 Welcome back everyone, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are here live in Las Vegas for SAS Innovate 2024, along with Dave Vellante, my co-host and co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media in theCUBE. And I'm pleased to have Jen Chase here, Chief Marketing Officer at SAS. This is her show. She is the leader award-winning CMO. Jen, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Oh, it's excellent to be here. And thank you for being here. We love it. You guys have great guests. They're like great, we call them great talent because they're great on camera. They know their stuff. They bring a lot of A-game to theCUBE. We appreciate that. So all good. Technology is infiltrating marketing. I want to get your thoughts on this because I know you think a lot about this. AI, you see all the use cases. Oh, I can write your literature for you. But there's a lot more going on. And what's your vision on how AI is helping you and other marketers? Because there's a lot of heavy work that could be done but you still need to have creativity. You got to have great messaging. You got to have great player. All that's got to be there. Take us through your vision. Yeah, well, you started off with talking about how technology is infiltrated marketing. And I think that's 100% true. And gone are the days where marketing was creative only. So you have to be able to flex both your left and right side of your brain as a marketer. I think if they were to tape Mad Men now, it would be mad tech. Really, we have to be thinking about technology as an enabler for customer experience. And so that's really how we look at generative AI. I think it's imperative that CMOs now are setting the vision for how they want to apply generative AI, not only in their marketing department but actually leading that conversation too across the company. There's a lot of risks and a lot of rewards that will come from AI. And I think the more the CMO can be involved in those discussions with the customer experience at the heart of it, I think the better outcome you're going to get. Yeah, and you know what's great talking to some of your folks like Brian and your team, the team here at SAS, they see this generative AI as a generational categorical net new category. Yet you're leveraging all the SAS customer data and workflows, so there's an acceleration of value. On the marketing side, it's every generation you have the next thing happen. So you had the Mar-Tech stack. Oh yeah, email marketing inbound, you do all that optimizations, a lot of quant jocks out there going, okay, as the lead's converting, what is the lead? So a lot of stuff went on in marketing, the Mar-Tech stack as it's been called. What's the, because now we got another abstraction that's going to maybe simplify or abstract away the Mar-Tech stack and create net new capabilities. What are some of those things that you're eyeing? Because that looks different, but the game is still the same, you know? But it's different stuff going on. How you do it. How you do it. What is the generative version of that? Absolutely, absolutely. So as we look at the use cases that we want to pursue with generative AI, we're starting with what do we want to accomplish? What's the value we want to bring into the organization? So every new use case is being weighed against, is that going to make our marketers more productive? Are we improving the marketers experience in how they do their job? Is it going to improve our time to market? It's going to make us faster, which we think will give us competitive advantage. And then the third dimension is, how is it going to improve customer experience? And I don't think we're having that conversation enough about generative AI. Everything is about how do you make content faster? How do you do things faster, but to what end? And so we're challenging ourselves to really look at those three dimensions. One use case we've got in practice right now is how do we create promotional assets from an original piece of content? Whether that's a webinar or maybe it's a long form white paper. All of the derivative assets you want to create to promote that, can we do that faster with generative AI? And so we really, we think that's a real solid opportunity for us. So reuse and repurposing. Exactly, exactly. And so to your point about marketing still going to require, you need to be creative, right? That's where that comes in that original piece of content. And then it's the promotional assets. Getting those done faster, we think is a really effective use case. So excited about that one. Do you think of it as equally creative and quantitative? How are you thinking about that as a senior marketing team? I think it is. And one of the things that I want to guard against is if everybody's using ChatGPT to write a promotional asset, every company is going to look the same, right? And so we really need to make sure we continue to differentiate ourselves in the market. And so you have to have that creativity. And I think there's actually going to be a higher value put towards creativity and marketing as an outcome of this. So a lot of things that we see happening are like linear things are going away, like training content. You have this kind of content, sales content, all this content out there, ways to measure insights. Is it working? So you have analytics. Now you have things like knowledge graphs and neural networks. You mentioned original content and reuse. And then you complicate that with how do you get your message out? There's so many channels. So we might live in a world where there's some autonomous automation around identifying organic channels of distribution, paid channels of distribution. I don't yet see that fully developed yet. What's your vision on how that evolves? Because what you're getting at here is we shoot original content, you have all this data, you got to make sure they're in the right places and is it the right data? Or is it hallucinating? So what is your vision on this? This is an important cutting edge topic. People are really trying to figure this out. Yeah, a couple of thoughts. I think as marketers start to apply generative AI in kind of market mix modeling, which is almost what you're talking about earlier on, I think it's going to be just, one of the enduring qualities of generative AI is going to be how we engage with software and that it's done more in a prompt-based way. And so another use case that we're actively pursuing is how do you, in customer intelligence 360, look at your audiences, understand your customers better and you don't have to be a data scientist to do that if you have the ability to interact with the software through a prompt-based way. And so I think that's a really exciting opportunity moving forward that you're going to empower even more people in the marketing organization to be a champion of the customer. So that to me is a... Yeah, I saw Pamela on your team. I think she runs Combs and all the AR and PR stuff. And we were talking about the power of organic interaction and how people are sourcing information from their peers or they see the marketing misses out there and sometimes if they want messages delivered to them they might opt in for that. So there's kind of this progression of non-linear progression on the organic side that was traditionally earned media, paid media banner ads and whatnot is changing. So the role of paid, earned and owned media is evolving and changing. What is your vision on that? Because I think this is, I see a lot of marketers leaning on old playbooks like, oh, we're going to pay someone to amplify our message or be a mouthpiece for us. Or I'm going to put, this is our media, our brand and then earned, we just have people pitch journalists that no longer exist or those kinds of things. How do you see that the new earned owned and paid? Yeah, in fact, I would say we think about it as payzo. Paid, earned, shared and owned. So shared is how do we activate our employee base to be sharing more content on SaaS's behalf? You said they were, they're talent, right? They're subject matter experts. They have incredible credibility in the marketplace. We want to make sure that we're really empowering our employee base to be ambassadors of the brand and the technology throughout. So I think about it from a payzo perspective. So you're for your employees becoming active socially and tweeting and retweeting, LinkedIn, reposting, Reddit posts. Oh, great. Yes, absolutely. We have training programs in place. We have a tool that we use internally in order to help enable and empower that. Some are going to say, some are going to lock that down and say, you can't speak, you're not PR trained, only spokespeople. So you're like, go, be good judgment and... Absolutely, yes. We have a tremendous amount of trust in our employees. We provide them with the tools that we want to make sure they're empowered and enabled in order to have effective conversations. But each employee is a brand supporter for SaaS. Well, send that talent to the queue. We'd love more talent to come on the queue. We'd love the experts. So... I've got about 12,000 people ready and waiting. She's going to love that job. So notwithstanding this notion of reverting to the mean, maximum vanilla marketing. So I get that that's a risk. But there's stats out there that a lot of people are afraid that AI is going to take their job, especially in marketing. I'm curious as to how you think about it. To me, AI makes me smarter. So I don't want to be dumber. So I don't want to go backwards. So that's cool. But how do you think about that as a market? How do you prepare your people for that sort of optimism versus pessimism? Sure, it's such a great question. IDC published a report that said in the next two years they expect 30% of mundane marketing tasks to be automated through generative AI. And I am here for that. You're here, yeah. That is going to allow us to elevate and provide even more higher value back into the organization because we're not doing mundane tasks. At the same time, two out of three marketers are concerned about their jobs and whether or not AI will take their jobs. And what I am saying very clearly to my organization is it is not AI that's going to take a marketer's job. It's going to be a marketer who understands how to apply AI that will. So my job is to enable and empower my organization to use generative AI effectively. We've invested a lot in what we call lifelong learning for marketers. I mean, marketing's changed more, I think in the past two years than it has in the past 10. And so we need to make sure we're keeping our marketers really just very current on technologies and setting a standard of this is what it looks like to be a modern marketer and how we expect you to get there. You know, I love about the key was going to riff on topics with subject metrics like yourself and marketing. Last year, Brian Harris gave me a demo of a digital twin factory tour. He's like, look how cool this is. This is an actual digital twin. So I have to ask you, do you see a day where there's going to be a digital twin for this event or your customer experience? Because you know, you got Apple Vision Pro, you got the metaverse evolving. So I could imagine in a world where you replicate all the work and investments in this to have a digital version. Do you ever see that day coming soon? Yeah, I mean, as we went through the pandemic, we certainly created many more effective virtual experiences. So we got pretty good at that, I think as a marketing profession. What we do love about this event though is the conversations that you can have and the people and I mean, events are really about those connections you make because you can stream this content back in your office but to have the dialogue right after a presentation or to make a connection with a peer. Yeah, the virtual events are kind of like individuals, more like a passive consumption. The people component is huge here. Like if we can replicate that, that would be like the key thing. I mean, that's, to me, that's, digital twins are possible. And you can just say, you know, do something, but if no one shows up. Yeah, I mean, What's your biggest excitement and fear of the AI? It's a lot of unknowns. So you have to take some chances, which means you got to be prepared to innovate and be situational aware of what comes at you. What's your biggest excitement level? What's your excited about? And then what you might, you're watching closely. Yeah, you know, what I'm excited about is I do think we're going to make as a society tremendous gains applying generative AI and AI technologies, whether it's improved healthcare, just a better quality of life for everyone. My biggest fear is that we do, we need to do this responsibly and make sure that we're being fair, we're removing bias and being extremely transparent with everything we do with AI. And personal information, security, those kinds of things are, that's the responsibility part, trust me. Do you worry about our capacity to govern AI at some point, maybe not this year, next year, but maybe 10 or 20 years from now. If AI is smarter than all humans collectively and we're growing computational power exponentially, that's what I worry about. It's like, okay, that's so unpredictable. Maybe you don't have to worry about that for a couple of years, but I think it's coming, actually. I mean, to your point about healthcare, I mean, you know, it's said that we, you know, if you go from, you know, you're what, 50 years old and you turn 51, you're a year older. Well, actually, with healthcare these days and technology, you're actually only eight months older. So we're compressing that, who knows? Maybe we'll go backwards, you know? I mean, I think the integration of AI is going to be a top priority and you got a good handle on it. What's your plan for the next year? You guys run a lot of events, you get a lot of customer events. What's your vision for the next, what do you have in your to-do list this year and then next year? And how do you see AI maybe putting the toe in the water or maybe integrating in? What's your plan? Well, immediately after this event, we take it on the road. So we are going on tours called SAS Innovate on Tour. So we take a version of this to 14 different cities across the globe. And it's a great way for us to meet our customers in their backyards. And so we're really excited about that. And then we will do this again next year in May in Orlando. So we're already making plans for 25 and 26 actually. When I think about some big initiatives that we're putting into place, certainly want to do more to raise brand awareness for SAS. I think we've for 47 years have been quite humble and we've got a lot to boast about. We've got some great technology and so I'll be doing a lot of work around improving our brand awareness. One area that I'm excited to explore more generative AI is our website experience. I think that a web experience can be completely just reimagined with generative AI. So we're going to be rolling our sleeves up and thinking about that very differently. And those Innovate around the world, those are one day events? Those are two day events. Two day events. Two day events. Really, wow. Two day events. I'm going for it. So there's 28 days of this after this. 28 days of goodness coming around the world. You have all your sleeves picked and dates are all locked and loaded. We were locked and loaded as of January one because we wanted to make sure our sales teams when we had our company kick off knew exactly they could go back to their offices and invite their customers immediately. We are locked and loaded. Well, congratulations on a great event. Great to see you. And of course you guys do that great program. I was lucky to be invited. Thank you for having me. Yes, love to have you come back. Yeah, I hope to have a good performance like I did last time. Although, I got a hole in one. No, I'm definitely kidding. No, I didn't know. You got a net hole in one. I got a net hole in one. Excellent. Because you handicap. Never had that before. That's pretty cool. You're relying zero on that shot. First shot. I knew the rest of the round. I'm trying to carry it, everybody. You guys are a great company. And again, I think what's impressive is you guys are announcing firsts. Subscribe to models. That's the first, okay? Production workloads with customers. Those are firsts. So you got a first going on with the team right now. So that's going to be a big part of what you're doing. And we're using this event as our opportunity to launch our new product. So you could expect that in 25. You could expect that in 26. That's our plan. All right, so next year we'll be sitting here. What are we going to be talking about? Ooh, I think we're going to be talking more and more about quantum computing. You heard a little about that this morning. I think there's more legs to generative AI that we'll explore. I mean, we announced this morning Datamaker in synthetic data. And I think that's going to be something that will continue to have a richer conversation about next year. Great. Jen, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you. Thank you. All right, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be back with more coverage of SAS NOV24 after the short break. We'll be right back.