The News

On November 11, 2021 Freshworks held its annual Freshworks Refresh event. This year, the event had a hybrid format with around 250 customers, partners and analysts participating on site while around 17k people have registered for online participation.

There was a social pre-event and an after-event for entertainment and networking purposes. 

The event itself was themed around “delight made easy”. Naturally, it had different agendas for customers and partners on one side and analysts on the other side.

The morning was dedicated to a 4-hour sequence of keynote sessions for everyone. The event was kicked off with a keynote by Neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and author David Eagleman, who spoke about the “Science of Delight”. The closing keynote was delivered by Amy Purdy, who shared her inspiring story of how she used creativity, a positive outlook and a never-give-up attitude to turn her life from nearly dying, finding herself with a double lower leg amputation and failing organs into becoming a 3 times Paralympic medalist. Between these two speakers, who set the scene, Freshworks offered product and customer information.

Freshworks CEO Girish Mathrubootham gave a product update that linked into Eagleman’s message and a distributed customer panel spoke about their experiences with Freshworks, how they implemented Freshworks solutions and how these help the respective businesses. Rounding this off, Freshworks awarded several prizes to customers who offer exceptional EX or CX and showcased the winners of an internal hackathon. The latter is relevant because these winning solutions made it into or will make it into Freshworks products.

The afternoon was filled with customer related information in the customer and partner track and product and strategy sessions for the analysts. The analyst track started with an open Q & A session with CEO Girish Mathrubootham, a session about the changing role of the CIO and continued with product updates and a distributed fireside chat with a customer. 

The bigger picture

Every significant player – and every player that wants to be looked at as significant – is positioning itself as a platform player and its platform as the foundation for the ability to generate a great customer- and/or user experience. This can be observed in offerings for all sizes of customers, from small businesses to enterprise. The definition of what a platform is and contains varies. So does the maturity of the various platforms. 

As I have repeatedly written before, having a great technology platform is not enough to enable experiences.

There is more to being able to create an individual experience than just a technology platform. Apart from an appropriate, customer-oriented strategy and a culture to match, that is.

The platform that is needed to enable experiences at scale for organizations consists of more than IaaS and PaaS. Software vendors that want to be successful platform players need to be able to deliver on four areas to succeed:

• (Technology) Platform 
• Ecosystem
• Insight
• Productivity

By extension, this means that smaller vendors that cannot or do not want to deliver on these four dimensions need to choose the platform or platforms they want to become a part of.

My PoV and analysis

This part I need to cut into two sections, one about the event itself and one about the content.

The event

First, kudos to the team who organized it. The event was well organized and structured. The Freshworks team around Alan Berkson and Shelbi Gomez was always available with a helping hand. I think the team can be sad that only 7 analysts came on site.

Plenty has been said in the past years about Las Vegas conference venues, so I do not need to add anything but that we certainly got our ten thousand steps. Seriously, the Mandalay Bay is a good choice.

The two external keynotes by David Eagleman and Amy Purdy have been highly engaging and in the case of David Eagleman also highly relevant to the event theme. The following keynote by Freshworks founder and CEO Girish Mathrubootham showed how ease of use and delight can be combined. Doing this, he established an emotional connection around delight and ease. Using this smart approach, these terms are now tied to the Freshworks brand.

Another kicker was the customer panel with representatives of DHL, GE Digital Aviation Software, Carrefour and TaylorMade who talked about which parts of the Freshworks software they use, how the implementations went (easy as) and how they use Freshworks to pursue the digital transformation of their respective businesses. In line with the nature of the overall event, it was made up in a hybrid way with one participant attending from a remote location.

From a brand perspective, these customers are at the upper end of Freshwork’s sweet spot in the market, but then this emphasizes on the company’s ability to scale up.

These customers, as well as the customer representatives, who accepted the prizes often spoke with strong positive emotion about Freshworks, rather than only pointing out rationally where and how the products help their business. This increased the tie between delight and ease on one side and Freshworks on the other side. 

Why is this important? Because every significant player is playing a platform game, which also reduces the differentiating factors. Consequently, it is important to be front of mind when it comes to positively loaded keywords. This worked well in quite some industries, think automobiles or smartphones, to name only two. Freshworks establishes itself as a likeable brand.

In an interesting twist, Freshworks not only presented several customer awards but also gave a glance at what I would call “employee-driven innovation”. Chief Product Officer Prakash Ramamurthy presented the winners of an internal hackathon. Their implementations did make it or will do make it into the products. 

The afternoon started with an open Q&A with Girish Mathrubootham who openly answered all questions that were fired at him, which is testament to authenticity. I didn’t fully understand the relevance of the subsequent CIO session, although it seemed to partly set the stage for the AIOps topic that came up a little later. It was followed by a fireside chat with a customer and various product roadmaps along with their respective Q&A rounds. Some of the sessions were based on more detailed video information that was made available to us before the event. It was often important to have this material reviewed before the event.

The event overall felt good. It was well structured, quite rich on information and offered many strong customer testimonials. I think that especially the customer success stories have been a strength of this event. More of them might have even strengthened it even further. In any case it was good to be able to freely speak with customers.

There was ample opportunity to network with Freshworks people, partners, and customers. As written above, from a session point of view I wonder how Amy Purdy fit into the message and what the sense of the CIO session was.

Being asked, Marshall Lager confirms that “very little of my time felt wasted, and I’m the first to admit it if I tune out of a presentation. I think they missed the mark by making Delight the theme, though, because the content didn’t really bear that concept out.” 

Having been one of a few on-site analysts, what I missed was more possibility to interact with the remote colleagues. This may have been due to the tight schedule. As a caveat, I am aware that this is difficult to achieve.

All in all, I like the concept.

The messaging

Messaging is a difficult topic. Marshall Lager opines that the event tended to lean “into the message at the expense of substance.” I would agree to this as I sometimes had a feeling of questions being dodged by executives.

The topic of messaging is however, not only from a CRM (or CX) point of view, very important. During last year’s Refresh, this has been a major discussion point with the analysts, which was partly addressed.

According to Chief Product Officer Prakash Ramamurthy “CRM now does include support. Lots of investment is going into creating a unified solution. We have strong offerings in all three areas marketing, sales and service/support.”

Still, the Freshworks CRM suite message is slightly confusing. 

Freshworks announced a bundle named Freshstack, which consists of Freshsales, Freshmarketer and Freshdesk and that is dedicated to startups. Given this, it covers all functions of a CRM. Why not name it (Fresh)CRM? Especially, since some of the product slides refer to this combination of products as CRM. 

Freshsales and Freshmarketer, on the other hand, are grouped as the Freshsales Suite and marketed as an “All-in-one CRM”. This weakens the idea of the “One Platform for One Unified Business” and confuses the CRM (or CX) message. Again, CRM consists of marketing, sales, and service.

Still, this package acknowledges the trend towards fostering a closer collaboration of marketing and sales departments to achieve one common goal and not two separate ones although there is no talk about revenue operations, which is the next evolution of this trend.

The functional roadmap of the overall customer solutions suite appears sound; yet it shows that Freshsales and Freshmarketer are fairly young products.

Which is a fact that can be used as an advantage, as there is little legacy. Freshworks Head of Product for the Freshsales Suite, Peter Stadlinger is well aware of this fact. In the prerecorded part of the session he speaks of an “unfair advantage” that Freshworks has. It remains to be seen how the company uses this advantage.

Freshworks clearly positions itself as a platform vendor – like everyone else. Asked what beyond high usability the differentiators of the platform are, VP of Product Marketing, Neo, Tejas Bhandarkar maintains that “our platform strategy is based on 3 things: 

a) giving a unified experience to customers through unified customer experience, collaboration, multi-channel, federated search, etc., 

b) delivering insights built on data, enabling customers to compose their own analytics the way they want, and

c)  empowering developers to build simple as well as sophisticated apps easily.”

Prakash Ramamurthy extends that “easily customizable and extensible is what customers call out as a differentiator. The extended roadmap includes analytics.” This extension is important as several customers pointed at analytics when queried about where Freshworks could improve.

In addition to this, Freshworks recently partnered with UIflow, to enrich the Neo platform with low code abilities, while looking at Slack and Microsoft when it comes to productivity and collaboration apps.

So, looking at the components of a platform, Freshworks plays the ecosystem card in these areas.

Interestingly, Freshworks also does not talk much about AI and machine learning as part of the platform. These topics, e.g., in the form of the virtual assistant Freddy, mainly come up in the application layer. Freshworks wants to provide purpose-built features and not deliver AI as a technology. “Users do not care whether it is an AI or not”. Still, the foundation for these purpose-built features needs to lie in the platform, i.e., Neo, to allow for efficient development and deployment. I think that this topic deserves some more clarity.

However, Freshworks chose an interesting approach out of the dilemma that being a “platform vendor” is not a differentiator anymore. This approach is the use of emotion.

The message that permeated all communication is “we want your success; we are easy to deal with and we create our solutions for ease of use”. This was confirmed by customer testimonials in an impressive manner, even considering that customers who attend this type of event are rather positive and customers who get on stage are even more positive. With this, and with the themes of “delight” and “ease”, Freshworks managed to tie strong positive emotions to the brand. This is a path to differentiation that other vendors have not yet chosen to this extent, and this might give Freshworks an edge.

All this leads to the question how Freshworks gets into and grows in and with accounts. There are two main ways, organically and via the ecosystem, i.e., partners. Freshworks has partners with presences in more than fifty countries.

Although partners have not been that big a topic during Refresh2021, Freshworks has a network of more than 500 partners and a marketplace that lists 1,100+ applications. That certainly gives some scale and reach into various markets.

The company clearly positions itself for the mid-market. At the same time, it opens itself to enterprises that do not want or need too much customization but prefer functionality out of the box. Still, Freshworks wants to establish that its solutions do scale and are attractive for (divisions of) enterprises. This is in alignment with “delight made easy”.

A division that implements Freshworks then grows its implementation footprint in two ways, increasing usage across countries and rolling out additional solutions. Eventually, other divisions might implement Freshworks, too – a classical land-and-expand strategy. Asked whether the employee solutions and the customer solutions mutually enable this strategy, replies seem to suggest that land-and-expand works well between the customer solutions, e.g., a division starting with Freshdesk and then rolling out Freshsales or vice versa, starting with Freshsales and then moving on with Freshdesk; the employee solutions so far seem to play a smaller role here.

The last topic of interest is the one of industries. Freshworks does not offer industry solutions. Being asked when this will change and a vertical strategy be employed, Girish Mathrubootham answered that the company will remain horizontal to ensure that the market stays broad enough. While this is a sound answer, one might argue that addressing verticals does not reduce the size of the addressable market but adds ease to verticals that are specifically targeted. This, especially in times of industry clouds. It might become necessary to explain why Freshworks does not require industry solutions. This should be possible, also following the theme of ease. In any case it will be interesting to see how a pureplay horizontal strategy pans out.

Overall, I think that we see another interesting player emerge that can be a good and viable alternative to the bigger players in the CX market, given that customizing requirements are not too big and that there is an own local presence or a local partner.

Freshworks is a young company. The most mature products are on the customer service and ITSM sides. The sales, marketing and employee solutions are younger and, given that, still somewhat simpler than other solutions. On the other hand, there is an ambitious, young company behind them. Building and delivering on the existing messaging will be key.

The Clash of Titans seems to get an additional participant.

Ecosystems are a big topic. What makes an ecosystem successful? What hurts? Are there any key elements to ecosystems to make them succeed? Does it differ from communities? Can a vendor survive without one? Or even better: Can customers succeed without? There are lots of questions to be answered in the times of platform play.

The CRMKonvos team had a vivid conversation with Alan Berkson, Global Director of Community Outreach and Analyst Relations at Freshworks, who, as part of is job works with, and builds ecosystems - pretty well, in fact.

He has a lot of interesting things to say, also about the current rage, which is Clubhouse - will it succeed? Is there any good to it?

Enjoy the conversation!

Freshworks has is now officially a fresh (sorry, I really couldn't resist this pun) member of the club of platform players. The company introduced its own flavour of CRM and a platform that they build upon. What is next? Lot's of ground to cover. A CRKKonvo with Prakash Ramamurthy, Chief Product Officer, Peter Stadlinger, Head of Products CRM and David Krauss, Senior Director Product Marketing at Freshworks.

ogether with Marshall Lager, Ralf Korb and Thomas Wieberneit they discuss market perspectives, what the value for customers is and how the innovations that the team has recently introduced fit in there.

Prakash, Peter, and David bring a wealth of knowledge to the conversation, including a pretty interesting dive into how to train an AI based upon the idea that the human who is in front of the machine is still one of the most important trainers, due to tacit knowledge and wisdom that cannot be codified. Which also explains the trifecta of priorities that Freshworks follows with its CRM:

• UI/UX first
• AI that actually works
• native customer 360

It is also about value, where we do a short deviation towards pricing and, of course, platform.

Enjoy a fascinating discussion with empathic points made.

A few days ago, together with a group of fellow analysts, I was invited to attend the 2020 Freshworks analyst days that covered a lot of ground from corporate vision through strategy and of course, some announcements for the Freshworks Refresh 2020 Global Virtual Conference. These announcements came shortly after the company appeared in the fourth Gartner Magic Quadrant for 2020 and after being ranked #16 in the 2020 Forbes Cloud 100 list.

All this clearly shows some ambition – and success.

As you may be aware by now, these announcements included Neo, the new Freshworks platform and the new Freshworks CRM product. These two topics created the most discussion points between the Freshworks executives and the analysts.

Of course, these two announcements were supported by statements on the corporate vision, mission and current standing as well as product vision. Impressive customer testimonials were not missing, too.

My Take

This I need to divide into three sections, one about the event itself, one about strategy and one about the new products. Let me start with the analyst day itself.

The Analyst Day

Of course it was a fully virtual event, thanks to Covid-19. The “day” was split into two sessions of four hours each across two days. Each day was closed with a social gathering after the content sessions, where we could talk shop or just banter, having a drink. This was akin t the lobby talk that one has during breaks or after a day full of information.

All sessions were live. There haven’t been any canned statements. Questions that were asked via the chat during the various presentations were either answered immediately or taken up by Alan Berkson and his team towards the end of the presentations, to allow for the need for clarification. Even some comments or the analyst discussions in the chat channel were sometimes taken up.

All this made the event very intense, so the four hour per day schedule was a good choice.

Corporate identity was catered for by Freshworks personnel using a Freshworks virtual background.

As to the content of the various sessions, there wasn’t too much depth. To accommodate for this, Freshworks offered the possibility for 1:1s after the event, something that in normal circumstances would have happened on site. Some possibilities to make the event even better would be to distribute some more detailed information beforehand for our preparation, using Zooms breakout sessions for 1:1s or smaller group discussions with the execs, and possibly adding more room for discussion, but then a lot of this already happened in the chat.

Having said all that: Kudos to the Freshworks team for pulling off an engaging distributed event like this. There are certainly some things to learn for other companies.

Strategy

The Freshworks strategy revolves around three main topics:

• Customer for life
• Customer and employee experience
• Enterprise scale

Starting with the last one, as it shows the ambition, for which the other two are main vehicles.

Freshworks wants to extend its reach beyond the SMB market and become enterprise ready, also to support growing and large organizations; albeit the company’s sweet spot still is in the midsize company market. This mandates keeping existing customers, making them customers for life – and advocates who help acquiring new customers, because they can get customers for life. Providing a superior employee experience helps further keeping existing and gaining new customers.

To support this ambition, Freshworks has diligently hired executives from renowned companies, like Jose Morales from Atlassian (Chief Revenue Officer), Prakash Ramamurthy from Oracle (Chief Product Officer), Tyler Sloat from Zuora (CFO) or Pradeep Rathinam from AnswerIQ, a Q1/2020 acquisition (Chief Customer Officer). Pradeep also worked for twelve years at Microsoft earlier in his career.

All in all this is a predictable move that extends the trajectory of broadening the offering via own innovation and acquisitions. It is also a necessary move which major competitors have already made or are currently making.

The opportunity with this move is becoming more attractive for companies that are looking for a comprehensive and integrated suite of solutions to run their business. The challenge is that, with the existing suite of solutions, Freshworks is set up similar to a smaller Salesforce, concentrating on customer facing processes from customer acquisition via closing a transaction through supporting and retaining a customer. This will require a careful messaging, strong products and seamless integration not only within the own product suite and partner products but also into other ecosystems.

New Products

Platform

As I have tweeted already during the event, Freshworks has now officially joined the club of platform players by offering a technology platform, insight, (some) productivity tools and, most important of all, an ecosystem. For a start, only the new Freshworks CRM is built on top of this platform, while the other Freshworks products already use some parts of this platform, like the identity and authentication service or the analytics services, conversational service and, of course the Freddy machine learning services. 

Figure 1: The Building Blocks of enabling Customer Experience

The weakest part of Neo is the productivity portion, where Freshworks mostly relies on partner capabilities. This is not necessarily a problem, as it is where an ecosystem is helpful, if approached strategically.

Figure 2: Freshworks Neo platform; source Freshworks

The Neo platform itself shall offer the services that are needed to efficiently and easily manage, extend, and use Freshworks applications. Part of it is providing cross application services. Other parts include development support from high code to low code. On top of it, it provides access to marketplace apps for their easy integration.

Neos most prominent function is its holding the Unified Customer Record that captures and shares customer data across touch points. Along with the Neo analytics engine and the AI system this has the potential to become a powerful CDP. Still, it might be beneficial to put some emphasis on customer consents. While the statement “engage with full context” might be read as including incoming consents, and being aware that Freshworks does not offer a CIAM nor an e-commerce, it is far more powerful to be able to argue with GDPR, CCPA or the upcoming California proposition 24 or to at least include this into the messaging.

Another topic that is important for becoming enterprise ready are the extensibility of standard objects via Neo in a way that all deployed apps and services can readily use the changes and the availability of ready-made process-oriented interfaces into ERP solutions.

CRM

Freshworks CRM, for time being, supports marketing and sales functions only, while the service solution Freshdesk stays out of scope. This is a new notion of the term CRM. CRM for me and many others includes marketing, sales, and service functions. Too often CRM is also incorrectly used as a synonym for SFA. Since with Freshdesk, Freshworks owns a customer service solution that is not yet fully integrated, but will be so in the near future, it would be important to include customer service into the messaging right away instead of creating another interpretation.

The solution is built around the notions of “UI/UX first”, a “native 360 degree view” on the customer and an “AI that works”.

The idea is to get simplicity, yet have a powerful application that makes the users’ lives easier, while being able to gather good and sufficient data to train the embedded AI/ML system. So UI/UX first in order to enable a good AI, which is the third objective. This message is more grounded than the upcoming word of “AI first” and acknowledges that machine learning provides better results when based on better training data. Still, it leads into the same direction.

To be sure, not everything is in place, yet, but there is a credible roadmap to get there.

Another little detail lies in the messaging again: While Neo holds the Unified Customer Record, CRM sports a CDP, similarly the AI/ML system as well as the analytics engine.

Figure 3: Freshworks CRM Capabilities; source Freshworks

I get it that these topics need to be mentioned in the context of a CRM solution, still I’d like to understand the underlying architecture somewhat better, as the diagram above might be misleading. Maybe it is just a matter of formulating this diagram with customer benefit in mind.

All in All

It is good to see that Freshworks integrates its offerings and starts to put it on one stack and into a coherent offering, albeit not too early. It surely is too early to say how well things work together and how deep the offered functionality is, but Freshworks is on the right way here. The presented roadmap makes good sense and will surely be adjusted based upon emerging needs and changing customer priorities.

Applications are getting more and more commoditized and are becoming part of an integrated whole. This mandates putting them on top of a platform.

With Freshworks having taken this step, there is one more player who acts on this realization.

The Clash of Titans just got more interesting.

The News

• Seamless conversations across social channels —Expanding on existing support of Facebook pages and Twitter, small businesses can now have real-time conversations with their customers over Facebook Messenger. For example, when a customer sends a company a question via Messenger, the message is routed to an employee who can have a live conversation over Messenger, directly from within Salesforce Essentials. With Instagram and YouTube, the employee gets notified when the customer makes a comment on a post or one of its videos, and can respond from Salesforce.
• Real-time chat conversations from website or help center—Small businesses can add a Salesforce chat widget to their website, and have the chat routed to an employee who can maintain multiple chat conversations from Salesforce. This provides the employee with a complete view of the customer’s profile so they can step right into the conversation and view features like previous interactions, case history, open sales opportunities or other information within Salesforce.
• Native phone support built into the #1 CRM — Make and receive customer calls with Lightning Dialerfor Essentials, an out-of-the-box call center solution built right into the product. When an employee makes or receives the call, the customer’s profile and account information is immediately available with a pop-up screen in Salesforce, giving them the full context and customer history to provide fast and personalized service. Calls are automatically logged within the contact and account activity history of Salesforce, reducing manual data entry and making sure that information doesn’t get lost.
• Easy channel setup with walkthroughs and live help — Salesforce Essentials offers small business customers a library of simple walkthroughs within the product to easily get set up with all of these new features in minutes—including guided overviews on key channels like Facebook Messenger, chat and phone. A team of Essentials Coaches are included in the U.S. and Canada during trials and the first 90 days of purchase to provide customers with any support needed via 1:1 live chat to get set up in no time.

• G Photography— Owner and photographer Gwendolyn “G” Houston-Jack is a portrait artist specializing in creating lifestyle wall art of families and individuals. As G Photography began growing, the company outgrew all of the systems it was using and spent significant time on deals that were dead to begin with. Houston-Jack knew she needed to find a solution that grew and scaled with her company. “When I switched over to Salesforce Essentials, I literally screamed with happiness in my home office! It’s definitely life changing. I never want to feel overwhelmed with my customer interactions. Rather, I want to feel aware and present,” says Houston-Jack. G Photography uses Salesforce Essentials to accelerate sales with a multi-touch work stream. With the standard sales dashboards in Salesforce Essentials, G Photography is able to keep all of her high priority deals, accounts and goals front-of-mind and never let these interactions fall through the cracks.
• org— Founded by CEO Chad Grills, his wife and COO Stephanie Postles, and Chief Content Officer Ian Faison, Mission.org brings stories and sponsors together to create high-quality podcasts and shows around evergreen business, tech, health and self-improvement topics. With just 10 employees, Mission.org turned on Salesforce Essentials to track their roster of guests, manage their sales pipeline and focus on the customer experience—whether in the office or working remotely from their phones. “Salesforce Essentials helps us prioritize customer service and growth. As a small business, it’s important to build trust with your customers while also making revenue predictable,” says Grills. Mission.org launched their first podcast in March of 2018, and now they operate a network of nine podcasts and a daily newsletter that reaches millions of business, tech and self-improvement fans.
• PepTalkHer— Founder and CEO Meggie Palmer wanted to find a way to help women supercharge their success and close the gender pay gap. She created the PepTalkHer App, a coach in your pocket that helps women track everyday career wins and provides data to back up pay raise and promotion conversations. As a small business owner who is always looking for ways to save time, Palmer needed a technology and automation system to do the work for her and keep track of leads and potential revenue, so she  turned to Salesforce Essentials. “Salesforce allows us to have a central hub of all of our prospective and current clients so that we can effectively market to them, talk to them and sell to them now and also into the future,” said Palmer. The PepTalkHer team uses Salesforce every day to help grow their community and empower women to reach their full potential.

• Instagram and YouTube are generally available today. Both are included in Salesforce Essentials at $25 per user, per month.
• Facebook Messenger and chat are generally available today. Every Salesforce Essentials organization includes 1 license. Additional licenses can be purchased at $15 per user, per month.
• Lightning Dialer for Essentials is generally available today in the U.S. and Canada at $2 per 100 minutes.

• Read the blog post about New Conversation Channels here
• Sign up for a free 14-day trial of Salesforce Essentials: Salesforce Essentials trial
• Learn more with Trailhead: Discover Salesforce Essentials

The bigger Picture

MyPoV and Analysis

• It needs to be easy to set up
• It needs to be simple to operate
• It needs to integrate well with the main communications channels
• It needs to work for the users and not the other way round
• Finally, it needs to be able to grow with the business

• a technical platform
• the ability of turning data into insight,
• an ecosystem,
• and productivity support.

• Zia, the virtual digital assistant
• Process automation
• Omni Channel
• Unified analytics

So, what is a platform?

• Platform (IaaS/PaaS)
• Ecosystem
• Insight
• Productivity

The building blocks of enabling experiences

Platform

Ecosystem

• The vendor or provider of the ecosystem who participates in the transactions that are executed via the ecosystem.
• The customers who will get more value for their specific challenges at a better price, which is a result of more competition in the ecosystem
• The provider on the ecosystem who have a broader audience

Insight

Productivity

• Human to human
• Human to machine
• Machine to human
• Machine to machine

CRM Evolution: The Main Themes

My 3 Main Learnings

• GDPR now becomes a topic across the planet. Coming into full effect on May 25, 2018, the regulation seems to make people nervous now. This confirmed earlier impressions that by far not every company feels (or is) well prepared.
• Systems, now more than ever, need to help people, customers as well as employees, get their job done.
• AI technologies are a big helper when it comes to overcoming the data problem that companies have. Humans do no more have the bandwidth to identify the needle in the haystack in the required reaction times. However, AIs are – and will continue to be for the foreseeable future – will not be able to get anywhere near human capabilities of hard problem solving. This means that there are very good avenues for combining human and machine strengths.

Final Impressions and Thoughts

The News

The Bigger Picture

MyPoV and Advice

My Take