The AI-Native Builders Rewriting Marketing's Playbook

Here's the thing about AI that nobody wants to admit: everyone's talking about it, but most people still can't tell you exactly how it's changing the game right now, today, in real and tangible ways. This episode fixes that.

In this special edition of Liftoff Journeys, I'm bringing together four conversations with leaders who aren't just theorizing about AI. Mike Finnerty, CEO Co-founder, Mutinex,  Matthew Wilson, CEO, Social Scale AI, Aubriana Alvarex Lopez, Co-founder, Agnitio and Vince Walden, CEO, KonaAI. They're building with it, selling with it, and using it to solve problems that have frustrated marketers, compliance officers, and brand leaders for years. Recorded live from the Colossal Bowl event, these chats cover everything from AI-powered content creation that actually protects your brand, to a startup founder's raw advice on getting comfortable with hearing "no," to the future of marketing mix modeling, to why your compliance team might be the most exciting department in your company right now (seriously).

If you're a CMO trying to justify your next investment, a founder wondering when to take the leap, or a business leader trying to figure out where AI fits into your world without the hype and the fluff, this is the episode to turn up. You'll walk away with real frameworks, bold predictions, and the kind of practical wisdom that only comes from people who are deep in the work.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Hey, it's Jeannie. Welcome back to Lift Up Journeys, the show where we go behind the titles and into the real stories of how the world's smartest people got to where they are today. Today's a special edition. I sit down with some of the smartest executives and leaders I know, and I ask them where marketing and business are headed and what they're seeing right now that everyone else might be missing. I also ask them to share some advice. Advice they wish someone they knew had given them on the way up. Here we are, the error method in motion. Let's get started.

SPEAKER_04 0:41

And we're back, and we've got Mackie Wilson with us from Scale Social AI. And I can't wait to get into this AI differentiation conversation.

SPEAKER_01 0:49

Yeah, no doubt.

SPEAKER_04 0:51

So we're at the Colossable event, which is fabulous. But I think every other word that we're hearing is AI. AI, AI, AI. So clearly it's the hot trend, and everybody's diving into it. Tell us a little bit about what your company does in the AI realm.

SPEAKER_01 1:07

Sure, and you're absolutely right. AI is top of mind for every marketer. And the question coming from CMOs down are what are you doing with AI? Right. And that's what we're here to help with. So scale social AI at its core is a AI-enabled content supply chain built for elevated performance, predictable outcomes through essentially authentic, relevant content at scale in real time.

SPEAKER_04 1:32

Amazing. So you used two buzzwords that I love authenticity and relevancy. No, no, no, it's good. It's good because I feel like a lot of people that are involved with AI are losing the authenticity. And from a relevancy standpoint, yes, it helps with operations, but how do you make it relevant to the results? So how is your company focusing on making sure that operationally you're scaling as trends and businesses shift?

SPEAKER_01 2:02

That's a great question. So it's pr preservation of the human element, right? It's not generative AI where we are creating something out of scratch, but it's more so it's creating a speed-to-market workflow that allows for that content at scale. So let me take you through the journey. Like, for example, your um Adidas, right? So you're Adidas, I got these shoes, it's amazing. They cultivate a community that rewards in um the Addi Club, right? So what Adidas understands, or Addi does, depends on the market, right? What they understand is that community drives sales. Yes. So what we are doing is creating branded experiences that gets uh curated and moderated in real time through AI. So rather than just rewarding everyone that uploads a shoe, whether it's in focus or not, it's more so an engaging experience. So it invites you as the consumer, as the creator, to create that content, gives you some pointers. I upload the content and uh-oh, it's totally out of focus, or I'm wearing Nikes, right? The AI in real time will identify like, hey, this isn't brand safe, it's not on brand, there's competitive logos. Here's some helpful tips to try again. And then when I get it right, it's like wonderful. And then this is where there's a prompt. For Adidas, for example, it's the power of community. So the prompt would be post. Hey, we'd love it if you post on Instagram or TikTok. And then ultimately, what they're rewarding for is that desired outcome. So it's a curation experience. So rather than going through the creator uploads the content, it goes to a human, and it's that level of subjectivity, I like it or I don't like it. Instead, in real time, we're collecting content, and the contents on brand, we're encouraging to go live. Because the shelf life for the content for most people is no more than eight seconds. So you want to continually engage. And that's where AI can help first through our solution.

SPEAKER_04 4:02

So I, as you're saying this for the viewers of the show, we've got CEOs and CMOs, but we also have uh chief compliance officers, yeah, chief legal officers. I feel a big sigh of relief because everything you're talking about also supports brand safety.

SPEAKER_01 4:18

Yeah, oh absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 4:20

And and that's such a huge, questionable factor with a lot of the new technologies and strategies, especially in creator economies that businesses are looking at. And I feel like you just solved the whole problem for an entire area of a business to allow marketing and revenue and the content customer engagement officers to pave way and to better results.

SPEAKER_01 4:43

Well, certainly for an example like Adidas, but when you talk about pharma or highly regulated industries, they're an extra layer. So regardless of the vertical, regardless of the brand or company, they understand the need for a high volume of content to speak to your diverse audience, right?

SPEAKER_06 5:00

Right.

SPEAKER_01 5:00

So if everything's going through like a subjective funnel of brand or team review before it gets to like regulatory or legal, you're never going to be relevant because you're always going to be behind. So through this process, we can say, hey, it's 99% of the way there. It matches the guidelines you provided, it's brand safe, the quality is there, then that can filter directly to regulatory. So it makes regulatory jobs easier because it's already 99% of the way there. It's just a matter of accessing the library and approving it. So that is a little bit of a different journey, but we work very like pharma's a big category for us, and that's the value we bring. We have authentic stories to tell that are coming through, and it's just a matter of like, hey, are these ready to go? And that's where you know regulatory can play a role, but it does expedite it.

SPEAKER_04 5:49

Well, absolutely. Well, and and I've been on the brand side in many CMO roles, and then that is always the funnel and the block. Sometimes you know, creativity is is crushed by the regulatory aspects and elements, which are all done for good reasons, but you're giving everybody uh independence and freedom and creativity, which is fabulous. And I can only imagine that the entire creator economy must be a huge fan of what you're doing too, because it gives them access, but also the regular purposing.

SPEAKER_01 6:17

Yeah. If we know who's a big fan of this, meta, TikTok, Google's of the world. Because if if you're a marketer, especially if you're an agency, everything scales. They have the AI to auto-optimize. So gone are the days of like, I'm going to cast like an influencer I really like, subjective. Right, right. Right. And like, God, I hope it works because my job's on the line. Instead, for the same investment, we have a thousand creators or that are informed through data. Right. And then we're putting that live and letting the algorithms and AI do their job. So, yes, there's many reasons to be fans of what we do in the creator economy, but no one's a bigger fan than you know, our masters, you know, Meta, TikTok, and Google.

SPEAKER_04 7:00

Absolutely. Well, you know, it's like when when David Ogilbeev's talk about advertising, part brand, part, you know, science, part art, and uh, you seem to be pulling that together with your technology to support that creativity and the storytelling, which we have all learned very quickly, that is a critical element of making anything in the leveraging AI a success.

SPEAKER_01 7:21

Absolutely. And it's a powerful tool to help marketers break through subjectivity. You know, there's data behind it. So the next stage of AI, and this is where the integrations are so important, is the AI scoring. Based on what your desired outcome is, it's analyzing the content for quantitative performance, qualitative aspects, and designating a score of the likelihood for it to perform to the KPIs you're looking for, or KPIs, excuse me, that you're looking for. So then when you're activating, it's based on real performance, not a guessing game. And that's the enemy of marketers, it's the enemy of a personalized consumer journey is subjectivity. Because we are all individuals, and through the power of social media, we're all the star, right? So something that resonates with me, unfortunately, wearing like a black sweater in Miami, right? That speaks to me. Doesn't speak to you, doesn't speak to anyone else at the conference, right? But it speaks to me because I clearly didn't look at the weather, you know?

SPEAKER_04 8:19

Well, you're pulling it up, and and there, I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 8:21

Thank you. It's very slimming.

SPEAKER_04 8:22

Put it down to your point. So I think we're we're all good here.

SPEAKER_01 8:25

Appreciate it. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_04 8:26

Well, so what's next for the business? Where do you want to take it?

SPEAKER_01 8:30

What's next for the business? Uh what's where the data leads us, right? Like AI to say we understand AI is a lapsing moment, right? This technology is evolving much quicker than anyone thought. So it's how do we continually embrace the technology, preserve the human element, and then let data lead the way. And that's you know, really what we're about and what we're founded on.

unknown 8:53

Wow.

SPEAKER_04 8:53

Well, you have created like an access of goodness across the entire landscape.

SPEAKER_01 8:57

Well, hopefully. Yeah, well, hopefully, a maybe a uh positive light on AI. It's not here to replace us, you know, generative AI, even though it's clearly advancing. We all saw the viral videos of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. The capabilities are amazing. But the trust comes from real human beings, and diversity comes through real human beings, and that's what we want to showcase. Then we want to leverage AI to share and amplify those stories to the audience that are interested.

SPEAKER_04 9:24

Fabulous story, and it's really interesting to learn more about your business, and we're all gonna watch and see where it goes.

SPEAKER_01 9:30

Fantastic. I appreciate it. Yeah, thank you for the opportunity.

SPEAKER_04 9:33

All right, stay tuned. Welcome back. I'm here with Avriana Alvarez Lopez. I can't believe I'm seeing her after so long. Thank you so much for meeting me on this amazing yacht here in the middle of this gorgeous water. That's my house over there. Just kidding. Just kidding. Very beautiful. It's beautiful. So thanks so much for coming on the show. You have been a very, very busy woman. Tell us what's been going on in your life over the last uh what year and a half?

SPEAKER_02 10:08

Yeah, 18 months. So I started a company that's amazing. Yes, amazing and crazy at the same time. Um, so August of 2024, we had a concept. I have two other co-founders, and in January of 2025, I ripped off the band-aid, jumped out of corporate, and started an AI startup.

SPEAKER_04 10:26

So obviously, AI is hot, the timing is right. What gave you the confidence to do this?

SPEAKER_02 10:34

Um, that's a great question, Jeannie. I think that it's just like you know when things are happening, and when you're seeing the the pain points in the industry and you're kind of living at those, I was able to say, okay, I think this is a problem we're solving. And I was also ready to really make an impact. Sometimes in a large organization, it's really difficult to do that. And I learned so much. I'm so grateful for my time and tenure in those spaces, but I was ready for that next step. And it just felt like, okay, I think the market's ready. The idea is, you know, something I truly believe in and I can get behind. Um and like, why not?

SPEAKER_04 11:08

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Why say no when you can say yes? Right, exactly. And I was having this conversation with someone not too long ago because you know, there's a lot of emerging leaders and a lot of entrepreneurs, there's a lot of business leaders that watch the show and that listen to the podcast, and some of them are asking, How do you know? Why should you not be afraid? What gives you confidence to jump in and do something? So I want to talk about what the company does. But what do you think you would advise a person who has an idea to start a business that will eliminate any fears they have? Which is advice.

SPEAKER_02 11:43

Um I think you have to talk about it and let so many people tell you it's a terrible idea. Because as a founder and starting something, you have to get really comfortable being told no. You have to be very comfortable um knowing why you believe in what you believe. So either it's going to help you filter your idea and refine it, or it's going to help you have the courage to just say, like, I truly believe this is a problem we're solving, and other people are going to see that it's a problem we're solving as well. So I think that it's just, you know, be uncomfortable. Like get comfortable being uncomfortable. Yeah. And also just, you know, you have to, you have to believe in yourself. You have to talk to yourself and um I think encourage, you know, look in the mirror and be like, okay, you got this. But I mean, if we gave up after being told no, once, twice, a hundred times, then none of us will be sitting in these where we are today.

SPEAKER_04 12:29

And how important is a network that supports you, that you can go to, that you can ask for help? Well, that's how we got connected.

SPEAKER_02 12:35

That is true. And I think it's so important. Human connection is really important and nurturing those relationships and just being a good person, right? Being a good friend and making connections for other people without asking for something in return is setting yourself up for immediate immediate success and long-term success at the same time.

SPEAKER_04 12:51

Absolutely. Well, you know, when I was starting one of my startups and we were going through the uh Tech Stars Accelerator program, they train you that if you're gonna ask for something, you should be able to offer something. Do you believe in that, or do you think if you ask for something that you should just be available in the future, do you think there's always a give and get, or do you how do you approach it?

SPEAKER_02 13:12

I always ask how I can help, you know. I think that that's a great way to see that. And I also think it's important to think about how does it feel to be on the other side of me. Yes. And so when you ask yourself that question, you position yourself in a way to be the person that you need, you know, be the person that you could have used five years ago, right? Um, so I think it's really important to to give back, to pass the torch, and especially as we're, you know, helping other minority leaders, other women leaders, people coming into this space, it's so important to do that. So that's a question I always am asking is how can I awesome.

SPEAKER_04 13:43

Well, let's talk about the business. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 13:44

What problem do you solve? That's a great question. I'm so excited to talk about and why I'm here if possible. Um, so in the advertising and media ecosystem, we have lived in a world that's almost like an airport with no air traffic control. There's a lot of human coordination, a lot of stitching things together, and that is a tax that the industry has been paying for a very long time. And so we solve that coordination tax. And so we are an operating system that sits on top of a company's data platform, a media platform, a publisher, a brand, an agency on top of all of their existing stack. And we help orchestrate those things. So we take lots of things that would take, you know, 53 days, 17 different people, months of work and handoffs and coordination, and we do those in moments.

SPEAKER_04 14:29

I love it. I love it. And you've had amazing success from what I've been seeing, from what I've been hearing. Everybody is just buzzing about what you're doing, what the company is solving for.

SPEAKER_02 14:39

So I think that's I mean, we've had 100% of our proof of concept goals turned into long-term, you know, subscribing clients, and that's uh, I think a huge win and testimony to my team, to our tech, um, and also to us and our thesis, right? Where we started. So I I love helping people and solving problems, and we're really excited to get to it.

SPEAKER_04 14:57

That's great. So, what's your best advice for someone looking to get a hold of that elusive budget that everybody is tightly grabbing onto right now?

SPEAKER_02 15:06

I think that um honestly it's it's thinking about it in terms of ROI. So uh a lot of people are thinking about AI tools and technology as simply an efficiency play, but it's really not. It is a revenue generator and it's a way to leapfog competition. So I think when you are thinking about how do I utilize these tools and technology to actually change the competitive landscape and where I'm standing and rise above really quickly, that's what we're seeing. So, how do I leverage all of my proprietary data, my team and our genesic wa, and how do I elevate that really, really quickly? Because that's why your CFO wants to hear. That's what you CRO wants to go out and sell, right? Yeah. Um, so I think that it's really going beyond the efficiency play and showcasing, hey, I think we will make up this investment in three months. That's a great sell.

SPEAKER_04 15:55

Absolutely. That makes that makes a ton of sense. It's really interesting because a couple companies that I work with and advise, one of them has written a skill in an LLM. You put in your phraseology and it translates it to the language of the CEO, the CFO, or other people in the company. So you know exactly how to approach them with your idea. And I think it's brilliant. Like I think there's a whole business there like how to how to actually get sign up for things. So it's fantastic. Well, it has been so wonderful having you on the show. So much for having me. Absolutely, and I can't wait. Hopefully, not this not as long next time. I hope so. All right, thanks so much. Stay tuned, we'll be right back. Okay, I am here. I'm so excited to be here with Mike Finnerty. He is the president of the U.S. of Mute Next. And you guys are not gonna believe what he is bringing to the table and to the show on Liptop today. Mike, thank you so much for being on the show.

SPEAKER_05 16:56

Thank you for having me. Great to be here.

SPEAKER_04 16:57

So um, you don't know me that well, but people that know me know that I love doing things that don't follow the rules, that break the rules, that find innovative ways to make things happen. And you are 100% doing that with my favorite thing in the world, data.

SPEAKER_05 17:11

Yep. You like to play fast and loose.

SPEAKER_04 17:13

Well, you know, I gotta I gotta make a fun. So tell everybody that's watching and listening what Mute Nex is.

SPEAKER_05 17:19

Sure. So Mute Nex is a marketing mix modeling firm that has taken a gentic to unlock the real promise of what holistic incremental measurement should bring to brands, which is essentially what is your marketing investments, what are your campaigns, what are your creatives ultimately doing to drive your business? How are you driving growth?

SPEAKER_04 17:36

So I gotta tell you, when I hear the words uh medium mixed modeling, MMM, like I start to like shake because I have yet to be at a company as a CMO where medium mixed modeling, marketing mixed modeling, whatever you want to call it, actually has a good data in the system, B works like it's supposed to, and C does not turn you into the person that's like, but I need the data now. And the data team is like, you can have it in eight to 12 weeks. Yep. So why are you different?

SPEAKER_05 18:07

So I think to your point exactly, marketers for a very long time have had to choose between incorrect or biased data, data that favors pricing or promotions or any number of things, but isn't accurate because they had it in front of them, or wait for holistic, true incremental data coming from a marketing mix model, six, twelve, eighteen months in arrears, right? And that's a terrible trade-off. You're always going to use the data that you have in front of you, which means marketers, by and large, have had to choose bad or biased data, right? Um, to make the decisions that they need to run their business.

SPEAKER_04 18:41

So you're using a genic, artificial intelligence to eliminate all of that.

SPEAKER_05 18:47

So if you think of like any MMM model, any advanced analytics model, there's three parts, right? You have to bring all the data together, you have to build a complicated granular model, and then you have to produce insights that are consumable to a business, right? A model output doesn't tell you the answer. You have to translate it into something that business stakeholders can run with. Um we've developed the first MMM agentic workforce to take all of those three steps, run them end-to-end without human intervention. We call it human in the loop for governance, but not physically bringing the data together, building the models or producing insights. It's all run agentically, so now marketers don't have to choose between bad or biased data that they have now and holistic data. We're bringing the holistic data right to them in the timeframe set they have.

SPEAKER_04 19:29

That just brings up like a hundred questions in my head. So I'm gonna try and start in some order that makes sense to everyone that's listening, everyone that's watching. So you've got an all-agentic team, but obviously you still need people.

SPEAKER_06 19:41

Yep.

SPEAKER_04 19:41

Right. So who are the people that are core to making your system work ultimately?

SPEAKER_05 19:46

So it's it's the same functions that you'd normally see in a peopleware version of MMM, right? We have data specialists who understand both our brands and their ecosystem, think of all the advertiser data, and that understand the marketing ecosystem. How do we get data from Google and Meta and TikTok and Snapchat, right? How does this all come together? So the same level of data expertise, except they're governing and essentially managing the process. They're not physically executing the bazillion steps that need to happen to ultimately bring this to fruition. So they have time to think about it.

SPEAKER_03 20:16

It's okay.

SPEAKER_05 20:16

That could be like that was the whole promise of AI in the first place.

SPEAKER_04 20:20

Yeah, yeah. That's awesome. Okay, so you've got this amazing team that's supplemented by a Genteca AI, governance uh must love you, compliance, data people must think must think this is great. Uh what what about speed, changes in speed?

SPEAKER_05 20:35

So for for a lot of our advertisers, Hershey being the one that that kind of went live uh with some press this week, are going from sporadic updates, maybe quarterly, maybe a few times a year, and that usually takes months to actually see insights, to almost always on, right? We're updating at least monthly, if not faster, for a lot of brands, and we're doing it within a few weeks. And so again, go back to the right data, but it's six months too late to use, or bad data in front of you. We're bringing again that that right data to the marketer so they can use it.

SPEAKER_04 21:08

So you just mentioned that you that one of your clients, one of your partners, is Hershey. Yep. And they're doing incredible work with them. And I know you launched that and announced it at the possible event.

SPEAKER_06 21:16

Yep.

SPEAKER_04 21:17

And so from here, can you give us like an example of of where it's actually working? I heard something about S'mores.

SPEAKER_05 21:24

SMORS, yeah. That that's been the I love S'mores, so we're gonna take that. So if you yeah, think think of it from Hershey's perspective. They're managing a complicated set of brands that are in market. They have pricing promotions running, they have trade going on, they have retail media with a a good number of their partners, and they have a ton of marketing. At the same time, you have things like is it summer or not? What is the weather? Is it raining outside? All of those things ultimately are going to drive push and pull s'mores and whether people go out, start a campfire, and and ultimately take their you know, kids and families around to make s'mores. And so what our model is doing is In the right time and with the right recency to make it usable and valuable is we're dissecting how much is pricing working? How much does pricing contribute to this? How much are the trade activations contributing? What are the retail media partners bringing to the table? And then what is all the marketing investment, what are all the campaigns creatives doing to ultimately drive s'more sales or chocolate sales, right? Um and so what that allows Hershey to do is really say, where do we need to take our business? How do we be more proactive at pushing, pulling our levers with a holistic view of ultimately what each is driving?

SPEAKER_04 22:30

Okay. Now not to sound like I'm putting you in the middle of an RFP, but can you also add labor into that and labor cancer?

SPEAKER_05 22:35

You can yeah. So what the the the rough kind of high-level statement is anything that we think is gonna materially drive demand for a product and you have consistent data, like any sort of reasonable data around it, we're gonna attempt to put it in. Now that doesn't mean it's gonna be super impactful, right? We would might come back and say, hey, this worked or didn't, right? But we can absolutely test it and build it into that model framework.

SPEAKER_04 22:57

So this is awesome. I mean, this solves so many problems. When I was a CMO of RightAid and we were using our medium mix modeling, I ran into everything that you talked about delays, biased data. It's great, but late. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's it's it's the potential is there, and you know the data's there, and that's so frustrating sometimes if you're trying to figure it out. But so moving forward, if you're a brand or a business, who is the right person to start the conversation with you? Is it still the marketer? Is it the operations person? Like does it move now?

SPEAKER_05 23:26

I think it's it's um probably a blend of three. I love giving non-answers, right? So I'll give, I'll give, I'll give a it depends, right? I think um the first stop is almost always somewhere within the marketing organization. You can see some organizations now having kind of joint functionality between marketing and finance. Um, and ultimately it's someone who's responsible for the management of, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars, of marketing investments that are ultimately chartered to drive growth for the business. That's unit sales, that's new accounts, that's revenue, right? And so this system allows them to essentially have that holistic view of their, their levers, right? What are the puts and takes that they can use to best allocate, measure, and then optimize those investments.

SPEAKER_04 24:08

Now, what about affiliate media? Because like MMM is the hottest thing in affiliate right now to validate incrementality, to validate the impact.

SPEAKER_05 24:17

Affiliate influencers, all that entire ecosystem. Yeah. I think where the media ecosystem where people are watching and then how they're transacting continues to be really fragmented, right? Not everybody is just staring at a laptop, seeing an ad, clicking through an ad, and then purchasing all in that same browser on that same laptop. Right. Um, there's so many different screens and so many different environments. Um, MMM is especially good at tying together all of those disparate activities and ultimately saying something happened over here and then drove a sale over here and a few days later, right? Because we're not constrained by user-level tracking, which has been kind of under fire for a good number of years in the ecosystem, we can help bring together and show the real impact of things like influencers that don't have and don't normally show up all that well in like a last click or a last touch type model?

SPEAKER_04 25:06

Cool. That's awesome. I mean, there's so much potential here. I feel like we could talk for hours on this conversation.

SPEAKER_05 25:10

We're excited. We're excited about it.

SPEAKER_04 25:12

All right. So if somebody either isn't doing MMM right now at all, or they're doing it and they're not happy, or they did it and they don't believe in it anymore, what are three things you would tell a brand, a decision maker on why they should reconsider Mute Next, multimedia marketing in today's agentic AI generated world?

SPEAKER_05 25:35

Yep. Yeah, I think the first the first question.

SPEAKER_04 25:39

I'm not gonna say it depends. Three things.

SPEAKER_05 25:41

The first question, every marketer should feel very confident that they have the data and the insights behind them to justify how much they're investing, where they're investing, and how that investment ultimately drives the business. Right? Marketing should be a growth engine for pretty much every major enterprise. And right now those conversations are inconsistent at best because the marketing community hasn't armed themselves with this kind of holistic incremental view of what investments drive.

SPEAKER_06 26:06

Right.

SPEAKER_05 26:07

So it's it's very much uh the first question, like until you can answer that, I would say keep pushing, right? Because it it's important. Um MMM is by and large the tried and true toolkit to be able to answer those questions because we're doing it agentically, it's no longer great but late, it's great and right there when you need it.

SPEAKER_04 26:26

Amazing. Amazing. Great. Well, this has been such a fabulous fabulous conversation. I appreciate it. Yeah, great to see you.

SPEAKER_05 26:33

Likewise.

SPEAKER_04 26:34

All right, everybody, stay tuned. We've got more guests coming up. We're here with Vince Walken from Kona AI, a Cobasync company, and we are talking about something that's a little bit different, but just as important as all the conversations we've had around marketing, and that is the digital workforce. Everybody's talking about AI, everybody's talking about how it's impacting their brands.

SPEAKER_00 27:03

How's it impacting the You know, it's funny, I there's so much talk about AI in every conference, and I made a New Year's resolution this year to not demonstrate or talk about AI unless I could actually show it, because there's way too much talk and not enough actual demonstrations. And here we are. I'm not demonstrating, so I'm breaking my own rule, but workplace transformation is huge. At Kona AI, we are a risk and compliance transformational uh SaaS program company, and what we're building are digital assistants. Now, what's a digital assistant? It is a whole bunch of agentic AI agents working together around various tasks. So for a compliance professional, it's digital assistance for that. For a finance professional or a procurement professional, it's digital assistance for their day-to-day tasks. It's not about replacing the human, it's about giving them more and helping them do more with less. And I'll tell you, these digital assistants are quite impressive. Given the technologies with OpenAI and Claude and uh and Google Gemini, it's it's amazing what we can do uh for a lot of the mundane repetitive tasks so that the workforce can focus on the value-added work.

SPEAKER_04 28:18

So talk a lot about these digital assistants for teams and throughout risk and compliance. Are they replacing the teams that people have? Are they supplementing them? Are they just automating the lower level work that are taking people's time?

SPEAKER_00 28:31

Well, the honest answer is a little bit of everything. However, we are not seeing reductions in staff. We're not seeing a lot of new hires, especially at the lower levels, because a lot of those can be looked at as for with digital assistance. The key, though, is for regardless of your industry and regardless of your business sector, if you've got 10, 20 people doing a repetitive task on the keyboard over and over again, that is a ripe opportunity for agentic AI and the digital assistants that support it. I mean, and regardless of your industry, if you're doing a repetitive task, you really need to think about it and how can agentic AI be used to improve productivity?

SPEAKER_04 29:12

So, from a compliance standpoint, the focus on brand health, the focus on brand security, the focus on workplace compliance has a lot of elements to it. And I know there's a lot of compliance leaders that are questioning how they can best adopt AI in the most effective way. What are three pieces of advice you give a compliance leader when they're looking at what they should be doing with AI immediately?

SPEAKER_00 29:36

Yeah. The three pieces of advice I give, first, start with your risk assessment or focus on the low-hanging fruit. There's no sense of doing AI for the purpose of AI. It's got to add value and it's got to do something. And it's got to be based on something that's important to the CEO or to the CL CFO or to the culture of the company. So start with your risk assessment and do something that matters that is, you know, that's not too overwhelming. Don't boil the ocean. The second thing is think about shifting your program from a reactive response type of program to a proactive continuous controls program. There's a lot of in it, there's a lot of things that you can do, like building the policies into the code, building the rules and the controls into the actual agents. So you don't need to audit them. It's just part of the code. So that's the second thing. Look forward, don't just be looking back. And then the third is keep it simple. Think about return on investment, think about finding hidden money, thinking about doing more with less and enabling your team with these digital assistants. Gone are the days where you can go to your CFO and ask for 10 more people to help this process. The first thing that that CFO is going to ask, the compliance officer, is have you considered digital assistance and agentic AI before I go and approve these 10 new people? And the answer is you better have that answer before you go.

SPEAKER_04 30:58

So from an investment standpoint, I think that's a great question that you're bringing up and and a point that you're making with a CFO. How does a risk and compliance leader have a conversation to show the value of the digital assistant to the CFO?

SPEAKER_00 31:14

Right. It's the idea that business is moving fast, and then the controls that we had in place yesterday are not sufficient to continue with the controls that are moving forward. Business landscape is constantly changing, new risks are emerging, and your people are using agents and digital assistants at paces faster than you can keep up with from a governance perspective. You need to be more flexible and you need to think differently. Having people going and chasing responses or controls or failures isn't gonna work anymore. You need to have these agents working 24-7 with policy in the code, as I mentioned, to flag what's not responsive or what's an issue proactively and not reactively. So you gotta do it in order to keep up with the business and run an effective compliance program aligned to your policies.

SPEAKER_04 32:04

You work with so many businesses and so many companies, and you're seeing everything, and I think you mentioned some of it. You're seeing companies using digital assistance to help find money to help identify issues or opportunities in the employee engagement studies. And you're seeing just ways that they can build a business they haven't been able to before. What do you think is gonna happen over the next six months for the compliance leader? Do you think that they're going to move up in inside the business as being more of an area that establishes trust between the employee and the employer?

SPEAKER_00 32:38

I do believe I'm I'm I'm an optimist by nature, but I'm excited for our industry. It's a really good time to be a risk and compliance officer. Go figure. But it's so ripe for transformation right now from every component of a compliance function. We're seeing big transformations in third-party risk management, which is traditionally a very labor-intensive, expensive task. We're seeing a huge amount of use cases in export controls. And given all the tariff changes and everything that's going on with the global and the global marketplace, export controls and regulatory alignment with sanctions is completely ripe for disruption and use for agents. Fraud risk management, anti-corruptions looking at transactions. Most importantly, though, we're seeing a huge demand in whistleblower hotlines and monitoring cultures. The DOJ at the U.S. Department of Justice is really encouraging companies to speak up and raise issues to the DOJ before they go, you know, as part of a self-reporting whistleblower program. A compliance professional wants to make sure that their employees are happy and not going to the DOJ first and that they can speak up within the company and that they feel safe. Monitoring that culture is important because if you've got a rogue employee or group of employees in some country or in some business unit that you're not seeing, that scares the heck out of control compliance officers. And being able to monitor your whistleblower hotline, your employee exit surveys, your defects, and your email systems, et cetera, for spikes or risk indicators, that's what agentic AI does. And no human would ever be able to spend that much time and digest that information. There's a dashboard that can monitor it very well and cost effectively.

SPEAKER_04 34:21

Now, last question. Can companies build their own AI agents or should they partnerate with experts that have more uh LLMs that are established and built with some of these rules that make sure that the digital assistants are working as effectively?

SPEAKER_00 34:36

Yep. You know, it's funny. In a perfect world, again, there is every single Fortune 500 company has developers and in-house development capabilities. The problem that I see, and we are working with Fortune 500 companies, even some of the biggest tech companies and AI companies in the world. Why are we working with AI companies? Mainly because their AI people are focused on their product, not on improving the compliance department. So they can't get the resources. We, again, my background is I was a white-collar crime investigator for a big four firm for a decade. I know compliance or I know white-collar crime and investigations. You need domain expertise to build the systems for compliance and build those agents. IT doesn't have that skill set. Um, and being able to outsource that build frees up and doesn't involve, you know, require IT resources. Companies are coming to us at Kona AI to build those specific compliance-related agents so that they can deploy in-house often and behind their firewall.

SPEAKER_04 35:38

Yeah. Well, this was such an interesting conversation. I can't wait to follow and see where these show up. Thanks so much for you.

SPEAKER_00 35:45

Thank you, Gene. It's great to be here in lovely Miami. I got the pink shirt on and trying to fit in. Thanks.

SPEAKER_04 35:51

All right, everybody, stay tuned.

SPEAKER_03 35:52

That was amazing, right? That's the episode. If you got something out of this conversation, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Hit follow on Liftoff Journeys wherever you listen so you don't miss the rest of our special series. And come find us and follow us, Liftoff Show on any social channel. Want to know which of these guests you'd grab coffee with and why? I'm Jeannie Weldon. Until next, Liftoff.