Aaron Steele: When we think of AI, we don't want to think of shoehorning AI in a place where it doesn't help, but we're trying to make sure that AI is there to really make a difference, both to the admin and to the person interacting with the service. We don't want it to be a replacement for a person. We want it to be a helper in both cases.
Tom Arbuthnot: Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This week, Aaron Steele takes us through his journey in Microsoft, all through the COVID funds, scaling out Teams and deploying Teams in some really interesting use cases with global sports organizations during that COVID pandemic. And then coming out and leaving Teams and Microsoft and working at Softel, trying to tackle the challenges of getting Teams phone into the SMB and mid market.
Aaron's had a really interesting journey with the Teams product. Thanks for him for taking the time. And also many thanks to Neat, who are the sponsor of this podcast. Really appreciate their support. On with the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. Excited to do this one. Aaron's a person I've spoken to for many, many years, mainly while he was at Microsoft.
We'll go a little bit around his history and what he's currently doing in the Teams Voice space. Aaron, thanks for coming on the pod. Do you want to just introduce yourself?
Aaron Steele: Yeah, thanks, Tom. Hey, everybody. I'm glad to be here. Aaron Steele. I'm a practice lead now here at a company called Softel. I've joined them fairly recently, uh, and I came from, you know, about 13 years at Microsoft.
And before my time at Microsoft, I was everywhere in the, uh, everything from small to medium business in the world of healthcare, and then I joined in a couple of different educational institutions. So, I was at, you may be familiar with DePaul University and the University of Chicago, University of Chicago being a fairly big well known university worldwide.
I was there working in the hospital space with them to do everything from AD consolidations to exchange migrations. So lots of experience in the higher ed and all the Microsoft technology space and then moved into a little bit of consulting with a company called Point Bridge out of Chicago who, right before I left,
and you may know folks from Point Bridge, folks like Jeff shirts and others came from Point Bridge as well. Then from there, I moved to Microsoft, joined the Microsoft consulting firm. Back in the heyday of MCS in the early 2010s, I was there doing consulting and working with Some of the largest companies on the world in the world.
Everybody from Accenture to your MasterCards to Johnson and Johnson to you keep going down the list and you can probably find my name, right? So I then moved into a role inside of Microsoft. In what is now called CAPE, you've interviewed, you recently talked with Tony, who's in the CAPE team now, and
Tom Arbuthnot: yeah, it's a good pun on that.
If you want the background of what CAPE is, I think that's the coolest acronym.
Aaron Steele: Yeah, exactly. So I was there when we were doing our Skype for Business and Teams customer experience programs, what they call in the Microsoft CXP.
Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. So talk us through that Microsoft journey. Obviously, you did a lot of stuff.
Yeah. Before then in consulting, so it was MCS first, then you moved into product as well.
Aaron Steele: Uh, yeah, so started with the with consulting and then moved a little bit into presales architecture and during the time at the end of my consulting journey was when I went out to Redmond and spent the three weeks to get my master's degree.
My Microsoft Masters is I'm one of those few Masters before Microsoft decided to cancel that program.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it still hurts my heart that that program's gone. That was such a good program. It was so nice to have a proper in depth, high level kind of exam to, or kind of certification to shoot for.
Aaron Steele: Exactly, exactly.
So that was a fairly sort of monumental thing. And folks, if you want to see me. You know, you want to go watch a little of me. You can probably go look up me and Brian Ricks because Brian Ricks and I spent about 20 hours at one point recording the entire Microsoft courseware for the Lynk 2010 exams.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yep.
Shout out to Brian, another friend of the show. Great guy.
Aaron Steele: Yeah. So, and then from there, uh, being in that sort of pre sales role, then jumped into the product group first in the product group where we were there as being effectively the backstop for escalations coming in when, as you're aware, when Skype for Business wasn't doing so well, right?
In the world of Skype for Business, What we all know is people have challenges deploying that Skype for Business tool set where they might not understand and fully grok things like network bandwidth, quality of life, you know, quality QoE settings and things of that nature. And truly the requirements weren't all that well laid out.
They were more recommendations, right? So choose to follow them at your own risk, but nobody's telling you you have to. And then when it's going bad. We get brought in.
Tom Arbuthnot: Then we point out you have to.
Aaron Steele: Exactly. So we would get brought in when an escalation would come in to Satya or whoever the executive sponsor of that group was, and our team was there to effectively engage with those customers directly and help them to understand what the data was telling them.
So if you're aware of the QoE Power BI reports and the QER process that was part of what, what that team built. So I was part of the team that built that and have lots of deep, uh, understanding of the CQD and quality of experience
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah all the get to green in those kinds of programs.
Aaron Steele: Exactly. And actually QOE and the, and the whole QER process, that was a, that's a fairly interesting one for me, partially because you may not know, but that all started because of Accenture.
Tom Arbuthnot: Oh, okay. They were the primary driver, were they? Interesting.
Aaron Steele: Yeah, we, we were in Chicago and Accenture had a base in Chicago and Wei Zhang, if you're familiar with who he is, he was originally homed in Chicago. So, I being there in the office in the Aon Tower, Overheard one day that we were on a similar call because I was on the Accenture call and then I hear a little aways from me.
Hey, wait, that guy's on the same call. I am. I walk over to him. The original version of the CQD call quality dashboard was sitting on a sitting on a machine under Wei's desk there in Chicago, and he was building that to help Accenture run through that QER process, which was what Andrew Snyderman envisioned.
Great. Working with Accenture.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, yeah, that was amazing when it was and those tools still exist today against Teams as well, but they were
Aaron Steele: exactly
so
Tom Arbuthnot: when we had servers, it was much more complicated because it was so much more dependent on the customers network.
Aaron Steele: Exactly, exactly. So from there being in and that team was technically homed in the office.
Uh, Bob Davis being the leader of the entire office group inside of Microsoft. That was who we were under. But then, at some point, right around when Teams was getting envisioned, our entire team got picked up and shifted directly into the Teams product group. And we became the effectively the Teams migration engine for the Teams product group inside of the Teams product group.
Tom Arbuthnot: And what was the feeling at that time? It was an interesting time because a lot of us were very wed to Skype for Business at the time and Teams launched without UC. Teams was just chat, if people can remember back that far, then we got Voip. It was quite a journey.
Aaron Steele: Right, right. It was
an interesting time because what we were being told was this is the future, but it wasn't a feature complete product.
So it was a lot of discussing with customers what their needs, what their drivers were, what their blockers were, understanding technical limitations, and working truly with the back end product group teams to understand why aren't these customers moving? What is, you know, what is holding them back?
What are the gotchas? What are the things that we really need to implement to really accelerate or make this happen? And then, you know, March 2020 happens, right?
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah.
Yeah. And suddenly everything got a massive acceleration to Cloud.
Aaron Steele: Exactly. So March 2020 happens. I'm still in the Teams product group.
We're, we're there. And then all of a sudden I've been, you know, at the time when, when March 2020 happened, I had already been working from home effectively for eight years. So to me, nothing really changed. I had an office. I was working from home. I had the bandwidth. It was just now I was on calls a little more often, right?
And all the trips I had planned were canceled. Right? Uh, so we got and I got to spend some time in some really interesting customers with the COVID time. So I was part of the team that was helping to put on the NBA bubble games. So back in here,
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah we talked about that. We talked. I think we did. We do a podcast on this.
We did something on this, but this is really cool.
Aaron Steele: Yeah, we may not have talked. I don't know. So in the world. So the NBA approached us and we have a dedicated team who's really there in the account team space who works with a lot of the sports organizations. So there's a bunch of people who are very familiar with those sports organizations.
And so we got in there and started working directly with the NBA. And it was, I'll tell you, it was a really interesting solution. They are a, they are a world class organization in terms of what they're able to do from a network and a TV presenting presentation, you know, world. They have, so those, uh, the arenas that they took over in Orlando.
That was just half of the world for them, right? So they had those three arenas and, and stadia, or, and setups where they could actually have games taking up, taking place at one time. Then they had independent TV trucks there with dedicated network bandwidth between them and Secaucus, New Jersey, which is actually where all their switching infrastructure is. Orlando to New Jersey.
Tom Arbuthnot: Right, so they were just beaming it raw across there and then they were switching and cutting.
Aaron Steele: And then, because of the setup we had, beaming it back.
Tom Arbuthnot: Oh right, because there was a, so if you're not familiar, they had this like crazy like remote viewers were in the stadium basically.
Aaron Steele: Exactly, they had each, each one of those arena spaces or courtyard spaces had 10, uh, 10 LED panels and each of those LED panels was like nine foot high by 30 foot long. Right? And what we did was we had that set up such that they had VMware machines running the Teams client, and then we were extracting with NDI that people who had joined those Teams meetings to put them physically onto those screens in the stadiums.
And then the actual TV cameras that were capturing that video broadcast that was going to the TVs were also piping that all the way up to New Jersey So that a separate set of machines that were also joined to those same meetings could inject that video so that the people in those Teams meetings were actually watching the game.
Tom Arbuthnot: That's so cool.
Aaron Steele: And then back in Orlando, we were pulling those videos, they were being recorded and those video of them was being shown on that screen all up. We figure the number, the latency number that they were getting from effectively screen to eye to screen was two seconds.
Tom Arbuthnot: Wow, that's crazy.
Aaron Steele: And they were doing two seconds when they were able to do that between Orlando and New Jersey back to,
back to
Orlando.
Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. And you got, you got quite deep into, weren't you product managing some of the NDI stuff at some point or some of those features?
Aaron Steele: A little bit. So Aaron Linney was actually the product manager and Andrew, uh, there was an Andrew guy who was actually the owner of those kinds of pieces of the stack at the time, but I was there being the technical person to help the NDA actually get this implemented, giving them all the requirements about what the hardware they needed to provision on those machines was, what the bandwidth needed to be, any weirdness in how NDI presented or any of those things.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, that investment continues today. I know for the large events in particular, they use NDI for bringing complex broadcast into Teams Town Hall and live events and vice versa.
Aaron Steele: Yeah, exactly. NDI, OBS and RTMP and SRT in the future are sort of the world of if you want it to look the way you want it to look, not how the client wants it to look.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, yeah, so your broadcast. You see those kind of remote interviews, all those kind of things. That'll be NDI mostly.
Aaron Steele: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And it's a really powerful text. So NDI, if people aren't familiar with it, SDI is the world of broadcast, but it's effectively a high def, uncompressed video stream across a BNC capable network physical connection.
And with NDI, it's the same thing, but across a switched, But capable network and I say switch there to be very specific because it is switches, not routers. Routers don't like to pass NDI because it's ridiculously high bandwidth. For anybody who's ever tried to do this, if you're thinking about NDI. When I talk to customers about NDI, I stop talking about 100, 100 base, and I start talking about 2.5 or 10 gig.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, so you need a proper, proper network.
Aaron Steele: Proper network because the bandwidth between two NDI switches, one video stream between two NDI switches is 80 megabit.
Tom Arbuthnot: Wow, it's crazy.
Aaron Steele: That's what uncompressed 1080p signal is.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah,
Aaron Steele: yeah,
Tom Arbuthnot: yeah. So not even 4k, just 1080.
Aaron Steele: Yeah, that's just 1080. So went from there, we did, we had all that, and then we took what we learned there, and we started doing that for everything else.
So we did that for, uh, for tennis tournaments down in South America. We started working with the golf. Golfing organizations around the world. We did some work with the Aston Martin F1 team there. So there were just any number of situations where Teams became that solution that was really able to bring remote attendees in to a meeting platform to be able to be remote attendees, but also somehow appeared on stage.
I mean, we also did this with Christie's, the auction house, and we did it with Prada for one of their sort of runway shows during the early days of the pandemic.
Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. It's so fun when you get to do like, uh, stretch the technology and also do it with some kind of like world class brand and scenarios stuff.
Really interesting.
Aaron Steele: Exactly, exactly. So it was, it was a really fun time and. And it was a really interesting time to be around because there were all these changes coming, and there were all these interesting ideas that everybody was thinking about. Everything from webinars, to how do you integrate video, to how do you make it be better, to what are the real challenges that make people, you know, have problems using Teams?
Are they the same challenges we had in Skype, or are they different challenges?
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, yeah. So let's fast forward. So you're now outside of Microsoft, you're Softel. What's your role in Softel?
Aaron Steele: Yeah, so in Softel, I'm what I'm, I've got the title of UC Practice Lead. So in what they, what we mean in the world of Softel for me is I'm basically there ensuring the health and delivery of the efforts we have to help our customers in all the places that we Softel play.
Awesome. So specifically in the world of, of, of the modern workflow.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, and Softel span Consulting and Software and Solutions. Is that right?
Aaron Steele: Exactly. So we're professional services, but also an ISV. And whether or not you may have heard of us, we've been around for about 30 years, and we've been heavily in the background of the entire sort of telephone industry.
So we are very deeply ingrained in the worlds of AT& T and Verizon here in the US. And BT and, you know, and, and Deutsche Telekom and others in other parts of the world.
Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And you're, we were talking offline, you're looking at kind of some of the challenges of helping customers, particularly SMB mid market kind of tooling for the telcos.
That seems to be a real challenge that lots of people are taking a crack at the moment. Talk us through that challenge.
Aaron Steele: Yeah. So there's two parts of this challenge. First is From the small and medium business point of view, their, their challenge is a challenge that Microsoft creates that Microsoft's never really going to solve, which is too many admin interfaces to get a lot of these tasks done, and you have to know all you need to know about these admin interfaces, and you can't easily jump from another platform into that platform and with small and medium businesses, often their administration interface for their phone system is either open a help desk ticket with their phone service provider, or it might be a little portal where they can do minor changes to things like routing or voicemail or things like that.
They don't have the concept of why do I need to sign into this big thing called the Teams Admin Center? And why are there 16 different sections there? And what do you mean meeting rooms?
Tom Arbuthnot: And then it. Then Exchange, then Intune, then, then, oh, we've got Rooms, so we need the, uh, the Rooms Pro Portal, and then we've got User Account, so that's M365 Portal.
Aaron Steele: And what is Entra? How does that relate to identity, and why do I need to go to that portal, and what, what do you mean I have to do Entra plus Azure? Right? So, so that's the challenge directly for the phone admin inside of the small to medium business and why it's so such a challenge for the consulting firms who are helping those small businesses to use Teams as their phone system, independent of the technology challenge of sort of getting that thing done.
Tom Arbuthnot: It's interesting, isn't it? Because lots of them are using, I mean. Office 365 has 400 million users, plenty of those are SMB and mid market. So the core functionality they just crack on with, but it's when you're lighting up more advanced functionality, it starts to get more complicated.
Aaron Steele: That's exactly it.
You get these challenges. And then there's the challenge that the small to medium sort of the consulting firms have on the same side, which is how do they scale? When they want, when they're there to help multiple customers, can they actually help multiple customers at once to actually administer their systems and run those things so they have that same challenge from that side of it?
You know, they may want to, and they may be there to actually, hey, we'll help you migrate and get onboarded. But how quick, one, how quickly can we do that? And how efficiently can we manage those things?
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, and that's competitive on the back end. So if you're a telco, you might have these giant multi tenant platforms where you can manage customers, jump in and out, do it, probably all automated as well, and looking at our world and going, wait a minute, how do I scale up to millions of users?
If it's, if it's 50 users an account, how does that work?
Aaron Steele: Yeah, how does that work? And what does that actually mean? And what if you actually ask AT& T? They've effectively be being a telco. They are not trying to sell Teams into any customers. Because they don't have the people who can do it, let alone the small to medium business customers.
They don't want to invest because there's such a high barrier to entry. Again, because of all those challenges.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, yeah.
Aaron Steele: So we're approaching this a little bit uniquely and there's some other players who are doing similar things, but we're approaching this from a point of view of where can we leverage AI to actually help things and where can we leverage workflow automation tasks.
To make these things simpler and make it so that there are self service portals that are simple, like those people in those small to medium businesses are used to having self service portals to make requests and have workflows to do things for them. Also providing for multi tenant coverage for providing for extended levels of RBAC that the native Microsoft tools don't.
Tom Arbuthnot: Interesting. And like, how do you see it? Do you think that? The end customers are going to drive that, or do you think it will be the telcos or MSPs or CSPs?
Aaron Steele: We really think that this is a winning story for the MSPs and the telcos who are doing this work for the end customers, because what we figure is one, it's a little bit of potential for profit for them, and it's also a reduction in workload for them as the.
Service provider for those people, right, so they can do the work. And part of the other thing of this, it's not just the ongoing management tooling. It's also migration and onboarding tooling.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yep.
Aaron Steele: Right. And a relatively simple deploy to connect to a phone system. Suck out all the information, assess what that phone system has and give pointers for the team who's migrating that into Teams.
Technically or Zoom or WebEx, but you know, me being a Microsofty, I like to think about the Teams world. Uh, so it, it gives that simpler interface and a clearer report to the actual MSP who's doing that work so they can very possibly do that work faster.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yep. Makes sense.
Aaron Steele: Right. So they don't have to be as nearly as.
Manually interactive about manually interrogating what is on that source system.
Tom Arbuthnot: And what kind of, what are the types of systems that these customers are running, that they're migrating from?
Aaron Steele: Yeah, so, uh, they can be everything from Cisco to Mitel, Avaya, NEC, NEC is a fairly big one we're seeing partially because of their abandonment of the phone system market, right?
So it's, it's one that a lot more customers are coming up and thinking about because NEC gave them that sort of hard timeline that is when you're, when you have to get off our system, even though we just sold it to you.
Tom Arbuthnot: So there's a bit of motivation there to actually move.
Aaron Steele: Exactly. But, and then, you know, we still get a lot of customers who are coming in and thinking about this, where they've got Cisco systems.
We've got customers also who are migrating from 8x8 or from Zoom or from other, you know, other platforms.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, so it might be UCaaS to UCaaS as well. Exactly. During the pandemic, there were a lot of UCaaS deals signed as like, quick, we need something. And, and also there was, you know, there's a case to be made by Teams is a very different product than it was.
Back then. Now we're ready to go. How do we get there?
Aaron Steele: Yeah, yeah, it's it's ready. And with the whole move towards Operator Connect, Operator Connect has been a real sort of eye opener for a lot of these customers and and some of the phone system providers who are doing this work, the likes of Lumen and Granite and and those and even like Bandwidth.
Right. They are seeing Operator Connect as a real enabler for them to be able to target some of these smaller and medium businesses because it's such a low barrier to entry with such a high integration point into Teams. So there's so much less that the admin has to even know about. To use to turn on Operator Connect.
They don't have to understand voice routing policies or anything like that. They don't technically have to understand lots of things. They can just sort of purchase an Operator Connect license and get, get it set up and provision with an Operator connect partner, and all of a sudden those numbers are just lit up in their Teams tenant and they can just turn them on and give them to users.
They don't even have to, you know, import weird things and do weird things about DID management.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, that's it. If they're a pure Teams shop and see the phone numbers can turn up in Teams Admin Center, they've got a fighting chance of assigning them and using them. Definitely.
Aaron Steele: Yeah. Yeah. And so, but then when you think about this and the other piece we've got when we're thinking about our platform is it's also a really robust.
So really robust roles based access control as well as site based delegation models as well as a very complete DID management tool. So that you have that full insight into the numbers inside of your environment. And again, that spans whether it's the service provider providing that to a small to medium customer or even a large enterprise to the small to medium customer doing that themselves.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it's really interesting space because I feel like Microsoft have kind of nailed the enterprise with Teams like like customers, enterprise customers by and large are 365 customers and by and large they're ticking down that not necessarily everybody, but most people are ticking down that road site by site, country by country, but the SMB and mid market, which is way more wed to phone like that.
Their workflows are more phone centric. There's still definitely work to be done there for Teams to kind of crack that nut, I think.
Aaron Steele: Yeah, and that's, that's sort of what we think is a differentiator that we have that we can bring to bear for this is we, we really think that we Softel have such deep experience in the world of phones and the world of telephony, and part of this is we're driving this directly with the telephony providers.
We want to be that engine so that Verizon. All their small to medium customers who are on hosted Cisco or systems like that, or who have PRI trunks coming in. Why can't we help them get onto Teams if they're already using Teams for everything but telephony? And why can't we help you, Verizon, to do that really quickly?
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Yeah, it makes sense. Interesting,
Aaron Steele: yeah, so we'll actually I'm not sure if this will be out in time, but we're going to be down at Ignite next week. I'm looking forward to seeing you down there.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I'm looking forward to catching up as well, be good.
Aaron Steele: Definitely while we're there. We're going to actually be presenting to the telcos at a summit directly for the telcos that is being hosted by Microsoft at its Downers Grove office.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it'd be interesting, like, like you can see Microsoft are engaging and they want to solve this problem and help the customers, which is great.
Aaron Steele: Yeah, so it, it's an interesting thing. And then the other piece of it for us at Softel, it's not just solve that problem, but it's also we have the really deep expertise in everything from contact center.
And when we say contact center, we do really truly mean contact center. It's the likes of we have people who came from Nuance, right? We have people who have 20 and 30 years of industry experience designing contact center solutions and implementing contact center solutions. So it's that, plus we've developed AI chatbots for contact center integrations, for incident management and incident integrations.
Right? We also have tooling that's capable to help customers manage their emergency services calling. As we know, the Microsoft world of when data has to update for your emergency services, It's kind of a, Oh, let's delete that and start over.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, yeah, again, complicated. Fine if you've got someone who looks after telephony full time who can understand it.
Aaron Steele: But if you have some, if you have 50 people and, and you're even your IT guy is more of a help desk guy. Does he really know enough to actually update the Liz database when a subnet changes?
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, yeah, I think, well, I was trying to say, we know plenty of enterprises that don't do that, let alone SMBs in the market.
So, yeah, it's quite a challenge.
Aaron Steele: Yeah, so we're trying to be. Concentrated in this world of telephony and contact center spaces, but also ensuring that when we think of AI, we don't want to think of shoehorning AI in a place where it doesn't help, but we're trying to make sure that AI is there to really make a difference both to the admin and to the person interacting with the service.
We don't want it to be a replacement for a person, we want it to be a helper. In both cases, because what we know is in a lot of service desks and help desks, that first level person, their job is really just to record the information and get the person off the phone as quickly as possible. Right? They don't have any.
That's the metric their metric on. Yeah, and that doesn't really help anybody. But if we can bring in a way for them to actually have functional and capable answers so that you have first, you increase the level of first level ticket closure, not just first level ticket moving right by giving them an AI that can help them do the job, but they're still there to interpret and give that answer to the customer.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it's really interesting that idea of having AI coaching contact center agents and like very often than on the answer is in some massive knowledge base, but they're not going to get to it in real time, but the AI can actually listen to the call and proactively prompt as well, which is really interesting.
Aaron Steele: Listen to that call and do things like. Fraud prevention on those calls to prevent phishing interactions, right? Yeah. So helping we really are thinking of this and bringing the idea of AI for helping rather than AI because.
Tom Arbuthnot: I was going to say it's very different inside of Microsoft, but maybe that's a bit harsh.
Aaron Steele: Yeah, we know that Microsoft is really pushing the world of Copilot and AI. And yes, it's valid and it has a lot of great use cases, but at the same token, forcing it there. To shoo somebody out of a biz, out of a job, doesn't feel good to me.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, there's just lots of experimenting at the moment. It's like, well, I think the latest thing is Outlook themes with AI.
And it's like, who was asking for that really? But you know, you can find really, those kind of coaching use cases are really strong as well.
Aaron Steele: So some coaching cases are good. There are some cases and interesting use cases in the world with Copilot. Hell, I used Copilot the other day. It helped me to actually write a PowerShell script to create, to create call queues from a CSV input.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I do that loads. It's so, so useful, especially when you vaguely know what you want to do, but you just, you need that little bit of help. It's awesome.
Aaron Steele: Exactly. So again. Use AI to actually help people, not use AI to replace people is sort of a way we're thinking about this at Softel in a more real sense.
Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well, thanks, Aaron, for taking us down the journey. Look forward to catching up with you at Ignite. It's going to be a good time. Lots to talk about. And if you want to find out more about what you're doing or about Softel, what's the best thing to do?
Aaron Steele: Oh, so first and foremost, www. softel. com, S O F T E L.
com. Uh, and also you can email me or contact me. It's A S T E E L E @ Softel. com. And I'll reply to you as quickly as I can. And I include a book link in my replies to my email. So you can always find time to meet with me.
Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Thanks Aaron. Great to catch up.
Aaron Steele: Thanks Tom.