Well, hello and thank you all again so much for tuning into
another episode of the Professional Pricing Society
podcast. My name is Terrence and today's
discussion. We have an amazing duo with us
tackling the conversation about utilizing artificial
intelligence with their upcoming workshop at our fall conference
in Las Vegas this year in October.
They're they're speaking session is titled Stopping the quoting
madness. Use AI.
We have Brooks Hamilton and Lydia D Liiello.
Brooks Hamilton is the founder of Hamilton AI strategy
advisors, which is an awesome base consultancy specializing in
crafting AI strategies for Fortune global 1000 companies,
family owned businesses and high growth startups.
And we have Lydia De Leelo Leelo, CEO and Founder of
Capital Pricing Consultants. With more than 25 years of
business leadership, supply chain and global pricing
expertise, she delivers exceptional results through
strategy, process and technology.
How are we doing today? Really.
Well, Terrence, how about you? Doing very well such a pleasure
to have you all on the podcast once again.
We've had you on in previous years.
And so it's a pleasure to be able to speak with you, Lydia
and you Brooks as well. I want to go ahead and just dive
into this conversation because it's, it's ahead of our
conference and, and the topic is kind of based on artificial
intelligence. And obviously this is one of the
kind of buzzwords. It's not a new concept, but it
is starting to feel like AI is taking off the ground with more
and more force behind it. Regarding your upcoming speaking
session, what what do you foresee participants to get out
of this session that you all think they'll be able to apply
even as soon as the following week of this conference?
We're really excited about demonstrating for participants
how they can go ahead and use AI techniques and tools in their
jobs immediately. This is going to be a hands on
session, so we're not talking about history or theory, but
we're talking about what they are going to be using and how
they can use these techniques right away.
I think it's especially fun about this is they're going to
get to practice a variety of skills.
Usually in pricing matters. We talk about the analytics and
the data, which is going to be part of it.
But we also are going to get to talk about things like how do we
make other parts of our lives easier that are stress inducing.
Like, I've got to go write that letter to send to my customers
in order to talk them through the price increase that's
coming. And maybe even worse, what are
the talking points that I use as I go talk to my sales team about
why we're going to have to push through this price increase?
So we're really going to walk through a wide gamut of
activities and ways that they can make their lives less
stressful and easier using the tools around them.
OK, good, good. Sounds exciting.
And especially for myself, you know, you one of the earlier
things you mentioned is that it's hands on and that's, you
know, half of the fun being able to apply things, you know,
within the actual session itself.
If you don't mind me asking, how did you all kind of come up with
this idea or this this concept to you know, to do this session?
Well, Brooks and I had had started talking about ways to to
combine AI and pricing together and realized that there was a
huge gap in terms of everyone is bombarded in the news by AI, but
how do you really use it most especially from a pricing
standpoint? What are the, the techniques and
the tips that you can implement immediately to make your job
faster and easier so that participants are spending their
time focused on analysis and not on, on all of the rote parts of
the job, which are so painful. And, and so Brooks and I have
both been in the pricing space a long time and realizing those
pain points and that there's an easy way to address that.
It is really the genesis that that started this conversation.
That's good. That's good.
OK. And, and you know, just kind of
glancing over the, the total landscape of AI and then
companies utilizing AI type of tools, you know, what do you see
in terms of business adoption when it comes to AI technologies
and its products? The adoption has been pretty
fascinating to watch and we in November of 22, we had the
moment of ChatGPT came out and turned everybody's heads around.
But that didn't mean that there were products which immediately
fit against the type of tasks that pricing teams engage in.
There are certainly the data security questions, but in
addition to that, there's the matter of how the pricing
process itself is modeled within these tools.
So what we are finding is the set of tools that are available
are really just now coming to market.
But we have seen some excellent tool usage for ways in which to
drive sales, like enabling the RFP process as well as finding
how to drive additional sales among current accounts and then
save money on inventory and have more efficient cash usage, as
well as making a lot of the rote tasks that we have to engage in
when moving data from 1 system to Excel to another system a lot
faster. So those are the areas where
we're beginning to see adoption is sales, marketing, supply
chain. And now I think there's going to
be a lot of opportunity to see those same technologies applied
to pricing both in terms of strategic contracts as well as
items like how do I identify where my areas of opportunity
are and profiling my customers that were not necessarily
available as well as inexpensive in the past, but are
increasingly so. So lots of opportunity and as
far as I can see, this is all just beginning in the industrial
economy. Interesting.
Yeah, I mean, a plethora of opportunities.
Usually when I talk with individuals about AI, one of the
first things I mentioned is the the efficiency, you know,
speeding up the process of big data, you know, and that entire
process can just be simplify just regarding the efficiency of
whatever AI tool that they're using for that.
But like you said previously, you know, it's, it's starting to
open up more sales opportunity and that'll be super interesting
to hear you all talk about as well.
Because I view AI as something that is kind of it's, it's not
new, but it is taken off the ground.
And so I feel like we are seeing it's kind of early stages as a
especially as it pertains to pricing and the whole, the whole
pricing industry as a, as a whole.
And So what tasks are best suited for AI adoption?
So some of the things that that we've talked about Terrence and
and that we'll be going through in the session are we're really
going to focus on, on managing RFP's request for proposal and
the tasks specifically that take all of the time like product
matching. Because when you don't have
consistency of data, right, where do pricing people spend
hundreds and hundreds of hours things like product matching
because the data is not complete, because there's a
space, because somebody omitted a digit.
All of those things that we all have grappled with all of these
years. So we're going to look at at
things like the product matching as well as look at tasks where
we say, hey, maybe this is something you don't want to
apply AI to so that folks can walk away with an understanding
of where does AI fit and where should we leave it alone.
So for example, if you're handling a situation with a
customer where you've got an angry customer and this is
customer relationship management, you really don't
want to leave that to AI. You want a person involved in
that if you're looking at data matching, if you are looking at
data sorting, if you are looking at providing back data sets with
kick outs, meaning it runs a set of data and tells you, hey,
these don't look quite right. Do you want to have a look at
these before we make any adjustment?
AI is great at that. But if you're talking about
customer specific relationship building, then you definitely
want a human as part of that loop.
And so each of those pieces is something we're going to delve
into as part of the workshop. You know, they're trying to
humanize like automated messages and it's kind of the similar in
the similar context you keep sometimes just easier and
quicker to get the job done when there's a human involved.
And so that that'll be also super interesting to hear you
guys talk about in this, in this upcoming speaking session
regarding AI expectations, you know, how much time in savings
can we kind of expect regarding the quoting process in the realm
of pricing? Yeah.
So if we think about quoting, there's some really neat
advances that have been made there.
Number of firms have looked into how to take the emails, phone
calls and images, PDFs, all of those things that we typically
get in inside sales or a customer sale service Rep role
in that represent an order. And it takes some time to
translate, find the right parts, match the IDs and make sure that
you have the right number of colors that they wanted, all
that good stuff. That's that takes time.
But what we've seen is these organizations have been able to
reduce the order creation process by about 90%, which is
enormous. And also the impact of that is
there are fewer errors. And when you combine those
things that you're the first one to respond and your quote
doesn't have errors in it, chances are your win rate goes
up. Maybe not a lot, but definitely
some things are going to be won and lost just depending upon how
quickly and accurately you're able to come back to the
prospective customer. This is such an interesting
topic to me in particular. That's cool.
Regarding AI expectations, you know, when it comes to
profitability, in your opinion, what do you see the overall
impact of AI adoption on the on the industry?
Profitability, overall impact, I should say.
Yeah, I think that's to some extent the jury is still out on
this. But maybe let me explain why.
There's a lot of activity going on at the stage of pilots and
early roll outs, but those results haven't necessarily been
widely shared. So we we see some some great
activity. We know that there are
substantial changes going on within the cost basis of
organizations as well as sales velocity.
And I think as the next 12 months unfold, we'll begin
hearing about just how substantial the returns on those
projects have been. One of the neat things that we
see about this this realm is the returns do tend to be I think
higher than typical SAS product type returns.
Also, we note that a lot of these projects, definitely not
all, but a lot of these projects can also be implemented more
quickly or the footprint that it takes in the organization is
lower, which leads a lot of opportunity to really go
experiment and pilot some of these and see which work for the
organization and which they want to pass on for now.
And I think this is also a case where because Brooks, to your
point about cost reductions are happening at the same point in
time, that sales velocity is increasing.
And along with that, sales velocity is also, in my opinion,
from what I've seen so far, a likelihood that you are going to
achieve higher price points because now your data is more
accurate, more specific and you know more about your customer
because your people, your pricing folks are spending their
time on analysis, not on data crunching to get to that data
set to analyze. And so I think there's going to
be an extra lift there that really hasn't been calculated.
And I'm going to be very excited to see how that really does play
out from a profitability standpoint for companies.
Yeah, that's a good point. There's more time spent
studying, you know, the customer versus debt data sorting and
everything else that can be simplified and essentially
expedited with an AI tool. So that's, that's good.
You all talked about what the participants are likely going to
get out of your session. Is there anything in particular
you hope that they leave with, or anything you're most excited
for them to to leave with? Yes, I think that they are going
to leave with a feeling of, I think that they are going to
leave the session feeling empowered by the information
they know, much more comfortable with the tools that they have
available to them. As well as, we hope, brimming
with enthusiasm to see where they can apply these, not just
in the areas that we pointed out during the session, but all the
hundreds of other areas where this can be applied.
I would add to that a sense of confidence because I've talked
to so many people who say, well, I don't know if that sessions
right for me because maybe it's too technical.
And I keep reassuring people it's not.
The technical piece isn't challenging.
We've laid this out so easily. And so step by step, it's very
much a primer, Terence. So literally you can walk in the
doors going, I don't even know what AI stands for.
And when you finish the course the next week, you're going to
be able to go out and get on ChatGPT and say, can you write
me a letter to my customer for a price increase and be confident
in your approach to do that. And, and not have questions
about is it safe and how do I do this and what do I do?
So I'm, I'm really excited to be able to share that level of, of
knowledge and understanding with the participants and, and help
them build that confidence. That's good.
This is further caters to the excitement for this for this
session with you guys are going to be spearheading in the fall.
The the dates are October 22nd through the 25th in Las Vegas.
Now I'll leave you all with this question as well for for both of
you. Where can listeners go to to
learn more about yourself? It's a normal about maybe the
company you you're with, what you stand for.
And of course they can always go to pricingsociety.com/PPS Vegas
24 to register for the conference.
But are there any additional resources or websites or or you
know areas where people can go to to learn more about you all?
So for Lydia, you can go to capitalpricingconsultants.com or
you can e-mail me directly at lydia@capitalpricingconsultants.com.
For me, our website is Strategy Advisors dot AI and easily
enough to reach out to me is Brooks dot Hamilton at Strategy
Advisors dot AI. All right.
Straightforward to the point. Awesome.
We want to thank you both for your time today.
We're super excited to have you both also in the conference
coming up. And for those of those of you of
you who are interested in learning more, feel free to
visit their resources, their websites and to learn more about
their workshop on our website at Prices Society dot com.
Until then, we will see you all in Vegas.
You guys have a good one. Bye bye.