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.