AI Adoption Is the Wrong Metric: Measure Work Outcomes Instead with John Phillips ServiceNow

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[00:00:30] Every system of record is now got their little AI agent and it's creating chaos for these practitioners. We're watching this like train wreck of productivity. Everybody thinks that they're now going to be able to develop the world's future with an LLM. And we end up coming straight in there and figuring out like, okay, actually, let's have a plan. High performance has both extreme focus and extreme recovery. It's in any environment, the highest performers in the world have those things.

[00:00:58] The future of work, in our opinion, is going to be a like an agentic companion that rules all of the systems through kind of that you've heard us talk about our AI control tower. I think we're going to quickly stop talking about AI adoption as tool usage. We're going to start looking at like the outcomes and jobs to be done. Are they being fulfilled? Is your work being fulfilled with AI as a companion or actually as the entire outcome?

[00:01:35] Hey, it's William Tidcup and Ryan Leary. You're listening, hopefully watching the You Should Know podcast. We have John Phillips on today from ServiceNow, a company that we love. And Ryan, first of all, how are you doing? I am fantastic. And you're looking kind of light today. ha ha You like that? It's Texas. It's 65 degrees outside. Yeah, I waited like 30 minutes to say that because you're sure. Yeah, yeah. You know, it's one of those things.

[00:02:03] We're going to watch the Super Bowl in a couple of days. There'll be eight beer commercials. You know, I wish there were scotch or bourbon commercials. Yeah. I don't know that I'm watching. Oh, no, I'm definitely watching. Definitely watching. The Eagles aren't in it, John. So, you know, outside of hoping Seattle just whoops New England. I don't have a rooting interest. Well, we say birds need to fly together. So that's right.

[00:02:32] I think they're I think they're owed one from the last time these two got together. Yeah, we're going to try not to start this with PTSD for me, but you know what I'm saying? Like if they were just give it to beast mode. You got one job. Why are we doing this? OK, so I think they're kind of owed. They're robbed there. So so TMI moment. We're going to open the show up, John, with a TMI moment here. So I am.

[00:02:57] My wife comes home the other day shopping, comes home and she's like, I bought you some new body wash. I'm like, well, that's great. So where is this going? Right. It's beast mode. It's it's actual beast mode body wash. And I'm like, that's weird. She's like, yeah, it's beast mode. She has no clue what beast mode. It was a dollar. It was like a dollar fifty. He was on Bill. It was on Bill Maher. He was on the podcast with Bill Maher the other day. That was hilarious. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

[00:03:25] He's more out there than he was as a player. Like as a player is kind of like Barry Bonds. Go away. You know, like that type stuff. But and he's all you do. And the human beings when you listen to his stuff, that's what I love him. And he's not changing. And we just get to know this. Oh, ride with him. One year. One year. Because Bill was like, hey, you decided to stay single and not have kids. He's like, no, I haven't decided that.

[00:03:54] He just shuts it all down. I just haven't found the right one yet. Like it's just a funny bit. Anyhow, for the audience, go watch that episode because it is quite funny. Just the differences between the two men and they all play out in front of us. John, would you would you do us a favor and introduce yourself? Yeah. So, John Phillips, I have the pleasure of leading our employee workflows business service. Now, I like to think that my job is one thing and it's to redefine the future of work.

[00:04:22] So we call it employee workflows, but it's going to be a lot of things. Long term practitioner turned product. I say I remember recovering practitioner. I'm not sure if they quit me or I quit them, but I needed to go build solutions that were better than what were out there. And so I became a product person. That's what happens actually. Is that you're using a product that there's got to be a better way. There's got to be a better way. You either become a founder or you join a company that has it and you make it better. That's absolutely it. Yeah.

[00:04:52] So why don't we start with, because you are in the candidate experience, both as a recovering practitioner, but also with your job. What do you see in these days? Like what if we were to do a state of employee experience, EX, what does it look like today? Yeah. Well, I would say it's one of the fastest moving areas. I would say that when I thought I was moving fast in my career, it's like on 10x hyperspeed right now.

[00:05:17] And I think that there's a couple of factors that are playing into that, which is one is this mandate that especially to CHROs, but this mandate to say, go get me productivity from AI. And it's a mandate that has a lot of false promises for folks. And as anyone who reads the articles around AI success, it's mostly because they're not solving core problems with it. They're just overlaying it.

[00:05:41] And so what is creating for this employee experience is I'm either over governed and I'm not allowed to use AI or they give me too many AI tools. And as I try to become, you know, AI native, as we would call it, the tools are everyone thinks they can just build on top of an LLM. And so we're watching this like train wreck of productivity and this, like the, you know, everybody thinks that they're now going to be able to develop the world's future with an LLM.

[00:06:08] And we end up coming straight in there and, and figure out like, okay, actually let's have a plan. Let's connect all your systems. Let's not deploy 50 or a hundred different versions of these things. So I think the employee experiences, unfortunately for HR, it's got a long history of being fragmented tools, lots of locations. It's like the link farm place. Yeah. That's not changing right now. There's very rarely someone who's looking across, helping them across.

[00:06:34] It's that every system of record is, is now got their little AI agent and, and it's creating chaos for these practitioners. And so, so for us, we, we have a, we have a front row seat for that. And so we try to come in and put all that together in a way. So our, my teams are obsessed around kind of helping customers stitch together all their AI and all their systems in kind of all their workflows into one, one seamless thing.

[00:07:00] So we get to obsess about it with a practitioner's lens as well, which is that simplification, but it used to be rip and replace systems and for employee experience. And now it's, it's like, no, no, forget the rip and replace. Let's stitch it all together and put an overlay. So that's where we're at right now with it. It's what I'm seeing. But it's a lot of chaos in the market right now. Yeah. How much of John, how much of the employee? I mean, let me back up.

[00:07:25] I is some curiosity and it'll, it'll help us later in the conversation. I hope I'm not just wasting your time. The, so a lot of times in conversation, I will hear people say, as long as employees are happy at their desk, right? So they're, they've got tools, they enjoy the tools they're using. They enjoy the work they're doing. Employee experience is amazing. Now, I don't necessarily agree with that. I don't agree with that.

[00:07:53] And as you're saying, we're, we've created a lot of chaos, right? They've got 37 different agents across 37 different tools and now they're lost. Now they don't know what to do. And there's a lot of chaos. How, how much of that is true that maybe I'm overlooking that as long as the employee is happy because they're feeling modern in work versus actually being productive in work.

[00:08:18] Yeah, I don't, I don't, um, I here's, I'll give you our point of view on how we're looking at this. It's still to be determined, but I look at the, the, the exchange of when we used to think about employee experience, it was a lot about what benefits can we put in? What, what perks, how do I make you feel good about your work? But when you break it down to like that human level, there's a level of like, I want to be known and loved. I want to be grown. I want to have a career. I don't just want to come in, you know, punch the clock.

[00:08:48] And so part of that growth is it's a value exchange that we haven't looked at it like a marketplace in the past. It's so if you think about marketplace conditions, there's like value for both sides or else the marketplace can exist. And I think sometimes we think of value as like perks for employees. And really it's for us, the way we see it is we're looking at that everyday productivity. Like how do you unleash everyday productivity? Cause the stakes are higher in the expectations of your company of the employee is higher.

[00:09:16] So how do you tool them up, give them productivity resources, but how do you actually increase the value exchange at the same time? So that employee to manager value exchange, how are you increasing for both sides, the effectiveness of that conversation? So as an employee, I have a better manager, which we all want. And therefore I have a better career and I then have a better life. Like they're not like separate things. And I think we've unfortunately compartmentalized them over the years to say,

[00:09:43] we have a team that thinks about how to give them great perks and make them feel happy. And then we have managers that are trying to make better managers and manager development. And the current state of that is you take AI overlays, you put all this stuff together. Now you have this, this kind of remarkable moment where you can say, if you do this with the right value exchange, then, then you have this uplift of worker, like productivity.

[00:10:07] You have an uplift of their career satisfaction, but it's not about just jamming more perks and like experiences in the system. Yeah. Yeah. So one, one quick follow, and this is more, William, I know you're going to have a thought on this, so I'll just say, feel free to chime in because I know you're going to, you know, when we use software, you see, you said productivity a bunch and it's just something that popped into my, into my head, John, when you're using an AI software, it says we saved you 23 hours this month.

[00:10:37] Is that legit? Like I, I, I may be a little off topic, but you're in this space. Like, is that legit? Did it really save me 23 hours or is that just a bunch of malaria? I think it's a little, well, it's, it's maybe saving you 23 hours. Um, do we know what to do with our hours when they're saved? Cause I don't, as I say, I don't feel like I have 23 hours left in my month. Yeah. So that actually saved me.

[00:11:06] When I think about productivity, I think about everything. Like can, if it, can I, can I get to my vacation faster? That's productivity too. It's not just, did I perform? That's that value exchange piece, which is, look, can I get to my PTO and book my PTO and get out the door faster? Yes. Okay. Can I like, like these hours saved don't always have to go back to your company. That's part of this like employee experience issue, which is we're already overtaxed employees.

[00:11:33] They're at 110% max or over. So maybe this is giving you back your life and giving the company exactly the value exchange it deserves. So like there, there, this is like that two value proposition. Like if you can make it say, Oh, I'm getting 23 hours back and guess what I did? I had dinner with my kids. I went to, you know, I had a Superbowl party cause I didn't have to work over the weekend. Like all of those things are productivity back when you look at it from a two sided value exchange.

[00:12:00] Yeah. Right. That's it. That's the way I see it. I think it's real. Um, but if it's, if it says I'd save you 23 hours, now you have to spend 10 more entering it into a system of record or something, then you didn't save that money. So see over the issue. John, uh, I hundred percent agree. And Ryan, the way I think of those numbers, every time I see them, cause I see them in almost every system is I think of the old commercial of the, I think it's tried and gum, the four out of five dentists surveyed. Oh yeah.

[00:12:30] Yeah. I, I look at it as that. Yeah. In so far as who are these, who's the five dentist and who are the four that said yes. And why do I care? How much did they get paid for your survey? A hundred percent baby. A hundred percent. All right. So John, I've gotten in trouble in the past several times, uh, for several different things.

[00:12:50] But one of them, uh, was when people started really publicly talking about engagement, we said, I had some companies that came out with a lot of survey technology, pulse technology, survey, stuff like that. And engagement became a thing. And I, uh, I took a counter approach that engagement, engagement, engagement, isn't a thing that out ultimately what you're trying to unlock is discretionary effort. Okay.

[00:13:18] It isn't, it isn't engaged. And the way I can easily prove that it's not about engagement is your best salesperson doubles quota. You give them 4 million quota. They double it, but they don't do anything that was remotely close to engagement. All they do is their job.

[00:13:37] And they crush their job. If you were to ask a board member, do you care if they're engaged? They would look at the quota and say, I could care less if they're engaged. I care that they're hitting your quota.

[00:13:52] But that's what would ultimately be at the board level. They wouldn't care about engagement. You care that at five o'clock on a Friday, an email comes in. I can do that now. I could do that over the weekend or I could do that on Monday. So it's about unlocking that effort, that discretionary effort of an employee. Now again, tear that apart. I don't mind. I'm a big boy. I can handle it.

[00:14:18] Yeah. Well, I guess maybe I'll put in two levels. One is I think surveys are an outcry of the organization. They need a communication channel to say either this is awesome or this sucks, or I need it to suck less. Like there's a level of like, you need those mechanisms to know what's going on because we don't have like so much of the value exchange is a black box. Like unless you're recording my one-on-ones, you don't know that if I'm doing a good job with my employees, you just hear about it in reviews and it's kind of one-sided. And like, so I think those,

[00:14:47] those things are really great data to do. If you pull on that thread of like, what's cared about. If, if I'm a quota caring person who makes a bunch of money by selling things, the value exchange may be, if I hit $4 million quota, I get exponential rewards and I can go do amazing things with my family. So the value exchanger that like that engagement is actually, can I free them up to do the most valuable, important thing for them by choice? Right.

[00:15:12] Board loves that because you get, you get $4 million quota hits and doubling your quota. The employee is going, this is the best place to work. And so I'm not going to leave. I'm going to continue to hit my exceed my quota. And so engagement is more like precise. It's like, it's like, no, no, no, for that person in that moment, I think hyper personalized thing. What's engagement for that salesperson? Get all the administrative crap off my desk. Let me do what I do. Great.

[00:15:38] Yeah. Let me take care of my family and, and, and achieve all the things I want to do. So I think what we're in an era of is you had at a big corporate level, and I've had to do these as a practitioner. You're trying to get like signals and, um, and understanding it at a, at a wide level of, well, we have a culture problem. We have a, this problem.

[00:15:56] I think we're at a level now where our data, sophistication of workflows and other things you can get to precise persona based understanding of the engagement of the person. And then it's, it's up to like that value exchange of me, John Phillips with my boss. What's that value exchange? And is the board winning? Am I winning? Is the company winning? Then that's it. I don't know if that, if that redirects didn't, I was not crushing it. Perfect. How is it what you got to make them cry? No, no, it doesn't happen.

[00:16:25] The, uh, the hyper-personalization and the data really makes a lot of sense to me because, uh, for that person that's killing quota that you started with, take all this stuff that they don't want to do off their plate so that they can do more of the things that they want to do so that they can achieve their goals. And by doing so they're engaged because of the rewards that come along with that, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I think, I think early on in that engagement game, it was a lot of

[00:16:57] treating everybody the same. So everyone would get the pulse survey with the one thing. And it's like, I could see some people where they were really cool. Like you're getting data from us. And then you're hopefully going to turn that into some type of action. Yeah. Which never happened. Which never, yeah. It's like the annual, I mean, all we did was took the annual satisfaction survey and then make it faster. Yeah. Yeah. Which is kind of the common thing you hear about AI. We have a bad, we have a bad process. Let's just make the bad process faster. Yeah.

[00:17:27] So, but yeah, I think I, first of all, I love, I love the response. So thank you. Yeah. One of the, so one of the things I'm thinking about is John, as you're talking, I keep hearing the common theme and I, I don't know that we skipped over the, the, what you're saying, but I, it, it, it's kind of ringing true with me. Something that maybe I haven't thought about as much as I should have where what's the value exchange between the employer and the employee.

[00:17:57] And if I'm getting those 20 hours or 23 hours back in my, in my month, that doesn't mean I need to use those 23 hours at the company. That means I've done my job more efficiently. I've leveraged what you've given me. I've done the work. I've exceeded my quotas or whatever that is. And now I can go on that vacation or I can have dinner with my family or take him to sports. And I think at least here in America, we're, we're conditioned to be afraid to do that.

[00:18:25] I think that I've at least in corporate, I kind of feel a lot of companies. It's just, hey, it's three o'clock. I'm out. I've got a game. This, I got it. My kid has a game. They have a chorus concert or whatever it is. And, and I, and I think that's important for people to understand that engagement is outside of work. It's not just in inside the, the four walls of the office.

[00:18:52] If you're making people come into the office, which, so wait a minute. I always have this conversation of pre COVID post COVID, which, you know, it's like six years ago already. Like that's crazy. Right? Like that, that's nuts. But where, where is this changed? So pre, well, we measure it pre COVID post COVID. You may measure it differently, but where has engagement changed say pre COVID versus today?

[00:19:17] Ooh, that's a good one. Okay. I'm going to try not to go down. Like I'm going to need to pull in my, my psychologist friends into the conversation, but. I'm going to friend. I think what, what COVID exposes, like we have, there's an underlying, as you described, there's an underlying fear. Like most people wake up every day. And if they're honest with themselves, they're fighting this internal dialogue. I am enough. Am I safe? Like all those things we can get to the human condition part.

[00:19:45] What I think COVID exposes, like you can go into a virtual workforce and there was kind of, there's people that could go hide. And then there's people that had no longer the boundaries of leaving the workforce and became completely obsessed because they had nothing else intrinsically that was valuable to them. And those people started to burn out at a remarkable rate. And so the question is whose responsibility is, is it like for me, I'd say the value of like, you know, from a software perspective,

[00:20:15] because that's how I solve problems is if you, if you said we put all this data in front of you and you start putting the insights to being like, here's what your productivity looks like. Here's this value exchange. You still have to make really good choices around where you choose to spend that extra value. I give you 23 hours back. What are you going to do with it? Well, what like the intrinsic understanding of like practitioners are really study the spaces high performance has both extreme focus and extreme recovery.

[00:20:42] It's in any environment, high, the highest performers in the world have those things. So what are we doing to enable that exchange to say pre COVID post COVID? Like what we exposed is there's an underlying fear. And then it got like exhausted because you were like, I don't even feel safe to walk around. And I guess what? I also was had that internal dialogue when I was walking into my manager one-on-ones and, and I always like, am I enough? Like, am I going to meet the bar? And so I'd say that all of that is just more, more, more.

[00:21:12] And I think the responsibility of, of us practitioners, people who are building software, all of these things is to say, you can't make the choices for those people, but you can put, you can put the tooling in a way that allows them to engage with their employer. And decide where their value is. And it's not about like, uh, saying to the company, you're going to get less from your employees. You're actually going to get more.

[00:21:36] Um, but you're going to get more for a longer consistent time with higher performance, with higher promotion velocity of the people that engage the tooling the right way. So that's how we think about it. Like from a both personal and then like, you know, the service now perspective would be like, let's connect all these workflows, all these tools, all this data, let's put it into a single place for you to engage.

[00:21:55] And then you get to make remarkable decisions around what is, what is value for you. And I don't think anybody should step into the personal value game of like you deciding how you spend that time, but let's give you the greatest value exchange you can. I like that. I like that a lot because again, people at different points in their life and different months and whatever, they're going to have to need, they're going to have to, they're going to have the option to make different decisions.

[00:22:21] Uh, around that. I think they're used outside of HR. You have a lot of people that look at productivity as crop yield and how much more can we get out of the crop yield? So you have 500 acres, like what else can we do to get more out of the crop real? And I think they would look at that. We gave you those 23 hours, reinvest that into your productivity to give us more for what we pay.

[00:22:47] Uh, that's a tired kind of a way of looking at productivity, but it's still exists. Uh, it's so prevalent. Yeah. Yeah. It's so prevalent in our world. I want to pivot just a bit, um, to the relationship between software and employee experience. Um, this goes back to on-prem to SAS, let's say AI, uh, and all the systems that they have to interact with.

[00:23:12] By and large, a lot of these people don't get paid to use software. They're doing a job that also includes software, but that doesn't, uh, you know, it's like Salesforce.com or Salesforce. You know, they, they don't, they're not, it's not in a job description anywhere. It's just, it's just, it's kind of assumed that yes, you're going to use Salesforce and you're going to, you know, put all your tasks and all your things into it, blah, blah, blah.

[00:23:39] And Salesforce over the years have gotten much better about data collection and intuitive things. But that's a part of their experience. In my opinion, that's a part of their experience just as much as the people that they buddy with at work. Like the relationship that they have with their manager. Okay. Yeah. That, that experience is important. The relationship that they have with software is also important.

[00:24:08] So in today's terms, their digital AI coworker. A hundred percent. Like all of those things, like the EX people, the EX experts have downplayed the importance of software in general through the years of like, man, even some of the vendors that actually produced the software for, you know, for a company, not necessarily thinking about the employee experience with their software.

[00:24:38] I'm not going to pick on anybody or anything like that. It's just, it happens. So what's your take on EX and software for, for the employees? Yeah. Well, the first thing I'd say is for all those things that you said were true for the person interacting with Salesforce, they would have a much better experience if they're interacting in service now. So that starts there. I didn't know. My bad. My bad. That's okay.

[00:25:06] That is, that's the key. That's the title right there. I wrote down suck less. I'm like, that's a t-shirt or another podcast name? Suck less. Do better. Do better. Suck less. And so I had no idea that y'all commingled. My bad. Oh, absolutely. Like, yeah, didn't even think it. I'm sorry. That's good. No, it's good. It's the world needs to know that there's a better awareness for us now. And we just gave them a moment. Breaking news. Yeah.

[00:25:34] There is something you were thinking. Stop that thinking. Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. So, so back to the, like, I think what you're trying to, to, to go as a re guide me if I, if I go down the wrong path is there, there's a responsibility of the way we build software now that is different than in the past. And I think you can, you can do it a couple of things. So I think that if we, let's just take AI, cause we're talking about AI a lot in the industry right now is AI.

[00:25:59] AI, we used to say right when it came over, it's like AI is only as good as the data you put in it. You're like true, accurate. You need good, clean data. You need a lot of data. You need like there's those things. And then we realized, oh crap. It's actually more than that. You actually need good workflows. And you're so, okay, so let's, let's connect the workflows. And then you're like, oh crap, these are pretty unsecure. So we need security. And then we govern it.

[00:26:22] So what's happened is now the thing that was like, AI is going to eat software's lunch is realize that AI actually can't be productive without all of the core workflows, the security, the data, and what you're calling like these applications. And so the responsibility now is how do you, instead of like doing the really heavy load on trying to fix these micro things in the applications, how do you put these things together in a way that allows the experience to come to life in a hyper customized way?

[00:26:51] So then it's more about what's the job to be done. So the experience is like, I have a job to be done. I need to use my service now system or some other system now, but what if I had an overlay that allowed me to just create my experience, get my jobs done sometimes by myself, sometimes with an AI assistant, sometimes with an AI worker who's actually doing work on my behalf.

[00:27:14] And so that agentic pieces of it can't happen unless you stitch all of these things together. So I think the responsibility is to say, all these point applications are not actually fixing the full jobs to be done. It may be if I'm like a payroll specialist, I need to go right into a payroll and change a specific thing. That's my job every day. But if I actually try to accomplish the payroll issue, I might intersect with five or six systems. And so why am I not doing that in a single overlay of jobs to be done? So that's the way we think about it.

[00:27:43] The future of work, in our opinion, is going to be an agentic companion that rules all of the systems through kind of that you've heard us talk about our AI control tower. It's more than just like control tower. It's literally experience. And so the future experience is going to be like not in a single system. It's going to be across all systems and it's going to be focused on like the hyper personalized job to be done and not go into this system and click this button and move this work. Right, right, right. I love that.

[00:28:13] I got to say, if I were to have to or ever go back into a corporate environment to work, which I'm about to like, I got heartburn all of a sudden. You okay? Yeah, it's coming. I think I would have to heavily vet their stacks on what they're doing. 100%. 100%. And I don't know that every employee would do that, right? I mean, just because of who we are and where we come from. But it would be very important to me. It would really be important.

[00:28:42] If you care about your life, if you care about your life balance, I would absolutely audit the tech. Yeah. That would be one of the interview questions. Yeah. Like it doesn't even have to be like HR tech stuff. It can like anything, whatever I'm going into, because that really dictates your day. I mean, if you're an accountant. I wouldn't work for a company that was a Microsoft shop. You don't want Clippy? What's wrong with Clippy? I don't like Teams. I don't like any of it. I don't like Outlook. Yeah, it doesn't matter. I haven't used Outlook since 06.

[00:29:13] So, no. But your point, Ryan, is that's a part of their experience. It is absolutely a part of their experience. You know what I'm saying? Like, I would want to know what you have rather than just take the job and all of a sudden in bond boarding, like, okay, you have this and this and this and this and they all suck. There will be signs without having to do full audit. But, so this is the, if the first time they engage with you, they make you interact with multiple systems to drive the engagement.

[00:29:41] You might be in for something bigger, which is, that's the thing. If you start and you start in onboarding and they make you go and make a ticket for your computer and a ticket for your HR and your ticket. Like, if you don't have a signal. They're already telling you. They're sending you the signal. Yeah. Yeah. You've got a signal of maybe you made the wrong choice and you should probably get back to plan. So, John, I applied to Home Depot. This is what, like a month ago or so, maybe longer. He just wants the apron. I just want the apron, right?

[00:30:11] So, I have this thing with Home Depot. You ever just want to work somewhere? Like, my wife wants to scoop ice cream. I'm like, well, you're a teacher. Scoop ice cream in the summer. Like, I just want to wear the, just a week. You could get one on eBay. I know, but I want to wear it just for a week. I just want to write my name on it and just, I don't know. It's just been a thing since I was a kid. It took me over an hour to apply. I did a 37-minute assessment. I didn't get one email back.

[00:30:40] Not like, hey, you've applied. Nothing. Nothing. Not an acknowledgement. DIY. Like, I'm pretty good at gaming the system on these things. Like, we've been around the block. I've done it multiple email addresses, different names. Like, I have not gotten a reply. Dude, I think you need to buy one off eBay and just wear the apron and then just go into a Home Depot and just help people. I'll tell you what. I will do that and I will have one of my, I'll have one of my daughters film me from a distance.

[00:31:10] Just as a bit. And we'll patch it in right at this point. Somebody comes up to you. Hey, he's wearing paint. Yeah. Let me walk you over to the paint counter. Yeah, but my point though is, like, I've always had this vision of Home Depot being a really fun job and have a great experience. And now that's soiled. Not, I mean, I may not be quality. I just wanted to stock shelves for a weekend. Like, just, just something. I couldn't even get that job.

[00:31:37] And that's, that's, that's not sure what that says about me. The universe is sending you signal fries. It's not great. Um, John, we, we had this thing back when we started, uh, the show where we asked people to define work and we haven't asked anybody that in probably a year. Yeah. And I'm, I think you're a great candidate for this, right? We're talking about experience. You've defined employee experience.

[00:32:06] What is work? And it could be anything. It could be services for, for money. Yeah. Like, but what is John's vision or view of work? How do you define work to somebody? Oh boy. Let's go. Okay. This is one of those things you should have probably sent to me ahead of time, but let's go. Like, let's, that would be no fun. Let's know. Yeah. So this is the genesis.

[00:32:30] Uh, John, just, just sort of for some more texture while you're thinking about it is we were know that work was changing. Well, we, we created work defined. What we were curious about is how is it changing? Yeah. And is there any universal definition of work? Like, have we gotten to a point now where it used to be work was pretty easy to define for kids? You know, if you're a parent, it's like, okay, yeah, I go to this box. I'm there from nine to five.

[00:32:59] I come home from the box. We do stuff. I get a paycheck every two weeks. Work was relatively easy to define. And we were right there at two years ago when we launched at not, not, not a great definition of work. That's so that's the background. Some of the background. Okay. So I'm going to go into a little bit of personal philosophy to be able to answer this question. So, so I, I, I believe we should all have a vision and a, and a,

[00:33:28] and a, and a applied person. Like what is, what is important to me is more than just like checking the important boxes that the world's told us, but it's like, what are my values? What are my beliefs? What, like, how do I want to apply this intrinsic uniqueness of me into the, into the world? Work is a tool to have that expression come to life. And, and, and so work like it's in the construct of the way society has made work.

[00:33:57] It's a way to earn money. It's a paycheck. It's a livelihood. It's a survival. It's like, it's all those things. And it is. But, but if you say, if you, if you have the luxury of choice, which I will just say too much of the world does not have a luxury of choice on the environment conditions or, or things that they're, they're put in. And, but you know, I'm a firm believer in that, you know, that, um, that skills and like

[00:34:24] talent is universal and opportunity is not that that saying I've seen it alive. I've worked in refugee camps. I've looked at things that like at levels, you go not fair access is, is the only thing that is created. So I'm going to put work into context of understanding humanity that I live in a, a world where I have lots of choice. I get to take my skills and my passion and choose how to apply it. But when I construct work, work is also family.

[00:34:51] I choose as part of my value system, be a fantastic father and a fantastic husband. Those are my choices. And so my, my value expression is where do I put my time to get this value proposition? So work can't be compartmentalized. That's like the, I need to earn money to achieve for X, Y, Z, to survive, to do these things. And then the perfect moment I get to blend all those things where my personal vision for me, it's like doing things better than that's ever been done around, like really disruptive,

[00:35:21] like do something that somebody doesn't think is possible. That's why I ended up in product. But, but like other people, it's like, I want to be a creative and then they'll make up stories saying, I don't have the skills to be a creative. Like, no, everyone has the skills to be creative. Like, so, so I think we have to deprogram the world's like pathways and the origins of pathways and say, like, you don't, like if you have a liberal arts degree and you decide to be an engineer, guess what? Go it like those things don't matter.

[00:35:49] If you choose not to go to college and you choose to do other things, go like for me, work is just an application of values and purpose. Does that, does that answer for you? It's your answer. I love it. Yeah. On print. Last question for me, John, is your take on AI adoption. So this is kind of a broad basis. You know, we all go to HR tech, we go to all these conferences and everybody's AI splashed

[00:36:18] AI over all their booths and agentic and generative AI and all of AI, AI, AI. I just saw a company that got some recent funding and their bit was kind of like walk me for SAS software, but it was AI adoption. So their whole bit was how do you get people? It isn't a question of the tools. It's how do you get people to use the tools? Right. Which I know that you obviously y'all deal with. What's your, what's your take now?

[00:36:48] What do you think? What do you think it'll be over the next couple of months? Well, look, I think there's a, I'm going to try to predict the future. Oh, they will see how the great thing about recording this is we can see how it ages. Yeah. I think we're going to quickly stop talking about AI adoption as tool usage. And we're going to, we're going to start looking at like the outcomes and jobs to be done. Are they being fulfilled?

[00:37:14] Is your work being fulfilled with AI as a companion or actually as the entire outcome? And we're going to start measuring it by outcomes, not by inputs. And so we don't know anything else except for, you know, we need to, it's, it's actually, it's, it's literally programmed into the very problem I said at the start, which is way too many fragmented systems, way too many interactive layers. And so if everyone says, if every one of your point solution systems says, I have an AI tool, and then we try to drive adoption, all you've done is make the problem worse. Right.

[00:37:44] And so I think we're going to quickly realize, and it's already happening at least with our customers. So like our customers are coming to us saying, we bought eight things and then we developed one ourself and nobody's using them. And you're like, well, that's because they don't talk to each other. Shock. And so, so then we come in and re-architect their stack. And we were like, okay, you know, the, the, and this is, is not meant to be an infomercial, but like the, the, when you talk about the control tower and you start talking about data, AI

[00:38:10] workflows, security, like you start, you put us in and we will help you get AI adoption at a deeper level, which is, we will help you get your work done with a single way to interact with those things. And you can choose 15 elements. You can choose a hundred systems. We'll connect them all and we'll do it across the whole stack. So like, I know that sounds a little infomercial-y, but like that's the, that's partially why that's, that's why I'm at service. That's why I chose to come here versus any other place going back to what's work is that

[00:38:39] that's a problem that can be solved. And that this point solution, this AI adoption, this, everybody needs to use it. True. Everybody needs to use it, but they need like a, they need someone who's going to help curate their experience in a way that allows them to be like get remarkable outcomes through, through like simplicity, not through complexity and multi-system. So a little soapboxy there, but like, that's how I see the future of it. We'll see how that ages.

[00:39:07] We'll like check date stamp this and come back. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, but I think that's an important, what you were just saying is important because I think this is exactly the problem. So many companies have, and they really don't understand how to solve it. And so the way you explain it there, and maybe we should cut that and put that in the front. I know you talked about it in the front, but it's, it sounds simple. Like it sounds like a simple fix.

[00:39:33] Obviously it's not, but with the right structure behind it, it is. So, but John, this is the simple part of making the choice to start going with somebody who can pull these things together. The hard part is how do you, how do you make everybody go back to employee value propositions? How do you make everyone who was, was hired to do their point solution feel valued in the transition to say, well, all one solution. The employee doesn't need 10 solutions. It needs one solution.

[00:40:01] And how do you get all of those IT professionals and developers all valuing that my work matters in this world of consolidation in not, and not going through a, like, oh, my work doesn't matter anymore because I didn't get my AI tool adopted. Ryan, I think you're running into a little bit of history too, because no, no offense,

[00:40:23] John, but TA and HR professionals at a point believe the job was just by the right software. Well, of course. Yeah. And that solves the problems where, whereas buying the software was not even that's, I mean, it is important, of course, but you can put inferior software on a superior process. You can't do the opposite.

[00:40:49] And oh, by the way, once you sign the contract, that's actually when the work starts, but you still got a lot of old heads that still think if I, if I purchased the right software, all this stuff will happen. Yeah. And it, and it doesn't. Yeah. Well, then there's seven softwares in. That's right. And then they call it John. That's right. That's right. 1-800-TIE-I. John, this has been amazing. We actually, we, we learned a lot today. This is good. This is good.

[00:41:19] It wasn't just a conversation. So we appreciate your time and, and all the, the good work that you guys are doing over at, uh, at, at service now. So to the audience, thank you all for listening and we shall see you next time.