The real value of AI for digital teams

Welcome and introductions

Lorna Hegarty [00:02]

Hello, everybody. Welcome. Welcome. We're just going to give it maybe one more minute and see if we can wait until a few more people have joined, and then we will jump in. So I'll just throw it to Megan and Kat to do some interpretive dance while we wait, Megan.

Lorna Hegarty [00:38]

All right, I think we will jump on in. So thank you everyone for joining today's webinar. The Real Value of AI for Digital Teams. So during today's session, we're going to be discussing the fact that for a lot of digital teams, AI has really arrived as pressure to just show up well in AI answer engines. So we'll explore how, although that really does matter, and we have talked a lot about that at Squiz, and if you've missed any previous webinars, go back and check the on-demand ones, because we've talked about the value of it and how you can really help to influence it.

But we also want to talk about how you can only really control the systems that… You need to be able to control the systems that represent you that you have control of. So you can only really influence those AI answer engines. Right? But you have your own systems that you can also control. So the bigger opportunity is to look at how AI can actually help you to create, manage and improve your own digital estate. And to do that, you need to get the digital foundations right first.

So I am joined by the wonderful Megan Andrews and Kat Barrow again today from Squiz. So thank you both for being here.

Kat / Megan [01:45]

Good to be here. Yeah. Thank you.

Lorna Hegarty [01:47]

Very disappointed with the lack of dancing, but…

I'm sure you'll make up for it in your next… We'll save that for later.

Lorna Hegarty [01:54]

But, yeah, I'm really looking forward to picking your brains today to find out where AI really does add genuine value. But what has to be present before it does and how you really take that first step and how you make that manageable for your teams. We'll be adding a few frameworks and checklists to the screen as we go, so everyone attending will be able to take something practical away and back to their teams following the session. As always, we'll have time for Q&A at the end, but we also really would like this to be an interactive session.

So if you have questions as we go, please just pop them in the Q&A panel, if we can, we'll all be keeping an eye on that. So if we can pick those out as we go and there's a good moment to jump into them, we will. So just add them as they come to you. So with all of that said, Megan and Kat, as I mentioned, most of the AI pressure is coming from this desire to show up in AI search engines.

So we talk about that as GEO or AEO, and that's a fair thing to worry about. Right? But what's your take on the fact that GEO, let's call it, is really only one part of that picture?

GEO and the intelligence era

Kat Barrow [02:57]

Yeah. Absolutely. I think it's really interesting because as you said, Lorna, we've spent a lot of time talking about this as well. It’s very [unclear in captions] focused on optimising your content to drive performance in external LLMs. And I think it's really just the first sign that we are moving into a new era in digital experiences. It's the first kind of tangible change that we've started to see happen, but it's not the whole story. And we really talk about it in terms of a new era deliberately because era is a big change.

It's a step change. This is not an incremental change that we're seeing in digital experiences. AI is really driving a fundamental shift in the way that we find information online and engage with information online. And we've christened that the intelligence era. And I think, the context there is that for the last sort of three decades or so, possibly four decades, actually, I'm just thinking about how old I am, it's probably more like four decades, we've been creating experiences that are very fixed and very controlled.

So if you think all the way back to sort of command line interfaces in the eighties through the different evolutions of digital experiences over the years, the thing that they have in common, although we've gotten closer to the user and we've started to kind of explore concepts of personalisation and things like that, the thing that they have in common is that they're fixed experiences. We sit there and plan and analyse and decide where we're going to put that button and how that form is going to flow.

We create these fixed destinations that people have to come to and then figure out how to use. With the intelligence era, we're moving much more into a world where your digital experience is building around you personally in that moment, in that context. And so, yes, GEO is very important. Yes, optimising your content for AI is important. But it's only one part of the puzzle. In order to be able to really thrive in the intelligence era, you've got to have the underlying systems and ways of working in place to be able to generate these kinds of experiences.

Megan Andrews [05:03]

Yeah. It's such an interesting thing to think about this as a shift in a full era because I think it's easy to get stuck incremental change. I think for these teams, for technical and marketing teams now, confronting this and actually admitting this and embracing this is a really big opportunity because you're going to have to do things differently than you did before. And I think that allows your teams once you have that understanding to kind of have a handshake on like, all right, well, let's experiment now and let's learn this together.

I think that's going to be one of the defining qualities of this time as well for successful teams is not just what's available to us, but how can we do it in a way where we can test and learn and be really dynamic on our own decisions? Because we are all learning what users are going to be doing next. Right?

Kat Barrow [05:57]

A 100%. And this is a conversation I have very often, actually, where, I'll be talking to clients and they'll say, what is happening in the future? Where are we going? Am I going to need a website? Am I not going to need a website? And the answer is no one has those answers. Right? But we do know that things are changing, and they're changing rapidly. And so that culture of kind of build, measure, test, learn, experiment, be agile is going to be so critical.

And in terms of whether you need a website or not, I think we've talked about this a lot in our previous sessions, but we really are at a point now where your website is serving two purposes, and it's serving two audiences. And I think that's only going to continue to evolve.

Megan Andrews [06:38]

It's one of those things too you really think about even in your personal life, but, translate this over to the web and your strategy. Control what you can control. Right? And to that point, Kat, if your website is what you've got control over, then invest in that. What can you do in that way? Look at your content, your digital experiences, all the different, services that you're connecting in, and understand what your strategy is around those, and then influence what you can off of your own website.

Right?

Poll 1: What is driving AI adoption?

Lorna Hegarty [07:09]

Yeah. Yep. So, yeah, summarising, you can influence how those answer engines show you up, but you can then really build and improve on those pieces that you control. Okay. So, before we jump into more of the meat of the session, I'm going to throw to our attendees. We're going to do a quick poll. And what we want to find out is really what the motivators or catalysts are for driving adoption at your organisation right now. So you should see a number of options on the screen there.

We've got pressure to show up in AI answer engines, as we've discussed, improving on-site search and answers, reducing manual content and build work, and a mandate to do something with AI. Now that mandate piece, I often think it sounds… it's almost, I guess, laughable, but this is a real thing. Right?

Kat Barrow [08:00]

Oh. Yeah. Yep. Absolutely. Like, I see this really often with customers. And, as we were talking about earlier, what that ends up causing is a lot of kind of fractured AI implementations. We've got a lot of little kind of pilots and things happening all over the place, but not necessarily, a very clear strategy on how that's going to grow and scale over time. I don't know if you're seeing similar things, Megan.

Megan Andrews [08:23]

Absolutely. Lots of teams coming up with their own solutions, and it's really difficult when you think about the long term impact of how they're all connected together. So even when you're thinking about tools right now, have that in mind. Can this connect across different areas of our site, not just our own unit? Things matter in the decision making phase.

Lorna Hegarty [08:44]

I think we've probably got most of our answers in there. Someone said the poll needs all of the above as an answer.

Lorna Hegarty [08:58]

But that's exactly the point. Right? Like, whichever one of these you selected, these are all things that we're hearing. And they all kind of lead back to the same question of, well, where do you actually kind of get started? What are the foundations you need in place? I guess from your guys' perspective, what are the foundations that any AI initiative really depends on?

Three foundations for reliable AI experiences

Kat Barrow [09:18]

Yeah, absolutely. Look, when we're thinking about the intelligence era, one of the things I often talk about is this kind of shift from designing websites as a destination to thinking about them more as a system, and a system that is going to be able to generate experiences dynamically on the fly in response to intent from someone. And for that to be able to happen successfully, there's really, I like to think of sort of three foundations that underpin that. The first is content, and as we've talked about, that's something we've covered a lot.

But your content does need to be trustworthy. It needs to be authoritative. It needs to be optimised because it is really the single source of truth that is driving the experience and driving the system that is creating those experiences. But as we said, it's only one part of the puzzle. The other part of it is really that you need to be able to present experiences on your website that respond to intent. So when someone lands on your site and puts in a question, you need to have a way to be able to generate those dynamic experiences that are personalised, that are contextual, and that are pulling together the power and speed and low cognitive load of AI-driven, conversational search, and combining that with the ability to direct people's attention to where you want them to go or where they should be going to complete their tasks.

So the ability to direct them towards a form or a call to action or a particular piece of information that is going to further their goals. So having a system that allows you to generate and present those experiences is a really critical foundation both to being able to present these kinds of experiences on your own website, but ultimately in the future to be able to do that inside third-party environments as well. And then I think the third really important part, and this kind of ties back to the whole conversation we were just having around the AI mandate, right, is you need to have a governed, integrated foundation.

And what by that is you can imagine that if you start to try to create a system that is going to generate experiences for you, and you're pulling together tons of different tools and content sources and integrations and plugins and all sorts of things, you're very quickly creating something that is very fragile, is not particularly scalable, and is very difficult to maintain long term. So you need something that is going to allow you to be able to pull together your content, your services, your forms, your data, your integrations into something that drives that kind of dynamic experience that people are looking for.

And I think the most important word potentially in that governed foundation piece is actually governed. Because the reality is that when you're moving from a situation where we're building fixed experiences to one where you have a system that's generating experiences for you, The only way that you can do that confidently is if that there are best practices and guardrails and governance in place and that the system is enforcing them on your behalf. That's what allows you to trust that system. That's what allows you to step from being fully in control to just being the human in the loop and allowing the system to generate those experiences for you.

Megan Andrews [12:30]

And, Kat, I think it's interesting because on that note, I've talked to a lot of clients recently who are curious about building their own solutions.

Kat Barrow [12:40]

Yes.

Megan Andrews [12:40]

tech savvy people who now have the power of AI augmented coding at their fingertips.

Megan Andrews [12:48]

So it's tempting to vibe-code a solution and put something in place that could patch together different things on your site. And I think that's an interesting playground for a lot of people right now. But to your point, down the line and certainly as you're scaling different experiences, you very quickly will see that vibe coding is great. And then as soon as it's live, there might be some holes in the framework there. You need to trust it.

Kat Barrow [13:19]

Yeah. No. You're totally… And, we've just seen, obviously, the whole, schmozzle with PHP this week, from a security perspective as well. So, yeah, you're right. you can absolutely vibe code something. But from a scalability perspective and also from a security perspective, there's so much more nuance that goes into creating a system that is going to serve you well and is something that you can trust. And I think it's really… at the end of the day, these foundations are coming together to create a digital experience that is leaning into the expectations that people have these days and is providing them access to the answers and the actions that they need.

And I think, one of the things to really keep in mind as well is that there is a cost associated to not leaning into those expectations. as we start to see more and more people adopting AI-driven experiences, as we start to see more of the sort of, like, hyper personalisation, if you're not leaning into those experiences, your end users are still stuck in that environment where they're clicking around, they're trying to find things, they're bouncing, potentially off your website and into your call centre or into your email support or into your live chat support.

And so there's a very real business cost associated with not having these foundations in place as well.

Assessing readiness and turning answers into action

Lorna Hegarty [14:40]

Yeah. So if we are recommending people avoid the temptation of vibe coding and they're thinking, yeah, these foundations all make sense, but how do I sense check where I'm at? What would you say? What are some of the things they should be looking at?

Megan Andrews [14:56]

First and foremost, make sure your content's in order. I think if your content is clear and accurate, you've got to dust off all the corners. We've been saying this for a while now that we could get away more or less with some of those dust covered corners before with SEO and we just chuck some keywords in place on different pages and hope for good rankings. But right now we don't have insight into how the rankings and appearances are happening in all these large language platforms.

What we can control is how our content is. Is it in good shape? It's time for those audits. It's time to put tooling in place, right? That'll help you right size and optimize that content to get seen off of your site.

Kat Barrow [15:43]

Yeah. Absolutely. And I think, as we were talking about as well, the other foundation that I think is really critical here is being able to turn your website into something that, yes, gives people answers, but also drives action. At the end of the day, whether you are selling something online or you're providing a service online, you're a government organisation, you're higher education, whatever the case may be, AI is presenting us with a very unique opportunity to turn our content into something that is actionable.

So once you've got all the dusty corners swept out so to speak, and you're giving people the right answers and the things that they want to know, how do you then drive people towards the next best action? And I think that's something that's really critical when you're assessing your readiness is do you have a mechanism on your website right now that's going to allow you to turn the power of that AI conversational answer that you've just generated into something that is going to drive action?

Megan Andrews [16:43]

It's actually a really good point. We talk about this a lot right now that it goes way beyond just fixing and optimising. It is thinking in a new framework of really what are the outcomes we are hoping to achieve, not what is the fixed journey that we're driving people towards. Actually, our Chief Product Officer, Julie Brettle, was in San Francisco last week, which is where I'm based. And so we got together and I was driving into San Francisco and when you go over the bridge, there's all these billboards.

You won't be surprised they're all covered with AI companies and technologies. It's an interesting cultural experience, but think about it this way. I was going to meet her at a specific place in a neighborhood. There's one way to get there. I know I need to get there to meet her. But if I were able to talk into my phone in real time and say, Only take me on side streets. I know these two streets are always busiest right now. I'm a local.

And take me along the waterfront. So all those different ways that I could hyper personalize, I'm still getting to a destination, but it's right sized for me. I thought about that. Yeah. So I was driving there and, like, this is what websites now need to become.

Kat Barrow [17:48]

Absolutely. Just that, like, hyper level of personalisation. And I think it has some really interesting implications for how we work moving forward as well. Like, my background is user experience design. I very much see there as sort of being an emerging space around conversational experience design. How do you design for an experience that is that fluid, that is that hyper personalised? How do you, create experiences that work for everyone but also work for a very specific person in a very specific context with all of those factors considered?

I think it's a very fascinating space.

Megan Andrews [18:24]

And I do think that's where you get to this maybe the bottom layer here of just the governed foundation. Right? So it's really great to be able to add these tools and create these different new experiences. You have to trust that you can do that in a way, again, that's using the content is there. Maybe the components you've already got within your CMS, these bricks that you can pull into an experience, but you've laid the bricks. Yes. Right? And then they're going to help build themselves what their experience will be.

Kat Barrow [18:52]

Absolutely.

Audience question: Does messy content need fixing first?

Lorna Hegarty [18:53]

I think as you were talking about content, Megan, we got a question submitted about content. The question being, this is all this is all well and good, but our content's a bit of a mess. Do we need to focus on that first? Interesting… Interestingly, you were saying, yes, you do need to focus on that first. I guess, is there a kind of short one line reassurance that you can give people to say, even if your content's a bit of a mess, you can still do this?

Megan Andrews [19:17]

Oh, absolutely. You just said it, Lorna. Think the take the leap, take the step and see how it looks. You might be surprised. You might think your content's a mess, but have you seen how a large language model actually interprets it? That's where these tools can come in handy. Put it to the test and, take off the shield and see what you're working with first. And, you've worked with a lot of customers. What are what are customers thinking about with this?

Kat Barrow [19:43]

Yeah, absolutely. As you said, it's… Some of it is just ripping off the Band Aid. I think what we're learning as the space evolves, and it is evolving very quickly, is that, yes, content optimisation is very important. But not all content is as important. Right? So you might have, 57,000 pages like one of my customers that I'm working with at the moment. Right? Of those 57,000 pages, once we actually switched on conversational search and started using it, the ones that are critical, the ones that are driving most of the [unclear in captions] are the ones that we can then focus on and optimise.

And you don't actually need to get stuck in the weeds of optimising every single one of those 57,000 pages. And so, we've been really working through it in terms of slices of content, high value priority use cases, but also just switching it on, as you said. Just switching it on and having a play around and seeing where is the AI getting most of its information from. And is that content, your really critical content that is, an attractive source of information for AI, is that optimised?

Is that accurate? Is that where it needs to be? Rather than starting from the, ground level and working through every last blog post on your website.

Lorna Hegarty [20:57]

Phew. Yeah. That's really helpful…

Kat Barrow [20:59]

Don't recommend that approach.

Readiness assessment and the changing role of digital teams

Lorna Hegarty [21:03]

So they were really helpful criteria. And, actually, there are a few of the criteria that are covered in an online assessment tool that we've developed. So we're going to drop the link to the tool in the in the chat. But, essentially, you can go on there, answer the questions, and find out kind of where your website's sitting in terms of being ready to address the expectations of this new era that's coming in now. So we will pop that assessment in there.

Go and have a play and see where you're sitting and then have a chat to us about what that actually means for you. So we have covered what needs to be in place. I want to spend a few minutes now on what this does to the day job of the digital teams that we're talking to today, because I guess that's the thing that people are going to be most worried about. AI is coming in, I need to be able to adopt it.

What does that actually look like for me and my team if I'm trying to develop this new looking and feeling digital experience for our users?

Kat Barrow [21:58]

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I've been I've been talking about this a lot, as you can imagine. And we are moving into a new era. It is a pretty significant shift. And I think what's interesting is that it changes everything and nothing, basically, at the same time. And what by that is, as we were talking about for the last three or four decades, we've been optimising for building pages. Right? We've had entire teams of people who are crafting the content down to the last word, who are working out the exact colour of the button and where it's going and the flow of the page and, optimising all of those sorts of things.

Again, said, my background is in user experience, so I was that person doing the A/B testing and the user testing and trying to preempt how we could make a site that was going to work for most people and work effectively. Whereas now, as I said, we're moving into the space where we're creating a system instead. And so I think what's shifting is a few things. One is that the focus is now going from building and optimising pages to building and optimising the system itself and the building blocks within that system.

So making sure that your content is up to date, making sure that your design system is really healthy and scalable, and you've got all those UI components that are going to be the foundations of that experience, making sure that you've got that governed foundation and it's all integrated and all of those things. That's kind of in terms of the hands on work. I think that's where that's going to shift to. But I also think a lot of the shift is going to be moving into more of the governance side of things and more of the strategy side of things.

It's effectively like, congratulations. We've all been promoted to leaders, and now we're leading a team of AI. And so the shift moves from the doing to the directing. And so when I say nothing changes, it's because the core foundation of what we've always been doing as people building digital experiences is optimising and learning and experimenting and A/B testing and using data to help us understand what is driving the most effective experiences that are helping our end users achieve their goals and our organisation achieve its goals.

That core hasn't changed. I think what does change is the way that we are achieving it. And so we're moving into the space where we are defining strategy. We're setting guardrails. We're setting goals and measurements and tracking our data and all of that sort of thing as opposed to spending a lot of time on where exactly on the page should this button go.

Conversational search and first-party insight

Lorna Hegarty [24:26]

And there's kind of an upside, right, from all of this that people might not expect when they go into utilising AI in the sort of way that we're talking about here today, once they are allowing people to ask for what they need in their own words, they can actually sort of work out what to improve next. So I guess from your experience, what do people start to see once they do start to understand what people are actually looking for in their own words rather than just sort of the keyword searches that they would have been doing previously?

Megan Andrews [24:56]

Well, I think it's interesting to consider that right now there's only a few companies in the world that could answer that because they're capturing all this natural language and that is the essence of their platform. You haven't seen yet as many sites of organisations and companies rolling out that same technology, but it's happening fast. So that's the key is if you can shift your experience and invite conversation on your site, you are going to get just wealth of knowledge around how users are actually asking questions, right?

Right now we can look at page views and we can look at clicks and we can get signals around maybe what people are trying to do, but we don't actually know. But if somebody's in a conversational format and they're saying, I'm enrolling in this programme, I need assistance with financial aid. And then immediately afterwards, they're asking about a specific grant or scholarship opportunity. It's all captured in one place for you. You don't have to piece things together, right? And I think, Kat, that for all the user intent studies and things that you've done, how do you see language and natural language layering into that?

Kat Barrow [26:15]

Yeah. It's really interesting. I was I was talking to somebody about this the other day. This idea that, generations, probably our generation, have been trained to search with keyword strings. So we don't put a lot of conversational intent behind those keyword strings. It's kind of what we've learned over the years works, throw in some qualifier keywords and things in there. Whereas these days, especially younger generations, there's a lot of really interesting research on how they are being conversational, and they are being detailed and very explicit in their direction.

So they're going, not just like Italian restaurant near me, Brisbane. They're going, I'm looking for, a cozy Italian restaurant for a first date. I want this kind of vibe. I'm allergic to peanuts, whatever. And so the amount of really, really detailed information and intent that we're getting is going to drive a level of insight into our users and our customers that we have just never had before. And I think the other thing that's really important, and I think you mentioned this already, Megan, but I'm just going to reinforce it, is that at the moment we don't get any of that data from the LLM environment.

Right? So people can be asking that exact very explicit question about your Italian restaurant, and you could be optimising for peanut allergies, but you don't know that they're asking that on ChatGPT or Claude. And this goes all the way back to Lorna's point at the beginning is we can only control what we can control. Right? Implementing conversational search on your own website gives you direct access to that first-party data. You can see exactly what people are asking. And, yes, it may only be a portion of all the questions that are being asked about you across all the different platforms, but it's still incredibly, incredibly valuable data.

Megan Andrews [28:05]

I think something else. I was working with a customer here in New York, and something we discovered in doing all this was actually that one of their keyword… Their top keyword search term was careers. And they thought, well, what careers? Are careers outcomes, programmes for careers, careers at our [sentence incomplete in captions]. So this was a great opportunity to embed a conversational search option on a career page and start to understand, okay, not just careers and we'll see where it takes us, but what are they actually going to ask about?

Yeah. And that's, it's not just an interesting, oh, how cool is this sort of exercise? This is foundational to driving enrolment, driving revenue for your institution or your organisation. Those outcomes have a very vast impact beyond just being cool marketing things that we get to do, right?

Lorna Hegarty [29:06]

I felt very… Well, I do like a cool marketing thing every now and then.

Who doesn't like a cool marketing thing? Yeah.

Taking a practical first step

Lorna Hegarty [29:15]

Was going to play like Cat. I felt very seen by your keyword string Italian restaurant insert location. As a millennial, that is definitely the approach I would still probably take. The thing that we often get asked about or that we want to make sure that people take away from a session like this is what is the practical first step? So it's not like people are short on ideas. They look at everything that they could be doing to improve and try and work out where to start, but it can actually be super overwhelming when you kind of look at all the options.

So if a team is looking at everything that could be done and doesn't know where to start, what should they pick and what should they actually avoid as well?

Kat Barrow [29:56]

Yeah. Look, I think Megan was speaking to it earlier, really, is, the best way to get started, the best sort of practical way to get started is to start. And I know that sounds really silly, but, we can get lost in a lot of analysis paralysis when it comes to our content particularly, especially if it is something that's been sitting in a corner for a long time and you haven't touched it. This kind of need to optimize everything first can get in the way of a lot of progress.

So what we have really been doing very effectively with a lot of our customers at the moment is going, let's pick one really high value use case, and let's frame it as a hypothesis. Because, again, if we go back to that, a mandate to do things with AI, like, is a lot of interest for a lot of organisations in doing something. And the key is being able to show the value in doing it and the trade off between, the effort that it took to implement the AI tool and the value that you're getting.

And so, yeah, what we've been doing is let's create a hypothesis. Let's really embrace this kind of build, measure, learn mentality that we're going to need to be able to succeed in a very swiftly changing world. And let's go. This is the use case. So, for example, we're trying to drive more career submissions at that university that you're talking to, Megan. So, this is our value hypothesis. We believe that if we implement conversational search on the careers page, we're going to be able to drive people more effectively through to the right career for them resulting in higher career submissions, for example.

And it can be as simple as that. You don't need to start big. You don't need to start overly ambitious. But what you do need to do is pick something that's high value to the organisation and to users. Ideally, I… Number two, we were talking about this the other day, Megan. I… And I agree wholeheartedly, like, it's painful today. It's something that is difficult at the moment or it's costly at the moment. It's… You're ending up with a lot of calls in your call centre about it.

Pick something that is causing the organisation pain. And those two things really give you a good premise to start because you're going, hey. I can solve a problem here, and I can measure the value of solving that problem.

Megan Andrews [32:02]

Yeah. And these last two points are where it really helps to cooperate across to look for opportunities to cooperate across your organisation as well. So you may work in an environment that's fairly decentralized, right? Where sometimes you have a central marketing or communications department and then lots of different content folks spread across different areas. But the thing holding you all together is this content piece. So that source material, hopefully at least who owns it, right? And you can start with, maybe it is if you're a university, a high value place like admissions, and there's an opportunity to work cross functionally with your admissions team and work with them, help them improve their content.

Everyone's looking for these answers. Now that you own it, I think that's the opportunity for everyone to learn together what this new era brings. So tools that can help you do that across the organisation. And then this measurable piece, you'd be surprised how many conversations I'm having right now. Even just this morning, had one with someone who hasn't implemented any tools yet, and they're working with a design firm. They have a whole new homepage design laid out. And actually, they're thinking about removing the little top right corner magnifying glass for search and driving everything through conversation on their page.

And so we were talking about some trade offs and benefits there. But I said, just as a start, how many page visits do you have and how many users are going to search? And she wasn't sure. And it's like, well, let's take a baseline measurement. Let's understand what that is now. And then we'll implement some changes and see what the impact is. So I think making sure even simple things are measurable so you just understand If something has worked.

Kat Barrow [33:55]

Yeah. And I think keeping the measurable sort of goals simple as well. I think, we can get really lost in the weeds of trying to measure everything, particularly if you are a large organisation. Obviously, we work with higher education a lot. And there's a lot of touch points on a journey all the way from, landing on the website to actually being accepted into a degree. Sometimes, again, if we think about the sort of analysis paralysis, we can get stuck in trying to measure every touch point.

And did my conversational search actually result in more people, being accepted for law degrees? Sometimes that's not necessarily… You don't have to go all the way down that journey. You can just go, the primary goal of this particular implementation is to drive more submissions on this one form, for example, And keep it really, really simple because it makes it easier to tell a compelling story. When you start getting into, traffic attribution and all of this kind of stuff, it can get really difficult and muddy, the purpose of what you're trying to do.

So I think, yeah, measurable and just simple.

Measuring value in terms the organisation understands

Lorna Hegarty [34:57]

Yep. Good point. To that point, I think measurable is probably the key thing that people will be like, I just… I need to be able to show to people who aren't in the sort of inner mechanics of the AI solution because they're not the ones implementing it. So say, your finance lead or your exec sponsor, someone that needs to know what it is that you're going to be showing them to demonstrate that it works. How would you boil that down? So you've mentioned a couple of bits there, Kat, but how would you boil it down to sort of three or four things that people should be measuring it on?

Kat Barrow [35:30]

Yeah. What I always suggest our customers focus on is things that the business already understands. And that comes, a little bit from my user experience days because I became a UX designer back in the day when no one even knew… I didn't even know what UX was, to be honest, when I first became a UX designer. And so a lot of the battle back in the day with user experience was translating the value of UX into business value that businesses could understand.

And to be honest, the same still often applies. Right? The easiest way for us to tell a compelling story is to measure things that are going to resonate with the broader organisation. So if your organisation is already focused on cost out efficiencies, for example, which was something that was a big focus when I was in… Working in finance, then focus on things like call centre reduction and cost to serve reductions. If you're an organisation that's really focused on acquisition, like a higher education organisation, then focus on those metrics and tie it back to that.

I don't know what you think, Megan, but those are certainly some of the ones that I've seen resonate well.

Megan Andrews [36:35]

Yeah, I was speaking with a school for younger non college age students. So all the way in The US, call it kindergarten through senior year, twelfth grade. And they actually had identified that the biggest outcome driver for them in any part of their funnel was getting students on campus for a tour. So actually most everything was designed around driving to that outcome. And sure, other things could be important, but the way that they thought about it was if even one extra student enrols in our school because we made it easier for them to get to a tour, we know the tour is the driver.

Once we have them here, we have a great success rate bringing them into [sentence incomplete in captions]. So I think some of it could just be identifying to your point earlier, where are the pain points and where are the real opportunities and finding those specific parts of the funnel to focus on.

Poll 2: What would make the biggest difference?

Lorna Hegarty [37:32]

Yeah. Nice. Right. Well, we have got one last poll before we wrap things up and take everyone's questions. We should have five minutes or so at the end to still run through some of those questions that have been coming in. So if you've got any more, please do pop them in the Q&A section. But for our last poll, we're going be just thinking about everything we've covered. Which of these four options would make the biggest difference to your team within the next six months?

So again, you've got those four options there. Clearer, more trustworthy content, search and experiences that understand intent, better connected technology and services, and stronger governance, permissions, and ownership. I feel like we should have, like, a countdown clock here. Is that a… Is that too British a reference, or does that resonate with everyone? I won't sing it.

Kat Barrow [38:51]

It is interesting, actually. I won't speak too soon because it's still moving around. But so many of the conversations we've had recently have been more focused on the content side of things. It's quite interesting to see that shift. And I think, we were talking about content and content optimisation being sort of the first cab off the rank, so to speak, in this broader shift in experiences. And so maybe we're starting to enter, the awareness stage of that second shift now That people are more focused on the search and experiences.

That's very exciting. Yeah.

Key takeaways and evolving roles

Lorna Hegarty [39:27]

Right. I am conscious of time. So I'm going to assume… I think we've got all our answers there. That is really interesting. But I think what we should quickly do is a quick recap of everything we've talked about. I'd love to hear the key takeaways from you both, and then we'll just make sure that we've got a few minutes at the end to just dig into some of these questions that we've had.

Kat Barrow [39:47]

Yeah. Sure. look, I think the first key takeaway really is what you started the whole conversation with, Lorna, which is, we can control what we can control. There is a lot of pressure, and I understand that, speaking to our customers to show up well in ChatGPT and to, show up well in Claude. And there's a lot of anxiety that goes alongside that as well. But what we have seen time and again is that by controlling the experiences on your own website, a, you're getting all of the benefit of that.

You're making your experiences actionable. You're getting all of that insight and data. But you're also really laying very important foundations for you to be able to thrive in those third-party environments, whether that is by optimising your content or whether it's by creating the systems and the building blocks and things that are going to allow you to generate experiences in third-party environments in the future. So really focusing on what you can control now, I think, is really, really critical, especially to kind of break through that analysis paralysis that we're all facing at the moment.

And then the second thing, as I was just saying, is having those foundations in place. Having your content ready to go, having a way to generate those dynamic conversationally driven experiences, and having that sort of governed foundation that's going to allow you to bring everything together and create a really scalable system.

Megan Andrews [41:14]

Yeah. And, Kat, I loved how you… I love how much your background speaks to this whole experience too around how we can. We can do it. We can let go of these really controlled journeys that we've put users on, and we can think about, yes, we built different things, but really guiding that in that dynamic capacity, allowing users, right, to find their way.

Kat Barrow [41:38]

Yeah. And I saw… It… It's disappeared off my screen now, but someone had made a comment there around, tech roles that are going to be gone or replaced in the future. And I think… look. There's always that kind of, AI is going to take our jobs narrative, and for some people, that is a real narrative, so I'm not downplaying that. But I think, as I was saying before, the essence of what we do doesn't change. I think the way that we apply it is going to change.

So maybe if you were a user experience designer, you're going to, move into conversational experience design. You're taking those same principles with you, just applying them differently.

Megan Andrews [42:17]

And that's an opportunity too for everyone in each of their roles. Again, because we're all learning this together and users are changing and technology is changing so rapidly, this last point of start small and prove it is really exciting, and it's an opportunity for everybody in their current role or if there's a new role they're evolving into. It's also true that if your job does shift, you start to define what is part of that role, what is going to drive these new experiences.

So I think keeping that open mind of the problem solving, the systems, as you were saying, Kat, and just applying new systems and seeing what happens. That's an exciting time, if nothing else. There's a lot going on. Right?

Audience Q&A: Who should own this?

Lorna Hegarty [43:06]

It certainly is. It's keeping us all on our toes.

Lorna Hegarty [43:08]

So, yes, we've got a couple of minutes. I'm just going to dive into a couple of questions at random here. Obviously any that we don't get to just now, we will cover and follow-up. So just keep an eye out for that. But one of the ones I thought that was interesting is who should own this? Someone said, who should own this, marketing, digital, or IT?

Megan Andrews [43:27]

Oh. Remember we had an all of the above earlier option? Yeah. I vote for that one. What about you, Kat?

Kat Barrow [43:36]

Yeah. Look. I think there's… I tend to agree, and I know that's not a very helpful answer necessarily because it's always nice to have, like, a clear one person owning it. But there's a role to play for everybody there. And that's where, it starts to, again, become this system, and a system has multiple users and multiple stakeholders. I do think it's helpful to engage with marketing as a sort of first port of call, particularly because they often have a really good sort of line of sight to how you justify the value and how you kind of set up that value hypothesis.

Also, they're really great at kind of telling that story and being able to kind of share the successes that you're making. And we've had a lot of success with engaging marketing, particularly in sort of higher education or comms in government as well. But it's really critical that you're taking all three of those groups on the journey. And I've seen what happens if you don't, and it gets very messy very quickly because that system requires IT people to help, manage the data and the integrations.

It requires digital people to help build those building blocks, your interface and your design system and all of those sorts of things. It requires marketing to be part of the conversation as well. So I do tend to agree with Megan. It's very much all three, unfortunately.

Lorna Hegarty [44:59]

Perfect. It's not a cop out. It's the right answer. It's the it's the true answer. It's the true answer even if it's the messy answer.

Closing remarks

Lorna Hegarty [45:06]

Alright. Well, unfortunately, we are going to have to leave it there. We are at time. There are lots of questions there, and apologies that we didn't get to them all. We will answer them all in follow-up. So keep an eye out for the follow-up comms and we'll get to those in that. So thank you everyone for joining us. You'll see on screen now a QR code, which will also take you to the assessment tool we mentioned earlier in the session. Make sure you scan that quickly now, jump onto the tool and give that a go.

See what score you come out with and give us a shout to chat through that with you. Thank you so much again, Megan and Kat, for your time. I've loved picking your brains and really hearing all the examples. You're talking to people every day about all of this. That's fantastic to hear all the practical use cases that you're seeing for this new era.

Kat / Megan [45:55]

Yep. Yeah. That was awesome. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Thank you. Bye. Bye.

Recording transcript coming soon.

Recording transcript coming soon.