Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:13:18 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:13:18] S2: Brian and Max, let... Let's quickly just talk... One of the things I got excited about, obviously, when we were chatting was the fact that when you really do this well, you can actually... And and and, you know, give every one of your employees effectively a coach. Mhmm. An AI coach, I think all of us are already using AI around our lives and personal to give me feedback. Help me make this argument better. Make this writing better. We have it for all of that. But you're now gonna be able to have contextual AI that can coach. Hey. You have a sales pitch coming up. Here's some of the best sales skills. Here's some of the best sentences you should think about. And that's all gonna be right there in the product. And say more about what that could look like and actually the fact that you can can provide people with coaching.
00:14:03 · Max Shaw
[00:14:03] S3: I'm already starting to do this a bot personally. Right? So I have, like, an agent that helps me from a health perspective that I've hooked up into all the different data. I have one agent that's focused on helping me with my kids and and running the family. And I think similarly, it's gonna become pretty status quo that everyone has an agent that's focused on their professional development. And for some people, that might look like a coach. And I think there's a real big opportunity. This is the kind of interactions that most employees, in a best case scenario, get, like, once a week with their manager, right, in, a one on one where you really start to get... Maybe occasionally more often, but it's usually at best, like, once a week. With AI, there's the opportunity to have someone along your side twenty four seven that understands your goals, understands the company's goals, and what your manager wants you to focus on, and then is able to blend all that together. And AI is actually really good at taking big aspirational goals and areas of improvement and turning those into actionable steps you can work on in the immediate future. And so having a twenty four seven AI coach that knows you, but also knows your business and knows what you're supposed to be working on, I think that will totally unlock a new way of personal development. I don't think it's gonna replace the role of a manager, and I think that's where some people get it wrong, but it's gonna augment it so that you have someone who's constantly on your team by your side helping you improve day in and day out. And each person wants something different. It needs to be hyper personalized to you. That's one of the things we've quickly kind of realized building out some of the early prototypes here is that it cannot be generic. Everyone likes to receive stuff differently. They have different cadences. I wanna talk about the stuff in the morning or the afternoon. It needs to be hyper personalized to each individual to really become effective, but I think it will become an expectation that when you join company, one of the agents that becomes available to you is someone to help you with personal development.
00:15:58 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:15:58] S2: The technology you guys are really competing with in many ways is, like, twenty years old. So it sort of feels like an unfair fight, candidly, in so many ways. And you guys together have built companies that you've taken public, you know, billion dollar businesses. Can we just like step back? Why'd you choose this area? Because in so... I mean, I obviously love it, but in some ways as the world is like AI and robots and less jobs and let's lay off, you know, 50,000,000 people, you're like, let's go focus on humans. Brian, why'd you guys pick this area?
00:16:36 · Brian Distelburger
[00:16:36] S0: Yeah. So for me for me, this has always been something that's really important to me. As we built up Yext, I cared a lot about the people management side of things. The people we had at the company would spend a ton of time on it and dealt with every situation you could imagine in terms of good management, bad management. A lot of the things we've hit on here in terms of personal development, coaching, and things like that, we sort of assume that a manager is good at that. But you know what? A lot of managers really struggle with that kind of thing. And one just specific case where a manager is not very good at that kind of stuff is a lot of times people will be in a role that is not right for them. And so unless the manager has worked in a bunch of different roles and a bunch of different scenarios, they might not even be able to identify that something else is right for an individual. And so when you zoom way out, so it's always been an area for me that I cared about very deeply. When you zoom way out and think about what are the big challenges in the world that we're all gonna deal with? I'm excited for stuff like going to Mars and the moon. That's awesome. Let's definitely do that. But also here on Earth, I would argue we are gonna go through a civilizational level change management problem. We have not seen anything like this in our lifetime for any of us. I think this is one of the most important areas that person could focus on and think about and work on. And so as, you know, having young kids and and a family and caring a lot about my friends and family and loved ones and what the future is gonna look like, work has always been a really important part of of humans' lives, and I think it's really important to be working on charting out what that future looks like.
00:18:28 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:18:28] S2: Brian, I wanna double click on that. You know, I I always say when the world zigzag and very much that it feels like very contrarian for you guys to lean really hard into this. And at the same time, that's why it feels so accurate. But let's... You just said something, and I I think that we need to unpack it, which is we all kind of know we're going through this pretty profound moment in humanity with the the... We have AGI is how I I I I think we're basically there. Say more when you're like this is the largest change management moment and why Windmill is a solution.
00:19:14 · Brian Distelburger, Alexa von Tobel
[00:19:14] S0: Sure. So you can look at, like, kinda where we are today as a as a lens. And right now, the biggest problem at every company that people are struggling with is changing jobs and roles and how they're gonna use AI to do different things and what that means for the people, what that means for the future of their business. Everyone in tech is worried that what they're doing is gonna be commoditized by the model companies, and cost structures, and all this kind of stuff. And so, all this stuff, this is the tip of the spear. We're just getting started in a lot of this stuff. And so you have the companies that are at the bleeding edge of technology that are trying to reshape their organizations right now, and trying to figure out what that means for all the people in their companies, And for people that are at different stages of their career, trying to figure out what skills matter, what is important. As they're coming out of school, it used to be you could follow a certain track and major in something, and you sort of knew what the future was gonna look like, roughly. People are terrified that that does not exist anymore. And so, I would... You know, we're dealing with this huge level of uncertainty. I don't think anyone can accurately forecast exactly what things are gonna look like. [00:20:32] S2: Agreed. I agree.