Steve Feuerstein (00:02.389)
What a distinct pleasure it is to have on the Transaction Report today, David Edelman. He is a lecturer at Harvard. He's the former chief marketing officer of Aetna, McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group. Dave, what a pleasure it is to have you on the Transaction

Dave Edelman (00:19.232)
It's terrific to be here, Steve. Thank you.

Steve Feuerstein (00:22.187)
You know, I feel it's always an interesting experience as an interviewer. You spend time with someone in somewhat of a virtual real realm because I'm watching you in other interviews. I'm reading your book, which you recently released and had a book tour for personalized customer service in the age of AI. I'm about halfway through them. We'll talk to some of the points that I noted throughout. But what I find really compelling about you is A, the diversity of your thought.

B, how ahead of the curve you were 30 years ago with your segmentation of one marketing theater and how you've built on that. And really, no pun intended, but your 2015 article about customer journey, how you've journeyed the last 30 years to get here in this space to evolve into personalization. So I'll let you briefly define the five promises of personalization.

Dave Edelman (01:16.196)
Yeah, sure. So as let me just also connect it to the history just a little bit because that's where a lot of the five promises come from, Steve. So when I started 30 years ago, wrote an article segment of one marketing, it was based on marketing. A lot of it was on how can we start using customer information to be more precise, more targeted in the way we're spending marketing dollars.

And what became clear over the 90s and especially over the 2000s as the internet came available and all kinds of new digital capabilities were now put in place was that it was more than marketing. It's about a customer experience. It's about differentiating yourself because you can start using customer information to change how people can get something done, get something done they couldn't do before.

or dramatically faster or discover new things. And so that was one of the reasons we also wrote the book because AI just unlocked all these capabilities that would enable your customers to do more. And because of that, as we started looking at companies who were doing better in terms of using personalization to drive growth, there clearly was a pattern. And all of these companies started from a

customer's point of view. It wasn't how can I use customer information as a marketer to manipulate people and make them think they're getting something for themselves. It was how do I legitimately change the experience? And so the first thing they think about is how can they empower? And that's the first of what we call the five promises of personalization. Implicitly promises that you

are making to customers because you are a custodian and a user of information about them. So the first is to empower them, enable them to do something. But because we're also talking about customer information, the second is to know them. Know them in a trusted way that they are feeling comfortable with. Using information that maybe you just simply asked them, zero party data. Information that they would assume you would have from their interactions with you. Then based on that, after

Dave Edelman (03:39.086)
thinking about how you're going to empower, what you're going to know about them, reach them appropriately. Don't bombard them. And in today's AI world, it's so easy to bombard people. Create all this content, hit all these customers, but do it appropriately. Less is more. And we can get into that more later. But hit somebody at the right moment, given their context, and then show them something.

that makes it clear that this is for them personalized. And again, we can go into some examples in just a bit. And then as you're doing that, you're creating more data. As somebody looks at what you've sent, interacts with you, and from that you should be getting smarter, better, more personalized, and therefore delight them. So empower me, know me, reach me, show me,

Delight me. Those are the five promises and it's a good framework for thinking about how to develop a personalization strategy always starting though with how are you going to empower the customer?

Steve Feuerstein (04:52.823)
You know, as I thought about your five P's, if you will, we used to have the four P's in Biz School. This is a little different. Your promises, your five promises. The first thing I just wanted to, before we get into the meat of applying this in the business of sports, of how this relates to the entertainment world, very applicable, extraordinarily sensitive, and perhaps one of the greatest use cases you can find that really appeals to the individual's passions, not just appearing

Dave Edelman (04:58.264)
Hahaha

Steve Feuerstein (05:22.895)
on their radar because it might be a purchase that's important to their life in their daily living, but a real critical passion point in their life, hence the business of sport. But I wanted to just query you on the order. When we look at empower, wouldn't we have put no first? Don't I have to know them before I can empower them?

Dave Edelman (05:46.648)
Yes, but you have to decide how you're going to empower people before you just start amassing information. And all of the companies that we've looked at recognize they have a lot of information. They could even get more, but chasing the collection of information can just lead you to spending tons of money collecting all kinds of things. And usually pretty much consistently the companies

that have been doing this well, start with use cases. Start with what can I do to break compromises that our customers are facing? How can I help them unlock more value from what we sell? How can I help them discover new sports they might be interested in or make sure they could find the sports that they want to see or the players that they want to see? Then what information can I mobilize against this?

across what I have, across what I can get. And think about that information strategy towards a sense of purpose, a sense of purpose of giving customers value. you need to have some information, of course, before you start going. But the main thing is think about how you're going to use it and letting that guide your priorities.

Steve Feuerstein (07:10.433)
So, you we talked a little offline beforehand about this unconventional nature of some of the interviews you've been doing promoting your book, which is an important, certainly a milestone in your career. I came across a whole host of articles that I found very compelling. And obviously this book comes at an incredibly important time. In fact, we're just about at the two year anniversary, which was in our industry in my personal assessment.

one of the most important moments in the history of the business of sport. And that was the advent of chat GPT-3. As we all know, AI has been around since the 50s, if you will, the way insurance companies were using credit card companies were using AI. But as we evolved and we had the winter of AI through the odds and a little that period of time, but we had this breakthrough not on chat GPT-1 or two, but really on chat GPT-3 with Sam Malton's announcement November.

2022, and we are literally just at that two-year milestone rather. What is fascinating about it is your book comes at a point where we have moved at warp speed and your book is all about speed. It's one of your kind of trifecta of tenants about how to succeed and recognizing that on your personalization score, there'll be those who are preeminent today may not be tomorrow. And having that breath of speed.

ability to constantly mobilize and be nimble is just vital. what I wanna drive to together is when you look at sport, you got this passion play, you've got perhaps legally the most compelling industry in the world, unifying business in the world, which is I can get into the mindset of a consumer, adult, CEO, C-suite, whatever it may be to a young, young child.

And we know that the personalized experience has been the holy grail, but we've taken for granted the technology we had, the tools we had, and very often the monopolies we had. That if I, there's only one New York Yankees in town, or out of deference to one Boston Red Sox, even though I know you're a Brooklyn, you're a Brooklyn boy and you'll still be true to your hometown squads. So with that said, how...

Dave Edelman (09:22.028)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes.

Steve Feuerstein (09:33.195)
do we reconcile the reality in sports? You got teams, critical stakeholder. You've got sponsors putting in hundred billion dollars. That for them to personalize has been their driving credo, but they've always been left replicating kind of the conventionals, the legacy approaches to reaching the fan, communicating with their target market. What goes through your mind when you think about deploying personalized?

when literally your book is entitled, Customer Strategy in the Age of AI, how do we start to deploy that for a sponsor, corporate sponsor, or a team owner?

Dave Edelman (10:15.224)
Yeah, so let's start with the team side because I think that's at first a bit straightforward because the fan is watching a team because they like the team. One of the, so a lot of it is around how can a sports team think about not just the playing but all of the content that they are creating from their players generating behind the scenes conversations, strategies.

pictures, sometimes people are interested in their lives off of the field. And can you take all of that content and now start to deploy that and make that accessible based on what people are interested in? What types of things they want to know about the players, which players they're interested in. Some may be much more about strategy, some might be more about style. And so,

having people actually even tell you what they're interested in. think one of the things that sports has not done as well is actually ask their fans what they want and collect that on an individual basis. Lately, I've been thinking a lot about zero party data because Apple now makes it really hard to collect cookie data. So 40 % of mobile phones, you're not collecting the cookie data.

and people are increasingly opting out or using VPNs. So it's going to be harder to collect that third party data, maybe first party data, but you should just ask which players are you most interested in? What would you like to know about your players? What things are you more about, you know, their strategy or how they think about their lives offside and use that to actually create streams back at them. The music industry is starting to do more of that.

by creating ways for fans of particular artists to get a lot more from those artists. And I think sports has not gone to that angle of what the music industry has done. I think there's more opportunity to ask and build databases of people's interests and then turn that into new kinds of products that the fans can access even when they're not watching the game.

Dave Edelman (12:44.354)
There, let me stop there. I haven't gotten to the end yet.

Steve Feuerstein (12:44.631)
You know, it's interesting, No, no, no, no. Very, very, very, very solid response. And by the way, just to divulge to our viewers, Dave and I are basically of a similar cohort on college and high school. I will say just for Gen YZ and now Alpha, it is interesting. You mentioned at the beginning, they go to watch the team.

Dave Edelman (12:57.124)
We'll see you soon.

Steve Feuerstein (13:12.151)
among those target markets, fascinating their demographics, actually very, very often they're going to watch a player. And so they follow that player and the loyalty that you and I had to, let's just say our New York teams, if we had that affinity, it's interesting, the youth of today, you know, into their late twenties are very player driven, personality driven. And so when that player may leave New York, believe it or not, Dave, and head over to Boston, what was previously verboten,

Dave Edelman (13:18.456)
Yeah.

Steve Feuerstein (13:42.057)
in today's universe can be an accepted behavior among those demographic segments. But with that said, so collecting data. let's, I always like to put that into a practical world of application. You were the chief marketing officer of Aetna. If someone said to you, collect data on fan behavior. Now Aetna, when you were there, was a sponsor of professional sports, right?

Dave Edelman (14:10.916)
Mm-hmm.

Steve Feuerstein (14:11.233)
They were involved in sports sponsorship as a tool to reach the mindscape, a strategic business tool to reach the strategic, you the mindscape of their consumers, whether that be B2B or B2C. So if we were talking about collecting data about fans, as a foremost marketing expert, which I learned that you are, Forbes is one of top marketing experts in the world. How do you go about collecting data about?

fans as Aetna, if you will. understand team, but let's pivot and look at it as you back as CMO of Aetna.

Dave Edelman (14:48.3)
Yeah, I mean, certainly it was not something we did per se, but you could imagine as part of interactions with somebody, you could ask them, do they follow sports and bring in certain kinds of incentives for people to answer some questions because they might get access to a game, a player, some type of bonus in order.

in exchange for them providing information. There's different ways of getting access to assets from the sports teams that you sponsor. And you'd have to think pretty far in advance of what are the kinds of use cases you'd want to consider and how you'd use players. But let me turn it around a little, which is what we did do. For example, we were one of the sponsors of the New York Mets.

So we had a big presence in city field and New York Mets were a big sponsor. We were a big sponsor of theirs. And we got the rights to players, especially certain players who had family members with health conditions, who could then talk about that. And we could use that as videos and assets, motivational videos, videos that showed our connection with our members.

by having sports figures talk about some of their own struggles and what they were able to do, how they valued the struggles of people in their family, things in a couple of cases, things they may, especially from a mental health perspective, things that they have overcome. And so using that to actually create content that we could use in targeting people with different kinds of conditions and interests.

Whether even or not they were New York Mets fans, they might have heard of these sports figures and using that to create useful motivational content that's backed with a celebrity, you know, essentially which these sports players are. And so we did actually a fair bit of that, of recording and creating a library of different kinds of video statements. So that's one idea.

Dave Edelman (17:07.842)
The other thing could be just in the New York area per se, where the New York Mets play and they've got a fan base. You going deep in New York as a geography, using the incentive for tickets as a lure to get people to tell us more. First of all, if they're even interested in getting the tickets, that probably means they're fans or at least they want to get out to a ball game. And from that, you know, who are players that they're most interested in?

And use that to sponsor feeds. I mean we could see going forward if players are going to create Even more in terms of content for themselves We could sponsor feeds from those players right to members who are interested in them and so we can create more of a connection From players to the fans and even help the players create the content through marketing dollars. We provide we didn't go that far, but that could certainly happen

Steve Feuerstein (18:06.251)
You know, it's interesting you said that because in 2000, I was leading a athlete representation group online and we started the first ever athlete radio show, if you will. It was a weekly podcast. And I'm of the opinion that we're living in an era in transition where essentially any human being will become a media entity. And we're seeing the likes of that, obviously, where they themselves and the athletes you just referenced of having that

that ability to establish themselves in a holistic fashion. Today we call it an influencer, if you will. And I think we're just at the embryonic stages of what that becomes. And in your book, I subscribe to it 100%, what you spoke of also was this, to me, the extension in the marketing experience. First of all, you reference how holistically the company is going to get much more holistic in its management exercise.

this siloed approach of CFO, CMO, all the different, you know, chief data scientist, chief experience officer, chief strategy. This is perhaps over the five, 10 years ahead, we're going to see some form of consolidation into a federation of holistic running of a business and not so much silo based. But you spoke of something beautifully, which was how the personalized process has enormous impact

by virtue of a synergy when linked in with others in the ecosystem. You give great illustrations of that with Marriott, how Marriott is one of the foremost experts in the world of doing that. I had no idea the tens and thousands of properties they own and how effective they are in different names and under their umbrella of hotel entities. But to personalization.

Dave Edelman (19:45.048)
Mm-hmm.

Steve Feuerstein (20:02.921)
And this is something that I know you deal with. And as we look at the process of personalization in an era where the human is in some ways being phased out of the process. So the question you might ask, what is it? Reid Hoffman three weeks ago comes out, puts out on his LinkedIn an interview between Reid Hoffman of today.

Dave Edelman (20:31.556)
you

Steve Feuerstein (20:31.593)
And Reid Hoffman at the point he launched LinkedIn. And if you did not know who was who, you would, be 50-50 as a guess as to who was the authentic human. In fact, Reid said he has more requests for interview for his chat bot than he does for his human self, Reid Hoffman. So personalization in an era when we are heading now to an era where literally

Dave Edelman (20:40.9)
Yeah.

Yes.

Dave Edelman (20:49.124)
It's okay.

Steve Feuerstein (21:01.311)
all roads lead to a chat bot identity where my bot will interview Dave Edelman's bot. I call it the great, after reading half of your book, the great paradox of personalization. Your thought.

Dave Edelman (21:20.036)
There's something about that that still makes me uncomfortable, although I see the possibilities. Let's actually start though with pushing the ecosystem piece that you were talking about earlier, Steve, because we didn't quite get into that and how that links to where you're going now. Because I just want to lay out a little bit more about the ecosystem.

Steve Feuerstein (21:41.899)
Yeah, 100%. And those are kind of good, there were some good segments there that I was looking forward to sharing with you. I just wanna make sure we put them out on the table. One was the paradox of personalization. The other was this enormous opportunity that has always been there offline, which is how do we, particularly in sponsorship, I've got 20 other sponsors of the same event. Why am I not identifying those who have

an ecosystem I wanna get involved in, channels of distribution that I can effectively penetrate. And what you've identified as personalization certainly gives you the power to particularly, and I'll just point out one thing before I yield the mic back to you. And that is, you're going on a trip and literally you get out, get the car, it's playing your Spotify music in the car. It tells you 30 miles in advance when you should be arriving perhaps to your quick food establishment.

that I loved your term healthful food opportunity. And you the opportunity to get a healthful indulgence for another discussion to define healthful. But with that said, everything becoming this synergistic opportunity to leverage your other expressions of your own personal identity in your journey to expressing who you are, but leveraging those spokes that you have.

that make up the hub of you as a person.

Dave Edelman (23:11.0)
Yeah. So there's two things first from an ecosystem perspective that we should realize is making connected ways to provide personalized solutions possible. So Gen.ai can write code. We don't talk about that explicitly enough. We're starting to now by saying that code can create agents and agentic AI that'll get things done for you. But Gen.ai can write code.

It can actually look at one database, understand its schema, look at another database, understand that schema, and write the code to combine those databases and exchange data between them and normalize that data so that you can actually have connection that hitherto required a lot more programming and more sophisticated what were APIs before that.

And so it's really streamlining AI, the ability to move information around in a managed way, because the AI can also control who has access to which data, have an audit trail from a privacy and a security perspective. And so the management of the movement of data across an ecosystem has become dramatically simplified. And that enables

what I would call destination brands where you might go to get a solution like Marriott booking a trip. I want to do a 10 day trip to Spain with my two teenagers. Here's our budget. You know, we want to do lots of good restaurants, maybe a couple of museums, blah, blah, blah. And you put that all in, Marriott can come back and provide you a sample itinerary.

But Marriott needs other parties to coordinate that. They cannot do that all themselves. And so they need to create that ecosystem and a way for data to move with standards so that they can provide that integrated solution, a personalized solution to you. You look like you want to say something, Steve. I'll let you go ahead.

Steve Feuerstein (25:25.129)
No, you brought us back to a beautiful place. I just wanna just compliment what you're saying, which is so interesting because when you look at VIP corporate hospitality companies that literally for sports events, let's take perhaps the most prominent, going to the Super Bowl. And what you just described, when you were talking about going to museums, think about the, when again, putting on your hat of CMO of Aetna and you want to entertain some of your most important VIPs.

Dave Edelman (25:27.78)
Okay.

Steve Feuerstein (25:55.412)
right? Most important little redundant there, your VIPs, if you will. And at the end of the day, you recognize, and this is the question I want to follow up with here, you described a perfect use case of what exists in the business of sports. Yet in our world, and I've been in this now 35 years, and our business, our main technology company deals with this every day, which is optimization. So I want to ask you as the marketing expert,

Dave Edelman (26:00.388)
You

Steve Feuerstein (26:25.679)
How do we not just fill in, and I don't mean this to be necessarily a rhetorical question, but how do we not just fill in those synergistic connections that seem to me, based on my market research, to make sense of what my user, my customer might want? And how do I ultimately know what is optimal so that the synergies and those other entities, quote unquote, vendors, if you will,

Partners, if you will, are not just being plugged in to make a holistic experience. I covered your car, I covered your hotel, I covered your sports event, your food, I covered the whole ecosystem. But I also want to cover it optimally. Where does the optimization fit

Dave Edelman (27:11.478)
So a couple of things there. First of all, you have to define what you mean by optimal. And one of the things AI works best under is when it has a goal. so AI can test and learn to achieve a goal, to get a reward for achieving some goal. So what is your metric? Is your metric, that combination of things actually leads to more business? Then you need to capture the data on more business.

that range of things actually leads to somebody using it, or that range of things leads to somebody providing feedback on their satisfaction. You do need a goal when you have optimization, and you've got to create something measurable that you can capture. And then coming back to something I said quickly before, you've got to test and learn. And one of the most important things that AI needs is data in order to constantly be fed

what works and what doesn't. So it can learn which things it should be doing in different cases. And so the more you can test and learn and set up what you're doing in a way that is measurable and manageable at scale, the faster you'll get information back, the faster you'll understand your systems will be able to optimize. And we actually call that the personalization advantage in the book.

One of the things we've noticed in all the personalization leaders is how they have gotten to a point where they're constantly running experiments, constantly. And they're using principles that are drawn from agile software development and applying that to marketing and to testing out customer experiences where every two weeks they're getting stuff out the door. They're testing and learning, testing and learning. Now, you know, doing a Superbowl is only once a year. So it's hard to get the data back.

to be able to have fast cycle test and learn. Maybe there are smaller games in between, other ways, but creating that base of data, the faster you can do it, the faster you can optimize.

Steve Feuerstein (29:26.741)
You know, as you speak to that, it's interesting. One thought that came to mind when, and again, to an earlier comment you made, was discussing about how personalization is going to reward the consumer, reward that customer through your data, revelational experience. You've, you've pursued data, you've analyzed the data.

And your interpretation or the AI's interpretation, the trend of data is leading you to believe that this would be the best service to provide to our client and provide to them that opportunity to opt in with some type of call to action. And it is interesting because you spoke earlier about that call to action. What's that reward? And there is this kind of analog between machine learning, reinforcement learning of a reward system.

Dave Edelman (30:07.524)
Mm-hmm.

Steve Feuerstein (30:20.431)
of how we train a model. And literally here, just interestingly enough, of talking of personalization by virtue of rewarding the consumer, which we see so little of from our business lenses today in that world of professional sport. I'll give you without naming the brand in the financial services industry, we literally saw a title sponsor of a large multi-million dollar golf tournament.

in financial services with credit cards, literally provide a website to the marketplace. It's been around for tens of years. And on that website, there was no option to purchase with their own credit card. Whereas if you looked at a competitor like Mastercard, who were not a competitor, but a fellow financial service business, the Arnold Palmer Invitational, presented by Mastercard on the PGA tour.

Dave Edelman (31:06.404)
you

Steve Feuerstein (31:18.219)
What you see throughout the entire website is buy here and get a 10 % discount if you pay with your MasterCard. And it was such an illustration of what I lived to, which is big boys with big toys very often make big mistakes. So how do we ultimately surmount this aspect? And again, as I was reading your book, this is what came to top of mind. How do we prevent this human ability to influence the outcome of the interpretation of the AAI?

Dave Edelman (31:24.93)
Of course.

Dave Edelman (31:31.01)
Yeah.

Steve Feuerstein (31:48.981)
which would then defeat the goal, again, recognizing that you asked a good question about how do we define optimal. But how do we get the human less involved on the interpretation and more involved on the implementation of what the objective data is supposedly reflect?

Dave Edelman (32:08.341)
Yeah, it starts with having from the top down and this is why we talk about it as a C-suite issue, not just a marketing issue, a sense of how you want to compete. Do you want to compete based on the way you are creating value for customers by activating information that you have or can get about them?

And so down through the people involved making the decisions, having a constant sense of prioritization that what we're trying to do is empower them to do something. And that empowerment has a set of goals for the customer and for us as a business. And because it has goals for us as a business, it can justify the investment. And we can actually see whether we are getting towards that investment.

Because let's face it, a lot of these personalization initiatives cost money. And it's not like companies have capital just sitting around. So you've got to put it towards a use that's going to generate value. And leaders think about those empowerment use cases towards the mutual value that you can have on both sides. Let me give you just a very simple example.

This isn't from sports, but it is financial services. we had a terrific interview with David Dittenfoss, who was the chief marketing officer at Fidelity. And Fidelity actually collects not just your transaction information, but for a big tranche of customers, what their financial goals are. What are they investing for? Most companies use that once to figure out your allocation of investment assets at the point

when you create that plan. But that plan should be a living document. And so what they said is they want to empower customers to manage towards a plan, not just set up some assets at the beginning towards a plan. So they use that as data as people might veer off plan to make them aware of things that they could do to get back on plan.

Dave Edelman (34:26.852)
All of a sudden they have a bunch of investment money that's come in from a bonus. How should they invest that time back to the plan? They could change that plan, but that plan becomes a backbone of their relationship with fidelity. then fidelity goes one more step by saying, when we do send content to you, what kind of content do you engage with? Do you like text? Do you like charts? Do you like little tick tocky videos?

Young people do like the TikToki videos. They don't like texts, but it's individual. And so they start to look at the nature of the, regardless of what's in the content, the nature of that content. And they start to realize that Steve likes those TikToki videos. Dave likes charts and graphs that show him the difference. And so they bias the way they bring the message to you towards the content that you're interested in. So that's.

really thinking about empowering your customers to help them hit their goals, to be using content that they're going to engage in. So that flows all the way down through now in the organization, how they think about content, how they think about marketing programs, service. When you call in, they want to make sure your goals are still there, have things changed in your life that might make you change your plans.

it just flows down. it takes that kind of ethos in the company. It's a strategic way of operating.

Steve Feuerstein (36:03.905)
You know, as I think about the article I read when it was, I think you entitled it competing on customer journey, is that correct? 2015, 2015. You had four tenants, if I recall. One was personalized, one was proactive personalization. was automation, proactive personalization, contextual interaction.

Dave Edelman (36:12.772)
Yeah, that was from 2015, yes. Yep.

Steve Feuerstein (36:32.431)
and journey innovation. And as I think about those, so you had proactive personalization and that became personalized, kind of snuck its way into the title of your book. But you're very consistent about customer journey and recognizing that so many of us have the mindset and in sports sponsorship, there's no question.

Dave Edelman (36:41.504)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, so good.

Steve Feuerstein (36:58.601)
I'd say it's probably as acute as it comes, particularly when you're not in a league sponsorship or seasonal sponsorship and you're in an event related, let's call it a four day pro golf tournament, a one week or two week professional tennis tournament. You might be involved in a shorter term engagement that, that frankly makes you look at the relationship on a very finite basis. And by the way, as a league, it's very interesting just to give you

the mindset, even though you lived at it in Aetna, you might sponsor a league. And at the end of the day, when it's over, you have a hiatus. And there's, we're seeing the birth of what we would call almost 12 months around the year, you know, leagues now, what you've particularly seen what's happening in basketball. So my question to you is very specific to this journey. It seems that the biggest threat I got out of it outside of what you mentioned about code.

Dave Edelman (37:37.976)
Mm-hmm.

Dave Edelman (37:45.092)
Yeah.

Steve Feuerstein (37:57.143)
And by the way, we're coming up, I think in February, the two year anniversary of Code AI and Co-Pilot. And as you talked about, think Sundar Puchai just from Google said, think, what is it? 20 plus percent, 30 % of the code written by his company today is written by a machine. And paradoxically, one of the greatest threatened species of worker today is those who wrote the code are about to be obsolete, right? Software, I just read a fascinating article, Dave.

Dave Edelman (38:02.414)
Mm-hmm.

Dave Edelman (38:11.94)
I, yeah.

Dave Edelman (38:18.084)
I'm

Yeah.

Steve Feuerstein (38:26.807)
about literally all the boot camps that I watched populate five, six years ago. And particularly after the announcement of chat GPT-3 in November 2022 and boot camps abounded. And today they're closing down, they're scuppering, they're shuttering. Literally they can't place the engineer, software engineer in a job. They were at 95 % before, they're below 50 % today from some of them.

As we progress on this customer journey.

The extension for your 30 year career thus far has been one of identifying the unit, the individual, right? Segmentation for once, penetrating that singular. You then evolved and expanded into this more robust experience going from me, as you described using AI in modern era. First it's for me, then it's for us, and then focus on the client, right?

that extension going beyond me, us, it's all about the client. My supposition is, and I don't see anything averting it, what would you suggest the journey to me, the logical journey beyond, if we go into the likes of the futurists, is really ultimately what's called transhumanism or this first stage, the chat bot, where it's digital, looks human, talks human.

speaks human, seems to know my consciousness. Where does this journey flow as we go to this next threshold beyond GEN.AI?

Dave Edelman (40:13.588)
I think it's going to vary, of course, a lot by person. But I think what we're going to see more and more is people using AI tools for the things they just simply want to get done. Where are we still connected? I'm sorry, did we?

Steve Feuerstein (40:35.543)
while I lost you for one second. You were saying that we're here. If you could repeat the part about users using it.

Dave Edelman (40:38.166)
Okay, I'll come back. Let me re-record it. Let me re-record it. Yeah. So people are going to use AI for the things they just simply want to get done and do not want to take their own emotional time, their own self-realization value to do. There's just, and different people have different thresholds for that, for the things they like.

Some people really like using their hands to build carpentry. Some people don't. And I think we're going to see much more, not just a bias that we have in social media of just hearing the things you want to hear. I think from AI, we're going to be doing the things we want to do. And we can do those more deeply and better with the help of AI, but then there'll be a whole lot of things we just don't want to do. We want to delegate them.

that the AI can do for us. Now, trust is going to be an enormous issue. What do you trust another, some other party, some AI company that runs some kind of agent to do? What information will you provide them? Will you trust them with? What will you think they can actually get done on your behalf without errors?

I think it's going to be a huge question in terms of figuring out how that's going to play out. But I think people are going to bias towards more and more the things they want to spend time doing, the way they want to expand their brains, the way they want to physically connect with other people, the way they want to experience sport or art from a live standpoint.

I think we'll see maybe even more time for live interactions because a lot of the other stuff that people might do and trap behind the screen can be done by AI. But I think it's this notion in general of moving towards deeper self-realization where you do the things you want to do, you explore it. The danger is, there's a lot of dangers, but one big danger is being in a bubble.

Dave Edelman (42:57.285)
is not discovering new things, not expanding your mindset.

Steve Feuerstein (43:00.629)
The echo, I was just gonna ask you, I wasn't gonna go to the echo chamber.

Dave Edelman (43:05.348)
Yeah, the echo, and I'm just seeing this, for example, very simply in my Spotify picks, Spotify is so good at knowing what I like to listen to. It's now, it's been lately over the last 18 months, narrowing my world instead of expanding it. And I think that kind of bias is dangerous. And it narrows our minds, especially people younger. So there's a lot of risks to this.

Steve Feuerstein (43:32.693)
I'm so glad you brought that up because I was gonna bring up the issue of the echo chamber. I was gonna bring up from the book when you talk about getting out of the car, getting my Spotify playlist, getting the food I want, where's the exploration? Where's the journey that takes me beyond myself? So I'm not just living within a cocoon and I literally stagnate because you think all I wanna hear is what I like today, but I have become the person I am today.

by as Richard Bach said in his book, 140 years ago, I've given everything in my life to become the person I am today. But I also want to go beyond the person I am today. And the reason I became the person I am today is because I explored, experienced in such diverse ways that I want you to pitch me other types of music. I know you're a saxophonist and a very good one, and you were a music major also in school.

With that said, I will say that I want occasionally to listen to the trumpet. Give me a shot. know, Ella Fitzgerald is cool. don't give me and I do think as I was hearing you speak, I and that's why I didn't bring it up. I answered it for myself because you and I know the next iteration has to come with the companies recognizing that I have to serve you a certain percentile based on your proclivities.

Dave Edelman (44:32.696)
Yeah.

Steve Feuerstein (44:56.363)
to know what out of the comfort zone within that standard deviation is reasonable beyond the comfort zone to help Dave live to his potential by serving me certain content that has to go above and beyond what I experienced today.

Dave Edelman (45:18.116)
Yeah, and I think AI so far hasn't proven its ability to do that at scale yet at all. And I think that's where humans are going to have to play a big role in this of tuning the models to have that kind of, I call it swing, where they can swing a bit wider.

Steve Feuerstein (45:28.788)
exponentially.

Steve Feuerstein (45:41.441)
Mmm.

Dave Edelman (45:43.428)
to expand the possibilities of what they recommend and do. I also think it's why we have to test and learn, test and learn, test and learn, because you don't know there could be something new that somebody would respond to that you hadn't thought of. So again, it comes back to tenets of we need people to understand people to drive the strategy of what that empowering experience should be.

But then you also need from an operational standpoint, setting yourself up to relentlessly test and learn, test and learn, test and learn in a way that doesn't get you into a narrower box, but helps you open up and grow and help your customers grow. I think that's going to be one of the big challenges going forward.

Steve Feuerstein (46:34.325)
Dave, what a pleasure. look forward, sincerely, really look forward to having another journey with you through this whole human experience, customer experience, again, co-author of personalized customer strategy in the age of AI with Mark Abraham out of the Boston Consulting Group. We'll do it again, Dave. It was a real pleasure having you on the Transaction Report.

Dave Edelman (46:56.462)
Terrific to be here. Great conversation, Steve. Thank you.

Steve Feuerstein (47:00.523)
Thank you. And by the way, if for some reason the video proved to be problematic, we have a wonderful audio ahead.