You mentioned mindset a couple times and I think that's something that's being left on the floor right now is that the mindset of the leadership needs to have a much more open view of what the possibilities are. And that's when I spend my time with the CEOs, I spend a lot of time with that alone before we even start digging into what the AI is, of being open to getting things wrong and making mistakes and experimenting, and that's what it lets you do.
And that's a good point. You asked something I didn't answer, which is the personal skill set of employees. And I think that comes back to this, part of it is insane curiosity. The people that can be successful are the people that are going to want to try things, not actually for any reason other than they're interested. And by the way, this is definitely the most interesting time like humans have ever had. It's just so crazy. And so you're constantly like yesterday, I mean, this shows you how much of a problem I have and I'm too obsessed. So, it's like 11:30 at night. I'm coming back from the vet because my dog got a thing. He's fine and I'm in the drive-thru because I need dinner yet. And I'm asking ChatGPT voice mode. My side hustle is trying to, I love science and physics and stuff. I'm like, what would Immanuel Kant have thought of quantum physics? And I had like a 20-minute conversation about it. Right now, I tell you that story partially because that's a ridiculous example of how nerdy I am, but also it's just curiosity. It's like, oh, that's cool. Let me ask, can it do? By the way, it's really good at things like that. And I'm like, can I, can it do it? You know, try things, try constantly, try new things. People aren't used to that curiosity. And then the other one I think ties to the frustration point, which is grit, where it's like, okay, I'm going to keep trying and it didn't work, but I'm going to try again tomorrow. I'm going to try again the next day. I think those two skills which have always been important, they're becoming vital.
Yeah. So, let's bring it back to customer service a little bit because this is a burning question that I have. So, your brand and many other brands are very, at least publicly, very human focused. You know, you want to bring the human back into the interaction. You want to make sure the human is superpowered. You want to have a human involved and that's been kind of the way you've gone forward. But given our path here and having inevitably AI agents are going to be more involved in the customer service stream, how do you square that circle of having this brand of being, you know, the best human thing versus delivering AI in the way that companies need it?
Yeah, I think that's a really good question. I don't think we all fully understand the answer yet, but I think there's a couple things. One is like what is AI not yet fully great at, which is like human relationship building, right? It's not. And it's even unclear what that even would mean. Like an AI is building a relationship with you. But then on the other end, should it just be an AI too? Is an AI building a relationship with another AI? That stuff is still pretty science fiction, right?
Well, South Korea has entire generations of women that have AI boyfriends exclusively.
Well, that is the companion thing, which is obviously not a business topic, there's no doubt about that. And but in a business relationship context, if you're in sales or customer success or something like that, you still have a lot of value because that's the thing people really want. And I'd argue they may want it more because everything else being digital will create, it'll almost feel so good. It's kind of like when COVID was in the thick of it and it was like you have to have your first in-person meeting or coffee or whatever. It's like oh my god this is so great, right? And we're going to have some feeling like these human interactions are going to be really valuable. And one of the things that prevents the human interactions and us having that time is that we do a lot of rote stuff, you know, updating data, sending information out, right? Blah blah blah. And so the more we make that self-service or automated or AI driven, the better. Now, what's interesting is people have tried to do this for a long time pre-AI, right? Like we all know you call some customer service thing and you have like an 800 number and it's like seven hours before you can talk to a human, right? Or you go to a website and it's like, hey, you try to get the phone number. It's like, no, we want you to navigate this Byzantine FAQ thing first. Right.
Right. I love entering my information 27 times. That's the best part of it. Yeah.
It's so fun. And we created these self-service technologies, IVRs, websites, whatever, and they suck pre-AI. But what's interesting is they can get quite good post-AI. We have to be careful and thoughtful because again, just like you said with employees, if you put too much out there and it doesn't really work well, the customer then gets cynical about it and then they don't use it anymore. So we have to pick our shots even more. I think for customers you have to be a little more careful than with employees because employees are a little more resilient to try things. And so there though you can say you know what these use cases can be done through chat, these ones can't. I was talking to one of the vendors, the CEO of a vendor that makes one of the big ones for like support software and he's like look honestly if you're a B2C customer, a B2C vendor and you're trying to update your subscription for your clothing subscription or whatever, support through AI works really well for those basic things. Update my password, update my credit card information, where's my shipment? And he's like, they get 80% AI resolution rate, meaning AI can solve 80%. But he's like, when you go to B2B, like a company selling another company, these things are complex. And he's like, 20% is good. And so what that means is don't force your customers into the 20% and even if it's not a fit, give them that optionality. Let them get to a human quickly, things like that. And so I think that's the thing. Be careful. The human part of this still matters a lot to the customer and is still really important in B2B because the situations are pretty complicated. AI can assist. It's still not ready fully to do everything.
