Eric Porres is Rewiring Logitech’s Org for the AI Age. First; he trained 800 people himself.

28:17And not only measuring that, Jeremy, as you know, but it's also, what was the reason for your answer? So that's super important, right? For instance, when we think about our teams in China and in the Far East, they do need access to different, I'll call it non-Western standard models. And so that's something we're exploring right now. How do we safely, in a privacy and security friendly way, enable, whether it be Quinn from Alibab or DeepSeek or any of the other models that exist, how do we give them the right kind of model playground such that they can work more effectively, collaborate more effectively, specifically in those markets?

28:59It's what you're saying there that that you can't, if you're measuring NPS as one outcome variable, and you said, what's the reason for the answer? You can't expect folks who don't have access to the best tools to have a great experience. And so part of your job is to make sure that everyone has access to the best tools so that you know that your NPS is a reliable measure. Yeah, but also the best tools for them, it sounds like, which I think is actually an interesting observation that, right. Well, no, yeah, that's absolutely right, right? Like what might be right for you may not be right for some, depending again on the use case.

29:31So in the case of even now, when you use as an individual, personally, in your own personal time, right? Like there are different file formats as a simple example, right? There are different file formats that GPT does a great job of that Claude doesn't yet need. And similarly, there are certain files that Claude does, I would say, a better job of either OCR recognition or image interpretation or code that it will do well, that others don't. So that's like the point of meeting people where they are based on that need state and providing the right model for associated with the goal, number one. I would just suggest there, Eric, insofar as you're measuring NPS, I think another great measure and perhaps even better if I, my understanding of kind of product market fit measures and things like that is instead of asking for an NPS, ask how disappointed would you be if you no longer had access to this tool?

30:24Yeah, that's a great question. That's something we ask as the other part of the software portfolio that I have in Smart Habits is we ask the exact question and we say, okay, you know, we know that 96 % of people in that particular example, 96 % of people would be super disappointed if it didn't exist anymore. So that is a great question. Jeremy, it's a great reminder. Thank you, because that's something we'll do. I want to do this tracking study every six months. People can give us feedback whenever they want. And something we will introduce, Heinrich, to your question and Jeremy to yours as well, the thumbs up, thumbs down in terms of conversation response, that will be measuring us.

31:05And then that is to say, okay, if I have a conversation in Logi AI, was it thumbs up? Was it net effective? Did it give me some kind of value or was it meh or was it really great? Again, that's not something else we're measuring now. You can get thumbs up and thumbs down in your commercial versions of GPT, for instance, but that's going back to them. That's not going back to us saying, okay, can we get that? And that's available to us at any time. So I would say you have a set, there's a combination of quantitative metrics as well as qualitative. So what I described before in terms of qualitative, now let's look at conversation depth.

31:46Let's look at conversation, the average prompt. Let's look at how many assistants have been created today and how many assistants will be created six months from now versus a year from now. Let's look at the usage of those assistants. Let's look at the champions in which every time I now now I know who my champions are because they had given me permission from the survey to say, yes, I'm an advanced user. Yes, these are the things I'd like to see better. Yes, this is why I love or hate Logi AI or G Suite. Yes, I'm proud to be, or I'm actually ready to be an AI champion within Logitech. Can you talk a little bit more about the champions?

32:28Because Bryce from Moderna mentioned that he had 100 champions and that it's kind of a fixed group. And basically, if you don't do the job of an ambassador, you're going to like, you fall out of the group, which I thought was interesting. And that's something that we've adopted a BarkBox and I've heard other people have success with. could talk a little bit more about like, how do you serve your ambassadors so they can serve the rest of the thousands of Logitech employees? Right. So it's the teach, tailor, take control. So right now, to be fair, in terms of our journey, I think I have a pretty good sense of who those ambassadors are in terms of the actual rolling out of the champions program.

33:07It's still very much in development, which is great because yes, I am speaking with Bryce about, okay, what did you learn about that experience. Henrik, as a separate conversation, love to interview you about what worked as well. But I find that in my case, I studied martial art for over 20 years, ninjutsu, and I got to be pretty good at it. I got my fifth dan license in 2004. And that said, okay, Eric, you are now knighted, as Jeremy said, by the grandmaster of the art to be someone who can then pass on the art to others. And what I found in that experience is that, right, teaching is the best teacher.

33:46And so from like, do you really understand your stuff? Can you actually effectively teach something to me that either I didn't know before or I had to unlearn and relearn? And that's so like prompting as an example is a skill that people often have to unlearn and relearn because of the sort of going from search degenerative AI. And so one of my markers in terms of ambassadors will be, okay, I want you to be able to teach to me and to a cohort of other people I've identified as super users and to help us understand how comfortable you are with the material you have, how you're teaching people, and then what are the key takeaways that they can then use as part of their every day.

34:25And that's one of the metrics by which we will keep or move ambassadors in and out. Because look, people are busy, right? Like you get assigned a new project, you have a new child at home, you have other responsibilities. So I don't think the expectation is that ambassadors necessarily need to be there all the time and that they should be able to have the right to rotate. Assume the tips, you know, get 100 % penetration, right? You get 100 % adoption, fluency throughout the organization. Have you thought about what's beyond fluency? No, to go from from fluency to mastery. So so what I would say, you know, beyond fluency, right?

35:03Like we know that the agentic future is upon us. Now, how people define agents like Mark Benioff has a definition of the agentic future. He is pivoted wholesale pivoted Salesforce toward like whether he was meditating in Hawaii or something like he has made a super commitment. And I've talked to some other people at Salesforce who've been there for a long time. And they said, look, we've never seen a company pivot this fast and as focused toward the agentic future as they have with Mark making that mandate. And so likewise, we have to think about, you know, to your point, Jeremy, where I will no longer a year from now or two years from now, if we do this right, I will no longer be working solely as a human knowledge worker.

35:50I will have a agent or set of agents that I will be responsible for. And my AI fluency will be one in which I can, as the human, right, human as the instigator, human as the judge, I will understand what tasks and what projects I can safely and effectively delegate to my agent workforce and which ones require the full scale of my intellectual attention. So I think that is one of the markers that go beyond, beyond Cluency. How do I work with Gen AI myself on a day-to-day basis? The next generation of that is how do I work with agents on a day-to-day basis and manage the team effectively? Can I just ask you to double click a little bit of that?

36:37Because I obviously agree. And I think there is these two worlds emergence. There's the ones who's very advanced with AI and we kind of talk about agents and stuff like that, as in like, you know, that is about to happen. And we already have like a bunch of agents that we use on a daily basis and what have you. And then I think there's the realities of most organizations are still just having the conversation. Should we use AI or not? So there's like this huge gap. And then obviously there's like all the shades in the middle. I find it complicated to help people think about how to atomize the work that they do and then productize whatever it is, is the output of their now the current day to day job.

37:22And then even think about how to kind of like productize that as an agent. Now, you being somebody who understands product really well, I'm sure you kind of do that intuitively. but have you thought about how best to teach people how to kind of think about this kind of like journey that they as you say is kind of about to go on where they will see themselves like not working themselves out of a job to somebody else but working themselves out of their current job by having agents doing some of the more kind of like the laborious versions of what they do? Well, yeah, so good question. So, all right, so 10 years ago or 12 years ago, you know, at Rocket Fuel, we would say, you know, free yourself from the tyranny of the grunt work, grudge work, and guesswork associated with the manual optimization of advertising campaigns and liberate yourself to do the most inspiring and insightful work of your careers.

38:16So what do you do right now, which is grunt work, grudge work, and guesswork, and how do you get to a place in which you can be, you know, be inspired, you know, do things inspirational and insightful. And when I think about that, I then think about like, where is AI great and where can AI actually accelerate dysfunction? And I think about that across these three vectors. And this is, I have to thank Greg Shubb specifically for giving me this mental model, which is, and I wish I had my soda can here to do it, but it's do the do, which is Mountain Dew, DEW, data, expertise, and workflow. So is your data structured or unstructured?

38:56Is it garbage? Is your data polluted or not? Expertise is a combination of what is you, the human, what is the expertise that you are known for? What is the, like, why do you come to work every day? Why do you get paid to do what you do? And then workflow, you could substitute the word workflow for process as well. What are workflows that are part of your, and I think this partly gets to your question, what are the workflows that are part of your daily existence? Have you done the audit of your workflow? And therefore, can you atomize that workflow into digestible chunks that AI might be able to take over for you?

39:31For example, if I think about back in my day, when I had fewer gray hairs, I think about the SDR function as an example, right? So, you know, sales development represented inside sales for those it's referred to for the listeners, SDR, BDR. And I think about what an SDR has to do. And I think about whether some of the workflows that are part of correspondence with a prospect, right? So marketing, in theory, marketing has done their job to heat up a lead to in which a place in which it's qualified. There's some MQL, there's some way in which that lead has been qualified. They've downloaded a white paper, or they've read two reports, or they've configured, in our case, in Logitech's case, They've configured a room that they're interested in.

40:13Okay, great. The historical way in which SDRs operate is one of which, okay, there's a human being, there's a young person, right? Young graduate whose name could be Max. And Max goes in and says, hey, you know, I just saw you downloaded this thing. Would you be interested, like, to try to qualify that lead further? And whether that qualification is, right, band, budget, authority, need, timing, smart, take your pick of qualification, it doesn't really matter. Some of those qualification levers can now be offloaded, I believe, to agents that exist. Salesforce is one company that's offering this agentic model of SDR engagement, and there are others.

40:52So can I give that process? As a human being, do I necessarily need to be doing bank qualification in that way? Or is that a process that I can offload to an SDR agent? Absolutely. Do I still need the human in the loop to think about what is the way in which I can create this rad knowledge base, the right kind of knowledge base, and then structure those communications effectively and the workflow and periodically audit those conversations and the engagement rate of those leads before they go from leads to prospect to actual business? Sure. But I don't necessarily need to be that human that does every step of that qualification.

41:32And that's a great place where SDR agents could be very helpful. Similarly with customer service, like we've seen it, you know, everybody here. In fact, there was just that piece that was done that I saw on LinkedIn yesterday, which was two agents realized they were speaking with each other. And they switched how they started to communicate into a higher frequency language that the computers could understand faster than if humans were having that conversation together. I kind of like tracked that down. It was fascinating. but according to um you know like deep research done on reddit apparently it it was programmed to do that and so they didn't actually like self-discover that they didn't self-discover right no it wasn't self-discovered they did reverse they reverted yeah yeah but but it was fascinating and obviously the concept is is certainly something that that could and will happen and i think so like in in my case i would like to build an agent now right you can imagine as one becomes, you know, knighted head of AI, the influx of unsolicited requests for, hey, have you thought about this ML machine learning operations?

42:42Like the influx has increased exponentially, right? We're in the age of exponential growth. Because I'm still so new into the role, I cannot possibly answer these people. So what I would love to have is I would love to be able to build an agent for myself that says, that queries me periodically and say, okay, hey, Eric, what are you in market for? What are you not in market for? And then stand up an agent to be able to respond to those inquiries and say, look, not interested now, call me back in three months, six months, five months, et cetera, such that I have a curated experience and I can actually help those SDRs, whether they be agents or humans, do a better job of managing their pipeline.

43:25One question I have on, and this might be pretty nerdy, but as we are looking at atomizing and age-emphasizing ourselves and we use the do model, data for a company becomes clearer, right? We have different organizations have different kind of data and some of it can kind of become unique. And some of them, it is unique to them and some of them, it's not. But as an individual, let's say that you just work in the marketing team and you think about data for you as an individual. You mentioned one earlier, it was obviously the data source, which is like all your interactions that you had with ChatGPT over the last two years, which is now like a repository that you can make into a Rack model.

44:04Do you have other kind of like things that you started to gather as data repository for you as an individual that can be useful? And I'm asking because I saw somebody who is now using Readwise a lot as being the repository for all the highlights they've done in Kindle books. And that now becomes kind of a database of something that say something about their interest that they can use. Do you have other kind of things that you use that you started to kind of like keep because you know you're going to use it for an agent at a later point? Yes. So notebook is what I use in no small part because when, for purposes of research.

44:46So I try and stay up. I try and read three or four or five research reports that come out per week, of which there are another 15 behind it that I'm interested in, but just don't have the time to read. Like, I don't know how Ethan Mollick sleeps, but, you know, I follow him pretty relatively. I don't think he does. And I think everyone should follow Ethan. He is an agent. You know that, right? Correct. case. Well, right. Cause Reid Hoffman actually has his age and his younger self that he's created that three-dimensional facsimile in him, which is super interesting and interesting to watch himself interview himself from 30 years ago.

45:21But anyway, so I use notebook as a repository of research information, both because again, I think I'm a reasonably curious person. So I'm curious about lots of things. I just don't have time to absorb all of them, but that curiosity, I would So that curiosity is the tip of the spear to say, okay, you know what, these five things I read and these 15 things I didn't read, that becomes part of a knowledge base for me. So what's the workflow there? Like, is there literally like, do you have a workflow built in your mind? Like if somebody sends you a research report, you tag it and immediately send it to Notebook.

45:56And then at the end of the week, you have like a time blocked on your calendar to ask Notebook, what are the five biggest learning? I'm making it up, right? You're not making it up. That is exactly what I do. Every week I get whatever, however many pieces of research I tag, flag, I open it in, I may be opening it on my phone in Safari, and I go through all of my open tabs from the last week and I say, okay, that piece of research, I download it, I then upload it to a notebook, and then I get my 15 to 20 minute audio summary of that notebook every week that I then listen to, add or read the briefing document with the notebook as well.

46:29And then what I may do, Jeremy, is I may use that research or some of that research in the future to create assistance. So, for instance, I've created a prompt building before. Yes, you can use AI to improve itself. And you can also go instead of a mile deep based on the type of work that you do. So I think Heinrich, you had asked the question about the marketer. Right. So every piece of content that a marketer reads to become a better marketer potentially is part of that knowledge base. And it's just like Jeremy, like, OK, I don't know how many books you read last year. And I think somebody on this podcast said it from a couple of months ago, which is like, you can't possibly remember what was on page five of the fourth book that you there were the fourth book ago that you read.

47:17And LLM can. And so having that access to access to that information in a bespoke way becomes very, very powerful. This is killer. OK, is there anything that you feel like folks need to hear that, you know, that you haven't shared with us yet? uh so probably i i am still surprised by the individuals i speak with professionally and personally who have not fine-tuned custom instructions to give the llm of choice knowledge about themselves whether it be their work their career uh and the types of outputs they expect and jeremy you asked about like what is that habit like a habit that you a listener can do right now, if you haven't done it already, is download your LinkedIn profile, assuming that it's up to date.

48:11And then you can upload that profile to your LLM of choice and say, hey, help me create, what do you think would be an appropriate set of custom instructions that would be right for me in 2000 characters or less, which is generally like the, that's the default character size for many of these models, in particular GPT. And I promise, right, it's like the output, the pre and post, right? The pre-exposure, pre-custom instructions, post-custom instructions is dramatically different. Run the experiment. I think that's a cool thing is like, tell everybody, take a prompt, you know, maybe like a burning question you've got, put it in LLM pre-custom instructions, then do what Eric just described, which just TLDR, download your LinkedIn, upload it to TITPT and say, what should my custom instructions be based on my LinkedIn profile?

48:59And then upload that as custom instructions, then rerun the same exact prompt in a new window with your custom instructions and just compare the difference. I think if folks want to dig deeper into custom instructions, Dan Schipper actually went really deep in one of our early episodes. He calls them the secret power-up to change LLM. So I totally agree. Any other kind of big piece of advice you think are no-brainers that folks just have to know before they stop listening to you at least today? Sure. So fact Checking, right? You know, AI, it's still an overeager intern or an overeager PhD, MBA, depending on who pick, right?

49:32You know, I do believe that the large, the frontier models, it is the jagged frontier as Ethan Malek described a year and a half ago. Like, you know, the future is here. It's just unevenly distributed. And so our LLMs are so eager to please that they will tell you, sometimes they will tell you the information that you want to hear. And so this is some of the work I've been doing recently. and I know Jeremy, I shared this with you and also with Bryce is creating neurodivergent assistance that give you the opportunity to really instruct the LLM to counter its narrative of always being, always being the people pleaser, right?

50:11Eric, should we post a link to your psychedelic GPT? Would that be cool? Yeah. In the show notes. So folks, folks who don't know. So Eric and I got into something on LinkedIn recently where we were talking about, you You know, psychedelics have influenced the kind of creative potential of humans for a while. And that's like introducing a chemical. What could we do with language to effectively introduce a psychedelic to an LLM? Eric worked hard on building that. And we'll post a link to that GPT in the show notes if you want a psychedelic kind of mind bending LLM experience. That's so cool. I hadn't seen that.

50:44That's amazing. Thank you so much, Eric, for getting on. Jeremy Motley, what stood out to you? you know what what stood out to me this phrase i can't remember where it came from i feel like it came from a recent episode but we've had so many amazing conversations folks check out the back catalog that i can't even remember which one it is maybe henric will but is this idea of commissioning yourself do you remember where that came from no but i remember somebody said it but you remember that that vibe right there's that's a vibe there and i just i really like how eric Eric is, I mean, he's an incredible leader.

51:19He's an incredible entrepreneur. He's an experienced CMO. And now he's stepping into this super cool, super huge role at Logitech. And if you ask how did it happen, basically he commissioned himself. You know, he didn't, oh, it was in our conversation with Blair, the rabbit hole. And he talks about the same thing, right? Commissioning himself to do the Adidas ad. I think in the same way, Eric effectively commissioned himself by, you know, on a moonlighting basis, taking the responsibility to train 800 of his colleagues, mostly because of his own personal curiosity. Then when the question comes, who should be head of AI at Logitech?

51:56I mean, it's, how about the guy who's already taken the initiative to train 800 people? You know, how about we start there? To me, that's a really cool, like - And you know, look, that's probably a good thing. You know, like this is kind of also what happened at BarkBox, you know, we have the guy who runs AI is called Mikkel and that kind of happened. He used to run design before, but then he, you know, got the AI block and kind of spend most of the time talking to everybody else about it. And you know what? I was talking to a part equity friend the other day who was kind of asking, hey, I just got involved in this big company and we need to kind of upgrade their ability to do AI.

52:26How should I do it? Like, who should I hire, basically? And there is something interesting in the thought of like, do you hire somebody from inside who have already the ear and is somebody who kind of like can talk the Logitech language as it is for them? or do you get kind of like the hot shot from outside? And then is it somebody who understands technology or is it somebody who understands humans, which obviously is somebody with an experience as CMO is. And even if you take Bryce, who is not a technologist, but is one of the ones that we've spoken to that seem to have the best handle on how do you really push this throughout an organization.

53:02And so I think even like, who do you hire? How do you get hired? You know, like, is it inside and outside? It's kind of like an interesting conversation. Yeah, yeah, it's super cool. I love the shout outs to Bryce. I think if folks haven't listened to that episode, you really owe it to yourself to listen to our conversation with Bryce Shalomel, the head of AI at Moderna, who's just probably a little bit farther on this journey than Eric's on. Eric looks up to him as a hero and as a thought partner. And Bryce lays out a lot of his thinking in that conversation. You know, the other thing that I thought was just a really nice, simple takeaway is for anybody who's just getting started, using AI to improve your use of AI is kind of the meta trick that unlocks a lot of possibility.

53:40whether it's using AI to help you craft your customer instructions, like we heard from Dan, you know, now over a year ago, right? Eric mentioned that. Or whether it's even running a prompt through AI and saying, hey, I'm about to give this prompt. Could you seek to understand my intent and then give me feedback as to whether I framed this prompt well? How can I improve it? There's something about the kind of meta awareness that you, if you don't know how to use AI for something, you can actually ask AI and AI can teach you how to use itself or how to use it for your purposes in a better way. The final thing for me was like, we all feel that we are in a hurry to upgrade our own abilities and our company's abilities to use AI.

54:22And I think we hear these kind of success stories and see these videos and hear these anecdotes from other people. But it's nice even to hear from Eric that, you know, he's also in the beginning of this journey, right? And we are just figuring it out. And probably no organization has truly completely nailed this yet. And so what I actually like about the industry of AI, if you like right now, if you take it just like applied AI, not just building AI systems, is that there's kind of like a nice camaraderie in like everybody's just making shit up as they go along right now. And sharing, which is actually like a pretty nice kind of like, yeah, like nice space to be in.

55:05yeah i agree it's a privilege and i think the more that folks are sharing their experiences and um i love maybe the last thing i'll say and it's related to that point is thought that champions at loggy should be able to come back and teach him something new and teach the other champions something new as a criteria for their continued championness i thought was really great which one way of saying is there's an implicit humility there that he is not going to be the person who knows everything. And he's actually looking for people who are contributing to not only the group's collective knowledge, but his own understanding of the technology, I think is a really, really wonderful attitude to have for anybody who aspires to be their head of AI.

55:50And I think that's a good way to end it. So with that, thank you so much for listening to another episode of Beyond the Prompt. And obviously, if you enjoyed this episode, it will mean a lot to us if you can share it to somebody else on LinkedIn, or you could go in and like, subscribe, wherever you do. That's kind of like how this show gets exposed to more people. So that would mean a lot to us. So if you can do that, we'd much appreciate it. And then until next time, take care. Be good.