I

was like, oh, wow.

I am literally on summer break.

I know.

we can celebrate our newborn.

Our first born was real little too.

So it's like, I'm just going to spend time at home.

It

Oh my goodness.

Because of the people and the food and the culture and the sunshine.

We went, my wife and I went for our honeymoon last year and it was like my favourite place on earth.

Okay.

Obviously the pizza and pasta.

Rachel would do pasta and I would do pizza every night and we'd share.

But we did a cooking class like up on the mountain in Amalfi that looked over the ocean one of the days and we made eight different dishes from this like Italian Nona and it was super cool and everything was authentic.

And that was kind of like my favorite experience there altogether.

How do you figure out a vertical? How do you, how do you apply Adobe? It's so broad.

[chuckles] There is a...

So the...

I'm gonna, I'm gonna cheat.

I'm gonna give you two.

So w- we have a free product, and so one of the things that you're... we're always struggling with now is, like, how do I make sure that I'm leveraging AI? I feel like anytime we have a problem, it's like, how can I use AI for this? It's kind of an open question that I think we're all pontificating.

One of those is, like, grabbing context so I can quickly load and build the best prompt possible.

How do you and Adobe think about the change in SaaS business models when it comes to, uh, billing or the usage of coding tools?

That's shiftparadigm.com. What's the one marketing job that you think became increasingly more valuable because of AI?

I, I think it's in our, in our analytics space where you are...

We call it an applied analyst, and there are these people that really understand and how, what is happening in a business, and they're able to explain it in really, really simple ways.

They make clear recommendations, they articulate what's happened, and with the proliferation of everybody having all of these capabilities and the ability to summarize, and everybody can write code, and everybody can analyze anything, that group that has some core principles around statistics and how things work and what is incremental and what is truth, they have become incredibly important because now everybody has a perspective that they've run through Claude.

What's the most overrated use of AI right now?

I think it is forward-looking projection.

I think that one of the things that we've seen historically is this, and it's this, this, this tension that exists right now on these platforms between the historical context that you've provided it, which we, we've loaded as much as we possibly can of all the context and everything that we know, and we ask them to pred- ask it to predict the future.

And I think oftentimes what you see when you start to do this over time is it only knows the context you provided, and it's trying to tell you things that you like.

So [chuckles] it is great at summarization.

It is great at synthesizing.

But I think when the question starts to shift into things l- that are more forward-looking, it really requires a, a human judgment on, on how to think about it.

How do you think about the, the projections when you're looking at what the, you know, the future of AI and the, the way that everybody's job is changing?

What do you do on a daily basis?

I think it's, uh, my kids ask the same question, and, uh, and I don't get two sentences in.

I think you do a lot of, you do a lot of listening, and I think you do ultimately, if you get really reductive, down to two different things.

My job is to try to create structure where often there isn't any.

Meaning, there's a reason we're going after this thing or defining a problem space to allow the organization to start to really get its head around it, because there's almost so many opportunities it can be a little bit disorienting.

And then helping to, to manage the change that you, that you've established with those, that new structure.

And between those two things, you're kind of vacillating between those two things all the time.

So how far down do you go? Are you actually like hands in code? I know you have an engineering background, but, uh, you know, are you looking, evaluating writing code, or you have people that are telling you the details of what's actually happening in the baseline?

Hey, I want to move on to our lightning round where I'm going to ask you some MarTech and AI growth related questions.

Are you ready? I am ready.

Okay.

How do you define what you do?

That's a great question.

I think at the end of the day, we're all about creating the digital experiences.

And that is what we're trying to do.

And we really think about how are we helping organizations either create and understand the digital experiences they're putting into the world, create new assets, create new art.

They blame AI

... it's a failure of vision.

It's a kind of a, right now it's a crutch.

We see some of these massive layoffs that are on the backs.

It's probably COVID over-hiring.

There was a bunch of other issues.

But to put it on the f- at the feet of AI for where it is today, it feels lazy.

How do you figure out a vertical? How do you, how do you apply Adobe? It's so broad.