Revolutionizing User Experience Jay Sanderson on AI and Digital Transformation at Progress

Episode Overview

 Jay Sanderson is the Senior Manager of Digital Experience and Product Marketing at Progress, a global leader in digital transformation solutions. With over two decades of experience in the tech industry, Jay has been at the forefront of advancements in AI, user experience (UX), and digital infrastructure. His journey began during the early days of the internet, where he developed a passion for technology that would later drive his career. Jay’s expertise spans from product marketing to digital experience management, and he has worked extensively with AI-powered tools to enhance customer interactions across various platforms. At Progress, he is responsible for leading initiatives that improve user interfaces and streamline digital processes for businesses around the globe.

Before joining Progress, Jay Sanderson’s career path included significant roles as a developer and technology consultant. He played a crucial part in designing and implementing digital platforms that revolutionized user experiences across industries such as fintech, telecommunications, and e-commerce. Jay’s deep understanding of the intersection between user interface design and backend systems allows him to create intuitive, efficient platforms that cater to the evolving needs of businesses and consumers. His work with Progress’s flagship product, Sitefinity, demonstrates his commitment to helping organizations modernize their digital infrastructures.

Outside of his role at Progress, Jay is a passionate advocate for the use of AI in improving digital interactions, particularly in the realm of personalization and customer engagement. He regularly speaks on the importance of integrating AI into existing business models to stay competitive in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. His thought leadership and practical experience in AI implementation make him a sought-after voice in tech discussions. Whether he’s advising companies on digital transformation strategies or exploring the future of AI applications, Jay remains committed to pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in digital experience and product marketing.

Episode Transcript

Kevin Rosenqvist: Hey, welcome to Pay Pod, where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments and fintech. My name is Kevin Rosenqvist. Thanks for listening Jay Sanderson has been in the tech world since the early days of the internet. Now he’s the senior manager of digital experience and product marketing at progress, a company that is helping businesses transform their digital experiences. He’s an AI guy, so him and I had fun geeking out a bit. We also talk a lot about the user experience and how imperative it is that customers can navigate apps and platforms with ease. So if you’re ready to geek out along with us, please welcomeJay Sanderson. It was funny. I was kind of impressed with your company at first because I was like, I was like, you had progressed com and I was like, oh wow, how do you get progress? Com and then I realized the company’s been around for 40 years. I was like, whoa, okay. But most of the people I interview aren’t with companies that have been around that long. And obviously, I know you weren’t there from the beginning, but do you know, like, what the company focused on at the beginning and how it evolved into AI? Yeah, it could.

Jay Sanderson : Kind of think of it as like a smaller version of an oracle. Right. Um, okay. No progress. Kind of 40 years ago. Came up with database technology back then. The product itself was called progress. It’s now called Open edge. And that’s really kind of what, you know, the saying no from no. Like companies building mission critical applications, whether it’s like a no for an insurance company or a small, you know, bank or whatnot that built literally like their, you know, their core banking platform or their core insurance platform or whatnot on the, on this technology, because not only was it a database technology, but like there was also like an application kind of capability that has had around it and that obviously growled. And then they started to kind of like acquiring more companies and all of that kind of thing. And, and now, now the company actually sort of runs across kind of, um, you know, three sort of distinct areas. It’s got this applications and data. We’ve got the infrastructure and network security, etc., and then we’ve got the digital experience. So I guess we kind of naturally kind of organically grown into a company that’s very much AI adjacent because, you know, we’re not out there sort of, you know, making, um, GPU chips or anything like that. We’re not writing large language models or doing anything like that. But all of these, you know, these AI applications, they’re all going to need data. They’re all going to or they’re all going to need infrastructure. They’re all going to need interfaces for humans to interact with them. So that’s where we kind of sit and play. And so yeah, so, so like 40 plus years later and they’ve been on the Nasdaq now for 30 years.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Wow. That’s crazy.

Jay Sanderson: To be honest, I did have to Google him before I kind of started working with him because I was the same. I hadn’t, uh, I hadn’t worked with that kind of people that had worked with that progress database technology back in the day or open edge. Um, you know, that that, you know, people that have heard about that obviously would know about us, but, uh, yeah, generally it’s like, yeah, there’s a lot of companies now that we’ve acquired, uh, in the world of software development or Dev Sec Ops and all of that kind of thing that are quite sort of synonymous. So we’ve got a lot of brands in the stable that are better known than the stable itself, if you like. Yeah, that’s a good way to put it.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: And you got you mentioned digital experience and you guys are all about that digital experience and the user experience and, and which as, as a, as a marketer speaks to me for sure. I mean, that’s something we talk about all the time. But can you talk what’s the difference between a digital experience and a user experience? And how does progress approach them?

Jay Sanderson: Yeah, I think yeah. Digital. It’s almost like we’ve got to lose that word these days, right? Like, digital is just so ubiquitous, right? Like it’s so. Yeah. It’s just.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: It is. It’s just it’s experience. It’s all digital.

Jay Sanderson: Yeah yeah yeah yeah. So I think, I mean, user experience is probably more interesting. I think what is the users have got so many options these days in terms of how they interact with the brand. You know, they can go into a bricks and mortar store. They can go to your website, they can use a mobile app, they can use no chatbot, uh, voice technology, you know, in their car at a checkout. Right. Like there’s just infinite choice. So I think for me, user experience is really about, you know, delivering the right kind of experience on the right screen device, you know, whatever. And probably more and more these days, there’s a lot of expectation around, um, personalization, you know, like, like hyper personalization where it’s like to that individual. Um, so that’s kind of user experience. That’s not not like an area that I’ve been super involved in myself. I wouldn’t kind of consider myself like an expert, but definitely have a massive appreciation for user experience because it’s, you know, so many people kind of get it confused with the esthetic and the, you know, like design of the UI. It’s not about that. It’s putting the capability for someone to get something done in the shortest amount of time possible, in the most intuitive way possible.

Jay Sanderson: Yeah. And preparing for those, those devices and whatnot, you know, like I think even today you see a lot of investment the companies are making in delivery mechanisms, like whether it’s website or mobile or whatnot. But that’s not where their customers are. Or, you know, maybe their customers would love to be talking to them while they’re driving or whatnot. I was like, before I come on this podcast, I was just sort of doing a bit, a bit of read up about what you’ve sort of spoken about before in the past and whatnot, and payments and, you know, payments at the register. I know when I travel to the states and whatnot, you guys are quite kind of a bit further along in terms of what’s being, you know, like screens at the checkout and they’re like, what? The ability that people have got to deliver messages in all sorts of guises now or like screens, is just so kind of vast. So probably going off on a tangent here. But yeah, I kind of like, yeah, excited to kind of see where that kind of stuff goes. Right. Like, yeah. So that’s the user experience and digital experience. Yeah. Uh, what does that cover cover for us?

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Kind of as I understood it from what I was looking at you when you were looking at your website and kind of digging in was, is that it was kind of all encompassing from an entire overall experience within, you know, between a consumer and a company, not just specific to like an app or something like that.

Jay Sanderson: Yeah, yeah. So I think that like, I guess in the digital experience, like software world, there’s a lot of there’s like, gosh, I think at last count there’s there’s something like 13,000 different people that are kind of making some kind of type of marketing Technology. Martech, right? Like you probably. You probably you might have seen the the Scott Brinker martech map. And it’s just like this one page with like literally 13,000 miniature, like logos on there. And so I have not seen that. I don’t know.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: That sounds like a headache.

Jay Sanderson: Yeah. So I think it’s every company, you know, regardless of how big or small you are, you’re going to have more than one different piece of marketing technology and you kind of stitch them together to provide whatever, you know, the experience is. And that’s the experience to your customers. That’s the experience to your employees that are putting all of this stuff to kind of get together. You know, you need intelligence. So there’s data that needs to be kind of gathered there, you know, all of that sort of stuff. So I really like to look at like our digital experience offering is kind of like the snap on tool truck to a mechanic, right? Like I need to get this job done. You know, what? What tools do I need to buy to use? You know, and what materials do I need now. So we’re to a large part about tooling to deliver experiences in the way that you want. So if you want to build a mobile app, um, that allows people to track themselves as they’re at an event and, and that kind of links up to the website. And then when they visit the website after the event, the website’s personalized based on, you know, things that they did at the event.

Jay Sanderson: You know, like, we’ve got the ability to kind of make those kind of dreams come true. It’s kind of like the Microsoft advertising back in the day, you know, where do you want to go today? Right. Like we’re so sure we’ve got some of those core fundamental offerings in DH where around like content management and whatnot. But then we’ve got a lot of offerings around like decisioning, you know, like automated. How do you automate a decision? You know, that saves time. Like we’ve all been on, you know, calls like into a call center, for example. And and you get that those dreaded words, it’s like, let me just speak to my team, lead about your account or whatever it is, or let me just go and speak to my manager like you think about that. Like every time that we experience those those words, that’s a decision. That’s being the manual decision that’s taking place. You know, like that person’s maybe standing up from their desk and they’re grabbing a customer file and they’re going over to someone else and they’re like, I’ve got this guy on the phone. And you know, what do we do kind of here? Like, like automating those processes, you know, like to me that’s experience.

Jay Sanderson: Even though it’s like back end technology that’s automating those processes. And AI is going to accelerate that a lot, like as we know. But when it comes to kind of like a decision from a to a decision standpoint, we offer technology that allows you to kind of make decisions but still push them through a regimented, regimented, kind of tunable process kind of thing. So it’s not, you know, nothing’s left to chance. You know, everything’s kind of explainable and manageable. Then we do we do do a lot of work in the UI, UX space. So we provide a lot of tooling for developers to go and build portal experiences, line of business applications, mobile applications, all that kind of thing. And we provide that, provide that kind of technology to millions, millions and millions of developers around the world. And that’s that’s really interesting because my background and I didn’t even get into my background, but I was like a developer back in the day, and I started building websites in notepad and stuff like that, and, you know, and progressed like E-com. And I just recently.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Started her up, but I just recently talked to somebody on this podcast about GeoCities, remember GeoCities?

Jay Sanderson: I do remember GeoCities. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those were the words, Mike.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: That’s so bad.

Jay Sanderson: Yeah, I’ve had a few of those. And and there’s actually there’s a, there’s a new site that’s just come out that reminded me of that a little bit. It’s called, uh, web Sim khai. And this site, like you enter in a domain name and it will just Jenae the whole website. It’s pretty crazy. It’s, uh, fun to play around with. It made me think of, um, GeoCities, but like, yeah, hopefully it looks.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Better than GeoCities.

Jay Sanderson: Yeah, yeah, that’s kind of my the beginning of that. Like when you think like who would have thought back, you know, when GeoCities was around like, you know, Amazon didn’t exist, Facebook didn’t exist. You know, like, you know, all of these companies so huge they just didn’t exist. And I make people think about that a lot, right? When, you know, when people talk about AI and oh, it’s not not impressing me yet or anything like that, it’s like, well, were you impressed with the internet when you had to use like, a dial up modem or call a bulletin board or or or visit, you know, like some of those sort of first early kind of websites. But, but, but but now look at it. It’s it’s just so game changing. So I still feel like we’re I guess with Gen I, I still feel like we’re in that GeoCities kind of era of it. Right.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Like that’s a good way to put it. Yeah.

Jay Sanderson: And some of for some of us we’re super impressed and super, super excited kind of thing. But other people it’s just not not game changer. And to me it comes down to there’s not an interface that’s appropriate for me to kind of uptake or not pick that up. And especially when it comes to business or customer service or anything like that, people don’t have their data in order to be able to kind of use AI with their own internal data in like a safe and secure way. And that’s actually another area that we’re really kind of putting a lot of focus on because, you know, data and interfaces, the two things that are part of our kind of core DNA. So yeah, there’s a technology called Rag stands for retrieval augmented generation. I’m not sure. Has anyone been sort of speaking to you about that? No. That’s kind of one for me.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: That’s a that’s a new one for me.

Jay Sanderson: So yeah. So if we keep the the retrospective analogies going a little bit, rag is kind of like, imagine you need to go and do a school report or project. Remember when you used to do those projects on the cardboard and you roll out the cardboard and you’d stick things on them. Well, let’s let’s go back. Back that far. Let’s just let’s let’s just call it, like an essay, right? Like you’ve got to go and do an essay on, you know, on let’s go with Leo Fender, you know, just going on your on your background. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. Sure, sure. So back in the day, you might go to this thing called a library. No. Maybe some people remember those things called a library. And you’d speak to a librarian and you’d say, like, I’ve got to go and do this, this this essay. No, this is my topic and whatnot. And that library librarian might kind of like, you know, show you how to go and find books and resources, maybe, you know, spin up some microfiche or, like, whatever it.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Is, go to the card catalog.

Jay Sanderson: Yeah, yeah, go to the card catalog. Do it.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: We’ve lost a lot of the younger listeners. Just so you know, Jay. Yeah. They’re not they’re gone. But anyway.

Jay Sanderson: Yeah yeah yeah yeah. So so so this this person would pull a lot of information for you, right. And and then you might check them out. But a lot of the time you just go to the photocopier. No. Another blast from the past. Right. These photocopiers. And you’d photocopy these sections out, you know, the book and you take those photocopies you made, do your project kind of thing. Right. So we can think about Rag in the generation generative AI context, is that following that similar process. Right. So imagine your prompt, you know, like I want to write a book about Leo Fender, you know, hits a rag system and that will then go off and search into internal owned data that’s all defined, controlled and whatnot and brings back those kind of photocopies or like they call them embeddings, right? Like, so this might be his. Here’s a paragraph of text out of this PDF file. Or you know, here here’s a note on a customer record or whatever it is that’s relevant to the prompt. And then those embeddings, that information, those photocopies get get sent to the LLM. So instead of saying to the LLM, hey, write an article about Leo Fender, the prompt becomes something more along the lines of can you construct an article using this topic using only these resources? And you know, here they all are organized for you kind of thing. So. So what you get at the end of it is something that’s going to have much less likelihood, you know, almost none of hallucination. And when it gets to comes to exploitability, you’ve got all of the, you know, here’s the answer to your question, or here’s the content that I’ve generated for you. And here is all of the resources that I have used to to, to create this.

Jay Sanderson: And the other thing that’s kind of sitting there is not only are you pulling in all of this information, these customer notes or, you know, whatever is needed to to to complete the query, but you’re actually bringing in, I guess, knowledge about that data, you know, so how is a related to be, you know, like what other things is, you know, be They done all of that kind of thing. So, so that all of that metadata, that knowledge that, you know, like kind of going back to that kind of like librarian example. No, it’s it’s she’s not just giving you books. She, she might be kind of oh, this. No. Leo Fender also used to work with this guy. Do you know what I mean? So she pulls in this guy’s autobiography. You know, maybe you can get some juicy stuff out of that, right? So. So that’s so that’s what, you know, one of my favorite topics at the moment. Because to me, that is what is going to because all of the Limes and the AI models and all that kind of thing, they’re just going to be like electricity. Everyone’s got access to that. So there’s nothing there really. You can’t just build something on that stand alone that’s going to give you a competitive edge. But if you’ve got your own proprietary data, then that gives you the ability to create something that no one else has, you know? And whether that’s to, you know, to to enhance your product offering or just simply kind of improve your customer experience and productivity and stuff like that behind the scenes. Yeah, that’s that’s a, that’s a really, really interesting area that I think is going to kind of explode.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: That’s what I was actually going to ask you about that, because I was noticing that you’ve been involved with tech since 98, I believe. So, like kind of to your point about the early internet and all that. And you know, when obviously when when I first became a thing with chat to most of us with ChatGPT, it was all the talk. It was all the rage and all that. But it seems to have slowed a little bit. Like as far as, just as far as like I mean, for people like us that are interested in it, we read about it all the time, but other people don’t know is is AI having or will it have the same impact on society as previous revolutionary technologies like the internet? Like social media? Yeah, yeah. Opinion.

Jay Sanderson: Yeah. Yeah. Look, in attempt to pull back some of the early. So some of the listeners we lost earlier. Let’s let’s jump to another let’s jump to another analogy. Right. You think about the first iPhone that you got right. That doesn’t seem so long ago but that’s actually 2007, right? That was pretty crazy to think. It is crazy to know that now. And that was pretty groundbreaking. And I don’t think anyone’s going to argue with you in terms of, you know, how has that changed the world? No. Like, no. For better, for worse? No. There’s all sorts of different examples there. I bet it’s definitely been a massive game changer, right? The smartphone revolution. Now, if you think about what kind of apps were coming out when the iPhone one came out, you know, like you had, you know, silly, lots of incredible. There was a sea of silly applications, and there’s probably not too many kind of smart phone apps that you can sort of think of, that thought of that hit the marketplace back then that really kind of stood the test of time. And now they’re like, I can’t think of anything. Yeah. Like the and you had lots of silly apps, you know, like fart apps or there was like the, the, the packaging popping app that was just like all just a sea of silly, stupid apps. And everyone was rushing to get an app out and all that kind of thing. I feel like that’s exactly where we are now, you know? So we’re seeing good. We’re just good analogy. You know, everyone’s like, no, no, we’ve got to have AI and everything. And and I think for me like, like I’m obsessed with this stuff. I’m not really seeing too much stuff yet that’s coming out thinking, oh, this, this is kind of game changing kind of stuff.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Like I see a lot of times I look at because I follow a, I get a newsletter and they always show you new products and stuff, and I’m like, like who? What? What is who cares? Like a lot of the stuff that I’m reading, and I know a lot of people are rushing to make stuff, hoping that it clicks and hoping that one of the tech giants buys it and all that. And I totally understand that. But there’s just so many things where I’m like, that seems like such a useless tool. And yeah, your analogy of the smartphone, the apps on smartphones is really good because you’re right, there was there were so dumb. Like, they weren’t they weren’t useful at all. And I’m not saying none of these things are useful. I use a lot of AI apps and they’re very useful. But yeah, it just doesn’t seem like it really like it was like mind blowing at first. And then it’s sort of like either plateaued or even dipped a little bit because people are, I don’t know, like you mentioned earlier, I think like some people aren’t super impressed by it. Mm. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes I am, but sometimes I’m not just by the ideas people have.

Jay Sanderson: Yeah, yeah. Look, I think it’s, um, it’s raised its own expectations. I think, you know, like, you pull out ChatGPT and you show it to someone that’s never heard of it, which is still it’s still pretty easy to do, like, I find, like, if I go down the street, you know, you grab someone that’s not sort of in tech or something like that, then chances are like, maybe they’ve heard about it, but they’ve never checked it out. They’ve never.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Used it. Yeah. Yeah. 

Jay Sanderson: And you show it to them and it’s just like oh that’s just like kind of a crappy looking basic website. It’s like looks like Google or something like that. And then even if it produces something and it produces some text, well that’s pretty cool. But they don’t have any real understanding of like just the raw processing power that’s taking place. Yeah. Seriously. You know, to make what they just saw happen kind of thing. And it. Yeah. You know, it would have been the same thing back with the internet when it’s like, oh, look, I press this button and dial this number and you hear all this noise and like, you see some letters on the screen. Big deal. Big deal. You know what I mean? But it comes back to, you know, they’ve got to it’s got to be the right interface now when it’s sitting in their car and they can say, I’m in a such and such kind of mood, play me some music. And it knows that they like, you know, Stevie Ray Vaughan and you know, this, that and the other. And, you know, maybe it knows that. They know it’s got access to their calendar and it just knows that they’ve finished work and they’ve had a meeting with their boss or whatever. The scenario is that understanding the context and understanding the person and, you know, and it’s the interface, you know, like when you can put that technology in an interface, solving a problem, that’s got to be it’s got to be right for them.

Jay Sanderson: Like I think that’s I think everyone’s kind of like aware of it. One of the, you know, the applications that I Say it’s solving really quickly and I want to show up where things are at. They’re like, I remember there was a service that that was offered to blind people where if they needed someone with vision to help them out, like to describe something. They used to be this manual service where they kind of like take a photo, upload it to a service, and all of these different people around the world would get a notification saying, oh, can you quickly look at this photo and just sort of, you know, give a quick description or answer a question? You know, ChatGPT solved that whole issue with one feature release, you know, like, so I think there’s going to be so many of these solutions that are going to hit, you know, it might just do one thing, you know, like, but I think that it’s it’s like automating your home bit by bit by bit. But it’s not going to be there’s not going to be this, uh, you know, like what everyone’s talking about that movie her a lot lately. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. It’s like.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: The Terminator. Those are the two things I hear the most.

Jay Sanderson: Heard.

Jay Sanderson: Terminator and like, like like I, I saw her for the first time only last year and then like. And it blew me away because I’m sort of sitting there and, like, going, well, all of this technology, it’s pretty much kind of at my fingertips now, like, like this kind of stuff now. Like there’s nothing kind of fiction about it. But if you think about that movie, what made her so sophisticated to the, uh, was it Joaquin Phoenix character was that she had access to all of his data, right? His emails and all of that kind of thing. And like, she knew him intimately. And then the interface. No. Like, it was this voice interface talking and everything. So, that’s so it was the data and it was the interface kind of thing that really kind of, you know, made that thing pop. Um, but yeah, like and I think that for me, like when I look at Google, like Google seems to be a little bit of a laggard in that race, but like Google has got. Know how. How? How many Gmail accounts and Google Docs and all of that kind of thing. So, you know, they’re very much in that position to offer that kind of experience to all, all of their customers. And I’ll tell you what, though.

Kevin Rosenqvist: Hey, Google is way far away from her right now. Oh, my phone is turned off. My phone just turned on. Yeah. Yeah. So what’s interesting to me too, from a marketing perspective, I know obviously you’re involved in marketing too. When ChatGPT first came out, it was fire and brimstone from all the marketing professionals. You know, it was like this big. Everyone was worried. I mean, I used to get do a lot of writing gigs for people, and that dried up. I would, I fully admit that dried up. As much as I love AI, it definitely that stuff went away, but it feels like you are. Do you feel like there’s going to be any sort of substantial job loss or changes that will affect people in any substantial way with that kind of a thing.

Jay Sanderson: Yeah, it’s an interesting point. Like, I totally hear what you’re saying. And I think that that initial reaction is slowly changing, I think. Yeah. There’s no doubt that there’s going to be job losses and whatnot. But I think at the same time, there’s an incredible amount of opportunity that’s going to get created. I remember having a chat with someone a few months back, and we were sort of both sort of talking about gen AI, and we’re both sort of very, sort of, I guess pro pro, its benefits and, and as much as, um, yeah, there might not be a need for as many, as many much writing talent as there is. Sure, the ability to write that it’s giving people that can’t write. Or do you know what I mean? Like like people, people, people that have got something inside of them that they want to get out and I’m a big one of this, like, like I was never a fan of going and writing. You know, I’d love to write a book, but I don’t have the patience to sit down and write a book. Know that that’s me. But with Gen, I like there’s so many different prompt techniques and whatnot that you can use to structure your thoughts. And, you know, like it can help you kind of like, uh, you know, like as a coach. So, from a writing perspective, I really look at it.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Benefits to some people. I mean, I know a lot of people who are terrified to write corporate emails. They’re terrified to have to write a newsletter. They’re terrified to have to do any of that stuff. So it really it takes that out of it. And I, I was talking to somebody recently who was kind of like, oh, you know, it just makes everybody crappier writers, because they don’t have to really try. They just chat. Gpt I’m like, I’m a pretty big sports fan, and there’s a lot of really, really bad sports blogs out there. Like so everybody had the ability to start a blog, and a lot of people weren’t very good writers. So yeah, those are to me, those are the people who are going to get replaced or, or or whatnot before, like some really killer writer for, you know, The New York Times or, or some novelist or anything like that. At least that’s how I see it. Yeah.

Jay Sanderson: Well. And then, like, how would you feel as a consumer being able to go to sort of a single source and say, hey, give me the rundown and it goes and pulls all of the raw sports data and such and stuff, compiles it and does it in the voice of your, you know, your favorite writer or like, or in the style of such and such like, like, you know, this is, I guess, where we’re heading. Yeah, I.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: That would be great because there’s so much bad stuff out there. Yeah. To be able to, like, aggregate it all into one place and get and get the best stuff that I like and have the I know what I like is. Yeah, yeah.

Jay Sanderson: Yeah. In terms of writing, I like there’s a prompt technique that I’ve been using for a long time and I’ll share it with you. I call it the interview prompt. Right. And now I’d love to know if anyone’s done similar. Like everyone I tell, they like it, but I haven’t heard of anyone doing similar. What I’ll do is I’ll enter a prompt like I want to write a blog about personalized sports reporting. Full stop. Ask me ten questions about this topic. Full stop if you understand. Ask me the first question. Full stop. Then what that’s going to kick off is it’s going to ask me ten questions and I can freeform in the prompt. And I can give it the answers. And then once I’ve just emptied my head right. Because it’s easy just to no no record text to speech. So speech to text or just typing stuff now now it’s got my answer to the 2010 questions. Now I can go and write the article using my answers. Right. So what you get back is something that’s well written. It’s not necessarily like plagiarizing anything. So like I think little techniques like this, that’s a.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Really good idea. I’ve never tried that before but I will.

Jay Sanderson: Yeah, yeah yeah. Please report back to me on how you go.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: I will I’d like that idea a lot.

Jay Sanderson: So, um. Yeah. So I think, uh, I kind of becoming, like, a muscle that we need to learn. So we need to learn all of these different types of prompts and know how to help us through, because you need to have the right prompt to get the right result. And it’s going to be a lot, you know, like, you know, communication skills, speaking, no presentation skills, all that kind of thing. Your ability to use AI to deliver output at a level, that’s the expectations raised. Let’s face it, where it’s going to rise, I think with, you know, that’s where it’s going. But for a lot of people, I think it should sink, no, create a greater sense of fulfillment because you can potentially achieve more. Yeah. But it’s going to be interesting. But I yeah, yeah I’m fascinated.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Where it goes for sure is we’ll circle back here. What is it this or. I don’t want Melanie. Yeah but I’ve talked with guests on this podcast before about how, how outdated the platforms and systems are that many banks use financial institutions and fintech companies, older fintech companies. Sitefinity is your flagship product, you know, from a digital experience perspective, and it’s very robust. From Codeless page building to generative AI and AI chatbots, digital commerce, full on developer side of things. How hard is it for some of these companies, especially the ones that have been around forever, to implement a whole new, more technologically advanced platform like Sitefinity to modernize the digital experience for their customers. Because it feels like everyone should do it. It can’t. But is it just is it really burdensome on some of these companies to switch?

Jay Sanderson: Yeah, it’s a good question. So in my past I’ve had the pleasure of working, you know, for a few different sized banks and certainly have my fair share of experience kind of consulting to kind of probably more, more like the second, third, fourth tier, you know, the banks. No. Like the no. The South Mississippi Credit Union, I just made that up. But like you can imagine, right. Like, yeah, you know, these small banks. So I think there’s let’s see if we broke it into three. No that I’ve seen you’ve got tier one no types. No the Wells Fargo’s or HSBC or, you know, like that of the world. All of those guys. Right? They’re they’re they’re obviously got big budgets. They’re doing pretty sophisticated stuff. But I think at the same time, when it comes to they can’t they’re still slow when it comes to adapting. I said the sophisticated offer on offering a good experience to the common denominator kind of thing or not common. General. Public. I could go no other offerings come around, you know, like these digital banks and whatnot. You know, these disruptors. And, you know, we’ve got, you know, like it’s all digital and you don’t speak to people and we don’t have branches and all that kind of thing that they, um, they can move a lot quicker because they don’t have the millions and millions of customers spread across a gazillion different legacy products.

Jay Sanderson: It’s just so massive. And it’s like, I guess unless you work in one, you don’t get an appreciation of how complex it is. Like, like it’s not just the front end, you know, it’s everything behind it kind of thing. So and that’s where you see at least in Australia, you see like a lot of these kind of tier one banks, they’re starting these new initiatives and whatnot so that, you know, maybe they’re bringing out another brand. It’s like, oh, this is our digital bank, you know, and but but it’s been quicker for them to go and start a brand, a new brand rather than kind of go and do that whole transformation and whatnot, or it’s just it wouldn’t be feasible or that alienate customers or all of that kind of thing. Yeah, that’s a good point. So like these kind of disruptors, you’ve got the big banks and then you’ve got the tier two, tier three banks and whatnot. And generally what I see with those guys is to a large extent, they’re they’re probably ones that have got a lot of opportunity because there’s a lot of bank in a box kind of technology, you know, where it’s kind of like you go to the I shouldn’t say there’s a South Mississippi Credit Union, but anyway.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Probably is, but there probably is. Disclaimer: we’re not talking about the real one. This is.

Jay Sanderson: Fictitious. We’re not talking about the real one. But you know what the marketer there is doing is they’re effectively running a website. And when the customer needs to do anything with their account, make transactions and stuff like that, they’ll go to the website. Sure, they’ll log in. But now what they’re actually using is kind of like a third party technology kind of thing. So this isn’t the experience that that credit union kind of built for you. This is like they’ve bought some banking software from a company and it comes with a user portal. So they’ve kind of gone, here you go. So now as they want to evolve their user experience, they kind of hogtied because they’re at the mercy of the of the software vendor that’s providing them that banking software. And then the customer portal. And generally in my experience you know these customers and it happens a lot in telco as well. Like there’s no like the billing system provider will say, oh, we’ve got a customer portal as well. But their core business is billing or their core business is banking. It’s not user experience kind of thing. So I think you see a lot of that now in the tier twos. Now, what technology like Sitefinity enables you to do in combination with some of our UI, UX, tooling and stuff like that, building customer portals, all of that kind of thing.

Jay Sanderson: Imagine going to your banking software provider that they can go and say, well, we don’t want your portal anymore, but we do want to access, you know, your APIs. No, we want to access your platform programmatically because we want to take control over the user experience. You know, maybe we want to put an offer, you know, front and center for someone that’s been using the home loan calculator or whatnot or, um, or maybe we want to give the people the ability to do a drawdown on their home loan without having to call the call center, you know, whatever, whatever it is, you know, and then they can kind of go and build their own experience. So I think, you know, with technologies like API technology, the ability to kind of go and build, you know, customer portals, it’s tremendously accelerated to the point where, um, you know, some, some of these, uh, smaller banks that that, you know, a lot of the time are built around great initiatives, you know, you know, providing back to the community, you know, to an industry or whatnot. They’re going to be able to start sort of providing, you know, experiences that are maybe a little bit more on par with what the bigger banks are offering. And a lot of times they’re superseding that. Um, yeah. As far as.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Experience goes, you mean. Yeah.

Jay Sanderson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. But I think when it comes to the bigger banks, like, like I think there’s still a laundry list of, uh, expectation that they’re not meeting, you know, like. No, like, uh, like I speak about using the home loan calculator. Like, I’ve been using that a lot lately, but I noticed that, like, you know, I always have to kind of go through a million hoops to get to that particular page, for example. Like now why haven’t they recognized, like, just hit the home loan calculator five times this week, and every time this week he’s had to go to the personal section. Then he had to click on the home side section. Then he had to scroll to the bottom of the page and go there. It’s like we know what he’s doing. It’s like, where’s my front home page banner. Welcome back Jay, do you want to give me one more language?

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Jay I get so I’ve talked about it on this podcast before. Like it blows me away how bad user experiences are from major companies that would seemingly like minimal technological effort. It feel like doing certain things and even like I’ve complained before about certain streaming apps and stuff like that, where you’re like, you guys are humongous. How on earth does your streaming apps still look like an early iteration of Netflix? You know, how have you not gotten up to date? So yeah, that frustrates me to no end.

Jay Sanderson: Yeah, but but but I see it changing though. Like like when you think about, like, you know, like like like I’m not the fintech expert but but but but but but but I think that cryptocurrency and open banking and all of those things that are happening there and it, it is still um, there’s still quite a lot of friction there. But moving from one, uh, financial provider to another is becoming easier. You know, like I’ve got a lot of background in, in the telco space and whatnot. And I was working in that telco space when they always used to sign you up to plans and stuff like that. And there was a real sort of shift to like, oh, well you can come month to month to us. Right? So and being month to month subscription businesses, you know, retention just all of a sudden just gets drawn into focus so much more. And then you and you see the blockchain you mean. Yeah 100 100%. Yeah. Yeah yeah. So it’s um yeah. So I think we are in that subscription world, like there’s no doubt about that, right? So so yeah. Yeah. Every company, if they’re not already, should be sort of really looking at their churn rate and know the fact that, you know, it’s much cheaper to keep a company that could keep a customer than it is to get a new one, all of that kind of thing. It’s quite crazy. So I really sort of think like the technology, what the technology is going to do to enable like people just, you know, whether you’re those digital disruptors, whether you’re those two tier three financial institutions, whether you’re the big guys, like the ability to do more and to provide much better experiences.

Jay Sanderson: Yeah. It’s, uh, I mean, it feels like it’s been around for a long time, but like, I think I think especially with AI and whatnot, I think it’s just going to accelerate all of that. But I’m really looking forward to the changes. I’m like, you, like, I’m just like, I always know as a consumer, I’m always, you know, in my consumer journeys out there, I always pick up on these little things and it’s like, oh, there’s a solution here for this. Why is it not implemented? And this isn’t new like this. Technology has been around for ten years, 15 years or whatever it is now. It’s like like I like to use the home loan calculator example a lot because like, like I’ve got my favorite, you know, brands calculator and like, they’re just like the way, like the way, the way it is to use is great. And even when I wasn’t a customer of this company, I always used to come to their website only to use this calculator tool. And I find as a consumer myself with financial institutions as well, it’s almost becoming less about, you know, what’s the interest rate or you know, that they can give me, you know, or it’s probably like less about the terms. It’s like more about how much time are you going to suck from me? You know, when I have to deal with you. You know, so for me, you know, in this stage of life where I’m at now, the I just want brands to deal with that are easy. Like like I think it’s, you know, you got to be pretty compelling on a price point. If your customer experience is crap enough for me to stay with you.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Totally agree. I’ve been more than once said many times I’ve not worried about the price as much, or gone and chased the dollar savings or whatever because I’m like, I love the experience they do. They treat me well. I’m in and you know that. To me, that’s great. That’s the best marketing you can do is to give your customers a great user experience. Yeah, we all expect it now.

Jay Sanderson: People do business with people they like, right?

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Jay Sanderson: And it’s, uh, I like guitar in the background, you know, like I’ve got a couple as well that I think every guitarist got this relationship with maybe it’s a retail store and you walk in the door and, and they know you by name. You know, they maybe know what amplifier you’ve got at home or what sort of music you like or, or whatnot. And they can just there’s there’s no discovery. They can just check out this that just came in. I think you’ll really dig it, because it’ll work well with such and such. And for you as a consumer, that’s such a bond, isn’t it? Do you know what I mean? Oh, yeah. It’s like I’m not even going to go and look at the sticker price or whatever it is. It’s like, yeah, ring that up for me. Yeah. Like it’s like.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Even to a simpler degree, like going into a bar that you go into a lot and someone’s like, hey, they know you, they know what you’re drinking. They’re like, do you want me to? You want to, you know, IPA, a draft, like it’s like, yeah, man. Thanks. There’s just something about that, that attention to detail that that experience you’re getting now, you don’t have to like, look at, you know, go through the motions. You’ve already got your beer coming to you. And like, that kind of stuff goes a long way. And it’s no different than an app or a or a.

Jay Sanderson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, like everyone’s kind of got that ability to do that too. And even if the knowledge is not there, like it’s just the behavior, you know, like, you know, if you’re walking around a car dealership and you know, you’ve got four kids in tow. You’re not just going to go and walk him over to the Camaro, are you? You know, you don’t. You got to go and check out these cool minivans I’ve got. Right. Like, so there’s that. The guy is going to.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: Be longingly looking at the Camaro, but he’ll go with me. He’ll go with the caravan.

Jay Sanderson: Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Maybe you take him for a test drive of the Camaro just to butter him up? Yeah. Just. Yeah.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: That’s awesome. Well, hey, Jay, thank you so much for being here. Jay Sanderson with progress. The website is progress.com. I really appreciate talking to use your experience and I with you. Thanks for being here.

Jay Sanderson: Yeah no worries Kevin. Have a great day.

 Kevin Rosenqvist: All right. You too.