Quests, token leaderboards, and a skills marketplace: The elite AI adoption playbook | John Kim (Sendbird)

0:00Unleashing this power of AI and giving it to the power of marketers, salespeople, you get all these cool ideas that get rolled out rapidly to the market.

0:07John Kim:It's taking someone's super creativity and giving them powers to deliver it to your customers. This is an internal platform where anyone in the company can raise their hand and create what we call the quest. When there's a quest, AI can actually read through the specification, create PRDs, and start actually coding. Basically a marketplace of AI needs and AI builders inside your company where anybody can just pop in and say, oh, I think I know how to do that. So tell me a little bit about this dashboard. So what you're seeing here is the overall usage of our token at the company level. We measure AI gods as somebody who spend more than 100 million tokens a day.

0:40John Kim:What I love about this moment is I think it is just such a moment to learn things you could never learn before because the best teacher with the most in-depth knowledge and an endless willingness to go to research is right there at your fingertips. This is like a beautiful time to fail forward and still get up and run faster than the other. Because innovation doesn't start from a pure theoretical structure. It starts with people who have that energy and the story behind them. So find them. They're always in your organization. And they really build energy around that. Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Clara Vo, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools.

1:19John Kim:Today, I have Jon Kim, founder and CEO of SendBird, and he's going to show us his AI token consumption leaderboard, where everyone in the company is ranked from AI newbie to AI god. He's also going to show us how AI quests can be the key to company-wide adoption. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. AI has already changed how we work. Tools are helping teams write better code, analyze customer data, and even handle support tickets automatically. But there's a catch. These tools only work well when they have deep access to company systems. Your co-pilot needs to see your entire codebase.

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2:38John Kim:Join them and hundreds of other industry leaders at workos.com. Start building today. John, I love what you're going to show us today because I tell people right now they want to transform their company. They need to think of their team as a product. And what you're going to show us, a little spoiler alert for everybody excited to get into this episode, is how you've turned AI adoption not just into a program in your company, but a product. So tell me, what's your ambition for your team around their use of AI? We want to become the AI-first company. And what we mean by that is not just to adopt AI as a tool, but how do we make AI as part of our workforce?

3:21So we're really trying to empower people and give them right set of information and tools so the data themselves can really harness the power of AI. And some of the things we are hopefully about to show you today will inspire people to do something similar. Yeah.

3:35John Kim:And let's, you know, go to go to the outcomes, because I think a lot of people that I talk to are trying to articulate the why behind adopting AI that goes beyond. I would like you to do more with less. And that's a lot of what employees are hearing right now is just I want you to go faster. You can go faster. We should be able to do more, more, more. But I think what your team is building is showing a different benefit of of adopting AI and everybody becoming builders. So you want to jump in and show us some of the stuff that you all are building with AI, and then maybe we'll back into how you got the team there.

4:09Welcome to a delight-ass shop. We're really excited about this. This is a swag store that really captures the culture and the energy of where our company is headed. The store is called Big S. Energy is an agent-as-a-service, and this entire store was built by our marketing team without engineering support. So you can actually buy really cool swag that are very timely. Actually, I really did ask my team to make this. My ass is bigger than your SaaS, fully deterministic. I think this is one of the most popular swags we have right now. You can actually go and buy this. So our marketing team integrated Stripe integration.

4:48So, yeah, we do charge a little bit of money. But I think it's going to be really cool. Another favorite, Context Window I carry a lot. So imagine unleashing this power of AI to your marketing team with this amazing creative energy. And instead of asking your design team or engineer to put this site together, they put this site together in a matter of a day or two, and then it's now up and running. We also have a super secret Easter egg. For those of gamers who are listening, if you do Konami code, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, and here's a little secret. So we are throwing a conference in May 7th called Delight Spark in San Francisco.

5:31It's got to be a really amazing conference bringing the CX leaders, AI builders from all over the world, people joining from Anthropic. We'll be showcasing our future roadmap. So hopefully it will be a great chance to really learn about the cutting edge of AI, but also thinking through the lens of where's the future of customer experience going to look like. So this is what our marketing team has built together.

5:53John Kim:I just have to stop and reflect. So we just had a really recent episode with Jason Levin, the CEO of Meme Lord, and he said, let your marketers cook. That was his whole thesis, which is when marketers can be builders, they can build things that delight your customers and acquire them. And I just go back to like the before times. if marketing had this idea, it would be like, well, can we prioritize it? Is it worth investing engineering resources in? It's just for this event. The event's going to pass quickly. Just do something out of the box in, you know, RCMS. And then you get this sort of like middling experience for your customers, very mediocre, very like MVP experience for your customers.

6:41John Kim:And now I think just looking at this, this store and the Easter egg and the way you get into the event it's taking someone's super creativity and giving them powers to to deliver it to your customers and this again is like the example of it's not about going faster it's about having a bigger ambition and doing more honestly fun things and i think this is underrated too which is it's so hard to build like it's so hard to prioritize fun in your product but when fun can You should be cheap. You should be more fun. So that's my thesis on why you should let marketers become builders. And I'm sure they love it, too, just from a team engagement, you know, creativity perspective.

7:27Yeah, I love that because that's exactly what happened. Because imagine sitting in a room full of engineers and product leaders and saying, hey, you know what? We have this cool idea. We want to add this to your product release cycle and roadmap. It's going to take you two sprints. It's going to bury heart. It's going to be very hard to get that on the table. But just like, again, unleashing this power of AI and giving it to the power of marketers, salespeople, like you get all these cool ideas that get rolled out rapidly to the market. So very, very excited.

7:55John Kim:Well, I would say that not every marketer, though, a year ago or two years ago was coding, although many more are now. So how did you get the team here? Like, how did you manage the transition from classic marketing, everything has to go to engineering, to actually enabling teaching people how to use this product or how to use AI and then how to get what they wanted done in production? So to really help facilitate that transformation, we built out a platform called the Automators Platform. This is an internal platform where anyone in the company can raise their hand and create what we call the quest.

8:33Now, this website particularly has been designed to just show you the demo today, but actually you can actually create a quest on your own. So let's say you're a finance department. Hey, I want to automate my account receivable and account payable workflow. You can kind of do that. And then some other engineers can come in and help. Or if they're AI-enabled, they can build it themselves. So just to give a couple examples, if you go to a completed list of quests, these are all the things that have been built or being pending. And then so let's say you go to Quest. Then there's usually a Quest giver.

9:09So this person, usually somebody raising their hands, like, hey, can somebody help me build a customer account lookup using kind of different workflows? And other people are like, let me actually give you a hand. So two people actually teamed up to build out this workflow. And then the result is they usually submit either code repository or some kind of a skill, right? this video, you can see how to actually use those skills. Unfortunately, it's an internal workflow, so we kind of blurred it out, but you kind of get the idea, right? So you have all these skills being built. Now, on top of that, what we're just rolling out, this is like hot off the press, I guess, or fresh out of the oven, is when you create this kind of quest, you can actually now ask AI to build it too.

9:51So when there's a quest, AI can actually read through the specification, create PRDs, and start actually coding. So this is the next level is alongside human engineers and team members. Now we have AI agents who are also helping us build automation and workflows. To do that really is to help people also learn themselves to how to build these tools. So we have these internal guidelines that continue to get updated pretty much on a daily basis, teaching people how to set up Githubs, create new applications. and also internally we have created this app template where all the authentication and all the environments have already been set up.

10:31So what marketer or the CSM, customer success manager has to do is they just extract the template and just build it on top of it and they don't have to think about the rest of the infrastructure. It's fully compliant. All the security is already pre-built in. So all they have to come up is with a cool idea they want to bring to the world.

10:51John Kim:I want to pause really quickly and just reiterate for folks that are not watching because you you breeze through it but it's so powerful which is you built and and this is totally separate i'm presuming from like all your other product roadmappy stuff you built a very fun i love the idea of a quest the ability for your team to request an ai automation or tool from someone else in the team so you take a subject matter expertise like a recruiter or a salesperson they know what they want they just don't know how to get there and you're like engineer will you go on this quest with me and they make the request and some things that we missed i wondered if you wouldn't mind pulling pulling up just showing folks is you've also made it really centric to the value you're getting out of this automation and so i saw in the corner of the quest like what's the risk of it that's probably some assessment of the data it touches or what it what it does the weeks saved and then who's the the team or person that's benefiting it and then i love this idea like people can build like jump in and help with these things without having to go through a whole like prioritization exercise all this kind of stuff and so i'm imagining you're kind of like building this like shadow ai roadmap that works really efficiently, basically a marketplace of AI needs and AI builders inside your company where anybody can just pop in and say, oh, I think I know how to do that and build it.

12:19John Kim:It was that kind of the intention is to get it out of like the big prioritization mess, get it out of I don't know how to do this myself and kind of make everybody feel responsible for it. Exactly. Because if you think through the traditional logic of software development lifecycle, you think through the lens of sprints and you try to fill up the sprint with different prioritizing blocks. But sometimes people have these little tiny micro vacations, I call them, where they have some free time. They want to build other stuff that are not tied to the most important core repository, your main product that's very, very stressful.

12:55Or there's fun little side projects that can help out. But also this has immediate customer pain, the user you can talk to within the company. So there's that feedback loop. And the moment you deliver the value, people are like, you get the instantaneous dopamine hit, if you will. So there's a lot of fun to this. And what's happening behind the scenes is people who are completing some of these quests, they actually earn experience points. If you earn enough experience points, you can change to a gift card. You can have a tea with any executive you choose. You can present what you built to the rest of the company.

13:27So we do weekly stand-up on Wednesday. So we have people coming up to the stage and sharing what they built with the entire company. This week was recruiting team automation. Previous week, I think, was marketing team. So there's a different team showing. And it's almost never actually the engineering team. It's other teams that are like really excited to show what they built.

13:46John Kim:I love that so much. And then, you know, the other thing that you did, which is very practical, which I've also advised almost every company to sit down and do, is you have a bunch of people that have vibe coded something with Claude code sitting on their computer. And they, one, just either don't know how to get that to production, or they're getting it to production for the entire internet. They're just, you know, pushing it up to Netlify or Vercel and saying, I built this thing. And I love the idea that you both built knowledge guides for how to learn core skills like Git that will make people a little bit more fluent in building things.

14:23John Kim:But also, please, everybody stop and listen. Make a templated, happy path to secure production for the things that people want to build. Behind auth, with the right kind of data access, just make it so because your team's going to do it. Somebody's doing it anyway. And it's a very low investment to get a lot of velocity on things being built, but also a lot of kind of like right size security. I would say it's not a hard thing to do. So I love that you built that? Who is responsible for maintaining that, keeping it up to date? Yeah, so one of the teams that we created is AI engineer for internal operations.

15:01It's a very mouthful, but really the team is responsible for helping and accelerating our AI transformation to becoming AI-first company. So this role directly reports to me and our chief of staff. So it has an ability to work trans-functionally, but obviously there's a lot of support from our CTO and engineer team, as well as our InfoSec. So they partner very, very closely. So we have this task force where we meet on a weekly basis to talk about unblocking some of these challenges, whether it be compliances, how do we log things, what are the software that we can actually vet everything in advance.

15:34So when our team's like, hey, I'm in sales, I'm going to build this tool, then here's a full tech stack, the IT stack you're doing if you have to worry about databases. It's just all there, come with your idea. And everything has already been vetted. So there's a working group. But it didn't start. immediately that way. It actually started with a couple of people, you know, kind of building out their own personal tools and showcasing. But again, it came from the non-engineering team, which really gave us the optimism, like, we can actually do this, and let's actually build more infrastructure so these people can run at 100 miles per hour.

16:06John Kim:I love that. And so speaking of infrastructure, it's not only these one-off automations and workflows or guides for building apps. You've also built, which I think is very smart, a company-wide skills marketplace. So tell Tell me a little bit more about how that works. Yeah. So share, anyone can create a plugin. Plugin is a collection of skills, or you can create and download individual skills as well. So let's say you are in sales team, or even if you're not in sales team, you want to learn more, you have to look at the sales skills repository, a plugin. So we internally use something called the Medic Framework.

16:39So if you want to learn more about Medic Framework, you can actually download or use a Medic, a med pick an advisor and teaches you how the skills actually build but you can actually plug it into your own software or into your own workflow to get this skill to give your device so we have that for almost all the functions for the recruiting design some of those things are redacted for compliance purposes but this is where we kind of actually build our marketplace because what we realized to your point earlier there are people who are building the same app across different functions or sometimes the same skill.

17:14And so we're trying to create this place where we can co-evolve rather than people operating in silos.

17:20John Kim:Yeah, and have you found that people have kind of understood this concept of skills and it's been a nice way to get people to encode their expertise? Or how did you train people on what a skill was? Did this happen organically? Well, yes and no. I think there's both top-down and bottom-down. Top-down, meaning myself, a CTO, some of our executive leaders really tried to get people to adopt it. There was a lot of top one-on-ones like, hey, we noticed that you haven't been spending any tokens. Can he help you? What's going on? What's stopping you from doing that? But certainly some people who are more curious, so we'll maybe talk about the archetypes of the people we're actually hiring for, is a sense of curiosity and agency.

18:00Those who are curious, who click a few more buttons and read a few more blog posts are like, hey, I've been hearing about this word called skills. And then they now see these word pop up in Slack channels. And then some people uploading markdown files. I'm like, hey, I saw this design markdown. Can I use that? What does the outcome look like? And this one person goes to the stage on Wednesday and showcase what they built, a beautiful looking slide. And we know this person's not a designer, but has a beautiful looking slide. They're like, how do you pull that off? There are usually some skills involved.

18:30So I think there's that organic kind of shared learning aspect as well.

18:33John Kim:So we're looking at this from a meta perspective, which is you're how I built, used AI, built a product to incept the rest of my organization to adopt and use AI. I'm curious, just off the top of your head, what are some real wins that you've had from this? We saw the swag store. That's a fun win. What are a couple like kind of top of mind skills wins or automation wins that you think the team is really proud of? Yeah. I'll do one better. So actually one team level example and one specific campaign that we're doing. So our marketing team, again, has built this entire marketing SaaS almost on their own.

19:11This completely set of tools, whether it be interview marketing plan, calendar, there's account-based marketing tools, various tools, right? We have competitor review. I wish I can click on this. It has a lot of sensitive information, real-time metrics. We call it Purple Cal. How do we stand out? As you see from the ass store that we built, I think it's pretty revolutionary. I know I'm going to buy a few. So this entire portal is built and managed and used daily by our marketing team. And just to give you one example of a very recent one, they're actually live right now, is this concept of a buzz board.

19:50It's like there are a lot of SaaS companies that actually do this. What it does is you can create a campaign and track what's happening, how many posts have shared, who's winning in the company that attracted most amount of engagement. And one example is we are right now doing a billboard in San Francisco in one-a-mile. So we have real photos. We have AI-generated billboards. So you can actually pick one of them and choose like a language or whatever, a pre-configured copy, and you can post directly on LinkedIn. And this entire tool was built by a marketing team. And then you can also change the length and details and energy level.

20:28and this is being used daily, as you've seen from the metrics we're tracking. So I think this is like one example of really good use. We also have Spark attendee logos, which is a conference we're, again, throwing,

20:39John Kim:and coming soon, Hawaii AI, John's episode. We're going to run a social media campaign. Great, this is going to be the top performing episode. This episode is brought to you by ThoughtSpot. Product leaders know the struggle. Your users want data insights, but they don't want to leave your app to find them. ThoughtSpot Embedded solves this by putting analytics directly into your product. Your users can search in plain English and explore data instantly, right where they work. No separate tools and zero context switching. What sets ThoughtSpot apart is that it's not just another bolt-on dashboard.

21:15John Kim:It's a search-driven, AI-powered experience that feels native to your app. Developers can embed it with just a few lines of code and then fully customize the look and feel. The result? More engaged users, faster decisions, and a product that delivers more value every time someone logs in. If analytics is becoming core to your product strategy, visit go.thoughtspot.com slash howiai for more information and try the free trial at go.thoughtspot.com slash howiai slash trial. What I want to reflect on on this is like there's this big debate about whether SaaS is dead or not. And, you know, I tell people, look, I don't think SaaS is going to zero.

22:01John Kim:I think there's plenty of software problems to solve that really deeply engaged teams with an understanding of space can create delightful solutions and things that matter. And I think people would like to buy those solutions off the shelf. And I think a lot of teams are going to be like yours, which is when they could reach for searching for some sort of external solution, they're first going to say, well, what do we want and can we build it internally? And what I like about what you're doing, which I also tell people, is it's not about functionally replicating an external vendor. It's not like functionally replicating a social posting vendor.