Podcast | 10 Jul, 2023

Episode 4: The State of the Generative AI Market: Parallels to Speech Recognition and Enterprise Software

Alex Olesen

Host

Alex Olesen

VP Vertical Strategy & Product Marketing

Vipul Vyas

Guest

Vipul Vyas

Senior Vice President of Go To Market Strategy

Vipul Vyas, Senior Vice President of Go To Market Strategy at Persado, chats with our podcast host Alex Olesen to share how AI, particularly Generative AI, drives efficiency and effectiveness in business. Vipul is also an adjunct faculty member at the University of San Francisco, focusing on emerging technologies and also on the healthcare space. Generative AI solutions such as ChatGPT, for example, are effective. Even small teams can create a lot of content in a short amount of time using these tools. It’s an efficiency gain similar to trading in a push lawnmower for a riding lawnmower. But, businesses also think in terms of performance, not just efficiency. 

“Yes, you can write it faster now, certainly. But, did it get more eyeballs? Did it get more traffic to whatever potential product you were trying to sell or promote? That is where efficacy plays a role,” said Vipul. 

Performance or effectiveness is what separates Persado from other Generative AI tools geared toward enterprise marketing teams. Marketers need effective language that generates an incremental amount of conversions. Persado Generative AI is a solution for the issue of conversions among digital marketers. 

According to Vipul, there are too many great ideas stuck in people’s heads. Vipul ultimately sees Generative AI unleashing a lot of creativity. Now people who can’t write or draw as well as they would like to can express their ideas in new ways.

Episode Transcript:

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Alex Olesen: Welcome back to Motivation AI Matters. I’m really excited for our guest today. I’m joined by Persado’s Senior Vice President of Go-To-Market Strategy, Vipul Vyas. It’s great to have you on today’s episode.

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Alex Olesen: Now I know you, and I work really closely together, but to start things off for the listeners, do you mind giving us a bit of background on who you are…

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Alex Olesen: …your career? And what led you to Persado?

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Vipul Vyas: Sure, I at Persado currently I, as you mentioned, head up our go-to-market strategy team that encompasses a few things. That’s an unusual title and role. But it involves our sales, engineers, solutions, and consultants that are synonymous with our organization, along with their product marketing organization or value engineering group, which really quantifies and helps us understand the business impact.

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Vipul Vyas: We have on our clients along with our education enablement team and our commercialization team. So, it’s a few different groups that are also under one umbrella…

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Vipul Vyas: …that we use to really provide our customers with. a high touch experience in terms of understanding and quantifying the impact that we have given the tools that need to be able to succeed on their own…

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Vipul Vyas: …etc., and then just helping them understand their solutions as well. In terms of career…

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Vipul Vyas: …I can go all the way back. I was a management consultant for many years until I got my first real job. So, I was at Price Waterhouse and Booz Allen. I did my MBA at Dartmouth undergraduate Virginia, and my first quote, unquote, real job was after I left…

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Vipul Vyas: Booz Allen. I went to a startup and had to actually be convinced to go because that was too risky, and this was in 1999. It was in the speech recognition space and went from speech recognition to voice by metrics. So, machines understanding what people say, to machines understanding who said it. And then I did a little bit of time in health care at another start-up that I founded, and then I found myself at Persado back, helping…

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Vipul Vyas: …make the robots smarter, as I was doing with speech recognition and voice by metrics. So, that’s how I found myself here at Persado. I’m getting back into the natural language processing world that started out almost 20 years ago. I am also an adjunct faculty member at the University of San Francisco, focusing on emerging technologies in the healthcare space.

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Alex Olesen: So, you sit in a very unique position at Persado, one in which I’m fortunate enough to have a front-row seat to participate in. We’ve had some great guests in the last couple of weeks talking about what Generative AI means to marketers. We had a guest on the last episode to talk about…

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Alex Olesen: …security and safety around implementing these technologies.

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Alex Olesen: Your focus in our day-to-day is around the business implications of using Generative AI. Talk to me a little bit about the efficiency and efficacy framework that you’ve been working on the past couple of months because I know it’s gotten a lot of attention from executives through Persado.

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Vipul Vyas: Sure. We look at it, as you just mentioned, in terms of AI; specifically, Generative AI can have an impact in terms of improving efficiency and also impacting efficacy…

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Vipul Vyas: …and so what that means is, it can. Obviously, you know, people have visually felt things like Chat GPT. If folks have used it, it makes doing a specific task much faster.

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Vipul Vyas: You know what would have a report that would have taken, or a blog post that would have taken, you know, hours to create happens now in minutes, and then can be edited and smoothed out…

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Vipul Vyas: …in no time at all. So, there’s a massive efficiency gain, you know. It’s like going from a push real lawn mower to a riding lawn. Or…

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Vipul Vyas: …you know, men with shovels or people shovels to backhoe. Right? It’s just that kind of just brute power brought into one person’s hands. And that’s pretty substantial. Now, in terms of impact efficacy…

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Vipul Vyas: …that really, we think of in terms of performance. So is what is being produced. Also, getting you a…

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Vipul Vyas: …increase in the business metric. It’s trying to move…

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Vipul Vyas: …and so, what I mean by that is, the blog post that I alluded to before. Yes, you could write it faster now, certainly. But did it get more eyeballs…more traffic to it, and more thorough traffic to whatever potential product you were trying to sell or promote? That is where efficacy plays a role…

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Vipul Vyas: …and in most cases, these technologies, generally speaking, have not started to impact…

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Vipul Vyas: …that space. They do so in a tangential way in that…

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Vipul Vyas: …now you’re able to do more things and get to more things that before we’ve never gotten to just because you couldn’t. And so, having lifted the constraint of limited labor, you now are able to do more things, and you’re becoming effective through that mechanism. But at a discrete sort of unit level, most of the tools are still on…

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Vipul Vyas: …the trajectory of improving efficiency…

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Vipul Vyas: …now. When you do both, when you can improve both efficiency and efficacy….

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Vipul Vyas: …that’s when things sort of get…

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Vipul Vyas: …warped or you enter a sort of totally different world…

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Vipul Vyas: …and you can do many more magical things, the constraints that you were living within in the past have completely disappeared. And so, things can have fundamental shifts and paradigms. Can really, you know, can move. So…

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Vipul Vyas: …that’s where I think we’re heading very soon is where we’re going beyond just efficiency gains and also impacting efficacy. And the combination of…

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Vipul Vyas: …those two, which is the ultimate, better, faster, cheaper, is where there’s going to be even more profound impact. So, I can give you some examples very quickly, you know, in the legal space.

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Vipul Vyas: You were, you’re now able to efficiently review…

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Vipul Vyas: …dozens and dozens, if not thousands, of contracts, and look for compliance to a new indemnification or limitation of liability framework like how many of these are in line with our new standard? How many of these are not, and before you need, like a paralegal, or maybe in a lawyer, to wade through all of these, and that is arduous. Mistakes can happen. And now you can just do that much more efficiently. But you can also get some interesting efficacy gains where…

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Vipul Vyas: …now we have inbound complaints for consumers…

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Vipul Vyas: …inbound messages and communications that may flag for litigation, litigation risk…

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…and you just couldn’t ever get to them all…

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Vipul Vyas: …and so, you couldn’t flag which things were potentially sources of…

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Vipul Vyas: …legal exposure and which ones were not. Now you can actually sift through those and say, okay. The person who slipped on a…grocery section probably is more of a concern than someone who’s complaining about our prices….

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Vipul Vyas: …and so, you can wade through that and identify things that before….

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Vipul Vyas: …just because of lack of manpower, lack of just resources, you weren’t able to get to, one on the efficiency set, and then also being able to pattern, recognize and discern which things represent a risk…

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Vipul Vyas: …in a scalable way. So, that’s not in the marketing world, obviously, but that gives you a sense of kind of what’s going on in marketing. I think it’s a little bit more…

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Vipul Vyas: …direct in that did the language and the words and the message you created drive more of the activity? You wanted more of the behavior you wanted…

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Vipul Vyas: …than before. So, are you not just creating language faster, generating content faster? But are you generating better content that’s performing…

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Vipul Vyas: …in the way that you want it to perform?

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Alex Olesen: And you know this is a topic that we discuss with clients all the time. But for the listeners, you know, Persado is a very good example of a technology which provides both. We do provide more…

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Alex Olesen: …effective language generating an incremental amount of conversions. And we, you know, constantly aspire to be a net time saver…

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Alex Olesen: …for the marketing teams that we work with.

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Alex Olesen: On the prior episode, we had a very…

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Alex Olesen: …interesting conversation around…

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Alex Olesen: …Generative AI’s role in augmenting jobs in the workplace. We discuss the Goldman report, which says that about 300 million jobs are going to be displaced by the end of this decade.

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Alex Olesen: What’s your take on Goldman’s findings and the potential for Generative AI to either pivot some people’s jobs in the workplace or potentially replace them?

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Vipul Vyas: There will be dislocation of different degrees…

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Vipul Vyas: …and that transition, change that any new technology… creates is typically…

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Vipul Vyas: …there’s some discomfort associated with that.

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Vipul Vyas: Now, you can do that smoothly, relatively smoothly, over a long arc of time that can be absorbed by society and just human beings and their ability to adapt…

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Vipul Vyas: …and so if you look at…

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Vipul Vyas: …the US labor force in the 1890s, early, 1900s, 80…

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Vipul Vyas: …percent of folks were employed in the agricultural space. You know…farm-related occupations. And today it’s two percent, I mean, very few people know a farmer.

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Vipul Vyas: So, two percent of the population produces food for the 98 percent of the people who aren’t in that space. When before, it was almost not quite the inverse, but close.

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Vipul Vyas: Pretty much everyone was involved in food production. And so that happened, if you look at graphs of how that transition occurred. It was slow and linear.

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Vipul Vyas: Fairly, you know, steadily over the course of a century, and so we absorbed that relatively well.

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Vipul Vyas: The dislocation of increased urbanization and the implications of people getting off the farms were managed in a way that didn’t create this much social strife. There are some, of course, you know, the sort of tale of the family farm and the, you know, aggregation of agriculture and fewer hands. There are no issues that people are concerned about there, but in general, from a social dislocation perspective, it was relatively…

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Vipul Vyas: …well absorbed. If you look at manufacturing in contrast, it really started to decline in the late sixties and seventies.

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Vipul Vyas: And there are some specific reasons as to why people theorize that it happened the way it did. You saw a precipitous decline from, I think, in 27- ish, maybe a little over 30 percent of the labor force employed in manufacturing, and it is now close to at least in the 7% range today.

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Vipul Vyas: it may even have drifted a little bit lower.

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Vipul Vyas: More recently. So, that happened in the course of less than 50 years and really accelerated in a couple of phases, the eighties, and then the two thousands. And it happened fast…

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Vipul Vyas: …and that’s you know what you have as a result of the rust belt. You know, the cities that were impacted, like Detroit…

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Vipul Vyas: …and that didn’t happen smoothly. And that doesn’t mean that can’t be mitigated.

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Vipul Vyas: If you look at Germany and Japan…

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Vipul Vyas: …they actually really worked hard to make sure their manufacturing bases were at least somewhat secure and tempered against some of the dislocation that was occurring in the US. Being the manufacturing powerhouse coming out of World War II did not feel such…

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Vipul Vyas: …protection or such mindfulness of that was necessary. We kind of took it… for granted that we were that manufacturing powerhouse, and so…

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Vipul Vyas: …that decline was never buffered. So I say that to…

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Vipul Vyas: …point to the fact that AI probably will create this dislocation. But it can be managed just like in the past. We’ve…

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Vipul Vyas: ..you know, there are examples of where forces that can lead to a severe dislocation can be mitigated. You just have to understand the threat, understand…

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Vipul Vyas: …the social issues it can create and then…

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Vipul Vyas: …make sure to invest to mitigate them.

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Alex Olesen: So, I think that’s a good segue into another part of your career.

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Alex Olesen: You are an adjunct professor…

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Alex Olesen: …at the University of San Francisco focusing on emerging technologies.

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Alex Olesen: What’s the discourse in your classroom with your students? What are they? What’s top of mind for them as they contemplate entering or re-entering the workforce?

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Alex Olesen: And what are some of the debates that you have among your students?

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Vipul Vyas: I think many of them want to understand, you know…

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Vipul Vyas: …to the spirit of your last question, what’s the job market going to be for them? What’s it gonna look like? How’s it going to be different than when they first contemplated going to school? Because things change pretty rapidly in the public, you know, Psyche and Zeitgeist…

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Vipul Vyas: …as of September 2022, when Chat GPT emerged on the scene.

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Vipul Vyas: So a lot of them are thinking about it. What are the implications for them personally?

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Vipul Vyas: I think this is one of those technologies that…

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Vipul Vyas: …will…

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Vipul Vyas: …Our CEOs alluded to having this sort of hype cycle in the short term…

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Vipul Vyas: …and then have more profound effects over the long term, you know. Travel agents got put out of business overnight in the nineties with the emergence of the internet. There was sort of a sputtering along for a while until…

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Vipul Vyas: …it just didn’t make sense anymore, right? And I think a lot of…

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Vipul Vyas: …industries that are going to be disrupted by Generative AI. It’s not going to happen all of a sudden. It’ll be slow. And then all of a sudden…

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Vipul Vyas: …I think the real discussion is, how do people position themselves? Well…

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Vipul Vyas: …to take advantage of the technology versus potentially get run over by it…

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Vipul Vyas: …and I think that just as in manufacturing, which where automation actually had a huge impact on the rate of employment. If you could run the machines, you had a job…

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Vipul Vyas: …if you were the machine. So, there’s gonna be a need for human augmentation for at least some period of time into the foreseeable future. And so, people who can…

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Vipul Vyas: …get the machine to do what we need to do.

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Vipul Vyas: And actually, it’s more going to be about…

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Vipul Vyas: …framing the problem. So people are going to be moving from production…

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Vipul Vyas: …to direction in terms of they’re going to be directors versus actors, if you will.

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Vipul Vyas: Movie-making analogy perspective. So, instead of being the orchestrator, the actual final leg of work, they’re going to be saying, this is the problem I want to solve.

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Vipul Vyas: This is how we want to solve it and then evaluate the solution. And so I think that is going to be a big change in people’s skills, that it’s going to be about defining problems…

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Vipul Vyas: …well, in an articulate manner…

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Vipul Vyas: …versus the brute force solution that’s maybe where they’ve had focused in the past.

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Alex Olesen: I think that’s correct, and…

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Alex Olesen: …I’m observing that too in the market when I speak to clients. We, you know, at Persado, we’ve made a push to make part of our product offering more self-service, less reliant on client first-party data…

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Alex Olesen: …and I even heard a couple of our clients refer to Persado as an extra member of the creative team.

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Alex Olesen: And I really do think that the dynamic that we see at play…

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Alex Olesen: …with enterprises who are implementing this technology effectively…

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Alex Olesen: …and efficiently…

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Alex Olesen: …it’s not necessarily replacing human beings today…

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Alex Olesen: …but rather helping undo writer’s block…

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Alex Olesen: …or help alleviate the blank page problem.

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Alex Olesen: And then when you take that and supplement it with the macro-economic data that Persado provides around hundreds of millions of consumer interactions…

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Alex Olesen: …that’s where you add a statistical element to…

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Alex Olesen: human intuition.

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Alex Olesen: So, in your observations, companies that are getting this right today: What are they doing, and what is your advice to an executive who’s contemplating making their first investment into Generative AI for the enterprise?

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Vipul Vyas: It’s an interesting, it’s a tough question because there’s…

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Vipul Vyas: …a few things are happening.

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Vipul Vyas: One, the core technology providers, such as Open AI, which has got a significant amount of funding from Microsoft, so it is almost sort of a commingled entity….

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Vipul Vyas: …obviously came on the scene with Chat GPT several months ago, almost…

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Vipul Vyas: …a little bit over half a year ago, I suppose? That’s now freely available to everyone…

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Vipul Vyas: …and the core technology is also available. So, you have as a function of that…

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Vipul Vyas: …the proliferation of dozens…

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Vipul Vyas: …probably more like hundreds of small companies that are all building point solutions on top of the core technology. Because now the barrier to entry…

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Vipul Vyas: …to be innovative, to create something…

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Vipul Vyas: …is much lower because someone’s taking the hit on that big development effort, the big training model development transforms all development machine learning efforts, all that big lift.

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Vipul Vyas: And now other people can leverage it to get in the market very quickly, and so they are. And so, it’s almost like a…

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Vipul Vyas: …brush fire came through. And now there’s a meadow full of flowers, just a lot of them to choose from.

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Vipul Vyas: But I think in terms of executives picking…

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Vipul Vyas: …the solutions that make sense…

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Vipul Vyas: …the generalist…

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Vipul Vyas: …technologies are not going to solve specific business problems because they’re focused on being good at being general…

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Vipul Vyas: …at offering a generic capability.

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Vipul Vyas: And they want ecosystems to point solutions because it helps them cheaply. Figure out what’s relevant in the market. Other people can go off and explore what use cases are…

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Vipul Vyas: …use or pertinent and…

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Vipul Vyas: …do all that heavy lifting for them…

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Vipul Vyas: …and they can sit back. You know, it’s the whole gold rush analogy of…

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Vipul Vyas: …the people who supplied the pick. Axes were the ones that made the money, not the miners, necessarily themselves. And so, I think the general technologies will still focus on the general technology, general tech because there’s so much still to do there. There’s so much green field still…

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Vipul Vyas: …to conquer and so point solutions will be the things that emerge that people have to evaluate because they’re focused on specific problems by their nature point solutions are attempting to solve specific issues or problems or challenges.

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Vipul Vyas: And so, then it’s a matter of what point solutions are the right ones to pick. And so, ones that actually are intimately familiar with the business problem that you’re trying to solve to some level of expertise of the processor space and that are focused on moving specific KPIs because, at the end of the day, you’re not buying Generative AI, you’re buying a business outcome.

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Vipul Vyas: It’s ideally what you’re buying. You’re buying a result.

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Vipul Vyas: And so looking back at other examples or other industries or other similar technologies where there’s a core technology provider set that has come on the scene that enabled a lot of other people to proliferate.

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Vipul Vyas: You see a few themes. One is that these point solutions have four key characteristics.

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Vipul Vyas: One is that they have optimized UI/UX for the specific…

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Vipul Vyas: …problem they’re trying to solve…

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Vipul Vyas: …and that’s an artful effort, though not insurmountable. So, they have to…

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Vipul Vyas: …make it as easy as possible for the end user to accomplish…tasks. And so then you at least get user buy-in. And the second thing is workflow integration.

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Vipul Vyas: It’s similar to UI/UX. Does this seamlessly flow into existing or adjacent processes, such that it’s not hyper-disruptive to existing…

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Vipul Vyas: …workflows, such that it’s hard to absorb? That may change slowly over time. But initially, you want to fit into a construct where people can get their heads around it so that the technology can actually be successfully absorbed. So, again, one is UI/UX. Two is a workflow integration. Three is reporting. And that’s really the way that the vendor justifies their invoice. But it’s also a way that you understand. That is this solution actually moving…

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Vipul Vyas: …the metric, that it says it was going to move, that it was going to move.

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Vipul Vyas: And so reporting and robustness of reporting and the insights you can give are gonna be big, and those are solutions specific, not general or generic. You know that that typically won’t come from a generic provider. And the fourth thing is that they’ve extended the technology. So, in this case, they’ve extended language models…

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…there’s a litany of previous examples that are illustrative of this…

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Vipul Vyas: …from speech to recognition technology that I’m familiar with. Where, if you want to do driving directions…the UI/UX had to be optimized for maps, workflow integration, and how to integrate with GPS ships and whatnot, which is the generic speech. Recognition applications would not bother with like, why would they? They had to actually report in terms of accuracy and get that feedback loop going, and then a fourth. They had to do novel things such as disambiguate…

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Vipul Vyas: …words like Marquette Street and Market Street M.A.R.Q.U.E.T.T.E. versus M.A.R.K.E.T. and they have to use traffic data to figure out probabilistically if they both sound similar when someone says them.

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Vipul Vyas: …which one is more likely going to be to disambiguate with me, too? So, that to extend the core technology to address the specific problem, such as an example, you know, in the case of…

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Vipul Vyas: …Persado, we’ve had to actually take language and actually inject emotion into it. and then couple that with, you know, a clear description of a call to action, to then a couple of motions with motivation to actually drive…

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Vipul Vyas: …action. And the behaviors we want. So Persado is another just case study of solution in the space with generic capabilities and generic technologies where the point solution has to extend…

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Vipul Vyas: …to what the core solution the core technology does to solve a business problem, in this case, driving conversions…

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Vipul Vyas: …and the behaviors we want from consumers. So…

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Vipul Vyas: …that’s the theme. You can see that with voice-by-metrics…

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Vipul Vyas: …as well in this another form of gender value people don’t have to think about is a path planning with…

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Vipul Vyas: …actual autonomous vehicles. The path plan is actually a form of Generative AI, and you have different applications in different scenarios from the 18-wheeler versus an autonomous…

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Vipul Vyas: …bus system that they’re now rolling out in different cities. So yeah, I think the executives are going to think about making bets on technologies. The good thing is that you know.…

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Vipul Vyas: …these bets aren’t sealed in cement…

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Vipul Vyas: …but you look for some hallmark characteristics…

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Vipul Vyas: …of winners. We’re likely winners…

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Vipul Vyas: …based on some of the attributes I just mentioned. And that’s based on my…

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Vipul Vyas: …you know, sort of set of characteristics I went through is just based on history or the last 20 years. Seeing similar trends play out where a general technology came on the scene. And then a bunch of point solutions emerged.

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Vipul Vyas: There’s a whole cacophony of activity and then a few…

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Vipul Vyas: …remain standing at the end…

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Vipul Vyas: …and it was the ones that have those four characteristics I mentioned more often than not…

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Alex Olesen: It’s very reminiscent of Vipple if you wind the clock back about 10-15 years.

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Alex Olesen: Large enterprises were either an SAP shop or an Oracle shop, both of which had HR functionality, finance, functionality, and procurement.

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Alex Olesen: …and then, with the advent of software as a service and cloud providers, you had what was referred to back in the day as best of breed…

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Alex Olesen: …and I remember in at the beginning of my career, selling into these companies…

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Alex Olesen: …there was a philosophy of, you’re either a loyalist to one of SAP or Oracle, and you buy every department of functionality or best of breed…

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Alex Olesen: …and you have the core ERP that would API into cloud solutions, which back in 2008, 2010…

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Alex Olesen: …didn’t necessarily have their own analytics and reporting functionality…

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Alex Olesen: …had limited rep in terms of their capabilities…

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Alex Olesen: …fast forward to today. A lot of those point solutions, such as work day, are notable examples. Those run entire large organizations. And I think it’s actually a pretty interesting parallel…

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Alex Olesen: …between an open AI and SAP general technology that can be used to satisfy…

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Alex Olesen: …repeatable business functions…

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Alex Olesen: …and then more bespoke LLMs will be built either on top of…

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Alex Olesen: …those language models or in conjunction with them. and I do think that it will follow a very similar technology adoption arc that the ERPs and best-of-breed solutions followed about 15 years ago.

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Vipul Vyas: You’re probably right.

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Vipul Vyas: Alright. I think that the other thing that will…

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Vipul Vyas: …follow…

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Vipul Vyas: …I suspect is going to be along the lines of…

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Vipul Vyas: …you’re gonna have Generative AI everywhere, especially from a marketing perspective. You’re gonna have Generative AI at all the point solutions…

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Vipul Vyas: …or at all the different points, channels, specifically. And so, you’ll have an SMS Generative AI solution. You’ll have one for email, one for web…

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Vipul Vyas: …and so you can have lots of different potential Generative AI solutions to pick from provided by your existing vendors for core messaging technologies…

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Vipul Vyas: …and so what may happen is that each one of these is going to have a different voice based on the people that are in charge for that particular channel within the enterprise…

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Vipul Vyas: …based on the vagaries of that particular Generative AI solution. And so, you’re going to be communicating different messages…

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Vipul Vyas: …to different, to people at different times…

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Vipul Vyas: …because you have this sort of…

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Vipul Vyas: …menagerie of different Generative AI solutions. This happened with CRM many, many years ago, where once people knew they could use SMS tools, they could use email, and they could use different ways to communicate with customers. Everyone kind of went nuts and started sending customers a bunch of SMS messages, a bunch of emails, a bunch of…

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Vipul Vyas: …even in some cases…

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Vipul Vyas: …printed material. And there was no one sort of coordinating what messaging was going to the customer…

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Vipul Vyas: …what made sense to prioritize? And what…

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Vipul Vyas: …ways we could, you know what mechanism we could use to keep someone from being overwhelmed so that we diluted our own messaging? That’s when CRM really came on the scene, right to basically be a coordination function. To say, I want to be an air traffic controller…

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Vipul Vyas: …to coordinate what is sent, to whom, and when? And how often? And that was basically an attempt to rein in the madness.

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Vipul Vyas: I literally, at one point, many, many years ago, got an SMS, a paper letter, and an email from the same company on the same day, wanting to do three different things. And so, this is again exactly what CRM was trying to solve. And I think nowadays what we’ll want to head off at the past is…

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Vipul Vyas: …different language…

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Vipul Vyas: …being used for a person in different places…

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Vipul Vyas: …and a lack of consistency and a dilution of brand identity. and also…

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Vipul Vyas: …you know, some people call it brand voice, but also just the ability to…

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Vipul Vyas: …really distinguish the company and also orient the customer. Here’s what they can expect…

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…in terms of how we communicate…

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Vipul Vyas: …because there is a single point…

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Vipul Vyas: …of coordination. And Persado can play that role of essentially a language hub…

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Vipul Vyas: …or air traffic control. To say, you know, here’s the kind of language that resonates with this person at this time in this context. And so, we should use across channels to essentially at the end of the day. You’re trying to always drive a couple of things. you’re trying to influence behavior…

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Vipul Vyas: …and drive loyalty. And so you’re not gonna be able to do that with…

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…disparate messages that aren’t very well…

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Vipul Vyas: …coordinated across platforms.

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Vipul Vyas: And that’s one thematic issue that I think people in marketing should specifically worry about, which is that now we have 15 Generative AI solutions. They all speak to our customers in different ways.

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Vipul Vyas: And then also our customer here is 15 different ways of us talking to them.

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Alex Olesen: So, on the topic of air traffic control. I know you you recently attended, I believe it was a congressional hearing on AI…

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Vipul Vyas: …any main takeaways you want to share from that with the listeners?

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Vipul Vyas: They didn’t head off the social implications of social media in time; they didn’t understand or grasp the unintended consequences, or the natural…

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Vipul Vyas: …progression of what would follow the implicate natural implications of something like social media because they didn’t bother to step back and understand them…

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Vipul Vyas: …and so they don’t want to make the same mistake twice…

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Vipul Vyas: As a result, I think AI is going to get a lot more scrutiny from a political perspective because it’s clear. I mean, you don’t have to imagine you can…

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Vipul Vyas: …feel it, that you can see and sense it, that it’s clear potential impact on society…

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Vipul Vyas: …and so, the big takeaway to summarize that is that…

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Vipul Vyas: …the political world will be active and much more engaged with Generative AI…

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Vipul Vyas: …then it has been with technologies in the recent past. I think Italy potentially banned a lot of them…

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Vipul Vyas: …you know, Chat GPT usage already as a country…

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Vipul Vyas: …enterprises have also done the same thing…

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Vipul Vyas: …so…

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Vipul Vyas: …I know that’s not governmental, but I think that’s going to be the theme is that you’re gonna have a very active…

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Vipul Vyas: …political response to anything that’s happening in the space…

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Alex Olesen: …that that makes sense. Well, I know we’ve covered a lot of ground today, and thank you. You’ve been a tremendous guest. I have one final question for you…

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Alex Olesen: …of all of your observations in the market, everything that you’re working on with Persado…

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Alex Olesen: …what would you say you’re looking forward to the most in this space in the next six to 12 months?

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Vipul Vyas: I know we spoke a little bit about potential, you know, social doom and gloom here and there, but I think that the other part the other side of the coin. Is that…

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Vipul Vyas: …all the creativity that is trapped in many, many people’s heads…

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Vipul Vyas: …for want of a way to express it…

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Vipul Vyas: …because they can’t get it out, because, you know, they can’t draw. They can’t write, maybe, as well as they think they should be able to write all the things, all the creativity…

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Vipul Vyas: …that is locked away in humanity…

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Vipul Vyas: …now has a mechanism by which to express itself.

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Vipul Vyas: You know, if you want to create an application, you need to learn how to code. There was an inherent barrier for you…

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Vipul Vyas: …expressing and bringing to reality what you wanted to bring to reality. Now…

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Vipul Vyas: …I mean code is an abstraction. Right? Basically, ultimately, code is just computer programming code. is just an abstraction layer above…

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Vipul Vyas: …turning on and off a bunch of transistors on a chip…

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Vipul Vyas: Ultimately…

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Vipul Vyas: …it’s just different layers of getting that now…

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Vipul Vyas: …simple spoken words, normal language…

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Vipul Vyas: …can effectuate that…

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Vipul Vyas: …you can actually describe. I want a program that does Xyz…

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Vipul Vyas: …as an example. And generally, I can create such a thing…

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Vipul Vyas: …right? And so, I look at that to say, there’s a lot of trapped…

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Vipul Vyas: …creativity that for simple sources of friction that have historically existed, couldn’t get out. Now, it can. Same thing on the marketing front. We, wanna…

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Vipul Vyas: …you know, as you mentioned, there’s plenty of things that never happened because riders block so many things that didn’t happen. Well…

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Vipul Vyas: …because I just didn’t know certain things that are now knowable.

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Vipul Vyas: And I think, as I alluded to before, when you have that ultimate nexus of efficiency and efficacy, that wonderful…

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Vipul Vyas: …confluence of the two you remove constraints. Now…

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Vipul Vyas: …things you can’t even imagine were possible before, such as speaking individually to Alex in the way Alex wants to be spoken to in a way that’s compelling to him…

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Vipul Vyas: …is possible because I can create copy on the fly images on the fly, video, on the fly. All contextually…

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Vipul Vyas: …modified…

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Vipul Vyas: …that before you know, just a concrete example, if I want to shoot a video, I’ve got to…

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Vipul Vyas: …get studio time. You gotta get actors. Gotta get, you know, a script written. Get all that stuff done. Get a, basically, shoot this thing, and do a lot of post-production editing. It’s a whole thing. So, you better make sure that the video generically is resonating with as many people as possible.

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Vipul Vyas: The constraints that force that are gone. So actually, I can create…

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Vipul Vyas: …interactive and engaging material and content for a person. In this case, you know yourself, Alex. dynamically, on the fly. for essentially close to nothing…

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Vipul Vyas: …in terms of cost…

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Vipul Vyas: …and the that settled to it better, faster, cheaper, and that…

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Vipul Vyas: …a fundamentally different way of engaging people. You know, a much more personalized way that’s going to resonate with them is just going to be different. I mean, it’s gonna open up an entire new…

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Vipul Vyas: …way of people interacting with enterprises, people interacting in general…

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Vipul Vyas: So, I think those are the kind of interesting, positive things I think, that are on the near-term horizon.

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Alex Olesen: It’s fascinating. It is such a…

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Alex Olesen: …watershed moment. In my opinion, I know you. You mentioned some others. I’ll summarize them for the listeners. Now…

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Alex Olesen: …I do think, sequentially…

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Alex Olesen:… manufacturing the computer being invented, the internet proliferating…

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Alex Olesen: …I do think that we are looking at another moment with the advancement of Generative AI that will have the ability to transform the way we work…

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Alex Olesen: …transform the way we live, the way we learn.

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Alex Olesen: And I appreciate all of the examples that you’ve given. You know you’ve had a front-row seat…

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Alex Olesen: …to this industry for the better part of the last 20 years…

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Alex Olesen: …and finally, the wealth of knowledge you’ve been sharing with Persado’s clients. Now, our listeners will be able to benefit from Vipul Vyas. Thank you very much. for joining the podcast again. This was Vipul Vyas. He is the Senior Vice President of Go-To-Market Strategy at Persado.

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Vipul Vyas: thanks, Alex. I’ll I’ll not let you stop me there. I’ll say two more quick things in terms of one of the things that buffered manufacturing decline and job creation was actually the rise of the It sector…

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Vipul Vyas: …which actually created jobs that people who no longer go to manufacturing can now assume to some degree. So, that was a safety net of some degree. So, we’ll need something like that. And the second is, you know, another big technology trend…

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Vipul Vyas: …that didn’t quite take office people into it was blockchain, as an example. And I think actually, it will have new relevance because you can imagine scenarios where…

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Vipul Vyas:… a company’s enterprise system is a negotiating with another company’s enterprise system or…

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Vipul Vyas: …AI bots are actually interacting with each other, and the resolution of the interaction because it’s now no one entities…

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Vipul Vyas: …ownership of that. The final adjudication can leverage things like blockchain to track…

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Vipul Vyas: …the outcome of such interactions. So, that may actually be a technology that sort of came and lost a little bit of luster recently. We actually find new life…

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Vipul Vyas: …I’ll leave it at that. Thank you for having me. I definitely appreciate it.

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