AI is the new UI

Transcription:

Patricia L. Harman (00:00:08):
Good Morning and welcome back to day two of our digging conference. I hope you learned a lot yesterday, networked met some new folks, saw some new products and technology. There were some great panel discussions, workshops, round tables, as well as several product demonstrations. All of the round table discussions that we held yesterday will be repeated today in case you miss them. We also have several new workshops, two keynotes, a research panel, and our research panel is going to take a look at the latest information on how insurers are focusing on improving their claims technology. Our first keynote of the morning addresses something I'm pretty sure you've all heard of before AI. Imagine that Terry Jones began his career as a travel agent. He spent 10 years in product marketing at American Airlines and then the next 10 years in information technology, he then became the chief information officer of American Airline Sabre, and these experiences prepared him to become the CEO of Travelocity, which I'm sure most of you have heard of.

(00:01:19):
He led a team of six to a $3 billion public company. He retired from Travelocity when it was taken private and helped found kayak.com where he was chairman for seven years until it was sold to Priceline for $2.1 billion. He is the Managing Principal of ON Inc. A consultancy he founded to help companies in their transition to the digital economy. He has served on over 20 boards and is currently the Chairman of Imagine AI. He's the author of two books on disruption and innovation, a proven innovator and the holder of several patents. He is here today to share his ideas on innovation and change. Please welcome Terry Jones.

Terry Jones (00:02:05):
Thank you and good morning ladies and gentlemen. First award of explanation, why am I limping around here? I spent the last two weeks volunteering at a boys camp, a hundred year old boys camp in Canada in the wilderness. We helped disadvantage kids and get 'em out in the woods, and unfortunately we had five inches of rain and when I stepped on the dock, the dock went down and the boat went up and I pulled my hamstrings. So ouch. Never did that before, so that's fine. I might sit down a little bit and I'm not doing my dance routine. I'm sorry. Look, I want to start with a once upon a time story, the ones our mom told us, the ones we all remember. So once upon a time, about seven years ago, I was going to the LA airport from my house in San Clemente, California, and that meant a long limo ride, probably about two hours, and when I got in the car, there was the owner and I'd used a local service.

(00:03:01):
I like to help local businesses, and he knew a little bit about my background and he said, could you review my website? And I thought, well, usually I charge $10,000 to do that, but maybe I'll get a free ride. I had time. So I took a look at his website and it had some nice images and way too much text, but it didn't have anything about punctuality, safety, reliability, didn't have price. I said, ed, why doesn't your website have price? He said, well, I'm a little more expensive than others and I want them to call. I said, Ed, it's the 21st century. Nobody wants to call you. What would Travelocity be like if it said call for price? Come on, and it wasn't mobile and you couldn't book. I said, ed, why can't you book? And he said, I want to call. I thought, well, Ed, you've got to simplify.

(00:03:58):
I have to call you on the phone. You sent me a limo confirmation. That looks like a life insurance policy. It's about eight pages. I don't know whether you have good drivers or bad drivers because you don't have reviews. When I get back to that sea of people in LA somewhere, there's a guy holding my name up on the back of his daughter's homework. It's a little hard to find, and then you give me a paper receipt that I have to take a picture of to put in my digital expense report. Look, you've got to change, but you don't need to change your core product. You have great cars and great drivers. Why don't you create another website, call it San Clemente online limo, put in pricing and booking and let the two sites compete. Let the customers decide what they want. Won't cost you more than a limo.

(00:04:42):
Well, silence. He didn't say anything, said, okay, I didn't close that sale. So I said, ed, how old are you? He said, 55. I said, gee, that's too bad. And he said, why? I said, look, if you don't change, I don't think you'll make it to retirement. Well, the rest of the ride was made in silence. And as you might imagine, three years later, Uber had started moving in. He went bankrupt. He didn't have to go bankrupt. It didn't have to happen. He had the brand, the cars, the drivers, the customers. He just didn't change with the times.

(00:05:26):
He had no UI, because that's all Uber is, right, is a UI. The cars and drivers are the same. We always took, it reminds me of a quote from the wonderful Hemingway book. The Sun also Rises. A character has asked, how did you go bankrupt? Two ways. He said, first gradually. Then suddenly, I mean it does sneak up on you, right? Change is here. Now I'm going to talk about total user experience. Today I was asked to talk about AI is the UI, employee experience, user experience, customer experience, multi experience, and I'm going to go pretty fast even faster. I'm on Percocet today, so who knows how fast I'll talk. But terry jones.com, live website, terry jones.com live. I'll repeat that during the program, you can get copies of all the slides, you can review me, you can even buy a book. So don't need to take notes.

(00:06:24):
Now we've come a long way in UI from the green screen. We've got a long way to go. There is no home button. You just click your heels together. Well, we're not quite there yet. Why? Total experience? Because the only thing moving faster than customer expectation, moving faster than technology is customer expectations. Everything has to be right away. Think about how the pony expressed changed the delivery of mail, right? Instead of three months, it was two weeks, and then the first transatlantic cable, you could send a message in seconds and then absolutely positively overnight and then two hour Amazon delivery. Customer expectations are moving faster and faster and we have to change with them. I mean, any kind of answer has to be less than 10 minutes, and many people aren't making those SLAs. 67% of users in a recent server would rather talk to a good chatbot than an agent because they know they can get through.

(00:07:29):
The balance of power between sellers and buyers have shifted to the buyer. Buyers are omnichannel. They expect you to communicate their way, which is 24 by seven any way they want. They expect sales and service in every channel. In fact, they don't care about channels. We talk about channels, we talk about mobile web and in person, they don't talk about channels because they only care about solutions. So how do we get there? Because distribution is being rewired. Years ago, I lived in Tampa and my air conditioner went out. I need to get a new one. Well, what did I do back then? Well, I looked in the Yellow Pages, I talked to some friends in the business. They said, go to Smith. He's a good dealer. And I went there and he sold Trane in day night and I bought a train. I didn't talk to the manufacturer, he talked to the manufacturer.

(00:08:22):
But of course today the world is rewired. I can go to a manufacturer's site, I can go to a price comparison site, I can look at a review site in this new world, the manufacturer might get the lead, they give it to the dealer and the dealer might call me. Relationships have been rewired by e-Commerce and my business. Yes, 18,000 travel agents went out of business, but believe it or not, 18,000 are still here in adding value. In fact, of all things, my daughter is a high-end travel agent. I spent my whole career trying to put 'em out of business and she became one. But obviously using modern tools. In fact, almost all her business comes through email and social media. Many insurance customers would like hybrid experiences, some in person, some online. Alright, half of Gen Z want to research online and purchase insurance in person.

(00:09:23):
75% of Gen Z and millennials turn to social media for information on products. Certainly in the travel business, it's all about influencers today and agents are getting AI anyway. They're getting it in copilot and Gemini and Salesforce, Einstein and so many more products. How can you help them with ai? Should you give 'em a bot? Should you have some kind of ai collaborative customer service? Maybe good TX is also profitable. Look at the numbers here about how much profit customers can earn by improving user experience. Expedia found they had a $300 million button that button said register when they got rid of the register button. 300 million more business because people didn't want a relationship. They wanted a ticket. So even small changes in UI make a very, very big difference. Now, I've been obsessed with UX UITX for a long time. I mean, that's the first page on Travelocity.

(00:10:31):
Pretty primitive, right? And then it moved to look like this, and then I went and helped invent kayak, which looked like this and was much faster because we discovered milliseconds make a huge difference in conversion. And then I did an AI company, which we'll talk more about called WayBlazer. Using AI to dramatically increase conversion. UX is already hard. It's going to get a lot harder with mx, with virtual reality, mixed reality, voice, sound automation, internet of things, AI. It's getting much more difficult. But we have to start with the experience as Steve Jobs said, and move backward toward the technology. UI can cause disruption. You probably know this, Uber owns no vehicles. Facebook develops no content. Alibaba has no inventory. Airbnb owns no hotels. What do they own? They own the edge. They own the edge. You see, it used to be a bad and retail location, location, location being at first in Maine, but location today is the edge of the glass because the edge of the glass is where the customer is, whether they're shopping in the store, sitting in bed, out on the shop floor at work, that's the edge apps rule.

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The edge ways discovered. They know where you are. So now if you're going to be stuffing traffic for 20 minutes, they say, Hey, there's a Dunking Donuts right next door, why don't you get some coffee? Because they know where you are at the edge. Shell is building themselves into car entertainment system. They say here, almost out of gas, there's a Shell station only a mile ahead. If you come in now, I'll give you a free cup of coffee. Own the edge. Great UI is key to owning the edge. Think about Uber again, the product's unchanged. The business model simplified. Stunningly simple UI. The UI is the product. So the folks at Uber took a look at the traditional business model of a limo company and said, well, we don't want to own cars, licensed cars and service cars. The market enforces our brand standard with reviews.

(00:12:54):
Drivers find us. We just want to find clients, set prices, bill and collect, add some amazing software with a great UI and become the biggest limo company on earth. Uber is just UI, Airbnb service, unchanged business model, simplified, stunningly simple UI. Well look, hotels find us. We don't find them. We don't want to provide security, manage the property, hire the staff. We don't want to set prices. We'll, you just do these four things, add some great software and have a market cap of $117 billion bigger than Marriott, Hilton and Hyatt combined just through good UI. So it's incredibly important. And you may say, well, that's not fair. I have the customers, I have the supply chain, I have the product, I have the assets, I have the brand. You do, but maybe you're not easy. These companies are drop dead easy. We have a saying in Silicon Valley, step one, install software.

(00:14:03):
There is no step two. That's how easy it should be. Are you that easy? Now, I've been going down this road of travel and technology for a long time. The first day in my first job, I walked into this travel agency and the guy said, well, you need to make a reservation for two people to Russia. I said, okay, do I call him on the phone? He said, no, no, you send him a telegram. I said, A telegram. I've seen that in the movies. He said, no, we have a telegram machine and that's what they want. We've come kind of a long way since then, haven't we? With user interface it. Phase one was systems of record systems that added up the sales and made the reservations and created the financials. And believe it or not, that's a five megabyte disc.

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That was it. Phase one, we made things easier for the computer because computers didn't have a lot of power. So I was CIO at American Airlines. You've all seen these airline systems that says a flight on the 23rd of June from Dallas to LA at 9:00 AM for Mr. Jones on Main Street. Here's his phone number. Where was the UI in here? You had to know it all, but it was very flexible. You could put the data in at any order. That was good. That was powerful. Windows made a big change. Easier for the operator. Well, not really easy. It got pretty complicated and it made an interesting change in call centers. Slower transactions, but quicker training. But it forced the user into the form. So you'd say, hi, I want to go to London. What is your name? January 6th, what is your name? Because they had to fill in the form that way right now. Then we got the browser and the browser's been a wonderful change. It created it. Phase two systems of engagement systems for the first time are systems rather than people engaged with the customer. Now, it was pretty primitive. That's the first page of Yahoo. That's the first page of Travelocity. And there was another reason it was so simple.

(00:16:21):
Remember that it was slow. It was really, really slow, and yet that limited connectivity equaled great opportunity, but it was mostly click and links. It was lipstick on a bulldog. We covered up kicks and TPF and MVS and all those operating systems with HTML. Then we had another revolution, right? Search. It freed us from menus to this kind of UI. A much easier to use UI with search. In fact, most people use search today and not menus. So again, easier for the user or for the customer. AI makes it all better. I think of AI as an additive. We don't just use AI raw. We put it into something. Here's an old ad from BASF.

Video Presentation 1 (00:17:11):
At BASF. We don't make the cooler. We make it cooler. We don't make the genes. We make them bluer. We don't make the toys, we make them tougher.

Terry Jones (00:17:27):
So think about AI that way. How do you build it into the product? Sure, you're going to use it in marketing, you're going to use it in copywriting. You're going to use it all over the place. But key is how do you put it in the product? Think about the revolution of mobility. There's 7 billion cell phones in the world, 5 billion of them. Network connected. 65% of search is mobile In my business, if you're not mobile, you're not in business. 5G. It was a big hype. Not much has happened yet, but as Bill Gates said, we underestimate. We overestimate the change will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change in the next 10. I recently spoke to Jaguar and Chrysler and we were discussing self-driving cars and all the things that a connected car can do. Well, what did Tesla do? Because their cars are connected.

(00:18:20):
They got into the insurance business because they have continuous data. Cars, insurance is moving from actuarial data to actual data. They wrote $500 million in policies last year. They had like 120 million in claims. They know exactly what's going to happen because of 5G and connectivity, right? Apps of course came about in the mobile era and some are awesome. I think kayak's awesome. Airbnb is awesome. Some are not awesome. We got the hamburger difficult UIs, but we introduced new business models like Hotel Tonight, last minute hotels, right? Those apps are beginning to understand context. They know where you are. They know what you might want to do next. Last night going through Atlanta, which was a mess because a president and a former president landed at the same time. It was giving me a map. But we have to remember that for every action, there was an equal and opposite reaction.

(00:19:22):
So I was in a Hilton last week. Hilton has a cool app. You can choose your room, you can get a mobile key. That's terrific. But what happens? There are lobbies that used to look like this. Now look like this. Who is going to tell me they have the best restaurant in town? Who's going to tell me about their spa? Most hotels have done the key, but they don't have a concierge app yet. So you have to think about, I did this to save money, but what happened? Nobody's in my restaurant. You have to really look at the whole beach ball when you're making a change. So we've come a long way toward making it easier for the user or operator, but we still have a very long way to go. There's about to be quite a big revolution. The future is loading. I want to talk a little bit about forces of disruption.

(00:20:12):
I have a speech about disruption. I'll just mention a couple, but we talked earlier about mx, about all the different ways that customers will now interface with us. Remember Johnny five and short circuit need more input. Images are now input. Sensors are input. Voice is input and output. Vision is input and output. Gestures are input. They're all ways of learning from the customer. Wearables, all these devices create a torrent of data. We've created more data in the last three years than in the whole previous history of mankind that created big data. We need systems to make sense of the data in which we are drowning, and that takes us to it. Phase three, systems of insight systems that can make sense of all these data enter ai because if data is the new oil, then AI is the refinery. Much of that data that's there in your, well, your IT department calls it data lake.

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I probably call it the data swamp, and a lot of it's dark data. So American Airlines has the data. I always sit in four F, but they don't know it. They never offer it to me. Hyatt has the data. I always select a high floor, but they don't act on that data. AI allows us to do that. Remember I talked about lipstick on a bulldog? That was HTML. Now we have a new kind of lipstick on a bulldog because AI can paper over that data swamp. All we hear about today is ai, ai, ai. Maybe it's,

(00:21:59):
I told you I couldn't do my dance and there's some stupid things going on. Apple may soon bring generative AI to emojis. Oh, great, great implication. But why is AI so powerful today? Two reasons. Two things have changed. One, large language models. The large language models have ingested the entire internet and they're running out of data. That is a big change. The other changes, specialized processors creating trillion dollar companies like Nvidia, those specialized processors and LLMs are the big change. So there's AI now for every industry, there's AI now for every department in your company, and there are AI tools that you can use yourself to assemble and build. My suggestion, having been AI now for 10 years, buy if you can with your data, but buy the tools. We'll talk more about it. I think AI is the new UI. AI is going to unlock so much power to make it easier for consumers, and that's the goal, right?

(00:23:16):
Changing how products are sold, how products are supported, how processes are automated. Richer input is available. You see, with richer input, we get intent and intent is gold. If we really understand what the user wants, we can give them a better answer. And we get that through chat, through natural language processing, through gestures, through wearables. So this is the user interface I designed for Travelocity in 1996. Look familiar. It should. It hasn't changed. It's identical. Where do you want to go and when? But that's not what you're thinking about. Hey, I want to go on an island with my family and play golf and have things for my kids to do. What if you could just say to a website, I'm planning a romantic 50th anniversary trip to Italy. My wife and I are looking for an exceptional experience with spa, swimming and tennis near wine.

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It immediately gave you some suggestions. Now, AI also allows for richer output. So in my last company, we analyzed millions of images and this image is a man, a pool, a sunset, and a woman. That's useful to have those tags, but better to take it up a level and understand that's a romantic image. If somebody is going on their anniversary, that's the hero image I want to show. Then you look at millions of reviews, and now we can summarize them. Okay, it's pool, lazy river, spa, fishing, but really it's water, sports, family and outdoor activities. So that's the image I want to show with that review to give them the right product at the right instant and get them to buy, you can make richer output. So if you ask that complex question, well, you want to go to Villa de Este, obviously it has a great pool.

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It's called Heaven on Earth. It must be fantastic. And guess what? It has tennis, wine, and spa. So if you can do that in one click, if you can bring the customer to the policy they want in one click, they're much more likely to buy. With our product WayBlazer, we increase conversion almost 17% by using these various tools. Now, conversational commerce is a big product today. Everybody's talking about it. The battle of the bots. Some of them are reaching for relevance. I don't think I need a taco bot to discuss my Pica De Gallo, right? But beginning to be mainstream Airbnb, you can say ski in, ski out. You'll get that. Recently, I've got five grandkids. I'm going to my granddaughter's fourth birthday tomorrow, and she likes wooden toys. So I went to this website and I said, I want wooden kid toys. And here it came out and said, I'd be happy to help you tell me what specific type of wooden toy you're looking for, wooden puzzles, building blocks.

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So I said train sets, and it came back and said, I found some train sets specific size. Let me know how I can narrow down the option for you. I didn't have to look through filters. I didn't get lost. It was helping me all the way through to find what I wanted. I've applied the filters. Are you looking for a brand? But lemme go back one, because what I learned at our own company, WayBlazer and Travel each step of the way while they were asking a question they could buy. So what you don't want to do is have a taco bot where you ask 22 questions and then have the great reveal. No, look here. Every step I could jump over and say, oh yeah, look, there's a train set. And then they also said, well, let me help you some more. Like a good clerk.

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You don't walk into a clothing store. And they said, come on to you Mr. Jones, give me your credit card. It's a conversation. So here's another one. This is Instacart. What cheese goes with figs? And of course, immediately they tell you the answer and then they help you buy it. So you need to think about what is the problem the customer is trying to solve? Not what product you have. What problem are they trying to solve? Best veggies to roast, right? Kayak just added this. Instead of filters, which we pioneered nonstop, American only, whatever. Now I can just type that information in right there. Oops. I guess you couldn't see it. And say flight's not American with one stop, earliest departure pop and it's done. So use natural language to let the customer shop quickly. Right? Now, how about AI and customer service? Well, the pros are you get instant response, low cost, they're multilingual. The cons are up to now limited understanding, lack of empathy, glitches, user frustration, and we all at the bottom say what? Agent, agent, agent, agent, because they don't work very well. Sometimes they're like this,

Video Presentation 2 (00:28:17):
I was just here with my kids and there's a bug in my lemonade and I like to exchange it. Please.

Video Presentation 3 (00:28:23):
Hello? Are you looking for help with refunds?

Video Presentation 2 (00:28:28):
Yes.

Video Presentation 3 (00:28:29):
Would you please explain the problem to me?

Video Presentation 2 (00:28:33):
Okay, well, like I said, there's a bug in my lemonade. See? Hello.

Video Presentation 3 (00:28:42):
Hello. How can I help you today?

Video Presentation 2 (00:28:44):
You know what? This is insane. Can I just have my cash back please?

Video Presentation 3 (00:28:47):
It sounds like you are interested in our cash back rewards program. Hold on while I connect you with a sales professional.

Terry Jones (00:28:55):
We've all been there, right? But some of them are getting amazingly good. Look at this one.

Video Presentation 4 (00:29:02):
Good morning. Thanks for calling Har Valley National Bank. My name is Gray. How can I help you today?

Video Presentation 5 (00:29:07):
Yes, last night I was entertaining some clients and I think I left my wallet at the restaurant. And to be safe, I want to replace my debit card

Video Presentation 4 (00:29:17):
Before I can help you with that. I'll have to authenticate you, okay?

Video Presentation 5 (00:29:21):
Okay.

Video Presentation 4 (00:29:23):
May I ask who I'm talking with first and last name please?

Video Presentation 5 (00:29:25):
My name is Chris Johnson.

Video Presentation 4 (00:29:30):
What was the name of your first pet

Video Presentation 5 (00:29:34):
Professor? Sparkles.

Terry Jones (00:29:37):
Think about that. That is not a human professor. Sparkles. Alright. Right? That's how good these call center bots are getting. Voice is going to be a much bigger actor than it has been in the past, right? There are 200 million of these devices installed. How many of you here have a voice bot in your home? Yeah, most of you, right? Listen to this,

Video Presentation 6 (00:30:02):
Alexa, order toilet paper. Amazon's choice for toilet paper is angel soft bath tissue. That's cool,

Terry Jones (00:30:11):
That's cool. But it's also disruptive. Why is it disruptive? Because when I go to Amazon on the web, there are 12 brands above the fold. How many did she offer? One. You think search is expensive. What's it going to cost to be the one? Because with voice, you can't read a big list. And voice is also immediate. Alexa,

Video Presentation 7 (00:30:35):
Reordered diapers. Your last order was Pampers 160 count. Would you like me to reorder it? Yes.

Terry Jones (00:30:42):
Yes, please. Right now, right? And now they're building it into cars. Alexa on the road. What's the nearest

Video Presentation 8 (00:30:48):
Gas station? Nearest gas station in 1.5 miles. And to help

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Maintain your vehicle,

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Alexa order more brake pads, ordering new brake pads. Although maybe if you didn't stop so close to the car in front of you, I left plenty of room. You drive too aggressively. If you were just quiet for two seconds. Two

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Seconds, she'll talk to you. Literally the entire time you are driving.

(00:31:07):
I think you should have turned back there. I know where I'm going. Hi, you know why I pulled you over? No officer, because we were driving 72 miles per hour in a 35 mile per hour zone. Anything else I should know? Two miles back we rolled through a stop sign without coming to a complete stop. Also, there are illegal fireworks in the trunk. Sir, I need you. Step out of the car please.

(00:31:32):
Amazon, Alexa. You'll never get away from it.

Terry Jones (00:31:36):
But that's true. Some helpful, some not. Right? This is about 10 years ago. I got a call from Jenny Ti, the chairman of IBM, and she asked me to come to Armon and see if I could teach IBM Watson about travel that ended up creating an AI company. This is the result.

Video Presentation 9 (00:31:54):
I'm going to Atlanta, February 27th and 28th. A need a hotel with a gym near Perimeter Mall. The recommendations are for the dates that I wanted, and they're all close to perimeter mall. I can even see pictures of the gym. At each of the hotels. The results are exactly what I wanted.

Terry Jones (00:32:23):
I thought there was another piece of this. Sorry. So you get the idea. Double digit conversion increase by using voice and the right hero image. Now how about computer vision? There are lots of ways we can use computer vision. I had to laugh at this one. Have you ever been to one of those places with all those signs? Well, with Google, you'd now take a picture of the sign and said, yes, you could park here for one hour rather than trying to figure it out yourself at one travel site, we let the AI optimize hotel pictures. We didn't have intent. We just let the AI change the image every second based on click input. So rather the end of the month where you read the web report and say, oh, I'd rather change the picture. We let the AI do it instantly and we increase conversion almost 10% by having the right image at the right moment.

(00:33:15):
Now that means you have to train these ais. I got a call when I was running this travel company from, someone said, you said the best Western Phoenix Airport has golf. I said, well, best westerns don't have golf. He said, right, that's why I'm calling you. Well, I looked at the images. They had one whole mini golf and the AI saw the flag and it said golf, right? So we had to teach it that a one foot high flag was not golf. So there is training involved here, but you know that many, many companies are doing image analysis for claims. Some are doing selfie applications for life insurance, looking at your face, trying to understand blood pressure, smoking, not smoking, all those kinds of things. So images are very powerful. How about virtual reality, augmented reality? Well watch this guy who's maintaining a jet engine and doing something he didn't do before with a personal coach.

(00:34:12):
So the coach is saying, Hey, this is the product you have to fix. This is the part, this is the tool you should use. Increasing safety, decreasing time, increasing quality. Is there a way you could use that in your business? I'm not sure, but here's another one with a remote engineer, helping somebody out on an oil rig go through and fix something they couldn't fix before. So how can we interact in a new way? The era of Zoom has made us very comfortable. Now with Apple glasses, over 3000 large companies that are already deploying the new Apple glasses. Augmented reality in my business, we are all convinced the one day tour is going away. It's all going to be on your glasses. Tour operators are moving from telling you about things to experiences like cooking, schools, boarding. You've probably done this kind of boarding. In Dubai. They have the security tunnel. No passport checks, nothing. You just walk through the tunnel, it checks everything. I think it has a trap door, right? So if you're bad, you're gone. How about robotics? How,

Video Presentation 10 (00:35:23):
Hi, I'm looking for some paint.

(00:35:25):
Need to find something Loba can show you and multiple languages. Loba also helps our team by constantly monitoring inventory, giving us daily feedback about what is in stock in the store. All of this allows our staff to focus on what they do best helping

Terry Jones (00:35:48):
You, right? So is robotics in your future? Look, I'm showing you a whole range of examples way outside insurance because I want you to have an aha. Aha. We could do this, we could do that. I mean, we built this robot in my last business as a concierge, and it could answer questions, but you know what? People said it needed a printer and a screen because I want to take away the directions to the restaurant. I want to see the pictures of food. So experimentation is key to UI. You're not going to get it right the first time. Look, so what happening in Japanese nursing homes, they don't have enough employees. Japanese are very obedient. They do their exercises with a robot. How about drones? Well, a lot of insurance companies are using drones to assess damage, to figure out what happened, to check the effluent from this pipe.

(00:36:45):
I've worked with a company who's delivering pizzas in three minutes in New Zealand, and now we're delivering defibrillators via drones because they can get there so much faster than an ambulance. But what's the UI? If a defibrillator just dropped in your front yard so you could help your loved one, it better have a drop dead. Perfect. That's the wrong phrase. It better have a really good UI, right? But they're going to be there in seconds. Now, there's also an explosion of sensor data. A hundred billion items connected to the internet in just a couple years. Jet engines now streaming their reliability data. So GE is selling power by the hour because it can systems that help you take your pills. I'm an iot example because a few years ago I got a heart monitor, a little tiny one inserted in my chest. It monitors my heart 24 hours a day.

(00:37:37):
If there's ever a problem, it tells my doctor who might change my prescription. So I'm IOT. I think that's kind of cool. But we know the old productivity solutions don't work anymore. Again, think about how this could apply in your world. Honeywell, where I spoke recently, has been sensing things for a hundred years. This valve went down and they light the red light, but you have to figure out what the red light means and then you have to act. So they went from sensing to meaning. Now it says AC shutdown section one, the compressor is off. And then they went from meaning to action back up on service dispatched from sensing to meaning to action. That's an outcome that's much more profitable and much more of a lock-in than just selling a valve. Or how about this?

Video Presentation 11 (00:38:30):
When George H walks around his apartment, sensors track his every move, not his face or his identity, just his movements.

Video Presentation 12 (00:38:40):
We have passive infrared motion sensors that are scattered around. The home

Video Presentation 11 (00:38:46):
Page is one of a number of residents at the Senior Living Tiger Place apartments in Columbia, Missouri, where they're helping test whether these sensors can help solve an age old, old age problem.

Video Presentation 12 (00:38:59):
The goal is to keep people in their own homes as healthy and independent and functionally active as

Video Presentation 11 (00:39:05):
Possible are using next generation high speed networks to remotely pinpoint subtle changes in an older person's everyday movements. They're monitoring for health problems or distress. It

Video Presentation 13 (00:39:18):
Could be a change in their heart rate overnight. It could be a change in their respiration.

Video Presentation 11 (00:39:22):
For example, frequent trips to the bathroom could be an early sign of a urinary tract infection.

Terry Jones (00:39:29):
So by doing this, what kind of insurance costs can we avoid? How can we keep patients living longer and healthier? My dog, Winston there, he wanders a bit. I got him one of these GPS collars that I can find him wherever he goes, and it's pretty cool. And they map him all the time. But then they added a feature that said, how much is he scratching, sleeping, licking, eating, drinking? I thought, okay, that's kind of interesting. But now they send me an email and they say, Hey, Winston isn't drinking the same amount. He's scratching more. He's not sleeping well. Would you like to talk to a vet? And with one click, I can talk to a vet. So the collar became lead generation for the vet. If I was a vet, I'd give them away. In speaking to life insurance companies and to medical companies, they think the whole diagnostic phase of health is going to change because of wearables.

(00:40:33):
We know so much about people based on the wearables they have on. We can diagnose most much more quickly. There's a thermometer company doing the same thing. You take your baby's temperature because they're crying. It's 102. They ask you a bunch of questions. They say, this is serious. Would you like to talk to a doctor right now? Which mom wouldn't do that again? What a lock-in and perhaps what a reduction in insurance cost. Hippo insurance is putting all kinds of sensors. They have maintenance plans, home health evaluations, connected cameras, leak sensors, smoke alarms, and by having all these data, they can lock in the customer and reduce cost. Connected diagnostics are a big business. Now we can take an EKG, oxygen levels, temperature, stethoscope, all in your home.

(00:41:28):
What does the connected human mean for life insurance? The life insurance companies I'm talking to are pondering, what does that mean? Can they move from actuarial data to actual data? Can they reduce cost and claims? But when you do these new UI, you have to look at the whole beach ball. If I'm on one side of the beach ball, I'll say it'ss, orange and green, but you're on the other side. You say it's yellow and red. Well, you really have to look at the whole beach ball. So I have a Roomba and it's an idiot savant. It's really smart. It cleans my whole house. Why does it start at three in the morning? Because when it loses power, it forgets its programming. They didn't look at the whole beach ball. They have this huge computer without battery backup. So make sure that you look at the whole beach ball when you design this stuff. Particularly ambient UI. Ambient UI like Nest that knows you left home. So it's going to turn down your thermostat, it's going to set your burglar alarm. It's going to watch on the cameras. Look at Tesla

(00:42:58):
Because Elon said, well, if I get in the car, why doesn't the door close? If I'm sitting in the car, why doesn't the car start? If it's parked against the wall, why doesn't it just go in reverse? Ambit UI is powerful, right? And they've got no dashboard, no knobs, no air conditioning vents, no button to open the glove box. Why is there new screen sideways? Because when you're charging you and watch movies, right? But is that a little overboard? 90% of auto customers prefer knobs and buttons, but everybody's getting rid of 'em. And I've owned a Tesla for 10 years. A lot of it's great ambient UI, right? Rains the wiper, go on. But sometimes it's too much. So we have to seek the balance in UI. Sometimes we can make things contextual and combined like the Amazon store where you just pick up the items and walk out.

(00:43:54):
How many people have been to that store? Anybody here? A few of you. It's pretty amazing, isn't it? Just put things in your cart and leave. Now they aren't being successful yet, but it's forcing other retailers to change and actually let you dump stuff in your cart and scan it. What about employee experience, right? What's happening with employee experience? I think employees are sometimes the cobbler's children, right? We spend all the time with customer UI and not enough with our employees. So Discount Tire has an Amazon amazing app that tells you how many minutes before your tire is done. But if you don't have the app and ask them, they've got a green screen, they don't know. They can't even use the app themselves. So ever done this? Oh, hi Mr. Jones, I found your reservation based on your phone number. How may I help you?

(00:44:49):
Oh, sorry, I'm unable to make that change. Let me get you an agent and what's the first thing the agent says? Hi, this is Anne. May I have your reservation located? First and last name, departure and advantage number. No screen pop. No pass, right? Yes, but I had a question about the app and it says the flight is available. Oh, I don't have the app. I dunno how it works. Too bad. We have to integrate the channels. We're too siloed, right? We have to make it easy. Now, I'm the chairman of a board, a company called amgen.ai. Amazingly, today about 15% of travel requests are made via email. People send an email, say, I want to go to Boston tomorrow, and it's all manual. The agent takes the screenshot of Sabre and sends it back to the agent. So we've changed that. So you can say, let's see, what's this one say, I want to go to LaGuardia early morning.

(00:45:43):
Stay at the New York Hilton, come back July 15th. The AI analyzes it. It looks at your corporate travel policy. It looks at your preference. It immediately sends you three options. You click and you buy. So from an email to purchase, that's easy. And corporations are also finally realizing now that every employee has a powerful computer in their hand. So the retail agent, the waitress can use their own phone to make things easier for you. Don't forget about those devices. Tech costs goes down, customer SAT goes up, curing the case of cobbler's children. Now the future looks difficult. Everybody wants more.

(00:46:32):
Many haven't mastered today. You ever have this problem on a website? Cancel on the right. My tax attorney called me and I've been at the web since 1996. Travelocity. He said, you didn't pay your California insurance or my taxes. I said, what I did? He said, you didn't. I went back through the site. Every page had next on the right, except the last page had submit on the left. I had cancel. I didn't pay my taxes. So a lot of people haven't mastered today what to do. We have to listen. Users are shouting. You have to have centuries. Yes, we do heat maps, but at Travelocity, I had a phone booth in the hall. Everybody in the company from the guy in the mail room to me had to listen to two customer service calls a month and a staff meeting to discuss. One, have we fixed the problem that made the customer call us?

(00:47:29):
And two, what great new features did we get today? It involved everybody in the company, in the customer's pain, and that's important. Now at Kayak, we don't have a phone bank. We're a search company, but we do get emails and we send the emails to the engineers and customer emails. You may think that's crazy, engineers make a lot of money. But our slogan is, give the pain to the people who cause the pain and it works. We went public with less than 200 people. If you listen, your product can become clay in the customer's hands, travel lost stayed. Number one mobile travel app in the world, 60 million downloads. But when we put it out, we thought, oh, this is mobile. It's about next flight out. It's about hotel for tonight. It turns out that wasn't true. This was early in the mobile days, but the behavior was just like the desktop.

(00:48:19):
If we hadn't had short feedback loops, if we hadn't listened, we wouldn't have 60 million customers today. I mean, remember your VCR and the flashing light because the clock didn't have battery backup. But if you just listen, this is the Dish network. They have a button called find remote. So if your kid buried it in the couch, it would beep. How simple, how elegant. Just remember, find remote. How can you make your UI that easy? We have to listen to the customer. 81% of the companies with above average user interface maturity have a senior executive leading the efforts and they make more money. So this has to come from the top down and leaders can act when they listen. Recently I got this menu on American Airlines blackened shrimp with jalapeno tilda grits. I've never had Tilda grits, but I wrote the new CIO and she said, trust me, they're awesome.

(00:49:26):
And she got it fixed. So people have to have the ability to listen. There's a wonderful guy in New York on third Avenue, he's called the Amazon Whisperer. He reads all the bad Amazon reviews about electronics and then makes a product that doesn't have any of those problems. Reverse engineering quality. Read about what people don't like about your competitors and fix it. You need to be a detective because it's still all about the customer journey. And we all do journey mapping and we try to figure it out from attraction, curiosity, exploration, trust, purchase return, deepen, rekindle. We have to plan through the journey because we can't predict what door they will enter. Are they going to use mobile? Are they going to use the web? Are they going to use social media? We don't know. Are they going to use IoT? Are they going to use gestures? Are they going to use wearables? Yes. So open all the doors, but make them all work together. So my journey is seamless as I change from device to device. And let me pick up where I left off.

(00:50:40):
TMU has been in the news because their app seems to be pretty evil. But boy, are they good at reminding you about things, right? They're probably the best e-commerce company I've seen about listening to the customer and reminding you, in order to be successful with UI, you have to burn the silos. We have to understand the customer only cares about solutions because no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. We get it out there, it's going to be wrong. We have to test and change. We've all done A, B, C, D testing. 20% of what you see at Kayak every day as a test. We are constantly testing, generally failing and continuously learning. But now we use AI testing thousands and thousands of products and clicks a second are automatically changed and updated by the AI. Success is going from failure to failure without lack of enthusiasm.

(00:51:38):
And that's what UI fixing is. It's failure after failure and improvement and context matters a lot. I was speaking to a rural bank and they said, we just changed all our transactions to be less than four minutes. I said, why? I said, because it takes four minutes for the tractor or the combine to get across the field, and when they get to the other end of the field, they have to empty out the corn and tractors don't look like this anymore. They look like this. These guys are inside training corn futures. They're doing their banking. They're online all the time, whether doing that boring job, but they have to stop at the end. So the transactions had to be less than four minutes. They had to listen. I was in a hospital and they said, we've just changed a voice because doctors and lab techs are covered in fluids and problems and they can't touch a keyboard.

(00:52:35):
They need voice input and that's working well for them. Recently I met Peter Diamantes, the futurist, and he and Tony Robbins have created a series of health clinics around the country because both those guys want to live forever. And he gave me a coupon and I went to one and they gave me a test for 40 cancers. They scanned my body six ways from Sunday. Thankfully, other than my leg, I'm pretty healthy. And as I said to an insurance company the other day, how come when I walked out, I didn't get an offer for life insurance. Life insurance companies is the only companies that make you give blood to buy your product. I mean, that's pretty tough, right? But this didn't even have to have personal information. They could just say, Hey, anybody with a score above 90, we want to give 'em an offer.

(00:53:24):
Think about in this new world how you can make it easy by partnering with others. Are you a glass half full person? What magical new service could you create because of ai? What can I do today? That was impossible before. So we were doing some work with the Airbnb or VRBO, and all they could do was search for a city. But what if somebody said, and they did, I want a great house near Zucker Park with a terrific backyard for my kids. They couldn't answer that question, but we could because we looked at all the images and we read all the reviews. And therefore, when somebody asked that question, when natural language search, we didn't lead with a hero image of the inside with LED with a backyard and a review of the backyard. That's what you can do when you control the data, right?

(00:54:27):
Maybe you're a glass half empty person. What new technology or trend could put me out of business? AI could, right? If your competitor gets it first, how can you become proactive? So somebody told me once that the best AI solutions will combine public data like open AI with industry data, maybe lira or the Insurance Association and corporate data because your corporate data is the key to success. I'm at a company outside here, charlie.ai. They've looked at 55 million claims and built an LLM around it. That's very powerful. But it needs to be combined with your data for your specific customer set, for your LLM, so you can make a new recipe. So one of the companies I worked with did this. They in healthcare, they took patient records, appointment records, prescription records, demographic records, weather data and pollen data. And the pollen data said we're going to have a huge pollen problem in Dallas.

(00:55:29):
Next week, a bunch of our patients are going to get sick. Four of them are going to go to the er. Two of them don't have insurance. What should we do? Well, we're going to inform a bunch of people. We're going to send out inhalers in the schools. We are going to send Ubers to those kids without insurance to bring them into the hospital to save us the cost of an ambulance and er. And then we're going to use the AI in a loop that's proactive with a new recipe by combining their data with public data, whether, how can you combine data in a new way for your success? So let's review. We talked about total experience, and that's what we have to think of. Employee experience, customer experience altogether. We talked about how MX and AI can change the game. You can't predict what door they will enter.

(00:56:30):
So open 'em all and make them all work together. The best solutions will be contextual. I'm going to back up. Sorry, this one went fast. Contextual, ambient, proactive, conversational, and AI powered. And if it's conversational, let them buy at every step. Don't ask them 50 questions and then give 'em this surprise answer because you don't know when they're going to jump off the train and buy, right? Improve your skills. Listen with empathy. Be a detective. Understand these models even with LLM, still need training. And don't recreate the past with this new technology. Reimagine what the future can be. Reimagine. Challenge the past. Why doesn't the car door open when I walk up? Why does the car need to start? But can it just turn off when I leave? Shouldn't the lights go on when it's dark? Shouldn't the wiper start when it rains? Those are questions Elon ask, and it just does it.

(00:57:35):
He challenged the past, right? AI is the new UI. Make it easier for everyone because we have unlimited computer power. Now, screens don't have to look like Sabre. Are people going away? No, people are not going away because people still provide empathy and understanding and advice, but we can give them the tools to do their job so much more powerfully than in the past. ServiceNow, CEO, bill McDermott said, there is no bigger risk in gen AI than being a fast follower. I agree. The most important thing to know about AI is these are learning systems. They learn 24 by seven by 365, Tesla has 12 billion miles of driving, learning. When one car learns something, they all learn it. So if your competitor has a powerful AI that's bUIlding databases of claims analysis and moving from actuarial data to actual data, and you are not, how will you ever catch them?

(00:58:40):
It's not a good place to be a fast follower. You have to learn to make better decisions. You see, in corporate America, decisions work like this. Well, in Silicon Valley, they work like this. Yes, no. In corporate America, it's more like pinball. Hey, I got a great new idea. Oh, marketing says that's a terrible idea. It says, don't worry, we can't build the software if you get through them. Well, service says, don't worry, we can't fix it. Manufacturing says irrelevant. We can't build it. And if you get through all of them, they bring out the big guns because now it's time for finance and legal game over, right? That's what happens in big companies. But guess what? If you come together, you have everything startups would kill for. You have the assets, the people, the brand, the Salesforce, the channels. You just have to stop saying no.

(00:59:35):
And realize in the 21st century, your job is to get that idea over the finish line, come together, beat the startups. You see, disruption and innovation are just two sides of the same coin. The only reason you call it a disruption is because you didn't do it. If you did it, it would be an innovation, but you didn't. So it's a damn disruption. Come on, innovate. The opportunities are out there. It won't be easy, but you've got the tools. And if you do it right, and you'll be like the Cheshire Cat and Alice in Wonderland when the cat disappears and only the smile remains. Thank you very much.

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Oops.

(01:00:31):
And again, it's terry jones.com for the slides. Thank you.