292 – Stop Automating Bad Processes: Why Your AI Strategy is Already Failing

Winning the AI Trust Race

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In this compelling discussion from the Ultimate Partner Winter Retreat, Vince Menzione sits down with Marc Monday of ServiceNow and marketing expert Ashleigh Vogstad to deconstruct the “tectonic shifts” currently hitting the tech industry. As the market moves from AI excitement into a period of “POC fatigue,” the conversation pivots to the essential groundwork required for success: clean data, governed workflows, and the transition from an attention economy to a trust-based machine economy. They explore how Gen Z’s massive spending power is reshaping marketplaces and why simply automating a 27-step bad process with AI is a recipe for failure. Whether you are a partner manager or an entrepreneur, this episode provides a roadmap for staying human in a machine-to-machine world.

Key Takeaways

• The market is experiencing “POC fatigue,” making it critical to transition from experimental AI to real-world value driven by central databases and knowledge graphs.
• ServiceNow is shifting focus toward “Control Tower” solutions to govern and orchestrate how various AI agents interact with mission-critical data.
• We are moving from a human-centric “attention economy” to a “trust economy” where machines make high-stakes decisions on behalf of users.
• Automating an existing 27-step approval process without rethinking the workflow first results in an “automated bad process” rather than a solution.
• By 2030, 75% of B2B buyers will be Gen Z, a demographic that favors authentic voices and direct-to-fan platforms like Substack over traditional channels.
• Hyperscaler partnerships are becoming essential “third-party validation” layers that allow AI agents to verify a company’s win rates and credibility.

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Key Tags

ServiceNow, Marc Monday, Ashleigh Vogstad, Ultimate Partner, AI Fatigue, Agentic AI, Control Tower, Trust Economy, Knowledge Graph, Workflow Engine, Gen Z B2B, Marketplace, Hyperscalers, Machine-to-Machine, Data Governance, POC Fatigue, Substack, LinkedIn, Digital Transformation, Co-Selling, Partner Programs, ERP Intelligence, Uncanny Valley, Marketing Lag, Shared Business Planning.

Transcript

Ashleigh and Marc Monday Audio Episode

[00:00:00] Ashleigh Vogstad: But the reality is, if you’re not using AI in a very meaningful way in your sales and marketing functions of your businesses, I mean you’re just way behind.

[00:00:13] Vince Menzione: We just finished Ultimate Partners Winter Retreat here in beautiful Boca to a sold out crowd. Come join me now for a compelling discussion on the impacts of the tectonic shifts we’re all seeing. Maybe just a second about roles and responsibilities. Most of you know Ash from previous, uh, things you’ve been doing with us.

[00:00:34] Vince Menzione: But, but maybe for you, Martin, this is your first time.

[00:00:36] Marc Monday: Where should I

[00:00:37] Vince Menzione: look there? Alternate partner. Their lives

[00:00:38] Marc Monday: there?

[00:00:39] Vince Menzione: Uh, yeah, over here is good. Either one.

[00:00:41] Marc Monday: Look over there. Which would you prefer?

[00:00:43] Vince Menzione: Um, this is good.

[00:00:44] Marc Monday: Great. It’s,

[00:00:45] Vince Menzione: and, but right now I’m just asking you for everybody, tell everybody who you are in your role.

[00:00:49] Vince Menzione: ’cause you just shifted roles at ServiceNow. It’s

[00:00:51] Marc Monday: true. It’s true. Hello everyone. My name is Mark one day and I lead the America’s partner business, uh, partner sales business at ServiceNow today. And effective Monday I’ll lead the global partner team. Uh, Jen Odes, who’s been on the podcast. Yes. She’s been and I are switching roles.

[00:01:07] Marc Monday: Jen’s gonna go run the patch and I’m gonna run the programs, uh, effective next week.

[00:01:11] Vince Menzione: That’s fantastic.

[00:01:12] Marc Monday: And I live in Seattle.

[00:01:15] Vince Menzione: You live in Seattle. Yeah. And you made the trip out here. I really appreciate that. It’s a long journey. And Vancouver or Whistler? So both of you came from the, from the West coast.

[00:01:23] Marc Monday: This may be the first snowboarding panel in history of ultimate partner.

[00:01:29] Ashleigh Vogstad: I liked the question earlier. Somebody asked, did anyone leave the snow to be here? It was literally a blizzard. I did not know if I would make it driving at 4:00 AM to the airport in a total whiteout.

[00:01:41] Marc Monday: You’re getting zero sympathy from me Live in Whistler.

[00:01:44] Vince Menzione: So, so Service now has been, uh, I would say on the forefront of this AI thing. I mean, like you were early in and control towers, that I always get the, the nomenclature wrong, but I do feel like we are seeing some, a level of fatigue right now. And I keep seeing, I mean, it feels like every, we’re getting whiplashed at least the last few weeks.

[00:02:03] Vince Menzione: Are you seeing that? And what are the two or three biggest blockers you’re seeing now in the market?

[00:02:10] Marc Monday: I think there’s, there’s a lot of excitement obviously in the marketplace, but there is a bit of AI fatigue. There’s a POC fatigue, I think that’s going on. I think the reality is we have to make AI real, and the reality is it starts with good data, uh, a, a central, uh, a database, and really making sure that that’s extensible through a knowledge graph.

[00:02:31] Marc Monday: And then that provides us the ability to identify that workflow. Then importantly, um, making it real and, and as fast as possible. And I think that’s really important for the customer. One of the value props of ServiceNow, of course, is that we’ll meet the customer where they are with whatever their estate has,

[00:02:47] Vince Menzione: right?

[00:02:47] Marc Monday: So any hyperscaler, any workload, any core dataset, um, any LLM and, um, our history is as a workflow engine, and so we can bring that level of knowledge to their business. And then importantly, we bring together the governance and orchestration from a control tower perspective.

[00:03:08] Vince Menzione: Nice. Ash had perspective on this, on the kind of the whiplash we’ve been feeling.

[00:03:13] Vince Menzione: From From the marketing agency side?

[00:03:15] Ashleigh Vogstad: Yeah. I mean, what comes to mind is the Miriam Webster dictionary said that LOP is the 2025 Word of the Year lop and Satchin Nadella actually came out with some press immediately following on that, saying that essentially that LOP is an exactly a useful construct to be having a conversation around the future of media.

[00:03:37] Ashleigh Vogstad: But I think what this is pointing to is just we’re all navigating. Exactly how much AI is good ai, and maybe we will get into a little bit later, but what is the difference between selling to a human being and selling to a machine? Um, and really when we’re getting into this age agent landscape, it’s much more about that machine to machine conversation.

[00:04:01] Ashleigh Vogstad: It’s not necessarily. Human eyeballs on recommendation links that is paid for by advertising. It’s more of a trust economy actually, where machines wanna be able to make decisions on our behalf with high trust so that you continue to enable that machine to make those decisions for you.

[00:04:22] Vince Menzione: We talked about the data.

[00:04:23] Vince Menzione: I thought we’d double click a little bit on that. In fact, that point it would normally have been here, but because of the snow wasn’t able to, they focus in on this governance and this data element. I was thinking maybe we could talk a little bit about that, because it doesn’t seem like AI will work properly if we don’t have the data to stay governed and clean, right?

[00:04:42] Marc Monday: I think this is the amazing opportunity for the partners out there. They do this already. This is one of those assessments that’s so quick and not easy, but clear to deliver a value prop as a partner. Let’s get you ready for ai. Let’s make sure that we’re ensuring that your data’s in a extensible in a way across, uh, some sort of knowledge graph that can be accessed across a number of different, um, use cases.

[00:05:09] Marc Monday: And oftentimes that’s multiple data sets. And so how do you get those columns and rows organized in a way that’s extensible for an agent, that we’re basically asking to do something that is an unique opportunity for partners right now. And I, I think that we maybe missed that step. So I see what I see happening right now is we’ve gotta come back to that as a starting point for the partners.

[00:05:31] Vince Menzione: Let’s talk about agent ai or you also have orchestration AI as well. I wanna talk about their, your new service platform specifically, but maybe if you could double click with this on that.

[00:05:42] Marc Monday: Well, I think that, you know, everyone is kind of trying to figure out how do we get there and who’s gonna orchestrate and govern what AI agent is calling on, what data set at what time, and what sequence.

[00:05:54] Marc Monday: You may have a mission critical application that needs to have immediate access, and you may have other agents that have casual access. How do you control that in a meaningful way is gonna be become increasingly important. So we have the idea of this product that we call control tower. The control tower gives you the ability to manage that orchestration as well as the governance.

[00:06:14] Vince Menzione: Any perspective on this?

[00:06:17] Ashleigh Vogstad: I think I’ll share the perspective. As an entrepreneur, I know many people here represent. Companies that are our clients and are, are massive in scale and, and hyperscalers. But I think there are some people in the room who are running their own organizations. I think when I came out, Vince asked, you know, Ash growth mindset, how are you actually living this?

[00:06:36] Ashleigh Vogstad: And we’re going through a journey in my business right now around what are all of the data sources that we have and how can we get that into an enterprise resource planning type system so that we can then overlay more intelligence. And that’s kind of where we’re at in the, it’s funny ’cause when you look at those maturity curves, they try and fit you in a box.

[00:06:57] Ashleigh Vogstad: Nobody here likes being in a box. Um, and we’re in a corner. Yeah. In some ways it’s like we’re in that agentic box. I built an agent last week, funny enough for Microsoft actually, um, an executive comms agent, but in one hand we’re on that end and on the other, our data’s a mess and we really can’t apply a lot of intelligence to the majority of the data sources within our organization.

[00:07:20] Ashleigh Vogstad: So we’re getting that all together right now.

[00:07:22] Vince Menzione: When you came out, we talked a little bit, you were, you were mentioning having an advertising agency, marketing agency. The changes that are going on right now. Right? The attention economy and the trust economy. And I thought maybe you could double click with us on that.

[00:07:35] Vince Menzione: ’cause that’s, uh, very interesting to see this shift.

[00:07:39] Ashleigh Vogstad: It’s a huge shift. So, uh, 1964 Canadian philosopher, Marshall McCluen, he comes out and he says The medium is the message.

[00:07:49] Audience Question: Yeah.

[00:07:49] Ashleigh Vogstad: And so you wanna think about how is agenta a different medium and what are the biases that this medium inherently has? So in my media world, you know, you get these storytelling tools rolling out at Speed Chat, GBT, soa, and in the beginning they’re really at that low end of the curve.

[00:08:08] Ashleigh Vogstad: You know, they can produce a shitty first draft, uh, but the content that they’re creating is really low emotional resonance. If you take kind of a neuroscientist perspective on this, and I’m definitely not a neuroscientist, but the part of your brain that’s responsible for that pattern recognition, your cortical sal circuit, that’s what’s kicking in.

[00:08:29] Ashleigh Vogstad: And when you’re looking at, say, an advertisement, you’re starting to think, you know, is what I’m looking at actually commensurate with what I expect to see? And when it’s not, you can trigger that what psychologists call your uncanny valley. Now some will argue that on County Valley is really diminishing these days because AI generated media is getting better and better.

[00:08:52] Ashleigh Vogstad: And I do think that it’s something you want to lean in, but you also wanna think intelligently around how you’re using this new medium and exactly what its, what its biases are.

[00:09:03] Vince Menzione: Is that the gut syndrome? Like when you feel something in your gut? Is that what you described?

[00:09:07] Ashleigh Vogstad: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the classic example is Coca-Cola.

[00:09:10] Ashleigh Vogstad: So 2024 Coca-Cola rolled out their very nostalgic for many of us holiday campaign, and they decided to use tools like Luma Dream Machine to make this whole Santa Claus North Pole, but AI generated universe. And it had that classic stuff around, you know, six fingered people and it gave you this. Kind of creepy post-apocalyptic vibe and the campaign completely tanked in market.

[00:09:37] Ashleigh Vogstad: Or more recently, last year, mango rolled out a new fashion line Mango’s a huge global fashion retailer. They rolled out a new fashion line, and in their advertisements they had AI generated models and AI generated clothing. Like to sell a real line. So, you know, you, you have to really be thinking about, again, when we come to an attention economy based on human beings or a machine economy based on trust, many of these companies are still selling to us human beings.

[00:10:09] Ashleigh Vogstad: And I, I think they can forget that at times.

[00:10:12] Vince Menzione: So what’s your guidance to customers today and to this audience and viewers watching us today from a go-to market motion? In this world of ai, like what? What are you telling? What? How are you counseling these organizations?

[00:10:25] Ashleigh Vogstad: You need to have an authentic voice.

[00:10:27] Ashleigh Vogstad: We, we’ve heard this a million times, so I’ll try and put a bit of a, a different spin on it at platforms direct to fan platforms, things like Substack. Substack grew 48% last month. I mean, we are seeing this skyrocket, and that’s a new channel where you can have an authentic voice. Many people in this room, myself included, we live on LinkedIn as the business to business platform.

[00:10:50] Ashleigh Vogstad: Consider expanding out into, into a new channel, um, would be one of my recommendations. Interesting.

[00:10:57] Vince Menzione: Any, anything else from, uh, what you developed or what you use and ai and what do you, what, what tools do you recommend they use and what.

[00:11:06] Ashleigh Vogstad: There.

[00:11:06] Vince Menzione: Yeah.

[00:11:06] Ashleigh Vogstad: What are we seeing with our, so I can give this example of this executive comms agent that we built.

[00:11:12] Ashleigh Vogstad: Or even part, yeah, we’re building agents all the time, so what we try to do is think about what is our customer seeking to solve. We heard a lot today about outcomes, and then we challenge an AI first lens, which is how can we build something with AI to make this easier, better, faster, more creative? We’ll even do things, we’re a marketing agency, so we’ll even do things like beat the bot, pitch competitions.

[00:11:37] Ashleigh Vogstad: So this is where you’re inviting your agent into the room and you’re asking it to put the pitch together, say for ServiceNow and Microsoft, and what can it come up with? And then we put it in a room of human beings and see who can out pitch. Bot, um, and come up with a more novel, creative idea. But the reality is, if you’re not using AI in a very meaningful way in your sales and marketing functions of your businesses, I mean, you’re just way behind.

[00:12:07] Ashleigh Vogstad: And I see it a bit more advanced in all honesty and sales because I think some of your large. Organizations push the AI down to the sellers. Mm-hmm. Um, so they’re somewhat forced to use it, but in marketing, I’m still seeing a real lack, which is funny since generative AI came out in 2022 and everybody thought the marketing function was the one to really be disrupted and displaced.

[00:12:30] Ashleigh Vogstad: I do think your marketing teams need to be leaning in more.

[00:12:35] Vince Menzione: We were talking about trust earlier. I wanna weave this into the conversation. Right. How do, how do you. How do you think through trust and applying trust in the area I world, I’ll ask you both this question under service. Now think about it. How do you think about it or transcend?

[00:12:54] Marc Monday: Maybe I’ll take a step back. I, I think just to kind of go back to the previous question, I think we’re in this age of massive complexity. Incredible complexity. Nina said it earlier, the customers kind of want us to tell them what to do. What are the steps? We’re at this dichotomy of this level of complexity that’s almost unimaginable and we have to make it simple.

[00:13:18] Marc Monday: I think that’s the first one. And then that, that is put up against this notion of we have to go incredibly fast ’cause the market’s moving faster than we can even understand it.

[00:13:28] Vince Menzione: Yeah.

[00:13:29] Marc Monday: And then we have to add on this veneer, and this is where the partner community becomes so important of how do we scale?

[00:13:35] Marc Monday: So how do you take simplicity, speed, and scale and bring it to market? It starts with the data, of course it starts with the workflow, but I might just take a giant step back and say one of the things that another partner opportunity you might run to really consider is automating a bad process, even with AI is still a bad process.

[00:13:58] Marc Monday: So again, a partner opportunity is, let’s zoom back out and say if your approval. Takes 13 steps in 27 days, building an AI process around that. Without rethinking it might not be the right solution. So I think part of it is also like rather than just dictating all of the steps, part of it, to the point of telling the customer the steps is getting them to participate in that conversation.

[00:14:29] Marc Monday: Why do you have 27 approval layers? Well. It’s the most dangerous thing in the language. It’s because we’ve always done it that way. Well, what if we did it differently? Yeah. And so I think that’s an area where the trust is a two-way street and you can’t just the part, the customer shouldn’t just outsource all of their decision making to you.

[00:14:50] Marc Monday: At the same time, you have to bring them into that discussion of what are you trying to accomplish and what is your, um, risk appetite relative to that.

[00:15:02] Ashleigh Vogstad: Yeah, that, that’s great, mark. I mean, trust is a really important conversation. I think about the Amazon versus Perplexity lawsuit right now that some are headlining the end of commerce.

[00:15:14] Ashleigh Vogstad: Um, and so really this precedent setting case, what this is about is perplexity. Essentially is disintermediating the Amazon platform. So you know it’s making purchase decisions on your behalf, so, so this idea of trust in the agent world is something I think about a lot. And how do you optimize trust for this agentic world?

[00:15:36] Ashleigh Vogstad: The professor I was mentioning, Eric Zow, who has this attention economy and the trust economy for agents where my research is leaning in is really around what is the hyperscaler layer on top of that. My working theory is that hyperscaler partnerships are just gonna become more important because the machines need to verify via trusted third party data sources what it is that you’re up to.

[00:16:02] Ashleigh Vogstad: So how many deals have you done? Uh, what is your win rate percentage? This kind of information is incredibly valuable to the agent world, and so I think we’re gonna see an. Increasing lean in to these third party validation co-selling systems like partner center.

[00:16:22] Marc Monday: I mean, just to add onto yeah. This idea, I mean, we do talk a lot about trust, but attention is probably underserved if I think about the role of a partner manager or an alliance director, it’s all about the trade-offs of what am I gonna spend my time on today?

[00:16:37] Marc Monday: And you’re being pulled in a million directions, and I dunno about you, but it’s probably 900 to 10,000 unread emails and maybe you’ll respond to your immediate messages and if something happens, you’ll respond in in text. Part of it is also delineating between the busyness and the impact, and I think a lot of that’s also part of this discussion of how do we get focused on the outputs that matter.

[00:17:02] Marc Monday: Really helping the customer get there through that discussion, which again goes back to it has to be a dialogue with the customer rather than just, this is the solution. Here’s our SOW. We’ll see you in six months.

[00:17:14] Vince Menzione: Agree. We have a couple extra minutes. I was thinking of maybe opening it up for you. Any questions?

[00:17:19] Vince Menzione: We have a mic in the back and I’m sure people have questions about this topic is, is fascinating to me and I wanna make sure that we’ve covered any of the questions we have. We have one right in the front from Shannon.

[00:17:30] Marc Monday: Send the hard

[00:17:31] Vince Menzione: questions over there. Not Yes. I’ll take the Easy books. Yeah.

[00:17:36] Audience Question: You referenced marketing lag.

[00:17:38] Audience Question: I think all of us would love to see marketing leading.

[00:17:41] Ashleigh Vogstad: Yes.

[00:17:42] Audience Question: Um, so how are you infusing within your marketing team at different levels around content creation? Um, there’s so much, uh, ego right on being a graphic designer or an editor, a copy editor that they. The human inflation in that conversation is a, is a hard thing to get them over.

[00:18:02] Audience Question: And now AI can help this. How are you?

[00:18:04] Ashleigh Vogstad: Yeah, let’s have a conversation after. But you just brought up a funny No, I’m gonna answer as well, but you brought up, brought up a funny, uh, conversation we had internally, just in the last 24 hours we’re interviewing for a new creative director and one of our candidates said, yes, but I don’t do Figma.

[00:18:20] Ashleigh Vogstad: I’m not a UX person. I just laughed and I said, you know, the day is coming where It’s a designer, it’s a UX person, it’s a project manager, a program manager, a copywriter. You know, AI is condensing a lot of roles in that way. So I think being multidisciplinary in your skillset is, um. Is quite valuable, but I’ll also take this into a hyperscaler direction and say, no.

[00:18:46] Ashleigh Vogstad: Here audiences, 75% of it buyers are going to be Gen Z by 2030. They have 12 trillion in spending power. I was in Silicon Valley yesterday, uh, helping a customer with a wind story. They did a $12 million transaction through Marketplace. Now that’s very impressive, but it would’ve been more impressive two years ago.

[00:19:06] Ashleigh Vogstad: There are more and more, 10 million plus. Deals happening through marketplace. And so if you look at that Gen Z and start to understand them and their buying behavior, like another example is, I think it’s 80%, no, no half, sorry, half of Gen Z last month made a purchase via Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. They are used to making these online transactions and average purchase price is going up.

[00:19:35] Ashleigh Vogstad: You know, $500,000 plus is starting to be the average in some of these enterprise selling platforms. So as a marketing team, how are we kind of going in and leading the marketplace? Conversation I think is really critical and there’s technical elements to that.

[00:19:52] Marc Monday: Maybe the caveman view of that would be, um, the other side, which is I think someone earlier said, we have to know where our customer is at.

[00:20:00] Marc Monday: And a lot of our, we are very lucky. We live in this very insular tech bubble and we’re thinking about, you know, where we are 10 years from now and the customer’s gonna are gonna get there eventually, and it’s gonna happen faster. But I would say in marketing, I mean the two easiest use cases right now are around localization.

[00:20:16] Marc Monday: Language localization and then specific market localization, like we don’t have to solve world hunger right now. There are some steps and those steps are some of the easy things. Localization probably is a big component of your marketing budget. That’s something that you can get really good, really fast language localization, addition market localization.

[00:20:35] Marc Monday: This market is a healthcare market. This market is an SMB market. Those are two areas where that through partner marketing motion can to get accelerated very quickly and has a tremendous ROI.

[00:20:47] Vince Menzione: Yeah. Great one. Nina, you had a question

[00:20:50] Audience Question: three Mark. You, you just, you just hit on part of it is that value proposition message is, it’s really easy in AI to, to fine tune that.

[00:20:59] Audience Question: The other thing that I’ll be very transparent about, um, at least in my organization and America’s partner, we only work with um, third party. Marketing vendors now that are AI first period.

[00:21:12] Audience Question: Nice. We

[00:21:12] Audience Question: completely cleaned out who the vendors are that we will approve to work with. Wow. Um, so because we can also see the cost reduction, but it is a mindset change.

[00:21:22] Audience Question: They have to, they, if, if they’re gonna be positioning this, it has to be inherent. It has to be part of their culture of, at.

[00:21:29] Marc Monday: Ashley made a really wonderful point. I mean, this bad first draft is so key and so, you know, in the past we would’ve spent. A couple days or maybe even a week on a really bad first draft.

[00:21:40] Marc Monday: And the bad first draft is just to generate feedback. You can generate a bad, a good, bad first draft in a couple of minutes with the right prompts.

[00:21:48] Vince Menzione: Yeah, good. Point. Point questions to the back, Steven.

[00:21:55] Audience Question: Mark, as you guys are building out agents, the orchestration to manage them, is that taking you into workflows outside of ServiceNow?

[00:22:05] Audience Question: Yes.

[00:22:07] Vince Menzione: Repeat the question, sorry. Yeah. Just in case people aren’t getting

[00:22:09] Marc Monday: Yes. The question is, um, for ServiceNow specifically, um, is that taking you out of your traditional business? And I think he, he means it’s probably business in it, and the answer is yes. So our value promise is that we can go north, south, east, west, across the estate.

[00:22:24] Marc Monday: Regardless of the workflow. So there are scenarios where we are expanding. Of course, we have a commitment to driving the CRM business, moving beyond just customer service management, but all the way through the process to CPQ and we’ll productize many of those things. But the reality is, if the workflow touches, let’s say.

[00:22:42] Marc Monday: Uh, a, a big database, you know, from one of your known providers, uh, an HCM system, your our traditional IT system. This is maybe around service delivery of a particular set of kit to a new employee for onboarding or offboarding across a number of those systems of record. Yes, we’ll continue to do that, and honestly, it’s the value promise for us that because we are capable of working with.

[00:23:06] Marc Monday: Every hyperscaler, every application, every data set, we can go up and down and across the state.

[00:23:12] Audience Question: Hi everyone. I’m Jen Pauls. Hey, Jen. I have a um, I have a question for you. So when you’re incorporating AI, and also you mentioned trust, how do you make sure that the offerings that you’re coating on are feasible specifically for that whole individual partner and client?

[00:23:34] Audience Question: And you’re not repeating. Something. Does that make sense to you? Yeah. Like how do you make sure that there is an individualized component that is original in thought, even though you’re feeding this pipeline, all these combined thoughts?

[00:23:51] Marc Monday: I, I don’t wanna push back on the premise, but I do think in some instances, partners, implementers will have competing solutions that do effectively the same thing.

[00:23:59] Marc Monday: Ideally they’re differentiated, but I do think publishing a, a standard. Particularly from a security and a reliability perspective, what that traditionally we would’ve called that API standard, and then a level of validation, either via human validation or systemic AI validation is really key. Um, the solution that gets marketed, let’s say, in our marketplace should work and it should be secure and it should be reliable.

[00:24:25] Marc Monday: So we processes to manage that, if that’s the question.

[00:24:29] Audience Question: Right? Well, it would, you know, yes. Yes. But. Um, when you’re trying to create a dispute or an offering, right, that’s specific to that particular partner, this is where I’m going. How do you make sure that the thoughts that are coming in are specifically, I guess, individualized for that one partner and what they’re doing and how they’re going to make a new, um, new, uh, track or a new journey in what you’re selling?

[00:24:57] Ashleigh Vogstad: I mean, I would answer that I think with differentiation is still really important. And if anything, if we had an 80 20 rule for 80% of the lift is coming from ai, we’re all still here and employed because there is a rule for the, the human, at least currently in that 20%. And I would say. Running teams who are often building new offers and products, both on the ISV and SI side of things.

[00:25:25] Ashleigh Vogstad: Getting that unique differentiation is critically important. Like that’s where a lot of value is created. Or you could look at, I mean Nabil probably has stories about this all day in the MSP world is it’s really challenging for MSPs to differentiate on top of their core offering, but that is where value creation happens.

[00:25:43] Ashleigh Vogstad: Yeah. Nina more, I’ll

[00:25:44] Audience Question: just piggyback on that. My recommendation to a lot of, of our partners today is build out agents at that 80% watermark. Right? And that’s a little bit what you were talking about, the 80, 20, 80% of that functionality. Quite honestly, if you’re looking at an call center or something, is something that can be ported.

[00:26:05] Audience Question: The, the magic is working with the partner on what X 20 is that differentiates their business, their experience, how, uh, the applicability to. So I, I will, I, to your point about ology, the premise, I mean it, to me, I think repeatability is, is awesome. It’s a superpower. It’s gonna get us there faster. It’s in that 20%.

[00:26:31] Audience Question: Yeah.

[00:26:34] Vince Menzione: Thank, perfect, thank you.

[00:26:36] Marc Monday: Maybe I’ll close with with one really simple use case just for all of us that are in the partner profession and we work in alliances or partner management. The easiest and best, most effective use case for us as power users today is a shared business plan. Here are the goals and objectives of us as a vendor or a platform provider.

[00:26:57] Marc Monday: Here are the goals and objectives of us as the implementer or a resell partner. Um, and in the past I used to describe this as a really complicated bow tie. On one side, you’d have our goals, and on the other side you’d have the, the, the implementer’s goals. And you’d spend all this time weaving together a knot and try to tie it together.

[00:27:16] Marc Monday: That activity can happen in about five seconds with the right prompt. And you can very quickly say, oh, you guys think about a CV. We think about a RR Oh, your fiscal year is, is offset. Your fiscal year isn’t, oh, you call this product something different. Um, we care about platform revenue. We care about services revenue.

[00:27:35] Marc Monday: You can reconcile that into a pretty darn good shared scorecard and business plan in a matter of seconds. Yeah, and that is a huge time saver. I

[00:27:45] Vince Menzione: love that.

[00:27:47] Ashleigh Vogstad: It’s just an ama uh, it just thumbs up for me because that joint business planning just doesn’t happen enough. I, I’m in some of the biggest alliances on, on the planet really, and it’s shocking to me how little joint business planning is done.

[00:28:00] Ashleigh Vogstad: And for the marketing question, Shannon, like how can marketers lean in? I mean, market development funds are made available based on things like joint business plugs.

[00:28:09] Vince Menzione: That’s right. Yeah, really great point. Great voice. Thank you so much. So good to have you finally have you here. Thank you, mark and Ash.

[00:28:17] Vince Menzione: Thank you so much

[00:28:18] Audience Question: Owens.

[00:28:19] Vince Menzione: Don’t forget, ultimate Partner Live is coming soon, May 11th through the 13th in beautiful Bellevue, Washington. I hope to see you there.