Persona Based AI - One Size Fits All Service Desks are Dead

Most IT organizations aren't behind on technology — they're behind on thinking. In this episode, Pops and Steele sit down with Matt Coatney, CIO of a large national law firm, to break down persona-based agentic AI: virtual agents that adapt to *who* they're talking to, not just *what* they're asked. Matt shares how a law firm environment — high-touch partners, urgent deadlines, wildly different workflows across practice groups — makes generic self-service fall flat, and what it actually takes to build role-aware automation that works. They dig into data readiness, the Big Brother problem, tier-zero service desk automation, and where the real ROI conversation with a skeptical CFO needs to start. Matt also gets candid about the risks of over-permissioned AI agents digging up things "security by obscurity" used to hide.

Key Takeaways
- Persona-based AI isn't mainstream yet — the technology exists, but adoption is gated by change management, privacy comfort, and governance, not capability.
- Generic self-service fails high-touch environments. A law firm with hundreds of partner "entrepreneurs" each running practices their own way can't be served with one-size-fits-all automation — urgency and workflow context matter enormously.
- Data exhaust is the unlock. Ticket history, assets, and system usage are already-known data that can power personalization without requiring people to hand over new personal information.
- Big Brother concerns are real but manageable. Personalization lands well when it's baked into an expected workflow (like a service desk that already has ticket history) rather than feeling like surveillance.
- Agentic AI raises new data-handling risks — attachments containing PII/PHI, agents that could store or forward sensitive data, and tools like Copilot surfacing improperly secured internal information that "security by obscurity" used to hide.
- ROI is often about noise reduction. In flat organizational structures, faster, better, more personalized service reduces escalations straight to the CIO/COO — a compelling case even without hard automation-cost metrics.
- The tier-zero cleanup loop: using AI-assisted human agents today (suggested KB articles, predictive closure notes) trains and cleans the knowledge base, setting up cleaner true self-service later.
- Personal accountability doesn't disappear with AI. Ceding too much judgment to an agent ("just read my email and tell me what matters") risks missing what actually counts — and someone still owns the outcome.
- Advice for leaders starting out: network with peers (ILTA, vendor conversations), and personally use the tools — you can't lead AI adoption you haven't internalized yourself.

Keywords / Tags
persona-based AI, agentic AI, ServiceNow, IT service desk, self-service automation, tier zero support, law firm technology, legal IT, CIO leadership, AI governance, data privacy AI, Now Assist, ITSM automation, enterprise AI agents, Copilot security, change management AI, CMDB, knowledge management, virtual agents, AI adoption

If you're an IT leader wrestling with self-service that feels generic, this episode is your blueprint for making it personal — subscribe to The Wired Garage with Pops so you don't miss the next conversation, drop a comment on where your organization stands on the "mainstream vs. science fiction" scale, and share this with a fellow CIO who's still fighting the one-size-fits-all portal.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

The other weird thing that's happening though with these AI tools that is new to me is that people are willing to, when they see the power of certainly like the AI, the advanced AI models and AI chatbots and increasingly with agents, people are more than willing to be like, oh yeah, I uploaded my uh my rental agreement and my wedding vows and this and that, and I had it help me with this. And there's just this long line of both personal and professional things they're uploading without giving it a second thought, which is why it's incumbent on all organizations have a secure private instance of whatever model you're using or have protections, contractual protections in place to protect that. But I think that if people get the excitement going, they're willing to share information, it's then um incumbent on us to protect that information. And that's sort of the seat I sit in when we look at um enterprise tools for AI and other things, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:41

We have Matt Cody with us again, and we're talking about persona-based magentic AI or AI. So the days of the one size fits all service portal are all over. In this episode, we're going to dig into one of the most exciting shifts happening in service desk automation right now, and that's the role-aware AI agents that actually know who they're talking to. So we're talking about virtual agents built to serve a developer differently than they serve someone in sales, HR, or finance, and not just a different greeting, but different, fundamentally different experience shaped by the role, the location, the device context, and even the recent ticket history. So this agent meets you where you are with the right information at the right time. So we're breaking down how these persona-driven agents are being designed and deployed in real enterprise environments. So what it takes to build them right, why most organizations are still leaving serious value on the table by treating self-service as a generic experience. So if you're an IT automation or just curious about what AI-powered service delivery is actually headed, this one's for you.

SPEAKER_02 2:49

So, Matt, thank you again for joining us. Always, always a pleasure. Before we get into the tech, just a little bit of background in your world. What does your organization look like? And where does self-service and automation kind of fit into the day-to-day?

SPEAKER_03 3:04

Yeah, happy to start there. So I am CIO at a fairly large uh national law firm. And uh that means I run everything from help desk and support to cybersecurity infrastructure, also analytics and AI and things of that nature, as well as research, library and research. So it's a it's a pretty broad remit. And the legal industry is, you know, in some ways, we're ahead in areas, in other areas we're probably a little behind. Our biggest uh, you know, key driver is the fact that we have, you know, in my firm, about 200 CEOs in terms of owners, partners, right? So we have a very high demand, high touch, very valuable resources, very people intensive. And uh automation, particularly if it is made to feel sterile, generic, not personalized to them and their important sense of urgency about this thing that's sitting in front of them right now, it falls pretty flat. So it has traditionally been very people heavy on the support side, and even in person and on the phone. It's only since COVID switched to be more digital, which has allowed us to have some sense of light automation, light streamlining on the service desk. But where we're finding the greatest utility early is in just having a better sense of who the people are, what their ticket history is, following standard like ITSM. We can look up ticket history and assets and being able to start to get that information into our analysts' hands more in real time versus that having them peck around in a dashboard for five minutes when someone calls them in a in a panic. So yeah. Yeah, it's it's a it's a different environment, but it is, you know, it is rewarding from the standpoint that we're actually able to make a a big difference in in their outcomes.

SPEAKER_00 4:56

So so when did you first realize that the generic one size fits all self-service wasn't cutting it anymore? Like, was there a moment, a specific failure or frustration that made it just obvious?

SPEAKER_03 5:08

Yeah, I I do uh I can recall a couple of moments like that. I'm sure Brian, in your past you probably can as well. We have great service desk people. You know, they're very passionate about their role and and very service-minded, but they don't understand necessarily. They don't understand lawyers, they don't understand the law, and they don't understand necessarily how some problems are truly urgent, right? We all, I think we all came to know that there's a uh, you know, there's a di a filing due at 5 p.m. And if the person's machine breaks at four, that's a problem, right? And so, but but the more nuance of, okay, this practice generally isn't busy for not bus, they're not not busy, but they're normally busy for 11 months out of the year. But maybe it's an MA practice or a tax practice, and there's that one month or even that one week where there's a deal that's 20% of their revenue for the year, right? If something goes wrong in that, like very narrow, very almost personalized to that group's workflow and what matters to them and their business cycle, without that context, we just come in with sort of our generic approach of solving problems. And it's going to fall flat with them because we don't understand their sense of urgency. So that's an that's an example, but it even gets into ways they use the tools differently, um, different workflows, different personality types that uh if we're just delivering one size fits all service across the board from staff person and first year associate to senior partner, we're gonna have a problem. So that that sort of differentiation has been something that's been really more ad hoc in in many firms I've worked with. And we're just now starting to really codify what that means and putting some structure around it. And we're getting there, right? That's part of the, I think that's part of the ITIL and ITSM model, right? So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:58

It's been a journey.

SPEAKER_02 6:59

Kind of a aligning to that business criticality there. Yes. How so and this is uh this feels like such a weird question because we're we are still it it feels like we're early in the agenc world, but really the time span for any innovation in this space is so short-lived that by next week there's a new solution, a new announcement, something. So um, I I mean, even in the Nvidia just had an announcement I think yesterday with RTX Spark, a new processor, unified memory, gonna be a Gentic agents and everybody's uh computers working along for them. How far along are most organizations when it comes to, or or maybe just you personally, when it comes to persona-based role-aware AI agents, would you even say this is mainstream a best in class thing, or this is still kind of science fiction at this point?

SPEAKER_03 8:00

I I'd like to put folks' mind at ease that it is not mainstream. To my experience, it is not mainstream in in most organizations yet. So it's definitely, you know, not science fiction. The capabilities are there. I think there are definitely leading organizations that are best in class that are starting to do this. But the majority of organizations, sort of the the big middle, you know, small and medium enterprises, aren't quite there yet. And, you know, that's as much an ad anymore, it's more of an adoption and change management and privacy conversation than it is a technology conversation yet. Technologies are increasingly getting there, but the skills to enable them and the governance and change management to actually like make it stick, make it work without feeling like you're breaching someone's privacy. That's that's where I think many of us are are currently.

SPEAKER_00 8:50

So yeah, so stepping on this a little further, roll-aware agents live or die on data quality, right? So um many of these organizations like have not probably taken that step because you know, their ticket history isn't clean, user profiles, like you mentioned, are exposed or has information out there, device context, just knowledge, period. And in your experience, how ready is that average enterprise data infrastructure to support rollerware AI agents? Great point.

SPEAKER_03 9:22

Yeah, I mean, it's it's right there in the in the name. It's persona, uh it's persona-based agents, right? And if you don't have an ability to understand who it is and what they do and what equipment they're working with and what their history is and all like all of that, you've lost all that data. How can you be personalized? I do think, you know, most organizations, it is a work in progress to get the data clean enough to be workable and yield good outcomes. It's never going to be perfect, but I do think organizations like they they shouldn't let the lack of perfection stymie their progress. There are, I'm sure, areas that are important to them where the data is clean, and that that could be a good place to start. The other thing to your point is is privacy has always like this is at Lexus Nexus, and this was years ago, 15 years ago, talking with their head of search. And they said, and Google has said the same thing, right? All the things we could do for you if you would only let us know who you were, right? So they they've had capabilities decades ago to make personalized search and personalized experiences be really impactful. But uh, there's a comfort level of how much are you willing to share? What does that look like? Are you comfortable with it? Now that was 20 or 15 years ago. Many of us have gotten much more laissez faire about our personal information. But everything's exposed where we're 10 to 10. Everything's exposed anyway. So I I think that it weirdly works in our advantage. We should not take advantage of that, though. But yeah, I I, you know, I think that there's a balancing act there. But the there's a lot of data that's already there. AI is making it easier to get the kind of data that's meaningful for this type of personalization without bothering the person, making them enter a lot of information, or sort of opening the door for everything, right? So there's this way to capture the sort of called data exhaust. Ticket history is a great example, assets are a great example, what what systems they have, what software they have. That's known information. No one could argue that's private or sensitive. It's just good background to have. And most of that data can be gleaned if you're not already doing it. Easier said than done, I know.

SPEAKER_02 11:42

So when you're rolling out something like this, and you mentioned earlier, the technology is the easier part. When you think about the OCM or the human side of this conversation, uh, the folks using the technology, the end users, the managers. Who's who's skeptical and how do you convince them essentially in that adoption conversation? Has that been a challenge?

SPEAKER_03 12:06

It it depends. I've found there's a lot of there is a lot of obstacle to a concern about Big Brother, rightfully so, right? Why are you and I see it a lot with communication channels, so teams or chat, email, why are who's looking at it? Why are you looking at it? Why do you need to know availability, the little availability indicator on Teams? Yeah. Consternation that has sent IT poor IT departments and managers. Anyway. So so I think if it's focused around that kind of like sensitive, personal-ish, like big brother concerns, that's a hard road to head down. But conversely, if it's something that is either just baked into the system they're using, and I the service, you know, Service Desk, ServiceNow is a great example of that. They're calling, they have a history, they know they have a history with you. As long as you're not including perhaps some, you know, disparaging words about them in your commentary, and it's more matter-of-fact, then yeah, they have no problem with that. I don't think. Most people wouldn't. Uh, so I think when it's part of the workflow, it's just natural, it's expected. You can get over that hurdle a little bit, a little bit easier. The other weird thing that's happening, though, with these AI tools that is new to me is that people are willing to, when they see the power of certainly like the AI, the advanced AI models and AI chatbots, and increasingly with agents, like our conversation about everything being out there anyway. People are more than willing to be like, oh yeah, I uploaded my uh my rental agreement and my wedding vows and this and that, and I had it help me with this. And there's just this long line of both personal and professional things they're uploading without giving it a second thought, which is why it's incumbent on all organizations have a secure private instance of whatever model you're using, or have protections, contractual protections in place to protect that. But I think that if people get the excitement going, they're willing to share information, it's then um incumbent on us to protect that information. And that's sort of the seat I sit in when we look at um enterprise tools for AI and other things, right?

SPEAKER_00 14:14

Let's say just going down that road a little bit, because this it just brought me just thinking a little bit about some of the challenges of tier zero. So uh it's it's all our it's it's it's our same organization. We're not sitting next to the internet, it's all staying within the company, right? It's a tier zero service desk. We offer it, let's say, through Teams. There's a support channel through Teams. They can type in their questions, and then the the A the virtual agents are acting there with all the information you provided with knowledge and profiles, CMDB, everything else. But they uploaded, we'll say, documents that had PII or PHI of clients or some other sensitive information that I don't know about help desk helping you can't see it. Maybe there should be some guard. I mean, there are probably some things there to think about protecting your service desk from things happening. But it's not unlike they can't just attach to an email and an email help desk, right? It's the same thing. But I guess you kind of think about it differently in this kind of kind of, or it gives you a chance to pause, say, wait a minute, we shouldn't accept all of this right into cert like for a service now and have this document hosted in my ticketing system because now I got to protect it differently. Yes.

SPEAKER_03 15:42

Absolutely. And it happens all the time. Hey, I was having problems opening this document. Can you have a look? And they attach the document, which was totally fine. It opened just fine, except it contained sensitive client data, right? And so there are definitely systems and checks and balances you can put in place that that can prevent that. For instance, on our service desk, we do auto ticketing through email. Any attachments are stripped, yeah, like sort of stripped, moved somewhere else, not stored indefinitely. The the help desk person can still get to it if they need it, but it's not maintained in our hosted environment. And that's just one example. It gets trickier with AI agents because they could take that data and do something with it. They could store it in a file share, they could read it, they could email it back out. I mean, they could technically do anything they want with it, and they may be training on that as data. So you do need to be extra careful as you start to bring agents into the equation. It's not just people anymore.

SPEAKER_02 16:39

And then help desk.

SPEAKER_03 16:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:41

It's yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:42

There uh there's actually a really interesting tool that was released not too long ago. Microsoft released it. It's called Mark It Down. And it uh there's a repo. There's like 125,000 stars already on that repo. And it will take like a PDF, a word file, whatever, convert it to Markdown. And I'm thinking it would probably be easier to remove PII from a file if it's in Markdown versus you have the image of a PDF. So maybe something to look into, a little nugget for folks on this episode. Mark it down.

SPEAKER_00 17:18

Love it. So, how do you build the ROI for persona-based service delivery for a CFO or CEO who doesn't really speak IT, who may be sort of concerned about the AI world, right? So, what metrics would actually move the needle in those conversations with them?

SPEAKER_03 17:34

Yeah, I can share certainly from from our experience just on the service desk side, and then we can expand from there. But, you know, in a in a law firm again, escalations tend to go from the individual contributor analyst straight to the CIO, COO, or managing partner without not much in between, even if there's multiple layers. So it's, you know, that noise factor is real. And, you know, if there's if there is a soft benefit of cutting down on that noise coming to one of those individuals because we're able to react more quickly, better quality, and more personalized experience and a happier client, customer, there's there's honestly no better ROI than that in many cases for an IT organization, because we are the face, you know, the support is the face of the entire organization. So you can be doing the most amazing innovation and AI and this and that. And if you have a less than stellar front line and that's the people's lived experience as customers, you don't live long as a CIO or as a leader. Uh so that's one, but that that's just very focused on on service desk and obviously sort of the typical metrics of responsiveness and satisfaction and things like that are very easy to point to and see improvements in. You know, when I think about ROI beyond that and the and the personalization, I mean, I I I'll speak from personal experience and the law, but I there are probably other applications as well. There's always this tension between the fact that we are a loose confederation of partners, senior partners with their own practices and their own businesses, and a little bit of a rebellious streak to say, well, I'm just going to do it my own way. I'm my own entrepreneur, they're entrepreneur, they're entrepreneur, they built their book of business, which means you have 200, 300, 400 snowflakes of ways that they like to do just about everything, even if it's not adding value per se. And so if you could bring in agents to say review uh invoices and standardize language and things like that, like if you could come in and help them have their own uh customized view of personalized view of the world while making that sustainable and scalable, like that's the unlock because the two things are either support a really expensive infrastructure to support this uniqueness or try to force them into standardization, which is incredibly difficult to do with, again, hundreds of entrepreneurs. And so I think you can get sort of the best of both worlds if you take that concept and allow that personalization, give them the ability to have again, like personalized help, like your own. Imagine you had your own agent that does things just the way you want to, but that doesn't require a staff of hundreds of people to support all that. Like that, that's maybe the pipe dream, but that's you know, back to your point about is this all mainstream? No, no. That's that's definitely more cutting edge.

SPEAKER_00 20:26

I it it's a difficult one. I think you're right. I mean, you you want to say this is efficient for, you know, first call close, a lot of things like that, but then you don't want to show that your team is inept or not able to, you know, doing things correctly. Or or that you're gonna lose all your team because now you can do everything in AI, which is never the truth, right? And uh so it it's a difficult thing to do, but I think it's somewhere you have to go because you're always being pushed on resources, you're always being pushed on quality. And if you can get rid of some of the easier answers and let people just ask a system a question and get the answer right away and walk away and not have to deal with waiting on a phone call, wait on hold, waiting on a callback, all those other system things that we fail at, I think that's there is a benefit there for tier zero.

SPEAKER_01 21:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:18

And like you said, the custom stuff is is really the the the rainmaker for it all, you know, is to hit the the practice directly, not do IT.

SPEAKER_03 21:27

So well, on the self to your point, the self-serve we are working on and experimenting ourselves. There is really something to be said for that. Intranets are a great example where there's hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of information out there, some up to date, some stale, contradicting, impossible to find things. Search doesn't really solve the problem. Uh and there, but there's a lot of great intelligence out there about who does what and who knows what, and and all that tribal knowledge. Uh, that's a great use case for having agents that sort of are aware to who. you are and what you care about and being able to serve up that content. So not just how-tos and support kind of things, but also who to contact in marketing for this or what's the what's the latest, you know, corporate PowerPoint template that we need to use, all these kinds of questions that that teams get inundated with phone calls and emails, not just, not just IS, not just Service Desk. So I think that there's definitely opportunity there. And then, you know, back to Steele about your point about NVIDIA, Spark and all that, not to be lost on, you know, these are incredibly resource intensive things.

SPEAKER_01 22:32

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 22:33

There's always been a push, a desire to move everything to cloud. And, you know, you see it with Copilot and Microsoft sort of reaching into everything, SharePoint and Exchange. So it can do all these things in the cloud. But at the end of the day, the person that's working on their desktop that's working on things other than Microsoft has all these tabs open. They have all these applications open. They've got, you know, Outlook loaded personally. There's a lot of opportunity to do magic within all of that data that's floating around in the memory of the machine that's coming up and down from the cloud. That's probably going to be more efficient and again personalized without piercing the veil of privacy locally on the desktop. So I do think like, is it going to evolve into everybody having open claw on their on their NVIDIA PC sitting under their desk? No, but I I think there is potential to pull some of that back down closer to the source.

SPEAKER_02 23:26

Yeah. Looking forward to see more about that when that comes out. But that's what caught my eye most is being able to supposedly and again air quotes, but being able to leverage frontier models locally without having to depend on the cloud. I mean it's seems contradictory to everything that we've seen thus far. And I guess it really will come down to the use case on do you really need it in the cloud? Do you really need it local? All I know is that no matter where you are and what your use case is, uh NVIDIA has it covered. I just I I can't wait to see what the price on 128 gig a unified memory is going to be on a Windows machine. So yeah, we're talking about it there is a trust dimension here and you have that context. The virtual agent knows your role, your location it's like a knowledge graph. It knows everything about you. Is there a natural line between helpful and intrusive and is that really just whatever the compliance manager says is the line.

SPEAKER_03 24:30

I've learned that lesson is never the answer is always no. Yeah no the compliance manager doesn't get to choose. I do think there's some element of control where the person should be able to decide what's included and what's not to the to realm where that's feasible. There is a risk of being overinclusive and just so back to you know we made a comment probably the last time we chatted where there is this sense that once you start to get really enamored with these tools and you see their capabilities to really just seed everything over to them. And I've had people who are in senior roles in regulated industries say, well can I just point it to my email and have it just read all my emails and tell me what I need to focus on for today. I just want the punch list. And I'm like you're going to cede that decision to a glorified search engine. And what happens if it misses that really important thing that a client demanded that that was due today and oops the AI I missed it. Back to a point about accountability like can you just say well my agent messed up so so I do think even if it's not a privacy or intrusiveness concern, you do need to be mindful of how much you let it turn loose and and let people sort of just have it run with things like there needs to be again that personal accountability responsibility. All that said like the knowledge graph and the the uh opening things up the concern that I've seen more frequently and I have the same concern things like co-pilot's a good example isn't so much what's my personal information in there. It's what else is out in my organization that someone didn't secure properly that was sensitive and now it's easy to find because I can just ask co-pilot, hey copilot, what are the top 10 salaries of our executives in my company? Which is a real world example thankfully didn't happen at our organization, but it's happened at an organization where someone relayed the story and I was like, oh yeah, that's problematic. So it's that we've had this concept of security by obscurity, which basically means it was open and wide open all along but nobody could find it. And then you bring in search engines and some enterprising young person decides to search for comp or termination letter or fill in the blank and there's a panic. And so I think that there's these kind of instances just continue to get more obscure and difficult to track down when you layer in an intelligence layer like AI. So that like to me that's so not personal intrusiveness, but it's organizational risk that that the compliance manager does have a say in and say, okay, we need to make sure we're locking this down appropriately. So those kind of embarrassing things don't happen.

SPEAKER_02 27:14

Maybe on the local or personal side some kind of tweaking configuration so they can decide what to opt into or opt out of. Yeah I I think that makes sense.

SPEAKER_03 27:24

And for our listeners that are yeah for our listeners that are old enough to remember this way back in the day in like the early 2000s personal search engines, desktop search engines were all the rage. Fast had one, Microsoft got into the gig I think even like autonomy may have tried it. Anyway and like it was the same kind of thing like you could check which things resources you wanted to search. This was pre-cloud days. So if you didn't have that you had no search really no sort of enterprise wide search because everything was sitting on your desktop. Yeah interestingly I like we're sort of getting back to that a little bit but only in terms of the processing power and sort of that personalized view.

SPEAKER_00 28:02

So if you fast forward three years from now and this is only three years. That's not a lot of time what does the service experience look like for your employees and what's possible that isn't possible today.

SPEAKER_03 28:14

Yeah I think much more self-serve is a is an obvious one because we're already heading in that direction but I'm really more interested in self-tuning and self-fixing across the board.

SPEAKER_00 28:26

I'm still waiting for providers to sort of catch up to that eventuality but so so you know so one approach I have for self-tuning and I don't know if this is what you're meaning but I can service now we have like the product was now assist for ITSM for example. And so you're in your incidence what it could do is it's not tier zero yet but your agents your your physical individual human agents are answering or responding to tickets but it's bringing them information like hey the last ticket like that was answered this way. Or you know it's giving some predictive guidance from history. It was helping them write closure notes. It was saying hey here's a KB article do you like this and so you can publish it pretty quickly where they hate to write public you know right. But it's to me it's it's like taking real stuff that's going on and letting them vet it and use it and then appropriately apply it hopefully and now you're building a clean system for like six months or a year and now your tier zero to me is cleaned up or is cleaner. You know what I mean because you've you've used AI of what it was going to tell it and you're kind of teaching AI okay no that's not important. This is important this what we'll apply and but because you got the human agents in the middle so it pauses you a little bit but it do you think that's a process that would help people kind of prep and clean your knowledge and your ticket history and things for tier zero?

SPEAKER_03 30:02

I I think I think so and I've already seen some organizations uh and even some vendors sort of heading down that direction pretty quickly. So I think that's very much within grasp even today, let alone three years from now. So I think continue to improve the productivity of the team, the sharing of capturing of the knowledge, things like that. Yes, I think those are those are definitely going to be mainstream pretty soon. Further out when I think of self-diagnostic self-tuning it's like at the at the device the Windows machine you get an update on a Friday it hoses one of your applications it detects that because it's launched a test script behind the scenes and oops it didn't work. So it's rolling it back it's submitting a ticket to the help desk behind the scenes to say hey this failed follow up with this you know like that kind of stuff that's more there is so much that could be done at tooling at the at the end users capability that just know there's products out there that try but no one's really cracked that nut yet three years seems like a long time maybe we'll get there.

SPEAKER_02 31:05

Yeah I mean are you a long yeah thoroughly enjoy going to the little oh sorry this isn't working would you like to troubleshoot? Click the troubleshoot and it loads and just nothing happens.

SPEAKER_03 31:16

Nothing yeah they they probably haven't touched that code since some intern wrote it in 2005.

SPEAKER_02 31:21

Yep or or earlier or earlier. Yeah so if a CIO hello or IT director in the audience is just starting to think about this what's the one thing that you would tell them before they'd kick off their first project to investigate persona-based agents or this experience?

SPEAKER_03 31:42

Yeah I mean I think know that you're not going it alone like the first thing I'd actually recommend is talk to peers. Go to conferences, talk to vendors uh that are doing this uh just get smarter on what the current state is, where it's heading, what are some of the gotchas like for me that's that education because so much of particularly at more at the like service desk and IT director were so insularly just bombarded of the fire drill of the day that we lose sight that there's other folks out there. So like our head of support I encouraged her to go to the ILTA the Legal Trade Association to get to meet some of her peers from within industry because she came from another industry, significant chops, but came in and was like, what's this law thing? So so I think just that networking is big. Uh I mean beyond that I am a big believer just generally speaking with AI that no leader is immune to having to learn how to work with this. Like you cannot I've said it before like I don't me personally I don't feel that you can lead an organization into the future without really internalizing what this capability is. And you have to not only see it but use it to believe it and it changes your perspective. So I I say get out there and use this stuff again just dabble try it out at low stakes at low cost and and then I think you can start to connect more dots than you could have before.

SPEAKER_00 33:05

So is there someone in the room that you want to bring in that usually isn't that room for that discussion?

SPEAKER_03 33:13

Yeah I I would get uh our stakeholder the people we're trying to support get them in the room with us and not their management like get get the individuals have a small advisory group or stakeholder group of the people that are actually impacted by this most and much like any organizational change management, at least sort of want to mix you want the people that are certainly more vocally on your side and will be your champions but you also want the detractors, you want the naysayers as long as they don't completely torpedo everything, you need their perspective to challenge and push you.

SPEAKER_00 33:43

So yeah that that's the first folks that come to mind. Last one I have for you this is more personal I guess but what are you reading watching or listening to right now that's shaping how you think I'll give uh I'll give two answers one professional one personal.

SPEAKER_03 33:59

So on the professional front uh I've been following Ethan Mullock on LinkedIn for a long time. He's a professor at uh Wharton, Pennsylvania uh Wharton School and he's all things AI he's a good source he's all over LinkedIn and he's a good source for really sort of smart takes on the progress of AI, some of the the organizational and societal challenges and is pretty good at calling BS on things. So he's been great to follow um a couple of other sources and articles but he's the primary one to be honest. Another one that someone recommended me lately that's in the same camp is uh see if I can pull up the name real quick. I get an email from every morning. Uh Shelly Palmer, who is a professor out of maybe Syracuse. But uh yeah those those two are great ones. And then personally I'm just a big buff of history. So I'm reading a uh a an account of 1942 in the US right after Pearl Harbor and just how like and it's all based on contemporary accounts of newspaper articles and journals and things like that. And it's just fascinating to be living in an era again sort of like a big transformational moment to be living inside of it is a bit of a head warp because you hear the greatest generation and of course we were going to become victor victorious. We were these great heroes and then you go back and look and like oh many people didn't think we were going to win that war. Like it was a bleak couple of months coming out of that and what was accomplished with production like just turning the country complete country on a dime like it was just like a goosebumps talking about it's just yeah it's just an amazing story.

SPEAKER_00 35:37

So yeah there you go. Good good I I have some old letters my my grandfather that I never met of course died on D-Day as a par paratrooper. And uh I have his letters that he wrote to my grandma when my mom was a baby and just it enlightened me on how much they did not know what was going on in the world and how scared but committed. I mean it was like they were very tossed, you know, like I don't want to go but I know this is what we got to do. I don't know if I'm going to the Pacific or if I'm going to the to Europe. I don't know if I'm fighting the Germans or the Japanese, you know, and he's jumping this is something new too. They didn't have paratroopers much then and they were learning to jump in like Tennessee and Georgia and North Carolina and this is all new and it was just very revealing how brave they you know that they they were but how much they did not know what was even going on in the world. So amazing yeah what a story well here's my takeaway from this one most organizations aren't behind on technology they're just behind on the thinking. So persona based service delivery isn't an IT project it's a people strategy that happens to run on a platform. So when you're designing for the individual instead of the average everything changes adoption trust deflection the whole picture so if you're an IT leader listening to this right now that's the shift worth making thanks to our guests for keeping it real with us today. Matt's always been great having you here subscribe share leave a review if this was worth your time and we'll be back in the garage soon. I'm Pops it's the wired garage cheers