Techstrong Gang – November 8, 2024

Hey, everyone. Happy Friday to you. Wow.

What, what a day we've got. Uh, how did tech and marketing shape this presidential election? Should we be optimistic about AI jobs?

I think we can all use a little retail therapy. AI can help there too. You are watching Textron Gang.

Hi everyone, it's Alan Shimel. Thank god it's Friday. I needed this week, man.

Um, we've got a great text on gang show for you today. We're gonna, you know, continuing this week's theme around the election and stuff. We're gonna talk about how tech and marketing shape the presidential election, besides the oodles and oodles of money that they contributed to the various candidates.

We're also gonna talk a little bit about ai, job optimism and, uh, retail therapy in the age of ai. It sounds like a great one. Let me tell you who we've got lined up to talk to us today.

Gonna balance show here. He's back home, sitting in his catbird seat, watching over silicon alley with decent connectivity even. It's our, oh, come On man.

Hey, I know Alan. Hey, gang. Good to be here.

I was suffering, I was suffering from some hotel wifi gremlins Posts, the premium connected. I Know I'm a cheap escape. You could've expected it.

I know I, we can expense it, but I had the gremlins and, and I also had some post-election blues in San Diego on Wednesday. But I'm back in Silicon Valley and I'm very happy to be here in Verne. Go.

Good for you. It's great. Great to have you and great to have you back home.

John, joining John out in the, in the Bay Area. Valley area. It's our marketing leader extraordinaire.

Lisa Martin. Hey, Lisa. How are you?

Hey, Al. I'm doing well. Excited to dig into these topics today.

A little nervous, but excited at the same time. Yeah, we could. It's okay to be a little nervous.

It's great to have you also joining us from Austin, where she looks like she has her full Thanksgiving thing going on back. There. It is.

Let me, I gotta get this right and a laha all laha Aah. Lot. It's a little backwards.

Yes. A whole lot. Yes.

It's okay, Anne. I still have another month to just take this year as a practice. It's all right.

It's, it's not like I haven't heard it before. Don't worry. Okay.

Well, great. We love having you here, Anne. It's good to see you again.

And then joining us. Looks like he might be in a different room there today, or maybe he just moved as he pivoted his camera around. Our chief content officer, Mike Ard.

You know, that's all we gotta do on content is pivot all the time. So, yeah, I just moved it around. He's a pivot.

Alright, great to have you all with us. Let's jump into a block, which is, you know, still continuing this election theme tech. Your marketing certainly shaped the presidential election this year.

The amount of money spent on social media, the amount, well, the amount of money spent, period, um, but the kinds of social media, how people perceived it. How effective was it, Mike, why don't you, uh, set the table here? Yeah, it seemed like it was different in this regard.

Um, there's a lot more spending aimed at men, and they were aimed at gaming sites, pornography sites, and places where men were hanging out. And I noticed it around lunchtime during election day. Elon Musk had a tweet saying, the men are coming.

And he kind of knew that men were going to the polls in large numbers, and he referred to them as the cavalry at the time. And, you know, when I talked to some of the folks who were working on the Democratic campaign, honestly, they were, uh, getting on buses, knocking on doors and cold calling people. And I wonder if they were just a few steps behind in terms of the marketing campaigns and the tech and the mastery thereof.

But Lisa, I know you watched this closer than I do. What's your take on what happened here? You know, it's, IIII always default to marketing one-on-One, messages need to resonate.

They need to invoke emotion. There's a lot of data that shows that a, that adds, that evoke emotion are much more profitable. I, I think we can ar we can safely say that there was a lot of emotion on both sides, but I think ultimately what marketing 1 0 1 would say is don't dive into too much detail.

Simple messages resonate well. I've also heard this job as the podcast election. And when I was paying attention to mainstream media on Tuesday night, going back and forth between different legacy media networks wanting to understand how they were presenting what the realtime data was, it was so fascinating to see that realtime data.

But what we were seeing was that people are, have been flocking to podcasts for a long time. But I think there is a sense of intimacy and privacy with podcasts that both sides did different podcasts, obviously di meeting, uh, uh, their constituents where they want to be met. But I think ultimately, um, the emotion was there.

I don't know, you know, what, what marketers and CMOs can learn from this, I think ultimately is default to marketing 1 0 1. One of my favorite adult time beverages is Tito's and Tito's market itself as the vodka for dog people. They didn't need to insult cat people, uh, to in order to do that.

And so I think marketers need to play that even field, keep messages, simple resonate, but also at the same time evolve. And I think we're seeing that pivot away from legacy media to new medias to podcasts and things like that, where more people are, and they have that sense of, of privacy and their information isn't being shared. And I think that's why the podcast election was, uh, potentially as impactful as we are seeing unfold this week.

You are, I think you're absolutely dead on Lisa. What this was basically a social media campaign, especially for Trump. You know, I, I talked to my wife, full disclosure, my wife and my daughter were those people who went to another state to help the Harris campaign.

Full disclosure, I talked to my son, who I saw in San Diego a couple nights ago, and he told me that he thought it was all the other way around. He thought that Joe Rogan podcast x it still has a huge amount of influence. Charlie Kirk, some of these people that I, I don't know nothing, I know nothing about.

Trump was spending a lot of time talking to them on their podcast. Logan Paul's another one. Meanwhile, people were obsessed with his crowd sizes and, and, and, and Harris's crowd sizes, et cetera, through the, through the traditional old media, which is antiquated Republicans.

And it pains me to say this are so far ahead of the Democrats in terms of using social media to get their message out to who they really wanna to bring to the polls. And that was something that was largely missed by the mainstream press. It was, there was some coverage of it, but I can't underscore my, my, my son was saying, you know, if if Harris had gone to Austin to talk to Rogan, it could have made somewhat of a difference.

But the whole idea and the whole approach of the Trump campaign is painful again, as, as it is it for me to admit, was far ahead in terms of use of social media, in terms of marketing and messaging. So I got a couple of thoughts. I'm surprised, Mike, how do you know they were advertising on porn sites?

com. Sure You did. Sure.

com and I, I believe Mike, there's A, there's a, there's a link to an article. com is a pornography set, but I don't know it is now. Yeah.

One being said, I don't doubt, as a matter of fact, I know they did. I read it too. What does that say about our country?

Should I be proud that we elected a president because he advertised on porn sites? Honestly? Mm-Hmm.

Not what we've sunk to. Yeah. That's pretty much what we've sunk to.

Okay. I'm gonna leave it right there. I have nothing more to say.

I'll rest. Okay. I, I'll interject, I'll interject some non porn related news, or, or a, an angle.

I, one thing I I failed to do yesterday while I was screwing up with my wifi was mention a couple of things that Trump is going to do to tech. And I think it's important to just throw out a couple of things out. I'll be as fast as I possibly can take you.

First of of all, he's gonna thank your time. I'll, I'll take the time then. Okay.

So he is gonna scrutinize and possibly repeal the chips and science acts. He will likely soon get rid of the FTC chair, Lena Kahn, who's an antitrust expert who's pursued big tech and ai, which means that's gonna lead to a lot more mega mergers that she slowed down under her watch. He supports cryptocurrency, which played a huge role in the Ohio Senate race.

Moreno basically was bankrolled by Coinbase Ripple Labs and others to the tune of $40 million. And that really helped him. We're gonna have the tariffs on anything from, from China, including EVs and chips.

Uh, these, these Chinese, these China tariffs are gonna continue to push away cheaper Chinese EV players like BYD and Neo from flooding the US market, which of course is gonna benefit Elon Musk, who is going to be, I guess, a government efficiency expert on Team Trump. Um, we're gonna see an expansion of AI through, uh, which has an enormous implications for energy, energy consumption, which kind of plays into Trump's energy policies, which focus on fossil fuels and drilling in the us which could drive cheaper energy prices, but in the long term have detrimental impacts on climate change. Uh, these are things that, this is why we also see Tim Cook and, and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and Sunda Sundar Bahai playing nice with Trump.

They see these incredible benefits to their companies, especially those who do business in China. They also see, if you flatter him, he'll do good by you. But what, yeah, there's a, there's a dark side to the Elon Musk Tesla.

Yes. Putting up strong tariffs here will maybe let him sell more Teslas in America. But what's a much bigger ev market than the US China.

And for every reaction there's an equal re reaction for every reaction, there's an equal reaction. He's going to, they're going to reciprocate by cutting his China. Of Course they Are China.

And, and he'll be, it, it wa may wind up being a, a net net loss for him. But let's, let's bring this back and not just make it about Trump. 'cause I, I, I'm done.

I've given that all the space. I'm giving it. Let's talk about mainstream media for a minute.

When I was a kid, even as a young adult, I could tell you who the anchor was on every, on the three main right? Your C-B-S-N-B, CABC and P-B-S-P-B-S had some great hikers. And these, these were people, they were like family.

Tom Brokar, right? Walter Concrete, Dan, uh, concrete, Walter re, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, McNeil Lara at PBS, McNeal Du Ley Briley and, and Harry K. Smith.

And, you know, I'm just pulling up names from my youth, but these people came in our living rooms, bedrooms every day, and they were trusted. And that's where we got our news. That's where we got our information.

This is how our opinions were formed. To me, 24 hour news cable TV was the death of maintain news media. Tired of the repeats, tired of the same.

And they got, and they're constantly looking for new stuff. CNN Fox News made it worse because they obviously considered themselves entertainment. They just didn't tell anyone.

Um, you know, and the rest that's followed on since then that makes CNN and Fox look almost Tam people have had. Can I, can I, can I ask, can I mention something? Because I feel really strongly about this and I totally agree with you.

You, so I used to work CI used to work at Dow. Yeah. I used to work at Dow Jones.

I've worked in the mainstream media as part of my mission at Dow Jones. I had to go on Fox Business quite a bit. And I, I will be very honest with you and transparent, there was a lot of pushback from me to them.

I would insist on not weighing in politically. And there was a certain amount of pressure based on the host, I was obligated to go on there. And this, this resulted in, in, in all sorts of tension in, in talking through where the point where I, where I think I got myself kicked off because I basically laughed at somebody's idea that, uh, um, this, this, this frivolous lawsuit against Jack Dorsey's twi, then Twitter would be successful by Nunes.

I said, that was absurd. Which, which was not taken well. Or I, or I thought that must taking over Twitter would destroy it.

So it that's true. And back in the network days, I mean, I used to do stuff with NBC for a long time, and it was just talk factually, do not take sides. It was very straightforward.

And I think cable, I totally agree with you, Alan. The, this cable infusion and social media is terrible, Right? Because John, you and I and Mike we're of an age here, right?

The ladies on our show are a little younger. Maybe you have different views. But the three of us grew up in that era.

And I, go ahead Anne. I grew up with, uh, an expectation of being informed of what was going on in the world. We every day got two newspapers on the weekend.

We got four. That's two. I I, I was expected to read the front sections.

I was expected to be able to speak about current events. And it was part of my upbringing to understand and respect the news. So I remember when cable came into my house and it definitely made me less interested in the TV news.

Um, but I still, you know, I love Diane Sawyer and you know, Barbara Walters and I, I, I definitely idolized them as women. And, and I didn't see a lot of women on tv. Uh, which is part of the reason why I go on and, and have been on 91 91 times because I want young women to see tech leaders as as normal.

But I would say that we have conflated, you know, information and news. We don't seem to know the difference anymore. And we think that our opinions are facts.

And that that is a dangerous thing when we can't agree on what the truth is. The truth is, well, I I I think it's opposite that we don't think opinions are facts. We think facts are opinions, Right?

Yeah. That's, I actually, I would sure, I would just say, look, there's two things about the mainstream media, right? The coverage is kind of so lightweight that people go looking for other sources of information and then they trip into stuff.

And I'll give you two examples. One is, you know, the way they report polling data, you know, they don't emphasize the fact that this stuff is, you know, gonna be really off by four or 5%. And that the day the science itself isn't exactly precise.

And the second thing is, when they report on inflation, they don't really understand that the basket of goods that are being used to track inflation are not what the average person in the Midwest is buying every day. And so that's why it doesn't mean anything to them when they hear inflation's down. 'cause they go to the store and they go, you guys are crazy.

So I think, you know, there's just this disconnect between what the mainstream media is reporting and what people are actually seeing and experiencing. And so they go somewhere else Superficial. They go somewhere else.

Exactly. Yeah. Sorry, Lisa, go ahead.

Oh, Sorry John. Thank you. I, you know, the, the research that I did on this in terms of it being really dubbed the podcast election is that, whether it's Joe Rogan or call her Daddy, or whoever's podcast it is, there's an inherent trust that, that the mass media public, excuse me, as with these podcast hosts, and brings up a great point of this.

We've been dealing with this spread of disinformation for a very long time. Now, it's very hard to corral, but for some reason, from a, maybe it's an emotional perspective, people tr trust some of these podcast hosts and, and what they're saying to Alan's point opinion as fact. And that's something that I think both sides, um, maybe one side lean into it more than the other.

Um, and that's just kind of a, a challenge that we're finding now. People just seem to have this inherent trust. There's so many more choices than when we used to have the four major Lot of choices.

But there are More, there are more choices. And, and, and the, the, the media, the mainstream media, and I'll be very honest about this too. It in pains me to say this.

There is so much pressure to do the stories and go for the easy click baits, like polling stories, inflation stories, the price of eggs, the pa price of gasoline. That's very lazy reporting. But that is encouraged by the powers that be within these organizations because that's the only way they can hold onto the smaller and smaller audience they have every year.

'cause they're losing people who wanna know more about a subject. Even it goes to sports. You go, you go to the podcast in sports, there's, there's so much more Well-informed and better based in, in, in, in ideas and opinions.

But opinions have kind of overtaken facts to the point where that's everything's editorialized. There's a lot of people out there today, you could give them a scientific fact and they'll say, well, that's your opinion. Climate change is real.

Well, that's your opinion. Here's all the data that shows it that I have my, I have a different opinion. It's not function.

Yeah. People through this fungible, you know, I think the world is flat. I, you know, but facts to facts and, and there's something sorely lacking.

And I think our media today plays into that. But, you know, I, I speak to my kids. My oldest is 25, the younger 23, I speak to them and their friends, where did they get their news?

They don't watch A, B, C-N-B-C-C-B-S, that's for sure. Or PBS for that matter. They don't watch the BBCI love watching the BBC news.

Um, they don't, they don't watch CNN Fox or any of the, the seven dwarves behind them, right? They watch on TikTok and YouTube and what they watch is not even the, or listen, the Joe Rogans or the, you know, mega influencers, the kids, the kids they like to watch. Like it's just some woman or guy who's close to their age who may be, you know, in New York and they're filming what's going on, and they just report it.

There's no opinion, there's no slant. They just, here's what happened here. You go figure it out.

Form your own opinions on it. They don't try to, they don't like kids today don't like to get opinions forced down their throat. Even if you try to be kind of slick about it.

'cause the more slick you are, the more they kind of gag on it. And I think that's where we're headed. I what I hope, John, to your point, I think these kids who are digital natives, whatever you want to call them, natives, gen, what comes after Gen Z, whatever, they're gonna be better at ferreting out the cream from the crop of, of all these choices that they have to, to get information from.

I think for the most part, we're terrible at it. Yeah. You know, I, I'll just tell, just one more thing I'll throw out was I used to work in the San Francisco Chronicle a long time ago.

When I worked there, the circulation was about in the 400,000 range. I understand now it's about 30,000. So people don't read.

Um, but the things that we grew up reading, but they're reading different things that you said that Alan, and then I think in a certain read, No, read, let's be clear And it'll read. But they, but they, but they see, they view or Consume things, Right? Well, Associated Press used to mean something, right?

It meant this is FactCheck, this has been discussed in a newsroom. This is not a singular perspective. And that matters.

I deliberately curate my information diet. I do not get my news primarily from social media. I think doing so is a scourge on humanity.

I think you, you have to, you have to fact check. You have to look at different sources. I deliberately, I watch the morning news, not the evening news, because I need the day to process anything bad.

I learned that in Covid, but I changed the networks that I watch. I changed them because I don't wanna get inherent in the bias, right? I look at news, it's international.

I, I love the BBC as well, because you need to curate your information diet. People are just accepting what is handed to them. And that is not good.

Well, that's the tribalism, right? The reinforcing of the echo chamber. Um, but, you know, let I just one more short segment on this, and then we gotta jump.

What does this mean for marketers? What does it mean for marketers? Lisa, what do you think?

Well, it g it brings me back to when Mike pointed out, you know, some of this, some of the locations were, were Trump advertising was popping up. And if we think of porn sites, it's marketing 1 0 1. It's, you go where your audience is and you have to evolve and pivot as, as weird as that sounds, it's true.

And it's what people do to be successful. I think ultimately, I still fall back to marketing 1 0 1, that, um, organizations, whether they're tech businesses or retailers or whatnot, need to follow the trends that their customers are setting and understand what they wanna hear, where they wanna hear it, how they wanna consume it, and make sure that it's digestible across a variety of formats. That's really omnichannel.

Uh, i, I just default to some of the marketing 1 0 1 basics that I think are still there. We're seeing evolution for sure, especially with the social media up front. Um, but kind of defaulting to some of those, back to the basics, I think is still an underlying theme that I'm seeing here.

Fair enough. I think just to quickly add, I would say you gotta meet people where they are and Site give, Give them what they want in a way they understand. That's, that's the whole porn business right there.

Exactly. Um, yes. No, no.

Starting, They've always been, they've Always, they've always been the pioneers in tech use anyway. They're always ahead of everyone else. Um, I, I, I would take a difference land on it, right?

I would say that there are places where the people you might want to vote if you're a Democrat are not on. And I don't think those people are on porn sites, per se. And a lot of them may not even be, wait, hold on, hold on.

Let me finish the thought before you jump in here. Here's the thing. There is no place for these people to go right now.

It doesn't seem like they have any centralized place that they're all hanging out. So maybe somebody needs to go build that for them before. 'cause right now, even if you, Elon Musk is saying at one o'clock, here comes the men, what was the Democrats gonna do about it?

They had no mechanism to respond or get the vote out. So maybe they need to think about, well, where is this content and where is this place that we wanna create that people will actually go to? Right.

Wait a second. Maybe what we should talk about is not allowing political operatives to own social media. Can't help that part already.

It's already out of the bar, right? Oh, you can, it's Already happened in the mainstream press. Not, not in administration.

It won't be happening. So, you know, You're right. But just for the record, I I'm going to take umbridge that you don't think Democrats go to porn sites.

Oh, okay. Well, I don't think I wanna advertise. And the higher qualities of life that you want people to aspire to, right next to that porn commercial doesn't quite resonate as much as Bill the Wall does.

So maybe it's not the right spot. Like I said, that said it all. But anyway, let's take a break here on Textron Gang.

We're gonna come back and talk about AI job optimism. Oh boy, you're watching Textron Gang Cloud Native now is the web's leading resource for the growing cloud native ecosystem. com is your destination for news, thought leadership, features and webinars on cloud native architecture, Kubernetes serverless, cloud native application development, microservices, service mesh, cloud native security, and more.

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And yes, and we noted in the election, there's a lot of anxiety about people's, uh, livelihood, shall we say, and that influenced the vote. But there's an interesting survey that says that people who have AI skills are a lot more positive about their potential outlook and their ability to maybe control their own destinies. And, and I know you looked at this, but what's your take on what's going on here?

And I'm asking the question because I think a lot of folks are trying to figure out, well, just what the heck is an AI skill in the first place, and how would I get it and how would I apply it? Sure. I think that an AI skill at this point in the game, unless you're a developer, is your prompt engineer.

You're somebody who knows how to automate tasks. You're somebody who uses it for research. Um, I think that the tide, what I took away from this survey is that the tide might be starting to turn as seeing AI as a asset rather than a threat by American workers.

Um, I think particularly hr, uh, professionals with AI skills are, are very optimistic. I think people that are embracing it are gonna feel good about it because they're going with the wave, not against the wave. But, uh, I think the demand increasing means that you're going to be more likely to get a job.

So obviously that makes people optimistic if they have skills that they know will get them a job, uh, or have job security. Uh, so they're going with the grain, not against the grain. Uh, but I do think there's still some skepticism about AI's real world, uh, excuse me, real world impact because, uh, I think younger people, you know, younger generations, digital natives, they're more likely to embrace these tools.

But I do think that, that some are still hesitant. And, uh, I think that's because it just hasn't been made clear to them yet, or, uh, felt clear to them yet what the benefits are. So, you know, some people just don't get it.

And I think that it's going to be increasing in the workplace where we do see it, uh, become more interesting and exciting. I certainly am using it to start writing emails. I'm using it to start short-cutting my research, um, as an SEO it helps me with keyword research.

So I, I think it's making me more efficient. And I think that people are starting to see that, which is what I interpreted from that data. Uh, picky bagging off of what Anne said.

It was interesting in the survey, and I remember, I think Mike and I have written a bunch of these stories, but this one in particular from the DICE study found that 82% of HR professionals anticipate demand for AI professionals to increase in the next six months. And nearly three outta four tech professionals expect to change jobs are in the next year because there's gonna be more demand for them versus the rest of the general tech professionals where this is a much smaller number. The other thing it came across yet an yet another study, and there's stu studies everywhere showing this adoption and the consequences of the adoption.

There's something from team viewer SIO research that found that two thirds of executives within companies believe in their organization's ability to manage AI related risks. So they are gonna be hiring more folks. And it's, it's, it's going, it's finally happening.

It's slow but steady. It's like any type of new technology, it takes time to resonate into adopt. And I think companies are kind of reaching the stage now where they're starting to implement these changes and the demand for these employees is gonna be higher than the rest of the rank and file.

I'm still trying to figure out what that means though, because I think we've already moved to this whole AI agent model, right? And initially we needed prompt skills and prompt engineering capabilities. But as AI continues to evolve, it seems like it's moving towards orchestration of a bunch of agents.

And I'm not sure I need AI skills to orchestrate a bunch of AI agents. I just need to know what the job is. So I'm not, I think that's one AI job, right, is orchestrating agents.

But yeah, I had to think, can I throw something in actually to, to answer what to Mike? So at, at this this conference in San Diego, I, I talked to Apptio's, the, uh, Ajay Patel who's an executive there, and he said exactly what Mike was saying. We're reaching the stage where we're gonna have these agents kind of choreographed and each even talked about the notion of each employee having an AI assistant or an agent that they work with.

And that there will eventually be like a supervising agent or a traffic cop that's gonna delegate tasks to, I, it sounds very, very, um, sinister in, in a, in a certain way, but I think there's gonna be a, a bit of a human element. It's gonna be ironed out. I mean, a lot of these genic AI announcements are being rolled out or just been announced.

So it's, it's a work in progress, but I think it's all gonna be somewhat choreographed. But that's, that's the devil's in the details though, there. I just dunno how they're gonna pull that off.

I think You'll have one super agent who will have alter egos that, that, that go into all, That's what Patel was saying Instead for the near term for the next two, three years. I don't know if we have an AI professional, but I would say people like Anne who are leveraging AI in their everyday task and as a result are being more efficient, better at it, are gonna be more in demand and, and have more opportunity than people who, and I know some of these people who refuse to get on board here, right? We, we, I'll give you an example.

We, we put on, I don't know, 300 plus webinars a year. Every webinar gets written by someone from Mike's editorial team. It gets looked at and proofread and edited and, and sent back.

And it's a constant struggle. 'cause at 300, you do the math, right? We we're doing one a day, basically, at least, if not more.

So when they come to me and say, Hey, we needed, no one's able to come up with an abstract for this particular webinar. I say, okay, well, who's on it? What's the title?

I take all that. I go into my handy d and d AI and say, write me a webinar abstract. I take it, I put a little Allen to it and I send it in.

Everyone says, oh, you did this really quick. I said, yeah, no problem. If you are not doing that, shame on you.

'cause if you are gonna send, I don't want AI writing my webinar abstracts, like I'm writing, I'm, I'm writing the, the, the next book of the Bible. It's just, There's some great marketing use cases that Ellen, to your point, and Anne's as well, that we're seeing. And that's the rise of marketing AI councils, uh, on my podcast, marketing, art, and science.

I spoke recently with two of them, Laura Heisman, who was the CMO at VMware, uh, before the Broadcom acquisition, who's now the CMO at Dynatrace. And Lynn Lucas, who's the CMO at Pure Storage, both of them talked about how they're leaning into generative AI for some great use cases. And you talked about the productivity.

I do the same thing. I just rewrote my bio yesterday and I asked it to take what I had written and shorten it, and it was brilliant and I had it in seconds. But what we're seeing is like AI powered content creation and personalization.

But what I'm also seeing from the CMOs team's perspective is it's the team saying, Hey, we've got this great idea for use cases, you know, predictive analytics, customer segmentation. And so these marketing AI councils are becoming, um, very much in demand. And there's a growing list of use cases that CMOs are going, wow, my teams wanna lean into this.

And they're seeing efficiencies, they're seeing the ability to contribute to, you know, faster, better lead generation that impacts revenue. So it's an exciting time, I think from a marketing perspective to lean into generative ai. And I'm seeing that across the board.

Yeah. Can I, can I add a, a note of skepticism because I, I, I feel I need to, um, well, if you look, reach through some of these polls, they also find that a significant number of employees acknowledge that the AI related projects at their companies were basically undertaken to show shareholders. The company is doing something with ai, the number was like 36%.

So I don't think it's all, you know, and there's a little, there's a, there's some of it is just for show, really to keep people off their backs, especially investors. So I was gonna mention that. That's That's a good point, John.

But also, I mean, we all go to so many tech conferences where AI is, is the, is the title of everything. And this kind of fear shocker has been coming from CEOs going with, you're not leaning into ai, this has been the last few years. You are too late.

Right? So I think there is, John, to your point, that's a great point that the they data demonstrate there's that, that kind of baseline of we have to show them we're, we're, we're playing in this, we're making some impact there. But I do see a lot of optimism on the marketing side.

So I agree. I Agree that I just, I just look at the math a little bit from time to time, and I get Alan's point and totally agree, we can make all this content faster and better, but, um, to what end are we gonna have 600 webinars because we don't have that many more people. I Hope so.

I hope from your mouth, It's good for business, Mike, come on. Absolutely. Every one of those webinars is, uh, I've got an announcement to make though.

I got an announcement. You know what, John Schwartz, you've been here. Yes sir.

You've been a gang member long enough. You no longer need to ask for permission to say something. Just blow, don't hold back.

I try to be, I try to be polite. That's what my parents taught me. No, and also you need to, I don't like to interrupt people.

That's, that's, Well, no, don't step on people, but you don't need anyone's permission to put your 2 cents in. John. Well, thank you.

Appreciate That Tro gang member. Besides, do I get a, do I get a badge or something or In the mail Because of inflation? It's gonna cost your nickel though.

Okay. Shipping, handling. But wait, there's more.

No. Um, oh, I'm going to go over into my Tri Dandy AI and ask it to design a badge for you. And, uh, I'll get it over to you.

I would, would, I would greatly de prize that. Yes. Well, I think we're gonna show that next time you're on John, bring it up and show.

I'll wear it at home. Yeah. Okay.

Um, so that's it on ai job optimism. Do we wanna move over now to our next? We'll take a quick break and come back.

I think we been a tough couple weeks, guys. We've all been under the ground. I could use, I, I'll be honest with you, I've been doing a little retail therapy the last two days.

Mm-Hmm. Um, me too. You, You're not the only One.

Yeah, it's a trend. So let's, let's talk about how, again, our friend AI has, uh, put put it mark on retail therapy as well. com is the number one online destination for DevOps education and community building.

com covers all aspects of DevOps, including DevOps, best practices and tools, DevOps culture, DevSecOps, business impact, continuous testing, continuous delivery and more. com has the largest collection of original DevOps content featuring breaking news, blog posts, podcasts, and more. com to learn more.

com where the world meets DevOps. All right. And you would be surprised, but there was a correlation apparently between election results and increases in retail sales.

It's not scientifically proven, but a lot of people have been going shopping lately just to maybe take some things off their minds, as it were. John, you have a story though that says that shopping experience is gonna be different soon, right? Yes, it's gonna be more interesting and probably a lot more creepy.

And I have to admit that, first off, so without, without undercutting this company, it's called Wavy Analytics. And, uh, I talked to the CCEO, but he's now the chief product officer. He just changed titles like two days ago.

So he's has a team that's using a combination of radar and AI algorithms to analyze physiological responses such as your heart rate breathing and micro movements through radio signals. And the idea is they are going to analyze your responses in a store, in a retail outlet. They're doing this already with a shoe company through a kind of a trained neural network to evaluate your emotional states and convert them into scores.

Now the idea is if this is going to be anonymous information, so they will know about your response, whether you're happy, sad, angry, bored, but they're gonna do it without having, you know, without using your company or your store card or your rewards card where they know everything that you buy and when you buy it, et cetera. So the general idea, according to Alex, who's the chief product officer, is they've been studying the human brain. It's determined that most of our decisions are made subconsciously, obviously.

And that in stores, it's all often done in, in front of a shelf. And you have different reactions based on things like lighting, the time of day, the type of day you had, say, after the election, you decide, I'm gonna go on a buying binge to, to ease my pain, whatever. Okay, that's a, that's a political comment.

But in any event, this is a new way for retailers to gauge customer satisfaction. Um, and this guy's getting a lot of traction and a lot of interest from retailers who are trying to figure out what's the best way without compromising data. Although again, you're giving them your heart rate, your, your micro movements, et cetera.

So, yeah, I, I mentioned this to Lisa yesterday, and, uh, Lisa, I was wondering what you thought, because you're the retail expert, It's am I, I I am a shopper. No, you're, you're a marketing. I, you're, you're the expert on a lot of things and I think retail and marketing are among them.

So yeah, It's interesting you bring up creepy and Ude macro at live, and that was my first thought of, they say there's no PII here. How did they demonstrate that? And when I looked at the website, I was looking for customer stories, I wanted to see where is this actually being used?

So I can see what was the traditional c stat score based on the traditional rewards card where they have all your information, your buying history, your name, et cetera, versus what Wavy is able to do by evaluating, um, physiological responses. I think it's interesting, um, I'd love to see more proof in the putting, but it's also, it's we're seeing this evolution from the traditional physical card to something that's more, uh, digital. Something that in that impressed me more though, John, in your article was some of the other, uh, use cases, the retail use cases, obvious, I think that we all would want to have that realtime feedback.

If I'm looking for something, I can't find it if the colors are wrong, or if the price is this or that. It would be interesting to see to someone come over to me from a, and bring that personalization touch in, but also the healthcare use cases, um, the smart homes to adjust lighting based on, um, emotional states, et cetera. I just wanna understand more how it works so that, that PII is preserved.

Did they say anything more? Yeah, that's a good, that's, I I had this thing that's a, I had same thought. You lemme, Can I, lemme lemme answer an Lisa's question first because I think that's important.

So I was pressing, uh, wavy about their customers and I said, so who are they? How can I talk to them? They are testing with one company in particular, they name called Lens Cart, which is a eyewear, e-commerce company.

And you're right, Lisa. Um, I'm, I'm trying to get more of an idea of what the, I wanna wonder what the customer's reaction is to finding out about this. 'cause they don't know.

They don't know what's going on in the store. They do one thing without, without a customer knowing. So then it has to be anonymized if case would be some sort of full disclosure, right?

So, and to me it's this, this is a story that bears like a follow up. And I, I sorry Anne for interrupting by the way, but, um, th this is what's interesting to me. Like I would, why I would, I would, You're just given a pass, John.

You're just given a pass. We just got a pass a and wrong. Yeah, but, uh, yeah, go ahead Ann.

It's just, well, I'm skeptical of this. Yeah. The anonymity part of it is, is a red line for me also.

How do you not do this with facial recognition? Facial recognition is the biometric, that data that I see seems the most obvious in terms of sentiment. The human face is very expressive.

Your eyes, heart rate can indicate that you're maybe you're, you're, you're very like inactive and just the act of shopping in a mall, you know, heart rate increase can mean a lot of things. I I I just, I I wanna understand how they're sewing this biometric data, you know, the Weird, the The weird thing too. And anonymity.

Yeah. Yeah. You Know, the weird thing too is like when you're in a store, sometimes often, like at a Safeway for instance, or almost any store rail's, they're coffee shops.

So you're, you're drinking coffee as your, as you're shopping. So your heart rate's gonna be accelerated somewhat. You may have gotten there through traffic and your tents.

So there's a lot of these other variables that I think that play into it. Yeah. Point You had a bad day, you just got on, somebody called you on the phone, you got a text message that your project is, is late.

There's all these other things that play into it. So people Have high blood pressure. People have blood, blood pressure.

I Do. Yeah. I don't get this part of it though.

Just 'cause I'm p****d off doesn't mean I'm not buying something. In fact, I might buy something because I am p****d off about something. So, um, I don't see the correlation per se.

So they have to stream together different bits of data, which is what makes me very skeptical. It's truly anonymous. Also, I mean, if that's a for grabs, why not the data from our phones while we're in the same room our phones are talking, you, you know, are they gonna be harvesting that data too, right?

Um, right. I just, I find it very, very hard to believe this is gonna be anonymous and not involve our faces if it doesn't involve our faces. I don't get how it's accurate.

But I, you know what? I would love to be wrong. I would love this to be a boon for Yeah.

Me, me too. I, I, I just, my, my skepticism just kept overwhelming me. But the more I listened to this and remember that, what was that app remember at South by years ago that where you could, it could track your movements everywhere and, and know your physical location compared to someone.

It was like, it was a memory hog and it, this kind of reminded me of that. Yeah, you're being tracked and, and lot and if you're close to somebody, you could be spot. Yeah, it was, it was, it was, uh, it wasn't near Chat, but it was around that time.

No, that was another one. That was nice. Yeah, They have the technology so they could track you.

You're just walking by David's bridle and it's Right. Hey, looking for a bridal jet. Well, it's probably a bad example.

You are walking by lids and say, Hey, we got a sail on hats. Right. It pops on your screen or something.

But, so here's the thing about this. I think there's two use cases here that we haven't spoken about. One is, I don't care that it's John that's happy or Lisa that's sad or in, well, Mike's always angry.

He's the head of the angry shopper's guilt. That doesn't make, that doesn't do it for me. 'cause I'm not gonna market specifically to Mike, Lisa, or John.

But what I do wanna know if I'm a retailer is, is my display, is my merchandise changing moods, making more happy people, making more people angry, affecting them somehow. Am I seeing a rise in body temperature, heart rate or something once they see my thing and based upon that, I can know if I got a good display or not. Right.

That I think that's, that's one use where I don't need PII even. Right. And that would be a good thing.

The second part of it goes just having, that information's not enough. How do I change, how do I make Mike Okay, Mike's angry. He's probably not gonna wanna spend the three grand on this tv.

Can I put a little something in there that makes Mike happy? Is there a pheromone? Is there a, a scent?

Is there something he could breathe in that, you know, Soma and, uh, you know, reminds me, I don't know how many of you re I'm all John Mike, you might re you ever watch Kentucky Fried movie? The Kentucky movie? Mm-Hmm.

I did. Yes. It was like Saturday night Midnight, get stoned and go to the movies kind of movie to watch.

It's like John, John Landell, I think, or something was involved with that. John Landis. It Was like, you know, it was kind of Saturday Night Live before there was Saturday Night Live.

Mm-Hmm. Right. There was all, it's a whole bunch of skits, but one of the skits is this, we a guy in a gala sitting in a movie theater and you know, this is what we had sense around when we were little, uh, you know.

Yeah. We got, and, but they had like an usher who would stand behind the couple, and as things were happening, he'd, he'd spray a little of this, it was raining. He'd put a little water on you.

You know, you, you really felt like you were in the movie. Are we Heading for since around television? Yeah.

Yes. All of Those. Yeah.

That was actually this guy talked about that. The, the, um, roll of scent in selling. Sure.

You talked about this experiment that was done in a mall involving cinnamon buns, flour Pri Yeah. Pleasant smell. Brain centers.

Mm-Hmm. Yeah. Maybe that's the, Uh, pleasant smells make people more likely to buy certain things.

Especially food, you would think. Yeah. Or the smell of a, I, I, like, I go into a shoe store and if I smell like this fresh shoe that's, I love that smell.

Or I love the new car smell Gets a little too much information here. Fresh shoe. May I ask or no?

Sorry. You know what? Let's get him back to asking permission.

I don't know. Um, yeah. Okay.

I'm kidding, kidding. Wellard, why don't you take the last word and then I think we gotta make way to the, the text on tv. I think if you See me coming for that television and suddenly there's a Yankee game on and the sound of a beer can opening, maybe I'm your guy And the crack of a bow.

Yep. Yep. Guys smell of peanuts and popcorn.

What a great way to end a tumultuous week. Take this weekend to enjoy yourself. I hope there's nice weather wherever you are.

Of course it gets dark, very early fodder for another show. Do we really need this? I like it dark.

I like it light darker, uh, light later. But anyway, have a great weekend. Anyone, gang members, thank you so much.

We've got a full text, strong TV Day here for you. So stay on, stay on channel here. Uh, we'll be back Monday with another great show.

For now. For now though, this is Alan Shemel. Thanks for watching.