Lauren Esposito 0:26

Yeah, I appreciate it, Jordan. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's been a great, you know, 17-year career here in marketing and I've had the fortune of doing so many different things. I did start my career in brand and design. Actually was a graphic design major, ironically enough, but pivoted into marketing strategy early. And worked through a lot of different size companies, startups and to mid-size companies. I helped companies acquire and go through an IPO process, eventually getting acquired myself into Salesforce. And then had an extraordinary education through my Salesforce career, product marketing, go-to-market, and demand gen, events, mergers and acquisitions stint there when we were on a big hiring and acquiring spree, and then ended my stint with Salesforce and again creating their first global brand strategy team.

And after 13 years with them, I was ready to figure out what else I wanted to do. And started to kind of look around and I found this company I never heard of before, Asymbl, who is also a Salesforce partner. And they were born out of staffing and recruiting technology that was really meant and built in the AI era in the last 3 years. And in their own belief of using the products themselves, ensuring that they implemented them first for their own business to then figure out how to scale them for their customers, they adopted Agentforce as well as like Claude and OpenAI like immediately.

And we're trying to figure out how to apply that to the enterprise. So when they interviewed me, you they had that really unique different positioning that I think we'll get to talk about today, which is this idea of like hiring AI, applying that same mentality of hiring humans, but doing that to AI because you can't just, as you probably all know, turn it on and expect it to work seamlessly, especially at the deterministic level, right, that enterprises need. So I was excited to make the jump and I'm back into a builder mindset, working in the AI space and creating a new marketing motion for the company.

Lauren Esposito 3:05

Yeah, I think first is I understand the enterprise need of driving, you know what I mean, cost efficiency, scale. I mean, at the end of the day, right, we're in the business, right, for margins and money. But still what I think has been happening in the last few years, especially with AI, is that people are realizing brand is more important than ever. And if you've done any work of trying to scale your marketing efforts in AI, every LLM still sounds the same, has the same thumbprint on it. You'll spend hours trying to generate assets and images realizing it's a piece of the puzzle.

It is definitely not the whole thing, right? There are some wins in there, but the AI is not innovative. It is not creating. It is, right, really coming from a summarization of data. It's only as good as you feed it. And so even as I was building the team with Asymbl, you know, we went through an effort to think about we got to reposition the company. We were scaling and redefining how we were going to we know show up in the world and that was a verbal and oral kind of written story as well as it was a design story.

So both writers and designers I was working with I said, "Look, the company philosophy, we're getting on the AI bandwagon, but we got to figure out how to make it work for us." and I faced both designers and writers who were like, "I don't know, it's going to replace me. What do I want to do with that?" And I'm like, "I don't know that we are anywhere near for the creative roles, right, to be replaced because understanding like the human psychology, right? What really surprises and delights us? What is a unique different way in than your competitive, right, marketplace?

How do you capture someone's attention in crowded advertising? I mean, these are the challenges marketers are faced all the time and creative solutions are typically the answer. So AI is not coming in with that innovation, right? It really is in the brain of the creative in my opinion that you know, their uniqueness and the way that they see the world and the way that they are able to steal ideas, respond to strategic insights and briefs is what makes great marketing and AI cannot do that today. Instead, I said, "What is the part of your job that you hate the most, right?

What are the things you don't like to do and are there ways to create digital workers, as we call them, or even AI agents, you know, who are really more task-oriented than specific job-outcome oriented, right? As partners to your workflow, you know, and so they thought about their creative process. And then they said, "Okay, where in my creative process might I want AI to play a bigger role and to steal things for me?" and how can I create that repeatability and trust with it and spend the energy to have it do a function and not to say, you know, design this entire campaign for me or write this entire article for me. And they were super successful in that, you know.

Lauren Esposito 6:46

Yeah, absolutely. So what we learned early on by you know, just kind of diving into what AI offered was again, okay, it takes a lot of time. Everyone's like, oh, we're going to reduce headcount and increase technology. There's a whole other conversation you can have on cost about that. But it's not even a it's not a lift and shift. You don't just, you know, turn this on and insert it into your current workflow. It actually redefines how your processes work, where your handoffs happen. And so again, it was empowering we realized to have if you don't it's like a teammate.

And so when managers are able to right define a role that they want on their team and then hire for that skill set, right? They onboard that individual, they train them, they spend time in the first year coaching and managing them, right? More in depth than they might have to in the years ahead and you put your energy in because it's not only going to make you successful in your team, but ultimately deliver right what you're doing in your outcomes. And that is exactly how we view AI. It needs a manager.

It needs a job description. It needs specific outcomes and KPIs because without that, you've just turned on a tool and you're like, "Well, is it working? Is it adding value? Is it not?" And by giving it into the like hands of the humans to say, "What do you need it to do? Why do you need it to do that? How do you need to do that?" It requires then that human thought to say, "is my process as optimized as it should be? Would I want that different handoffs? Do I want to log into five different systems or can my agent actually surface these things inside of Slack for me?" you know, and so when we realized, "Okay, we're creating digital workers who have those defined job descriptions and we're onboarding them and coaching them." They all have human managers.

They have one-on-ones with their agents weekly, right? Or how else do you manage? Is it hallucinating? Is the you know, is the reliability there? So naturally.

Lauren Esposito 8:47

Yeah, all of that I will say primarily Slack for us. Which does have like audio built in. We do have agents absolutely on Wispr Flow, too. So that's something we're integrating. It but what we found is, okay, all of our human teams were in Slack. Our apps are connected to Slack. Our data's in Slack. This is you know, our channels are there. We're partnering with our external, you know, agencies etc. In Slack, our customers. So by having the agents, whether or not they were built in Agentforce or in OpenAI or in Anthropic, being surfaced inside of Slack, now I chat with them like any other teammate, right?

I can at-mention them, they take action when they're connected to the workflows they need. I have a content like basically guardian, right? That named we've named Casey. And so she started out where, "Okay, if rebranding an entire company and rewriting all of our positioning, every employee and other digital workers need to understand that at scale. I have a three-person team. I can't answer all those questions, do that enablement. So, Casey became the front end where any employee could ask her any question. She's connected to, you know, Google NotebookLM. She's connected into Claude and running skills over there that are about our brand voice, our customer story.

She's connected to our data source. These are approved, you know, stories to tell externally, like approved ROI stats to tell externally. And so, she's creating, you know, a whole workflow for the entire company that I no longer have to manage. I just have to look after Casey and say, okay, where is she getting it right or wrong and coach her or getting feedback to say, you know, we can even allow other employees to give her feedback when she is maybe hallucinating a little bit. And so, that they can even coach her again, like another teammate.

So, that's where we're finding more success is saying, it doesn't even mean Slack has to be your answer. It's where are you doing your work today and how do you get your agents right in there? Because that's where adoption changed for us. Asking people to go log in, you know what I mean, to a different system to do that became cumbersome. And again, slowing people down in their time and energy, you know, and being able to deliver.

Lauren Esposito 11:21

Yeah, you don't know what you don't know and the tech is changing so fast, right? So, we're very fortunate. We have a chief digital labor officer who's also our chief technology officer and he lives and breathes, you know, in these AI ecosystems. And he's changing our policy, our guardrails, right? As new models come out, as we learn new security risk, right? We have someone who's strategically understanding where the market is at, what's going on in the situations, and ensuring that we have the trust. At the same time, he has unlocked where, you know, start small.

You know, what is that first use case and what can it be connected to? And how do we have the observability of where these agents are just like your org chart, who has an agent, who has a digital worker, how are they talking, what systems and permissions do they have? So, we provision our digital workers similarly to how a human is provisioned, right? If I'm going to hire someone in sales, they might have a different provisioning right than in finance for the data and the information right that they can see in the company.

So, thinking again about it as an employee, it gets a little bit easier to have the guardrails, the security, the access. I think what holds people back because they just don't know where and they get so overwhelmed where to start because we're promised this huge AI transformation. It can do all these things and it's like, no, really take it in. That's what I'm saying. I had a content guardian, right? I didn't come in to have a the marketing strategist right away or you know, a campaign, you know, owner. I had a function that I really needed and how to build to that because then you understand the time and energy it takes to invest into this digital worker to make it successful.

And you start to realize you can't just replace a human. There's a lot of things, it takes a lot of energy, you know what I mean, to coach and manage these things. And so, the hands-on approach I think goes a long way of starting small and saying like, give a test bed to a group. Let them see what they come up with. Learn from that before scaling. Don't try to go through a complete transformation right now. We're just not there yet.

Lauren Esposito 13:49

Yes.

Lauren Esposito 13:52

Well, we have Shiv, who is a real human, and he's our Chief Digital Labor Officer. But we have our C-suite like we have a digital business analyst who's looking across every one of the C-suite departments, surfacing a report, his name is Bradley, right? Every week for our CEO and our SLT team, and saying, "Okay, here's what's on track, here's what people are working on, here's what's at risk, here's where the customer health is, here's where our financial projections are, you know, what marketing launches are coming." So, we're getting you know, what would have taken analysts and teams weeks to put together for a quarterly review, we're getting that information surfaced in a weekly basis.

Lauren Esposito 14:44

Yeah, well, I mean, I'm using it all the time. We've got Slackbot, right? There's organization tools, we've got other digital We have assistant digital workers managing calendars and to-dos. But I think, you know, just because we've talked to you a little bit on the design side, like we created some Google gems, right? So, we have an illustration look and feel that we designed as a part of our brand. And so, we have a gem, and you know, it has the directions so that we can put ideas in, and same thing with our mascot.

You know, we have a gem for him, he's a 3D rendered robot, his name is Sim. Okay, we want to have him driving a car, running through the finish line, building the building, you know, and those would have taken immense resources a business our size could never have afforded, right? And now we're able to kind of have fun in the brand and create these things that are repeatable model and you don't necessarily need the you know, cost and investment that they're not creating final output. All of that still has to go back into Adobe tools, be edited by a designer, be coordinated with content and copywriting, has to be thoughtful.

It's not just make me an illustration. What is the illustration for? What does it communicate, right? There's design thinking that a designer still needs to apply. So, you know, that's the way we're like leveraging it in some of that capacity all the way to like man, you know, SEO optimization, what keywords we should be going after. We have competitive battle cards that help us understand the news of our competitors every week, trends that are going on in the industry. You know, just being able to kind of keep your pulse on stuff when our human cognitive capacity just couldn't do that at scale. And I think that's been a big win.

Lauren Esposito 17:01

I well, one is, right? I think really thinking our whole what workforce orchestration is thinking about Yeah, you need people and you need technology, but it's really about how they're orchestrated together. It's the flows, it's the processes, it's the automation, and that is the orchestration. And so, really figuring out where does work get done? What is the natural flow, right? And how do you get your technology to just adapt into that rather than trying to adapt your humans there. That's one. Two is explaining that to your human teammates so that they understand, "Oh, I know this isn't going to be another thing that I have to go learn and do necessarily in another system, another platform, which people just don't have the time, right?

We already are trying to do a lot more with less in most of our professional, you know, day-to-day jobs. And so, I think by empowering my employees to say, "You decide. You decide what work you wanted to do. You decide what workflows you wanted to be a part of, and start small." Once they saw a win in a tiny use case and a you know, in a value prop that created real outcome for them, the mindset started to change. Okay, this could be useful. Okay, I'm glad I don't have to, you know, the suckiest part of my job potentially, right?

I don't have to spend so much time in. So, I think empowerment goes a long way in getting people to have that mental shift.

Lauren Esposito 19:12

Yeah, we in that employee you know, empowerment process, it's asking them to define what is it that you're trying to drive as an outcome. Okay, you want it to do your blog analysis or your research. Okay, what how much time do you spend on that already a week? Cool, you built now, you know, your digital worker to help come in and accomplish some of that. How much time do you have to spend now doing that and what has that done to your process, right? So, my content writer, you know, built a whole model around her blog process and she went from really one strong blog a week to now five because she didn't have to spend so much time going into all the tethers of the internet and researching the things and pulling the synthesis of our product knowledge together and our services not instead she could spend her time really crafting strategic outlines and writing, you know what I mean?

The part of it that she really is passionate about. So, her productivity went up. So, it looks different for everyone. It can be time savings. And then the question is what does she do with that time on the back end, right? And that was okay, yes, she's writing more blogs, but now I've also got her, you know, stretching into new projects in new work as well because of that. For us, we've been thinking a lot about at a larger organization level you know, it's profit per employee or revenue, right? Per worker.

And so, really starting to count these AI, you know, agents as digital workers. And not every agent's a digital worker. A digital worker really is delivering a specific outcome, not just doing a task. You know, it's an orchestrated it could have 50 agents inside of it. Our Bradley, our CEO's digital analyst or intelligence worker, he has 50 agents. So, you know, you got you have to kind of define, right? What is a worker? What is an agent? What's a generative tool? What's a you know, automated workflow? Those things look different, but you can start to look I think holistically of the business.

Okay, what is the profit per worker and what is the revenue? Because you can kind of break down am I scaling, right? Are we able to do more or not and are we seeing that growth long-term versus again man, credits are expensive. Time's expensive, you know, I think people are unaware that you might not want to be so quick to let go of your human headcount right now because the costs on the other side are also pretty enormous.

Lauren Esposito 21:51

Yeah, it depends. We have three types of digital workers. We have digital workers we've already built inside of our product, right? We have Rosa, she's a digital recruiter. So, that can be stood up quite quickly, especially if you're working inside of our recruiter suite, which is our ATS platform and has all the intelligence built in and it's exactly that. What other information does she need to be connected to if from an MCP perspective, but she's built. We have service digital workers. They're actually customers pay us to deploy them on our service accounts, right?

So, it's a business analyst who's actually sitting in the services agreement able to again cognitively understand roadmaps, issues, blockers, feedback in every weekly call, you know, people get sick, accounts have changeover, right? This the everything is connected and nothing is lost and that goes a long way with speed and productivity. So much in services can be tracking that information, coordinating with people, you know what I mean, making sure the gaps aren't there, so people can pay us to deploy this in a service engagement and they're already pre-built the way that Asymbl services, right?

And that's something. And the third is custom and that's where I think depending on what you need, again, every business needs different outcomes at different stages. And so, those are longer builds that we do have some foundations for. You're interested in Casey? Are you interested in Bradley, right? Are you We have an SDR agent Teddy on Agentforce. Of course, the legwork is there and we can move pretty quickly. But if there's something that you could dream up, then that's a different kind of scope and we're happy to lean in on that as well on the custom side.

Lauren Esposito 24:16

Yeah, I think you know, it used to be a human or software question, right? That we were faced with. And then you were locked into the software. The software came with its own UI, it came with its own integrations, right? Their customizations, but you're kind of locked in. That's not the case anymore, right? AI has kind of changed that game and especially when we start to see that people are surfacing technology in a lot of different ways and these MCPs are allowing for new types of user, you know, interfaces. So, I think the future is thinking about like configuration, again, orchestration a little bit.

Yeah, I hope digital workers catch a name, you know, in the future, but really businesses are I think going to be looking at you know, what individual AI offers us today is great, you know, on an individual level, it's cool, especially if you play with it in your personal life, you can get it to do great things. The repeatability, the you know, reliability, the trust is not there at the enterprise level and you can't just apply what you experience in individual AI to the enterprise, which is why people, like you said earlier, are locked down, slow to start.

And so it's about understanding the layers of that. That's why, you know, we've found like we love Salesforce. Our product is built on Salesforce, the platform is trusted, it's enterprise ready, the deterministic layer is there, we can control our workflows, we have security in our data, you know, we have visibility into things, this is great. The fact that they have the connections into Claude and other models, this is wonderful, how can we customize that to go even further because the intelligence and the agility, right, that exists in the AI capacity there is what we want to that deterministic layer.

And not everyone loves the Salesforce UI, not everyone loves the experience of what Agentforce is delivering, but the foundation is there and that's a good thing. And so it's about, I think, finding the right mix, right? You don't have to abandon, you need to keep that enterprise layer and that trust and security, how you build AI into it, but then the level of that is you're not locked into the UI. Now people can surface that where they want to work. Maybe you want all of your business to run in Claude and that's the interface you want to operate in, cool.

Maybe you want to do it in Slack, maybe you do want to do it in a Salesforce or a Microsoft. And so we have choice now, right, about how we want to yeah, bring these things together and ensure that with the layers, right, of that of the platforms and the tech stack are going to look different and I think we're going to have way more flexibility than we've ever felt before, which is kind of exciting.

Lauren Esposito 27:21

Yeah, absolutely. You can find me on LinkedIn, Lauren Esposito, but also visit us at asymbl.com. That's A-S-Y-M-B-L dot com.