Welcome to ChannelWaves, the podcast where channel leaders share success strategies, best practices, and emerging trends, brought to you by StructuredWeb. Here's your host, Steven Kellam. Welcome everyone to ChannelWaves StructuredWeb's view into everything channel. I'm your host, Steven Kellam, and today we are going to be talking about Generative AI. And I'm very excited to have Chris Lamborn join us. Welcome, Chris. Hey, Steven. Great to be here.
So Chris is a former channel chief and now is the Principal at Channel XLR8, which is well, actually, I'm going to let you tell us a little bit about XLR8. Thanks. So Channel XLR8 is essentially an advisory business that works with emerging vendors to help them maximize the channel. There's a lot of complexity and potentially a lot of cost in that. And we're about helping them build a robust business that they can then continue to grow. Generative AI might actually come in very handy on that.
Generative AI, and you start to look at all of the modern technologies is really about helping others do more with what they have. And so I think most definitely you're looking at companies now making leaps and bounds of progress that they couldn't have done before because they can use some of the newer technologies, generative AI being one of them. Right. Well, you and I have talked about this many times, and there's two sides to generative AI, right?
There is the side that you're talking about where it could be incredibly helpful, but then there's also the side where people are a little wary. So maybe we start with that side. Right. Some of the challenges. So what are the big challenges out there and the people that you talk to? Simply put, what are people afraid of in regards to generative AI?
Steven, I think when you cut through it all, primarily most of the concerns are based around it being seen as a threat to somebody's job, particularly in channel marketing or channel in general, because it's often seen as the redheaded stepchild anyway. And as generative AI is very often because it's new, probably more than reasonable, now positioned as taking over the world. This is going to make people nervous, I think.
Also there is that stance that says particularly channel is complex, which it is. So there's the assumption that there's no way that generative AI can help or that as soon as you start using generative AI, your leadership team is going to think that channel is really easy if a bot can do it. And I think when you look through it, there's also another one. And that's the generational difference.
I didn't come into this world with a cell phone in my hand, and I grew up with TikTok being a noise that a clock made rather than something that you video. And so I've had to deliberately work to understand, accept, and adopt the benefits. And so it wasn't natural to me. And so I think, like with all technologies, and particularly new technologies, people really have to work out how they can use them to improve what they do or to make themselves more efficient. They really have to embrace it.
They have to be responsible for helping to define its role. And the reality is those concerns about people who are at risk of losing their jobs, they may be, but it's not going to be the generative AI that makes them redundant. It's going to be the people who take them on board and become more skillful and more advanced in what they're doing. And I think history has proven itself with people that adopt technologies and move faster and move further.
We've had conversations about the difference between a digital native and a digital adopter. And I think both of us are definitely on the digital adopter side, right? I don't think we have a choice. And I don't know about you, but I'm seeing that play out in conversations when I'm talking to vendors. I see an excitement level at one end on what it can do, so there's a positive approach to it. And on the other end, I see trepidation.
On the positive side, I hear people going, oh my gosh, it's going to save me time. I'm going to do my job better. I can be smarter. And the other side, people are going, they're just throwing up security, take my job. Inaccuracies everything. You could talk about any technology they're just throwing out there, right? They are. And I think this is where there's a responsibility of companies. You put new technologies out there, it's great.
People will naturally adopt and people will deflect from them. It happens with everything. But I think companies have a responsibility to help their employees and those around them become educated in these new technologies and to really proactively bring the technologies in. The day-to-day rhythm of the business really concerned me, actually, this morning talking with somebody, and they're working with an organization that has essentially banned AI from its employees.
Okay, we should talk afterwards because I have the same conversation. But the thing is, what does that create? You really don't want to create closet generative AI teams. That creates friction, creates impacts across your whole organization. So the key thing is making it acceptable to use generative AI to help you versus being seen as cheating or putting yourself at risk and setting the guidelines and the boundaries around that. It's a bit like your kids are growing up.
Never tell them not to do something because what are they going to do? They're going to go and do it, but they probably won't tell you they're doing it or they've done it. And so it's this thing, it's not this crazy dangerous environment, but help people use it to maximize not just them, but also you as a business. Well, I completely agree. I think that the vendors need to do that and they need to have a game plan for that. Chris right. They need to know what to talk about, what the issues are.
I also think they need to talk with their solution providers, people in a tech stack, people like us who are doing something like ChannelGPT. And as we've talked to our clients and our prospects, we're literally listening to them. We're really trying to listen to what their fears are and then we're able to address them. Some are pretty logical, right? We need to protect privacy and we have boundaries and we need to deal with accuracy. And all those are pretty straightforward.
It's when it starts to get out into the world of like really getting serious, as you said, started going down that path of it's going to change the world or ruin the world, we're going to start World War Three. are the thing that people start to go a little bit off the deepend. Yeah, I think that kind of comes back to that piece, is really being as clear as you can, but also showing people how it can benefit them.
You take channel marketers as an example and you go, okay, they're the ones that may be concerned, but you also go, how could it actually help? And I'm quite a simple person, the engineer at heart, so you break it down. And when I look at it and it's doing an injustice to ChatGPT, but in its simplest form, kind of this proactive and instantaneous way, gather the relevant information off the Internet and put it into a useful form. It's a language tool, right?
It's not a search engine, it's a language tool and it's searching the Internet to complete your sentence. That's all that it's doing. We've spoken about this before and I kind of challenge anybody to say that not a day goes by when they're trying to write a plan, or create some marketing priorities, or gather information on potential partners, or even look up competitors where they are not searching input from something.
You do a Google search, you search your old emails, you pull up something you wrote before, you send a coworker a message of something you saw them write. ChatGPT can save you hours, literally, and it also opens your mind and it enables you to get those sources of information quickly.
But this is where the reason why this shouldn't be feared, because this is where you need the intelligence specialist people to come in, because not everything you're given is 100% relevant and the nuances are often missed. But I'll tell you, I use ChatGPT almost every time I'm looking to do something new. Not for the final version, but to give me a really quick outsider's view, a broad data dump, if you want to call that that's really easy to work with and saves me easily half a day at a time.
And I think this you and I was think this is the point we're pushing towards generative AI, if adopted correctly, is an aid. It's an aid to do your job faster, better, more efficiently. And you and I, the total hours of the day when we're emailing dictates this. But I don't know a person in the technology space especially who wouldn't turn down an extra half a day a week just to do what they would really like to do and to breathe right.
And so this is where I think, yes, there are some elements that need some structure, but it really can help change how people do things instead of replacing how people do things. And I think the other piece to it is it opens up an opportunity for a new generation of people, particularly in the channel space. We've all been here a long time and it's quite hard to bring new people into something that is quite challenging, is quite complex.
And if we can use these types of technologies to help people get involved in the channel more and evolve their own skill set, I think that's an added benefit. But something that we need as a market. I've been in the tech stack for a long time in this space and anytime that you can take something that's somewhat redundant and allow someone to be more strategic, I mean, I go back to MDF and do you want to be dealing with prior approvals pop right?
Or would you rather have it automated or someone else do it so I can be more strategic? Makes a ton of sense and to me it's kind of the same thing. I wrote three blogs last week in 3 hours and it usually takes me much longer to do that. And I use chat GPT to give me the basic outline I had to rewrite it still took me hours to rewrite it and put my own impressions on it, my own words, but I've got it trained in my voice and I can get it much better.
So basically it's just coming alongside for me and helping me create content, right? But you're right, it's not that finished product. I think we will get closer to that finished product as things like our ChannelGPT or ChatGPT continue to evolve. But I think right now I'm just trying to tell people start simple, think a subject line on an email, think a simple email content or maybe a blog.
We don't have to get super carried away about some of the legal issues like copying code, encoders, all that sort of stuff. I'm trying to keep it narrowed in on channel marketing but I think to your point around it can become better as it moves along. I think that's part of the opportunity. You look at how vendors and partners engage with each other and historically partners have been much more advanced than vendors have new technologies and methodologies.
But you play that statement through that you had that you could enable partners to be able to almost instantaneously. Take content, take marketing materials, take pieces from you as a vendor and turn it into something that is relevant for themselves, with their own benefits, with their own unique positioning, relevant to their skills, and have it in market in less than a few hours. That's the benefit of it becoming personalized for one to the better world. Because what would you normally do?
You wouldn't support half of those partners because you don't have the resources to do it. And so therefore, you're losing the opportunity to grow your business. Look, as a former partner and a sub $10 million partner, when piece of content came in and my team, which is very small, had to reach, let's say we're in the wine business, we're in Napa, and we had to reach these wineries and the COO there, we need to position one of our vendors there. I mean, you freeze as a partner.
It's like, oh my gosh, what's my subject line look like? Oh, how do I take this content that's about this big vendor? And how do I make it about risk mitigation and business continuity for me to this vertical, there is no way, Chris, that people have been able to do that. And I think this opens up that world. Here's the interesting piece for it.
If you let partners do it on their own, what you just talked about, if the vendor says, okay, here's I'm out there, I'm just going to let my partners do this. I give them this tool and they go and search. Remember, there's some things you have to pay attention depending on which is open AI, when did it stop? Right? And how relevant is how far does it go back? Which is why training, I think it's a huge opportunity for vendors, for consultants, for anyone to have input.
What we do is we train whoever the vendor is. We would train that instance, that private instance, to make sure everything is accurate, right? Whatever that vendor wants is inside of it. And then the partner comes in there and they know then that data is correct. And then the partner can even input the most relevant data on there. And then you, Chris, can come in and say, hey, I'm an expert on ChannelGPT or generative AI. Here's the IP. I am added to it to make it what we're building out.
And I'm sure other people can do this about StructuredWeb, it's just the direction we're going. We're building inputs, spaces where the right input can go in. And then you're going to create experts at generative AI. It's going to be a whole field of people that are knowledge base. They're going to be able to help build this stuff out. But the thing is, Steven, that those people are emerging now, and not just because of generative AI, because of, as you said, all of the other functions.
Digital marketing is not new. Everybody's been singing on about it for kind of nearly a decade. So they've already got the head start about needing to do things in a different, more proactive and a more automated way. Unfortunately, you've got a lot of companies having to reduce number of heads they have, having to be careful on costs, and that will ebb and flow as it does naturally. But to enable yourself to recover faster and continue that revenue growth, you can't just stop what you're doing.
And so what this helps is companies who are having to just put more work on the remaining individuals now can give that work life balance by bringing in technology to an area, we all live most of us lived with cell phones and what is it? 60% of us live with something like Alexa. Why? Because it makes our lives easier. Okay? And by the way, do you remember and throw the whole privacy, ethics, out the window. Don't even go there, I've got a good friend.
Oh, my God, I can never do this because it's just good. I know you get a better what is this? Although you laugh with it. So I've got a good friend banned Alexa from their house, okay? Banned it. However, they use facial recognition to get into their iPhone, which takes a photo in every 4 seconds of your face and says where you are and your surroundings. But that's fine. That's fine because it's apple.
Look, we could have conversation and people don't even know where their food source is anymore, right? You ask a kid, what does a chicken look like versus a pig? Right? And all they know is it comes. So I think humans were a little attuned to that and we sort of get over that sort of stuff, but I think it's fascinating. Let me ask you this. Do you believe partners are just going to use it anyways? Right? Here's the thing. Do you think people are just going to use it no matter what?
Do you know what? I think there will be a group of people that use it no matter what the forward thinking and what you find is particularly in the channel, it's a very small market of people. It's a very close-knit environment, so it will spread. And the reality is that those partners adapt a lot faster than vendors do. And so where a partner won't necessarily have to go out to proactively, start to use generative AI, they're naturally going to do it because the people they employ will use it.
A vendor may not take it on at that speed because there's structure, there's process, there's everything else that we've just discussed in there. So I think that's where I think the vendors that are going to win with this are those that are take that stance, as we said earlier, of helping partners guide. Maybe that's a good way of putting it, because they've got the skills, they've got the desire.
So let's work in the right place together because, yes, you're not going to stop people using advanced technology to advance their own businesses. I mean, that's been my premise all along. If partners are going to use it, take it to its simplest core. What are partners worst at? What's the worst thing that they do? I'm not going to get drawn into this one. Steven I'll get kind of like it's. It's marketing, okay.
Everybody thinks in the tech space sales certifications, the studies of feeds, they got that down. They could talk about, you know, why marketing? You know, why marketing? Because most organizations, most partners that drive marketing don't have the investment and can't make the investment in the broad set of marketing skills that are needed. And vendors can't always support your argument earlier, the broad selection of partners that come across.
So you're kind of setting marketing people up to fail out the gate on that side, except for large, large organizations, large partners and large investment. And I think that's why people use agencies. People use marketing automation tools. This is just another tool to go in that tool bag to help you get further, faster. No, it's a game changer. I think it's going to be you're either plugged into it, or you're going to have a real challenge catch up.
And you either going to let your partners kind of run with it, like the Wild West, and by the way, they're going to get some stuff wrong, or you're going to come in and you're going to race it with them and learn to be whether you're a digital native or a digital adopter. Chris it doesn't matter. I met people who are digital adopters who are just as smart and talented in the digital world as digital natives. They just had to open their minds. Little hard at it, right? It really doesn't matter.
And I think that's what's going to have the biggest impact of its overall evolution and its adoption. I do think generative AI will still probably be seen for the next year or so as a bit of an underground movement or a guilty pleasure. And you'll be reading things. Every time I read something you write now, I'm going to wonder how much of it you actually wrote, but you're going to be reading things and wondering about why because you haven't accepted it as part of the norm.
But the people who are really going to benefit over the next year are those who really do adopt it early and recognize it as a powerful tool to help them deliver that higher quality, faster outcome. And I think you said it earlier, the key thing with this is you don't have to be a geek to benefit from it. Yeah, you can evolve it yourself. It's not like going and working out how to do major excel calculations. It's about leading people through.
And I think that's the real benefit of generative AI. End of coming after the first AI trance because that's made the usage of stuff the ability to use technology much easier. Okay, so two last questions. One is in your shoes as a consultant. What are, like, the three things you would recommend to a vendor? Now, that's question number one. And question number two. What do you think this thing looks like in five years? Wow. All right.
So vendors, look at now look at how generative AI can make your business, the functions of your business, particularly your marketing functions, more scalable, more efficient, and more effective. You will still need your specialist people there to make it relevant and true to your business. Also look at how you can engage the partners with this so that it becomes what generative AI is a true round source of information to get an outcome.
Because to your point, start to put some guidance, put restrictions, but start to give guidance. Now if you want to travel somewhere in a car, you go into a GPS and you follow them. You don't get the map out. Give people that guidance. However, it's your fault if you jump off the end of the cliff. It's that kind of piece. And I think you start to look at five years.
And it's funny, I was having this discussion the other night about the impact that generative AI could have on the world as whole and how exciting it was. But I think when it comes to the channel universe, it's similar. I hope it's going to become an integrated and accepted part of how we at work, just like the Internet is now, nobody questions whether you looked something up on the web. So don't start questioning, but take it for what it is.
Accept it for what it's helped people do and appreciate. I think we got all this. I do appreciate there do has to be some structure and controls put around how it's used. That balances some of this piece out and some of that has to be technology based and some of that is company based. Okay, sure. But I kind of come back to this thing, the channel business, as you've grown up and I've grown up with it, they're built around people building relationships.
Now, generative AI doesn't replace the personal connections. Avatars don't replace personal connections. But what they should do is enable us to spend more of the time building those relationships and enjoying those relationships than being SaaS sucked behind laptops and with keyboards trying to get information that's readily available from us. That's a pretty good point, right?
More time to think and more time to interact, more time to do something that's going to benefit you and benefit the business. Because isn't that what technology is about? That's what it's supposed to be about. So it's supposed to be about if people adopt it and use it. And I think that's the exciting thing that for me is the piece that goes okay, yes.
I get same concerning as automation, same as probably when the abacus moved to a calculator, people were concerned they'd lose their jobs making abacuses. They moved to making calculators. And I don't demise the threat in certain industries that generative AI can bring. But I think in our world, it's very hard to see where it doesn't give people an opportunity to add more of the value that they inherently have than the negativity that it may bring into it or the conflict.
That it may bring into it, but does have to be accepted and it has to be acknowledged that it's part of what's there and not this hidden gem that only a few people use. Agree. So, Chris, thank you for joining us. Much appreciated. So really quickly, what's the best way for people to get in touch with you? It's easy, Chris@channelxlr8.com. Make it easy for everybody. And this is a big passion of myself, as you know, Steven, which is kind of why we're doing this.
And seeing the evolution of these technologies of AR VR and those pieces across, I think it's going to be game changing for the world, but for channel as well in pretty short term. Cool. All right, thank you. Steven. Thanks a lot. Everybody have a great day.