AI, Sales, and the Future of Work with Chris Black

Speaker A: Hi everyone and welcome back to another episode of Paris Talks Marketing. Today my guest is Chris Black, Chief Revenue Officer of Jolera, a fast growing MSP company based in Canada. So Chris, uh, welcome to the show.

Speaker B: Thank you very much for having me, Paris. I'm excited. We've had this conversation lined up for a while, so I'm ready to get going.

Speaker A: Yeah, why don't you kick us off with a brief explanation of who you are and what you do.

Speaker B: As you said, I'm the Chief Revenue Officer of Jolera. We're a global systems integrator with uh, with a global footprint and landscape. My responsibility at Jolera is to, to drive customer and partner success worldwide. So it is finding, winning and keeping and growing our partners and customers. I have a wonderful team, my island of misfit toys as I like to refer to them, that they're responsible for doing the tough work on a day to day basis. And my job is really to find them, mentor them and give them the tools, time and resources they need to be successful. Previous to Jolera, I was part of a team that grew one of Canada's biggest MSPs and sold it to a Japanese multinational in 2015. I'm born and raised in Calgary, a very proud Canadian, but also a student of the world. So you will often find me on a flight somewhere around the world, visiting one of our international offices or traveling with my wife.

Speaker A: Excellent, Chris. I wanted to dive right into what you call the 25 year old startup which is Jolera. And from what you've told me, the company is nearing 100 million in revenue and 700 people. But you're still able to refer to it as a 25 year old startup. Can you elaborate on how you all maintain that entrepreneurial startup like spirit and agility while still having the systems and stability to scale something of this size?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Joe Lara started in Toronto, Canada 25 years ago and when we take a look at it, a lot of the fundamentals, the values, the ethics, the integrity and uh, a lot of the brain trust are still in place. You know, how do you maintain a business like this and continue the pace and growth it's founder led? Our original CEO is still our CEO. He is in there, sleeves rolled up on a day to day basis, driving the business forward. His role has changed significantly over the years, but I think Alex would still say fundamentally at the core of what he does, it's focus on customers, focus on technology trends that are going to positively impact customers and make sure that the Team is putting customer first and those would be the fundamentals. And it sounds really cliche, but that idea of keep it simple and working from first principles really has, has worked out well for us. We're in many parts of our organization where we're brutal about hiring. We're very specific. You know, you mentioned 700 people. Those 700 people are meticulously chosen, brought into the organization, trained and, and really crafted into the role players we need them to be across the organization. When I think of, of how we've been able to keep the culture, hiring from within has been a massive part of the business. It's not just finding great talent, it's keeping great talent, it's utilizing that talent in multiple roles across the business over many years. And when I look across our business, both from executive down to middle management down to individual contributors, we've been really, really good at keeping people and then cross pollinating talent, capability and culture across the organization. There have been some challenges as we've continued to grow. You know, when it was just uh, a Canadian operation, then Canadian and Portuguese operation, and now being in 15 countries and 67 cities. You know, I mentioned a little earlier, I spend a lot of time on flights. Alex spends most of his time out internationally. I had a team in here, an international team in here for a week last week for an event. Ah, a week long event in Calgary. Getting out in front of people, seeing the white of each other's eyes, breaking bread, sharing a laugh, sharing a cry. These are all things that are really fundamental to our business in the early days and they continue to be today. So I think it's a human business doing technology, bringing value to customers. That's Jo Lara in a nutshell.

Speaker A: Yeah. And this recent growth tear, I do wonder, are there any market factors at play or any market shifts that you think have ignited this period of hyper growth? Is it AI, is it something else? Is it combination of those factors?

Speaker B: Uh, I would say it's purpose built. So let's take a step back in relative terms. AI has been around for 50 years in some way, shape or form. It wasn't until ChatGPT3 came out that people really started paying attention to it, um, in regular realms. So if we look at why Jeweler has gone through a massive growth spurt, well, it started seven years ago and I'm definitely not going to say it's because of me, it's because of Alex. Taking a step back and looking at the business and saying very purposefully, what are our greatest strengths? Where is the market going and how do we align those two? So seven years ago the decision was made to completely reimagine our business and redistribute resources and allocate and amplify in places that we're going to drive more value to the market. So as a business I, uh, was brought in to lead the sales and marketing elements of the business. And we made a number of other changes, adding a ciso, you know, moving some of our key role players around. And what we saw was a market opportunity between cloud commoditization and consumerization of it. That fact that at every restaurant, in front of every bank atm, everywhere you look people are utilizing technology and technology is no longer a peripheral component of our lives. I mean, look at what we're doing now. Talking from the distance, we're talking from. Technology is an integral part of every business and every individual's life. When we looked at that, we said our strengths are in managed services. As a business. We have this 20, at that point in time, almost 20 year DNA of providing managed services around technology. So not just reselling a piece of technology that a customer takes and incorporates, not just moving a cardboard box across, you know, line in a transaction. Our job has always been how do we find the right technology for a customer, business need, implement that technology and then manage it to the outcome that the customer is looking for. It's providing that business outcome that we've really been good at. So what we did as a business is we said we're going to take a step back, we're going to put a hold on our directness, that direct customer motion and we're going to start helping other IT providers, other MSPs, other resellers to provide managed services to customers. And that was at a time where building annuity revenues, uh, where customers were looking for outcomes. We're in the subscription based world. It was really, really important. So we transitioned our entire commercial go to market motion over to driving that to other partners. Well, what did that do for us, Paris? I mean, uh, it made sense. We did it very well. We had a ton of experience within this industry. The partners took it up and took it up en masse. We went from having four or five salespeople in Toronto to having hundreds of salespeople in Canada and now thousands of salespeople across Canada, the us, the Middle East, Western Europe. So we have thousands of evangelists talking about our dance card on a regular basis that uh, know our solutions, know the value proposition and are selling them to customers. That was one piece of our Growth. The other piece was then once we had that solidified, and there's a beautiful thing about annuity revenues, when you sell monthly recurring or annual recurring revenues, you have this solid foundation that you can lean upon and then build off of. So what we did is we started rebuilding what we imagined our new direct business to be. And that was enterprise class customer problem solving. Working with the biggest companies to help solve their most difficult problems. Now our partners focus on the mid market space and bring us into that. We focus on major enterprise. We don't create any contention between our partner's business and our own and we're able to take advantage of two of the hottest markets in two completely different ways. So to go back to your question, I know it's a long winded answer, what created the trajectory? Purpose built planning and building the right people, processes and technology and then attacking the marketplace with just a ruthless zealotous passion. And it's great for us, it doesn't hurt that AI has come into play and that's helping grow. One of the fastest growing business units we have is our AI consulting business where we're out there helping customers all over the world to assess, understand, secure their data and then utilize elements of AI and automation to make their businesses more effective, more efficient and to really think of the art of the possible. But I would say that's a recent machination. We've been growing at a 35% CAGR for 5 plus years now without AI. AI is simply adding more fuel to the fire.

Speaker A: So to summarize what you just said there, you basically took the long tail of the market, mid size businesses to small businesses and you said we're going to build a channel, a channel partner model. We're going to give that all to our channel partners. We're going to sell through them and we're going to focus our small sales team, or what you've referred to as executive led selling, I want to come back to that. But we're actually going to shrink our direct sales team, focus on enterprise and then we're going to have channel partners take care of the long tail of the market. And another thing that you said in our prep call was taking a dollar and divided it up into four quarters, it's a hundred pennies. My question is, how did you all build out that channel partner network? Cause to me that seems pretty difficult. You've got probably just hundreds of these small mom and pop MSPs. How did you round them up, how did you reach out to them and what kind of Value proposition did you give to them to effectively turn them into a salesforce?

Speaker B: That's a wonderful question. I'll go back to that analogy of the 4 quarters versus 100 pennies. They both equal a dollar but distribute in very different ways. We looked at the channel partner ecosystem similarly to the way that we looked at our direct enterprise business. In fact, I don't deal with hundreds of small mom and pop msps. We have a very small channel partner list. We went after premier channel partners that we knew had limited managed services offerings, that had limited cybersecurity offerings, where we were going to be able to go in and add accretive value to those organizations from day one based on our being in the industry. Between Alex, myself, Joe Knyser and many members of our executive team m, this has been our entire careers. So our network within this industry is exceptionally strong. We knew we were going to be able to get into the doors of these resellers and MSPs. We knew we were going to be able to pitch our capabilities and we knew that once we were in there and we were talking to the executive power structure in place that our message was going to be well attenuated to their needs. And it's worked. So I don't have a ton of small partners. In fact, those small partners would have a hard time really utilizing the value of Julaira. Now, based on friends and family and network connections, we do have a smattering of small partners that we will work with. And some of them are wonderful, some of them are really, really good at what they do. But we're actually pretty judicious about who we'll bring on as a partner. And they tend to be larger partners that operate at national or international scale and that are really going to have, I'll call it a uh, programmatic approach to onboarding new services partners. So when I think of some of the partners that we have, and we have some of the biggest partners out there, you know, when we engage with them, we built the entire training and enablement apparatus to be able to go in and uh, where we saw having so much experience in the industry means that we've seen the good, the bad and the indifferent. And most channel partners that walk into an organization walk in with a channel account manager who's never sold what those partners are selling. They've never actually done the hard work. They walked out of university, started working for a manufacturer and they go in and they talk the book of the manufacturer. So they walk in with a bunch of what I call Architecture and brochures and talking points that don't resonate in the real marketplace. They've never actually sat across from a customer and really driven a solution home. Now, I'm painting with broad brush here, but by and large, most channel account managers are really not that effective at their jobs. So what we did is we built teams of individuals within our channel that are 100% aligned to the customer journey. They've been out there, they've sold it, they understand it, they understand the value proposition, they understand where customers are going to have objections. They're not just working off of a battle card. They have real world experience. So when they sit in front of a sales team, not only are they more compelling, they're also able to say, and I'm going to be the person that helps you. Our solution architecture team are going to be the people that help you. So when you have a customer opportunity, here's how we can engage, broaden out the deal and help you close it faster. And then once you start winning with those partners, it's that snowball rolling down the hill. It just builds and builds and builds in size and momentum. And that's really a secret to our partner. Success comes down to the fact that we built a program and hired people and engage in a way that is valuable, meaningful, and has a ton of velocity behind it. So when I walk into a. Now I think of one of our big North American partners, softchoice. When I walk into a softchoice, not only am I meaningful at their executive level, but our, uh, people on the street are meaningful for their people on the street. They turn the dial, they make the sales happen, the conversion percentages are very high and obviously the outcomes are excellent.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great model. Is it constructed as something like a franchise model or is it white labeled where you all are providing the services behind the scene or how does the partnership structure look?

Speaker B: Great question. So I get asked this all the time because so many people go out there and they offer these white label solutions where you get to play this game of here's my invisible partner that's beside me, but you'll never know they're there because my brand is so valuable that customers will only deal with me. And I think that's an illusion. And I've said no to many partners that said the only way that they want to audit with us is through white labeling. We won't do it. We did it in the early days and we fell victim to the reality of today. So we talk about this ubiquitous technological environment that we live in right now. Well, here's where what people do. Let's say you owned Paris Resellers and you and I met and you thought we were really great. I introduced a partner, that partner was hidden from you. And I bring a solution architect onto the call. You're going to look that solution architect up on LinkedIn. It's going to happen. It happens every time. This person's really compelling. They're very good when they don't work at ah, Chris's company. What are you going to think? You are going to think there's something off. You're going to ask a question. I've introduced friction into the sales process. Oh, and let's add in. You've never sold managed services before. You've hired us to help you sell managed services. You have no reference base, you have no logos to lean upon. You have no deep experience. When a customer is buying you, they're taking a risk, they're risking it on Paris. And Paris is organization that has done all of these different things but not manage services. So what we did is we quickly scrapped the white labeling program and we said there is a better together sales motion. That's already proven in the IT industry. You don't walk in and resell a Fortinet firewall under your own brand. No, you lean on the power of Fortinet. We are dealing with a best of breed provider of this type of service and that is what the most successful partners that deal with us do. They say, we brought in a best of breed provider to provide this level of service. You can expect the same quality and experience that you've always gotten from us, Mr. Customer, and we're going to hold them accountable to deliver that to you. Then all of a sudden when that customer says, okay, have you ever done this for a company our size? In fact, we've done it for dozens of company your size. So now you can lean on the reference base, you can lean on the experience set that's in play. You get the scale and the extensibility, you get the cost scale. It really is a better go in together and collaborate as opposed to white label and try and obfuscation is something that once customers discover it, you've created a ton of distrust and friction.

Speaker A: If you introduce someone as a part of your team, as you said, one quick lookup on LinkedIn would really threaten that trust relationship. So I do think being completely transparent and saying, uh, yeah, this is my partner Chris from Jolera, and they've worked with companies like yours and Lots of others. So you're in good hands. And still we're the ones. We're your local partner who's bringing this resource to you. That's why we're still valuable in this equation. But you're working with one of the big boys here and you're in good hands. And uh, I don't think as long as you're clear with these channel partners that you're never going to compete with them and there's never any risk that the clients that they bring to you would ever bypass them and go direct. Then it's just a win win on all sides, I think. And one other question I have about those relationships for those channel partners. Are they responsible for generating their own leads or do you help them with lead gen in any way?

Speaker B: You're asking really good questions, Paris. Here's the dichotomy. If I'm the one generating the leads, what do I need the channel partner for? For they're the sales engine for me. So they're able to take the lion's share of the margins because they're doing the sales and marketing and the customer management. From a customer satisfaction side, and that's not operational customer satisfaction. We're talking about the relationship management. The partner's responsibility is to provide the apparatus that finds and engages the customer, develops the opportunities. We will obviously help with the sales motions once an um, opportunity is discovered, but it's their responsibility to do that. If they weren't doing that and I needed to do that, I don't need the partner. I would just build my own sales team. That's not what I'm building. So yes, it's the partner's responsibility to go out and find the customer. We will help them close the opportunity and we will help them turn their customer into an evangelist for them. But they have to go and do the selling.

Speaker A: Makes perfect sense. Let's transition to another theme which is about the future of work being either remote in office or hybrid. And you mentioned that Djolera was remote long before even Covid came in and forced everything to go remote. Now there's always trade offs there, but how do you balance the flexibility that modern workers desire, um, with the real need for the forming and the storming stages of team development that really happen best in person. How do you maintain that balance?

Speaker B: I think balance is the best word to utilize for this. And it's a balanced approach in everything that we do. I talked to you when we did the setup for this. We are a remote first company. It is an organization Where I'm in Calgary. We have 13 people in Calgary, uh, out of our 700. So we're highly disconnected from the rest. We don't have a local office space because each of us are working on our individual portfolios and we have people that are sitting here on the service desk. They don't want to have interaction with me on a day to day basis. They're taking calls from customers. We have escalation resources that are some of the busiest people on the team. So we do have team events, we do come together, we do get to know each other, we do drive town halls as a larger, broader organization. What we've really looked at and done is said where do we need to have that connective tissue and where are we good remotely? We still have office locations in many, many jurisdictions. Look in Toronto, I'll be in Toronto next week. We still have a significant number of people in Toronto and we ask them to come into the office three of the five days a week because our belief is multifold. One, you can't form and storm or norm if you're not in there working together on a regular basis. We look at Toronto. It's one of our largest commercial centers. It's also the place where we bring in all new hires. It's a place where customers want to visit because our uh, part of our North American service desk is there. Part of our North American soc and security operation is there. Customers come to visit all the time. What they don't want to visit is a cold, desolate wasteland. They want to see human beings. They want to interact. Now you don't talk about culture. You see, live and learn it. Having individuals within the office three days a week where we have significant presences is very important to us. It helps build the culture. It helps get new people trained and hired. It drives those side conversations that just don't happen if you're sitting at home on a teams call. It was never about productivity for us. We have great product in our resources. You know, I talked at the beginning, it would be disingenuous for me to say you spend all this time hiring great people that we don't trust. No, we hire great people. We trust them implicitly. But those people, as is always the case, work better together. They learn from each other. You know, if we have them with relationships with each other, it's not just a job. I'm never going to go to the point that I don't like talking about businesses as families. I just disagree with that.

Speaker A: I agree. I think it's More, uh, the better analogy as a team.

Speaker B: Yeah. I look at it as a community. It's a collaboration. And people are better parts of that community. They collaborate better when they know each other, when they trust each other, when they feel like everybody has skin in the game. And you do that in the same way you build relationships with customer. You do that by having a cup of coffee together, by having a talk about what went wrong on the weekend, by talking about this great thing that you experience, by sharing the highs and the lows and doing it in that human way that we've done for the entire existence of humankind. Now, how modern people want to work. I think that there's a lot of these misnomers. Everybody sits back and says, well, the way that people want to work is 100% remote. Now, I don't know a single person, and I know a fair few, I don't know a single person that wants to be completely remote, that doesn't want a human experience. There will be some out there for sure. Congratulations to them. But as somebody who's hired hundreds and hundreds of people over the years that has managed literally thousands of people that have been under my purview, almost all of them wanted the human experience. They want to engage with their teammates. I hear it all the time from CEOs, from C level executives, down to even my team last week that I had brought into Calgary for that event. That team wants to see each other. They want to build those relationships, they want to work together. Is that all the time? No. On a, um, Friday afternoon or a Monday morning, I want to be right here in Calgary in my office, catching up with no distractions. I don't want the five minute coffee conversation with somebody. I want to be able to get my stuff done. But let me tell you, when Tuesday comes, I want to interact. I need to interact.

Speaker A: I hear you. I have to admit that we're missing that in our agency right now because we're entirely remote. And I think we're missing a lot of the spontaneity that comes from unplanned brainstorming sessions or just walking by, asking somebody what are you working on? Or unscripted type of occurrences. Let's move on to the last big theme that I wanted to cover with you, Chris, which is about AI. And it's hard to talk about about cyber security today without bringing up how AI is dramatically impacting this. And there are, of course, positive and negative aspects of this. Of course, AI in the hands of bad actors can present major cybersecurity challenges for companies. But I want to focus on the good side of AI, which is helping companies to do a lot more, be 10x more productive. You said something in our pre call that I thought was really interesting, which is that when you sit down with the CEOs, the reality is they're not necessarily looking right now for cutting edge large language models, custom LLMs. Their need is something more fundamental. Can you elaborate on that and tell me more about what you meant by that?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I think AI, uh, is such a wonderful conversation. I don't even know how many hundreds of hours of conversation I had around AI last week. And that we'll continue to have. I think when we take a look at it, if we take a step back and go back to first principles and really think about what a CEO is trying to drive within a business. They're trying to drive top and bottom line growth. They're trying to find more effectiveness and efficiency within the construct of their business. They're trying to reduce risk. These are the same common pillars that have run a, uh, CEO's playbook for a very long period of time. So when they look at anything, whether they're looking at marketing, whether they're looking at technology, whether they're looking at AI, they're looking at it through that lens. That is the primary lens that everything will get filtered through. So if we think about AI, and I had this conversation with an executive last week, actually he shared something with me that blew my mind. And he's one of the next follow ups that I have later this morning because I'm going to absolutely take him up on the offer that he made. But what they're trying to do is they're trying to understand it. AI right now is, is a chatbot, it's a search engine. 99% of people are using it for menial, everyday tasks. What vitamin should I take for this? My doctor told me this. What do you think? Like these are important little constructs. But when you think of it from a business perspective through those lenses or those pillars that we talked about, uh, a little bit earlier, you know, what the CEO is looking for first and foremost is to educate themselves and their leadership team on what AI is and what it isn't, what it introduces as risks or what it eliminates as risks, how it can add efficiency and effectiveness and what their customers are going to need in relation to AI and their relationship between them and their customers. What are my competitors using AI for? This is really an investigative time. There are some companies that are out there utilizing this stuff and they're the early adopters and all the power to them. Because I think early adopters have a real opportunity as long as there's safeguards in place to uh, take advantage of stuff. But most people are not early adopters, especially within larger enterprise type businesses. They don't have the luxury of being able to go and early adopt something, have it screw up on them, have it create risk and then have the brand damage or reputational damage that comes with it. So what they're looking for is education, enablement, early stage. The next step from that is that they're going to be looking to understand security, governance and risk. How do we make sure that our data is appropriately labeled and prepared, then secured and governed to ensure that the data we want to not be exposed isn't exposed? There is stuff that you don't want sitting in some public LLM and it's happening today. Then they want to sit back and you want to map all the processes. You want to understand how does a business work? Uh, most organizations really haven't intricately mapped out what are the processes within each of our business, how do they operate, how do we operate, not just order to cash, but in every element of the business. What are our processes? Once you understand the processes, you can start utilizing AI, uh, and automation to be able to shorten those processes, remove manual steps to build use cases around, adding effectiveness and efficiency and then taking your data. And perhaps you look at some of these solutions, creating a digital twin of your business, understanding that ontology and then making significant changes to how you operate that add significant benefit to your end customer and to your business stakeholders themselves.

Speaker A: I think one of the interesting points you made there is a lot of companies in a way are starting to rediscover automation and a lot of these AI, uh, agentic workflows are maybe 90% automation that they could have done three years ago with the same tools like Zapier make, but with a little bit of AI sprinkled in. You have a few different maybe steps or nodes of that workflow that, that leverage AI and that's really cool. But a lot of them are really coming full circle to as you said, just taking another fresh look at their entire standard operating procedures, their workflows and saying maybe now a lot of this manual work can be automated. I think that's the mindset that AI has driven into so many companies, especially managers is they're much more focused on their productivity now. I think there's more pressure now to, to show productivity rather than just to show the headcount or growth in other areas. I can say that for marketing agencies like ours, for the entirety of our existence, the vanity KPI, the vanity metric, has always been how many people do you have? But very quickly it's changing with AI to what is your revenue per headcount? Actually, because that is a sign of real productivity impact. So I do think a lot of the ways to first engage with a, uh, new client for AI consulting is say, let's take a look at all your workflows and let's see what can be automated and then where AI can be inserted in those automated workflows. But I think automation is the larger theme that encompasses AI.

Speaker B: Absolutely. AI has just been the gateway drug to get companies to move forward in this direction. And the ones that are moving forward are seeing massive benefit to it. Right? You sit back and you start looking at your data in a different way and you know how your data is constructed, how your data is secured. You're not only reducing your risk, but you're preparing your business to be able to report better, to operate better, to have more visibility and transparency. There's so many net benefits to this process, but it wasn't until, you know, that chatgpt moment happened that people were really paying attention to it. And there's lots of pretenders out there, there's lots of AI tools that pretend to be something that they're not. And there's lots of organizations that are going out there and, and reselling these solutions and claiming that they're the cure for, you know, all the ailments of a business. And the businesses are quickly overwhelmed and they don't see the results and they're demotivated by it. I mean, if what your value proposition is for your tool to, to write emails for people, I guess so it takes out the human element and the sincerity of it, but all the power to you. I think AI and automation can be so much more for a business. And I love what you're talking about. It's those vanity metrics versus the real metrics that matter. It's something that in sales marketing for years I've railed against. You know, people will talk about the number of impressions. I don't care about impressions on the website. I care about the number of meaningful impressions on a website. Who are the actual business stakeholders that we engage with that looked at our website, if you can tell me that number, it matters to me. Other than that, it's just noise. Probably half of our people and our own marketing team looking at Our website as we iterate and evolve it. Same thing with events. Yo, we collected 200 business cards at an event. Okay. How many of them are from IT managers or IT directors? 10. Okay, so you had 10 meaningful conversations, not 200. Because the other 190 aren't in a position to be able to do anything in relation to our business. That adds value.

Speaker A: Yeah. In fact, even putting a lot of effort into a website now, when you think about how many people are really just going to stay inside of ChatGPT and Google's AI overviews is just a prelude to AI mode and AI mode is the real deal that is Google transforming into Gemini. So that's coming. There's no question. And it really makes you think. Now, okay, we still need to maintain a website. There's still going to be visitors, but they're going to be far fewer people that uh, are going to click through like they would click through from Google search results because they have a better experience staying in the chat, continuing that chat. And a lot of that conversion funnel itself happens in a tighter window in the chat rather than over several visits, over several weeks, maybe to a website. So then the website has to be able to serve that information to the LLMs. And then it also needs to be able to close the deal and make it frictionless when people do decide. All right, now I'm 95% sold that Jolera is the right partner because I've gotten such great advice throughout this long chat. Now I'll go to Google to navigate to Julara to make sure I can land on that website. I can book a call. And then when I do that, it just needs to be really, really easy.

Speaker B: I think this is the advent of the marketplace, right? You sit back and how we position our goods is going to be completely different from a commercial standpoint than it was previously. A smart organization is going to hop onto ChatGPT or insert name of their LLM of choice. They're going to write a good prompt. Here's my criteria, my rfp, so to speak, for what I'm looking for. Who are the participants that I should be looking for? What should the pricing be like? It's all readily available organizations all over the place. I guarantee you, if you're watching this and you're a business stakeholder type in something that you think is secret or intellectual property or undiscoverable about your business. And I almost guarantee you that you will find it in one of these LLMs, whether it's your revenue number, revenue by certain departments because you will have had people within your organization who are using these tools right now to do their job, and you have no control over it. They're putting information in there that is now in the public domain and it is being used as part of that cumulative knowledge on that LLM for all searches and queries that are happening. It is a fabulously risky but fun time within the technology sphere. I look at marketing now and my entire mindset around marketing at scale has fundamentally changed. Where there is just so much, there's so many areas that you can upskill your game as a marketing organization, internal or external or as an internal organization, start looking at it and saying, okay, here's where my depiction of marketing has completely changed. When I'm engaging Paris and his dean, my expectations change in terms of how much quality, how much velocity, all of those things. Because I know how fast, at least me, I know how fast this can be done now. So I'm going to hand it to you because I want an outcome and I don't want to manage it. But if you tell me it's going to take six months for you to do a, uh, full marketing overview and create a brand strategy, I'm going to shake my head. I can get the basis of a brand strategy from an LLM. Now, can I execute upon that? No, that's where your expertise still comes in, but you need to be able to turn things around, um, much, much quicker. So it's fabulously difficult, but exciting.

Speaker A: It is very exciting. I would even say that someone who, as you said, can just give their RFP to ChatGPT. I think they'll start even one step earlier and say, ChatGPT helped me create the RFP. These are my pain points. I'm not really sure how to structure it, but I need to find somebody who can help me solve these problems. I want to build an RFP that will help me then go out and build a short list of qualified providers. Just help me map out the whole process. Actually give me the RFP and then point me in the right direction and

Speaker B: you can have the agents run the rfp. You no longer need a human being, the adjudication of the RFP responses and the participants. You can create agents to run all of that. And now with the new Grok 4 model, it's not built on consensus anymore. You can now have multiple different agents looking at multiple different RFP responses and they will come to the best conclusion by challenging each other and then submitting to the end stakeholder, the decision maker or group of Decision makers. Here are our suggestions. And I don't think that 99% of executives or business people fully understand the implications of this, but we soon will. We're going to see this creep in, uh, and it's going to become an absolute avalanche in our world. And the idea, and this is where, sorry, I'm going to get a little philosophical here, but a lot of long standing behaviors and attitudes around how a deal is one are going to absolutely disappear because it's not going to be, well, I really like this guy. He takes me for a beer and a burger every couple of weeks, or these guys have the best swag, or this or that. Businesses are going to make ruthless decisions based on data. And if you don't have the data and information to support, you know, why you should be a proponent at the table or why you're choosing this certain proponent, you're not going to get chosen. So it's going to force organizations to be really damn good at what they do and it's going to be less about the charismatic pitch person and much more about the substance. So I'm really excited by that because I see so many deals that we lose for the wrong deal. We have great conversion rates, but there's deals I know we should win that we don't win for the reasons that are outside of our control. But if it was put up against the scrutiny of an LLM or some sort of intelligent agent, that agent would choose us in those scenarios. I'd like to believe that based on price, capability, experience, reference, ability, it's a logical choice and I like a world of logical choices.

Speaker A: I love that you just brought up Grok 4 because I was researching that over the weekend. I haven't tested it yet because I still am on a, uh, free GROK plan. But I'm about to pull the trigger because I do need to test out Grok 4, that feature that you mentioned. And for our audience listening. Grok4 will actually have, I think, four different independent agents run the same research against your prompt completely independently. They'll arrive at their own conclusions and then at the end of the process, they will all collaborate together, share their notes, and then agree on the right overall solution. It could be a blended solution of all of them, or it could be that one has a superior solution and vote and elevate that one to the top. That's just fascinating because that's your hiring committee, isn't it? I mean, for the new age of sales, you're saying, hey, all right, Grok, thank you for helping Me put together this rfp. Thank you for helping me shortlist. Thank you for helping me reach out and communicate this to these companies. Now here are all the proposals. Let's have a look at them. Let's weigh all the pros and cons. I think what it's going to do, number one, as you said, it will disadvantage the slick salesmen who over rely on just showering people with gifts or golf outings and things like that, steak dinners, which is a good thing. It's going to make these decisions more ruthless and I think it's going to vastly accelerate the sales cycle. So somebody buying cybersecurity and that's a major decision. The cybersecurity companies we work with usually tell us three to six months sales cycle average. But in this kind of environment, if those buyers can use AI agents to accelerate things and just remove a lot of the wait time and a lot of the fluff, maybe they're making decisions in weeks rather than in months. And what does that mean for the growth of the qualified providers like Jalera and others? Could mean really great things. Maybe you're not losing that deal to the slick sales guy anymore.

Speaker B: Uh, look at it this way, one of the most difficult things within organizations, how do we make the right hire? So you throw out a job, you get 50 applicants. Who are you entrusting to go through those 50 applicants? And this is no offense to HR people don't want to be offensive and at scale in bigger companies when you have these different HR leads for different departments, you get a modicum better result because there's a little bit more fine tuning and domain specialization. But by and large HR people are generalists and those generalists are looking for a psychological component. What is your attitude like? What does your CV look like? Have you changed jobs a certain amount of times? They're looking for all these details, those details matter. But all of a sudden you get those 50 resumes that take out the bias, take out all of the racial bias and it exists. Take out the sex bias which exists, take all those things out and just put it into a logical construct. Here's 50 resumes. I want those four agents to go through these 50 resumes and recommend the top five that I should interview and then tell me why those top five made the list and what areas I should be concerned about or excited about with each of those top five. All of a sudden you have these agents within minutes, not hours, not days, within minutes they come back, they've shortlisted the top five, they've given you all of the critical reasons why those are the top five. They've given you a list of questions that are concerning for each of those top five. Ken, like you're walking in armed with so much more information at such a faster scale, uh, hiring somebody goes from three months to a week because you are able to shortlist everything that organizations with a sense of urgency that embrace the technology are going to win and think about it on the other side of the equation. So you take, here are 10 people that we hired that didn't make it. Here are the reasons why they left our organization. What are we doing wrong? Are we hiring the wrong people? Think of the analysis that you can do that will start to trim these bad decisions, that will start to trim retention challenges that will help you hire better people. Like at the most basic core of a business, you have human resources. That should be fundamentally changing right now. Based on this. If an HR department isn't using AI to be able to vet or understand the human resourcing component of a business, I don't even know what they're doing.

Speaker A: Yeah, pretty wild to think about how fast this all has happened, but think. There's another problem that I overheard on a podcast recently too, from the other side, which is that savvy candidates, especially entry level candidates coming out of university now are, uh, they're doing their own AI magic and they are crafting highly personalized, highly tailored CVs and cover letters for hundreds of jobs actually, and having agents go out and apply on their behalf. And in some ways you could very much argue that it's unethical. They're misrepresenting themselves now. So then you have an AI agent actually trying to parse out what are the best applicants that have all been themselves created by. So then now you actually have AI, uh, agents facing off against AI agents on the other side. And I think HR is maybe headed for a quasi crisis in the next year or so because you don't know what to believe anymore. M Can I believe this CV that I'm looking at was actually handwritten or crafted personally by this applicant? Or was it done by AI specifically to match this job description that we wrote? Now my AI is going to review that and maybe it's going to pick this person. Does that give an unfair advantage to the people who are the savviest in using AI to apply for jobs? Is it even ethical to apply for 500 jobs that you don't even read? Probably not, but it's fascinating to think about. HR is going to. Is going to get massively disrupted.

Speaker B: I think everything's going to get massively disrupted. Sales is going to get disrupted, operations going to get disrupted. Every element of every business is going to be disrupted by this. But one of the beautiful things that comes out of the tail end of this and there's going to be some pain in the middle, there always is. But one of the beautiful things that comes out of this is that the people that are left, the people that are engaged, the people are going to become specialists at what they do. There is no longer going to be B or C players, there's not going to be floaters, there's not going to be those individuals that we've all seen in our organizations. We've all hired them, we've allowed them to exist. Those people that are good enough, good enough will not be good enough anymore. So let's go to your HR1. Uh, yeah, absolutely. You're going to have all these candidates, especially young candidates and people you know who are applying for jobs that don't have it. But there's a really easy fix to this and you just do tiering. If somebody's coming out of university, it's not about their experience anyway, it's about their intelligence and their aptitude and that your belief in their capability to learn and adapt. So that comes down to what did you take within school? What are your references for the jobs that you've done so far? So you can really tune in, uh, on that type of applicant. For any experienced applicant, you can make up whatever you want to your LinkedIn CV and the references, this is where you're going. People will have to get much, much better at going out and self promoting. We'll see it on this podcast Right now. If you're out there as an experienced worker and you are not mining your network for references to how good you were to deal with your personality, your, your work, the job you did, organization, you're doing yourself a massive disservice because organizations are going to need a way to be able to understand whether what you say on a cover letter is real or not. And the best way to do that is by having clear and nice references and a great CV. And that CV will exist online on LinkedIn. You could have your own version, but if you just say, I don't use LinkedIn, I wouldn't hire, I'll say here, hire a candidate, use LinkedIn.

Speaker A: Sorry, that for me almost an immediate disqualification if there's no LinkedIn profile. But that, that's a very interesting angle because LinkedIn is in a great position then because they're, they are the socially validated source and there's nothing else. If, if you, if you say now that we, we can't really believe any CV that we see, what else is

Speaker B: it a fallback and it's going to need to be referenceable. If you think, I don't want to beat up on my hr, uh, department, but know the HR sitting there and doing reference checks, how good are those reference checks? How thorough are they? Who should be doing the reference checks? I mean, if we're now hiring less people. So I look at the organization of the future is going to be made up of less people that are more specialized of what they do to be able to work with the human beings and the AI agents that they're working with. Because have no doubt, your employees in the future are also going to be AI agents. So you're going to need to be able to go back and, and you're going to have less people people. Me as a hiring leader, as opposed to the past, where it would be too onerous and time consuming for me to go, all of a sudden my HR agent is sending me the list of candidates that I should be talking to and the references, if it takes me an hour to go vet references as opposed to, you know, going through resumes, having all the calls, et cetera, et cetera, if you can whittle that down to a consumable amount of time. It's not an HR generalist doing reference checks anymore, it's Chris Black. Because the best person to reference check a sales specialist or somebody working on the go to market side of the equation is me. I haven't done it up until this point in time except with extremely senior hires because it's simply been too onerous. Remove the onerous element of that. I'm going to do it myself. Why? Because I'll probably in the future have a team that is, you know, a fifth the size of what it is right now. And those. It's scary to think about that, but it's true. If we're walking in there objectively, if we're walking in there and we're saying there's going to be a fifth as many hires because each person that I have should be 10x more productive than they are now. That means I am going to have a ton of room to grow. I'm going to be able to go after a bigger marketplace and I have to hire less people. If the hiring process is minimized and I'm hiring less people on a Regular basis. I'm doing those reference checks myself and that way the accountability lies with me, which I think is what every business leader wants. I see light at the end of this tunnel. There is going to be some pain, but this is going to force everybody to step up and be the best version of themselves. Focused on outcomes and driving the outcome within the roles. There's going to be no hiding anymore. I uh, look at the advanced reporting within our business right now. There is no hiding. There's no way for you to float underneath of the radar.

Speaker A: Yeah, well said, Chris. This has been fantastic. As we wrap up here. Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you wish I would have asked you or you think could benefit our audience?

Speaker B: I would just implore people right now. You know, whether you're a business leader, a ah, manager or an individual contributor, I would start within your domain of knowledge and where you really want your career to be. I would start upskilling today on AI uh, this is not something that can wait. This is not something that that is, is going to pass us by. It's not hype. This is fundamentally going to change the way that we all do our jobs. And if you're the person within your role who hasn't embraced it, somebody who has embraced it is going to replace you. And I'm not trying to be, you know, some sort of fear propagandist. That's not it at all. I think there's a, uh, magical future in it for all of us. But you've really got to engage and enable and show the value of it. Be interested, be involved. Now is not a time to take a break.

Speaker A: Very well said, Chris. Thanks for spending the time with me. It was a great conversation. Where's the best place for people to find and connect with you online?

Speaker B: Best place to connect with me on a regular basis is on my LinkedIn. That's where I spend a ton of time, shockingly. Chris Black yyc on LinkedIn. You can find me there anytime. I actually do answer messages on the platform as well. So if you're ever looking for for me, you can find me there or Chris B at jolero. Com. I love to engage and talk.

Speaker A: Great. Well thanks Chris. We had a great conversation here and I'm looking forward to keeping in touch.

Speaker B: Thanks Paris.