How The We Love Tech Awards Spot Real Innovation

AI is making a weird problem even worse: it’s getting harder to tell what’s authentic. That’s why we sat down with Russ from Business Intelligence Group to talk about the We Love Tech Awards ( https://welovetechawards.com/) and what real, transparent judging looks like when trust is on the line. We get specific about how awards can be more than marketing, especially when real people review nominations, score the work, and give feedback that founders and product teams can actually use.

We also zoom out to what we’re seeing across the tech landscape right now. From CES to Mobile World Congress, HIMSS, and Enterprise Connect, the energy isn’t just “more AI.” It’s the shift from trials and proofs of concept to real deployments in hospitals, warehouses, and frontline environments. We talk MedTech and digital health, customer experience and contact center technology, cloud apps, and why this moment feels like a true burst of innovation even with macro uncertainty hanging over everything.

Then we go where awards don’t go often enough: people. Russ shares a striking stat that fewer than 10% of business award nominations are for individuals, and we make the case that recognition should match the humanity behind the work. We also cover digital certificates, including blockchain-based credentials that can live on LinkedIn, and we lay out the practical timeline: the nomination deadline is March 27, followed by a judging window supported by thousands of judges worldwide.

If you’re building a product, leading an innovation team, or know someone who deserves real recognition, listen now, share this with your network, and leave a review. Who are you nominating this year?

Transcript

Welcome And Awards Deadline

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hey everybody, we are talking the We Love Tech Awards with Russ from Business Intelligence Group. Russ, how are you?

SPEAKER_00 0:08

I am great. I'm looking forward to the deadline coming up next week, March 27th. So it is the time flies.

SPEAKER_01 0:15

It feels like we're just at CES yesterday. I can't believe we're already at towards the end of March. Before that, uh, and you know, an update on the We Love Tech Awards, maybe introduce yourself and the great work you're doing at Business Intelligence Group.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Yeah, so we are we're we're Business Intelligence Group and we're running about 13 different awards programs, some for us and some for others, like Evan. And this is our second year doing the We Love Tech Awards. And this is going to be an amazing year because of all the AI stuff that's coming out, in my opinion. I know you saw a lot of it at CDS, but we're really excited to see what companies have in store for their customers, their employees, kind of bringing that enterprise tech into the real world.

SPEAKER_01 0:59

Fantastic. And remind us why genuine recognition through an awards program with real judges is such a powerful signal these days and why it's really catching on.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Well, you know, to me, it's all about authenticity and transparency. And, you know, today, in today's world, the AI world, it's getting harder and harder to determine what is authentic. And so programs like mine and programs like ours, this is the We Love Tech Tech Awards. Um, we use actual real people to judge these programs. You can go, you can look them up, you can message them on LinkedIn if you want. And they're giving you real feedback. And that's really important too. So if you're a product manager or a founder and you want real life feedback about your product, we've got amazing judges from amazing companies that are, you know, giving you that authentic true award experience. This isn't, you know, AI awards that are judged by themselves or anything else. These are real people going through and reading and scoring your nominations. So that's that's what I think really makes everything different about these programs.

SPEAKER_01 2:01

Yeah, it was fantastic in the first inaugural We Love Tech Awards uh program last year, the dozens and dozens, hundreds of interested parties and really the amazing enterprise grade products and solutions that were nominated. I had a blast. I learned about so many amazing innovators and solution providers and use cases. I had no idea. Tell us about, from your perspective, how that first year went and some of the feedback and why we decided to run the second annual We Love Tech Awards.

SPEAKER_00 2:36

Well, I think the people really appreciated the exposure in the audience uh that you brought this year, you know, last year to this program. Um, that's something that always is important to people is you want to get recognized, but you want the exposure for that recognition. So your audience really allows us to do that to bring some more uh exposure to those to those winners. Uh I think what are you up to now? Over a half million people on YouTube, and and now you're on Bloomberg television and everything else. You're you've you've got your audience is expanding every day, it seems like.

SPEAKER_01 3:07

Yeah, and it's it's out of pure passion and love for technology and innovation. And I love discovery and learning and education, and that's why these We Love Tech Awards is so interesting. Um, the amount of innovation out there, not just AI, but beyond AI, is just incredible in areas like MedTech, Collaboration, CX Contact Center. Uh, I mean, we're we're in this Cambrian explosion of innovation around apps and cloud. And it's just so fun uh seeing this ecosystem flourish, starting at CES, but I was recently at Mobile World Congress. The mobile world is as exciting and dynamic as ever. I was at HIMS, where health tech and digital health and the Internet of Medical Things, uh not just for consumers, but for providers and healthcare systems, is at an all-time high as we're all getting older. And um even at Enterprise Connect, where we saw the latest and greatest in customer engagement technology, contact center technology, it's just a great time to be in tech, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 4:14

It really is. It's it's so enabling. AI has enabled so much that it's you're right, it's not all about AI, but AI has enabled so much that it's really it's let it let loose the creativity and the innovation, I feel like. What was what was the one thing at that show at CDS or HINS that stood out to you? Is there a common theme that stood out to you that you saw?

SPEAKER_01 4:36

Yeah, I I think uh the um the move from you know the trials and uh proof of concepts to real-world deployments in in frontline worker environments and hospitals and warehouses and with nurses and the pay in the hands of patients, even for remote healthcare monitoring. I mean, they're just there's a move to real deployment. And again, it's it's proceeding, you know, in the enterprise carefully, deliberately, uh, unlike consumer, where we just throw everything out there and it sticks, whatever sticks to the wall sticks. But it's just an amazing uh time to be in the technology space, despite all the macro and global economic uh challenge. Uh, now is the time to be an innovator, to be a creator, to be even to be a developer. Um and also, you know, a prosumer. I call myself sort of a prosumer, a professional consumer. I use six, seven, eight, ten different tools. I understand you've been coding uh as well. Um uh what a great time to be uh a founder or a creator or a maker.

SPEAKER_00 5:44

Yeah, absolutely. It is so enabling. The AI technologies are so enabling. And I can't imagine, you know, being at the head of an IT department or the head of a CIO organization right now and having these tools. Um it's almost like where do you start? You know, it's uh it, you know, your the resources are almost endless now. And so it really is interesting to see some of the great technologies coming out of AI, coming out of healthcare, as you said. We're seeing tons of innovation in healthcare. We had a program earlier this year, the big innovation awards. Um, our leading, our biggest winner was a healthcare company, Alcon, for a new machine they developed that does back of eye and front-of-eye surgery in the same machine. Wow. So it's it's very it's very evident that people are out there solving real problems with new technologies, and it's really exciting time.

Putting People Back In Awards

SPEAKER_01 6:32

It's exciting and important. I'm off to uh the RSA conference in San Francisco, and there it's all the all about how do you equip our defenders, our white hats, our security teams with the tools needed to protect, defend individuals and the enterprise. As the attackers get smarter, so do the defenders. And so AI is really coming to the rescue of many of the analysts and security teams out there who are who are burnt out and overwhelmed with all of the threats. So, you know, and that applies to defense in general in the DOD world and beyond, but also to enterprises and security. So there's really no part of this world that goes untouched by uh AI and AI related technologies. And what a good, great time to recognize them with the We Love Tech Awards. If you're an innovator, a creator, a founder, a big company with uh a product or solution you'd like to nominate, get that nomination in, uh, you have a couple more weeks.

SPEAKER_00 7:35

Yeah, and what you said is so true. It's um, I think everybody is feeling pressure and they feel overwhelmed. It's like I feel that especially, you know, as I'm trying to go into this new technology world too. Uh if you almost feel overwhelmed with the amount you can do, but it is important to step back and to take a breath and to look at what you've done and to recognize what you've done and to see the progress that you've made. And that's what these awards are about. It's about stepping back and looking at the progress. You're making progress with your customers, you're making progress with your employees. And you as a person are making progress. And we'd like to see those awards too, the people awards, uh, where we're recognizing more people. I I have a stat that I'd like to do.

SPEAKER_01 8:16

A ton of humanity behind all this innovation.

SPEAKER_00 8:19

It's why it's why we do it.

unknown 8:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:21

It's why we do it. And I I have a stat for you. What do you what percentage of awards do you think are won by people, business awards, not the Oscars, of course. But what percentage of awards do you think for maybe won by people?

SPEAKER_01 8:31

20%, 10%?

SPEAKER_00 8:33

It's less than 10%. Less than 10% of nominations coming in are for people, and that's got to change, in my opinion. So we're doing a lot this year for empowering the people. Uh, because we think, you know, we do we do all this work for ourselves, right? We do it to make humanity better. So let's recognize you know ourselves. I love that.

SPEAKER_01 8:50

I love that in particular as a podcaster and uh interviewer, TV host. You don't have a company on your show, right? You have an individual, a person, an engineer, an executive, whoever it may be. And it's kind of in this AI world that that human-to-human conversation, what we're doing now, is the last bastion of uh humanity that can't yet be faked. Uh it sure feels like it. Yeah. And and so that's why you know I've had thousands of interviews. That's why I love doing it. It's just an amazing way to connect, meet people, learn from people, more importantly. And I think the We Love Tech Awards is an extension of that.

SPEAKER_00 9:31

Well, you know, what's funny is uh in the We Love Tech Awards, we give out uh blockchain certificates. So they're digital certificates and and and um they're actually really cool. They go right on a LinkedIn profile. And what's amazing is if you're not winning for a person, it's a little hard to get that on your profile, right? So it's if you won for a company or a product, we can sure do that, but it's gonna say you know the product name on there, which is a little weird. So, you know, these these uh digital batches that we give out, I think they they can go on your company page, on your LinkedIn company page if you have a promoted page. Uh, but these these awards really go on people's LinkedIn certificates and they become assets, you know, for your employees. So, you know, take a look at those, take a look at the award categories because there's a lot of categories uh for people in our program.

How To Nominate And What Happens

SPEAKER_01 10:18

Yeah, it's fantastic. So give us a rundown of the timeline, um, the deadline, and what's next.

Ten Years From Now And Closing

SPEAKER_00 10:26

So we've got the deadline coming up on March 27th. Uh, I know a guy if you need a little extra time. Uh, but you know, we do go to judging. So these our judges take their time. Nominations are very easy to put in, they're all online. Uh, you can go get the nomination guide at we love techawards.com. If you download the nomination guide, give it to your marketing people, they know what to do with it. Uh, they have awards, you know, they've they've nominated for before. It's basically a case study. If you think about awards nomination, it's you know, what did you do? How did it work, and and what did you solve, what problem did you solve? So the nomination is pretty easy to put together. Then we spend about two weeks judging those nominations. We have about 4,000 judges around the world that score and and review nominations for us. And so all that data comes back. The data's really amazing now. We get to see all the data on on how people did and kind of all the metrics about the performance of the program, which is pretty cool. AI now does that for us instead of hiring data scientists. And then we get to reward people, which is my favorite part of the job. Um, and we get to tell people how great they are, and then they get to tell the world how great they are. So it's it's uh, you know, it's a it's a great, it's a great process, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_01 11:36

Yeah, but I'm partially. And it's only going to get bigger uh over time. I hope to be talking in 10 years about the 10th annual WeLove Tech Awards. Just imagine where we'll be with uh holograms and AI augmented reality and goodness knows what else. What what a what a trip we're on.

SPEAKER_00 11:56

It absolutely is. I can't imagine. What do you think 10 years from now, other than a hologram, will bring us?

SPEAKER_01 12:02

Do you see something out there that you're and my uh my my 15 agents will be uh dutifully handling my business for me and occasionally checking in between margaritas as to critical decisions? But if uh the current market is any indication, we might be there in just a few years and not 10.

SPEAKER_00 12:21

Yeah, yeah, we might be there in one or two if it looks like that. If NVIDIA can keep up with demand, right? Yeah. Well, I am excited. This is this is a great gonna be a great program this year. We had some amazing winners last year. Uh I know we'll have a couple repeat winners, we always do. So uh looking forward to seeing all those nominations.

SPEAKER_01 12:43

I can't wait to see the nominations. I see them personally, and also the awards, and um good luck everyone. Way more fun than the Oscars. Way more fun. And those flaps. Exactly. Thanks, Russ. You do an amazing job. Thank you. And thanks everyone for listening, watching, sharing, and of course, nominating your favorite solution. Take care.