 Welcome back Paul Gillan here with Rob Strashay. We're in the last, the final sessions, final hours of Red Hat Summit 2023 and Ansible Fest, which is part of Red Hat Summit this year. And it's been all about Ansible this afternoon. So our next guest will further that discussion. Rob, I understand you were a recent customer of our next guest. I am. I needed some shampoo and my son and I went in there and we're able to find it. It was, and it was a fantastic experience by the way. Outstanding. I mean, it's great, great to hear as we were talking about just a moment ago. I mean, smiling associates ready to help guests. That's, that's the name of the game. It's Ulta Beauty. Experience is the name of the game. And Jesse Amerson is the, Amerson or Amerson? Amerson, Amerson. Is IT director for performance automation and quality at Ulta Beauty. The nation's largest beauty retailer and one that's known for its focus on customer, on a great customer experience. And you're all about automation, I understand. Correct. Yeah, it's a long title, right? Performance automation and quality. Automation is at the center of that very deliberately. When we talk about automation with an Ulta, we're talking about giving back labor hours, giving back productivity hours to our technology professionals who can be working on the harder problems that are facing our business, facing our guests. We want to automate what is the, I would call it necessary. It's oil that does not have to be done manually. That's the goal. Interesting, there's a case study on the red hat side about your story and it has the phrase, the retailer's using automation as a catalyst for innovation and cultural change. I don't think of those two things as being related, but obviously you've figured it out. Right, right, automation. People think automation, okay, well, that's great, but it's kind of like, duh, sure you should be automating. So just go automate it and it'll be good. And again, coming back to this notion that everyone is tapped for resources and hours. Everybody's asked to do too much, not enough people, not enough time. And so when we talk about taking the toil out of the work, the workday of our technology professionals, we're talking about giving back hours for innovation. We're talking about giving back capacity to go out and figure out a better way of doing whatever it is that we need to do. It might be working on a new business model. It might be making improvements to our digital footprint, whether it's our digital store, whether it's our digital technology that our guests do see. We're giving back hours so that we can give those back to the company and our guests to figure out how to serve them better. How has this helped you not only retain employees, but incent them? I mean, it's been a tight labor market, irrespective of the recession and everything else that's going on. How does this help you when you're trying to go and get people and bring them in? Sure, I think there's a much bigger story around that that's still playing out, right? And I think it's all about, is am I going to work for a company who is doing things the old fashioned way? Am I going to work for a company that's doing things manually that's going to make it hard for me? We spoke about experience. Paul Wright, you introduced her right in the top of the segment. We were talking about it before. It's experience for our associates as well. It's our customer experience. It's our associate experience. And people who are talented have options. They can go work for companies that are automated. They can go work for companies that are working on leading technology. And what we want to be doing at Ulta is showing that we're ahead of the curve too. We're leading edge. We're adopting a tool stack that is going to make your job more enjoyable that your peers are talking about in their jobs, technology like Ansible, like Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform that brings people to these conferences like Summit because they're excited about the technology. That's why we're here. So what are some of the more notable use cases of Ansible at Ulta Beauty? Certainly. So we are on a very significant transformation with SAP. We are migrating from ECC to SAP S4 HANA. And there is a ton of automation opportunity in doing this. This is a once every 20 year typically exercise for large organizations that run ERP platforms. It's no different for Ulta. And so you don't go in and fundamentally rewire this part of the technology stack very often. This is a golden opportunity for us. Everything from the core infrastructure, the virtual machines, the environment that we're provisioning that SAP runs on top of all the way up through the configuration of SAP as an application, the ongoing maintenance of it, the ability to restart our SAP cluster following planned outages like patches, following unplanned events if they happen, such as incidents, things that will bring down our instance, that is super value to the organization on the order of weeks and months that have been reduced to a button press. And it's done the same way every time. So where are you from a cloud journey perspective as you're modernizing? It sounds like you're automating and modernizing at the same time. We are, and there's a very heavy overlap between cloud, where the workloads are being executed, and automation, right? There's not, they're not rigid. They don't have to go together. They often do, because when you're moving to the cloud, you're lifting the hood on a number of things. It's similar to that, that S4 journey. You're looking at an application. You're looking at how it's engineered. Is it engineered for the cloud? Is it, is it, is it cloud native? Is there a version of it that's cloud compatible? And when you're looking at that, you're also looking at how am I deploying that application? How am I deploying the infrastructure it runs on? How am I configuring it? And so yes, those two conversations happen frequently, and we're talking internally now about a cloud operating model that is inclusive of Ansible, and it talks more about the broader lifecycle than just the automation, and where's the automation in that journey? Now, one of the features of Ansible is that you can encapsulate your YAML automations into playbooks. You can share those, you can modify them. What are some of the best practices you've learned for how to share those expertise, that expertise that you've encapsulated in those playbooks across the organization? 100%. So we want to propagate design patterns. We want to propagate modules. We want to propagate YAML code that is efficient. It is written in a way that is maintainable, and we put governance around that so that when other consumers pick that up, oh, hey, well, I didn't realize, this whole playbook may not be what solves my problem, but here's a snippet from that playbook that gives me an idea, or it helps me understand. We're still in the early stages of the governance, so we don't have that completely figured out, but we do know that we need to keep very careful control over how playbooks are syndicated. We need to be looking at where partner YAML code is coming in, how we're qualifying that, and then how we're redeploying it for other use cases. We are still figuring that out, for sure. Yeah, it seems exciting with some of the announcements that made specifically around lightspeed this week, which would seem to play very well into that in the future of where you're going. Absolutely. Really excited you brought up Lightspeed Rob. I was hoping that you were, Paul, bring it up. Absolutely, so I've been following this for about the last six months as the word started to spread in the community about the project inside Red Hat, and heard the lightspeed name for the first time yesterday, yes, super stoked, and I'll tell you the number one thing that I'm really excited about, and I did not know about this until yesterday, and that is that when Lightspeed recommends a code snippet, or it recommends a next line, or a next part of the syntax in your YAML, it's also going to show you where that's coming from. It's going to cite itself. It's going to cite its source, and that is super, super helpful. So whatever product team thought about that feature, because it wouldn't have made the headlines. It's not the coolest thing on the planet. That is super cool because it allows us, that is a teaching aid within that application. That is super, super cool. Imagine going in, you're citing, oh, okay, I understand now why this was recommended. Yes, sometimes there's going to be a relevance conversation, but more often than not, there's probably going to be, oh, I just learned something else because I saw the source. And it moves away from that sort of black box, or around AI. Black box is a really big challenge right now. It's a challenge for AI. I personally believe it's a challenge for technology. I think that at the heart of, when I'm trying to influence our user community within Ulta, and I was talking about this earlier with some of our colleagues at Red Hat, I think there's a human agency challenge here. People want to understand that they're still in control. They want to understand that the technology is there to augment or further enable them. That it is not going to either get in their way, or sort of way out to the left to splice them, or be some kind of threat. More often than not, people don't understand. It's that black box that you're talking about. And demystifying that is what brings the human agency back into the picture, and it's what's going to drive adoption of products like Ansible. I firmly believe that. You have to be looking at uses of AI generative and otherwise within your own company, or your customer-facing applications. What use cases intrigue you? Yeah, so right now I think there are really, really strong opportunities internally with products like Lightspeed that are going to reduce toil. They're going to reduce barriers to introducing new technologies. I think that is going to be a huge theme in technology from a technologist's point of view over the next five to 10 years. When we think about it on the customer side, what we need to do is we need to be doing two things at once. We need to be really careful with that customer data, and we also need to be giving the customer a better experience. So there's a level of transparency that's going to have to come into that conversation as well. And I don't think we've figured that out yet, but there are all kinds of use cases. I mean certainly product recommendations is an example. Accessing large libraries of beauty tips would be another very basic example, but you need to do that in a way that's not only contextually relevant in adding value, but you want to creep people out. And I think we've been talking about that for about five years or so now, and there's a creep out factor with AI that we have got to make more transparent in a way that doesn't add complexity to the customer. How much do you want to know, but drive credibility? I think playing off of that a little bit in retail to your point, the creep out factor, I actually worked for an open source software company that did the first party data creep out factor and helped to build that AI and they recommend the next product and based on certain models. Right, right, right. How, I guess it has to be a delicate balance to how far you go with that. And is there that same kind of balance that when you're looking at Ansible and how far you go to automation, like you were talking about, you don't have the governance nailed at this point. I think there's a lot of people in that camp, so. Of course, right, of course. So how do you balance that out, I guess you could say? Right, you know, I'm going to give an answer. I gave it at a round table a few hours ago, right? And it's maybe not the answer that everybody would like to hear, but it's the reality on the ground, which is, you claw and scrape and dig around and you look for ways of adding value, use case at a time, potential internal customer at a time, maybe talk with our network team, talk with our infrastructure team, find a team member who is passionate about learning and trying something new, and have an open conversation. We think this is an outstanding platform. There are going to be playbooks that our technology partners have written for your use case. Take a look, talk to us, talk about a problem you have, and let's figure it out together. Oh, by the way, we are a center for enablement. We're going to work with you on governance and support, but we also don't have it all figured out. We just want to start somewhere. And I think that's a big theme, is just starting somewhere. Now, you're entering, this is a multi-phase transformation you're on, you're entering your third phase right now. Correct. What will that look like? Right, right, so I define success in this third phase as automation is just how we do things around here, right? And in my view, it is where there is a large population within Ulta's technology department that is fluent in Ansible, right? They may not have mastered Ansible, that's okay, but they're executing Ansible playbooks every day, and in many cases, they're writing or extending the playbooks that they use. To me, that embodies automation being just how we operate, just how we do things around here, and that's what I'm looking for. The proof points will come, the metrics will come, the savings will come. It will be that community of practitioners that I will look to and go mission accomplished. I think this is an awesome thread because it actually came up and it was a question posed to Matt Hicks, the CEO. Sure. So you'll love this. It was, he was posed the question of how do you feel, especially with Lightspeed and Prompt Engineering as it's becoming? Prompt Engineering, yeah. How do you feel about the fact that the playbooks that you use, that you contribute back to the community? I think I know your answer on this one, but I want to hear it because I think it's one of these sensitive topics about do you see those playbooks as your intellectual property or are you glad to give them back to the community and have everybody learn from what you've done? Raging debate right now, right? It's a super huge debate because all of a sudden, AI has come into essentially everybody's living room with chat GPT, right? That is the moment we're all living in and I'm not going to forget where I was or what the context was when I first heard chat GPT and I went, what is that? It wasn't that long ago, right? It was a matter of months ago. And of course, all of a sudden, what we're looking at is the substance of, more or less our civilization being indexed and then serve back with massive compute to answer any question that you can pose, right? And so that's leveraging nearly infinite IP, right? It's nearly infinite intellectual property from our civilization. And so I absolutely think that that's something to wrestle with. My answer, I'm going to bring it down to the ground level a little bit with you is my answer is the reason that I'm here sharing this stage with the two of you, the reason that I was hosting a round table earlier today, I did another event yesterday is because we absolutely believe in open source. There is an intellectual property discussion and debate that is started but far from over. But in my world, I know that if we contribute, we're going to get more back from the community. And that's what it's about. So for me, it's about connecting up other customers. It's about learning from our Red Hat partners. It's about sharing what's working and what's not and it's going to go to the playbooks. I mean, we're not going to be shy about sharing. We had someone ask us for a snippet of a playbook in, I want to say that it was Ansible Fest late last year and we provided it, you know, and we will do that. In technology roles that I've been in, I have not been shy in the past about sharing code. I think that's important. There may be a boundary there with respect to how accessible it gets getting posted up on GitHub. But when you're talking about sharing informally within the community, that's a given. And you're going to get more out, you're going to get more in return than what you put in. I'm firmly convinced of that. You have a strong point of view and you're not afraid to share it. That's fantastic. I agree, I agree. A great story at Ultra Beauty with automation, with the culture based on automation and around customer service. How can you argue with that these days? Jesse Amerson, IT director for performance, automation and quality. Thanks so much for joining us and telling us the Ultra Beauty story today. Thank you, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me. We will be right back. We're in the closing stretch of Red Hat Summit and Ansible Fest in Boston. Paul Gillan with Rob Strashe. We'll be back in a few minutes.