Contact Center Integration with Talkdesk’s Rei Kesai

Scott Kinka: 

Hi, and welcome to another episode of The Bridgecast. We’re thrilled to have you join us here, and I’m super excited about this episode we have with us, Rei Kasai, who is the SVP of Product. Effectively, he can correct me if I didn’t get the title right at Talkdesk, and we’ve got similar backgrounds. I’m super excited to jump into this. Rei, how are you today? 

Rei Kesai:

Great, thank you for having me on the show. 

Scott Kinka:

Fantastic. Rei, where are we talking from? Where are you? 

Rei Kesai: 

Yeah, so I am from sunny California. I was born and raised here, and yeah, this is where I’m based in the thick of Silicon Valley. 

Scott Kinka:

And you got to give something about the family, wife, kids, they living with you. What’s going on? Tell us where you’re at. 

Rei Kesai:

Yeah, I have three beautiful daughters, and I am actually a bachelor right now because they’re all in Asia having a great time with Mom and having a girl’s vacation right now, so I’ll be a bash for the next month by myself. 

Scott Kinka:

You’ll be doing a lot of podcasts 

Rei Kesai: 

Apparently. Absolutely. There’s a lot of peace and quiet when the ladies are out of the house.  

Scott Kinka:

Right. Rei, what are the weekends involved for you outside of tech? 

Rei Kesai: 

Yeah. No, one of my passions is actually cars and I’m a big Porsche guy and you can see there’s a model right there. 

Scott Kinka: 

You can see that behind you. 

Rei Kesai: 

One of my current projects is restoring a car. So, with the little time that I have with some buddies, we are working on a classic 911 right now. 

Scott Kinka:

What year? 

Rei Kesai:

It’s a ‘97, ‘97 air. Cool car with a wide turbo body. And I would say it’s one of those examples of a great car that was loved to be driven, hard as a race car, but they’re built to be beaten up. And then, basically, now I’m taking it back to streetcar restoration. 

Scott Kinka: 

I love it. Yeah, that’s tremendous in the background. From a technology perspective, we talked about this during the pre-show. You’ve got a history of enterprise software. I’m not saying that you’re not in it now, but I mean SAP ServiceMax, and where you are today is what at least I perceive to be a communications- and really customer-experience-focused organization. Just tell us a little bit about that journey. 

Rei Kesai: 

Yeah, I would say that I’ve been very fortunate to be part of some great organizations, and to give you some background, this is my third time building a CX platform. And I’ve just been very fortunate to see the evolution of the space and the technology and the disruption that’s happened during my time here. I’ve been in Silicon Valley the entire time and have been part of those disruption cycles. And we are going through one right now. I’ll talk a little bit about it later, but super excited. That’s why I continue being in this space because the job never ends as a product person in this space because there’s just so much to, I would say, innovate and improve and really disrupt the way that we think about experience and so forth with customers. 

The Evolution of Talkdesk: From Telephony to CCaaS and AI

Scott Kinka:

So there’s a lot to explore there. I’m trying to decide whether I want to hit you. Give us the Talkdesk story now, or we can ask you some questions about that journey. Let’s go to the Talkdesk piece real quick. Can you just, for those who we had Bill Welch on about a year ago, he is the president and COO, literally, I think he was there for a week, which created an awesome episode around why he came from enterprise security to the organization that you’re in now. But from your lens, I mean you run product, and you’ve been, I guess it’s something like five years there. Give me the Talkdesk story from your lens. 

Rei Kesai:

Yeah, I think from a Talkdesk point of view, I joined roughly five years ago, and we’ve been during a time of hypergrowth as a company. It’s just been an incredible experience and pleasure to go through this journey. We started off in our humble beginnings, really being a telephony. I would say it is capable of using CRM platforms, mainly Salesforce and Zendesk. And now we’ve evolved into, I would say, into a full one C ca platform, and now it doesn’t end there, but as we’ve continued pushing on, really we look at ourselves really as an AI platform for customer experience, and that’s where the world is going, and that’s where we’re making a lot of investment right now in that part of the portfolio. 

Scott Kinka:

So we’ll double click on that a little bit more, but let me ask a couple quick questions. You’ve changed, I don’t want to say changed the model, but evolved the model over time. What’s the one thing, what’s the superpower for Talkdesk? 

Rei Kesai: 

Yeah, I would say that, impartially, there have been disruptions in this space. If you look at it, I would say the space traditionally, for the last couple of decades, was very much of a divide between communications and telephony. And you could sort of look at the other side of it, which was customer data management and workflows. Then, you sort of look at a third component, analytics and automation. And there’s this convergence that’s happening right now between these three pieces. And if you look at Talkdesk and where we are different, as we start to look at the space, a few years ago, we made a deliberate decision to really focus on industries. What does that mean for industries in this space? It’s really about how industries look at creating a customer experience for their customers if that makes sense. And that starts with then what are those journeys, those workflows and ultimately applications that sort of enable that, right? And so communications become sort of a byproduct or enabler of it, but not the end all be all of it. And that really, I think, is where we’re different. As we looked at the spaces, how do we start to create all these journeys vertically? And so now, as a result of that, if you look at, we are very strong, if you look at healthcare, you look at retail workflows, and you look at financial services workflows, they are distinct and how these businesses think about up driving value and differentiation of themselves to their customers or potential customers for lack of better words. And that is where we’re different. We created a lot of interesting new applications and workflows, and as a leader of it, no one believed us in the beginning or in the early years. And now, what’s interesting is that there’s a copying of that strategy in the space right now. 

Scott Kinka:

I think it’s interesting because I mean I’ve also developed CX software in my career, and I think that the model has always been this sort of in the customer service organization that the CX platform becomes this sort of monolithic center of what the agent does. And I think the way I’m hearing you say that is you’re saying we’ve architected the business to be good at working around the applications that are specific inside the industries that we’re servicing rather than being the center of the universe. Is that a reasonable way for me to describe it? 

Rei Kesai:

Well, yeah. Yes. On top of that, you made an interesting comment about the focus of the agent. And if you look at our customers talking to us clients and looking at their business, they look at their end customer as the angle or the prospects that they would sort of convert into customers. And so to them, it’s not about really the agents, it’s about, hey, what are the experiences I will give to that customers and maybe agents in retail, we have people who are in store as an example, people who are in warehouses. You have, I would say, in healthcare, you have providers who may be at a physician’s office, or you may have people who are outside the office doing care to, let’s say, one of our elderly parents to provide care in the home. And you think about that, and it’s a very different set of problems than just trying to enable communications with an agent and an end customer if that makes sense. And so that’s how we look at the world now is that to me, customer experience is not about just inside the contact center, but we’re all these different touchpoints and talk us being part of that because the big problem that all our customers, I hear repeatedly over and over, it’s all disjointed, it’s all fragmented, it’s all done in different systems. I, by virtue, have created that problem, too, because I have actually created field service platforms, contact center platforms, and sales platforms. So part of it’s like me, a technologist, a product person who created products like this. I saw this opportunity, and it can be one. And if you believe in one, this is where our customers get really interested. Hey, how do we enable these conversations? It doesn’t matter where this touchpoint is, right? And I believe that is where the world is going. And like I said, the communication modality then becomes a byproduct of it. Does that make sense? It’s not just about a telephone call anymore. It could be in person, it could be over mobile, it could be at a kiosk. You can imagine all these different modalities. How do we create the platform to enable all those experiences? And you can think about it, and it’s not just. I’ve talked to a lot of customers about it, and there’s sort of a duality in this. There’s the line of business that wants solutions. They don’t want a science project yet. Then, I have the CIO’s office, which needs a platform to extend and create innovation and new use cases. So we have this duality that we’re working on right now, and that’s how we sort of designed our platform to service both of these needs if that makes sense. Don’t get into detail. 

Scott Kinka: 

It does. Interesting. It’s funny, last episode I had a conversation with a product lead and one of the conversations that we got into was this concept of if you’re an IT leader running around buying point solutions driven by the business, all you’re doing is putting yourself in the integration business as opposed to solving problems. Does that kind of makes sense given what you just said?

Rei Kesai:

It is. That’s what I learned in my early days and later at SAP, which is that the CIO just wants to deliver value to the business. They don’t want to. And I think we’ve been in the business long enough. Integration is tough; there’s just a lot of risk. Vendors are pointing, well, it’s not my problem, their problem and so forth. And then you get into, well, whose problem? Then you got the SI involved in everything else. So a lot of this is about, I think, simplifying that experience because, ultimately, that’s what all buyers want. If I have a business problem, how do I enable the business, or how do I, as a business leader, enable that? It gets into SaaS and technology platforms and so forth. That was one of the genesis, at least where our thesis, we think about industries in particular and AI later, and this is where I think we’ve been uniquely positioned. We made a heavy investment to create and simplify the integration to these most common back offices. I would say systems of record. So you could think about the electronic medical record system of a hospital system as the ERP of a manufacturer, right? It is the system of truth; it is the one system that drives everything in the business and is incredibly difficult to integrate with. So, as any IT leader who actually manages that system, they don’t want people to touch it. The mission control system, you have the sis who are like, well, we can do it, but it may take a lot of time. And that’s just one example. It could be a bank like a bank that actually has an account management system that manages all the accounts. Lemme think about it. It is a mission-critical system. So I use these examples where we’ve created pre-built integration for all the most common and leader platforms there. And that’s really helped us because now what we’ve been doing that then we can start to create all these experiences on top of it, and whether it may be, hey, our customer’s customer, the end customer, maybe they need help with doing, why do they actually contact the business? Typically, they have a problem, or they want to buy something that’s one of the two things or have something done. And what does that person at the company do? They help do that. They either sell you something or buy or solve a problem. And so, how do we accelerate that? And I made that comment earlier about agents, and that’s been sort of the modus operandi for a long time. It’s like, well, give the agent these tools and ways to go do that faster and easier. Oh, go put it on the web and make it self-service. Great, do it yourself. But sometimes you just can’t do that because it’s just hard. And that’s when you need people involved in some of these things. And so again, we created these things so that our customers are buyers, making it easy for them to get the value. They are not looking to buy a telephony system or a system or record, but they want to solve these workflows. Workflow is hard to do. 

Simplifying Integration for a Seamless Customer Experience

Scott Kinka:

So it’s interesting because you come from have a legacy at, I’ll just pick on SAP for a minute and I don’t mean that in a bad way, but generally seen in the market as a, I used the word earlier monolithic system that does everything, anything. So, react to this statement for me. Let’s have some fun.

Rei Kesai:

Sure, absolutely. 

Scott Kinka:

Any system that claims to do everything doesn’t do anything particularly well. 

Rei Kesai:

I agree with you. I completely agree with you. That statement. So that’s where we’ve been deliberate because we can’t beat everything to everyone. And so when we think about a retail business or, let’s say, a service business like the healthcare system or, let’s say, a bank, there are fundamentally a few things that matter to them, and everything else is ancillary back to their customers or their prospects. So, what we focus heavily on is those workflows. So, it could be back to a healthcare system while there are businesses to provide patient care. I mean, that is ultimately their mission. They also are businesses. And so for them, it’s about how do I get the patients to show up. If they don’t show up, then they lose revenue, and they lose that revenue. The costs go up, and the service of care goes up. So, for them, it’s not about driving revenue per se but rather how they provide a great patient experience. Part of that is about cost containment and so forth, for example. And so for that, how do I get things to show up in your life? I have to cancel the appointment, I have to rebook it, or I need to get connected to the right care provider, some of these basic things so I show up and actually get the right care. It’s a great one. I’m just using an example. This is what we call high-value use cases, and that’s what we focus on. So there are only a few like I said, that matter that we are focused on. And what’s interesting is that those have started to become cross-industry too. This is where I’ll talk a little bit later about AI and so forth, but how is this sort of all coming together, and how is this helping us accelerate into other industries as well? So, as we looked at as an example, it would be what a healthcare system wants to do to have you show up to the right location, let’s say a branch or not a branch, but a facility is the same as a bank who has multiple local branches for you show up to sign a loan origination document for lack of better words in the business of generating loans. So that makes sense. You don’t do it. You need to give away money and some business. So all these examples where I use are that, and some of these actually go across industries, so we’ve created Lego blocks to help create one that could be transferable to a second to a third. And you start to see all these, how it all starts to come together right later on. 

Scott Kinka: 

I have the expectations, and this is a loaded question because I’m going to ask it in two ways. Both the individual inside the business, I was going to say agent, but you corrected me on that. The individual inside and the customer have their expectations of interactions that have changed dramatically since the pandemic and the adoption of tools like we’re chatting about right now. Oh, absolutely. How has it fundamentally shifted the traditional customer to an agent using that purposefully here interaction in your mind? 

Rei Kesai: 

Great question. Great question. I think a lot of that is being driven in our day-to-day lives as trying to get things done. Even when I am having a conversation, I might be texting on the phone, doing video, whatever, and that expectation is now being asked of the brands or our customers. And so what you’re seeing right now is there are some industries that are a little bit further ahead in terms of adopting these things. And generally, I’d say retail businesses are in particular. And if you get into banking, they actually have adopted a lot of these things for quite some time, and they figured out how to, and I say other industries have not, and it’s just sort of an adoption cycle. But what I’m trying to get at is that, ultimately, I think the people who are providing the service want that, too. They want to be effective, too. They’re looking at these tools or capabilities to help them do their job. And if I’m just trying to figure out how to get things done and I know that there’s a better way, I think that’s also forcing new patterns. So there are patterns in our businesses: our customers are thinking about how they want to interact with customers, and the customers themselves want these new ways to interact. So maybe if you think about generational differences too, by the way, I think for some of us who may think of the telephone as the primary way and the only way my parents are like that, you think about many of us in the middle where we got introduced to a lot of always digital checkout. So we actually crossed these two worlds very easily. Now there’s a preference, and now you go later on. It’s like I’m only fully digital. I even want to be on the phone. Why do I even want to spend time talking to someone? And I think that will drive a lot of the adoption of these things across the industries depending on where the business is and who their sort of customer base is and their constituents are. That makes sense. So we look at it as, hey, how do we enable that and give choice? But also, do not look at it as well; you just buy this thing and that thing and Cobb it all together. To me, it’s just about an experience because we know what it is. We do it ourselves. Hey, you call me out, Hey, 

Scott Kinka: 

Do it in your personal life. 

Rei Kesai: 

You’re texting me. I’m going to send you something. 

Scott Kinka:

Yeah, exactly. 

Rei Kesai: 

I just need to talk to you because I didn’t want to text you anymore, and it is too much effort to text you on this topic. You get my point. And so this modality change is all expected, and I would say that’s expected of the brands and our customers as well. 

Scott Kinka:

So, to summarize that you’re basically, we have almost personal experience in our own lives that our communications are multimodal, easily able to be changed between them. And then I think lastly and probably most importantly, that there’s sort of ubiquitous connectivity to other pieces of information that I can bring into that. So if I’m in a text message with you or we’re chatting on video, I should easily be able to bring in a picture, show a file or share. They sound simple because we deliver them in our lives, but they are not in business applications because the application and the source of information are prepared. 

Rei Kesai:

We’ve put all these controls in place, and they are there for compliance and security, which, of course, are important. And if you look at it, the other side of it is that we’ve always traditionally looked at, I would say, the people providing these experiences are a department. And if you look at some more modern companies, they don’t really look at it like that anymore. It’s like everyone’s job is to service the customer, and that changes things. And that’s a little more forward-thinking in terms of as, say, more visionary companies think of it in that way, but then how do you enable that? And that’s also, again, like I said, a really hard problem when you think about it from a product technology, and how do you for CIOs trying to figure out, okay, how do I make sure that this is secure and compliant and enabled for everyone? But again, those are the types of problems that we’re working on to help both the business enable these things and also make the IT leader successful. Ultimately, what we’re trying to do here is 

AI-Driven Workflows and Integration

Scott Kinka: 

So let’s cross the chasm. I think this is a good spot to jump into it when workflows are direct, and you’re like; this is the use case from point A to point B, you’re drawing a connection from point A to point B that’s changing fairly dramatically right now with AI. So talk about how that’s sort of layered onto the experiences you guys are trying to deliver. 

Rei Kesai:

I love to talk about this. So this is where I’ve layered this, which is back to just the frame. This is how we look at communication, which is a foundation. I mean, it’s foundational. If you can’t do that, then nothing will work. You’ve layered that on top of a business application layer where now you’re starting to drive workflows and then be industry specific that then requires integration because ultimately data drives some of these things done that AI. And one of the interesting things, and again for us to talk to, we’ve organically developed the platform from day one in this area, and that’s been a benefit to us partially because when we look at the last 18 months, there was a big technology disruption around LMS and so forth, and what does that mean to technology companies? Ultimately, what it has done is levelled the playing field. For us, it was very easy to basically adopt these advanced technologies. It’s the benefit, well, as people were just trying to figure out how to drive value as opposed to just technology. Hey, here’s an ML and AI, and everything else is what our business buyers and CIO buyers want. They want to solve problems. They’re not here to buy technology. Well, there’s some, but I’ll say that’s the minority. But for the most part, going back to what I said earlier, they are trying to drive these customer experiences, and we’ve actually enabled that backbone already. And so when you think about the truth, I would say value unlock for AI does get into a lot of these workflows. Ultimately, can I accelerate it ultimately? And that’s either through just augmentation, helping the people running that workflow, potentially just automated without any people involved to begin. That’s the ultimate goal. And then I think there’s some time to get there, or it might be the people who sit on top of that trying to understand what’s going on in terms of analytics and so forth. This has been a big part of our industry for a long time around measurement and data and analytics of what’s going on, who’s doing what, and everything else we simplify. That’s being simplified tremendously, too. So I get really excited because it’s for us in the next. I would say the next inning for Talkdesk is just that we have all these pieces already there. And this is where I do think that how we’re now different again in this space going back to the industries is that our customers who adopt our platform in these industries can get immediate value. When we think about automation in particular, when you think about everything from, I think it’s been tough for a lot of our customers and CIOs to how do I create a simple self-service workflow that the end customer can go do and people have tried, it failed, it’s been crummy, it’s just not great. So what happens is you just go through it. You get mad as a person. You just say, talk to an agent everywhere, or you’re on a text or chat, whatever, just send me to the person. I don’t want to talk to this bot because of a lack of better words, right? Because fundamentally, it’s tough. And so it’s because those bots, all they ever do, try to listen to what you want and just send you somewhere else, not really solving a problem, if that makes sense. 

Scott Kinka:

It’s also constrained historically from an optionality perspective. I mean, most bots historically, people are like, I don’t love the experience. Well, the reality is that the person who designed the bot structure didn’t have all of the potential questions they were going to get asked explicitly programmed, and then your failsafe is out to an agent. So talk about how AI’s changed, just sort of the optionality in that process to be able to deliver better outcomes. 

Rei Kesai: 

Love to, and I say there’s a nuance question because there’s that side of it and then what it can do ultimately if you think about, let’s say you’re a patient and I’m the provider and you ultimately want to reschedule your appointment, that’s all you want. I don’t want to go through this effort to talk to someone about everything else. It might be better. Unfortunately, doing that is hard when you think about one; you have to integrate it into a system and then all the workflows. The beauty of it is that we figured out how to do these things with the various providers. And then two, which is to your question about optionality, this is where I love this area. So just recently, within the last quarter, we launched a product called Navigators. It is a little plug on Talkdesk, and what it is is basically a replacement for the IVR and what we saw initially, which was what you’d have to do is, like you said, is the consultant or maybe the business admin or whatever would create these optionality scenarios. They’d have to do some work to figure out what all the permutations and questions that you’d have to think are intense, for lack of better words. Well, and I say technology disruptions, LLMs have just disrupted that workflow because now it could be as simple as appointment booking as a topic. How would I actually ask for an appointment booking with all the permutations associated with that, not just in English but across languages? That is big. And so this is where we’re starting, and this is where customers have done implement that and just do a few steps and bam, now they’re just off to the races to help at least in the basic step of getting this person to the right place at the right time. Don’t send them through transfer health because of the lack of better words. The challenge is if you’re in person at a clinic, you don’t go through that. You just show up to the receptionist. They know exactly when you show up, they know where you go, exactly where you’re going to go in a virtual world. You have a hard time knowing where to go. That makes sense. So we have to solve that problem for them. 

Scott Kinka: 

I mean, the technology can certainly support it. Do you find that customers have challenges having the data set to inform the LLM? Let’s just use the example that you just talked about. The assistant at the front desk just implicitly knows when somebody says x, I can go here, but if her brain, his brain, doesn’t exist somewhere unstructured, then how do you inform the LLM? 

Rei Kesai: 

Oh, that’s incredible. That’s a great question. So this is where, again, being specific to industries really helps us because we’re no longer being generic as we’ve thought about what are the, so back to business problems, the problems that our customers look at, I want to solve these workflows. Then you start to look at, well then, how would the end customer try to do that or ask for it or for lack of better words? And this gets into, okay, so now without putting all the burden of that setup and knowledge to our partners and to the consultants and so forth, I always say as a product where you codify these things, you put them into the product because the moment we do that, you can scale, you remove the thinking and that’s where this domain and IEP gets in. So, as we work with customers, it is about, okay, here’s the question set for lack of better words, what we call intense lack of better words that matter. From there, obviously, if I am, we had a great example where this was actually a medical device company. So you can imagine I have some screws in my knee. So what was really interesting is that in the context of screws for the medical device company, it means titanium hardware that is put into the body. But use that as a context, you can imagine, screw it could be offensive, right? So this specificity is actually put into our product in terms of industry. So, you think about language? It is actually a very nuanced and difficult topic that we’ve actually taken all that complexity out into product, and ultimately, the CIO and everyone gets value from that. Right? 

Superpowers for IT Leaders

Scott Kinka: 

Super interesting. With a couple of minutes we have left, I want to just focus on Rei a little bit, if you don’t mind. We talked a lot about product, but you as an IT leader, I’d love to just get some of your feedback and ask you a couple of fun questions. Sure. First one is how about you? We talked about the company. What’s your superpower? 

Rei Kesai: 

My superpower as a leader? 

Scott Kinka: 

Yeah. 

Rei Kesai: 

So, as I said I alluded earlier, I’ve been very fortunate, and I would say meeting certain individuals and being exposed to great companies and being part of those organizations has really taught me as a leader as I’ve grown in my career. But what that also does for all of us is pattern recognition. As you go through, you say you know what works and what doesn’t, what’s good and what’s, I’ll say, I guess my supervisor, I know how to pick them and just been fortunate to be part of Talkdesk. And as I say, we have all the ingredients that it takes to gain, disrupt, and just really, I would say, be the leader in this space. 

Scott Kinka:

Got it. I’m going to surprise you with this one. What’s the best piece of business advice you ever got? 

Rei Kesai:

Never stop learning. 

Scott Kinka:

Okay, how do you live that every day?

Rei Kesai:

What was interesting is you spoke about Bill earlier. He has this saying: be curious about this and that. And I’ve always had this philosophy where if you stop learning, then you’re never going to grow. And to make this more specific, I was just talking to an intern, actually, and he went to my alma mater, say, what are you doing? And then I say, I’m not going to pontificate and give you advice. I’m going to give you a few things that someone taught me when I was in your shoes. And that helped me. And as I said, one of my mentors and still leaders, a good friend early on, I was like, Rei, when you’re early, go and learn all parts of the business, and you know what, first of all, what you like and don’t like, but two, what works and doesn’t, the moment you have that it helps you then solve problems. Ultimately, for us, how we scale is important. How do we solve problems and everything else? If you don’t have that curiosity to learn what the other person is going through or what that function is, you’ll never improve. And I say I think that’s where greatness comes. It is that sort of cohesion across the business that comes with people who are actually interested in actually solving these problems together. So, to me, that’s what I was saying. This is what I have learned across companies and cultures, and I feel like those are the ingredients that I think lead to success. So, hopefully, that helps a little bit. I know it’s a long way to answer your simple question. 

Scott Kinka: 

No, I like it. No, I like it. Well, supporting that learning then what’s on your end table right now? What are you reading? 

Rei Kesai:

Yeah, No, great. I have many books. I have a bookshelf right here, but one as a product person and any IT leader is crossing the chasm. You said chasm. I love it. Early on, that book is now tattered. However, I read it every so often because it just reminds me to think about how we and technology look at these cycles, and a lot of it is about timing and seizing the opportunity and pattern matching and knowing what could go right and what could go wrong. And so you can easily get, I could say, sucked into the vortex of how things are going, and you’re just busy. But I read that book every so often just to remind me, okay, what are the patterns I need to continue to look at and watch? Which stage are we in? What Do we need to go to next? And I tell it to, especially for product people in particular, it is the bible that you should just have as a framework, one of many, right? Not to say it is the framework, right? But I think to help lead an organization, 

Scott Kinka: 

It’s so funny that I’ve spent a lot of time myself leading product organizations, and you mentioned that concept of getting sucked into the vortex. I would always say don’t be in the business of being in business. You know what I mean? Because that’s great about that book. Highly recommend it. We’ll make sure that the link is in the show notes for those who haven’t read it. And I agree it’s a great bible for that. Alright, two last fun ones. First, I need a crazy prediction from you for the next 12 to 18 months. It doesn’t matter if it’s in business or technology or if it’s in sports or related to the Porsche you’re rebuilding or whatever. Tell me what’s going to happen so you can look back. 

Rei Kesai: 

I would say you made a comment earlier about the hype cycle and AI. It’s a hype cycle. It’ll be some winners and then catastrophic failures. There will be, and that’s true with any. I would say technology led the innovation cycle. I would say many friends who are VCs and looking at the space, and that’s what it is. Ultimately, it’s the numbers game. One of ’em will make it to the top. And I think I share this as to why this matters. I think it’s me as a technology leader looking at creating these capabilities and working with partners to enable them as well. I need to pick the right ones that I know that can help me get to the next level. And there’s a lot of choice and buzz if that makes sense. You have to be very careful about that or just be aware that this is going to happen. And then two, as a CIO leader, it’s the same thing because they’re getting approached like, Hey, go try this and go try that. It is great, I think, from an experimentation point of view, but I think be cautious of betting the business on some of these things. And that’s my prediction is you can easily get sucked into the hype and the vortex of that. But it is important for us as leaders to see where things are going. It is evolving very quickly. 

Scott Kinka: 

Is there a corollary here with the growth of just the concept of cloud? Let’s go get some, but without really having a business use case to do it around AI. 

Rei Kesai: 

Absolutely. I mean, I think though is it’s almost like you even look at earlier, you go.com boom telling someone, it’s like, Hey, let’s start this company to go sell pet toys to the great, great, yeah, that’s a department in a larger organization, but if you don’t have a sound model of value, they’ll never succeed. That was my point about looking at this space right now, and if there’s clarity about that, that’s where product leaders come in. Where am I driving value? How am I driving differentiation and defensible moats and everything else? And I would say the space, you have to be careful and look through the hype both as me as a technology creator and provider as I’m looking at, but also as the buyer. You hear it. And I think this is where this education is happening right now. And I think those who’ve seen this cycle know what could go right and what could go wrong. And that’s why I do say there’s opportunity. That’s why I’m not saying to be risk averse and not change anything, but there are certain things that matter. How do you amplify those things? That’s where I totally think this is a tremendous opportunity. 

Scott Kinka: 

That’s an awesome spot to end, but I have to get one last question. I feel like you’re going to have a fun answer to this question. Okay. Let’s assume that the catastrophic output of what we were just talking about is some dystopian AI event, whatever that is. Skynet finally actually happens, and you have one application that still functions on your mobile device for that dystopian future. What would it be? 

Rei Kesai: 

My music. My music. 

Scott Kinka:

I love it. Is that Spotify, Apple Music? What do you use? 

Rei Kesai: 

I actually use Spotify and a hack for it, which is terrible because they have an incredible AI algorithm telling you what you want to listen to. I will actually switch my accounts with my daughters to mix it up a bit. So, it gave me the idea of discovering new music. So I don’t want to be, there’s a preference to obviously listen to what you want to do, but always be curious about other things. I’ve discovered a lot of new things that I would’ve never just done by myself, and that’s why I do things. These products open your eyes and expose you to different things. So my music is near and dear to me as well. 

Scott Kinka: 

That’s amazing. Yeah. The world might be a different place if everybody followed that and logged into somebody else’s social media accounts every once in a while. I don’t know about that. And see how the echo chamber supports them. 

Rei Kesai:

Yeah. That’s a whole other topic, but maybe we won’t go there., 

Scott Kinka:

No, completely. We don’t have time for that. Rei, this was amazing by the way. I could talk you for another hour. What a great talk and totally appreciate you joining us on The Bridge today. Thanks so much. 

Rei Kesai: 

Absolutely, thank you for your time.