tell me about your vision?
Well, I have a vision of a world where people
can actually communicate with their organizations
and have positive experiences.
And that sounds like so simple.
And it sounds like, well,
there's a lot of companies doing it,
but it's amazing how many people are not, right?
And even when we start thinking about the age
of artificial intelligence that people are calling,
they're like, well, AI is going to solve this.
And my belief is AI is actually just making it worse.
The reality for all of us as human beings
is that we want human connections.
We wanna be able to explore
and have unique individualistic experiences.
And when we have problems within those,
we want to figure out easy and fast ways to solve it.
And again, sometimes people are gonna say,
well, AI can solve those problems quicker.
Well, maybe in other cases,
you wanna actually talk to somebody,
you know, talk through it and figure it out.
AI is not empathetic.
And every so often we need an empathetic ear
to go through whatever the challenges are.
So maintaining this human condition of creativity
and connection and empathy while we are engaged
with the brands that we want to engage with,
I think is a huge challenge for a lot of organizations.
And if all I can do is help one organization at a time
better and improve that type of mindset, then great.
That's what I'm here to do.
How did you get started?
Yeah.
Well, this is, I've written about this.
It's in my book.
The first chapter of my book
goes into some pretty good details, good stories.
But I started working at a movie theater.
And when I was at a movie theater back in high school,
I was cleaning up auditoriums, you know, sweeping popcorn,
making popcorn, selling at concessions, taking tickets,
like, you know, everything that you would do
at a movie theater.
And I was told, you know, part of our training was
the customer is always right.
And we've all heard that concept before.
You know, and some other things
that were really deeply ingrained with me,
I grew a passion for storytelling,
obviously going in and watching movies
and living in somebody else's either misery or success
through film was a big passion of mine.
And those things stuck with me.
And as I got into technology and more professional businesses,
the concepts around the customer always being right
and how do you facilitate that?
And then how do you leverage technology
to ensure that the customer is happy?
You know, how could you potentially predict
what the customer is asking for
before they even ask you for it?
Which is another thing that we've often talked about
in like hospitality and the Ritz-Carlton was big
on this concept of, you know, figure out what they want
before they ask for it, right?
And then be able to deliver, you know,
and I often bring that back to the day.
That's what AI should be doing is it should be predicting
what they want before they ask for it
so that you can proactively go and help that customer
and make sure that they are happy and successful.
Like don't hand them off
and expect the AI to fully do it for you.
That's a disconnect, right?
Get the intelligence, that's part of this.
And so, yeah, movie going and storytelling
and, you know, and customer experiences were all rooted
right from my very first job.
And as I progressed, I started to see a strong need
for better understanding the experiences of consumers
and how technology can benefit that.
And one of the interesting things that I saw often,
which goes back to how we started the conversation,
is that the business side of a company
often doesn't talk to or even understand
the technology side of a business.
And the technology side doesn't understand
the business side either.
They're literally individual silos
and very rarely are they communicating
and trying to understand like,
why am I building this technology?
How does it benefit the business?
Or the business asking for something
without even understanding
if the technology can do it or not.
And again, these problems are persistent
across all organizations.
And so I began to act more or less as a interpreter.
Right, so interpreting the business
and technology requirements and visions and needs
and be able to bring those sides together
to build solid products and experiences
and technologies meant for consumers.
And really my entire career has been around
that concept.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is gonna get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show
and thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.