AI Fears, AI as the New Hollywood, and the McDonald’s Checkout Line

 

In this episode of Video Voyagers: Edge of AI, hosts Richard Benavides and Audrey Lecker discuss the impact of scaling on customer experience and the fear surrounding AI technology. They explore the benefits and drawbacks of automated systems, such as at McDonald's and Amazon. They also dive into the role of AI in creative industries, and how it might both enhance and threaten the work of artists. Richard and Audrey emphasize the importance of embracing AI tools and staying informed to future-proof yourself in a rapidly changing landscape.

Richard Benavides is the Director of Customer Success at Videate. He helps training and customer education organizations create consistent, high quality video content at scale, “From Script to Screen With No In-Between”. Richard is a customer success expert, a customer education program and content creator, and a self-professed “Software and Integrations Nerd”. 

Audrey Lecker is Head of Content Marketing at Videate, where she is involved with data analysis, search engine optimization, and content strategy. She has eight years of experience in the SaaS community, specializing in both thought leadership and demand generation content for B2B enterprise companies across websites, social media, email, and paid media channels. 

Episode Transcript:

Audrey Lecker (AL): Welcome to this episode of Video Voyagers: Edge of AI. We're your hosts Audrey...

Richard Benavides (RB): And I am Rich. This is more of an informal kind of kind of episode here talking about a couple things that maybe might be of interest to you here in 2024. But first, Auds, how was your holiday?

AL: It was good. I mean, for New Year's Eve, I kind of stayed in and just did puzzles, which was super fun. I was not feeling being out in public. But Christmas was great. I spent it with some friends and, I had a nice road trip out to where they live and we made puzzles. Which is why I did a bunch of puzzles on New Year's Eve too. Yeah. Apparently I'm in my puzzle era right now.

RB: Nice. I mean, my wife is too. She actually asked for this giant puzzle table thing that you put on top of a tabletop and you do the puzzle on that and then it has drawers where you can put all the pieces and stuff.

And yeah, we found out though that my two-year-old is a puzzle cruncher. He likes the feel of destroying a puzzle. My wife found that out after working on a puzzle and getting about halfway done. That was fun.

AL: Oh, no. Oh, that's heartbreaking. I've got two dogs and one of them is a puzzle piece stealer. And so like right now I have a puzzle out in my living room and I have to put stuff on top of it to hide it so that he won't get in there and eat my pieces. He did get one, but it's not completely destroyed. It's just that now the colors are all weird so I can't figure out where it goes.

RB: Oh no. That is disgusting and sad. Speaking of disgusting and sad, let's talk about my holiday. Our whole family over the past like two or three weeks has been sick in various ways. And I think that's across the country. I've seen articles on Vox or something saying, yes, everyone is sick, right? What can we do about it? And the answer is hot nothing, wash your hands. Just avoid people in general. But yeah, so the whole family was just sick in various ways.

AL: Don't go out in public ever again.

RB: AI, right? So that was a great transition. Great, yeah, we're trained professionals. Do not try this at home. 

AL: I love that transition.

SaaS scaling at the expense of customer experience

RB: So I've heard a few leaders recently in the CS space on LinkedIn and podcasts just start to be really honest about the appetite leadership has for scaling, even at the expense of customer experience, right?

And that's a real interesting thing. Like when you start to hear them say the quiet part out loud like that, I think that's of interest for CS and customer ed people. And just in general life, I mean, this isn't just in customer ed or customer success. When have you ,Auds, seen scaling just in general life affecting your customer experience?

AL: I mean, so many ways, but the first one that comes to mind is, especially cause I was recently on a pretty long road trip. I was eating at a lot of McDonald's. I usually don't eat a McDonald's when I'm home, but I was at just every McDonald's across the Southwest this Christmas. And I didn't realize that they had completely gotten rid of the whole cashier system. So now you have to do everything on those giant tablets and it is not effective.

It was super confusing. And I've never seen such crowds at McDonald's. Like usually they were extremely good at just running people through that line. Now everybody has to figure out this tablet situation, and you kind of never know what's going on with your food either, because so much has been automated-- which I'm a huge fan of automation, but not at the expense of customer experience.

And like, there was this one time where I was so hungry, um, and cause I'd been driving for like six or seven hours at that point and like, they just didn't make my orders. I was like just sitting waiting and waiting and waiting. And then there was like, nobody to talk to.

RB: Oh no!

AL: I had to like go up to the thing and like wave down somebody in the back who's like making fries and be like, can you help me? So that was extremely frustrating. Like I just need a person to do it for me.

RB: Yes.  But you know, even nice restaurants where you sit down--oh, it's super nice. I've got a seven-year-old and a two-year-old, so I'm not exactly going to Ruth Chris steak house or something like that. But you go to a Red Robin or an Olive Garden or somewhere like that and now they have tablets too. They have those little tablets that are always sticky for some reason and you're supposed to look through it for appetizing food. This isn't appetizing! I'm literally touching some other kids snot probably. 

AL: Yeah. So gross.

RB: You're supposed to order and pay and rate your service all on this tablet. It's terrible. And then of course your kids want to play with it.

AL: Oh yeah, 'aren't there games on this?' But I think we just discovered why everybody was sick and it's been the rise of these tablets and restaurants.

RB: Yes. Yes, restaurant tablets, everybody touching them.

AL: You heard it here first, folks. I'm just coming out and saying it right now. This is why.

RB: Yeah, that customer experience. Anything else that you can think of?

AL: Oh yeah. I recently had this experience with Amazon, which we talked about Amazon a little bit with Noah Little and how, sometimes, you just want to talk to a person. Sometimes it's nice and balanced with Amazon, you can get somebody on the phone after you go through their online thing. And we all know that Amazon's the absolute emperor of scaling. I had to go one step above king, so emperor.

RB: Mm-hmm. Yes. Yes. Supreme leader, yes.

AL: Yeah. Supreme leaders. They do it so well. But I would say in some cases, yeah, at the expense of the customer experience, because-- I don't know if you guys have ever experienced porch pirates, but this is the first time I've ever gotten hit by a porch pirate. They stole a bunch of stuff that was coming in from Amazon, because I was ordering my family's gifts and stuff.

A bunch of stuff got stolen and because I couldn't reach a person on Amazon or navigate through their online process, I wasn't able to get any refunds or anything. And there were some things that just didn't even get delivered to my house, but they said that it did, and you can't plead your case to anybody. They just have a little form. And if you don't fit into their little, whatever the programming is, then you just don't get anything resolved. So that was really unfortunate. I was frustrated.

It didn't keep me from buying stuff from Amazon though.

RB: That's what they're all banking on, that you'll still go there. I mean, honestly, I still went to the sticky tablet places. So yeah, I guess they're right.

AL: Yeah.

Future-proofing yourself as a Customer Success professional or Creator

RB: So But you know bring this back to see creators CS professionals, right? We should talk about them, just a little bit how people can future proof themselves in 2024 as that scaling is happening.

So, Auds, you're a amazing creator. If any of you have seen some of our stuff out there recently, it's funny. If you look at like before and after Auds, you can tell when it was just a few of us trying to just make something happen and then when it becomes professional with Auds.

So from your standpoint, how are you future-proofing yourself and our marketing areas?

AL: Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I do think it helps to be a nerd and to get excited about all the new tools coming out because it's really easy to get terrified. Like when ChatGPT first kind of started taking off at the beginning of last year, I was a little freaked out because I was like, Oh my God, at some point, this is going to take my job. I'm going to be screwed. What am I going to do? 

RB: Hehehe

AL: But luckily, I think my, just my interest in AI and my curiosity about it really helped turn my perspective around because then I was too busy digging into brand new tools and seeing what I could do with it and getting really creative with them to be afraid.

And then I started to realize over time as I really familiarized myself with those tools that I think by getting excited and curious about the tools in a way, it has actually future-proofed my career.

And I've heard that back also from several of the guests we've had on this podcast, where they're like, it might've even been Bianca Ker who said, "AI isn't gonna take your job. Somebody who knows AI is gonna take your job."

RB: Yeah, go to the Bianca Ker episode and you'll see a lot of really cool stuff. So a little plug for that episode there if you haven't heard it.

AL: Yeah. I think it was that one. Yeah. And also from a creative perspective, I know that there is a lot of conversation right now-- I would say in the marketing space, we've all kind of jumped on a lot of the AI tools pretty quickly. But when it comes to just the artist, the creative space, so outside of marketing, outside of SaaS and business, the conversation is still around freaking out that AI is taking all of our stuff.

I mean, it's not like I don't think that's a bad thing. I think it sucks that a lot of people's art has just been taken by these massive databases and things. But I guess my opinion now is while that sucks, the cat is kind of out of the bag and there's not really anything we can do about it. I think that there's probably some restrictions that we could put in place moving forward for what goes into those databases, how they're using your existing art and that sort of thing. But aside from that, cat's out of the bag, I think you just have to double down on AI. And I think you have to get really curious and creative with how you're using it.

The other thing before I forget that I wanted to mention on the creative side is, so I'm a creator in my own right as well and I have gotten so excited about the various AI tools. I mean, Videate's one of them. It's not quite the use case that like, as an artist I would use necessarily yet, though I think there's an iteration in the future that I would want to be able to use it for.

But some of these other tools as well, especially in the video sphere, I've essentially been able to do the level of graphics that would have required a full Hollywood studio, a full team of people. And I can do it in 15 minutes. I think that's incredibly exciting because as you know, it's very difficult to get something made in Hollywood.

So by bringing these tools to the people and essentially democratizing these tools and the level of design and graphics and CGI and all that stuff, we're gonna be able to see just a whole bunch of diverse stories in my opinion.

I think a lot of creators, once they get over their fear of-- and it's a totally legitimate fear, I just wanna say right off the bat, I'm not poo-pooing the conversation around "is this bad or not?"-- I'm just also really excited about the tools and the possibilities. So I think that once creators and artists are able to kind of move past that conversation into, okay, well, what is this all about? I think they're really going to be impressed and excited about what they're able to accomplish.

And you mentioned scale, talk about scale, just a one person team, essentially, being able to do a level of graphics that would have required millions of dollars just maybe five, ten years ago.

RB: Yep. And you know, I think from the customer ed side, I think that's exactly the use case for us for video, right? You have customer ed people who understand their product up and down, left and right. They know what their people need to be able to learn this, but they don't necessarily have the bandwidth to create this massive library of video because of just the work that goes into having good audio, the equipment, everything else.

Like even in this podcast you might have just heard a random truck outside my window cleaning the streets. You hear that stuff and suddenly that take is done and you have to redo it.

So I think something like this where it aggregates, "Here's your audio and here's your video going to the right places at the right times". And then it just creates the video for you and you don't have to do anything else.

I think tools like Videate, that's part of the reason I wanted to come here, right? A couple of years ago when I started here was because I knew that tools like this were important for CS people and for customer ed people and for people that did both. I was both at my last job.

And so I think, from a CS side even, we need to multiply ourselves, right? Like everything we do needs to be with the purpose of helping more people. But at the same time, I think what's gonna happen is this, everybody's talking a big game about "we understand we need to scale. And we understand that there's gonna be a cost of the customer experience". They're talking the big game now, they're gonna be wringing their hands when they have to pay the piper for that, right?

And when churn happens, and when customers don't necessarily want to say great things about your company, because their experience wasn't great, because they didn't get to be with your great people. Instead, they got pushed off this way, that way, whatever else, right?

And so I think that those of us who are in CS need to make sure that we are still providing as good an experience as possible, and that our results are still better than industry average. So I think even if you buy into that, even if you're given that mandate to scale, and you lose some of your team, even in those situations, you need to be aware of the industry at large and be able to say, "hey, here's where we're still doing this better than the rest of the industry". And a lot of that's gonna be through AI tools. 

Making sure that your customer ed person doesn't have to go to a video person, doesn't have to go to a voiceover person, doesn't have to go to anywhere else. They can just literally do it all themselves and tools like us in other areas, right?

I know we internally use a customer success tool that provides some AI, it takes the numbers that you put into it and says, for this person and it gives you, it's not necessarily that you have to follow everything that it says, but it gives you some ideas. It's like having that extra person that's watching out and making sure that things are good with your customers. And when it looks like they might not be raising their hand and saying, hey, you should look at this, right? 

So I think from a CS side, from a customer ed side, it's gonna be all about leaning into this and staying aware of the industry at large to be able to see how your results are compared to that, because there's gonna be a lot of different paradigms happening and there might not be an understanding of that with leadership. We've seen stuff happening already, on LinkedIn and stuff, you hear about a lot of CS people, a lot of customer ed people suddenly looking for work. And those companies, it's going to come time to pay the piper.

And those of you who are still there, you need to be able to show like, Hey, here's the situation I was in. Here's where other people in this situation have gotten to in the industry. Here's what I've done to make us not feel this pain as much. And I think that's how we're going to future proof ourselves.

And then be the spearhead when people realize how much that maybe we've gone a little too far that direction and that we need more personal touch. So that's my little soapbox for 2024.

With that, is there anything else, Auds that you wanted to talk about today or do you want to go ahead and let our good people go?

Taking the fear out of Artificial Intelligence technology

AL: Yeah. I did want to mention, because I think one of the things, it's not isolated to the artist communities, the creative communities. I think there's like a lot of fear all over the place. Cause yeah, it's scary. I'm not going to say that it's not. There's all of this new technology and it's happening so, so fast. So much faster than we ever thought! We knew it would happen fast, but not this fast, you know what I mean? And that is one of the goals of this podcast is to reduce some of that fear. 

RB: Mm-hmm. Yep.

AL: To bring these kinds of tools and technology down to the ground level so that you can see people talking about them, how people are using them and,  take away some of the shadows around it.

I'm just having this really strong memory of this song from when I was growing up. I must have been like five or six. We had a little tape player. And so in the car on road trips, I would listen to my little Walkman and I can't remember any of the other ones, but I can remember this one song, which is about fear or being afraid of something that's in your closet or whatever. And the song goes like... "But once you find out what it is, then it's okay." And it was really cute.

And it stuck with me. There's scary stuff all over the place. You know what I mean? But I think once you shine a little bit of a light on it and you get to know it a little bit better, you can actually see, "Oh, this is actually really cool. And there's a ton of ways that I can use this."

And then while that doesn't completely take the fear away, at least now you're kind of focused on moving forward. And I think that one of the things that's going to be, that we're going to see proved out that's really important is companies that jump on the AI bandwagon.

You and I have talked before about how sometimes it's a bad thing because you're just kind of throwing AI out there and then you're not really thinking about it too much. But I think that's better than doing nothing. I think just completely avoiding it because it's scary or like you don't fully understand it, I don't think that that's going to be very effective moving forward.

I think we have to just dive in and understand how to use it and play with it and kind of get used to it also. Because honestly,  the more that I've used chat GPT, the more I'm like, oh, it has no personality. Like it is not going to figure out comedy. It is not going to figure  it out. I always have to go through and rewrite stuff to make it sound like there's heart behind it or to give it a personality or to make it make more sense. And that I think is going to take a lot longer to do via AI, for example. So I'm less afraid about my writing career.

RB: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think the key is awareness, right? Like awareness takes away fear. Or honestly, awareness sometimes gives you a path forward in the fear. Like the more that you are aware of what's going on, the more you can either file it into, oh, okay, this isn't something I need to be afraid of, or this is something I need to address, or hey, maybe I should run. You know, all three of those are valid responses.

AL: Yeah.

RB: If you don't, if you aren't aware, you don't know which of the three is the valid response, which makes it even more stressful. It becomes a fourth possible response, which is just freezing, right? And so I think being aware of where we are right now in just whatever industry you're in, be aware of what AI is doing. Don't just do your own thing and expect everything to be okay. Like be aware.

Go read books, listen to podcasts, you're here, great job. Like this is the kind of thing that you need to do to be able to level yourself up and make sure that you're ready for that next wave and what happens here in 2024. So yeah, good, good stuff. It is, it's fun.

AL: And it's cool! Like AI is so cool. I think one of the things I'm most excited about, actually, is the translation capabilities. Obviously in the future, it's going to help with space travel and all that stuff, but that's not going to happen in my lifetime. You know what I mean? So like, I'm excited about that, but I don't get to take part in it aside from watching Star Trek. But the translation capabilities I do get to take part in, and there are so many things, like for example, nuances in TV shows and songs and whatever that are in other languages that you just don't get necessarily. Or you have to wait until a subtitled version comes out, or until maybe a fan who's really dedicated and knows that language can subtitle it.

At a certain point, I think within our lifetimes, we're gonna have this real-time translation capability that's built on AI, where I can travel around and understand without having to use Duolingo. I've only got so many hours in a day to learn another language.

There's so much I think that we miss out on just not knowing the language of something else. And that to me is so super cool that I think within our lifetimes, we are going to be able to understand each other in a way that we've never been able to before, unless you were trilingual or quad, quadrilingual or whatever.

RB: I mean, yeah, if anything, we've learned anything over the past like 20 years, I think the biggest frontier currently is each other, right? We maybe didn't know that people disagreed with us so much, or that people thought about things so much differently.

And it's hard for us to deal with, I think, as people. But we're starting to become more intelligent in the way that we process things. I think that's gonna be a huge thing as well. 

Yeah, it's gonna be exciting, just everything that AI can do to help us understand each other, convey important stuff. And do so quickly and effectively, I think it's gonna be pretty powerful.

So with that, Auds, this has been a great conversation. Do you have anything else you wanna talk about or are we saying goodbye?

AL: No, I really enjoyed this. Also I think that was what you said about the biggest frontier is each other, I think that's really beautiful and very true.

RB: Yeah, I think it was a little cheesy too, but I'll take it, you know?  I mean, cheese is delicious or else we wouldn't have it on everything, right? Anyway, until next time, hope all of you are able to enjoy cheese or whatever else it is that makes you happy. And I hope you're able to really become aware of what's going on with AI and that we can help you be a part of that so that you are ready to tackle your 2024 and just become even more awesome than you currently are. So until next time.

AL: Yeah. And tell us in the comments, if there's a particular AI tool that you are curious about, or an AI take that you want us to discuss, we would love to hear from you.