What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Revolutionizing the Digital Workspace with WorkGrid: A Conversation with Rob Ryan
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Ever felt the friction of navigating through a labyrinth of digital applications at work? Ever wished for a smarter way to get personalized notifications and tasks? You're about to discover how WorkGrid is revolutionizing the digital workspace. We sit down with Rob Ryan, WorkGrid's head of business value and product marketing, who shares the story behind WorkGrid's inception, how it integrates into daily applications, and the role of its no-code natural language chatbot in providing employees with personalized, relevant answers.
As we move forward, we delve into the intriguing world of how WorkGrid simplifies complex tech stacks for better sales notifications. We examine why WorkGrid holds promise for a wide array of organizations, including those in regulated industries and government. Rob gives us an insider's view on compelling use cases such as productivity and onboarding, the deployment cycle, and how WorkGrid's AI chatbot is reducing development costs. Listen in, and get ready to embrace a more efficient and productive digital work environment with WorkGrid.
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Hey everybody, evan Kirstel here with another great conversation today with WorkGrid helping organizations simplify their digital workplace. Rob, how are you Good.
Speaker 2:How are you today, Evan? I'm great.
Speaker 1:You're in Boston, as am I Beautiful summer here. And finally, I'm excited to chat with you. This topic of the future of work is right in my wheelhouse. Can you introduce yourself and your role at WorkGrid a little bit about what you do?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. So a little bit about me, rob Ryan. I'm the head of business value and product marketing, as well as thought leadership, here at WorkGrid software. In terms of my career, I've spent gosh the last 15 plus years in the digital workplace and intranet space working for various vendors, and many, many years back, in fact, I was application lead deploying social intranets into a Fortune 500 company. Today, I help to lead and grow WorkGrid software as we are the leader of guided attention technology for the digital workplace.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, before we dive into all things, employee experience and guided attention I'm really interested in that term of art let's play a quick video for the viewers, who maybe give them some context into what we're actually talking about here.
Speaker 3:It's supposed to make our lives easier and increase productivity, not overwhelm us with the flood of emails, information and tasks. Employees deserve an experience designed specifically for them and their needs. That's why we created WorkGrid. Think of it as an employee digital assistant that gives employees the information they need when they need it. Our all important tasks and information are consolidated outside email, so employees have a single place to go and take action.
Speaker 3:Remove the noise with personalized news and alerts for each employee based on their role, location or department. Showing employees what's important to them right now, like benefit reminders, office closures or important communications. Enable employees to quickly take action and stay on track by bringing all tasks together into a single location, whether they're corporate, team related or personal. Provide employees access to the most relevant information they need, all in one place, with personalized, function-specific micro-apps that integrate with core enterprise systems. Never again will employees have to navigate complex systems to access their pay slip, get their time off balances or get a status update on their KPIs or monthly sales targets. Allow employees to get the information they need when they need it with a no-code, natural language chatbot that provides employees with personalized, relevant answers to their common questions, and it's all available whenever and wherever employees need it. Simple, intuitive contextual Grid.
Speaker 1:Well, that looks like a dream. I wish I would have had that at the 20 plus years I was working in enterprise tech. That would have made my life much easier. So tell us, what's the history of work rate? How did this vision come to be?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, a few years back, work rate grew out of, effectively, liberty Mutual, given the fact that they themselves had identified digital friction as an issue and a challenge within the organization.
Speaker 2:In fact, you see this in any enterprise organization today there's too many apps, there's too much information, there's digital noise pollution in the effect of too many pings, dings and attention black holes, things calling to us, vying for our attention to bring us back to another application or a workflow or whatnot, and if you look at the statistics, you see that in every report, hey, employees are wasting 50 to 80% of their day not doing the things we actually pay them to do, but to really be distracted or have to search fine for that information or perhaps even pull them out of the work that they had, and that, of course, was a challenge that needed to be solved for.
Speaker 2:And so work rate was born out of that need to solve for that pain and that challenge, and, in fact, the layering of AI, intelligence and chat was all part of that process over the last few years and, in fact, we have been a little bit in stealth mode up until about the early part of last year, where we started to really put a push into the market, and the video while you showed is fantastic.
Speaker 2:One of the things that it perhaps doesn't necessarily come across is the fact that we are where the employee happens to be. So we're not, we're not looking to be another destination or another app center for you to go to, because that's that's commonly the play in the challenge that many applications want you to do. Come to our solution we're going to solve, for all of that pain, all that challenge and that friction, that doesn't. That isn't how employees work right. So we are where you happen to be, delivering you the to knows, the to do's, providing access for you to ask questions, faqs, etc. Tapping to workflows for approvals whatnot? Micro apps, so that employees can ultimately get on with their day and not disrupt their flow of work.
Speaker 1:Really it looks almost too good to be true. But tell me, how do you integrate into all of these desperate applications? I've got 100 tabs open, I've got Workspace, I've got Microsoft, I've got all kinds of proprietary apps. How do you integrate those together?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. We tap into over 200 plus applications today that you could use Salesforce, workday, zendesk, servicenow, etc. All the top ones that you're looking for. We provide an array of templates to really allow digital workplace leaders, application leaders, to get started to begin to shave off some of those challenges in delivering right-sized notifications and actions to employees. A few examples may be expense notifications or actions or even ticketing. I want to input a ticket, but I don't necessarily want to go to my ITSM to do that. I want to actually do that within the flow of my work, wherever I happen to be. Then I can quickly go through question and answer with my bot to input that particular ticket or get nudges on how it's moved throughout its status. Again, I'm not having to be ripped into another application, go back into email. I can have that within the flow of my day. It's right-sizing, both the use cases and the use to the personas of the organization so that we can keep them productive.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. How's the adoption looking? Are there particular kinds of companies or businesses or job functions that you've seen really benefit from work with early on?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. The more complex you are, the better a fit you are, given the fact we were born out of complexity. If your tech stack is one that your mid-market or enterprise most likely, you have hundreds of applications, you have employees constantly moving in and out of line of business apps and their day probably looks like they are app-hopping and moving around consistently. That is where we certainly have found ourselves to gain adoption and traction, and also in line of business plays as well. If it's more of a sales organization that's looking to deliver better notifications around product changes, skews etc. And give that snapshot of opportunities, we can do just that.
Speaker 2:If it's an organization that's looking to drive down their ticketing costs and help employees really get answers to what they need, that can be another play for us as well. That certainly expands from there in terms of use cases and personas. In terms of organizations and types and market, we really serve all types. We're perhaps shy away from would be more government In terms of the regulation body that they require, but we're certainly able to adapt to regulated industries. Government ends up being a whole other basket of nails.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Employee experience is something generally very hard to demonstrate. The return on value it's tough to measure something so intangible. So how do you measure success Absolutely and demonstrate that practically speaking?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we partner with you. We partner with our customers early on to help to prepare that business case on hard dollar ROI as well as soft dollar ROI, depending on how they're defining their green and brown dollars. Oftentimes we're looking at productivity savings on time, on target, which, depending on the organization that may seen as a soft dollar play. But then there's, of course, hard dollar ROI which can be assessed from case management, ticketing etc. That can ultimately provide value back and the reassurance that, yes, we are receiving a return on that investment.
Speaker 2:That's oftentimes the question would it play experience applications, because it can be so nebulous in terms of those variables.
Speaker 2:So what we'll look at is we'll oftentimes look at use cases such as productivity, onboarding etc. But also time to develop the application integration. So, for example, the heart of our product is a work read workshop which is effectively a low code, no code platform that allows you to build the experience in a drag and drop fashion. So business technologists, those that perhaps live within the business but have a degree of tech acumen, can build those experiences directly for the line that they work within Drag and drop functions, also with ability to release the escape hatching code if they need, and connect into deeply into those third party applications, whether it is a service now sales for Zendesk, workday, etc. They can build those experience and then deploy those as they see fit with high granular permissions. So the deployment aspect and being able to start from either a blank canvas or a template to get you started right away is what we help to provide to make sure you do have that jumpstart, you do have that action, so that you can see success very quickly and early on.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. What's a typical deployment cycle like? Is it weeks or months or yeah? Great question. It can be a little slow in the enterprise world.
Speaker 2:Great question, and that actually comes back to the ROI fashion Right? So oftentimes with intradets and I can certainly speak to this as I spent a number of years at many of the leading vendors in that space the integration would take you anywhere from six weeks plus. Okay, we want to integrate with this particular system. It's going to take two, three months for us to actually perform that integration and oh, by the way, it's going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Speaker 2:You actually see that a lot with SharePoint, ps engagements, where we're looking to make SharePoint a better experience, and oh, by the way, here's an exorbitant amount of which you have to pay for a very simple integration. For us, it takes hours and in fact, for a business technology, even a technology lead, to create those quick experiences and see value right away. So we can really bring down that development cost. For digital workplaces who are looking to enhance their overall interactivity between their systems and their users, because the work grid workshop helps to provide them with that jumpstart, that shot of adrenaline to get them started wherever they happen to be on their digital workplace or employee experience journey.
Speaker 1:That's that's interesting. I love the idea of this chatbot that you have for internal questions, insights, interaction. Yeah, is that based on a large language model, sort of like a chat, gpt like approach, or how have you approached that with?
Speaker 2:It is. Here's the real ironic part behind our chatbot. Our chatbot is actually part of our legacy platform, or it was In fact. We have a fantastic CTO, jillian McMahon, who AWS hero and expert in AI and LLMs, and our chatbot was, in fact, one of our features which, early on, we started building intelligence into the platform. It's actually part of our DNA, but it was the least looked at feature over the last few years until chat GPT hit the market and then suddenly chat was what everyone wanted, which is interesting.
Speaker 2:So good news is we had a head start in building out the chat experiences with AI and serving those up as things that we could deploy and deliver to our customers. So you can think of our chatbot really as an AI work assistant to provide you with the right micro apps, transactions, your pay and other experience. Perhaps you want to call back your expenses, perhaps you want to look at your pay stuff, your benefits, understand your 401k? Chatbot will do exactly that. It'll help to assist you through those actions. So we've been very fortunate that the time has come for this part of our product to really shine and, of course, naturally we're making additional investments into it because, let's face it, ai has the future and it's everywhere.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely Well, so exciting. So what's next? Are there other things you're working on on the roadmap that you can share? You must have a lot on your plate.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we're tapping into more LLM stories, as we're also trying to take you know, really a temperature of the marketplace. You see two camps as well that are emerging those that are willing to throw their hat in the ring in terms of adding more AI into the employee experience, and those that might be a bit more temper in their approach. So we're looking at both control factors to be there for organizations that do want to take that next leap and really push the periphery of where their boundaries lie in terms of adding intelligence into workflows, but also those who are looking to deploy with a more controlled structure, given the fact that we work with enterprise class customers, mid-market customers, those that are looking for those types of controls we want to make sure that we're designing for however they wish to envision their digital workplace and employee experience Fantastic.
Speaker 1:So we're in the heart of summer. Here You're in Boston as a my is the team in the New England area where you guys based.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, the majority of our folks are out of the Portsmouth and Boston area, but we have some fantastic developers actually out of Belfast, ireland as well. So you know we are effectively a global organization, 50 plus strong and, fortunately enough, you know, many of us are also remote and in office, depending on the nature of our role. Move back and forth. That also gives us perspective as well, as other organizations are going back as we look to more stories and examples of templates that can be, in light of the return to work, so helping to support organizations and users as they start to start to move through this hurdle of what is the new work life look like as we come back. Don't go back. What, not? What type of needs do we have in terms of room booking, hoteling, etc. Those are all exciting things we have in store.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, it's so interesting. Congratulations on all the success. We all have a busy fall season here with events and shows Anything on the horizon that you're particularly excited about travel wise, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. We've had some great shows over the last year. We were at Gartner's Digital Workplace event, where we were discussing digital friction as a whole and really the need for guided attention, technology in the workplace, being able to be where the user is and delivering them the right to nos to dos, notifications, etc. If folks are looking for more information in terms of work grade, you can visit our website, workercom. We also have a podcast we just launched and we titled it the WorkGrid, where you can find that wherever podcasts are consumed. We have a few more events coming up DWG and others, certainly for 2024.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for sharing the vision and the mission at WorkGrid. Rob, really interesting and unique what you're doing and wish you the success and thanks everyone for watching. Feel free to reach out to me or Rob with any questions or feedback you might have.
Speaker 2:Thanks, evan, appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Okay, thanks, Take care everyone.