Embracing change: AI's impact on business transformation

Jon Busby: Linda, welcome back to the Tech Marketing Podcast. Thank you. You were one of our guests on last year's Masters of B2B at the same conference. So it's a pleasure to have you back on. So you're the SVP of IT Digital Customer Experience at Siemens Healthineers.

Linda Brunner: Correct. You got that correct. It's a mouthful.

Jon Busby: It is a mouthful.

I'm intrigued. This year has been probably one of the most disruptive years, I think, in B2B marketing. In marketing as a whole, in fact, it's the whole, not just the economy, but with the impact of AI. From the last time we spoke, what do you feel has changed, Linda?

Linda Brunner: I think there is more and more focus, requirement for business impact in the space of data. Yep. Technology and measurement. And I thought it was so interesting this morning as Bob Lirici brought that out because he was getting everyone to look at the circle and yet focus in and that bottom right hand quadrant as he called it.

And that. Is what's really pushing us or challenging us, but also bringing out some opportunities for us.

Jon Busby: Yep. Yep. And I think that's a great way of putting it. I actually got a, had a chance to spend time with Bob yesterday and he mentioned. It's liberating almost, but we tend to talk about it being a bit of a challenge, but I think liberating is the best way of describing it.

Linda Brunner: And it's really bringing opportunity. It is tying in, though, with a lot of the other things that we've already heard and will probably hear over the course of the conference when it comes to doing more. With less or doing more with the same and with less, budgets are being cut. There are headwinds.

There are some tailwinds, but there are also headwinds from a business perspective and really understanding how your business ticks and where those levers are going to be. Is both the challenge, but then the opportunity that will come from it.

Jon Busby: I think the stats that Bob talked about this morning what he mentioned, 6.2% increase in sales productivity due to AI and a 7.2% decrease.

In marketing overhead. So it's like you say, it's both, it's an opportunity. It's an opportunity for us to reinvent ourselves, but we have to do it aligned with the business.

Linda Brunner: And it's a little scary, right? Because people are uncertain and anytime there's uncertainty, anytime there's more change coming around the corner.

Myself included, right? You start thinking, all right what does that do for me? What do I need to do next? Where do I need to flex out? Where will my team need to be? And again, we've heard the topics of upscaling. Or re skilling, re focusing, but we're leaning in and we're learning. And I think that's the key first step because just to jump in and try everything almost like a pepper spray, at least that wouldn't be what I would sign up for.

Coming in, understanding where it's going to make an impact, what that impact is going to be. Can you scale that and where does then the work together with the team bring even more for the business?

Jon Busby: Yep. I'm intrigued. So as a CTO, obviously I've been living and breathing this technology for a while.

Our conversation last year left a lasting impression on me, I think Linda, on the difference a B2B. Marketing leader can make I'm intrigued. What does your day to day look like? What does, what is your average week or day look like in order to drive that kind of change?

Linda Brunner: Meeting with the business partners and making sure that we are lockstep together, right?

In, in the infamous words of our CFO, there is no IT project. They're all business projects. And bringing That capability, moving the technology forward, enabling and facilitating the data workflows across the business, because in a organization of our size and complexity, there's a lot of silos also, and then connecting with the ambassadors that are embracing it and of all, it's measuring it, identifying in advance.

What is your target goal? And then being authentic and realistic, are we making it, do we need to adjust in order to reach that, or was it just something that we're not going to be able to do and where do we pivot and what do we do differently?

Jon Busby: I don't know if you had a chance to see, I think it was David's session yesterday, but he, obviously we both live in technology.

It was really stark how he put that slide up that mentioned that 70 20 10 model and just 20 percent is the technology from what you've just mentioned there. It agrees with what he mentioned, like 70 percent is the people.

Linda Brunner: And it's a hundred percent. We talk about bringing new technologies in.

Yeah. If you don't reinvent the processes and really look and challenge yourselves, are we going to do something different relative to what we did before? Then any platform or any technology that you wind up adding to it is not going to deliver to the expectations and the aspirations of what the business is trying to do.

And that's difficult place to be because. The technology is the tangible piece. So the focus is always right in on the tech. What else do we need to plug and play here? Yet just taking what we did in Excel sheets and bringing it into a technology is not going to have a bigger, better impact on where we're trying to go.

Jon Busby: It's not going to transform the business. It needs to be, it needs to be around the people, which is something that really left me a lasting impression on your. Experience with diversity and inclusion inside, inside Siemens. So let's continue that thread for a moment. We've talked about AI and its impact.

Like how do you think AI should be integrated into B2B marketing teams? You use the pepper spray analogy there. What's been your approach?

Linda Brunner: So our approach has really been learning first, right? So we've set up. Internal secure playgrounds, and then we've gone out to the business folks and working with them, letting them play, right?

Really setting it up as a playground and letting them play, but still ensuring that they're not That it's secure and they're not sharing inadvertently because it would never be maliciously our information X external, right? And then seeing where is it going to help the most without being a direct threat?

To the teams that are in place. So it's about enhancing and making people more productive. It's not talking about replacing certain things. And it's the same when like robotics, right? RPA came into play and all of those things, it's taking the. boring stuff and making that, automating that so that the colleagues can work more on the strategic topics.

Jon Busby: Yeah. I tend to put, think about that as augmented intelligence instead of artificial intelligence work. We're not replacing people. But you used the word threat there. That's a very emotional word for me. Is that something that you felt inside, inside Siemens?

Linda Brunner: I'm gonna say in some cases it was brought forth and verbalized.

In other cases, it was almost this feeling. Yep. As you Talk to folks, or as you bring out the technology, there's always those that are what I would call the front runners, right? And that the folk that the techies who want to try it, who have something new, you also need to make sure that the information is.

Real and accurate and tangible. And there's a lot of that we're still learning about, right? With artificial intelligence where, okay, how did it come up with those answers? And yet, you have the people to be able to validate that. And. There again, it was removing that or demystifying it so that people felt more comfortable.

We also have co pilot inside and we're setting it up because there's hundreds of use cases that are being brought forth. And yet, how do we make people more efficient and effective of what they're currently doing? Doing right. Installing the brand guidelines so that it is within the confines of what it is that we're trying to do.

Some of the biggest areas are going to be in service and we are trying it out on ourselves. So we've launched a chat bot, right? An AI chat bot for. employees for support, I. T. support, and we've had hundreds and hundreds now, thousands of uses of that. And it is delivering to some of the expectations that Bob also had up on his chart, right?

Customer satisfaction is actually increasing because our employees are getting answers much faster than if they opened a ticket, waited and went into a black hole and then they came back. And of course it's educating the AI because it's becoming more robust and then we're You know, big use cases are going to be customer service, of course content.

I think generation or augmentation of content generation, because the strategic, the conceptual around it needs to have a kernel of someplace to start. And then from there continuing to. Develop it or refine it, repurpose it, translate it is another big area. So training capabilities, both for our internal our employees, but then more so also for our customers with the equipment.

In their local language is another big space that we're looking into.

Jon Busby: You've just gone through so many use cases that I couldn't even keep up, which is how exactly the same challenge we've had here at Together as we've been on our AI journey internally. And in fact, I've just heard today, we've just trained half of our account teams this morning and just got some successful responses back.

We can do one thing, We found very helpful as we had to start with that playground approach, and then you use this word use case, like you need to really go down to that individual use case to understand how someone may utilize it on a day to day basis so that it is non threatening, but so it can also drive the value and the impact that it has across the business.

Is there any framework you've used or structure you've used to assess the impact that it's had internally?

Linda Brunner: Again, depending on what. The respective use case is we have looked to set up some KPIs. In some cases they were best guesstimates and others. They were structured similar to the way you set up any KPIs.

Then looking at those that are, leading versus lagging and how, where is it happening? And. As we then share those, which of them have those aha moments that then translate into other tangible, more tangible use cases. So we're still learning around that, but we're looking at it purposefully so that of course, all of these technologies require additional investment.

Jon Busby: Yes.

Linda Brunner: And for that additional investment, we need to make sure that. We are building on something that can be scaled and will then actually be used because right now it's a lot of new toys and Anyone with new toys, it's almost that bright, shiny penny, and you're after it, yet, where will it translate into real impact?

Jon Busby: I think that's the challenge that a lot of businesses are facing, right? I tend to look at my team and I describe us as magpies. We look for those new shiny objects, but we get excited about them because it's our job in innovation to be exploring. exploring how the difference they could make to the business.

We actually, we developed a framework which we call the three compasses, which sit around responsibility, is this going to impact people's jobs? How do we do that in a responsible way that, that drives the company forward? And then do we actually have the skills and actions to be able to execute on this as well?

What's been the best could you define like the best example where you've deployed AI and it's had a meaningful impact.

Linda Brunner: We have used it much earlier in our product development and pockets of the product development where it brings, depending on which product, so You know, I can't call out one specifically here yet where it will assist our customers in reassessing how they're using the product in their setting.

So that we have some real tangible results.

Jon Busby: So that's integrated into your products.

Linda Brunner: Into the products.

Jon Busby: I think that's one of the most difficult use cases to, to address, right? It's a product. It's, you've got a big. Productivity is easy, right? Productivity is meeting notes and making sure, you're adding those elements to reduce cost and get people to be more productive.

But adding it to your product that's a long term investment.

Linda Brunner: And it is, and I think that goes, it ties to the business that Siemens is in. They are, we are proud of being pioneers in innovation. And that's our mission. We're innovating health care for everyone, everywhere, sustainably.

And so if we can tie that in and deliver that to the health care providers who in turn Are you delivering that to their patients and making the patient experience much better? And we've had a huge group in the R and D area, the engineers from a software engineering, as well as from an R and D to focus on that and supercomputers.

We've got a place in Princeton that, so that's something now we need to bring it. To the other functions in the organization. And I think where we are starting to see some impact is in those, some key areas that I mentioned, right? So in a customer service environment in a self service environment within our employee base internally from a content generation or augmentation of content generation.

And then as well in. you know, sentiment analysis. And then ultimately, as we look from a portfolio perspective, as we continue to evolve and try to break through in the innovation space, in generation of a digital twin of a patient. That's the holy grail.

Jon Busby: You've touched on something there a few times.

You mentioned copilot earlier. We were also trailing copilot. We've got multiple pilots. I think we've got about 17 different trials. We're running across our small organization. Of course, you guys are a lot larger. I can imagine that would be quite a task to keep an eye on all of them, but one question I think every organization is going through is.

Do you build or do you. Like you mentioned this relationship with Princeton, like it's inside Siemens. Are you going through a mix? Like how have you approached that build versus buy? We have

Linda Brunner: a mixed approach to it. There is some and it depends. It depends on the use cases, right? Where we are buying and then augmenting.

Jon Busby: Yep.

Linda Brunner: And there are some that's just part of the number of patents that we have and the continued innovation and what the competitive advantage now for us, where it's about building and having it in house and having those patents and being able to build on. I think it's one of the

Jon Busby: biggest risks that many businesses have, right?

This, we're seeing a consolidation of power against literal handful of tech companies. And so I think it's important that we as businesses find a way that we can break that up and invest in order to drive that competitive advantage. I'm going to come back to KPIs actually, cause I'm just really intrigued about your answers here, Linda.

One thing I've learned is I like things to be quite binary okay let's put in everyone's time sheets and show you the time saving. But that's quite a lagging indicator. That's happening after we've rolled out AI, after it's had an impact. Have you found there to be any particular KPIs that have stood out, your board have looked at or your leadership have looked at and said, I can see how that's driving growth or driving a productivity gain, like it's anything that stood out for you?

Linda Brunner: It's a bit of a, it's a bit of a challenge because reality is we're still pretty early in the stages. I'm going to say some of the things that are the. Easiest to measure are the ones that we're going after. So efficiency gains, time savings is one freeing up time for our field organization to be out there, to spend more time with customers is one that we are looking to track.

For example, okay. Freeing up time for. You already mentioned it. Meeting minutes, efficiencies digging through knowledge bases that we have to bring to light what it is that we can use to engage our employees, but then also to ultimately Deliver faster product development or design capabilities.

And then some of the basics for any PNL is also productivity and savings. And where do relative to top line. Where's your bottom line?

Jon Busby: I think we've, what I found is the, I'd love to have a lot of quantitative measures that say this is the impact it's had, look how many million we're saving.

And we've taken approach of having an independent transformation monitoring team that monitor the progress that makes and can raise red flags if they're seeing behaviours that aren't in line with our values or in line with our business. But what we're finding is those qualitative measures, those quotes from an individual staff member that says, I just took something down from 40 hours to four hours are really what we're bringing the leadership around to say, this is the difference it's making.

Linda Brunner: And we're, we are equipping our leadership. Yeah. To have those same experiences because you can internalize that much faster when it's your own words that are bringing that forward.

Jon Busby: Completely agree.

Linda Brunner: Engaging with that the softer pieces, the more intangible pieces I agree. I had a quote on my whiteboard.

I may have mentioned it last year when we were chatting, but you can torture numbers long enough. They'll confess to anything. Balancing that measurement, if you don't measure it, you haven't done it and you don't really know, right? Yet looking at it. And I think that only from a numbers perspective in a space like this right now, I think will be more inhibitive than freeing.

Jon Busby: But you mentioned a couple of things there around product development. One thing I've noticed my team of developers is before you would always see quite a stark difference between a junior developer and a middleweight. And AI has just levelled that playing field. It's allowed junior team members, I think at every level, not just.

Not just software development to be up to speed faster, to make less mistakes, to get from A to BA lot quicker. Are you, do you think AI is helping to democratize the workforce, especially the younger generation, or do you see that as a bit of a risk?

Linda Brunner: I think there again, the jury's still out because there is.

Experience. Now I'm going to go to put my D and I had on, right? So people with different experiences from different perspectives, it doesn't matter. That's where ultimately innovation comes from. And there's always that component or aspect of reverse mentoring. When you have somebody that's more tenured and senior to somebody that's junior and the vice versa, right?

Because right out of school, it's, They're digital natives. They know much more about these technologies than we necessarily do. So yes, there is a certain amount of democratization across that, which is great because then together, those people can go then do the next thing. Are they going to have. No involvement with the development.

I don't see that happening, at least not in the near mid term where I do see is robustness in the development, the testing around it, the augmentation of all of that. I see that's where. This technology is going to help us get more efficient and ultimately more effective. Then

Jon Busby: I wanna dive into that, 'cause I wanna make sure I understand that properly.

So when you say robustness, what does, what do you mean? What, how, what does that, how does that manifest itself?

Linda Brunner: There's no technology in isolation, right? We have, I've gotta call it a spaghetti soup of technologies across our landscapes, our whole ecosystem, and they. Intricacies of making a change here and then going down the path and then domino effect to that, it's becoming more and more complicated to check that to ensure that when you have that next release that you haven't broken something in the process.

One maybe more places than one and that's what I meant by the robustness because AI is helping Look through all of that and being able to look again along the entire flow so that's where I'm coming from and being able to lift certain pieces of code certain capabilities that you have and stitch them together in essence is another key place.

So that's what I meant from that robustness.

Jon Busby: So how does that, cause you mentioned your DEI let's bring it to diversity completely agree. I think. It's absolutely key to have diversity across a number of different levels in order to drive innovation. How are you seeing diversity and AI kind of mold together?

Linda Brunner: More from the different experiences and bringing the functions together. Because prior to There were, there was a tendency to be more siloed, right? Marketing is looking at it with the lens of marketing. Sales is looking at it through their lens. Finance is looking at it through theirs. Our corporate communications colleagues are looking and, The capability across it is there's a realization that, Hey, when we work together, we can bring even more to the table and supplement and compliment it.

So the experiences and the piece about not only our own workforce, but then the community that we're in and how are we delivering then ultimately. How are we working with our customers together on some of these topics? And we are establishing long term. Relationships with some of those customers that are not only from the portfolio that we're putting in place with them, but helping from a workforce perspective because the healthcare industry is really challenged when it comes to that.

So helping them become more efficient and effective and serving their patients. And then in some cases, being able to make healthcare more efficient. Accessible. into a lot of communities and places, remote places, where it may not have been before. We've started on that journey. We still have a ways to go.

Jon Busby: So if I was to summarize that AI is definitely democratizing the workforce, but what you've mentioned there I think is even more powerful, which is it's breaking down many of the silos between, not just between departments, but between individuals, between teams, that allow us to find new ways to work together.

I think that's incredibly powerful as a message. Have you found healthcare is an incredibly trust based industry? And when we talk about artificial intelligence, I think there was an example from Google just last week where it, If you search for a certain element in the search generative experience, it told you needed to eat a certain amount of rocks, I believe.

There's, there's a risk that it will provide the wrong answers. Like, how are you dealing with the trust element of AI?

Linda Brunner: And that's why I mentioned that at the very beginning, right? Is bringing it in, making sure that it's secure. Making sure that we have confirmed and reconfirmed the answers before we allow that to go outside, because that, to your point, that would be an undermining in the health care space.

And, Aligning the business values, be it with DE& I access to care, it's a big piece for us and a big area to focus in on and partnerships that we're forging with other entities that are out there. And yet, if we, when we go out with it. We want to be 110 percent sure that it's not going to put at risk any information from a patient and a privacy perspective.

It's not going to put our customers, the healthcare providers, at any risk. But that's a, it's a give and take. And cyber security is a huge part of that. Peace now, and citizen development is a huge piece of that because AI. Hey, if we put that in the hands of any or every one of our employees, we all, in a sense, become a citizen developer yet.

How do we put the checks and balances around that? And partner. And it goes back to how we started the conversation. More and more focus is on true partnership between the business. And it, there's almost nothing that's done these days across the business that isn't connected in some way to it yet.

It can't be. That the it organization in and of themselves are a silo. We need to keep enabling. And yet the requirement from a business perspective is that we are ensuring we keep all of that secure, that it is robust, that the business can count and rely on us to keep them running on the. smallest individual building block all the way to some of these complex systems.

Jon Busby: I'm going to try not to be leading with this question because I'm really intrigued to know your response on this, but what do you think the biggest risk is when it comes to some of this new technology?

Linda Brunner: I think some of the risk is that potential exposure is probably the first. People relying on it as a given.

When it hasn't been proven yet. So the whole hallucination piece of it is still a big piece that we want to, right? We want people to be excited about using the new technologies. We don't know all of it ourselves. And yet we have to uphold the expectation of our customers. That it's

Jon Busby: secure. I think this is why I didn't want to be too leading.

Have you seen much resistance or either blockers in using it in your business? Has leadership putting blockers up or has employees placed any blockers to stop deploying or slow down deploying AI or even halt it completely?

Linda Brunner: We have not experienced that. I think the curiosity is still the piece that's driving it.

Healthcare in general. Very risk adverse. Okay. And I'm going to say our organization is really one of the underpinnings is top quality, right? We don't compromise on quality and upholding from a compliance perspective and security perspective and ensuring that the, from a regulatory and a legal.

That we are fully within what is expected.

Jon Busby: I think for me, that's as a, also as an innovation leader, that's an inspiring message to see. I think what I, we always advise our clients and hence why I've tried not to be leading with this question, Linda is one of the biggest risks that I think most businesses can face when deploying some of this new technology is to do nothing at all.

I think you need to make sure that you are. Moving forward and David mentioned it yesterday, there are strategic risks to not thinking about putting this into your organization, because if you don't, your competitors will. So it's inspiring to know that even in risk averse industries that, we are still finding ways to move forward.

But to do so in a very responsible way.

Linda Brunner: Yeah. And that's what it has to be. It has to be responsible. Yet. If you look at any of the, hype cycles the Gartner hype cycles, the growth of this in the time since you and I chatted last is just, it's phenomenal, right? Has it, have all the kinks been worked out yet?

No. No. And that's why we're. We're looking to our employees to help us. And it's a unique opportunity for us as an organization to be prepared for what may be around the corner. Do we have a crystal ball? No. Yet we're driving topics strategically and we would be remiss if we didn't look into these different technologies and see how they could be used.

Jon Busby: And it's a, it is something that's at the tip of all of our tongues at the moment, but let's talk more about the ANAs and the B2 awards of which of course you're a juror. If if I'm, if I remember that correctly do you find that the principles advocated on stage each year are truly put into practice for success?

Linda Brunner: Yes. Yes. Yes. And what I'm proud to say is that. The judging of those awards has evolved over the time that I've been involved with it.

Jon Busby: Okay. So how long have you been a juror for the year?

Linda Brunner: For the last five or six years as one of the top jury. And what's great about that is that we have been very open about what good looks like and how we would assess good And keep challenging ourselves, as well as the ANA, to bring some of those aspects into the judging criteria, and then also hold ourselves accountable to provide some concrete feedback as to who What we saw as really good and where there may have been some opportunity to make that entry even more robust.

Jon Busby: Would you say it's accelerated over those five years? Cause if we think about the change we've had, that was that you must have just joined just before COVID. We had COVID which shook up the entire world, not just B2B marketing. And then of course we've now got AI. Would you say you've seen an acceleration or has it been a bumpy ride?

Like how would you describe the last five years and how that has changed?

Linda Brunner: I'm gonna say there've been maybe some Bumps in it, but in general, it keeps moving up. Okay. And why am I saying that there's also what's helped working together with the ANA is to clarify some of the criteria.

And clarify some of the, there's so many different topics that you can submit an entry into and what differentiates some of those topics, because there are some that will submit entries into five different categories because it applies here, but it can also apply there. And when we get into the topics for the top jury to deliberate on, we really want to make sure.

That we're upholding that responsibility, that this is a topic and a top winner we've challenged ourselves sometimes, should there be a winner in a particular category? Or should those entrants be better? Those entries be better served in a different sub category where there's a better fit for it.

Jon Busby: Which I think shows the evolution of how those awards have, how those awards have changed. Have you seen any new categories come out as a result of some of this disruption?

Linda Brunner: With the advent of all these new technologies, there are always new categories that come into play. And then I'm going to say one of the, and we started hearing about it a little bit.

And I think the next place that we can start looking at as we move forward, yes, marketing. Predominantly from brand to demand, but even the last speaker right before I came in here from Xerox, right? She was talking about changing that, expanding that, looking at it. We ourselves within our organization are looking at it as that the infinity loop, right?

Our customers are coming in and out, be it from The beginning from awareness into loyalty, a lot about the install base and are we continuously engaging and delivering satisfactorily to their expectations? Do we lose some along the way? So I think this this sort of infinity loop of brand to loyalty.

It's going to be a space where marketing can continue to evolve and to deliver towards expectations. I

Jon Busby: think I agree. I think we saw some funnels yesterday. We like to see a funnel cause it's a nice easy way to distil that customer journey down. But I think we are at the, we had a shift in how we might be thinking about this, how we might be thinking about how we engage customers.

So no, completely agree. Linda, it's been a pleasure having you on the Tech Marketing Podcast again. I'm going to ask you one final question. Same question we had last year. Okay. In five words or less, what advice would you give a future CMO?

Linda Brunner: Drive for impact and outcomes.

Brilliant. Five words.

Jon Busby: Thank you very much for having me here.

So no, thank you very much for joining us again, the Tech Marketing Podcast. Hopefully we'll see you again next year.

Linda Brunner: All right. Sounds good. Thank you for having me.