2907: Xperience 2024: The Intersection of AI, Sustainability, and Customer Experience

[00:00:00] What role does sustainability play in the tech industry? And how can companies balance

[00:00:07] innovation with environmental responsibility? Well, today here on the show floor at Experience

[00:00:14] 2024 in Denver, Colorado, I had the opportunity to sit down with Peter Graff, Senior Vice

[00:00:21] President of Strategy at Genesys. And we're going to explore these critical questions.

[00:00:27] Because Genesys has been making headlines with its latest advancements in AI-powered

[00:00:32] experience, but also its commitment to sustainability, including achieving carbon neutrality for

[00:00:40] its cloud operations. So I invited Peter to share his insights with me today on how Genesys

[00:00:45] is expanding automation and analytics and conversational intelligence across its platform

[00:00:51] with new co-pilots, virtual agents, empathy detection and a modern agent workplace. But

[00:00:57] I also want to discuss all things sustainability. But I don't want to reveal any spoilers. So

[00:01:03] buckle up and hold on tight as I beam your ears all the way to Denver, where you can

[00:01:08] join me and Peter Graff in conversation. So a massive warm welcome to the show. Can you

[00:01:15] tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do?

[00:01:18] Sure. My name is Peter Graff. I'm the head of strategy for Genesys, which is a, we call

[00:01:24] it an orchestration company. And we're here at our annual customer event at Experience

[00:01:30] 24.

[00:01:31] What would you say are the key themes from all the conversations that you've been hearing

[00:01:35] at the event on the show floor and the keynotes? You must be talking to so many different people.

[00:01:41] Is the key theme AI or is it something else?

[00:01:43] There's no doubt about it. But it is because the contact center and customer experience

[00:01:52] and also employee experience is so prone to being improved with AI. AI is like the perfect

[00:01:59] use case for our industry to use it in a variety of different ways that we summarize under

[00:02:06] the bigger theme of AI powered experience orchestration.

[00:02:10] Love it. And one of the things that I think, or I didn't get lost, but because of all the

[00:02:14] AI and everyone's talking about AI, is the sustainability side of things. And there was

[00:02:19] a big slide yesterday about cloud being carbon neutral. So how does this, the sustainability

[00:02:24] factor, how does that fit into Genesys' broader strategy and what strategies or what initiatives

[00:02:30] have been most impactful in reducing that carbon footprint? Because big story, isn't

[00:02:35] it?

[00:02:36] I think it's a good question. But first, I might have to start with explaining why we

[00:02:39] were diving so deep into sustainability as a company. It might not be obvious at first

[00:02:44] glance. Our values are based around embracing empathy. And that means the way how we treat

[00:02:51] each other, the way how we're treating our customers and partners, but also how we're

[00:02:55] treating the environment and society at large. And so it's deeply ingrained in our overall

[00:03:00] strategy. And I like to call our strategy a sustainable strategy rather than having

[00:03:05] a sustainability strategy. And so obviously, environmental considerations are key. And

[00:03:12] there has been a lot of concern with the actual footprint of compute that has been growing

[00:03:18] and that is now growing even faster with the application of AI. It takes a lot of cycles

[00:03:22] on the CPU to make those things happen. And so we've been working with two fantastic companies

[00:03:29] to come to what we announced yesterday, which is the carbon neutral operation of Genesis

[00:03:34] Cloud. Essentially, we are running on AWS as a platform. So we don't have our own data

[00:03:42] centers. We use those of AWS. And we've built a fantastic architecture on top of that infrastructure.

[00:03:50] And it's interesting that the environmental and economic interests completely align. So

[00:03:56] in other words, we're trying to use as little as possible of that infrastructure because

[00:04:00] we pay for every bit of use that we have. And on the other hand, AWS tries to make this

[00:04:06] infrastructure as energy efficient as possible because they will have to pay for the energy.

[00:04:11] And so taking those two things into consideration, what happened on the Genesis side is that we

[00:04:16] have built an architecture in our system where we are absolutely minimizing waste from a computational

[00:04:23] perspective. Imagine in the good old days where you would have your own contact center,

[00:04:28] you would have to size all your compute power based on the peak load for the year. So if you

[00:04:36] have a lot of traffic around Mother's Day because you're a flower shop, you'd have to

[00:04:40] size huge amounts of service for that load that day and these servers would continue to kind of

[00:04:46] sit there for the rest of the year idling along. What we do in the cloud is we are actively

[00:04:53] resourcing compute capability only when we need it. And so in this way, we're minimizing

[00:05:01] the overall use of hardware, of energy and that helps us. So it's our own application design,

[00:05:10] our architecture and the way how we are creating visibility to every engineer within Genesis to

[00:05:16] understand, okay, when I program it this way, I'm going to cause a higher cost for Genesis,

[00:05:23] but I'm also causing higher emissions. So that's the Genesis side. On the AWS side,

[00:05:28] they do a great job of running their data centers very, very energy efficiently with

[00:05:33] specific CPUs, with specific operational models to actually save energy and then

[00:05:39] they also apply offsets. And more importantly, they're powering them more and more with green

[00:05:44] energy. So when we take everything of that into account and we look at the footprint that's

[00:05:52] actually left, what Genesis says now is we are taking accountability for that remaining footprint

[00:05:58] and we have now worked with Rubicon Carbon, which is a highly trusted way to offset emissions in a

[00:06:12] way that's truly additive, right? So they're doing things and running projects that essentially

[00:06:17] really avoid carbon. And so we're using this partnership to actually take the remainder,

[00:06:23] the small remainder of emissions that are still left after all of this and acquire

[00:06:28] offsets on behalf of the customers who run our solution. So that's why the operation of

[00:06:33] Genesis Cloud is carbon neutral. Wow, incredibly cool. For people listening around the world,

[00:06:39] how can cloud technologies help companies advance their sustainability initiatives? Because it's a

[00:06:44] huge topic right now, especially with ESG scores and not only that, it's with the partners and

[00:06:49] the suppliers that you work with and their ESG scores. Any advice around them? Well, first of all,

[00:06:56] we have huge benefit as a company because there's many ratings around the world around

[00:07:02] sustainability. One of the more important ones is EcoVadis and it's actually been born in the

[00:07:07] procurement space where our customers more and more demand that all of their suppliers are

[00:07:13] certified. And that means essentially that they have a effective sustainability strategy in place.

[00:07:20] And we have received the gold medal from EcoVadis for two years in a row, which essentially means

[00:07:28] Genesis is in the top 5% of the 100,000 companies that are rated around sustainability and in the

[00:07:35] software space, we're in the top 2%. And so we really are leading the way. But as you say,

[00:07:44] not only this, our customers are more and more making sustainability a requirement within their

[00:07:49] purchase. In the last fiscal year for Genesis, sustainability influenced more than $200 million

[00:07:58] of business for Genesis. So it's not a small part. So it is actually value creating for us

[00:08:04] and for the environment and for society. Other elements of how companies can use us,

[00:08:12] there's always the area of security and privacy and those kinds of things. We have a wide array

[00:08:19] of certifications more than any other vendor in our space globally, all the way from FedRAMP

[00:08:27] compliance, GDPR compliance in Europe, IRAP compliance in Australia, and many, many more

[00:08:34] that we offer to our customers. And essentially, helping them minimizing incidents through

[00:08:41] higher levels of security and compliance with requirements and so forth. So those are just two

[00:08:47] examples. But for now, if customers ask us, how much carbon footprint do I inhabit from running

[00:08:52] Genesis Cloud? The answer is nothing. Wow, that's attractive, right?

[00:08:57] It's often underestimated. We have done analyses, the carbon footprint of a Genesis customer who

[00:09:06] used to run an on-premise solution before on a per agent basis is up to 15 times lighter

[00:09:13] on Genesis Cloud. That's how much better this is compared to prem.

[00:09:18] That's incredible. If we were to take a peek behind the Genesis curtain for a moment,

[00:09:23] can you tell me a little bit more about some of the steps that Genesis took to make Genesis Cloud

[00:09:27] operations carbon neutral, and how partnerships like the ones you mentioned, AWS and Rubicon Carbon

[00:09:33] contribute to maintaining that commitment in the future as well?

[00:09:37] Yeah, I mean, we wouldn't make a commitment like this if we weren't absolutely convinced we can

[00:09:41] continue to move forward with this. And that has to do with both our own strategy and the way how

[00:09:46] we program and how we achieve economies of scale, both from an economic as well as from an environmental

[00:09:52] perspective, because the more people that share the infrastructure, the more effective use of that

[00:09:57] infrastructure you actually have. We started with the strategy of making Genesis Cloud carbon neutral

[00:10:05] because we believe this is something that we have to do, that our customers will value, and that we

[00:10:11] can perpetuate going forward. And I'm confident about this because of the efforts that AWS

[00:10:16] performs on their platform to continue to increase the amount of green energy they use to power those

[00:10:22] data centers and so forth. And also, the economies of scale with every deployment that Genesis has,

[00:10:28] and we have 20 deployments around the world of our cloud where the identical code is running.

[00:10:34] But economies of scale help to reduce the overall footprint across all of these data centers on a

[00:10:41] per agent basis or on a per customer basis. Another huge topic here at the event is experience

[00:10:48] orchestration. You mentioned it a few moments ago, but for people listening that can't attend

[00:10:52] the event, can you tell me more about the AI-powered experience orchestration? What the problem Genesis

[00:10:58] is helping organizations to solve with it as well and the capabilities and how you're positioned to

[00:11:03] maybe lead in this strategy? So most people when they hear AI in the context of a contact center

[00:11:10] think about automating a conversation with something like a chatbot. And using this to

[00:11:17] actually reduce the number of conversations you need to have with an agent, which would obviously

[00:11:22] save the company money. That's called experience automation. It's an important aspect of it,

[00:11:27] but it really is designed to make the life of the company better because it saves them money. So

[00:11:33] it's an efficiency gain. Another way how many companies are looking at the use of AI is to

[00:11:40] support the agent that's actually having the conversation with a customer in time by providing

[00:11:48] flows, by automatically summarizing a conversation which is after work, after call work that they

[00:11:54] have to do anyway. But so essentially not eliminating the agent but making the agent

[00:12:00] more efficient and taking out of these seven or eight minutes that the agent spends with one person

[00:12:06] take two or three minutes out of that and again creating efficiency. So if you look at that alone

[00:12:13] what all you're doing is you're driving efficiency and effectiveness

[00:12:16] of your context and essentially you're looking at it like a profit center.

[00:12:21] What experience orchestration does it expands that because it's about creating an end-to-end

[00:12:27] experience that is personal and to orchestrate that personal experience. And the reason why you

[00:12:34] want that is because personal experiences create loyalty with your customers and loyal customers

[00:12:40] create future revenues. And so rather than only looking at the whole contact center as a cost

[00:12:47] center we're now looking at it as a way to generate future revenue as a profit maker.

[00:12:55] And so that's the shift and experience orchestration covers all of these. It delivers

[00:13:02] efficiency effectiveness and empathy at the same time. And we're using this to automate

[00:13:09] experiences on one side to augment the experience with the agent on the other side and we're using

[00:13:16] it to continuously optimize and personalize experiences so we create more loyalty. All of

[00:13:21] these things together is a large set of technologies that we have summarized as Genesis AI which is

[00:13:30] native to our platform. It's like the river that flows through it's everywhere and that platform

[00:13:36] the ease of adoption the specific use cases that we support for our customers the ongoing

[00:13:43] optimization creates a lot of value as you hear with the customers that you talk to here on the

[00:13:48] show floor and that's the definition if you will of AI power to experience orchestration.

[00:13:53] Not just efficiency and effectiveness for cost reduction but empathy loyalty trust for long-term

[00:14:02] revenue growth. And I think one thing we maybe should clear up as well and you mentioned it a

[00:14:07] moment ago it's not about eliminating those human agents it's about enhancing words like co-pilot

[00:14:13] and I'm curious are there any contact centers out there do you think that might

[00:14:17] not read that message correctly and look at it as more of a cost saving and removing the human

[00:14:23] element because for myself it seems that these two elements together that's where the magic happens

[00:14:27] and if you cook corners and that's where things got wrong. So if you think about the companies that

[00:14:33] come to mind for great experiences what these companies create is they move from satisfying

[00:14:40] your functional need to satisfying an emotional need because you really start to have an attachment

[00:14:46] to those brands that's harder to break as if you know you're working with a brand that is

[00:14:52] potentially disappointing you by providing a very poor experience. So experiences have become

[00:14:58] so important and Genesis has done so much research around this that it is not enough to only create

[00:15:05] automation but funny enough sometimes automation is exactly the right thing. So let me give you

[00:15:10] an example. Neil you look like a guy who gets around with technology right so if you need

[00:15:16] to reset a password and you can't find the link you might go to a chatbot and you would be

[00:15:21] perfectly fine with the chatbot spitting out a url you click on it you reset your password and you go

[00:15:26] right now imagine the same task of resetting a password with my father-in-law who's 83

[00:15:32] he's not a digital native and he needs to be talked through this yeah and so the same job

[00:15:40] needs to be handled very differently based on the context that you have and my father-in-law has

[00:15:45] that's experience orchestration. So automation for some people is exactly the right thing to do

[00:15:51] because that's the experience that you want yeah on the other side that password reset

[00:15:56] you want an h to help me because I don't know how to do that and so that's exactly the point

[00:16:03] it's not that we say automation is bad on the contrary it can actually save a lot of money and

[00:16:07] for some people it's exactly what they want and what they need and then they should get it yeah

[00:16:13] but in other circumstances it's not at all the case and there are so many examples across what

[00:16:18] happens in contact centers around the world every day we do this at scale and we see where people

[00:16:24] struggle where we're not where customers are not meeting the requirements and the specific

[00:16:30] circumstances of those customers. And when we're talking about transformational change the old

[00:16:36] IT rulebook is you can only improve what you measure of course yes can you tell me more about

[00:16:41] how traditional methods like let's say net promoter score are failing now and we're falling short in

[00:16:47] today's more experience-driven economy. So the net promoter score is an interesting concept been

[00:16:52] been around for a long time I call it a vanity KPI mostly because you still run into it a whole

[00:17:01] bunch of times and but it's often not the fact that companies know really how to improve it

[00:17:08] it's not very actionable and the other thing is and I've worked at different companies before which

[00:17:15] very much relied on referrals as a business so the question how likely are you to refer us to a friend

[00:17:21] actually made sense and still if you looked at net promoter scores they were essentially emotionally

[00:17:26] triggered answers you got a lot of zeros and you got a lot of tens and it didn't have a lot in

[00:17:31] between it's usually a u-shape of some sort. And so you want to have a way to measure an interaction

[00:17:38] that is actionable right and that asks questions in a way that matter to the audience me as a

[00:17:45] consumer it's not in my interest to refer a company and it's just asking about an intent it doesn't

[00:17:52] actually ask about the experience and so it's no surprise that Gardner even predicted two years

[00:18:00] ago that in the next three years 75% of companies will abandon that promoter score as a way to

[00:18:06] measure the quality of service. So what else can we do? There's a whole bunch of other methods

[00:18:12] that all make sense but they all assume the question so you can do a customer effort score

[00:18:18] where you would actually measure how much work is it for the customer to get something done.

[00:18:23] You could have customer satisfaction scores maybe a bit more specific about a couple of things but

[00:18:29] what we've done at Genesis is we've built what's called the experience index and you can find it

[00:18:33] in our app foundry and the experience index is actually based on research with consumers in

[00:18:39] specific industries to ask if you call your bank for example for this kind of problem what is the

[00:18:46] experience you would expect so you know or if you call in for a problem or a guarantee case like

[00:18:55] you know how what are your expectations in terms of time in terms of communication in terms of

[00:19:01] resolution and then after people have this experience you can actually ask them okay to

[00:19:08] which degree did this meet the criteria that our research actually unveiled as the most important

[00:19:13] thing in that moment for that industry and so we've built tens of thousands of benchmarks around

[00:19:19] this so not only can you see how you're doing you can also see how customers in the same

[00:19:25] industry are doing with regards to those questions and that creates an index that is much more

[00:19:30] actionable because you have like five or six questions for a specific situation where you

[00:19:36] can really dive into what's going wrong. So it's those people-centric benchmarks and much more

[00:19:41] people-centric while an NPS is the ultimate example of a company-centric benchmark like how

[00:19:47] willing how likely are you to refer me is a very egotistic you know way to ask. And obviously you're

[00:19:54] having a lot of conversations here not only with your colleagues but also with customers and

[00:19:59] people on the show floor I'm curious when you take that flight home at the end of the conference

[00:20:03] what are you going to be thinking about what are you going to be reflecting on based on those

[00:20:07] conversations. So I work in strategy right so for me it's always a beautiful balance between

[00:20:15] reality and the future and so what I love about a show like experience 24 is you get a fantastic

[00:20:23] injection of reality you get a beautiful showcase of customers that have been using our technology

[00:20:29] that we've already built and we have the ability to engage with those customers to hear a little

[00:20:34] bit about what they think is going on and one of the reasons why we created this levels of

[00:20:41] orchestration paper that I hope you could maybe refer to in the webpage is to invite customers

[00:20:51] to engage in that conversation about what's next how do they see the future and we identified six

[00:20:58] levels of maturity if you will around experience orchestration all the way from no orchestration to

[00:21:05] universal orchestration and when I'm flying home I'm gonna try to sort my thoughts what I heard

[00:21:12] from our customers about what they expect in each of those levels what they what the business case

[00:21:19] is that they would need to show to move forward in those levels and overall what their vision is

[00:21:25] there's so much AI in the news every day and it's getting more and more fantastic and the gap between

[00:21:32] how do I take what I hear there and make it something that's actionable in my company seems

[00:21:37] to get wider and we are here as a company to help customers close that gap and take that technology

[00:21:44] revolution which AI certainly is and turn it into an evolution of their own business and that's

[00:21:50] really what we're here for and my reflections of traveling home are around that question

[00:21:56] yeah what else is going to come and how can we make it an evolution to our customers

[00:22:00] well I will add that blog post that we mentioned a few moments ago some great information I do

[00:22:05] urge anyone listening to check that out is there anywhere else you'd like to point everyone

[00:22:09] listening if they want to find out more information about what they missed a recommendation that I

[00:22:13] have is that people obviously take a look at the keynotes I thought they were fantastic

[00:22:17] they're going to come out in the 27th for people to watch online and then if you're interested in

[00:22:23] sustainability we have a fantastic sustainability report out there which is definitely worth looking

[00:22:28] at at our sustainability page on genesis.com and learn a little bit more because it's very

[00:22:34] multifaceted and be using genesis to touch 100 million lives you know per year hopefully

[00:22:43] in this fiscal year through charities that are using genesis cloud and do many more things that

[00:22:49] are absolutely noteworthy but we don't have enough time to go through all this here yeah there's only

[00:22:55] so much we can get through today I will add those links so people can go off and find out more

[00:22:59] information I appreciate how busy you are back to back in meetings and on that show floor and

[00:23:04] keynotes etc so thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule for sharing that with me today

[00:23:09] thank you Neil it's a pleasure to be here as we heard today genesis is at the forefront of

[00:23:14] merging sustainability with cutting-edge technology and I think it is insights into

[00:23:19] the company's AI advancements and commitment to carbon neutrality paint a compelling picture for

[00:23:25] a future where technology can not only enhance business outcomes but also help contribute to

[00:23:31] a better planet but how do you see sustainability shaping the future of technology in your industry

[00:23:37] what steps can an organization take to balance innovation with environmental responsibility

[00:23:44] lovely your thoughts on this one tech blog writer outlook.com twitter linked in instagram just at

[00:23:49] neil c hughes let me know your thoughts but now it's time for me to get back on that show floor

[00:23:56] thank you for listening today and until next time don't be a stranger