Customerland

Navigating the Convergence of AI, Ethics, and Retail Engagement

Sara Richter Season 2 Episode 18

In this episode, Sarah Richter, CMO at Emarsys SAP, discusses the evolving role of AI in retail marketing. She'll explore how AI can complement the human touch in marketing, helping marketers stay crucial to brand storytelling while utilizing tools like the AI Product Finder to enhance customer engagement and retention.

We'll also discuss the intersection of data privacy and ethical marketing, with insights on how AI can foster deeper human connections if used responsibly. The conversation will cover the challenges faced by retail media networks and the impact of EU regulations on marketing practices.

Sarah will share strategies to navigate the economic uncertainties of today by focusing on customer-centric marketing. We'll examine the importance of agility in marketing and the need for personalized experiences that replicate the intimacy of a local store visit. This episode will also highlight the changing roles of senior marketers and the ongoing effort to achieve personalization at scale. Join us to gain a deeper understanding of both the changes and constants in the marketing landscape.

Sara Richter:

For the first time I could really see a convergence of consumers actually saying to us they want to see AI in their retail experiences. They want retailers and brands to use AI to make experiences better.

Mike Giambattista:

Sarah Richter is CMO at Emarsys SAP. Sarah and I have had several wide-ranging conversations, all surrounding topics related to customer centricity, customer experience, retail in kind of a broad thematic way. But the conversations are always one informative, two a lot of fun and three hard to schedule. So, sarah, thanks for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

Sara Richter:

It's a pleasure, mike, and I apologize for being difficult to get a hold of. It's always a pleasure to spend time with you.

Mike Giambattista:

Well, you're very busy, and I think everybody I certainly get that. So since we first started trying to schedule this conversation, as I mentioned earlier, we've got three major announcements that all had multiple components of things that SAP Amarsys was bringing to market, and we should certainly talk about them. But I think that, additionally, what I find so rich about these conversations is your perspective. So we'll talk about the product set, but really I think you know what is Sarah seeing out there that most people would never get to see? But let's start with the product stuff.

Sara Richter:

We can start there. I mean, we've brought some really amazing things to market that we're really proud of. I think we and I were chatting at NRF, which feels so long ago now Wow, and we were talking from an SAP standpoint. There were some interesting things that were brought to market. From an Amarsys standpoint, we were talking about some of our new digital ad capability and extending into LinkedIn and TikTok and some of the things that was going to give marketers in terms of understanding, reaching their audience and understanding their data, and I think that's all really important. But if I'm really honest, I think the conversation at the moment and this I think people do genuinely know that you have to be asleep not to know it.

Mike Giambattista:

The conversation is dominated by AI at the moment, it's just inescapable.

Sara Richter:

And yes, it so happens that we've announced a Gen AI product earlier this week. But I will be honest for this call and say you and I had scheduled this long before. Actually, we had that in the works. It's a nice coincidence, but I think the coincidence actually is kind of what tells you something about it that this is so top of mind and it's changing, I think, almost daily how people are thinking, how they're reacting. It's changing what consumers are asking for. I found it really fascinating to watch the ebb and the flow over the last kind of I don't know what 18 months or so since ChatGPT came on the scene and upended things for a lot of people, and watch people go from super excited and this is going to revolutionize our worlds to the absolute other end of the extreme.

Mike Giambattista:

Super fearful of like the world is ending. How long is it going to take?

Sara Richter:

This is the beginning of Terminator right. I mean I actually saw that somewhere in a publication which cracked me up. So I mean I've seen everything and it's impacting every industry, right? I mean it's not certainly from marketing and technology and retail, which is where I'm most familiar, but you saw it in the strikes in the entertainment industry. It's everywhere. So I don't think you can escape it unless, honestly, you've kind of buried your head in the sand and are being an ostrich.

Mike Giambattista:

Well, there's no reason to. I mean, if you're, if you're in business, especially in our kind of sector of it, it's um, it can revolutionize the way you do your job, and it is. It's already. It's already doing that in so many places. So, um, so yeah, completely. Um. Let's talk about specifically the AI product finder, which I think is the latest kind of deployment of how you guys are looking at AI. I mean, what is it? How does it work?

Sara Richter:

Tell us about it ratchet back a little bit because with you, we haven't talked so much about AI.

Sara Richter:

Actually We've talked about, as you said, customer centricity and loyalty and personalization, and all of those absolutely come to bear on AI. But what's exciting from our perspective, I think, is actually Amarsys itself has quite a legacy in AI. We've had machine learning, predictive AI, infused into our platform for the best part of 10 years, so we actually have thousands of marketers out there who are already changing their world around AI, and they were before ChatGPT and GenAI came. So part of what we're excited about is that this feels like this evolution is really picking up pace and its moment has come, and we did some research in the buildup to the product release. And the thing that got me excited was, for the first time, I could really see a convergence of consumers actually saying to us they want to see AI in their retail experiences. They want retailers and brands to use AI to make experiences better. Simultaneously, marketers are investing like 75% more in the last just couple of months of 2024, which is crazy.

Sara Richter:

We think we're only in April, so where is that going to take us in the 75% of the year still to go? But what they were seeing was actually this amazing increase in customer engagement and a topic near and dear to both of our hearts an impact on loyalty. It was improving loyalty, so that's where it gets exciting, and so what the new product finder brings to the table is to really allow marketers to be more precise about how that, what campaigns they should be running around, which products. So which products out of my vast range should I be taking out and targeting to this audience. And then the other piece of it will help you actually with the tactics and the recommendations to really zero in, to get really precise about the things you're offering and then to do it at scale, at speed in a personalized way.

Mike Giambattista:

So, just for additional context, are we talking about an AI product finder? That's? It's not really a consumer-facing tool. It's really more for the businesses who are deploying it to better understand what the opportunities are within their product mix and how to deploy those and execute those opportunities.

Sara Richter:

This is really about a marketer saying I am trying to think about what campaigns I'm going to run and what products I'm going to promote, and I've been told by my business that I need to increase the sale of tennis shoes by X percent. Which tennis shoes To whom? What am I going to promote? How am I going to promote it? What's the best channel to use? What's the best offer? What is the order of the communication and how it should come out over the different channels? Should I be thinking about promoting these kinds of shoes to people in Los Angeles and these kinds of shoes to people in Chicago, because they're far more likely that's where it's going to resonate and how I'm actually going to get a hit and I'm going to drive the right business outcomes and being able to do that quickly. And then the other piece of the pilot that we've announced is also our is the piece that actually allows you to, from a copy standpoint, so the headlines, your copy headlines to actually generate those more quickly as well. So all of this is focused on freeing up the marketer being that marketer to move more quickly, be more agile, have more data and, when it comes to the content and creative, have more ideas, because I think it's really important that we're not trying to replace the marketer here.

Sara Richter:

I don't believe that GenAI replaces the marketer. Genai can't do anything that's unique. What it can do is it can bring you the things that are out there and it can help you to analyze data. A marketer still is the one that understands their brand and the language and the voice, and they then have to look at all of these things and make the right decisions about what to take out to market and what not to take out to market, based on these recommendations that come up. I kind of described earlier as it making it rather than starting with a blank sheet of paper, which is a lot of work for everybody and really intimidating.

Sara Richter:

Exactly For anybody who's tried to write anything or create anything. We know that this gen AI helps you by giving you ideas, making suggestions, starting to move things along faster and giving you better data faster, so then you can really bring that unique approach and creativity that you have as a marketer and be that much more effective.

Mike Giambattista:

Right, the depth of experience, the depth of of the understanding of the language and nuances and brand and Exactly yeah.

Mike Giambattista:

Yeah, I think a lot of marketers are starting to come around to that. I mean, look, it was probably the marketers who first started ringing the bell that the sky was falling because every copywriter, copy chief content strategist out there was going uh-oh, you know, it's time to dust off the resume and go find another career. And I think what you're finding, and certainly what I'm seeing as well, is wait a second, my life just got you know 10 X better, because I can accelerate my productivity not just in quantity but quality, by using some of these new tools.

Sara Richter:

Absolutely, and it's interesting I had I had that exact same conversation with, actually, somebody in my own content team who came to me concerned that somehow, you know that, was this going to replace that? And I said absolutely not, jenny. It's not going to create anything new. It can show you, it can mimic, it can piece things together, but it's not going to bring that spark of ingenuity. And that's what a marketer brings, what a writer brings, what an artist brings, that level of creativity. And that's what then takes us to the next level. What the AI piece does is allow you to move faster and move better, hopefully, and free you up from some of the things that were sucking your time and weren't making you as efficient as you could possibly be.

Mike Giambattista:

I've had a couple of conversations recently with colleagues and friends and people who operate in the retail media network space about what's happening. There's so much excitement and so much money being poured into those new series of channels, and the conversations that I've had anyway were are what are the lumps in the snake right now? What? What are the hurdles where? Where are things getting stopped up? Because there's the opportunities are massive.

Mike Giambattista:

The, the technologies that uh are now available that are wild to deliver personalized instant real-time on theot messaging through some of these retail media networks are just crazy. Where are the bottlenecks in it? And they seem to be saying that it was with the brand's ability to understand what they could do now and so so yeah, you can start off with I need to sell more shoes, but all of that product selection, uh, segmentation, analysis, messaging you know, thinking that you still need to go through, you still need to produce that stuff and you still need to do it at scale, was kind of a hard thing for a traditional, a traditionally kind of a tool bucket that can accelerate a lot of those processes right off the bat.

Sara Richter:

Absolutely it will move. It helps to move that. So much that forward. That's exactly right, great, great. We know we want to take X product to X audience, but there's the time that goes into building all of that content and all those campaigns. So this will help you not just figure out, match the product to the audience, but then say, right, what we suggest is, here's a bunch of suggested tactics, here's such a just you know, subject line copy from the subject line generator, here's how to go about it, here's the channels, and all of a sudden you're leapfrogging the process and that time is starting to go away.

Sara Richter:

I think there's another thing, though, that has held people back, which is the concern about some of the ethics around, and data privacy issues around, ai. I think that's something that is something that's been talked about a lot. It's interesting and it is certainly making waves in Europe and I expect in the US it will follow. But within the last couple of weeks, the EU has just released their approach to AI and how they should be thinking about it and kind of putting a framework in it, really in terms of both from an ethical standpoint and also from a data privacy standpoint, and I actually think that's a good thing, because I think there has been nervousness from marketers and from others about are we doing the right things here and is that slowing you down? Are we doing the right things? Because I fundamentally believe that most marketers they respect their consumers and they have respect for their privacy and for their data privacy and they do not want to do the wrong thing. They actually want to do the right thing because, at the end of the day, that's a valued relationship and you want it to continue to last and you want that loyalty to continue and that's good for both parties, right? That's part of the value exchange. So I think starting to give people a framework so they have more confidence in what they're doing Now we're quite lucky.

Sara Richter:

We've had a pedigree within AI and SAP has done a lot of work, actually as well, around putting an AI ethics handbook out there for it to follow, so we come with a lot of that, which hopefully helps.

Sara Richter:

But I think people are looking also for broader basic guidelines and I've been kind of saying that you know AI is having its GDPR moment, if you like that. We're putting a framework hopefully not as painful as GDPR is often perceived to be, but if you think about GDPR. It was first adopted. Gdpr came very much out of Brussels and the EU and it took some time, but globally, people have adopted data privacy acts that are quite similar. I mean, the California Data Privacy Act is a good example. From a US standpoint, I think we will see similar things happen as time goes by. And while there's always resistance to regulation because we're humans and we resist it I actually think fundamentally most people are looking at it as a positive of and it's it's alleviating a certain sense of nervousness of how I can go and I can use this and I can do it the right way.

Mike Giambattista:

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Sara Richter:

I forget what the number is, but you know, had you been caught in an egregious violation of gdpr, there was a monster, fine potential astronomical, which which I, which this, which is not what this is about, and I'm pleased to say that that this is this is more about. When you got past that in terms of what gdpr was trying to help you do, that was fine.

Mike Giambattista:

It was the fine that scared everybody but you know, ultimately that's what you know. That was the thing that got people's attention because it was. You know, gdpr occurred in a response to, you know, just some wild west kind of data practices that were not ethical and certainly not well considered. So I'm with you, I think it was ultimately a good thing. But the sentiment curve on that whole process was whatever GDPR oh my goodness, gdpr it's coming for us recognition that we all have to play by some ethical rules and just like what I think you're saying here is what the EU has just come out with, we'll probably filter into the US market as well in some sort of stable recognition that we just have to play responsibly. And here's how we do it.

Sara Richter:

Exactly, and I and I think, and I think the tone has been set for that and people are used to that, and I and I think it does alleviate some nervousness for people who want to. They want to get in the sandbox and play with the new tools, but they also don't want to make a bad mistake, and and that's that's. I think that's reasonable.

Mike Giambattista:

I'll go along with that. I think it's reasonable too. So let's talk about if we can shift just a moment from this really interesting product that I would love to just get my hands in, if I'm allowed to at some point, to see how it all works.

Sara Richter:

Well, I'm sure we can book a demo for you. If you'd like to have a look, I would love that. I'm sure we can do that. Yeah, well, I'm sure we can book a demo for you. If you'd like to have a play, I would love that. I'm sure we can have that. Yeah.

Mike Giambattista:

Here, I am talking about it and excited about it, but you know it's a whole different thing when you get to go in there and play with things. But let's talk about, as I alluded early in the conversation, your perspective, because Emarsys is a sizable player in this broad space. You're part of SAP, which is a sizable player in this broad space. You're part of SAP, which is a giant player in this whole space. You're the CMO. You have a high level position, which, which I think, means a unique perspective on what's happening. So, without, without you know, talking about things that are still behind the curtain, that you're still working on and giving anything away that you shouldn't. I think it would be really interesting to hear about Sarah Richter's kind of broad perspective on what marketers should be thinking about right now, or maybe what they should be thinking about in six months that they may not be aware of, because you probably have a view to some of that stuff.

Sara Richter:

So I think well, you'll tell me if I do or not, I guess. So I think the connection is I don't think it's changed enormously, actually, from my perspective, because I still think that connection, that need for marketers to be completely obsessed with their customers, has not changed, except to perhaps become even ever more important. And I think that, for me, is still the most important thing. And we're in an economy that seems to fluctuate in all kinds of wacky ways that nobody seems to be able to predict. We're in a recession? We're not in a recession. Inflation is going up. It's coming down? No, it's going back up again. We're going to have rate increases? No, we're not. We're going to lower the rate.

Sara Richter:

When we look at the economic swirl that we're living in, it's quite challenging. And then you add the fact that there's not just one, but now two major conflicts that are impacting supply chain and purchasing and people's just general level of, I think, willingness to take risk, I think is quite low at the moment. So, operating in that kind of a, it's a very challenging economic climate and it seems to it feels to me like it. You know, it's a very challenging economic climate and it, and it seems to it, feels to me like it. You know there's a whirlpool over here and no sooner does that close down than another one opens here, and navigating that as in any for anybody in any type of business, I think is very challenging. I think, as a marketer, though, you could feel that you're going after a specific space and that you think is quite, that feels quite, quite. The ground feels quite solid under you and you find very quickly it's turned to quicksand. So you're looking for something that is stable and you are looking for ways that you can consistently have a positive impact in the market and for your business.

Sara Richter:

And I think your, your lifeboat, your life fest, is your customers in this, because they are the ones that keep you afloat and they are the ones that will actually help to show you the direction that you should be going. But you can't do that if you're not spending a lot of your time thinking about who those customers are and understanding the importance of every single engagement you have with them and treating each one with value. Your customer is someone who interacts with you from so many different angles and so many different channels at all times a day and wants to be recognized as a single individual and wants you to talk to them as a single individual. I think more and more as our digital world gets more complex. Right, and I mean the number of digital channels that pop out from for all of us. I mean nobody can keep track, right, and it's like the number of MarTech solutions that are out there.

Mike Giambattista:

It's it just. It seems to just expand, exploding.

Sara Richter:

Yeah, literally, literally in front of your eyes. No sooner do you talk about one than three others have proliferated around it. It's slightly terrifying, but so you have to. You need to be grounded in the things that that truly matter, and being grounded in that is understanding who those customers are, where they interact, and I think, as I was saying, with all these channels, I think more and more People are gravitating towards a engagement that is like the engagement they have when they walk down the road to the store at the end of the road, where the proprietor says hey, mike, it's great to see you and you know what.

Sara Richter:

I had a shipment come in of those flip-flops that you really, really like, and so I grabbed a couple of pairs of different colors in your size just to make sure that I had them when you came in. So you get first dibs at it. No, no pressure, but I know you really like these and I wanted to make sure you had them and you don't feel sold to. You actually feel that you've been given a premium service and that someone has cared about you and values your business, and there's a pretty good chance that, whether you intended to buy a pair of flip-flops that day, oh, yeah, I'm buying the flip-flops.

Sara Richter:

You're buying the flip-flops Even if you're headed out on a skiing vacation what you really needed was a new hat and a set of gloves.

Mike Giambattista:

Right, but just to be able to tell somebody about the great experience I had, I'm buying the flip-flops. You're buying the flip-flops, and I'll find somebody to give them to.

Sara Richter:

Exactly, you're going to do it, and you're going to do it every single time, by the way, and that's that relationship that I think people are craving and looking for and when they gravitate to you know, customer loyalty and customer obsession which is a term I just use, and personalization, which is a term you and I use all the time, that's what they really mean. That's what they really mean. They want to feel that they had a valued one-to-one interaction, that somebody cared, and that is probably more precious than almost anything else I think we can do.

Mike Giambattista:

I completely agree with you. I'm this, this is a podcast Ultimately say you can't see me nodding in agreement violently, but I completely agree with you. I think you know because I sit on the sidelines, I don't do the actual work, I comment on people who are doing the actual work. So I'm one of those people. But what you gain after doing this for some time is kind of a linear perspective on how people, marketers specifically are responding to the technologies, to the market pressures, to the new consumer sentiments and everything in between. And, um, you know there's loads of statistics that have been out there over the past several years of, um, senior marketers uh, basically fear that they were inadequate for the job's complexities. I mean, being a marketer now, a senior marketer especially, is nothing like what it was 10 years ago. And yet most of the senior marketers out there grew up in the trade, so to speak, in that period of time.

Mike Giambattista:

And I've had to do this radical rethinking of what they're all about, just radical. And you know I'm putting words in people's mouths that I won't name because they wouldn't appreciate it. But you know there's a lot of imposter syndrome out there that's been there for the past several years of like I can't tell anybody but I don't know what I'm doing here. Or I know what I'm doing for the most part, but there's this component over here that's like completely mystifying to me and what I think I'm feeling and hearing now out there is something different, that where that that sense of inadequacy or fear that they, that they couldn't get their heads around whatever aspect of it they were required to.

Mike Giambattista:

Now, through ai and gen ai and ai based tools, these people who have great conceptual minds are now able to do things and conceive of things that they, that they haven't been able to, that were previously kind of fearful.

Mike Giambattista:

Oh my gosh, what if somebody finds out I don't know what I'm doing? Kinds of subjects and and now there's a uh again. This is just, you know, my semi non--scientific pulse on the marketplace, but I think there's a kind of a renewed confidence Like wait a second, I've figured this out how I can use AI to do this component of the work we needed to do that I was struggling with before, and now I'm on top of the world and I'm doing things that were previously you know, I couldn't even conceive of my productivity levels and my output levels and you know the new ways we technologies out there to you know, build out job security, because being a CMO has been a rough, rough road. I'm talking to one right now, a very good one, by the way so with with an obvious handle on what needs to happen out there. But anyway, that's just my sense of what I think I'm hearing and feeling out there.

Sara Richter:

Yeah, I think it's hearing and feeling out there. Yeah, I think it's interesting. I mean the route to I totally agree with you the marketer. I think the marketer's job I don't care what level you're at has changed almost beyond recognition and you think about what you were. I mean, I'm going to date myself terribly here, but I mean I remember starting out in my first marketing assistance role and I spent a lot of time in front of a giant Xerox machine making copies of things which you had to actually physically take around the office and give to people.

Mike Giambattista:

Oh yeah.

Sara Richter:

I mean the world has moved, fortunately. I mean what a terrible, dreary, horrible task that was and what a giant waste of time and Lord knows how many trees we we were killing for no good reason. So the world's moved on. That's the most simplest and basic thing that that I can probably think of. So I think I think marketers have. I think marketers that have been successful have had to embrace it.

Sara Richter:

I think I think the nervousness is natural because, as we were saying earlier, the change has. The change once it started has just never stopped, and you're caught up. You are, you're caught up in it in an on a level that is. That's quite scary, I think, for a lot of people. You think about what, what, what an organization's MarTech stack actually looks like and the level of complexity going into it. We're actually doing an interesting exercise at the moment internally, where I've asked my team to actually document that which has been a. Really we hadn't done it in about 18 months and it's fascinating just to see there's no part of my organization where technology is not fundamental to what people are doing every day. Oh right, not a single part of it organization where technology is not fundamental to what people are doing every day.

Sara Richter:

Oh right, Not a single part of it anymore, and there was a time when it was, and it's really, really interesting and I'm looking forward to sharing it actually with the company, because I think they're going to be surprised at how much we use and how like we are Now. Our marketing tools of choice may be different than our customers, but the fundamentals of the complexity that we're dealing with are exactly the same. The challenges of the data may be different data. I may be measuring something slightly different, I may be looking for a different outcome, but I'm still caught up in all of that and I'm still needing to react to it, ideally in real time, if I can, and react intelligently and and ideally, not react but anticipate and move before something has happened, which is, you know, obviously the nirvana for all of us. So I agree, I think it's, and I do think the speed that gen AI has brought to it.

Sara Richter:

I also think and I was talking to somebody about this, I guess, guess yesterday I think a gen AI feels a little bit more approachable in some respects to people. I think they feel they can understand it, whereas the predictive AI that we've had with us for a long time actually is complicated. It's it's algorithms and models, and I think a lot of people hear that much and their eyes start to glaze. That's just not a world that I want to go to. There's nothing wrong with that at all, whereas I think Gen AI and, particularly because of you know, chat GPT being accessible.

Sara Richter:

I mean, if you have a web browser, you could. You could access chat GPT, all right. Well, how much of the world is that now? It's right there and it does things that are very difficult. A normal human being understands my mother understands that you can at 79, that you can type into chat GPT. Give me an idea, tell me about how I could describe the sky being blue and it will spit out a whole bunch of different ways, that the smell of the sky could be Azure and it could be turquoise, and she understands that.

Sara Richter:

So when you come down to a marketer who has been living in some kind of technology driven, embroiled world for a while, you can see why this all of a sudden becomes something that is a little easier, perhaps, to understand and embrace, as long as you don't feel you're being replaced by it, and I think that's the that's a big hurdle.

Mike Giambattista:

That was a big hurdle, yeah, it was a big hurdle that I think hope we're past right now. The other thing that I think you just prompted is you know, a marketer has been talking about personalization as the, as the mean for the longest time and not that long ago, personalization was, you know, you put you know recipient's first name Hi, sarah. You know. And you know here's the email to follow, and that counted as personalization which wasn't and didn't feel personalized. And you know, technology has allowed us to do some pretty cool things with personalization more recently, but I think that consumers have become more demanding and sensitized to authenticity over these past few years. And now, if you're going to personalize, you better be really good at it.

Mike Giambattista:

You better, you know you can't just say hi, mike, here's your sandals on sale today, because, whatever, as you're saying that the personalized touch needs to be a human or very human, like touch, um, for it to work, because otherwise it's just dismissed, as you know, some other marketing ploy. But um, so I think that authenticity is. You know, we've seen the studies that say oh well, gen X and Gen Y really demand authenticity. But I think it's beyond that. I think consumers overall are you know they? We are not stupid, um, they, we can sense, fake easily, um, but it seems like if you're, if you're a smart marketer who's willing to to go a couple of extra miles on your customer's behalf, you now have tools, um, at your disposal that can, that can get you to a level of authenticity and personalization at scale that you probably could never do before.

Sara Richter:

I wholeheartedly agree and it kind of goes back to what we were just talking about is that the most important thing is your customer and understanding that customer. Spend that time, that you can't spend too much time on it right the more time you spend, the better you will understand.

Sara Richter:

The better you understand, the better you will be able to engage. It's, it's, it sounds it and it sounds easy and it's not, and I don't want to suggest it is. And it's an ongoing cycle and of course, customers change, companies change brands, change products. You know economic circumstances change and we talked about some of that earlier as well. That all, of course, has to funnel through, but again, it does. That all does funnel into understanding your customer. Understand where your customer is. Do you understand, you know where they live? Do you understand how they like to shop? Do you understand the their, their, truly understand their buying habits? Do you understand what they really care about? Um, what motivates them? Um, how do you get a?

Mike Giambattista:

moment, cause that can change.

Sara Richter:

You know the changes circumstantially, so yeah, yeah, do you know how they engage with you on the mobile when they're sitting on a train commuting into the office versus when they're sitting on a train commuting into the office versus when they're sitting munching their sandwich in front of their laptop screen?

Mike Giambattista:

Right.

Sara Richter:

Totally quite different.

Mike Giambattista:

Or ignoring their kid when they should be paying attention to them.

Sara Richter:

Exactly, we won't mention that. Well, I think it's going to be first of all.

Mike Giambattista:

Well, I think it's going to be. First of all, it's always fun talking to you. It's always energizing, but it's probably going to be another I don't know half a dozen product announcements before we get together again, just because that's what scheduling is like here. But I'm really looking forward to it. I want to keep doing this with some consistency, because it's really rich and I think people who listen to this podcast get something out of these conversations. So my people will be in touch with your people, as they say. And thanks for all this. It's always fun.

Sara Richter:

Thanks, mike. An absolute pleasure as always, and I would be delighted to do this more often.

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