Navigating Change and Accelerating Research

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Episode 44 of The Exchange kicked off with Karen Lynch introducing special guest Timothy Lynch, a change management consultant specializing in generative AI. The discussion quickly turned to the recent major AI platform outages, underscoring the importance of having robust contingency plans in place. They also delved into the unveiling of Digital Landscapes by Walmart Data Ventures, discussing its potential impact on the competitive landscape.

Karen highlighted quantilope's new online learning hub, discussing its potential as both an educational resource and an additional income stream. The launch of Clever AI by CleverTap was examined, stressing the importance of evaluating various offerings before committing to a solution. They delved into a detailed conversation about Bloom, an AI platform reliant on language models, and its applications.

The conversation then turned to research velocity and learning, underscoring the value of rapid prototyping and structured research sprints. Throughout the meeting, they shared personal experiences and insights, drawing inspiration from industry leaders like Jeff Bezos. They also paid tribute to the late industry legend Reg Baker, celebrating his legacy and impact.

Many thanks to our producer, Karley Dartouzos. 

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Transcript 

Karen Lynch: And it's showtime. Hey, everybody. I'm not imagining it. Lenny Murphy was not able to join us today. And so I was scrambling at the last minute to fill his shoes. And I thought, who better to replace his shoes than Tim Lynch? So For those of you who do not know Tim Lynch, I'm going to let him introduce himself to you. Former insights industry professional turned change management consultant with a wealth of knowledge around tech and specialty in generative AI right now. He also happens to be my husband. Tim, welcome to the exchange.

Tim Lynch: This is what our relationship and marriage has been for 30 years now. I know. Yeah. So hi everybody. You know, I have been in and around the industry for decades. Um, starting in medical research, uh, working with physician behavior and changing physician behavior, using qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Um, I then took a, I've always been with the technology side. So, um, took a fantastic journey with, uh, the team at Focus Vision. Um, through Revelation, through Decipher, through the integrations, and then went over and worked with Tom Anderson and Odin Text and built that up. So text analytics, that's, again, that market research, technology, behavior change aspect. And now I'm in it again with AI. So leveraging large language models and behavior change, job change, a little bit more out of the beyond just the market research, but to entire organizations and how are they changing, leveraging AI?

Karen Lynch: And one of the interesting things to him about, and again, I promise him, don't worry, I'm not interviewing you. So one of the things that I think is really interesting is that in your role as a change management consultant, you do a lot of usability work, user research. So you may not be working in the research industry, but you're, your knowledge of research has followed you into this current career, right?

Tim Lynch: Well, it has, it has given me, the insights industry has given me all of the nuggets, all of the skills that are in my toolbox that I jump into, whether that's interviewing, whether that's, you know, sample size, whether that's, you know, we're going to do a quantitative study, a qualitative study, a usability study, Um, you know, all of the books that we have around our house in this, um, are all things that I use on a daily basis.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Well, it's, um, it's fun to have you here. And, you know, for those of you who don't know, last year when we had an AI event, we, um, we offered up a consulting package and Tim was doing some consulting for some of our IIX AI attendees. So anyway, it's really fun to have you here talking. And, you know, before we get too far into things, just things, meaning the topics of the week, things I really want to get your perspective on, I do want to pay homage to an industry legend, somebody that I did not know personally, nor did Tim, but was somebody that Lenny was, was very fond of, who, you know, I think collaborated with in many ways over the years, Reg Baker, Reginald Paul Baker. Karley’s going to share a link to his obituary. If you're not aware of his passing, we are sorry for everybody in his orbit and in his family, of course, who, you know, are mourning somebody who's been in this industry for, you know, 40 years or so. I was thinking about that and I was seeing myself perhaps getting there. So someday, not there yet, but I understand and, you know, shout out Tim, I was telling you, and he was an avid bird watcher. So that's what happens. You should see Tim and I with the birds. Anyway, it's really funny. So if you ever want to make a donation, there's a link in the bottom of this obituary to the American Birding Association. So I love that. I think that's really a nice way to honor somebody and, and bring who they are into things. So. Anyway, acknowledging, acknowledging a great, a legend that I wish I had met. And let's just, uh, you know, recognize there's no good segue from an obituary into the topics of the week.

Tim Lynch: So, well, we want to go to, you know, the obituary to the celebration, right. To the, to the celebration of his contributions and, and, and all that he gave the industry and continuing the celebration. With our first topic. 

Karen Lynch: Congratulations on being here. Yes. All good things. So yes. So let's talk about our first topic because this affected me. I don't know if it affected everybody else, but, um, or anybody else listening to, you know, open AI chat, GPT, major outage outage this week. Um, I remembered again, like, cause Tim and I are kind of coworkers. We each have our own office in our home. We're very blessed with space and, um, you know, you know, messaging him and running down and saying like, what's going on with chat GPT? It's not working. And Claude's not working either. And, um, you know, and then, then come to find out, you know, chat GPT, Google's Gemini perplexity, Claude all down.

Tim Lynch: Yeah, it was a very Ron Popeil moment or morning where it was, but wait, there's more, but wait, there's more, but wait, there's more. Like it just kept, uh, they kept falling and, um, you know, it wasn't any single thing that did it. You know, but this is, this is kind of the, you know, it's cloud, you know, we have it where Facebook goes down. We have it where, you know, the fail whale with Twitter, like it does happen because AI is getting so very personal. You know, we talk about it in, in grandiose, these are platform technologies and all of that. But it's really the individual that is changing the way that they work day to day, hour by hour, moment by moment. And then it's taken away. Yeah. And that can make people feel the feelings.

Karen Lynch: Right. Well, I was, I was feeling the feels. There's a really funny article and the article isn't funny, but the title is the, the title is funny, which is forcing millions to use their brain as OpenAI's chat GPT takes the morning off. Cracked me up because, and Tim and I were talking about this, because it's like my brain, it's not that I don't use my brain when I rely on chat GPT to help me with certain tasks. I'm actually thinking quite intensely about how to word this? How do I leverage the platform to get the most out of it? How do I help it understand what I'm asking so it can help me? Like me, when I'm using generative AI, I am working very hard to use generative AI or thinking very intensely. It was just, it's become a habit of some things that I do. And without it, I was like, wait, what did I used to do doing this task? And I think that just speaks to where people are on their adoption curve, right? Like you and I started leaning into generative AI very quickly. Other people, not so much. So I don't know, we were talking about neurology, like what's happening in our brains and anyway.

Tim Lynch: Yeah. And it's just, it's an awkward style switch, right? I mean, everybody on, everybody on this writes with a keyboard. Well, if your internet goes down, you know how to write with a pen. It's not that you don't know how to write with a pen. It's just this awkward, um, situation shift.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. It's a great analogy. That's why I pay you the bill.

Tim Lynch: The hard, the hard part that everybody in the end, well, everybody in the, when I say everybody, I only mean everybody in the tech industry that has these things right now had to face these were the foundation aspects, right? You know, Google, uh, open AI, um, and tropics Claude, what they are used to enable AI and lots of other things. So Grammarly's AI was down. Microsoft's co-pilot was misbehaving because it's open AI underneath it. So it's like, well, did the co-pilot go down? No. But, uh, uh, an enabling technology that feeds in the co-pilot was struggling and that changes a whole, well, it, it surfaced a whole need for how we, how do we communicate in times that, you know, systems are down or systems are compromised. And a lot of the technology players have those.

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Tim Lynch: But now they have to have them for somebody else's technology that's inside their technology. And that's a new dynamic.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, yeah, I know. Right. It's like we're not only learning new systems, but now we need to learn the fail safes for the new systems for when things happen. Right. Man, I wouldn't want to be a change management consultant right now. That's for sure.

Tim Lynch: Or in crisis communications.

Karen Lynch: Or in crisis communications. Oh my goodness. Um, yeah, no, really interesting stuff. So if you were one of the ones who experienced that disruption, I was with you that day was not my favorite day.

Tim Lynch: And then the afternoon had AT&T go down and Verizon go down.

Karen Lynch: I know. It's not okay. None of it's okay. Look. Anyway, the only thing we have going for us, which, again, Tim is my husband, and I'm like, we ended our day at the beach. So the good news is that we ended up at a beach bonfire, having a lovely evening. So isn't that the balance we like to strike in life? We have stressful days, and then we move on. All right, speaking of moving on, let's move on, shall we, Tim? One of the pieces that we thought was important enough to put an article out about it was on the conversation Lenny had with the team at Walmart and about their newest movie. So for those of you who know, we've been talking and we had a podcast episode about Walmart Luminate. And we've had Linda Lopilino on the Green Book podcast. We actually alluded to this last week or started the conversation last week. And Lenny said, I'll be talking more about it next week. So it's kind of a bummer that he's not here, although Tim is also up to speed. But Walmart Data Ventures has now unveiled, kind of it was under, oh my gosh, what do you call that? Like, whatever. We weren't allowed to talk about it until Tuesday. Digital Landscapes, which is offering more behavioral data and customer journey data to some of the shopper data that they have. And they are really kind of launching a full on insights practice where brands can go to them for very rich data at this point beyond just shopper insights, but some of these other things that full service research companies work to come up with.

Tim Lynch: Super interesting. Super interesting. You know, they, they had in all of the, in all of the tech talk is, you know, this data is great data is the next gold and all of that, but you got to connect it. You got to bring it together. You have to wrap a product around it. Like how do we productize all of this stuff that we have, um, to go from the raw information data to something that's actionable and useful. And you know, this is a major step forward for their team and a major revelation into an offering that's available for, for, for multiple brands and researchers.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. And you know, I think one of the things that you and I talked about with this was, um, you know, it's certainly like not something that the other, the other big retailers won't also do, right. They all have shopper data, you know, Amazon web services and, you're talking about Target, like everybody has this shopper data. It's the idea of commercializing into or monetizing their insights and their analytics into an offering, becoming basically an insights supplier. So for people in the industry who are listening to this and thinking, so what, like, what does this mean for me? The reality is, is this there's a new there's a new competitive landscape right now, where customers of yours potentially or of your clients, if you're full service, you know, working on a supply chain, you know, they could just go right to Walmart and get some of that kind of mainstream consumer data that you might've been working hard to provide for them. But guess what? Now you're competing with Walmart or collaborating.

Tim Lynch: You know, the insights, you know, one of the things we love is its collaboration, right? We're competition here, but we're collaborators here. Um, you know, Walmart definitely will have a first mover advantage. A data advantage from their scale. You know, they operate in the B, the billions, right? So, you know, they just, they vibrate at a much different scale, but they're not alone there, right? Like you said, Amazon operates at that scale. Target operates at that scale. Who will be the fast follower? And what will their unique offering be?

Karen Lynch: It's gonna be interesting. It's going to be interesting. That's something Lenny and I say all the time. It's going to be interesting. So when you are kind of watching emerging trends like this, like that's one of the only things you can say is it's going to be interesting. So take out the popcorn. So here's another segue into another. Exactly.

Tim Lynch: It's popcorn. It will be interesting to see velocity, right? Like how fast does the fast follower come? Um, you know, we do, we in, in, in all of the, all of, not to beat the dead horse, but in all of the AI conversations, you know, we're talking about making major shifts within the quarter. Walmart is a giant firm. They came out fast. Who comes out fast? Like, is there, is there a pace change that has happened?

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Well, certainly we talk about pace change all the time with all these things, AI, right? Like the, the, the exponential or that, you know, that curve of advancements there is, beyond, you know, our human comprehension. And, you know, we talk a lot about, we're probably going to get GPT-5 probably by the end of the year, even, like significant advancements in a very short period of time. So yeah, how quickly these people will move, I have these, these people, these other entities, I have no idea. But you know that, you know, it's in the works. They're trying to figure out if they can do this too. So anyway, speaking of people trying to figure out if they can do things too, how's that for a segue? That was a great segue. So, you know, one of our partners, Quantilope has opened up, they have an online learning hub, and they've opened it up to non clients. So this is an online academy. And, you know, basically, becoming kind of an edge, having like an educational offering. So I, you know, what I find really interesting is, You know, they're showing thought leadership, they're throwing innovation, but they're also opening up another income stream for themselves, right? It's like, well, you know what? We can educate people. So they're putting a stake in the ground saying we are qualified to educate others. We have so much knowledge we can educate others. And it'll be another income stream for them. So I think that's really interesting. And people who have been dabbling with that idea should take a look at it. So I don't know. My brain is, wrestling with this topic, right? Because we know they're good at what they do. And then I'm also like, but are they who I would trust for education? I'm not sure that's where I would go. So I don't know how you feel about that.

Tim Lynch: Yeah. You know, it's, um, it's building an ecosystem around the community, around the topics and sharing, you know, when you're in love, you want to tell the world, right? So as we're doing right here, sorry, I was a little too cheesy, but, um, but you know, so they have that expertise. So do you wall it off and say, only if you're a paying customer here, do you get, do you get this or, you know, and it also helps the front end of the relationship because some portion of those will just naturally become quantal of customers. Yeah.

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Tim Lynch: Um, and you know, that's the, that's the model that Salesforce does. Uh, you know, Salesforce has the idea exchange, um, and their whole trailhead community. And you don't need to have Salesforce to use Salesforce. Microsoft has it with Microsoft learn. Amazon has it with AWS. Um, it, it's a proven way to, to get a community excited around topics where they're sharing and learning and growing. And it happens to also be aligned with a, with a SaaS offering.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, yeah. Well, I wish them luck. I'm sure I'm sure you do, too. And everybody at Green Booker, you know, whenever we see one of our, you know, one of our partners who we know, for one thing, start doing something else, we're always like, please, best of luck to you and your venture. We'll be paying attention. So, you know, plus we're all for innovation, right? We really like innovation. So, you know, another thing that came to us, another innovation this week, another platform innovation that came to us is a company called Clevertap. CleverTap launched CleverAI. Now, you know, I found out about this on Acer Research Media. So that's the link that Karley’s about to share. And this is kind of new to me, I think that, you know, they have presence all around the world, but they're not necessarily US based now. I had never heard of them before when this, you know, crossed my way. And they are a customer engagement platform, right? So there's lots of them. There's probably lots that are off your radar. There's, of course, you know, the large CX or customer engagement platforms like Qualtrics, who we talk about quite a bit. And when I clicked on this one, especially their AI offering, having just been at the X4 Summit for Qualtrics, where they've layered AI into everything they do, I'm like, oh, yeah, this is really interesting. This is very similar. These are very similar offerings. And anyway, it just made me pause because it's a, it's a, it's a category where I don't know all the platforms that operate in this space. And I don't know. I don't know whether our audience does either, but it makes me go, Hmm.

Tim Lynch: Yeah, this is buckle up. We are, everybody is going to have it in. And again, it's going to go to that. Where is your data? What is your data source? What works for you? And so, all of these technologies are going to be able to be empowered and leverage large language models. Who they partner with, where their data is, I mean, companies can have lots of compliance conversations on those, and then align with what are our data sources, right? If we're already using Qualtrics, I don't know what it is, is this enough to make a platform switch? In the last two years I haven't seen many platform switches. Yeah. Right. If you are, if you are in Google, if you are in Google shopping, then you are leveraging Gemini and working with and figuring out how that fits in. If you are in the Amazon world, you are leveraging Anthropic and Claude and figuring that out. If you are in open AI, ChatGPT, Microsoft, then you are leveraging it in that. And so, there's going to be more and more and more and more that are just leveraging it where they are. And the pie is big enough. There are so many, there's so much opportunity out there. It's not that we only need one way to integrate AI into your consumer insights, service, products, descriptions, things like that. There's plenty of work to go around.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and what's interesting as you're talking, I'm sitting here thinking like, you know, if, If you have a business and you've never explored any of them, it's a good time to check out all the offerings. I know that Qualtrics has this amazing reputation, but it doesn't mean that it's right for you. We don't know what the pricing is. I haven't looked into that. One thing that did stand out, and if you're already using something, it would take a lot to make a switch. We see that across financial services. People don't switch banks. Ecosystems, people don't even want to switch drugs. If you take Tylenol, sometimes you don't even want to take the Advil or whatever. People don't like to switch. There's teams that do research for switching. I've worked on a few of those teams myself. But anyway, what I find really interesting, though, is if I was brand new to this and I log on to two different platforms, and one is a trusted industry known, and one is a startup, one of the things I'm looking for is ease of use, usability, and the platform itself. Is it intuitive? And I think what we saw at our competition at this year's North America event, there was a company that won this year's Insights Innovation competition called Listen Labs. And as soon as I saw it, I was like, well, they were going to win. They made it look so intuitive. Their platform, their user interface was intuitive. And I liked it because I need things to be simple right now. Right. And sure enough, they did win. And I can't help but think that the usability of their platform is part of the why. So I thought when I saw this clever, I was like, people should check this out because it looks easy to understand. Like it just made it seem like a simple concept as opposed to that's really complex, which I think is complex, but they made it look simple. So anyway.

Tim Lynch: Right. And now, you know, so if your brand product, if, if your customer, if your e-commerce platform is Shopify, this might be great for you because you have control over those. If you are a Walmart, if you are a target, you have data governance, you have a ton of other processes that go in beyond this particular tool and have got ease of use.

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Tim Lynch: While ease of usability is extremely important, it's not, it's not the end all be all decision.

Karen Lynch: Right, right. No. Excellent point. It's good. Good stuff. Tim Lynch. Good stuff. I'm trying so hard. You're doing a good job, baby. You're doing a good job. Friends.

Tim Lynch: You know, Lenny is not you can't just jump in and try to be Lenny. That doesn't work.

Karen Lynch: No. And I bet he would say you can't jump in and be Tim Lynch either. Yeah, I know. Don't I? Anyway, enough about that. So GetY, let's talk about GetY. Here's what's fun. Tim, you had actually shared the news about GetY before I had seen it. So that's really interesting to me. But GetY, actually GetY is going to be at our IIEX Europe event, which we'll talk about shortly. But GetY secured 3.5 million in Series A funding. Danish consumer research tech company developing more innovative solutions with this money. Um, so, you know, we checked out, I think both of us have checked out this press release and, you know, both of us have thoughts about it because I have a background in qualitative research. Tim has done a lot of interviewing. We certainly have seen hours and hours and hours of video, video, open ends, video content, and had to struggle with the analysis of that. So, you know, what's interesting is. It seems that there are other solutions out there yet they've gotten funding. So that's what makes me go, Hmm, about this story. It's, it's, they've got funding, lots of players in the industry haven't. So what do you think?

Tim Lynch: You know, it's, they, it's series A, right? So this is early on, they are building it out. They are European based. Um, and that automatically has data governance, regulations, where your data lives, right? So there's that dynamic and depending on where you are, that dynamic matters or doesn't matter. Right? So like other people are working on this. We were dreaming of it back in the old focus vision days. Like, you know, this is just, and so other platforms are going to have a disability because they are all working on solving the same problem. Toyota makes a great car. So does Honda. There's plenty of room. They are both very profitable companies. Yeah. Um, so it'll be, it'll be interesting to see. We'll watch, we'll see where it grows. You know, it's not that because they're doing this, others aren't. Um, it's that there's a market opportunity of significant size and this company has got enough momentum to justify the investment.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty cool. That's cool. And like I said, I'm excited to be meeting them in Europe, um, which we'll talk about in a minute. The other thing is, uh, which I think you can talk to, which I, um, I didn't tell you that we're going to talk about, but the layer on this is that it says their biggest selling point is Bloom, which is an AI platform. So what I think is really interesting, cause that's just another LLM. Like, tell me, what do you know about Bloom? And why is that a big selling point?

Tim Lynch: So these language models, there are hundreds of them. The main players that people know about are OpenAI, ChatGPT, Claude, Anthropic, Google Gemini, right? They are the three main pillars out there, but there are thousands of other LLMs that are being tailored to see, do I need to use billions of parameters for it to fit this use case? There are liquid LLMs, which are for when you don't have connection to the cloud. So I want to have an AI-enabled car that's not relying on a constant internet connection. What happens if we lose the internet? Does my car not work? So there are so many efforts in there, and it's really on how we get the best performance at the lowest overhead. And everybody's solution is working on finding that balance. That's why the big announcement from OpenAI to go to GPT-4.0 in the, I think, top three bullet points of why it mattered, aside from the fact that you could talk to it, it could see things, was that it was a 50% reduction in token and cost to run. Do people care how much it costs OpenAI to run? They've got billions of dollars, but it matters.

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Tim Lynch: And so as these, what is our product? What model are we using? And then what does it cost to actually operate this thing to give us the performance we need?

Karen Lynch: Right. Yeah. Interesting. So all of these other players like to get why, for example, that might be creating AI solutions for analyzing video, et cetera, et cetera. And They are all based, some of them potentially on different LLMs, but there is something about Bloom specifically that is an advantage. I don't know enough about why or what that means, but if you are paying attention to this episode and you are in that space, you might want to check out, well, what's their LLM versus my LLM and how is that better? And is there something to that that I need to pay attention to? That's the research I would suggest you do if you're in that space. Anyway, good stuff, Tim Lynch. Yeah.

Tim Lynch: It's going to change. It's going to change every month. Um, yeah.

Karen Lynch: What's going to change every month?

Tim Lynch: The models we're getting at GPT five. We're in anthropic club three. What comes after club three Opus? You know, it's Gemini 1.5. What's the next Gemini there? There's.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Yeah. All right. All right, real quick, we're going to share one more article. See, you thought we were only going to talk 15 minutes in the absence of Lenny, but here we go. I'll have a half an hour of content, always. One more article. We're not even going to talk too much about it because of time, and I want to do our final goodbye. But Google Ventures, this article is to Google Ventures formula for conducting research faster. I think it's a valuable read. For any researcher who does any kind of usability work, there's also in the article, it talks about this is really from a book. The book is Learn More Faster, and it's really, we're not gonna get into detail about the process, Tim, but it's literally a process for, like a formulaic process for doing quick research sprints, for lack of a better word, right? Like expansion on that.

Tim Lynch: Yeah, it's about, you know, research velocity, right? We used rapid prototyping. So how fast can we, how can we bring the right consumers into the right, the right environment that we know enough to do the next thing and then iterate? It's about the velocity of learning. Jeff Bezos from Amazon is famous for saying, you know, you know, 95% of my decisions are wrong and that's okay because they're reversible. I'll just make another decision. But the velocity of learning kind of goes with the whole theme of today, right? It's an increase in velocity. And this is a great framework for how we do it in a structured way, so that we know the journey that we're on.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, yeah. Super cool. All right, that's basically our time, but we wanna plug before we go in the last, you know, in the last, we're already over, so we have no last. No, it's not you. You did great. Everybody give him a, you know, give him a clap if you're paying attention. You did great, Tim Lynch. And yes, by the way, we do call him Tim Lynch, often in the house. Anyway, it's not important. It's shouted. It's shouted Tim Lynch. I don't know why you're like the first and last name husband. Anyway, but we don't want to leave without reminding you, you can register for IIEX Europe, IIEX, LATAM, Karley on the job there. Exchange30, get a discount on the price of admission for that. We will be talking about all of these things. Tim is not joining me in Amsterdam this year, even though he was there last year. We have a funny story to share about that. Ask me about it sometime. But anyway, I will be missing him in Amsterdam. So I hope you all join me. There soon.

Karen Lynch:  And that's all we've got for today, Tim. You can go back to your day job. Thank you for helping me. Anyway, goodbye friends. Thank you so much. We'll see you next week. We'll see you next week and hope you have a great one.

Links from the episode:

The passing of Reginald Paul Baker 

OpenAI ChatGPT Experiences Major Outage 

"Millions forced to use brain as OpenAI's ChatGPT takes morning off" 

Walmart Unveils Digital Landscapes 

Quantilope Opens Online Learning Hub to Non-Clients 

CleverTap Launches Clever.AI 

GetWhy Secures $34.5m in Series A Funding

Google Ventures Advocates Rapid User Research