Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / Reality Bytes #33- Inside Assist (w/ Mario Tarallo)

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Reality Bytes #33- Inside Assist (w/ Mario Tarallo) · The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers

0:01
Welcome it, change Makers to the Deck Show with Tim Flower and Tom McGrath.
0:07
Let's get into it. Hello, everybody, welcome to a special edition
0:13
of that show you will know and love. It's the Deck Show, show
0:16
within a show within a show, one of those special editions of reality bites
0:21
where we get to welcome and talk to a fascinating colleague, a fellow Next
0:26
Thinker, and we've got a great one for you today. We're actually recording
0:30
in the midst of the Experience World tour. Just want to put a big
0:34
shout out to everybody who was able to come to London or Paris. Last
0:38
week, Tim and I had the privilege of being on stage in London.
0:42
Absolutely incredible crowd. It was standing room only if they were hundreds of people
0:47
just on their feet for it. We saw some amazing customer presentations, some
0:51
great keynotes from from Next Thinkers. People seem very very excited about what's coming
0:55
down the pipe. It was a truly truly special day. I got to
0:59
go to Paris well, that was fantastic. And of course next week we
1:02
have Boston and beyond that actually went by the time you listen to this,
1:07
Boston will be this week in a couple of days time. But if you
1:08
have a look in the link in the show notes, you will be able
1:11
to click through and perhaps still get yourself a ticket, still get on that
1:17
absolutely free guest list, and if it's anything like London or Paris, it's
1:22
something you should definitely consider doing. And then we have Munich in the first
1:26
week of November also. I believe all those details are in the show notes.
1:30
But let's get on to our guest and the great show we have today.
1:34
His name is Mario Torello. He's a product management director here at Next
1:38
Thing Mario, and he's been here as long as I have, probably a
1:42
lot longer. He's been here for at least four years, I can say
1:45
that, and always a pleasure working with him, A real privilege to have
1:49
him on the show. So welcome Mario. Thanks for making the time,
1:51
mate, lovely to see Hi Tom, it's great to be here. And
1:55
you did I think I crossed paths with you at Experience in London and then
1:59
in Paris. What was your general sense of feedback of your own response to
2:05
the shows this year? I think it was pretty amazing, great energy,
2:07
great feedback, mass customers, conversations, very good yeah, very good indeed,
2:14
and I'm just very exciting about the direction of the dex is going and
2:19
maybe we'll get into some of the way's next thing is helping in your teams
2:22
in particular, making it so exciting. But first of all, Mario,
2:25
so I do know that you've been here at least four years, because I've
2:29
been here. But tell us not only how long you've really been here,
2:31
but what you're a little bit about yourself, what your road to next thing
2:35
look like? Look? Sure, yeah, so to be precise, it's
2:38
been six years and a half, I believe. And next thing, yeah,
2:44
so, as you said, currently problem management director based in the beautiful
2:50
city of Lausanne in Switzerland. Well, a bit about myself. I was
2:54
born and grew up in Italy and norther in Italy where I started did computer
3:00
engineering, and straight after university I started to work in consulting. So I
3:07
spent the first six about six years on my career in a few consultancy firms,
3:14
starting at ey Milan, then moved to Paris, then back to Milan
3:16
again. Then I took a sabbatical year and decided to resign for my job
3:23
in Milan, and with my wife, we actually went to India for one
3:28
year, generating generating quite some I would say interesting reactions from the most traditional
3:34
family members and friends at the time, but it was pretty cool. So
3:38
we spent some time there volunteering and traveling, and after that I finally arrived
3:45
in Switzerland and joined Next Thing indeed six years and a half ago, first
3:50
as a product manager, and then I progressively took more responsibilities and now heading
3:58
a team of I'm leading a team of five have great product managers covering a
4:04
variety of products in the scope of the Next Thing portfolio. Fantastic and go
4:10
into that in a bit more detail, Mario, what what is the day
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to day what is your what do your day to day roles look like?
4:15
You know? And and how do you how do you manage I mean the
4:18
spread of those five product managers and the size of their team. That must
4:23
be a huge amount of responsibility. I as see. It's it's pretty intense
4:28
as well as very interesting and very nice. The well indeed, the scope
4:32
covers actually, at the end of the day more than a bit a bit
4:38
more than five products if you consider some additional features as well. But in
4:42
short, our team works on what is next Think Engage, the life dashboards,
4:47
investigations, the Digital Experience Score, and now also the new product that
4:56
we call next Think Next Think Assist that I believe we're going to discuss a
4:59
bit to day. And myself, as a product management director, I'm responsible
5:03
for helping the teams set in the vision and the strategy for these products,
5:10
working in collaboration with yeah, a bunch of stakeholders, internal and external ones
5:15
as well as I believe one of the main responsibilities I am on top of
5:20
people management duties, let's say, is to help not working in silos and
5:28
therefore breaking somehow the silos that may happen right when working with a diverse range
5:34
of products. And yeah, I forgot to mention, Mario, but it
5:42
is reality. But it's therefore it's not just me and it's a teamsm with
5:45
us today, but we are joined by two of our regular panelists, Sean
5:48
and Meghan, and I know they both have questions for you also. So
5:53
since I forgot to introduced in the beginning, I thought I put that in
5:55
and invite Sean to ask the next query. Yeah, hi, Mario,
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so speaking of it, says I actually think yesterday maybe Megan reported on this
6:04
in our marketing meeting. I know we receive quite a bit of traffic to
6:09
the Assist related content, but I was just curious maybe if you can talk
6:15
through I guess, the inspiration for the product and how you see it impacting
6:19
the world of end user computing. Sure, so I think I would start
6:25
by saying that, as you know very well, AI has always been at
6:30
the core of the Next Thing history. I believe you had Pedro and Pat
6:36
on the postcast on the podcast as well a few months back, and I
6:42
assume they told you the story of the company and how it was born actually
6:46
as a concept at the Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence at the Engineering School of Los
6:51
Anan Switzen. So I has always been there. Now talking about most more
6:59
recent times, I think things dramatically changed since, uh well, the launch
7:04
of chudge bt a few a few months back already. The interesting thing is
7:12
that before, even before hearing about the launch of CHUGBT, we had already
7:16
started to work on this challenge that now basically became a new product because Next
7:23
Thing Assist that was how can we make our product even more easy to use?
7:31
How can we help our users to get value in a in a much
7:34
easiest way, and that's what we started to think about, providing some type
7:40
of conversational interface to the users so that they would be able to get data
7:44
insights and execute actions from and within our product without the need of doing any
7:49
complex tasks or writing queries and stuff like that. And while we were already
7:55
working on approve of concepts for that, then all the chudge bt things started.
8:00
And I believe that was the moment where we really started to fully understand
8:07
to a certain extent that the huge potential that these technologies have. I'm talking
8:11
about generative AI, large language models, and so on and so forth.
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And to be honest with you, to this day, we probably didn't grasp
8:18
yet the full extent of such or such a potential, but so we we
8:24
embraced it, and and we kept working on the product. And yeah,
8:28
and basically, here we are with a new product functionality within Next Thing Infinity
8:37
that allows you to interact in a brand new way with our product to get
8:41
that out of it much more easily and quickly. That's great, so I
8:46
understand, you know, it helps users more efficiently use Infinity and the Next
8:52
Thing product. I'm curious, I guess taking a step back for end user
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computing. What challenges could it help folks who work in at EUC solve.
9:03
Yeah, I would say when I think about Next Thing Assists, you should
9:07
see it as a indeed an assistant kind of a body, an operator that
9:13
is sitting next to you, and that helps you achieving tasks more easily but
9:20
also quicker. Right and specifically coming back to challenges and use cases, I
9:26
believe there are primarily a couple of things to mention. One is the potential
9:33
challenge of creating brand new content within our product. So imagine as a user,
9:37
you would like, for instance, to create a new alert, a
9:41
brand new dashboard, a new survey with the next Thing engaging on and so
9:46
warth So Next Thing Assists allows to do so much more easily and quickly.
9:52
Once again, so the content creations of the key parts of this story.
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And the other one is uh at the end of the day, the delivery
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and access to insights. And that's at the end of the day what next
10:09
Thing users want. We just don't want to brace to browse data for the
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sake of browsing it, but because we want to get insights out of it.
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And Next Thing Assists and the power of genitive I and large language models
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definitely can help in getting insights much more effectively. So I would say content
10:26
generation but also insights delivery are two key parts of the story. And at
10:33
the end of the day, I believe this is something that helps in a
10:39
way democratizing in a way access to digital employe experience management in the sense that
10:48
once again, what may sound what may seem as a challenging task, maybe
10:52
getting insights out of the product by you know, typing from scratch a query,
10:58
no how the query should work, and in the data model and these
11:01
kind of things, these may become things of the past because everybody would be
11:07
able to just type a sentence a question in a natural language and by the
11:11
way, not just in English, potentially in any language and just get the
11:15
insight they're looking for. So in a way, it's a way to democratize
11:20
the management of the digital employee experience. But beyond that, I think that
11:24
another key value is that it's not just about making things easier, but in
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many cases it's about making things better because these technologies are now so powerful that
11:37
in many cases they can actually perform, sorry outperform humans. If you think
11:41
about let's pick an example where large language models do an excellent job. There
11:46
is the creation of text, the creational content. And if you think about
11:52
next, think where this applies very well is when you need to create a
11:56
new campaign, when you want to create a survey, for instance, to
11:58
contact the employees. Is tools such as tools such as a CYST and products
12:03
such as a CYST that leveraged large language more than that are great at creating
12:07
brand new questions that are the right questions to ask for a specific context for
12:13
a specific user in multiple languages, and so on and so forth. So
12:16
this is to say that on it makes things easier, but sometimes and most
12:20
of the times, it will probably make things much better and outperform what actually
12:28
the human could do without such technology. Excellent. Thanks for answering that.
12:33
You kind of read my mind too. It seems like at the heart of
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that so it does serve not only the employees or interacting the technology, but
12:41
then the IT personnel and making it absolutely efficient. Thanks. Cool. I'm
12:50
going to jump in next. Mario. I guess I have a lot of
12:56
things I'm curious about the SYST. I think it's a really it's a cool
12:58
concept. Our audience it's clearly really excited about it. Like Shan said,
13:01
every time we put out content about assists, people go really seem interested in
13:05
reading it and listening to it. So, but if you think about not
13:09
just a cyst, but this whole this generative AI, this kind of large
13:13
language model technology, how do you think if you look into the future,
13:16
what are your predictions for how it's going to reshape like the way we work
13:20
in the digital workplace. Yeah, I think that we have a major impact.
13:26
And as you said, it's not just about the CIST, it's not
13:28
just about conversational technologies. There is a huge potential out there when it comes
13:33
to I in general, and AI technologies and algorithms and machine learning that do
13:41
not necessarily imply a conversation. Right, So even large language models themselves,
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we have tons of applications that do not necessarily require a conversation. So even
13:50
outside the conversational aspect and AS systems so on and so forth, I believe
13:54
these are technologies that we have a major impact across the board when it comes
13:58
to digital experience management and workplace management. And when I say across the board
14:03
is really if I think about the personas the type of users, the type
14:07
of people that they will impact. It's pretty much everyone starting from you know,
14:13
it could be the top management in a company, the CIO. That
14:18
imagine CIO is looking at a digital experience score. They would like to understand
14:22
why the score got solow yesterday. They would like to know what are the
14:26
top five things they need to know we need to do sorry to improve the
14:30
score. Well, this type of technologies can help to provide such chancews much
14:35
more quickly and providing detailed yet summarized analysis of what needs to be done.
14:43
Or a CEO once again running a service with fifty thousand employees and getting responses
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back, how can this person get a very quick understanding of okay service?
14:54
Great, I got tons of responses, but at the end of the day,
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what are the ten top pain points that they should focus on? Right?
15:01
But then moving also somewhere else in the organization if you think about it,
15:07
support teams as well. This type of technologies also do great things when
15:15
it comes to helping to identify the root cause of a problem. So when
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I think about it support teams and machine learning and artificial intelligence, this is
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definitely a great use case where the analysis of multiple sets of data, identification
15:33
of correlation and prediction can definitely help pinpoint in what the root cause can be.
15:39
So even the help or even the work of it support people can dramatically
15:43
be impacted in a beneficial way by these type of technologies. And last but
15:48
not least, I believe you mentioned even the employees themselves, right, So
15:52
when it comes to for instance, self help and the traditional chat bots,
15:58
especially the latest the latest developments, when it comes to large language models and
16:03
so on and so forth, they can really bring all these to the next
16:07
level where you would be able to have really a natural conversation in whatever language
16:12
you speak as an employee to understand what is your experience, what are the
16:18
main things that for instance can be addressed without contacting it, but just you
16:23
know, checking what are the options available to make your experience better, and
16:26
a variety of other things that you will be able to ask to this type
16:30
of this type of in this case conversation tools. So in short, I
16:36
think huge potential to impact workplace experience management and digital experience management across the board,
16:42
across or roles in the company, including the imprison Wow, you paint
16:48
such a compelling picture, I'll be honest, I wish in my work that
16:52
I had a tool like that where I could just have it to my content
16:55
analysis for me, Like, hey, marketing genius, can you just tell
16:57
me which content I should be making more of? That'd be great, right,
17:02
Yeah, that's awesome. Okay, you talked about the impact it can
17:06
have on service teams, So that leads me to my other question I want
17:08
to ask you. So recently, our chief marketing strategy officer here next thank
17:12
few scenes I had, he wrote a piece for their decks Hub that asked
17:17
the question why does L three still exist? Which I thought was really a
17:21
hot take when I read it, and I could see it being quite controversial.
17:22
But he made the case that maybe with the advance of technologies around the
17:27
digital experience like ours, that it might eliminate the need for L three.
17:33
So what's your take on that. What's your reaction to that kind of position?
17:37
Yeah? So, I think this is very much related to the concept
17:42
of shifting left right IT organizations, IT support organizations specifically. I think they're
17:49
being having this dream of shift left for quite a while. What does shift
17:55
left means? It means that today when an IT or sorry, a user
17:59
is complaining is calling the support. Typically there is a level one the service
18:03
desk that starts to work on the ticket, and if level one, the
18:07
typically performs basic troubleshooting tasks following a script. In most cases, if level
18:11
one is not able to address the incident, they need to escalate to another
18:17
level, a much more expensive level I can be level two teams, level
18:19
three teams, and so on and so forth. So the dream of a
18:22
tea support organizations is to lower costs by shifting left, meaning making sure or
18:30
trying at least to allow a level two teams to do what level three teams
18:37
are currently doing so that they don't need to escalate two more expensive teams,
18:41
and same for level one doing what today level two teams may be doing,
18:45
and going even one level down, allowing the employees right kind of level zero
18:52
to do themselves the fix that is needed to address their concern without contacting the
19:00
Now in this context, we in respect to what we're discussing earlier on when
19:03
it comes to artificial intelligence, definitely, I think in a way this is
19:11
one of the key benefits giving the possibility to support teams to do and to
19:19
handle complex tasks without the need to escalating them is definitely something that would allow
19:26
to shift left and at a certain point quoting again yes, seeing potentially what
19:32
is done today by level three could be done by someone else, a less
19:36
expensive team. So what if we give, for instance, to level one
19:38
service desk engineers, what if we give them, what if we provide them
19:42
within sights automated insights about the potential root cause of an incident, about a
19:49
potential fix, about the options they have to improve the experience of the employees
19:55
without the need to call in their colleagues from the other teams. So any
19:59
technology, including of course artificial intelligence that can make more complex tasks easier to
20:04
do is definitely something that helps this shifting left idea and therefore awfully lawering the
20:12
costs as well for the companies as well. Awesome, thank you, Mario.
20:17
That was so interesting. That's up for me, Mario. As Meghan
20:21
said, is really one of the most intriguing products released in some time,
20:26
not only by Next Think but across it in general. I'd say, and
20:32
you know, huge congratulations to you and all your colleagues in developing it.
20:34
I think the response and the interest levels, as Meghan has said, absolutely
20:40
off the charts. People are really really buzzing about this. Just a word
20:45
before you go about your experience of being a next think or it's something we're
20:48
asking all the guests on these shows. How do you find it? What's
20:52
it like for you? What do you appreciate most about working here? Obviously
20:56
for as long as you have six years, there must be something you like.
21:00
My guess, yeah, I guess it is right, It's correct,
21:06
definitely, Well, I would say, I get this question asked quite often,
21:11
and I think the number one response is people first and foremost, so
21:17
the people I met. The next thing, the colleagues and need to I
21:18
have to work with and I have the pleasure to work with every single day,
21:25
is I believe the the biggest and best asset of the company. Beautiful
21:32
people, great professionals, Really a pleasure to work with them all. And
21:36
it's been like that since they joined, since the very first day, and
21:38
I met quite a lot of them, as you can guess. So that's
21:41
the very first thing. A couple of additional things I believe are if I
21:48
think about my role first before as a product manager and now as as as
21:52
a product management director, this is such a pivotal role when it comes to
21:59
the the opportunity to interact with so many stakeholders right internal and external. You
22:06
get the chance to talk with customers with clicks from all the teams, with
22:11
partners and so on and so forth. So it's a role that allows you
22:15
to interact with so many people at the end of the day to first and
22:21
foremost deeply understand what type of pains we can solve with our product. And
22:26
this is one of the things that I think brings you more energy. And
22:32
the other thing I would say is that it's an exciting perial to be the
22:33
next thing, because well, the dex market is so cool and it's getting
22:42
so great a month after month. I remember, I think four or five
22:47
years ago, if we were typing decks on Google, there were very few
22:52
results, if any, And then we started next thing as a company started
22:56
to use this acronym five years back, I believe, or something along these
23:00
lines. And now you see everybody's talking about dignpl Experience Management. Uh.
23:04
And it's a very exciting too. It's very exciting to see how at the
23:10
market developed and it's still developing. I think the best is yet to come.
23:12
Yeah, and you're going to be in Boston, Mario, Well,
23:17
I see there, I will I'll be there. Excellent. Look forward to
23:21
crossing paths of you once again as we're doing a sort of biannual basis,
23:25
i'd say, and absolutely years to come still. Look thanks from the whole
23:29
team for all your amazing work here and thanks for coming on the show man.
23:33
We really appreciate it'd be great to hear from you a pleasure, Thank
23:36
you very much. To make sure that you never miss an episode, subscribe
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23:53
If you'd like to learn more about how Next Thing can help you improve your
23:56
digital employee experience, head over to Next Thing. Thank you so much for
24:00
listening. Until next time.