Hey everyone, welcome to The Next Wave Podcast. I'm Matt Wolfe, I'm here with Nathan Lands and today we've got an amazing episode for you. We've got Zainab Ozenmeer on the show with us today. She's the CMO of Atlassian and we're going to have a fun discussion about how we can actually leverage AI in our marketing today. Zainab, I want to ask you, how did you go from getting a PhD AI or AI-related PC and then getting involved in marketing like health? What was that path exactly?
Well, first of all, thank you very much for hosting me and hello everyone here in the room. It's really exciting for me to be back in Boston because I went to school here and it's always a little bit nostalgic to be in the city. So it starts from there, right? I actually studied engineering and then I had a fast track to AI because my first job out of college landed me in the realm of speech recognition and speech synthesis.
Even back then, which should I say this 25 years ago, speech recognition and speech synthesis was driven by AI and machine learning and all of that. So that was my focus area and I think how did I make it into marketing? I think I had the marketing gene in me. The jack of all trades, Jean and me, like for all that time, even when I was an engineer and a resource scientist, I would find myself really liking talking about my work as well as doing it. I was always pitching it to everyone.
So I did start marketing at Google is one of the best places you can learn marketing is kind of a it did for me what an MBA program would never be able to do. So that's how I transitioned into it. And since then, you know, in terms of what rolled AI played in my journey, I actually didn't have a lot of experiences in terms of AI was a big theme in their transformation companies like Palantir, Paul, Tonnetworks and then lastly Atlastien where I am now, CMO.
So you mentioned 25 years ago, you were doing speech synthesis. What was the difference between speech synthesis, but then and what it's like now? Yes, really good question. So I do have a vivid memory actually of me going into my office when I was doing my, you know, what I was training these speech models essentially as you do for, you know, for the audience is like training is a big part of machine learning.
And I remember starting training and then leaving my office in the evening and then hoping that by the time I come back next morning, the training would be complete and I'd be able to play with the models. And I believe I'm just going to make a rough guess like I think it would take a fraction of a second right now to run that whole process.
So things I can tell you things have gotten not just better, but fast much faster as well. Right, right. So let's talk a little bit about Atlastien. You know, I bet a lot of people here actually use a lot of Atlastien products, but maybe they don't know the company. So give us a bit about what the company does.
Yeah, anyone in the audience have used Jira Trello, loom. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So Atlastien is a collaboration software company. We have a massive mission to basically unlock and unleash the potential of every team in the world. And I really love that mission. And that's why I'm there. So when we look at Atlastien. So we look at like AI in the context of Atlastien. We are constantly questioning, you know, how can AI be a part of the team?
How does human AI collaboration look like? How can we how can we position AI in a way it unlocks human potential sensual week? So that's kind of the way we look at things. So a lot of people right now might see AI as a threat. A lot of people are worried about AI and, you know, losing their jobs to AI. How do you see AI and why should marketers care about AI?
So one of the main reasons we should all care about AI is because we are just inundated. Like we were just surrounded by knowledge, content, information. And it's getting increasingly difficult to actually make that knowledge work for us, right? Like build the context, like really just extract what's necessary for us to do our jobs much better.
So this could be in the form of, you know, interacting with knowledge. I mean, the way chat has enabled us to do, but also not just in the sort of public domain, but more sort of in the context of, you know, the data that we interact with in the organization every day. It could be on in the context of ingesting and digesting information.
Like one of the table stakes features of AI today is summarization, for example, but I can't tell you how many times I summarized documents on a given day. At last we have a very content rich culture. So I receive these long pages, like think about them as documents, confluence pages.
Full of content and I basically at this point summarize all of them and get the key points and for all my stakeholders who are watching this, sorry, as I don't read the whole whole document, I summarize it all. But so that's one area.
One area is like how can we manage our interactions with knowledge in a way that benefits us and that AI can help a lot there for marketers specifically obviously seeing AI as a creative partner is going to be a key thing in the in the next few years is already a very key elements. I think the way I look at it here is it's really a partnership as opposed to someone doing like AI all of a sudden like being the creative entity in the room and were completely eliminated.
I think the way I look at it is the way it works for me is that I partner with AI as my secret creative agency. And then I actually look at the output and I still modify the output. And it's but it gives me a lot more avenues of creativity to think through that I wouldn't come up with myself essentially. So that's the other piece.
And I think I'd say from a leadership perspective like marketing leaders if we think about that. I think AI actually gives a very interesting opens a very interesting door to setting the bar for the content that we put out. So when you're creating content normally you're relying on one person's ability to create that content which means their experiences and their their knowledge essentially and that keeps getting better even with that one person.
I think with AI as a starting point we're able to leverage the entire organization's history as a starting point and I like that I like that as a as a thought of raising the bar in the average content we we kind of create. And just to call like address your question around AI as a threat versus not right.
Personally I think I think of it as something that makes me look much better right. But just to address that maybe from somebody else's perspective we recently had faith a Lee in our team events right at Blasian. And she obviously got the same type of questions. But her response like stayed with me so I want to share it. She said human creativity is more profound than what we ourselves give it credit for.
The notion being that I mean things will evolve things will change John definitions will change but with there will be new ways new jobs and new new ways of doing things but that doesn't mean like the human creativity is powerful so I think it's I see it AI as a partner more than threats.
That's what I always tell people to I feel like humans are capable of so much more than we currently do yeah and AI is just to enable so many new things that happened that weren't possible before yeah and so that's why I'm like a huge technoptomists and you know yeah AI will bring challenges as well but overall I think it's going to make the world a lot better yeah I think so.
Simultman said similar things as well he said things that you know assuming that AI is going to take all of our jobs and humans not are going to be able to do anything is not really giving enough credit to humans he was sort of figured out there's going to maybe move up the chain a little bit of the things that they focus on.
That's correct yes yes and they would want to I think do that yeah right right so you you guys over at last you've done some amazing research you've done some deep dive surveys can you tell us a little bit about the research that you guys have done over there.
Yeah no I'm happy to actually share some research points that we all internally do so we're very data joint company we ask you know customers or prospects like a lot of questions before we build products on his seat and we recently asked marketers about 500 marketers across the US several questions around AI adoption use cases etc so I'm happy to share some of that information so this was a survey done across the US again I said 500 marketers of different levels
leaders leaders managers individual contributors and different sizes of companies but some key points that are worth mentioning is that whenever we asked them you know do you use AI regularly 89% said they use AI regulatory so that 62% said daily so 62% are daily active AI users what was interesting actually an interesting detail is 95% of leaders so subgroup of people
so subgroup of responders said they use AI regularly so it's above average like ever about the 89% so clearly leadership teams marketing leaders are are very much on AI I think it's also goes to which use cases they use so we did ask them no what do you use AI for mostly and the top answer was research so it goes back to that
knowledge discovery point that I made I think they are really asking questions around understanding you know several data points customers competitive competition market landscape etc so there's a lot of research in there the next most popular answer was
content creation creating better content and then I like ideation and brainstorming was was the third in fact there was a binary question which I thought was interesting we asked them in a very binary way do you think AI makes you do better work or does AI just make you faster and it was it was
probably both in reality but it was split in half 51% said AI makes me do better work and then 49% said it makes me faster back to your question though about AI being a threat or not so we asked them whether you know they think AI whether
they have any concerns or else AI putting them out of their jobs 79% said no and the rest said yes so it's about one in five people still have that fear amongst the marketing audiences yeah and I know you also sort of asked what are some of the barriers to entry why using why aren't you or your company using AI right now you know what
the reasons people gave for not wanting to use AI yes that's a really good question so we did ask them you know what what are some barriers for entry if you're not using AI and I think the top answer was around essentially yeah the company policies not like necessarily around data privacy such and not like allowing them to do that I think there was also
leadership guidance was one so we don't have enough guidance as to like what we should use it for was the second one and then I just don't know what to do with it was was a third one got you so with all of this data that you've collected all of this research what do we do with it what it yeah how do how do we apply this information as marketers how do we use this I mean first of all I think it's really important to say yes marketers are embracing AI I mean this data is
that gives me a lot of confidence and they're embracing it AI in a way that they're not scared of it they're they're actually thirsty for it from based on what we can tell I think there's a lot of take away in terms of leaders leadership around having like our our eyes on the pulse of of what what is being used for and maybe being a little bit more deliberate about doing
it scaling some of the successful use cases and and actually like getting entire organizations adopting them just to sort of like because that there's clearly a demand and it's being seen as a barrier so I think that's a that's an interesting take away that I had
and then also one thing that I didn't mention is that marketers say that the biggest challenges they face and marketing is content could the time it takes to create content as well as generic content like they're not very happy with what they're they're out putting so I think there's there's also that was a great take away from me that you know that's the area that to double down on
it when most people talk about AI they talk about like all these efficiency gains and you get from using AI what are the gains you think people get like in terms of creative gains they get creativity I mean as we said like that comes back to that whole concept of creative partnership I think that at this point if I
look at it as a couple things obviously content marketing is a big area where our creative it's a creativity plays a big role I kind of look at it as short form content long form content and I think in if you're you know if you're like me or a lot of people on my team and you're saying okay I want to find a really catchy title to this presentation I want to write an abstract or I want to just
say a storm on different avenues for campaign taglines or something like that at this point you should just give AI a chance on that stuff right like that's that I feel like at this point that it will actually really help and it will be again in terms of getting to a going through for creative process faster so it's there's a little bit of
accuracy still in there but also potentially unlocking paths neural paths in your mind in terms of in terms of new output so that's one the other one that's interesting that we're kind of doubling with a lot is more sort of like on the product marketing realm is we've got say you want to write like a press release or block post right I think to get help from AI there's two things
you need there one is you know you need you got all of this data around your products right across your organization so it's very important to have a way of bringing all of that data and the sources into that creative process the second thing you need is you need to define what a good press releases for you and that could be past press releases that you've had but also other
these press releases that you really liked reading you know so it's a it's those two things if you put them together and if you have the ability to actually leverage that data those data sources to output the next press release you have that's kind of like the next step in in I would say product marketing that's an area where we're actually doubling in a lot with some of these agent frameworks that we are
actually developing it at last we have a product called rovo it allows us to chat and interact with organizations knowledge base and data but it also has these expert agents that help us do very specific things so for example the test that I've described to I would do with my communications comms prefter agents and they would kind of like write these things for me is a good baseline again the human will always be in the loop it's all about creating effective
let's talk a little bit more about additional practical use cases for AI you actually showed us some from videos earlier how you guys are using it at last in yeah and I would love to show these videos to the audience and maybe you can talk us through what we're seeing yeah so I mean this is back to content generation and content creation in context so the way we actually do context is when we're creating a document like this one this is a customer case study
we let's say in the process we want to say can you help me write a social post here that is 300 words long or can you help me make it punch here we don't have to go and leave our workspace and go to a kind of a chatbot to do that we actually can do it as we're creating that document and add it to the document on the spot so it can let us like actually mold content in the context and that's a that's a big thing because I feel that we're still trying to figure
out the UI away and how AI gets like we've into our workflows and I think more and more we're going to see AI being a little bit more fluid in these different workflows if you're in a in a document you'll be able to interact with an AI editor this is a lessons AI editor but like that's actually brings more value to be on the spot and being able to lean into AI as you create in content so that was an example of that another one that I
mentioned agents. I mean I think of taking a step back everybody's like talking about agents these days so taking a step back the way I in my human brain like I kind of explain agencies say you're you're you're having a meeting with a couple co workers right and you
have a legal question pops up or an HR question pops up and you kind of slack your or like to message your favorite HR person and say can you join us we have some questions right so it's the same with agents like you want to be able to lean into experts agents to bring them into
conversations let them help you on the spot in context that's kind of what we're experimenting with with our products that are fascinating as you know with all companies we dogs through our products so that's where this next example that I shared with you
comes from which is my favorite agents it's called a customer 360 agent and we do have a video this one so I want to roll this second video clip that we've got this is the agent that they're using here at last year and yeah and and essentially this is like every interaction you want to have around your customers so it's as quantitative information like asking how many customers are do we have in this customer gives you back that information can you give me like how many
products we have in that customer's footprints do we have any customer case studies with this customer's and what are the benefits they're seeing out of our products so this agent is the expert in our customer base and they know everything about our
products that anyone wants to ask so why is that an important thing to me this this was this is the most mind blowing thing to me as a person right why is it important because so many times we're bound to static dashboards that can answer a certain set of questions about any entity including customers right so you you go to a dashboard you can answer the first second you have when you have your fourth question you either need to know how to write SQL to interact with a database or you're
going to a data analyst to say can you pull this report for me like how many times have we been through that I had to learn SQL just for that reason so the idea of being able to use natural language to interact with complex databases and be able to
pull any data point from them I think is a very very powerful thing for a lot of marketers as well as you know all go to market all knowledge workers I'd say so that's the piece that actually gets me really excited at this point yeah yeah in that video there is it you
know it kind of moves really quickly but when you ask a question to that bot it looks like it sort of decides where to send questions to so it's not like a chat GPT where the question is going and coming back from the same place every time it's actually querying the database and figuring out the best place to go and finally answer that question that's exactly right it's actually scanning all sorts of information sources including databases third party tools third party
applications as well as your internal proprietary data and everything so so I think that that kind of reasoning is really really interesting and of course we as a bit pretend you have a crystal ball what do you think marketing looks like in five years from now okay yeah so crystal ball I'll get to that's the really out there so but even in the next few years like a couple things I expect to happen as we discussed I think the the AI will become more fluid it will become more prevalent in the
context that we're working as opposed to us like going to a chat bot every single time we need to lean into AI so I think that UI that that interaction will improve I think we will improve in our ability to ask AI the right questions and think of like how do we best make use of AI as well so those things are evolution that are continuously going to get better in the crystal like the crystal ball for me are a couple things like in an ideal world I would love to
land in a place where every single person that we're marketing to has a very personalized message you know that's the idea we're delivering that message in and there is a way to actually let AI make on the fly decisions to make our content more relevant more interesting for for that person so I think this has been a marketing dream for many years but I do think actually we can realize it in the next five years so that's like one of the the
the things that are that I'm excited about I'm also very excited about image and video generation for marketers because I think one of the things that we love to do is express ourselves visually in our in our storytelling visually a little bit better and to be able to accelerate that process in a way that we can define and prompt someone to create teaser videos for us very quickly and make them effective that's very exciting
to me and I think we're on our path there as well very cool so what do you think marketers should be focused on right now where should their attention be what they should with what should they go do after listening to all of this yeah I would say make make make your interaction with AI a very personal thing so that it can actually really hit the it the spot for you I would say you know back to like for me this this whole interaction with understanding customers is a very
personal like this is what I love so that's why this is my favorite agent right but what is what is it that you want AI to do probably there's a way to get there today right like you just have to figure it out so for example I have one person on my team there's a you know my my kind of leadership team does a weekly rollout to me and then there's one person on my team every Friday she will go and ask rovo our enterprise chat offering this question
what have I done what have I accomplished this week and rovo kind of goes on everything she's worked on and then brings it back and then that's our rollout to me so that's that's very interesting that's it's a personal the way of way of using AI so figuring out what actually moves the needle for you personally is the isn't really good starting point I think what's next for you and I think what we are actually trying to do is work in the middle of this
what I what I explain as trying to figure out how to weave AI into your workflows we have agreed events in Barcelona in a couple weeks time it's called a team Barcelona event we're going to make a lot of AI announcements there so I'm very excited to to be there very cool so do you have any final pieces of advice for anybody we've got about a minute left here so any any last words that you want to share before we wrap this one up
no I mean look I think one of the things that I do want to say is that I really think that the partnership element is important to keep in mind I feel like there is a there's a quite a bright path for us in the future around interacting with AI and learning and and really 10 X thing accelerating
learning so one of the things that I didn't mention is when we asked marketers what do you want more from AI like in addition to what you're actually doing right now one of the things they said is I want AI to help me with new marketing skills so the the role of AI in actually tirelessly answering your questions is that you can tirelessly ask AI questions so I think it's a it's a really big asset in the sense of you don't have to be shy
about learning new skills and asking questions so that's another element of AI but always consider or think of AI as your partner as opposed to threats would be my general advice yeah couldn't agree more well thank you so much enough this has been a fascinating conversation really enjoyed having it with you and we appreciate you joining us on the show today so much for having me thank you