Hey, good evening everyone. It's Gail Scott Key of the Gail Scott Key Entertainment Now show with my dear co-host Jeff Sanden. Tonight, we are going to be in the company of someone who is so amazing. He is the most admired CEO in business, and you're going to soon see why. Mike Capone leads Click's mission to create a more data literate world, helping over 40,000 organizations turn complex data into confident, decisive action. Mike brings a rare blend of deep technical expertise, product vision, and real-world leadership experience in data, analytics, and AI. We're thrilled to have him with us to talk about the future of data, responsible AI, and what it really takes to build a purpose-driven, high-performing company in this new era. Please join me in welcoming Click CEO Mike Capone. Mike, welcome back. It is so good to have you here.
Oh, it's great. I'm excited to be here. Gail and Jeff, thanks for having me.
All right, Mike. I think we'll come out hot. You know, Gail and I both know Click. We know you guys have grown through major acquisition, rapid innovation, and data and analytics. So, how would you describe Click's mission today in your own words?
Yeah. Well, look, it really hasn't changed, right? The mission has always been help customers, governments, people in general be successful leveraging data, analytics, and of course now AI. And what we've really been doing is just building out our capabilities to complete that mission and help our customers succeed in that world. So, it started way back 30 years ago, which was visual analytics. That was our go-to. Everybody remembers Click and ClickView and now ClickSense. But more and more it's really about the data and making sense of the data. And I'm sure we'll talk about this in great length. But with the advent of AI, what we're figuring out is it's not as easy as they want you to believe, right? Because the data has to be of quality, trusted, governed. And so really what our focus through the acquisitions that you mentioned and just our day-to-day grind is making sure we can have the capabilities to help our customers with that serious problem in today's world.
Absolutely. Yeah. AI is definitely a big shift and speaking of shifts, you've led organizations through big shifts in technology and markets. What leadership lessons have been the most important to you in guiding Click through change?
Yeah. Well, you know, Jeff, the wisest CEO I ever worked for, a guy named Carlos Rodriguez. He was amazing and he gave me my big chance to become a CTO and ultimately teach me how I could be a good CEO one day. And I remember the first thing he said to me when he got the CEO job was, 'I never knew how lonely at the top it is.' And I was like, 'What are you talking about? I see your salary and everything. You're doing fine, your life is good.' But I didn't really understand how right he was until I got the role. Because ultimately, every decision, you could talk to as many people as you want to, but every decision comes down to you. You have to make the call and you have to live with the call. And we've been through COVID, acquisitions, wars and geopolitical conflict. We shut down a business in Russia. But what I did learn most of all is that even though the decision is yours, if you surround yourself with really great trusted people and you let yourself be a little bit vulnerable, I think sometimes everybody expects a CEO to just know. They're like, 'Well, Mike, you're the answer.' And you want to appear invincible. I got this all the time. You don't actually have to be that way if you surround yourself with the right people. And my team is amazing. And I'm very comfortable being able to say, 'Look, I'm uncertain. I really need some help here and some advice.' And people, you'd be amazed at how much people warm up to that. And they'll give you unadulterated advice, not just tell you what you want to hear. And that has really served me well through these eight years because they have been unique. There have been a lot of Black Swan events over the last bunch of years. And what I like to tell people is I'm not a good CEO because I'm right all the time. On the contrary, I think I'm a good CEO because I admit when I'm wrong. I'm probably wrong 49% of the time, but I'm willing to say, 'Yeah, I got that one wrong. Let's fix it.'
Right. Yeah. Speaking of guidance, when you think of the next three to five years, what's your north star for Click and for the customers that you support?
It's a crazy world, Jeff. In the last couple of weeks, we've seen a shakeup based on a belief around uncertainty. In fact, I was on calls with some large investors today in my capacity not at Click but as a board member of another company. And I have to tell you, the investors are concerned because is AI really going to eat the world? Is AI really going to eat cloud software like SaaS companies? That's the question. Our mission first of all, I don't believe that. So let's be clear. I think there's degrees of things. I think the world how we interact with technology and software of course it's going to change. But are cloud software companies like Salesforce, ServiceNow, others going to become irrelevant? No, I don't believe that. But there are investors that are saying the terminal value of these companies could be zero in seven years. They could be irrelevant because of AI. So, our job quite honestly is to help our customers navigate that. And our customers are everybody from paying commercial customers, big banks. I was with a big bank today in New York City. To governments to not-for-profits. We work with a lot of small not-for-profit companies. And they're all trying to assess what AI means to them. So really, as a trusted partner, we want to be able to have meaningful conversations about how AI can be their friend and how they don't have to panic and they can really get the benefits of AI without throwing out all the investment they made in technology over the years.
I love it, Mike. I like how Click is sitting at the intersection of data and analytics and AI. And as you said, we are going to dive into that because we just released, matter of fact, the agentic AI, which is super exciting. Now, what I'm thinking is what do most business leaders still misunderstand about using AI effectively? Because the last we've checked, 5% of businesses are looking at it.
That's mind-blowing. Why isn't that bigger?
Well, I think it's actually the statistics I would point to are like there's experimentation going on everywhere, particularly in large enterprise customers. And it feels like everybody's kind of got a strategy. But when you ask people are you getting true business value out of AI, the answer is no, but sheepishly. Like, 'No, we may have spent some money but we haven't gotten there.' And the reason is very simple: you got to do the work. I think people are always looking for the easy answer. And by the way, some less scrupulous vendors out there are sort of selling a bill of goods. It's like, 'Hey, just plug in this LLM and everything will work great.' Doesn't work that way. You got to do the work. And the work starts with where is your data? What data do you need to be successful? How do you harness that data? How do you learn to trust that data? Transform it, govern it, etc. And that point, the tagline that you talk about, it's really meaningful because it is that intersection is where the magic really happens. The models, look, they're going to be a dime a dozen. It's going to be so easy to build models. But what you feed into those models will continue to be hard. All the places your data can be: in the cloud, on premise, in SAP, in Workday, in TikTok, wherever. Being able to harness that, prove it out, and that's our mission. That's what I believe we do. And if you look at companies, I was talking to a company we had executive advisory board today. We had a bunch of great customers on there. But one of them had 10,000 Click applications running across their enterprise. 10,000. And I said, 'Well inside your organization, where is all your most trusted data?' And they said, 'Well, it's in Click because we run our business on Click.' So that data is already curated and cataloged, ready to go and trusted. And now we put AI on top of that and it really works. So that is the virtuous cycle that we need to get to: harness data, trust it, and then feed it into these models. But I think people are getting a little disillusioned because they wanted to take the easy way. So now you got to go back and get the picks and shovels and actually do the hard work of getting the AI data pipelines built the right way.
I love that because it's basically saying the practical steps that you recommend because organizations can be data rich but insight poor. Would that make sense?
Yeah, I love that. I'm going to steal that. That's a good one, G. No, that's totally true. Look, everybody's sitting on a treasure trove of data. There's no question. And if your business has been around for more than six months, you've probably got valuable data sitting somewhere. But getting it out and getting it into a format that makes sense is something that companies continue to struggle with. Although it is getting better. I think the realization is setting in that we have to do some work here.
Absolutely. And that builds around the excitement, right, Mike? Because when you talk about generative AI, it's the responsibility to use the data and AI ethically inside Click, which we do. And with your customers, how do you see that developing over to them? How do we make them still excited but seeing to embrace AI 360, if you will?
It's a concern. Everybody I talk to is taking a step back and saying, 'Okay, how do we make sure that we govern this properly, that we have the right controls around it, that we are thinking about the ethics and the implications of what we're doing?' And to me, that's great. You can start to see now governments and society in general just starting to try to figure out ways to regulate this stuff. Depending on what part of the world you're in, it can be a little bit more aggressive or a little less aggressive. The harsh reality is that the advancement of technology, the innovation, is always going to outstrip society's ability to regulate it. That's just the nature of innovation, starting with Moore's Law and just continuing. So now it falls upon the private sector. It falls upon Click honestly and others in the space to be able to actually help our customers grapple with those issues, give them the capabilities and tools to actually govern, and also give them the advice. We have something called our AI Council, which is made up of not technologists actually but ethicists, people who spend time advising governments on ethical use of AI and what's happening and how things are transforming. That's really important because that becomes part of our moral compass as well. We're in the same boat. We have to make sure what we're doing meets the very high ethical standards that we have at Click. And we then share that with our customers. But you see things in the news already. You're starting to see AI pop up in the medical field and doctors are giving bad diagnoses because they're leaning on AI too much and they're shortcutting the normal diagnostic processes that they should be going through. This is the dilemma. So if I meet with a customer, at least 15 or 20 minutes of an hour meeting will be around governance and ethics. 'What are you seeing? What are you doing? How can you help us?'
