Insights Unpacked: AI, Investments, and Ethical Shift

Check out the full episode below! Enjoy the Exchange? Don't forget to tune in live every Friday at 12 pm EST on the Greenbook LinkedIn, Facebook, and Youtube Channel! 

In Episode 38, Karen and Lenny embark on a whirlwind discussion, grappling with the challenge of distilling two weeks' worth of content into a concise 30-minute LinkedIn recording. Amidst this abundance of material, they unpack the highlights of a recent conference, delving into insightful interviews with industry leaders and the practical applications of AI technology. ListenLab steals the spotlight with its impressive success and innovative marketing strategies, earning kudos for its distinctive visual branding and recent competition triumph.

The duo then shifts gears to explore investment dynamics, spotlighting TestSet's recent funding round and ACKWEST’s pivotal role in the data quality sphere. The conversation takes a thought-provoking turn as they dissect the FTC's ban on non-compete agreements, mulling over its potential ramifications and ethical considerations. They advocate for a paradigm shift towards prioritizing employee retention and ethical business conduct, dissecting the impact of non-compete clauses on job mobility and organizational culture. Amidst legal intricacies and constitutional debates, they speculate on the evolving landscape of corporate policies in response to regulatory changes.

The dialogue evolves further into the realm of AI integration, with a spotlight on Apple's ambitious plans to infuse AI functionalities into the iPhone ecosystem. Reflecting on the potential behavioral shifts among users, they ponder the transformative influence of AI on daily routines. Intrigued by the prospect of AI-infused Ray-Bans, they envision a future where artificial intelligence enhances mundane experiences, hinting at a world where technology seamlessly integrates into our everyday lives.

Many thanks to our producer, Karley Dartouzos. 

Use code EXCHANGE30 to get a 30% discount on your general admission IIEX tickets!

IIEX Europe

IIEX LATAM

Transcript 

Karen Lynch: We are live, I think. We are live.

Lenny Murphy: Well, kind of live. Audience, we're actually recording this on Thursday afternoon. I have to go out of town for my daughter's dance, and you're going to.

Karen Lynch: And I have to go out of town for my daughter's dance, which is not a prerequisite for this role, by the way.

Lenny Murphy: It is not. So unfortunately for this Friday, the 26th, we are both doing parent stuff, right? For dance. So we're recording this at 347 p.m. On Thursday, so it's still kind of up to the minute that You're not gonna all the links will be pre populated by the time you guys see this as when it goes live at 12.

Karen Lynch: Anyway, housekeeping I know this would have been a really good week to get live engagement because we would like to start off talking a little bit about the week we had last week since we didn't air an episode because of IX North America. So it would have been great to get like, tell us your thoughts and get all that live stuff coming in at us. But I'm so, so sorry we cannot do that.

Lenny Murphy: And there was a lot, and I'll tell you, from a curation standpoint, we had two weeks worth of content, and there was a lot of stuff flowing this past two weeks that we are condensing into exactly less than 30 minutes to accommodate the recording on LinkedIn.

Karen Lynch: That was a very qualitative thing to say, by the way, exactly less than 30 minutes.

Multiple Speakers: My kind of math right there.

Lenny Murphy: I'm learning. I'm learning. I thought I started this as a quant guy, and I think I've discovered my inner quality over the years.

Karen Lynch: Anyway, so yeah, back to North America. So I know you have some feedback. And for anybody who was not there, And you haven't been, you know, checking the hashtags. There are some really good recaps out there. The one that I really want to point out, the Logic Group, who is our title sponsor, Claire Harrigan was interviewing people on their green carpet, and they are posting these sort of short form videos. I mean, she talked to Priscilla McKinney, Margaret Chapman, Josh Cormie, Jamin Brazil. Those are the ones that have gone live. I don't know who else she's talked to, because I wasn't there the whole time with her. Just go to the LinkedIn page. We have that link that we'll be sharing. And just look at some of those videos of people's on-site takeaways. Pretty cool.

Lenny Murphy: Absolutely. And I think there's a few more of those coming as well. A few vendors did recordings, leveraging their AI tools for automatic analysis on-site. And they've reached out. We'll probably have some more stuff that we'll share. And not just about, oh, how cool IIEX is, but actually, you know, other topics as well.

Karen Lynch: The takeaways, right? So, you know, Christian Aloma from Threadline wrote his recap of his top themes. We had Peter Cloutier from Behaviorally share their top themes. You know, there's plenty of that. So, yeah, there were some top themes, so.

Lenny Murphy: Absolutely. And let me, my, my takeaway, because I've spent all week now talking to everybody. I'll tell you, last week was so nice that nobody, everybody was at IX, so I got a lot of work done. This week, we're talking about IX. The, but there was, it was a cool summary that occurred to me earlier. Then by this time last year, it was kind of, Oh, crap! Right? There's high engagement because we saw this sudden new thing, or at least it appeared a sudden new thing, right, of AI. This year, it seems like the takeaway was that a lot of folks were there to learn. Not about hypotheticals, but about real use cases. And there was a ton of that. You did an amazing job of curating that content and ensuring that we had, you know, OK, here, here's how things are happening. Here's what people are doing. Here's the impact that it's having on the business. And we had tons of sessions like that. And I think people were there to learn about that, which will accelerate the pace of adoption as we go forward from here. And we're still kind of wrapping our heads around these converging data sets around, you know, feedback from the event, grit, conversations, anecdotal conversations. What an exciting and amazing time. And it all kind of culminated at the event in many ways. And we'll have more to share as things go forward from our own thought leadership on where things are going. But the stuff that you and I have been talking about for what, what is this, Episode 38, for the last 38 weeks? Yeah, all of that, we saw that in real life manifesting and playing out at IAX, and it feels like Now we're moving forward into a whole new phase, which will be interesting.

Karen Lynch: 100%. And the competition finalists this year, the Inside Innovation competition this year, the finalists were all like, oh, cool. You can see them folding this new technology into their new offerings. And that was pretty, pretty cool to see to talk about use cases, right? For the most part, there were some great use cases being shared for this emergent technology that manifested in that competition. So it was a really good one. This year is the best one I've seen. And, you know, there have been some good ones.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you and I talked about this in the podcast as well. I'm glad that I was not a judge, because they were all fantastic. Shout out to our winner, ListenLab.

Karen Lynch: For our listeners on Friday, we recorded an episode of the podcast that should come out next Monday. So we pre-recorded Monday's podcast, and the exchange is tomorrow. So anyway, you'll still hear the North America recap. Go ahead. Yay, ListenLab.

Lenny Murphy: Yes. Yeah, congrats. I also heard that they were amazingly effective marketers at the event. So a lesson there, not just on the application.

Karen Lynch: It's a simple name, Listen Labs, but they walked around in green lab coats. And so they looked like scientists. They had this, and it was a very simple visual cue that they are smart. And I mean, they are smart. That's a well-educated group of individuals. They are smart, but they also were like, let's appear smart, right, on site for the conversations they were having. Anyway, Yeah. No, they were, uh, they were, they had, they had the right stuff. So yeah. Tune into Monday's podcast because that episode, when we push that out, because it's, it, it, it explains why we believe they won.

Lenny Murphy:  Absolutely. And let's jump ahead for a minute. So I'm just talking about the competition, um, news shout out, uh, to past competition winners, uh, uh, Rewi, which they won the competition, the first IX in Philadelphia. So whatever that was that all bars together, right but yeah And then cool tool who won the competition a few years ago with their UX reality. I think it was in Europe and They won anyway, they announced yesterday that they acquired a really cool tool. So that's the first right? I mean we can't think of it This is our family right these companies that have won over the years through the competition we have a special place in our heart for all of them and it's first time that we've seen a competition winner acquire another competition winner, so some very cool shout out to our friends at Riri and cool tool and I'm not a successful merger. Full disclosure, it's public. I am on the board of REWE. So I did know this was coming. But it's a really cool thing.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, sweet, sweet. Yeah, no, I love that too. And I just think that even the finalists that did not win, they came up to talk to me about it afterwards and say, is there anything they could have done better? And I was like, you have a very strong you know, very strong offering, like, you know, it's no losers, like, let's just focus on that. Because this is a good thing. You all got great visibility to a pretty cool offering. So yeah, good stuff all around. So absolutely. Yeah, so let's talk, you know, I know we want to talk about the, I just really want to just stick with the kind of investment activity since we were just talking about the REWE and CoolTool thing, but I think, I don't know TestSet, but I think it's really timely that we're talking about ACWEST and now we're seeing, you know, oh, so ACWEST has invested in TestSet in Europe. And here we go. Remember, we talked about in the last few weeks how they are to be taken seriously as people who understand what's happening in the data quality space and the importance of it, and they are now going to be putting money behind it. So I think we should be watching out for this company.

Lenny Murphy: Absolutely. Right. It's Hugh and Keith. So Hugh Davis, Keith Price, we talked about them a few weeks ago, and as you said, reminisced about the role of these guys. Yeah, they are. I think this was the first deal publicly. And, a test set. Known for providing uncorrupted, unbiased, human verified insight data. Quality. Quality play.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Quality play. And that's what we expect of them. That's why they're getting into this game. And that is what, you know, they're going to put money behind human verified insights data. Anyway, we'll be watching them. So I'm excited to learn more about that company as they move forward. So that's a pretty cool one.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, an international company that is a European company. So we're so aqueous is playing internationally, not just here in the US. So yeah, yeah.

Karen Lynch: Speaking of internationally, we did not mention that we have our next event. We moved right off of IIEX Europe at the end of June. So right now we just both moved on. But IIEX Europe, that 20% called the exchange. If you use the code exchange, you get off on our IIEX Europe event. So yeah, let's talk about data quality in Europe at the end of June and see what's happening overseas.

Lenny Murphy: Absolutely. And I know for a fact, because we just talked about that there is a really cool presentation that's going to be there. So on this, this research on research on this issue, which is really cool. So yeah, it'll be a we know it's at least one presentation about it.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, the agenda's about done. It's looking good. It's looking good. And that's on the heels of North America, which again was pretty good. Now I'm really quite excited to see what we're bringing to the stage in Europe. Anyway, but we digress. Let's move back to the other topics at hand.

Lenny Murphy: Well, let's talk about the FTC ban. We can talk about the other things we had in investments like AI.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, yeah, we'll come back to that. But what I want to do, like the facilitator in me or the presenter in me wants to say, who here has ever had to sign a non-compete agreement? Right? I mean, it's just one of those things where you're like, well, I have to sign a non-compete. That's just going to change my exit strategy.

Lenny Murphy: Yes.

Karen Lynch: Maybe not anymore.

Lenny Murphy: Well, at least for the moment. So if those are not following the news, we'll have a link to the Wall Street Journal report. The FTC has banned non-compete agreements that restrict job switching here in the US. A lawsuit challenging it has already been filed. So lest I get too excited for the moment. Although right now, I'm thinking about switching jobs right now. Maybe the next you got maybe a couple months. Now's a really good time. If you're such a company, everybody despises everybody. If you want to poach somebody, now's the time to do it.

Karen Lynch: Well, or let's reframe that. If you want to keep somebody, let's do that. Let's stop thinking about the poachers and just say, let's get ahead of people who want to leave this company and focus on keeping good people at your organization so that the non-cheat is a non-issue. I remember, look, I'll date myself a bit. When I was leaving one of the qualitative firms I worked for to start my own business, I did not, I was so transparent and said, I do not want to take clients because that is not how I want to start off my own business. I am not going to start my own practice doing that. I would rather pay my dues and work hard to secure clients that I earned all on my own and not on, you know, on the wings of my previous employer who trained me and helped raise me up, right? That just wasn't what I was going to do. That's what, patting myself on the back, that's what good ethics are, right, and integrity. And let's work a little more towards that instead of, you know, this other feeling of, oh, I don't trust you before you've even started working for us. Right, right. Let's put the pressure on the employee. Good person. Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: And all of that said, and I will still be, go back to my mercenary tendencies. If you're gonna switch, now's the time to do it. You gotta really narrow it. This won't last. This will not last. You know, it's just, everything you said is true, regardless of what happens with that. And I 100% agree with you. I despise non-competes. I think it's just a crappy way to do business, because it does send the wrong message.

Karen Lynch: Well, it's a, it's a prenup. It's, it's, you know, it's the same kind of analogy, which is we're going into this thinking about when it ends, instead of just the assumption that it might not. Instead of the assumption that it will be a great relationship for as long as we both can, both parties can put into it. So I think that's why it really irks me quite a bit because it's not giving the, it's, yeah. So anyway, I really, I'd love to see these go away because I think it's not helpful to anybody.

Lenny Murphy: I agree, but more than likely, it's going to be challenged. And I'll say this for a second. It's interesting. What's going to be challenged is the FTC does not have the authority to do this. That's what it's going to be challenged on. The Congress in the US has not granted them the authority to make a rule like this, a rule change. Not a rule change, a proclamation, because there is not a rule that exists. It's a private business. So that's the challenge. It's a big thorny kind of like all things nowadays are kind of a constitutional separation of powers and checks and balances.

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. Beyond my pay grade. Right. Um, uh, But I suspect it will get traction and then the states will do what the states do one way or the other. So, but at least the topic has been broached. And I think that's a good thing to your point. Maybe we'll see a change overall where companies just start shifting how they do this and focus on retention versus prevention.

Karen Lynch: Right, right, exactly, exactly. So see, you like my rose-colored glasses. They suit you well.

Lenny Murphy: I do, it matches my cheeks.

Karen Lynch: Yes, exactly. They are so funny.

Lenny Murphy: All right, we're trying to stay on task.

Karen Lynch: Well, yeah, I just think that, you know, the only other partnership that we wanted to talk about before we move on to all things AI, because quite frankly, let's give it a pause because it's also AI related, but this Coca-Cola-Microsoft five-year partnership is really interesting. They've announced a collaboration focusing on cloud and AI technologies driving innovation and efficiency between Microsoft and Coca-Cola. So a very bold statement from a brand that we all watch and pay attention to. Big brand saying, yep, we are partnering with Microsoft to make sure AI is part of our ecosystem. I think that's a big deal.

Lenny Murphy: It is. And I'll tell you, I heard something just today that was similar, maybe with this, One of the largest CPG companies in the world partnered with Microsoft to build their own LLM. I expect that's what this has to do with. So it's a segue, right? We know there's some resistance. Some brands still have concerns about privacy and security, et cetera, et cetera, of their data within, you know, feeding into the big LLMs, right? And rightfully so. I would absolutely expect Coke is probably thinking about that, of like, we're sending a whole bunch of data, but we don't want, we don't want our competitors to get access to our data because it's fed into your, your, your LLM. So the genesis of these types of partnerships is to, one, they will probably develop their own custom solutions that sit inside their organization that, you know, we'll see, We'll see many such instances of that. And if Microsoft's doing it, we'll see. Google will do it, and OpenAI, and it'll be whoever wins that fight. But Microsoft definitely has an edge, because they are already an enterprise partner for most of these companies. I would argue AWS would as well, because of their hosting. Or sorry, Amazon, because of hosting. So it'll be interesting to see this happen. You're right, it's the money, right? The money's flowing there, they see the benefit. Koch shifted years ago towards an analytically focused solution. Many people probably in our audience lived through the great bloodletting where they just kind of reorg everything within the insight space and focus on what they thought of as their data machine and poured everything into that. AI unlocks the promise of what they were trying to build for years already.

Karen Lynch: So, and I mean, if you're, if you're at a company that's not quite to the size and scope of Coke or any of the other big, you know, CPG behemoths out there, uh, you know, you might want to be

Lenny Murphy: talking to procurement and say, we're going to have to get over these hurdles because, you know, we are, uh, I've been very public about my reticence to utilize, uh, AI personally. Um, I used a co-pilot this week. So there is no resistance as it is futile, my friends. I needed to get a presentation done, and it was 10 o'clock at night. And I could spend five hours doing it, or I could do it in about 20 minutes. And I chose to do it in about you know, you just and that's a super high level use case, but it worked.

Karen Lynch: So yeah, there you go. I know. I know. It doesn't mean you were lazy. It means you were efficiently using your time.

Lenny Murphy: I was really damn tired as well. But for that particular set case, yes. All right. We got a few more minutes. We got a bunch more to get through.

Karen Lynch: We do, we do. So let's just, let me just say, you know, because there's, you know, we want to get to some innovations, but there are also two solid reports that came out in the last two weeks that we'll share the links, we don't have to dig into them, but the Stanford HAI release 2024 version of their AI index report, we'll share that link, you know, That I remember when that came out last year, we had somebody who was talking about it at our AI event last September. So that report is out. And actually, I haven't downloaded it yet. But it will be good to look at that report in the context of what was said last year and kind of start to track that trend because that one's gonna be pretty cool. I don't know about the MRI report. I don't know if you know anything about that one.

Lenny Murphy: I did. So MRI, uh, uh, the, uh, market research. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm not going to butcher it.

Karen Lynch: Uh, institute.

Lenny Murphy:  Yes. Fantastic friends of ours that focus on education, et cetera, et cetera. They do tons of great work. Um, the, uh, they released a report, they did study on, uh, um, AI and focus market researchers weigh in on AI's workplace impact for today and tomorrow. And it's a great report. The results go, they definitely match exactly with when we, on the overall pieces that we've got in GRIT, that's coming up as well on usage and attitudes, but it went deeper. It went deeper and they looked at kinds of differences in segments, et cetera, et cetera. Definitely worth downloading. You'll find yourself in that report one way or the other.

Karen Lynch: So yeah, good stuff. We know we like that. We like finding ourselves in the reports. We do. We do. All right. Tell me about Street Bees. I don't know about Street Bees. I think you found this one too. Look at you looking like that.

Lenny Murphy: Street Bees, they're out of the UK, I believe, built basically a large ethnographic panel for all intents and purposes. Sorry guys, I know you probably don't like that language, Street Beast team. Fundamentally, you got a whole bunch of people who do cool stuff for research and integrating photo and video capture with AI analysis. You know, that's what, yes, of course, that's what you should be doing, right? So, and I don't mean to have to be dismissive of what they did, that's, understand, this is just where things are going. It quickly became table stakes. And Streep East is another example of a company that, you know, has done really cool stuff in leaning into the efficiencies that the solutions, these technologies give to their customers and creating more value for that. So yep All right, I don't use Apple so you talk about this next No, it's just an article that came out.

Karen Lynch: Well, actually more than one. We might see one and then there's, you know, when it comes to big tech like Apple, then there's going to be a dozen of them. So you probably just also Google this, but Apple is getting into the AI model game. And they're talking about how AI is going to come to our phones. The introduction of an open AI model. It says, you know, this says Open ELM, but it must be, is ELM different from LL, a large language model?

Lenny Murphy: What's an ELM? I am, I am not sure.

Karen Lynch: Right? We'll have to look into that. But it's this idea that we're going to get, you know, AI functionality built into our phones. So just start to imagine what that's going to be like, But if anything can make it mainstream usage, it's going to be your iPhone, right? For millions of users. I mean, everything that this phone has done to help me start doing things that I never thought I'd do before. Whether it's, again, not a gamer, phone gamer, not really doing social media at my desk, definitely doing social media on my phone. So my phone changes my behavior by the very nature that it's always with me. And now Apple's going to be integrating this technology into it somehow. Stay tuned. That'll be really interesting. When they do those updates about the new products coming out, this one's going to be fascinating the next time that happens once we start talking about this.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. I mean, it'll be Siri on steroids. I don't know what ELM is, but I do know a specific element of this. The difference is that this will, almost all AI solutions operate in the Cloud. This is engineered to operate on the device. So it'll be powered by the phone, everything will be driven within the phone. And Uh, and I know we're short on time, but the summit occurred to me earlier, we're talking about this conversation about, uh, one, one thing that drove the growth of AI versus any other technology is that we had the infrastructure to support it already in place. Think about everything from the internet to wireless centers. So we had to build the infrastructure, right? We had to build networks. We had to build technology and servers and all that good stuff. AI wasn't that way. We already had all of that. All of it was already existing. All we have to do now is optimize the components for speed and processing power. Hence why NVIDIA has exploded, right? And other chip manufacturers. So keep that in mind, naysayers. You're wrong.

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: You're just wrong. The, uh, these technologies use cases we can debate about. Right. But the core technology being integrated into things like, uh, like devices like the iPhone. Yeah. It's just, it's here because it's easy to do.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. And it's going to be helpful. Like once people start to adopt, it's going to be helpful. I mean, I think we, there's another, you know, new story about, you know, meta and their, their large language model. And you know, that's going to be coming to, to, to a social media platform near you. We've seen it. Some of us have seen it in LinkedIn, you know, their new AI functionality, like this is going to be integrated into more and more of the, um, Sites that we come to rely on just daily as individuals And I think that if that isn't telling that some of these large Organizations are using it in things that we are going to become users of whether we wanted to or not.

Lenny Murphy: Yep You know, right and and back to the device, right? So now because meta you know, they decide not to build a phone Yeah, but they don't rate it, you know part of Ray Bans. Yeah glasses and I'll have multimodal AI. And that specifically has implications for research, right? So think about, you know, ethnography, shop alongs, you know, more and more of that. My belief is that research will continue to ask fewer questions, but those questions are gonna be a hell of a lot more meaningful. And those questions are gonna be about people's human experience. And so the era of wearables from a research standpoint like that, became no-brainer. So if you run, if you do ethnography, if you own a sensory testing facility, I'd be getting some of these meta Ray-Bans and starting to experiment.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, I definitely would experiment with these. I sure hope that I can get hooked. I shouldn't, you know, because Yeah. Cause I like me a good pair of Ray-Bans actually. So, you know, put a little AI in them and I'm down.

Lenny Murphy:  I mean, they'd have to get a prescription for me. That was, I will share this and we'll end on this. I want you guys to picture this, right? I've worn glasses since I was eight years old. Then we got, I bought glass. Oh God, experiment with glass. I'll get contacts. You know, I wore contacts once. I bought the contacts so I could use glass. I put them in once, I got an eye infection, and never wore them again, and therefore never used glass again. So there's pictures floating out there somewhere of me wearing glass, like, ooh, look at me. But it didn't work, but a cool pair of Ray-Bans, it'd be a hell of a lot easier, I'm sure, to put my prescription lenses into Ray-Bans and use that product.

Karen Lynch: So. All around pretty sweet. So anyway, we really do have to wrap, friends, since we are pre-recording, we have a very finite amount of time. So remember, it was going to be exactly less than 30 minutes. We are exactly less than 30 minutes away. So that's a wrap. That's a wrap. That's a wrap. We're all set for today. We will see you next week. I will be on the road. I'm heading to Salt Lake City for the Qualtrics event. So next Friday, I'll be debriefing that a little bit with y'all too, Lenny. And that should be different.

Lenny Murphy: It will. It'll be fun. And you gotta tell us about your experience meeting the Backstreet Boys.

Karen Lynch: I know. I don't think I'll meet them. I didn't meet the Killers last year, but I did get into the VIP seating.

Lenny Murphy: So there's that. I'd rather meet the killers than the Backstreet Boys, but whatever.

Karen Lynch: It's great fun. They put on a good show. I mean, the whole event is nothing like any other industry event I've ever been to with 10,000 attendees. So anyway, enough about that. That's next week.

Lenny Murphy: Thanks. All right. Everybody take care. Bye-bye.

Links from the episode:

The Logit Group Green Carpet event at IIEX NA 

Kristian A. Alomá, Ph.D. on LinkedIn: IIEX North America 

Navigating the AI Wave: Insights from IIEX NA 2024 

iMAD Research on LinkedIn 

FTC Bans Noncompete Agreements That Restrict Job Switching 

TestSet Launches in Europe with Strategic Investment from ACKWEST Group 

RIWI Announces Acquisition of the Majority of CoolTool Assets 

The Coca-Cola Company and Microsoft announce five-year strategic partnership 

Stanford HAI Releases 2024 AI Index Report 

New MRII Report 

Streetbees Integrates Photo and Video Capture into SBX Tool  

Apple’s new AI model hints at how AI could come to the iPhone 

Meta Llama 3 - The most capable openly available LLM to date 

The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses have multimodal AI now