Reinventing the CXO Role for AI

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Julia Nimchinski: What a pleasure! And next up, welcome Tiffany, Boja and Eric, Charles!

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Julia Nimchinski: Now that you need introduction, Tiffany, Bola, Wall Street Journal, bestselling author and chief strategy and research officer at Futurum Group, and Eric Charles, senior operator at Ahana. Operators. Former Cmo. Of exactly welcome to the show. How are you doing.

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Erik Charles: Doing great.

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Erik Charles: I enjoyed the prior session. By the way.

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Julia Nimchinski: Yeah, we are going to focus today on AI and spitting on the decision making Eric take it away.

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Erik Charles: Alright one good to see you again, Tiffany. Thank you very much.

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Tiffani Bova: You as well, Eric. Thanks for thanks for being the one who’s gonna join me today. I appreciate it.

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Erik Charles: This will be, this will be fun. So all right, this is great. We’ve got 30 min, and and we’re talking about reinventing the Cxo role for AI, which which I think is great. When I look at

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Erik Charles: the Cxos and board, we should add board to that. I feel because the overlap, and we’ve got such an interesting discussion debate, and what is going on, and what do you have to know? And this morning I was in a conversation with several members from the local university about the challenge they have. They’re actually trying to write AI rules for students.

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Erik Charles: And it’s really this, like, hold it. We can’t ignore it, you know. It’s no different than a web search in their case, but we don’t want them letting the work be done for them and thinking, that’s interesting, because in the business world.

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Erik Charles: in many ways we’re asking the AI to do the work for us, there’s so there’s the typical town and gown discrepancy. I feel going on here. So do you have a, you know, and then I would love to in a way almost focus this a little bit with your your Pptc rubric.

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Erik Charles: Because I was thinking about that. The people process culture technology, technology we’re talking about is the AI, but that rolls into the process of using it that you know what is the impact on the culture? Obviously a lot of employees are probably some people on the call that are going to be freaking out of like is my job at risk

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Erik Charles: due to AI,

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Erik Charles: you know. And how do people use it? So why don’t we start with your thoughts? Should we start at the ground first, st and just talk about the collapsing, the customer journey? What’s AI doing to the great? Go to market operation out there. What’s your take on it?

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Tiffani Bova: Well, Eric, those were a lot of questions in there, so.

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Erik Charles: I’m sorry.

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Tiffani Bova: That’s okay.

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Erik Charles: You know me.

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Tiffani Bova: Yup, I’m like which which one students business.

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Erik Charles: Yeah, the students is more just an intro I which I.

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Tiffani Bova: Yeah, yeah.

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Erik Charles: But we can dig into it if we get.

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Tiffani Bova: No worries, no worries. So I I’m actually gonna ground it all the way at the bottom, and I and I try when we have conversations like this with big transformational shifts. And you know, I’ve been in tech now 30 years.

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Tiffani Bova: literally in like 6 months. It was 1996 when I started to get into the technology game, if you will. And I would say that jobs to be done is a great place to start. So for those of you listening who are not familiar with jobs to be done. It’s a concept that comes out from theater. Leave it from many, many years ago, and you probably have heard people don’t buy

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Tiffani Bova: drill bits. They buy quarter inch holes, right? And so the the sort of the what is the technology. AI, right? What is the outcome? The hole in the wall right? The drill bit in the hole. I think he didn’t go far enough. He’s not alive anymore, obviously. But I don’t think he went far enough, because we don’t sort of stand at the wall and go. Isn’t that a wonderful hole in the wall

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Tiffani Bova: we want to like hang a shelf or hang a family picture, or we want to build a desk for our kid, or something like that, right. That is where we’re really taking it. So if you apply AI to that, the concept is that the job never changes

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Tiffani Bova: like, I want to sell something to a customer

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Tiffani Bova: it used to be. We would barter like. I’ll give you a chicken if you give me a pig like right, and and then it became more financial based. And then, now it’s Bitcoin. Right now, it’s digital interactions and engagements and sales motions. But the job is, I want something you have, you have something I want. Let’s exchange that money for a product or service.

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Tiffani Bova: So from an AI perspective, I want everyone to realize that the job that you are doing now is not what changes. How that job gets done is what is getting changed.

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Tiffani Bova: I do not believe AI is going to replace jobs. I do believe it will replace tasks. Now, you could argue in the jobs to be done framework, that there may be people who say there’s industries littered with

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Tiffani Bova: with jobs that are gone because of technology. Sure, some of it was, you know, heavy manual labor. Shouldn’t we have machines doing it right or repetitive tasks. Isn’t it better to have machines doing it? So you know, an elevator operator don’t really need them anymore, right? But it allowed then, humans to do other things. So if you feel like

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Tiffani Bova: AI may replace your job, then the question I have for you is, should you be thinking about, how do I use AI to reimagine my job? What could it take away from me? And then what can I add on top of that? And so that maybe lends itself to the to the second question or 3rd question on sort of collapsing the customer or buyer journey. Again, if you think about marketing technologies like, you know, I was a loquest beta client.

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Tiffani Bova: literally in 2,001.

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Tiffani Bova: So back then, you know, the marketing technology stack. There was like 8 or 10 options, I think if you look at what Scott Brinker puts out now, it’s like 15,000. It’s some obscene number of options. So there is no shortage of technology. And clearly, marketers are not out of work, and neither are salespeople. There’s probably more of those roles. But those roles are now. Those people are doing different things. So what pieces and parts of the journey can AI actually improve.

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Tiffani Bova: not only for productivity and performance and profitability of your business.

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Tiffani Bova: but for the experience of your customers, and I think that’s where you should be really focused and what you should be asking. I know it might be scary. But if you can try and reframe your mindset, I think that’s where you know. Really, magic happens.

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Erik Charles: You know, it’s it’s funny when you talk about the you know 15 companies on the list and the old tech stock those things, and then I joke, and I remember a task I did. It was

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Erik Charles: mid 2,000 S. And I was asked to update the placemat of of the ecosystem for a company I was working at.

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Erik Charles: And now it’s like, well, I said, we’ve now gone from a placemat to wallpaper. If I wanted to list everybody constantly changing. It would take the entire wall of a very large room to be able to see what’s out there. I agree with you on the the tactical versus the strategic. It’s like, if your job is too tactical, you should be looking around to. You know. How can you leverage it before it leverages you in a in a sense. So I definitely think that’s there.

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Erik Charles: And I’ve been. I’ve had the joy of watching this live both in my own job. But now, like you, I’ve been in tech for a few decades. My son is now running sales for the Western Us. For a small for a Saas Software Company. So I see him leveraging AI for doing like, you know, he uses it for quick. Tell me a little bit more about the market challenges in this area.

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Erik Charles: and he’ll he does his prompts and pulls it up. He’s a salesman. So what does that AI replace? Well, it replaced maybe a Bdr.

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Erik Charles: Doing a lot of background work.

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Erik Charles: So he’s replaced a lot of the work of the Bdr.

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Erik Charles: And he can almost get it in there. So I think about that 1st touch, then. And this is what I’ve been. I mean, if I start thinking about the people, then you know how long the role of the Bdr. Sdr. Adr. Whatever you want to call them, I think, is significantly shifting.

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Tiffani Bova: Yeah, so cheap. Let’s like, let let me let me just kind of

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Tiffani Bova: pose this to you. I mean, ultimately, if we go back in time. And there was, you know, a dozen marketing technology solutions. They were on Prem. They were not Saas based or cloud-based. They were called very different things back, then

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Tiffani Bova: sales performance in the 3, rd you know. 20 years. Let’s just call it from 2,000 to 2025. The real acceleration of sort of Seth Godin writing the book, permission marketing, and then everything that changed from a marketing perspective after that, right? And let’s just talk about performance. 25 years later, there’s tens of thousands of marketing technology sales and marketing technology solutions. Yet only 30% of a seller’s time is spent selling.

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Tiffani Bova: And still the low, 50% range will actually hit quota.

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Tiffani Bova: So even with all the advancements of technology, we still have this huge gap in amount of time. A seller is actually spending, selling, and they’re

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Tiffani Bova: half pretty much are going to miss quota. So even with all the technology advancements, why aren’t they spending more time selling when all technology. The promise was that they were going to have more time to sell, and they have less time, because now we’ve split the hair of, let’s just pick the 6 stages of the sales process right? And the 42 steps in the buyer’s journey

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Tiffani Bova: right. And we now can track all of it because of technology. But is it actually making us better and smarter? And are we just trying to track everything for vanity’s sake, or to make sure as a marketer. You keep getting your budget like proving those metrics is the way to prove the value and keep getting the budget versus really saying, Hold on a second like, maybe I want to put myself out of a job

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Tiffani Bova: and really use the technology to collapse the 42 steps to get much smarter to allow the system to be much more predictive around what is the next best action removing humans from their own perceived next, best action. So you can get consistency and test and iterate and learn. I mean, that’s the promise

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Tiffani Bova: of digital marketing and marketing. And when I was back in my role at Gartner. All the way back in 2,008, we made a prediction that the marketer, the Cmo. Would spend more on technology than the chief information officer, and when we said that, by the way, everyone thought we were crazy. But sure enough, pretty quickly behind that Microsoft Salesforce Oracle sap, all went out

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Tiffani Bova: and bought marketing technology companies because they wanted to get their hands on that budget.

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Tiffani Bova: And it was because businesses want 3 things. They want to know information about their people.

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Tiffani Bova: their finances, and their customers like right? If you can really understand that and really have clarity there, you can make much faster decisions within the business. And I think this is where automation, where a basic AI, you know. And I say, basic, just for a second moving to agentic, the promise of actually having agentic AI as part of your marketing organization like, you might have 5 marketers

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Tiffani Bova: and 4 agentic agents. So you have a team of 9, not 5 and some technology. But you have a team of 9. And how do you manage those other 4 that are really digitally based? Right? Digital employees, digital labor. And how do you integrate that into a team like those? Are the exciting questions to ask for me right now.

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Erik Charles: So so let’s say we’ve got, you know, cause cause one of the things we talked about before this, when we’re swapping notes back and forth before the call is is the the

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Erik Charles: experience with AI is becoming a board level metric. The Board wants to see it, so there’s some gray-haired board members sitting out there. What should they be looking for in a Cxo candidate? Maybe they’re reviewing the next. I mean, it could be finance. Could we’re talking about marketing. But what should they be looking at for AI experience for someone to come up to the C-suite.

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Tiffani Bova: Yeah. Well, I you know, I just did a Linkedin live with Roger Martin this week on okrs, right? And kind of kpis, and the danger in the trap of without a Kpi or Okr that you just. That’s not a real strategy, right?

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Tiffani Bova: And you can’t measure what you can’t manage. And if you’ve ever heard, Roger, that’s a very truncated sentence that gets tossed around a lot which was part of a much larger statement that was said in that by Drucker. So ultimately, you want to make sure that you don’t get caught in the what’s the metric? What’s the expense? It’s more of the how do we reimagine what we’re doing now?

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Tiffani Bova: Where can we look at it? Almost like you’re a software leader, and you want to launch an Mvp product. You don’t put it into full production day one like you put it in a sandbox, you test it, you shoot holes in it. You find a set of customers. Right? You go out and figure out, is this really what they want? You pull them into the design journey of that product. You get feedback through customer advisory boards or partner advisory boards, or whatever the case might be.

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Tiffani Bova: think the same way about agentic.

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Tiffani Bova: And so is there a team within the organization that is going to say, look, we are going to as a cross functional part of this organization. We’re going to take someone from sales, someone from marketing finance. Hr products, whatever it is. Say, we’re going to stand up this agentic team, and I’ll just give you an example. I was working with a client down in Brisbane, Australia, in my book, Experience Mindset, and and we literally took a wall, and we journey mapped the customer. And this was, you know, 10,

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Tiffani Bova: maybe 9 years ago, so very much ahead of the agentic conversation, if you will, and all we did was we mapped out every step the customer had, and then every step that the employee had to match what the customer had, so that we could see all the things employees had to do. And then all the things the customers had to do, and how could we, at the time it was salesforce? How could we use the technology to collapse that timeframe improve the experience, etc, and by just mapping that out and asking for everyone to input within their own

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Tiffani Bova: role control. Sure enough, we took something that was like 14 months down to like 4 weeks

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Tiffani Bova: significant improvement, and like no awards, and no one ever wanted to deal with this company. It was part of the Government so very bureaucratic, and lots of red tape and regulations, and they have won tons of awards now of being one of the best experiences in government because they really took that sort of product centric customer centric view approach and pulled everyone in versus saying, it has to come from the top down.

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Tiffani Bova: As you mentioned with students. Your employees are using it today. The trick here is to harness what they’re doing, making sure it fits within rules, and you’re not breaking trust. And you’re not sharing Nda or IP, or any of those things that you don’t want to do for obvious reasons. And how do you maximize that?

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Tiffani Bova: I would say, you know there is no one out there just like with Cloud, that has 10 years of a gentic AI experience. They don’t exist.

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Erik Charles: Right.

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Tiffani Bova: So you have to, either say, we’re going to find someone within that is just going to immerse themselves in where and how we can use agentic. Who’s doing? What what technologies do we own? If it’s Microsoft? If it’s service. Now, if it’s salesforce, if it’s Ibm if it’s you know everybody has a story now. So what do we currently have the ability to do within the current acquisitions and technology we already have in place?

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Tiffani Bova: How do we turn those on? Where do we use it? How do we use it? And how does it impact what we’re doing? If you don’t have that kind of beginner’s mind. And it’s very fixed, like, okay, this is absolutely only about cost cutting.

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Tiffani Bova: or it’s only about reducing headcount, or it’s only about improving one piece of the business, then those might not be the right leaders to take you to the future right again. Once again, like cloud, we still have this conversation on Prem. Or off Prem, you know, in some small businesses some 15 years later, they’re still making a 1st time leap during covid many small businesses. It was their 1st time online.

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Erik Charles: Right.

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Tiffani Bova: So it’s not. You know, technology is is even usage, and access is not.

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Erik Charles: So th, this brings up an interesting thing to me. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I love the idea of being able to set up enough of the prompts. Enough of the designs to get an agent to say, Go.

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Erik Charles: how do we supervise the agent

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Erik Charles: in the go to market. How do you know what should be the audit trail or the tracking like? If I if I and I’ll go back to that 1st touch or early touches.

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Erik Charles: You know, if I dial up an agent who’s gonna go scrape through linkedin websites, industry reports. We fed it our Icp. We fed it a few, you know. This is what we think we can do, and it’s sending out messages, and there they should be adjusting the message and personalizing them.

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Erik Charles: How do we? How can we keep an eye on it? What should we be doing to? Because we don’t want to slow it down? We know what we’re up against. What’s you know? Because you talk about that. We talked about that a little bit with humans and strategic control. But sooner or later you have to dip into the tactical side. How do? How do we maintain control of our agents?

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Tiffani Bova: Yeah. You know, there was a great study that Microsoft just put out. Actually their work index report came out a few weeks ago. Work index 2025 by by Microsoft and it. And and they really actually introduced this term kind of like agent boss

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Tiffani Bova: like, if you’re a boss of agents. Maybe not. Humans like you might be running a after hour call center as a human. But the after our agents are not human.

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Tiffani Bova: But you are responsible from between 10 Pm. And 6 am. To run the call center. There just may be a couple of humans and a lot of agents. And so you are an agent boss, are they?

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Tiffani Bova: Are they doing what they’re supposed to be doing? Are they responsive, you know? Are they following the process? Are they uncovering anything? Is the workflows working like you are an agent boss. And we went back and forth. I was part of the sort of research team on that from an outside perspective, and we went back and forth on the term. I was like, I don’t know if I like, you know, boss, anyway. But

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Tiffani Bova: you know, agent bosses where they landed, and then actually having organizational structures like what I just sort of teased out where you know I’m Tiffany Bova and I have 7 humans who work for me, and I have 5 agents.

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Tiffani Bova: and they’re very clear agents. It’s not that each human has an agent. It’s agents that support those humans in very specific tasks and processes. And so, collectively, I have this team, and maybe those agents give me 3 x human capacity than I would have if I didn’t have the humans, so should they be on my org chart.

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Tiffani Bova: should they be counted as digital labor.

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Erik Charles: Right.

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Tiffani Bova: I mean, like, these are the really compelling questions. And if you’re listening to this going oh, my goodness! Like, you know, like, how am I going to have a team meeting with my humans and my agents like, you know, it gets fun a little bit, you know. It’s a great cocktail conversation. But the reality is that these are real questions, because you don’t want

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Tiffani Bova: tens of thousands of agents running around your organization just like you wouldn’t want 10,000 employees running around your agent organization with no oversight and no management and no rules, and know all that you have to think the same way, because if they’re just running around aimlessly they can do more damage than good. I realize humans have to direct.

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Tiffani Bova: I understand. But you also don’t know what some human has introduced, some agent that you’re not aware of, similar to shadow it back in the day. Now, are we gonna have shadow agents. Which not are we? We are

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Tiffani Bova: and so

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Tiffani Bova: do you manage those shadow agents? And how do you corral it where you really do view it as part of your organizational structure.

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Erik Charles: It’s funny. I remember the 1st time I started seeing certain contractors showing up on org charts.

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Erik Charles: You know, marketing teams where we use, and we use a pr agency. And instead of just saying that person runs Pr, we actually put the agency in the primary contact at the agency on the org chart

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Erik Charles: to recognize the fact that you know, if you’re angry at a press release.

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Erik Charles: this is the person that signed off on it. But these are the people that actually executed it?

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Erik Charles: Are we ready? Are we ready to just make agents like, you know? Treat them like contractors? Then in in the org chart and the reporting, and the is that the is that the comfortable mindset.

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Tiffani Bova: Sure. I mean, if if that’s something that your company does today, I mean, I I think if you’re going to deploy an agent like, I said, like, you know, having, you know, using bots and moving to AI and moving to a gentic is 3 very different functions. Right? So if you have a bot that’s doing basic knowledge base answering after hours like, let’s just talk about the call center after hours. Right?

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Tiffani Bova: That’s 1 thing. But if you’re literally having agentic AI behave as a call center representative and solving much more complex problems. And then, instead of it being like, Oh, the bot will handle tier 5, and when it gets to tier one a human steps in. But what if agentic is? It takes it all the way to tier 2,

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Tiffani Bova: and then a human steps in at tier 2. That’s very different. And so, you know, from a call center perspective clients expect not having 10 min hold times, right? So are there ways in which agent can reduce that and allow you to hit that sla and and do it with humans and technology. I am not a fan of human alone.

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Tiffani Bova: regardless of agentic. And I’m not a fan of technology alone. I am a fan of the power of the 2. Now there may be situations where human alone makes a lot of sense, and there may be situations where agentic alone makes a lot of sense. But I like the 80, 20 of if 80% is the combination of the 2 solve for that, and then the outlier would be when agentic or human, does it completely alone, and that there’s a really good reason. And if you’re a

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Tiffani Bova: plumber, that’s different, right? If you, if it is a service, a human service that it’s face to face that gets a little bit more difficult if it’s digitally based, especially in things like marketing, like I’m going to kick off a campaign. There was just something that was announced in this particular industry, and we have a product. I saw the news 90 seconds later. I’ve already designed and created a campaign, and I’ve launched in 5 min.

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Tiffani Bova: Not. We got to pull a meeting together 2 weeks later we get approval, and we launch like speed. Is the new currency? Can agentic really help us now you don’t want that to just happen on its own again once again, right? So part of your org that that last step would be a human steps in and goes. Let me read the copy. Let me make sure it’s okay. Let me make sure they’re not saying or doing something, not they, but the agentic. AI, right. It is not doing something. We don’t want it to do.

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Erik Charles: What are the trigger questions? The C-suite should be asking their team. So you’re you’re a Cmo. You’ve got a a growth marketer underneath you.

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Erik Charles: I mean, you can ask the generic, how are we using Agentic AI, you know the scary question. You know somebody from the C-suite walks through walks through a bullpen or something, and says, Are we using AI?

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Erik Charles: But how can we check to see if our teams are starting to leverage the right pieces?

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Erik Charles: I always like to deconstruct what’s happening today almost like that example I gave you about the company in Brisbane, like, you know, really, journey Map, what you’re doing today from a marketing perspective.

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Tiffani Bova: And then first, st I’d say, are you maximizing everything you already have within your 4 walls? Technically, where are the processes broken? Going back to my Pptc framework. Right? What processes are broken? Do I have the right people focused on the right things? Are they organized correctly, like making sure all that is happening. The processes are they streamlined? Are there clear handoffs? That should be something you’re always doing? But maybe this agentic AI and AI in general.

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Tiffani Bova: forcing you to actually take a look at it again, because it should be something you are constantly monitoring, not kind of just once a year, and then saying to yourself, Okay, what is our performance today? What is the goal of marketing? Is it net new clients? Is it leads? Is it, you know, average sale price or asp. Is it basket size? Is it back? As you know, improving basket abandonment on, digital you know.

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Tiffani Bova: purchases, is it? What are the metrics that you currently have. And if they’ve kind of just remained flat, it’s like, how do I get 10 x what I’m getting now

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Tiffani Bova: like, if we had a 10 X goal, and I could just wipe the chessboard. What would I do differently, knowing what I know? And how could I deploy a agentic AI and AI to help me do that. Go for 10 x like, not incremental like. Oh, you know, we want to improve net promoter score by, you know, 2 points, or we want to, you know, increase the velocity of the of the funnel by, you know, a week, or we want, you know, like, I really want to. I want to 10 x everything that we’re doing right now.

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Tiffani Bova: And the normal response would be, Let me throw bodies at it, or let me spend more money versus. Now, you know you can’t spend more. Put throw more bodies at it, and maybe you can’t spend more money. So is a gentic. The way that we we actually make this happen.

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Erik Charles: Have you seen any good examples of a gentic being used at the customer success retention level? Because we, you know, we we talk about the, you know. 1st touch. Get the close.

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Erik Charles: you know, expanded within the count for land and expand, that’s all. I mean. I consider those all still, the marketing sales side, and then we we bridge over into customer success, which which gets us retention, that the overlap of that the full. Have you seen any great examples of a gentic for customer success.

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Tiffani Bova: Yeah, I you know I know a few. And and I would say this, regardless of my previous employer employer being salesforce. But Salesforce has deployed it internally, I call it sort of that, I don’t call it, but the market kind of calls it this client 0 experience experiment. So salesforce is its own client, 0 for customer success using agent force, they’ve, you know, spoken publicly about it a lot you could dig into. You know

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Tiffani Bova: the volume, how much used to be handled by human, what the response time was, how many touches, you know, the satisfaction, the things they were able to do with just the humans, even though they had AI built into their systems. Obviously, now really leveraging agent force, you just see the amount of engagement and interaction exponentially grow satisfaction exponentially grow the amount of

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Tiffani Bova: of cases or touches that they can have in a given day or a week. You know how it’s really democratized. The fact that customer success, a human, may have only been reserved at the top, and the largest of accounts. And how do you get that to the entire long tail. I mean, there’s a lot there to unpack. And so I would just say to you that

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Tiffani Bova: I am a huge believer in this sort of client 0 experience, right? Really find a part of your business where you can try and deploy it where it doesn’t have. It’s not mission critical, and it won’t completely, you know, destroy your revenue streams.

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Tiffani Bova: But the worst thing that can happen is you learn from it right that failure is only a learning exercise. Not a Oh, my gosh! We have to close our doors and let go of all of our people like you don’t want to test it there. But if you are iterating really quickly, I’d say change management becomes

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Tiffani Bova: absolutely super critical, because, looking at the processes and opportunities for improvement, I would say, having a beginner’s mind right as a leader, not having the fixed mindset of. We’ve always done it this way. I’m not going to change agentic, you know. Stay over there, or I’m only going to use it for basic functions, because that’s what I feel comfortable doing versus thinking about what the market has an opportunity.

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Tiffani Bova: I guarantee you. Your people are using it in some way, so doing that inventory and understanding, so you can make sure that you don’t have rogue agentic agents out there engaging with your clients, or doing things nefarious internally, and or even hallucination on some of the things that are coming from a senior level. It should be really a partner at the table of the board.

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Tiffani Bova: showing you the signals in the business that you otherwise would not know. It may not be correct, but the smarter, and the more you use it the smarter it gets.

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Tiffani Bova: the more you use it, the cleaner your data is, the more you actually have an opportunity to be competitively positioned to win in the market. Going forward.

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Erik Charles: Perfect. I know we’re up at time right now. Y’all can find her find [email protected]. You can find [email protected]. We both, you know, got our got our Urls with our names early in the in the Internet day. So

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Erik Charles: before somebody could grab it. Thank you very much. It’s been great talking. I recommend you hit her site. She’s got a couple of great books, the experience, mindset and growth. IQ. Both wonderful growth. Greater leads, some on demand content, a newsletter and podcast with new episodes drop on Thursdays.

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Erik Charles: Excellent. Well, thank you. Everybody. Thank you.

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Julia Nimchinski: Thank you so much. Thank you. Such an honor, Tiffany and Eric, always great to see you, and we are transitioning to our next session. Welcome. Let me connin cro at 6 cents.