AI, robotics, and automation are advancing quickly, but successful transformation takes more than adopting the latest technology. It requires the right strategy, the right people, and a clear understanding of the business outcomes you're trying to achieve.In this episode of The Buzz, powered by MFG.inc, Scott Luton is joined by guest co-host Dr. Muddassir Ahmed and Christine Bush, Director of the Robotic and Motion Center of Excellence at Schneider Electric, to explore how AI and robotics are changing manufacturing and the workforce. They discuss the growing debate around AI safety and speed, why companies should focus on augmenting people rather than simply replacing them, and how manufacturers are using robotics to address skilled labor shortages and create more flexible operations. Christine also shares insights into IT/OT convergence, open software-defined automation, and what separates organizations that successfully scale automation from those that remain stuck in pilot mode.Key TakeawaysWhy organizations need a clear AI strategy that balances speed, safety, and business outcomesHow AI can augment engineers, operators, and maintenance teams rather than simply replace themWhy labor shortages are accelerating investments in robotics and advanced automationHow manufacturers can build greater flexibility into production by making robotics part of the process from the startThe role of IT/OT convergence, IoT, and open software-defined architectures in the future of manufacturingWhy successful automation projects require the right mix of people, perspectives, and technology to move beyond pilot modeAI and robotics offer enormous potential, but technology alone won't transform manufacturing. Tune in to hear practical perspectives on how manufacturers can combine human expertise with smarter automation, build more adaptable operations, and turn promising technology investments into real business value.Additional Resources & Links: MFG.inc: https://mfg.inc/With That Said: https://bit.ly/WTS-19SEP2026The Buzz APAC Edition: https://bit.ly/The-Buzz-APAC-Edition-Sept2026SCM Sensei AI: https://www.scmsensei.ai/U.S. Bank Strategic Alliance Leader page: www.supplychainnow.com/us-bankU.S. Bank Freight Payment Index: freight.usbank.comAI rivals found rare agreement on safety. Putting it into practice is harder: https://bit.ly/AI-Slowdown-DiscussionOne-third of AI-replaced workers will be rehired by 2029: Gartner: https://bit.ly/AI-And-The-WorkforceToyota estimates factory automation could cost $6.4 billion per year from 2028: https://reut.rs/4hpMtPcMFG.inc Leadership Training: https://reut.rs/4hpMtPcCelonis Ebook: https://bit.ly/Physical-AI-Explained-in-7-RobotsSupply Chain Now Resource Hub: https://supplychainnow.com/resource-hub/Schneider Electric: https://www.se.com/us/en/Christine on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christine-bush-22568818/Dr. Muddassir Ahmed on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/muddassirism/Upcoming Live Programming: https://supplychainnow.com/upcoming-live-programming/Supply Chain Now Resource Hub: https://supplychainnow.com/resource-hub/Learn more about our hosts: https://supplychainnow.com/aboutLearn more about Supply Chain Now: https://supplychainnow.comWatch and listen to more Supply Chain Now episodes here: https://supplychainnow.com/program/supply-chain-now Subscribe to Supply Chain Now on your favorite platform: https://supplychainnow.com/join Work with us! Download Supply Chain Now's NEW Media Kit: https://bit.ly/3XH6OVkLearn more about Blue Yonder Cognitive Solutions: http://blueyonder.com/cognitiveWEBINAR- Demand Volatility Isn't a Forecasting Problem: How One FMCG Distributor Released Capacity Without Capital: https://bit.ly/4r94YM6WEBINAR- You Can't Manage What You Can't See: Using Visibility, KPIs, and AI to Optimize Logistics Operations: https://bit.ly/4ql6iemWEBINAR- The Four Eras of Freight Audit: How we got here, and why the Control Era (finally) changes everything: https://bit.ly/4yVXPBxWEBINAR- The Real ROI of AI Analytics in the Supply Chain: Better Answers When Everyone Starts Asking: https://bit.ly/3TpCX6uWEBINAR- How to Stop Losing Margin After a Package Ships: https://bit.ly/4An41UxWEBINAR- Rethinking the Supply Chain Management Classroom: https://bit.ly/4xJIkM2This episode was hosted by Scott Luton and Dr. Muddassir Ahmed, and produced by Trisha Cordes, Joshua Miranda, and Amanda Luton. For additional information, please visit our dedicated episode page at: https://supplychainnow.com/thebuzz-smarter-automation-reshaping-manufacturing-1639 The content in this episode, including all audio, videos, visuals, and graphics, is the property of Supply Chain Now and is protected by copyright law. Unauthorized use, reproduction, distribution, modification, or re-uploading of this content in any form is strictly prohibited without explicit written permission from Supply Chain Now.For licensing inquiries or permissions, please contact us at production@supplychainnow.com© 2026 Supply Chain Now. All rights reserved. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Brian Riback is the CMSWire 2025 Contributor of the Year. Brian is a strategic leader with over 20 years of experience as a CRM and retention specialist. He ias based in New Jersey, USA. In June 2026, Brian published a detailed article exploring how brands can build trust in the era of AI discoverability. The article was titled "How CMOs Build Brand Trust Across AI Search, Agents and Answer Engines." In this conversation with Mark Hillary, Brian describes his ideas around how to operationalise trust - a process he calls TrustOps after a paper by Andrew Frank from Gartner. --- For over two decades CMSWire, produced by Simpler Media Group, has been the world's leading community of customer experience professionals. Today the CMSWire community consists of over 5 million influential customer experience, customer service and digital experience leaders, the majority of whom are based in North America and employed by medium to large organizations. --- https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianriback/ https://www.cmswire.com/ https://www.cmswire.com/author/brian-riback/ https://www.cmswire.com/digital-marketing/how-cmos-build-brand-trust-across-ai-search-agents-and-answer-engines/ https://www.gartner.com/en/experts/andrew-frank   Summary: Outline AI Discoverability and Trust AI tools increasingly influence how buyers discover and evaluate B2B providers. Visibility alone is insufficient; companies must control the credibility and context surrounding their brand. Content and Websites Content should identify its author, publication timing, sources, and relevant questions. Websites should validate AI-generated recommendations with use cases, case studies, testimonials, trust indicators, and accessible human support. AI-generated content can assist production, but authority depends on original expertise and evidence rather than volume. Trust Operations A proposed trust-operations function would coordinate marketing, communications, PR, legal, IT, and cybersecurity. The group would create playbooks and manage risks affecting brand representation across AI systems. Measurement and Alignment Brian recommended emphasizing qualified leads, pipeline movement, conversion, and nurturing rather than impressions or unmeasurable awareness. Marketing and sales should share revenue accountability while maintaining clearly defined roles. Current Work Brian is developing Version Lab, a tool for creating audience-specific versions of ads and emails, and continuing his writing for CMSWire.

The core structural shift discussed is the transition from fixed, seat-based licensing models to metered, consumption-based pricing for artificial intelligence tools. Driving forces behind this change are vendor margin pressures and increasing alignment between costs and actual resource utilization, which is resulting in a measurable difference on invoices rather than announced policy changes. Gartner's projections indicate that by 2028, over 35% of new corporate legal technology spending will operate on usage-based models, and this trend is evident in technology procurement and vendor billing practices.Key evidence is provided by data from Accenture and Gartner. Accenture's survey of 750 executives found that only one in five dollars spent on AI token usage can be traced to clear financial outcomes, while Gartner estimates global AI spending will reach $2.7 trillion in 2026, mainly on infrastructure. CIOs are frequently unaware of embedded AI costs, with untracked usage and spending increasing accordingly. Deloitte reported that 31% of UK workers use generative AI at work without employer knowledge, and 17% cover these tools out of pocket, totaling £958 million.Further supporting this shift, BambooHR data shows that 42% of AI tool usage time involves troubleshooting or prompt iteration, equating to roughly 20 workdays per user per year—an activity that becomes billable under consumption models. Vendors like Addigy are rolling out monitoring suites to track shadow AI usage and enforce compliance, while routing platforms such as OpenRouter guarantee data residency and track counts at a granular level. Across the technology stack, billing and consumption visibility are concentrated with vendors, leaving service providers and clients without independent reconciliations.Operational implications for MSPs and IT leaders center around contract exposure, accountability, and the need for defensible consumption tracking. Service providers face the choice between reselling metered AI services (and absorbing variability inside fixed-price contracts) or focusing on policy, instrumentation, and independent usage measurement. Practical safeguards include establishing clear roles in AI procurement, conducting usage amnesties to inventory real adoption, and maintaining independent records to validate vendor invoices and mitigate dispute risks. The absence of such mechanisms increases exposure to unexpected billings and client dissatisfaction. 00:00 The Bill Nobody Can Check 03:40 You Pay For Every Retry06:26 The Meter Isn't Yours09:56 Why Do We Care?Supported by: ScalePad Proofpoint Mailprotector

In March 2025, Gartner predicted that agentic AI would resolve 80 percent of common customer service problems on its own by 2029. This February, the same Gartner practice predicted that half the companies that cut service staff because of AI will hire people back into similar work by next year, under different job titles. Eleven months apart, same firm. Healthcare is buying the first forecast right now. Voice AI vendors claim their agents can handle most inbound calls, and the business case that follows fits on one slide. Count the calls. Convert them to positions. Book the salaries as savings. What the slide leaves out is the people who train the bot, test it, listen back to it and pick up the calls it cannot finish. Those roles arrive later, in compliance or quality or IT, and nobody sets them next to the number that got approved. The question to settle before approval is which project this is. A bot answering a call at two in the morning that would have gone to voicemail is a real gain, and that is a capacity project. A case built on fewer people is a different claim. Chris Boyer and Reed Smith leave that one open, because the honest answer depends on what the organization wrote down when it signed. The second cost is quieter. A voice agent is built to capture the caller's intent, confirm it and complete it, which leaves no home for the rest of the call. Texas and California now require providers to tell patients when AI sits in the middle of their care, so more patients will know, and some will start asking for a person before they say anything else. Every AI-handled call also leaves a full transcript, more patient conversation than most health systems have ever held, reported upward as one number about how many calls the bot kept. Amy Brown of Authenticx names the fallacy directly. Executives like to believe AI means immediate cost reduction, when putting AI in front of patients in a regulated environment is a commitment that takes people to keep it honest. Her company now evaluates AI-to-human conversations, and her read on those is not flattering. If your access center business case counted the calls the bot will answer and not the people who will read them, you approved a capacity project and called it a savings plan. MENTIONS FROM THE SHOW Healthcare's Long Walk Toward the Patient, the free eBook marking 500 episodes, which features Amy Brown's earlier Touch Point interview: https://www.touchpointpodcastbook.com Authenticx, the healthcare conversational intelligence company Amy Brown founded in 2018: https://authenticx.com Amy Brown, founder and CEO of Authenticx, on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-brown-84821210/  Gartner, March 5 2025. Predicted agentic AI would autonomously resolve 80% of common customer service issues by 2029, with a 30% cut in operating costs. Analyst forecast: https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-03-05-gartner-predicts-agentic-ai-will-autonomously-resolve-80-percent-of-common-customer-service-issues-without-human-intervention-by-20290 Gartner, June 10 2025. Predicted 50% of organizations planning significant customer service workforce cuts because of AI would abandon those plans by 2027. Based on a March 2025 poll of 163 service leaders: https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-06-10-gartner-predicts-50-percent-of-organizations-will-abandon-plans-to-reduce-customer-service-workforce-due-to-ai Gartner, January 26 2026. Predicted generative AI cost per resolution will exceed $3 by 2030, above many offshore human agents, and that regulations guaranteeing access to a human will raise assisted service volume 30% by 2028: https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-01-26-gartner-predicts-genai-cost-per-resolution-for-customer-service-will-exceed-offshore-human-agent-costs-by-2030 Gartner, February 3 2026. Predicted half of companies that attributed headcount reduction to AI will rehire for similar functions under different job titles by 2027. Its October 2025 survey of 321 service leaders found only 20% had actually reduced agent staffing because of AI: https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-02-03-gartner-predicts-half-of-companies-that-cut-customer-service-staff-due-to-ai-will-rehire-by-2027 Gartner, July 9 2024. Survey of 5,728 customers conducted in December 2023: 64% would prefer companies not use AI in customer service, and 60% worried AI would make it harder to reach a person. Cross-industry, not healthcare specific: https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-07-09-gartner-survey-finds-64-percent-of-customers-would-prefer-that-companies-didnt-use-ai-for-customer-service Klarna, February 2024. The company's own claim that its OpenAI-powered assistant was handling the work of roughly 700 agents: https://www.klarna.com/international/press/klarna-ai-assistant-handles-two-thirds-of-customer-service-chats-in-its-first-month/ Sebastian Siemiatkowski at SXSW London, June 4 2025, describing human customer service as becoming a VIP offering: https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/04/klarna-ceo-says-company-will-use-humans-to-offer-vip-customer-service Texas HB 149, the Texas Responsible Artificial Intelligence Governance Act (TRAIGA), effective January 1 2026. Requires health care providers to disclose to patients or their representatives when AI is used in diagnosis or treatment, before or at the time of the interaction: https://capitol.texas.gov/BillLookup/History.aspx?LegSess=89R&Bill=HB149 California AB 3030, effective January 1 2025. Requires a generative AI disclaimer and instructions for reaching a human on patient communications containing clinical information, unless a licensed provider reviews the message first. Scheduling and billing messages are outside its scope: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240AB3030 Reed Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedtsmith/ Chris Boyer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/ Chris Boyer website: http://www.christopherboyer.com/ Chris Boyer on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisboyer.bsky.social Reed Smith on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/reedsmith.bsky.social  Recommendations from this episode: Chris: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late by Cory Doctorow. Verso, published June 23 2026, 240 pages: https://www.versobooks.com/products/3584-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai Reed: Lane Being Lane: The Story of Lane Kiffin, College Football's Agent of Chaos by John Talty. Harper, published September 15 2026, 320 pages: https://www.amazon.com/Lane-Being-Kiffin-College-Footballs/dp/0063573253 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a rare introspective episode, Sean Mooney, Founder and CEO of BluWave, marks the company's 10th anniversary with the full origin story — from Austin and 120-hour investment-banking weeks, into private equity, to the Ratatouille moment that convinced him to walk away from a partner's seat and build something new. He tells how BluWave nearly died in its first year, how asking friends and customers for help turned it around, and how bootstrapping plus a one-of-one dataset and homegrown AI built before ChatGPT sent the flywheel spinning. Along the way he shares the lessons that stuck: values and people both matter ('and,' not 'or'), speed and agility are non-negotiable, and to drink your own Kool-Aid. It's a candid, hard-won founder's story, and a preview of where BluWave goes next. Press play. Episode Highlights: 3:15 - Austin roots, 120-hour investment-banking weeks, and "experience in dog years" 9:20 - How private equity forced a shift from architects to engineers to general contractors 12:10 - The $3,000-an-hour problem that became BluWave: an "Amazon meets Gartner" for business building 15:00 - The Ratatouille moment (and the Bumbys' "utterly honest read") that pushed Sean to leave PE 19:30 - Nearly shutting down in year one — and the two questions that turned it around 25:10 - Speed and agility, taught by a John Cusack ski scene: fall, dust off, keep going 29:00 - Where BluWave goes next, and the "make two groups successful" North Star For more on BluWave, visit https://www.bluwave.net/

Lisa Liu is the Corporate Marketing & Communications Manager at Stellar Cyber. In this episode, she joins host Charlie Osborne to discuss the new Gartner category, ISOC, including what it is and why it's important in today's market. This episode is brought to you by Stellar Cyber. Learn more about our sponsor at https://StellarCyber.ai.

What employers should know about key developments this week: Candidate Fraud Escalating Globally: According to the research firm Gartner, by 2028, one in four candidate profiles could be fraudulent in some way. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools now make it easier to create false identities and fabricate credentials, and employers face the dual risk of hiring unqualified candidates or unknowingly bringing in individuals with fraudulent intent. North Korea's Remote Worker Operation: From 2020 to 2022, the U.S. government identified over 300 U.S. companies—including Fortune 500 firms—that unknowingly hired fraudulent remote workers operating as part of a coordinated North Korean state operation. Building an Insider Threat Program: Hiring fraudulent candidates can result in security threats, intellectual property theft, reputational damage, operational disruption, and potential Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctions. Employers should implement a comprehensive insider threat program that identifies risk areas while complying with applicable background check laws and other federal, state, and local legal requirements. In this episode of Employment Law This Week®, Epstein Becker Green attorneys Brian G. Cesaratto and Genevieve M. Murphy-Bradacs examine how employers can safeguard their hiring processes against fraudulent candidates and state-sponsored threats in an AI-enabled environment. - Visit our site for this week's video edition and more news: https://www.ebglaw.com/eltw448 Sign up for notifications: https://www.ebglaw.com/eltw-subscribe Visit https://www.EmploymentLawThisWeek.com - Epstein Becker Green is a national law firm focused on health care and life sciences; employment, labor, and workforce management; and litigation and business disputes. This video is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Viewing this video does not create an attorney-client relationship.  EMPLOYMENT LAW THIS WEEK® and #WorkforceWednesday® are registered trademarks of Epstein Becker & Green, P.C. © Epstein Becker & Green, P.C. All Rights Reserved. Attorney Advertising.

While the podcast team is taking a Radical Sabbatical, Kim is interviewing authors of the books that have had a big impact on her in the past two years.  Today, employees working in organizations both large and small are faced with incredible pressure to integrate AI into their workflows both to save costs and to do more.  But many of those same employees express fears, “am I just training robots to put me out of a job?!”  While it can be tempting for leaders in the C-suites to use AI to “finally get the upper hand on these whiny/needy/entitled employees!”, they risk damaging their core mission, specifically providing value to their customers.  In fairness, those same leaders in the C-suite are rightly under pressure to integrate these new tools or risk getting wiped out by more nimble competition.  So, what's the best way to go about this?  In this episode, Kim Scott speaks with Tiffani Bova about her latest book The Experience Mindset.   In this conversation, they explore the critical relationship between employee experience and customer experience, emphasizing the importance of self-reflection, effective feedback mechanisms, and the necessity of training employees. The discussion also highlights the disconnect between executives and employees regarding training and feedback, illustrated through real-world examples like the 'Undercover Boss' show. Ultimately, the conversation underscores the need for organizations to prioritize employee engagement and actionable feedback to foster a positive workplace culture and drive business success. They discuss specifics such as the importance of addressing workplace irritations, the need for effective management training, and the significance of streamlining processes to enhance productivity.  Tiffani especially stresses the critical role of office culture in fostering open communication and the necessity of training managers to improve employee satisfaction.  The discussion also highlights the impact of automation and technology in optimizing processes and the importance of aligning incentives to encourage growth and innovation. They explore the intersection of technology and human experience, particularly focusing on the role of AI in the workplace. They discuss the importance of understanding the human element in technology adoption, the balance between tech and human interaction, and the critical role of company culture in driving business success. The conversation highlights real-world examples of AI implementation, the challenges of technology overload, and the necessity of fostering a cohesive culture that aligns with organizational values. Guest Background: As both a practitioner and academic Tiffani Bova offers a unique perspective and has helped lead the tech industry through several evolutions over her nearly 30-year career as Salesforce's former Growth and Innovation Evangelist, and previously as a Research Fellow at Gartner and a sales, marketing and customer service executive for start-ups and Fortune 500 companies. She is the author of two Wall Street Journal bestsellers: GrowthIQ and The Experience Mindset. At The Futurum Group, she runs the research and strategy organization, while working closely with the entire leadership team to develop and scale its data and intelligence platform and insights for its clients. She also leads the team's efforts within the technology and telecom channels, demonstrating the power and performance of connected go-to-market strategies and alliances. While at Gartner, her forward-looking insights and guidance helped some of the largest technology companies in the world including Microsoft, Cisco, Salesforce, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, SAP, AT&T, Dell, Amazon-AWS, expand their market share and grow their revenues. She was a trusted advisor to multiple senior executives who were responsible for shifting from on-premise to as-a-service business models resulting in new billion-dollar divisions. In the late 90's and early 2000s she was a pioneer of cloud computing, she previously led direct and indirect sales, marketing and customer service for two of the largest web-based start-ups in the US and spearheaded a newly formed division of a Fortune 500 company to $300 million in revenue over two and a half years. Tiffani has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Fast Company, Bloomberg, MSNBC-TV, Yahoo Finance, INC and Forbes. She is also the host of the podcast What's Next! with Tiffani Bova. More info here: https://www.tiffanibova.com/ [links for YouTube description] (Bio) https://www.tiffanibova.com/biography/ (book: The Experience Mindset) https://www.tiffanibova.com/the-experience-mindset/ (how to contact) https://www.tiffanibova.com CHAPTERS (00:44) Introduction to the Experience Mindset (02:19) Self-Reflection and Critical Feedback (04:56) The Importance of Employee Experience (05:39) Understanding Employee Feedback (07:23) The Undercover Boss Example (11:25) The Value of Training Employees (15:29) Disconnect Between Executives and Employees (17:30) Real-World Application of Employee Feedback (20:05) Identifying and Fixing Workplace Irritations (24:31) The Importance of Management Training (27:58) Understanding Processes and Their Impact (36:36) Streamlining Processes for Productivity (41:51) Understanding the Human Element in Technology (44:33) AI: Triumphs and Disasters in Implementation (47:32) The Balance of Technology and Human Experience (50:17) Creating a Cohesive Company Culture (55:20) The Impact of Culture on Business Success Connect with the Radical Candor team: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Companies racing to replace people with AI may eventually discover they moved too fast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In today's Cloud Wars AI Minute, I break down Gartner's $2.59 trillion AI infrastructure spending figure and why rising compute and memory costs are shifting where the economics of the AI boom are landing.Highlights00:11 — Let's talk about this new Gartner number that just came out. Gartner is claiming that it's $2.59 trillion in CapEx expenditures that we're starting to see companies investing in the AI infrastructure space. Well, this is a very big number, and in an earlier video, I covered the fact that now we're starting to see cash flow not being able to keep up.01:02 — If we take a look at Nvidia for a second, that is going to be running a lot of this compute on its hardware, you're going to see that they're at $89 billion in one quarter. Now, that's their revenue in just one quarter alone, and that's up 117 percent year over year. This means that they're demanding prices and they're manufacturing this in a market that the demand is far exceeding their ability to actually produce equipment.01:36 — And you're also seeing 400% DRAM prices going up since the start of 2024, and so when you combine these two different pieces together, what we're seeing is that the revenue is really being made by the hardware manufacturers and the ability to do the compute. This is where all revenue seems to be going right now.02:15 — Gartner has even predicted that in 2026 we're going to see the trough of disillusionment happen in the AI space. Now, what this really means is that we're going to see the hype cycle bring it down a bit to be able to go into what is the actual reality of AI return on investment, and so we should start seeing this hype cycle come down.03:22 — And so this is going to be a very interesting thing for us to continue to watch throughout 2026, and it should open up some opportunity and hopefully maybe help us reduce the demand that we have on both compute and memory infrastructure, allowing this to normalize a bit. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

Our guest on this week's episode is Tommy Slaymaker, Director of Fleet Services at The Pete Store (one of the largest Peterbilt dealer groups in North America). Diesel fuel is the driving force behind our supply chains, powering everything from railroad locomotives to long-haul trucks. Prices have now risen to historic highs, due to the shortages brought on by the war with Iran. What impacts are these high prices having on supply chains and trucking in particular? Senior News Editor Ben Ames finds out as he speaks with today's guest. Every business is grappling with artificial intelligence, how to use it and where can it improve business processes. Warehouses are no exceptions in this AI struggle. Senior Editor Victoria Kickham came across some new research that reveals new trends on how AI can potentially transform warehouse operations.The goal of all packaging used for parcel deliveries is to protect the products the packages contain while they make their ways to their final destinations. It is never an easy balance to get just enough strength without wasting too much material. But this week Ben Ames wrote about a new type of paper-based packaging that is making headlines in the packaging world - and it comes from the research and development labs of Amazon. Articles and resources mentioned in this episode:The Pete StoreWarehouse digitalization hits inflection pointAmazon says switch from plastic to paper makes e-commerce more sustainableVisit DC VelocityVisit Supply Chain XchangeSend feedback about this podcast to podcast@agilebme.comThis podcast episode is sponsored by: Werner

According to Gartner, sales organizations undergo an average of four transformations every two years. Of those, only 11% manage to drive commercial success. For the go-to-market organization, and especially for the enablement function within it, that statistic says a lot. Every single one of those transformations lands on their desk, and the ask is pretty much always the same: move quickly, keep the field informed, and make sure what they’re armed with is 100% accurate. So how do you build an enablement function that can keep up, especially as AI increases the pace of these transformations? Riley Rogers: And welcome to the Win/Win Podcast. I’m your host, Riley Rogers. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Rebecca Sharbono, Senior Manager of Sales Enablement at Tanium. Thanks so much for joining us, Rebecca. I’m super excited to hear your take on this one. I know it’s very top of mind for you and the team. Before we jump right into the deep end, could you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role? Rebecca Sharbono: Riley, thank you so much for having me. As you mentioned, I’m an enablement leader at Tanium, a cybersecurity company. I spend a lot of my time training and enabling people across the go-to-market org and supporting business initiatives that scale across all those go-to-market teams. I have spent years developing people across nonprofits and startups and large corporations. That moment when you see the light bulb go on for someone who’s learning something new or learning a different way to do something, watching them go from unsure to confident, and realizing that I got to play a small part of that, is huge, and that feeling never gets old. Across all of my career, my rule is really simple: leave people better than you found them. And these days, what that means is figuring out how to help teams move at speed without losing trust and craft that makes people really good at their jobs. RR: Let’s dig into it. As so many organizations, yours, mine, are grappling with AI innovation that is truly ceaseless, every day there’s something new, how are you seeing that affect Tanium’s go-to-market priorities? RS: Wow, the struggle is real. What it comes down to is looking at it a couple different ways. Part of me looks at it through a product shift, and then part of me looks at it through a people shift. There’s a shift that’s happening with AI models and with products, and I know specifically with Highspot and with Tanium, there’s a lot of AI that’s in our products. And at the same time, it’s happening in how we build our people. So we’re moving from this idea of we need to train experts to use a complex tool or process, such as Tanium or Highspot, to enable anyone to run at an expert level. When I tie it back to product, our AI platform lets one operator do what used to take a team. My job is making sure that our people, our field, can do the same thing, where they can walk in and perform like a team of experts faster than ever before. When I think about how AI plays into that, it isn’t just in how we sell anymore, it’s the mirror that we’re holding up in how we’re developing talent. RR: I like that. It kind of drives home the point that, yes, it’s changing the way that we can do things, but it’s not changing necessarily what we’re doing. We’re still going to market with relatively similar products. We’re developing our people in similar ways. We just have some different mechanisms, and not only do we have different mechanisms, there’s different kind of priorities and pushes, by which I mean, as you’ve mentioned, we’re moving with greater precision, greater urgency. Where is that pressure kind of coming from for you? RS: This is coming from all over, much like the AI that’s being thrown out there. But I think at its core, there are three places where I can distill it down. Again, I go back to the product. AI-driven tools move faster than training cycles used to. And then I think about the market as a whole. Customers now expect proof of value in weeks, not quarters, not months. They want to see that impact right away. And then the people. Today’s talent doesn’t want a six-month onboarding. They don’t want a two-month onboarding. They want to be useful in week one. And I think what’s interesting is that enablement really sits at the center of all three of these things. RR: I would like to think about this through the lens of a recent example, and maybe slightly less recent now, because again, to the point of new things every day. But given the industry that you’re in, monumental change in the models that are available can send shockwaves through your workforce and your customers, a good example being the release of Claude’s Mythos model. So can you walk us through what it looks like on the enablement side when something so significant drops in your industry? RS: Tanium is a cybersecurity company. We sit within the IT industry, and what we do is help businesses connect their endpoints and have full visibility in real time. Taking a step back a moment, the release of industry disruptors like Mythos, whatever the next thing is, really shows us that the tool capability jumps are now arriving so much faster than most organizations can absorb them, and this is a pressure point. Every time a Mythos level model drops, the ceiling on what’s possible jumps overnight. With that, people’s readiness to speak to it doesn’t jump with it. So what the field needs isn’t necessarily training on the new model, it’s judgment training. They need to know what it means, what it’s capable of, and what it’s not, because the gap changes every few months. So specifically with Mythos, what we identified the field as needing in that moment were a few different things, but they needed them really fast. That goes back to that speed we talked about earlier. They needed to know the capability as a foundation, “Hey, what is this? What does it mean,” so that we can position ourselves as a trusted advisor when we’re talking with prospects and customers. They needed to know the impact, because if they’re talking to a CISO and a SOC analyst, they’re gonna have very different questions, different fears, different requirements for that conversation, and we needed to make sure our field was armed with those right conversations based on the persona they were gonna be speaking with. When we got word that this was released, we stood up an enablement package within, I think it was, a 48-hour timeframe. It was all hands on deck. We had analyst themes to start building the foundation off of, and their insights to work from. Teams across the company, product, enablement, sales, pre-sales, you name it, jumped in to provide the right talk tracks and help us build FAQs. And then we launched everything with a field activation brief just a few days later. RR: As we talked about, you need to move fast, but up until recently, you didn’t necessarily have all of the tools in the toolkit to move quite as quickly as you needed. So what resources and support were the field working with, and what did you see kind of not working? RS: We didn’t have a way to ensure that the field had the most up-to-date information. While we were housing stuff on SharePoint, sometimes if a seller would go in and try to search for a piece of information, it may have pulled something up that was from two years ago, and things change at lightning speed, as we know and as we’ve been talking about. So that was a huge gap. We had ways to create content and measure some activity, but the speed and the impact together, we didn’t have that in real time. And as you can imagine, there were decisions that were being made on instinct or lagging data because the feedback loop just didn’t exist yet. RR: As you were tackling that beast and started building a new way forward focused on speed, what were your early priorities, and how did you get started breaking that down into manageable bits and pieces? RS: It truly is, hey, what’s the endpoint that we’re trying to get to, and then what does that mean for us and how do we prioritize how to get there? When speed becomes a priority, many times I see people creating more stuff. You don’t start with more content. What you need to do is start with clarity. So looking at where the pain was loudest at that time was really important. We’re hearing from sellers that they don’t have what they need. They can’t find the information at the speed they need it. Those were pretty loud pain points right out the get-go. So the first priority is figuring out how we actually move the needle and identify what’s mission critical versus nice to have. Secondly, building the fastest possible feedback loop so that we know within days, not quarters or weeks, if something is working or not. That was really important too, to figure out we need to identify a test group, a beta group, once we’ve looked at some different solutions to get feedback. And thirdly, we have to make it usable by one person without hand-holding, because if it needs an expert to drive it, to understand it, to use it, it’s not actually fast. Those were some of the things that were rattling through my brain as we figured out how to build that foundation, prioritize what we needed, and how we got started. RR: You did the work to figure out what the path forward was. You spoke with people to understand what they needed. You essentially built the vision. Once you started to understand what the North Star was, what were those first few components that you needed to tackle once you had landed on a solution? What is the go-forward plan there? RS: It was basically how fast can we get this thing implemented. The field needed it. The enablement team needed it, especially when we were thinking about how we’re running training at scale. We’re a global company, so how do we make sure that there’s consistency and standardization across all of the team, not just sections or segments of the team? We were looking at what tools could help us solve for these things, and we landed with Highspot. It came down to that usability piece and how easy it was for anyone to be able to use the tool, and it’s been awesome to work with the team. We had a very quick turnaround. We started implementation late October, early November, and then we did a soft launch in December, ’cause we had some initiatives coming out that we wanted to make sure we got into Highspot and started pointing people to the platform. And then we are gonna do a full hard launch at our sales kickoff event in February. We saw some really amazing results early, right away after that launch. RR: I would be curious too, knowing that it’s relatively recently stood up, but you’ve also encountered big moments like that launch of Mythos since it was stood up. So without that work to get it out at an accelerated pace to launch Highspot early, what would it have looked like to tackle that moment? RS: Oh man, I don’t even want to think about that. No, I’m just kidding. It would’ve looked very different, because one of the initial things we did with Mythos was stand up a Highspot page where we could house all the information, the talk tracks, whatever, the FAQs. That response time is huge, and honestly, if we didn’t have Highspot in place at that time, it probably would’ve felt a little bit disjointed. We would’ve had to figure out, okay, where are we sending the field to look for these things? What’s the instruction there? What are we telling them to do? And one thing that’s really easy with the Highspot Sales Play is the what to know, what to say, what to show, what to do, and that makes it so easy for, if I’m a seller, to go in and know exactly those steps, and where I can walk away feeling equipped and empowered to go and have that conversation. Tying back to your original question, I just don’t think we could’ve stood something up fast enough. RR: Well, I’m glad you had that on deck when straits were dire and things were tough. I want to loop back to something that you shared early on that I thought was a really interesting point, which is that it’s not necessarily that the way that things were done before was wrong, bad, not strategic. It just was built for a different kind of working. So what does it look like to you now when you’re bringing AI into your workflows so you can match the speed that the business is asking you for? RS: When I talk about the different pace of the business, it looks like moving from batch to real time. If you’re not familiar with batch, it’s like, okay, we’re gonna build this thing. We’re going to take time to do this, to get it built out. We’ll get the feedback at the QBRs that are happening, and then we’ll launch this thing a few weeks before that. It’s very much build the whole thing out and then deploy it at one time, versus real time. So traditional enablement was built in sort of that batch cycle. AI collapses that entire cycle. Think about it as we can build training faster, we can personalize it to the seller in the moment they need it, and then we almost instantly know whether it’s landing instead of waiting a few months till our next offsite or something. So the workflow doesn’t just get faster, it almost gets a new nervous system, something it’s never had before. And I think that’s the real unlock when I think about it. Not AI writing content for you, it’s AI closing the loop between what you built and what worked. RR: Okay. So knowing that AI has, again, created a new nervous system, to your point, for the work that you do and the way that you deploy it, I’d be curious to hear about some of the capabilities that you’re leveraging with Highspot that fall into that AI camp. Things like Role Play, things like lesson generation. What do you see these capabilities unlocking for you and the team? RS: Couple of things come to mind. The ability to get more reps. Reps get more reps, and I think about things like AI Role Play, where they can go in and practice, build confidence, and feel super equipped before they even have a conversation out in the wild, and that is such a game changer. This means they don’t have to schedule time with their manager to run something. They’re not waiting for a coaching slot. Whatever it is, they can literally go into the platform, and as many times as they need, get those reps in. The lesson generation definitely accelerates the build, and it’s a competitive shift, I think, in the market when it comes to building training. That’s been super helpful because now you can stand up training within hours, sometimes minutes, at least the initial lesson, and not weeks. When I started, we were building online trainings, and we would have these cycles that would last up to 10 weeks. You think about that, you get the scope of the project. You start the project, you’re working on it, you have all these feedback touchpoints, and then 10 weeks later you have the package, and by that time, stuff could completely be different because it’s now taken you over two months to produce something. With AI, and using things like the lesson builder and the AI Role Play, we have poured accelerant on how we build and develop training. RR: With the lesson generation, have you used that to build any recent training experiences, courses, et cetera? What have you used it for? RS: I’ve used it for things like SKO pre-work, but we’ve also used it for our onboarding. We just redesigned our sales onboarding this past quarter. We redesigned our SDR onboarding, and we redesigned our pre-sales onboarding. Right now, it’s all built in Highspot, so that lesson generator came in super handy for some of those lessons. RR: Yeah, especially going back to thinking, 10 weeks to build a learning experience, and you just listed off three key ones there. It would’ve been a lot of building. Looking at how much has been built in a few months, we’re still in the under-a-year phase. What is the biggest impact you’ve seen from all of the work we’ve talked about? RS: We now have a centralized hub that we can send all of our go-to-market teams to, and we have that real-time visibility and those analytics to help us make better-informed, data-driven decisions going forward. I think one of the clearest proof points, and this is a really simple one, it’s very basic, but our findability ratio of 18.2 to one, which means every minute an individual spends searching for content, they’ll spend over 18 minutes actually using it, means that they are able to find what they need in real time. Sellers aren’t gonna waste time hunting for the right piece of content. They’re actually gonna be able to spend time selling, which is what they’re supposed to be doing. In addition to that, some of the impact we’re seeing downstream: over 5,000 pitches sent, nearly 300 Digital Rooms built for customers and prospects, and more than 400 hours of external dwell time across over 8,000 shared items. Those are all huge things. Just the fact that we even have those numbers and can speak to them is mind-boggling because we had nothing like that prior, where we could literally say, “Hey, here’s how many pieces of content our prospects and customers are engaging with.” We had nothing close to that level of data. It’s proof that our buyers are engaging with what we’re putting in front of them. It’s proof that our sellers are engaging with what we’re putting in front of them. And honestly, Highspot has been the backbone of all of that. RR: It’s amazing the granularity that you can get now. And beyond that, with those numbers in play, you can then start to think a little bit differently about what to do next, because you have those guiding numbers to say, “People are taking the actions that we want them to.” But as we’re coming to our close, I would love if you could leave us with one takeaway for any other enablement leader that’s struggling to keep up. What would you want them to hear? RS: Yeah. First of all, you don’t have to have it all figured out. Let’s just ground in that. It’s a learning process. Sometimes we’ll fail, and sometimes we’ll knock it out of the park. So I would just start with that. Also, I think what’s really important is just building the loop that tells you what’s working, ’cause speed without that visibility is just chaos with good intentions. Let that sink in just a little bit. But start small, prove it fast, and let the data build your confidence instead of your guesswork. Honestly, for me, it just ties back to why, why are you doing this? Never lose sight of why you’re doing this. And for me, it’s simple, that leaving people better than how I found them is so huge. And while the tools keep changing, the why you’re doing it, that’s not gonna change. RR: What a perfect full circle, and we brought it all the way back to the beginning. All we’re doing is building people up, building them better, and I think that has really come through in everything you shared. I’m sure your sellers appreciate you, and I know I appreciate you for taking the time to come and share what you’ve been working on. It’s been really great to hear what your world looks like. RS: Thank you so much, Riley. RR: To our audience, thank you for listening to this episode of the Win/Win Podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize go-to-market success with Highspot.

Most data teams think they're too busy to slow down. The real problem is they're too busy taking orders to ever be seen as anything but a cost center.

Strong execution might earn results, but it doesn't automatically build influence. In this episode of ThinkCast, Gartner Vice President Analyst Rob O'Donohue explains why CIOs can no longer afford to leave their leadership brand to chance. From understanding the difference between brand and reputation to diagnosing when a reset is needed, Rob shares a practical "4D" Framework to help leaders intentionally shape how they're perceived and trusted across the organization.   You'll learn: Why "doing a great job" is no longer enough to build executive influence The difference between brand and reputation, and why both matter The three events that signal it's time for a leadership brand reset How CIOs can use feedback, GenAI and behavior change to strengthen their reputation What it takes to turn a desired leadership brand into a lasting perception Dig deeper: Become a client to learn more about building your brand Join us at Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo™ See why Gartner is the world authority on AI   Timestamps: (00:00) Understanding the difference between brand and reputation (03:44) The 4D Framework for shaping executive perception (08:53) How GenAI can help strengthen your executive brand (12:00) Identifying gaps between perception and reality (18:36) Turning your brand strategy into daily habits (22:10) Why reputation changes more slowly than behavior (24:22) How to protect and sustain your executive reputation (27:16)The first step to building a stronger executive brand  

In this sponsored episode, Paul Delory of Gartner joins Kyler and Ned to discuss the reconciler pattern for operations and the shift toward continuous operations. Together they discuss how immutable infrastructure, policy as code, and platform engineering help bridge the gap between traditional IT and modern automation. They also highlight Gartner’s upcoming Infrastructure, Operations &... Read more »

In this sponsored episode, Paul Delory of Gartner joins Kyler and Ned to discuss the reconciler pattern for operations and the shift toward continuous operations. Together they discuss how immutable infrastructure, policy as code, and platform engineering help bridge the gap between traditional IT and modern automation. They also highlight Gartner’s upcoming Infrastructure, Operations &... Read more »

In this sponsored episode, Paul Delory of Gartner joins Kyler and Ned to discuss the reconciler pattern for operations and the shift toward continuous operations. Together they discuss how immutable infrastructure, policy as code, and platform engineering help bridge the gap between traditional IT and modern automation. They also highlight Gartner’s upcoming Infrastructure, Operations &... Read more »

Is AI going to replace software testers, or make them more valuable than they have ever been? Jonathon Wright says both, and in this episode he does not back down from either position. Jonathon Wright has spent thirty years in test automation, going all the way back to WinRunner. He now runs thirty AI agents across twelve screens, he sat with Gartner for their research on agentic platforms, and he says the last six months changed the job more than the previous three decades combined. We get into what he calls confidence engineering, why he has not opened a browser in five years, and what happened when he generated thirty seven thousand test scenarios from space agency specifications and put them in front of NASA. He also tells the story of a testing leader who taught his agents everything he knew about accessibility work and then got let go. A few minutes later he tells you your career has another fifteen good years in it. I pushed him on the contradiction. Listen for how he answers it. What you will learn in this episode: Why the flood of AI generated code makes verification the scarce skill, and testers the people who matter most What confidence engineering means and how to apply it to systems that never return the same answer twice Why browser automation was the easy problem, and what is actually hard now How intent driven testing lets you model a whole system before a single line of code exists Why getting the requirements right matters more with agents than it ever did without them The story of an agent taking twenty minutes to press one key, and what it tells you about the hype cycle Three concrete things to start doing Monday to stay valuable as your agent count climbs Whether you are an automation engineer, a manual tester, or a QA leader trying to work out what your team should do differently this quarter, this conversation will give you a clearer read on where the value is actually moving.

The episode reveals a structural transfer of forecasting and adoption risk from AI vendors to managed service providers (MSPs) and IT service organizations. Five companies—CyberFOX, Intezer, Sophos, Flamingo, and Charles IT—have taken distinct strategies to expand AI capabilities within the channel, underscoring a coordinated attempt to shift the uncertainty of AI demand, usage, and revenue forecasting off vendors' balance sheets and onto service providers.A central data point comes from Gartner's survey of over 1,300 technology leaders at companies above $50 million in revenue: fewer than one in four have successfully scaled an AI project across business units, even as 85% plan to increase AI investment and many cannot quantify current spending. Analysts note a move away from flat-rate subscriptions toward usage-based AI pricing, significantly increasing projected IT costs through 2035 for customers. The episode highlights that vendors are pre-building AI channel programs with the expectation that third-party providers will absorb both commitment risk and customer deployment burdens.Supporting evidence includes announcement details: CyberFOX's new North American deal with Ingram Micro, Intezer's launch of a comprehensive partner portal, Sophos's OpenAI integration targeting MSPs, Flamingo's open-source AI agent platform, and Charles IT's acquisition of Descent, an AI-native MSP. Spending data from Ramp and adoption surveys from the Census Bureau and Futurum Group further illustrate the gap between stated AI success and actual operational adoption, elucidating systemic uncertainty and reporting bias in AI project returns.For MSPs and IT leaders, the implications are clear: the structural shift means channel programs increasingly pass fixed commitments and usage volatility to service firms while providing little guaranteed demand. Practical safeguards include independently counting and verifying clients with active, process-integrated AI adoption before entering distribution contracts. Defining specific, outcome-focused criteria for adoption can protect against being tied to overambitious vendor forecasts, allowing providers to negotiate terms on verifiable demand rather than projections that vendors themselves could not convert.00:00 Everyone Is Selling To You 03:41 The Forecast That Didn't Convert06:29 Nobody Can Prove The Demand09:38 Why Do We Care?Supported by: GoTo(LogMeIn) Pax8

What if sustainable leadership transformation begins not with strategy, systems, or titles—but with connection? In this episode of Let's Have This Conversation, Melissa Swonger, known as the Architect of Connection-Centered Leadership™, explores the invisible architecture beneath effective leadership: the beliefs, relationships, behavioral patterns, and cultural dynamics that shape how people lead themselves, influence others, navigate change, and build organizations where people can flourish. Melissa is a scholar-practitioner, change theorist, international bestselling author, keynote speaker, executive coach, and organizational culture advisor. Her work bridges psychology, leadership development, organizational culture, change theory, human behavior, and whole-person development to help leaders move beyond surface-level solutions and create sustainable transformation. According to Gartner research, 90% of HR leaders believe that focusing on the human aspects of leadership is necessary for success in today's workplace. Yet recognizing the importance of human-centered leadership and consistently putting it into practice are two very different things. Melissa's work addresses that gap through Connection-Centered Leadership™ and her Integrative Transformation Blueprint™, a research-informed approach built around three stages: Awareness → Connection → Movement The framework challenges leaders to examine not only what they are building, but what they are building on. Sustainable organizational change requires understanding the underlying beliefs, relationships, behaviors, and informal systems influencing how people communicate, collaborate, make decisions, and respond to change. Throughout our conversation, we explore why leadership begins long before someone receives a title, how self-awareness influences organizational culture, and why meaningful connection can become a catalyst for stronger leadership and sustainable change. We also examine Melissa's concept of radical kindness and why kindness, connection, and human-centered leadership should not be confused with avoiding accountability. Instead, they can help create the conditions for trust, honest communication, meaningful relationships, and transformational performance. Melissa shares insights from her work across executive advisory, leadership and culture consulting, speaking, workshops, retreats, and author development through The Muse & The Method™. In This Conversation, We Explore: At its core, this conversation asks leaders to consider a powerful question: What are you building—and what are you building it on? For executives, HR professionals, people leaders, entrepreneurs, organizational development professionals, and anyone interested in the future of work, this episode offers a deeper examination of how connection-centered and human-centered leadership can create sustainable transformation from the inside out.   For more information: https://www.thesagehillproject.com/   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every company claims to have an AI strategy. Blaine Mathieu says that's hardly the point.In this episode, Eric Chemi sits down with Blaine, founder of the River Group and author of "The River Doesn't Wait," to unpack why a technology strategy is table stakes for the AI era and how the real competitive edge comes from an operational strategy. Eric and Blaine dig into the "river" analogy behind the new book and the importance of a content marketer's POV (Blaine's son) in adding that context. The conversation also covers whether size still matters for the agentic era and how the gap between early adopters and laggards is widening faster than in any past technology shift.Blaine Mathieu spent more than 30 years as a CEO, Chief Product Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, and Gartner analyst before founding The River Group, which helps senior executives navigate agentic AI disruption across their organizations. In his new book, "The River Doesn't Wait" distills that experience into a practical framework for deciding where to retrofit existing operations and where to reimagine them entirely. You can get your copy here: https://therivergroup.ai/book/To learn more about Blaine's work, visit: https://therivergroup.ai/

•     Inteligencia Artificial Agéntica: la nueva carrera armamentista en la ciberseguridad financiera•     Ataques a velocidad de máquina: cómo la IA agéntica está cambiando el fraude bancario•     25.6 millones sin un solo exploit: IA, deepfakes y el futuro del fraude financieroEn 2026 los atacantes dejaron de usar IA para escribir mejores correos: ahora la usan para ejecutar ataques completos, casi sin intervención humana. El caso GTG-1002, los deepfakes que mueven millones sin dejar rastro, y por qué la banca no está lista para defenderse a la misma velocidad.Durante tres décadas, la ciberseguridad financiera vivió con una ventaja manejable: el atacante era más rápido que el defensor, pero ambos operaban a velocidad humana. En 2026, esa ventana se cerró.En este episodio hablamos de la tercera generación de IA ofensiva: sistemas que ya no aconsejan, sino que ejecutan. Analizamos el caso más documentado hasta hoy —la campaña del grupo estatal chino GTG-1002, revelada por Anthropic en noviembre de 2025— donde un agente de IA ejecutó entre el 80 % y el 90 % de un ciberataque contra treinta organizaciones, incluidas instituciones financieras, con apenas minutos de intervención humana.También hablamos del atraco que no dejó ni un solo rastro forense: los 25.6 millones de dólares que una empresa transfirió tras una videoconferencia en la que todos los participantes —incluido el director financiero— eran generados por inteligencia artificial. Y del punto ciego que más preocupa a los expertos: por cada empleado humano, una institución financiera puede tener entre 45 y más de 100 credenciales de máquina que nadie está gobernando.Cerramos con lo que sí funciona hoy, sin presupuesto adicional: los controles de proceso —verificación fuera de banda, separación real del principio de cuatro ojos, autoridad explícita para colgar y verificar— que siguen siendo la defensa más rentable contra este tipo de fraude.Un episodio para quienes trabajan en ciberseguridad, banca, fintech o gobierno de identidades, y quieren entender qué de esta amenaza es real, qué está sobredimensionado por el propio mercado de seguridad, y qué se puede hacer desde el primer día.Fuentes citadas: Anthropic, Reserve Bank of India, TrendAI, Fastly, FBI IC3, Cloud Security Alliance, Gartner, Deloitte, Mandiant, Palo Alto Networks, Veza, GitGuardian, entre otras (referencias completas en el dossier original).Intro Oturohttps://aprendefactory.org/https://mariomerazauthor.com/https://www.instagram.com/aprendefactory/https://x.com/MerazMario

We'd love to have your feedback and ideas for future episodes of Retail Unwrapped. Just text us!Most retail brands don't collapse in one dramatic moment; they drift, one small decision at a time. Gartner predicts that by 2027, 40 percent of CMOs pushing for bigger rebranding budgets will lose influence with the C-suite because they can't prove the return. AI is already eroding organic search, adding to brand drift. Join Shelley and Karen Leland, founder of Sterling Marketing Group and author of “The Brand Mapping Strategy,” as they unpack why reinvigorating a brand beats rebranding. They discuss how brand marking is findable, followable, or unforgettable and the risks associated with each.Special Guest: Karen Leland, founder of Sterling Marketing Group and bestselling authorFor more strategic insights and compelling content, visit TheRobinReport.com, where you can read, watch, and listen to content from retail industry experts, and be sure to follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter.

Context has become one of the busiest categories in AI. Every CIO now wants context Engine. Every legacy data catalog and knowledge graph platform has started calling itslef a "context platform”.  At the same time reports say that 60% of CEOs say they've got $0 benefit from AI.To understand the nuances, on this episode we have Prukalpa, Founder of Atlan. Atlan started solving this problem back in 2020, long before it became the hottest category. And today it counts 20% of the Fortune 500 as customers with an 85% competitive win rate.Prukalpa explains how context for agents requires knowledge, expertise, and norms, why Gartner's “context is king” made the category hot but also created confusion in the market, and why companies now treat context as strategic IP.00:00 Context Is King03:20 From Data To Agents05:00 Scaling To 200 Customers06:37 Product Market Fit Truths11:19 Landing The First Customers18:44 Data Teams Couldn't Trust Their Data21:07 Building the Enterprise Brain26:19 Problem With Horizontal Products30:21 Why CIOs Buy Context Now34:59 Positioning in a New Category36:33 Context as a Business Asset37:20 The Shared Enterprise Brain40:50 Shaping the Category41:22 What is AI Native?43:21 Self Improving Company46:50 Team Patterns of Frontier Companies48:42 Judgment and Taste Matter More Now50:04 Atlan AI Experiments50:59 Building Investor Network55:14 Waterbridge to Peak XV to Insight59:37 Don't Rush to Find PMF01:01:57 Everyone Must Build01:06:17 Real Bottleneck to Scale Isn't Sales-------------India's talent has built the world's tech—now it's time to lead it.This mission goes beyond startups. It's about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.What is Neon Fund?We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that's done it before.Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we're doing it all at Neon.-------------Check us out on:Website: https://neon.fund/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShowwConnect with Siddhartha on:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7-------------This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.Send us Fan Mail

Hosted by Steven Van Belleghem, Peter Hinssen and Pascal Coppens, this episode unpacks how 1,200 OpenAI agents secretly swarmed and broke into Hugging Face. Plus China's "new new three", Cory Doctorow's reverse centaur, NVIDIA's $13bn Hugging Face deal and humanoids running the 100m in 9.39 seconds. Keywords OpenAI, Hugging Face, NVIDIA, Anthropic, Moonshot AI, Kimi, DeepSeek, Alibaba Qwen, Z.ai GLM, MiniMax, Zhipu, Unitree, CXMT, AI agents, reward hacking, agent swarm, reverse centaur, Cory Doctorow, future of work, humanoid robots, World Humanoid Robot Games, embodied AI, China innovation, new new three, biotech, WAICO, World AI Conference, Pax Silica, AI governance, open weight models, IPO, STAR Market, Hong Kong IPO, Gartner, customer experience, chatbots, Massimo Bottura, storytelling, Steven Van Belleghem, Peter Hinssen, Pascal Coppens, nexxworks

A little less than half of workers now use AI regularly on the job. Of that group, 44% admit the output looks finished on the surface and holds nothing underneath. SHRM has a name for it: work slop. Dr. James Atkinson is VP of Thought Leadership at SHRM, where he leads the research teams behind that finding. He spent nine years at Gartner, finishing as Managing Vice President of Data Products for its HR research practice, and ran data products at Payscale before joining SHRM. James walks through SHRM's Skills Revolution research in this conversation. Read the full report here: https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/research/skills-revolution-preparing-employees-tomorrows-jobs In this episode, he covers: • Why CFOs approve people investments framed as productivity gained and cost avoided, and why SHRM's navigating the C-suite research found finance leaders want that case backed by workforce data • How 44% of AI users admit to producing work slop, and where HR can step in to define what good output looks like • What SHRM's Skills Revolution research says about learning and development systems that can't track how fast skills are changing Timestamps [00:01:01] Why the labor market is uneven rather than hot or cold, and why the last two months shouldn't set your expectations [00:01:51] Healthcare keeps adding jobs as the population ages while federal employment declines and local government picks back up [00:03:13] Framing a people investment as a business opportunity with a productivity number and a cost number attached [00:04:49] SHRM's navigating the C-suite research: CFOs want the ROI spelled out and backed by workforce data [00:05:34] Turnover as the metric finance already understands, because a role sitting empty is a day of lost productivity [00:06:11] Ask your executives how they want to be presented to before you build the deck [00:06:48] Just under half of workers use AI regularly, and 44% of them admit to producing work slop [00:07:28] Why AI needs guardrails and how managers become the people who say what good looks like [00:09:12] The Skills Revolution research: skills are changing faster than learning and development systems can follow [00:11:10] Why skills inventories still haven't replaced job descriptions, and what might finally move that Guest Bio James Atkinson is the VP, Thought Leadership at SHRM, where he leads research teams uncovering key insights on the challenges and trends affecting HR and the workplace. James joined SHRM with more than 15 years of research, data, and product experience, having spent a decade in various leadership roles within the HR industry. Prior to SHRM, James was the Vice President of Data Products at Payscale, where he was responsible for the overall strategy, development, and delivery of data products for compensation professionals. He also spent 9 years at Gartner, finishing his tenure there as the Managing Vice President of Data Products for the HR research and advisory practice. Across his career, his teams have created award-winning research and data products for HR executives and their teams on topics including learning and development, total rewards, recruiting, talent management, HR strategy, HR technology, and diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. This work has been featured in top business journals and media outlets such as Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, and Forbes. James holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan and an MBA from Ohio State University. Brought to You by Paylocity Paylocity is the fastest growing unified platform for HR, Finance, and IT. Paylocity brings your people, processes, and data together in one place so HR leaders can spend less time managing systems and more time doing the work that actually moves their organizations forward. Learn more at paylocity.com Keywords: SHRM research, labor market outlook, work slop, AI guardrails, HR ROI, CFO conversations, workforce data, skills revolution, learning and development, career development, employee attrition, talent retention, healthcare hiring, HR strategy, skills inventory, job descriptions, people analytics, workforce planning, HR Mixtape

A structural shift in regulatory accountability now places incident notification and liability directly on the operators or deployers of AI-powered and software tools, rather than on technology vendors or model developers. This mechanism is made explicit by the requirements of the EU's Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), Digital Services Act (DSA), and the upcoming Machinery Regulation. Incidents such as the Cursor AI coding agent breach at a Belgian chemical company underline that compliance timelines and regulatory scrutiny target the entity deploying the technology.CrowdStrike and Okta both reported that increased enterprise security spending is being driven by heightened AI-generated attacks, according to their quarterly results. Gartner forecasts AI security spending will reach $4.8 billion by 2027, up 68.7% from this year, with usage control as the most dynamic segment. A public letter signed by over 100 vendors—including OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, and Microsoft—warns of urgent defensive needs but does not shift responsibility to software suppliers.Recent breaches and vulnerabilities illustrate how accountability remains with the service provider or end-user implementer. The Cursor breach assigned notification duties to AnySphere (the product vendor) and the breached organization, not to upstream model providers. Likewise, after N-able's Passportal bug, MSPs were accountable for client-facing remediation. In each case, the “accountability line” lands on the party deploying the tool.For MSPs and IT service providers, these trends require updating agreements, operations, and client communications. Service structures must prioritize regulatory response timelines, documentation, and clear reporting obligations. Providers serving EU clients, or those linked to global supply chains, will encounter business risk if they do not proactively address these regulatory demands before mandated deadlines.00:00 Prevention Got A New Price 03:25 The Half That Doesn't Move05:50 Where The Call Lands09:27 Why Do We Care? Supported by: Proofpoint GoTo(LogMeIn)

According to Gartner, 73% of B2B buyers actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach. That tells us two things. One, personalization is prolific. Many teams are trialing different plays and finding varying degrees of success. Two, personalization is a risky play. Get it wrong, and you might actually do more harm than good. So what does it actually look like to show up in a way that earns a buyer’s attention? Riley Rogers: Welcome to the Win/Win Podcast. I’m your host, Riley Rogers. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic are Molly Donlon, sales activation manager, and Tommy Dauphin, senior account executive at Paylocity. Thank you so much for joining us, both of you. I’m super excited to dive into all of the fun and unconventional ways that you guys are capturing attention, driving engagement, and tackling the beast that is today’s modern buyer. Could you help me kick things off? Just tell me a little bit about yourself, and Molly, I’ll kick it over to you. Molly Donlon: Tommy would have insisted that I start anyway because he’s a gentleman from the South. So I started out in sales as a business development representative in my corporate career, and I actually used Highspot as a BDR. I stayed in sales for three and a half, almost four years, and then fell in love with the strategy behind sales, and especially personalization. I almost felt like an investigator, where I could go and do the research and find something that told me that this person actually would benefit from what we are providing, and then explain how I made that connection. So I decided to help my teammates and my colleagues within sales, rather than put that into practice with clients. It’s been an amazing company and a great journey. RR: Amazing. Well, I’m super interested to hear more about the buyer engagement private investigator lifestyle. Before we do, Tommy, I’ll kick it over to you. Tommy Dauphin: Excellent. Thank you so much, Riley. And, Molly, you are absolutely correct. I was not going first on that one. You were definitely gonna get the first intro there. So Tommy Dauphin here from South Louisiana. Been at Paylocity, it’ll actually make eight years next month. And then before that, I worked at Cintas for 10 years, primarily on the operations side. Paylocity was my first outside sales job. So not only did I have to learn the world of sales, but also the world of HR tech, and all of the things in between. So it’s been quite the journey, but like Molly said, fantastic place to be, and very excited to be here today. RR: Well, I’m looking forward to learning more about everything happening at Paylocity right now. And Molly, I’d love to start with you. You mentioned that one of the things that you loved was doing your own research, and it sounds like it’s not just sellers that are doing their research, it’s also buyers. So when buyers are learning, researching, Googling before they ever talk to a seller, how do you actually get their attention? MD: In a Forbes article, it said that about six in 10 B2B buyers prefer to go through most of the buying process without a sales rep intervening. And HRIS, human resources information system, what we sell, is very complicated, and it has an impact on the whole company. So I find it hard to believe that sales reps will be completely free of participation in the sales process. But I do think we should be leaning into the behaviors and the desires that we’re hearing from buyers. They want to see all of the information available, and that’s why we’ve had such great success with Digital Rooms, for example. The best way to accommodate this behavior is here are the trustworthy resources, so that we can meet you when you’re ready to talk to someone. RR: Okay, so you mentioned needing to create a place where when buyers are researching, they land in a location where they get everything they need, the right messaging that you want them to have, and that then leads them to an actual person that can then usher them through that back half of the sales cycle, or whatever point they reach you. Tommy, I know that you have more than a handful of creative tactics for those get your foot in the door moments. So how do you make a meaningful impression before the conversation starts? TD: I think the number one piece is providing value in every step of the way. In every interaction, there’s gotta be something that I’m bringing to the table, and me showing up and dropping off a business card or a pamphlet or a brochure or something is not cutting it. You have to do more than that. And it’s also a situation where not every person knows how to go through a buying process, because sometimes I’m talking to people who have evaluated their process every 18 months, every two years. But every once in a while, you run into that person who’s said, “We’ve been with our current provider for the last decade.” Well, a lot has changed in the last decade in the world of HRIS, so not only do you have to learn how to buy this product, but you have to then compare, contrast, and figure out the differences, and it can get confusing. The waters get muddy. Everyone starts to look and sound the same, and we have the phrase internally of the sea of sameness. We don’t wanna fall into that trap. So we really do try to differentiate ourselves right off the bat, and one of the ways that I do it is I like to drop off fudge, chocolate peanut butter fudge. And yes, it is something that I make myself. This is a recipe my mom’s been making for over 40 years, and I’ve been making it for seven and a half years. My tactic has changed over the years, pre-Highspot and post-Highspot, because before I didn’t have a good way of getting the information to the prospect about the recipe. But now I do. So what I have done is I have branded a QR code that takes the prospect to the recipe, and it’s housed in Highspot. So I can see who and when they click it. If I wanted to make it unique URLs, I could do that. But also, I can see when they’re accessing it, and then for how long they looked at it. So when I go to drop it, and number one, I always drop to the receptionist as well as to the prospect, before I get to my truck, I get an email saying that recipe has been scanned. I feel like I’m gonna be getting at least some sort of phone call back or return email for me to be able to have that additional conversation. Not having a tool like Highspot, I couldn’t do that before. It wasn’t nearly as easy. Now it’s a plug-and-play thing, and I’m rocking and rolling with it week in and week out. RR: I still can’t get over that approach. It’s so good, and it is so unique. I can’t imagine that there is anybody else that does that, and that is exactly why you get out to the parking lot, and already you’ve got someone on the line going, “Who is this?” Or, “You know what? I’ll take a call.” So I love that strategy. And I also love the call out to engagement data, of how you’re using that to intuit what’s happening in the mind of your buyer or in the mind of your prospect. So when a buyer engages with something that you’ve sent them, whether that is a fudge recipe or a brochure or whatever the case may be, what does that tell you? And then how do you use that to decide what to do next in a deal? TD: Number one, all I’m looking for is them to engage. Whether they like the fudge, they don’t like the fudge, they’re diabetic, or whatever the case may be, it sparks a conversation, and I’ve actually changed my process with that over the years. I used to drop the fudge, and then I would say, “If you want the recipe, just email me.” Well, no one willingly emails a sales rep. So it is definitely one of those things where I had to adjust. Now I can do my outreach. I can call, I can email, I can even text if I do have a cell phone number or something like that. And number one, I just wanna make sure they got it. Did they enjoy it? And then number two, if I find out too, because I’ve gotten this before, “Oh, sorry, I’m allergic. I can’t have peanuts or anything like that,” well, now I’m coming with one of the other drops that I have that is not food related. It gives me access and ability to have a conversation, be unique from the jump, and then after that, that’s when we bring in Digital Rooms or a brochure that we have tied to Highspot or something like that, where then I can interact with them in a more professional manner, talking about the products and services that we offer. It gives me the ability to adjust on the fly and do it from my phone if I need to, do it from a computer or an iPad, and it gives me the flexibility to build something specific for them. It’s not just the generic everyone gets the same response, and hopefully something sticks. I can have that personalization that you talked about at the beginning of the episode. RR: I love that, and I’m really curious too. So we’ve heard a little bit of the individual approach, of the very unique thing that you do, because I can’t imagine that every single rep at Paylocity is roaming around the continental US with fudge in their truck. Molly, I’d love if you could tell me a little bit about how you’re thinking about doing this at scale. What does your process look like for building something that you think, A, sellers will use, and that, B, buyers will go, “Hmm, maybe I should actually look into that”? MD: And one of the great things about Paylocity is our sales reps are gritty. And like Tommy was hinting at earlier, he tested the fudge approach. It’s the same with the Digital Room templates that we build. We know that when we put a Digital Room template out there, our reps are going to want to test that out. One thing that I always try to keep in mind, and when I first came into the HR and HCM space, it sort of shocked me, and I was confused when I saw all of the AEs, when they were creating their Digital Rooms, they had pictures of their families and their dogs or their pets, but mostly their kids, and a bio about, “Here’s who I am, here’s what I love to do.” Sort of humanizing, because at that point we might not know much about the prospect or the client, but we can start that conversation by opening it up and telling them about ourselves personally and as a company. One common theme I see across all of our sales win stories, when I ask the sales reps, “How did you win? Why did they pick us?” It’s almost always the client comes back and says, “You were the only one who was transparent with me about what you can and can’t do. You were the one who treated me like a human. You had real conversations with me.” So I think finding the wins and the strategies, like what Tommy’s doing, and then finding ways to share that across the broader organization, that’s the best part of my job, and it makes it really easy when you have a vehicle like a Digital Room. RR: You mentioned being in touch with your sales teams and hearing about what works. What are you kind of seeing in addition to that human element of, “I’m showcasing that I’m a person in this world”? What else are you seeing that’s compelling to buyers today? MD: Yeah. It’s in a TikTok world, and as a TikTok girl, I can confirm that videos are in high demand these days. And Paylocity in the past has historically been seen as kind of an underdog. We don’t have a famous actor with our logo promoting our brand. We haven’t had our name on a golf polo. We’ve been investing that money into our product and our people. And so when a prospect sees the platform, they’re shocked, and they learn that we’re all US-based, the customer service and everything. So I think that that’s one of the trends I’ve seen, is we’re leaning really heavily toward video content, showing who we are and painting a picture, telling a story. RR: So it’s almost just a double-down on that human element, of there is a face to a name, to a company, and I can associate all of these things about a brand with somebody who can speak to me, ask me how my day is. That’s super interesting, and I love how much you’re leaning into that. One thing that has been very clear throughout this whole conversation is that sales and enablement have a very strong feedback loop. You guys are having the conversation of what’s working, what’s not, and you’re iterating together to make sure that you can drive the business forward. So Molly, I’d love to hear from you first on how you stay in sync with sales. MD: This is one thing that is easy to lose a grip on. As anyone in enablement knows, you are getting a to-do list from the VPs, from your director, from the sales leaders, from sales reps who are telling you different things. Honestly, I consider myself to be in a good place, in that so many reps especially reach out, because they say, “Well, Molly will help, or at least she’ll try.” And unless I worked the weekends, I don’t think I could do every single thing that they ask. But I try to let them know, “I hear you most of the time. 99% of the time I agree with you, and I want to find a way to make that work.” It can be difficult to remember, “Oh wow, I haven’t checked in on my best friend in sales in a long time, Tommy. I wonder how he’s doing.” It’s sort of just like having a client who you want to go back and ask to be a reference. And I will absolutely help Tommy with something, and I know that when I need feedback on something, Tommy will be there because I have helped him launch his idea, or I’ve told his story across the organization. So to say it’s quid pro quo would be bad, and I’m not accepting bribes, although that would be nice. But the more you can communicate and help the field, the more they are willing to help you. RR: And I really like the idea of reciprocity, of I’m here in service of your work, and in order for me to do my job well, you gotta give me a hand. Because when I perform well, you perform well. It’s a good rule to live by, and I would be curious, Tommy, from the sales perspective, how that kind of plays out for you. TD: So I got two thoughts here. Number one, I think it’s pretty special to be at a place where the days of, “What are the people at corporate thinking? This is not how the real world works,” those have not been here for a very, very long time, if ever at all. I think our enablement team and our sales team do work very closely hand-in-hand to be able to come up with a good game plan that people do enjoy and use, and it makes sense and it works. The second piece to that is, as I think Mike Tyson made this quote famous, “Everyone has a good plan until they get punched in the face.” Enablement can have a great plan, sales can have a great plan to execute it and roll it out, and then something happens, and then it doesn’t work. Well, rather than just saying, “Well, that’s the plan we came up with. Good luck,” we have done a really good job of pivoting and saying, “Well, okay, let’s shift and let’s go this direction,” or whatever the case may be. And I think that only happens when you have an open line of communication from the field to enablement and vice versa, because you have to be able to adjust. You have to be able to pivot, and to be able to say, “Okay, that didn’t work. Let’s go do this now.” In fact, in preparation for this conversation, Molly and I were actually just spitballing, and it had been a few weeks since we had connected, and she mentioned something that we’re gonna be doing in the next quarter, and I’m like, “Oh, wait, I have a solution for that.” So the people doing the actual job of day-to-day stuff and the people who are building things to help, I think, have to have a relatively regular conversation to be able to say, “Let’s make this whole thing work together.” RR: As both of you were answering this question, I think it became very apparent to me why at the very outset the thing that both of you reiterated was that Paylocity is a great company with great people, because it certainly sounds like it, that you have this willingness on both sides of the field to iterate, to collaborate, to figure it out together, and when something isn’t working, to be like, “It’s you and me against a problem.” But back on track. Molly, we heard a little bit about how you’ve built really strong partnerships with field teams. As you’ve driven usage of the materials you’re building, how has that improved or impacted your sellers’ ability to reach buyers, and what impact have you seen that have on those big outcomes? MD: It’s been incredible to see Digital Rooms take off at Paylocity. It’s a culture of collaboration. Word of mouth spreads like none other. It’s wonderful to see the RVPs, the regional VPs, the directors in one region find out about something that a rep over here is doing that’s working really well, especially with Digital Rooms. They bring them onto their calls without any intervention from me, I might add. Sometimes I don’t even know that this is happening because the communication between the leaders is so strong. They’re sharing these stories, and then having a rep come on to the call and talk to other reps and having that credibility as someone in the field is incredibly impactful. When they see how their colleagues are able to break through the noise and use Digital Rooms to re-engage people who kind of fell off, “Sorry, I was busy. I wasn’t able to really engage with you, but now I have more time. This is extremely helpful as a resource,” that kind of thing, we have just seen a great impact. And as a result, I think in the past month, there have been almost 700 Digital Rooms sent in, just in the segment that Tommy and I are in. That, I think, is proof in and of itself that word of mouth has caught on like wildfire. RR: Tommy, curious from your perspective, how has the addition of Digital Rooms changed the way that you engage with buyers, and what has that meant for your results? TD: It has completely changed the way that I run my initial meeting. So years ago, when I started here, we had a PowerPoint presentation that we would typically bring to the first meeting, and it was discussing the story of Paylocity, the background of who we are, walking through what customer service looks like, and then we would get into finding out information that the prospect was willing to share with us and try to uncover what their needs are immediately so then we can figure out what the next steps need to be, whether it’s gonna be a full-on discovery conversation, whether it’s gonna be a demonstration of the product, and so forth and so on to discuss pricing and implementation and all of those things. Now that we have Digital Rooms, one of the things that I’ve been able to do is I have a standard template. So now I have this template that I use in literally every conversation, whether it’s a prospect, whether it’s a partner, center of influence, whatever the case may be, because I built this template based off of templates that Molly had created. I just kinda picked and chose the things that I liked about them, and then I made my own custom one, and now I have something that I can run an entire meeting, and no matter where the prospect wants to go, I have a part of the room that has the information that I need. I don’t have to have a 90-slide PowerPoint that I then remember, “Oh, they asked a 401k question? Well, that’s slide 76. Let me hurry up and click, click, click, click, click to get to where I need to be,” and then now I have… I can show them what I want. This is a page that’s completely customizable and buildable, so now, hey, I kinda let the prospect lead the conversation. At some point, you as a sales professional have to say, “Mr. or Mrs. Prospect, what matters to you? Let’s have that conversation.” But if you don’t have a tool where you can change and navigate in real time, it’s kinda hard to do that. So now that we have Digital Rooms, it opens it up so much to be able to say, “Okay, they wanna talk about X, Y, or Z topic. I know exactly where to go,” click, click, click. Now I’m showing you exactly what you want, and the conversation is much more impactful because you’re cutting through, as y’all said earlier, cutting through the noise to get down to exactly what they wanna talk about, and it allows you to have that conversation with maybe the HR person, but yet the CFO walks into the conversation. I’m still in the same room, and now I’m talking about things that the CFO cares about that the HR person didn’t even ask me about. So I don’t have to create new things after every conversation, and then, oh, by the way, I simply launch the room to them after the meeting. They’ve already seen it. They’re in the room, in the meeting, and now they can just re-access the same information. My click rates have gone through the roof now that I bring the room up at the beginning of the meeting and show them the room, rather than it’s an afterthought. “Oh, hey, by the way, as a recap, I’ll send you this room.” “Okay, cool, thanks, bye,” right? Now that is the meeting. It is the whole thing that we are going through, and it’s completely changed how I do it. RR: It’s super interesting, and I love that you took that in the direction of orienting the meeting, because a lot of what we were talking about initially was how does it allow buyers to do their own research. But then you’re taking it also as once they finally engage with you, it’s still that tool to keep them engaged, informed, in the loop, and then also keeping you in the loop on what they’re looking at, what they’re interested in, so then that next conversation is that much more targeted towards their interests. So again, you don’t necessarily have to ask, “Hey, Mr. or Mrs. Prospect,” because you know what they’re doing. So I love that full life cycle perspective you just gave me there. For any of our listeners that are tuning in and are like, “I wanna do this. How do I build these relationships with my sales team? How do I build a strong buyer engagement program?” What advice would you give? MD: For me, every day I learn something new. Every day I improve as a sales enablement manager, and what my recommendation would be is to start small. Just reach out to one rep, and don’t blast a handful of them. I think it goes back to personalization and customization and reaching out thoughtfully and starting to build those connections and build the trust. The most important thing is to act on the feedback and ideas that they have, because it can be really defeating when a rep brings an idea or feedback to you and you say, “Thanks,” and then it is never reflected in the work. So it really starts on a very small level, helping when you can and building trust. RR: Tommy, I’d be curious your take. TD: Yeah, I echo what Molly said. I think a lot of it has to do with who you start with and how that initial interaction goes. I’m not saying you need to start with the top salesperson in your organization, but start with someone maybe in the top 10 and get feedback from them on a specific thing, and then roll out any changes that can be made or should be made. And then that, like Molly said, that’s gonna spread like wildfire. “Hey, I was part of this pilot program. We came up with this idea. We’re rolling this out. Now it’s a national thing.” Number one, that’s an incredible amount of buy-in that you’re gonna get from those top performers. The reality is a good sales enablement team and sales rep team relationship benefits everybody. So I think there’s a mix there. It will take time, and it will take the ability to gather the feedback and opinions of a few and then roll out to the masses. So I think if you can show from an enablement side that you genuinely care, and you from a sales side genuinely want this to do better, then everyone’s gonna find common ground and find the solution that will work in that moment. RR: One of my favorite things about the podcast and getting to have these conversations with folks like you guys is hearing that it’s just good people doing good work with the best of intentions for each other. I think that’s what you always hope to encounter, the workplace you always want to be in. So I love hearing a little bit about how it’s showing up for you both at Paylocity, and I really appreciate the reminder that just be a person. Go-to-market doesn’t need to be this rigid thing. If you can show up as a human being, that’s gonna be more compelling than anything else you can do. So Molly, Tommy, thank you so much for the great advice, the great reminders. It has been really wonderful to learn from you both. MD: Thank you so much for having us. TD: Thank you, Riley. It’s been wonderful. RR: To our audience, thank you for listening to this episode of the Win/Win Podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.

Executives at the World Economic Forum in Davos are asking for data governance but the data profession wasn't in the room to answer. The gap isn't the business's understanding. It's ours.

Plus: A new survey finds a sizable share of company leaders don't know the rate of return on their AI investments. And Ford is setting ambitious sales targets for its new electric truck. Danny Lewis hosts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

AI adoption is accelerating. But are organizations moving just as fast on AI ethics? In this episode of ThinkCast, Gartner Senior Principal Analyst Shanna Grafeld explores why AI ethics has become a business imperative, not just a technology concern. From human rights risks and workforce trust to governance, accountability and the evolving human-AI relationship, hear how leaders can stay ahead of AI challenges before they become costly problems.   You'll learn: Why AI ethics is shifting from a compliance issue to a strategic business priority The human rights and trust risks organizations should be evaluating today How leaders can encourage AI adoption without creating overdependence What effective AI governance looks like in practice   Dig deeper: Become a client to learn more about AI ethics Join us at Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo™ See why Gartner is the world authority on AI   Timestamps: (00:42) Why AI ethics is now a business issue  (02:31) Lessons from past technologies  (04:40) Rethinking the human-AI relationship  (09:50) Increase capability, not reduce accountability  (12:20) The fears leaders should take seriously  (15:00) Addressing workforce anxiety (19:52) Building proactive AI guardrails  (28:24) The biggest challenges ahead  (31:10) Where leaders should start today

In this special episode of The Data & AI Chief, host Cindi Howson sits down with three incredible authors to explore what it really takes to lead through the AI era, from scaling innovation to building AI-ready data foundations to designing systems that keep humans at the center. Get ready for a deep dive into: Scaling innovation and leading through uncertainty with Linda Hill, Harvard Business School Professor and author of Genius at Scale: How Great Leaders Drive Innovation Building AI-ready data foundations with Sanjeev Mohan, Principal at SanjMo and author of Designing the AI-Driven Data Foundations Designing accountable, human-centered AI with Harveer Singh, Co-Founder and CIO of Rizz Wireless and author of When Data Moves Consider this your fall reading list for leading through the next phase of AI. Key Moments: Why Scaling Innovation Requires a Culture Shift (01:03): Linda Hill, author of Genius at Scale, unpacks her ABC model of architects, bridgers, and catalysts in scaling AI innovation. The Timeless Fundamentals Behind AI-Ready Data (32:40): Sanjeev Mohan, author of Designing the AI-Driven Data Foundations, explains why data fundamentals haven't changed even as the tools have. Why Every Data Pipeline Decision Has a Human Consequence (58:38): Harveer Singh, author of When Data Moves, shares personal stories showing the human stakes behind every data decision. Key Quotes: “Innovation is almost always the result of collaboration, experimentation, learning of people who are different, who have different perspectives, different expertise.” - Linda Hill “I strongly believe that to achieve the promises of AI, we should really focus on the foundational pieces, because those things never go away.” - Sanjeev Mohan “The more and more we are embedding these AI agents into our technology, we need to make sure that there is an accountability factor, there is a responsibility factor that is put into it before these decisions are made.” - Harveer Singh Mentions: Genius at Scale: How Great Leaders Drive Innovation Designing the AI-Driven Data Foundations When Data Moves The AI Fairness Test Nobody Runs Guest Bios: Linda Hill Linda A. Hill is the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and Faculty Chair of the Leadership Initiative. She is widely recognized as one of the world's foremost experts on leadership and innovation. Hill is the coauthor of Genius at Scale: How Great Leaders Drive Innovation (March 2026), which introduces three essential roles for leading innovation across organizations and ecosystems: architect, bridger, and catalyst. The book was shortlisted for the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award. She is also the coauthor of the award-winning books Collective Genius and Being the Boss. Her TED talk on leading collective creativity has garnered more than three million views. Sanjeev Mohan Sanjeev Mohan is a recognized thought leader in cloud technologies, modern data architectures, analytics, and artificial intelligence. With a keen focus on emerging trends and technologies, Sanjeev hosts It Depends podcast and authors regular Medium blogs. He is also the author of Data Product for Dummies. Formerly a Vice President at Gartner, Sanjeev was renowned for his in-depth research and strategic insights, shaping the research agenda for data and analytics globally. Over the past three years, he has led SanjMo, a consultancy specializing in technical advisory services that elevate category and brand awareness for clients. Sanjeev is the author of Designing the AI-Driven Data Foundations, a practical guide to building modern data foundations for the AI era. Harveer Singh Harveer Singh is a globally recognized data, AI, and fintech leader who bridges enterprise-scale leadership with entrepreneurial execution. Across 25+ years, he has transformed financial institutions spanning banking, payments, telecom, and Web3. A recognized industry leader, Harveer's work has earned DataIQ Top 10 CDOs, American Banker Innovation of the Year, and American Asian Outstanding 50 honors. In 2025, Harveer co-founded Rizz Wireless, an AI-native wireless company, where he serves as Co-Founder, CIO, and Board Member. He is also co-creator of RZTO, the company's Solana-based rewards token, which reimagines how loyalty and telecom rewards work and is listed on Gate.io. Harveer is the author of When Data Moves, which challenges the tech industry to remember that data systems serve humans, not machines. Hear more from Cindi Howson here. Sponsored by ThoughtSpot.

A disconnect between technical capability and end-user adoption is driving current decision-making in AI and infrastructure among managed service providers and IT leaders. While companies like Broadcom, Perplexity, Apple, and NVIDIA are introducing hardware and platforms for on-premises and local AI processing, the primary lever for value remains organizational adoption rather than available technology. Costs and infrastructure investments are being shaped by how—and whether—users engage with these tools. The most significant evidence is from Voya Financial, where a five-hour AI training for 11,000 employees led to 98% adoption and frequent use, despite no change in underlying technology. Industry data cited shows that while generative AI now reaches 80% of occupations, only 2.8% of tasks have more than 50% usage, and none reach 70%. This indicates broad awareness but little real transfer of work to AI, making current spending primarily reflective of shallow adoption rather than deep operational change. Additional developments include a clear industry shift toward privately owned AI infrastructure, as shown by recent product launches and by NVIDIA's ongoing focus on cloud-rented compute. Gartner projects that consumption-based and inference-specific storage will expand rapidly by 2029, but these estimates are based on limited current adoption, underlining a mismatch between infrastructure readiness and immediate need. For MSPs and IT providers, the risk is overcommitting to AI infrastructure before clients are ready. Real opportunity lies in structured adoption programs for existing AI tools—identifying staff with teaching skills, piloting training internally, and focusing on increasing client usage. Deferring on-premises AI infrastructure projects until client adoption and economic signals align is positioned as a safer, more pragmatic approach. 00:00 Three Companies, One Idea 04:20 Nobody Turned It On 07:53 The Window Opens In 2029 10:46 Why Do We Care? Supported by: Proofpoint GoTo(LogMeIn)

What does cyber resilience really mean when the stakes extend far beyond the security team?In this special Reimagining Cyber: The Boardroom Edition, we bring together perspectives from three 2026 conversations to explore how cybersecurity is becoming a board-level business and operational issue.Theresa Lanowitz, Cybersecurity Analyst at Omdia and former Gartner analyst explains why resilience can't be treated as simply another cybersecurity initiative — and why the whole organization, from the board and C-suite to frontline teams, needs to take responsibility.We then look at the first year of the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) with tech leader Dominic Brown (founder, Graves Light Consulting) , exploring what the regulation means for financial services, why implementation has proved challenging, and why governance, testing and accountability are becoming increasingly important.Finally, Doug Merritt, CEO of Aviatrix and former CEO of Splunk, argues that cybersecurity is entering a new “containment era.” If organizations have to assume that breaches will happen, how do they prevent those breaches from becoming catastrophic? His answer: measure the blast radius.Across all three conversations, one message stands out: cyber leadership is no longer simply about protecting technology. It's about preserving operations, protecting customers, sustaining trust and ensuring the business can continue when disruption occurs.This is cybersecurity from the boardroom perspective.As featured on Million Podcasts' Best 100 Cybersecurity Podcasts  Top 50 Chief Information Security Officer CISO Podcasts Top 70 Security Hacking PodcastsThis list is the most comprehensive ranking of Cyber Security Podcasts online and we are honoured to feature amongst the best!Follow or subscribe to the show on your preferred podcast platform.Share the show with others in the cybersecurity world.Get in touch via reimaginingcyber@gmail.com

A structural transfer of liability and risk is reshaping industry engagement models, with outcome-based contracting increasing across service agreements. This shift is being driven by buyer demands for accountability in technology solutions, notably in artificial intelligence deployments, and is illustrated by recent unpublished but credible reports that OpenAI is quietly allowing select large enterprise customers to pay only when AI tasks are successfully completed. Supporting research from Gartner and CIO Dive highlights a growing disparity: while 19% of service buyers seek outcome-based payment models, only 13% of agreements from sellers currently accommodate them. The core development spotlighted is the disconnect between expectations for measurable AI-driven business outcomes and the lack of empirical evidence that such technologies are delivering on those promises at the organizational level. A large-scale survey by the National Bureau of Economic Research, encompassing nearly 6,000 senior executives across four countries, found that over 89% reported no observable improvement in employment or labor productivity from AI investments during the past three years, despite substantial organizational changes and budget reallocations. Additionally, research by Thomson Reuters found that 91% of 1,800 professionals reported their organizations were not realizing expected AI value, identifying a gap in demonstrable returns even while the technology is being deployed. Supporting data from Techaisle reveals partner capability thins dramatically as customers progress into advanced AI adoption stages. Most channel providers retain capacity only for basic "estate" work, with capability dropping to near zero for the most advanced client needs. Forrester has also identified persistent barriers to reliable measurement, such as fragmented and inconsistent data baselines, as well as dependencies on customer-side decisions. These factors magnify contract risk and reinforce the liability shift toward providers, who become responsible for defining, measuring, and underwriting outcomes without always possessing necessary levers or data. The operational implication for MSPs and IT service providers is heightened exposure to contractual and financial risk when agreeing to outcome-based terms, especially without mechanisms to price or control every relevant input. Providers are often unable to flow contract risk upstream to vendors or technology manufacturers, as their own agreements typically exclude outcomes. The episode concludes that early engagement and proactive definition of acceptable, controllable outcomes is essential, as outcome-based demands are likely to appear pre-baked in future client agreements, shifting bargaining power away from providers unprepared to quantify their exposure. Using data from their own worst-performing months, documenting client dependencies as contract conditions, and piloting outcome-based lines in otherwise standard agreements are outlined as practical tactics to mitigate downside risk before broader market adoption. 00:00 Four Numbers, One Cause 03:45 What You Ask For When You Can't Tell 06:45 Nobody Underneath You 10:20 Why Do We Care? Supported by: Guardz ScalePad

The episode centers on a structural shift driven by the falling cost of AI-assisted insight extraction and its impact on how buyers assess technology providers. Referencing companies such as OpenAI and Google, as well as research from the AI Revenue Institute and Gartner, Dave Sobel highlights how lowered model prices enable automated systems to rapidly analyze vendor documentation and shape procurement decisions, fundamentally changing the basis of competition from persuasion to transparent, retrievable data. A recent AI Revenue Institute study, as cited by Dave Sobel, found that over half of surveyed decision-makers had removed a vendor from consideration after an AI assistant highlighted a documented shortcoming. Simultaneously, OpenAI and Google have reduced their top-tier AI model pricing, with OpenAI dropping costs by more than 20% and Google offering a temporary 50% cut before reverting. Analysis from TD Cowen and Business Insider shows that such price cuts have driven up both usage and revenue, with OpenAI's low-cost models experiencing a 14-fold usage increase post-reduction. These developments are reinforced by Gartner's identification of the “inference paradox,” where greater AI capabilities and lower per-query costs actually raise overall spend due to increased volume and complexity of tasks. Supporting data includes Google's reported 50x annual increase in tokens processed and a Deloitte case of a healthcare provider with unplanned AI costs rising as much as 3x in a year. Alongside this, Pew Research identifies that a third of new web content on commercial sites is machine-generated, leading platforms like LinkedIn to introduce AI-detection and downranking measures. For MSPs and IT leaders, the implications are direct. Automated buyer research now prioritizes concrete, extractable data over marketing language; any absence or non-disclosure—especially around pricing—can result in removal from consideration without notice. Publishing specific, measurable facts (service boundaries, pricing logic, response times with dates) increasingly determines whether a provider is surfaced or omitted by AI agents assembling comparative analyses. Failure to clearly define offerings and exclusions results in unfavorable inferences or comparisons, increasing operational risk and transfer of accountability away from the provider. 00:00 The Buyers Brought a Machine 03:45 Cheaper Made It Bigger 06:49 Your Website Is a Deposition 10:06 Why Do We Care? Supported by: Proofpoint HaloPSA

In this episode, we kick things off by examining a major breakthrough in the often-painful journey from AI demo to live operations. Third-party logistics provider Kenco has successfully ⁠deployed six supply chain AI agents into production with DeepFabric⁠ in just three months, a stark contrast to broader industry trends where Gartner expects more than forty percent of agentic AI projects to be canceled by the end of twenty twenty-seven. The partnership is now scaling aggressively, with twenty agents planned across North America over the next twelve months and audit-spend reductions of forty-five percent already achieved.Next, we explore the critical role of border security in cross-border supply chain integrity. Canada Border Services Agency officers ⁠seized approximately three hundred eighty-five kilograms of suspected cocaine from a commercial truck⁠ at Blue Water Bridge in Point Edward, Ontario on August thirteenth. The driver was arrested and charged with importing a controlled substance and possession for trafficking, underscoring the ongoing enforcement challenge at busy commercial border crossings.Finally, we discuss the ocean freight sector bracing for a massive wave of new capacity that could severely pressure container rates. The ⁠global containership orderbook has reached an orderbook-to-fleet ratio of roughly thirty-eight point seven percent⁠, meaning vessels on order represent nearly two-fifths of the existing fleet's capacity. With fleet growth running at about four point two percent against expected container-trade growth of only three to four percent, industry analysts warn that vessel supply is likely to outpace demand, potentially releasing significant downward pressure on freight rates once current geopolitical disruptions normalize. ⁠Follow the FreightWaves Today Podcast⁠ ⁠Other FreightWaves Shows⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fair warning: Dee Kei opens this one by saying he doesn't know if he's going to release it. Congratulations — you found it.This is a looser, more speculative episode than usual, and that's exactly the point. Dee brings a theory he's been sitting with: that the rise of AI tools and plugin saturation is quietly driving a resurgence in the value of analog gear — not because analog is objectively better, but because it represents something that AI fundamentally can't replicate. Humanness. Randomness. The chaos of a real circuit doing something slightly unpredictable.Lu, who has personally moved over $157,000 in analog gear sales and spent years tracking sold listings on eBay and Reverb, brings the market perspective. They get into which pieces actually hold their value (vintage preamps and compressors from the right era), which ones don't (anything mass-produced and recently released), and the old idea that buying the right gear is just another savings account you can twist the knobs on while you wait.From there the conversation opens up into some bigger territory. They talk about the current bubble of vintage mixer restoration and servicing companies popping up, what vibe coding is doing to the plugin marketplace, and how AI tools are being deployed very differently in live sound versus the studio — including a breakdown of the L-Acoustics source intelligence system and how it can achieve up to 40dB of feedback reduction in real time on a vocal channel. The episode wraps with Dee going full speculative: the Gartner hype cycle and where AI actually lands when the bubble pops, what nuclear fusion does to the cost of running AI at scale, and the two technology shifts he thinks will fundamentally change everything about how we make and experience music.It's the kind of episode that happens when two engineers with too much on their mind decide to just talk. The industry context makes it more interesting than it sounds.SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PATREON FOR EXCLUSIVE CONTENT!⁠SUBSCRIBE TO YOUTUBE⁠Join the ‘Mixing Music Podcast' Discord!HIRE DEE KEIHIRE LU⁠HIRE JAMES⁠Find Dee Kei and Lu on Social Media:Instagram: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLu @JamesParrishMixesTwitter: @DeeKeiMixes @MasteredbyLuThe Mixing Music Podcast is sponsored by ⁠Izotope⁠, ⁠Antares (Auto Tune)⁠, Sweetwater, ⁠Plugin Boutique⁠, ⁠Lauten Audio⁠, ⁠Filepass⁠, & ⁠Canva⁠The Mixing Music Podcast is a video and audio series on the art of music production and post-production. Dee Kei, Lu, and James are professionals in the Los Angeles music industry having worked with names like Odetari, 6arelyhuman, Trey Songz, Keyshia Cole, Benny the Butcher, carolesdaughter, Crying City, Daphne Loves Derby, Natalie Jane, charlieonnafriday, bludnymph, Lay Bankz, Rico Nasty, Ayesha Erotica, ATEEZ, Dizzy Wright, Kanye West, Blackway, The Game, Dylan Espeseth, Tara Yummy, Asteria, Kets4eki, Shaquille O'Neal, Republic Records, Interscope Records, Arista Records, Position Music, Capital Records, Mercury Records, Universal Music Group, apg, Hive Music, Sony Music, and many others.This podcast is meant to be used for educational purposes only. This show is filmed and recorded at Dee Kei's private studio in North Hollywood, California. If you would like to sponsor the show, please email us at ⁠deekeimixes@gmail.com⁠.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Gavin McMahon: The Arrow of Coherence That Unifies Your Brand Storytelling Business of Story Podcast | Host: Park Howell Most brand stories fragment the moment they leave the marketing department. Gavin McMahon has a name for what stops that — and it may be the most important concept in business storytelling you haven't heard yet. Gavin McMahon is a recovering mechanical engineer, founder of a 25-year leadership and storytelling consultancy, and author of Story Business: Why Stories Rule the World and How They Can Reinvent Your Business. He joins Park Howell on the Business of Story podcast to introduce the Arrow of Coherence — the cause-and-effect narrative logic that connects every layer of an organization, from the C-suite to the front line, into a single governing story world. The problem Gavin diagnoses is one every business leader will recognize: the synonymous mess. Most companies tangle purpose, vision, mission, and strategy into one undifferentiated blob of corporate language. The result? Thousands of employees making daily decisions — small and large, value-creating and value-destroying — without a coherent narrative to guide them. In a pre-AI world, that fragmentation was a slow burn. Today, ungoverned AI scales that fragmented story at machine speed. The Arrow of Coherence is Gavin's answer. Borrowed conceptually from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's idea of an arrow of relationship, Gavin defines the Arrow of Coherence as the cause-and-effect logic that must shine through a brand — the same governing logic that makes the world of IKEA, Apple, or Patagonia feel coherent whether you encounter it in product design, customer service, or a thirty-year-old marketing campaign. When that arrow is present, every decision in the organization points the same direction. When it's absent, you have drift. In this conversation, Park Howell and Gavin McMahon explore why brand storytelling is not a marketing function but an act of world building — and why the best brands govern their stories through something closer to a show Bible than a brand guideline. They discuss why the CEO is the most underutilized storyteller in any company, how to build a coalition of the willing to embed story culturally rather than hierarchically, and why AI will amplify your narrative entropy unless a governing Brand Brain is installed first. Gavin also shares the two things he wishes he had known in the 1990s when he was leading digital transformation at Gartner — lessons about human decision-making, the stories people tell themselves, and why the truth is never driven by facts alone. What you will learn in this episode: What the Arrow of Coherence is and how to apply it to unify your brand story across every department and channel. Why most organizations suffer from a synonymous mess of purpose, vision, mission, and strategy — and the single narrative move that untangles it. How show Bibles differ from brand guidelines and why that distinction determines whether your story survives scale. Why your CEO is your most underutilized brand storyteller. How to use AI as a collaborator without surrendering your story to it. The three practical steps you can take today to start building your own Arrow of Coherence. Gavin McMahon is the author of Story Business: Why Stories Rule the World and How They Can Reinvent Your Business. Learn more at storybusiness.com. Park Howell is founder of The Business of Story, creator of the Story Cycle System™, and author of Brand Bewitchery and The Narrative Gym. Full episode show notes, transcript, and resources at businessofstory.com.

Buyers have more information than ever, but that does not mean they have more confidence.In this episode, John sits down with Zachary Gropper, Founder and CEO of Insight Revenue, to talk about Challenger, platform sales, AI research, buyer validation, and why old sales motions are breaking under modern buying pressure. Zachary brings a practical lens from his years around CEB, Gartner, Challenger, Pavilion, and the teams now trying to sell more complex platform solutions in a market full of stalled deals.If you are in sales, leadership, enablement, or go-to-market strategy, this conversation gives you a clearer way to think about insight, trust, buyer confidence, change management, and what sales reps still need to do when buyers already show up with AI-generated research.Want to build a stronger sales motion before buyers get even harder to move? Visit Visit www.jbarrows.com and learn how you can Make It Happen.What You'll LearnWhy simply sending methodology books does not change sales behaviorHow AI can make reps sound smart while weakening real credibilityWhy buyers now need validation and trust before they commitHow platform sales require change management, not just product positioningWhy sellers need to build a bridge from customer strategy to the outcomeWhy asking why matters when buyers come to the call with AI researchZachary Gropper is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Insight Revenue. With more than twenty years studying the art and science of B2B sales and marketing best practice at CEB, Gartner, Challenger, and Pavilion, he helps commercial teams bring repeatable practices, processes, and go-to-market strategies into companies of any size or industry.Connect with Zachary Gropper:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/zgropper/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zgropper/Learn more About Insight Revenue:Website: https://www.insightrevenue.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/insightrevenue/Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCutptmXap5pi5PuPZcU1fDQJohn Barrows is a sales trainer, speaker, and founder of JB Sales with over 25 years of experience in the industry. He has made hundreds of cold calls a week, led startups to acquisition, and trained high-performing teams at companies like Salesforce, LinkedIn, Amazon, and Okta. Through JB Sales, John focuses on practical sales execution—helping reps fill pipeline, close deals, and build trust with buyers in today's AI-driven sales environment.Connect with John Barrows:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnbarrows/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johnmbarrows/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@johnmbarrows Check out John's Membership: https://go.jbarrows.com/ Join John's Newsletter: https://www.jbarrows.com/newsletter

Don’t miss the marketplace revolution! Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ In this episode of the Ultimate Partner Podcast, Vince Menzione sits down with AWS Marketplace leaders George Maroulakos and Arif Razvi to uncover the rapidly shifting ecosystem of technology procurement and partner transformation. They dive deep into the evolution of buyer experiences, the critical necessity of executive alignment, and how agentic AI is redefining software discovery and consumption. If you want to accelerate deal velocity and ensure your business isn’t left behind, this conversation outlines exactly why integrating the AWS Marketplace into your core co-sell motion is no longer optional. https://youtu.be/Avp0sIyxRU8 Key Takeaways Embracing the AWS Marketplace should be viewed as a natural extension of your co-sell motion, not an interrupt-driven exception. Successfully leveraging the marketplace requires top-down executive sponsorship to overcome internal friction across legal, finance, and revenue operations. Partners must prepare for global expansion by ensuring local entities and currencies are wired up to meet buyers where they are. Agentic AI and natural language queries are leveling the playing field for software discovery, moving beyond traditional SEO-driven presence. SaaS pricing models are shifting toward consumption and outcome-based structures, demanding highly detailed product metadata. The speed of deal closure is drastically increased when partners are prepared to transact seamlessly through the marketplace. If you're ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags AWS Marketplace, partner transformation, buyer experiences, hyperscalers, co-sell motion, revenue operations, strategic alignment, agentic AI solutions, outcome-based pricing, metadata optimization, software discovery, private offers, global expansion, deal velocity, cloud centers of excellence. Transcript Arif Razvi and George Maroulakos Audio Episode [00:00:00] George Maroulakos: From my perspective, think about marketplace as a why not as opposed to a why. [00:00:06] Vince Menzione: You can feel it happening. The ecosystem is shifting beneath us, the way Hyperscalers are partnering, how AI is remaking the channel and what it means to win in 2026. [00:00:17] Arif Razvi: Welcome to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. I’m Vince Menzi, own your host. [00:00:22] Arif Razvi: And each week I sit down with leaders at the intersection of technology, [00:00:26] Vince Menzione: partnerships and outcomes. The voices shaping how ecosystems actually work. We talk about what’s real, what’s changing, and what it takes to lead in this era where the partner channel isn’t just part of the strategy. [00:00:39] Arif Razvi: It is the strategy because being in the room changes everything. [00:00:44] Arif Razvi: Let’s start. [00:00:48] Vince Menzione: I’m excited to, because we were talking about some of this earlier with Matt, but I thought this would be a great conversation. I’m gonna ask each of you to introduce yourselves, George and Arif, and your roles. ’cause you have two very unique roles. Uh. Contrasting roles, I would call it, within the AWS Marketplace Organization. [00:01:06] George Maroulakos: Yep. Happy to do so. So I think Vince just didn’t wanna say my last name, so that’s why I’m gonna introduce myself. Mayor. Very, very good. So Mayor Laki, George Meki, pleasure to meet. Hey, I can say that, uh, all of those that I haven’t met before, lots of familiar faces as well here. Uh, so it’s really great to see. [00:01:21] George Maroulakos: Uh, I’m part of the AWS Marketplace team and our center of excellence. That focuses on buyer experiences. So like why is a buyer guy here in this partner session? And I think, you know, I’m gonna help to try to bring some perspective around what our buyers see as the value for using marketplace and. [00:01:40] George Maroulakos: Working with all of these great partners that are here in the room and, uh, you know, the experiences that we see in helping to drive, you know, the blood to all organs. I’m using that a lot, Alison, to copyright it. It’s, it was really good. I love that, that analogy. But, um, for, but for both our partners as well as for our customers. [00:01:59] Vince Menzione: That’s awesome. [00:01:59] Arif Razvi: Hey everybody. I’m Arif Roski. I’m based here in New York City, although I’m a Celtics fan. Um, uh, go, go. I, I still supported the Knicks through the championship and I’m very happy for them. So excited to be here. Excited to be among, uh, other channel and alliance leaders. I’ve spent my entire 25 plus career in channels and alliances. [00:02:20] Arif Razvi: The last seven years, uh, on AWS marketplace where I lead, uh, a couple of functions. One is I support all of Matt Ian’s feature launches. So from a go-to market perspective, uh, I support his launches. I also focus on international expansion of marketplace. So, uh, Matt alluded to this earlier. I’ll mention some, I’ll talk about some stuff in a little bit. [00:02:39] Arif Razvi: And then, uh, we do some deep engagements with some of our most strategic partners to help them accelerate and unblock their marketplace business. By embedding a subject matter expert from my team into their organization to really help drive, uh, adoption of marketplace. [00:02:55] Vince Menzione: So important. Both of your roles. [00:02:56] Vince Menzione: By the way, this is standout roles. I, you know, I. I don’t want to get into trouble here. I talk about other hyperscalers, but I said this with Matt on stage earlier. You guys have been at the forefront of driving marketplace in such a strong way, having somebody who’s customer focused, right? And that lens is so important. [00:03:15] Vince Menzione: I don’t feel, I feel like that’s missed so many times. And then you also have. You know, quite a bit of an important role here in terms of what you’re doing in embedding resources. ’cause a lot of times people get lost in the process and it seems to be the, the common currents. So, um, really great both sides of the same equation here, right? [00:03:33] Vince Menzione: Buyer led, partner built, uh, let’s start George here. Um. Let’s talk about how buying has changed. Right. We go back to the early days of marketplace. It felt like it was a listing at first and it started to become important. Organizations like Work Span started to come to fruition and started to drive, at least in my part of the world. [00:03:53] Vince Menzione: And then we started talking a lot more about Marketplace. And of course the, the cus customer commits really started driving things in a different direction. You’ve got the customer, so talk about what your journey’s been like. [00:04:05] George Maroulakos: So I’ve been with Marketplace nine and a half years, which is pretty long time since the beginning of it, and watching the evolution of, of where things have come and where they started. [00:04:15] George Maroulakos: And I remember, uh, I was covering the, the northeast region when I very first started and working with, uh, you know, different enterprise accounts and financial services and, and, and healthcare and life sciences, and talking about this. This creation that occurred called, called AWS Marketplace, and even folks within AWS didn’t really know what that meant or how to talk about it or sell it. [00:04:38] George Maroulakos: So there was this creation of a infield based business development function to help supplement the account teams and the value and the importance of marketplace as a part of a customer’s AWS journey. And when I first started the, the, the highest, uh, or most frequently subscribed to products that existed were. [00:04:57] George Maroulakos: Uh, Amazon machine images a amis and it’s very specifically open source amis. So think of Bantu or Cintas as the predominant things that were being subscribed out of marketplace. So, um, by definition, not really revenue generating. You’re, these are not the a hundred million dollar transactions or the billion dollar club that we talk about today. [00:05:19] George Maroulakos: It was very much helping. The builders go again, go back 10 years, uh, who are just getting started with the cloud and how could they find partner solutions that they trusted or that they felt were secure and helping them to start to build out and migrate their workloads into, into AWS. Um, so I existed before the. [00:05:39] George Maroulakos: Very first private offer was transacted. Nice. Um, there’s actually a, a gentleman towards the back, uh, who helped with one of our very first private offers. I see you back there, Joe. Nice, nice. Um, so we, we worked on, uh, uh, uh, really big transaction with, uh, with, at the time AppDynamics, uh, and, and helping to get. [00:05:58] George Maroulakos: You know, a customer really up and running with their implementation that, so watching over the 10 years from, you know, the builder mentality of, of getting started with the cloud to really embracing all kinds of partner based, um, solutions that go along with AWS. It’s really been, uh, you know, a, a rocket ship you referenced earlier, moving to the top right quadrant, if we want to use the, the Gartner analogy, and I think we’re at another. [00:06:24] George Maroulakos: Inflection point because with what’s going on with Ag agentic solutions, the way that our customers are finding and discovering different partner solutions is better than ever I would think. And I think it gives much more of a equal opportunity in playing field for all partners of all shapes and sizes because you’re not driving your presence based on SEO or whether or not you have the best Google search results. [00:06:53] George Maroulakos: With AgTech and how you differentiate your solutions, you’re gonna be able to really get yourself in front of more customers more quickly. And as Matt talked about earlier, the, the, the really big penetration that we’ve seen thus far is real, is on the discovery piece, the, the research area, the pre-purchase activity, so validate what’s available. [00:07:13] George Maroulakos: So I think marketplace has really evolved over the 10 year, nine and a half years-ish that I’ve been there. And I think it’s gonna continue to change here in the coming months ahead. Yeah. [00:07:23] Vince Menzione: Any predictions? [00:07:25] George Maroulakos: Yeah, I, I think, you know, the, I, the, the importance of marketplaces is only going to continue to grow. [00:07:32] George Maroulakos: Uh, and I think we’re going to see, you know, even more innovation and expectation from our customers on being able to find the right solutions and being able to procure and deploy them as quickly as possible. [00:07:44] Vince Menzione: Nice. Arif, from your side. Partner transformation. So, you know, embedding resources with the partners. [00:07:51] Vince Menzione: Right. So you basically help kickstart a lot of the, the efforts, right? George? George is looking at it from the customer side, and then you’re kick-starting it on the partner side. [00:08:00] Arif Razvi: Yeah. Either kickstarting it, uh, on the initial stages with a strategic partner. Yeah. Or accelerating their adoption of something that’s already there. [00:08:07] Arif Razvi: Right. So what we’re seeing, what I’m seeing a lot of more recently is partners who say, I didn’t know you had capabilities for us to sell into Korea or Japan, or we just, we just launched India. Yep. Matt alluded to this easier, uh, earlier that we’re making it easier for partners to expand globally. And now partners are realizing, wait a minute, I can match my. [00:08:26] Arif Razvi: Uh, my business processes on marketplace, so revenue recognition, tax collection, locally, local invoices, and now they’re starting to set up multiple entities outside the US to meet those buyers, uh, where they are. [00:08:41] Vince Menzione: Nice. And you mentioned having these resources. How do you determine who gets resources and who? [00:08:47] Arif Razvi: Well, there’s, uh, staging and there’s, uh, there’s qualification mechanisms we use. We work with the PDMs for the partners. So any PDM, uh, any pd DM managed partner can be nominated for, uh, what, what we call a compensation. [00:08:59] Vince Menzione: So you’re overlaying that organization sense. [00:09:00] Arif Razvi: We’re overlaying the PDs. We’re not replacing, we’re only doing time bound sprints to unlock very specific activities. [00:09:05] Arif Razvi: Very [00:09:06] Vince Menzione: cool. So it’s not a poll. Yeah. Cool. You’re not, you’re not there forever. [00:09:08] Arif Razvi: No. [00:09:08] Vince Menzione: You’re there to get the job done. We [00:09:09] Arif Razvi: did that before. Uh, yeah, we’re, we’re doing short sprints now. [00:09:12] Vince Menzione: Yep. Let’s talk about how the buyers are using marketplace. You’ve done some really in, we talked about this earlier with Matt, but we’ve talked about some of the innovative things you’ve done. [00:09:21] Vince Menzione: You know, being, being able to embed into a website and in the storefronts. All these things seem to be unique to AWS. Talk to us about how the buyers are using the marketplace today. And [00:09:31] George Maroulakos: yeah, I think, you know, Matt talked about earlier the. Pre the, the preconception around why customers use marketplaces for the financial incentives, the, the financial benefits that go along with it, whether it’s direct incentives that are associated with the individual product that’s out there, or the Association of Marketplace to our private pricing agreements and the ability for. [00:09:55] George Maroulakos: Transactions that occur in marketplace to count towards those commits. Um, I’m gonna amplify a, a particular point that Matt made, uh, in his talk that, you know, we have many more customers who do not have PPAs with AWS than those that do. And the volume of transactions that take place in marketplace. [00:10:11] George Maroulakos: Dwarf, uh, in volume from those that, uh, are occur from our PPA customers. So yes, there are very large transactions that occur and there is Ben financial benefit that goes along with it. But there’s many other value points that our customers find from discovery. From ease of use, from consolidated billing, from post-purchase, um, you know, management and governance that goes along with it, and reconciliation that’s available, that’s, that exists. [00:10:36] George Maroulakos: Um, you mentioned storefronts. I’m really excited. That was one of the most exciting launches. That’s why I reminded him when he was talking about it, uh, around, you know, what that means. And it’s both a presence for, um, our partners and being able to create their own storefronts on behalf of, of customers or within their own property, but also for our buyers directly too. [00:10:54] George Maroulakos: Take that next generation of something that was previously, you know, our private marketplace and curate a catalog that is very specific and intentional for the things that they’re interested to innovate with and the partners that they’re interested in using. And so I think meeting our customers where they’re at. [00:11:10] George Maroulakos: And being, you know, marketplace anywhere and everywhere is I think really important for our customers. And then the other aspect, you know, in terms of how our customers use marketplace, there’s more than one persona at our customer that we need to be, be, be aligning with. Right. Interesting. We typically talk about procurement and the value points that procurement find in marketplace, but just as important as, as the technologists. [00:11:32] George Maroulakos: It’s the Cloud centers of Excellence. It’s the innovators who are looking for those business applications or those infrastructure solutions that exist and making sure that we have the right things from the right partners available to them. So we see value all over the place with our customers and how they inter interface with [00:11:47] Vince Menzione: more. [00:11:47] Vince Menzione: You brought up something really interesting, insightful, is the fact that all the different personas in the organization that are touching the marketplace, right? [00:11:54] George Maroulakos: And it’s at different points of the journey, right? Yeah. So while there may be early discovery and research and experimentation going on from, you know, the technologists or, or, or the, or the, the, the business application owners, um, as it progresses through the, the, the. [00:12:09] George Maroulakos: The opportunity lifecycle procurement and sourcing and legal, and the shared services then become a more important part of, of making sure that we get those opportunities closed and launched. [00:12:18] Vince Menzione: Yeah, and that was one of the things we were talking about earlier is the fact that how, how, uh, it, it, the work arduous it could be. [00:12:25] Vince Menzione: To go through that whole process at a customer side. Right? ’cause they have to. [00:12:29] George Maroulakos: It is, and and you know, I think when Cloud first got started, it was quite scary for procurement, right? It became another version of Shadow it. And we were seeing things that were getting purchased on P cards because they could quickly stand up infrastructure versus waiting for the IT team to do it. [00:12:44] George Maroulakos: And so now you introduce all of these other things that. Procurement kept near and dear to their heart, and here comes another wave of, is this truly positive disruption? Is it going to affect what’s, what I’m doing affect really my goals and objectives of supporting the company. And as you, you know, you continue to express the value of marketplace, they start to see, hey, this is actually very complimentary and helped me can get better control and governance in a way that I. [00:13:11] George Maroulakos: Perhaps didn’t have before with what was going on inside the cloud. [00:13:15] Vince Menzione: So this is a question for both of you actually, but I was thinking about these partners in the room and what did they get wrong? Like what are they doing? Like what are the things we always talk about, things that they’re doing right? [00:13:26] Vince Menzione: We’re having the happy talk about all the great success that’s been going on, but what is your advice to partners that maybe are not getting it right? Like what, what, what are the things you see that. The easy stumbling blocks that could be fixed. [00:13:38] Arif Razvi: Yeah. Well, probably the easiest is, uh, waiting to talk about marketplace at the last minute and not making it part of the full commercial journey [00:13:45] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:13:45] Arif Razvi: That the sellers will go through. Right. So, um, but that includes being able to have those internal conversations from the executive level, getting that executive sponsorship from marketplace upfront. That filters down through the rest of the organization. So you’ve gotta get rev ops teams, finance, legal, you know, the marketplace terms, the, the standard, uh, contract that goes into your listing has to be approved by legal. [00:14:08] Arif Razvi: Uh, and then you get down to the sales teams, making sure that you’re not penalizing sales teams for doing transactions on marketplace, which will create friction, then meeting buyers where they are, right? So local entities, local currency, um, having all that wired up. Uh, I met with a, a partner yesterday at Summit who is literally wiring up 10 new regions, 10 new entities in 10 new locations on marketplace in advance of what they know is a pipeline that’s going to be building into those regions. [00:14:37] Arif Razvi: So they’re getting ready and not waiting for the last minute for marketplace. [00:14:40] Vince Menzione: I love it. And the internal, go ahead. [00:14:43] George Maroulakos: Yeah, I, I echo definitely what Arif was saying and I think the, the other aspect of that is that our customers shouldn’t feel like it’s more painful. To use marketplace versus they would any other way. [00:14:54] George Maroulakos: And so whether that shows up in pricing, it shows up in awareness of what marketplace is and isn’t, or what it can or cannot do. Um, whether it’s introducing it naturally or it’s this, oh, by the way, on the end, like the, the more. Integrated marketplace is as a part of your co-sell motion, whether you’re doing it directly on your own or through a reseller or with AWS or all of the above. [00:15:17] George Maroulakos: Um, it’s, it should be a natural extension and a value point that you’re bringing to your respective customers, not some. Interrupt driven or, or exception based activity that goes along with selling your, your, your, your solution. [00:15:31] Vince Menzione: Why do you think customer, some customers or some partners are held back or what, what, what is, is it a mindset? [00:15:38] Vince Menzione: I mean, I talk about the principles, you know that, but like, is it mindset? What is it? Is it, [00:15:42] Arif Razvi: it’s, it’s internal. Friction. Yeah. A a a lot of what I see, especially in these, in, in embedded engagements is the amount of, you know, I have a lot of empathy for this room, right? Because you are the ones that have to go internally and navigate all of these stakeholders to be able to convince them that marketplace is the route to market. [00:16:01] Arif Razvi: It’s the preferred route to market, and it’s the way that a AWS wants to co-sell. With its partners. And that’s a hard thing to do if you don’t speak the same language that the tax legal, rev ops, finance, accounting, because everything changes. When you start doing transactions on marketplace, your revenue is booked differently, right? [00:16:20] Arif Razvi: It’s booked as a w from AWS and not from the, you know, from the, so things change and having that conversation is often challenging. Uh, we are working on some tools that will help make that conversation easier. Um, and we’ve already written blogs, and again, there are mechanisms that your partner managers have internally that they can request support and guidance. [00:16:43] Arif Razvi: Uh, and we’re happy to provide that. [00:16:45] Vince Menzione: What needs to change so that marketplace becomes a true go to market engine. [00:16:49] Arif Razvi: Top down, top down, top down where, where I’ve seen the most success. From a partner is where they’ve gotten strategic alignment at the executive level. That marketplace is the way we are going to, uh, sell globally. [00:17:02] Arif Razvi: Right? Then that starts to filter down, as I mentioned earlier, into the different teams and yes, it is a journey and you may start with the US or if you’re EMEA based. Partner, you may start with just amea, but eventually you will start to expand your, you’ll want to expand your business. Um, and marketplace is a great place to do that because we have all of those mechanisms globally to help you scale without adding incremental resources to handle the tax or the compliance or the invoicing and collection and all that stuff. [00:17:30] George Maroulakos: Yeah. I’ll add to that because I’m gonna steal a second thing you said, Allison, about centering around a customer. I, I loved a lot of Allison. Come on now. I’ll be your hype guy. I absolutely, but, but, but the but demand will drive supply. And I think to what you were talking about, Arif, when are customers, when. [00:17:46] George Maroulakos: Our customers come to you about wanting to use marketplace. Yeah. How are you ready to adapt to that? How are you ready to respond to it? And if it becomes a disjointed, not centered around a customer, bespoke based, independently based interaction with the customer, everybody loses. Versus if you’re ready to embrace what that means and how to make that as good of an experience, if not better, versus how they might have traditionally procured your solution and deployed it. [00:18:13] George Maroulakos: Um, now we have a much better together story. So I think understanding that customers more and more are going to use marketplaces, particularly AWS marketplace, and want to make use of partner solutions that embrace marketplace as a part of their way to procure and deploy. You have a much better chance of being successful with them. [00:18:33] Vince Menzione: You know, it made me think about this. Is there a seminal event? Like I think about, I think back to COVID changing buying behavior, right? I’m, we’ll use AWS, an example, three boxes show up in my house every day, right? That didn’t happen before. We used to go to the store. Is there a seminal event we’re waiting to happen? [00:18:50] Vince Menzione: I, I know that the millennial buyer, we talked about this earlier with Matt, is the new buying persona. Over 50% of buyers are millennial and they’re used to doing comfortable with phones and trust Is all there. Is there something else we’re missing or what do, what do you think’s gonna happen? [00:19:03] George Maroulakos: I really think it’s what in front of us right now. [00:19:05] George Maroulakos: Yeah. Vince, I think what. Agen solutions, what Agen SaaS offers, what the power of information and research that’s now directly available to customers versus maybe indirectly available through consultancies or deeper research. Um, the velocity of what our customers are going to be able to do and with partners that they may not have even heard of right before. [00:19:32] George Maroulakos: You know, they started their journey. I, I think this is a present day. Inflection point. Yeah. Um, going back, you know, over the past several years, the advent of supporting private offers I think was a pretty big milestone for marketplace. It allowed for our partners to be able to. Work through customized terms and conditions and commercials that were important for a particular opportunity in a customer. [00:19:54] George Maroulakos: But today, the here and now I think becomes the next inflection point for the success of marketplace. [00:19:59] Arif Razvi: That would [00:19:59] Vince Menzione: Go ahead. [00:20:00] Arif Razvi: I was just gonna add on top of that, but partners need to be ready for that. Right? And if they’re not ready to accelerate a deal and get it closed in days versus stalling it for weeks to negotiate. [00:20:11] Arif Razvi: Yes. Like they’re not gonna stand. Customers are not gonna stand for that. So partners need to be ready to move quickly. If you think about all the innovations that Matt is delivering for Marketplace and Partner Central. They’re about accelerating co-sell. They’re about accelerating deal velocity. They’re about, we know f from, from the Forrester studies and others that we presented, that we’ve made public that the deal value goes up when you’re dealing with marketplace and co-selling with AWS. [00:20:36] Arif Razvi: So how can we just accelerate that? Yeah. Partners need to be ready for that and move quickly. [00:20:40] Vince Menzione: And you use partners in sort of a, you know, plural sense, but I think about those organizations as so many multifaceted. We talked about finance, we talked about all of different functions in the organization. [00:20:51] Vince Menzione: What are you doing to help that? I mean, we talked about you’re doing a lot of readiness work, but I do feel like there’s a lot of evangelism still to be done internally with those organizations. How do you think about [00:21:02] Arif Razvi: that? Yeah, we, um, obviously events like this are fantastic mechanisms to at least get the conversation started and get your head thinking about what you need to think about. [00:21:10] Arif Razvi: But we have other activities. We have, uh, rev Ops squads, right? So revenue operations teams, and we bring them together, uh, around the world op, uh, ops squad, which is operational teams, so deal desks and others that help them, uh, understand the capabilities that marketplace can bring to accelerate deal velocity. [00:21:28] Arif Razvi: And then we have, like, obviously other events like the, the, uh, marketplace Seller Conference in September where we bring marketplace sellers together and give them, you know. Guidance. And so there are ways to get this information beyond just like getting somebody from my team, of which there are very few as you, you know, as we start to, to consolidate down. [00:21:47] Arif Razvi: But um, but they are available and there’s other mechanisms and we’re happy to share those out. [00:21:50] Vince Menzione: Nice, nice. Well coming here doing this and we’ll make a podcast episode out of this as well. Can you hear. I hear us all, uh, because I do think it’s important to get in front of, especially the Chief Finance Officer and operations and all those different departmental heads who aren’t really embedded into, like, they don’t come to these events. [00:22:07] Arif Razvi: Yeah. And they also don’t log into Partner Central. That’s right. So how do they get this information right? Yeah. So we have to one to one it with them. Yeah. But that doesn’t scale when you think about what’s gonna happen now with this next wave of GSIs and sis and, and others coming onto Marketplace who hadn’t been there. [00:22:22] Arif Razvi: Yes, they’re gonna need the same guidance. Yeah. So we have to start thinking about what we’re building is AI tooling to help with those conversations. [00:22:28] George Maroulakos: Well, and, and you know, if, when I think about it from, from our buyer’s perspective, even just yesterday we held a, a couple of round table discussions with some procurement leaders that were, we’re here for the summit and, you know, we do a lot of enablement and, and awareness. [00:22:42] George Maroulakos: With alliance leaders at our partners, and that’s certainly a, the tip of the spear of getting the conversation started, but it’s not enough. And one of the things that we hear from our customers is. Well, you may have a great partnership with particular partner A, but the individual experience that I had with that sales rep doesn’t match that. [00:23:02] George Maroulakos: And so yeah, the evangelism and the awareness, yes, and the understanding of marketplace has to go beyond just the alliance team. You guys are the amplifier to it. But the folks that not only are in the back office and all the, the, the operational teams, but on the front lines and field sales need to also understand and embrace, not understand all the features and capabilities of marketplace. [00:23:25] George Maroulakos: AWS needs to handle that, but understand how marketplace fits into the co-sell strategy in what’s going on for that particular customer is very, very important to make sure our customers get the right experience. [00:23:37] Vince Menzione: Well, I think Arif, you mentioned this earlier about compensation models. And that’s a, that’s a factor too. [00:23:42] Vince Menzione: ’cause people, people, um, they’re fearful of change. They’re fear, fearful of compensation changing. Especially, especially sellers. I, um, again, that’s a coaching area. [00:23:54] Arif Razvi: Yeah, it’s a coaching area. Um, it, it, it is, um. It’s probably one of the easier ones to solve. Um, and, and, and, you know, we have these conversations with partners about net, uh, cost neutral or uh, seller neutrality and things like that. [00:24:06] Arif Razvi: Once you show them the economics of how AWS can increase their deal value, those economics sort of, they go away. The problems go away, but they, you have to get in front of those. Uh, you know, senior leaders, the CROs and the CFOs, to have that conversation to then go, okay, I get what’s going on here. I get why I’m paying. [00:24:23] Arif Razvi: The listing fee is, is about funding all of these marketing activities that we do for our partners, right? [00:24:29] George Maroulakos: Well, and then you use the word neutrality. The other end of that neutrality problem or, or, or challenge is the pricing that goes along with the opportunities that are made available to customers. [00:24:38] George Maroulakos: And so to one of your earlier questions on points of friction or what, what stops it from taking off further? When, when partners and our customers have a disconnect on. What they’re expecting to pay when they use marketplace, or if there is a unnatural cost that goes along with procuring that solution through marketplace. [00:24:57] George Maroulakos: That also tends to bring a, a pretty bad experience, not only for that opportunity in front of them, but for respective opportunities that may, may be in play thereafter. So thinking about not, you know, having an a, an unnatural experience for our customers relative to pricing as well as compensation and, and everything else is, is also very important. [00:25:17] Vince Menzione: So we’ve got a few minutes left, and we haven’t really touched on ag agentic AI and agen AI solutions. A little bit different than the SaaS solutions per se. How, how are these solutions brought and sold differently than SaaS? [00:25:30] Arif Razvi: Uh, well, as Matt said, the SaaS apocalypse is not real. [00:25:34] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:25:34] Arif Razvi: Um, he doesn’t, I’m glad to hear that, nor nor do I. [00:25:37] Arif Razvi: Um, I, I think what, you know, where, where SaaS has been very user seat based, you’re moving now to a world that’s gonna be more consumption based or outcome-based pricing. And so that’s really changing the dynamic and I think partners need to think about what does an outcome-based, uh, pricing model look for My particular. [00:25:55] Arif Razvi: Um, product, uh, Zendesk is a good example of, Matt published a blog, uh, earlier this week, I think it was, where we, we referenced Zendesk pricing on closed tickets or, or resolutions to tickets, right? For, for outcome-based pricing. So I think we need to think about on the pricing side, how to reprice, how to think about pricing. [00:26:13] Arif Razvi: But on the discovery side, thinking about what your, what your listing looks like, it’s no longer about marketing copy. It’s about, it’s almost, I was talking yesterday about being an API contract. ’cause the agent needs to have all the details that a person doesn’t necessarily need to have in order to make a recommendation that your product is the best fit based on the technology that’s underlying that, where it’s gonna fit in the infrastructure. [00:26:37] Vince Menzione: So three and a half minutes left lightning round. Um, but seriously, what, what if I’m in the room or even any, any partner that’s listening today, what do I need to change in the next 30 days? [00:26:50] George Maroulakos: From my perspective, think about marketplace as a why not as opposed to a why. And if you change your mindset around marketplace can be better together in helping to accelerate and expand your opportunities with our mutual customers. [00:27:03] George Maroulakos: You’ll get a whole lot more value out of it. You’ll get away from the fud in the system or some of the traditional roadblocks that you either have been or could be encountering when you think about marketplace, uh, together with your, with your solution. So think about the why not think about the value that the, the, the total solution can bring to our mutual customers and integrate it much more naturally into your total sales motion. [00:27:26] Vince Menzione: Nice. [00:27:27] Arif Razvi: I would say maybe three things. One, um, don’t just sell globally. Operate locally. Think about how your buyers wanna buy and then meet them there, right? As a partner, even if you’re doing CPPO transactions, um, you know, meet them in the location. Number two, top down, go get that executive alignment so the problems start to disappear, or at least are easier to manage when you’ve got that executive alignment. [00:27:51] Arif Razvi: And the third was, uh, don’t wait till the last minute to introduce marketplace. Work with your sales teams to make sure it’s part of the early conversation versus no procurement leader wants to know at the end of the day, oh wait, it’s coming. I gotta deal with this marketplace thing. They don’t wanna deal with it on the buyer side. [00:28:06] Vince Menzione: No, absolutely. Alright, we’ve got time for like one question in the back. Is that Eric? Yeah, that’s [00:28:12] Guest: me. [00:28:13] Vince Menzione: Hey. [00:28:14] Guest: Hi, Eric Rosenstein, um, with Cornerstone Strategy XAWS. So George, you talked about, uh, tools around that customers can use to research for self discovery. So what guidance, uh, first of all, like what capabilities are these tools gonna bring and what guidance would you give an industry specific ISV? [00:28:36] Guest: So someone that’s focused on law enforcement or private equity. That solution may be Angen solution, or it may be something more SaaS related. What guidance would you give an ISV to think about how to best leverage those tools? Is it metadata? Is it like. The outcome that your solution’s gonna drive, how would you tell ’em to best utilize those coming tools? [00:28:58] George Maroulakos: Yeah, excellent question and, and I think this is gonna, going to continue to emerge in the days, literally in weeks, weeks ahead. But recently, I, I’d say over the last six months, the advent of agent mode I think has been a game changer and the ability for our customers to use marketplace directly to research. [00:29:18] George Maroulakos: Efficiently what’s in our catalog. Prior to that, we had a category based. Old school based, search based category, click through way, which became very buried beyond the first page for any solution that was out there. Now with natural language query and the ability to propose, what am I specifically looking for, it gives partners that were on the first page or the last page in equal opportunity to be surfaced. [00:29:48] George Maroulakos: So then for a partner being able to do many of the things you just enumerated. Better metadata, better keywords, better description and differentiation for what your solution offers allows for the Ag agent search, whether it’s natively within AWS or outside of AWS through Claude Chat, GBT Crock Pick your, your, your agent of choice. [00:30:10] George Maroulakos: To be able to identify and know that your solution’s available. [00:30:13] Arif Razvi: And from a partner side to your question, I would say, uh, rich metadata, uh, both so that agent mode can find it. Yeah. Use cases, problems, it solves, you know, uh, technical specifications, pricing where you can, right. So that agents can really understand the solution, uh, that the buyer is, um, is looking for. [00:30:33] Vince Menzione: GEO is. [00:30:37] Guest: Perspective should be like as detailed as saying, so this agent is gonna act on these various data sources. [00:30:44] Arif Razvi: Yes. [00:30:45] Guest: Bringing it all together to drive that outcome that you want the agent [00:30:48] Arif Razvi: drive, if you can include what it needs to connect to in order to deliver that outcome as part of the listing. [00:30:53] Arif Razvi: Absolutely. ’cause the agent will want to know. For sure. [00:30:57] Guest: Thanks. [00:30:58] Vince Menzione: Alright, we are at time and this was a great session. [00:31:01] Arif Razvi: Thank you Vince. [00:31:01] Vince Menzione: Great to see you, George. George and I grew up, uh, five miles away from each other and went to the same college. I love it. Great to, great to spend some [00:31:09] Arif Razvi: time with you, George. [00:31:11] Vince Menzione: Thanks for listening to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. If today’s conversation resonated, share it with a partner leader in your network. Subscribe where you listen, and head over to the ultimate partner.com. For show notes related content and the resources for this episode, and if you haven’t already, now’s the time to register for the Ultimate Partner Live Event in Reston, Virginia, October 26th through October 28th. [00:31:38] Vince Menzione: Until next time, keep showing up in the rooms that matter because being in the room changes everything.

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