Katie Bianchi
Appearances
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
AI is a shield and AI can be a sword. And we've got to be the best, strongest, fastest shield there is. Our processes were built for case resolution pre-AI, not post-AI. No shortcuts in innovation. It's that notion of forgetting everything you know, acknowledging you know nothing, and starting from the beginning. So humbling. My goodness. You're eliminating handoffs. You're reducing friction.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
for our own teams to access all the tools that are out there today and come and apply it to the processes that they struggle with every single day and come and tell us how they apply something in a way that we can actually figure out how to take and scale.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
The best people who are going to tell you how to fix what's going on aren't necessarily the leaders and the managers who are so abstracted sometimes from the day to day.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
They are the folks you have in your organization that can actually understand the biggest problems that arise and look at the doom technology that's out there, create their own experiments, and then come to us and work with us to teach us how So then we can work together to figure out how to drive a scaled adoption of that motion throughout the entire team.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
You know, there are green shoots of that as part of a culture. But I think we have to look to AI actually as a generational technology transformation that actually accelerated this. to be honest. And our CEO, he is a very involved visionary. And I think he recognized very early on that we had to do more learning than doing.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
And the way to do that learning was to really step back, assume you don't know anything, and bring in all of the right people to actually help teach. And he created for the first 12 months, what we called an AI summit.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
And every month, a hundred leaders across the company would get together, they would learn from what was happening outside, and then they would show and tell what they were doing in their specific space across their specific use case. And it was, Honestly, in my career, the first time I've ever seen innovation get executed in a way that actually...
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
sticks and is incredibly compelling because we all learn together, but different teams went down different paths to solve different problems. And he let that and wanted that to happen, that divergence to happen so we could learn as we went. And then because we were doing these every single month, over time, there was a very big convergence of
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
how we were going to execute this at a different degree of scale, common architecture, common metrics, common framework, and common solutioning, which then we slowed down for a while, but all of that investment helped us speed up. It was incredible. It was incredible.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
Absolutely. And there was incredible intentionality into how that process of innovation was going to go. We didn't know where we were going to end up, but we knew what we were going to do, I would say, as a company under his leadership to...
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
get to the place we wanted to get and to do it in a way that would deliver the right outcomes for our customers and our people, no matter what use case we were exploring as part of the, and there were many, but no matter what use case we were exploring as part of the initiative.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
Yeah. Yeah. And I think we knew, you know, we were driven to align on what outcomes we wanted to get to. But to your point, the path of how you do it, what the best way to do it is, was was unknown. And it's that notion of forgetting everything, you know. Yep. Acknowledging you know nothing and starting from the beginning.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
Yeah. So just quickly in terms of what they do, what they do today, we have a co-pilot that handles our technical support use case. And that co-pilot can handle everything from simple and repetitive tasks all the way to providing some decision and diagnostic support for our most complex problems, which is really awesome because it lets our team focus on the most complex problems.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
And so from that perspective, we're using our AI right now to reduce our time to resolve by over 40%. whether it's the simple use cases where we're actually getting a higher degree of traction of having AI fully resolve those cases, all the way up to the complex cases.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
And it's been really interesting because doing this for the simple cases delights our customers because we're on a path where they're going to be able to fully self-resolve themselves. And for the complex cases, and we do it on the complex side, not by replacing humans, but by surfacing the right data to them at the right time, so they can work smarter and they can work fast.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
One of them, I think, to me is like I would have started earlier on the the data side. I think it's the most underestimated part of any AI effort and probably the least glamorous in certain ways. I think people tend to get excited about the shiny layers of co-pilots and automation and agentic AI.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
But if the underlying data isn't clean or you don't know what data is required to solve the issue and you don't figure a way to turn that on and get it flowing across your data pipeline, the value just won't be there in your solution. won't scale.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
So look, I think looking back, we probably could have moved a little bit faster if we had started earlier in the journey around data unification and sort of capturing some of the telemetry much more quickly. So I think that's one thing. And I think
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
One of the biggest misconceptions, especially for, I would say, like a customer experience organization, as you go on this AI journey, I think the biggest misconception is that you can do it alone. What do you mean by that? Well, I don't think AI transformation is something that a post-sales team can or should own entirely. in isolation.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
You can't bolt it on to existing workflows and you don't want to. You need to drive net new process re-architecture. And that takes a lot of partnership with your strategy or operations organization, as well as your IT organization. And when you think about fundamentally what you're doing, you're solving problems with the product. And
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
our product organization is actually the one that is building technically doing the engineering behind the co-pilot build. And I think that that has been a huge accelerant for us. Now we're doing that in the highest degree of partnership where we are cleaning our data, validating our data, and then helping the product organization improve both efficacy and accuracy.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
But we would not be where we are right now if they weren't owning the engineering around that, right? Number one, because they've got the engineering expertise, but number two, because they have the product expertise.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
Yes. And I think for us, what's been really interesting is that AI and this sort of revolution has made tight collaboration between go-to-market, CX organizations, product and IT. It's an absolute non-negotiable. One example I would give you is really how we're working to unify data capture and automated workflows across both pre and post sales.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
So if you think about a historic motion between pre and post sales, pre sales captured all the technical requirements and all the outcomes and all the use cases. They stored it in a system or they didn't. We didn't have access to it and deal closed. Post sales would pick it up and start all over again and frustrate the customer by asking the same questions.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
And they'd have to start from scratch in terms of building a technical strategy, which takes a ton of time, redoing work, missing context, etc.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
And now as we're building this interlock between pre and post sales with AI driven flows that are going to carry that data from pre sales to post sales and use it to recommend deployment strategies that are tailored to each customer, you're eliminating handoffs. You're reducing friction. You're accelerating time to value.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
And for our customers, it's going to mean a more seamless, much more personalized experience from the first conversation that they have with us in the pre-sale to the time that we get them to value through a full deployment. And honestly, I do not think that that level of integration would have ever happened without AI forcing us to really think about
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
the end-to-end process and the data capture that's required and what we want to build towards in terms of the experience that we want to provide for our customers.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
I'll give two examples. I think one, if I'm specifically looking at the support use case, the way that we've changed the process is that number one, based on all the inputs we're getting through the case lifecycle, we're driving certain data inputs at case closure. And we're summarizing all of that
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
into knowledge that feeds our co-pilot so that that question may have been asked nine times in the past and a human may have had to engage to answer it. But on the 10th time or the third time now that that question gets asked, we wanna have a solution for it.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
And we're building our processes to ensure that we have enough data that as AI and AI reasoning gets smarter and better, that that capability is built in and it's actually something we can leverage from the start.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
The second example would be, as you think about this whole customer journey and customer lifecycle from pre-sales to deployment to ongoing value realization and support, you actually want a fully closed system. And the way that I think about it through the persona of a customer or a partner who's deploying our product is,
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
is you no longer want to hand them a manual runbook for how to deploy a product. You want to hand them a copilot. And that copilot will have all of the information around every interaction that we've had specific to selling, architecting, deploying, and supporting a product that has looked like what they are going to deploy to.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
And if you imagine your deployment leader, whether it's a third party partner you want to do your work or your team going in and as part of the process, getting a technical strategy automatically created for them from all of that learning and all of the net new inputs specific to that customer that have happened in the pre-sale.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
So all they need to do is pick up a, what I would call dynamically generated playbook and execute to that. That's what we're building towards.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
It's not necessarily collect everything. It's collect what adds value. And honestly, you have to go through a journey to learn what adds value.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
Well, we did it for support. We actually went through some painstaking level of analysis on every case to say, what is every data point? What is every interaction that actually gets this case done? solved for? And how do we collect it? Like, how do we turn on Zoom transcripts? How do we turn on audio recording? How do we pull in from JIRA? How do we pull in from the network and telemetry?
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
And as we've gotten smarter, we figured out what information is high quality information and what information is not high quality information. And it's allowed us to sort of tone and lock that in a of this with our deployment journey. And we're actually still starting in the same place. It's like, what's everything we need? Because you actually have to uniquely learn it for each experience.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
Yeah. You know, I think about it in the lens of, like, how does work change? What is the future of work? And what we're seeing right now is, like, our teams are spending much less time grinding through tickets and more time focused on real complex customer challenges. Yeah. And it's the kind of work only humans can do.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
I think one of the amazing parts about being part of a company that has to move at the pace of cybersecurity and continue to innovate to stay in front of adversaries is that it means that we are going to continue to innovate. We're going to continue to develop new products. And we've got to figure out how to stay ahead of that.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
And a big piece of staying ahead of that is to make sure that AI and some of the tools and technology that we have available to us can take on the repeatable, the predictable, the what's already been solved.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
So our sales engineers, our PS teams, our support engineers, and our architects are freed up to engage more deeply with our customers on how to apply new technology to improve their security outcomes. So I think it's changed the way that we are all working in a really energizing way. Our teams have to react less to the noise and more on, I think, solving the problems that matter.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
So for me, it's not about replacing people with AI. It's about elevating the role of people and increasing their impact in a world that does not stand still in cybersecurity.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
Yeah, absolutely. You said it really well. I think it's like AI is a shield and AI can be a sword. And we've got to be the best, strongest, fastest shield there is, whether it's what our product can do or whether it's how our teams are working every single day to bring that value to our customers more quickly with less complexity than ever before.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
Yeah, look, I think honestly, We have to continue to measure success by the outcomes we deliver for our customers. It's eliminating issues before they happen. It's resolving issues as quickly as we can when they do happen. It's not just a shorter time to deploy, but a faster time to get them to value.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
with a deployment that ensures that as they grow and scale, they'll continue to stay technically healthy and operational. And, you know, most importantly, with that, it becomes the fastest time to value an ongoing value, right? So it's not just about solving those problems, but it's got to be about helping customers get the full benefit of what they bought sooner.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
So I think that's got to be the backdrop. We can't lose sight of what we do every single day. But at the core of it, with AI, there are a different set of things that you need to ensure are working well in order to deliver those outcomes. And it really comes down to, is your data right? Is your data accurate? Are the solutions you're providing to customers accurate? effective?
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
Are they helping resolve the issue? Are they helping customers do the work or get the answers they need in a faster, more reliable way? So you do have to spend the time making sure that the product that you're delivering to the customer, which is now this AI solution where it used to potentially be a document or a person, You got to make sure that that's right.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
You got to make sure that you're providing a wow experience to your customers. So where I coach my team is like, we're developing a solution and we're developing a product. And that product has to provide a wow experience to our customers from the first time that they touch it. And it means that we've got to think differently about the solution design that we get to.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
And it also means we need to measure things a little bit differently in terms of how good that solution is for the problems we're trying to solve for those specific customers.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
I think one customer story that stands out is we've had a couple of customers who we've been able to help prevent major incidents in their infrastructure because we flagged emerging issues using telemetry before they even saw symptoms. So that early intervention helped them to take action quickly, helped them stay ahead of some of that risk.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
And it was a clear moment for us of sort of our ability as an organization to move us from being more reactive about the problems to actually being much more proactive. And with all the intelligence we have, you know, we have other customers recognizing.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
customer situations where sometimes you have customers who are frustrated, who are at risk, who aren't getting to value, where they might have struggled with the way that deployments had been done in the past or frequent escalations on specific issues.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
But because we've been able to get a lot smarter in the way that we're handling cases and looking at issues before they go red or using the data that we have to have a more proactive deployment engagement, you see that really change the way that customers lean in and engage with us. And we can't remember, we can't forget, just like you said a little bit earlier, our customers are...
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
are solving, they have the hardest jobs in the world. They're solving the hardest problems in some of the most emission critical industries in the world. And our job is to make the complex simple. And so when you're able to do that by embracing AI, by embracing automation and really rethinking it, you see them lean in in completely different ways.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
And it's this notion and this mission and this philosophy we have about using that to actually build customers for life.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
Very simply, I say I'm responsible for making sure that customers stay ahead of threats, with our AI-powered platform that secures users, networks, and clouds at scale.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
Yeah. I mentioned this a little bit earlier. I am actually most excited about using AI as the operating system for how we work. where it's not just a tool that we use occasionally on the side to enhance an old process that we've used, but it really becomes the singular engine that guides our teams in real time.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
So I like to imagine a world where AI helps every single team member know what to do, how to do it really well, and when to take action. So we're managing by exception, And that's going to allow us to accelerate time to value, solve the hardest issues much more quickly. So I think this type of intelligent inflow guidance was really only something that AI can unlock.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
And it changes the way we operate, right? It makes this notion of expertise in a fast-paced world much more scalable. Yep. It drives consistency and it allows us to deliver better outcomes at speed and to a degree of quality that honestly, I don't think we could have imagined a few years ago.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's the only tool that can actually help you keep up with the pace of innovation, if that makes sense, right? So if you look at some of the tools that are out there, like now, like Notebook LM, right? This gives every single person on your team an AI-trained assistant on all of the internal and external knowledge, so they can get more real-time information and
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
We're using our AI right now to reduce our time to resolve by over 40%. It's the only tool that can actually help you keep up with the pace of innovation. It's not about replacing people with AI. It's about elevating the role of people and increasing their impact in a world that does not stand still in cyber.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
And as our product organizations continue to launch new products, new features, new functionality that are complicated and complex, they're using AI to generate perfect documentation that feeds that system. So no longer do you have to write a document
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
do a PowerPoint, do a webinar, beg people to come to the webinar, think that they retain the information, you have a full system that keeps pace with innovation that people can access when and where they need it.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
Yeah, I've always had, I've actually always really had a passion around customers and service. So as I started earlier in my career, I was very focused on driving a process and driving automation that improved customers' ability to get value out of whatever solution it was that they were purchasing from us.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
I'll speak from my experience, but I don't know that I would say that they're getting overlooked or overshadowed by the controversy. Look, I think the importance of having safe and trusted AI, especially in a security space, is incredibly important.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
But I do think there's a perspective of this is a pretty powerful tool that can actually, when applied in the right way, safely with the right data, can have incredible outcomes. I think one of the things that I struggled with a little bit as a leader is like we did make that choice to solve the hard problems first.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
And that really became we're going to use AI to solve every single technical problem that we have. And what now as we are sort of on that mission and have that scaled, we know that we still have a lot more work to do to actually apply AI effectively.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
To make the processes for how we resolve those cases, because we won't go down to zero, but to make the processes for how we resolve those cases much more effective, much more efficient. And so it really depends on what your strategy is and what problem you're trying to solve for second and third.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
Just curious. I'm sure it is. I thought you were going to ask me for my one piece of advice, which is don't click on any link ever. Okay.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
That's a great one. That's a great clip. That's especially helpful when your dad calls you and asks you what this email means.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
usps notifications that are not real or like signing up for random things it's just ridiculous so i'm going to send him that clip the level of sophistication and how ai isn't like how ai is actually enabling those things to convince people is part of what we deal with every day right like two to three years ago everything would be spelled wrong you could tell right away
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
And now you've got two things happening. One, they're much more sophisticated. They're much more savvy. They're much more convincing. And then there's a lot of, I think, websites that are spinning up out there that are convincing you to buy certain things or buy certain tools that may not be real, that may be AI generated. So I think it's just... Interesting.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
And I really built on that passion over an almost 25-year career where I've done different roles in leading strategy and execution for large businesses focused on what I like to believe are great missions. So I was, during my time at GE, really focused on hardware, software, services, development for driving... Technology that inspects critical industrial assets.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
Because if AI isn't part of the fabric of how every person and every function operates every single day, a COE becomes a crutch for that and will never get you to scale.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
CSAT, NPS. Yeah. Okay. Tell me about that. We should know enough about every interaction and have an opinion about what great looks like, where we can measure ourselves against good versus having to tell customers where we're having, having to have customers tell us where we're great or where we fall short. That's putting the load on them versus us taking ownership of it.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
Well, I can give you my favorite principle. And my favorite principle is always, it may not be our fault, but it's our problem. And I don't think that should ever change.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
Irrelevant. I'm a tennis player and it's loud.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
It's super fun. But as a tennis player, I like to give it some garbage. I like to give it some...
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
It's definitely caused some drama in the suburban landscape.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
Starbucks surprised me in the bus way. And I said that just that it's like my favorite, you know, CX expression is like, it may not be our fault, but it's our problem. So a few weeks ago, I accidentally placed a mobile order at the wrong location in my town. And when I showed up at a different store, they didn't make it my problem.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
Like the barista just said to me, no worries, we'll make it for you. What was it? And it was a very small moment, but it showed empowerment at the front line and a real customer first mindset, which then turned the mistake that I made into into just increasing loyalty.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
So ensuring that airplanes are safe to fly and power equipment is safe to run as sort of the digital industrial era was starting to take hold. This notion of making customers successful with technology. software and analytics became something I really, really gravitated to. And that really started my journey into what I call the full, the full tech space experience.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
This was a highlight of my day, Lacey. So thank you so much for the invite and look forward to trading some more stories with you as things progress in the world of CX. Awesome. Awesome. Thanks, Katie.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
So for the past eight or nine years, I've been really focused on how to drive that experience and how to drive the acceleration of value realization in security.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
I think the application of technology to solve some of the hardest problems in industry is something that's always really, really important. really, really compelled me.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
The harder the problem and the harder the solution, the more I gravitate to it because really at the core of it, what I know is that that problem that's being solved for a customer has such an impact on the mission that they're actually serving, right? Whether it is
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
healthcare, financial services, social services, energy, or transportation, those are all really compelling things to help, you know, build move and empower the world.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
Yeah. Yeah. Well, look, I came in at an incredibly exciting time for the company. I think what it does so well is just continually disrupts itself and innovates in the security space.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
So for me to have the opportunity to come somewhere and a company that's trying to disrupt itself in the network security space, build a new category in cloud security for customers and also transform the way that SOCs are run and The power that a post-sales organization or a customer experience organization has in helping customers execute on that mission is too good for me to pass up.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
And, you know, I did end up joining, right, I think it was in December of 2022. So right at the time that Generative AI was hitting the scene. And honestly, it felt like jumping off. onto a rocket. It's exciting. It's intense, but it's also impossible to ignore. What was great about the timing and the way our leadership team approached it was it forced actually urgency and clarity.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
So we knew we couldn't sit back and observe that we had to lead. And I think to do that well, we had to return to the start in many ways, especially from a customer experience perspective. So- You know, we had to rethink everything we knew about how we did things through the lens of this incredibly powerful technology that was hitting the scene.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
And it really forced us to go back to the start and learn about the way things were done so we could actually learn about how to do them better with AI.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
Just as a quick, quick overview, you know, at the end of the day, my role is all about how to get our customers deployed fully and reliably. how to get them to value and continue to deliver value, and how to ensure that whatever we've deployed for them stays technically healthy as they grow, change, and scale with us.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
So as you think about that landscape of work, we're really in the execution and scaling phase. We continue to experiment because the technology changes so quickly that you have to continue to experiment at the rate the technology is changing to figure out how to apply it. But AI is already embedded in how we resolve every single technical support case.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
And we focused first on technical support, given what we knew to be a really massive opportunity to completely change and delight our customers and respond cases much more quickly, even the more complex ones. So we've also started the journey to actually how we embed AI and the way that we deploy our products and drive value for our customers.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
Yeah. It's interesting. We did. We focused first on areas where scale and complexity were slowing customers down. And for us, that was support and deployment. And if I think about
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
how I think about like the one, two, three of implementation, the first part is fixing the foundation and making sure that your data and your processes and how people access both and how you feed those into AI sort of has to be central, but we didn't just focus. on the quick wins. We focused on what it would take to solve our hardest and most complex problems as well.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
The work we do is very technically complex and it's high stakes. So we tried to push AI into the deep end early, knowing that if it could help our teams handle the toughest cases, we would unlock real transformation.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
But what it required us to do is really understand how every single case got resolved, which could be resolved simply through improving our documentation or improving our process so the AI could essentially learn from every interaction.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
But then it also forced us by focusing on how complex cases get resolved as well to accelerate some of the decision points that we made around collecting better product telemetry, collecting more information from customers that may not fully resolve the case because they're very complicated, but would take the time to actually accurately diagnose that case from sometimes weeks to
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
down to days and hours. And by focusing on that full system and really understanding in the detail how the cases are resolved, with which data, with which expertise, it really helped us focus on everything to have a bigger impact at the start.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
Absolutely. So, you know, we think about it in three steps, but I'll answer the last part of your question first. Like we committed to fixing the foundation. focusing on simple to complex issue resolution and how we built that infrastructure in alignment with our IT organization and with our product organization. And going back to first principles means that you have to be patient.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
There's no shortcuts in innovation. And so that process for us around fixing the foundation was... all about understanding what data resolved our problems and how do we assemble teams to assess and quickly clean it up and load it and test again to make sure that the data that we loaded resolved the issue the second time. And then we had to completely rebuild our processes.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
Our processes were built for case resolution pre AI, not post AI. So when you take the lens that you want to learn from every single interaction, you have to redo your processes. And so that was sort of the second step of that. And we knew if we didn't get that right, the AI wouldn't scale. So that's actually where I would say, you know, on a two plus, probably a two plus year journey,
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
We spent the first six months learning, building, and cleaning, and having our product organization decide on what the right architecture was for the solution that we were going to build. They started to build their own internal co-pilot. And then with that, figuring out what are the metrics of success that tell us whether or not we're getting better over time as we teach it to resolve our cases.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
Cordon off your best and brightest resources of people who are most curious and able to help you experiment and solve problems you've never had to solve before. That's step one. And we did that as we were building the support copilot. We basically went into our organization and said, hey, we need the 30 people.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
who are best at resolving cases, analyzing cases, and helping us build this engine and make it better and helping us to do the experimentation along the way. So that was sort of one team we built up. And it really is unheard of. Like you go to a support organization and say, we're going to take 30 of your best people off the front line. to build a solution for the future.
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
That's incredibly different. It's a different way of thinking. And then alongside that, we built a team of very smart and capable strategists, IT resources, and product people who came together to help us actually figure out how to build the frameworks of re-architecting process, re-architecting data pipelines, and building the solution and building structured experiments that would help us
Experts of Experience
Your Pre-AI Processes are USELESS | AI Rules For 2025
learn, pivot, and change course in a way that we needed to. So that ecosystem of people that we really cordoned off and decided that we were going to have innovate for us was one of the ways in which we were able to accelerate execution. And the second component is, and it kind of goes back to that thread of get your smartest, most curious people to teach you. We're trying to up the