AI time travel | Neil Bhammar

[Neil] (0:00 - 0:18)

There's a lot of voice agents that are coming to life that don't have good feedback mechanisms where you give them an input, but then the ability to adjust that input before it's finally submitted, it's not super seamless. So you're either stuck with did it get my input right or not. And it's kind of frustrating when you have to redo it, adjust it, because they don't make it really seamless.

[Dillon] (0:27 - 0:37)

What's up lifers and welcome to The Daily Standup with lifetime value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man JP with us. JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (0:37 - 0:40)

Customer success is wrong. I'm wrong, baby.

[Dillon] (0:42 - 0:52)

I love that you made that a real clunker. Didn't even flow very well. And we have Rob with us.

Rob, can you say hi, please?

[Rob] (0:53 - 0:59)

I think you're supposed to say, I don't want to be right, but what's up people.

[Dillon] (1:01 - 1:04)

And we have Neil with us. Neil, can you say hi, please?

[Neil] (1:05 - 1:06)

Hello, hello.

[Dillon] (1:06 - 1:08)

Thank you, Neil, sparing us.

[Neil] (1:08 - 1:09)

Cool.

[Dillon] (1:09 - 1:15)

I really appreciate it. And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

Neil, thank you so much for being here. Can you please introduce yourself?

[Neil] (1:15 - 1:35)

Absolutely. I'm Neil. I'm born and raised right around Boston, spent most of my life around here.

And I have spent the last five and a half years building a venture backed transportation technology startup where we make tech for school buses. I recently stepped away from that role. But for the last four out of those five and a half years, I led our operations and customer experience teams.

[Dillon] (1:35 - 1:55)

Hell yes. That's a cool piece of technology in that it's very niche. Interesting.

Incredibly niche. Yeah. Anyway, Neil, thank you so much for being here.

You know what we do here? We ask every single guest one simple question, and that is what is on your mind when it comes to customer success? I would love to hear what that is for you.

Two big things on my mind.

[Neil] (1:56 - 2:25)

One, Rob and I have talked about this quite a bit, but I think the way that we are going to interact with the tools we use on a daily basis is going to drastically change. And the sub point to that is I think and I hope that humans are going to spend more time outside and off of screens. Even if it's while we're working, because I think that the way we're going to interact with our tools is going to become so much more seamless that we're going to do it with our AirPods on while we're on a walk.

[Dillon] (2:25 - 2:32)

Fat chance, Neil, because the overlords are going to learn as quickly as you adapt, and they're going to give you more crap to do.

[Neil] (2:33 - 2:36)

You're right. The screen is going to be in my glasses on my eyes while I'm on a walk.

[Dillon] (2:37 - 2:48)

It's in your retina. You can't get away from it. That neural link is just going to be deep in there.

Rob, since this is based off of a conversation you have with Neil, why don't you take it away?

[Rob] (2:48 - 3:53)

Well, I like this topic because Neil really got me thinking outside the box with it. He mentioned this to me probably six months ago, and I'm still thinking about it. That was right around the time that I started using ChatGPT in voice mode.

It really changed the way I work. I can, for example, have a one-on-one with you, Dillon, but talking to your digital clone in my phone, not to spook you, but someone who's actively trying to get away from my screen. I think the entire concept of user interface is changing quite quickly.

I take walking meetings as often as I can. The reason I love that is because I actually not only A, have a more positive experience of just experiencing the world around me, but B, I actually notice I process information much better when I'm walking around, when I'm following some journey. I'll literally remember where I was like, oh yeah, I was turning the corner on B Street when we talked about this certain topic.

I don't know if everybody's brain works that way, but mine certainly does. I cannot wait for the day when I don't have to spend upwards of 10 hours facing my computer screen.

[Dillon] (3:54 - 3:59)

Purely because you don't like sitting in the same position, because you would be doing the same work.

[Neil] (4:00 - 4:09)

This is just the sort of stuff you think about all the time. Dillon, can I challenge that statement that you'd be doing the same work? I think when you, okay, if Rob and Dillon have a conversation.

[Dillon] (4:09 - 4:11)

This is my show. No, go ahead.

[Neil] (4:11 - 4:35)

Go ahead. Let's say Rob's got a personal CRM where he's taking copious notes. I think the inputs are the same, but the fact that Rob is opening up HubSpot or Dex or whatever the heck, clicking these four buttons, finding Dillon's name, clicking the note tab, then typing it all out after thinking about it.

I think the inputs and the outputs are the same, but the scope of work in between is really different.

[Dillon] (4:36 - 5:30)

Okay. JP, I want to get you in here, but I have one thing to say to that. That is, I'm actually building something for myself currently, that's a bit of an automation, very slight AI personal assistant that connects to my personal CRM HubSpot, but it can also connect to all of my email accounts, my calendars, and also this store of information that includes a lot of contextual information.

But what I would argue is that it's a bit of semantics that you challenged me with, which I'm a challenger, so I'll give it to you. But I think then what would happen is Rob's flywheel just starts moving that much faster. There's no more admin that just gives him more opportunities to talk with more people about the zany harebrained ideas that he does.

So he would be doing the same work without any of the supportive admin tasks. Just agree with me so I can send it to JP, please.

[JP] (5:31 - 5:32)

I agree.

[Dillon] (5:34 - 5:34)

Go ahead, JP.

[JP] (5:36 - 7:38)

This is the topic, boy. I tell you what. I mean, no.

I mean, seriously, who doesn't want to spend more time at the cornhole range or playing some Parcheesi or whatever? I want more time to be able to do all those things, man. I've never been to Swiss Alps, man.

I'm trying to ski, you know what I mean? But I'll say when it comes to the whole... I guess what we're getting at here is the work-life balance with the methods by which the overlords want to make sure that we're getting the most productivity out of this.

I think that this is an equation that ultimately needs to be solved on a personal level and that everyone's X that they solve for just needs to be in an agreeable range. I think that we can both be pickleball players, but if I want to spend two hours a day playing pickleball as opposed to someone else who's like, hey, I'm going to try to spend time whenever I can. I love pickleball too, but I maybe don't quite have enough time.

I think that there's this element of shared time that I think I'm learning is really important. Of course, I'm an individual and I bring my work to a company, but people go on vacation. Sometimes people are having a day where maybe they're going through something and not as productive.

I think that zooming out of my time and starting to think about... I get it, we're in a very individualistic sort of society, but I think there is something. I think being able to claim some of that, what is it called in Monopoly?

The community chest. Go dig in that community chest for some of that time that we're all sharing instead of viewing it maybe in the binary of like, I have to get X, Y, Z done in this amount of time. Again though, I'm on a pooled model.

I think that my thinking serves the pooled models versus you have individual KPIs.

[Dillon] (7:39 - 8:49)

What I think is interesting about what you said, JP, is the examples you gave to me are not analogous in that the reason I think that is because you mentioned these things about if somebody's on PTO, you got to be able to step up and help them and things like that. I think those literally only exist because of the social norms within our society. They would otherwise be the first thing eliminated by a capitalist company because the whole point is for there not to be an agreeable range.

It is to maximize X by any means possible, which is why I called out at the beginning this idea of like, no, no, no, you're not going to have the same amount of work, but it's much more streamlined. They will smarten up on that real quick and they will just give you more work to a lot in whatever time they're allowed to demand of you, which in and of itself is this antiquated understanding that we live in with knowledge work and so on and so forth. So Neil, what I'd love for you to do is in your closing thought, I mean, you can go whatever way you want, but in your closing thoughts, what I think will be interesting is to understand how you as a founder of a company thought about this.

And you were a founder, right?

[Neil] (8:49 - 8:52)

I joined as the first employee, so I wasn't a founder.

[Dillon] (8:52 - 9:03)

Okay. But you probably were a part of a lot of those conversations around the management of employee time and workloads. You froze.

Okay. That's fine. You froze.

-: 11:04

I think I understood the premise of the question, though. It was basically how did I as a manager of people think about this relative to the output of my team members and their efficiency? Is that right?

Cool. I think it was less about how do I squeeze more work out of myself, more output out of myself and my team members. That was a byproduct of doing this, but it was a little bit more about how are we doing the work that we are best fit to do and enjoy most?

I think if I chatted with the vast majority of my team members, inputting things into the CRM while it takes two seconds to load per page is not their favorite thing to do. And so, yes, granted, the output has net increased. It's increased by spending the same amount of time, but on more higher frequency on the things they enjoyed doing, which is talking to customers and then maybe recording a voice note about it afterwards.

And I found myself using a whole bunch of internal tools to do this, where we had a customer success platform. We would have to enter these monthly customer pulses. And I would always do like 150 phone calls on a walk and then want to enter my pulses right after going back to my computer.

And again, hitting this button, that button, this button waiting for the UI to load. It was incredibly painful. And so for me, it was, okay, how do I spin up something that just allows me to record these quick voice messages and it fills out a form?

Last piece as I go off on a tangent is I think where there's a lot of voice agents that are coming to life that don't have good feedback mechanisms, where you give them an input, but then the ability to adjust that input before it's finally submitted, it's not super seamless. So you're either stuck with, did it get my input right or not? And it's kind of frustrating when you have to redo it, adjust it, because they don't make it really seamless.

And so I think part of a winning interface for a lot of platforms that evolve like this in the future is not only how do I allow there's like multimodal inputs to interact with my platform, but also how do I make it really seamless to correct the agents when they get If I could tack one word, just one word that we could think about that's less morbid, accessibility.

[Rob] (: 11:04

Accessibility is going to be massively improved if things go in the way that I hope for the future of user interfaces.

[Dillon] (: 11:11

We have a minute. So why don't you tell me what you mean by that? Because when I think accessibility, I think a certain term or a certain way.

[Rob] (: 11:19

So I'm thinking about some work that my wife did for folks with autism. She helped develop an app years ago that would help folks with autism order at a restaurant. And, you know, people have different styles of how they prefer to communicate.

Right. You can tell Neil and I come from a similar ilk where we're the types of people who like to take a phone call or 150 phone calls on a walk. And we do that all day, every day if we could, even if we retired.

But I think, you know, it's not just a matter of like the opportunistic areas for us to adapt to our style. But there are real needs in the world, real pressures in the world for certain marginalized populations to be able to better access information and outcomes that they're trying to achieve.

[Dillon] (: 12:02

I would agree. I mean, I love this topic and this idea of let's just tear up the current understanding of how work is completed, particularly knowledge work. And we have an opportunity right now to completely reinvent it.

I don't hear that often enough. I think we talk within these constraints all the time of like, wow, you could just use AI to write your emails for you. And it's like, dude, like it could do so much more than that.

Anyway, I want to come back and let's talk more about it, because I think that this topic is way bigger than any one 15 minute window. But for now, we do have to say goodbye.

[Neil] (: 12:36

Awesome. This is very fun. Thank you.

[Dillon] (: 12:38

Thank you.

[VO] (: 12:44

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