hey Matt welcome to the work Rd podcast for those who don't know you can you share a little bit about yourself and some of the work you've been doing over the last few years hey Rob yes absolutely um let me start by saying thank you for for having me back on two guest appearances in quick succession I'm I'm very honored um for those of you listening to the to the podcast um you know my name is Matthew Boyd I work as the head of product marketing at unile um I've actually spent more than a decade now uh working in the internet and digital employe experience space um you know and that's a a varied career starting out in in marketing and really trying to understand the story around the internet you know it's it's kind of History where it's it's ended up today and how it's perceived within within a lot of organizations and then I I did a period of consultancy where I actually got to be quite Hands-On and practical um in um you know business consultancy essentially understanding business problems and how the internet could solve them and then delivering internet solutions to to customers and now I find myself um bringing that experience to bear in the world of product marketing and and talking about the UN platform and and how it's changing uh you know the digital employee experience for 5 million users around the world fantastic and one of the questions I wanted to kind of dig into with you was that unile uh has absolutely crushed it in terms of one of the latest reports coming out from leading analysts can you elaborate on what truly differentiates un from the other digital workplace platforms that are out there on the market and in fact what are some of the things that we don't NE necessarily see in those reports that you know folks if they're comparing and contrasting they should keep in mind that's a really really good question um and I think importantly my answer will will inevitably come with some level of bias because um having worked at un for you know more than 10 years um I've seen the product grow and the company grow alongside it and um I genuinely believe we're doing amazing work but what I'll try and do is take a step out of the product marketing role and and take a more objective stance um it's it's amazing to be recognized by these independent analyst organizations um it's incredibly hard work those reports are they don't write themselves and there's a lot of detail that goes in from from not just un but but every kind of uh internet provider and and those even aspiring to become an internet provider from tangential markets um so I think the important thing to understand about about how un is scored well in those reports is that it's a combination of product strength and customer testimonial um and I think that is is kind of one of the most critical elements if is a testament to our product engineering teams who have built an incredible platform um and you know it's not just about the breadth of functionality but in our case very often about the depth of functionality um so when we talk about looking at un through a differentiated lens um I think the types of organizations that that we look to work with are often the largest most complex although they don't like to admit that they're a complex business they are often facing complex challenges and and they they are you know um as a result of that some of the more demanding organizations and I mean that in a good way they they set a high standard a high bar for for their digital employee experience and I think that given those are the kind of businesses that that uni looks to work with what we have done to differentiate ourselves is Focus heavily on Enterprise scalability so it is about how do you store and manage millions of content items when you're serving uh you know knowledge information Communications to hundreds of thousands of people with varied jobs in over 140 countries um that requires something special in the way of information architecture content governance um and un has really honed in on those aspects of its platform to support that kind of um that level of complexity and that need but we've simultaneously focused on Enterprise grade configuration as well so what we found is with smaller organizations um you know that are looking for really fast time to value they're often willing to make tradeoffs between uh functionality that is out of the box and just ready to go and what they can tweak and amend to be very unique to their organization and there is a kind of a you know a balance there um as you know what our experience has been that as we start to to move up that scale um businesses demand greater levels of control greater levels of of configuration um that's put into their hands their administrative team's hands um in order to optimize the platform for for very specific or bespoke requirements and needs um so I think those two elements combined mean that we've built out a lot of of Internet capability or digital employee experience capability but we've done so in a way that focuses on um uh hi degrees of control and exceptional levels of scalability um so you know that is kind of one element of differentiation within within the analyst reports and I think it's it's kind of that across our entire product which help us to get really strong product scores we go broad that ability to really walk the line between Simplicity but comp complexity particularly for those Enterprise class customers who are looking to make sure that their digital workplace actually looks and feels like their home they're part of an extension of their organization is that is that accurate that's absolutely you've hit the nail on the head you know um it took me three minutes to say what you could say in in 30 seconds Rob you're I Al I also might have spent a little bit of time in this industry as well yeah just just a couple of days or weeks just a smidge exactly um but it's true though in the fact that you know you like you were saying even in your introduction right You' spent years in Professional Services which um I feel that in a bias here I feel that as well as pre-sales are really The Trenches of this business because you get to see on the back end really the the guts and Gore of an implementation and program strategy and having to you know instill governance in your customers who you know might not want to have that difficult conversation but it's only keys to make them successful and then on the front end of that it's really trying to make sure you define rationale to them that hey we can't have everything we want but we can make this as perfect as it can be so it's it's that experience that's really coming across in in what you're telling us today um one of the things I wanted to know is that um through some of the Trends and challenges that you see particularly from what the analysts are saying right um how has un begun to address some of those needs as a part of their product road map between what the market is asking for and then on the front side what you're developing in terms of a product point of view yeah it's another really you know they're great questions because I think you can answer them so many different ways um and I think the first thing that I think is really important is is I think what I'm learning is actually um democratization of produ road maps is an incredibly powerful tool um you can't just flick the switch and say cool we'll just you know everyone could just vote and we'll just build what everyone says there's a lot more maturity that goes into it and you know it'd be fair to say that uni has been on on a growth trajectory a you know maturity um you know uh trajectory as well as it relates to how we Define and build out our product into the future and I think selfishly you know and kind of quite boastfully I think we're probably leading the way within our Market in a customer partnered road map execution oh interesting yeah yeah it is interesting because I think in my early days I was kind of like oh I have all these great ideas we should build what I want and um what you actually start to realize is that there is so much power in um in the customer collaboration so much untapped Insight so I mean the key trends and challenges so you ask me what are the key trends and challenges that we're addressing actually the great thing is that we don't actually have to work out what those are in isolation we're speaking to our customers we're hearing from them what their challenges are and and what they see as the next big Trend they need to solve for within the digital employee experience and it allows us to create a road map which is able to move past the shiny object syndrome and that I think is where um some vendors sometimes get get caught they want to be you know they want to be perceived as Innovative and and you'll know you've seen like these kind of uh analyst reports and they measure you on like things like Innovation and road map quality and things like that right and it's um it's grueling because you want to be able to show them that you're building amazing cool new things but it has to add value to your customers um and so I'll give you one great example and who cannot talk about AI when we talk about road map execution um it a great example is given the kind of customers we work with that they're very large um and they often have quite grandiose aspirations now when it comes to AI digital assistance and and and the future of digital agents AI powered digital agents in the workplace so when this kind of Technology first started to emerge in a in a kind of a real Way Beyond the kind of base level AI chat Bots Q&A pairing behind the scenes you know with some Bas level NLP kind of wrapped around it um now we're at a point where real digital assistants are emerging now while some uh you know while different vendors not just in the internet Market but in many markets were like cool okay so what we should do is we should have our own digital assistant the internet should have a digital assistant and that might work for certain organizations but through conversations with our customers we actually started to realize that many of them had big internal AI programs that they wanted to accelerate but they also wanted to look at Market leading digital assistants AI digital assistants um which meant that there is a big question mark there about how good your digital assistant is going to be versus the likes of work grid for example who have spent years building up an incredible you know Market leading solution can you build something better than a specialist in a specific field um and it it kind of helps you to try to understand that you know a lot of these large Enterprises their strategy is to try and bring together best of breed applications across various markets and deliver a cohesive digital employee experience versus trying to have one vendor trying to be uh all things to all people and I think that's a really like interesting story because it speaks to the emergence of AI capabilities how different organizations think about you know what they want from their internet provider and then how you can create a road map that um that prioritizes you know your your kind of engineering capacity against the the true value for customers that's great it it sounds like you're you're really honed in on having the the customer advocacy as a part of the conversations in your road map and the product having the ability to create composable experiences based upon their Tech stack based upon what they have again Rob you summar you can play back everything I say so much better than me we should just time stamp I should have had a career in marriage counseling or therapy or something yeah exactly I think the write up on the podcast needs the timestamps of of of Rob of Matt boy's waffle and then it's just perfectly like lay it in if you are short on time no worries no worries um so what are some of those new product features that enhance really the ex and engagement and productivity that we hear about that you know truly differentiate UN in terms of what they're offering to their customers what's what's the new things under the sun that's a really good question um I mean there's we're doing a lot um you know you know what I'll I'll be selfish I'm going to cherry pick the things that I'm most excited about yeah so like first one um uh doing big work around analytics um you know I think that it's a huge problem trying to help Business Leaders understand what digital employer experience is and how they're doing at it is is really challenging I don't think um I think it'd be fair to say that nobody really has a definitive answer to that right now but through significant investment in our analytics offering un is looking to close that Gap to help uh Business Leaders um get to the Insight really beyond the numbers I mean we've been got data you know huge volumes of data um captured in these systems but distilling that down to insights that's really really kind of where you know the rubber meets the road and we're not only have we kind of um you know broken out our analytics service into a micro service so from a technical perspective what that means is we can evolve our reporting capabilities independently of the core platform which means rapid you know rapid Innovations when we need to adapt our analytics reporting methodology we can move quickly to do so because of the microservice architecture that's kind of techy but it's also really cool because it does mean for a customer fast innovation in the space of analytics and Reporting and that that is a space that's moving fast but we're also weaving AI into our analytics service and this is kind of about beyond the shiny object Syndrome again kind of like you know there are some really cool kind of um AI features that are circulating in the consumer world like AI image generation and things like that but um you know there is a big difference between that and service level AI which can like wrap say machine learning models um or or underlying AI Services into your data set to kind of generate summarize insights for Business Leaders and that's a big area of focus for us at the moment um and that's really exciting um and the other bit is um you know around Frontline worker um and I mean that labeling of itself is a hugely complex term Frontline worker can mean so many different things there are so many different types of Frontline worker But ultimately it you know it's things like one to one chats um which will actually be released imminently oh very cool yeah it is cool um I actually really like it um you know and it's it it's the interesting thing about it is like as a as a knowledge worker we take things like Microsoft teams almost for granted now like I can you know anybody and coordinate um but Frontline workers um you start to get into this kind of gray area of kind of Shadow it and WhatsApp and private Facebook groups um trying to kind of muddle your way through a need for for secure onetoone or group Communications in in the organization and so this is really going to Mark a step change for us in how we serve front workers um you know through that mobile app experience so that's that's pretty cool too and those are two areas that are absolutely critical particularly at the Enterprise level right analytics they had stagnated for years and you'd constantly hear customers talk that they they wanted more insights into the data it can't just simply be Dow ma or hey we have 80% of our employees come to the homepage that's great because you defaulted everyone's browser to the homepage reason for this yeah but how are they using it how do they feel about are they actually getting business value out of it those are the the details and the story that plays out in the data that if you can extract that well that's valuable to your digital workplace leader your community manager I'm not sure if that's an age term that's what was used ages ago but that's that's who's looking for those bits that help them them really justify the value of their platform of their program strategy and on the the deskless worker side um the one toone chat you know it's funny that that's a feature set that gets doesn't get looked at too often and it should because guess what the person who's out there installing cable or out there in retail they're texting they're using Whatsapp they're calling up their buddy Jim Jane whatever and they're looking for information and knowledge so why not wrap that in inside your digital workplace so that those conversations live as part of the data fabric of your organization so that's fantastic that you're looking at those two areas yeah 100% really exciting and um you know as always the customer is at the heart of it um our analytics service you know we run um we run really cool kind of like maze user experience testing so shout out to the the maze platform there you go little endorsement but we use kind of um ux testing programs that customers can kind of like you know if we're kind of redesigning something like filters on an analytics dashboard um you know all customers can participate try out the new the new potential design or input feedback on that that goes straight to the product management team so it's a direct Channel no intermediaries no kind of like you know direct Channel with feedback to the product managers themselves um and then with larger features like onetoone chat active preview programs right you features buil ready to go but it's not really finished until it's been tested you know on the front lines literally in the sense of onetoone chat so um you know we put the the oneto one chat capabilities out into some of those largest Enterprises that are struggling with with that kind of style of communication so it's a great great customer collaboration story too excellent one of the things I wanted to discuss with you is a Hot Topic that's coming around um I guess not just within internets but really digital workplace leaders and use a Computing and the rise of your c aiio um which is AI governance we hear that as being a Hot Topic tell me what's Uni's position on the ability uh to integrate Ai and compose it to right-sized with an organization's decree on how AI should work for them yeah do you know it's um it's fundamental you know when we talk about un's position on the topic of of AI and and you know especially you know the governance um of AI um you know it's language we use within our own business governed AI um and I think that when we look at AI within the world of work it has this like overwhelming promise to transform productivity and dis employes experience and um you know it's going to tap into all this latent potential within our organization and accelerate success and break down silos it has this this huge promise to transform ultimately the world at work um and I honestly I think that for a lot of cios that scares the out of them insert a bleep in your editing there Rob no worries um it does because you know Business Leaders who are operating outside of the CIO org are saying well I want you know basically chat gbt to to reduce marketing collateral for me and I want to be able to um use AI to analyze our sales performance and there is so much secure data um and and uh you know even kind of intellectual property right like even forget the data right then and no one should forget the data but for a second put that to one side and just think about the intellectual property somebody has a great idea and they feed that into um into these these uh you know maybe publicly available and self-learning models and what kind of how does that erode uh business Advantage for example and I think that these kind of questions um are the ones that that keep cios up at night because they're being asked to to work out an AI strategy which can bring AI into the business but in a managed and secure way a way where it can be governed um and so this is the opportunity for for vendors like guni and vendors in various other markets how do you harness emerging AI services in a way that puts containers and controls around provide like Central places to access the AI Services which are not um you know an individual going off and using unsanctioned um Services out in the wild you have to be able to provide it to them uh in in govern and controlled environments and that's what we're trying to do um the other part of that strategy which is key is about being selective on the AI services and providers that you work with a lot of the AI Services un has worked with to date and you know uh to be clear AI in the space of internets is actually not new it's getting bigger and bigger but un's AI strategy began at the Inception of of the the platform itself because when it first launched we were already using early iterations of Microsoft's AI translation service so the story of the AI internet is is long running for for un at least least um but it's always about you know and and that's that first um kind of AI feature it was a Microsoft service and a lot of our additional AI features are Microsoft Services we we look to um heavily interrogate the security the quality of the offering and the level of governance and control that can be passed through to our customers when we're looking at what AI services to introduce and not to introduce um so in that respect we pick services which allow us to provide governance and controls to our customers as Downstream beneficiaries of of that integration um and that that's kind of you know uh our stance on It ultimately is that you know putting you know you can't stop the adoption of AI but you can drisk it and that is is kind of where we're trying to help I think that's a key bit right is I remember I I don't know who the speaker was but I was at an event and they had some statistics around the use of Shadow AI already apparently some of the organizations they had worked with had started to perform some sense making on um folks passing data out and then suddenly getting data back in from personal email addresses and so what they were doing was let's say it's marketing content creation or whatnot they were uh kicking information over and then a few minutes later things are coming back in from their personal email addresses that is certainly it looked smelled like chat GPT um content generation and that's look that's going to happen people are going to find they're like mice they're going to find the quickest rout to the cheese and if it can help them do their job a little bit better 10% better they're going to do that so why not compose your digital workplace to provide those same tools as appropriate for the organization so at least you're keeping as you said a container around it a governance wrapper around it with rights to use and terms and conditions that at least it's staying inhouse and that I think is is certainly a missed opportunity and are you seeing that with your your customers are they starting to take up and tick up on this the realization of starting to use the digital workplace in this fashion yeah we are we are definitely but I mean full transparen see there's a big split yeah we see some organizations who are dying to to kind of use New AI services and they love the fact that through uni they can use some like for example let's take the chat GPT and the content generation piece right so they can securely use that from within their their un internet to generate content right so that gives a a secure and governed environment through which they can access the uh GPT services and some clients are super excited about that potential and then there are other customers who on the far side of that are honestly they are very smart and they say we're not ready for this our business is not ready to to utilize these kind of capabilities right now we don't have the digital dexterity Beyond traditional internet experience Es at this stage to um utilize it effectively and securely and we are not positioned right now to train our Global Enterprise and upskill them to a level where we can start to roll out you know these kind of emerging AI capabilities and in true unly fashion all our AI capabilities can be turned off um and and even turned on for select individuals so we're able to then map their needs uh within their business in in that respect um but it isn't you know maybe surprising maybe unsurprising I'm unsure I think I was maybe a little bit surprised when I realized this to be a reality but not everyone is saying yes give me all things AI even if it's secure and governed yeah people are people um at the end of the day right you're going to have what some organizations rushing and it all depends on their culture and then some holding the horses back um and then in the middle is the well what are workers doing that should be ultimately be attuned to your business and your direction I think the fact that un is offering that ability to go in with a composable phased approach let's say where we're going to start small certain pockets of the organization let's say if you're that type of organization we're going to show success early using X Y and Z in terms of AI and then prove that out as a part of our business story I think that's a fantastic for those organizations who are going to be those laggards who might want to try a little bit of the safe space of utilizing Ai and as they formalize their uh backend strategy on really using much more deeper machine learning for their operations or whatnot well you can separate that out from the employee experience it doesn't have to be you know one whole program but at least from a management perspective there's ways that you can begin to introduce that that's that's promising particularly for those large risk adversed organizations that you oftentimes will come across well so then let me pose a question to you rob um so I mean the the question I suppose that I ask myself is who's going to come out on top do you think it's um you know on the one hand you've got um the kind of uh digital native and digital accelerators they adopt AI really rapidly but they maybe don't have the governance and controls in place when they they kind of start unleashing that potential and they then have to retrospectively down the line strip pull back reset expectation and introduce governance or do you think that the digital laggards who take their time um and and and plan and build skills and expertise before rolling out eventually overtake those those kind of those people who who have rushed in where where do which side do you think is g to come out on top that's a great question um and I don't want to give you the the EXC Consultants answer where I just get run it right down the middle um I don't think the lag Goods ever win right I I think it's those who are at least going to innovate but innovate as attuned to your organization and what you do so I think the organizations that take a front of really wrapping a program and understanding Hey look we can deliver to our knowledge workers the right fit of the Gen AI capabilities that allow them to work better safely in a productive manner I think those organizations that adopt that fashion and then look at the okay how are we going to use Ai and ml to optimize our operations to create better risk profiles for our customers let's say if we're an insurance company or formul at new products based upon our customer data like that I see as the organizations who will make it to top where they're actually they're putting in a chief AI officer they're putting a program strategy in place like you I in conversations what I oftentimes see is that hey we're doing a little AI over here and a little AI over here and but it's nothing that's cohesive in terms of an overarching strategy which a large scale this is large scale business transformation happening with generative technology that's akin to the printing press now that took hundreds of years for adoption to take hold right you're looking at something that's what um well at least with geni being top of mind for customer that's 18 19 months at this point and you can just look at the stock tickers of Nvidia and AMD and apple which you know are just skyrocketing it is a bubble Market there is a lot of hype behind it um but behind all hype there is a large Golden Nugget there to be maintained the organizations that understand that and Define it to their people and what they do as a business I think will absolutely come out on top having a tool like unile that is composable that you can execute with your strategy I think is where you start to make that win as opposed to you know going with products that are AI washed where hey we we got AI everything we're thrown in there at 10K it's in our our press releases and that's yeah you got to strip it away and understand okay that's fluff everyone has that now 100% um you know and it comes back to my point about you know road map execution at the start it's like you know um rushing to build a digital assistant and then you don't have the uh tens and 20s of of Engineers that are required to actually accelerate that in line with Market expectation I mean that that space digital assistant and digital agent space accelerating oh yes so fast I mean you know I actually I went to Gartner conference recently and I went to the the Microsoft Booth digital workplace Summit and um there was nothing on the booth except the words Microsoft co-pilot MH that is the whole story now yes um you can just imagine the levels of investment that go into go into that I mean still got a long way to go with that one from my trial experience I'll be honest with you but um you know in the point being more more broadly don't necessarily position ourselves as we don't position ourselves as a co-pilot because um this is just you know complete transparency um denotation of that moniker will succeed or fail based upon how Microsoft executes at the end of the day because they have put so much marketing behind that we've seen a number of our competitors move into we're a co-pilot too okay if Microsoft executes poorly that will be considered the chatbot the way the chatbot is deemed today which was a very poor experience yeah um and then you see that you see that happening and so I think there's there's a bit of that of understanding well underneath the covers it's like any other product underneath the covers what does it do what does the roadm look like what is their years of success do they have those years of success behind them do they have the logos behind them that showcase that yes they can execute for your business and you know this is a a segue here but you know can you share with us a quick customer story um I mean you got hundreds of customers that um you know has really propelled their business forward their employe experience forward with the use of un yeah um God I mean honestly there's um you know obviously I looked at the questions beforehand so there's lots of examples to to draw upon um do you know I with all the talk about AI I'm actually I'm not going to pick a customer story about implementation of of AI features and services and I think what in my head that means is that there are fundamentals in digital employee experience that most organizations still um struggle to get right and actually you know we're at risk of thinking that AI could solve that problem overnight in in a flick of a switch and so for me um I think one of the most compelling stories that I've kind of looked at recently was um you know the story of of Kerner um you know Hospitality own luxury hotels um I'm sure if you if anybody listens to this podcast Googles them you'll recognize a few of the names in that in that pretty impressive list but importantly their story was one of connecting the dots between the customer experience and the employee experience they said okay so um we've got Frontline workers who speak to our guests are our high paying guests every day how do they feel about working for Kerner are they happy yes are are they happy are they are they engaged do they want to do give 110% every day and the gut feel was yes but then the following question becomes well haven't we given them everything that they need to achieve that 110% like that that best willing in the world I want to help this customer this this uh guest at the hotel have the best possible experience but I don't have the answers or the information I need to answer their question and then they have to wait while I go and find somebody else who knows the answer and it it's scenarios like that that they recognized as being detractors from the customer experience and so they set about you know a path and a mission to empower their Frontline workers with the right tools and the right information that Translate their high levels of Engagement their their love for the K the brand and for their work into um the ability to deliver for in terms of customer experience they created um a Frontline mobile app using uny of course um and they put in there things like Frontline worker FAQ cataloges for customer questions what questions the customers ask frequently and how can we accelerate the timed information um by by making that all available in one central location and that's just one small part of you know their their kind of overall uh employee experience platform but it spoke to me this this kind of bigger story about um you know even the most engaged employees that we have right now if we haven't given them the right tools to do their job um they can really struggle and um so I love that Ken story and I I love that it it connects how we treat our people with the downstream impact on how our customers feel about our brand and about their service and experience so that's my story I think it's a really good one and actually there's a dare I say it's more promotion from uny but whether you're looking for an internet or not we've got a great video case study and I think it's a really interesting story that people could watch after this after this podcast if they you know have another five minutes to spare fantastic actually that's probably a good note to end on so Matt where can folks learn a bit more so um simply you can go to unity.com um if you go to y.com there is loads of great completely free insights um you know as I say if you go to in the navigation our clients page there's loads of video stories in there if you're interested in understanding real stories from from large Enterprises who are tackling the digital employee experience challenge um go to the client's page check that out if you're interested in some kind of more uh you know inspirational insights then have a little look at the Insight Center you'll find guides white papers kind of our new digital noise survey for example full of statistics about how the way we execute digital applications in the workplace can be hugely disruptive so let's say you are thinking about a new internet and you don't want to create more digital noise you should read that report full of data points and research which is completely free again excellent fantastic Matt thanks for coming on to the show today thanks for having me Rob it's always a pleasure