 Okay, so it is now my privilege to introduce Lynn Caposi, who is the Chief Marketing Officer of Aquia, doing her second stint at Aquia. I've known Lynn since her first stint at Aquia, which was seven or eight years ago, and so she's now back, and she would like to say a few words. Lynn? I'll try again. Good morning. Good morning. Excellent. Excellent. I love that. I love when people talk back. I'm going to be a few minutes, not to worry. So happy to be a sponsor again of Drupalcon. I tend to yell, so I'm going to back up a little bit. I had a great first day. Hopefully all of you did as well. In case you haven't seen a first glimpse of the picture yet, I get to do the first glimpse of the picture. So not to worry, there'll be other pictures coming out as well. So take a minute to look for your face and look for your wave if you were here yesterday. Thanks to our great friends, old friends, and new friends for me last night for the party from Media Current and Lingotech. So I blame you, but I thank you as well. So that was a fun, very fun night. And again, we're so happy to be sponsors of Drupalcon. We have a lot going on from Acquia this week. So if you haven't taken a few minutes, please do so and come by our booth. Come by and say hi. We really do have people in the booth. It's not an empty booth. So please come by and say hello. We have some great demos going on. Preston So did a fabulous presentation yesterday. We've got some great kind of Drupal presentations, technical deep dive. You can talk up here. So really just come by and say hi. And if you're not familiar with Acquia, please come by and we'll show you some demonstrations and talk to you a lot about kind of what's going on right now in the market for Drupal. We also have certification sessions going on. So if you're interested in that, we have training certification in you can get certified in being a site builder or a developer, front end, back end specialist, Acquia Cloud professional, you can get certified in site factory as well. So it's in room 300. So please let us know if you're interested in doing any taking any of the certification training. And again, come by the booth. We've had some trivia going on. It's kind of been a fun environment and come by and ask for your survival kit. We're giving out survival kits this week for Drupalcon. So please stop by and see that. Really, the reason why I'm up here is to introduce a friend of mine who one of the thing I can't forget to talk about the party. So tonight we have an industry meetup party. Tonight it's at 530 to 730. It's at the Pratt Street Ale House. We have industry meetups. So we're going to break up by industry. So if you want to talk to other folks that are focused on government or financial services or health care, life sciences, you can do that. If you don't have a hat on for a particular industry, come anyway because we really do want to still see you and have you come by. Grab something to eat and come and chat. So that's tonight at the Pratt Street Ale House at 530. And then you can go later to the other Pantheon and Lullabot party as well. So really what I wanted to do this morning is to introduce Barton Cody. So I met Martin in 2010, I think yesterday, right? Martin, we figured out. And Martin spoke at the first Aquia Customer Conference that we had. We had a joint customer at that time. And I can honestly say that it was the only customer that my kids ever wanted to hear about because it was the cartoon network. So it was really was quite fun to be able to share that story. And Martin is the executive director of marketing technology for VML. It is a lead agency that helps transfer brands. And really Martin has a tremendous amount of industry knowledge and triple knowledge and market knowledge. And so it's my pleasure to introduce Martin Cody. I'll do the trip. Good morning. Thank you. Well, it's great to be here. I'm trying to make sure my slides are here. Showing up, there they are. Okay, actually, this is really interesting. This talk is going to, I think, build off of what Dries covered yesterday. So, and there was no planning. So I sort of feel that if you're here talking about sort of trends and what's coming, if your things are coming together from various people at the same time, you kind of feel like you're on track. So I kind of hope that this actually does end up resonating with people and being some things that you can take some insight for and kind of focus on. So we call this the rise of content commerce and conversation. Kind of sounds like a movie title, but I don't think it'll be that dramatic. But really, I feel that these things are coming together to transform experiences. And the content and commerce piece has already kind of been coming together. And what's really interesting is the acceleration in which this conversational wave has overtook what was already sort of happening as far as whether you're calling it omnichannel or whatever you were sort of referring to, the idea that that was coming together so quickly. And now, suddenly, we have a whole another layer to come up. We're really feeling this acceleration in a way that I don't think we had before. We used to have time between these waves and these sort of changes and the way we're shifting, working in the way we're talking and communicating with customers. And now it's simply accelerating. So that's really what we want to focus on. I want to focus on a little bit of what really goes into this idea of conversational. That's conversational UI. A lot of people associate AI with that. So there's a lot that sort of gets pulled out from that. I want to talk about what really it means by conversational marketing and how that affects you in the future. And a little bit of what you can do today. But I want to take that a little bit further and say I believe this conversational transformation, so to speak, actually can impact what we're doing in terms of how we approach putting together ecosystems on our own and with clients. And as well as sort of how we operate, how our teams come together. I think it actually is sort of a unifying force that will help us all sort of talk a little bit more. So I think it's really interesting. Why am I here today specifically? I think it's because, as Lynn said, we've actually been working with Drupal for the whole 10 years that I've been at the agency. It was really only the last seven that we participated. And that was when several of my team and I first went to the Drupal con in San Francisco, got a chance to meet Dries, got a chance to meet quite a few of the rest of you in the room, and we were sold, so to speak. At this point, Carl Kodrowski, our Drupal lead, said it best where Drupal was the first CMS he ever wanted to use a second time. So that kind of summarized it for them and it was really something that we've latched on to. Realistically, though, we've also used a lot of the competitor products because we haven't been able to get the penetration in our clients that we'd like to with Drupal. So it's always been a bit of a frustration and we've kind of stuck with it because we believe in what's happening here. We believe in what you do. We believe in how you write it. And we want to get more people involved. So a lot of where I'm coming from is both with one foot in this community and one foot out sort of knowing what's happening with the industry trends and trying to bring some of that to it to see how better to do that. So the developers love Drupal from sort of the hands on. But for me, I was more informed about how good this was by the 10 years I spent not using Drupal. So 20 years ago, I formed a small business. Cody Reynolds, go for it. And I built a custom website on PHP MyAdmin, kind of built a whole sort of CMS and writing that and I was supposed to be running a business. We were supposed to be setting this up and I spent an inordinate amount of time writing code to build this website. So from the very beginning, I was like, huh, there's a better way to do this. I then did a 180 and went away from this small business to work for a Fortune 500 company, very logical. And one of the projects I ended up with, first off, was their first foray into a CMS for their .com. And that was a custom Perl application written by the only true hypochondriac I've ever known and he was out constantly. So we all had to dive into this Perl code and no one could figure out what he was doing. And now we were supposed to take this .com and I was tasked with pushing it out to all of the brand sites and you could see the problem was forming. So I went from for anybody for a small business to a Fortune 500 company, there was a problem here. So in the same year that Dries founded Drupal, I joined Fatwire Software, which was trying to solve this problem. I saw that was an area we wanted to be able to fix things. So I went over and spent about six years with them trying to solve this problem, how to build a better content management system, how to deliver better experiences. I worked on the sales side, I worked in the product teams and I worked on the marketing side. And I look back now with envy at what you've done, thinking what we could have done if we had this infrastructure and this approach in the community that you've built. And I certainly think that their new owners feel the same way. My slide disappeared there. Oh, going backwards. It's morning, sorry. So Oracle purchased Fatwire and I certainly believe that they would be in the same boat as trying to figure out what's there. And now we basically moved forward to the agency. So that 10 year period of time and the 10 years with VML has sort of informed what I think people need. And I've been trying to share that with our clients, trying to share that with the rest of my team and trying to share that to sort of change the way we do things. And this sort of nostalgia trip that took me down this path of my history led me to go to a slightly different direction. It got a little nostalgic about another thing that came out 20 years ago, which was Jerry Maguire. Maybe a bit of a stretch, but bear with me. You may not know this movie, but you may probably know this scene. So, liven it up a little bit here. It's a family mile. Are you ready, James? I'm ready. I just want to make sure you're ready for it. Here it is. Show me the money. Oh! Yeah! So, when I first saw this, I was like, that's funny, I like that. Now, that feels like a lot of calls I've been on with clients. I'm the awkward guy on the other phone screaming into that, trying to make things right. But I think what was really interesting about this movie, again, if you're not familiar with it, is he was in an industry that he didn't think was working the right way. There wasn't the right mix, there wasn't the right balance between life, between how they were treating customers and how they were treating clients, and he wanted to make a change. So, he wrote a manifesto. That led to him being fired. That's not the good part. The good part is, he then proceeded to go on and find a way to deal with the people he was working with before, to work with a client and make things better, and to find a way to sort of embrace his community and get things done. And so, for me, this was sort of an inspiration to say, that's what we're trying to do here. We're trying to say that some of what we're trying to do is a change, is a challenge, is a transformation, and it's hard, but I think there's people to do it. So, Jerry's gonna be kind of our spirit animal and kind of guide us as we go through this. First off, what sparks the imagination more than sort of conversation right now? You can't do a Google search and not get a result about a chat bot or something else here. And it really does, it inspires us. But I like to come back and say, before we go too deep into all of those words, what's the root of it? And for me, it really is conversation. And the definition of conversation is the informal exchange of ideas by spoken words. And I really think that's powerful. We really wish all interactions could be that way, right? It's really casual and convenient. Why would I want anything that isn't that? And so, at this point, I do think that figuratively and literally, that should be our guiding principles going forward. That should be what we're striving for. And so, for a consumer, a conversational experience is a way for them to learn, to share, to buy, to resolve issues, to give to somebody. All of that falls under convenient, easy conversational. And the idea of conversational UI is simply that at this point, that could be chatting with a bot. That could be speaking with an intelligent assistant or simply giving a gesture. But at the same time, all the rest of the ways that we interact haven't gone away. So this really is still the same thing. So conversation, to me, once we have this approach, it's going to make us have to change everything else we're doing. We can't abandon the way we're presenting content or the way we're sort of doing commerce just because conversational is here for the new UI side. We have to actually make that conversation impact the rest of what we're doing as well. So why chat bots? Why are chat bots the first thing that people gravitate to when they talk about conversational UI? Well, they're really the tip of the iceberg. Because it's happening inside of a messaging platform that is so universal and so common, and what Dries mentioned yesterday, they're easy to build, right? You combine those two things together and you get rapid adoption. And therefore, it's sort of like affecting us very quickly as a chance to come across small organizations, big organizations, anybody can go out and build a bot. One of the examples that we like to share is Joshua here, he's a 19-year-old student and he built a, I don't know if it's actually called the parking bot, but it overturned 160,000 tickets and since pulling back $4 million for the users who did it. And basically it just trolled through all of the legal documents and legal laws about when you can get a fine and then people walked through to stated the situation they had and then it told them how to challenge it and most of the cases were overturned, right? So at this point here, if it's something that can be done that easily and generate that kind of revenue, you know that it actually is gonna have a business impact. Just for those of you who haven't seen it, just here's a quick sort of view of what's inside a chatbot, it really is sort of that platform, some form of natural language processing, web services to pull content back, right? That's really sort of the core of it and then you need the actual content. The interesting part is right now, a lot of the actual machine learning artificial intelligence is essentially optional. We know it's gonna happen and we know it's gonna make it better but as far as like where you're starting, you know there really can sort of do something very basic from the very beginning and make a lot of progress and learn and grow and do that. So this is very much a crawl, walk, run kind of industry right now and you wanna take advantage of that. And I think people should start looking into it from that perspective rather than assuming this is something maybe more complicated than it is. But as far as that trend of where it's going, Mary Meeker who if you read her sort of yearly report, sort of highlighting the idea that as we've seen the evolution of AI, so we're seeing the evolution of this conversation evolve from simple sort of social, who are you chatting with sort of a brand in a very novel sense to something that is going to go more along the lines of that parking bot and actually have business related conversations and really drive, optimize, automate a lot of the actual transactions. So where AI sort of fills in when we look at that optional part and see where is it going is really breaking down into sort of sense, think, act. All of those things have various elements underneath them. I think the most important part is there tend not to talk to each other, right? If all of those things happen at the same time, we really wouldn't need to do anything because it would be smart enough to figure it out on its own, but that's not the case. We still need to be heavily involved in how this happens. Most of these are happening on an individual basis and then being combined together. So the most important part about this whole idea of conversational UI is yes, the interfaces will radically change how we interact with the technology, but it's really the context that allows them to have impact and meaning for us. And it could get to the point where as it gets smart enough, the actual context could replace the even need for UI, but right now, where does that context come from? It comes from us. An AI partnership is not just a technologist working with maybe a data scientist. It's a collaboration among the content creators, the designers and the technology. It really is about content and design and you don't want to forget that because the people who are tackling it that way are going to have successful AI projects, successful chatbots, successful conversational UI versus something that is novel and forgotten about. So we like to view it as together we make a great team. The people in the AI work hand in hand to create great experiences. Artificial intelligence sits on top of content and sits on top of context and that's what you can provide. And that's really where you're starting to fill out the idea that you already have an ecosystem that's building out both that content and the context, have the ability for people to come in and work with your tools to tell the stories. There's a lot of opportunity there to jump in and own not the technical space, but the broader sense of how this actually can come to fruition and people can actually use this in a meaningful way. So ultimately, conversational marketing comes down to addressing that inherent idea of when we're dealing with this problem, we expect someone to follow a linear path when in reality as human beings, we bounce all over the place. And that creates inherent complexity when you're trying to serve up a system that will address them where they are, when they need to be, what piece of information as they change their mind. And that's really where AI allows us to start to make those changes. It allows us to sort of push that forward, automate those things, but if we don't have an understanding of the insight and who they are, we won't be able to get there. So at this point, I've talked a lot about what we think conversational UI is. I felt that I had to actually prove that we've done something. Excuse me, so I wanted to talk a little bit about Edison or Eddie for short, and this is something that we created. It's an artificial chat bot to inspire creativity, answer questions and brighten people's day. The reason I focus on this is it's a little bit about the, there's a goal in mind, right? We want to actually challenge creatives. We have a plan for what we're trying to do. We have an audience in place. We know where we're trying to address them, and we think that this interface will be a better interface than what we're doing. So the first step was to actually point it to our own existing archive of work, noteworthy work, which is a Drupal site. So then we set it up to serve up the information in Facebook. So we sort of update our anatomy chart here of Eddie and it's the same basic pieces, but we dropped in some of the actual online tools we were using, some of the web APIs you can call to make it happen, and then at this case, the repository was Drupal. We didn't actually use the Facebook Messenger module that was there because we actually had plans for making this more universal to access external creative repositories, and so we kind of went a different path, but I would definitely recommend you look for more of a module perspective to make this easier to be able to expand it. Here's a quick little just video of working with Eddie. When they first presented this to me, I thought it was going to be a novel joke, and in reality, I ended up loving it, and now we've rolled this into production. It started out as a demo, and now it's something that we actually use because it is a little bit more intuitive than the website. It's basically just a bunch of tags on a page, right? So you sort of self-guided to try and, you don't know what you don't know in this particular setting when you're dropped down into specific questions and presented with topics, it's a much more intuitive way to actually discover material, and that's what we wanted for creatives. We wanted them to be inspired. If I know what I want, I can search for it on the site, but if I don't, this is a great way to be able to do that. The other really interesting thing about our work with Chatbots sort of in the wild with clients is that whole idea of those tags popping up underneath it to sort of give people ideas about clicking on topics or clicking on an office to try and find work. That's something we found people actually use almost more often than actually typing in the natural language query. So at this point, it's more about structured approach, so the importance of the UX design is almost more important than the technology here. And again, that's really where it comes to the idea that this is a team effort. You can't just program the information and point to it and the natural language would work, you actually have to participate. And in addition to our UX designers actively being involved in this, the other team that we bring in to all of our conversations is the creatives. So in this case, it's hard to say besides because they should keep opinions to themselves, our Chatbots a little snarky. And we built that in. We built in some brand personality. So we've actually paired our copywriters up with our technologists to use these same platforms to store not just the content they're serving up, but the actual script, the information, the chance to be able to have a dialogue just the same as you would craft out a messaging through an overall marketing campaign. You can do that now in a more dynamic setting here. So really for us, I wanted to show that that this is really how everybody comes together and people are gonna need tools and platforms that allow them to do that better, right? That's really the goal here to show what's going on. Now, we've actually sort of had this one out for a while. We've made a little bit of progress on trying to make this a little bit more broader so that it's not just Facebook Messenger. So I was on vacation last week. I was diligently preparing for this. And so one of the things we did was do this. What were the steps for Xerox? Two pieces of work. Would you like to hear about the latest? Yes. Best website slash experience design 2016. Focus on. Say next to hear the next one or ask a new question. Next. So we're here on vacation. This one's the type on Facebook Messenger. So we had them whip it up so that I could use Alexa to be able to search for that content. Not quite in production yet, so I'm using my phone for the people who actually know how that works. We're using reverb, it's not actually a skill that's published that you can tap into. But again, the idea that we're trying to expand that out so that our creatives working on whiteboarding can just ask for work. Have we worked with this client as we're working through that? So all of these are actually practical applications for what we're going to do. And in that particular instance, because we knew we needed to pull in content for the site and we wanted it to be on Facebook Messenger, we wanted it to be on Alexa, we wanted it to actually eventually pull in from other repositories, we had to look at it more as an architectural approach. We had to look at the architecture of the system, not just say, oh, I'm just gonna build a chatbot in a one-dimensional aspect. So at this point, conversational really does bleed over into the rest of your design. And that's why for me, the sort of consolidation leads us to talk about not just conversational marketing, but a conversational ecosystem. So how do we take that same metaphor to say, conversation between people and between machines from sort of the front end, to talk about a conversation between systems to help us plan better for these new solutions and capture that wave that's coming in of new features that we need to embrace and roll out for clients. So at this point, that sort of merging of content commerce and now this sort of new piece is basically saying that what's the difference between asking a chatbot or asking someone in store for that. And if that comes together, you get to the point where your technology stack needs to cover everything from digital to in store. So it becomes very comprehensive and how do you go about solving that problem? And that's one of the sort of universal questions that I think people are struggling with. And we've all collectively seen some form of the, you know, Lune Escape, Scott Brinker's chief MarTech, 2,000 vendors all in a list. And obviously we know the worst case scenario is for someone to come in and say, I'll pick one of each and that'll work, they'll solve all my problems, right? That's not the case. And at this point, to my chagrin, we already see that AI and chatbots and whatnot already have their own chart. They didn't even like add to the other chart. They just created their own chart to pull all of this in. So now we have this land grab of people trying to create, build your own chatbot tools. And that's where I think that's the wrong way to go. I think the opportunity is to say, there's a more mature way to approach this. And so traditionally, there was sort of that world of solutions. There's something we call the hype cycle, which is represented by things like the tech radar from Forrester and various other pieces that sort of pull this together. But basically trying to help people figure out, how do you bridge this gap? How do you figure out what's coming? How do you figure out what's gonna consolidate and where you sort of pull those pieces together? You know, that's what should keep people up at night and a lot of times isn't. And that's where you get sort of redundancy and overlap between the systems. David Mitchell, one of my colleagues originally drew this diagram and it turned out to be really helpful for us in explaining things to people. Sort of on your bottom side, you sort of have the enterprise IT. Anything at this point could be mainframe. Databases are sort of there. And then in your upper right, you have any sort of advanced technology could be perceived as science fiction or magic. If we don't understand it, that's essentially the way you would view it. One step down from that, you're in pure R&D. And then from the R&D world, you sort of merge into things that are actually, we can touch, we can go out and maybe download the code, play with it and be able to do that in the emerging space and eventually vendors are gonna form from that. Now the traditional model is for the commercial vendors to take what's coming out of R&D into emerging and drop it down there. And developers spend most of their lives somewhere between integrating commercial systems, maybe sort of dedicating themselves to the emerging space, very few in R&D but some, and then sort of just custom development. They're just somewhere there. I think the idea of what we're calling sort of engineering acceleration is really when you look at that and say, there's a smarter way to do this. There's a better way to architect the overall system to sort of accommodate the fact that if we're needing to catch up with all of these new changes that are coming and these new experiences people wanna have, how do we build a better way than just waiting around for a new wave of startup vendors or an older commercial vendor to build solutions to do it? Now if this looks familiar to me, it should because it's what you do. But a lot of other people don't get this, right? They don't understand why you would do this. So we try to explain that ultimately we feel that as modular development and as sort of Drupal Core itself sort of evolves, you're tackling that. And there's lots of commercial vendors who have built on top of it. So you've sort of basically created that line and I think that's really powerful. But at the same time, I don't know if it's often positioned in a way that people understand that it's covering all of that. But I think you actually do a pretty good job of that. And as we said the example before was the Facebook module for sort of Facebook Messenger and that bot is there and that's great. But at the same time it would be a mistake to just look at that as a one off as opposed to sort of connecting that. And so that's sort of saying, hey, think about it a little bit more broadly. Think about all those other teams. Think about how you're writing the script and how you're maintaining that and how you're accessing other systems. It should be a much broader ask and you should be proactively pushing that out rather than just sort of letting it be one dimensional as far as just the ask was a bot, right? I think another really interesting example is what NASDAQ has done with their sort of distribution. And why I like it is the marketing. I've seen hundreds of things that are amazing that are happening on but that one, if you go to the website and look at that, anyone could buy it. A procurement person could watch that video and go, that makes total sense. You've given me a technical solution. You've given me an operational solution. You've mapped out how it's gonna evolve over time and how it's gonna be serviced and supported. It's great. I think that's really something that we've come to call operational acceleration. So a lot of times it's very easy to sort of solve the technical side of it. It's much harder to solve that operational side of it, to give somebody a solution that makes them feel, though something is complex, there's a step by step path to go through that. And that's really where I think you're ending up with something that's hard to resist, hard to really sort of say, I don't get it. I can't do that. And that opens you up to a much larger audience. So I think that's an area of improvement and something I wanted to kind of dig into a little deeper. And this is hard. This idea of changing the way people work or changing the way people sell and approach buying things is a challenge. So taking that same thing, conversational operationalization. I think my marketing courage to be taken away, that's not really very flowing off the tongue, but you get the idea. This is really the conversation between teams, between stakeholders, between partners and vendors all trying to work together. Many of the analysts who are sort of covering this space, despite the deluge of marketing material saying, I have the one cloud to rule them all, is that this really doesn't work that way. You need a village of partners, vendors, to achieve any of these goals. And so there is more pressing a need for people who know how to work together, who know how to collaborate. And that's very hard for people, because most of the people issuing like RFPs or asking for work are viewing it as a zero sum game. Somebody wins, somebody loses. If you're in an account, you're viewing everyone else in that account, or that client as a competitor. So essentially we're saying, how do we move that to more of a non-zero sum game? How do we take that leap and move people to where we acknowledge that there's more opportunity in the win-win than in the you win, I lose? And so for me, the answer is co-opetition. I got a lot of fun words to say in this one. So combining co-operation and competition. Inherently it's when, basically companies collaborate in areas where they believe they may have competitive advantage, or they believe they can share common costs. So logically it basically says, I like pictures better, that in this case don't just fight for a slice of the pie, work together to build a bigger pie, and then you could fight for that piece of the pie. Or even better, acknowledge what you do best, how that complements what somebody else does best, grow a bigger pie, and not have to actually go back and compete because your piece is getting bigger because everyone else is, and now I'm hungry. One of the ways that VML has helped solve clients with this is a construct that we call the content rocket. It kind of looks like a rocket on its side. And essentially what we're trying to do here is capture the interconnectedness between the people who are actually creating the content, so the internal system and how we're actually going to create what we need to to talk to people and to sort of achieve our brand goals along with an understanding of the user experience and who those users are, and then ultimately the platform to sort of combine it. So essentially we're saying here, where are we creating the content? What's the calendar? Is it translated? How is it distributed? And how is it ultimately aligned with this user needs this piece of content at this point in their journey to be able to have enough of an understanding of your product to ask for help or to click on something or to download something or whatever that is, and how do you have enough analytics to feed back in and say this is working, this isn't working, and what does the technology look like to support that? This becomes a Rosetta Stone to be able to connect your internal users, your marketing users, your brand users with the actual technology and the other vendors that you're working with. I need you to fill this purpose. I need you to write this this way because it needs to solve this problem. It's all based on the business. You don't need to draw up this way. You don't need to build a rocket. You need to find some way to sort of communicate that these things connected is a much more successful thing to deploy, to sell, to rather than just sort of focus on the technology piece. So oftentimes for clients, we'll end up with interesting charts like this where we actually have user personas for content developers, for analytics users, for developers. In addition to the sort of traditional these are my actual people who are purchasing something or these are my external stakeholders I'm trying to address. We end up addressing both of those and no system is fully designed unless it actually covers both areas. Once we have that in place we can then come back to this and talk about how do we refine the personas to actually drop them into this chart? How do we sort of step about to actually sort of mapping that content strategy and content process and then ultimately get down to the how are we mapping the existing technology solutions? Where are the gaps? Where do we go? Drop some Drupal in there just to pander to the audience. And then there's Google Analytics but you could easily add A.B.Testing you could add commerce you could add any of these and so at that point you're getting to the what system should own this? You get to a point where you have a better map for how these pieces should work together and it gives a little bit of insight so that people know what their role is. So if a vendor understands how they're fitting into this they may not be more aggressive about trying to take more space the client has more control over how to do that. So once we sort of set up that vision and like I said I recommend setting up some sort of vision to capture that you need some sort of structure to then be able to sort of say how do we run this? Maybe that helps on day one but what about the year anniversary? Where are we? What have we done? How have we maintained this? How have we evolved this? And this is where a metastructure that's our paraphrase for a center of excellence say global advisory council whatever you want to call it but this is really where it gets very interesting. I've been involved in many projects for the last two years where I have literally been laughed out of the room initially for saying we should have all the stakeholders together our competing systems integrators our other competing agencies the vendors who provide the technology and all of the marketing users should all be in the same room talking about this. And they laughed at me just like they laughed at Jerry they laughed at me and now we're doing it on many clients we actually have set up these structures in place to be able to manage that that chart below sort of showing that cadence of meetings between all of these people is happening and it's allowing us to actually manage this much larger complex ecosystem that we have to deliver these experiences that way and to be ready to incorporate something like how are we going to build a chat bottom off of what we've already done this allows you to bring all of that together. So for us that vision sort of evolves to more of the how do you encourage sharing how do you encourage ideating how do you encourage activating and sharing between that and ultimately how are you trying to create a community. And so for me just like with the last chart I go this looks familiar. I think you've actually already solved the problem that a lot of people are struggling with. You've built a community you've built a community where people both know how to collaborate when it's appropriate and compete when it's appropriate. You've figured out how to pool your resources to come together for a particular client and work and share that. The thing that I think is missing is that's not necessarily sold as part of the solution. So I'm here ultimately saying help me help you. Conversational marketing. This is something that you should promote. I really think there's so much opportunity to be able to focus on how you can enable these experience beyond just the tech. So remember that natural language plus context equals change. How do you make that happen? And remember that the AI essentially is not going to fix the complexity of us, but it can make the experience more automated, more efficient, more manageable. And I think this is a space that you can jump ahead and own because it's not really owned yet. As opposed to conversational ecosystem, the way I've described it is something that you already own. And I think one of the interesting things about AI is they talked about the AI winter. And what broke the AI winter was not a lack of researchers or people interested in AI, but it was the fact that parallel processing to power gaming combined with the wave of big data and the rush to do that provided them with the equipment and the input to be able to do work that they weren't able to do before. It was cost prohibitive to do. So I think in the same way, something that you've been embracing for a long time is essentially people are ready to hear that message now because there are too many systems coming at them too fast to simply say, I can wait. So a much more flexible environment, a much more collaborative environment, a more conversational environment, I think people are ready to hear that. And ready to hear how you're able to sort of deliver on that. So telling that story that you've been solving this, I think people will be receptive to hearing that. And I think it will help our clients to be able to do that. The caveat is it needs to be viable, right? It can't be something that's just, if you come here and get it, you'll get it. It's gotta be something that makes it easier. And some of the stuff that was covered yesterday gave me a lot of insight that you're heading in that way already. So this is just a keep going there to be able to do that. And then lastly, the conversational operationalization, got it out, is to embrace this. To really take a time to say, we want more than your code. You figured out how to do a lot of things that you take for granted that other people are very much struggling with. They're like I said, they're throwing me out of the room for saying to do that, you're already doing that. So the more people that you bring here to solve that larger problem of how do you address the content users collaborating with the rest of the people? How did you set that up? How do you sort of prioritize against shifting timelines? All of the way that you do that is something that people wanna buy. People are desperate for that. Because a lot of people promise it, most people can't prove it. And unfortunately, in the sort of more traditional model, a lot of times that doesn't come out until you purchase some software, you wait a year, and then you struggle for a year. And oftentimes it's two years later to go, that wasn't the right choice. That wasn't the right way to do this project. That's really hard. And so any time I'm a firm believer in saying this is complicated, but I have a step-by-step approach to take. And I think you have all of that. But I think you need to share it more broadly and make it part of your messaging and make it part of who you are. I think connecting all of your personal relationships you have, how you work together, is what people wanna hear. And by people, I'm talking about marketers procurement. All of these people who traditionally aren't buyers of Drupal will understand this. These are solutions they're looking for. These are things they're trying to solve. And when they sort of hear that language and they see that track record, I think they'll embrace it in a way that you may have had more of an on-off with an IT organization. It's either they're fans or they're not fans. And in this case, they're getting this great messaging about how it's all inclusive from lots of other people. And maybe you're a little bit shy to say how good what you're doing or show how even though there's a lot of options at the beginning, you can get to sort of a conclusion. More of that step-by-step, I think will have a huge change in heart to be able to bring people around to understanding the potential of how this could fit in and augment everything they're doing today and set them up more for the future and the next wave post-conversational, right? When we have no UIs, when we are going to a whole nother realm, how are we gonna do that? Well, the right stack, the right approach, the right team model, the right collaboration between all of the users is the case. So encouraging that collaboration first within, bringing more people to the table I'd love to see more people who use the system at a conference like this, talking about it, collaborating about that space and kind of building those interfaces that could sort of have an impact and own that conversational marketing space. And then ultimately, I think sort of building off of your success. So in conclusion, I wanna paraphrase Jerry. He says we live in a cynical world and we work in a business of tough competitors, but what I'm hoping is that through your effort, through my effort, through working with our clients, we will get to a point where more and more people are saying, Drupal, you complete me. Thank you very much. We're supposed to gracefully sit now. Yeah, thanks. Is the mic working? Okay, thank you. I can't see anything and I can't hear myself either, so I'm just gonna pretend that this is happening. Ignore them, let's go. No, no, it's just you and me, Martin. Absolutely. I've got a bunch of questions, so let me think how I'm gonna start. All right, I'm gonna start this way. I live in San Francisco and I've seen a lot of technology just sort of driving down the street, hyping AI and chat. It makes for a really great and compelling demo. How does this make the leap to production and actual business value? I mean, I think the key is the design, right? I mean, it's the same and that's why for me, it is only facilitating what you're already trying to do. So that's why in some ways I put conversational in front of the rest of it. You have to solve a business problem with that. It can accelerate, it can be another interface to be able to approach that, but otherwise it's just gimmick, right? And then I think, production-wise, I mean, the good news is there's so much work being done by Google and Amazon to make this available with just an API call that the role to production is not really the problem. It's actually making something that makes sense, providing the right content or the right context. I mean, that's the key. So like I said, it's more of a business problem than a technical problem. It's interesting that you mentioned Google and Amazon. Thank you for setting up my next question. What I'm here for. In embracing this sort of technology, are we in some way forfeiting our open-source roots by relying so heavily on these very, very, very big companies with very, very proprietary technologies that only they control and own? It's a great question. No, I mean, yeah, I mean, fundamentally, I mean, the thing that's good is, I mean, everybody has one, right? So there's a little bit of, it's not just one. So you have some options there. I do think that as it evolves, there is some risk in that and sort of being dependent on the ability to do that. But I think there's also a difference between some of those projects are sort of open-source. So it's more of the infrastructure and the ability to process is what you're doing. So it's a little bit more of a utility. So it's a little bit of a fine line there where as long as they allow you to control what's coming in and out with your own data, just recreating the infrastructure to process it may not be as much of a sacrifice. So I think it's something to observe and see if anything changes that would precipitate wanting to set something up on your own because there's a problem there. But for right now, it feels much more utility like to me. And again, a lot of the people I've heard who are more cynical are saying they're releasing all of it available to everybody to hire engineers because once people use it, they'll be able to then turn around and hire them because they have experience on it. So I think there's a lot of reasons why people are doing that. There's a lot of, I would say the majority of folks who work in Drupal space are working at companies that are at a smaller scale than your traditional system integrator. It's your SMVs, your Drupal shops. And Drupal's history has traditionally been that of enablement for the quote unquote little guy. It's an up level for people who want to build digital and web experiences. But the AI game is sort of the big leagues. So along the lines of what we were just talking about, what's the value for a smaller or medium science company, one that isn't say global or one that doesn't have a call center that's taking a lot of physical phone calls? What's the value in getting into the AI scene? Well, like I said, I think with the chatbots, I found that just having an existing site adding that to it was very minimal effort. And so I think there's a lot of opportunity to simply focus in on that's a staff cost, right? So if you can reduce some of that staff cost, what can your customer support be doing? So even if your customer support is one person, that person could offload some of the basic stuff to a chatbot with minimal effort and then focus on helping customers who maybe are trying to do something more complicated. So a lot of it is it's shifting around the work. And I think that scales small to big. If you take that, I don't view it as replacement ever. I don't think AI should be viewed as if I do that it's changing something. It's simply augmenting what you're doing. And so I do think that that's incredibly relevant. And I think as what I'm hoping is the more that we're sort of packaging these pieces up and making it more usable, it will apply both to the enterprise and also scale down. So the people will not only have to like build their own customer support chatbot, but there could be one that almost automatically plugs into what they're doing today so that there'd be no reason for them not to do it. That would be the opportunity for me, for this community is to focus in on those pieces. So that actually leads into my next question. This is great. So you had this chart with that constellation of vendors and partners and people working together in hopefully in concert with the same alignment. But enterprise is sort of an interesting, it's a hot topic in the Drupal community. It's both an attracting and repellent term in many ways. We like getting in and into the larger projects. They certainly fund and pay for a lot of jobs, but it's also in some ways a burden upon this community. So when you see a chart that's full of enterprise vendors, vendors that have business plans that involve defensible modes and owning proprietary technologies, and Drupal's coming in with this, we can plug in, we can play nice message. Who gets shouldered out here? No, it's a great question. I mean, to be honest, that was the whole Jerry McGuire thing is I was like, this is so funny. This is like what's happening, is that he's trying to go against the sort of behemoth and trying to find a way to do it on his own. And for me, I find the problem with sort of the enterprise situation here is I don't think they found a way to participate that makes sense to them. And to me, it wasn't a technical thing, right? Technically, they would either participate or not participate, but it's much more about this actually selling the idea of how you work and how you sort of have competing forces within. The participation is how they transform themselves. Like they're looking for other ways to actually function. Like marketing departments that I'm working with are like, we know we need to change how we operate. So I think what's funny is if they came in knowing that they want to learn from you as from the process, they would be more active and there would be less of a conflict between you're going against our goal because they're actually participating in a more meaningful way. And I think that puts you in an advantage in those accounts to say, they're working the way I want. Therefore, I'm more loyal to their technology as opposed to a marketing message coming from another larger technology vendor. So it's trust though, right? It takes time and I think it's challenging, but I think I at least see that more of my clients are open to the idea of this is how I want to work and the more partners that are willing to come to the table and work that way, I will back them. I will find a role for them to play. And so I think that's really the, it's a little bit of a leap though. Sure. Last question, since you mentioned Fatwire, I had to go back to that one. So you mentioned Fatwire, you mentioned Oracle. These are companies with lots of technology, experience and money especially. But then you also mentioned how you walked away from that and in certain ways that they've failed in ways that we've succeeded. What do you think that is? No, I mean, I think at the core, it's precisely what we just said. I mean, they are chasing a sales model which is geared towards somewhat riding whatever's popular, whatever the sort of trend is and in a way that sort of makes them competitive and I think there's a fundamental sense of if you don't have that as your agenda, you tend to build what people need and not to say that I feel they could do a better job of building what they need and still succeeding. That goes back to the I challenge them to say do a better job, don't add a feature just because you think you can sell it as opposed to doing it the right way. And I think that that's inherently what you do. They'll oversell, they'll promise something because there's competing forces in the organization and you have less of that. And I think, and also I think fundamentally the distributed nature of it is in itself an accelerator and that helps. So you kind of have two advantages. I think it's the priorities are more clear combined with the model allows for that competition and the priorities to sort of shift in a way that I think a lot of commercial organizations don't have that freedom and therefore they're more stifled than they should be. But I think that if they open themselves up and actually asked what's long-term success for our clients these problems would all fall away. Which is why, be redundant, went back to my last point. That's what we're saying is if the goal is the client will be happy in five years, you build your software different. We do our services different. The client should approach who they partner with differently. If you're gonna work with this person for five years as opposed to like I'm gonna pay you the lowest amount of money, build this in six months, it's a very different equation. So to me that's the underlying shift to this conversational. I was saying to me that I want it to be casual and easy should be in everything, right? I wanna have partners that I feel like I'm having a conversation with and not this formal, I've written this strict contract that's like you're my partner. My long-term success is your long-term success. Do you get a lot of pushback from that culture? I do, I do, but like I said I will say and I can't mention too many names, but we've had progress and a lot of big clients to make that change. Like I said, clients are the ones who will bend before everyone else will. But if the clients understand it, they'll force everyone else to. So that's why I was saying is the more people who come to a client and say I'd rather talk to the other people that you're keeping me separate from because you think we're competitors, we will be much more productive if we talk to each other. That's what I say to my client and they're like really? And I'm like absolutely. Now if you went and said the same thing, then they hear it from someone else. And then if you get someone else, you know, so I feel it's sort of the, and then once the client goes this is much better. I have one meeting, I resolve all my issues in one meeting, this is efficient. Then that's when I hope that you start to get more of a permanent change. One last question, I lied about the last one. Are you concerned at all about the conversational AI revolution only being accessible to those who speak English? That's a good question. I mean the one thing that I have a certain amount of optimism for is the fact that we're mimicking a lot of what's happening in China with like WeChat and some of those other platforms, we're taking our lead from them. So I think there's a large extent of, there's already a certain amount of globalization built in to this change. I don't think that solves the entire problem. But I think that the other answer is the more, rather than like I said, I've already literally had like 10 calls from someone where I'm like, I have a drag and drop interface to build the chat bot. It's like hang up. I think the more that you do the enterprise approach to say, if you're already solving some of the multi-language things, you could have a chat bot that speaks multiple languages. You could approach to make it, the chat bot itself could be trained against different cultural sets to be able to do that. So the more that the scale is there, there has to be the intent. And that's why my emphasis is on as you move from sort of the theoretical fundamental AI research into sort of the how we apply it in marketing, it becomes about that context. And that's really the key. And so that's where, again, I feel like everybody needs to take ownership of that to precisely that reason to say, wait a minute, we can't just train this against this data set because that's not inclusive. We need to train it against this, or we need to come up with options. And all of that comes in the planning design. It has nothing to do with the technology. So again, that's where I think that aspect of this is a team that involves creatives and experience and as well as technology and data scientists, you want that perspective in order to avoid that happening. Cool, thank you so much. Sure, thank you. Just for an ounce, wow, everybody laughed. We really are just talking to each other. Yeah, it's just me and him. Coffee is available in the next room, or the exhibit hall, rather, and sessions begin at 10.45. Thanks, everybody.