Matthew, Okay, welcome everyone to today's DX Cafe event, crown, peak, hybrid, headless and the future of the dxp, big, big stuff. I'm Matthew McQueeny from Konabos. If you have any thoughts or questions as we move along, please type them in the chat, and we will surface them throughout, right in the screen here when we get some good ones. And we'll have our esteemed guest here today, who is Paul Taylor, VP of Global Solutions Engineering at Crown peak, Paul, welcome. Thanks so much for being here. Could you tell us about your background and what you do at Crown Peak? Yeah, absolutely. First of all, Matthew, thank you to you and the DX cafe for inviting you know myself and crown peak. Here today, I've had an interesting career in in the world of Crown peak. I mean, I've been doing this stuff a long, long time. Currently, today, I lead the global solutions engineering team at Crown peak. But prior to that, you know, I started my career in hardware sales. It hardware sales back in the mid 90s, and quickly found a passion for software development. I spent 15 years or so in the agency world, eventually becoming a chief technology officer for a global marketing agency. And, you know, during my time in that agency world, I've built teams implementing many of the content management and dxp vendors that we see and compete against today. So, you know, I've seen it all, traditional, headless, hybrid, headless, monolithic, static file publishing, you name it. And a lot of that we're going to talk about today, I'm sure. Yeah, so I am going to go back there to selling hardware. What when you look back on that, what is that? What does that even mean today? And the other bigger piece, though, is there must be things you still take from doing that today, even if it's less of a hardware based world. Yeah. I mean, you know, this was, I was still in basic networking kit, fax machines, photocopiers, all of that sort of stuff, you know, pre 2000 and we had this whole thing called the millennium bug that was coming around, and was going to be doom and gloom. And we were selling compliance things to make sure, you know, the world wasn't going to go bang, that it that it didn't do, I guess, you know, coming from a sales background and a commercial background. It gives you a little bit of experience about what customers and consumers are actually buying when they buy software from a vendor, rather than, you know, just purely the technical side of the sale that a lot of individuals can do. So I still take the value, return on investment, all of the things that make a difference for our customers that I learned a long, long time ago and helps me in the world today. Well, and isn't it kind of funny? I finished a part time MBA last a year and a half or so ago, and it would be funny reading the case studies, and one of them was about toasters and how people were going to out innovate each other on toasters and the features that were built, and it was a whole thing. And I have to imagine, when you brought up kit like fax machines and all that, there was even that race to deliver to the customer and add features and do all that there that we even see today, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it fundamentally doesn't change, right? The customer's still looking for exactly the same thing, regardless of the product. They're looking for, value, simplicity, and, you know, ultimately, something's going to make their lives easier, absolutely. 

So let's talk a little bit, actually, on this slide here we have day in the life. What is here in almost 2024 what is a day in the life like for Paul. So, so Paul kind of runs three distinct areas inside the crown peak business. The first thing is the technical side of a sale. You know, whether it be new logo or expansion, it's about getting the proper fit of product for each customer's needs, not necessarily their wants, but what they need, rather than necessarily what they want. So that's the first bit. Secondly, it's about pipeline generation, so the team support the marketing function with analyst engagements, webinars, thought leadership, trade shows, this stuff. So we do this quite a lot. And then the partner management side of things as well. Our partner base is massively important to us, and we need to make sure that they know how to leverage the crown peak products and services for their customers best to support them through the journey. For me, it's, you know, every day is different, and that's what makes it exciting. It's a mixture of working with the team based on data to create the best coverage for our customers and partners globally, and then spending time with our marketing and partner teams to identify the best go to market strategies for particular target verticals. So every day is different, and that's what keeps it interesting. When you talked about those three main things that you might do individually, do you find it's difficult to balance. Both across the three or do you naturally want one to be bigger at any one time? Like, how's the balance of those tasks? I mean, I'm very fortunate, and I have, you know, a number of good leaders that work as part of the org, who very much focus on their individual piece. And we get them together regularly, because one impacts the other, right? Because if you're you need partners to generate pipeline that you need to then be able to sell, you know, to customers, and then you need your partners to re implement on the back of that as well. So it's a circle that is, you know, ever evolving. So, you know, no one piece is more important than the other. And of course, you have to keep the customers happy no matter what you do. And you brought up the point about the sales and taking prospects who might have an interest in in the product. Do you find that the customer today is different than they were a couple years ago? Are they asking for similar things? Are they aware of some of these new terms that we're going to talk about is a big part of your job, education. It is education. You know, there are, there are some things I'm sure, you know, we'll talk about a little bit later on, where you know, fundamentally, everything's you're still looking for the same stuff today that you were years ago. There are different technologies available to your point, but ultimately, you know, when you're buying CMS and dxp, you're trying to make a technically complex task, simple. For a non technical author, you're trying to get a message cohesively to your customers across every single touch point as part of that customer life cycle. And that hasn't changed. You know, admittedly, the touch points have got wider. There are more now than they were a few years ago. But the problem is still the same problem well, and I wonder, as we move to the next if, if we've also over estimated the touch points in order to sell a new headless, composable vision, versus how much is still web and mobile, right? 

Yeah. I mean, there are lots of different touch points, some above the line, some below the line, some electronic, some web, some mobile. And of course, as technologies evolve, you know what was traditionally running on, you know your mobile devices is now very much a web based technology. So you know you can, you can deliver to all of those channels in lots of different ways. But it is becoming easier in one hand, but at the same time as more technologies expand, you have to be able to deploy content to those as well. So on this slide here, I want to talk both about your own role evolution at Crown peak, and then you can't talk about that without talking about how it also intertwines with the market overall. Now you've been there. I think when I saw that about a decade, yeah, how? How has that evolution been for you? It's been interesting, and it's probably not the natural evolution that somebody in my role would have, would have done, and I think that's partly down to the kind of customer centric side of what I've done historically. So it's all been about helping customers with enterprise complexity challenges. So, you know, I started as a solutions architect when I joined crown peak, and that was about helping customers drive their organizational goals. We then created a team under the then CTO at the time that represented the top 10% of customers by revenue, driving strategic sales, account, direction, product incubation and the like. And so I was part of that for a number of years. And then about four years ago, I think I created the Global Solutions Engineering team that we, you know, we have today, so very different roles over my time, I think, to your other point around the market challenge. You know, while everything has changed over the last 10 years, at the same time, nothing has changed. You know, organizations are still trying to compete or complete this digital transformation journey across the entire organization, and are having differing success levels of that. They're still trying to create this one to one cohesive, personalized journey across all the touch points, and they're still trying to drive efficiencies through every business process, and that, of course, is now becoming increasingly important as budgets are squeezed and at the same time, customer expectations grow. So you know, the great news from a crown pee perspective is, you know, we have answers to this stuff and answers that make these organizational challenges simple, and it's those stories that I love telling throughout all of my roles at Crownpeak. So you brought up a very important word in there, as well as many others. I'm not trying to downplay all the things you said there, but you brought up the word enterprise, and that is put out there a lot in our industry, right? And sometimes you'll hear, mid market, upper mid market. But let's really zone in on enterprise. What does that? What does that term mean to you, to crown peak, and also you said, the challenges of enterprise. What are some, some of the things in the enterprise that you. Require kind of a special touch, a specific solution, a way of doing things in their business. Yeah. I mean, so for me, I look at the enterprise being an entire organization. I don't look at it as a particular size or scale of an organization. But, you know, fundamentally, the customer is looking for content that they want that's personalized to them in a one to one message, and they want that across every single touch point. And as organizations get more complex, those number of touch points, they are increasing. You know, you have kiosk stuff, you have ATMs, you have stadium signage on top of the traditional, you know, web based technologies that we talked about earlier, and you have to get those messages across all of those channels. 

But that is difficult, because in a world where we're being constrained on the revenue that we have available, people are being a little bit smarter with their money. You have to tease it out of them in a way that makes them want to engage with the brand. And if you do that, well, then you win. And if you mess that experience, you struggle. So, you know, think of, think of an example of an organization that's got, you know, website, mobile sites, commerce sites for their new customers that are coming on board. But then once you've already won those customers, you've got the loyal customers who are interacting with a portal where they might get hold of their insurance programs or the products they bought, whatever it would be, but because the challenges they've had around organization, technology and the like, the portal doesn't have the latest look and feel on it, and so suddenly the message, the communication, the channel, the conversation, is broken. And so when I talk about some of those organizational challenges, it's about, how do we get content across all of those touch points in a way that's cohesive in a world of increasing complexity? I was talking a few weeks ago to a CEO of a rising digital agency, systems integrator, and it made me think that what they were saying, essentially, is that when they go for work with customers, they try to find the smallest unit of work to estimate, to get in, to prove the value, and then to hopefully build from there. You know, the whole trust is built in teardrops, or drops, type of thing, and lost in buckets. Do you find that this composable reality makes that a little easier. Where we're not going from, we like to joke an all in one to all at once. You can kind of evolve business a little differently in this environment. Yeah, it's a very good point. You know, the if you're going to rip and replace everything inside an organization, it's going to cost a lot of money and take a lot of time, and frankly, you're never going to get there and so the ability to take off little pieces of it and add value immediately on almost this incremental journey is something that is it gives us a massive advantage in the market, as you know, as People trying to talk to customers. And so, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. We see that the challenge, and the flip side of that, of course, is, you know, we see it all the time. We see a big enterprise, CMS vendor, deployed inside an organization, and then markets all over the place that aren't agile enough to talk to their customers, because they're not included in the big thing. So they all go and pick up these little agencies versions of their CMS. And of course, that creates a governance challenge. So you know, it's it gives us the ability to shift quick with an organization, but at the same time, you have to do that responsibly for everybody involved, very good. So we've talked about a lot of lofty items. Let's go back to basic principles here. I always like to ask this question when we're explaining CMS dxp, and I should even always say CMS is content management system, dxp is digital experience platform. But the terms we hear a lot, and I know crown peak goes a lot with the hybrid, headless version, but let's, let's build up to that. So for Paul, what do you how do you define headless first? I think so I'm gonna, I'm gonna talk about headless and composable in a similar thing, because I don't think they're the same. I think we quite often talk about them and we think them being the same, but I see them as fundamentally two different things. Headless is nothing more than delivering content via an API for consumption everywhere and anywhere. So it allows you to deploy content using any technology or framework and to push it anywhere in the world, right on a request basis. 

Composability, for me, is about allowing an organization to construct their own digital experience platform vision through curated choice. And if you go back and look at, you know, Scott Brinker, Chief martech, 11,000 vendors on that big slide that we've all seen, there's a lot of good platforms in that world. And so allowing an organization to compose. Is their digital experience, platform journey and swap out the pieces that they want, that that, for me, is, is the distinction between the two? And do you, does composable need to be headless to work? Not at all best way. No, no, I don't think so. I mean, headless has its place, you know, where content is dynamic and should be dynamic, for example, paging, listing, sorting, filtering, querying when content is dynamic, then there is nothing better than a headless call to that content. Great. So let's go to the third one. Hybrid headless is this kind of a mix of both worlds in a way that matches customer demand. Yeah. I mean, for me, it's an interesting term in itself, and it means different things to different organizations. I think regardless of whether a platform is naturally headless or not. You know, every CMS can throw an API in front of their content repository and call themselves hybrid headless, right? Because you can fundamentally use it in that way. And in our experience, that's what many vendors do. And it seems like it answers many technical complexity problems in the market. But while offering a lot of flexibility, it also creates a lot of technical complexity, which in many cases, isn't what an organization needs. So I think it's using it at the right time. If you think about what most organizations are trying to do, they're trying to get that content across every channel, everywhere in that customer life cycle. And the challenge with many vendors is that there's no single technology choice in an organization, especially for those that spend a lot of time in mergers and acquisitions. And so they want to take advantage of this one to one message, but they don't want to have to rip and replace every single piece of technology that they've got across those touch points. And so one of two things happens, they try and take on too much and think that a single platform is going to solve all of those problems with a single technology, and that quite often shelves digital transformation projects, or, you know, the as we talked about earlier, the organization updates their primary touch points and doesn't touch all of the stuff that they've already got the loyalty with their customers on. And so to successfully solve that problem, you need to give a marketer the flexibility to publish any content using any technology and deliver it anywhere in the world. And all we have to do to do that is figure out what and where, but then, at the same time, give the technologists the flexibility to use the same platform in a headless way, if you choose. And so that's really what you know crown peaks take on hybrid headless is it's about blending what a marketing team needs with what an IT function needs, and giving him the best of all capabilities. 

You know, it's funny when you brought up a good point about the psychology within enterprise organizations and almost blaming, blaming the technology and then stopping digital transformation, because it makes me think of like if someone starts working out at the beginning of a year, you know, when you have the gyms filled with people because they have the new year's resolutions, January, February, right? January, February, and then a week in, they're very they're very into the workout. They're, you know, but they don't understand you shouldn't work out three hours a day. And it's akin to that where their soreness is so bad because they haven't worked out and now they're really into it that they're blaming that level of soreness and that experience on working out, as opposed to on the process and the right way to do it in an agile, nimble fashion. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, for me, I like to go back to, I mean, I don't like to go back to analogy on COVID, but I will you know. So think about what we quite often see. Marketers want to be able to do stuff quickly and across all channels, right? That's a given, and they have to do that. And so the idea that the market came up with was to create this idea of a purely headless CMS and so that then relies on technologies to make any presentation change. You can change your content, that's fine, but if you want to make a change to where content lives on the page, you have this cycle. Go back to the start of COVID, and everybody's putting banners on their home page of their website to say, sorry, we're going to be a few days getting back to you, because, you know, we're going through something we don't really understand at the moment. The frustration of that, of course, is to make that presentation change, you need a development team who are also off with the same reason that everybody else is not around, and so it creates this this problem. Now don't get me wrong, headless is absolutely right for the right use case, and so is publishing content in a way to deliver any technology anywhere. And if you can get the best of breeds, then the organization will get the agility that they need to talk to their customers at a pace that is right for their customers, with all the technology flexibility that they need for their own IT side of the house. And of course, if you acquire more businesses and more technology standards, you can simply integrate all of those without having to rip and replace everything out as well. That makes me think one. Other question, do you? Do you believe that the use case for a headless CMS, or for going with more of a hybrid, headless or composable dxp, maybe in a single vendor? Do you think that mostly comes down to the digital maturity of the organization? I think that, you know, everyone's trying to do this, do this thing, and solve this problem, and thinks that you have to replace your technology stack end to end in order to do it. I think it's, you know, where you'll have maturities. Maybe, I'm not sure that's, that's the way I would, I would use it. I think you'll get some organizations that will make a lot of mergers and acquisitions, right? So, you know, what is a.net shop, one day suddenly acquires a business that is a Java shop, and you've got millions and millions of pounds worth of investment that you've suddenly got to merge in. And how do you do that? One or the other wins? And that typically is a platform replacement. So I'm not sure it's necessarily maturity. It's probably a situation on how organizations grow in the modern world. And you know, ultimately the customer is screaming because they see Apple, Amazon, Google, everybody is innovating. And of course, if you're not innovating at the pace of those guys, they're going to the competition.

 So I think it's a, I think it's a pressure inside the organization thing. And of course, you've got to do something, so better to do something than nothing, and sometimes that results in people not necessarily making the right decision, but making a decision. It's a great point on the mergers and acquisitions actually, because that is a it's all pushed as a great thing, right synergies, all this. But there's a real host of change management elements that we talk about with the people and the business, but the tech is really the place where it's almost the whole business unto itself. Yeah, yeah. The other funny thing you brought there about wanting to be Apple and Amazon, it makes me think of like 1520, years ago, when we'd be working on websites and we'd have a discovery, and we would say, Who are your top three influences? And then we said, Apple, yeah, okay, great. And how much have you got? What can it work like Amazon or but it's aspirational, right? Is it? You know, that is what the customer expects, and that is therefore what every organization has to deliver. And you know, not everybody has the revenues in order to do that. So what you got to do is be smart with what you have, you know. And so what we like to think about is, you know, we'll Empower an organization to deliver content across all of those channels and do things that delight their customers, rather than just sink themselves into a massive technology project. Yeah, no, absolutely. So let's tell a little not a bedtime story. We don't want people going to sleep in the middle of the day, but we're here on the East Coast. I know you're over in England, but can you tell us about the origin story of Crown peak? Yeah, I've been around a long time, 2001 and we started, we realized a market gap in the CMS space. And it was a gap that, at the time was there really to serve the marketer. There were lots of IT organizations running on things like, you know, SharePoint, Microsoft Content Management Server and the like. And it was, it was glacial back in the day. And so marketers were struggling to get their conversation out to the customer right. And again, this is why we do this thing. And so, you know, we created a SaaS product. And you know, you could argue with the OG or SaaS back in 2001 it was a long, long time ago, but it was, it was really about empowering marketers to get their message out across all the channel, without having to worry about the IT side of the org. But as time passed, you know, we found that that separation of marketing from it concerns has really gone about full circle. And so now we find that 50% of our customer base is marketing. 50% of our customer base is it because we solve problems for both sets of the house, and there aren't many platforms that do that in a way that has, you know, high levels of information security and operational control and so therefore appeals, particularly into highly regulated organizations where accounting workflow, that lot is really important. So that's where we started from, and that's, you know, the core crown business that we have today. We've made a couple of acquisitions on the route, you know, 2016 we grabbed hold of active standards in the UK that gives us our digital accessibility and quality product line. The idea being there is that you can't manage 10s, hundreds or 1000s of digital experiences without considering the quality. And by quality we mean accessibility. We mean organic and natural SEO. We mean brand standards and regulatory compliance. And so we have tools and services that help organizations both make money and save money by deploying those services on top of their org. And actually, you don't just have to be a crown peak customer to do it. 

We have plug ins for Adobe Inc cycle for that product line as well. So that's. Was our first acquisition. We grabbed a company called evident back in 2018 and that gives us our digital governance solution, and that helps customers identify third party tags around the lines of GDPR, e privacy, CCPA and other worldwide regulations, so we can both tell you what's happening on a site and also help with privacy policy that you need to do under Global regulations. And then in 2021, we acquired e spirit, a leading, you know, German based, European based CMS provider. And the idea behind that was increasing our customer and employee footprint east of the Atlantic. And in doing so, you know, we also drove into verticals that we'd not previously been in. So, you know, retail, automotive, FMCG or CPG in the US. And you know, today, the CMS platform that we the first spirit that we took from E spirit is, you know, one of our primary offerings to our customers all across the world. And then, you know, earlier this year we, you know, we made two acquisitions. The first one Illumina, which was, you know, an accessibility testing and services company. So with our accessibility product is all very well, saying, Hey, here's the problem, and good luck solving it. But now we can help customers globally with, you know, training and remediation and getting them on the right side of the regulations. And then, more significantly, the acquisition of attract. You know, as we we'd previously started to engage in retail verticals, you know, acquiring product discovery or commerce search, if you like, made a lot of sense to us. And so with the products there, Fred hopper and EXO, we can now help customers increase their average order values, reduce cart abandonment, and ultimately trade smarter in a world of competing choice. So it's been quite a journey. You know, the next set of acquisitions is never far away, but what we're doing is acquiring complimentary products and services to what we already have to give customers that choice, right? It's not about competing. It's about everything that they need, nothing that they don't. And we're finding that that's what's giving our customers the agility that they're looking for. So bringing up the point 2001 being kind of born, SaaS, like you said, do you find in this, in kind of the narrative of the company's build that it leapfrogged challenges that those who were on prem monolithic, like some of the growing pains they might have gone through as the market shifted. Yeah. I mean, you know, 100% it was you kind of say you were SaaS before the term was invented because that came years later. And, you know, AWS and those guys didn't turn around till 2010, plus. So it's everything back in the day, was built to be deployed on premise. And it was in a data center. It was tin underneath your desk. And of course, it was designed to be maintained, the care, feeding and watering, by an individual organization. And of course, when you do that, you then get control of when you update that software. And of course, an update can be quite time consuming when you're on a platform that is being managed, platform as a service, or in tin under your desk. And so, you know, what we wanted to do was say, look, all customers one version of the product. Everybody gets the same version, and you run with it, and we create a really good separation between content and configuration to mean that you don't have to worry about any of those upgrade headaches. So, you know, it was really about making sure that you get the latest capabilities and security patches rolled into the product without you having to worry about that. And that, again, leads to organization on agility. Yeah, no. And then when you talk through a lot of the acquisitions, like you said, it's almost, I'm not putting this word in your mouth, but it's almost composing elements that you see as very important, like you're standing for certain things, governance, governance, accessibility, you know, I think you said retail analytics. I mean, these seem to be very strategically business oriented, as opposed to shiny new technology toys, 100% you know, it's, you know, we have a responsibility to our customers to make their lives easier and ultimately make them money and save them money, and I keep saying that I fundamentally believe on it. And so everything that we do is about driving business value to our customers. And the great thing about being an exclusively SaaS or subscription based business is we rely on our customers repeat revenue to keep us honest. And so we listen to that customer base, and they're very vocal, and that's a great thing, because they tell us where their problems are and where they need us to go and invest and of course, the great thing about it is we provide it to one company, and every company can take advantage if they choose to. And that's the other great thing about it. Speaking of those customers, and I know we've customers are. Are very important to what we all do. We've talked a lot about this, but let's really hone in on the customer, the ideal customer profile for Crown peak and then we'll get to marketing position. But let's talk, let's talk ICP first. Yeah. So you know where, where crown peak fits particularly. 

I mean, look, let me take a step back. First of all, we have different buyers for each of our products. So you can buy crown peak in its entirety, or you can buy individual parts of the ground peak portfolio on an individual subscription basis. We absolutely don't differentiate in that way whatsoever, and so just because you have a single part of our platform doesn't necessarily mean that you fit the overall ICP, where we play particularly well and where we help customers achieve their goals is where there is a high level of organizational complexity. And what I mean by that is multiple sites, multiple channels, multiple languages, multiple products, multiple experiences, multiple touch points, multiple authoring teams, distributed globally, and where you have that level of complexity, then the architecture and operational delivery model of the platforms fit very nicely and make you agile, where you sell products and you want to bring your own algorithms, for example, to help drive product discovery or use your own visual merchandising teams to you know, don't just totally rely on the AI side of things that and use their experience. We play particularly well and where you need high degrees of visibility, from an accessibility perspective, across your entire digital estate, we play particularly well there so that somebody inside that space, quite often, organizations upward of maybe 250 million in global revenues is typically where you find that the ideal sweet spot across all of our products fits. But of course, we have customers up of that and below that across all of our customer verticals as well. How, how do most customers fine crown, peak, three ways. So, I mean, we spend a lot of time doing this sort of stuff. Of course, we spend a lot of time out at, you know, industry events. We rely very heavily on the analyst community, and we have great relationships with, you know, Forrester, Gartner, IDC and the like. But at the same time, you know, we have a very, very engaged partner network globally, and so we very much see ourselves as a partner led business. And so we have lots of great, happy partners doing a lot of cool work with us, and ultimately driving successful both to sales, that's great. And then in the market positioning. We don't have to name names, but you talked about the analyst community. A lot of a lot of these, a lot of these competitors show up in those quadrants and waves and all things like that. But do you have a particular place where you feel the market position of Crown peak slots in really well? I an interesting question. I think it tends to be more in like, I say, the complexity of an organization. You know, we don't we. We play particularly nicely in highly regulated industries. Historically, we did a lot of stuff in fin serve. We did a lot of stuff in life sciences and pharma. We with the acquisition of E spirit, we got more into automotive and into retail and to manufacturing, and then, as we, you know, and some retail and commerce, and of course, attract now our product discovery products is very much all about retail and commerce. So there's no particular vertical that crown peak focuses on exclusively, but we do work across all of them. We have a lot of point solutions inside, you know, the retail and commerce space, but we have solutions across all of them. The thing for us is, regardless of the industry that you're in, the problems that you're trying to solve are quite often the same, and when that organization has this high levels of complexity. Again, you know, the Crown peak for a single website that just delivers four pages is probably not the best use of technology, but where you have bigger states, you want to drive governance and control but empowering local market flexibility, that is a really good space for Crown peak for a market position. 

When you bought it, you bought it, you brought up a very good point about SaaS, and whatever we're going to call the world you lived in, which was pre SaaS, but, but being SAS and it lending itself much more to customer success than big sales cycles of a license that'll be locked in for two years like this World, you need to be connected with the customer, both for your own vitality and for the product to always be current. And so I wonder if, if coming from that basis has been an advantage. But in the market, because you understand you always, I mean, everyone understands this, but in your case of having to almost be this, like, you know, right at the customer on a regular, regular basis, like, how do you stay keenly aware of the customer's needs? And is that something that that is a differentiator? Like, you're always going to have people there when there's an issue, you know, you have these governance solutions that play well to highly regulated industries. Does that? Does that come through as well? Yeah. I mean, it does, you know. I mean, customers are the most important thing to any of us, and you know, so much so that we invest, you know, 20, 25% of our global revenues directly back into Customer Success and Support. So, you know, this is not a journey that we're selling you a license and walking away. We are on this journey with you every single step of the way. So you have customer success managers partnering with you. We have technical account managers who will be your partners in crime making sure you make the right decisions to make you successful. Hey, we'll fly them out to you to draw on a whiteboard as you're planning your next fiscal year. We have a support team that wins awards for what we do, and, of course, a great partner network that keeps us honest in the world of our partners, and so that collaboration means that we're constantly listening to what our partners and customers are telling us, and when you align the analyst community over the top of that, it gives us a really good sense about a, what's coming, B, what we missed, and therefore need to fix and see what the biggest problems our customers have every single day across that vertical. And as you say, because you're SaaS, you don't have to worry about this. It's going to take me four months to get it, or four years to get it, because I've got to wait till the right time in my, you know, on premise life cycle. And so you can actually think of a TC over crown peak platform over 1015, 20 years, because always on the latest version any technology anywhere, regardless of whether it's been invented or not. So it gives organizations a lot of agility. Yeah, reminds me of the story in Amazon's time with Jeff Bezos, where in every meeting, every leadership meeting, there was always an empty seat, and that empty seat was the customer, so they always had to be in the room with them, right? Oh, one thing I forgot to mention. I don't know if you've heard of this thing that started really hitting a year ago, but it's called generative AI. I've totally missed that part. You alluded to it in some of the governance, maybe in some kind of like walled, walled chat, GPT type things, or generative AI. 

How has generative AI impacted ground peak, and how have you leveraged it, or interacted or integrated with it? Yeah, I mean, that's, that is a great question. And you know what it's, it's front and center of where everyone is looking right now. And for us, it's, it's quite a fortunate position. So, you know, we've been using generative AI for, you know, a year plus two years, something like that. We started doing some simple stuff, you know, where, for example, you can use the tool to go and work out a focal point of an image, and it will generate crops based on a subject matter of an image. So using it for some cool use cases. There doing things like grabbing EXIF data out of images and then making suggestions for, you know, complementary attributes on that content. But that was until we went and acquired attract. When we acquired attract, bear in mind that entire platform is a mixture of this visual merchandising expertise and artificial intelligence and machine learning. We acquired our own data science team. And so, you know, we're fortunate enough to have a really great set of individuals who are pushing the needle. And so what we've done straight away is now deployed that across our entire product portfolio. So no longer focusing just on product discovery, but using that experience to do things like help content authoring, create content from bullet points to help in an accessibility challenge, organizations get compliant with this European Accessibility Act that comes out in 2025 tasks that would typically have taken 10s of years of, you know, content marketing, you're able to throw out in a fraction of the time. So we're very fortunate to have this team. And, you know, customers will see this stuff more and more on the roadmap as we go forward. Are there it's only been a year, I mean, with in the customer market point of view. But are there any insights that you've been able to glean, especially from some of the highly regulated industry customers on the platform, in how, in how they're using generative AI in the best way? Because it really, it's kind of an open, a wild west as they would say here and there, it has to be a lot more controlled. Are there ways they're able to leverage it still? Yeah. I mean, you know, the first thing is, I mean, let's use Life Sciences as a great example of this, right? You know, everybody wants to create personalized content, but of course, when something bad happens involving a drug, then suddenly the lawsuits happen. And so, you know, while creating massively. Dynamic content in the life sciences, space seems like a great idea. It has to be controlled. And so there are things you can do with generative AI to create content, but the responsible thing is to then make sure that there's always a human being looking at that content before you, you know, send it out for prime time. So it's a mixture of those things in each industry is different well. And I wonder too, because I guess it was this week that, you know, the innovation is happening so fast all of us, but that they came out with this GPT project product, sorry, where you can kind of throw it against your own content library or world. And I wonder if, in some ways, that's where it'll be a good use case for some of these highly regular, regulated industries, where they really only want it to be indexing that they have within the garden. Yeah. I mean, you know, it comes back to that, that balance doesn't it again, just because you can doesn't mean you should. And so there's using it to drive operational efficiencies behind the kind of content publication cycle. And there's also then using it to generate content on the fly that your customers see. 

So as long as you get the balance, you're going to get different use cases across all of those verticals. And it's, it's having that responsible view on how you use progressive technologies. And I think that's something that you know we need to get the balance on, and our customers certainly will want that. Yeah, so Paul, you've proven, at least to me, You're a very smart guy. You're very knowledgeable on many things. Let's get into what do you read? What do you? What do you, both for industry, and then sometimes even not for industry, because that those can often inform as much as what we think we're reading directly about. What do you? How do you consume your own content, and on what kinds of subjects, and even who, if there are such, yeah, yeah. Great question. Um, so, you know, obviously DX Cafe is my number one source of everything relating to this industry, and I love the podcast, and the work that you do is great. Keep it coming. I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. You know, for me, crowdsourcing experience knowledge is probably one of the best places to get a balanced view on what's happening in the world. And so LinkedIn, for me, is the place to find out what's happening across multiple verticals, not just the ones that we focus on, and, of course, wider challenges around the world as well. So if I, if I, you know, I like to repost, I like to comment, I like to drive conversation through, you know, that social media channel, that's a big one for me. I think, secondly, you know, I spend a lot of time talking to analysts. I do a lot of briefings. I do a lot of inquiries. And so what they're seeing, and bear in mind, you know, 12 months ago, actually, maybe a year ago, year and a half ago, we only really worked in one vertical and so the CMS space, so you had one analyst briefing and set of inquiries across each of those. This year, they've started doing accessibility waves, they've done search commerce waves. And of course, we've also, you know, acquired multiple products. And so now we have 12 separate analyst briefings and inquiries that we're doing every year. So there's lots of other areas that we can kind of pull that information from. And I guess the other thing, like I said earlier, you know, I talk to customers. You know, we have 850 customers plus at ground peak, and they're distributed globally across every single vertical you can imagine. And they all have unique challenges to their industry, but ones that are also very common. And if you can find and fix one, then you can very much get it fixed and drive innovation across the mall. And of course, I hope that, based on where you live, you have to read Shakespeare, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, I live in Stratford upon Avon, just eight miles out of it. So yeah, we have the Royal Shakespeare Company in town, and so we make the point of going to see something three or four plays a year when they're on. Because why would that was always the funniest thing in the early days with the chat GPT, when you could be like, you know, write a write a post about the XPS using Shakespeare or something, right? Honestly, I mean, I use chat GPT every single day. You just find ways to get it into your life. And, you know, I encourage the kids to use it when they're doing their homework, but you have to again, it's responsibility, right? You say, use it to define the structure of the work you're going to do, and then you find out they've used it to do the work, and it's like, yeah, that's not really going to fly, yeah, but that is the problem, all right. 

So I think we're basically against time. So now that we're coming up against the end of a year, somehow, 2023 is almost over, even though it just started. And looking at 2024 I'm going to ask, put you on the spot. What do you what are you really looking forward to, both on your known roadmaps, personally, professionally, and on what you might into it? Right? It might be coming from a from a crowd Pete perspective, you know, it's the we love, continuing to innovate, and we're constantly looking at other acquisition targets and ways to make our service better for our customers. And so you never know what's coming down the road. And you have lots of conversations doing that with lots of great organizations, and eventually you find one that is the right fit for our customers, and so working with those to then drive the businesses together to create those efficiencies and ultimately to make our customers more successful. So that's the that's the thing inside the crown peak world that keeps me, you know, really excited AI. It's hard to look outside the world of AI, right? And it's what is that bringing? Because it brings stuff at a crazy rate. So I was watching a video the other day where one of our German speaking sales engineers had his voice and face translated into Portuguese with the accent, and it was perfect. We tested it through a couple of Brazilian members of the team who said it's perfect. And you look at this and you go, well, wow, where's this going to stop? So it's really, really exciting and scary to see. You know what is, what is coming there, and then ultimately, how we can go and apply that in the world of solving our customers problems. It's almost in that how we can operationalize the AI, where, right now it's sensationalizing us like we're doing it for fun and going, Oh, that's cool. Yeah, we could do that like it's crazy that it, at some point, it's going to reach a cruising altitude where we just know what we're kind of doing with it. And there's incremental innovation. But I don't even it's given us so much, and it's, I still haven't gotten my hands around exactly how to use it each day. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I have, I have next to me here. Look, I have a big book on artificial intelligence and the approach to it. There's quite a bit to it, right? There is, well, Paul, this was phenomenal. Really appreciate you coming on and look forward to keeping the conversation going into the next year, wonderful Matthew and the day X cafe. Thank you very much for having me in ground peak today. Enjoyed it. Applause.