 I think AI is a reflection of humanity and a real opportunity for everyone to move forward. Katie, thank you for joining us. So you obviously, the nature of your role involves innovation. I'm also really interested about what happens when you try and bring a whole organisation along. So often there's people like you, sat in an organisation who are focused on innovation, the rest of the organisation has legacy ways of doing things and can sometimes be a little harder to bring along. So how do you kind of create a culture of innovation? Yeah, I'm really fortunate to sit as part of a centre of expertise that Publisys has invested in. It's been building over the last two or three years and there's a very strong central group of about 100 leaders who have then propagated the good word about innovation and embracing technologies like Web 3 and AI and helping their teams to learn about it so that they can then spread that message across our group. And we've actually, over that period of time, we've been able to about 3,000 people across our business to run activations with our customers through this sort of scaling methodology of making sure that there's a centre of expertise and that we can proliferate that through internal knowledge development but also with our clients and really support the use cases so people can understand how they can use this technology to engage consumers. So you've said Web 3, it seemed to be the main topic of conversations. We talked about innovation in the ad industry, that was it. And then November of 2022, it seemed like collectively everyone just moved on. But like Web 3, Metaverse, NFTs, none of it's gone away. And so I'm interested in kind of like, now the hype has disappeared and it actually can continue to grow without that. Where is it heading? Yeah, well I think Web 3 has all kinds of fantastic opportunities and we're working on immersive experiences but also working on quite a lot of blending Web 3 technology with real life experience. So thinking about how Web 3 tech like wallets and NFTs are going to completely change the way that we have relationships with consumers as brands and retailers, the way that we build loyalty programs, the way that we gamify and incentivize their participation and their engagement, it's going to radically transform social channels and the way that the Web works and the data that we have about consumers. Not to mention the internet of things and thinking about data signals coming from wearable devices for example and from your phone and then layering this fantastic level of kind of AI on top of all of that to really understand so much more and have so much more insight about what people are interested in, what they care about. There's just going to be a dawn of a new era of understanding and ability to micro-target and personalize the brand messages, the experiences, the content, etc. And you sort of just touched on it a little bit. I want to explore it a little bit further because as whenever we talk about innovation and the things that happen, sometimes people, humans are forgotten and so we kind of like innovating but we forget that actually there are people that need to interact with the innovation and use it for it to kind of become a thing and so how do you kind of ensure that you are still connected with people? Well it's really interesting actually. I'm going to steal a thought maybe from somebody else that I heard say this during CAN and in that actually AI actually just makes us, it tells us more about human beings. The data that AI uses to train its models is actually a function of decades of history, of humans gathering lots of information and speaking to each other in social channels and having ideas and being creative so AI actually couldn't be more human in a way. It might not be able to exactly replicate what it's like for you and I to have a conversation right now but it's already so much better since the advent of GPT4 and it's going to continue to evolve so I think AI is a reflection of humanity and a real opportunity for everyone to move forward with more knowledge, with being able to progress their projects more quickly to be more cost efficient and to have exciting work to do essentially. Actually that's a really refreshing perspective to kind of talk about the humanity that's actually inbuilt into AI but I guess the opposite to that or the counterforce to that is that that comes with inherent like human failures as well a lot of biases so how do you kind of rule some of that stuff out and nullify it? Yeah I think it's very important to train machine learning models to understand bias and discrimination and to recognize when and to call out red flags. It's just like we have brand safety measures and technology already built into the way advertising works today. We need to make sure that the AIs are aware of that, that they're guarding against it, that they're not picking up all those really negative points that you know that affect our society today and that could proliferate in a kind of a very quickly large language model learning kind of environment but you know I think humans are still at the helm so humans can govern that and the technology isn't going to kind of run off and do its own thing so I think it's important that you know just like you treat your child, train your child or teach them about you know good morals and ethics you know we can give guidance to machine learning to help it to have structure around what's okay and what's not and what's acceptable and what's right in our society as well. I would love to like understand like brands that you feel like have utilized some of the more newer technologies in interesting ways so kind of we learn from other examples case studies and so what would be the ones that you'd point to go actually that's good use of tech. Yeah well I think you know we have like very fortunate to have some of some brands within our portfolio that are very innovative and I'm sure it'd be no surprise to anyone if you've been to VivaTech for example that LVMH is one of our most innovative and forward-thinking brands and they actually love to experiment and you know and I saw them last year at VivaTech doing a lot with AI with avatars with augmented reality and you know they just they love to play with everything and I love seeing that from a brand so so I would say they're one of the more extreme examples of brands that do that and like to tell the world about it as well share the innovation with everyone else and show what's possible. We have brands that are leading innovation in a variety of different ways some of them are that I unfortunately can't name are working on the first decentralized identity propositions at scale that are going to be very very exciting things for the world that you know enable the real opportunity for consumers to have control of their own data to maintain their own privacy but also have this sense of true interoperability across the things that they're interested the brands they love the products they love in ways that have never been possible before so yeah so more coming soon on that. I'm only I'm vaguely familiar but I somewhere or audience might not actually know anything that's happening so it'd be good for you to maybe understand like break down what the challenge is and therefore what does that mean. Yeah well I think if anyone has been you know watching the the the evolution of the kind of cookieless situation in the marketing industry as I'm sure we're all familiar with you know one way in which that will potentially be addressed going forward is actually with kind of decentralized wallet propositions with people having essentially an interoperable kind of global or universal account through having a web3 wallet and and also having we're designing a lot of solutions around that that are much more accessible to the average consumer and not like the web3 tone of techie that you have to be today to understand and remember all your passwords and everything. So a lot of those things will function in a much easier way in future and then that the way that web3 technology works is it's it's really easy to build applications so that you can actually have kind of a universal identity and then port that like all over you know different websites and different commerce spaces or real-life kind of IRL experiences as well as and virtual experiences in gaming etc and those are the kinds of things that are going to really allow us to navigate internet technology of the future and have the kinds of experiences I think brands have been imagining and hoping for for a very long time and consumers as well. So you're obviously you are like your job involves looking at what's next and so thinking about your role in two years time like what are the things that are maybe keeping you up at night or maybe just getting you excited. Yeah I'm I feel like we're at the tip of the iceberg about what web3 technology and AI could really be and what I'm very excited to see in in two or three years time is some of those use cases some of the things that we're working on with customers right now and not just us obviously there's lots of other organizations kind of racing towards being able to do the cool new newest coolest thing as quickly as possible but I I just I feel like the consumer experience is going to be so different in the blink of an eye really and especially with the release of like Apple's Vision Pro glasses for example there's you know real accessibility in many ways around and there are many other kinds of ones coming after them that are doing kind of they have immersive wearable technology that is going to change how we interact with the world and with the virtual world and and change how brands and retailers communicate with consumers so I'm actually just really excited over the next two or three years to see all of that come to fruition and so it we talked earlier a little bit about kind of like creating a culture of innovation but also like I also as like an innovation mindset so even if your job title doesn't have innovation in it you can still look at kind of have that sort of mindset so what would you maybe kind of what tips would you give for people to kind of be open to what's next well I think that that's the key word really is open and I was encouraged all the people on my team to keep learning keep going to events keep meeting people I think great ideas don't just come from one person and and oftentimes the the biggest leaps I've been able to take in my career or the greatest product ideas or you know the new ideas about how to communicate with people came from somebody that I you know I met at a cocktail reception or I reached out to on LinkedIn and just because they looked interesting and I wanted to know more about what they did and you know just be curious be open listen ask questions and you know try not to come into a situation with an agenda really be as open as possible to absorb what's going on around you because there's rich and exciting and creative things happening right now that you know I feel like you don't have to dig too far to really to learn about amazing stuff sign up to communities communities is like one of the core principles of of where culture is going and where all these technologies are going so make sure that you are if you're a marketer understanding the community signing up to them being part of them yeah I mean I think just keep learning really and then finally I'm going to ask you the opposite question which is kind of and this this is I heard this perspective many years ago and so I've sort of held on to it and it was the idea about like if you want to predict the future you could spend a lot of time trying to figure out what will change but at the same time you could probably identify the things that won't change and kind of use those as your guidepost for innovation so the example I was like chairs we've been sitting in chairs for a long time and we'll probably be sitting in chairs for the next hundred years so actually we're going to innovate think about chairs and I'm Chris from Yorkshire what are the things that you kind of think of as like eternal yeah well I kind of on the point we touched on before humanity is eternal and I think it's really important for people to not get so absorbed in the tech that they kind of forget the core principle but you know actually the tech is just an enabler and you know we still live our daily lives we socialize we have friends we have family etc and like that still remains the core of human experience but you know I think we're to kind of get back more on the professional on a professional level about it and web2 technology isn't going to disappear like all of our social channels aren't going to disappear overnight gaming as it's been up to this point isn't going to disappear overnight it's only going to keep growing and so I think you know I see all those fantastic things that already exist in our lives kind of continuing to evolve and become interesting and then kind of converging a little bit with all this new tech that's coming around and you know I think that and the core elements of those things and the things that are so popular with people like content is becoming actually a much much bigger you know content has existed in our industry forever but it's becoming a much bigger part of you know how you have a relationship with the consumer and how you build value and how you build loyalty and you know I think that's going to persist so a lot of the core principles of our industry are not changing radically just because you know there's a bunch of new buzzwords out there and new tech and new tools to play with there's a lot that actually we can take forward from all of the learning that we've had in the industry before all of the you know things that we know work and we know that yield a human response to them and we just we bring all of that past experience and all of this really great stuff together and it's going to be very exciting all these things are just things that make us social all these things are things that make us human yeah and so actually innovation that that sits around those things as core principles yeah will be really popular thank you learn a lot thank you so much