Customerland

Coaching AI, Leading Humans

• mike giambattista • Season 4 • Episode 3

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Forget churning out more content; the real advantage now is coaching intelligent systems to deliver work that still feels unmistakably human. We sit down with Johann Wrede, CMO of UserTesting, to unpack why the modern marketing leader must operate like a business generalist, not a channel specialist—and how AI raises the floor on execution while threatening to flatten differentiation.

Johann traces an unconventional path from engineering to sales to marketing to the C-suite, revealing why integrated thinking beats siloed teams and how curiosity has been the throughline in every step. We dig into the shift from outputs to outcomes, the growing responsibility CMOs have across finance, talent, and culture, and the practical ways to build teams that prompt for critique, pressure-test assumptions, and use AI as a typist and analyst while protecting the origin of ideas.

The conversation gets tactical: how to detect and avoid “common denominator” content, when to bet on in-person experiences to earn authentic digital lift, and why brand voice matters even more when a bot handles the first touch. Johan shares lessons from UserTesting customers who test tone, empathy, and clarity before deploying AI into apps and contact centers, aiming for helpful, on-brand interactions without pretending the machine is human. If you’re rethinking your marketing operating model—designing briefs for agents, calibrating prompts for better judgment, and building tight research loops with real people—this one maps the path.

If this resonated, follow the show, share it with a teammate who’s retooling their workflow, and leave a quick review telling us how you’re coaching AI for better outcomes.

SPEAKER_00:

As we start to knit these things together, um, we have to stop thinking about actually doing the work ourselves and think about operating more like a manager or a coach who has, you know, today maybe it's a handful of interns in a year or so, maybe it'll be more like entry-level skilled people. And over time, those people, those AI uh capabilities will mature and have more and more skills. But the humans will have to be the ones who understand how to coach. And just like with real people, you have to understand who you're coaching to be able to get the best out of that person or that system.

SPEAKER_01:

Today on Adventures in Customer Land, I'm with Johan Reid, who is CMO of user testing. And um, I'm sorry for your sake, listeners, that you missed the opening couple of moments of this before we actually hit the record button because uh I had been dissing the role of CMOs as podcast guests. And at that very moment, Johan pops into frame, and here I am, mid-sentence, saying things that are better left off mic. But anyway, um, none of that is with malice. I'm really excited to talk to Johan. Uh, he's got tons of experience in that role and and other similar. So, with all that, is a terrible introduction. Johan, thanks for joining me. Oh, it's my pleasure, Mike.

SPEAKER_00:

And you know, I I being a CMO is not an easy gig. Uh, there's a lot of good, there's a lot of bad, and I'm really excited to talk about all of it today.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, why don't we just set context? And this will give me opportunity to apologize for what I almost said. But um, if you would, just you know, your role as CMO at user testing, what does that look like? And then maybe even a little bit, what is user testing all about?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, why don't I start there? So uh user testing is a business. If you if you think about uh if you think about the need to get the voice of the customer into decisions uh in in an enterprise, that's what we do. We we have a network of people and a platform that enables you to ask any question, get insights, see the people, hear their thoughts, get their opinions. Um, you know, some people have have called it focus groups on steroids at scale, uh, but really it's about creating a straight line connection between uh companies and their customers and getting those insights. Um my role as CMO is an interesting one. You know, as a as somebody who loves data, who loves hearing the voice of the customer, it's a really great place to be because I get unlimited access to our tool. Uh, but I'm responsible for all things marketing at user testing. And uh part of what we're doing right now is is moving into speaking more with marketers. Our legacy as a business has been in the user experience community. And so uh I often tell people I love my job because I get to market to marketers. And uh there are a few things that are more fun in business to me than doing that because I get to talk about marketing a lot.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. Okay. Well, so that's my that's my opening to say um by way of semi-apology, that as you popped in here, I was speaking to one of your colleagues about how I typically don't really want to interview CMOs for this podcast because CMOs tend to show up with their talking points, and and that's all that's it's the talking points, and there's no real conversation there, which makes it difficult. On the other hand, the moment you popped in, I can already tell this was not going to be a talking points kind of a thing. There there appear to be very few rails that we're gonna have to.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm not I'm not aware of restrictions or limitations, Mike. I don't I don't see those.

SPEAKER_01:

So there was no fine print on this whole arrangement at all.

SPEAKER_00:

So and I have no I have no notes uh in front of me. I don't have any windows open. I'm just looking at you. So that's that's what this is gonna be.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, this will be a lot of fun because, well, you can already tell. Um, if you don't know, if you haven't taken a look at Johan's LinkedIn profile, which I did in preparation for this conversation, Johan's had a handful of similar roles for other companies in uh similar and adjacent spaces. And I think that's gonna make for a really interesting conversation on a couple levels, but one because I think it's generally accepted that uh CMO tenures are shrinking, um the job is becoming infinitely more complex and difficult. And to be a successful CMO right now takes skill sets that weren't even invented 10 years ago. And yet uh Johan is is successfully building a really sophisticated company in an increasingly sophisticated world. And I'd love to hear about kind of your path and your insights along the way that got you here.

SPEAKER_00:

That's uh that's a lot, that's a big question. I think, you know, first of all, um I'm gonna start with with a little bit before I became a CMO. Uh I was really fortunate to work at SAP for a long time. And uh I I was able to cut my teeth on a variety of departmental leadership roles. Um, my background, I started life as an engineer. Uh, spent a lot of time in sales out in the field. Uh, was part of a product launch team at SAP. And then I moved into marketing. So I've got a uh I I guess maybe a non-traditional CMO background. Uh I didn't study marketing, I didn't get a marketing MBA. I sort of earned my way into marketing. Uh and I had the opportunity at SAP to manage increasingly complex functions. And what I observed there was that everything was really stovepiped. And that really informed my desire to become a CMO because my view is that modern marketing is integrated marketing. We can't operate in silos. And a lot of the work I did at SAP was to transform teams to integrate them better across functions. And uh, so that's what I took into my my first CMO job. And, you know, this is my my third one, and uh you learn a lot. Uh the CMO job is I often tell people it's not a marketing job anymore. You do very little actual marketing work uh when you cross that line. And that was something I didn't appreciate about the job. Uh I felt I've uh it was it was a little bit of whiplash in my first one. I was like, wait a minute, you know, I'm not I'm not sitting here working on messaging, I'm not doing the ideation, I'm not involved in in the actual work of marketing. Um, it's it's a it's a really different job and it takes it takes some learning. And I think that's, you know, when we look at CMO tenure, I think you also have to consider where is the CMO in the evolution of their CMO career? Is it their first job, second job, third time around? Because I will tell you today, I I am a much better informed, stronger leader because I learned from my two prior experiences.

SPEAKER_01:

A couple of things come to mind as you're telling me this. One is that the kind of the other side of that same coin is how mature the organization is in their hopes, definitions, expectations of what a CMO can bring to the table. But yeah, um I'm really interested and intrigued of uh what you said about that a CMO really isn't in your roles and capacity right there, aren't really doing the marketing. So describe that. What is what was that big whipsaw effect all about?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, uh, you know, as I think it's it's in the same way, and maybe the best analogy is the same way that when you go from being an individual contributor to being a leader for the first time, right? Suddenly you realize that wow, I'm not writing the copy, I'm not you know, analyzing the data necessarily myself anymore. Now what I'm doing is I'm I'm directing, I'm coaching, I'm uh I'm I'm looking at somebody else's work and providing the feedback. Uh, as a first-line manager, typically you're still quite involved in all of the detailed meetings, all the detailed planning. But as you go up and up and up, um, you have less of a hand in that. But even as you know, head of global events at SAP, I was still intimately involved in creating what is this event experience going to look like for the business. But then when you get into the the CMO chair, now it's really just a lot more about managing the budget, dealing with with personnel planning issues. It feels like, you know, you plan, yeah, the planning starts in in August, and then you have kickoff in January. And before you know it, you're right back into the planning cycle and you're, you know, talking to finance, talking to HR. Your your role really becomes a lot more of a business leader cross-functionally. Uh, I'm involved in conversations on everything from acquisition to budget planning for next year. Uh, I'm participating in conversations about culture and uh how do we drive employee retention across the business? Those are things that you don't do as a marketer. As a marketer, you're really in the marketing organization, focusing on marketing outcomes. And I think the big shift is becoming a CMO who has a contribution to make to the business. You become a business leader first and a marketer second or third. It starts dropping down the list.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm I'm thinking about your career as you've described it. I see four, I'm sure this, I'm getting this wrong, but I see four distinct kind of phases where you started as an engineer, went to sales, went to marketing, and now you're a C-suite leader. And those are um, you know, certainly there's a path because you followed it, but that's not a traditional path at all. Um, I think people who have spent the time and money to go get uh MBAs in marketing would all be gnashing their teeth right now. Um but somehow it's worked, and it seems like um you've gained perspective, necessary perspective along the way. I'm kind of just curious, just because I'm curious, um, because I talked to a handful of people in marketing who have resisted the kind of um leadership roles that kind of came with more seniority because they really they really loved marketing. They really loved doing the ideation and getting in the weeds on on the data. And um, I'm just curious, do you miss it?

SPEAKER_00:

Um sometimes for me, it's less about the data. I have plenty of data. In fact, CMOs have data coming out of our ears these days. Um, I miss more of the creative work. Uh, you know, I really loved when I led Brandon Advertising at SAP, I got to participate in the script writing sessions and casting actors and all of that fun stuff, talking to people about fonts for hours. There was a lot of joy in that, uh, talking about, you know, what does this color make you feel? Some of the more creative aspects of marketing. I miss those things, but uh I still get to dip my toe into it from time to time, review work, help, help break log jams and brainstorm. But what I've discovered is that I take tremendous joy now in helping people grow in their careers and helping uh, you know, I've become incredibly passionate about AI, and I'm a bit of a champion inside the business for AI adoption. And so I find um, I guess the best way to put it is I've found new passions to to fill the the the space that I've had to make for others to take on the marketing work that I did earlier in my career. Yeah, passions are allowed to evolve, aren't they?

SPEAKER_01:

We're allowed to to morph, change, and grow along the way. I hope so. I do too. Otherwise, I'm off in left field somewhere. I'm trying to rationalize myself here. I'm often accused of having more interests and hobbies than any other human being.

SPEAKER_00:

So maybe it's a marketing thing. I don't know. Um I think it's a if I'll just jump on that for a second. I think it's a curiosity thing. And I think that, you know, there's there's um, I was thinking about this the other day about how curiosity is possibly one of the strongest drives that we have as human beings. Like it's curiosity that leads us to touch a hot iron when we're children. It's curiosity that leads us to stick our hand down a hole in the ground, wondering what's in there. Uh and I think people, you know, people have over the course of my career, every time I got a promotion, uh, there's always somebody who's like, Well, what do you what do you attribute your success to? And the more I think about it, the more I think it's curiosity.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes. I'm I'm debating the silence here is because I'm debating whether to follow that dog down to some because it because I think it's really interesting. Here's what I'm here's what I'm wondering, and I'll probably just end up cutting this out, but um I'm the same way. I've I've been accused, not necessarily praised through my curiosity, accused of having too many interests. And but um, you know, you talk to people about their roles, it's a it's a very soft skill. Uh in fact, it's not even a skill, it's just a trait. And um, I believe in it as you do. I think it's one of the most critical factors to becoming successful in business in almost any realm of business, but especially a marketing kind of a role. But you don't hear people, and you don't really see job descriptions talking about that. You don't really hear people talking about those as some of the critical aspects of somebody's personality they may be looking for in a role. So I wonder if that if curiosity is just one of those things that you that's that's baked into a person through whatever means, nature and nurture, um, that just kind of you hope it comes out. You hope it shows up in the in the wood grain somehow. Or or maybe it's maybe it's time to actually do something official here and and start asking for curious-minded people. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00:

I um Mike, I think now we're really off on a tangent. Right. I think one of the challenges that we face in business today is that we primarily value hard skills, right? Salespeople become sales managers because they're really good at selling. Marketers become marketing leaders because they're really good at marketing. Um, the problem is that when we cross those divides, when we go from being an individual contributor who requires uh increasing levels of technical aptitude to execute their work, uh, and we move into a leadership role, uh, we don't we don't value the intangibles, we don't value the soft skills in the same way. We don't value the the ability to navigate hard conversations or to have that curious mind that uh that asks the questions that other people aren't thinking about. And I do think there is a place for cultivating those things because to your point about nature and nurture, I think some people just innately may be more curious. But I also believe that we as humans are endowed with curiosity, and maybe it just wasn't cultivated. We haven't cultivated ourselves, the schools we went to, our teachers didn't cultivate it in us. Maybe our parents did not did not encourage us to be curious. But I think with a little bit of a nudge, anybody can tap into that curiosity. And maybe it's a little bit of an exercise of using your intellect to say, hey, I am going to lean into curiosity, I'm going to explore my curiosity and try to leverage it as an asset, as opposed to just sort of taking it for granted or not even thinking about it. Uh, much in the same way that people can be taught to have difficult conversations.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, absolutely. I'm completely agreeing with you. Violently agreeing. I see the head nodding. I see the head nodding. Not a visual medium, but you kind of get it. Um yeah, and maybe it's also incumbent upon leadership to encourage that and try and draw curiosity out of those kinds of people, you know. Um, I haven't seen that in practice, but I'm thinking of the as I've heard people describe other people they admire when they have described them as being curious. I've always taken that as a really high compliment towards them. And um, and I think it's worth nurturing. So let's make that another podcast. Okay, you know, that's going someplace somewhere, but I don't really know where. Um on the other hand, bringing this a little closer to home, you've talked about how the modern CMO needs to evolve in an AI-first, insights driven era. Like what is that what does that look like? Because you already you already mentioned increased technical proficiency, but but the world is changing really fast right now. So what does that look like in your view?

SPEAKER_00:

Look, I uh I've I've become a bit of an AI advocate, uh standing on tables talking to people about AI, virtual tables, uh inside of user testing, because I I believe that AI is to some extent an existential threat to marketing as we've always understood it. And, you know, I think there are some really great and amazing things that AI will do for us. And I also think that there is the potential for AI to be a total unmitigated disaster. I mean, the amount of the the the amount of content that AI can just generate for you, where in the past you might have had a handful of executions that were worked up. AI can give you thousands of options and you can just keep saying, I don't like that, I don't like that, I want this, I want that. And it just it can generate so much content. And and the challenge, of course, is that it's it's basing it on the the common denominator. I don't want to use say lowest common denominator, but the common denominator. So everybody's content as they're trying to accelerate content delivery with AI is all gonna sound the same. So we have to be mindful of that, right? I think that's one of the ways this job is changing, is we're going from being, you know, trying to trying to get to volume. Uh now volume's easy. It's the quality that's really going to suffer that we have to be careful of. It's a little bit of a going back to craftsmanship model. Um, I also think that the practice of marketing, and and frankly, I think we can broaden this conversation because I think it's every every person in the enterprise has. To shift their thinking from being a doer to being a coach, especially now that we have agentic AI and its capabilities are burgeoning. The LLMs, the generative AI is getting better and better. We're also seeing small language model models evolve that are really good at specific tasks. As we start to knit these things together, we have to stop thinking about actually doing the work ourselves and think about operating more like a manager or a coach who has, you know, today maybe it's a handful of interns in a year or so. Maybe it'll be more like entry-level skilled people. And over time, those people, those AI uh capabilities will mature and have more and more skills. But the humans will have to be the ones who understand how to coach. And just like with real people, you have to understand who you're coaching to be able to get the best out of that person or that system. And so I've been encouraging my team to really think of themselves as coaches and how do they coach the AI to reach the outcome versus doing it themselves?

SPEAKER_01:

Oh boy, there is a lot to talk about there. And that that honestly should be a couple of a couple more episodes. Um I was talking to to somebody recently who runs a division of a fairly large company that's in charge of actually designing and building AI products, really sophisticated ones. And we this wasn't a marketing-specific conversation, but but it could have been. What he said was, he said, you know, last year as a company, I'm paraphrasing badly, but uh last year as a company, we recognized and we put out to everybody in the company that AI was about to change the way we worked internally. As we're building these things that are going out into the wild, AI is about to change what happens internally here as well. Cut to current times, and I think this was just a part of an internal meeting just very recently, said is kind of this isn't policy per se, but he said, look, if we're still working the same way we are today, next year, this time, you shouldn't be working at this company. You should always be thinking right now how you can rewire, redesign, rethink your function towards outcomes rather than just outputs. And um, I thought that was really telling to you know, to hear him say to his staff, which is quite large, don't be thinking that that you just have to accomplish the task in front of you. You need to be thinking about how you're gonna rewire yourself to rethink what you're doing for this company. In other words, again, I I agree violently with that a hundred percent. There's so much there. You know, uh one of the other things that came out of that was that um, and I have not seen data support to support this. I this is basically hearsay at this point, but from a very credible source, that um the AI-based technologies are changing and growing so fast, faster than the their various user bases can keep up with the meaning of it and the utility of it. It's moving and can do so much so fast, so differently, that uh changing your mindset is is becoming difficult. Which opened up another conversation I'd love to hear your opinion on, is which is you know, maybe what we should be thinking about is uh take a 10-step back approach to marketing and and away from tasks, which can either all or mostly be outsourced to AI models right now, and thinking about what engagement really means, what attribution really means, what multi-channel really means when we're not responsible so much for the pulling of the levers and the pushing of the buttons. It it's it propels us, I think compels us to think differently about why we're here.

SPEAKER_00:

It's um it's a really timely topic. I was I was at advertising week last week and I was listening to I'm sorry. I'm sorry I missed you. Um I was I was listening to these consumer marketers talking about their their view of advertising, and I'm I heard a lot about in real life. Uh I heard I was on a panel and you know one of the folks was saying, I'm betting my whole budget on in real life stuff. We're not doing any digital. We're just gonna build these incredible events and then let that drive the social media outcomes. Because if we invest in the experience, that's not AI, that's real. We're gonna get people together with each other, interacting, enjoying the product. And then the outcome will be social media amplification, which will will get the digital as a result of the in real life. And I thought that was, I mean, it's bold to bet the whole budget on that strategy. But my sense was in this AI first world now where content is coming faster and faster because teams can can execute this faster and faster. Um, there is a retrenchment around in real life and the value of people. And we see that as a business because our platform gives human insight, like you hear from real people, and we're seeing increasing demand to get that real voice of the customer versus going out to pick your, you know, pick your tool and ask it what it thinks people want. Like, you know, at the end of the day, AIs don't buy things, people still have to buy things. So getting to the person, hearing from people, uh, we're just seeing that becoming increasingly important uh in this world where more of the the execution work is done by the AIs. And and and the the there was one quote, and I'm probably gonna get this entirely wrong. But I heard someone speak last week about creativity and the fact that the way that LLMs are designed, they'll never be as creative as humans because LLMs can't have original thought because they're trained on all of this stuff, and then they just make inferences from that. And so it's all very logical, ordered, but constrained by the past, whereas humans are free thinkers and can do free association and and come up with entirely novel experiences. Uh, and so I really feel like the trend is and will continue to be the more we can use AI to just go and execute and build and iterate and generate, the more valuable it will become to have original thought, original creativity, and real insights and input from people and engagement with them.

SPEAKER_01:

I um let's make this personal for a minute.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

The uh, you know, I think when when the whole world jumped into Chat GPT and uh maybe whatever it was a year and a half, two years ago when the whole thing just blew up, um, you could you could see language patterns in its responses. You could pretty much detect, like, wait a minute. And it was easy at that point. I think ChatGPT has gotten a little better at trying to appear to be uh a human author of whatever its response uh response is, but there are still some telltale signs. And and I wonder if I'm just I'm unique in this. I'm I want your opinion, but when I'm on LinkedIn or I'm on any of the social channels, if it appears to me to be a an AI generated bit of content, whatever that is, if the AI, if it's there for creativity's sake to show what this AI can do, I'm all about it. I'm I'm engaged, I want to see what that is. On the other hand, if it's some thought leadership um that has some telltale signs that has been generated by AI, I have I have to reconcile what I feel about that really quickly. Um, in some cases, I know the author, but it feels disingenuous to me. It feels like I've like the guy cheated me or personally. So interesting, Mike. I mean, is that just me? Should I go to my therapist with that? Or is that you know, is there something there?

SPEAKER_00:

I don't uh look, I don't uh I don't think you need therapy. Just I mean that's actually I I don't know you well enough to to be able to comment on that.

SPEAKER_01:

Just leave that one right there.

SPEAKER_00:

Um but listen, I so let me let me let me give you my framing on this and and the way I've talked to my team about this. Um I in in a long time ago there were typing pools, and people didn't type their own correspondence at work. They dictated and then the typing pool took care of the actual typing. And I'm certain that every typist had their own little way of doing things, and and and that wasn't considered disingenuous. That was using a tool that you had at your disposal. And I look at AI the same way. Um, because I I try to avoid typing all this stuff out because frankly, ChatGPT or Gemini or or any of those tools can type way faster than I can. Uh and it it can string together my thoughts in a way that makes sense to back to me. Um, what it can't do is come up with my thoughts. And I think that's where I don't I don't look at using an AI to actually write a post or a or or long-form content as a bad thing, because it it's an automation step to get to the output. It's it's the uh it's the production of the asset. Uh and and the way I talk to my team about this is if you're not using every tool at your disposal, think of AI like the internet. If you used a sentence like, hey, when I did this research, I used the internet. Well, nobody would say that. Of course, if you're doing research, competitive research or research on a uh an account to do an ABM campaign, you're gonna use the internet, right? But at some point, using the internet was novel and and questionably trustworthy. And so now we are looking at at AI and we're saying, oh, you're cheating if you're using AI. And my view is no, you're not. You're only cheating, and and frankly, you're only cheating yourself. If you seed the creative thinking to the AI, if you go to the AI and go, what should I blog about today? Okay, write it. That that's that's poor practice and you're gonna get a poor result because it's not gonna be interesting, it's not gonna be new, it's just gonna be a regurgitation of stuff that's been posted before. But if you have a novel idea and you go to your your assistant and you say, Hey, here, here's my idea. This is how I think about it. Write something up for me and let me see a draft. Great. Now you're actually using your tools and your resources. And so that's completely agree. Completely agree. It goes back to that conversation about coaching, coaching the AI to get the output as opposed to just asking the AI to do all of the work. To do the work, right?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, yeah. And I I uh maybe I needed to clarify my my misgivings somewhat, but um, I'm in complete agreement. I'm a heavy duty AI tool user. Um but I think, especially as it relates to uh some sort of written output for if it if it's a content piece of some sort, I want to make sure that even even using this tool, and again, I'm a heavy user, that this sounds and feels like it's coming from a human with some communication skills, with a point of view, with a voice. And uh, you know, I you can tell, you can tell it it's clear as day when you're scrolling through LinkedIn or whatever, and there's somebody you know who's in your feed because you've connected with them, and they've got some posts, but it's but it's clearly the language of an AI with the emojis of an AI, with the M dashes of an AI, and you're like hey, uh I hate that it uses M dashes because I've used M dashes for a really long time. Me too, and now they're illegal. What the heck? But um but I'm with you, I'm completely with you that you know it is a tool, and I I find that these the ones that I use invaluable in my day-to-day work. I mean, I'm you know, far and away more productive than I ever have been in my career, so so I'm I'm nodding yes again.

SPEAKER_00:

Um yeah, but to your point, right? It's we are um, you know, going back to my internet analogy earlier, we've become more sophisticated now. We're smart enough to ask what's the source, right? You can't just quote the internet, you can't just use Wikipedia as a source for something because we all know that people are going in and editing Wikipedia to create bias and all these kinds of things. And so we we have evolved in the way we use the internet to consider the source. And I think that as we get more exposure to AI, whether on on our own production side creating content or as a consumer of content, we will get more sophisticated in our ability to sniff out that content that is sort of just like, hey, what should I blog about? Okay, write it for me, versus somebody who's just using it as an assistant, uh, who is doing the typing, who is helping as a thought partner to say, hey, you know, think through your position. I think that's one of the most valuable uses for AI for me is I always have a thought partner on tap who I can challenge to say, hey, come back to me with questions, hard questions, ask me to argue the negative, ask me to, you know, just come back to me and help me think things through so I can better formulate and synthesize and then reflect back to me. What are you hearing me say so that I can check myself and say, okay, is my thought and the way I'm articulating it landing? Or, you know, is it interpreting me the way that I want to be interpreted? And so if we're using those kinds of capabilities, these tools are incredibly powerful. And frankly, I love the fact that I don't have to type all this out, like it just add it to it.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, pretty amazing. Just curious, how often do you have to ask your AI tools to recalibrate their personalities or responses to you? From saying, hey, uh, you know, great idea, Johan. Let's take it over here to like let me be more critical about what you're you're proposing here.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, I tell it it always has to agree with me because I'm always right.

SPEAKER_01:

See, I'm more privileged. Why not?

SPEAKER_00:

I think it's frankly, I I um I've I spent a lot of time thinking about and reading about uh different kinds of prompts and not so much like the mechanics of prompting, but rather some of the those sorts of sorts of of prompt elements that you can you can give to these tools to say, hey, I want you to be critical of my work. As take take a pessimistic orientation towards my topic and give me feedback. So, you know, or even things like finish the job, follow it all the way through. Um so I don't know that I I often reset, I just build it into my prompts, depending on what I'm trying to accomplish, because I don't want it to always be the same way, have the same point of view. Uh, I tend to think about it more from that exercise of uh, you know, am I trying to ideate? Am I trying to poke holes and test something? Um, you know, and and then I will prompt it accordingly.

SPEAKER_01:

So what the next contemplation, the moment of contemplation here, it's a bit of a crosswords in this conversation because I have to decide whether we want to go and talk about user testing some more because I think you know what you've described is somewhat of a shift in your target focus, what you're going after, and how you're doing that can be really interesting. Um, but I think there's so much more rich material here in the how and why we currently use AI tools and what that could look like.

SPEAKER_00:

And um, maybe maybe I could offer you the intersection of those two things. I love it. Um, because what we're seeing in a lot of our customers is grappling with how do we make AI more human uh as we deploy it in our products, in our contact centers, in our experiences with customers. Uh, and so what we're finding as a business is the need for human experience with these tools to inform how we use and evolve those tools. Uh, if you think about the way everybody's building AI into their apps, that experience can be good because it accomplishes tasks faster. But if it feels clinical and that's not the voice of the brand, then it's actually creating brand harm. Friction.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it's creating friction. Um, and we have customers who, you know, one of our customers rolled out an AI chatbot in their contact center and they tested it extensively. It's it's Cafe Pacific, and we have a use this case study around it. Uh, you know, they they wanted to get the tone and the style and the voice right so that it was less off-putting and it felt, you know, you still you know you're dealing with a chat bot, but it felt more representative of their brand. Not necessarily more human, but more representative of their brand. And so I think that's where it's this intersection of how are we using AI, uh, both as our own internal tools, but also putting it into our products, uh, whether it's a banking app, an airline app, whether it's it's, you know, in an e-commerce moment on the website, help me get through this shopping experience. Uh, you know, we did some research on how people are adopting AI. And if we're not going out and asking and observing how are people interacting with these, what are their expectations? Do they want it to feel human, or does that feel disingenuous?

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. And do you know, I don't think we all want AI bots to feel like human beings because we know there's a cognitive dissonance. I know I'm talking to a machine, sounds like a human. That that's not where we see this going right now. We see it being, we want it, you know, we To have a consistent brand experience, we want it to feel easy, but we know we're talking to a machine and that's okay. And so that that's going to change and evolve. Consumer tastes always do. Uh, but that's what what where we see a lot of value uh in in you know for our customers and for and certainly for our business, because the more these tools proliferate, the more use cases where we're embedding AI in applications, the more we need to ask people, hey, how is this landing with you? What do you think about that?

SPEAKER_01:

How does that feel exactly? Yeah. So I'm gonna do our schedules and our teams a bit of a favor and save the bulk of this conversation that's just dying to happen for the next time we get together. Because there honestly, there's uh in all seriousness, there's so much that we should be talking about because of your perspective with your past roles, but also right now at user testing, um, coincides really beautifully with the bigger questions that this readership and audience are wrestling with right now. So uh so I'm just gonna work really hard to to duke it out with your people and get on your schedule again.

SPEAKER_00:

No problem, Mike. I love this conversation and I'm really happy to make more time. Uh this these are these are the topics that are near and dear to my heart, and I spent a lot of time thinking about. And I think uh, you know, one of the weird things that's happened is I've kind of fallen in love with the discipline of marketing and business leadership. And I want us all to collectively do better, right? We we are at a little bit of a crossroads with these tools, and they have the power to either be used for good or be really disruptive in a bad way. And uh, I've become fairly passionate about making sure we use them for good.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, you can tell. And that's probably why this conversation went the way it did. It was a complete agreement on so much. Well, Johan Reid, again, is CMO of user testing. Uh, it's this is our first real conversation, but it's been a ton of fun and really informative and insightful. And I, for one, am looking forward to the next one. So thank you. Me too, Mike. Thanks for having me today.

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Mike Giambattista

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