Transcript:

Rick Currier (00:00)

Hey Shawn Hey, how's it going? Well, you were the very, not only my very first podcast, but you're also the very first person in my house recording a podcast, which is different. ⁓ well it's wait, it's homey and it looks good and can't complain. Yeah. You know, it's funny. We're, taking a very, ⁓ community first approach to this business. And so I think it's just natural. Like we're to have people in our home now. ⁓ I'm doing one next week in California where I'm actually going to someone's home. So I get to do the reverse.

Love it. That's great. You know, when, you get to sit with folks in their home, the relationships gets built so much better and so good. Yeah, I, you know, it's, it's so true. mean, so I, I've always worked in the advertising B2B marketing space and I mean, I go back years. I've been to people's houses for dinners, like clients, you know, cause it's, it's a very relationship driven industry and I love that. You know, ⁓ the reality about life now in businesses, it is still such a relationship.

⁓ The way you go about doing business is still so relationship heavy and the more you can build relationships with people the the faster you build trust and then it's so much easier to work together Yeah, it's it's interesting to hear you say that because my goal for today's episode is to dive into everything AI Yeah, so to hear you just have still so much emphasis on that relationship element I'd I'd love to dissect that a little bit later But first a little introduction introduction about yourself who you are what you do because I know you and I got connected through

Our mutual friend Hondo, you came in, did some consulting work for us, blew my mind on AI, but I actually don't know a lot about your background. Love it. No. So yeah, my name is Shawn Mills. I'm the CEO of Pisteyo. I had recently run a digital transformation company that is helping organizations, you know, figure out what's next from a software development perspective. And one of the things I saw in that process was that, ⁓ that there was a disconnect between what IT and

software development was trying to do and the business was trying to accomplish. And as AI started to land in the laps of everyone, and it's the biggest buzzword for many, many reasons, that intersection is becoming even more important because AI is ⁓ intelligence, right? And so, you you can't lose that relationship aspect. And I do look forward to diving into the conversation around how does AI still play a role in relationships? And it definitely does.

But so I'm now here ⁓ running Pisteyo. We've got a great team and working with some amazing companies accomplishing some mind blowing things to help them grow looking to either save money or make money and really start down the AI transformation path. it, is it really focused on any particular job function or area within the company? Are you just seeing projects?

all over the place. Yeah. So, Pisteyo is really more of a management consulting firm. So management consulting first. So we'll come in and help organizations build the strategy, understand a roadmap, set up their teams for success. Cause you know, it is different, right? And the way you interact with AI is not normal. You know, we're used to Google's, ⁓ you know, keyword searches, and now you have to talk to AI in a specific way to get the greatest value out of it. And so, ⁓ as we are,

you know, working inside of organizations with the C-suite building that roadmap, we do then start to help find use cases inside the organization across all organizations. ⁓ There's use cases for them in sales and marketing and HR and customer service. So all across the board, we're helping organizations. Interesting. Are you, are you finding most management teams don't even know where to start and you're coming in helping them identify key areas within the business, whether it's sales, marketing, finance, or

Are they bringing you in thinking, we need help with sales. And then that's where you're focusing. like, what are you seeing? One or the other? You know, it's interesting. So over the last probably nine to 12 months, was really like a grassroots AI was a grassroots effort inside of an organization. And so they're finding a lot of use cases like, you know, in a little silo here or a little silo there. And it was a big disconnect between leadership of an organization. And they were fine at first like, yeah, this little AI thing will let it just do its thing.

But just literally over the last three months, we've really seen leadership teams take a much more forward role in the adoption of AI because they see how powerful it is and they've seen what it can do inside their organization. And so they're really trying to corral it to make sure that it's tied to their strategy and it's driving the outcomes that they want to drive. And now there is a connection between the grassroots effort and the leadership efforts that are starting to

Now, as you're implementing this project, how much of it is figuring out the workflow and integrating the technology versus training the people to actually use this stuff correctly? Yeah, so we have a pretty specific approach that we take with organizations that really starts at the education level, ⁓ helping teams, like individuals, know how they can use AI from a personal productivity perspective. ⁓

to help them do their jobs better, faster, more rewarding on a day-to-day basis. And we really start there because if you don't start there, they'll become passive resistance, which is like the worst thing AI could do is, you know, folks hear the word AI and they're like, it's coming for my job. And the reality is, you know, it is a core component of how people will work moving forward. And if you don't adopt it, it might come for your job.

But as you adopt it, you just become so much more valuable inside of organizations because you know how to leverage it. Do you have specific cool stories about, as you've implemented some of these processes or ways of doing things with AI, where it's really just fundamentally changed the way teams are doing things or the results that they're driving or helping them do their jobs better? So we get to see so much fun stuff. mean, it's like one of the more, because I'm an entrepreneur first, right? So I've started three companies.

⁓ I get to go be an entrepreneur every day in every organization, which is super fun. So one of the ⁓ really interesting things that kind of pops to my mind first is we were working with a marketing company and they do crisis management and we were taking their team through an enablement of, how do even use AI? So we break our system down into, you know, there's a two hour workshop and then we do a day break and another two hour workshop with the leadership teams. And between the first session,

And the second session tariffs got announced. so they're in there. So crisis happens inside of some of their very large companies. And they're like, we would have taken two days to get this prior to us working with you just halfway through our sessions together. And we were able to get through that in about 90 minutes. And so the benefit organizations get is just super.

And we've seen with the tariffs that two days is a lifetime. A lot changes in those two days, right? It might have come and gone and come back again in those two days. Yeah. So I mean, it's not just the time savings, but what you can accomplish in a rapidly evolving environment is crucial. Right. Interesting. entrepreneur at heart, multiple companies, how did you become this AI expert? Like what's your journey been like? Yeah. So the previous company, ⁓

that I had founded was a company called Lunavi. And I have now moved to the board of Lunavi because I just got super passionate about AI. And so probably about a year and a half ago, um, as I started to see the market change and the capabilities of AI really growing and, know, technical folks and folks that have been in AI will tell you AI has been around forever. has. The reality is it hasn't been $30 a person per month and accessible to every size company at a price point that

you know, you can afford. And so I started bringing AI into Lunavi from a sales and marketing and a customer support perspective and saw the capabilities and really see that it was going to be a big, massive disruptor inside of, you know, all industries everywhere. And I wanted to help organizations take advantage of it. Interesting. What, what from your experience at Lunavi kind of helped shape what you're doing now at Pisteyo. Yeah.

So, you know, we were stepping into large organizations, midsize organizations, solving technical problems. And so we were bringing, you know, our expertise working with technical companies or with, you know, software developers, IT teams, cloud architects, et cetera, to solve business problems. and so we had been doing that quite a bit and, my personal passion is connecting business to tech. And so that, having that tech background,

and having run several companies really ⁓ was the foundation for building Pisteyo so that I could not only solve the business problem but help connect tech to that business problem. Yeah, interesting. And going back to what you were talking about earlier in terms of the relationship, the human connection, so walk me to why you think that is still so important in this world of AI. Yeah, so one of the challenges, I've been excited about sales and marketing my entire career and the big challenges

you got to get to know your customers as fast as you can and your partners, et cetera. So the, with AI now you have the ability to know them much more quickly. Right? So if you're working with XYZ company, you can go learn what, you know, the key metrics are inside of XYZ company. You can understand more what might keep the CEO awake at night with that company and the pressures that they feel. You can learn that very, very quickly with AI so that when I go meet them,

I have a faster connection, right? So because I can be empathetic, I can understand the drivers to their business. So it makes a much quicker connection. And then the other, a like pure outreach perspective, like again, that connection needs to happen as far up the sales and marketing process as possible. And so, you know, one-to-one marketing has been a buzzword forever, right? And what was that? It's like filling out a, ⁓ a mail merge is, is a one-to-one marketing capability, right? And now you can have a.

hyper-custom, fully capable of understanding what is a company's dealing with, message delivered to them from lead all the way through to close process. So, all right, so let's walk through. I'm a marketer, and I've seen this a lot, a lot of these teams out there right now. There's just individual people that are trying different things with AI. I'm not seeing a ton of systematic adoption, at least within internal workflows.

What advice do you have for a marketer that, you know, is leading a team thinking about, have to think about this more systematically, strategically. What advice do have for them on how they should at least start this process? So I'm going to start with what not to do. All right, cool. And because I fell into this trap and so want to make sure everybody ⁓ has the opportunity to avoid it if they want. So when AI first came out, I went to my marketing team and said, Hey, look, this thing is incredibly powerful.

you know what, I'm going to set a goal that we need to have 10 X more creative content produced starting in one month. And you know, that goal without the education of teaching them, Hey, here's how to use it. All that stuff, totally backfired. So, you know, I've received passive resistance like, Shawn, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, know, I'd ask, well, how are we doing? we're doing great. And then you'd look at the metrics and we're not doing what we need to do. And so

With marketers that are starting to go down the AI path, would definitely encourage them to make sure their team is on board, right? So make sure that you've enabled them to understand how to use it, that it's not replacing their role, that it is elevating their role to be as creative as possible, to start building relationships faster. ⁓ But ⁓ once you get beyond that, the ability for marketers to now systematically approach one-to-one at scale,

is just incredible and at scale in such a personalized way that it resonates with you or me in a way that marketing has never been able to do that. Interesting. So beyond the marketing component in terms of trying to attract and build your customer base, what about from a partnership standpoint? Thinking through and going back to your system integrator days, you probably worked with a partner ecosystem to deliver solutions. A lot of these marketers that we reached on the podcast,

they're developing co-marketing strategies, right? So AWS and ServiceNow and Intel coming together. How should they be thinking through the lens of AI to support partner engagement and reporting and all the internal stuff that goes on to then go out and do the one-to-one marketing? Yeah, no. ⁓ The reality is one-to-one marketing applies to whomever you're marketing to, right? So now you have the ability to do these joint partner strategies, but still able to deliver all the way down to the very end customer. So if the...

the team is working on a joint strategy between AWS and Oracle. I don't know what it is, but who are you trying to reach? You know, you can now customize that messaging all the way down to the end customer. not just telling the sole story of why we came together. It's why we came to matter and what's in it for you. Like you, you not you and everybody else that looks like you know, it's you. ⁓ and so there's a huge opportunity there. But then if you think about the ecosystem of training, like you want to,

train everyone on why this partnership is great. That took a whole training team to do that before. Now you can leverage AI to help build the training material and the content around training. can help it build you the reinforcement ⁓ through ⁓ surveys and things like that that just used to take so much time. You can now with such a much, much smaller team get a very sophisticated product out that is

back to my one-to-one matters to you. Now, are you seeing in order to achieve this level of effectiveness, are you having to ⁓ buy and adopt really sophisticated AI technology, build your own agents? Are you seeing people doing this with just cheap E.T. and some of the others out there? What level of commitment do you have to actually pull this off successfully? Well, that's such a great question. So when we think about AI in general, we think about it in kind of three buckets, like personal productivity,

AI automation, and then, you know, the big buzzword of agents, like building these autonomous things that just go do things for you. So you can absolutely get started in just personal productivity, right? You can replicate what you would want to do in an automated fashion, just using Chachi BT or Gemini or whatever product that is your favorite LLM to start, right? So you can start with testing like, Hey, I want to draft a message to the CEO of XYZ company.

⁓ and I wanted to focus on this one product of ours, test that way, your ability to use AI, AKA prompt it to speak to it intelligently, to get a great output. And so then once you learn from a personal productivity, how you get these, you know, still much faster, ⁓ created content than you were able to do before, but not fully automated. So you can test it and run through the process. And then once you find and have, have it dialed in, then you can start automating it to.

really get the juices flowing. And the automation process is probably where you see a lot of the senior leadership coming in and make sure that's aligned to the goals that trying to achieve. Got it. Yeah, totally. What are you seeing as some of the top challenges out there? So obviously you talked about just education and training and making sure everybody is on board with this vision. Are you seeing other challenges pop up as companies are trying to do this? So depending on the size of the company, the challenges become different, right? So in the larger organizations, how to govern this process, how do you

bring the team together. How do you make sure it's aligned? It's not ⁓ bringing in added risk, that it's following ⁓ the governance that you want in place for your organization and that it's auditable. So the challenge we're seeing in large organizations is just wrangling everybody to be running down the path in the same direction and being able to get an idea of, I'd like to get one-to-one marketing into my partner network. How do I get that approved throughout the

throughout the whole chain of the organization to then get it to production and be able to go execute on it. So setting up those governance frameworks and bringing the right teams together that is both tech, business, HR, across the board. And it's bringing ⁓ unlikely characters to a cross-functional team that you might not have worked with before. making sure organizations can get that structure together has been a challenge that we see in larger ones. Yeah, it almost seems like you really need executive buy-in.

based on the cross-functional approach that's needed to do that. Right. Yeah, for sure. And then on the smaller companies and is starting to just figure out which platforms should I use. Right. And so our approach really is don't use that as a reason to not get started. Pick a platform, learn it, you know, get a great understanding of how that tool set can work for you and then dive in and start experimenting, start testing. And so don't get stuck.

in the fear of the unknown or the fear of selecting the wrong product or, hey, AI's moving so quick, I should just wait. waiting is not a good idea because the people that are diving in now are getting the reps and getting the experience so that as it keeps maturing, they're gonna take advantage of it faster. So the fear of the unknown. So from my point of view, there's so many tools out there, so many platforms, new ones coming online every day. How are you staying up to date on all this stuff and how should the average marketer figure?

stay up to date when it's not their day job. Well, and that's part of the challenge, right? Inside these organizations is that it, so if you want to know how fast it's moving, like you've probably heard of Moore's law, compute doubles every 18 months. This is moving four times that pace. So every three months, three, every three months. So if you think about like watching your kids grow, you're like, you grow so fast. mean, doubling something, doubling in three months in business land is like insane pace. so, you know, just find one, pick it.

stick in that lane. Like you can't learn at all. Like inside of a big company, you're going to inside your role, you have a day job, learn a tool that is working. It's going to keep growing. It's going to keep maturing, run with it and take advantage of it along the way. How are you staying on top of it? Well, we have a few podcasts that we listen to like on a daily basis. So because it's moving so fast, daily podcasts are actually keeping you up to date on a daily basis. Interesting. What are your top?

Top ones. So the AI breakdown I listened to a ton. then ⁓ this week in AI, I listened to that. It's more of a weekly one. So it gives you a big broad thing ⁓ quickly. Are probably two of my favorites. Very cool. Very cool. ⁓ know, it's thinking back about like, okay, training, education, executive leadership, making sure we're doing cross functional work here.

when we start to implement this, what are some KPIs that we should be aware of? And I know that could vary based on the function of the team, how do we track results on all this stuff? Well, and so in these larger organizations and in every organization, we suggest that you build a framework of how do use cases get approved inside of your team or inside of your organization. as part of that is we've built a scorecard that will allow companies to be able to decide

Does this make sense? And it's really risk adjusted scorecard, risk reward adjusted scorecard. So don't pick a high risk, high reward thing to get started. Pick a something that's meaningful, but lower risk that still moves the needle and assign a value to it. And then keep it inside of a system or I mean, worst case scenario spreadsheet and track. Did it accomplish what you wanted it to accomplish? And then report it back into the company so that you can show wins. You can show successes.

and that people start to rally around it. know, making sure that it's not, it has to do, like I mentioned earlier, it either needs to save money or make money. Let's like, don't go write a jingle using an AI tool for a song just because, tie it to something that matters. Yeah. Okay. So don't try to boil the ocean to start. Right. Right. And I can see why people bring you in for this because I mean,

You know, I've done a lot with AI more, think on the personal productivity level, but you know, I'm not developing scorecards or thinking about cross-functional applications of this. So is it, and from your experiences, that where a lot of people are getting it wrong is that they're just trying to bring in these technologies without the framework in place from an education, tracking, cross-functional approach governance. Right. So again, there's definitely a bifurcation between large and small companies and a smaller company, midsize company, a hundred million, 200 million or less.

you can wrangle the cats and you can pretty successfully allow for citizen development to happen and individual business units with less governance. The larger your company gets, the more it needs to be aligned to the strategy and the more you need to make sure you have the governance in place with the right cross-functional team that is then reporting up to steering committees inside of ⁓ the C-suite.

Because they want to know too they're being held responsible or accountable by their boards and they want to be able to report that back so Building out this framework is definitely key for organizations to be successful Yeah, so where do you see like I know this is hard to predict a couple years from now But like Let's say a marketing team is fully utilizing AI the way you envision it right? What does that look like? right? so, you know what I think about a lot and when we're talking to organizations that is that

because AI is so intelligent, I personally think marketing is able to go way closer to close. Like in the lead to close process, marketing now, because they're able to see the customer and understand the customer and get even closer to the customer, as well as get closer to their products, get closer to the solution, they'll be able to take leads way closer to the...

current SQL will be closer to close than it's ever been before. so marketing leads will stay longer in marketing ⁓ because the super high value leads that are coming in and have been nurtured to the point where, you know, it's built a solid foundation with a great relationship gets handed to the sales team. And then the sales team is able to take it to close very quickly. Again, there'll be sales AI enabled sales teams too. ⁓ Plus everything in that process will be one to one, you know,

we're working with an organization right now that it's not only one-to-one, you know, emails and one-to-one webinars, one-to-one proposals, one-to-one marketing slicks, one-to-one landing pages. And again, this isn't like form fill company name, product name. It's like fully customized approach to every single buyer. And we talk about buyer personas a ton. There's a one-to-one buyer persona now. There's not groups of buyer personas.

there's a one-to-one buyer. In that scenario, because I know a of these marketing organizations are utilizing different tools from creating proposals to the way that they're handling leads, right? All this internal existing infrastructure. So are they having to just rethink about the tools that they're utilizing, how they're connecting these tools and AI agents working across the automation of this? It sounds like a big project. Yeah. And it's interesting because it does sound like a big project, but

It doesn't have to be you can break and we encourage breaking it down to a very small chunk that drives value Take it from idea all the way to production so that you're getting value and then keep expanding on it So you don't have to build you don't have to boil the ocean with this whole massive plan and project That doesn't provide any value until you're done You know find a sliver find your lane get to production and start seeing value and wins quickly. Are we talking? Months and millions of dollars or is this?

reason why we kind of built the company the way we've built it is we want to show value inside a month, right? And so use low code tools, use no code tools to show that you can get accomplished what you want to get accomplished. And then if it needs to land inside of one of your proprietary applications, then come back and code it into your proprietary application, but prove the value first. Don't go spend a million dollars on trying to create something. Go spend $50,000 to go show.

I just went from idea to outcome in a month and the outcome's great. And then I'll decide, does it need to be more pro, more embedded into my apps or does this low code solution solve my need? Interesting. know, I think this is what scares a lot of people is because AI can do so much that everyone's trying to wrap their head around the possibility of endless possibility, right? And when they're thinking about their organization, it's like,

shooting for the moon. And I think it's really cool because you've broken it down in that, like, let's start small, achievable, doesn't have to be expensive, timely, and let's scale results from there. And the key is scaling results because there's so much ambiguity or hesitancy. we're not really doing anything like hyper new. And we're just following traditional agile processes to get stuff to production.

get stuff showing value as fast as possible. And we're now just doing it with AI, but it is very much tied to the business. Yeah, yeah, I love it. And that's kind of what we're trying to do here at Partner Vista because we're not, you we didn't go out and create a revolutionary new product. We're taking some existing things that are already out in the market and we're trying to stitch them together in a way to add more value. And, you know, we want to scale and there's a lot of things that we want to do five years from now that's like shooting for the moon. But like, let's start with what we can achieve today, drive more value.

results. But I think what you said earlier too is kind of the holy grail for marketers is getting marketers closer to close and having leads stay in marketing longer, getting them closer to what we really mean as a marketing qualified lead. I've been doing Legion for 20 years and on the publisher vendor side, we all talk about MQLs and marketers out there saying like, what's being delivered is not an MQL these days. It's not. It's just, we use the acronym and we say the words, but

Sales is not saying these are qualifier else right? Yeah, they're leads I'm hearing inquiries now like people are just calling them inquiries, right? Right. I think this is an approach to you know, hopefully get marketers to what what they really want to be doing, right? They want to see the results right like you whenever you talk to marketing teams I always love when they bring up KPIs and because you know historically it's like hey you spend X amount of money in marketing and half of its great. You just don't know which half right so

the more a marketer can see their success, the more they wanna keep investing in the things that are being successful. Yeah, yeah, I love it. What are you most excited for, for where this is all going? now we're talking to the moon, let's shoot to the moon, like, you know, and this could be short term too. What's really got your interest right now? Well, it's really hard to think about ⁓ long term right now because things are changing so fast. But, you know, from my perspective, AI can be

super disruptive, right? And so how do you smooth that process in an organization to help them get the benefits quickly? How do you bring along your employees with you to participate in this amazing new technology that is going to help organizations fight way above their ⁓ weight against the competition? Agents are going to be in the automation that is capable.

Right now I get to be with the assistance of AI, like the smartest person on the planet. I get this super power tool that can help me solve very complicated challenges for my, my own company's growth, well as our, our, customers, ⁓ growth that, know, is, it's just something that's never been unleashed before. And I'm really excited about to see how this plays out. And you know, the agent thing is it sounds amazing. It's going to probably take longer than.

People expect it to take, but it will have big benefits as it comes to market. right, so I'm not going to ask you secret sauce in terms of how you're punching above your weight with Pisteyo, but personally, how are you utilizing AI that's just changed your day-to-day life on a personal productivity standpoint? So we'll focus on two things. ⁓ One, deep research answers incredible questions. So when you're thinking about growing a business or even if you're thinking about

when you have a super high value client you're going after, doing a deep research on them, ⁓ leveraging AI makes you closer to invincible when you're talking to a customer about the challenges that they need. It used to take so long to understand the intricacies of a company to be able to speak about them. And now you can get that very quickly and you can synthesize it down to the things you need to talk. So for me, deep research is by far one of the most powerful things. And then,

growing a company, AI automation. Fortunately, we're starting from, we're started from a very small company and so we automate everything. And so, from a call to a quote and a proposal in between, automate. And so, being able to do that, which would historically take a significant amount of time, is now automated, is fantastic. that's great. And so, if people want to learn more on where they can...

Understand how Pisteyo can help with some of this stuff. Where should they go? Yeah, no, feel free to go to our website Pisteyo. ⁓ Shawn Mills, reach out on LinkedIn. Pisteyo's on LinkedIn. ⁓ Love to connect. Now, last thing is, is AI going to turn evil and kill us all? Well, I do love the statistic that just came out recently from, I think it was OpenAI about the

Amount of money it costs every time somebody says please I've heard that and thank you and thank you. Yeah And so, know, I'm still a believer of being nice, right? Whether it's a an AI Agent or AI. Yeah, just in case they do decide to take over the world. need to make sure I'm nice to you Yeah, stay on that on a good list, right? Right. Well Shawn, thank you so much for coming in. This was a lot of fun That was great. Appreciate it. Yeah. Cheers.