Latest / The Wilmac Wire / Holiday Break | Behind the Build Episode Replay with Bob Pease

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Holiday Break | Behind the Build Episode Replay with Bob Pease · The Wilmac Wire

• Emily Miller: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome back to the Will MacGuire. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you are joining us for today's episode and listening to it on April 9th, happy Easter week. I hope you had a wonderful holiday. I will also be honest with you. If you're listening to this episode, the day it drops, April 9th, I am currently in full wedding mode. Tomorrow, April 10th is the big day and the day this episode drops, I am likely getting ready for my rehearsal. So needless to say, we're keeping things a little bit light on the podcast front this week. But low key and taking things light doesn't mean that we're leaving you hanging. We are going to bring you one of our favorite episodes from earlier this season, which was our behind the build update with Will Mac's very own vice president of engineering and friend of the podcast, Bob Pease. Specifically, this is coming from season three. episode eight. Now Steve, Bob and I sat down to discuss agent tech AI. We chatted about what bringing workforce management to the 911 industry has taken so far and what it's been like. And then we dug deep into Mac and will Mac continuity WFM and where they're headed next. If you missed it the first time, it is a great episode. And if you caught it already, I strongly advise you to give it a second listen. If you enjoy it, I encourage you to just stay tuned, stick with us. AI is moving so ultra fast and that means that WillMac is moving fast. We've got another Behind the Build episode coming your way in May with a lot of new ground to cover. We will be back next week with a special episode celebrating National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week. But for now, I hope you enjoy your holiday, wish me luck for the wedding and enjoy this episode of the WillMacWire. Thanks for tuning in. speaker-0: All right, thanks for tuning in to the WillMac Wire. We've got one of our classic quarterly behind the build episodes today. So I'm happy to introduce Bob Pease, WillMac's VP of Engineering back to the WillMac Wire. Hey, Bob, how's it going? speaker-1: What's going good? Really excited for today's episode. ⁓ yeah. speaker-0: Yeah, we're in person. We're not in the WillMac office and each of our separate offices for this one. So this one's pretty cool, right? All right, so for our listeners, ⁓ the Behind the Build episode is basically a series that we've started on a quarterly basis where we sit down with Bob. Like I called out, he's our VP of Engineering at WillMac to talk product, talk product, how things are going on the development team, what we're finding in the market, that sort of thing. ⁓ So. today is one of those episodes and we're gonna get a lot into Constantine WFM and agentic AI. So to get things started though, I wanted to start it off with our classic this or that segment. Steve's laughing already. ⁓ We just started this ⁓ earlier on in season three, but it's really a brief icebreaker. So I'm gonna pose three different questions to you. You're gonna choose one or the other and then you're gonna give a little explanation why and then you'll hear some comments I'm sure from the peanut gallery over here. All right, so we'll get things started with This or that whiteboard planning or jumping into the code. speaker-1: jumping into the code. Yeah? Yeah, with agent-a-k-i and a lot of the tools we have as software developers, it's sometimes easier just to start coding to get the ideas going and then move to the whiteboard to kind of go through some of the nooks and crannies and problems you see. speaker-0: That's ironic to me because you have a huge whiteboard in your- speaker-1: I love my whiteboard. We use it all the time. speaker-0: Yeah, that's the toughest for that, feel like. But I can tell from lately how into the Identic speaker-2: for AI to go over your world. Was it coding or? speaker-1: ⁓ No whiteboarding. ⁓ All the onus was on the upfront planning and making sure you knew where you were going before you started doing anything. But now we can write thousands of lines of code and throw it away in just a couple of minutes. It's different world. speaker-0: Okay, next one, the pizza subs or pizza stop? speaker-1: Pizza Stop. Pizza over subs for me any day of the week, but yeah, Pizza Stop is awesome. speaker-0: For our listeners, the Pizza Stubbs is a spot close by to our new office in the five-star bank building and Pizza Stubbs was our old stomping grounds over on State Street. I do miss Pizza Stubbs sometimes. speaker-2: I think people still walk over. speaker-0: Yeah, I know we've gotten it delivered to the office a times, but had to ask that one. Okay, and third question. I think we've already touched on this and I can guess your answer, but a genetic AI or generative AI? speaker-1: The more AI can do for me without me having to interact with it, the better. speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-2: recursive. speaker-1: yeah. I'll be honest, I mean, a lot of the tools we're using are recursive. Like it will start a workflow and kind of course correct as it goes. And it's kind of cool because you can see it, the way it's thinking and the way it's adjusting to some of those things. speaker-2: Yes, love it. speaker-0: All right. Thanks for going through this or that segment, We're just going to jump right into kind of our first topic of today and talking about building Will-Mack Constant WFM. So the last time we had our last Behind the Build episode was in November during our fiscal year kickoff. So that was about a month after we launched Continuity WFM. So Bob, I want to talk to you a little bit about how Continuity WFM has been maturing post-launch. So from the product and engineering side, what do you think has evolved the most quickly since October? speaker-1: can't answer this singly. There's two things that come to mind for me. ⁓ One is forecasting. ⁓ So when we first started talking with PSAPs, a lot of the responses we get were like, forecasting doesn't matter. My numbers are my numbers. My staffing levels are my staffing levels. But we've slowly been turning the corner on those conversations. And really driving at the value forecasting can provide for your call takers in particular and optimizing your schedules. ⁓ So that's been awesome. And then, of course, agentic AI within Continuity WFM. We made huge strides in what we're able to offer there and we have a whole roadmap of features that we're kind of building towards with agentic AI. speaker-0: Yes, Mac. For our listeners, we're referring to Mac and Agentic AI pretty interchangeably. ⁓ So our buddy Mac is what we're talking about when it comes to Agentic AI. OK, let me ask Steve from the customer and market side, what you're seeing on the sales team, on the marketing side, within the market. What have you seen evolve since October? speaker-2: I think we've taken a huge dive just into the industry. ⁓ We've always sold products into the industry, but they weren't our own products. ⁓ So I think we a very familiar name, but maybe we didn't jump into thought leadership, being part of the community as much. ⁓ I know you're gonna touch on APCO and Nina, so we're jumping in there and we're just having deeper conversations with our prospects and customers. ⁓ along differently than how we anticipated. We built continuity replay for enterprise companies. That sales cycle and how you have to approach the sales is completely different than how you have to approach it in the public safety or PSAP world. So figuring out that, how we want to go to market as far as do we want to offer pilots? Do we want to offer POCs? How long? ⁓ That's been hot right now. ⁓ And then obviously who you're selling to. Are you selling to the end users? Are you selling to county executives? Are you selling to the sheriffs or commanders? Then some places you're getting involved with politics. The budgets at these places are being controlled by politicians. And I think that's one of the big things where continuity WFM is really, if you break it down, a SaaS platform. And it's a platform, meaning it's a UI that you look at. and you maneuver in there and the end user has to have the knowledge to be able to use the product correctly. And that's sweet. And SaaS has been huge for 10 years and it's, I think it is very beneficial and you can see the value of it. But I think bringing Mac into the play is a little bit more sexy and maybe easier for the community or politicians to get their head around like, look what we're bringing in. And Mac is really the brains behind the operation and can run the platform for you. And learn and do it better and quicker and be there 24-7 doing it. So I think all that has really happened in past three months. So it's amazing everyone talks about AI being at Mach Speed. We're living it right now and it's unbelievable how quick. just how we marketed our solution three months is completely different than how we're marketing it now. ⁓ So all exciting, but you really have to, and I think this is in general of any product company, and especially with how quick things move is have your ear to out there listening to everything, having conversations with people in the market and seeing where this thing goes because it's moving quick. All exciting stuff though. speaker-0: Yeah, definitely exciting stuff. can speak to the marketing side with, I think, something that's different with the WFM market compared to Replay. Like you talked about, Replay is more enterprise. WFM, like every PSAP is so vastly different. PSAP leaders are different personalities, different demographics than your enterprise sellers. They buy differently, like you said, ⁓ from the agentic AI side and how we've marketed it. ⁓ When it comes to 911, like how often in the news is something relevant to a 911 center positive, good? Not often. feels like if we start to tie in that agent AI thing that starts to move the ball in a different direction, I guess, is how I'm thinking about it. speaker-2: It's a win for the community. You'll hear every once in a while, we purchased this technology because so-and-so and it's going to improve everybody's lives. In enterprise, there's ROIs, we're making it more efficient and that's great. In public safety, the leaders can say, this is going to help people save lives. And that's a big difference and that's something that they should be getting out and touting to the community. speaker-0: And we're going to hit to more on kind of that higher level outcomes, the employee wellness or attention, the better service to the public. But before we get into that, ⁓ I want to talk about the differences or I guess the gap that we've seen when it comes to workforce management in the call center setting and workforce management in the public safety setting. Workforce management in the public safety setting doesn't really exist, I guess I would say. It seems to be a new concept to the group, but within the context and a role that's been around for. 30 plus years. speaker-2: I'll handle the macro version and then will dive into the actual features. public safety, this is a Steve McDonnell opinion, I'm not 100 % positive, but I'm pretty sure public safety is the only call taking industry, probably in the world, definitely in the country, that does not utilize workforce management software. Every other call taking industry does that. Any retail you call, any bank you call, any insurance company you call, anyone that has people picking up the phone in some sort of contact center way are all utilizing WFM software for 20 plus years, probably 30 plus years if I'm being honest. There's numerous reasons ⁓ why it hasn't moved into the PSAPs or 911 centers and Bob will get granular on it. ⁓ But we think it's important because the PSAPs are mission critical. These are the places that save lives. If anyone deserves to be utilizing this software to making their centers run flawlessly and the people have easier lives because it is a stressful job that they have, it's the PSAPs should have this software and they should be engaged with the software. So that's kind of what we've seen on. the difference between contact center and PSAPs. It doesn't exist in PSAPs. They are actually using spreadsheets, manually Excel spreadsheets. And then the other thing we see is they will use scheduling tools that are ideally built for patrol cars, fire stations. We've even seen healthcare ⁓ and they're procured by the county and they're kind of just jammed into the PSAP being like. you figure out how to use this. This is what we bought for the other ⁓ sections and this is what you need to use. And it doesn't fit, obviously. So they're struggling with it. ⁓ So we haven't seen an actual workforce management solution out there, especially like ours, which is built with AI and powered by us. But Bob will get into kind of the granular reasons why we don't see it. speaker-0: Right, right. speaker-1: Yeah, mean, one of the big contributors is flexibility. When you're in a PSAP, you don't have the same flexibility that we have in a contact center. We have certain stations that have to be manned 24-7. They can only be manned by an individual person. When that person has to leave to go on lunch, it has to be backfilled, and those types of flows don't exist out there in the industry today. I would argue another big contributor here is a lot of PSAPs just don't even understand what workforce management even does for you. I heard a really interesting story recently. from a PSAP. ⁓ I had two different managers of two different teams within the PSAP ⁓ talking about how they both have the same number of people on their team, but there's a strong case to be made for the day shift team should have more people because there's higher call volumes, but that actually creates some friction on the night team they would be stealing a person from. And they're making very subjective emotional decisions around whether or not they should move people. rather than data-driven decisions, right? And that's kind of one of the things that WFM starts to bring for you, right? Bring those data-driven decisions. Help understand if I move this person, what are the impacts gonna be on my schedules, which is where Mac really comes into play. We can run those models for you and give you a preview of if you do make this personnel change between teams, what are the impacts actually gonna be in your day-to-day operations. But for a lot of PSAPs, they just don't even know how to do this because they're filling processes with... literally sometimes people manually writing their names down on a piece of paper. Like, where's your data repository for that, right? It doesn't exist today. speaker-0: Let me ask, can you expand a little bit more on how WFM for a PSAP is different in terms like compared to WFM in a call center? speaker-1: Yeah, you know, it's one, have to be able to separate the physical desk requirements, right? Which is a little bit different than your traditional contact center because it doesn't matter who's sitting where or even a lot of contact centers can have people working from home, right? Which isn't really present in the PSAP industry. ⁓ So that's a big piece of it's ⁓ managing their overtime and comparing that to like union roles that they might have to adhere to and how that impacts scheduling. ⁓ and automating those flows is another kind big differentiator that I'm seeing. speaker-0: All right, Steve, anything to add on top of that? speaker-2: No, I think it's a very niche vertical that we happen to be reselling software in and we've found this need and feel very ⁓ passionate now about bringing this product to. speaker-0: Yeah, and you talked to a little bit, Steve, about kind of the outcomes and how three months ago the outcomes that we were marketing were vastly different. Yeah. A lot more granular than we're seeing now. So just to call out a couple themes that we're seeing in terms of employee wellness, reducing churn, ⁓ employee retention, response readiness, and in turn of that, better response to the public. Do you want to start by expanding on that a little bit? speaker-2: I mean, I think when we jumped into this, ⁓ we were very granular as far as feature function. Like, hey, this is what you, and we learned from the prospects, hey, what do you need? And by learning that, we were doing what the end users wanted and needed, which is great, and you need all that, but we were kind of missing the big picture on the business case. ⁓ So wellness, taking that for number one. That's something we just don't deal with on the enterprise side. ⁓ I'm not saying these companies don't care about wellness, but when they're purchasing software, it's definitely not their top five thing they're concerned about. Going to decision makers and talking about wellness has been different for us and getting our head around it. But one of the huge value props of continuity WFM and Mac is scheduling and forecasting your PSAP correctly. People aren't having to work more than they should. They aren't getting surprised with shifts. ⁓ And that goes right into wellness. These are mission critical, very difficult jobs. We've heard from multiple PSAPs that when you're hiring just for one position, they hire four, sometimes five, because only one of them is going to make it. half the time you either don't get through training or you get out on the floor and go through a couple calls and are like, ⁓ my God, I can't do this. ⁓ So these people have very difficult jobs and just trying to make their life easier is huge. So I think that is big for wellness. ⁓ The overtime and retention stuff, I think the retention PSAPs do not They have a lot of turnover right now, but it really hurts a 911 center with turnover because as we just said, you have to hire more than what you're going to retain. And the training process is 12 to 18 months. That's a heavy capital lift as well. You're hiring four to five people, only one's going to make it, and you're not going to know for 12 to 18 months. So you're putting the rest of the group at stress level. during that time. ⁓ handling turnover and retention is huge. I think that's one of ⁓ the biggest value props that Mac or Continuity WFM will handle. So I think those two are probably the top two that I kind of push. And then, I mean, there's numerous other ones. We do deal with union shops. ⁓ When you talk ROI, this thing, has the ability, I'm not saying we will do it, but has the ability to cut overtime pretty significantly. You're talking more than 50 to 60%. ⁓ And if it's not a union shop or if it's a union that wants to save money, this is an easy ROI to do. If not, you put the parameters of the union rules in there. And Mac stays within the guidelines, makes it as as efficient as possible while staying in with the union rules. ⁓ So I think we have to handle both situations. speaker-1: Yeah, 100%, right? Some folks are managing for, some people are managing against over time. whatever your stance is, that's fine. We want to be there to support you and help you get to the optimized staffing levels that you need. I want to expand a little bit on the training too, because another thing that comes up, all that training that Steve outlined, that's your bare minimum just to get out there on the floor. That's not where they want you to stop, right? They want you to be trained across multiple skills so that you can move around the center, because that's a big part of the wellness piece, right? Call taking is very stressful. You take a lot of calls ⁓ and it's typically not the favorite position for people to work in, right? So you want to get trained on police dispatch or fire dispatch, EMS dispatch, whatever it is. So ⁓ the training just extends beyond that too. And it's a lot to manage, right? And that's some of the troubles that people are running into. Might not have appropriate staffing levels to even handle that training and schedule out the training. So it kind of falls apart and how do you track it and make sure that you stay in line with that as a huge part of the wellness piece. speaker-2: for it. speaker-0: I think too, wasn't there a story about a PSAP with a 12-hour shift and certain people don't even get relief from their desk for the full 12-hour shift? ⁓ Which, yeah, so that definitely plays speaker-2: some of that thought leadership. Which we're not necessarily at the point to be able to say, hey, you've been doing the 12 hours for the past five years, but technically every other PC app we work with is not doing that and this isn't efficient. And it's on us to kind of get to the point where we can recommend the proper schedules or what the best case is and have APCO and Neenah be recommending this stuff too. And let Mac do it for you. speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, great segue. I wanted to hit quickly on kinda, as we transition into the conversation more about Mac and agentic AI and where the product is headed, I wanted to take a brief break and talk a little bit about Neenah and APCO. So we've been aware of Neenah and APCO. Neenah is the National Emergency Number Association. APCO is another public safety professionals group. And I guess the network runs really deep with those. We didn't realize how deep it went, but each individual ⁓ state has their own APCO and NINA groups. They have an international one. They all run different types of conferences that bring public safety professionals together. So we've started to dig into that a little bit more and expand our network and reach within that. And that includes being involved in APCO standards working groups. There doesn't seem to be a lot of standards information around AI, around workforce management. So that's where we're starting to step into the game. including a working group for best practices for AI integration into the Emergency Communication Center. those conversations have been really fun to be a part of and to get that inside look from the vendor perspective as the SMEs on AI and then getting it level setting with where the people who are actually utilizing the technology are. ⁓ So, that's been very fun to dig into and I'm excited to share a little bit more about kind of the conferences that we'll be attending and speaking at. in the coming months. So we've talked about it a little bit already, but with Mac, we've got agentic AI within WillMac, Constant, and WFM. So can you explain, what makes agentic different from the typical AI features that people tend to hear about and ⁓ think towards when they hear it? speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. ⁓ agentic AI is able to actually complete an action on your behalf, right? And it can start with the user prompt, like you can put in your command, right? Plain English sentence that you want to send. But your agentic AI then has, we call them tools, like on the engineering side, when we're building this out, has a list of tools and it could be a database connection, an API call, integration with some other platform, whatever it is. And you basically give all the tools to your agent. with instructions on how to use those tools. And then when the user says, hey, I want to do X, Y, Z, it now has all the things within it to be able to reason through the LLM to understand what the intent is and then go complete the action for you. So it's very powerful because you can then offload these tasks if it's a workflow, if you have to go five different steps to go complete an action, you can actually hand all of that off to your AI agent and not have to fill out forms or click buttons or navigate to different screens. speaker-2: Mm-hmm. speaker-0: Okay, and so a use case for that within WFM, like we talked about, for example, on-boarding. Like everything within WFM seems to be, it needs to be configurable because each PSAP is so vastly different. Correct. So can you speak a little bit more to that? speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. ⁓ So when you first onboard continuity WFM, yeah, you do have to go to a bunch of different things. That's a lot of configuration across a lot of different screens within our application. ⁓ Mac will guide you through that process in a conversational manner. It'll introduce, you know, the concept here, we're going to set up your location. So those are your physical buildings that you're operating out of. How many do you have? What information needs to go there? And it's just guides you through that process, through kind of question and answer, and then throughout that, information it gathers, goes and actually does a configuration for you. So we walk through all the complexities. We have FAQs built into it. if you, as a PSAP user, don't understand what you're doing, you can just ask it and it will help you. It will answer in plain text for you, right, and help you understand what that is. The whole goal of Mac is the onboarding agent. When you're done, you go right to the schedule page and start generating schedules out of all of it, right? So it does end to end onboarding for you. speaker-0: Right. And we time that too. It's like 20 minutes to get up and running, which is pretty impressive from the stance of like all the customization behind it. And like you said, it's very simple Q &A. And then if you're confused as the user, you can ask it a question. So it's just got so many use cases within that small. speaker-1: If you think about any software implementation, some of the big barriers are dealing with our schedules for all the people that have to be involved to make sure you have the right people on a call, right? Like that's all prime for AI automation. speaker-2: And once that's all set, you can really just let it go. A hundred percent. I mean, you can check in on him, but he should be running your schedule. ⁓ I think again, going back to unions, Mac's going to recommend some certain stuff. in the contact center world, if Mac was in there, he would just go and do it. They're going to say, make it as efficient as possible. I don't care what happens. And Mac would just run and do it. in the public safety world, we're gonna run into people being like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I get that he's making it more efficient, but run it by us first. We'll approve whether he can go and do it or not. So I think setting up the parameters specifically for PSAPs has been important to make sure Mac and his ability to just go and do this stuff is checking. There's some checks and balances there that a physical person will say, hey, okay, yeah, this sounds good, let's do this. And I think that's important for PSAPs. ⁓ You know, going back to the adoption, PSAPs are really just getting around to cloud. So you talk call handling, which is basically phone calls coming in. ⁓ used to be for contact center Cisco and Avaya and now over time, ⁓ 10, 15 years, at least 10, 15 I'm thinking, ⁓ had Five9 ⁓ InContact. NiCE now InContact All these cloud companies already take that. In the public safety world, the call handling tool is still ⁓ like a Cisco and Avaya, version, on-prem. There's not many that have moved to the cloud. So for us to be coming in and saying, hey, Mac's just going to do everything. He's AI up in the cloud. We do want to make sure that we're giving them steps and some checks and balances and not just throwing some awesome technology. speaker-0: Yeah, and I think that goes back to your mention of mission critical. Like we're dealing with life or death here. I understand the concern maybe in terms of letting it completely go, but understanding the power behind it and like you said, easing into it for more low-hanging fruit type things like that seems to be being received well. speaker-2: I mean, you talk use cases and what he really is is he's a forecasting and scheduling agent, professional. But he knows the PSAP world inside and out. That's really what he knows. So there's multiple use cases once Mac's in there that he can help a customer out with that are outside of forecasting and scheduling. ⁓ But for the most part, it's taken the historical data. and the current data and being able to predictively forecast it correctly. I don't think any PSAP is doing that right now. speaker-0: Do you want to expand, Bob, a little bit on the forecasting piece and where agentic AI falls into it? speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. ⁓ Very much the same as your traditional WFM forecasting. We take your historical call volumes and then we plug that into some formulas and help you generate a forecast and then actions off of it. ⁓ Again, the only difference for us is we have those, we have some stations within our center, the dispatch stations that have to be staffed 100 % of the time. So we basically kind of ignore those, right? That's not what we need to forecast for because there's literally nothing you can do about it. It's all about the call taking portion of it. ⁓ Also looking into, you know, introducing some of those training things that we talked about into the forecasting. ⁓ If I'm sure it's staffed by this much, this many people, how long is it going to take me to get through my training cycles based on my typical churn rate out of the training programs to understand how long it's going to take me to recover? There's some really powerful things there as well. Mac is a huge part of that forecasting. There's a bunch of algorithms that, you know, we can use to generate the forecast. MaxRail Power is generating the insights and action items out of that forecast to help the supervisor or the manager take action against what we're seeing in the data. speaker-0: Yeah, there's some when we've seen the demos in our bi-weekly like continuity roadmap meetings with the company. It's been really interesting to see how granular you can get with those types of details and insights. Like from the forecasting perspective, like, yeah, okay, this area is this time ⁓ stamp is green, but this one's yellow. But why is it yellow? And then what can I do to solve that and make it green within a quick thing and then say, yeah, okay, Matt, go for it. And it's good. speaker-1: I think that's a good point too, right? It is very granular. And imagine you're in a PSAP and you've never heard of forecasting. You don't have someone that does forecasting full-time for you today. AI is there to help you through that, right? Mac will guide you through that process, help you understand that data. And then again, take the action on it. speaker-0: Right. yeah, Mac just lives throughout the product and that I think has been a really significant change since October, which is what? Four months ago? Yeah. That's pretty speaker-2: Yeah, I mean, I think most software solutions are going to have some agentic AI living within it and you want it to be your own. Yeah. It can easily be someone else's agentic AI. But the agentic AI is the part that really automates it and improves it. So Mac, once he's in there, he just gets smarter and smarter as it goes and he's making his own improvements as we were talking about the recursive AI. And that is happening 24-7. And no matter how great a people you have, you can't do that. And the reality is in PSAPs, there isn't a title of scheduling and forecasting. It's other people who have more important things to do being taken away to deal with this stuff that they don't like doing and taking an incredible amount of time away. speaker-0: Right. I think within our ROI calculator, like I know we kind of talked about how employee wellness can be something that's difficult to measure, but when you look at a supervisor who's spending 50 % of their time on scheduling, like with WFM, that can be reduced significantly with agentic AI, with MAC, that can be reduced ⁓ there's immediate payback right ⁓ All right. So Bob, I just want to zoom out for a quick second. Your leading development now across two vastly different products as we've kind of hit on for vastly different markets. What would you, can you speak a little bit more to what it's like managing two products at once and how that has changed how the team operates? ⁓ speaker-1: Yeah, kind of a multi-stage answer, right? Obviously, not shy myself or the dev team around using AI. So we lean heavily on agent AI to generate code and help us out there. One of the problems that we're running into now, especially across two products is human beings can't keep up with the amount of work that AI can produce, right? So we've had a little bit of kind of back and forth of like, oh, AI is generating all this code for us. Well, now how do we make sure we can support it and we're reviewing it and it's secure? Yeah. You know, so we're getting really creative as a team and collaborating on how we embrace that to just kind of keep that upward trend of the amount of things we're able to tackle. Really important because now that we have two products, we have to manage priorities across two different products with different people internally. ⁓ So it's a lot there. We've had to get a little more strategic in how we sit down and plan and be more intentional about what work we're going to commit to. versus I would say six months ago, people come and say, ⁓ what's the priority once it's gonna be done? And it was a little more willy-nilly, right? Because we could just handle it. We could be a very reactive team. It gets a little bit harder when you have two products with different priorities that are competing. speaker-0: Yeah, it's exciting to see kind of like you said, you're still bringing changes though and updates to both products on a bi-weekly basis. like you said, the AI has enabled your team to be more efficient, but also the strategy and priority has become clear as you guys work through it. ⁓ I'll be the first to say that you guys are doing a great job. And I'd love to see what you guys, what you're doing. And I just remember in the last behind the build how we spoke about vibe coding for a hot minute. So it's really cool to see how that has changed and evolved. All right, so looking into kind of our next theme as we start to wrap up, ⁓ we head on it before. WFM is pretty much used across all communication centers except 911. It's starting to make its way in. ⁓ Steve, do you want to speak a little bit to kind of the total addressable market and how we're approaching that with WFM? speaker-2: Yeah, so before we jump into that, I do want to say that Bob and his team are doing a great job, but having two products in two different stages, continuity replays, a mature kind of growth stage where with WFM we're kind of in, let's go out and get as many customers as possible. So I think it takes a lot of discipline that we didn't need to have before. ⁓ and being more proactive with the schedules, which overall for our company is a good thing to be maneuvering into. But it's not like this podcast specifically was for WFM, but we still love replay and are still pushing forward and doing plenty of things with replay. So to the total addressable market. So we've kind of shifted it out. And again, this has been changing constantly. It's very fluid, but phase one is pretty firm. we're going after the largest PSAPs in North America, Canada, and the United States. That tends to be around 500,000 people in a county, or is generally what we're looking for. So there's about 70 to 100 of those. So that is what we're going after. Phase two would be scaling it down to the rest of the PSAPs. And that you get into tens of thousands. ⁓ But you need a larger team, you need a larger sales team, you need a larger product team. ⁓ So with those together, ⁓ you're looking at 500 to a billion total addressable market. And then you throw in patrol cars or moving Mac into different spots of the public safety. Those are the phases that would be next. ⁓ We're starting to think about, but we're concentrating on this phase one and it just gets better. ⁓ I think, you know, we'll probably try to have a podcast guest on in the next quarter or so to talk about. kind of vertical markets that we play in. So we like to call ourselves or did like to call ourselves a vertical SaaS company. Now we're a vertical AI, agentic AI company, but it's very specific. vertical meaning we are playing in a very specific market that not a lot of people are coming into. And I think that Total addressable market for a vertical play is good, solid for us. And we can go and try to get 50 to 60 % of the market and not 10 to 15. ⁓ I think there's a lot of upside. ⁓ We think it's an easier product to scale business-wise. ⁓ It's an easier kind of to comprehend. ⁓ It's demoing product where continuity replay is not that, it's more backend technology. ⁓ It's a lower cost. and there's just right now, there's not a lot of competition. So we feel like we could scale it a lot quicker and that's what we're excited about. ⁓ So yeah, any other questions around the tech? And addressable market for viewers out there that don't recognize that acronym. speaker-0: No. No, are there any total? a little bit of an inside scoop and just to hear kind of what's on our brains every day. Like you said, it's evolved quickly and this conversation looks a lot different three months ago. So hopefully our listeners go back to the most recent behind the build and listen to that one and listen to this one and you can hear how vastly things change kind of in our world. All right. So as we take this product market through Appgo and you know, we already talked about those communities a little bit. I just wanted to, before we wrap up, ask you guys to speak a little bit more to kind of, we hit on it already, but those high-level value props that we're seeing some good ⁓ reception from. So, Bob, if you kind of want to start from the product perspective. speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I guess we haven't really talked about this explicitly today, but just centralizing your data, again, back to some people are literally filling out books for things they need, like time off and stuff like that, getting that into one platform. I don't know how to quantify the value add from a wellness perspective for a PSAP, right? There's so much friction every step of the way for everyone involved in these processes. It's just a huge value add right there. And then I guess, know, to Steve's point earlier, the supervisors within a PSAP are spending so much time not doing their core responsibilities because of all these manual processes that they have to get through. Leveraging AI to make that process smoother and offload a lot of that to continuity WFM and not have to do it on a day-to-day basis, huge value prop right there, right? Get them back to actually supervising, actually training and being on the floor with the people that they need to support on a daily basis. speaker-2: Yeah, and you know, I think going back to retention, how important keeping these employees happy and moving along because turnover is not good for the PSAP. Hiring is rough, training is rough. So I think all of that is important and a huge value prop for continuity to WFM on an even higher scale. I don't think PSAPs have been able to get early progressive technology. And this is cutting edge technology that we're trying to move into the PSAPs that, in the bottom line, it's gonna save lives. living in communities that utilize this, and if, God forbid, something happens, you want someone to be there answering a call immediately and dispatching whoever needs to be dispatched immediately. And this software literally helps that by using the best technology, agenic AI, recursive AI, whatever you want to call it right now. that there is and having the ability as AI improves, that's going to improve. So I think you're really looking at a bigger picture here of communities being able to save lives and taking advantage of Agenic AI and new technology where maybe in the past, whether it was commercials or how they looked at it, PSAPs just didn't want to dive into the new technology. So I think that's the most exciting thing and right here at Monroe. We've been talking to Monroe. We hope to have a pilot in there soon. That hits home for all of us. We want that 911 Center to be perfectly staffed constantly. speaker-0: Alright, Steve, you kind of touched on it in terms of what you're excited about. Bob, as we lead up to the next Behind the Build episode in three months, what are you most excited for for the upcoming quarter? speaker-1: Definitely the agentic AI roadmap. It's really cool to me because once you get the foundations in your product, there's no real end to the way that you can take that and apply it and continue to build out more functionality around it. So I feel like AI is changing so quickly as well. It feels like every other day someone's like, Bob, can we solve this with AI? What do you think about this with AI? Right? So like, there's just no shortage of new ideas or opportunities for us to go and pursue. speaker-0: I love it. I'm in a similar boat ⁓ from the product marketing perspective. Like this is really keeping my team and I on our toes. We're learning a lot and it's kind of ⁓ the buy-in across the organization is evident in terms of educating ourselves, educating our teams and getting working towards that same goal. So excited to see kind of what this, I'm gonna have to listen to this one before the next one to see how much has changed in terms of our conversation topics. So before I wrap us up, I want to let our listeners know that we will be speaking at quite a few conferences now in the upcoming months. So we'll probably debrief a little bit that on the next Behind the Build. So Steve, you'll be speaking at Texas Public Safety Conference in late March. You'll be speaking at APCO Western in early April. You'll be speaking at PA APCO in late April. And I probably will hear back soon on a few others. are you excited for those? Yeah. speaker-2: Get out there meet everyone. Mm-hmm do some speaking. ⁓ yeah speaker-0: I'm excited too, we got our first dry run next week, so better be ready. All right, Bob, anything else to add before I wrap this up? speaker-1: I wasn't expecting an ending question like that. I don't know. just, you know, the excitement is palpable to your point across the whole org. So I'm just, I'm here for it. And I'll say the whole dev team is too. Like when I sit down and go through this new problem popped up or whatever it is, right? There's the excitement that they bring to the table is really kind of, think, seeding a lot of that energy that we're feeling. speaker-0: All right, I love it. Next time I'll let you know when I ask you that last final question. All right, so for our listeners to stay connected, follow along with Will Mac continuity, replay, WFM and Mac updates at WillMacTech.com. You can also connect with Will Mac on LinkedIn for any product and company news. We're all pretty fun time. So I would definitely check our LinkedIn pages. Yeah, our LinkedIn pages, Steve McDonald, Bob Pease, Emily Miller. Subscribe to our release newsletters for continuity replay and WFM updates. And please feel free to share feedback or topic ideas by dropping a comment on this podcast or reaching out through our website. So Bob, Steve, thanks for joining me for another Behind the Build. speaker-2: Thank Thanks guys. speaker-0: Thank you for listening to the WillMac Wire. If you liked today's conversation, make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or watch full episodes on our YouTube channel. You can also learn more about WillMac technologies and our work in customer interaction technology at willmactech.com. We'll be back soon with more conversations with the drivers, those shaping our industry and those building right here in Western New York. See you next time.