Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:11:16 · Alexa von Tobel, Brian Distelburger
[00:11:16] S2: So effectively, you're gonna do... And I'm like laughing a little bit because I had a friend the other day who runs HR for Fortune 50 company. She was she was like, man, my next month, I go underwater. We do all the reviews. It's just like it's like this huge lift. And we're kind of shifting more to like an aura whoop esque era where it's persistent feedback, persistent data. Where are you so that you can start elevating your own thinking to how do you actually make this employer teammate much better rather than thinking about how to fill out forms? And you guys obviously integrate with Slack and Google and all... And, yeah, GitHub and Google Workspaces, etcetera. So you're getting all of that data, but it's really allowing people to get their head above water to think about how do we make these team members better. [00:12:10] S0: Yeah. I think I think that's
00:12:10 · Brian Distelburger, Max Shaw
[00:12:10] S0: Yeah. I think I think that's [00:12:12] S3: the baseline. I think there's layers on top of that, though. One I would call out is personalization. I think right now, job titles are very rigid where you are a software level four, for example. And you're starting to see a lot of organizations starting to combine roles at a lot of these AI labs. You're... You say you have, like, members of the technical team, and it's all product design and engineering are all kinda blended together. On the go to market side, I think you're starting to see similar stuff as well. And I don't think that what that ends up with is everyone is just the exact same member of the technical team. I think that what that looks like is every person's role is specifically crafted to that individual's unique strengths and unique interests. And I've found throughout my career, the best work happens when you line up the right person with the right projects, something they're super passionate about, something they're really good at, and you give them the right resources. But to do that's just extremely time consuming for a manager to try to figure that out across their entire team. With AI, I think there's gonna be the opportunity to much more personalize every specific role to exactly match an individual skill set.
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.