In this conversation, Karen Stroup, Chief Digital Officer at WEX, discusses her experiences with building an AI strategy at WEX, highlighting the importance of board alignment, experimentation, and employee engagement. She shares insights on setting bold goals, creating a culture of innovation, and the necessity of a robust AI governance framework, particularly in the financial services sector.
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Lily Smith: 0:00
This week I talked to Karen Stroup, Chief Digital Officer at WEX. We had a great chat about how to get buy-in on AI up, down and around an organisation and how to prioritise an AI-powered strategy that fits customer needs while maximising CEO board and employee engagement. The Product Experience Podcast is brought to you by Mind, the Product part of the Pendo family. Every week we talk to inspiring product people from around the globe.
Randy Silver: 0:32
Visit mindtheproductcom to catch up on past episodes and discover free resources to help you with your product practice. Learn about Mind, the Product's conferences and their great training opportunities.
Lily Smith: 0:44
Create a free account to get product inspiration delivered weekly to your inbox. Mind, the Product supports over 200 product type meetups from New York to Barcelona. There's probably one near you. Hi, karen, welcome to the product experience. How are you doing today? I'm great. Thank you for having me. So we're going to talk about AI today and, in particular, how to get your board aligned and on board with your AI strategy. But before we get stuck into that, it'd be great if you could give us a real quick intro to who you are and your role in product, although your job title is Chief Digital Officer, is that right?
Karen Stroup: 1:29
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Karen Stroup: 1:31
So I would say digital encompasses product but is broader.
Karen Stroup: 1:35
So I actually got into product management about 20 years ago after a career in strategy consulting and at the end of my consulting career I was working in California and San Francisco and I had the opportunity to work with a lot of tech companies that really focused on the customer and deeply understanding that customer experience, but used technology to reimagine new solutions to longstanding customer problems, and I thought the intersection of the two the customer and the technology was absolutely fascinating and that led me to my next step in my career, which was going to Intuit, where I was a product leader for about 10 years, and since then I've gone to some other companies where I've driven a lot of change management around becoming product-centric companies.
Karen Stroup: 2:25
So I'm currently the chief digital officer at WEX, which is a B2B payments company that focuses on making it easier to pay and get paid. Simply put and you asked about digital I am the chief digital officer, which means I have a purview of not only driving the digital transformation and product transformation, but really thinking about the experience end to end. I'm the executive sponsor for AI, as well as leading data and analytics and design and product marketing.
Lily Smith: 2:48
Oh, interesting, executive sponsor for AI. I love that. How does that kind of come to life, like what does that mean in reality? I guess that's how you know. We are now talking about alignment with the board, so that sounds very aligned with, like that role as executive sponsor for AI. But yeah, tell us a little bit about what that means and also how you came to get that role.
Karen Stroup: 3:11
Yeah. So at the end of 2022, obviously, the world changed with the announcement of ChatGPT and, as we were preparing for 2023, the board the CEO and I and our CTO we're all talking about okay, what does this mean for us? We fundamentally believed that this was going to be one of those once in a generation shifts, like the internet, like mobile, something that would fundamentally change how we do our business, and the decision that our CEO came to after some conversation was this is really a business and customer-led transformation. It's a business and customer-led transformation. It's not just a technology-led transformation. So in asking me to be the executive sponsor for AI, it was really an endorsement that this is broader than just the technology. It is actually doing a lot of what we do in product management starting with what's the problem to be solved, both from a customer and a business perspective, and using AI as the how, the technology to help us reimagine those new solutions to longstanding problems.
Lily Smith: 4:10
And so it sounds like you had board alignment from the beginning, or is that more like board buy-in you?
Karen Stroup: 4:19
know, I think we had a spectrum on our board.
Karen Stroup: 4:20
So one of our board members is HBS professor of AI and so he was certainly in the camp of. The world is changing and we want to be part of that change and, yeah, he really brings a fantastic external perspective to our board that helps us think big and bold. And then we have other board members who represent different perspectives, and so there was a lot of openness to what AI means and advocacy from one of the board members, and the general perspective that we held was we would rather lean in and believe this is going to happen. It's going to change how we deliver products and services and experiences to our customers. It will change our cost structure. We'd rather lean in and assume it's going to happen than lean out and wait for it to happen to us, and so, even if it takes longer than we expected, we'll gain more by being on the early adopter side. Of course, we want to be safe, secure, compliant, protect our customers' data, but we were in the camp of we want to be the disruptor. We want to lean in.
Lily Smith: 5:21
So what were the next steps? You know, you get this new fancy job title and responsibility, like what happens. What's your, what's your first steps?
Karen Stroup: 5:32
Yeah. So I got the phone call right before the holidays the Christmas or December holidays and so it got my mind spinning over the break and so I was like, okay, I really need to lean into this and understand what is happening. What are the technologies, what are the problems to be solved, what are the approaches? And, of course, it was goal setting season, and so when I came back the board and my boss, melissa, asked me okay, so what are your goals going to be for AI? And the first year, in 2023, our goal was really around experimentation. We said we want to test and learn, and it's really about understanding what it means and the art of the possible, as opposed to having defined business impact and so not knowing what sort of goal to set.
Karen Stroup: 6:14
I set a goal of saying we want to do 12 experiments on AI this year, one a month. It feels like a reasonable goal, but we ended up doing 60 experiments, so we blew away our goal and it really set the stage for 2024, which was around scaling that experience. So for 2024, we had three bold goals One was to unlock productivity at the company. Two was to reimagine our customer experiences and our products from an AI first perspective. And the third was to inspire and educate our employees on AI so that they believed in the art of the possible as opposed to being scared by what AI might do for them. And so 2024 was really around going from experimentation to going to scale, and 25 will be around value realization.
Lily Smith: 7:02
That sounds like a very well considered strategy, sounds like product management right, exactly, exactly. Let's just take it back into 23, where you're kind of at that experimentation stage and also, I guess you know, going back to what you were saying around this being very led by you as a chief digital officer rather than by, like a CTO, as a technical solution, to like leading with the technology rather than leading with the customer. How did that come about and how did you then experiment and bring everyone along the journey with? Because we're using AI in its broadest terms, but I guess the biggest leaps that we've seen recently is more with generative AI.
Karen Stroup: 7:49
Yeah, and so we've used AI for more than a decade and stuff. So I am specifically talking about Gen AI and the applications there, and I'll say that, while I'm the executive sponsor of AI, it is very much an executive leadership team approach. We all had a shared goal on AI, and so the CTO and I are joined at the hip. We are very much partners in crime and figuring out not only the what but the how we get this done and then, from a legal, a compliance, a finance perspective, all of ELT has shared goals around AI, which I'll start by saying that it is incredibly important for it to be a shared goal, because we win together or we lose together, and if I'm out there trying to advocate for AI but none of my peers think that it's important and they're not gold on it, I'm probably not going to be successful, and so that alignment was actually incredibly important and continues to be so. So we take our goals from the CEO level, which is endorsed by the board, and we cascade them through the organization and ensure those cross-functional teams do have shared goals around AI. So that was I mean it sounds obvious, but one of our really big secrets to success.
Karen Stroup: 9:00
The second thing. I would say so from an experimentation perspective. It's kind of like where do you get started if you go back to 2023 or Gen AI capabilities. So we incubated a small team and it was a very small team and so let's just test and learn. What are some problems we're trying to solve.
Karen Stroup: 9:16
We did go and use external data to say where do we want to focus. So we looked at both from an industry perspective or external perspective, what functions are right to be reimagined with generative AI, and then from an internal perspective, where are our highest cost points and where are our biggest customer problems? And we looked at the intersection of where is it known that this can be a good solution and where do we have problems we can solve can be a good solution and where can. Where do we have problems we can solve? And so we really started to focus on, of course, technology, ops and our go-to-market motions as three big areas. But in addition to that, I put a challenge for my own team to say we want to reimagine product management with AI and we want to reimagine our product experiences with AI itself.
Lily Smith: 10:03
And how was that received within the organization?
Karen Stroup: 10:06
I think with everything, there are different ways that people received it. So I generally heard support, for we are super excited that WEX is leaning into this. We're proud to be at a company that is embracing the art of the possible, that is leaning in on the cutting edge. And, of course, there are questions that go along with this. What does it mean for me? What does it mean for my job? It's kind of scary. I don't really understand it.
Karen Stroup: 10:30
And that actually was part of our third goal, which was around training. But it was really around the employee sentiment, where we wanted people to be excited and not scared by AI. And so what we did there is we actually. We partnered with an external group called GAI and we started by offering optional sessions of 40 people each and said, hey, prompt engineering sounds kind of intimidating.
Karen Stroup: 10:54
Like what is it? It sounds like engineering. You're probably not going to get it right the first time out of the gate, but you'll come to a training. We'll have experts, take you through case studies, they take you through hands-on keyboard exercises to really understand what this chat, gpt or other tools is. And so we did probably about 25 of those sessions of 40 employees each last year to rave reviews Once people started to experience it and understand that this is something that can help them do their job. It's like an intern, it's like a thought partner. It's not a replacement for them. The light bulb really went off, and so we see many of our employees more than the majority of our employees who actually use Gen AI tools more than once a week, and so it's really becoming part of how people are working and increasing the quality of work as well as the efficiency of it.
Lily Smith: 11:48
And I guess the next kind of big sort of question for me is as a financial services company, you know you must have extra hoops that you have to jump through. You know just in terms of like embracing Gen AI tools within your operations but then also using it within the platform. So what has that been like?
Karen Stroup: 12:08
Yeah. So one of the things we did early in 2023 is we said we want to formulate our AI governance policy similar to what we saw in Europe around data and privacy six or seven years ago. We expect that there will be governance around AI and we want to lead with it, and so, as much as we want to embrace experimentation and learn quickly, we want to do it in a safe, secure, compliant way, and we want our customers to feel confident that we're using their data and our data very judiciously. And so we had a cross-functional team that consisted of HR, legal compliance, risk finance, information security, product management, you name it. It's very much a cross-functional team, but we set up an AI governance process, and so any ideas that people have, whether they be formulated ideas or early stage ideas, have a process that they can go to. They have a place where they can go pitch the idea. Then this cross-functional team understands what they're considering, what they need, can assess the risks, and it becomes a real partnership between the business.
Lily Smith: 13:10
That also gives employees a place to go with their ideas to try to get traction and in terms of, like, assessing that risk, you know, was there like a learning journey on for that cross-functional team to understand, like, how to assess it and what like, even what questions to ask yeah, absolutely, and the journey continues.
Karen Stroup: 13:29
I would say, just like any, any great product, it's a test and learn. You know, we we work in a credit industry, we are a fintech, and it's really important that we are careful in what we do, and we want to create an environment where we can be nimble, and so it is very much a balancing act in terms of how we are using the data, where we experiment and where we test and learn. But part of the way that we're bridging that gap is we are doing small, controlled experiments, and so, if you're thinking about using an HR tool to help screen resumes and identify the best candidates, well, we're doing an AB test. What does it look like? Is there bias that's being introduced? Do we see more efficiency? Do we see better candidates? But what are the risks? And so, with everything, we're pretty much doing it as an AB test to understand what could be and what questions should we ask the next time, so that we get smarter as we go.
Lily Smith: 14:26
In terms of where you're at in this journey? Have you been able to quantify at all the value that's been generated in the AI strategy that you've got?
Karen Stroup: 14:38
Yeah. So we have a couple of different ways that we're quantifying this, and we're in a quiet period right now, so I can't talk specific numbers, but I will talk about the methodology, and so what we did for 2024 is we set a goal for internal productivity, and it really goes around saying how do we encourage people to use these new tools and capabilities Gen AI tools and capabilities to transform the way they work so that they can spend more time on value-added activities and less time on the mundane, and so always trying to frame it in a way that it's a carrot, not a stick, it's good for the employee. So think about a salesperson. If a salesperson is using Gen AI tools to do business development, to mine their contacts and they close more deals and they make more money because of it, well, that's a huge carrot. Other salespeople want to do that too, and so the way that we're doing this is looking for.
Karen Stroup: 15:33
We have a group of AI accelerators that we have anointed people who raised their hand and said hey, I want to be an early adopter. We're giving them access to more tools that we haven't released to all of the organization. There's a community of practice. They have their own chat channel where they're encouraging and supporting each other and those employees are really experimenting and unlocking the successes in their own functions, and I think that's one of the most powerful ways that you can drive change management and drive positive sentiment.
Karen Stroup: 16:03
If it's something that's being done in your own company as a smaller company, you could look out there and look at the Googles or the Amazons of the world, and, of course, there are amazing stories about what Microsoft is doing to use Gen AI to transform their productivity, or Google, but when you have those examples of how your colleague is using it, it becomes really, really powerful and a lot more credible. And so we're trying to drive the grassroots adoption of Gen AI and the success stories and we're quantifying it in a way that by doing sampling and almost doing consultant math. If, on average, it takes this much time, if we're able to save this much time, then we can quantify the impact across the org and it's been a meaningful number. So we're really we're really thrilled with the progress.
Lily Smith: 16:53
That's awesome. I just can't imagine how much? Effort that must take to do all of that analysis.
Karen Stroup: 17:01
It is, but it also is really powerful. Yeah, it is. I think you have to be comfortable. As I said, I came from a consulting background. But if you think about a case study, if you're thinking about interviewing for a BCG or a McKinsey and you're like, okay, what could be if it's X percent of Y? But you can get to a point where you're like, oh actually, like this part of the job is really mundane and if we use Gen AI to do it, we can spend more time talking to customers and, as a matter of fact, we can use Gen AI to do synthetic users and talk to customers there and we can talk to get 10X the amount of customer input than we can before. It becomes this virtuous cycle where you, same time, you're using Gen AI to do more things better and then you deliver better experiences for your customer, which is really what the payoff is for all of us.
Randy Silver: 17:58
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Lily Smith: 18:10
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Randy Silver: 18:48
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Lily Smith: 18:55
There's also some guest speakers from UK product tanks. Special shout out to Rebecca Mortimer, who's in my product team at BBC Maestro. Whether you're coming to the Barbican in person on March 10th and 11th or tuning in digitally, join us and get inspired at MTP Con. London Tickets are on sale now. Check out mindtheproductcom forward slash MTP Con to find out more, or just click on events at the top of the page. I guess what's been the sort of like the biggest surprise for you, with all of the experimentation that you've done with Gen AI and all of the different applications of it that you've used, like what's been the most surprising or kind of exciting.
Karen Stroup: 19:43
Oh gosh, the whole journey I mean. To me, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. How many times in your career do you get to experience these generational shifts of technology coming in that really transform how you're working? So, to me, when I play this forward and my teams are brainstorming of what does the future of our products and experiences look like, and you're prototyping or sketching things out where the world is going and the art of the possible is just absolutely incredible, and I think about even a traditional user interface, and I see teams experimenting with ideas of instead of having an admin portal. You're just asking questions right, what does this inner user base look like in the future? Or how does voice come into play, like, are you talking to something and you get a visual and text response back.
Karen Stroup: 20:40
The most exciting part to me is one what's possible going forward, all of those questions that you've wanted to answer, all the work that you never have time to do. There's actually a way to get it done. Two, using some of the low-code or no-code solutions like Cursor, where teams can actually, in less than a week, create a new experience with working code so you can visualize it, you can test it with customers. That is incredible. And then three I think about reimagining the support experience. And no one wants to call a call center, no one wants to call in, and as you think about the power that is at our fingertips in terms of being able to predict and accurately answer in a very personalized way, the questions we have, to me that is a game changer, not only for support but for customer experience across the board. And so for me that is, it's going to happen. It's just a matter of when and how.
Karen Stroup: 21:29
And I think that's one of the surprises I've had. I think when we started with one of our agent-assisted solutions in our benefits space, we focused a lot on the answer, accuracy and kind of the technical part of it, but what we realized is the real differentiator is actually in the customer experience. And so, even starting with okay, so there's a chat screen on your screen when you log in, like what encourages someone to go and try it again. Like no one's had a good experience with chatbots in the old, like I'd probably avoid them at all costs. And so, even if you make an amazing new technology and you're going to get a very different experience, how do people know the first time they come in, that they should give it a shot, and it'll be different. And so I think it really emphasizes that the traditional principles of amazing product management actually are equally, if not more, important as Gen AI comes into play. We talk so much about the data and technology, but that customer experience still, at the end of the day, rules the roost.
Lily Smith: 22:33
So just bringing it back to the board alignment, how have you kind of kept the board up to speed with the progress that you've been making and have things changed in terms of like, how much people want to invest or you know how people perceive this as an opportunity for the business?
Karen Stroup: 22:53
Yeah, that's a great question. So our board is very curious and engaged on AI. So every quarter we have an AI update, either at our tech committee meeting or at the full board meeting, and the full board is invited to the tech committee, and so we've had a lot of attendance because everyone wants to learn this. And so there are a couple of things we've done. One we're bringing in AI speakers. We're sharing AI articles. As I said, we have an HBS professor who is on our board and we ask him to start with the state of the world. What's he seeing with the startups he's talking to, with the students, but really looking at educating everyone and inspiring people with what's possible out there. Then we have a standard update that we do that talks about what's our progress against our goals and what are we learning, and everyone is providing really thoughtful input into have you considered this? Are you thinking big enough? Are you being safe enough? And so we have that conversation.
Karen Stroup: 23:48
But I think one of the most pivotal moments for us was sometime last year. The board said think 10x bigger. This is not the time or the place to be safe, but make your goals bold, aspirational, and if you miss a 10X goal and you're at 5X. That's a lot better than having an incremental goal and outperforming it by 50 or 100%. So we did that in 2024.
Karen Stroup: 24:12
We had very bold goals and I was nervous heading into the year. I was like, oh my gosh, like are we going to be able to achieve this? And we hit some of the goals. We surpassed some of them, which shocked me because I thought it was such a big number that we would never be able to achieve it. But if we hadn't set that bold goal, we would not have made half the impact that we made. And then there was another goal we missed, but the board was actually really supportive, Like it's not about whether you hit the goal or not. It's about gaining momentum and the learning and understanding and building the enablers you need to accelerate this. In our last board meeting, the focus is really now shifting to the value capture. So not just creating the value, but understanding how we capture it and how we translate it to either top line or bottom line impact, and I feel like that's a real trend for 2025. We're kind of through the experimentation phase and now it becomes real.
Lily Smith: 25:06
How have you worked with like or have you worked with other businesses? You know partners and customers, even to kind of bring them along on this same journey.
Karen Stroup: 25:16
Yeah. So I think it's incredibly important to learn externally and to bring the customers along. So separating the two. From an external learning perspective, my assumption is there's a lot of people who are a lot smarter and are experimenting in different ways, and so we should absolutely be out. We took about 50 people out to Silicon Valley a year and a half ago to go study customers or study companies who are leading and ahead of where we were and using Gen AI, but that shared experience really helped us as a leadership team, as an extended leadership team. Think about what we can and should be doing with this. We are bringing in speakers internally. We doing with this. We are bringing in speakers internally. We are promoting this. We are setting goals within the team.
Karen Stroup: 26:05
So there's a lot of external learning that is happening and with our customers, similar to our employees, there's a bell curve. There are people who are early adopters and all in. They want to pilot with us, they want to be the first adopter, they want to learn with us. There's a lot of people who are like I'm really interested in what this could do, need to understand more, and there's the other end of the spectrum. There's a percentage of customers who are like you know what, I want to wait and see, and so I feel like our job is to meet the customers where they are. If they want to experiment with us, let's do it together. If you're uncomfortable, that's okay. We can educate you on what we're doing, how we're doing it, learn together and you don't have to use these products and services from the beginning. And so I think it's not a one size fits all strategy as it pertains to customers, and I think it's really important to understand where people are coming from and not try to force something on someone prematurely.
Lily Smith: 27:04
That makes a lot of sense, and you know we've talked about a lot of the successes that you've had in the organization with your AI strategy, but we often learn a lot through our failures as well. Is there anything that you're able to share in terms of you know what hasn't gone so well or what's been unexpected that you know? You wish you'd known now, but you know before.
Karen Stroup: 27:28
So many things, and I totally agree that failure or learning is part of the journey. One thing that comes to mind immediately is we have been stymied at different times when we don't have the data that we need in an accessible way, and so it may exist, it may not exist, we can't access it in the way that we want, and so, as we've been preparing for 2025, one of the things that we're doing as a result of that learning is, again, kind of traditional product management, but defining where we want to go, what's the vision, but, as part of that and part of the work back plan, saying what is all the data that we think we need for these 10 different ideas that we want to execute on. And that's enabling us to create a very intentional data strategy and prioritize internal or external data that we may want to get, put it in our data lake, get it ready and ensuring that our products are AI ready, so that, if you think about laying the train tracks, we're laying those tracks before we're ready to actually build and launch the product by anticipating where we're going. And we certainly ran into some hurdles in the first two years of our journey of saying, oh, actually we don't have the data, we've got a great business case and if we could do this, we could deliver a lot of value, but we're not ready internally to do it and so changing that to be very proactive and planful in terms of define the strategy, define the needs and lay the train tracks before the product is ready for it. So that was one learning. I guess another learning that I had was you know we're talking about the customers and you know, meet customers where they are.
Karen Stroup: 29:03
I found that, as excited as people are about AI, it is also very intimidating, and a lot of places where we use AI in our daily lives whether it be Netflix or Amazon or credit risk fraud, where AI has been prevalent for years Amazon or credit risk fraud, where AI has been prevalent for years it's actually behind the scenes and so people are leading with the benefit and so you're leading with like we'll help prevent fraud, we'll help keep your driver on the road, we'll recommend the next movie for you to watch.
Karen Stroup: 29:33
They don't say do you want to use AI to recommend the next movie for you to watch? And yeah, as AI has been, and Gen AI have been such a predominant theme as product people, we want to lead and say, hey, we're using Gen AI, but actually people don't care as much about the technology and by leading with the technology, it actually creates a lot of questions, some skepticism, some uncertainty, and can slow us down, and so it's been a reminder to me that we're really AI is in solution to the problem we're trying to solve, and so, as we're pitching this to people, you really need to lead with the problem what's the customer problem you're trying to solve and what's the benefit that's being provided. And the AI is part of the how you do that. And, yeah, that is a much more effective way to engage with our customers.
Lily Smith: 30:19
I completely agree. I think it's you know, having been around the block as well in this technical world, you know all those things of like blockchain lets you do this, or big data lets you do this, and now it's AI lets you do this, and it's like just tell us what the tool is, and like you know what we're meant to be doing. Just I don't care if it's AI or not.
Karen Stroup: 30:41
I think that's such a good way to put it. It's like people want the solution, they want the value, how you get there.
Lily Smith: 30:47
Like you know, a lot of people don't actually want those details yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure we will get there at some point and you know I absolutely have my fingers crossed that those customer service, you know, auto responses like go away and they do get like massively improved by some Gen AI very, very good solutions. So we talked a little bit about the kind of the people side of things and how things have gone like within your organization. But how have you found sort of like structuring your people around some of these goals and have you had to like recruit specifically for this, or have you just upskilled people within your team?
Karen Stroup: 31:34
A combination of both. So, first of all, I don't think AI and using Gen AI naturally happens Like if you go in and you try to use ChatGPT or Gemini or any of the tools for the first time, you're probably not going to get amazing results. And so the first thing that I found from an internal perspective is we actually have to create that forcing mechanism to get people over the hump. And so, for myself, I found that I wasn't using AI on a daily basis. I was like gosh, I'm really not. I'm not leading by example here. So for a month, my goal was to use some form of Gen AI five times a day and I kept a spreadsheet and I jotted it down and I made myself do it, and after a week or two it's like it takes three weeks to create a habit After a couple of weeks, I found that I was naturally asking the question of oh, could I use a Gen AI tool to help me with this?
Karen Stroup: 32:25
And my use of Gen AI increased exponentially, but it wasn't organic and it wasn't unintentional.
Karen Stroup: 32:35
And so, about upskilling our employees, we've created that same sort of forcing mechanism, which is how do we encourage and sense, train that hands on keyboard, get people over the hump, because if we just leave it to natural devices, I don't think people are going to change the way they work. So we've had a very intentional, curated effort, both within my team but also within across WEX, of saying what's your goal, but how do we help you be successful? How do we help you upskill yourself? There's a quote that I've heard several times around AI is not going to take your job. Someone using AI will, and I believe that very firmly, and so we're creating that culture of empowering our employees to be the ones world of AI and Gen AI who bring that strong understanding of what's possible, how to do it, the confidence, the expertise, the conviction on reimagining the experiences, and the combination of the two a small number of experts and a large group of excited, motivated people has been a really powerful combination for us of excited, motivated people has been a really powerful combination for us.
Lily Smith: 34:03
That's awesome, karen. I can't believe that we've been talking for 30 minutes. It's gone so fast. Are there any kind of like top tips, I guess, or, like you know, things that you want to leave our listeners with, of like the best advice that you've got for people who are on this AI journey as well?
Karen Stroup: 34:18
That is a great question. So, one, I would say don't wait for it to happen, get started. There's no wrong path, but not doing anything I would advocate is the wrong path. So one is get started. Two, I find that treating this as a product, saying where are we today, what's our goal, vision, what's the path we need to get there, and what do we want to do to test and learn and have measurable OKRs or KPIs along the way.
Karen Stroup: 34:47
We have a tried and true methodology that you use in product management that actually works really well in the Gen AI world too, and so don't forget about our best practices. Actually apply them to Gen AI. And three, I would say have fun with it. There's so much possibility here that I think that you actually this is the opportunity to dream big, and we have to give ourselves and our teams room to experiment and learn about what's possible, because if we don't do it, someone else will. I think I started with you have a choice to make. You can either be the disruptor or be the disrupted, and it's not a one or two year time horizon, but cost structures will fundamentally change, how we deliver, customer experiences will fundamentally change, and my belief is that we want to be on the cutting edge of that. We want to be the disruptor and we'll have some missteps along the way, but ultimately, by investing early and experimenting often, we'll figure it out.
Lily Smith: 35:40
Awesome, Karen. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Karen Stroup: 35:48
Thank you.
Lily Smith: 35:49
It's been so great to be here. The product experience hosts are me, Lily Smith, host by night and chief product officer by day.
Randy Silver: 36:02
And me Randy Silver also host by night, and I spend my days working with product and leadership teams, helping their teams to do amazing work.
Lily Smith: 36:12
Louron Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.
Randy Silver: 36:19
And our theme music is from product community legend Arnie Kittler's band Pow. Thanks to them for letting us use their track.
