Insight ON You Bought the AI License. Now What?

Audio transcript:

You Bought the AI License. Now What?

Jillian Viner (00:02):

Welcome to InsightOn. Most leaders already know that buying AI tools and actually transforming how their organization works are two very different things. What's harder to admit is that the gap between those two things is usually a people problem, not a technology problem and closing that gap is harder than most of us realize. This week we're talking to people who took that problem seriously and did something about it from a strategic framework for driving real adoption to a company that gamified learning and built a platform from scratch because nothing off the shelf is going to cut it. If you're responsible for getting your organization to actually change how it works and really integrate AI, this week was made for you.

John Veltri (00:46):

The best way to get your organization moving in AI or in general as a leader is to lead by example. I think what we're not seeing enough of is having leaders of an organization say, "I'm going to go use this tool and I'm going to build a forecasting tool for my team. I run a sales team. I'm going to go build a forecasting tool using Gemini that circumvents the hour long meeting that we have every Monday that can be soul sucking sometimes. How do I get that work removed and how do I put that in practice so that the people that work for me see me leading in this way to say, I'm going to take a risk. I'm going to be ... " What's the word I look for? Like a psychological safety net. I'm going to use that psychological safety net and show that there's a level of vulnerability to try, test and verify and make mistakes or find successes.

And if your employees or your team members, they see a leader doing that and willing to take those risks knowing that it's a good thing to risk and potentially fail, but fail fast and move forward and find non-failures. I think that's the best way you can lead in this environment.

Jillian (01:59):

There's a perspective that leading AI means buying the right tools, sending the announcement email, and then kind of just like waiting back and waiting for transformation to happen. And John Veltry would like to have a word with that perspective. Welcome to Insight On. I'm Julian Viner. My guest today is John Veltry, Managing Director of Insights Google AI Go-to-Market. John has spent eight years at Google before joining Insight and he spent the last several years helping organizations bridge the gap between deploying AI and actually embedding it into the way that people work, which turns out to be much harder and more of a human problem than most leaders expect. He has a very specific framework for how to do it right and a very clear point of view on what the role leaders themselves need to play in making it stick. All right, let's go. Well, John, thanks for being here.

John (02:49):

Thank you for having me.

Jillian (02:50):

Before we dive into this conversation, give me just a little bit of background on you. Where do you come from? Where's your area of expertise?

John (02:56):

I run the AI go- to-market for Insights Google solution line. I've been a part of, well, which was SADA, so I've been a part of that business for over four years. Prior to that, I had a cup of coffee somewhere in between, but before that I spent about eight years at Google. And when I was at Google, I did everything from GCP sales and services, but the predominant focus of what I did and ran there was the Google workspace practice, go to market and sales.

Jillian (03:26):

So John, a lot of organizations are investing in AI tools like Gemini. They're putting licenses in front of their teams. How do they make sure that that investment doesn't stop at the license? How to make sure that the utilization is what they expect?

John (03:39):

Right. I think what we're seeing is organizations are doing exactly that. They're buying the platform, they're buying the service, they're handing it to their employees and they're saying, "Go off and use this as you think you're best suited." It's search, it has some better answers to it. And I think that's great. They get use out of it. But what we really want to do is we want to make sure that that use is accelerating fundamentally the way the business is operating. And what we're looking to partner with on Google using our best practices around organizational change management is ensuring that we're not just educating people on how to use it, but we're defining use cases that can be impacted by agentic workflows, that we're looking for that optimization between different platforms and different databases within the technology ecosystem that the customer has to ensure that we're helping drive not just adoption, but optimization for the business as whole, finding those use cases that can accelerate whatever department it is, whether it's legal, human resources, finance, sales, finding new areas to impact the business and grow through this technology, not necessarily just deliver time saving efficiencies, but actually drive revenue or drive scale.

I think that that's how we can get the most out of the product.

Jillian (05:02):

That's the exciting part anyway. Absolutely. See what it can

John (05:05):

Do. Search is search and being able to look something up and just get a more intelligent answer is a great initial outcome, but having that aha moment, which is different from person to person, department to department on, wow, this really made me a more intelligent employee who can do something faster and do something better, whether it's research a customer, respond to an email, produce a better spreadsheet, create a better presentation. It really gives you, when you have that moment, you start to realize that this is an inflection point on our careers, on any sort of industry, on the technology, and it's truly going to impact how every business operates in a positive way.

Jillian (05:50):

They've made the decision to invest in the technology. They put it in the hands. How do you get from here's the thing to, okay, it's actually making an impact.

John (06:00):

Sure. So our business focuses predominantly on that, right? How do we work with Google to ensure that when something is purchased in their business, whether it's a SaaS product like Gemini Enterprise or Google Workspace or using the technology that they built to build applications and services on GCP, not just that the technology works because it does work. And we need to go through the implementation and make sure that there are areas of the solution that work with whatever that organization is integrating it into, but then making sure that if I hand you something, you're understanding how to use it. We call it organizational change management or that's the team that we use that delivers it. And going through that process of not just handing a product to a customer, but going through the process and due diligence with them while they're evaluating the service that helps us evaluate them.

And we want to know who your stakeholders are, what your lines of business decision makers are, what intricacies do you have that's unique to you as a business? Because if we do a deployment, we're working with a customer on adopting a new technology, 85% of every organization uses it the same way. It's that additional 15% that makes you as an enterprise you, and we have to make sure that we hit that additional 15% so that we're training people the right way, we're finding the workflows, we're building the culture aspect because it is a significant transformation that every organization is attacking right now, whether it's looking at their collaboration and their productivity tools or figuring out how they can build agentic workflows into their processes and that has an impact downstream on how employees feel when they go to do their job, how they feel valued, what kind of access do they have, putting that mutual shared model together, I think that it's incumbent upon every organization to make sure that they're looking at that and not just evaluating, do the bits and bytes of the technology solve a technical problem.

Jillian (08:03):

Yeah. You mentioned agent orchestrations. A lot of companies are kind of chomping the bit because agent is like the word of the year for 2026. It

John (08:12):

Is.

Jillian (08:12):

Is there an order of operations that organizations need to consider once they get the technology in place? Do you have to master a certain percentage or of adoption rate with just general use before you can go to agents or is it just ... I don't know. How do you assess that?

John (08:31):

It's a good question. I think the way we're digesting the problem statement, which is, and it's akin to something you asked earlier. So here's the thing, here's a product and the product can do a lot and that a lot is unique to every organization depending on how they want to use it and how they want to engage with that agent, which is essentially whether you want to use the term digital twin or a digital employee, but it's a new part of your organization that can accomplish goals and tasks and become a productive piece of your day-to-day.

We've seen organizations adopt these technologies and make that leap to this panacea of, "Hey, we would love to have this agent talk to this agent and find these efficiencies and everything that we're hearing about and reading about, we want to get to that beautiful end state." And I think oftentimes we're seeing that some of the basic fundamental grounding that an organization has to have around how to use the tool gets missed. So when we're looking at this strategy, this launchpad of how we're taking customers from point A to point Z or wherever they want to go, the way we're digesting the problem is saying, "Here's the thing, here's a tool in the sense of this conference that we're at today, here's Gemini Enterprise or here's Google Workspace." We want to make sure that we are starting with the employees and training them on, here's where you find the tool, here's how you use it, here's how you build a gem, here's how you share a gem, here's where you use a shared gem.

Jillian (10:03):

Foundations.

John (10:03):

Foundational approaches to education on how to use the product because as we're going through that, then we're uncovering organically different security and governance vulnerabilities, different areas we can use customer success tools. Are there opportunities for us to implement other Gemini enterprise, agentic platform, that's the new term, capabilities that underpin the solution. And as we're going through this, we're finding these other areas that we know we can fine tune the foundation so that as the solution launches, we don't uncover some of these things that could become problem statements for an organization and have to peel back the move into this new agent world. And again, as we're doing that, whether we're using Insights Prism tool or just coming up with conversations organically, now we're moving into a phase where we're discovering, here's the third party connectors that we built, here's the MCP tooling that we're using to connect into other platforms and databases.

Here are the agents that are going to be the most efficient for this line of business or this department. And we have a problem steam that we can solve for at the end, which is we trained your users, we found these vulnerabilities or areas of improvement and foundation. And at the end, we know that these are the agents that are most obvious to find the highest level of return on your investment or efficiencies for your business and we're not jumping straight to something that we haven't done any due diligence on. And I think if we take that pragmatic approach and it's not a domino approach, it is overlapping or concentric circles or whatever visual you want to apply to it. I think if we take that measured strategy, we end up with a significantly higher adoption rate and those employees then start to become citizen developers might not necessarily be the right word, but they become more bought into the strategy and they start to improve the way the organization works.

Because we train them the right way, they start to find agentic workflows that they can add. They start to find other areas for product improvement and integration and it becomes a much more shared risk model or a shared growth model than us just to trying to apply our deployment strategy and integration strategy that we've used repeatedly. It's a much more collaborative model.

Jillian (12:11):

Yeah. It's so different from any other software that you bring into a company where just learning how the software works, you're really showing the functionality and then letting people kind of take the software where it can go to help them and their functions.

Speaker 3 (12:26):

Right.

Jillian (12:26):

I want to ask you about timelines because there is certainly a pressure out there to move fast and everybody feels behind. When you talk to customers, tell me truthfully, what is the expectation that they have about, okay, buy the license tomorrow, right, get in their hands the next day, when can I see a return on my investment? What is your expectation there?

John (12:50):

I think the relationship is much more beneficial if we sit down with customers and say, "What we really want to do is we want to stay with you for six months or 90 days." And in that period of time, we're going to address the problem statement and come up with this rapid adoption or as fast as we can to find value benefit, but we also want to stay with you to ensure that those practices we put in place stick,

But that we're also around and we're working together on this shared model of responsibility so that as releases come out as things change, we're still with you to adopt. A great point is if you went back to this conference last year or even last summer, not even a year ago, everybody wanted to talk about prompt engineering. How are we going to sit down with a customer and teach them how to prompt so that they know how to work with agents? That's not even a thing anymore. Use that example to say, if that was the focus of what we were doing for an organization or a customer of ours around an Agentic solution and we did that as a single engagement over a period of a month, we would be going back to that customer now a couple weeks later saying, "Hey, we know we trained you on how to do this, but the ecosystem and the products have evolved in such a way so fast that we actually need to revisit the strategy around how you would use these tools." And I think if we can come up with a much more consultative approach or customers are willing to take us on as a much more consultative approach to sit with them and make sure that we're growing and developing together as they adopt, I think we end up in a much better place by using this Launchpad framework that we've got.

Jillian (14:35):

So I agree with that. Everything is changing so fast. It's in some ways frustrating, in some ways very exciting because I find that a lot of times there's a problem that you have to solve and it's like, if you just wait a day, the labs are going to solve it for you. If that's the case, where do you kind of point clients to measure success as they go? Are you pointing them to look at adoption rates? Is it that they need to put down some sort of metrics around productivity, which we know notoriously is just hard to measure. It's more of a vibes metric than anything else. So how do they know that things are going? This is a big investment

John (15:16):

In the short term, we are focused on adoption rates. We know that it is something that we are very strong at in terms of making sure if I have to educate you and bring you into a new environment and integrate it into your workflow and make it something that's akin to second nature, we're really good at that and we know that if we're focusing on adoption rates and we bring your adoption to 75%, 85% across your organization, that the utilization is going to organically yield new opportunity and new capability. I think if we want to look at not necessarily how your employees are working on something but measure success in terms of time saved or return on your investment, I think it's a bad answer, but I think it's more dependent on what the use case is, what the customer's trying to apply it to, the different department.

Are they using it in legal? Are they using it in human resources? Are you using it in sales? If we're looking at what we can measure, we're trying to measure the productivity gains, or not necessarily the productivity gains, but the utilization of the tool for productivity gains. Yeah.

Jillian (16:34):

At the beginning, you said that a lot of organizations utilization is low. What is the reason for that? How can we help organizations speed adoption?

John (16:43):

I think I might've said this earlier, but one of the main things that we want organizations to do and one of the ways we're approaching the problem statement is we want to focus on our ability as a business, as insights business to educate, train and develop the employee use cases so that it becomes part of their daily workflow and it becomes something that we've built into the process. We want to make sure that we're not surprising anybody or employees aren't surprised with the tools that they've been handed and we want to take them through this transformative process that becomes part of second nature so that they know,

Hey, if I have to go do some contract due diligence, if I throw all of my customers contracts into Notebook LM, that's how I have an opportunity to just ask it some questions and quickly find efficiencies and utility out of it. And that becomes that repeatable process or it becomes that viral moment within an organization where you're saying, "Hey, I learned how to do this the other day. Insight showed me the way to use this tool that is going to help save me a certain period of time." That then becomes the impetus for other people in the organization to grow and adopt. And I think if we stick on that strategy, we find a greater level of adoption.

Jillian (18:15):

So you think it's more of understand the use case over fear? I mean, you've shared with me before this alien analogy, which you loved.

John (18:24):

Yeah, I think if summer movies are coming out, there's always alien flicks and I was thinking about it. If we're in Las Vegas, if a spaceship landed on the strip right after our conversation, I think people would have a really hard time with that moment of their life. But I think the analogy behind it is if somebody told you today aliens are real and they're going to be here on July 1st and then in a week from now they introduced you what they look like and then a week after that, what they sound like and they gave you a background and a history on it, would it still be a moment that would be jarring? Yes, but you would also have that level of preparedness for it. I think AI is kind of like that in the corporate space or in the enterprise space. If you are just handing someone a tool that they've never used before and you're not preparing them correctly for how to use it, what to expect from it, you can run into both low levels of utilization and adoption, but you can also run into problems, right?

You can run into security practice issues, you can run into data leakage, you can run into other vulnerabilities that as a shared community, the employees don't necessarily know how to use. And as long as we're taking that opportunity to show them the power of what the tools can do, show them how they have to be best prepared to not use it in a way that becomes either less efficient or dangerous isn't the right word, but introducing additional risk into the organization around how to share information, what to look it up, how to question it and answer. If you go through that in that scaled approach or that pragmatic strategy that builds off top of a foundation and grows, I think you get a much more collaborative engagement. I think you get a much more prepared workforce and I think the customers find a level of excitement in it as opposed to a level of trepidation and fear of something new.

Jillian (20:31):

Let's leave listeners with a role model. What's something that you've seen a leader do that you wish all leaders would do? It could be something small.

John (20:39):

A leader.

Jillian (20:40):

Yeah.

John (20:42):

I think that we could talk about it just as a general question or even specific to this. I think the best way to get your organization moving in AI or in general as a leader is to lead by example. I think what we're not seeing enough of is having leaders of an organization say, "I'm going to go use this tool and I'm going to build a forecasting tool for my team. I run a sales team. I'm going to go build a forecasting tool using Gemini that circumvents the hour long meeting that we have every Monday that you can be soul sucking sometimes." How do I get that work removed and how do I put that in practice so that the people that work for me see me leading in this way to say, "I'm going to take a risk. I'm going to be ... " What's the word I'm looking for?

Like a psychological safety net. I'm going to use that psychological safety net and show that there's a level of vulnerability to try, test and verify and make mistakes or find successes. And if your employees or your team members, they see a leader doing that and willing to take those risks knowing that it's a good thing to risk and potentially fail but fail fast and move forward and find non-failures. I think that's the best way you can lead in this environment and show your people that it's okay to test and learn and grow and fail, but fail fast and find improvements and find wins because I only know so much and the only way we move fast is if everybody has an opportunity to grow with each other. And I think that's the best way a leader can lead in this market or this environment.

Jillian (22:28):

Great advice.

John (22:29):

I hope so.

Jillian (22:30):

John, thank you so much for your time today. It was great. Thank

John (22:31):

You. I appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Speaker 3 (22:33):

Thanks for listening to this episode of Insight On. If today's conversation sparked an idea or raised a challenge you're facing, head to insight.com. You'll find the resources, case studies, and real world solutions to help you lead with clarity. If you found this episode to be helpful, be sure to follow Insight on, leave a review and share it with a colleague. It's how we grow the conversation and help more leaders make better tech decisions. Discover more at insight.com. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are of those of the hosts and the guests and do not necessarily reflect on the official policy or position of Insight or its affiliates. This content is for informational purposes only, should not be considered as professional or legal advice.