Is implementing generative AI different from implementing other tools? Should CIOs build or buy, and how should they choose their AI partners? In this episode, Yadin sits down with Suhail Nimji, VP/Head of Business Development, Corporate Development, and Partnerships at Jasper, to discuss what he is seeing and hearing in the market.
Is implementing generative AI different from implementing other tools? Should CIOs build or buy, and how should they choose their AI partners? IIn this episode, Yadin sits down with Suhail Nimji, VP/Head of Business Development, Corporate Development, and Partnerships at Jasper, to discuss what he is seeing and hearing in the market. They dive into the change management differences with AI, as well as the questions CIOs should ask as they build AI partnerships.
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“This is a journey, not a sort of, hey, we've implemented this thing and let's go. And so when I talk to CIOs about the landscape, it's more so who can you partner with on this journey? And I think that's the most important thing to think about. Because it will be iterative.”
“The CIO's job is to be thinking about the next frontier constantly while having one eye on the present and one eye on the future. And to think that this is like a net new sort of revelation for them would be remiss. Their entire job with their leadership is to think about, how are we implementing the best technology for our customers, for our employees? How do we give the best experience? Generative is just another sort of like, oh, look, there's another tool that we should go evaluate.”
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Timestamps:
(01:15) What is the current conversation about generative AI?
(02:30) What is different about the AI conversation now?
(07:34) Is upskilling and reskilling a big part of the conversation?
(09:32) AI creates workflow change, more than a technical one
(12:22) Deciding who to partner with
(15:05) Trust in AI partnerships
(16:20) Questions tech leaders should ask as they choose AI partners
(21:44) Data security and privacy
(24:38) Is this different than other tools?
(27:27) Build versus buy
(29:14) Are there unique hurtles when rolling out AI solutions?
(30:47) Change management
(33:54) Suhail’s advice for CIOs
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Suhail Nimji on LinkedIn
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0:00:01.0 Suhail Nimji: It's very important, first and foremost, that you trust the person you're sitting with and partnering with that they will be the ones that can adapt to the ever-changing landscape.
0:00:13.4 Yadin Porter De León: Welcome to the CIO Exchange Podcast, where we talk about what's working, what's not and what's next. I'm Yadin Porter de León. AI has been around for a long time. And CIOs are practiced in the selection and implementation of new tools to support their organizations. So, what is it different about generative AI? What should CIOs consider as they decide whether to build or buy, and who to choose as their AI partners? In this conversation, I sit down with Suhail Nimji, VP and Head of Business Development, Corporate Development and Partnerships at Jasper to discuss this in depth. Because Jasper is a generative AI tool focused on the marketing organization, Suhail has been busy discussing generative AI with enterprise technology leaders and has unique insights into what CIOs should be thinking about as they make decisions around which tools to deploy. We dive into the implementation of those tools and change management as well as security and privacy considerations. It is more of a workflow change than a technology change and many people aren't ready.
0:01:15.4 Yadin Porter De León: Suhail, there's a lot of hard problems that enterprise technology leaders are trying to solve right now. And right now what's different is there's a different tool they have in their toolbox and of course that's artificial intelligence, generative AI, large learning models. Some are trying to take a model first approach rather than application first approach. A lot of different things swirling around. But I really want to kind of start by level setting with you with regards to what is that conversation about the state of AI in the enterprise, large companies trying to do big things and change. What's that conversation like right now?
0:01:47.1 Suhail Nimji: Yeah. Look, I think I really want to emphasize that. You talked about a new tool in the tool belt. AI's been around forever, and by forever I mean like large enterprises have been thinking about AI, implementing AI as far as time can tell, when you've compute, you have AI. And there's been evolutions on the various cycles of AI. But it'd be remiss to say like, "Oh, this is new."
0:02:14.4 Yadin Porter De León: It's a great point. It's a great point. So, what is different now? Because the conversation is different, the buzz around is different, the hype is different. What is fundamentally different now about the conversation? I guess maybe that's a better way to put it.
0:02:25.0 Suhail Nimji: I think there's always a hype when there's a breakthrough. There was a hype in the cloud era, but that was a breakthrough in on-prem to cloud, and so you were getting optimization of workloads. That was the interesting thing. What happened in 2017 was there was a breakthrough, which is the Transformers paper and that whole cast of characters have started companies, et cetera. But you gotta remember OpenAI is long before that. They kind of looked at the paper, they iterated, they were working on the thing. The thing that has changed more than anything else is the fact that generative, and you can thank ChatGPT for this, democratized that entire landscape. Jasper had been around for a year and a half prior to that. We had our own enterprise customers and it was the best thing that could have happened for the industry. It's rising of tides raises all ships.
0:03:13.7 Yadin Porter De León: It changed your schedule, didn't it? A few more flights you had booked. [chuckle]
0:03:17.2 Suhail Nimji: Yeah. But look, I think it was the greatest thing that could have happened because it went from this like, okay, generative is an interesting application, larger language models are interesting to, wow, we can truly use this in enterprise today and let us tell you how. And I think that was a conversation change. It went from the engineer to the end user and the fact that you could effectively see it, touch it, implement it, it changed. And that was a really interesting thing. GitHub Copilot has been around for a while. Again, it kind of got democratized along the cycle. And that has been another change where companies are thinking about GitLab and GitHub and how to use these code generation capabilities to kind of advance the implementation of their software lifecycle. And that's predominantly the change.
0:04:02.6 Suhail Nimji: The other thing that's been interesting is how CIOs are thinking about the build versus the buy. And that's where things with Jasper have been really interesting is that we are a verticalized CMO driven copilot for marketing. It is what it is. It is a verticalized software stack. And I think the best way to think about it is like VMware has got their own capabilities, really deep technical capabilities. They're also working with large language models. They're also building their own larger language models. And yet the CMO and CIO choose to go both ways, which is, hey, we wanna use Jasper for the verticalized solution for marketing, blog posts, content creation, campaign creation, et cetera. And by the way, we need our own private infrastructure for knowledge management, CX management, et cetera. And so that's how the CIO conversations have been happening.
0:04:53.0 Yadin Porter De León: I'm glad you mentioned VMware too, 'cause yes, full disclosure, everyone, yes, VMware is a user of Jasper tool. I use it constantly every day for all sorts of things. And it has been a game changer as far as our workflow goes. But it is to your point too, Suhail, is that now you have the end users asking the technology leaders for these capabilities because they can see them, they can touch them, they know what the output is, they know what the potential is. And maybe that is... It's been a shift. It was almost like the biggest PR campaign that AI ever had. What happened November of 2022.
0:05:23.0 Suhail Nimji: Yeah. Look, and I think the Transformers' breakthrough was also pretty important. It went from static to dynamic. And that is going to allow us to do a lot more in that sort of framework. And I think that's what CIOs are seeing. There has never been a point in time where the CIO and the organization has tried to experience like, okay, how do I reduce burn? Or how do I optimize the resources we have? How do I make our employees happier and more efficient? And it just seems to be a world where the demands have constantly gone up and resources haven't gone up along with it. And generative is that sort of, wait a minute, we can implement this. The end user can actually get time saves back. How do we want to think about optimization in our entire workforce? And that has been sort of this wave that we've been seeing, and it's great.
0:06:17.3 Yadin Porter De León: Yeah. And there's a lot of the hard problems I think that you'd mentioned, I think that they're important that there's; these problems aren't new, these problems of optimizations, problems of giving people time back, automation, efficiency. These are constantly problems doing less with more constantly things that executives have to look at, lines of business CIOs, et cetera. But now they're taking a different approach simply because these tools, let's say like a Jasper, they're more easily available. But there's that human consideration piece. Just because you have the tool doesn't mean that you can immediately deploy it, teach everyone, everyone come up to speed on day one. And there's a concern too that anytime you roll something out, anytime you put something together, and then deploy it, it could be shelfware or not used in the best way and people don't see the value of it right away. Are you seeing that as a big part of that conversation where you're going in and saying, "Look, yes, this is gonna be a great tool, but you have to have internal education, you have to have enablement, you have to have plans to make sure people are up-skilled, re-skilled." Is that a big part of the conversation?
0:07:27.3 Suhail Nimji: Yes and no. And I think, again, this is a really cool medium to kind of have this conversation. Look, the CIO's job is to be thinking about the next frontier constantly while having one eye on the present and one eye on the future. And to think that this is like a net new sort of revelation for them would be remiss. Their entire job with their leadership is to think about how are we implementing the best technology for our customers, for our employees. How do we give the best experience? Generative is just another sort of like, "Oh look, there's another tool that we should go evaluate." But they've been doing this forever. That is the job is to serve the customer and the best way to serve the customer is with the latest and greatest technology to create efficiencies, to lower friction, et cetera.
0:08:18.7 Suhail Nimji: And so they have had these processes in place to say, "Okay, look, we are evaluating another tool and this is the sort of value capture we're gonna get." Jasper's that perfect example again, which is like, "Hey, look, we've implemented... " And a lot of organizations have had processes in place in this kind of slots and that sort of operational efficiency, organization change, et cetera, change management. Where organizations do purchase Jasper and say, "Hey, this is a incredible ROI on time." The thing that's a little different this time more than ever is the workflow. How do we reimagine the workflow? So, I don't have to spend two to three weeks in a cycle. I can do things in two days. That is a fundamental shift. And I think that's what's actually different about this time more than the previous sort of iterations is that this is more of a workflow change than it is a technological change.
0:09:12.3 Yadin Porter De León: I like that you say that 'cause that's one of the things that when I say like someone says, "Hey, look, this used to take you an hour and it's only gonna take you 15 seconds now," that's cool, it's exciting, but really what you're doing is that workflow, which is what you're talking about, this is something that I wouldn't have had an hour to spend thoughtful time on for maybe a week, or I might've kicked the can down the road two weeks. So, I've collapsed a two week workflow cycle in into 15 seconds. That's compelling. And like you said, it is a mindset shift 'cause you said CIOs have been thinking about this stuff always. But something's different now. I was just in Slack this morning, someone's demanding this tool. There's fear of missing out. There's people who are like, "Look at, your team is running faster than my team now because my team doesn't have this." And I've never seen that before. No one was clamoring for Grammarly or for a content management solution. Nobody was clamoring, but people are clamoring for this. And so the pressure, I feel like what's different from my experience, especially, it's a demand.
0:10:08.7 Suhail Nimji: This being Jasper?
0:10:09.3 Yadin Porter De León: Oh, this time, no. This conversation of this time around like CIOs have been looking at these tools always, "Hey, here's a new tool, but this, "Hey, here's a new tool," is there's a ton of demand coming for, "Hey, we need to get this new tool." Whether it's Jasper, whether it's something else, we need to have something 'cause I feel like I'm not as an individual or my team isn't running as fast as they could because we don't have this. And there hasn't been the same demand for other enterprise tools as there had been for this type of solution.
0:10:40.6 Suhail Nimji: Again, the end user is a huge sort of like the end user that can do things better for the customer. And we have to remember we all work for the customer. That is our job. Our job is to figure out how do we make sure that our customer's customer is taken care of the best way whatever product and services that we offer. And I think what generative is it's that sort of thing. It's like, "Look, I can create a piece of content faster. I can do knowledge management work faster. I can think about resolutions to customer success faster." And then you get really, really, really on the technical weeds of it where it's like, "I can write code faster. I can get the first line of code out a lot faster." And so those engineers are seeing time saves across all mediums as well as marketers on the application side are seeing time saves across all mediums. But the cool thing is like what can I do with that time? And I think, again, when we talk about the workflow change, the way you can do with that time is actually think about the thing that you're working on a little bit more than just kind of iterative...
0:11:43.1 Yadin Porter De León: Just not banging it out. Like you solved that problem with a blank page where you don't know where to get started and here you're doing that heavy lift of getting that first draft out. Whether that's the first lines of code or whether that's the first draft of some piece of content and the blank page is no longer that barrier. You can get something out, it may not be great, but it's a start and it gets you thinking and it gives you stuff to pull on. But then you get to the point where, okay, well how do I make it better than... It's like you said, you now have that time that the human in this, this is, I like to have the AI plus human conversation. The human now gets to spend more time thinking about what is good, is this good, or how could it be better when you wouldn't have had that time before? So, not just being more efficient but also freeing up some time so that the ideation, the creation, the more human value pieces you have more time for.
0:12:28.0 Yadin Porter De León: So, let me take a step back for a second, 'cause we know that the conversation shifted a little bit. This is just another tool of course like a CIO can implement and evaluate and see what the value is going to be for the organization. But there's a lot of noise. Like you'd mentioned before, there's a ton of noise out there. And it went from maybe a couple 100 to 500 vendors who are in this space to 5,000. Some estimates are gonna be 10,000 vendors in this space. And I think that conversation is that I've been having with executives and the CIOs that I've been sitting down with, who do you start talking with?
0:13:00.0 Yadin Porter De León: Do you go best of breed and then do you build versus buy? There's all these questions swirling around. So, I think you sort of have a good way of looking at what those problems are, what that conversation looks like when they're entering into how I'm gonna start leveraging this type of tool, 'cause It's not just, hey, let's buy a SaaS thing and just deploy it and I'm done. It's a journey. And Microsoft's involved, Google's involved. What advice are you giving these technology leaders when they're first starting to look at how they're going to partner, how they're going to plan and build a strategy around the generative AI piece? 'Cause it's a little more complex.
0:13:41.0 Suhail Nimji: Look, I think when Google and Microsoft are getting involved, it's a good sign for all of us. That means that there's actual real horsepower here. Because those two giants don't set a foot in the ring unless it's really meaningful change 'cause that's a huge sort of focus shift for them. So, that's a good signal that we are all thinking about the right things. I think the thing that is the most important that you kind of said for a second, was partner, it's very important. This is a journey, not a sort of, "Hey, we've implemented this thing and let's go." And so when I talk to CIOs about the landscape, it's more so who can you partner with on this journey? And I think that's the most important thing to think about because it will be iterative. There are things that we have not forecasted yet, technological change we haven't seen yet that I think generative will enable over the next 12 to 24 months in this life cycle of adaptation and evolution and experimentation. And I think it's very important first and foremost that you trust the person you're sitting with and partnering with that they will be the ones that can adapt to the ever-changing landscape. That's a first thing.
0:14:55.5 Yadin Porter De León: I like that you mentioned trust. I think that's a real critical piece.
0:15:00.5 Suhail Nimji: Yeah. And I think that's... Again, we lead with that at Jasper, which is, look, we promise that we will do the best we can to keep up with this lifecycle. And that's our sort of commitment. But I think as these conversations happen, it's very important to think about the step function changes that are occurring in this landscape. And again, that to me is the best way to think about this. We are entering this journey together and that we have to kind of think about this from the step function of, "Okay, who's going to help me keep... " And act almost as my sort of like whatever field and function, whether it's foundational model, application layer, et cetera, who can I trust that they've got their stuff figured out, they're the industry experts in their space. We can delegate to them on these sort of platform functions and features. We can actually rely on them to build at speed and scale. And that's really what's important.
0:15:53.8 Yadin Porter De León: No, I think it's good. I think you're moving to the territory where I wanted to cover next. And those are the results. I think those are good results. You wanna make sure that they've got the roadmap that you build trust so that they're gonna be able to help you with your own strategy and you can rely on them to be there in the future, next quarter, next year, next five years. What are some of those questions you feel like enterprise technology leaders should be asking if they wanna make sure that they're establishing a partnership with the right team?
0:16:17.9 Suhail Nimji: I think some of the questions, are on the application side. I think the first question is like, it's the basic stuff like, "Are you well-funded? Are you not well-funded?" Like, "Who are your partners? Who are you not your partners?" Those are the basics. Are you gonna be around? And the second thing is like, "Look how many customers have you done this with along the way." There is a value add in being the first, there's not always. And so, again, at our scale, 100,000 customers, like, we've done this, we've kind of grown with the market, et cetera. But I think as we think about this, I think that's effectively how the CIO should be thinking about this, it's like, "Okay, does the CEO know what they're doing?" And in our case, Dave is the world's best AI applied marketer. That is what's going for us. When you think about these LLM providers, you think about Anthropic and Cohere and Sam and Greg, they're the best at what they do. And so we can rely on them, their engineering team, their staff to kind of move the ball forward.
0:17:16.1 Suhail Nimji: And on the application side, it's more of an AI applied story. Is that vendor and partner that you're choosing to partner with, do they understand the landscape well enough to adapt with the changes? That's the conversation. And the thing is like there's no sort of magic to these discussions. It's just the simple things of like do they know what they're doing? Have they implemented this before? Do they have a good pulse on what the market looks like today and have a really good vision for what the market looks like tomorrow and adapt with the changes that come with it?
0:17:50.9 Yadin Porter De León: I think that's good. Yeah, because it is a conversation, 'cause I've been working at a startup with only 250 people in it and I'm sitting in the office in Round Rock, Texas, at Dell's office and they're talking to us about what's your roadmap? And they're grilling us too. 'Cause we're like, "We're only a company of 250 people. Are you guys gonna be around in the next five years?" We're Dell, there's got a lot of technology leaders at big companies who are gonna have that conversation like, "Hey, Suhail, what's your roadmap look like? What's your take on the future?" A lot of it is uncharted territory. Like you said, there's some really brilliant people in the field doing really brilliant stuff. They've been doing it for years, but at the same time, there's always an X factor. You don't know exactly what's going to be coming out next year or the next two to three years.
0:18:30.0 Suhail Nimji: I think it's also really important to take a pulse on like who's doing R&D in the space. I think the way that I think about startups as well is like, the CIO who should be thinking about, okay, who's the CEO in this company? Do they have the vision? On the sales side, you gotta be thinking about like can they implement the vision and go sell the product, et cetera, and get customer feedback? The CPO, are they listening to the customer? Are they actively sitting down and having discussions and saying, "Okay, we thought that was our roadmap but we're hearing the customer journey be a little bit different and we know that if we build just a little bit more, if they build it, they will come." That's visionary and that visionary comes from the R&D side of the house.
0:19:05.6 Suhail Nimji: And if you have these three sort of sweet spots and these three engines humming within an organization, it's a safe bet. Again, the CEO that has the vision, the CPO that can implement the vision, talk to the customer and R&D, and I think those sort of key pillars help move a lot of this forward. I think those are the important kind of factors.
0:19:26.3 Yadin Porter De León: Yeah, so I mean, everyone, it's been an evolution for the CIOs specifically because you kind of had to become a little bit more like a VC founder. You're gonna have to pull your Marc Andreessen skills out and say, look, I need... 'Cause you know working with more sort of innovative companies is becoming a way that some companies are getting that edge and they always should have. It feels like now there's just a little bit more pressure for the CIOs to be more business-focused and have the ability to be able to look a little bit further out onto the future and partner with people. There was that whole saying for a long time, "Hey, no one got fired for buying IBM," but also there was times in which, hey, nobody evolved. Nobody differentiated themselves by buying a lot of these large enterprise products.
0:20:03.1 Suhail Nimji: Yeah, no, no, I look... I completely agree. And I think the CIOs have done a really good job being a little bit more in tune over the last decade, I would say. Plus a lot of CIOs have a little bit more of a pulse on what's happening in Silicon Valley, and that's an incredible feat that these lifecycle changes than technological changes that are happening. You're not going blind in these conversations with the CIO and it's incredible. I was actually just with the CIO on Friday of one of the top four global banks, and that discussion wasn't, "Hey, help me understand generative AI." It was like...
0:20:38.9 Yadin Porter De León: Which is good. [chuckle]
0:20:40.5 Suhail Nimji: Yeah, which is fantastic. It's like help me understand the nitty gritty of these. Like think about the application layer, but think about the chaining, think about the vector database, think about the LLM providers. That's how tactical these questions are getting and these conversations are getting. That's an incredible place to be by the way. A lot of CIOs are like, they're already 10 steps ahead. They're organizations are already playing with this, and I think that's also another sort of change where historically it's been a little bit slower on the adaptation side, et cetera. This is full steam ahead. It's incredible.
0:21:09.8 Yadin Porter De León: That's very encouraging too. 'Cause I was having a conversation with Peter Chen, who's one of the heads of digital technology at Siemens, $72 billion company, 300,000 employees, and he's very much aware of this, keeping his finger on the pulse, but especially for a thing like you just mentioned, financial services, but healthcare some huge, huge hurdles, huge challenges that even if you're playing around with it, even if you're far ahead, there's some big concerns. And so I think this is probably a good point to shift into how you're having that data security and privacy conversation with them, 'cause that's usually one of the biggest things that CIO runs into, "Great, I wanna do this, but the first thing I got to address is where's my data? What's being done with it? Where my customer data is, where my patient data is? What's being done with it?" Where is it and how is that conversation going? What are some of the big, big hurdles that you're running into there and how are you getting over those?
0:22:00.1 Suhail Nimji: Yeah, look, I think again, there's a beauty in [0:22:05.9] ____ being an enterprise grade company. We're like, these are things we have to think about. It's a high-quality problem. We are very thankful. Look, I think when you think about these things, you have to remember that training data has always been like... And you kind of mentioned it, right? This has always been a focus, and this will always be a focus, security of my data. How do I securitize the data, make sure that there's encryption at rest, like row-level encryption. None of that is leaving my tenant. If it is leaving my tenant, what is MNPI? How am I staying HIPAA-compliant? These are all very evolutionary things that we have had focus on. For us at Jasper, we built the platform with that in mind. In our press, security was like first and foremost for us. But the thing that's actually interesting that's changing is, okay, what metadata is okay? It's not customer data.
0:22:50.4 Suhail Nimji: What about metadata? Right? Thinking about that sort of lifecycle management of, "Hey, we can't train obviously on your data," but as a whole aggregate, how is that looking at the sort of model quality? And actually what's really interesting is some companies are like, "Hey, look, it's okay. Just don't touch this data," but it's okay if you see prompts which are performing really well, which are not performing well and outputs are performing well and not performing well, and not really looking at key identifiable factors of that which are proprietary to the organization, but the metadata as a whole and saying, "Okay, we know that these things performed relatively well and it's based on this model, et cetera. Let's kind of fine-tune that a little bit and push out a new thing."
0:23:31.4 Suhail Nimji: That's the other thing that's been interesting in this sort of space is making sure you have feature flags in place that you're not always constantly updating the model to the point where companies are having security risks. So do you have a feature flag available that allows you to sort of... I wanna say slow down the pace, but also be in lockstep with the change that's happening. And so the CIO and the organization has the ability to implement, do the security review, et cetera before you kind of move this thing forward. And so I think the conversations are as normal as they've always been.
0:24:03.6 Yadin Porter De León: 'Cause yeah, 'cause it's very similar to like, let's say you have a SaaS data protection tool or a cloud, and so you're gonna have to go do the security review, it's gonna be the same, show me your Visio, walk me through, we're going to pound on you for weeks, sometimes longer, and then ultimately you come out the other end and you say, okay good, great. Now we feel like we're comfortable. We feel like we can answer all the questions from a security and data privacy standpoint, and then you move forward. It's not a different... You said metadata was one thing. Is there anything different about the conversation now that you're talking about, let's say a potentially-generative AI tool, especially if you're consuming it as a SaaS that's really fundamentally different from other conversations that you would be using?
0:24:40.6 Suhail Nimji: I wouldn't say fundamentally different. I wouldn't say that at all. And actually one of my favorite quotes in life is that life is a series of events that repeat themselves. It's a quote by Andy Warhol and I tend to think about that a lot given that these conversations are relatively the same and different obviously because of the implications, et cetera, but the concerns have never changed. The CIO's job is to again, provide an incredible experience for the customer, for the employees, but it's doing that, maintaining that throttle and balance of innovation about security, those haven't changed at all. And those are things that companies like us have to think about every step of the way that these standards are in place. Like ISO framework is an important framework. Are you thinking SOC 2 Type II-compliant? These are benchmark, these are industry benchmarks for a reason, and how are you thinking about that encryption, right? Again, at rest row level data in transit. These are fundamental building blocks that haven't changed and I don't foresee them changing at all, 'cause they were good standards to begin with.
0:25:42.5 Yadin Porter De León: Yeah, I think I like the Mark Twain quote, which is, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And I think because everyone always says, well, this time's different. Well, it's slightly different, but it's still kind of the same things.
0:25:53.9 Suhail Nimji: That's a good quote.
0:25:55.6 Yadin Porter De León: There's still the same concerns that we've had with HIPAA, ISO, SOC 1, SOC 2. Those aren't changing, but there seems to be maybe are you experiencing additional concern about this tool versus other tools? People inherently feeling like a generative AI tool is less secure or is there more trepidation or is it... Or like you said, CIOs have kind of evolved and maybe there's no fun around this. They're like, no, this is just another tool. We're going to put the security review just like we always do.
0:26:23.0 Suhail Nimji: Yeah, I would say they've just kind the same sort of new look, I think Morgan Stanley is a great example. They kind of led the wave of implementation and like as a financial services and they're like, "Look, this is another sort of tool." We're gonna do the same security review and we're gonna push this thing forward. You've seen that happen time and time again. The CIO of Ally, Sathish, he came up with an article the other day, right? Ally is gonna come up with a generative AI tool. Would've thought that wouldn't be the case, except it is because it's the same sort of thing. Like CIOs are looking at this and going, great, this is another way to make our products and services better. This is another way to give our employees a step function in time management workflow changes are happening. We don't wanna be left behind. They're kind of jumping in, but they're doing it in a way that again, is very methodical, very safe. And look, security and compliance are number one priorities. They never change.
0:27:16.2 Yadin Porter De León: And then so this is the one big question that a lot of executives had. We just had a big working group in our event a couple of weeks ago, and so we had 150 CIOs and tech leaders in a room from the big companies like Delta and Siemens and others. And sort of the big thing was, okay, do I consume the build versus buy you talked about. That was the big one. It's like, I have this data, it needs to be done. I need to have my model close to the data, and I need this for security reasons. Should I be having this on-premises or can I have this in this cloud? Can I have it in multiple clouds? And ultimately when we had that conversation, it wasn't terribly different than a lot of the other workload conversations. Where's the application gonna be? Is it gonna be on-prem is the application gonna be in the cloud? It's almost we can place model with application, and it's a very similar conversation.
0:28:01.0 Suhail Nimji: Couldn't agree more. But look, I think again, in the build versus buy where we play, look, I think cloud and on-prem haven't changed. People still use mainframe in some capacity. Yes, a lot of that workload has moved to the cloud for all various reasons, all good reasons. I think that's gonna... It's been the same sort of factor here where CIOs are going to use private models that they roll from scratch, they're gonna use Open Source, they're going to use the commercial models that are provided by OpenAI, Cohere and Anthropic. And that's where things get really interesting, especially for Jasper, which is a platform for marketing. It's a verticalized tool and platform. And the CMO is not going to go, "Hey, I wanna go build this from scratch." That won't happen.
0:28:43.4 Yadin Porter De León: It's not really their core. We're not great at building large language models from scratch as a marketing organization. Let's get someone else to do that. That's sort of a classic way to approach things. What are we good at? And let's focus on that and then have other people come in for the other stuff.
0:29:00.6 Suhail Nimji: That's right.
0:29:00.8 Yadin Porter De León: So where are you seeing any unique hurdles? Are there any unique hurdles when you're looking at rolling this type of solution out? When a CIO's building a partnership with a tool like Jasper, that's a little bit different than let's say like a Grammarly or just rolling out Microsoft Word. There seems to be some, like you had mentioned, workflow differences. So when looking at this and looking at how people are gonna be more efficient, how they're gonna be better at what they do, where are companies finding success at navigating this specific roadmap for this tool and the rollout of this tool that really helps them be more successful when they're rolling this out? And how does that relate to which partner they pick when they do this?
0:29:41.5 Suhail Nimji: I almost feel like you want things to be more different than they are Leon. I'm like laughing at these questions. It's like you're like tell me it is different. Like please tell me it is different.
0:29:50.8 Yadin Porter De León: Yeah. It seems like it, 'cause it does intuitively, people are like, "This is a human's language interface." And personally too, I want my Jarvis interface too. I wanna be able to talk to Jasper like Jarvis and just have it just be there all the time. And I feel like there's a different way of interacting with this tool than I have other, and maybe that's the only difference. Is that this time it's just a different type of interface and it's getting people... 'Cause I get people on the team coming to me all the time saying, "Hey, look, I'm not getting the outputs I want." Well, it's like, well, because you're not actually talking, you're doing keyword search, like you're doing Google. You need to go and have a different relationship with the way in which you interact with the tool. And I guess that's for me, I feel like things are different from maybe, and maybe that's just an end user perspective and from a CIO perspective, it's really not different.
0:30:31.8 Suhail Nimji: That's right. That's right. So, okay. So you kind of nailed it on two things, right? From the implementation standpoint, not different at all. From change management. Yes. Change management is a little different because it's... That is different because, so we have to think about, look, the way that we did, you brought up keyword search. We were iterative in learning how to do keyword search with Google. That was a learning curve for all of us, right of, like okay, like, and as Google has gotten a lot of smarter, our ability to search has become very different. That's gonna be the same sort of thing that happens in what we're calling prompt engineering. It's how do you instruct the model for the best output? The best thing about Jasper is that it's not sort of instruct the model and that's it. It's iterate. Like the human in the loop capability is very important for us, which is like how do I interact with this? And I think that's a little different. Most applications have been static, which is you go into the tool, you do an action and that's it. You leave.
0:31:30.8 Yadin Porter De León: You just have to figure where the buttons are, where's the buttons? You find the buttons and then boom, you're done.
0:31:33.0 Suhail Nimji: That's right. With Jasper as a platform, and again, as CIOs are rolling this thing out, the change management as you live in this platform now. You can actually do a lot of work in this platform. You create campaigns end to end, right?
0:31:43.0 Yadin Porter De León: You can tell it you had a bad day, and it'll be empathetic too.
0:31:48.6 Suhail Nimji: You could, that is a use case, but I think that's part of it, right? The change management is very different versus the implementation. This is something that just shows up on your desktop. CIOs enable it. You got a license, you're good to go. That's not different than how other applications work, except on this one there's a little bit more of a workflow management change cycle. It goes from the content teams, the CMO teams, et cetera, other platforms for enterprise search, you hook them into systems differently. And so that's another thing when you think about CIOs are thinking about, when you think about platforms like Glean or Fabric that's gonna come out and a lot of these sort of enterprise search capabilities that are coming out, that's a different conversation. How do I plug into the data? Which data am I giving active provisioning to? How am I securing that? And that also is very much a systematic change of how CIOs are thinking about enterprise search. So we talk about this from the standpoint of it's not much different, but it is a little different because the workflow has changed.
0:32:44.2 Yadin Porter De León: So the change management, I'm glad you mentioned that. Change management, that's the key piece. 'Cause that is. 'Cause you are really, you're almost re-skilling your team to work in a different way and think about their work in a different way. And this is, I'm always constantly telling people just like, "No, don't think about this is taking this one task and kind of automating. Think about this. You would've had to spend a week trying to slot this big thoughtful chunk of time into your schedule, and now you can just do it two minutes before you jump on your next call. You can go boom. And then, oh, while I'm on a call, I'm on a call and I'm using it and putting and then sharing immediately in real time. So when you come out of the call, it's not just we're having a call about the work that is gonna happen maybe next week, it's you come out of the call and the work, the first draft Is already done." And that then shifts it.
0:33:22.8 Yadin Porter De León: Maybe not so much into the CIO, but that shifts it into each line of business. Now each line of business has to be prepared for this change management and has to have champions of this change management. You guys have been great working with us on just office hours and training webinars and one-on-ones and all that stuff because it is, it's a fundamentally different way of working. So with that, I kind of wanna to wrap it up with one piece of advice you have, or maybe it's several. I think how CIOs can continue to have their finger on the pulse. What should they really be looking at as what's coming next or where should be looking to stay up to date on the latest thing that's happening 'cause there's rapid change that's happening here.
0:34:02.5 Suhail Nimji: I think the best advice that I can give is just stay curious. And the best part is the CIO is already naturally curious and that has been a gift that they love technology. They love keeping up with trends and technological landscape shifts, and that's pretty much it. And know that every solution isn't gonna be fully baked just yet and have a leap of faith that this is the partner you wanna go down this journey with. And a lot of CIOs are already implementing that. CMOs specifically are implementing that, and there's been greater collaboration in different divisions that we've seen, which is breaking down silos in a great way, in a meaningful way. The conversations that I'm having these days, they're just as fun for me. I also get to learn this is not a Suhail goes on a show and kind of gives this conversation. There is just as much learning for me in a discussion. That's another great way. It's just have a discussion in a conversation.
0:35:02.8 Yadin Porter De León: That's fabulous. See, that's why I like talking to people like Suhail, 'cause I'm curious and I'm always looking to have these conversations and let me get people on, and me let me talk to the head of tech at Siemens and figure out what they're doing. And it's nice, like you said, curiosity, that CIOs remaining curious is key. And then maybe using AI too to stay on top, I can help you stay on top of AI.
0:35:21.0 Suhail Nimji: Yeah, look, I mean there's a lot of great solutions out there. I think Jasper's one of them, wink, wink... Not just who that can help you in that, but no, you think... You're right. There's a lot right now that is in synthesizing information and using tools directly kind of going in. And you don't always have time to read the most recent research paper, but you can synthesize it using generative, right? And...
0:35:43.9 Yadin Porter De León: That one is my favorite. Take a 52 page white paper and drop it into one or two page, highlight bullet points, and then I can go into the paper and then read more on any of the ones that really jump out at me.
0:35:53.5 Suhail Nimji: Yeah. So that's it, to your point of like use the tool, understand the tool, but just stay curious. And I think we're all learning from each other in the industry right now, and that's a very unique period of time. Like how fortunate for us to be living in this age.
0:36:05.8 Yadin Porter De León: It's pretty exciting. Well, Suhail, this has been great. Tell the listeners maybe where people can find out more about you, what you're doing, what Jasper's doing. Any place you can go online to find more info about what's happening.
0:36:19.0 Suhail Nimji: Yeah, I mean, you could always go on jasper.ai to get a full-blown overview of what Jasper's doing. We have great tutorials there, videos there. I'm available. Majority of us are always available to ask questions, answer questions. You can always look me up on LinkedIn. I'm happy to filter questions there. Meghan Keaney Anderson our CMO is also very active in the space, and so a lot of CMOs are kind of reaching out to her already to have discussions. So again, feel free to go to jasper.ai and look us up and we're happy to answer any questions you may have.
0:36:47.8 Yadin Porter De León: That is awesome. Well, Suhail, this has been a fabulous conversation. I could have had another hour, hour and a half, five hours actually chatting with you, but this has been great.
0:36:56.0 Suhail Nimji: I think you would've been very bored at hour five. You would've been very bored.
0:37:01.1 Yadin Porter De León: We can break it up into chunks. Well, thank you Suhail for joining the CIO Exchange podcast.
0:37:05.6 Suhail Nimji: Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.
0:37:08.7 Yadin Porter De León: Thank you for listening to this latest episode. Please consider subscribing to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And for more insights from technology leaders as well as global research on key topics, visit vmware.com/cio.