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🎙 Welcome to Rarified Air: Stories of Inspired Service, a podcast that takes you on a journey into the DNA of InterSystems. I will be your guide as we explore how our unparalleled commitment to customer service fuels limitless human potential.
🤝 Join us as we dive into the culture of InterSystems and share the stories of the people who make it all possible - our customers, partners, and employees. From helping healthcare providers improve patient outcomes to powering the world’s most important institutions, we’ll show you how our dedication to customer service excellence is in rarified air.
[00:00:00.000] - Stephanie Mitchko
We have to learn as leaders to use AI and any technology, by the way, as a team member, a team enhancement, as opposed to think about it as it's going to replace us, because at the end of the day, it doesn't go anywhere without the garbage that we put into it.
[00:00:16.400] - Podcast announcer
Welcome to Rarified Air: Stories of Inspired Service. Our host, John Paladino, Head of Client Services at InterSystems, will use his 40 years of experience to show you how to build a successful customer service program and highlight stories of innovation with customers. Join us as we explore the past, present, and future of service, from AI's promise to the enduring power of the human touch.
[00:00:45.700] - John Paladino
Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Rarified Air. There's a growing debate about generative AI replacing humans. In the face of this, how do leaders respond? And how does their response in impact customers and customer service? Today, we're going to dive deep into this very question.
[00:01:06.580] - John Paladino
But first, I'd like to welcome our guest today, Stephanie Mitchko. Stephanie is an amazing person with an incredible background. She was a CTO and a COO. She's worked at companies like Cadent, Cablevision, and Charter Communications. She's also the only CTO I've ever met that has won an Emmy. Welcome, Stephanie. Tell us a little bit more about yourself, because I know I'm not doing your bio justice.
[00:01:33.740] - Stephanie Mitchko
Thank you so much, John. It's great to be here, and I really appreciate you having me on your show. Thanks for calling out the Emmy, and it is a little strange. Technical Emmies are not something that most people know about.
[00:01:46.630] - Stephanie Mitchko
But let me tell you a little bit more about how I got to that point. My background is electrical engineering. I studied electrical engineering in Brooklyn, New York, and I went where most electrical engineering students went at the time, either to Grumman or one of the defense contractors to work for the Department of Defense. My title early on in my career was actually the Director of Kill Assessments.
[00:02:12.320] - John Paladino
Oh, boy. That's a pretty unique title, too.
[00:02:16.390] - Stephanie Mitchko
Yeah, lots of fun. I always get to tell people, "If you ask me what I did, I would have to kill you, so don't ask." But I'll tell you a little bit about it because it's very relevant to what we're going to talk about today. My job was to do electronic integration of the Aegis Weapon System. That's a shipboard weapon system that's used in electronic warfare. At the time, very similar to today, where we're all having our challenges around what is AI and what does it mean, at that time, the challenge was, "Why are you going to put electronics on my ship? People are not comfortable with this." We had to overcome the same questions that we're overcoming today. Why was that the right thing to do?
[00:02:58.740] - Stephanie Mitchko
I worked on this integration. It was very successful. But after that, I left the contractor that I was working for, and I went to a company called Cablevision in New York. This is a cable company. They were trying to launch a new service called high-speed data, data over cable.
[00:03:13.850] - John Paladino
Today we take it for granted.
[00:03:16.110] - Stephanie Mitchko
Today, it is ubiquitous. Everybody wants it. Everybody has it. I was excited about it. It was interesting tech. I went there for a couple of... I thought it was going to be a year or two. It wound up being the 15 years. I got to work on some of the most innovative products at the company. Launching high-speed data was one of them.
[00:03:33.010] - Stephanie Mitchko
The visionaries that the company at the time said, "Could you figure out how to not put that much capital out there, get rid of those disk drives, and put all the content in the cloud?" We call it the cloud today. Back then, it was just a data center. I worked on that project. I had an amazing team. It was first deployment, real commercial deployment in the industry. Myself and my team were recognized with a technical Emmy for the first production of cloud-based video service.
[00:03:59.640] - John Paladino
That's fantastic. That's a great story. Full of innovation. It sounds like you had a lot of opportunity to innovate, develop leadership skills, work in interesting projects, work with great people. Does that sound right?
[00:04:11.600] - Stephanie Mitchko
Exactly. That's exactly right. The team is really the key to all of that. I've been fortunate to be surrounded by amazing people who can actually think and do innovative things.
[00:04:23.200] - John Paladino
We're facing a whole new era. Generative AI has come so far in the last six months, not even the last 10 years. Machine learning and AI have been around us for a long time, but I think it's now at that point where to some it's scary, to some, it's a great opportunity. A lot of people are just trying to figure it out. How does it apply? With your background in innovations of companies of all size, how do you personally view where we are today with generative AI?
[00:04:54.110] - Stephanie Mitchko
I love this question. People don't like my answer most of the time.
[00:04:58.010] - John Paladino
Just be blunt.
[00:04:58.690] - Stephanie Mitchko
The last two years have been transformative in the space, really for two reasons. Because the models and algorithms that have been developed over years and years, we know somewhere at Google, we know the creators of these, they've been around for a while, but the access to a large data set for training had not. The internet came to be, and there's lots of data out there. When the internet data, public data, became the training information for the model, things just exploded.
[00:05:29.650] - Stephanie Mitchko
The second reason we're dealing with all of this at such a fast pace, it's the compute power that we have and how small it is.
[00:05:36.400] - John Paladino
Yeah, good point.
[00:05:36.580] - Stephanie Mitchko
We can get lots more compute. You can do it in the cloud. It's not as costly as it was when Gregory Hinton from Google was doing this 20 years ago. It just wasn't there. Now the tech on both sides, perfect storm, come together. You have big data sets for training, and you have compute power that's cost-effective and really fast. The model can be run on your laptop, so every teenager in the country, you can now run AI models.
[00:06:02.620] - Stephanie Mitchko
Then came releasing this to the public. When OpenAI put the chat product just out in the public domain, that created a whole new tsunami of user-generated content, people using it, training it, et cetera. That's how we got here. What we do with it is really the question. There's a lot of controversy on how it's going to be used. Then to your point, a lot of angst about what's going to happen to business, to society. Those are all very open questions.
[00:06:37.110] - John Paladino
Yeah. Just to continue the discussion, we're trying to figure it out as well at work. I see it as an opportunity from a customer service standpoint, to be more effective, get problem solved faster, to help people, some of the mundane things we have to do. If we go through a ton of logs and evidence and analysis, maybe AI can help us that faster. We're experimenting to see how it might be able to help us do a better job. We always strive to do better, and we're passionate about client success, so it fits right in. In terms of our products, we'll see. But we're in this journey as well. My attitude is lean into it.
[00:07:16.740] - Stephanie Mitchko
I think that's the right way to go. I actually love AI in the customer service arena. As you mentioned, I was the Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Charter Communications. Thirty million homes across the country.
[00:07:30.020] - Stephanie Mitchko
You mentioned the pandemic. By second quarter of my tenure there, we were in full lockdown, so we had to send people home. People who were on enterprise networks were now trying to work and go to school and see doctors over the home Internet. Most people don't pay attention to this, but our upstream utilization increased almost 30%, which we wouldn't have seen for three years in three months because of the pandemic. That was a catalyst, I think, in a good way, for a lot of technology. We had no choice. We had to put data in place, and we had to put automated systems in place. I got to do really great data science that would have taken projects over two or three years in months.
[00:08:14.250] - Stephanie Mitchko
On the customer service side of things, there was two areas that I think are just you're doing them, which I think is great. Managing your product to your point, finding problems, seeing patterns in solutions, finding the problem before the customer calls you, great application and a great way to do that.
[00:08:32.800] - Stephanie Mitchko
On the call center side, this whole new how to service the customer with bots, with AI-generated synthetic voice. It's not going into the IVR and having, "Please press one if you're having this problem, please press two if you want that." It's a voice saying, "Hi, Stephanie, what can I help you with today?" Using the modeling, we were able to determine what the most common calls were about.
[00:08:59.210] - Stephanie Mitchko
When you're in that consumer side of broadband, it's mostly, "When's my bill due? Why are these charges on there? And how could I pay it?" A big chunk of them taken off the table, allowing the customer service folks to actually service customers who needed an intelligent response to a problem they were having. I think customer service is going to change for good.
[00:09:21.130] - John Paladino
For the context of an urgent need that needs to happen quickly, that's where I think innovation, whether it's AI or not, I think that's opportunity for innovation to really accelerate.
[00:09:32.280] - Stephanie Mitchko
AI is transformative, and that's the part of leadership that needs a little push. You have to think about how you operate totally differently.
[00:09:40.780] - John Paladino
Let's drill down a level lower. Let's talk about the human generative AI interaction because it's really amazing. I was reading this book on generative AI, and they just go through a back-and-forth conversation between a doctor and ChatGPT, and you get lulled into thinking you're actually speaking to a person. That really blew my mind on how good the response from generative AI can be.
[00:10:08.640] - Stephanie Mitchko
It's important to remember that no matter how the AI appears to you, seems to you, it is not empathetic, it is not happy, it is not sad, it is not helpful, it is not bad. It just is. It's just a generative piece of technology that gives you some information. I think this is great that a doctor can get information quickly and feel some interaction. I worry about people assigning human characteristics to something that is not human. I think we just have to be very conscious of this. The doctor has to be conscious of this.
[00:10:52.440] - Stephanie Mitchko
My mother tells me not to be nasty to Alexa because when she's playing music or something, I'm like, "Alexa, stop, you stupid whatever."
[00:11:00.760] - Stephanie Mitchko
She's like, "Don't be mean to her."
[00:11:01.790] - Stephanie Mitchko
I'm like, "There is no her."
[00:11:03.930] - Stephanie Mitchko
This is the challenge. I think as humans and everything that makes us human, we have to really raise the bar on our own ability to determine what we're talking to.
[00:11:15.530] - John Paladino
That's a great point. You're saying AI is great, you should lean into it, but what you worry about is you could go down a bad path. It's how you apply it, right?
[00:11:26.200] - Stephanie Mitchko
Exactly.
[00:11:27.050] - John Paladino
If you're applying it to analyze logs, if you're using it to help you do something faster, but you remain in control. Stephanie, if you had to boil it down for leaders who might be listening to this and thinking through what should they do in terms of approaching what's happening around us with generative AI, what advice would you have for them?
[00:11:48.300] - Stephanie Mitchko
Slow down. Think about what you're doing. The first thing you need to do is understand what are the data sets and where did the data come from that you're using to even take action with any model, whether it's machine learning model, with generative AI model, or even just if then else. What data is in there? Because a lot of times the curation of data is left in the rearview, and it's really important, and there's great tools today.
[00:12:14.960] - Stephanie Mitchko
For executives, ask the questions. You might not have any idea how your data is orchestrated, where it is, where it's stored, whether it's unstructured or all the technical nonsense. But executive leadership, it's your obligation to ask. You don't have to all the details, but you have to understand where the data is coming from. Those are things that make people uncomfortable if they're not steeped in the language, but executives need to know how to talk about these things. I think my advice for execs is AI is transformational.
[00:12:45.970] - Stephanie Mitchko
There's a lot of people out there using words of caution, which I might agree with, but the horses are out of the barn. These models are out there. They're out in open source. They're out in enterprise. The biggest vendors that we have, Microsoft and others, are embedding them in their desktop tools. It's here. We have to learn as leaders to use AI and any technology, by the way, as a team member, a team enhancement, as opposed to think about it as it's going to replace us because at the end of the day, it doesn't go anywhere without the garbage that we put into it.
[00:13:21.410] - John Paladino
My advice would be, look at it from your customer's perspective. How can you help your customers be more successful? There could be a competitive advantage of using AI. But I think if you look at it from a customer context and try to make your customers more successful by applying it in the right ways, maybe by helping your people, your products, your processes, it can be really transformative for your customers as well.
[00:13:46.100] - Stephanie Mitchko
Yeah, I agree.
[00:13:47.360] - John Paladino
We talked about rapid innovation. We talked about transformation that's happening right now. How do you tie governance? Is that a constraint? Is it a good thing, a bad thing?
[00:13:58.370] - Stephanie Mitchko
Yeah. Right now, it's a very gray thing. When I look at the landscape of what's happening with AI regulation, the EU has AI regulation. It's a risk-based approach. One of the things you have to have is adequate human oversight. I say, "Well, what is adequate human oversight? How does a human oversee what's going on in AI?"
[00:14:19.700] - Stephanie Mitchko
In the US, you see the same thing. We have a structure now from the federal government about what AI usage in society should look like. It's basically transparency and you can't do bad things. Actually, there's something in the EU that you can't manipulate humans. How do you even regulate that? I think for leaders in this environment, you have to be a little brave and really run your business, lean in, use the technology, but keep something in your back pocket so you understand what the rollback might be. I think with AI, because it's so embedded, we have to think a little bit harder that if we did something today, what is it going to mean two years from now if something was to happen?
[00:15:02.800] - Stephanie Mitchko
Right now in the legal world, it's a Wild Wild West. We have Sarah Silverman suing Meta and Open AI. We have the SEG, the Screen Actors Guild, arguing over AI representation and video usage and creation of their likenesses and royalties. I just think it's too unknown. I think leaders just have to lean in. Most of us know what the right thing to do. Keep asking those questions. So what? AI, so what? What's next? What's the right thing to do?
[00:15:33.160] - John Paladino
That's great advice. We've been talking about leadership and how leaders are facing lots of challenges, working at a faster pace, innovating, dealing with lots of changes happening around us. How do you see your future? What's your ideal future when it comes to applying AI?
[00:15:53.630] - Stephanie Mitchko
I would love to see a future, just generically, where people feel the reality of abundance. I love to use that word abundance because there's so many leaders, no matter what area we're talking about, have a zero-sum game. I can only be good if somebody else is not. I can only win if somebody loses. Maybe that's how it works in sports events, but not how it works in leadership.
[00:16:18.320] - Stephanie Mitchko
In my future, I would love to see AI that is safe. We have to make sure that the mind share, the thinking and the data that's going into these products and services is not coming from a place of bias. Then I'm really going to focus on that one because there's a lot of challenge right now in all of this in data sets in society just because of where the data originated, the way society was when the data was generated.
[00:16:46.130] - Stephanie Mitchko
There's some great resources to read out. There's a beautiful book called Race After Technology, which is about what happens in society or has happened already due to bias in the data. Bias-free data, helpful AI assistance, and abundance thinking for everyone, so we can get to the next level.
[00:17:06.990] - John Paladino
That's incredible. Thank you, Stephanie.
[00:17:09.160] - Podcast announcer
Tune in next time for the second part of this conversation, where John and Stephanie discuss the qualities of great leadership in times of change.