December 16, 2025 ā¢ 51 mins
In our tradtional end-of-year DEX Show special episode, Mondelezās Geoff Wright returns to unpack a wild 2025 for IT, AI and employee experience. Tim, Tom and Geoff riff on AI agents that shop, plan travel and work across your browser tabs, the coming street fight between Windows and Chromebooks, and why younger workers just want a browser and to be left alone. Geoff explores shadow AI, culture and the human resistance to change, plus his Q1 predictions: Googleās big enterprise push, soaring laptop costs, and why experience, empathy and a good laugh still matter more than any shiny new model.
Learn more about Spark, The Worldās Most Powerful DEX Agent for Employees hereĀ
Download The First Annual Workplace Productivity Report hereĀ
Learn more about Spark, The Worldās Most Powerful DEX Agent for Employees hereĀ
Download The First Annual Workplace Productivity Report hereĀ
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome it, change Makers to the Deck Show with Tim
Flower and Tom McGraw.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Let's get into it.
Speaker 3 (00:09):
Hello, change makers, it's fat time of year again. It's
fat time of year again. It's the end of the year.
And you know, we all have our traditions. We all
have our traditions and our families and our friendship groups
and our offices. And if you're a regular listener to
the Deck Show, you know that nothing flags, but it's
the festive season. Then a special appearance from our favorite guest,
(00:33):
our most returned guest, is that EVERTB. I can use
none other than the wonderful Jeffrey right from wander Lai's
here to help us reflect upon the year that was
twenty twenty five. Jeff, how are you magical?
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Living the dream, dreaming the live?
Speaker 4 (00:48):
Magical?
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Are you?
Speaker 3 (00:50):
I should have also I should also reveal that, you know,
look for the other fifty something episodes we release as
a podcast across the year. You know, lot of effort
and preparation goes into it. But Jeff, when it comes
to getting you on zero zero other, we reached out team,
we book you in and then we just we just
(01:11):
fly by the seat of our pants. So to that end,
you know, give us something to get started on. Jeff,
how how was twenty twenty five for you? More generally it.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Was a roller coaster. But mostly it's it's it's the it,
the it stuff is just you guys. I see you guys,
we guys, we us us IT folks, the same people
around this time of year that you know, all of
our friends and family bring us all of their technology
from the past decade and ask us why it doesn't work? Right,
That is the time of year. You know, the is
(01:43):
my iPad from twenty ten not work anymore? Jeff, you're
in it. You can fix that. Or hey, Jeff, my
toaster's giving me this weird error, or the CA cup
maker's got this weird error on it. You're in it.
You know how to fix that, right, Like that is
the curse and the blessing that we all as IT
professionals have to deal with. Right, But you guys know
about Google, You guys know about open Ai, chat, write
(02:06):
co pilot. That was this year was the year that
things are like breaking my reality when it comes to
what comes next, right, and it's not happening, Like you say,
what how is your year? It's like years aren't years anymore.
It's like months and weeks. How is your month? What
(02:28):
happened this month? What happened this week? Right? I mean
just just last week, Google announced that Gemini, which we're
all familiar with, Gemini workspace and all the Gemini cool stuff,
is going to be able to use agents to track
travel and pricing and all of these things during the
(02:49):
holiday season. What happened. Priceline stock tanked, Expedia like all
of these travel companies had a reaction to this, and
I was like, wow, I'm like, let me, like, you know,
anytime there's a big news announcement like that, I try
to like peel it back a little bit and lo
and behold. This holiday season, for those of us that
(03:10):
understand this technology and know how to use it, it's
going to be freaking insane and worrisome at the same time.
If you guys don't use Chrome, the Chrome browser or
like Gemini, you can now log in and if your
you know, significant other or someone in your family wants
to have sneakers or shoes or TVs or whatever you're
trying to get them, you can now use Gemini to
(03:31):
track the lowest price, the trending price like the stock market.
So now you can say, hey, I want to have
these seventeen items, add them to your cart, use Gemini
or like what used to be frugal back in the day,
can now show you exactly when the right time is
to buy. So let's say it's Black Friday or maybe not,
(03:51):
and you can use your credit card or your PayPal
or your Apple pay or Venmo to trigger the purchase
at the time that it believes it's the lowest price.
Now I've already done it. It's already working phenomenally well.
And now the argument is, I think in my head,
companies are going to have a real difficult time with margins. Yeah,
(04:12):
because if you're going to start using these technologies to
track the absolute best price, companies are going to start
struggling to say what price should we charge?
Speaker 4 (04:22):
Well, not only that, but you're no longer competing on
the intangibles, right the customer service, the company value, the
return policy, whatever it might be. If you're only competing
on price, it's a race to the bottom.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
And this is going to really push that. It's going
to force that hand. I mean, I would love to
see it a different way, but open Ai did a
open AI and Walmart signed a deal a couple of
weeks ago. If you guys don't know, just type in
you know, Walmart Open Ai and they're going to try
having like Rufus two point zero, which Rufus is the
(04:55):
AWS Amazon shopping agent. Open A is now going to
have you in Walmart to be able to pay for
or check for or do whatever you want. I don't
see it being I don't know who knows. I haven't
used it yet. I haven't seen it yet. They've only
done betas in some places. So I'm going to be
(05:15):
you know, I'm going to be waiting to see whether
it's successful and it gets traction or if it's another Rufus,
because most people I know compare it to Rufus, and
I have colleagues and friends that are at Amazon. Rufus
is kind of you know, like raise your hand if
you've used Rufus, you know, not many people log into
(05:36):
Amazon and ask Rufus to start shopping for them. Right,
you already know what you want if you're if you're
shopping on Amazon, there's it. They've already kind of done
the job for you.
Speaker 4 (05:46):
Do you think that at every big AI headline, every
big breakthrough that comes out, and like you said, it's
it's accelerating monthly, weekly, daily. They're all initially seen as
the death of something, right, the death of and we're
a big fans of the death of the help desk. Right,
AI is going to get us to a place where
we don't need the help desk. I've heard and we
can talk maybe a little bit about the death of
(06:08):
the laptop class, that digital workers are going to replace
human workers on all of our laptops. It's always the
extreme view. Is this the death of Amazon, the whole
Google Gemini shopping thing or is it? Is it not
as not as extreme?
Speaker 2 (06:23):
I think it's going to help you shop at Amazon.
I think if anything, Gemini is going to compliment these
shopping sites because it's going to ingest the best press.
I already tried, like on Gemini asking for like, hey
what's the best this was about that. A lot of
the times it does redirect links to Amazon, right, so
it could actually increase traffic. I mean I would I'd
love to know what the data is on that, but
(06:43):
I'm sure it's going to increase traffic. My like, that's
like only one that's only one piece of it. You
know Google. The next part of that story within Google
is the brow is the Chrome browser, right, and companies
like Island dot Io company like again Perplexity tried to
buy out Chrome, Jira, the Lassian company, bought out the
(07:06):
browser company, all of these. You know of course, Copilot,
you know, Microsoft has Edge. I do see and I'm
already kind of working on do see disruption with the
ways of working with just the browser. And what's crazy
to me is Google did this years ago, right, like
years ago, a chromebook, right, you could get a Chromebook,
(07:28):
the most maxed out chromebook, and with hardware getting more expensive,
you can get the most maxed out hardware in a
Chromebook for like three hundred bucks maxed out right, a
Lodovo Adele, pick your flavor and everything works in the browser.
It's hi, I have Chrome, I have Google Docs, I
have whatever it is workspace there it is g Suite.
Now there's this idea of like, hey, if we have agents, right,
(07:51):
which they do in Gemini now and now Copilot's trying
it and some other companies are trying it. Those agents.
If you guys like take a look at this. It
is one of the coolest It just makes sense. Of
you are the guy that comes to work or girl
or person that comes to work, and you have service. Now,
you have Jira, you have Outlook, dot Com, you have Gmail,
(08:14):
you have a Gemini, so you have five tabs. Now
again you can max out your tabs. You have five
tabs open. The Gemini agent can now work across those
tabs with your access. So your elevated rights across those
tabs in each one of those platforms, now can be
your mini worker to say something like, hey, pull the
(08:35):
table from service now and tell me what's the highest
CI impact. Blah blah blah. Create tabs in Jira reflecting
the backlog, to do DevOps to fix those issues, and
draft an email to my leadership telling them these are
the action items. This is the problem statement, this is
the preferred way forward, here's the desired outcome. And then
(08:56):
I go from.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
You're the orchestrator of work. You're not doing the work anymore.
You're the orchestration or the intelligence behind what work has
to happen, and you're instructing it on what to go
do and it goes and does it.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Which for guys, I said, guys like me, there are
a lot of people that the creativity in their brains
is so explosive. Sometimes I don't even know where to
go when I when I can actually ask Gemini how
to create a website, which, by the way, it does
it for you now, Like if you guys haven't tried
like the new like Gemini three, you can say create
(09:28):
me an iOS game like and it does it right there, right,
create a website, create an app like, create this, create
create a business model, create a business plan. Right, it
does it for you. So for those of us that
are hyper you know, hyper creative, but have a hard
(09:48):
time sometimes with the you know the io that oh
is going to be supercharged turbocharged.
Speaker 4 (09:55):
Where I get a lot of benefit, Jeff is I
have that create of spark as well, and I've got
this great idea, but I can't completely articulate it or
I feel like I'm missing something. I need that collaborative
partner to say what am I missing? It gives it
to you. It's amazing that the way that it can
(10:15):
uh play off of your creative ideas and and feed
you more to to then allow you to take it
to the next level. I think it's just it's amazing.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
It's it's again it's the it's the Matrix or mad Max,
whichever way we come out. But it's going to be
where we have. There's going to be a shift in
an op X period, right the SaaS model is now
going to be, you know, the my dream state. My
dream state is let's get rid of Windows, Like I
want to tell Microsoft, like, from the bottom of my heart,
(10:46):
let's get like enough with the wind. We've been patching
and chasing cvs on Windows forever. And then you talk
to these people that do these the browser based agent
based island, like that's all you like. Oh I don't
like I like to install printer drivers on my PC.
Come on, we fit, that's not a problem anymore. Like
(11:07):
people are always like, oh, well, I like to have
like physical Like again, I want to have Adobe Acrobat
installed on my PC. Go to acrobat dot com. All
the new features are there already, by the way, Like, oh,
you want agents, you want AI assist, you want it's
in the browser. Yeah, but I like to have the
browser like on my computer. You know, smack. I like
to smack the stuff I like to, you know, I
(11:27):
like to I like to run updates ninety five thousand
times a day and then and then again as soon
as I update a package, as soon as I update anything,
it's it's vulnerable again, or it's broken, or it doesn't
work across the business. You know what works across the
business the Internet a browser BW DOW like my stuff
dot com, mywork dot.
Speaker 4 (11:46):
Com, until it goes down, until it's collapsing under its
own weight. That's the other big headline recently is the
end of the world is coming because the Internet is
going to collapse.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Well Amazon had that big thing and that was more about,
you know, we all hyper automate. We all see these
opportunities to automate orchestrate AI this, AI that, But dude,
you need you need some biological things.
Speaker 4 (12:10):
Until it takes a break, right they say, AI is
twenty four to seven until it decides to take a
cigarette break, and it's one day it's not there.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Yeah, I mean I that's why I think we all
need to have local internet. Just spin up your own
cloud at the come on Internet they got so yeah, yeah,
that's right. We need to decentralize the Internet, guys. Blockchain, blockchain,
your microwave, blockchain, your you know, your home.
Speaker 4 (12:35):
You got this, Yeah, it turn the lights on and
off in my smart house if the if the internet's down,
I know, I.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
Mean I I love analog things. It is one of
the most empowering things to be able to shift my car.
See dials like you put an album on.
Speaker 4 (12:51):
Put an album on.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Dude, see vinyl spin like if you if those of
you kids watching here listening to this show, know what
a record is. Although vinyl and CDs I saw. I
was in the mall there was a vinyl and CD
store like Vintage, and I was like of records like
seventeen thousand dollars in the CD is You know.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
Jeff, how when you look at your user base at
wonder these how's it adapting and how its demands evolving
as AI starts to permeate its work patterns, and how
much perspective and visibility? Do you have a mischief?
Speaker 2 (13:27):
A lot of the AI platform, a lot of the
Jenai stuff sits in my camp. So what I would
say is, there's it's I don't believe any business other
than other than maybe banks, financial, there's insurance companies, there
are some company there are some businesses that are fundamentally
set set up and you know the controls and the
(13:48):
GRC stuff is pretty much bulletproof, err because it has.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
To be right.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Bank of America can't say, hey, we're going to try
out this new AI product without beating it like every
way possible to ensure that. And even then, right, it's
got to have some really tight gates on it. With
US larger, a lot of companies, even IT companies and
technology companies that I'm cool with some colleagues in those spaces.
(14:15):
It's it's it's always comes down to security and privacy. Right,
We're all, we're global, all of us, most of us GDPR,
German Works Councils, councils around the world, many of them
are very very careful around AI. You know, we all
understand it, it can help you. We all understand that it
(14:36):
has it's it's its place, but you know, it really
is the who wants it and can get it. And
then those of us that are in this place where yeah,
it could, it could revolutionize the way you work in
your job. I get that all the time.
Speaker 4 (14:51):
I can't think of a technology where past technology that
we've brought into the enterprise where we weren't trying to
solve a specific problem. AI is in search of a
problem to solve. Still, you can go experiment with AI.
You can explore it. You the shadow AI is everywhere, right,
You've got there's so much accessibility, but it's very difficult
(15:15):
to pin down what problem we're trying to solve.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Yeah, because it's mimicking the human mind. Right, we're digital
twins with like some extra seasoning on top. It's it's
how do you you the human have to have the
problem statement well defined before you unleash it. If you don't,
it's it's just like you know, it's just like your
(15:40):
attic or your basement, it's just crowded with stuff and
you don't know where to begin. You don't know where
to start. You don't even you know, you don't even
know how the things can can plug in together? Right
you can. What's interesting is you can ask it like, hey,
what are some of the top what's the top five
top ten problems you're platform can solve? More often than not,
(16:03):
it's automation or orchestration. It's kind of it's it's machine learning.
And then you can again, the gen AI piece of
it is let it, let it think for you.
Speaker 4 (16:13):
So Jeff, let me ask you this with the with
AI's reputation now as a consumption, a consumption monster of energy,
of water, for cooling, of real estate, for data centers,
of tens of billions of dollars in investment without the
return revenue back on that investment. It does it fix itself?
(16:35):
Or or does it? Is this a true technology bubble
that's gonna retrace its steps.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
There's some froth for sure around all of the AI stuff.
I believe does it fix itself? You know there's the
Tokolac or Tokamac reactor. If you guys don't know about
this hawk, some Harvard people got an MIT people got
a whole of the fusion reactor technology. They were able
(17:03):
to do net positive energy and over a certain amount
of time it's going to be I believe that these
models will figure out a lot of cool stuff, curing
certain cancers, finding like you know, cellular degradation, things like.
There's gonna be a tremendous amount of cool stuff. Google's
Deep Mind released a whole mapping of They have a
(17:24):
good case for eliminating pancreatic cancer. Right. These technologies are
gonna have a tremendous amount of positive impact. I also
believe though there's gonna be you know, just like humans,
there's gonna be good humans and bad humans, good people,
bad people, good use cases and bad use cases. Politically,
(17:45):
if we you know, I do these thought exercises sometimes
just as I'm daydreaming. If we had free energy tomorrow,
if these models were able to come up with a
fusion reactor sustainable to create free energy, that the only
outcome would be oxygen right or water H two O
would be the exhaust let's call it right the waste.
(18:06):
It would be net positive. Would we unleash it on
the world? Or would Mobile and Exon and I hate
to do the whole like bad guy good but it's
more about It's not about like good guys or bad guys.
It's about exon. Mobile might say something like, we got
we got to like adopt this technology because someone's gonna
have to fix it, repair it. There's gonna be engineers,
there's going to be a business model that's that that's
(18:28):
around these these reactors and stuff. But now, if you
have one hundred thousand employees around the world that are
pumping oil, they're drilling, they're doing it, how do you retool?
How do you upskill your entire workforce to say, you
used to used to drill oil. Yeah, now you're going
to repair nuclear reactors.
Speaker 4 (18:44):
Well, our businesses around the world are dealing with that now, right,
That's the AI problem, AI adoption and AI usage, governance, security,
using it for good versus bad bad actors. Good, that's
what we're dealing with now, tom.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
So, Yeah, absolutely, and talk to us, Jeff, about what
that's been like on the front line of that process
in your digital workplace. Because I always think of you
as as as an amazing tech evangelist. But I wonder
if I wonder if, like this year, the evangelist role
has kind of felt outmoded. You know, we've gone from
(19:16):
having to encourage technology usage to having a completely different
relationship to it, to what monitoring it to getting out
of its way, to trying to figure out what it's
role is in this specific explosion.
Speaker 4 (19:28):
Death of the evangelist.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Yeah, Now, I'm a creative storyteller. I see a lot
of roles opening up with in this creative storyteller. It's
not evangelist. It's interesting the way they have it. It's
but the it's the idea of open AI Gemini copilot. Right,
at some point in time, all of these llms are
going to ingest every data point possible. Right, So, now imagine.
Speaker 4 (19:53):
Wondering except the ones that are in textbooks and libraries
that aren't digitized. There's so much knowledge and data out
there that they don't have access to. I can't read
a book.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Who reads?
Speaker 4 (20:01):
Come on, nobody reads anymore?
Speaker 2 (20:03):
Who reads any words?
Speaker 4 (20:04):
What are you talking?
Speaker 2 (20:05):
What do you like? This is when you like took
your t Rex to work? You know, is this like
in the late nineteen hundreds? Are you talking about it?
Speaker 3 (20:10):
So it's just scanning romantic novels into it?
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Yeah, I mean my role has has become or or
so I see it as I am plugged into every
possible data point I can find in these spaces, right,
So learning about the whole agentic. If I hear agentic,
(20:35):
I know, it's a bud, it's it's buzzy, it's agentic.
Everything's AGENTIC. I get. You know, we're gonna have AGI
in the next three to five years. Okay, Okay. What
I have found in the past, you know, twenty years
of twenty five years of it is What you think
technology is going to do is very actually will not
be it? Right every time, I'm like you know what.
(20:58):
This is it death of the death of the service desk.
A one is gonna go away. This is the one
right ten years ago. This is it. It's gonna you know,
next thing's gonna automate all these things. We're gonna have
all this go Yeah. No, it changed it, but it
didn't happen the way I thought it was. Right. We
try to like focus on these things where it's like,
you know, you know, we're gonna have robots and cyborgs
(21:19):
and Tesla bots and all this other stuff that's gonna happen. Okay,
will it be what you think? It is? Unlikely? Do
I feel it's my duty though, to ingest all of
these all of these news articles and all of these
vibes on Reddit and all these people that are kind
of talking about these different probable technologies that are going
to change things. Yes, And then I have my own
(21:41):
community that I talked to at my company to say,
did you know you know? And I hate to be
like not only really hold up a sign, but it's like,
did you know that browsers are going to start changing
the way that we don't realize? Right, it's gonna start
changing the way you work, Like it's going to be
browser based. Do you understand that you're not going to
be able to do these things? Or this digital twins
(22:02):
and the oculus Wearables I'd like to say three to
five years. Wearables are going to be one of those
things that it's gonna catch on the iPhone at some
point in time, whether it's your because of your carpal
tunnel or the IO is so slow, right, That's what
really keeps people down to it throttles them. Is that
IO of like, all right, I'm looking on my phone,
(22:23):
I'm looking this up. Whereas the idea of like a neuralink,
you know, ten years, twenty twenty years from now, if
we all have this CPU strapped to our foreheads that
allows the Internet and us to communicate lightning fast. Right now,
we have so many things unravel when you start thinking
about that concept of if everyone has a wearable glasses
(22:47):
vision surveillance, you know IO in the head of what's
going on, how you're gonna address it? Now you get
to a point where and again my head is it
could be shangri la. Could you imagine if everyone on
play on at Earth had that technology strapped to their
head and now you'd have immediate empathy for when you're like, oh,
(23:08):
my sneakers are don't fit me well, but you could
know that there's you know, kids around the world that
don't have shoes right, or that you know what I'm saying.
You have that inner, you have that planetary singular nation
in your head of really, what what I see being
the most important thing in my life? It's not even
close to what we should be doing.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
So it's with no trainers have the neuralink implant all
the same.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
They can't you can't sneakers, but they have these things.
Speaker 4 (23:40):
We're still working out the model Tom don't, which is.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
Which is probably going to bear out when you look
at the last year, Jeff, where do you see your
particular role of responsibility? Where do you see your success?
And where do you where have you seen the shop frustrations?
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Humans people are your greatest asset and the most difficult
ones to work to deal with. It's people that think
these technologies are hard. Technologies aren't hard.
Speaker 4 (24:14):
Technology is the easy part. People are hard.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Getting the people to adapt to ingest to understand it,
and it's it's tough because we all talk about oh, well,
you know, human capital, and it's it is. It's you're
without humans, without the workforce, right, coming up with what
they need to do. How it's not AI is not
going to do that yet. I think even even when
(24:38):
we get these cyborgs and robots and all this other stuff,
there is one horizontal layer that impacts all of this stuff.
And it's electricity. Okay, one one solar flare, one intergalactic
power outage. And then you know the kid from Back
to the Future that needs to put his self tying
shoelaces on, doesn't know what to do.
Speaker 4 (25:00):
How do I what is it?
Speaker 2 (25:01):
It's not tying my shoes for me? Right, So my
successes and my frustrations are all human based. How do
I come up with the calculus the formula to get
my people, my company, my employees, my partners, to understand
(25:22):
what I understand through my eyes that and allow them
to impact their day to day in a positive manner.
Because sometimes what I say and what I do around
this company, it's sometimes it's like agat it's negative. Right,
It's like, oh, look at chef, He's trying to get
us to use AI assist. You know, I know how
to write click on something, I know how to do
(25:43):
this it's because it's you. You have. Sometimes you have
to tie the bow, you have to wrap it perfectly,
and it's exhausting. It really, it really is sometimes to
tell your people, like, you know, I understand you've been
putting mayonnaise on the outside of the bread. You've been
putting ketchup on your top of your bun. It's better
(26:06):
inside the sandwich than on top of the sandwich. I
promise you. Well, I've been doing that. You know, I've
been putting mayonnaise on top of my burger for five
thousand years. I understand you've been doing it, But I'm
telling you, just try putting it inside the burger. Put
it inside the sandwich, and then you know, at some
point in time, ninety nine point nine percent of the
(26:27):
time I've had people go, wow, Jeff had no idea
you could put ketchup on the burger and not on
the bun. It's amazing. My hands don't get sticky. It's fantastic.
There is, by the way, always point oh one percent
that will somehow tell me, like, I like ketchup on
my fingers. I like man, I like greasy mayonnaise fingers.
It's all part of the experience.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
Chef.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
That's my experience. I like to eat my hamburgers with
greasy mayonnaise ketchup fingers, which I then say good for you.
Don't tell anybody you like to do that, please.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
Are you starting to observe any kind of division between
those in your user base who are tentative about AI,
who are hanging back, who was scared of it at
verse to it, who like their greasy fingers proverbially speaking,
and the gung ho ones some division in their acceleration
of their work some some? Is this creating kind of
(27:21):
two classes of employee presently? And is this something that's
on your radar in your role?
Speaker 1 (27:27):
It is?
Speaker 2 (27:28):
It is definitely because I'm such a global we are
such a globular company, and I'm such a globular dude.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
It is.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
First of all, there's there's a curve, no doubt that's
age related. Those of us over the age of fifty
something that aren't in it don't even know what Gemini is.
There's people that they're oh chat gipt I tried at
once to ask how to make a recipe for something?
Speaker 4 (27:52):
Right?
Speaker 2 (27:52):
You know, they saw something, they read something, and then
they tried those those I say, those people, but like
there is there is definitely a large block you know,
if you want to you know, splatter plot plotter, scat
scatter plot something like. It's just it's just age and
parts of the world. Now here's the two dynamics I see.
One is parts of the world. Parts of the world
(28:14):
that aren't actually allowed yet to use these technologies or
the Great Firewall of China they're still using trying to
use deep seek and they're not supposed to. Or there's
like there's all these different little things that say, well,
some people can, but they shouldn't be. Then there's people
that shouldn't be and they are. Then there's the people
that are in like mostly North America because of US
(28:34):
South America too. It's it's an open gate. Knock yourself out.
People under the age of forty. Yeah, people under the
age of forty or are really good at it. I
met a guy that works for a very very large
analyst company that you guys are familiar with. Said to me,
(28:56):
he's twenty six twenty seven years old, senior analyst at
this company, and he was walking me through how he
uses copilot because we were starting to get copile. I
was like, hey, walk me through with you. How do
you use it? It blew me away. He was like, Jeff,
I have it map out all of my prospective clients.
I have all of my qbrs done this way, all
(29:16):
of my data points pull in, I have reminders, said,
I was like, blown away. This guy's entire workflow using
co pilot is what I know. Some account managers spend
weeks and months on gathering and going old school gorilla
marketing and stuff like that. And he was like, every morning,
(29:36):
and I've seen this with people that have Gemini Ultra.
Every morning, this guy gets a debriefing of you know,
Jeff Wright did podcast. Oh, these three people on LinkedIn
did this. Oh, here's the new Like, here's your work stuff,
here's it gives you. Like this morning briefing that, by
the way, blends work and personal life at dentist appointment
(29:58):
at two, pick up stuff at Walmart three, you know,
this afternoon presentation for these people, Tim and Tom m
Catherine like we all had these people ping us on
LinkedIn about these things. I was like, oh my goodness.
And this guy was he's twenty six, twenty seven, and
he said, Jeff, you don't do that. Jeff, you don't
do that. He's like, Jeff, you don't do that. He's like,
(30:19):
he's like, what are you old school? And I was like,
I'm just I'm just overschooled. I don't know, like I
don't even know where to kind of focus. Sometimes that's
where the that's where I see people, people under the
age of thirty five. I mean, here, I'll give you
a great data point. We're seeing like people that start
with the company that are under the age of thirty five,
(30:41):
if you don't give them the proper technology stack, they
leave in three to six months. They leave your company, right,
And what I thought was going to be give me
a MacBook and all the pretty stuff. People under the
age of thirty are like, dude, where's my chromebook? Just
give me a chromebook and my browser tabs and that.
I was so shocked when I started hearing like okay
(31:02):
as an exit interview, you know, was your technology stack
part of the reason why you left? And the idea
of like I just I want my chromebook, I said. Kids,
people in grade school, chrome os, Google docs, g suite,
high school Google docs, g suite, chromebook, colleges chromebooks. Some
of the more ones. Of course, you get your MacBook
as kind of byod Our whole whole education system has
(31:26):
been raised on Google and g suite. Why are we shocked?
Why are we shocked that now we're like, Oh, here's
your here's your old farty Windows eleven laptop. Here's here's
your durface pro like the surface knockoff from Dell. Here
you go, and here's the flip oh. And by the way,
it runs Windows And why, I mean, one of the
(31:47):
things I hear all the time? What, Jeff, Why why
do I get this pop up all the time to
reboot my machine? And I gotta reboot this, and I
gotta close out my stuff, and I gotta save my stuff.
Why do we have to save stuff? If I was
working in the browser, it just saves my chromebook, it
would explode and I would log in from my tablet
or I would just reboot and it would be right
back to where I was working, right. And they're like, yet, like,
(32:11):
why don't we have chromebooks here? And I'm like, I
don't know. We have a few, we have a couple.
We didn't know the demand was there. People in their
twenties are like, give me Google and leave me alone.
I want to get my work done, do my job
as best as I can so I can stop being
here and go do what I really love or go
do something else. And no offense to people that love working.
(32:35):
I think people people sometimes take they take what I
say the wrong way around, you know, people getting to
do whatever they want. Yes, we have people that are
workaholics that are truly passionate about their jobs and they
love being at work and they love being around the
people that they work with. Totally get it. For the
other ninety nine percent of the civilization that we have
that don't want to actually do that, or they do
(32:56):
it because they're kind of passionate, but they'd rather be
playing video games, golfing, you know, racing cars, whatever it
is that truly like invigorates you. Okay, those are the
people that when you give them these windows laptops, especially
in large companies like mine, they're just the crusty. I
(33:19):
made a comment to one of our colleagues once about
the oh, I think it was like the salad dressing rating,
the sd R or SD because sometimes people will get
laptops and they're supposed to be cleaned off and you're
your new employee, and there's like half a you know,
half a half an Italian sub like and some vinegar
on the keyboard. Like, these are the experiences we don't
(33:41):
want to give people. And if we're not, I say,
we if we're not watching the road with the way
these hardware stacks and technology stacks are coming Windows and
these Windows PCs. You know, we saw it this week
Google was going this way and Microsoft was starting to
go this way. Does that have to do with the
AI and their relationships with certain companies, maybe, But I
(34:05):
think the vision is you know, I think the vision
at Microsoft is, you know, Microsoft Edge forever, Microsoft Windows forever.
At some point, these guys have got to get off
this whole Windows platform. It's got the idea of having
a local OS is about as antiquated as having a
local you know, you know, what is it? What was
the next thing? Version six or whatever you guys have,
(34:27):
what was that?
Speaker 1 (34:27):
You know?
Speaker 2 (34:27):
On prep? It's gone? Yeah, six, it's gone. Is there
anybody that uses the V six still?
Speaker 4 (34:34):
There's some very rare exceptions that need to be localized.
Ye old school, yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
T Rex people from the late nineteen hundred, Jeff, they
really love.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
That V six May Yeah, that's a that's an amazing observation.
And what about what about intersections between you know, we've
traditionally in other years we've had had you on, we've
spoken kind of quite expressly about experience, and we're starting
to touch upon it more directly here. And the way
experience is evolving, any intersections with what we traditionally think
(35:05):
of as decks with AI, specifically EI, either question of
visibility shadow AI or the way people are adopting or
experiencing work through AI, it becomes your part of your
kind of vision of the currency workplace.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
Yeah, experience to me, right, experience is at the center,
and I know it's it's it's at the center of
what we all love. If you want to have a place,
or a role or a business that has a blissful
experience for every employee at your company, right, that will
(35:45):
undoubtedly correlate directly with the stock price, with the company's success,
happy people, wonderful experiences across everything. You know, Yes, we
are it focused, but like I break out of that.
(36:06):
Right to me, it's how do we get people that
have the most positive emotional reactions in a workplace that
produces a positive outcome period, Like get happy people to smile,
to laugh. I do avatars now, we have synthesia. We
have some tools now that I own that allow us
(36:26):
to do cool you know digital Jeff punchlines right. All
of my knowledge based videos, I say something stupid in them, right,
like and subscribe even though it's not like it's on SharePoint, right.
Or I'll say something like, you know, oh click here,
just kidding it's a video. Like. We have some workthroughs.
But getting people to just for me experiences, I mean,
(36:48):
it is the experience getting people to smile, to laugh,
to feel comfortable. A laugh, to me is the most
fundamental way to break down somebody's armor. We all wear
armor every day. We all wear thick kevlar to go
to work, to be the person that they expect to see.
Getting around a massive group of people, I had about
(37:09):
one hundred plus people, and an orientation like getting those
people to just take off a little bit of that armor.
You know, of course it's rated. G Jeff, it's a
very you know, dad joke. Throw out that dad joke.
Ninety percent of them will laugh. I'll get to the
rest of them one on one later, right, Get the
masses to just smile and feel good about what you're doing.
(37:30):
Get them to pay attention. You want to talk about experience.
My people ask me always something like, hey, what's one
of your core responsibilities getting people to be engaged with
what you're saying? Our attention spans with TikTok YouTube shorts,
all of this content stuff. You got my my best guesstimate.
(37:52):
Now you got about forty five seconds to deliver your message.
Thirty if it's hot, fifteen if boy it's got a
cop like you got to like go like, you know,
click here if you want free something. Okay, Oh, by
the way, you got to like reboot your computer. Whatever
you can do to keep them engaged and have almost
like I mean, we're doing like almost like a TikTok
(38:12):
reel of like digital workplace shorts. Call it right. You
know how to self service reself service password reset, you
know how to request a laptop, how to request help
from your quick thirty second videos of Jeff's avatar quick
and with a feedback loop was just good at what
(38:33):
it's band real quick thumb up, thumbs down, Right, Jeff,
we noticed that that video you did last week got
like one hundred thumbs downs. Okay, I don't need to
know why. I don't care delete, gone, explode, redo it
redone redo great. Oh we only got two thumbs downs. Okay,
that's a keeper. There's always going to be somebody that's
disappointed with me, but hey, that's just life, right, So
(38:56):
I just focus on how do I get the content
that I need to give people to ensure that the
business is successful quickly, easily and engaging. It's crazy that
we we often think like, hey, well, like, well, it's
an I thing, or here's a process, or here's a
knowledge article or here's a video. It's simpler than that
we with we we at big companies, especially right even
(39:20):
like even if you guys have like five six thousand,
five thousand employees, if tomorrow your entire company says, you know,
five hundred, you know, five people, If if your entire
company has leadership saying, hey, last week we found out
we were all going left. We need the entire population
of our employees to go right. We could send an
(39:42):
email we can do it all hands, you know, Like
do you hear and it sounds so antiquated when I
hear that, like, let's do it all hands. Everybody's got
to join the call. You've enjoined the call that no
one's going to listen to that's going to shop on
Amazon for their Christmas gifts while they're listening to you.
And maybe maybe, if you're lucky, somebody that was was
paying attention that you're friends with will call you later
(40:03):
and say, Hey, Tim, Hey Tom, did you hear what
the CFO said? Did you hear what the Did you
hear what he said?
Speaker 3 (40:08):
No?
Speaker 2 (40:08):
I was shopping online. Why would you say, were'd you
on the call? Yeah? I was on the call. I
wasn't paying attention. How do you get everybody from your
company that's going left to go right? And it's about attention.
You need their attention and you need them engaged. And
as far as I see from, I mean, it's not
my recipe. TikTok figured it out, YouTube shorts figured it out.
(40:28):
Ig figured out, like, you need to give people quick,
fast hits of what their workforce needs to be doing
to get them to go from left to right as
fast as possible.
Speaker 4 (40:40):
But there's the other intangible there is that that messaging
needs to be relevant to them. That's why the TikTok's
and the reels, the algorithms work because it feeds me
information that I'm interested in, and I think that's our
creat good go back to that creativity and the humor
and all the other things you're talking about. The human
element is finding ways to make what's in the best
(41:00):
interests of the company relevant and important and engaging to
the employee. And that all hands might not be the
way to do that anymore, right, No, we.
Speaker 3 (41:10):
We have God.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
I mean, maybe it's because I see it, but I'm
sure you guys see it too. Like I see all
hands calls. There's like, you know, three hundred people in
a large room, and it's just, you know, we need
to do better things. And then you see half everybody's
head nodding. Why people doing this?
Speaker 1 (41:27):
You know?
Speaker 2 (41:29):
And I again I zoom out, and it makes it
makes me chuckle, It makes me laugh. I just I
just stare down at this mass blob of people with
you know, and I'm like, of course, I'm like looking
at who's nodding their head and who's not, like, you know,
who looks confused? Right all? But most of it's this,
I mean, it doesn'ty, it's just it's just unnecessary constant
(41:51):
head nodding, right, just and some people go really deep, right,
really oh he's Oh, he's super nodding, so he must
be a super good employe because he's super getting it right,
he's a super getter. He's really nodding. It's a heavy nod.
Speaker 4 (42:04):
Right.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
Then you have like the people and I go like,
do they don't like? What's the what's the desired outcome?
What problem are you solving by nodding your head like that?
Nobody's really like doing anything for you. It's maybe if
it's helping out, you know, stretch your neck a little bit,
but that doesn't engage people. It puts people. And again,
my bon's hurt. I've made this comment to you guys
many times. I have all kinds of itis. My bones
(42:27):
just hurt all the time. And I see, I see
three hundred people sitting in those unbelieving, like super hard,
crunchy stackable chairs. Now, yes, some people have better bones
than me. But if you've ever sat in one of
those cafeteria style stackable chairs at a conference, and if
you're lucky, it has a little like a half inch
(42:48):
of padding, but if it doesn't, you're shifting. It's not comfortable.
Those chairs are not meant to be comfortable. They're meant
to be as as efficient as possible to pack as
many stardines in the can so that people can hear
somebody say something and then get up and leave and
get the free donuts and coffee at the back of
the room, right like, that's what it's for. So you're uncomfortable, Oh,
(43:08):
go ahead to I'm sorry, No no, no, no, no,
please go and finish. You're uncomfortable. You're putting people in
a room. It's the recipe is wrong. The recipe is incorrect.
If you think that that's going to help you engage
your employees to give them a message, the medium is
is wrong. You need to find I mean, I've seen
(43:29):
again you guys did it at your at Live again.
It was for the executive or whatever. It was like
the major D super Excelsior package or whatever. But the
room had beautiful, super comfortable couches.
Speaker 4 (43:44):
Of the leadership circles.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
There was I sat down again. I wasn't sitting at
one of those tables. I sat down and I said,
I said, I said, what is this?
Speaker 1 (43:51):
What is this?
Speaker 2 (43:52):
What is this wizardry you guys are doing now? You're
making people comfortable and me and the dude from North
Grumman and like the cc DO or c IDO, like
a lot of the captains of industry. I'm not a
captain of industry, but like I mean I was. I
sat down with some of these guys and just started
riffing in this very comfortable couch infused air with lots
of pillows and conversations and good stuff happened. So if
(44:17):
good stuff happens for me on a couch like that,
like everybody like fill the room with couches.
Speaker 4 (44:22):
It's a metaphor for the show. Tom. You know, we
got a virtual couch. Hopefully people feel comfortable here. We
had great conversation.
Speaker 3 (44:29):
I was going to say, just a few seconds later
security he realized he'd made it int you in they
had call. He was out, But for a few seconds
he tasted that level of executive.
Speaker 2 (44:42):
No, you guys talk about experience. The woman's woman's name,
I want to give her like a shout out. I
think it was.
Speaker 3 (44:49):
No, no, no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
Was it?
Speaker 2 (44:52):
If it was Stacy, then kudos to Stacy. I walked
into that room and there was there was plants. You
guys had a lot of live plans, a lot of greenery,
a lot of like little shrubs, here and there. The
room felt very comfortable. And I told her, I said, hey,
I said, this is amazing. She goes, yeah, I did this.
I planned this, like we plan this. I said, what
a wonderful experience. And she looked at me. She was like,
(45:15):
you know, she's like thank you, Like nobody ever, you know,
And I felt bad. Nobody ever said like how horrible?
Like what a beautiful comfy couch. Like people don't often
talk about plants. Plants in a room. Really, it's alive,
it's green, it's breathing your exhales, right, it's nice. And
(45:35):
I told her, I said, this is unbelievably comfortable and wonderful.
And she was like, yeah, we actually got these couches
like flown in or whatever. She was like telling me
the whole how they do it and how they get
all that. I'm like, wow, Like, you guys really must
be serious about your experience for the super commodore Elite
excelsor your package. For those of us that can sneak
in and get past security.
Speaker 3 (45:57):
Well, shout out to Stacy Hinkley. Whether it was day
so you spoke to an this was the executives. He
was from Montana, was a big part of her vision.
And I'm sure we'll be great glad to hear this
resounding it was of it from you, Jeff. And look,
before before we let you go, we are coming to
the end of our of our time. It's been a
(46:19):
wonderful installment of your of your annual or biannual appearance
with us. But you look, I think one of the
things that kind of impresses itself upon me. As we
can colup a conversation, you started out saying, like, forget
the year. You know, we're we're we're compressing years into months,
weeks into days, you know, And and I've really felt
that I think you're absolutely right. And then we talk
(46:40):
about now the experience of time right like you're you're
at it, you're at an all hands for an hour.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
You know.
Speaker 3 (46:46):
And and it's like we're being reconstituted in terms of
what we're comfortable with, in terms of what makes us comfortable,
in terms of where we want to be, in terms
of how we want to receive information. Everything is changing,
and maybe therefore it becomes its redundant, Jeff, to ask
you for your prediction about twenty twenty six, and to
ask you what you're anticipating to ask you what it is.
(47:08):
We're not focusing on what we should be. Let's not
say for twenty twenty six, Let's say for Q one
next year.
Speaker 2 (47:14):
And to end with that, Jeff, I see a huge
adoption and shift in people that never thought Google would
ever be an option for them. Enterprise wide small companies.
We all talked about, you know, oh, I have one
hundred employees, five und employees, one thousand employees. Oh, we
have MacBooks in g suite. It's always been a good
recipe for small companies. It's easy, it's scalable. You just
(47:36):
sat up. I mean, g Suite's pretty simple. Google Enterprise
Q one next year. There's a lot of people that
contracts for Microsoft. The renewals are usually end of this
year beginning of next year, right because that's the end
of the fiscal or. I don't even know what finance
with fiscal Chisckolls quarter one Q one, but most contracts
are going to come up in March right into April.
(47:57):
I feel like there's going to be a fistfight. It's
going to be an it's gonna be a street fight.
There's gonna be a street fight. It's enough people that
are gonna start adopting Gemini and g suite or Google
Workforce Enterprise, and it's it's it's gonna be good. I
think there's gonna be a hybrid, maybe old guard those
of us that are still Windows die hard people that
(48:19):
are gonna say that Windows is secure and entra and
you know we all need you know, domain controllers and
all the other bologni. But there's gonna be your small
medium businesses that were Windows shops that I think are
gonna be Google curious, right, g Suite curious. They're gonna
start saying like, hey, our Google guy said that they
could give us one hundred seats, get a good admin,
(48:41):
get a good c SAM, set them up with the accounts,
and let's see if we can work this way. Of course,
there's gonna be those diehards that love Excel. That's the
one break. That's the one thing that breaks is if
you have one thousand billion Excel Excel people, they love
their Excel and you know, Google Sheets just doesn't do
it for them. But for those of for the small
(49:03):
medium businesses that are are able to do it, I
feel like there is going to be a wave of
capital that goes towards Google this year. Once that cats out,
the bag, people are gonna see how number one, how
easy it is, and number two the pressure on CPUs
and GPUs next year. Hardware in general, all of these,
(49:23):
all of our are buying up chips and silicon and
rare earth like. All of it's going to these massive
hyperscalers and infrastructure, which is going to lead to laptops. Lenovo, HP, Dell,
all the other companies that we get enterprise from. They're
going to go up tremendously seven eight hundred nine dollars
for a corporate, regular enterprise laptop. Guess what's half the
(49:45):
price a Chromebook. So even if it's a wash, even
if the laptops and the windows is going to be
it's gonna be like, even if it's like a huge discount,
you're depreciated assets your ebeda if you want to do
the that ebademath is going to be total cost ownership
with Google's products and platforms is going to be better
(50:07):
for your company. That's my prediction.
Speaker 3 (50:10):
It's an excellent fun prediction. Or we can at least
say we're going to test you on it. Hey, if
you know one, if you guess you can drop a
prediction on the plate and then vanish. You know we're
going to have you back to account for the accuracy
of this. And look, I don't know if I can't
quite remember when this is scheduled for. If it's not
the last show of the year, it's almost the last
(50:31):
show of the years. So don't only want to say
goodbye to you, Jeff and and thank you for coming,
but thanks to the listeners for tuning in throughout twenty
twenty five. Have a have a wonderful festive season, have
a happy new year, and we'll be back raring to
go in January and look forward to seeing you all again,
so to speak. Then, Jeffrey, Tim, Catherine, everybody, thank you
(50:55):
so much, Thank you just wonderful time. Thanks Jeff.
Speaker 1 (51:01):
To make sure that you never miss an episode, subscribe
to the show in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite
podcast player, and if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, make
sure to leave a rating of the show. Just tap
the number of stars you think the podcast deserves. If
you'd like to learn more about how next Think can
help me improve your digital employee experience, head over to
next think dot com. Thank you so much for listening
(51:23):
until next time
Welcome it, change Makers to the Deck Show with Tim
Flower and Tom McGraw.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Let's get into it.
Speaker 3 (00:09):
Hello, change makers, it's fat time of year again. It's
fat time of year again. It's the end of the year.
And you know, we all have our traditions. We all
have our traditions and our families and our friendship groups
and our offices. And if you're a regular listener to
the Deck Show, you know that nothing flags, but it's
the festive season. Then a special appearance from our favorite guest,
(00:33):
our most returned guest, is that EVERTB. I can use
none other than the wonderful Jeffrey right from wander Lai's
here to help us reflect upon the year that was
twenty twenty five. Jeff, how are you magical?
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Living the dream, dreaming the live?
Speaker 4 (00:48):
Magical?
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Are you?
Speaker 3 (00:50):
I should have also I should also reveal that, you know,
look for the other fifty something episodes we release as
a podcast across the year. You know, lot of effort
and preparation goes into it. But Jeff, when it comes
to getting you on zero zero other, we reached out team,
we book you in and then we just we just
(01:11):
fly by the seat of our pants. So to that end,
you know, give us something to get started on. Jeff,
how how was twenty twenty five for you? More generally it.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Was a roller coaster. But mostly it's it's it's the it,
the it stuff is just you guys. I see you guys,
we guys, we us us IT folks, the same people
around this time of year that you know, all of
our friends and family bring us all of their technology
from the past decade and ask us why it doesn't work? Right,
That is the time of year. You know, the is
(01:43):
my iPad from twenty ten not work anymore? Jeff, you're
in it. You can fix that. Or hey, Jeff, my
toaster's giving me this weird error, or the CA cup
maker's got this weird error on it. You're in it.
You know how to fix that, right, Like that is
the curse and the blessing that we all as IT
professionals have to deal with. Right, But you guys know
about Google, You guys know about open Ai, chat, write
(02:06):
co pilot. That was this year was the year that
things are like breaking my reality when it comes to
what comes next, right, and it's not happening, Like you say,
what how is your year? It's like years aren't years anymore.
It's like months and weeks. How is your month? What
(02:28):
happened this month? What happened this week? Right? I mean
just just last week, Google announced that Gemini, which we're
all familiar with, Gemini workspace and all the Gemini cool stuff,
is going to be able to use agents to track
travel and pricing and all of these things during the
(02:49):
holiday season. What happened. Priceline stock tanked, Expedia like all
of these travel companies had a reaction to this, and
I was like, wow, I'm like, let me, like, you know,
anytime there's a big news announcement like that, I try
to like peel it back a little bit and lo
and behold. This holiday season, for those of us that
(03:10):
understand this technology and know how to use it, it's
going to be freaking insane and worrisome at the same time.
If you guys don't use Chrome, the Chrome browser or
like Gemini, you can now log in and if your
you know, significant other or someone in your family wants
to have sneakers or shoes or TVs or whatever you're
trying to get them, you can now use Gemini to
(03:31):
track the lowest price, the trending price like the stock market.
So now you can say, hey, I want to have
these seventeen items, add them to your cart, use Gemini
or like what used to be frugal back in the day,
can now show you exactly when the right time is
to buy. So let's say it's Black Friday or maybe not,
(03:51):
and you can use your credit card or your PayPal
or your Apple pay or Venmo to trigger the purchase
at the time that it believes it's the lowest price.
Now I've already done it. It's already working phenomenally well.
And now the argument is, I think in my head,
companies are going to have a real difficult time with margins. Yeah,
(04:12):
because if you're going to start using these technologies to
track the absolute best price, companies are going to start
struggling to say what price should we charge?
Speaker 4 (04:22):
Well, not only that, but you're no longer competing on
the intangibles, right the customer service, the company value, the
return policy, whatever it might be. If you're only competing
on price, it's a race to the bottom.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
And this is going to really push that. It's going
to force that hand. I mean, I would love to
see it a different way, but open Ai did a
open AI and Walmart signed a deal a couple of
weeks ago. If you guys don't know, just type in
you know, Walmart Open Ai and they're going to try
having like Rufus two point zero, which Rufus is the
(04:55):
AWS Amazon shopping agent. Open A is now going to
have you in Walmart to be able to pay for
or check for or do whatever you want. I don't
see it being I don't know who knows. I haven't
used it yet. I haven't seen it yet. They've only
done betas in some places. So I'm going to be
(05:15):
you know, I'm going to be waiting to see whether
it's successful and it gets traction or if it's another Rufus,
because most people I know compare it to Rufus, and
I have colleagues and friends that are at Amazon. Rufus
is kind of you know, like raise your hand if
you've used Rufus, you know, not many people log into
(05:36):
Amazon and ask Rufus to start shopping for them. Right,
you already know what you want if you're if you're
shopping on Amazon, there's it. They've already kind of done
the job for you.
Speaker 4 (05:46):
Do you think that at every big AI headline, every
big breakthrough that comes out, and like you said, it's
it's accelerating monthly, weekly, daily. They're all initially seen as
the death of something, right, the death of and we're
a big fans of the death of the help desk. Right,
AI is going to get us to a place where
we don't need the help desk. I've heard and we
can talk maybe a little bit about the death of
(06:08):
the laptop class, that digital workers are going to replace
human workers on all of our laptops. It's always the
extreme view. Is this the death of Amazon, the whole
Google Gemini shopping thing or is it? Is it not
as not as extreme?
Speaker 2 (06:23):
I think it's going to help you shop at Amazon.
I think if anything, Gemini is going to compliment these
shopping sites because it's going to ingest the best press.
I already tried, like on Gemini asking for like, hey
what's the best this was about that. A lot of
the times it does redirect links to Amazon, right, so
it could actually increase traffic. I mean I would I'd
love to know what the data is on that, but
(06:43):
I'm sure it's going to increase traffic. My like, that's
like only one that's only one piece of it. You
know Google. The next part of that story within Google
is the brow is the Chrome browser, right, and companies
like Island dot Io company like again Perplexity tried to
buy out Chrome, Jira, the Lassian company, bought out the
(07:06):
browser company, all of these. You know of course, Copilot,
you know, Microsoft has Edge. I do see and I'm
already kind of working on do see disruption with the
ways of working with just the browser. And what's crazy
to me is Google did this years ago, right, like
years ago, a chromebook, right, you could get a Chromebook,
(07:28):
the most maxed out chromebook, and with hardware getting more expensive,
you can get the most maxed out hardware in a
Chromebook for like three hundred bucks maxed out right, a
Lodovo Adele, pick your flavor and everything works in the browser.
It's hi, I have Chrome, I have Google Docs, I
have whatever it is workspace there it is g Suite.
Now there's this idea of like, hey, if we have agents, right,
(07:51):
which they do in Gemini now and now Copilot's trying
it and some other companies are trying it. Those agents.
If you guys like take a look at this. It
is one of the coolest It just makes sense. Of
you are the guy that comes to work or girl
or person that comes to work, and you have service. Now,
you have Jira, you have Outlook, dot Com, you have Gmail,
(08:14):
you have a Gemini, so you have five tabs. Now
again you can max out your tabs. You have five
tabs open. The Gemini agent can now work across those
tabs with your access. So your elevated rights across those
tabs in each one of those platforms, now can be
your mini worker to say something like, hey, pull the
(08:35):
table from service now and tell me what's the highest
CI impact. Blah blah blah. Create tabs in Jira reflecting
the backlog, to do DevOps to fix those issues, and
draft an email to my leadership telling them these are
the action items. This is the problem statement, this is
the preferred way forward, here's the desired outcome. And then
(08:56):
I go from.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
You're the orchestrator of work. You're not doing the work anymore.
You're the orchestration or the intelligence behind what work has
to happen, and you're instructing it on what to go
do and it goes and does it.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Which for guys, I said, guys like me, there are
a lot of people that the creativity in their brains
is so explosive. Sometimes I don't even know where to
go when I when I can actually ask Gemini how
to create a website, which, by the way, it does
it for you now, Like if you guys haven't tried
like the new like Gemini three, you can say create
(09:28):
me an iOS game like and it does it right there, right,
create a website, create an app like, create this, create
create a business model, create a business plan. Right, it
does it for you. So for those of us that
are hyper you know, hyper creative, but have a hard
(09:48):
time sometimes with the you know the io that oh
is going to be supercharged turbocharged.
Speaker 4 (09:55):
Where I get a lot of benefit, Jeff is I
have that create of spark as well, and I've got
this great idea, but I can't completely articulate it or
I feel like I'm missing something. I need that collaborative
partner to say what am I missing? It gives it
to you. It's amazing that the way that it can
(10:15):
uh play off of your creative ideas and and feed
you more to to then allow you to take it
to the next level. I think it's just it's amazing.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
It's it's again it's the it's the Matrix or mad Max,
whichever way we come out. But it's going to be
where we have. There's going to be a shift in
an op X period, right the SaaS model is now
going to be, you know, the my dream state. My
dream state is let's get rid of Windows, Like I
want to tell Microsoft, like, from the bottom of my heart,
(10:46):
let's get like enough with the wind. We've been patching
and chasing cvs on Windows forever. And then you talk
to these people that do these the browser based agent
based island, like that's all you like. Oh I don't
like I like to install printer drivers on my PC.
Come on, we fit, that's not a problem anymore. Like
(11:07):
people are always like, oh, well, I like to have
like physical Like again, I want to have Adobe Acrobat
installed on my PC. Go to acrobat dot com. All
the new features are there already, by the way, Like, oh,
you want agents, you want AI assist, you want it's
in the browser. Yeah, but I like to have the
browser like on my computer. You know, smack. I like
to smack the stuff I like to, you know, I
(11:27):
like to I like to run updates ninety five thousand
times a day and then and then again as soon
as I update a package, as soon as I update anything,
it's it's vulnerable again, or it's broken, or it doesn't
work across the business. You know what works across the
business the Internet a browser BW DOW like my stuff
dot com, mywork dot.
Speaker 4 (11:46):
Com, until it goes down, until it's collapsing under its
own weight. That's the other big headline recently is the
end of the world is coming because the Internet is
going to collapse.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Well Amazon had that big thing and that was more about,
you know, we all hyper automate. We all see these
opportunities to automate orchestrate AI this, AI that, But dude,
you need you need some biological things.
Speaker 4 (12:10):
Until it takes a break, right they say, AI is
twenty four to seven until it decides to take a
cigarette break, and it's one day it's not there.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Yeah, I mean I that's why I think we all
need to have local internet. Just spin up your own
cloud at the come on Internet they got so yeah, yeah,
that's right. We need to decentralize the Internet, guys. Blockchain, blockchain,
your microwave, blockchain, your you know, your home.
Speaker 4 (12:35):
You got this, Yeah, it turn the lights on and
off in my smart house if the if the internet's down,
I know, I.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
Mean I I love analog things. It is one of
the most empowering things to be able to shift my car.
See dials like you put an album on.
Speaker 4 (12:51):
Put an album on.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Dude, see vinyl spin like if you if those of
you kids watching here listening to this show, know what
a record is. Although vinyl and CDs I saw. I
was in the mall there was a vinyl and CD
store like Vintage, and I was like of records like
seventeen thousand dollars in the CD is You know.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
Jeff, how when you look at your user base at
wonder these how's it adapting and how its demands evolving
as AI starts to permeate its work patterns, and how
much perspective and visibility? Do you have a mischief?
Speaker 2 (13:27):
A lot of the AI platform, a lot of the
Jenai stuff sits in my camp. So what I would
say is, there's it's I don't believe any business other
than other than maybe banks, financial, there's insurance companies, there
are some company there are some businesses that are fundamentally
set set up and you know the controls and the
(13:48):
GRC stuff is pretty much bulletproof, err because it has.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
To be right.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Bank of America can't say, hey, we're going to try
out this new AI product without beating it like every
way possible to ensure that. And even then, right, it's
got to have some really tight gates on it. With
US larger, a lot of companies, even IT companies and
technology companies that I'm cool with some colleagues in those spaces.
(14:15):
It's it's it's always comes down to security and privacy. Right,
We're all, we're global, all of us, most of us GDPR,
German Works Councils, councils around the world, many of them
are very very careful around AI. You know, we all
understand it, it can help you. We all understand that it
(14:36):
has it's it's its place, but you know, it really
is the who wants it and can get it. And
then those of us that are in this place where yeah,
it could, it could revolutionize the way you work in
your job. I get that all the time.
Speaker 4 (14:51):
I can't think of a technology where past technology that
we've brought into the enterprise where we weren't trying to
solve a specific problem. AI is in search of a
problem to solve. Still, you can go experiment with AI.
You can explore it. You the shadow AI is everywhere, right,
You've got there's so much accessibility, but it's very difficult
(15:15):
to pin down what problem we're trying to solve.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Yeah, because it's mimicking the human mind. Right, we're digital
twins with like some extra seasoning on top. It's it's
how do you you the human have to have the
problem statement well defined before you unleash it. If you don't,
it's it's just like you know, it's just like your
(15:40):
attic or your basement, it's just crowded with stuff and
you don't know where to begin. You don't know where
to start. You don't even you know, you don't even
know how the things can can plug in together? Right
you can. What's interesting is you can ask it like, hey,
what are some of the top what's the top five
top ten problems you're platform can solve? More often than not,
(16:03):
it's automation or orchestration. It's kind of it's it's machine learning.
And then you can again, the gen AI piece of
it is let it, let it think for you.
Speaker 4 (16:13):
So Jeff, let me ask you this with the with
AI's reputation now as a consumption, a consumption monster of energy,
of water, for cooling, of real estate, for data centers,
of tens of billions of dollars in investment without the
return revenue back on that investment. It does it fix itself?
(16:35):
Or or does it? Is this a true technology bubble
that's gonna retrace its steps.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
There's some froth for sure around all of the AI stuff.
I believe does it fix itself? You know there's the
Tokolac or Tokamac reactor. If you guys don't know about
this hawk, some Harvard people got an MIT people got
a whole of the fusion reactor technology. They were able
(17:03):
to do net positive energy and over a certain amount
of time it's going to be I believe that these
models will figure out a lot of cool stuff, curing
certain cancers, finding like you know, cellular degradation, things like.
There's gonna be a tremendous amount of cool stuff. Google's
Deep Mind released a whole mapping of They have a
(17:24):
good case for eliminating pancreatic cancer. Right. These technologies are
gonna have a tremendous amount of positive impact. I also
believe though there's gonna be you know, just like humans,
there's gonna be good humans and bad humans, good people,
bad people, good use cases and bad use cases. Politically,
(17:45):
if we you know, I do these thought exercises sometimes
just as I'm daydreaming. If we had free energy tomorrow,
if these models were able to come up with a
fusion reactor sustainable to create free energy, that the only
outcome would be oxygen right or water H two O
would be the exhaust let's call it right the waste.
(18:06):
It would be net positive. Would we unleash it on
the world? Or would Mobile and Exon and I hate
to do the whole like bad guy good but it's
more about It's not about like good guys or bad guys.
It's about exon. Mobile might say something like, we got
we got to like adopt this technology because someone's gonna
have to fix it, repair it. There's gonna be engineers,
there's going to be a business model that's that that's
(18:28):
around these these reactors and stuff. But now, if you
have one hundred thousand employees around the world that are
pumping oil, they're drilling, they're doing it, how do you retool?
How do you upskill your entire workforce to say, you
used to used to drill oil. Yeah, now you're going
to repair nuclear reactors.
Speaker 4 (18:44):
Well, our businesses around the world are dealing with that now, right,
That's the AI problem, AI adoption and AI usage, governance, security,
using it for good versus bad bad actors. Good, that's
what we're dealing with now, tom.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
So, Yeah, absolutely, and talk to us, Jeff, about what
that's been like on the front line of that process
in your digital workplace. Because I always think of you
as as as an amazing tech evangelist. But I wonder
if I wonder if, like this year, the evangelist role
has kind of felt outmoded. You know, we've gone from
(19:16):
having to encourage technology usage to having a completely different
relationship to it, to what monitoring it to getting out
of its way, to trying to figure out what it's
role is in this specific explosion.
Speaker 4 (19:28):
Death of the evangelist.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Yeah, Now, I'm a creative storyteller. I see a lot
of roles opening up with in this creative storyteller. It's
not evangelist. It's interesting the way they have it. It's
but the it's the idea of open AI Gemini copilot. Right,
at some point in time, all of these llms are
going to ingest every data point possible. Right, So, now imagine.
Speaker 4 (19:53):
Wondering except the ones that are in textbooks and libraries
that aren't digitized. There's so much knowledge and data out
there that they don't have access to. I can't read
a book.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Who reads?
Speaker 4 (20:01):
Come on, nobody reads anymore?
Speaker 2 (20:03):
Who reads any words?
Speaker 4 (20:04):
What are you talking?
Speaker 2 (20:05):
What do you like? This is when you like took
your t Rex to work? You know, is this like
in the late nineteen hundreds? Are you talking about it?
Speaker 3 (20:10):
So it's just scanning romantic novels into it?
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Yeah, I mean my role has has become or or
so I see it as I am plugged into every
possible data point I can find in these spaces, right,
So learning about the whole agentic. If I hear agentic,
(20:35):
I know, it's a bud, it's it's buzzy, it's agentic.
Everything's AGENTIC. I get. You know, we're gonna have AGI
in the next three to five years. Okay, Okay. What
I have found in the past, you know, twenty years
of twenty five years of it is What you think
technology is going to do is very actually will not
be it? Right every time, I'm like you know what.
(20:58):
This is it death of the death of the service desk.
A one is gonna go away. This is the one
right ten years ago. This is it. It's gonna you know,
next thing's gonna automate all these things. We're gonna have
all this go Yeah. No, it changed it, but it
didn't happen the way I thought it was. Right. We
try to like focus on these things where it's like,
you know, you know, we're gonna have robots and cyborgs
(21:19):
and Tesla bots and all this other stuff that's gonna happen. Okay,
will it be what you think? It is? Unlikely? Do
I feel it's my duty though, to ingest all of
these all of these news articles and all of these
vibes on Reddit and all these people that are kind
of talking about these different probable technologies that are going
to change things. Yes, And then I have my own
(21:41):
community that I talked to at my company to say,
did you know you know? And I hate to be
like not only really hold up a sign, but it's like,
did you know that browsers are going to start changing
the way that we don't realize? Right, it's gonna start
changing the way you work, Like it's going to be
browser based. Do you understand that you're not going to
be able to do these things? Or this digital twins
(22:02):
and the oculus Wearables I'd like to say three to
five years. Wearables are going to be one of those
things that it's gonna catch on the iPhone at some
point in time, whether it's your because of your carpal
tunnel or the IO is so slow, right, That's what
really keeps people down to it throttles them. Is that
IO of like, all right, I'm looking on my phone,
(22:23):
I'm looking this up. Whereas the idea of like a neuralink,
you know, ten years, twenty twenty years from now, if
we all have this CPU strapped to our foreheads that
allows the Internet and us to communicate lightning fast. Right now,
we have so many things unravel when you start thinking
about that concept of if everyone has a wearable glasses
(22:47):
vision surveillance, you know IO in the head of what's
going on, how you're gonna address it? Now you get
to a point where and again my head is it
could be shangri la. Could you imagine if everyone on
play on at Earth had that technology strapped to their
head and now you'd have immediate empathy for when you're like, oh,
(23:08):
my sneakers are don't fit me well, but you could
know that there's you know, kids around the world that
don't have shoes right, or that you know what I'm saying.
You have that inner, you have that planetary singular nation
in your head of really, what what I see being
the most important thing in my life? It's not even
close to what we should be doing.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
So it's with no trainers have the neuralink implant all
the same.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
They can't you can't sneakers, but they have these things.
Speaker 4 (23:40):
We're still working out the model Tom don't, which is.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
Which is probably going to bear out when you look
at the last year, Jeff, where do you see your
particular role of responsibility? Where do you see your success?
And where do you where have you seen the shop frustrations?
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Humans people are your greatest asset and the most difficult
ones to work to deal with. It's people that think
these technologies are hard. Technologies aren't hard.
Speaker 4 (24:14):
Technology is the easy part. People are hard.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Getting the people to adapt to ingest to understand it,
and it's it's tough because we all talk about oh, well,
you know, human capital, and it's it is. It's you're
without humans, without the workforce, right, coming up with what
they need to do. How it's not AI is not
going to do that yet. I think even even when
(24:38):
we get these cyborgs and robots and all this other stuff,
there is one horizontal layer that impacts all of this stuff.
And it's electricity. Okay, one one solar flare, one intergalactic
power outage. And then you know the kid from Back
to the Future that needs to put his self tying
shoelaces on, doesn't know what to do.
Speaker 4 (25:00):
How do I what is it?
Speaker 2 (25:01):
It's not tying my shoes for me? Right, So my
successes and my frustrations are all human based. How do
I come up with the calculus the formula to get
my people, my company, my employees, my partners, to understand
(25:22):
what I understand through my eyes that and allow them
to impact their day to day in a positive manner.
Because sometimes what I say and what I do around
this company, it's sometimes it's like agat it's negative. Right,
It's like, oh, look at chef, He's trying to get
us to use AI assist. You know, I know how
to write click on something, I know how to do
(25:43):
this it's because it's you. You have. Sometimes you have
to tie the bow, you have to wrap it perfectly,
and it's exhausting. It really, it really is sometimes to
tell your people, like, you know, I understand you've been
putting mayonnaise on the outside of the bread. You've been
putting ketchup on your top of your bun. It's better
(26:06):
inside the sandwich than on top of the sandwich. I
promise you. Well, I've been doing that. You know, I've
been putting mayonnaise on top of my burger for five
thousand years. I understand you've been doing it, But I'm
telling you, just try putting it inside the burger. Put
it inside the sandwich, and then you know, at some
point in time, ninety nine point nine percent of the
(26:27):
time I've had people go, wow, Jeff had no idea
you could put ketchup on the burger and not on
the bun. It's amazing. My hands don't get sticky. It's fantastic.
There is, by the way, always point oh one percent
that will somehow tell me, like, I like ketchup on
my fingers. I like man, I like greasy mayonnaise fingers.
It's all part of the experience.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
Chef.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
That's my experience. I like to eat my hamburgers with
greasy mayonnaise ketchup fingers, which I then say good for you.
Don't tell anybody you like to do that, please.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
Are you starting to observe any kind of division between
those in your user base who are tentative about AI,
who are hanging back, who was scared of it at
verse to it, who like their greasy fingers proverbially speaking,
and the gung ho ones some division in their acceleration
of their work some some? Is this creating kind of
(27:21):
two classes of employee presently? And is this something that's
on your radar in your role?
Speaker 1 (27:27):
It is?
Speaker 2 (27:28):
It is definitely because I'm such a global we are
such a globular company, and I'm such a globular dude.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
It is.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
First of all, there's there's a curve, no doubt that's
age related. Those of us over the age of fifty
something that aren't in it don't even know what Gemini is.
There's people that they're oh chat gipt I tried at
once to ask how to make a recipe for something?
Speaker 4 (27:52):
Right?
Speaker 2 (27:52):
You know, they saw something, they read something, and then
they tried those those I say, those people, but like
there is there is definitely a large block you know,
if you want to you know, splatter plot plotter, scat
scatter plot something like. It's just it's just age and
parts of the world. Now here's the two dynamics I see.
One is parts of the world. Parts of the world
(28:14):
that aren't actually allowed yet to use these technologies or
the Great Firewall of China they're still using trying to
use deep seek and they're not supposed to. Or there's
like there's all these different little things that say, well,
some people can, but they shouldn't be. Then there's people
that shouldn't be and they are. Then there's the people
that are in like mostly North America because of US
(28:34):
South America too. It's it's an open gate. Knock yourself out.
People under the age of forty. Yeah, people under the
age of forty or are really good at it. I
met a guy that works for a very very large
analyst company that you guys are familiar with. Said to me,
(28:56):
he's twenty six twenty seven years old, senior analyst at
this company, and he was walking me through how he
uses copilot because we were starting to get copile. I
was like, hey, walk me through with you. How do
you use it? It blew me away. He was like, Jeff,
I have it map out all of my prospective clients.
I have all of my qbrs done this way, all
(29:16):
of my data points pull in, I have reminders, said,
I was like, blown away. This guy's entire workflow using
co pilot is what I know. Some account managers spend
weeks and months on gathering and going old school gorilla
marketing and stuff like that. And he was like, every morning,
(29:36):
and I've seen this with people that have Gemini Ultra.
Every morning, this guy gets a debriefing of you know,
Jeff Wright did podcast. Oh, these three people on LinkedIn
did this. Oh, here's the new Like, here's your work stuff,
here's it gives you. Like this morning briefing that, by
the way, blends work and personal life at dentist appointment
(29:58):
at two, pick up stuff at Walmart three, you know,
this afternoon presentation for these people, Tim and Tom m
Catherine like we all had these people ping us on
LinkedIn about these things. I was like, oh my goodness.
And this guy was he's twenty six, twenty seven, and
he said, Jeff, you don't do that. Jeff, you don't
do that. He's like, Jeff, you don't do that. He's like,
(30:19):
he's like, what are you old school? And I was like,
I'm just I'm just overschooled. I don't know, like I
don't even know where to kind of focus. Sometimes that's
where the that's where I see people, people under the
age of thirty five. I mean, here, I'll give you
a great data point. We're seeing like people that start
with the company that are under the age of thirty five,
(30:41):
if you don't give them the proper technology stack, they
leave in three to six months. They leave your company, right,
And what I thought was going to be give me
a MacBook and all the pretty stuff. People under the
age of thirty are like, dude, where's my chromebook? Just
give me a chromebook and my browser tabs and that.
I was so shocked when I started hearing like okay
(31:02):
as an exit interview, you know, was your technology stack
part of the reason why you left? And the idea
of like I just I want my chromebook, I said. Kids,
people in grade school, chrome os, Google docs, g suite,
high school Google docs, g suite, chromebook, colleges chromebooks. Some
of the more ones. Of course, you get your MacBook
as kind of byod Our whole whole education system has
(31:26):
been raised on Google and g suite. Why are we shocked?
Why are we shocked that now we're like, Oh, here's
your here's your old farty Windows eleven laptop. Here's here's
your durface pro like the surface knockoff from Dell. Here
you go, and here's the flip oh. And by the way,
it runs Windows And why, I mean, one of the
(31:47):
things I hear all the time? What, Jeff, Why why
do I get this pop up all the time to
reboot my machine? And I gotta reboot this, and I
gotta close out my stuff, and I gotta save my stuff.
Why do we have to save stuff? If I was
working in the browser, it just saves my chromebook, it
would explode and I would log in from my tablet
or I would just reboot and it would be right
back to where I was working, right. And they're like, yet, like,
(32:11):
why don't we have chromebooks here? And I'm like, I
don't know. We have a few, we have a couple.
We didn't know the demand was there. People in their
twenties are like, give me Google and leave me alone.
I want to get my work done, do my job
as best as I can so I can stop being
here and go do what I really love or go
do something else. And no offense to people that love working.
(32:35):
I think people people sometimes take they take what I
say the wrong way around, you know, people getting to
do whatever they want. Yes, we have people that are
workaholics that are truly passionate about their jobs and they
love being at work and they love being around the
people that they work with. Totally get it. For the
other ninety nine percent of the civilization that we have
that don't want to actually do that, or they do
(32:56):
it because they're kind of passionate, but they'd rather be
playing video games, golfing, you know, racing cars, whatever it
is that truly like invigorates you. Okay, those are the
people that when you give them these windows laptops, especially
in large companies like mine, they're just the crusty. I
(33:19):
made a comment to one of our colleagues once about
the oh, I think it was like the salad dressing rating,
the sd R or SD because sometimes people will get
laptops and they're supposed to be cleaned off and you're
your new employee, and there's like half a you know,
half a half an Italian sub like and some vinegar
on the keyboard. Like, these are the experiences we don't
(33:41):
want to give people. And if we're not, I say,
we if we're not watching the road with the way
these hardware stacks and technology stacks are coming Windows and
these Windows PCs. You know, we saw it this week
Google was going this way and Microsoft was starting to
go this way. Does that have to do with the
AI and their relationships with certain companies, maybe, But I
(34:05):
think the vision is you know, I think the vision
at Microsoft is, you know, Microsoft Edge forever, Microsoft Windows forever.
At some point, these guys have got to get off
this whole Windows platform. It's got the idea of having
a local OS is about as antiquated as having a
local you know, you know, what is it? What was
the next thing? Version six or whatever you guys have,
(34:27):
what was that?
Speaker 1 (34:27):
You know?
Speaker 2 (34:27):
On prep? It's gone? Yeah, six, it's gone. Is there
anybody that uses the V six still?
Speaker 4 (34:34):
There's some very rare exceptions that need to be localized.
Ye old school, yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
T Rex people from the late nineteen hundred, Jeff, they
really love.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
That V six May Yeah, that's a that's an amazing observation.
And what about what about intersections between you know, we've
traditionally in other years we've had had you on, we've
spoken kind of quite expressly about experience, and we're starting
to touch upon it more directly here. And the way
experience is evolving, any intersections with what we traditionally think
(35:05):
of as decks with AI, specifically EI, either question of
visibility shadow AI or the way people are adopting or
experiencing work through AI, it becomes your part of your
kind of vision of the currency workplace.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
Yeah, experience to me, right, experience is at the center,
and I know it's it's it's at the center of
what we all love. If you want to have a place,
or a role or a business that has a blissful
experience for every employee at your company, right, that will
(35:45):
undoubtedly correlate directly with the stock price, with the company's success,
happy people, wonderful experiences across everything. You know, Yes, we
are it focused, but like I break out of that.
(36:06):
Right to me, it's how do we get people that
have the most positive emotional reactions in a workplace that
produces a positive outcome period, Like get happy people to smile,
to laugh. I do avatars now, we have synthesia. We
have some tools now that I own that allow us
(36:26):
to do cool you know digital Jeff punchlines right. All
of my knowledge based videos, I say something stupid in them, right,
like and subscribe even though it's not like it's on SharePoint, right.
Or I'll say something like, you know, oh click here,
just kidding it's a video. Like. We have some workthroughs.
But getting people to just for me experiences, I mean,
(36:48):
it is the experience getting people to smile, to laugh,
to feel comfortable. A laugh, to me is the most
fundamental way to break down somebody's armor. We all wear
armor every day. We all wear thick kevlar to go
to work, to be the person that they expect to see.
Getting around a massive group of people, I had about
(37:09):
one hundred plus people, and an orientation like getting those
people to just take off a little bit of that armor.
You know, of course it's rated. G Jeff, it's a
very you know, dad joke. Throw out that dad joke.
Ninety percent of them will laugh. I'll get to the
rest of them one on one later, right, Get the
masses to just smile and feel good about what you're doing.
(37:30):
Get them to pay attention. You want to talk about experience.
My people ask me always something like, hey, what's one
of your core responsibilities getting people to be engaged with
what you're saying? Our attention spans with TikTok YouTube shorts,
all of this content stuff. You got my my best guesstimate.
(37:52):
Now you got about forty five seconds to deliver your message.
Thirty if it's hot, fifteen if boy it's got a
cop like you got to like go like, you know,
click here if you want free something. Okay, Oh, by
the way, you got to like reboot your computer. Whatever
you can do to keep them engaged and have almost
like I mean, we're doing like almost like a TikTok
(38:12):
reel of like digital workplace shorts. Call it right. You
know how to self service reself service password reset, you
know how to request a laptop, how to request help
from your quick thirty second videos of Jeff's avatar quick
and with a feedback loop was just good at what
(38:33):
it's band real quick thumb up, thumbs down, Right, Jeff,
we noticed that that video you did last week got
like one hundred thumbs downs. Okay, I don't need to
know why. I don't care delete, gone, explode, redo it
redone redo great. Oh we only got two thumbs downs. Okay,
that's a keeper. There's always going to be somebody that's
disappointed with me, but hey, that's just life, right, So
(38:56):
I just focus on how do I get the content
that I need to give people to ensure that the
business is successful quickly, easily and engaging. It's crazy that
we we often think like, hey, well, like, well, it's
an I thing, or here's a process, or here's a
knowledge article or here's a video. It's simpler than that
we with we we at big companies, especially right even
(39:20):
like even if you guys have like five six thousand,
five thousand employees, if tomorrow your entire company says, you know,
five hundred, you know, five people, If if your entire
company has leadership saying, hey, last week we found out
we were all going left. We need the entire population
of our employees to go right. We could send an
(39:42):
email we can do it all hands, you know, Like
do you hear and it sounds so antiquated when I
hear that, like, let's do it all hands. Everybody's got
to join the call. You've enjoined the call that no
one's going to listen to that's going to shop on
Amazon for their Christmas gifts while they're listening to you.
And maybe maybe, if you're lucky, somebody that was was
paying attention that you're friends with will call you later
(40:03):
and say, Hey, Tim, Hey Tom, did you hear what
the CFO said? Did you hear what the Did you
hear what he said?
Speaker 3 (40:08):
No?
Speaker 2 (40:08):
I was shopping online. Why would you say, were'd you
on the call? Yeah? I was on the call. I
wasn't paying attention. How do you get everybody from your
company that's going left to go right? And it's about attention.
You need their attention and you need them engaged. And
as far as I see from, I mean, it's not
my recipe. TikTok figured it out, YouTube shorts figured it out.
(40:28):
Ig figured out, like, you need to give people quick,
fast hits of what their workforce needs to be doing
to get them to go from left to right as
fast as possible.
Speaker 4 (40:40):
But there's the other intangible there is that that messaging
needs to be relevant to them. That's why the TikTok's
and the reels, the algorithms work because it feeds me
information that I'm interested in, and I think that's our
creat good go back to that creativity and the humor
and all the other things you're talking about. The human
element is finding ways to make what's in the best
(41:00):
interests of the company relevant and important and engaging to
the employee. And that all hands might not be the
way to do that anymore, right, No, we.
Speaker 3 (41:10):
We have God.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
I mean, maybe it's because I see it, but I'm
sure you guys see it too. Like I see all
hands calls. There's like, you know, three hundred people in
a large room, and it's just, you know, we need
to do better things. And then you see half everybody's
head nodding. Why people doing this?
Speaker 1 (41:27):
You know?
Speaker 2 (41:29):
And I again I zoom out, and it makes it
makes me chuckle, It makes me laugh. I just I
just stare down at this mass blob of people with
you know, and I'm like, of course, I'm like looking
at who's nodding their head and who's not, like, you know,
who looks confused? Right all? But most of it's this,
I mean, it doesn'ty, it's just it's just unnecessary constant
(41:51):
head nodding, right, just and some people go really deep, right,
really oh he's Oh, he's super nodding, so he must
be a super good employe because he's super getting it right,
he's a super getter. He's really nodding. It's a heavy nod.
Speaker 4 (42:04):
Right.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
Then you have like the people and I go like,
do they don't like? What's the what's the desired outcome?
What problem are you solving by nodding your head like that?
Nobody's really like doing anything for you. It's maybe if
it's helping out, you know, stretch your neck a little bit,
but that doesn't engage people. It puts people. And again,
my bon's hurt. I've made this comment to you guys
many times. I have all kinds of itis. My bones
(42:27):
just hurt all the time. And I see, I see
three hundred people sitting in those unbelieving, like super hard,
crunchy stackable chairs. Now, yes, some people have better bones
than me. But if you've ever sat in one of
those cafeteria style stackable chairs at a conference, and if
you're lucky, it has a little like a half inch
(42:48):
of padding, but if it doesn't, you're shifting. It's not comfortable.
Those chairs are not meant to be comfortable. They're meant
to be as as efficient as possible to pack as
many stardines in the can so that people can hear
somebody say something and then get up and leave and
get the free donuts and coffee at the back of
the room, right like, that's what it's for. So you're uncomfortable, Oh,
(43:08):
go ahead to I'm sorry, No no, no, no, no,
please go and finish. You're uncomfortable. You're putting people in
a room. It's the recipe is wrong. The recipe is incorrect.
If you think that that's going to help you engage
your employees to give them a message, the medium is
is wrong. You need to find I mean, I've seen
(43:29):
again you guys did it at your at Live again.
It was for the executive or whatever. It was like
the major D super Excelsior package or whatever. But the
room had beautiful, super comfortable couches.
Speaker 4 (43:44):
Of the leadership circles.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
There was I sat down again. I wasn't sitting at
one of those tables. I sat down and I said,
I said, I said, what is this?
Speaker 1 (43:51):
What is this?
Speaker 2 (43:52):
What is this wizardry you guys are doing now? You're
making people comfortable and me and the dude from North
Grumman and like the cc DO or c IDO, like
a lot of the captains of industry. I'm not a
captain of industry, but like I mean I was. I
sat down with some of these guys and just started
riffing in this very comfortable couch infused air with lots
of pillows and conversations and good stuff happened. So if
(44:17):
good stuff happens for me on a couch like that,
like everybody like fill the room with couches.
Speaker 4 (44:22):
It's a metaphor for the show. Tom. You know, we
got a virtual couch. Hopefully people feel comfortable here. We
had great conversation.
Speaker 3 (44:29):
I was going to say, just a few seconds later
security he realized he'd made it int you in they
had call. He was out, But for a few seconds
he tasted that level of executive.
Speaker 2 (44:42):
No, you guys talk about experience. The woman's woman's name,
I want to give her like a shout out. I
think it was.
Speaker 3 (44:49):
No, no, no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
Was it?
Speaker 2 (44:52):
If it was Stacy, then kudos to Stacy. I walked
into that room and there was there was plants. You
guys had a lot of live plans, a lot of greenery,
a lot of like little shrubs, here and there. The
room felt very comfortable. And I told her, I said, hey,
I said, this is amazing. She goes, yeah, I did this.
I planned this, like we plan this. I said, what
a wonderful experience. And she looked at me. She was like,
(45:15):
you know, she's like thank you, Like nobody ever, you know,
And I felt bad. Nobody ever said like how horrible?
Like what a beautiful comfy couch. Like people don't often
talk about plants. Plants in a room. Really, it's alive,
it's green, it's breathing your exhales, right, it's nice. And
(45:35):
I told her, I said, this is unbelievably comfortable and wonderful.
And she was like, yeah, we actually got these couches
like flown in or whatever. She was like telling me
the whole how they do it and how they get
all that. I'm like, wow, Like, you guys really must
be serious about your experience for the super commodore Elite
excelsor your package. For those of us that can sneak
in and get past security.
Speaker 3 (45:57):
Well, shout out to Stacy Hinkley. Whether it was day
so you spoke to an this was the executives. He
was from Montana, was a big part of her vision.
And I'm sure we'll be great glad to hear this
resounding it was of it from you, Jeff. And look,
before before we let you go, we are coming to
the end of our of our time. It's been a
(46:19):
wonderful installment of your of your annual or biannual appearance
with us. But you look, I think one of the
things that kind of impresses itself upon me. As we
can colup a conversation, you started out saying, like, forget
the year. You know, we're we're we're compressing years into months,
weeks into days, you know, And and I've really felt
that I think you're absolutely right. And then we talk
(46:40):
about now the experience of time right like you're you're
at it, you're at an all hands for an hour.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
You know.
Speaker 3 (46:46):
And and it's like we're being reconstituted in terms of
what we're comfortable with, in terms of what makes us comfortable,
in terms of where we want to be, in terms
of how we want to receive information. Everything is changing,
and maybe therefore it becomes its redundant, Jeff, to ask
you for your prediction about twenty twenty six, and to
ask you what you're anticipating to ask you what it is.
(47:08):
We're not focusing on what we should be. Let's not
say for twenty twenty six, Let's say for Q one
next year.
Speaker 2 (47:14):
And to end with that, Jeff, I see a huge
adoption and shift in people that never thought Google would
ever be an option for them. Enterprise wide small companies.
We all talked about, you know, oh, I have one
hundred employees, five und employees, one thousand employees. Oh, we
have MacBooks in g suite. It's always been a good
recipe for small companies. It's easy, it's scalable. You just
(47:36):
sat up. I mean, g Suite's pretty simple. Google Enterprise
Q one next year. There's a lot of people that
contracts for Microsoft. The renewals are usually end of this
year beginning of next year, right because that's the end
of the fiscal or. I don't even know what finance
with fiscal Chisckolls quarter one Q one, but most contracts
are going to come up in March right into April.
(47:57):
I feel like there's going to be a fistfight. It's
going to be an it's gonna be a street fight.
There's gonna be a street fight. It's enough people that
are gonna start adopting Gemini and g suite or Google
Workforce Enterprise, and it's it's it's gonna be good. I
think there's gonna be a hybrid, maybe old guard those
of us that are still Windows die hard people that
(48:19):
are gonna say that Windows is secure and entra and
you know we all need you know, domain controllers and
all the other bologni. But there's gonna be your small
medium businesses that were Windows shops that I think are
gonna be Google curious, right, g Suite curious. They're gonna
start saying like, hey, our Google guy said that they
could give us one hundred seats, get a good admin,
(48:41):
get a good c SAM, set them up with the accounts,
and let's see if we can work this way. Of course,
there's gonna be those diehards that love Excel. That's the
one break. That's the one thing that breaks is if
you have one thousand billion Excel Excel people, they love
their Excel and you know, Google Sheets just doesn't do
it for them. But for those of for the small
(49:03):
medium businesses that are are able to do it, I
feel like there is going to be a wave of
capital that goes towards Google this year. Once that cats out,
the bag, people are gonna see how number one, how
easy it is, and number two the pressure on CPUs
and GPUs next year. Hardware in general, all of these,
(49:23):
all of our are buying up chips and silicon and
rare earth like. All of it's going to these massive
hyperscalers and infrastructure, which is going to lead to laptops. Lenovo, HP, Dell,
all the other companies that we get enterprise from. They're
going to go up tremendously seven eight hundred nine dollars
for a corporate, regular enterprise laptop. Guess what's half the
(49:45):
price a Chromebook. So even if it's a wash, even
if the laptops and the windows is going to be
it's gonna be like, even if it's like a huge discount,
you're depreciated assets your ebeda if you want to do
the that ebademath is going to be total cost ownership
with Google's products and platforms is going to be better
(50:07):
for your company. That's my prediction.
Speaker 3 (50:10):
It's an excellent fun prediction. Or we can at least
say we're going to test you on it. Hey, if
you know one, if you guess you can drop a
prediction on the plate and then vanish. You know we're
going to have you back to account for the accuracy
of this. And look, I don't know if I can't
quite remember when this is scheduled for. If it's not
the last show of the year, it's almost the last
(50:31):
show of the years. So don't only want to say
goodbye to you, Jeff and and thank you for coming,
but thanks to the listeners for tuning in throughout twenty
twenty five. Have a have a wonderful festive season, have
a happy new year, and we'll be back raring to
go in January and look forward to seeing you all again,
so to speak. Then, Jeffrey, Tim, Catherine, everybody, thank you
(50:55):
so much, Thank you just wonderful time. Thanks Jeff.
Speaker 1 (51:01):
To make sure that you never miss an episode, subscribe
to the show in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite
podcast player, and if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, make
sure to leave a rating of the show. Just tap
the number of stars you think the podcast deserves. If
you'd like to learn more about how next Think can
help me improve your digital employee experience, head over to
next think dot com. Thank you so much for listening
(51:23):
until next time
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!