Please welcome Medallia’s CEO, Joe Tyrell.
Thank you so much for being here, and welcome to Medallia’s Experience 2024 user conference. I know for many of you, this is a first opportunity to reconnect with colleagues and peers in person in quite a while. It also should be a great opportunity for you to make new connections, to reach out and introduce yourself, and to make those connections that’ll help you continue to drive your business forward.
I joined Medallia about 11 months ago, and when I first got started, I reached out to connect to many of the CEOs and executives for your companies. My intention there was I really wanted to find out what are we doing well, and what are some things that we should focus on to do better to help your businesses grow? And as I reached out to connect to these leaders, I received the same consistent question from just about every one of them, which was, who are you? So they didn’t really say it that way. That’s probably the way that I heard it. Really what they were asking me was, “Tell me a little bit about your experience. What is it that you’re bringing to Medallia that’s going to benefit all of your businesses?”
So it gave me a great opportunity to share my background in running software companies. I’ve been in and around Silicon Valley most of my career. It also gave me a great opportunity to talk about the importance of data and my experience in using a lot of data in my career. I mean, zetabytes of data. So if you’re not familiar with that term, it just means a lot. I also got the opportunity to talk about the importance of neural network machine learning and my experience using it to help companies get to that granular level of detail that provides that interesting insight to help them really personalize how they interact with their employees or with their customers. And certainly, I had to spend some time talking about my extensive experience using artificial intelligence. And using it in really highly regulated and very compliance-oriented industries, with the responsibility for a lot of PII that we had to make sure that we were protecting at all times.
So hopefully during my conversation with them, and hopefully what you’ll pick up in the next few minutes here on stage with me, is just this passion I have for technology. And what I love about it is that you have these code bases. And you can program these code bases to generate an expected outcome. And I love that aspect of it. But with all my experience, I have found that there is one code base that’s more programmable than even any of the innovative new technologies that kind of seem to grab the headlines. And that highly programmable code base is us. You see, as humans, we are inherently programmable. But instead of adding lines of code to create expected outcomes, we are built through a series of experiences that create expectations for us. And so as we’re experiencing our lives, it’s also important and very different from a technology perspective to recognize that not all experiences are created the same. In fact, in full transparency, I’ve had some absolutely terrifying experiences in my life. And all of those really center around the fact that I’m a survivor of raising four daughters. It’s been crazy. So I’ve experienced kind of the formation of these new languages coming at me from them, and I don’t really understand what they’re talking about. It’s been this spectrum of experiences living with my gens. So Gen X, Gen Y, and Gen Z, who have really different expectations from each other and maybe a little bit of entitlement, which I can 100% blame on my wife because she’s not here today.
But the most impactful experience that I’ve had in being with these girls is really witnessing life through their eyes. You see, over the course of the last 29 years, my daughters have had some really incredible images flashed in front of them. They’ve seen images of shootings at shopping malls, at schools, movie theaters, and churches. They’ve experienced a global pandemic, just as you and I have. But for example, my daughter, Grace, started high school as a freshman right before the pandemic began. She didn’t return to be with her classmates until her junior year. But the big impact has been this ongoing barrage of information. Not just these unprecedented attacks on their self-esteem caused by the pressures of social media, but all of this information hitting them every single day, all designed to tell them what they should think, what they should do, and ultimately who they should be. It’s because these strings of experiences have come into their lives that it has generated this expected outcome in the fact that they expect bad things to happen. It’s no wonder that so many of our young men and young women deal with anxiety and depression, given what they’ve lived through in the last several years.
So as a dad, I’ve spent the last 29 years helping them understand how to wade through all this information coming at them. But specifically, what I’ve really tried to focus on is to help them understand the difference between information that is interesting versus information that’s important. So that when they see a posting of their friends at some concert, they can recognize, “Hey, that’s interesting.” Or if the celebrity they happen to be following puts out on their feed that they’re at some exotic location or resort, they can recognize that’s interesting. But I also need them to understand that none of that is important. You see, they have to determine for themselves what they should think, what they should do, and who it is that they’re going to become.
Now, this is the exact same distinction that everybody in this room is actually paid to understand. To understand the difference of the information that you have that’s interesting versus that’s important. Because as practitioners of experiences, if you can string together a series of good experiences for your customers, your guests, your patients, your members, your students, then you are going to create a specific set of expectations that working with you actually produces good things.
Now, you have so much information coming at you, it’s kind of daunting sometimes to figure out how to wade through it all. In fact, just last year alone, across the globe, there were 97 zetabytes of new information that was created. That is more than a mountain of information. But the reality is only some of it is actually interesting.
So when you think about interesting versus important, the key is, what’s the information that’s important to help you attract your next new customer? What’s the information that’s important to help you grow and retain that relationship with your customer? And what information is important to help you significantly personalize and improve the experience that they when interacting with you?
Now, as you start creating those strings and you’re looking at that data, we also have to recognize that not all data is the same. And when we treat it the same, it’s very easy for us to find ourselves making mistakes. So let’s look at some interesting data just for a second.
Let’s take a male. And we’ll start to get a little bit more granular as we go through it. So with this male, we’ll say that he was born in 1948. And now we’ll start to apply some filters, ’cause we’re trying to narrow in on a single individual. So this male born in 1948 was raised in the UK. Now we’ll get even more granular. We’ll say that this person has an income of over $3 million a year. And now we’re going to get really, really narrow. We’re also going to say that this person has been married twice. And now I’m going to get to the point where it’s got to be just one individual that we’re looking for, because this last filter we’re going to apply is that this individual lives in a castle. So it might be obvious to us as we go through this criteria that we’re talking about King Charles. But in reality, the person that I’m looking for that also fits this criteria is Ozzy Osborne.
So if you think about your responsibility to engage these people, I suspect you would probably do it very differently based upon who they are. So while the data tells us that they’re the same, the reality is, is that we know that these are two very different people. And that’s because there’s a lot of data that’s interesting, but only some of it’s important. That’s got to be the real focus, is to get to that data that helps us to truly personalize our engagements and our interactions with those that we serve.
And the reason why that’s so important, the reason why you’re going to hear Medallia constantly talk about personalize every experience, is because once you can identify that data, now you can actually predict the experience that they want to have. So that’s our focus. This is what we’ve been marching towards for the last 11 months. To help us accelerate this journey, what we’ve been doing is really focusing on aggregating, organizing, and tagging all of the data that we have in a much more granular way. Because this allows us not only to identify the data that’s important, but also how we’re going to be able to take action on that data.
In just a few minutes, our chief product officer, Simonetta, is going to come on the stage with a number of our product leaders, and we’re going to introduce four new generative AI capabilities. This new AI is going to fundamentally change the way that you access, consume, understand, but most importantly, how you take action on your data.
Now, whether you’re a public or private company, whether you’re trying to make sure that you can meet the expectations of your board of directors, investors, Wall Street analysts, or even just the internal bar that you’ve set high for yourself, we know that you want to engage AI in a meaningful way. But you should also do it without having to worry about introducing unintended consequences, or worse, unintended bias. Which is why all of the AI that we’re going to introduce you to over the course of the next two days is deployed with a framework, with a governance, and with an understanding that you have to think through some questions for your own company before you start to deploying AI in production or at scale.
So what are some of those questions that you should ask yourself? Well, the first one is, who in your company do you want to be able to ask questions of AI? You also have to answer, what questions do you want to be allowed to be asked? You also have to figure out, do you care what the answers are? See, when you start playing around with generative AI and you start asking it questions, what you’re going to get is answers. So are you prepared for anybody in your company to ask your AI solution, “Which of our stores or locations are the most racist?” Now, I know that’s a jarring example, but the reality is, is if you ask a question, you’re going to get an answer. But the answer that you’re going to get is only going to be as good as the data that your AI has access to.
So that’s why at Medallia, we’re focused on answering and asking business questions. What we’re looking to do is deliver a high level of value with a very low level of risk for your organization. We’re focused on business outcomes with our technology. And yes, it’s cool and it’s innovative, but there’s got to be a so what attached to it. And so what we’re looking to do is to deliver real business value to you. The AI that you’re going to hear about over the course of the next two days is designed to save millions of hours of time for your folks who are coming through all of these verbatims, trying to make sure that they’re reading them and understanding them properly. Our AI is intended to eliminate the misinterpretations of the feedback that you get from those that you serve. Our AI is intended to also deliver very specific suggestions for you and what actions need to be taken.
Now, in order to do this, we’re going to leverage our technology to pinpoint the exact reasons and specific causes of dissatisfaction. And then return to you detailed findings with specific recommendations on what action needs to be taken to help that individual customer. The goal here is to significantly improve the experiences that your customers have when interacting with you because we’re personalizing it. It’s instant AI interactions that generate real-time personalized responses.
And lastly, we’re going to answer the most important questions that you need to ask and give you the ability to engage both data and your customers in a whole new way. But most importantly, we have designed all of this technology to be incredibly flexible. So certainly you can leverage our large language models that are built with the capabilities of handling over 300 million parameters. But if you have your own proprietary LLM, you can simply plug it into our platform. If you have a desire to work with OpenAI’s enterprise LLM, we can plug that into our platform as well. Or if you tell us, “Hey, our company’s a little bit adverse to new technology, but we want to get started. Can you give us our own LLM that we can train, and it’s just our data?” we can do that as well.
So hopefully you can get the sense that we’ve been busy over the course of the last 11 months. And so before I bring up our product leaders to walk you through all this innovation, I did want to announce just one more thing. As I’ve had this opportunity to talk to so many of the companies that are here today, it’s been interesting as I’ve really seen two philosophies emerge in how companies think about engaging customers and getting insights. Certainly, there’s one where it’s more market research driven. And those companies are really looking to move quickly, iterate on questions, to figure out what type of feedback they’re really looking for, and constantly change the focus of their engagement with their customers. On the other hand, I’ve also had a lot of conversations with companies that think about this more programmatically, where they’re looking to have a client retention, a customer loyalty program. Where they’re really tracking historical data so they can see the trends and any changes in customer behavior or customer satisfaction levels.
But the reality is, is I’ve had an opportunity to talk to so many of you incredibly successful companies. Those most successful companies leverage both. They have a robust program that allows them to, on an ongoing basis, track, monitor the impact of any changes that they’re making, but they also have the ability to move quickly when they need that flexibility of truly just running some research projects.
So today, at Experience, we’re going to ensure that you have the best of both worlds. I’m excited to announce the introduction of Medallia Agile Research. This is now delivered as part of the Medallia Experience Cloud, so it’s already in the platform that you have. This is a completely self-service solution that allows you to move quickly, to iterate in a very agile way. And once you’ve tweaked your programs, how you want to engage your customers, you simply click one button, and we’ll move all that information over, and we’ll update the core program that you’re running in MEC.
So as you can see, there’s a lot of new capabilities that I’m really excited for you to experience over the course of the next couple of days. As executives and practitioners of creating experiences, we all have to figure out how to navigate through all the information that we have to really identify what’s interesting, but focus on the data that’s most important. Just so you know, I intend for Medallia to move quickly, as it relates to new innovation and constantly pushing the envelope from a technology perspective, but we’re also going to move thoughtfully. And so over the course of the next two days, you’re going to learn about a lot of brand-new capabilities we’re introducing here at Experience. And that new innovation is designed to help you be able to move your business forward with both speed and with strategy.
You’re also going to learn about solutions that are not necessarily new, but maybe new to many of you, simply because we’ve actually been innovating and introducing a lot of new capabilities over the last 16 months that you just might not be aware of. So I’m excited for you to learn about those as well. And then, lastly, you’re going to hear about some incredible journeys. Journeys of people who focused on what was most important, to help them achieve accomplishments that a lot of people just didn’t think were possible. In a few minutes, you’re going to hear about an incredible journey of an award-winning actress, entrepreneur, and author. And tomorrow, you’re going to hear the unlikely journey of a Super-Bowl-winning quarterback.
So wherever you may be on your journey, wherever you may be in helping your company get to that next level of really personalizing experiences and focusing on the information that’s most important, I really encourage you to leave Experience with just even one or two things that you can start using today to help your company identify the important, to help you achieve the possible, and to help make a difference for those that you serve. Because trust me, the last thing your customer wants is to hear you ask them, “Who are you?”
So welcome to Experience, and welcome to the new Medallia. Thank you.