[Fully Managed] Michael Gadbsy from O3 World Ep. 198

Shannon: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Fully Managed Podcast. Thank you, Mike, so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

Michael: Thanks for having me.

Shannon: Of course. So today we’re going to start because you are in Philly. We’re going to start with some rapid-fire Philly questions. This is my favorite thing to do because I can talk about Philly and I love this place. And also I get some recommendations from you. So this is selfishly for me and not for you at all.

Michael: Okay.

Rapid Fire Philadelphia Questions

Shannon: First, first one. You ready? Let’s go. Let’s go. Okay. First word you think of when you hear Philadelphia?

Michael: Oh, man, so much. Colorful. Yeah, yeah, I would say that. Colorful in many ways, truly.

Shannon: What celebrity do you think of when you think of Philadelphia?

Michael: Oh man I hate to say will smith but that was the first thing that popped in my head which is terrible I need to do better than that you know that’s fine because I was going to say if you say rocky you get executed online no well you know it’s funny though because I’m not like I so appreciate sort of the depth of philly you know and I think about like a lot of the people who are from the area that that are you know certainly more interesting to me I’m a huge in a sport, so most of the celebrities I think of definitely start with the Eagles and Phillies and that sort of thing.

Shannon: Well, it is. It’s the first thing you think of. Sometimes it’s not going to be the most. Can I say, I’ll amend my response, the fanatic. How about that?

Michael: That’s fine. That’s fine. I mean, he is a celebrity for sure, and it’s great that everyone’s finding out about him now.

Shannon: All right, favorite cheesesteak spot. A hard one sometimes.

Michael: Oh, this I got on lock. Sonny’s in Old City. It goes under the radar but it’s as good as any of the other cheesesteak places it’s definitely not as crowded and it’s an old city which gives you access to more stuff so like when people visit from out of town I always send them there because they’re usually going to like see liberty bell independence hall that sort of thing and it’s like it’s right there which is great.

Shannon: I love that. I, my favorite, I love hearing a new one too, because my favorite cheese steak in the city is from a juice store. That’s basically a Bodega on like the corner of a street. And I, and so, you know, I think that there’s better cheese sticks and pads than Gino’s. This is why I ask.

Shannon: Okay. What’s one small business you frequent the most in Philly?

Michael: Yeah. Do bars and restaurants count?

Shannon: Yes, they do. But just so you know, there will be a question about that as well. So you’ll need to.

Michael: A small business that I go to often in Philadelphia. Well, I’m in Fishtown and our office is here in Fishtown. So I generally, you know, hit up a lot of places in Fishtown. So whether those are sort of bars and restaurants here, some places like Moharin’s or Frankfurt Hall or even Fishtown Tavern down the street. Or like there’s the little like, I forget what you would call it, but like the little antique shop down the street here. It’s generally where I kind of spend a vast majority of my time. Or if you’re kind of hitting like Old City, there’s a great little strip there where they have like all the first Fridays. There’s a bunch of little shops there that have all the little knickknacks and whatnot that are a ton of fun. But generally, when I think of any sort of small business in Philly, I think of food and I think of the nightlife and that sort of thing.

Shannon: And if we could skip ahead to the best place. So my home away from home is a place in South Philly. I live in South Philly, so not too far from where I’m at. Called for Pete’s sake. It’s at Front and Christian. Great little bar, great family bar. So it’s great during the weekends and whatnot. And the food is excellent.

Michael: I’ve been there. I also live South Philly. I worked at Lorenzo and Sons for three years.

Shannon: Really?

Michael: Yeah, in college. It’s funny, my son and I go there on a fairly regular basis after soccer practices. So it’s definitely a go-to.

Shannon: Yeah, I was also poached from there for the previous job before this job. Love it. I yeah that place is very very close to my heart south philly I think about very often so that’s it’s a lovely place so thank you for the recommendations I would be thinking about all of these I’m unfamiliar with fishtown as popular and up and coming as it is very recently I know very little about it it’s the only place in philly that I haven’t lived I’ve lived in every other part.

Michael: It’s awesome. I definitely recommend, I mean, I, I try to compare it to like other cities, but you know, I mean, I guess the best you would do is like Brooklyn or something in New York, but it’s like, it’s not that big, but it’s awesome. It’s a great spot. It’s funny. We’ve been here since, we moved in, in, definitely much different than, and it wasn’t quite as developed, but since then, you know what I mean? So much has developed around here, everything from like, not just the bars and restaurants, but the, the, I mean, they have a hotels now little spots that people can go to stay on the weekends which is great and then you know it’s it’s you go down frankfurt ave hop skip and jump from the delaware so it’s it’s a great spot great space you know I can’t speak highly of enough.

Shannon: Oh that’s really great to hear yeah I definitely have to explore it more because I see so many advertisements for different places there that I think that are yeah for sure Well, thank you for all these recommendations. I’m giving you one last question because you went over, you actually kind of described like three that I was going to ask you. So you breezed through those easily. So last note, if you were to change something about Philly, what would it be?

Michael: Oh, wow. There’s a lot. I love this town, don’t get me wrong. I mean, I’ve lived here a long time and I think it’s a great town. And I always tell everybody, you know, if you want a city that’s real, that’s honest, that’s got a lot of grit, Philly’s your town. And I really respect and appreciate that. But just along comes along with the grit sometimes you know there’s some areas that we could clean up a little bit for sure and and certainly like a lot of other cities we’re troubled with a lot of the same problems crime and poverty and that sort of thing and you know for such a great city it was know such a awesome heritage I mean I you know I mean you talk about you know the birth of the country and you talk about you know where some of the best ideas about freedom and liberty come from I mean that’s that’s our town so and it’s baked in everybody here right like you know you go people you know I guess give eagles fans a bad time but man talk about a passionate fan base right like these are people who care so much or like I tell everybody you want to come see something a spectacle come see you know the Phillies in the playoffs in October it’s there’s nothing like it and so I think all of that sort of tied together but definitely you know that comes with it you know some downsides too and I’d love to see that cleaned up a bit.

Shannon: I completely agree there’s this camaraderie in philly that does not exist anywhere else I have no I’ve never seen it anywhere else in the same way and vigor as this city we wear our yeah we wear our hearts on our sleeves that’s for sure yeah I love it here well that is a perfectly wholesome note to end this game you did so well you passed my test thank you I’m glad I appreciate that.

Michael’s Background and Professional Journey

Shannon: Well, thank you again, Mike, for joining me today. I really appreciate it. This is not about Philly, though, even though you gave me amazing feedback on Philly. This is about you and you’re in Philly. So I guess it’s a little bit about Philly. But I want you to tell me a little more about yourself and tell everyone a little more about yourself. So what led you up to where you are now and your professional journey, what you’re doing now and what you’re looking for in the future?

Michael: Well, I’ve been doing this for a long time, so I’ll give you a little background on that. So O-three is for digital consultancy. So we work with clients to understand where the gaps exist in their customer or employee experiences, and then help to solve those problems through digital solutions. Traditionally, it’s, you know, websites, applications, that sort of thing. These days, we’re building a lot of solutions that help solve those problems. But really, you know, my background, you know, this this company in twenty years old, you know, when we started, it was like, hey, there’s this thing called the Internet. And, you know, we want to we want to do great things on it. Right. It was a very different world back then. You know, I went to school in Philly. I went to the University of Pennsylvania. And, you know, towards the end of college, it was one of the cool things to start to get into was really what could we do with this whole big Internet thing. And, you know, I’ve always sort of looked at that as a guidepost in my career. It’s kind of looking at what’s next. I think that’s a big reason why, you know, over the years, first it was, hey, we’re just going to help companies get online. And then it was, hey, now we’re going to help. you know, use the online space to help centralize operations for these organizations. Then it was like, Hey, these organizations don’t even need, you know, brick and mortar stores anymore or, or even offices, right. They can, they can function entirely within this ecosystem. Right. And then you fast forward to where we’re at now, where we’re talking about completely reinventing, where businesses are on the whole. So I think it’s a good way of sort of showing, you know, my career path kind of went that way. It advanced with technology. You know, it’s funny, I have a degree in economics, which was just a way of me kind of like figuring out how to get into a whole bunch of stuff. Towards the end of college, I got really into design. Over time, that turned into user experience design, which became a core practice here at the company. I got right down to even, you know, I started helping writing curriculum for master’s programs when they didn’t exist in the early You know, as time progressed, you know, my career sort of progressed with that and kind of moved from being, you know, I consider myself a designer, more of a strategist now. And that’s what I help clients with now is really help to figure out what are the roadmaps look like? How does that tie back to their business objectives? And then on the whole, just, you know, how do we, how do we help them sort of improve their companies overall?

Shannon: I think that’s lovely. I think that it’s really fun to see a career path kind of move with how the trajectory of like, the business is, I guess it’s, It’s good because you’re advancing at a level of need, which obviously I’m sure you’re aware of, but it’s something that you don’t always see because if you stayed where you were before and were set on doing that exact thing forever and didn’t adapt, then maybe you wouldn’t be here today. So to know and be able to move with the times.

Michael: It’s what I try to tell my kids. You gotta, you gotta learn how to learn. Right. It was, you know, what was, you know, if I look back what the world was like when we started this business, very different. you know very different you know traditional print media was still you know very much front and center the only real reason for the internet was to help sort of you know the advertising world essentially you know have a have a broader reach once form and function kind of came together it just changed things and then over time that has continued to change now you look at I mean, geez, like how we interact with companies in the next ten years is going to be vastly different, right? You know, all of a sudden the idea of like, well, you know, I need to go to a space to go buy products might even feel like archaic, right? If all I want to do is buy a product, am I just going to ask, you know, a question and then have that product show up at my doorstep, right? So, which, you know, hasn’t… It has been the case now for a few years, but it’s certainly going to become more and more the standard. So it’s been fun. It’s been fascinating. And particularly in the last few years, AI has kind of taken more of a central role in that, really helping companies figure out what and how to use it in the right capacity. I mean, yeah, it’s been cool.

AI and Hyper-Personalization Discussion

Shannon: Talking, actually, now that you bring up AI, so you emphasize hyper-personalization in your approach and very much surrounded around empathy. So with AI, I think a lot of people have a lot of gripes and worries about it because of it almost being impersonal. How do you look at that? Or like these, these solutions?

Michael: I think it’s the other way. So here’s the thing. Everything we do is sort of focused on how do we make experiences better? Right. And years ago, it’s about ten years ago, you know, we were speaking on topics around how do we begin to personalize at all? Right. How do we use the data we have from either profile information or behavioral data? to really start to, you know, have digital experiences, start to display information that people needed and wanted at the time they needed or wanted it, right? At the time we were talking about personalization, it was really segment-driven, right? It was like, okay, well, you are, this is your gender, this is your, you know, general demographic, these are your behavioral traits, so we’re gonna show you X, Y, Z. And when you think about it, like, that’s okay. And what we found was on the whole was like, that was, it was good and somewhat effective to a certain degree, but it missed the mark on a lot of things. And it generalized far too many types of experiences. Particularly when, you know, you had brands that were trying to adhere to either, gender specifications or, frankly, demographic specifications that weren’t necessarily right. Right. So now it’s, it’s bad personalization and that’s bad. So when you really think about it, the only real form of a personalized experience is to be hyper-personalized. We want to have a thousand different data points on an individual in order to deliver right message, right product, right service, right action at the right time. You need that information to do that. with the rise of generative AI and now AI taking, you know, front and center on all the things we’re doing, now we can actually finally deliver on that, right? Now you can have, like, if you think about, like, the best experiences you have going to a store or restaurant or anywhere, right? I have to imagine, and tell me what you think, but, like, those are people who probably know you well. When you walk in, they already have, like, I know when I go to Pete’s, you know, and here in South Philly, you know, and when you know I walk in and they have you know that beer that I love ready for me sitting at my table right like I love that right I mean probably a problem they know me quite that well but fine I don’t mind right but I love it

Shannon: Exactly.

Michael: And that’s the sort of experience you want, right? Well, that’s the thing now we can deliver in the digital sense, right? We can have that sort of depth of knowledge on an individual so that every time you show up, the action is either readily available to you or that action is already being taken on your behalf with your approval. in order to deliver the right experience. So that hyper personalization is critical, but so is context, you know, understanding where you’re at in your day in your life, right? Like we joke all the time, around a tone of a conversation. Like if you’re going to have a conversation with a virtual assistant and it’s, you know, there are times where you want it to be sort of jokey and a little more fun and active. And there’s times where you want it to be serious. If somebody’s frustrated or upset, you don’t pop in jokes at that point, right? Like, like you need to sort of meet people where they’re at to a certain degree. And, and, and now we can do that. And that’s a, that’s a pretty cool time and place to be in the digital space.

Shannon: Yeah, I think that there are a lot of interesting things about AI that I think are extremely helpful and worthwhile. I think that the problem I guess I see with it is that it’s not as advanced as a lot of people would like right now. And so like some of those things that we think it could be really good at are not yet in place. But there are for maybe personalization purposes, but for purposes of like different tools that are created that may assist in your everyday work. I think that is an incredible addition to how we do tedious activities that may take long. I love I love that it exists for that. I can’t imagine how difficult it was to do certain things before this is incorporated.

Michael: Yeah, for sure. I would say that if I think about all of the little things that I don’t want to do on a regular basis, as long as there’s a step in the right direction and you’re taking some of those things off my plate on a regular basis, I’m good to go. That’s an improvement for sure.

AI Implementation Examples

Shannon: Do you have an example of a way in which you utilized AI to cater a customer’s experience that you distinctly remember being very successful? Work that we’ve done, you’re saying? I’m sorry?

Michael: You’re asking work that we’ve done?

Shannon: Yeah.

Michael: Yeah, I mean, we do this all the time now. big part of the service we provide is really understanding first and foremost, helping companies map out use cases that make sense for them to develop AI solutions around, right? One of the big things we focus on is helping them either two sidedness, right? Either from a marketing and sales perspective, craft messages that are going to be hyper specific to individuals, right? That’s one part of this. And then the flip side of that is really just helping internally, like people like sales folks really streamline their approach to the communication that they’ll provide so that when they’re actually, say, sending an email, it’s in their voice, in their tone. and it sounds like it’s not robotic. It sounds like it’s coming from them. And in both of those cases, You know, we do a lot of consulting in using the tools available to them to kind of build those systems and those like automation trails that help them do that work. And that’s probably one of probably a dozen different types of use cases in which we’re supporting clients on right now. But in all cases, I mean, that’s a big part of our message from a customer experience, employee experience perspective. The more you can tailor the communication, the more you can tailor the experience to the individual, the better off you’re going to be.

Shannon: Yeah, I definitely agree. I have definitely seen some funny emails in my day that are clearly not going to be effective in their purpose because of the lack of personalization. Obviously, everyone wants to feel catered to and that they’re, you know, I guess when it comes down to it, cared about regardless of what the inquiry is. And I think that Yeah, to be able to have those automations in place, because, of course, there are so many people out there that have certain cold outreach strategies that they’re reaching out to a mass amount of people. And to have that be personalized as much as possible is difficult when they’re doing it themselves, because, you know, the amount of time that that would take.

Michael: Totally. But if you think about the impact of them and how effective they’re going to be, the more it can feel personal and actually personal. And that message is actually coming from a human. The better off you’re going to be. Right. I can’t tell you. I mean, you probably get the same thing. Right. You get probably your inbox flooded now with, you know, I think it’s hilarious. They have like one line in there about me. And then here’s our offering. Right. It’s like that’s not personalized. Like, yes, all you did was look up some information about me and pop it into the email. Right. There’s definitely some opportunity there. And, you know, what we’re really trying to do is help folks understand how do you get that a layer or two deeper so that, you know, really you’re just making the outreach easier on the whole.

Shannon: Yeah, no, that is definitely something that is so helpful in that process for specifically sales as well, but also for any purpose, I guess, that you’re doing outreach for. they like I think ideally everyone wants to be able to personalize their emails but if they have certain quotas that they have to reach or whatever it may be like they might not be as successful because they’re not personalized as much as they’d like but to have a tool help them make something sound more personal at least is you know a good step for sure.

Virtual Assistants and Customer Support

Michael: Well, you can think about it from another end too. So a lot of what we help develop as well are things like virtual assistants, right? I refuse to use the word chatbot because chatbot gets a bad rap. I like the term virtual assistant because that’s really what you’re kind of getting out of it. When you’re building those things, like a lot of what we have to take into account is how do we intermingle a custom data set, something that’s specific to say a knowledge base for an organization and then layer on, okay, how are we going to tap that information at the right time to produce the right response for whatever, say, a customer has to ask if we’re thinking about customer support or we’re thinking about upfront and like a marketing or sales process, right? It’s so important that you are leveraging not just the data and the conversational experience, but you’re trying to make that sound natural, right? And you’re trying to make sure that it comes from a brand tone and voice that is specific to the organization. It’s really intermingling a lot of that stuff. No different than sort of helping, you know, sales support. You’re really helping it, you know, from a kind of customer support perspective as well.

Shannon: Yeah, those are very, I think, especially for a lot of people that are talking to a virtual assistant are already frustrated. And so having like the most human approach to that frustration is very helpful. I can understand the early ages of virtual assistants, I was gonna say chatbot, but I will use virtual assistant. That There is more frustration to be made from talking to that, just because it hasn’t been fully developed into what it is now, whereas when it’s seemingly more human, you feel more at ease with your problems, especially when they’re catered to solving your problems better. Right.

The Future of Human-AI Interaction

Shannon: I also think it’s very interesting What do you think about this, of the way in which AI is advancing for those purposes of making things seem more human? Do you think that there’s going to be this, like, revolution in the future about people trying to get away from these kinds of tools because people don’t understand the difference?

Michael: I know that’s very, like, I know what you’re asking. I think one of the big challenges with AI on the whole is people have expectations of machines that they probably shouldn’t have. I think people expect more out of the technology than they expect out of one another, and I think that’s fundamentally wrong. Before we start to you know, turn away from what the machines offer us, et cetera. Like I do believe there is a little bit of a reckoning coming around what are our needs and expectations of one another. Because at the end of the day, I think it’s interesting that like we’ve never been asked, you know, make it sound less human. you know we’ve never been asked you know we we want this to be more machinery more machine-like and robotic we’ve certainly had tone voice tones that are more serious or we’ve certainly been asked to make sure that that it’s that it’s clear that it’s a that it’s a bot or that it’s a virtual assistant right versus human but like I I can’t I can’t recall a time when someone said like well I want this to be to be you know less human and yet what you find is you know the the more human you make them the the more there seems to be this expectations the more accurate or effective they need to be on the whole when the reality is is like they just need to do a job right so I think we’re going to be in this kind of weird state at some point where you know I’d be very curious to see what happens with how people sort of interact with the technology and and what their expectations are going to look like as far as you know am I do do I would I prefer to deal with a human at some point right when we talk about like replacing sales processes and and speeding them up and making them more personalized we’re doing that with the with the in the interest of trying to make these experiences more human but But at some point, you probably really are going to want to talk to a human, right? At some point, you’re going to want to have this sort of face-to-face communication, even as we’re having, right? So when and how and where does that experience exist in this funnel? Like, it’s a really good question because I think, you know, the more human we make them over time, you know, is there going to be this expectation at some point that that’s going to be good enough? And, you know, am I going to… Am I going to just be able to sort of deal with that and then I’m never going to have to talk to people again? Like, I don’t think so. The reason we want these things to be human is because we like interacting with one another. I think there’s a certain psychology in that. But it’s so interesting to me because like the more we start to deal with the machines on a whole on a regular basis and the more humanist they are, I don’t know. I guess we’ll have to see what that looks like over the next four or five years.

Shannon: Yeah, I definitely agree. I think that it’s possible that one day someone, maybe a company as a whole, probably a larger one for it to actually make some kind of impact, whatever it may be, that someone will do something wrong or go too far with what they’re doing with… AI or AI tools or virtual assistants or whatever it may be that is enhancing a user experience to make it more human, replacing humans in that way, which is kind of funny. But And then maybe we’ll figure out that maybe this isn’t great in every aspect. But I think it’s an important conversation to have of where a human should always be in the process. Like, for example, what we talked about with sales is the idea that it’s great to use an AI tool to enhance this process in the idea that there might be a quota that a sales outreach or an outreach team has to reach and per using an ai tool to personalize those messages in order to reach more people might be really helpful and honestly they’re probably already working in a robotic way already prior to using ai where they’re not being as personal because of a quota that is having to be met or whatever it may be and so that makes sense and that doesn’t necessarily feel very shallow so to speak I think that’s just a strategy whereas once they make a connection for a sailor, they have a lead, you’re probably going to want to get on a call with a person.

Michael: I think so. I suppose, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off, but I suppose that there’s a, you know, there’s, this is sort of what we need to measure over time, right? Is like, at what point does that trade-off need to happen? I tend to believe, you know, as I stated, that like, you’re always going to need humans in the loop to some degree. Our general philosophy at OTHREE is that We’re not here to replace humans. We’re here to augment them, and we’re here to make them better. And we’re here to make those human experiences better. But at the end of the day, again, fundamentally, I think that does require, at some point, some human-to-human interaction, right? But I do think it’s interesting and go back to your point about, you know, replacing some of these processes that have been sort of more robotic over time and really improving them. It’s funny, I was talking to a colleague recently and we’re talking about, you know, new phone systems that are going into place where you can kind of train a whole AI system on say like one salesperson takes four or five calls and then they can start doing these sort of automated calling before you. thought that was fascinating and like where are these systems of course but like that you know they were already piloting it they went through the process very quickly and and I’m like I’m like are you sure you’re you know your customers are really gonna want this right and at the end of the day you know to his credit like they had already done the testing and they said it for whatever reason it fits well with their customer base and all this other stuff but like I think that’s just as important as doing the implementation is trying to figure out like where and how Do you want, like you’re very deliberate about how you fit humans in the loop on the whole process and design them into the strategy so that your results are sort of indicative of what people expect. versus just trying to jam it into, you know, we’re just gonna replace our salespeople with, you know, the system. There’s a lot to be said for that. And I think there’s a lot of value that, you know, companies are going to need to extract out of understanding how humans fit in the loop, in order to really sort of justify, you know, putting these things in place.

Shannon: Exactly. I, I think that’s true. And I, I think that people will always be implementing more and more tools into their everyday, like work life, just because if it’s making things easier, then of course we’re going to learn new things and know how to use them so that they’re, you know, making our processes easier. But at the same time, I think that, even though there are tools put out there that may be able to replace more, maybe minor positions for lack of a better phrasing for very specific things. I think that it’s very important to always keep in mind where a human should be best in. And that’s, you know, I completely agree.

Closing

Michael: A hundred percent.

Shannon: I think this was an incredible philosophical conversation that I did not expect to have. We’re just over time. So I think this is a perfect place to end, but thank you for, for, you know, delving into this with me so much. I thought this was really fun. And I do really love to talk about the, you know, different people’s opinions on like the complexities of AI and how they’re going to impact us in the future and like what to look out for.

Michael: Well, I appreciate you having me on and I appreciate your time.

Shannon: Thank you so much. And thank you, everyone, for listening. I hope you had fun. And I hope that you get to get as much out of this as I got to. And I appreciate you guys. And thank you so much. Have a lovely day.

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