00:02.97 Robert Karel The pressure to operationalize AI and marketing is immense, and it's coming from every direction. Boards want efficiency, leadership teams need to please their boards, teams are experimenting on their own, is trying to govern functional processes they don't really understand. 00:18.74 Robert Karel Meanwhile, most marketing leaders are trying to figure out what a real AI transformation looks like versus what it's supposed to look like on a slide deck. 00:23.53 John Schneider Thank you. 00:26.87 Robert Karel Today, I'm sitting down with John Schneider, VP of Platform and Ecosystem Marketing at UKG, to dig into the gap between the two. John brings a practitioner's perspective to what it takes to move from shadow AI and tool sprawl to empowered AI forward marketing org. 00:42.52 Robert Karel John, welcome. 00:44.03 John Schneider Thank you. Nice to be here. 00:46.26 Robert Karel Well, I'm glad you can be here. And when we start off, ah maybe share a little bit about your background, what kind of what led you to your current role, and then maybe just describe what you're doing with UKG today. 00:57.30 John Schneider Absolutely. So my career is 25 years long and running, always been in tech, starting out at Deloitte Consulting and gone on from there. um Generally speaking, and I didn't really plan it out, but I've been really centered on solving one problem for the majority of my career, which is traditionally it's transforming a fragmented product portfolio into a more unified and scaled platform for a more repeatable revenue model. 01:23.54 John Schneider Um, so, you know, my role has evolved largely came out of product marketing, actually first out of it, t ironically. 01:30.56 Robert Karel Okay. 01:31.10 John Schneider Um, but then went into marketing and started up and through product marketing. And so I've really skewed my skills and strengths and experiences towards go to market, go to market architecture design, helping scale stage companies really orchestrate their plans and hit their growth objectives for a liquidity event um like driving in tap to its $2.6 billion dollars IPO back in So that's like my core you know specialization, if you will. 02:01.72 John Schneider Currently at UKG as VP of platform and ecosystem marketing, my mandate is to serve as that architect for the messaging and marketing strategy related to our broad portfolio offering under a single workforce operating platform narrative. 02:16.90 John Schneider UKG, just so you know, is ah is a $5 billion dollars plus revenue global company. if you haven't heard of it, it's pretty darn big. you'll You'll see the brand all over the place now that I've said it. um And we're really actively building this real-time system of action that integrates the largest workforce data set in the world. 02:34.74 John Schneider My focus is really bringing, you know when it comes to the AI side of this topic that we're be discussing, is really bringing that AI native approach to our go-to-market execution um so that we can help drive a better acceleration of adoption of the broader platform and portfolio that we're trying to bring to the market. We have 80,000 customers globally, so the opportunity is immense. And it's just a very exciting thing. um Prior to UKG, I was chief marketing officer BetterWorks for the past four years. where I had a very similar theme where it was a multi-year journey to you know commercial transformation, you know taking a single product tool into more integrated performance enablement platforms. So that's really kind of my thing. um And I've become, you know over the last few, you know maybe the last decade or so, very passionate about workforce transformation in general. 03:25.75 John Schneider So typically what I look for in ah in opportunities for me is not just that transformation around moving to platform and and scaling the business, but also I look for solutions and problems related to how I can help make the workforce more effective in their jobs. And of course, that means I'm also looking at AI from the lens of the actual products we're selling. 03:47.83 Robert Karel Yeah, no, and it's a you're in a kind of fun convergence because, you know, being all your experience in HR tech, which is all about you know organization, performance, management, engagement, and you're doing that in terms of all the culture shifts to go from a multi-product to a platform. 04:04.14 Robert Karel think that takes a lot of out of history. I've got a, this is very similar to my background too, where you're like, you have the folks that are really passionate about their product and no one wants to be that, you know, stepchild that doesn't get the same amount of attention, but that's not how you run a portfolio or a platform. 04:19.41 Robert Karel So you're dealing with the change management of the org, plus selling an actual product to solve change management within orgs, plus ah obviously what we're going to talk about today is how AI is fitting into all of this. 04:23.55 John Schneider Mm-hmm. 04:34.45 Robert Karel How can you operationalize a lot of this change management, a lot of these processes to scale as you get bigger, 04:34.45 John Schneider even 04:43.40 John Schneider Thank 04:44.28 Robert Karel dealing with reality versus hype, which is the title of our episode. And, you know, I don't, let's just say, I don't think our episode is going to be incredibly unique because I think there's a lot of people questioning the hype and trying to understand what's real. And so I'm excited about our discussion today to kind of, you know, at least get your ah perception of kind of where things are going and how you're actually applying this at UKJ. 05:07.99 Robert Karel So let's start with kind of what's happening frontline on the ground. 05:11.28 John Schneider Thank 05:12.39 Robert Karel So obviously, as as we mentioned, the public narrative around AI and marketing is pretty chaotic. There's lots of vendors out there and marketing leaders out there publicly, and LinkedIn claiming all of their brilliant innovations and all the cool things that they've done or that you can do with their product. 05:30.89 Robert Karel But when you actually into the front line, the actual front line marketing teams and yeah different disciplines within marketing, there's a lot of churn, a lot of experimentation, but the repeatable ah roi seems to be a little, you know, hard to hard to nail down. 05:47.98 Robert Karel So from your perspective, what is the reality in the front line versus the hype that we're hearing? 05:48.11 John Schneider Thank you. 05:54.30 John Schneider Yeah, i mean, the reality is really that marketing is absolutely drowning in noise right now, right? I mean, there's hype about the hype as you just come. There's probably too many too many conversations about all the hype. 06:05.46 John Schneider um But I mean, the the boardroom pressure is palpable um to change, to evolve quickly. And, you know, candidly, nobody's been through this kind of a change before. So even... 06:17.46 John Schneider the C-suite doesn't necessarily know what's next step, right? So that pressure to do something, to act is is incredibly intense. And then when there's any sort of um shortcomings or mishaps, then AI, you talked about the the sprawl of AI, right? then Then people take it into their own hands, right? And that idea of governance between what is central and corporate and offered and and and trained against and and protected data versus how you allow you know your frontline worker to actually use AI and experiment is is really a ah you know candidly somewhat a mystery for all of us to get that balance right. And it'll probably take several several more years to to work that out. um So I do see that um you know generally there's been and this rush to throw tools out. 07:06.58 John Schneider I think that has slowed down a little bit with the um the realization of how much AI costs. And we've seen that now, which is almost now it's retracting the other way too much where it's like, oh, wait, no, wait, now you got to justify the use of AI. 07:20.28 John Schneider um So we're still in very, very early stages of this. um But I think you know the way that I look at this is you know the tech should scale your vision and not your legacy of how you've worked in the past, right? um If you take a fundamentally broken process, a siloed marketing activity, um and you inject it with generative AI, you don't transform the business, you just accelerate the chaos, the dysfunction. 07:46.42 John Schneider um and really what you're doing is adding speed and volume to problems you already had. um 07:52.50 Robert Karel um I'm going to get to that problem quicker. Yeah. 07:54.62 John Schneider Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're getting to that problem quicker and it's getting to the point where it's so quick you could be creating situations where you're breaking customer trust, which is the ultimate wrongdoing in marketing, in my opinion. and yeah I think to rewire marketing, you really have to intentionally look at the architects of that effort. And if they are the architects of the current process and the current infrastructure, if you just give them the pen and say, you write the plan and you run with the technology, you know people are going to unconsciously be biased towards protecting legacy ways of doing work. 08:28.42 John Schneider protecting organizational norms and things like that. They don't mean to, but it's natural. And so I think the first real principle you have to you have to take a step back in this in this world where we stand right now is you need to go back to the basics of understanding that you know a true AI first operational model is going to require that clean sheet, not somebody just running in and writing down a plan. 08:49.56 John Schneider And I think that's where you mentioned the practitioner side. you know Being a practitioner of the area that's being optimized is absolutely critical. Because you have to have a willingness to completely redesign your process, but you need to understand the business problem you're solving and what good looks like, right? Before you were to deploy any technology solutions against it. 09:10.10 John Schneider And i think I think for me, I think about that and why maybe I've been more successful than average on this front is that Having started my entire career at Deloitte Consulting and then at several marketing agencies after that, um I was always starting with a fresh pen, right? 09:23.80 John Schneider I had new clients all the time. And so, you know, you always started with anchoring on a business problem, not on the technology of the solution that would follow. 09:25.92 Robert Karel Yep. 09:31.92 John Schneider So it was always about what jobs need to be done, how do they need to be done? What's the aspirational vision of the buyer's journey? What are we trying to achieve outside in the market? And all those things that that really anchor you on a future that's actually going to be optimal, not just you speeding up with technology essentially, right? So I think that's a really, I think that's really an important aspect of avoiding like, 09:54.01 John Schneider getting into that chaos of hype cycle of just keep throwing tools out, trying things and trying to prove, oh, yeah, how many hours I use AI. It seems to be we judge things on how how many hours you use AI, not what outcome you get from it. Right. And that's that just shows how, you know, um early, early stage we are right now. 10:10.90 Robert Karel Yeah, no, I think you're right. And, you know, interestingly, um the cool thing about the AI early adoption within enterprise was this incredible desire for frontline employees to play with it and to experiment and to learn. 10:33.59 Robert Karel But at the same time, you know I think you're right. Many of them, especially maybe less experienced, more junior employees, they're just automating what they're already doing. 10:42.13 John Schneider So, 10:47.77 Robert Karel Whereas I'm guessing you'll probably agree real leadership and strategy is not assuming what worked yesterday is going to get us to where we need to be tomorrow. So the the rethinking of the processes as you're rebuilding and maybe automating some of them is that level of judgment, which leadership right now, and what kind I think we're going to get to this, is you hinted leaders don't even know what to ask for. 11:17.43 John Schneider Yeah. 11:18.10 Robert Karel So they're just asking for a lot of experimentation and innovation without setting a real goal. So I love that you're trying to put some real practical thought into what is our goal? What are we trying to accomplish? What does good look like? And then we can build something. 11:36.76 John Schneider Yeah, I mean, there's no there's no owner's guide handed to you on AI right now. Right. And there's no warranty against it. And so I think what you're talking about there, you know, if if you take the road of I need to scramble to keep up to prove to others that we're doing something. 11:51.85 John Schneider you're probably already just starting it from the wrong place. And that usually is the side of just basic efficiency metrics that I think pretty much anybody could attain with by just handing people tools anyways. 12:01.90 John Schneider So I think it creates like this unnatural environment for for succeeding. 12:02.08 Robert Karel you 12:05.62 John Schneider And I think I'm kind i'm calling it like hype stuff cycle amnesia. you know we've all if If we've done this a few times around, we've been through multiple hype cycles in our careers in different technologies. This may be the most intensive. 12:17.85 John Schneider However, we all know what to do to do things right. you know we've We've all been through digital transformations multiple times now, different forms of it. And if you take steps back and ask yourself, what is the normal way to approach a business problem? Really, it is very it's not that hard to you know hard to do this or hard to succeed with it But it's this notion of rushing so fast against something so immensely powerful that I think is really creating a ah vice between what leadership expects and what employees are actually getting out of it. 12:49.56 Robert Karel Yeah, and let let's start on the positive of AI. We'll talk about the challenges as well, but a positive is some of the that grassroots frontline work that's being done, they're coming up with some really great things that could help the marketing org or product org or sales or anywhere, could help create more efficiencies, open bandwidth to do more strategic work. 13:02.11 John Schneider Thank you. 13:14.71 Robert Karel But because it's really a lot of this is shadow AI, this shadow AI sprawl that it it exists on people's desktops or in their accounts. But how do you go from this grassroots i experiment to actually saying, okay, this is what we want to adopt as a marketing leader. 13:34.50 John Schneider Thank you. 13:37.69 Robert Karel Everyone in this function that does this process should follow this same strategy path using these same tools and training similar skills or however, whatever AI tools you're using, how do you get from individual play to operationalizing and scaling something that's working? 13:56.76 John Schneider Yeah, I mean, I'll answer that on a couple of different levels. I mean, first on that point about kind of that grassroots um development of it and use. i i um One thing that I think has been very left out of the conversation is middle management. 14:12.66 John Schneider um There's been a lot written about, you know, getting rid of middle management, that everybody's a manager. But there's something to be said for what what middle managers are, which is they are accomplished individuals in their craft, right? They've developed their practitioners of excellence in their area, and therefore they've earned the right to manage other people. 14:32.02 John Schneider And of those people, those people are the ones that are trying to aspire to be like them. They're learning their, their craft, right? So if AI is less of a technology problem, and more of a people and change management problem, which is what I believe, the middle management has a critical lean in, lean relationship to this, right? 14:50.10 John Schneider Middle management, they're the ones on the ground every day trying to make an operation or a thread work and run through. 14:56.08 Robert Karel the 14:57.59 John Schneider And then I'll take it to the next level, which is what is the ultimate, or at least what we perceive to be sort of more the ultimate version of all this, what we're doing with Agentic is we're gonna be so orchestrating workflows across teams, across people, across roles. 15:12.25 John Schneider Well, who's gonna solve that? The individual practitioner certainly is not. they don't They know their job and they're working on their job. It's the middle management layer, not leadership. It is really going to understand, so I mean, you you know, marketing, right? 15:25.13 John Schneider We've both been a marketing a long time. Think of how many handoffs there are, right? 15:29.39 Robert Karel Right. 15:29.51 John Schneider Who is a person who's actually going to understand what an agentic orchestration layer looks like that takes things from, you know, a business problem to a creative brief, a creative brief to a concept, a concept to the written copy, the advertising, the creative, the now into demand gen and downstream further. 15:46.78 John Schneider Like there is only one way to approach that, which is having experts who actually understand what good looks like across that. Where are bottlenecks? Where are there opportunities opportunities for efficiency? 15:57.06 John Schneider Where does human need to stay in the loop? Where where can they step back? And i think we're really missing that point right now. It it feels like it's more of a, Leadership mandate with not enough clarity that goes skipped down to everybody with equal attention to to what they need to do. Not that managers are a special class of individual that is the empowerment layer for the rest of the workforce. And that's, I think, something I really think is a really big miss on the in the model for a lot of companies right now. 16:26.22 Robert Karel No, think it's a great point regarding middle management. And I think, you know, we have a personal bias around product marketing, like a sales or engineering middle manager manage up and down. They're managing the engineers or the sales reps in their region, or they're managing up to their their VP or their directors or their product. 16:47.70 Robert Karel When you're a product marketer, you're managing sideways too. And because it's cross-functionally, you're working across product and sales and support and whomever. 16:57.78 Robert Karel So it's even more important to like get your processes worked out and understood with getting support from leadership and getting buy-in from so many people. 17:00.90 John Schneider Thank you. 17:09.73 Robert Karel So just yeah the bias is showing in terms of ah the fun of a product marketing job description, but the challenge is even greater as well. 17:21.64 Robert Karel I'd love to kind of, on the other side, when you hinted at this, kind of around those top-down mandates. So we're hearing from investors, boards of directors, CEOs saying, we've got to embed AI everywhere. We want to save some money. We want to like make it clear to our investors that you know we are being the most efficient business possible. um so It's all about cost savings, to your point. And that's not the ultimate value. 17:52.69 Robert Karel We'll probably dig more into this later, but just right now, as a leader or a bit a middle manager, how do you balance these top-down mandates to just, without any guidance, but embed AI everywhere, 17:57.00 John Schneider No. 18:06.07 Robert Karel with actual you operational discipline and realities that you're accountable for certain OKRs, if you will, or KPIs for the org to deliver some sort of value. 18:16.73 Robert Karel How do you balance those two things? 18:19.17 John Schneider Yeah, I think to that point, there are some aspects of that that are uncontrollable. You know, if you're at the management layer, and you're trying to just do right by the goals of the company. However, what I think is going to happen is there's been a tremendous push in particularly in the tech industry for margin and efficiency. 18:39.19 John Schneider And I think it actually even predated ai to some degree, I think there may have been over exuberance and investment and and growth. And so there was a natural like desire to get to more profitability within these SaaS companies to to sort of pay off against whatever projected valuations they were they were expected to have at IPO and such. 18:57.86 John Schneider So I think there was some that was some just part of this was natural and AI just put more ah sort of enabled or rapid move towards you know how do we how do we increase our margins. 19:03.83 Robert Karel yet 19:07.42 John Schneider but You know, cutting headcount is often a very short-sighted view of like, we need to do an immediate to correct course, right? And um it can be a margin eroding, you know, 19:19.96 John Schneider company culture to build against. Right. So I think the the thing that I i really, you know, what we need to like focus around on is what is the true ROI of AI? 19:31.12 John Schneider And it's hard to say true ROI of AI, but it, you know, it's, it's really about buying back execution capacity. 19:31.91 Robert Karel Thank you. 19:37.48 John Schneider So if you've done the headcut head cut, head count cuts, and you've also asked them to use AI, really this is the where the rub is right now. You're actually overworking the people that remain and you've kept your top talent, the ones that could actually invent and be creative and find new pockets of innovation for the business and ask them to do everybody else's job too because the AI was supposed to be able to cover for it. So it is ah it's a short-sighted view, but I do think what we'll see like often what we see with these sorts of hype cycles and changes in the market, 20:11.34 John Schneider it's going to rebound back where people start to ask, well, we need more people back in the model to support what's going to happen. So I think there's this moment where you just sort of have to bra brace yourself a little bit. But with that said, your question is more about what do you do about it with your your hands and in the cookie jar and running as fast as you can? 20:29.21 John Schneider how do you How do you have an impact? And I i think really you have to be one of those types of people that embraces technology. You don't have fear fear of use of it. and you are at a moment of growth in your own career. Nobody, again, really knows the end game of how effective AI will be. So I think when i if I were talking to a mid-level manager in this situation, It's, you know, you might be wanting to put the framework of like, what was it like right when I got out of college proving myself and i was working an extra 10 hours a week. 21:01.97 John Schneider You're going to have to be somebody who's growth oriented. You're going to have to be somebody experiential with like what you're doing and experiment a lot. 21:05.04 Robert Karel Mm-hmm. 21:09.91 John Schneider And you're going to have to be a coach to the people below you. When ChatGPT really kind of hit full force, I was CMO at ah what is a relatively small startup. And so we didn't have all the IT infrastructure and coaching and we didn't have, you know, open AI or Google experts coming in and training us over and over again on best practices. We weren't doing that. 21:33.05 John Schneider I was the one who had to open it up and you know create my first custom GPT. And I built my own you know baseline curriculum for my content team. And I said, we're going to go through this and we're going to try to build an agent together. Right. And I and i had it all pre-canned because I built it myself. 21:48.64 John Schneider um You know, that's a lot. You know, when you're a CMO, that's like taking yourself back to, you know, a lot of basics in terms of you know, learning how to use a tool and bringing it through. 21:54.10 Robert Karel Mm-hmm. 21:56.84 John Schneider But I think that, you know, that models the way for others, right? If you show as a leader, you show the expectation, then others will follow. 22:04.57 Robert Karel Yeah, know I was recently talking to somebody um about um you know just managing up to their CEO. And right now, to your point, a lot a lot of the most more senior leaders are not getting their hands dirty. They're mandating. But like the extent of this CEO... um using AI is to get what their high paid experienced employees are recommending and putting it with AI and asking if AI agrees. 22:36.25 Robert Karel Right? And then if it doesn't agree, What do you do with that when the CEO doesn't even know how to necessarily, these are not all CEOs, I'm saying this example, but there's a lot of that out there where I think everyone needs to get more confident at every level of the organization for everyone's career ah growth and security. i don't think CEOs that don't know how to use chat CP, forget chat CPD. use AI and being able to leverage AI skills. That's not going to scale five years from now either, I bet. 23:13.08 John Schneider Yeah, I, I, I, to your point, I think, um, with leadership, one of the things that maybe is typically a leadership skill, but not something necessarily emphasized at the individual contributor level is human judgment. 23:29.24 John Schneider And when you when it comes down to ai human judgment is the, I think the gold standard of of skills that you could apply to what you're looking at. So if you think back to you know the rollouts of you know say Microsoft Office, when you know it became an online tool and it was a suite and all that, I mean, if you if you looked at like, for example, Excel, um you know, finance puts an extremely sophisticated long string formulas. 23:56.44 John Schneider Well, it's no different. they They had to like double, triple, quadruple check whether their formula was correct. I mean, especially if they're working on things that are going to go to the board. Right. That's human judgment being applied. 24:08.54 John Schneider And I think i think with you know the natural language component of AI, some people just look at it and it just looks too right to even question it. And that's absolutely the wrong route to go because it actually has more risk of being wrong than that formula that that finance person was putting in Excel. So I think human and judgment and and you know I've even written about it in Forbes. you know I've wrote an article about... um the value of liberal studies coming back, um the idea that you can um critically think um is is is going to be one of the most important human components in the future, because you are now the most important like in marketing. 24:36.71 Robert Karel Amen. 24:48.46 John Schneider we've We've all been often slotted. I said I came up through product marketing. you know Everybody comes up through some route, field marketing, product marketing, you know some ah some other aspect marketing. Well, I don't think gonna that narrow anymore because what's gonna happen is with with all of that agentic orchestration, you're gonna be able to take on a broader domain and do more of the workflow than you've ever done before. And I think that's okay. Actually, that's empowering and interesting to me, but that means it's about you judging the quality of how the orchestration goes rather than you doing all the work yourself individually. 25:23.42 John Schneider You might not be the best writer. So how do you figure that part out? If you, you know, now it's doing writing for you and you didn't necessarily have to work with somebody on that piece of the, you know, advertising copy or whatever. 25:34.52 Robert Karel Yeah, and i think I think the most important human skill is problem solving. And no matter what marketing or any other role you're in if all you're doing is following some scripted process, you're not problem solving. um But you know you can become a better writer if you have basic skills in how to solve a problem because you'll know the steps to learn and how to build judgment and experience. So yeah, couldn't agree more. 26:00.44 Robert Karel So there's probably, there's a lot of folks at different levels that are at different stages. 26:02.93 John Schneider Thank you. 26:06.81 Robert Karel you know In tech, sure, we're probably ah more ahead in terms of adoption and expectation, especially. 26:17.07 Robert Karel There's other industries that are you know either more conservative, but more highly regulated, or just laggards based on the type of business they're in that are not don't have the same pressure. 26:27.31 Robert Karel They're still playing with AI, but don't have the same pressures. But you've been through a number of, put AI aside, a number of just massive business transformations. 26:37.32 Robert Karel You mentioned the IPO that you help support. 26:39.33 John Schneider think it's a very good thing. 26:40.10 Robert Karel You talked about going from multi-product to platform um repositioning and go-to-market strategies. 26:41.45 John Schneider think it's a good thing. think it's very good thing. think it's a very thing. 26:47.27 Robert Karel So with AI now, so what are some of the biggest risks that you feel a lot of leaders may underestimate? 26:50.49 John Schneider think it's a very good thing. I think it's good thing. I think it's a very good thing. 26:54.94 Robert Karel as they're promoting AI operationalization of marketing and all these other processes. 26:58.53 John Schneider I think it's very good thing. I think it's a very good thing. 27:02.35 Robert Karel Like what's the thing that has not been considered? You mentioned middle management's important. 27:06.51 John Schneider think it's very thing. 27:06.71 Robert Karel I think that was a good one. But are there any other things that you think leadership just needs to focus on more than they may not have with all the hype? 27:17.40 John Schneider Yeah, I think, you know, back to the hype cycle part of it, there is the side of this, which is almost like, you know, depending on the industry, like you said, some industries are moving so fast, it's not really applied AI, it's, you know, throw the tools out to try to gain the efficiencies, potentially lower headcount, things of that nature. 27:35.86 John Schneider I do see companies almost running so fast and so furious at this, that they're losing focus on their core customer base. And the fact that the customer is not moving nearly as fast as they are, you know, it's, it's, it's AI, this AI, that AI, this AI, that, and instead of just understanding that your customer. 27:53.53 John Schneider Three months ago is the customer they were one year ago. And they're the customer you're standing in front of today with, with minor, you know, growth and change in terms of what their expectations are. 28:03.80 John Schneider And and if if you if you lose that customer centricity on your go to market strategy and understanding what keeps you competitive in your market, and you just start to catch up, you you're trying to race towards all the AI tools you would offer your customer, you may start to lose sight of the fact that you had competitive differentiators that are equally valuable as they were before. 28:25.37 John Schneider um in ah In a parallel contrast, not with AI, but when I was at Jive Software, headed up a very large pricing and packaging study where we did a ah global multivariate study of thousands of people on what is the willingness to pay for our product. 28:41.30 John Schneider And it was a very interesting, you know, multi-month process. But when that when the um results came back, and I think the product organization in particular was stunned, 28:52.34 John Schneider the things that scored the highest for value were the exact reasons why people bought our product when it was first and conceived of. um And so I've created this analogy with Facebook. I'm like, you know, one of the things Facebook knows not to do is to mess up the the news stream, right? The social stream, right? Because that is the core reason Facebook exists, regardless of whether they throw a marketplace on top or some other feature set. 29:17.46 John Schneider They've never done anything to ditch the basic nature of looking in that in that stream as your reason for opening the app. And I think a lot of the time we get so caught up in the fact that if if growth isn't where it's at or competitors are saying something flashy or the analysts inform you of something, suddenly that has to be everything you're putting your energy against. 29:36.34 John Schneider when the fundamental willingness to buy on the product is based on what was this product doing and what was it supposed to be doing from the day the business started to take off and have value. Right. So i think that's one of the most important things right now in this time is I sort of keep your cool a little bit, have, be confident, have some swagger, understand your, your customer is not moving as fast as you think they are. 29:59.75 Robert Karel Right. Yeah. you know and But at the same time, i definitely see certainly more mature organizations where the thing that they were best known for has become commoditized. 30:13.88 Robert Karel Right. And so, you know, I think back to like, you know, many years ago, I worked at Intuit. 30:19.40 John Schneider okay 30:20.38 Robert Karel You know, Intuit was founded with Quicken, personal finance. um And as has grown into this, you know, multi-billion dollar Silicon Valley, ah um you know, massive successful tech company, it spun off Quicken a couple of years ago. 30:39.35 Robert Karel Right. So there are stages. So I agree with you in essence, but there there are stages in a company's life cycle where the thing they're best known for, they may need to reinvent themselves or they' their ah growth is going to be flat and you know their TAM is shrinking. So that's when it gets really hard. That's that's the real transformation when you're like, you know, 31:06.94 Robert Karel our past can't be our future anymore because there's no more market for it because there's disruptions and there's other things. And, you know, I don't think apps are dead, but apps are certainly challenged. You know, that's that's the the other side of that coin. 31:17.16 John Schneider Mm-hmm. 31:21.10 John Schneider It's a, it's a tension and it's constant, right? There's new product introduction and innovation, and then there's continuous innovation against the thing that you are known for and capable of doing. Um, those, those moments of true inflection where you, you face the threat of commoditization have to be highly considered. And I think going back to what i said before, i don't disagree with you by the way. 31:44.99 John Schneider Um, going back to what i said before though, um, If you think about it from the standpoint that we've all been through these transformations before, there are ways to do this, ways to approach it. And it's not necessarily to scramble and run as fast as you can at the shiniest object next to you. 32:01.11 John Schneider um It goes back to the classic model of understanding your buyer and and looking for the trends and patterns in which that they are actually doing things and going after those things. 32:01.13 Robert Karel Right. 32:09.95 John Schneider So it just becomes, and and when we're in these hype cycles where there's just so much news and media around just doing something different, It can be easy just to say, I want to do this something different versus do what is right in a stand, you know, what you do in a digital transformation where you study the market, you understand the situation, you quantify the value, and then you test and learn and grow from there. Today, we often just declare our next direction before we we've even had enough time to know how much customer uptake we'll even get from it. 32:41.46 Robert Karel Yeah, that's a great distinction because even my Intuit example, it wasn't an overnight decision and a light switch to spin off Quicken. 32:51.78 Robert Karel It was probably a 10-year journey that led to that. So don't move so fast because your customers are not, to your point, moving as fast as you're fearing. 32:55.28 John Schneider Yeah. 33:02.26 Robert Karel but that's But that's what happened with ai is, you know, I went to what was like not this past December, the but prior December when like, gentic was like the new word that everyone's liked. And I went to the Gartner event and every single booth was gentic something. 33:21.46 Robert Karel And it didn't even mean anything. 33:23.49 John Schneider Mm-hmm. 33:23.70 Robert Karel No one used the term appropriately in terms of what it's actually the actual promise of it. It was it was just an adjective to describe whatever the heck they were selling because they were afraid not to, but all they've done is confuse everybody. 33:39.13 Robert Karel And so that's the example of the the gut fear, make a quick change without actually considering what it even means. Yeah. 33:48.09 John Schneider I would I at one of the HR tech conferences I went to, I took pictures of the different um promise statements that were made on this last year. And I didn't show what the company's name was. 34:01.34 John Schneider And I sent it to my team. And these were big vendors, like everybody knows who they are. 34:05.84 Robert Karel Yeah. 34:06.10 John Schneider And I would ask, who is this? And nobody can answer any of them. it's a geologist that AI does this AI thing for AI. And and i to your point, I think people didn't even know what they saying at that stage. They were just trying to say we do AI. 34:20.63 John Schneider um So yeah, it's ah it's just a risky... yeah And like I said, and I do get it. I mean, there is there's absolutely the need to move quickly and experiment and all of those things. But this has just been a particularly... 34:32.54 John Schneider I think, aggressive transformation of of how business is to be done in the future. And there's just so much learning to be done in this process that we have to remind ourselves that our customer base wants the greatest and and to know you're an innovator. But They also don't want you to be risky. 34:49.45 John Schneider um They don't want you be disingenuous to what you know they've been in the past. There's all those basic truths that you you give your customer that make them believe in you and go with you through the process. Most most customers don't wake up every day like saying they want to change your technology stack out. That's a pain. It's it's not a not a desire. um So that's kind of where i'm I'm going with that. 35:11.34 Robert Karel Yeah, no, it's true. And obviously, as as as an experienced marketer, you know, as well as anybody that the best marketers think about what their customers need before they think of anything else. And that usually is a pretty safe way to go to market because you're going to remain relevant no matter what hype's around you. And a lot of Earlier stage companies, more junior marketers may be afraid of not pitching the newest feature or proving that our innovation is as good as anyone's. But I always say first, best and only are the worst differentiators. 35:46.71 Robert Karel yeah you know So it's like that that means nothing to a customer. um So anyway, ah let's let's talk as we're kind of wrapping up to um the workforce itself. So there's the concept of the synthetic workforce, which is as scary as hell thing. 36:05.11 Robert Karel concept to folks that are already losing their jobs and trying to get new jobs and the idea that um what does it mean getting humans out of the loop for a lot of these processes? 36:10.02 John Schneider so 36:18.58 Robert Karel um So is there a positive spin and bad marketing, but is there a positive spin around the fact that if we get AI to take on certain roles and to be, let's call it ah a trusted embedded part of the workforce, we're not at the trusted stage yet, but let's say we get to a point because AI is improving, people are learning. 36:39.93 John Schneider Mm-hmm. 36:44.24 Robert Karel Let's assume we get to a point where AI is a trusted embedded part of the workforce. What does it mean with the synmthetic synthetic workforce working with humans? How is this a positive for marketers everywhere? 36:57.71 John Schneider I absolutely think we just need to confront these things with the words that are most appropriate. Right. And i think there is a nature of a future synthetic workforce. um and That's a reality we're all just going to face. And it's what we're building towards. 37:11.38 John Schneider um You know, why why create, you know, buzzy concepts that, you know, obfuscate what it is. And it doesn't actually make people uncomfortable because there's that automatic fear of replacement. And I mean, your work, your your agency, all these things are being threatened by it. but you know As an operator, I think of it a little bit differently on the architecture side. you know The autonomous digital worker may put the you know human out of the loop in certain components of their job that used to be. 37:40.54 John Schneider But that doesn't, again, we talked about it a little bit before, it does not mean layoffs. um Redeploying scarce human capacity to innovate, to analyze, to break new ground is where those those resources should now be applied. 37:54.48 John Schneider we're basically freeing up our highest value strategic minds and in in what we have from that manual work, the rote work we've always been doing that we don't even enjoy ourselves anyways. So I think there is there there is that excitement. and And if we are always asking those hard questions ah related to why does something work the way it does or how should it work? The AI can help us go deeper in places we've never gone in our own careers to answer things we haven't or or change the scope of our job and our responsibilities. um So I think we really do need to design against that idea of autonomous, you know, digital workers that can do parts of our jobs without us. 38:32.28 John Schneider um and And it shouldn't it shouldn't be, um it shouldt it it should focus on getting us out of that rote work. And, you know, automation will be good for us on that side of it. 38:45.14 John Schneider And it's happened before in our lives and it happens kind of every day in industries that that that does happen. So i think I think it will, you know, kind of probably flatten and change organizations and how how they're layered and structured. 38:57.83 John Schneider And like i said, especially in marketing, I think gonna be able to put your arms across and say, well, I've never done that part of the job, but now I can do more of it, you know, and there's really nothing wrong with that. 39:05.14 Robert Karel You 39:07.07 John Schneider And so there, you know, there might be, you know, greater capacity and more effectiveness out of the people that you have. um But I don't think it necessarily is a bad thing to call it a synthetic worker or a autonomous agent or whatever. we if we If we fear that, it's sort those inevitables, right? And then then it becomes an adversarial situation versus embracing it and making the most of it and becoming part of the solution with it. 39:33.43 Robert Karel That makes complete sense. And let me ask you two different ranges of careers. um And because right now we're hearing a lot and I've experienced it personally. I've experienced with a lot of friends and talking to a lot of recruiters. 39:50.58 Robert Karel Companies are eliminating the most expensive, most experienced people as part of their money saving because they feel um like They're taking VP roles and they're become head of or director level roles or they're taking director and they're making um individual contributor roles because they're really plus somewhat experienced but not the most experienced people. 40:19.22 Robert Karel could even even that out and they're saving money. So on the one end, we talked earlier about judgment and experience being that thing that you have more time to do. you could let You could actually spend more time with strategy and planning based on that experience with AI. 40:35.90 Robert Karel But if you're getting rid of the people that have and the judgment and experience to deliver, so that's one end. So I'll ask ask you to talk about that. But then the other end is, 40:46.56 John Schneider Mm-hmm. 40:47.16 Robert Karel know, my son is going off to college for his freshman year of business school ah in the fall. And what are they going to be able to bring to the table? And what do they need to be relevant in this new workforce? Because both sides are afraid. 41:03.85 John Schneider They are, they truly are. Actually, let's go with that one first and i have a son in college too. 41:06.46 Robert Karel Yeah. 41:08.28 John Schneider I think that our kids that are about entering college are okay because they're almost like that first AI native generation. They're going to figure out the new way of working and come out and have seen it firsthand. So I'm less worried about them. I think it was ah it's been a very bumpy road for those that had just graduated from college without AI and didn't build up the experience. So that that's a rough that's a rough boat to be in. And I think that they're they're dealing with more higher levels of unemployment, 41:39.77 John Schneider um They're going to have a harder, they're doing a lot more remote work, but they don't have as much mentorship around them. And I look to that that generation to be very entrepreneurial because they're going to have to take a lot of it into their own hands. 41:45.02 Robert Karel Good. 41:52.35 John Schneider And that makes me hopeful, but it is a tougher environment and i than than I think you or I came out in. um For us on the other side of the spectrum or where, you know, oh, wait, do we really need high powered executive to make these decisions? This gets back to that sort of modulation where we we probably are overcorrecting right now. we're going to come back to something in between the. 42:15.70 John Schneider The value of change management. and work and all of those soft skills do not go away with ai And people still need to be explained to like, what are we doing? Where are we going? Why are we doing it? How are we doing it? Make me feel good about my contribution to it. 42:32.89 John Schneider So I think from a leadership perspective, it goes once again, back to like, what makes you a human? I think you really, really need to lean into strong soft skills, strong leadership skills, and emphasize your ability to change groups of people towards goals and objectives aggressively to stand out from someone who's just very good at their job. Because yes, if all you were were the person that just adjudicated that role and that decision, you might be able to push it down a couple layers, save some money and have somebody with AI that can basically equalize out to that person. So I think 43:06.33 John Schneider You have to look for those pockets of what is really, truly not going to be replaced by AI. And at the end of the day, we're all humans still. And I think for for the time being, at minimum, for a long time, I hope, um robots are not going to relate to us the same way. We're still not going to let a robot cause us to feel excited about a direction yet. And so I'm pretty hopeful that's that's what leaders do still in today's world. 43:30.87 Robert Karel So let's let's end with one last question regarding kind of, you know, within ah UKG, with what you're working on within your marketing org and how you're trying to operationalize AI. What's your North Star? what's What's your ultimate goal where you're like, as, um as you know, a relatively new marketing leader within the last year at UKG? 43:53.08 Robert Karel um What are you hoping that you'll be able to say you delivered for UKG's, you know, platform and ecosystem marketing team? 44:01.10 John Schneider I could not be more excited because I think I think I have fairly strong North Star and clarity around where where all this is headed for marketing. But, um you know, we've generally been a push based system, you know, of marketing, right, where we broadcast big messages and send them out to every pocket of the world and hope people react. 44:18.84 John Schneider um And now we're going to be in this world where we can make predictions. and we can analyze situations for what they are and move towards like a real time engine that would create value for the customer, right? So the way I talk about is like hyper relevance at scale, right? At like an infinite scale, right? In a business like UKG where we serve 50 person company all the way up to the biggest corporations in the entire world. And then we have multiple industries where we we we have dominant positions. We have to speak people's language 44:52.82 John Schneider And when you look at all the permutations against how many products we offer, there's quite literally no way you can create that much content and that much messaging for every type of buyer that is out there. 45:04.73 John Schneider And it's part of why I joined, ironically. You'd think that'd be a reason to run from it. You know, be like, wait, you're joining the team that does messaging and content and you're like, you're You're joining something that's almost infinitely impossible to solve for, but AI does allow for this, right? If we were able to trust ourselves and understand that over the future, when we do have these autonomous agents that can create this content, we're going to become coaches of those agents. 45:27.43 John Schneider We're going to be the man the change management layer of, You know, why are we doing it? Where are we going? How are we evolving all of those things? But we're not going to there's no way we can take pen to paper and create all the assets. And I think that in the in these big tech industries where there's a lot of competition, the the next big winners are going to be these ones that can actually hyperscale their content and messaging strategy down to to absolute personalization for the buyer on the other end. That's something that in B2B has never really been there, right? it's ahs ah They're a little closer in consumer, but even they aren't aren't truly where where I think it is. So I think that's really the truly exciting part of of what we're going to be seeing here. And there's some big components that we're goingnna have to build against that to make it happen. 46:13.18 Robert Karel I love that. And I remember 20 years ago, cult calling it tailored marketing was right message for the right person at the right time. And it's like, we've been trying for that long. And I agree with you. AI absolutely could be the catalyst that finally can make this a reality at scale. 46:31.78 Robert Karel It's for companies as large as you, as well as mom and pop shops, because it's going to be maybe democratizing that ability as well. 46:40.34 John Schneider Yeah, absolutely. And I'd say another you know thing related to this is that one of the most important things, I think, you know I talked a lot about you know going back to basics on what digital transformation looks like, understanding how you build a business case, all that, but I will double underscore the importance of building an early, strong and trusted relationship with your IT partners. 47:01.82 John Schneider right You're going to have to build a unified data layer of all the sources of data, whether it's be your your CRM, your marketing automation, and everything in between, and and other agents. right You're going be orchestrating data sources from all over the place. and so if you if If you bring them in early and start to bring up the topics of governance and security and all those things, you will be in such a better position than trying to just shove it forward from the standpoint of I need. 47:31.10 John Schneider um And I think that's going to be a big separator for a marketer is to learn, again, back to the human skills, how to drive change management, how to relate to other people, how to get people into the same direction, believing in what you believe needs to be done for the business. 47:46.03 Robert Karel That's perfect. And I think a great way to end it. Great advice. And this was a terrific conversation, John. I really appreciate you taking the time today. 47:53.43 John Schneider Thank you very much, Rob. I loved being here. Thank you.