100+ Episodes: Reflections & Future Directions

Tessa Burg: Hello and welcome to another episode of Leader Generation, brought to you by Mod Op. I’m your host, Tessa Burg, and I’m back again with Cheryl Boehm, my co-host. Some of you may not know, but Cheryl is an OG on Leader Generation. She has been a voice on the podcast in the past, but she is behind every single episode that we’ve produced since 2019, which is quite nuts.

Cheryl Boehm: Yes, I can’t believe that we started this podcast in 2019 and I remember distinctly when you came to me and said, hey, we’re gonna do a podcast. I was like, hmm, yeah. Okay, Tessa, we know nothing about podcasts, so it has been quite a journey and we’re over a hundred episodes now, which is just incredible and it’s a little hard to believe too. And not all our listeners have been listening since the beginning, so I think it’s a great opportunity to rewind and take a minute and give a little bit of background of where the podcast started and where it’s going. So if you could just touch on what your initial thoughts were back in 2019 when you said, let’s start a podcast and what kind of your dreams and aspirations for the podcast work. That would be great.

Tessa Burg: Yeah. And I will do that, but I also say, just so people keep listening, in case you think that’s boring, we’re gonna move right into where the podcast is going, which I’m equally excited about. But yes, in 2019 this came out of the pandemic and a lot of our clients were put in a position where they had to make a decision on the spot, what to do with their marketing budgets. And in that moment and in those weeks where there was so much uncertainty, I learned so much from our clients. And I remember Linda Owens was our very first guest from Nestle Professional and she is an incredible leader. And our subject on that episode was about how do you manage up? ‘Cause I was so impressed with the bravery and the stance that she took in continuing to market and serve their clients, even when so much uncertainty was taking place. And that’s really what the podcast was all about, is how do we learn from our clients. How can we continue to exchange information with them? And the original name was Rapid Testing, which was a process we developed to get to the answers faster. And we quickly found that talking about just testing was really limiting and didn’t really meet the vision of learning from clients and building a client community. And so we pivoted to Leader Generation, because what we were doing was talketing to leaders, not talketing. What we were doing was talking to leaders, gathering their insights and allowing those insights to power and inspire other episodes. We learned a lot and we were biweekly. Now we’re weekly. And the reason being, one, Mod Op is a much bigger company and we have a lot more clients that we wanna hear from. We cover a lot more industries and it’s incredible to learn what trends are happening in specific industries, but also then see that macro level across industries and across the client landscape as to where there are shared challenges and shared concerns. And one of those shared challenges and concerns is AI. And so we’re going to be introducing the AI Playground as part of this podcast moving forward and I’m just super excited to not just continue to learn from our clients, but to give that information back and give them what’s new and what’s next in the AI technology landscape.

Cheryl Boehm: I am so excited about the playground. I mean, I think as you said, we’ve covered so many different topics throughout our hundred episodes, but we’ve been focusing so much lately on AI, because it is impacting our business and marketers, like, no other technology. It feels like. And it’s just evolving so rapidly. and it’s just evolving so rapidly. and the chance to really experiment with AI.

Tessa Burg: Yeah. And the playground came out of the AI Council and you’re also an original member of the AI Council.

Cheryl Boehm: See.

Tessa Burg: And we started, I don’t wanna say started slow, you know, with the AI Council, we were pragmatic. It was all about responsible use and governance in the front. And we won’t hammer that since it’s like every other episode recently, ’cause it’s that important. But the feedback we got is we’re not moving fast enough and talk about the value of transparency and building trust. We have so many team members that after they got a taste of what AI could do for their careers, for the value that they deliver to clients like we want more. And so the AI Playground came out of our app evaluation process. And Cheryl, tell me a little bit about, I mean you were in the very first app evaluation. What was your experience in the council in evaluating apps?

Cheryl Boehm: So the first app that we evaluated was Grammarly, because we found a lot of people were asking for it. And so we were like, well, is it providing value? Is it worth actually investing the time and energy into using this? Is it gonna give us value? And we pulled together individuals from all kinds of different departments. So we had, you know, media, creative, and then we had, we have a office in Panama, who are, you know, Spanish is their first language. And so we had, you know, that lens on it as well and pulled all these people together and we all did this trial of Grammarly. And it was fascinating how polarizing, some people loved it, some people hated it. And we really discovered that it came down to use cases and we were able to uncover who was gonna get the most value out out of it. So rather than like rolling out licenses to the entire agency, you know, we’re at 400 plus or whatever now, we rolled it out to the people who really were gonna get the most value. And so it really, was great because we were also able to put guardrails and we were allowed to test it and play with it in an environment that was set up by our IT and tech team so that we knew what we were putting into it and everything wouldn’t, you know, cause any issues. As you said, you know, we’ve been talking a lot about governance, so we had that flexibility to try it out and play with some guardrails in place, which I think was really important.

Tessa Burg: Yeah, I’ll never forget that first feedback meeting. I was so blown away by the diversity of perspectives and emotions and yay, nay votes. And it really became the catalyst for coming up with the risk management framework and our levels of adoption and accepting that one, all AI has risk. And two, not everyone is gonna use every tool. We’re very different than how we used to manage our technology stack in the past. We felt like, well we have this, we can only have one project management software platform and everyone’s gonna do this. And we do still have a core stack. And so in parallel it made us step back and say, how well have we even evaluated our core stack? Because AI is being built into everything. Yes, there are 67,200 AI apps available right now and that’s daunting. But it also made me realize like how does this compare to Copilot? Like how does this compare to what we already have in the tech stack that we’re gonna continue on to make sure that we as a business do have centralized technology that scale and and secure. But it also made me realize we’re not going to have the one stacky diagram like we used to.

Cheryl Boehm: Yeah, exactly. And I think it’s also interesting because, you know, you have your early adopters who really, they’re like, I need this AI, I need this technology. And this also gave us a chance to have some of those people tested out who were like adamant about needing it. And then once they tried it, they’re like, hmm, you know what, this really isn’t as beneficial to me as I thought it would be. So it has also helped prevent some waste, I guess, you know, investing in some licenses and stuff that people thought they needed, but then they use once and it just sits there. So that’s been a huge benefit as well.

Tessa Burg: Yeah, I agree. And as the head of IT, eliminating waste is one of my favorite things to do. Yes it is. It’s been massive and I’m excited too to give our clients more visibility, because though we started the Grammarly evaluation to see if it was worth it and to sort of stave off just giving everyone a license for everything because that was, you know, getting all those requests, it was starting to feel very overwhelming. And we were at the time, I mean this is over two years ago, still trying to figure out how we’re gonna put in controls to monitor responsible use. Now where we’re at is we’ve realized, it’s helped with adoption. The more people we’ve brought into the fold, we started with 14 people in the AI council. Now we’ve had over 200 participate in different AI Council evaluations and initiatives. That is the adoption, the willingness to participate in evaluations, the excitement to receive training, to learn how to do better, has taken off. And I’ve been so pleasantly surprised and just something we couldn’t have predicted. And that’s what I’m excited about with the playground is we know clients right now are also feeling just as overwhelmed as we did, what do I do with all this tech? What’s the right app for me? How will this impact my team’s role? And we mentioned this in the agent conversation that we’re starting to do audits to help create those roadmaps for our clients and their business. And we want the AI Playground to be that inspiration that we got from it and start, you know, first and foremost with transparency. ‘Cause transparency builds trust. And if you see what we’re testing and how we’re using it, then you will feel more confident. Either try it for yourself or allowing us to use it on your behalf, because client communication, client transparency is so important. The other thing it does, which I don’t think enough, just people in general, agencies or clients side alike, don’t start with, is the use cases. So we are going to have the AI Playground the podcast episode. So when you’re continuing to listen to Leader Generation, if it’s an AI Playground episode, you might hear two to three people giving quick reviews on the app that they tested, what they liked about it, what they didn’t like about it, how it compared to other apps, and give it a score, maybe whether or not they plan on using it going forward and where they think would be most useful. Core to those episodes are gonna be the use cases. And the more clients see those use cases and see the value and benefit of applying AI to their existing workflows, that creates inspiration and it also allows them to more easily baseline where they are today so that they can measure the value of using AI in their workplace moving forward. The third thing that I think is Mammoth, is it gives our clients a view into one of the data pipelines we use to inform our thought leadership reports. We’re gonna be releasing AI app report in 2024 and we’ll be refreshing our AI reports ongoing using our own data, which comes from our use of our technologies, our products. It also gives another feedback loop into our innovation. So as we’ve been testing these apps, like any company, we have a specific vision on where we see going. We, you know, we imagine that Mod Op is going to become more strategic, more experiential. We are going to be able to give clients an unfair advantage by offering them extensions of the innovation and tech that we build and working it into their own client tech stack to accelerate their performance. And that is different from other agencies. There are lots of agencies that are more niche and their innovation roadmap is gonna look a lot different than a Mod Op innovation roadmap where we are more full service. And you can see, I think you’re gonna see, like we talked about the agent suite, where these agents came from based on the gaps that we’re seeing in applications, because part of our modern engine is select curated applications. Part of it is select curated data, but a large part of it is the data we have in the innovations that we’ve built and how we’ve tied that together to accelerate campaign creation, delivery and performance. So I think when we put out the AI Playground, while we’re not giving any of our IP away, and you know, I don’t think they’re trade secrets, you were definitely going to better understand why we’re building what we’re building and the value that it can bring to our clients. And that makes me, you know, it’s all, I guess comes back to that trust and transparency. We’re excited to do things for our clients, but what we need to do is make sure that, you know, we’re an open book in what we’re doing, the use cases that it can solve and the value it can create.

Cheryl Boehm: Yeah, absolutely. And I have seen firsthand the benefit of the a AI Playground and have just really enjoyed testing new apps, seeing which ones really help me in my own workflow and become more strategic. And you listed out how that translates into benefits for our clients, but if our clients want to get involved in the AI Playground, is there a way for them to do that?

Tessa Burg: Yes, I’m glad you asked that question. So one, I hope that they talked, if they’re an existing client, I hope they talk to their account managers and ask about a specific app. Or what we’ve actually seen more often is clients like an app, but a lot of apps have too high risk right now. And I’m not sure, if that’s gonna change, when it’s gonna change. But there is definitely a way to create benefits in a way that is custom to the client. And, you know, we have a mono, we have Mod Op strategic consulting. We have the resources that can help you address your use cases in a way that is safe and secure for your brand and your data. So I hope that there are questions asked. I hope clients come to account managers and say, I wanna solve these use cases or I want to use that app. Can you take a look at my business and tell me where I could best use that and how that would help me evolve my team and help us meet our goals at the end of the day. The other thing is to request us to review apps on their behalf. I know a lot of clients are still in a space because they’re at, I mean we work with some of the largest brands in the world, so I’m not even, this is definitely not a slight, like I completely understand that being in IT at one of the largest companies in the world, with tons of data, is way harder than being IT at Mod Op. But they might not have the ability to have an AI Playground on the client side. And so yeah, ask us to test apps on your behalf. We’re certainly happy to do that, and again, happy to help guide you on where that fits in your landscape, or you know, if it doesn’t. That value equation that you mentioned earlier has been so eye-opening. It’s like, yes, not all AI is equal or is good for you, good for your business, ’cause it’s an investment. So we have to measure the ROI in order to understand what we’re truly getting and if it’s adding value to our customers. And then the third way clients can be involved is be a guest. So we don’t have to talk about AI all the time, we don’t even have to talk about apps. But I do think that as you’re following the podcast, as you’re following the AI Playground, you might have an experience that Cheryl and I have had, which is you start feeling way more human and you start realizing the value and strength of your own strategic thinking and leadership. And when we take, as we started to create our own agents and use apps, it’s taken a lot of this mundane work off. And I’ll say the idea for the AI Playground probably came from just having more time to think strategically. So if you are a strategic marketing leader and you are realizing sort of the power of your expertise, the power of what it means to be a good leader, I know a lot of CMOs now are taking on more growth roles, they’re becoming more financially minded and they’re getting, they have time now to step and get that higher level lens of what do we need to invest in to get us to high growth. And it’s been fascinating because that’s not a seat a lot of CMOs have had in the past. So I’m excited to interview clients who are already starting to step in to that strategic role. We interviewed one a few weeks ago about brand and if people haven’t listened to the past episodes with our clients, I highly encourage you to, it’s a nice break from AI, but the the relationship is that that’s what we’re aspiring to do as humans, is to think at a higher level, to solve bigger problems and in solving those problems, bring better experiences for our customers.

Cheryl Boehm:  Absolutely. I think learning from each other has been one the biggest benefits of the podcast. And we’ve had so many great guests over the last a hundred episodes. And so we’ve talked, you know, a little bit about the past, a little bit, you know, of the future with the AI playground. What else do you see happening? What are your aspirations for the next 100 episodes for Leader Generation?

Tessa Burg: Yeah, my aspiration is to not be on so many episodes. We did the Asian episode, just the two of us, we’re doing this one. And I’m excited for more voices to be on the podcast. I think clients are really gonna enjoy hearing from more Mod Opers. I mean, we have such diverse expertise, really deep skills and experience in so many different industries. And then I won’t have to record as much and then I get to learn as much from our team members and specialists as the clients. So that’s gonna be really exciting. And this is, you know, love doing it, a lot of work. And I think the episodes will be more interesting too, hearing more voices. And I’m excited for others to have the feeling we had in the feedback sessions, which is, oh my gosh, I mean, we’re allowing people, this was Cheryl’s idea, more than one person to review an app. So you might hear episodes and it might be over time where two to three people are giving their perspective on the same app and man is it wildly different, but it’s inspiring. So that’s what I’m most excited about in 2025.

Cheryl Boehm: Yeah, and and you touched on this, but I’m also excited to hear from our clients. Oh yeah. And from other experts in the field, like you said, more voices, more to learn, more opinions, more strategy, more of everything. So that’ll be pretty exciting. And we just, we now have an email, it’s podcast at modop.com, if you’re interested in becoming a guest and having your voice heard on the podcast. So just shoot us an email.

Tessa Burg: Yes, well thank you Cheryl so much for joining me on another conversation. We promised listeners we’ll be hearing from a lot more. More use cases on how and where to use AI, how to measure the value. So if you want more episodes, wanna listen to past episodes, visit us at modop.com/podcast. That’s modop.com/podcast and you can find Cheryl and I on LinkedIn. Until next time, Cheryl, hopefully it’s a while. Thanks.

Cheryl Boehm: Who you kidding, I’ll talk to you in a few hours.