MEDIASCAPE: Insights From Digital Changemakers
Join hosts Joseph Itaya and Anika Jackson as they dive into conversations with leaders and changemakers shaping the future of digital media. Each episode explores the frontier of multimedia, artificial intelligence, marketing, branding, and communication, spotlighting how emerging digital trends and technologies are transforming industries across the globe.
MEDIASCAPE is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. This online master’s program is designed to prepare practitioners to understand the evolving media landscape, make data-driven and ethical decisions, and build a more equitable future by leading diverse teams with the technical, artistic, analytical, and production skills needed to create engaging content and technologies for the global marketplace. Learn more or apply today at https://dmm.usc.edu.
MEDIASCAPE: Insights From Digital Changemakers
Known Better, Done Well: David DeWolf on Transforming Business Relationships
What does it truly mean to be human in an age of artificial intelligence? David DeWolf, founder of KnownWell, offers a refreshingly nuanced perspective on how AI should enhance our humanity rather than diminish it.
Having built and sold a 2,500-person digital products company before founding KnownWell in 2023, DeWolf observed a critical gap in how businesses were approaching AI. While many focused solely on advancing the technology or boosting personal productivity, few were addressing how AI would transform business leadership, organizational structure, and human relationships.
DeWolf's solution tackles what he calls the "professional services paradox" – the phenomenon where the very human elements that drive growth (relationships and specialized knowledge) traditionally undermine scalability. By analyzing natural information flows between service providers and clients, KnownWell creates objective relationship health metrics for businesses that previously relied on subjective assessments. The results are remarkable: companies using the platform see a 50-60% reduction in at-risk clients within six months.
Beyond the technological innovation, DeWolf shares profound insights about purpose-driven leadership, challenging the conventional notion of work-life balance. "I am a single human being," he explains, advocating for integration rather than separation between professional and personal identities. For aspiring entrepreneurs, he emphasizes the importance of "humble confidence" – the seemingly contradictory combination of unwavering determination and genuine openness to learning that characterizes successful founders.
Whether you're a business leader navigating the AI revolution, an educator wondering how to prepare students for this new landscape, or an entrepreneur seeking to build something meaningful, DeWolf's conversation offers valuable wisdom about maintaining our essential humanity while embracing technological advancement.
This podcast is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. An online master’s designed to prepare practitioners to understand the evolving media landscape, make data-driven and ethical decisions, and build a more equitable future by leading diverse teams with the technical, artistic, analytical, and production skills needed to create engaging content and technologies for the global marketplace. Learn more or apply today at https://dmm.usc.edu.
Welcome to Mediascape insights from digital changemakers, a speaker series and podcast brought to you by USC Annenberg's Digital Media Management Program. Join us as we unlock the secrets to success in an increasingly digital world.
Speaker 2:I am thrilled to welcome to Mediascape David DeWolf of KnownWell. That name, knownwell is really intriguing to me, david, so I'm really excited to dive in because you do many things. Just looking at your LinkedIn like you have family ventures, you're a board member, you host AI know-how you have known well, and on and on and on. So I'd love to hear how you got here and have you been working in the AI space before the rest of us started talking about it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, man so many questions are so packed. You know, I'm so glad KnownWell strikes you the way it does. I'll just start with that, because it is definitely a passion of mine. I've been in technology forever so, yes, you know, was my last company that I built and grew to about 2,500 employees. We were focused on building digital products for media, information and technology companies and in that world, yeah, we had been using AI for gosh over a decade.
Speaker 3:You know, people forget what's new about AI is the democratization of it, not the technology itself. Right, the basic technology neural networks have been around for a while, but my passion is actually not the technology for its own sake. My passion is actually how do we apply technology in business and specifically the human part of that? I think so often we forget that the humanities are important in technology. We focus on the STEM subjects, right, and I think, especially with AI, there's been this awakening of what does this mean?
Speaker 3:And what I found as I was starting KnownWell was that there were a lot of conversations about the technology and just the advancement of the LM. There were a lot of conversations about personal productivity and how we put it to use. Those are interesting to me, but where I was really passionate was about how is it going to impact us in the business world? How are we going to lead differently? How are we going to run our organizations differently? What is it going to do to jobs? All of those things.
Speaker 3:And when you look at the bottom of all of those questions, I felt like it was really, really important to begin to distinguish what makes a machine different from a human being, what's truly human, and that's that humanities. Part of AI that I think is so important and so known well, comes from exactly that. What is unique about a human. You and I can sit here and get to know each other and we will really. You will know me and I will know you, and there's a deep understanding, there's a consciousness there. Machines don't do that right, and I think that ability to have relationship is so important. And as we look to deploy AI, ai should be used to promote our humanity, to elevate our humanity, to allow us to do things that are more human and do for us what actually does the opposite, which is make us more mechanical, right, and so that's my passion and that's where the name comes from.
Speaker 2:You are saying something that I often say to my students. I talk about how artificial intelligence gives us the chance to actually spend more time being human. Then we ask what does it mean to be human? It doesn't mean paying the bills, doing menial tasks. It means being present for our loved ones, for our community, for our work, being able to iterate and ideate and come up with new and innovative ideas and I'm really excited about that of ideas, and I'm really excited about that. I see that people are still in a lot of places scared of technology and we're seeing a lot more bottom up People are starting to use it and then saying, hey, we really need to put some of these processes into place to their CEOs and their C-suite, but also at the student level. I have students who said we couldn't use AI tools at all in undergrad, students who said we couldn't use AI tools at all in undergrad, and now you're telling us we have to because I'm saying my classes are AI first.
Speaker 2:There's no digital media management, no ad tech, mar tech without artificial intelligence, whether you know it or not. So let's get your hands dirty and test these tools Totally. Now I'm hearing from employers that they're not hiring people who don't have some skill set in AI. It doesn't have to be expert level right, but it has to have some. So the fact that you're really pinpointing the fact that we're supposed to use this technology to have more humanity is amazing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and I love what you said there. You know there's so many aspects. I do think the natural inclination for human beings is to be scared of change and fear, especially of technology when there's a big revolution. Now, don't get me wrong, there's plenty of things we can have a whole conversation about. Some of my fears are like, the way we use it is really important. Right, the technology itself is amoral, but the way we apply it can undermine us or it can elevate us. But I think it's really important, especially when you're talking about education. Right, I'm very close to my kid's high school principal. I've had this conversation.
Speaker 3:Same thing it's banned from the school. It's the exact opposite of what I would do. Right, I'm on the board of a university. Exact same thing. It's the exact opposite of what I would do. We need to be teaching the young up and comers. How do you leverage this in a good, positive way? How do you look at the results and discern, like, do I need to question this? Might this be hallucinating? Might this be biased, all of those types of things? There's a new skill set and we have to really help build those muscles. And if we say, don't touch it, it's scary, we're going to do the opposite and we're going to end up with the exact opposite result from what we're hoping for.
Speaker 2:Yeah, especially when we see other countries really embracing I mean China now teaching it in K-12. I do work for a nonprofit foundation that has an online school and I was just talking to the curriculum director about how we're going to incorporate AI into the curriculum, but also into the leadership course, and here's how you use different tools for research, and those skills are so important. They're just the next phase Critical.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's right, and they can actually enhance our learning, right? We think a lot about oh, people won't know how to write anymore those types of things. You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of when I was in high school and the TI-81, I think it was first came out the advanced calculator right, and it was banned from school and you'd be expelled. My kids now it's on their required purchase list. We haven't gotten stupider as a society, right? We're not dumb because we have these calculators right. In fact, they've allowed us to do more, and I think AI is very much the exact same thing. It can empower us to take the next step and have even more breakthroughs. There will still be deep experts in subject areas that know the math, the language, the whatever even deeper than we do today. The language, the whatever even deeper than we do today, just because we can automate some of it for those of us that are normal and don't want to do calculus every single minute of our lives right doesn't mean that there won't be experts.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%. And that goes to the argument about oh well, will teachers be taking over? And I say no, there's information certainly that. Say no, there's information certainly that we could have an AI avatar. Talk about the facts and figures of the topic, but to really get the recent case studies, talk about what we as humans are doing in the field of our expertise in our industries. That's not going to be replaced. You can't just take our individual knowledge bases. Now you can use tools like Delphi and put your knowledge base into something and have a clone. That's helpful for some stuff, but it's not going to take over the whole landscape.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. I love that example and I think we can actually do this exact same thing with whatever job it is we're talking about. Will there be some that are disrupted, of course, but take the teaching profession. Ask yourself what is uniquely human about this job. Wouldn't you love to be able to do more of that? Right? Grading papers, I'm guessing, is not the favorite of any teacher, but connecting with students and actually understanding them and their nuances and helping them to learn and have that light bulb moment I don't think technology can do that nearly as well as a human being. So let's let teachers do that, not just grade papers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly. So let's talk about because KnownWell has been around since 2023, what made you switch right? Do you still have your other company? Are you fully focused?
Speaker 3:So, 16 years growing a professional services firm, sold that company twice to private equity, had a blast, incredible run. And, to be really honest with you, 2023 was coming around and on January 1st, I stepped down because my two oldest kids were getting married and I wanted to be mentally present for their weddings and it's hard to run a business and be mentally present, to be mentally present for their weddings. And it's hard to run a business and be mentally present. And after 16 years of running hard and 16 years of consecutive growth, it was just time to step down, and so I did. I retired for nine months and what was really unique about that time is, yes, I got to spend time with my family and friends and refresh and recharge all of those great things. But I couldn't have timed it better because, if you remember, january 1st was just six weeks after the release of ChatGPT, yeah, and I was able to watch AI cascade through our society on the sidelines with literally nothing to do, and when you're running a business, you have blinders on. You interpret everything through the eyes of your business, and I was able to step back and not have those blinders on and just watch what was happening and I saw these dynamics that we're talking about.
Speaker 3:Right, I saw the advancement of the technology. I saw individuals starting to use it, but what I saw was a lot of organizations that were scared, that were saying this is either going to make me or break me. This is my opportunity to either win or really lose. But they were stuck. They had no idea where to go, what to do, what the future was going to look like, and so I just started talking to customers.
Speaker 3:I really believe, as an entrepreneur, you do two things. Number one you talk to tons of customers. Number two you follow the money right. Those are the two things that I did. So I started talking to investors what are they seeing? And I started talking to executives and, over and over again, I started to see certain patterns. One of the patterns that I saw was this pattern of everybody knew they had to move, they were motivated to move, they were ready to move, but they had no idea what to do, so they weren't moving.
Speaker 3:The second one that I saw was everybody was talking about AI and talking about their data, and they said you know, one of the problems we have is we're overwhelmed with data. We have way too much. In fact, there's an Oracle study from about a year ago that says that 93% I think it is of leaders claim that they have so much data that it's undermining their decisions, it's making it worse. Yet at the same time, 91% will tell you they don't have the quote intelligence that they need to make good decisions right, so it's just information overload. So that was a trend. And then, finally, I saw this other one that kept on coming up but seemed unrelated until I had an aha moment, and that was we kept on hearing companies talk about surprise churn of their customers, and I couldn't connect the dots there and figure out what it was. Here's what it turned out to be More and more companies today are turning out to be like the professional services organization that I ran, which is they're relationship driven, they're not transactional, and in a relationship business without transactions, there is no ability to do customer analytics and actually know and deeply understand the very nature of your commercial relationship, and without that you can't create a disciplined, predictable operating machine.
Speaker 3:And, coming from this world of professional services, I knew this in spades, right. In professional services, we live in what I call the professional services paradox. Call the professional services paradox, which is every single day, you wake up and what gets you to grow and to be a successful professional services company is the exact same thing that undermines your ability to scale right. It is human knowledge, it is relationship. It's these things that aren't scalable. Well, guess what?
Speaker 3:With AI, they're scalable in a new way, and the reason why is we don't need transactional data anymore to understand the world around us. Transactional data was created as a reflection of reality that machines can understand. What we have naturally is what you and I are doing right now. We're conversing this conversation is a natural information flow. It is a natural representation of what's going on and guess what Machines can now understand.
Speaker 3:That so known well is helping to promote human relationships and build stronger service provider client relationships by understanding the natural information flows that already flow between a service provider and their client. That's what we're using AI to do, and the great part about it is we've seen tremendous results. We see that once deploying and operationalizing our platform, within six months, our customers see a reduction between 50 and 60% of their at risk clients. They see an increase in their healthy clients, like extremely kind of top end delighted customers between 50 and 90 percent, all because now they have this understanding of the relationship. They have metrics that they've never had before, that understand what used to be subjective measurements are now truly objective measures of health that they can go act on and execute on. That's the power of AI it's doing what machines can do, enabling these great businesses to go do what only they can do, and the humans are going out and making it happen Amazing.
Speaker 2:On a smaller scale. We talked about this in my class yesterday, because we talked about MarTech and how every company needs to really understand their customer base inside and out, and personalization, and how generic personalization of, okay, somebody's birthday is in December, you send them a coupon for traveling in December. Well, that's probably not going to work right, but if you know that they travel to these cities, if you're an airline and they've traveled several hundred thousand miles on your airline, then you can come up with a different message, and that's something that we're really missing the boat on. And this is where, to your point, exactly what you're doing it's not. Although you're using it for enterprise systems and larger organizations, there's also a need for smaller companies to be as nimble.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think one of the points the example you just point out is great. I think because there's two sides to the AI equation and I think, because of generative AI, a lot of people focus on the creation of content, right, right, and a lot of organizations, big and small, still think about AI and they have this big pit in their stomach but I have to get my data ready. Well, there's input and there's output. The great thing about AI is, yes, it can create content. It can also quote, understand that content, it can make sense of natural pros, and I think that can be super helpful, especially when you talk about those small organizations.
Speaker 3:You don't have a team of data engineers, right? You don't have an IT department that can help you with these, but with AI today, you don't need it. You don't have to have clean data. We don't need data warehouses in the same way that we used to. My big provocative battle cry these days is I think data is dead right. There's still a lot of people talking about it. Battle cry these days is I think data is dead right, there's still a lot of people talking about it, but I think the reality is conversation and our natural flows of information are overtaking it really really quickly, and that's an advantage to these small businesses that you're talking about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you also mentioned democratization, right. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, have been running lots of things for a long time. Yeah, financial systems, recommendations for what movies we watch Totally Big and small use cases. And one thing I think is that this democratization that you talked about is also the advantage of more people can start businesses with less barrier to entry, less people needed in their companies to start, and then they can scale up appropriately for long-term success. I've been on both sides. I've had organizations where, all of a sudden, I got an influx of clients. I hired, hired, hired. Didn't think about some of the repercussions of that. If I had had these tools back then I could have said, okay, let's be a little smarter about this, I don't need to hire five people because I can have my AI tools do this part of the work right, and then I'm the one who is interfacing with the clients, doing these other levers and triggers, and then I can staff appropriately, totally.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that's so true, and many, many types of businesses in the past have scaled with people right. In my world, in professional services, it's of businesses in the past have scaled with people Right, and in my world in professional services, is the worst of the worst, right, and what happens in those worlds is there's so many aspects of what you said that actually get in the way of healthy culture. Right, the friction that's inserted just by adding middle management takes us away. It actually takes us away from what truly makes us human. It's why people become less fulfilled typically as they get stuck in a big enterprise.
Speaker 3:Right, we hear it all the time. We hear about the bureaucracy. People complain, right, there's some stability, there's some things we like about large enterprises, but there's a lot that people crave in small businesses and medium business where they can have a stronger culture, where they can feel like they're in a team, all those types of things. I really believe that we are at the advent of a new season of business where the middle market is coming back and I think that's really really exciting, not just for the economy, but I think it's really exciting for people. It's for our fulfillment at work, for our place as human beings.
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. I wanted to ask about starting a podcast. Okay, Right, Because you started the organization A few months later you started the podcast, Obviously for both of them. You saw a need, you saw a hole in the information people were getting and the kinds of services that were being provided.
Speaker 3:Totally, talia. This was a very deliberate decision. When I started to really think about KnownWell and I observed this hole in the market we talked about right, like, how is AI going to be applied to business, and I saw nobody talking about it I made a decision. One of my two co-founders that I brought in to support me is my chief marketing officer, courtney. She's awesome and she's actually done a lot of podcasting in the past, and what I decided was there was a blue ocean, there was an opportunity, there was a void in the market, and that one of the best things that you can do at a point like this, at these inflection points that they happen maybe two or three times in a lifetime, if you're lucky right is you can actually stake a claim. And so we decided to plant a flag. We actually formally launched the company on September 5th I think it was of 2023. It was that exact same week. We published our very first podcast episode. We've been doing it every week since for this reason. Now here's the fun part. Let's talk about the results, not the reason why, within two and a half months, we had not only found the product that we thought we'd build, because we found some real pain. We actually landed our first customer without having a single line of code written or an engineer on staff Wow, and they were an inbound lead that found us through our thought leadership and the podcast. Amazing, that's the power of media these days.
Speaker 3:Right, fast forward about gosh. It was probably six or seven months ago. We started to see a new trend in our lead flow. Like what is this? We started getting on the phone and talking to new prospects that were inbound. We had no connection to whatsoever. We're asking where'd you find them? And we started to hear a theme. Openai told me to reach out to you. It was like what? Well, we have seen. Probably in January, we saw just this really take off, where we had now put out enough content that you know. If you go ask about not even commercial intelligence but how do I score my client health right, derivatives of that and you talk about being a relationship business, open AI, chatgpt will point you directly to Nunwell. Those are the types of results we're seeing just from being in the digital content space and prioritizing our thought leadership. Funny enough, it's also helped us internally. It helps you perfect ideas right, and so our product has come a long way. I just I'm a huge fan of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was just at AI Mavericks a couple months ago and it was all CEOs and founders and AI companies and talking about exactly what you're saying. Now we're seeing podcast SEO. So people are searching for hey, I want to know about this. It's leading them to podcasts. If you go into chat or Brock or Claude or Perplexity or all of the different systems, copilot, right, all the different ones that I'm not mentioning as well and you type in a prompt and you want to ask about something, your companies are starting to come up. Search is moving.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So that's fantastic and I love hearing this because this is what I preach about podcasting but often, you know, people say, okay, that's nice, and I talk about my experience and all the opportunities it's brought me, but you're using a real example of a business case where you're getting so much inbound traffic from that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean to give your listeners a comparison. You know 16 years of building three pillar right. Multiple hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue per year. Like we scaled the business and I have better lead flow now in known well, a year and a half old, with 22 employees, than I did at 3Pillar with 2,500 employees, a real marketing budget and 16 years of performance right. That's the difference.
Speaker 2:What does it mean to you to be a purpose-driven leader?
Speaker 3:Because I know that is something that's really important to you, yeah, so to me, it means living what I believe, right? I think so often we talk. One of my pet peeves in the business world is we talk a lot about work-life balance, and that term drives me nuts. Not because I don't love my family I've got eight kids and a beautiful wife of 25 years. I love my family, right, I love my life. There's lots of things I love about it.
Speaker 3:What drives me crazy is that the phrase pits your work against your life. Right, and I am a single human being. I am right now sitting here. I am a father, and you better believe that if I get an SOS message that my daughter or my son is in the hospital, I'm going to walk out and go Right At the same time when I'm putting my kids down to bed at night. I'm still a CEO. And if I get a text message that one of my employees is in the hospital or fire is going off, you better believe that I'm also going to leave at that point in time.
Speaker 3:And this world we've created, where one has to be against the other versus working in synergy, drives me nuts, right, and so for me, my purpose is I really believe that business should elevate the humanity of people, and I've found a business where I can live that purpose, not just in how I run my business, which is what I was able to do last time.
Speaker 3:I was able to build a culture that promoted that. That's still important, but I want to be able to actually build and to elevate humanity. Allow people to be better wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, friends, skateboarders whatever you want to be right At the same time of thriving in your work, and I do believe that both are very possible, and I've been very blessed to be able to live a life where both have been possible for me, and so I want to pass that along, and I think the world's a better place when that happens, and so I want to make sure that I wake up every single day. Being a purpose-driven leader means that is why I show up, that is why I build the business, it's why I make the hard decisions in the business. It's not for other alternative reasons.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we are, in some ways, so the same person. Everything you're saying I'm like yes, yes, yes. All of that are true to who I am as well. So, piggybacking on that, what does it take to be a good startup founder?
Speaker 3:Hmm, man. So this is a hard question because there's so much there, but I boil it down to one simple phrase and I call it humble confidence. I think the successful entrepreneur what I have seen has to be so stubborn that they will not give up on their vision, but has to be so humble that they can learn along the way how to evolve that and how to navigate the path to get there, because it's never a straight line and those two things on the surface seem incredibly in conflict. Rarely do you find someone with extreme confidence, that won't give up, that is stubborn I'm going to will this to happen and an incredible humility to say I don't know what I don't know and I want to learn from other people, and I don't have to be the right person in the room and I don't have to be the smartest person in the room, and I think that combination is at the heart of every successful entrepreneur.
Speaker 2:And I feel like not everybody has that focus and that centeredness in their ventures but, this is what the future should look like. I hope so, yeah.
Speaker 3:I hope so. You know there's a lot of entrepreneurs that you know, two broad brush flavors. There are those that start businesses because they have a passion for what they're doing and sometimes that's the work itself, the industry itself, the problem they're solving. Sometimes it's their purpose, right? You have other entrepreneurs who do it for the money, they do it for the success, they do it for the recognition. In my experience, the odds of success are so in favor of those that do it for a different reason. It's not power and it's not money. When the entrepreneurs go out and they start something for those selfish means nine times out of 10, just from anecdotes of the people I've seen, the friends I've had, the rooms I've been in they tend to fail. They could be successful for two or three years, maybe five years. They're not enduring companies. They could be successful for two or three years, maybe five years. They're not enduring companies. They don't build great businesses.
Speaker 2:Let's take it back a little further. I teach for two master's programs the master's in digital media management and the digital social media. I've also taught the master's in PR and advertising branding. You were a media major, I was, yeah. So, this goes hand in hand because our students right now are in that convergence of media and technology. So what was your path from straight media into?
Speaker 3:Yeah, my path was really pragmatic. I graduated from school and my very first job offer was from a radio station in Buffalo, new York, paying me $17,000 a year. And my now wife, who was my fiance at the time, said oh, I'm not going to Buffalo, new York, and you can't support a family on that. So I ended up in Dallas, texas, and so my first real job not my job offer was actually working for an ad agency and I had. This was right at the height of the dot com. This was 1999.
Speaker 3:I had learned over the years. I had one class in school and just had a passion for I knew how to write HTML and so this ad agency hired me to do quote new media. I was building websites and my very first client at that ad agency and I was a temp worker. It was only there three months, but my very first client for him was a software company and we were building a website for a software company and I ended up going consulting with that client and, turns out, the CTO of that organization happened to really like me and offered me a job and I ended up going into user experience design for the CTO and then quickly became a front-end engineer and then within a year became an engineer on the CTO's team Fun part. He is now my chief scientist at KnownWell.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, careful. I love that. What advice would you give to students of today who are looking at you know, obviously we talked about a few things before we jumped on that really, everybody needs to know how to use AI tools. I'm hearing I mean, we've been talking about this a few months ago. The narrative was you won't be fired from your role if you don't know AI, but if you don't know AI and now I'm having CEOs literally tell me yeah, we're not hiring people because if they don't have a baseline knowledge, they can't operate in our business structure.
Speaker 3:I actually think this dilemma goes back to something that is kind of a deeper, deeper problem within our society. You know, I think that we have gotten into this mode for a long time. Everybody just had to go off to college because it's the thing that you do and there was really no discernment of what was I made for, what are my gifts, what are my talents, what are my passions no-transcript reminder of is get back to the heart of what you love and what you're great at and find that intersection. Now you have to intersect it with something where you can make a living at as well. It's really important. But I think, instead of just picking a profession or just making your parents happy or just doing something because it is the most prestigious thing or you'll make the most money it's kind of like the entrepreneur conversation we had those that go do it for the money, the prestige, aren't the most successful, they're definitely not the most fulfilled, right. But if you can find that purpose, if you can find that reason that you are uniquely qualified to do, I think you will thrive. And you will thrive even in a world where AI is coming for everything and you will.
Speaker 3:What we're seeing in real time leveraging it. We're an AI company, but we still have humans. We're using the AI. We are seeing that it's those that have deep expertise and a passion and a love for what they do. They treat their job as a craft. They actually get the biggest and best benefit from the AI. It takes them those are already operating 3x 10x greater than their peers. It takes them to 20x, 40x, and I think that's who you want to be. You want to hone in to what's uniquely you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, fantastic. Well, you're preaching to the choir here. I've loved our conversation. I want to understand a little bit more about. I understand that you're onboarding professional services companies into a beta.
Speaker 3:We are, yeah. So this platform we've talked about it's live, it's deployed in customers and it is having a tremendous impact. We're seeing reduced churn, increased growth all coming from de-risking your client base, because you know them and you can execute on it, and so we're providing metrics and insights and we actually give recommendations. Here's what you should do. Our platform surfaces up very personalized recommendations. This is what you should do to strengthen this client relationship. The results of that are through the roof. It's going really well, and so we've just actually opened up a few brand new spots in our beta program. And if you are running a middle market professional services organization, if you have at least 25, 30 clients, you're probably encountering the professional services paradox, and we can help solve that, and we would love to work with innovative companies that want to help us shape the direction of this product and really use it early on. So go to knownwellcom and check it out and we'd love to talk to you. Fantastic.
Speaker 2:Well, this is going to be mandatory listen or watch for my students. This is exactly what we're talking about right now the changing ecosystem. What people really need to realize that we are going to be more human in this age of AI and agentic AI and Web4 and all the things that are coming at us faster than we realize.
Speaker 3:Totally.
Speaker 2:And you're hitting the spot so well on really understanding your customer, understanding how to keep your existing customer informant, even deeper relationship with them. So thank you, David DeWolf, for bringing your expertise to Mediascape today.
Speaker 3:It was so much fun. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for having me, Annika.
Speaker 2:Likewise, and we'll have your website in the show notes and thank you to everybody who's watching this episode or listening to it on your favorite platform. I am Annika Jackson, one of the hosts of Mediascape Insights from Digital Changemakers, run by USC's MS in Digital Media Management Program.
Speaker 1:To learn more about the Master of Science in Digital Media Management Program, visit us on the web at dmmuscedu.
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