Okay. Welcome, folks. Um, you join us today, Crownpeak and Forester. And the webinar topic today is you want to buy and build a DXP strategy. There's been a lot of interest in DXP over the last year to two years, and I'm joined by the wonderful Joe Cicman, principal analyst from Forrester, who's been very busy this year, creating, writing and analyzing and research in this space. And I'm quite happy to say that Crownpeak was placed. So thank you very much for that, Joe. Joe joins us here today. We've got a few questions just to get his point of view, get his guidance and some best practice. And hopefully that can help us all look to build our best and most optimized dxp strategy as we go into the New Year. Welcome, -Joe. -Thanks, Imran. It's great to be here. It's -good to see you. -Yeah, good to see you. Good to see you. Okay, well, maybe let's start with an easy one. Start with an easy one to, to kick us off today and let's go maybe to definitions. Okay. So that it should be very easy for you. So talk to me a little bit about how you're defining, DXP today. I'm curious around how you're defining and equally, -how maybe that differs from others. -Yeah, definitions are easy, but, um, coming up with a, an understanding of that definition that you can use to spot something at 200 yards, that's a little bit trickier. And so I when I work with my clients, I work I give them a couple of perspectives on that. So first off I'll start with the conclusion from my research from last year, which is DXPs exist, but they're built by enterprises not exception. Um, but when it's a build out, okay, it's a platform that provides the architectural foundation and modular services for developers and practitioners to create, orchestrate and optimize digital journeys at scale, driving loyalty and new commerce outcomes across owned and third party channels. And you can think about your digital experience platform as being a system of applications and their underlying platforms, brought together by various vendors and agencies, bound by APIs and events connected through good data, and which provides the foundation for experiences and apps to be rapidly built on top. Now, vendors offer some of those components in their portfolio. So when I do evaluations, I look at it through the lens of the portfolio of core components of a platform that provides the yada, yada, yada. Okay, I'm going to press you. You're probably not going to be happy. But what do you think are those core components? If there's if there's 1 to 2 core components, the main core -components, what do you think those are? -Yeah. So, um. It begins by understanding the customer with data, creating the experience with content, tailoring the experience to fit the context with marketing or martech, and then delivering value with commerce. And so those four core components, work together in sort of this continuous feedback loop because as you're using data to understand your audience, and then you're, um, blending that with content that you've created. But as the audience interacts with that content, you're going to discover what resonates with some cohorts better than others. And so you're going to use that to drive more content. You're going to make some variants for cohorts. You're going to, you know, maybe you're going to see some some interaction data that maybe isn't conclusive, but will it inspire a hypothesis? And so you're going to, create variants that test your hypothesis and you're going to find out which one works better or which one works better under different circumstances. And you're going to continue to do this, and you're going to use AI, uh, to crunch, uh, all of that data to spot the cohorts. Um, and, you know, we're even seeing AI. Uh, generating those variants and I think in the future, there's a potential for the AI to do more and more and more of that work. That's that's the really fun part, um, to imagine. But it's also the part that requires very sober, stoic governance over that because the AI is learning like the person would learn. And if anyone has ever been young, you know that it is very easy for a young person. Sorry for a person who is young in their life experience to draw the wrong conclusions given a set of set of information. So governance is on top of those components is, um, super important anyway. Yeah. So those are the those are the four major components. I love the way that you and I, before this call, kind of made a bit of an agreement of let's keep AI to the second half, let's not bring it in early, and what have we already done? We've already brought it into the early conversation. You know, you can't get away with it. You can't get away with it. Um, I mean, it's interesting you mention about, I mean, content for sure. Yeah. Crown peak is a dxp portfolio, the whole content management, the whole, uh, product discovery, um, accessibility and the quality of those digital, um, experiences and channels, you know, that that part of our, the core of our platform. But it's funny, you know, and I'm curious of how you think it might differ between analysts and vendors and even the market. No one has just one pure DXP experience. It seems as though, um. As you say with the data requirements and data can come from so many different, different kind of data pools and channels. Um, this ecosystem is kind of is needed. We need to be thinking outside of the box per se and the wider ecosystem versus we do this and this is all you need, you know. So I'm curious, are you seeing the differing views of of the DXP in the market. Yeah, when I did that research last year. I started with the question what is a DXP? And I asked vendors, I asked, I asked SIs, I asked CTOs at enterprises, and I got lots of different definitions, and it was very clear to me that it was like the parable of the blind people standing around the elephant. So I needed to zoom out and start asking, well. Well, what's inside of your DXP? And what I started to hear was. Like I gave the thought experiment of a a ring fence. I just I went to enterprise CTOs and I said, hey, draw a ring fence around your DXP and then show me what's inside of it. And they had a lot of those core components, but they had a lot of other components. And one CTO in particular said, all right, well, I can draw the ring fence at a but it's different than it was last year and it's different than it's going to be in two years. And I said, wait a second. Your ring fence is. Expanding. Your ring fence is expanding. As your digital mission expands and he goes, yeah, I guess that's right. I said that's right. Okay, so. You're going to bring some of your own stuff to the party, aren't you? Yeah. You're going to bring some operational stuff to the party, aren't you? Yeah. Okay. It's, it's and it's all going to look different. And so, you know I talk with a, with one company that sold um food ingredients and talked to another company that managed a network of hospitals. And the things that were in there, the different things that were in there within their ring fence Was based on the business that they were in. Yeah, and everyone's in a different business. Yeah. So that's why it's bespoke. But it's it's not a scary thing that it's bespoke. It's a good thing that it's bespoke because it allows you to express your value proposition as a business. Mhm. Digitally. And that's just why you need different things. And it's something we've also been spending quite a lot of time this year looking over a great proportion of our bases retail. Um, they have different technologies and different needs. We then have banking, manufacturing. Um, farmer you know, you kind of start seeing that you have these verticals that you play with very well and you kind of lean into actually, what do they need? Because it might be very different vertical to vertical. And that has an effect of maybe what technologies we go in, acquire and integrate. Also what ecosystem partners that we we go and try and build those partnerships and integrations with. But it I'm curious as to why you're and from your research I guess this year in particular, why is it becoming kind of a hot topic, as it were? Why is it evolving at the pace that it is right now? I mean, we used to be quite happy with we've got a CMS, we're happy with that. Um, and now it seems as though we need all these little bits, all these little bits to bring together into that, as you say, that journey, that map and that experience. Why? What's all the interest? What's what's piqued it, do you think? Yeah, I think I think there's two invisible hands here. One is just the march of time. The second is the cloud. And so historically, when you, you know, think back to the advent of, you know, the interwebs. Uh, when every business needed their website. It was an about you page, and you go to the website, you would hear the story of how, you know, um. If my great great great grandfather came to this company and started or came to this country and started a company, and it's grown into this, and the the home page was, was telling the back story of, of the company. He wasn't telling the story of what they can do for a, for a customer. And so the thinking evolved over time. The digital interactions evolved over time and gradually as you went from that very simple about you page or about us page. It. Uh, more and more things got digitalized. And so there's that march and and that gets more complex. Add to the cloud. Then what you have is a pre cloud world and a post cloud world. In a free cloud world. It was all of this monolithic on prem tech. Uh and you had to have it monolithic and push it all together so that the latency between the commands was. The latency. The communication latency between the um components was really tight because everything was packed really close together, because that's how you scaled systems back in the day. But when you you scale systems very differently in the cloud now, and the architecture changes once it's in the cloud. And so what you have is this push of greater digitalization, which results in businesses that can express more of their value proposition or can deliver more of their value proposition digitally. And then you have the architectures pre cloud and and post cloud. And we just came out of a pandemic. Um, and in the beginnings of the pandemic you saw a lot of bolt on solutions. Yeah. Uh everybody. People, for instance, added curbside -pickup. -Yeah. You couldn't think strategically. You didn't have time. It had to be tactical. Yeah. Yeah, the two things happened. One, that they also proved to themselves that they could do it because there were projects for those very interactions on the books for years and all. It in a moment it was needed and enterprises had no choice. And they discovered the power. They they had to make those things when they had no other way out. It's like. When the conquistadors burned the boats. There's no way out. You gotta win. Um. And. And now we are in a state where the economy is unprecedented and. Uh, enterprises need to turn to digital. And so when that is your way out of the predicament that you're in. Yeah, there's going to be a whole lot of interest in it. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting you say about the bolt on the speed there to prove it piece. Um. I mean, as you saw through the through the analysis this year, I mean, we as Crown Peak, um, we are on an acquisition kind of path to accelerate our portfolio based on what we see in the market, but also as best of breed, but also kind of what we see are our customers need. And we do we do feel and we seem to be proving quite well that acquiring those best of breed technologies, those adjacent technologies, help us move a lot faster. Um, because this is such an evolving market. But we need to, to to have that speed and that experience and competency that you get through that acquisition. But I am kind of curious as to when you have done the evaluation. You know, from a vendor perspective, is there a preference you're seeing with regards to build versus, let's say, buyer acquire? Um, to meet the speed of market expectations right now? What are -you seeing there? -There is a significant Um. Leaning upon partners. And when you're in the cloud. The vendors have many more options of bringing great software to their customers through partnerships. Because you have app stores, it's all in the cloud. You can do this. Uh, your customers don't have to install it, um, necessarily. Just sort of app store, or maybe it's just very easily composed together. And so that will lean in, that will have vendors leaning into a partner strategy. Um, some vendors have the ability to build apps faster when they've got core cloud native capabilities. I mean, cloud native accelerates everything, right? And it's going to accelerate the pace of vendor innovation. But then, you know, there are other technologies. When I look at some of the acquisitions that that get done. Some of them are aqua hires. Uh, under the covers. Where? Sure, they could have just partnered, but they needed the the brains that built that AI. They needed the brains that built that low latency, high scale data infrastructure. And so it always depends. And it's a it's a case by case. And I'm not seeing one strategy, uh, taking the lead that I would say the one strategy that becomes more viable in the cloud as the partner strategy, which is neither build -nor buy. Yeah. -You know, it's interesting. And that's actually why I mentioned the experience note as well. So as you know, I came to Crownpeak through the product discovery acquisition. And it wasn't just the product and the client base, but um, equally, we have a data science and AI team, um, a dedicated team of about ten people who we've been able to build that experience not only to extend what we're doing around project scope, but use that experience to extend across all our portfolio. As you saw with, let's say, CMS as part of the the study this year. Okay, okay. All right. Well. I'm curious. Let's come to that martech question because it's one that always. I always feel a bit sorry for, um, organizations when they're going on this, this kind of strategy of how do I go and build build my DXP. And by the way, we're 100% we think that we want to be that DXP platform that allows customers to go and build their own, you know, um, we don't want it to really just feel as though customers need to be locked into just our portfolio. We want to try and be open. But, you know, you look at that martech landscape and there's so much choice, isn't there, Joe? It's just crazy how much that that landscape changes every year. Every year. Um, and I'm curious as to what advice you would have for for organizations to navigate that landscape because it is some worldly. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, what? In 2012, it was like the martech 3000 or 5000. It's like the martech. Uh, we all know that that that one slide but just is turned into pixels. Now. You can't even see the logos. Yeah, you're going to zoom out and it's going to be like Van Gogh, you know, like a pointillist. Um, yeah. Uh, so, um, yeah, I, I get calls from there is a type of call that I will get from a Forrester client, and it'll be from the technology organization, and they'll say, hey, Joe, look, I have to build a roadmap for us to be awesome. What, what are the components that I need on it? And if we can narrow down one component, I can give them some sort of a shortlist. But when I detect that – That my client has is under the impression that they can go out on a shopping list and bring back a bunch of ingredients and then make something great. That's when I will give him the time out. And the guidance I give him is you have to start first with strategy, then. Uh stack rank that or prioritize by business impact and then make your roadmap and go shopping for it. Oh, and by the way, the roadmap is going to be two pronged. You're going to do some tactical stuff that'll get you started quickly, but then you're going to take another route, uh, to harmonize that stuff into like an enterprise digital experience platform. And so, you know, step one is build customer journey maps highlighting the moments of engagement. Uh, you want to understand the, uh, for each of those digital interactions? You want to prioritize those moments, and the process is based on the benefit to customers and the value to you. And then, yeah, third, do the two path roadmap so that you can move quickly, test and learn a cheap product market fit. While laying the foundations for the future. And you could think of it as the ROI is when you do your strategy, you'll know the ultimate return. And then the AI is the investment in the roadmap. And when you do it that way, you never have these technology projects that have a cost for which you don't know the return. You always start with the return, and then you go shopping for what you need to deliver that return. I would say that's the top piece of advice in how to do this. It that necessarily implies that it's across functional team that if you're a technologist you're going to be working with your team. Um, and that if you are, uh, if you're in a marketing leadership role where you're. Where you are doing the customer experience work, you will necessarily have to have that relationship, that strong working relationship with your technologist. I'm glad you mentioned that. Um, it's kind of worrying. We don't see that enough. It seems to be. -I talk about it so much. Yeah. -It seems to be so one sided. Um, IT are leading this project or the business' leading this project, and it's, no you guys girls, you got you you got you got to be as one here. But I do like the point you mentioned around well, what does this look like? So kind of put the technology aside. What does the journey look like. And I know you spoke in previously around you know, what are these moments if we're thinking about that digital experience. Well what are those moments. How do they all come together. But equally, how do they all kind of change depending of where you are in that journey or in that experience? Um, and I think sometimes we jump to technology versus actually starting to think about what does that look like and the impact for the business, for the users of the in the business, and then for it in terms of delivering it? I think the other thing that is also. Often, um, often not forgotten about but deprioritized is well, okay. You've got all these moments. Well, what are you going to what are you going to insert into these moments? What content? What product? Because you're going to have to go and create that. Or are you going to go and have to manage that demand? And if you are thinking from a 1 to 1 perspective and you're international and you've got that complexity there, how are you going to manage that scale and demand? And, um, you know, one way could be I, um, we are going to cover that second half. Let's not go down that whole rabbit hole just yet again. But you know that that is something we see often is I'm quite it is quite funny. We see the same people going out with let's go build we this is our budget. This is kind of what we think we need. Let's go find that technology list and then let's start the discovery process, as it were. Um, whereas it should kind of be the other way around. Okay. All right. Well, we started to talk a little bit about different uses. There. Um. And you know, if we. If we think about if we put it into the context of the marketing leader. Okay. Um, and we're going to I think we should talk about other different users. So the it merchandizing, for example, because I do think that they all come into the mix, especially from an e-commerce perspective. And as you know, I'm, I'm econ retail background. So slightly biased in this conversation, Joe. Um, but for example, in e-commerce, a big part of that digital experience is helping the consumer, let's say, find the right product or find the right content. So but but I am I do kind of slightly worry that sometimes the merchandizing team, especially in the e-commerce world, are one of those users that's left out. It's kind of it. And then marketing and it's like, well, actually the people that are driving the revenue of the business to the Merchandizers. So are you seeing them now starting to come as a bigger player in that picture, as it were? Yeah. Um, and that's when, uh, DXPs. Need to. I mean, this is one of the reasons that DXP needs to be tailorable is because every organization is going to have a different set of operational players, and the DXP needs to provide the what we call the practitioner experience for all of them. And so if you can imagine maybe a nightmare of a non integrated set of components where your merchandizers would have to work and multiple screens across multiple apps just to get something out the door and say new product introduction. Um. What you want to avoid is having the technology team write down in a little document. You know the steps. Instead, what you want is for the technology team to provide a cohesive set of screens like a wizard, such that the process for new product introduction, or whatever the process is, is codified in software, and it can be versioned and it can be optimized. Um, and uh, there are I would say it's very difficult for, for a DXP to have all of those perfect optimized screens out of the box. Uh, what I see happening is the DSPs have this framework for adapting or tailoring the, the practitioner experience. And so you can go in, uh, an enterprise can go and do their implementation, their partner or their IT team, uh, before the launch can put the practitioner screens in place, build them and you can build them, like with react, like you would build a customer experience. But then what you have is highly efficient. Um, merchandizers. And with Merchandizers, I guess you could think of it as any Creative person. If there's latency in the pencil or if there's latency in the screen flash, you know, you could have a a flash of inspiration and you just want to get it out as quickly as possible. But that inspiration can fade if you're fighting with the technology. So that's, that's that's why you want to take friction out. It's not I mean, your CFO would probably say, oh, well, how many clicks? How, you know, how fast can we go through this process? Sure. You're going to get some efficiency gains that way. But the magic, the real gains you have is when the creative process just flows and you keep people on task, and that's when you can get their inspiration. Out there, and then they can see how it, uh, how it performs, and then they can make their modifications and then they can very efficiently go through their optimization loops. That's why you want to take care of Merchandizers. -Yeah. -Yeah. I mean, I remember times when I've actually been, um, a customer site and working with the merchandizing team, and it's sometimes it feels like you are on a trading floor. They're they're changing products, they're changing content, they're changing assortment. You know, something blows up on social, right? That brand or that product or that style of image of that product needs to be at the top. Um, it's it's quite fun in some ways, but you can see that any latency and being able to make those changes and publish those changes has an impact not only to their role, but also an impact to the trading of the day. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about kind of approaches. And it so we talked a little about Covid. Had to and to be fair props to anyone in Covid that kind of did as you say those bolt ons and just made it work, you know, proved it. But equally, I guess right now in a position where, okay, we've done all these bolt ons, now we need to and it's working and it's, it's, it's okay. But strategically we need to like think more strategically about how all this stuff is coming together and our general approach. So I'm curious around, you know, what you're seeing and the needs of it, um, and trying to find that balance between strategic thinking and approach of building my tech stack and managing my tech stack long term, because it is going to change, but also those needs of the business. So I'm curious around, is there a single modern approach for going out and building a dxp these days? -We we got there. Yeah. -I mean, I would say there are some modern tenets that, when applied to a technology strategy, will give you the flexibility. And so uh, being cloud-native is one, being API first is another. Uh, tech technology wise? Um, eventing is another mechanism that will, um. Help achieve a loosely coupled environment. And when you're loosely coupled, then, uh, if you're native, let's say your native search solution isn't cutting it for you. You can plug in, um, a different search solution. Uh, and you can do that across the board with all sorts of measurement apps or. Um. Like an iPad type connection out to all of the social platforms for um. Uh, syndicating content or getting, um, getting user interaction events back. And it's it's not just you. It's not just social. You're going to have things like. On your support desk. Uh, there's going to be some interaction in the support desk, which you would want to pipe into your, uh, customer data such that, um, your personalization, uh, mechanism can take that into, into consideration as well. So loose coupling, but that will, that will look very different for or that will look different in every enterprise, uh, because every enterprise has to deal with. Some of their legacy. You know, everybody's got a different footprint. But the general approach has been this loose coupling as much in the cloud as as you can. And, um. And that'll give you a lot of the agility that you'll need, and it'll just continue. As technology marches on, you get more and more, uh, flexibility of just made available to you through these, you know, low level innovations. Like maybe it was, um, maybe you were using rest a few years ago. You're using GraphQL today. So those types of innovations, you can really put the use pretty effectively. I think might might come back to you on a question around some of that, especially with regards to legacy. I think sometimes we feel like we're forced into big switches. Um, and actually sometimes it doesn't make sense. And but equally, trying to find that common ground and that balance where some of the new stuff can still work with the old stuff still effectively. I think I'm going to come back to that in a bit, because I think given we've talked about approaches, we'd be foolish not to at least come to the topic around headless hybrid, headless full stack. You know, it's it's it's kind of a pivotal, pivotal point as to depending on which approach you go, that's going to have a knock on effect. How I feel is to how you go and build your kind of tech stack. So I'm curious around again, back to your research, and I'm guessing that you saw all of these approaches, and it'd be good to hear a little bit more about what you saw. What I saw is it comes down to trade offs, and that's just a day in the life of anything technology or engineering wise. And so like if you talk about Fullstack, you know, imagine that maybe you're running, um, a relatively small campaign. Maybe it's for existing customers. Um. He, uh. You couldn't do that, actually. We were seeing this in during Covid with, like, the PPE loans where you could just stand up something quickly. It didn't have to be super fast because you weren't dealing with abandonment. And so you could stand that up and full stack solution. Adequate performance. Fantastic. Off to the races. If you are, if you have a very highly branded. Experience that must be as fast as humanly possible, because you're selling something and you don't want abandonment, and you know that that milliseconds affect revenue, then you'll need to take advantage of as many. Advanced optimizations as possible, and most of those advanced optimizations happen at different points along the whole. From click to browser refresh. Edge caching, edge functions, all of that stuff. You'll have to take advantage of those in a way that isn't already packaged up for you. But. But those are the trade offs, right? It will be more work for you to make, uh, the most optimized, performant front end. You're going to have to deal with the trade offs between what your marketers and merchandizers have to work with, which would, and what your devs would have to do on their behalf. And so you'll also have to build out, um, you know, Wysiwyg tooling. Uh, but if it's worth it to you, if the, if the revenue live justifies that. Then. Yeah, that's. That's the balance that you would strike. So trade offs and how much it's worth to you. And that defines uh, what's going to what the right fit is technology wise, uh, for your certain circumstances. And it's important to note this is not at the company level. You know, this is call it at the campaign level. You're going to be making those decisions. And so it's important to have a base of technology that gives you all of those options because you can't afford to replatform. And then if um. Uh, if you can't afford to replatform just to be able to go headless. You need all of those options in your platform. I see, I think, the hype around it, and I do think, personally, I think there's been hype around it over the last few years has made people jump into going headless and possibly not being as informed as to what is actually really involved. And I know that there have been companies that have done that, and they've kind of come at the out of it or they're still in it and they they have certain, you know, remorse and regress in some ways. I know some who have actually even gone back, uh, because it's proved to be too difficult. I do I do get this sense and again, correct me, please. But you know, those that are going full headless and I really down the road of going down that route, you know, that those organizations generally are highly tech driven. Um, in some ways there's there's visionaries there. They want to be the first to do, um, do these things and take these new approaches, whereas maybe with, say, hybrid headless is a bit of a it's a bit more of a mix. It seems as though when I'm in those conversations with organizations, there's quite a lot of folks from the business. It's not just it. There's a lot of folks from the business, and that seems like a nice blend between business and it trying to find the balance there with hybrid. That's kind of what I've been seeing over the last, over the last 12 months here anyway. -Thank you. Mhm. -Yeah a lot of it is culture. And if you have a culture where your cross-functional teams speak in value language, you can avoid, you can avoid some of that. Okay. All right. Well I'm going to give you an example. You know, I'm I'm retail through and through. So I'm afraid that it will be a retail example. But so let's say I'm an international. Um, because obviously it has to be big. It has to be complex. Yeah. International fashion retailer. Yeah. And go, um. Revenues. Okay, but I need to improve revenue. And as we all know, during these economic times that's going to be a struggle. But I need to improve revenue. And I'm stretched on resource and I'm being hounded from a margin perspective. So I know I can't go and buy or build more resource. Um, because that's just not possible for me. But equally, I've got this target of increasing increase in my growth, and I'm on a, let's call it a traditional e-commerce platform. Um, you know, one of those ones where kind of everything's in the box, as it were. Um, I think we know the usuals are for that, but traditional. Okay. And it runs. It runs well. It's stable. It's secure. Um, it's a good workhorse, let's call it. But I'm conscious that I seem to be missing out. Missing out on flexibility, as you say about these experiences. I want to create but create this engagement. Um, I'm also a little bit worried about my conversion rates, and I keep getting hounded that I'm not doing enough personal ization. And partly because I have got this big, big, big ecom platform. Um, and I'm trying to figure out, you know, you know, I want to build my Dhcp strategy. That's what I want to do. I can see areas where I can improve, but, you know, do I go big bang, big switch, rip out everything, start, start again. Or is there a safer, safer route for me where I can probably see things from an incremental perspective? I'm curious his view in my position. How would you and I don't want to lead the witness, but chip away? Possibly, um, versus take all the risk at once. There's a there's a. There's a strategy called a strangler pattern. Where you identify the most, the currently most valuable opportunity to swap something out, and you make a little swap out so you don't swap out the full. Uh, some people will call them monoliths. You don't swap out the whole platform all at once. You do it a little bit at a time, and that even though it can be technically involved on how to do that. The. It's simpler from the business perspective, because it's a small amount of investment to start to get the revenues, the revenue lift quicker. And it's those small baby steps. Any. Anyone who. Uh. Let's say. Oh, well, we're going into the new year. And so we're going to take some time off with family. But then in the new year, we're going to hit the gym or we're going to hit the treadmill. Don't max out day one because you're going to lose the next three four weeks. Um, you start very slow, beatable, beatable goals. And that's the psychology that, you know, that's a management psychology that everyone can relate to. So this strangler pattern is the same thing mutable, beatable replacements. And you're getting payoff along the way and you're making incremental investment, but you're getting it quickly. And you're always then able to invest in the next most valuable thing. And then you just keep doing that ad infinitum. And eventually that that. That big, untenable, unwieldy, um, system. Ends up being replaced. -Yeah. -Once you've taken the risk out and you've kind of earned the the value as well as you say from those incrementals that you can then go and do that final big one because they generally big is the reason I asked is had it this year. Um, very similar example. The CTO was okay, we're moving away from ECS to be careful there. And they said who they were. Um, but I'm moving away from it because it's, you know, it's all just not meeting the requirements, you know? Um, so we might as well just move and just build a brand new tech stack and do a switch. And it was a case of. Yeah, but if you really if you kind of ask yourself why, it's like, well, everything's in the box, as he called it. And I was like, yeah, I get that. But you can still chip away at it. And my, my term chip away is I, you know, is is the catalog good. Is everyone happy with the catalog? Yeah. Okay. Um, all the product information within there. Is that all good? Yeah. That's all good. Um, check out solid. Yeah. We've actually spent so much time and effort getting the check out. Right. Um, okay. During peak, was it solid? Oh, rock solid. I was like, well, just identify the things that are harming you. Okay? So maybe you do go headless or hybrid headless or whatever it is. And that makes it easier for the marketing team or the merchandizing team. And maybe, you know, you're saying your search isn't great or you're not getting the conversion rates that you want. Well, that that's that's a that's a tool in itself. You know, that might be a merchandizing tool. It might be a recommendations tool. But chip away, as you say. Um, because the value you get from those cheaper ways is going to going to grow quite quickly and arguably quicker than doing a, a, a big bang change, which is going to take a long time. And because it's so big, um, it takes it takes time, I, I feel and I've seen to actually get the value because you've done such a big change in one go. Okay. Well talk to me then back to back to my example. Okay. I've bought into it then, Joe. So tell me, how do I communicate the value of this DXP that I, I'm kind of talking to all my colleagues and friends about that. I want to go and build, and I've got an idea how I want to do it, but I need some money. I need some money. So tell me how I go and communicate that value to my non-tech stakeholders. Yeah, well, your non-tech stakeholders have journey maps and they know the digital interactions that are going to pay off. And you show up with, uh, a two pronged roadmap of tactical moves that you can make to start moving this stuff out, the start proving out those interactions and getting value from them. And then your second prong is how you harmonize those interactions into a global platform. And that global platform, you're going to end up building up over the course of 1 to 3 years. But it's fine because you're not you don't have the orange cones, uh, out in front of the you know, you don't close down the road for three years while you're building the thing. You're incrementally building it, um, proving its value or delivering the value that you're being asked for, and then you're harmonizing it. And so that's why I say always as a technologist, always have those journey maps. And in in view, always understand how each of those digital interactions pays off in terms of benefits to the customer and value to the firm. And then at that point, you're not passing a tin cup around looking for funding. Um, you are responding to how much is it going to cost me to get X? How much is it going to cost me to get Y? And when you speak in terms of. The value of those of those things, then. Then you eliminate the communication. Uh, you improve the signal to noise ratio in internal communications. So it's not just a bunch of, uh, technical gobbledygook on the road map. The road map says this is the solution to value Point. This. This is the solution of value point this. And it'll take us this long to get here. And then once you get that value, it unlocks this next thing which is going to cost you this much. And so the road map then follows, uh, something that is expressed in terms of, of value language. And then on the business side, they know that if they, you know, pop into a meeting and you're talking all this tech stuff, they'll know how it maps back to how it benefits them. Okay. So. Everyone's bought into my journey. I feel good about my journey. All my stakeholders are good about my journey. Everyone's got got the map. They all get it. Okay. But I started this journey and now I'm starting to freak out -a bit because I'm starting to think, okay. -Oh, I've started this. It's all going good. Everyone's happy or, you know, we all see kind of where we're going to. But when we get there, am I going to be left behind? Am I going to have to do this again? You know, how do I try and protect myself from being left -behind again? -A lot of it is mindset, and the mindset in particular is you want to treat your digital experiences as products, not as projects. And you want to keep those products aligned with and responsive to the needs of your team. So let the demands of your team drive the capabilities that you have in your platform. And you can also work with partners. You can co innovate with them. And you can lean on their strategy teams. And there they are, the ones who are going to help you stay apprized of the current state of the art in the technology. But if you remain product oriented, in other words, you are building your product and that product is the experience. And if you never disengage. Then you will be able to naturally understand over time where the problems start to emerge, how to mitigate them, and at what point they're going to be. They're going to be become untenable. And so you'll see. You know you won't get called. Just when the problem is untenable. You'll. You'll be there observing as the problem, uh, grows and you'll be able to spot the timing of when mitigating that problem comes into view. So if, if you are, if you take the mentality of steward rather than a hired gun, uh, you will be able to identify the right timing. -Parents are better than babysitters. -All right, Joe. We are kind of in that final mile, I guess, of this session, and we kind of promised it. People are going to expect it. So let's just jump in. Let's jump into the wonders of AI. So you know. Where are you seeing AI? Taking a role in in Dxp. And if I can just add a slight sub question to that in terms of okay, we're seeing it, but practically and in real life, you know, where are you seeing organizations using AI within this dxp -space? -Right now it's very experimental because the. Um, the operational processes have to have to change. Like. Naturally, whenever you are able to do something faster, your operational processes are going to are going to alter. Um, you also have to continue to have human in the loop as you. Watch. You know, in the early stages you can have the machine craft, the first draft of copy, blog posts, whatever. But you're you're you're using who used to be the copywriters effectively as as editors. Mm. So we're still you know, they're still largely in that. In that stage right now, but, you know, in time. You can. In time, uh, you're going to have the machines able to do more and more on point variants. It's. I've. I have worked with. You know, some enterprises that are evaluating how they can put this thing on autopilot and have human in the loop just for oversight of outcomes. You can imagine how that how you would want to go very gradually into that world. You wouldn't want to, um. You wouldn't want to just, uh, uh, rip the Band-Aid off and jump in there because. -I mean. -It is. It is. We have seen this year what happens to brand reputation when humans make, uh, overly aggressive judgment calls? Now imagine a machine that has, uh. No empathy and no morality on its own. Right. So. Uh. We're in a stage of very gradual steps. Now, what that does with Dhcp is Dhcp is putting a structure in place to apply that governance. Uh, to or to codify that governance. And the dxp is is curating where that intelligence comes into place, what the intelligence is um, and provide and is providing the, uh, the measurement of how that content is, is performing. So the dxp is binding all this stuff together, uh, packaging it. Uh, so that it fits within, within the operations. And again, when the Dhcp is codifying all of those processes, it's not like human written processes that can be very easily, um, diverted from. So governance is a big, um, play in this whole thing. Yeah. We, um. So again, I guess back to. That's why I know very well which is the trading side of things, you know. Um, you gotta have the right products for the right customer at the right time, all those things. But we, you know, we all know those like little, little phrases. And trying to do that 1 to 1 is pretty hard. And we have seen, um, what we do is, you know, enable that through AI from a 1 to 1 personalization perspective. But what we learned very quickly, you know, over the last 3 or 4 years is visibility. The merchandizing team needs to have visibility. As to well, why is it suggesting that? Why is it doing that. Um, and control, you know, allowing Merchandizers or anyone in the business. Yes. Leverage the AI but kind of build their, their, their guardrails, build the business logic on top as to how and where they want it to be directed. You know, we see that quite a lot. In addition, at a user level and then at a at a higher business level, it's kind of that governance, that safety and that trust. So there are these different levels depending on the user you're talking to as to what they need in order to be comfortable with it. Okay. Um. I did say try and keep it a little bit short on I. And we got there. Okay, um, last question if I can. Joe. Um, what are you expecting as maybe the big shifts we're going to see in the DXP, DXP space before your next Forrester wave. You know, to some extent, I expect the unexpected. Um, so, you know, right now, of all the promise in Chennai, we're seeing a lot of experimentation in the next two years. I expect that there's going to be some killer apps that are going to emerge, and those are going to get packaged up and included as features in DSPs. Now what those killer apps are, it's uncertain. And I would be probably be remiss if I, uh, tried to make a call right now, today. Uh, but that's what I'm expecting. And so. Um, we're probably going to see an awful lot of. The cycle between, uh, innovation to come up with a killer app to when that becomes. Maybe standard fare in -DSPs. -Yeah. Cycle times going to going to speed up. -And so it's going. -To be great things. On the horizon -for sure. -Okay, well, we'll look forward to next year. Okay, folks, thank you very much for watching today's session. Thank you Joe. I really appreciate your points of view, your experience and your your guidance. And thank you all for attending. All the best.