Marketers of Technology
00:01:52 · Andres Figuera, Timo Pelz
[00:01:52] S1: And yeah, I understand then that it's education with technology. So is an application like Kahoot something that you guys work with? [00:02:01] S0: Yes, I think Kahoot is actually a perfect example. Not only is Kahoot part of the family, Clever actually belongs to the Kahoot family of companies. We are, in many ways, if you know an Okta that you use to as a single sign on solution, at the base level, that is what Clever does. Right? And if you imagine a teacher trying to log in 20 students into a Chromebook, every student has to remember their passwords. They have to help them with that. That takes a lot of time. And then once they're on their Chromebook, they have to get into whatever application they're using. Let's say it's a Kahoot. They may have a different login for that. Trying to get 15, 20 kids to do that, that's half your lesson. Right? And so Clever gives you a secure way to connect student identities to the applications that teachers use in the classroom. And we do it in a way that is safe and secure, which increasingly is a top priority for schools because it is a sector that is targeted by bad actors more and more.
00:02:58 · Andres Figuera, Timo Pelz
[00:02:58] S1: I can only imagine. And it is a solution and an optimization of time for teacher because if it's one classroom of 20, okay, you can handle it once. But if it's like several classrooms that you're leading with or several grades, this... It turns crazy. So I can only imagine how much time and how much energy must really save teachers in this process. And, Timo, just so that we can then speak more about the... To the nature of this podcast, do you have an issue that you had to resolve or a problem that you faced within Clever as the vice president of marketing that you can tell us about? [00:03:29] S0: Yes, and to the shock of everyone listening, it's about AI, right? [00:03:34] S1: Nowadays, what isn't, right? You would go again [00:03:37] S0: with AI. So this is not the typical AI story that I think I've heard so far. It's more about how do we actually operationalize AI across a marketing organization. This is not about the superlatives, is not about the shiny case studies. This is actually about treating this at the human level and bringing your team along for the journey and understanding that it's not something that you do overnight.
00:03:37 · Timo Pelz, Andres Figuera
[00:03:37] S0: with AI. So this is not the typical AI story that I think I've heard so far. It's more about how do we actually operationalize AI across a marketing organization. This is not about the superlatives, is not about the shiny case studies. This is actually about treating this at the human level and bringing your team along for the journey and understanding that it's not something that you do overnight. [00:04:03] S1: No. This... Like, the processes and making sure AI is properly embedded within an institution, I believe it is what companies are tinkering with and making sure they are doing appropriately because you can pay a cloud subscription for the whole company, and then everybody does their own thing, and it... And they start using tokens at their own rate. They start just doing whatever on their side. So maybe trying to do it all standardized is a better approach than just letting everybody go crazy.
00:04:28 · Timo Pelz, Andres Figuera
[00:04:28] S0: So yeah, look, the specific problem I think that we certainly face and I think that a lot of my peers are facing right now is that AI is everywhere. Right? You can't turn around without it hitting you in the face. But just because it's everywhere doesn't mean that people absolutely immediately know what to do with it. Right? And so I want to state something that I think is often overlooked in this context. My team already has full time jobs. They have things to do. Meanwhile, there's this, I call this enormous undefined blob called AI that's coming at every single person on the team from every direction. And the the message that is coming at us marketers, the very implicit message is AI is going to change everything and you need to figure it out and you need to do it now. You're already behind on this. There's so much urgency. And I think what that does is it puts a lot of people off, right, because you feel like you're already behind and there's not actually a lot of useful information in that message. It is just generalizing a very, very complicated topic in a way that is not helpful. And so that was one of the challenges I was looking at when it comes to making this more accessible for my team and making sure that we are reaping the benefits that AI absolutely has in store for marketing. [00:05:51] S1: And then could you maybe tell us a bit more how you were able to make it accessible for them or how that process was for you?
00:05:58 · Timo Pelz
[00:05:58] S0: So look, we fermented. I did what a lot of leaders, I think, initially did. And this was, I'm going back almost to a year ago. Right? So this is not something that happens overnight. That's another thing I think that's really important. If you feel like this is like a like a switch that you can just flip, I think you're not going to have a really good time. So I did what your gut instinct tells you. I encouraged a lot of experimentation. We tried some tools. We let people explore. And when you just get a little bit a toolset in, we had a bit of this, oh, okay, this is neat moment of like, yeah, this is not... This is pretty cool, but it didn't stick because we approached it as a tool. And so I... This first approach absolutely bombed. I failed Andres. Right? So because what I first encouraged was I just say, give you a little bit of budget, get your tool for your function and figure it out. So I got a lot of activity, but not a lot of shared capability. Right. And so back in November of last year, I took inventory and there was a lot of scattered experimentations and basic prompting and very different levels of fluency. Right? And so that doesn't really help you. That doesn't really accomplish what you're trying to do. And so the dominant emotion on the team, think was not skepticism. It was... I think it was overwhelmed. It was like, what does this actually mean for me? Where do I start? What does good even look like? Right? And so it wasn't... That was my realization at that point. This wasn't a tooling problem. It's a context and a structure problem. Right? And so the way that I thought about it was permission, giving them permission to do more work with AI without actually giving them structure creates a lot of activity, but not actually the transformation that you're trying to accomplish.
00:07:44 · Andres Figuera
[00:07:44] S1: So you gave them the possibility to go crazy with AI, but providing them the structure and guidelines they needed to not just do whatever they wanted.