Building Bold: How Quickbase’s Platform Powers Innovation at Scale

0:00:09.3 Kailey Raymond: Welcome to Builders Wanted, the podcast for people shaping the future of customer engagement. Today's guest is helping businesses innovate faster, smarter, and with fewer barriers. I'm joined by Jon Kennedy, Chief Technology Officer at Quickbase, a leading no-code platform helping organizations solve complex problems with custom scalable solutions. Jon's work sits at the intersection of product strategy, platform innovation, and AI. Under his leadership, Quickbase has rapidly expanded its global engineering footprint, led major platform integrations, and infused AI into the heart of its offering, all while keeping scalability, security, and customer impact front and center. Today we'll talk about building with boldness, scaling for growth, and how Quickbase is empowering a new generation of builders from IT leaders to frontline problem solvers. Let's get into it.

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0:01:53.2 Kailey Raymond: Jon, welcome to the show. Very excited to have you here today.

0:01:56.6 Jon Kennedy: Really excited to be here.

0:01:58.2 Kailey Raymond: This should be really fun. I wanted to start off and have you walk through a little bit more about Quickbase. You know, you're solving business problems, really complex things that businesses are having trouble with from supply chains to field operations. Give us a quick pitch of how Quickbase is helping solve those problems.

0:02:19.2 Jon Kennedy: Yeah. So Quickbase, it's a platform to build apps, to develop apps, and I think the power of Quickbase really is in its customizability. So you show up to Quickbase, you've got a business problem, it's your business problem it's, you know, a little bit different than everybody else's. And you can build the application to suit your needs, to do whatever it is you want it to do and customize it to be exactly what you want. So, we have customers who build all kinds of things on Quickbase, like from CRMs for their business, to ticket tracking apps, to asset tracking things, to secret Santa who's bringing the secret Santa stuff. This platform is big. We have Fortune 100 companies building apps to do all kinds of mission-critical stuff. And so like the power of Quickbase is really like, you can build a customizable application workflow for your business in days, like legit. And that's what people do. And that's why it's powerful.

0:03:06.8 Kailey Raymond: Beautiful. Customizability, personalization embedded into your use cases for an enterprise and maybe not enterprise secret Santa sounds a little bit more on the fun side. 

0:03:17.3 Jon Kennedy: That's right. So, enterprises do it. Enterprises use it. Obviously we have smaller customers and even within the enterprises we have customers that build the secret Santa app 'cause they're like, ah, I'm gonna build on Quickbase. That's how I organize it. So, it's extremely useful. 

0:03:29.0 Kailey Raymond: I love it. And you know, you've helped grow the engineering and product org quite significantly in the past couple of years. I'd love to hear from you about what some of the biggest challenges you faced when scaling an organization so quickly.

0:03:44.2 Jon Kennedy: Yeah. That's a good question. We've more than doubled in the last couple years and it's been global. So we have people in Eastern Europe, we have people in the US, we have people all over. And look, I love technology, but I view myself the more important role for me is just leading these people. And so I think the biggest challenge is making sure that all the teams really feel empowered to make decisions to, like if you have a team that's in Eastern Europe and you have a team that's in the United States, make them feel like, hey look, they're just geographically separated, but they're a part of the same team. Like if like the technology, like there's technology challenges obviously, but it's really like the biggest challenge is like getting the people working cohesively and fired up and as a unit and, you know, empowered. So like, just make some decisions and sometimes you're gonna be wrong. It's okay, right? But just to have a bias for action, like building that culture. Like, I think that's the biggest challenge and I think we've done a really good job of that.

0:04:38.7 Kailey Raymond: This comes up often is like this idea around building a culture of curiosity, you said bias to action, you know, making sure that folks feel empowered to do the work that they, you know, are really tied to those business results and feel like they can grow their careers. I'm wondering in your career, if you can look back, and you think about maybe a pivotal moment where it might have shaped how you're thinking about technology leadership today? 

0:05:08.6 Jon Kennedy: There's a bunch. I've certainly gotten, I've certainly had some great mentors at a bunch of different places, starting with MIT and then going through SimpliVity. It was a great mentor I had there as VP of Engineering. Look, I think I have been most successful when I felt like my leader trusted me and is like, well, Jon, you got the ball and if you mess up, it's okay. I trust you to be right a lot, you know, an Amazonian principle, but you've got to feel like you're trusted to make decisions and you're not going to get called to the carpet if something goes wrong. Like you've got to have the trust. And if you can instill trust in your organization, it's okay. I trust you to get the job done. Then I think that's where people really flourish. That's the environment I want to live in. And so, I just try to. In my career, I've had that in many places and that's what I try to build here. 

0:06:03.6 Kailey Raymond: What are the tips to build that type of culture? 

0:06:07.0 Jon Kennedy: First of all, one is just interact at a human level and be explicit about that. When you take people out for social events, build trust like humans. The second thing is feel tactically. It's like, don't micromanage. What does that mean? It means I don't necessarily need to review every little thing that's being done. No, I don't need to look at everything. If there's something you want to alert me to, great, but I'm busy, you're busy. No, I don't need to look at every little thing and I trust you if we're briefing to my boss or to other leaders. Yes, we'll do a review, but I trust you to build what you need to do and be prepared to communicate that. So, like, inspection in the sense of asking questions just to make sure things are meeting the bar, but not inspecting to try to find flaws. Little stuff like that. As people, you know it when somebody's like, okay, this person's trying to help me or this person's trying to figure out if I screwed it up. It's a human thing. 

0:06:58.3 Kailey Raymond: Totally. Even the word inspection, I was like, oh, gosh. I get a like a visceral reaction to it. 

0:07:04.3 Jon Kennedy: Right. Nobody wants to get inspected, but as leaders, when you're ultimately responsible for the platform, Quickbase, and making sure that it's highly available for customers that are doing enterprise and critical workloads on it, you do need to make sure the bar's set high. And so you need to ask questions and make sure it's there, but you're not inspecting to find flaws. 

0:07:23.5 Kailey Raymond: Yeah. And you know, we're talking about like internal teams and processes, like a lot of the extremely unsexy things that make the business work. I also know that Quickbase, because you empower so many different use cases, the platform itself is truly empowering. It's empowering freedom to build with a lot of different users from both developers to non-technical teams. So, what does it mean to you to build a platform that is truly empowering for these different groups of folks? 

0:07:54.0 Jon Kennedy: Yeah. Well, I mean one of the main reasons I came to Quickbase five years ago was 'cause I like this idea that you could have this citizen developer, right? So what does that mean? That is somebody who owns a cabinet making company and they sit down, they're like, look, I need to track inventory better. I don't wanna pay somebody or like buy something off stuff. Like, I just wanna build an inventory tracking app for like my cabinets, right? And so you sit down, you're like, well I got this quick pacing. And you're like, okay, and you can configure it and you can use your nomenclature, you can use the materials you use and you can build that whole thing out that's bespoke to you, right? Like, I don't know, that seemed pretty empowering to me. It's like very empowering. Like I solved this problem, right? And guess what? You built a computer application and you're not a computer programmer, right? You're just like, 'cause Quickbase enabled to do that. And then you can show your boss, like, check this out. Like, yeah, we used to track all this stuff in spreadsheets. Check out this app. Now I can track everything, you can audit it, we can send you emails if you want. Like, it gets automatically updated you whether have that or you wanna the email spreadsheets around. I think it's pretty powerful, pretty empowering for somebody that like is not a technologist to be able to solve a real world problem like that. Yeah.

0:08:58.5 Kailey Raymond: Fully agree. And you know, I think that, and you all have kind of had this ethos around building without limits. It's at the core of Quickbase. You've kind of mentioned a couple of these, but I'd love to hear some of these examples. Like how are you seeing customers push the boundaries of what's possible? 

0:09:16.9 Jon Kennedy: Quickbase is like really a set of power tools and you can do a lot of stuff with power tools. And you can get a lot of trouble with power tools too. Like table saws can do great things and they can do bad things, right? And Quickbase is like really a set of power tools. And so customers, like big customers have built applications, like I mentioned, to track global creation of real estate for big commercial retailer. Like all of the buildings that these retailer builds, all of the material, all built and tracked within a Quickbase app. Like that's a big app, right? And so that's a real powerful part, you know, real powerful example, what the platform can do. We have a [laughter] we have impressive customers that the names that you would know who have built real mission critical applications to run their business on Quickbase. And so like there's a boatload of those examples. And it's really cool to be on a customer call now where you're like, wow, man, you do all that. That's really powerful. And then the last part for me as a guy who's responsible for the platform and keeping it up like, the platform has to be solid and available, right? If you have a Fortune 100 company building a mission-critical app on your platform, like it's gotta stay up. And so we take that super serious here and are proud of our uptime. Anyway, I went maybe a little far field there but like there's tons of examples of people building really powerful applications.

0:10:35.7 Kailey Raymond: Yeah. No, I hear you. I was having a conversation a couple days ago with some product and engineering leaders and we were talking about building with AI specifically. They were saying, you might be able to understand 60% at best of the use cases, when you're actually building something that your user base will actually start to build with. You're going to see a lot of things that you never expected come out the door, especially within this context of AI. I know you all have placed a pretty big bet on AI, so I'd love to hear from you and how you think about and you see AI transforming this low-code space and just customer expectations around it as well. 

0:11:19.7 Jon Kennedy: Yeah. It's an awesome question. We could do a whole podcast on that. I'll summarize a couple ways. So, Quickbase has invested in AI in a few dimensions. The first dimension is make it easier to build Quickbase apps. So via generative AI, just describe what kind of app you want to build and out pops an app. That kind of bootstraps you to getting started, right? So faster augment. That's one way. It's the same thing with pipelines. Pipelines is our past solution essentially to connect to other third-party systems and move data around. So via Gen AI, build me a pipeline. When a record comes into this table, fire off an email, send a text, put it on, you know. So, that's a pipeline, you can build that with Gen AI. So that's number one way. Build easier. 

0:11:58.9 Jon Kennedy: The second thing is get more insight from the data that's in Quickbase. Quickbase is a database fundamentally. At its core, it's a database with a UI on top of it. And so you can think about machine learning algorithms now that you have this structured data to derive insights from what you have. If you're tracking churn, customer churn, it's like, well, which of these customers are most likely to churn and for what reasons? I have all this data in this database, just ask for quick Insights function or ask some predictive analytics that we're building just to give you that, right? And so it's like build faster, get more insights out of your data. And so where I see this going is more of that, but also being able to connect other data sources really quickly and ask questions of all those data sources, right? And just naturally speak to Quickbase and say like, hey, because a lot of people use Quickbase and connect to Salesforce and start asking questions about customers in Salesforce. And so I see AI helping there. And then there's very much an agentic piece that's going to happen, where it's going to start doing things for you. Like, hey, I built you a pipeline to send an email every time a new lead comes in. Do you want to accept it? Oh, that's great, right? So this is a big topic, but those three vectors I think are worth a lot and we're investing in all three.

0:13:09.9 Kailey Raymond: Yes. It's such a meaty area where everybody seems to be growing is, this kind of concept around making sure that anyone can be a builder in this concept around, to your point, integrating all of the data and connecting that information together to be able to just, in human language prompt it and ideate or try to solve a problem together with some sort of agent. That is the really interesting white space that I think a lot of folks are ready to kind of get to. I also think that there's some fears around it or some trepidation around it. And I'm curious to kind of hear your side of this. You're talking about the flexibility of it and how awesome that is, and that's great. But there's also this responsibility and you need to deliver security, you need to deliver enterprise-ready solutions. How do you make sure that you're balancing those two things? 

0:14:03.6 Jon Kennedy: Yeah. I was going to actually go there because every customer call I'm on, especially with big customers, the first question is like, okay, look, where does this data go? How does it work? I need to understand this before I let my builders use it. And that is a great question. And Quickbase from the beginning has been responsible AI before that was even a term. And so number one, we don't train models with any data. When you build the smart builder and you use it to build an app, none of your requests are sent to train any models. Customer data in Quickbase is encrypted and we don't have the key. So I can't even look at the data even if I want to. And Quickbase is a platform that takes security and governance extremely seriously. In fact, I think governance is one of the ways in which we distinguish ourselves because you can govern this thing all the way down to the record level. And so a lot of customers are like, okay, I'm hesitant about AI. Like really, like people are just hesitant. I get it.

0:15:00.5 Jon Kennedy: And I think when we talk about how Quickbase doesn't use their data and how we've governed it and put guardrails around it and have checks for hallucinations, and I view it as a powerful story because it's like, look, this is a way to use AI, generative AI, machine learning, and, you know, have Quickbase kind of be the intermediary there a little bit and protect you. Like sure, you can spin something up on Bedrock if you're good and you can do a whole bunch of real powerful stuff at AWS and it's great. But a lot of our customers aren't like, again, they're citizen developers. They're not building Lambda. You know, they're not running Lambdas in the cloud. And so I say like, hey, look, Quickbase is going to use AI to do a lot of things for you and take advantage of it, right? And it's another on-ramp, just like this was an on-ramp to building an application. It's an on-ramp to using AI on top of your application.

0:15:44.1 Kailey Raymond: Yeah. It's like, you know, governance and safety needs to be embedded within the framework of the platform itself. Like that is almost becoming this kind of standard that needs to happen. It's obviously like one of the biggest things on folks' mind. And you already mentioned this one as another thing that kind of comes up. You've mentioned uptime, how really critical, like, you know, these apps are performing some mission-critical things for the companies and the customers that you served. But that kind of growth that you've seen over the past few years, that there's a tension between speed, stability, like how do you navigate that as you're scaling? 

0:16:22.0 Jon Kennedy: What we do is, we prioritize on a tech debt or a tech roadmap level, I should say, things we know we need to do to maintain our scale and speed. And so we anticipate requests to the platform increasing dramatically, and they have. And we have built infrastructure and scaled up infrastructure on all three clouds, frankly, to make sure that we can handle that. We have an extremely strong site reliability engineering team here that just lives and breathes by the uptime, making sure the platform is stable and performing. And so we prioritize it, we take it super seriously. And as a result, we're pretty proud of how scalable and stable this platform is.

0:17:05.5 Kailey Raymond: What would you say would be one of the harder technical constraints that you face when you're trying to make these enterprise-grade capabilities accessible to folks like non-technical users? 

0:17:19.5 Jon Kennedy: It can be hard. If you show up to Quickbase, and you have some idea of what a database is, like tables and foreign keys and relationships, and you're like, wow, you will be an unbelievable builder because you've got a little bit of that foundation, and you're like, I don't have to set up an Oracle database with a schema and a UI, I probably could just build it and it changes it, you're like, people go to town. If you show up as a knowledge worker, and you're like, look, I don't really understand what an app is, what tables are, what does it mean? Onboarding people like that can be difficult. That's where I think AI can come into play. That's where making the interface easier to use. And there's this tension between a real powerful, maybe it's a bad analogy, like a real powerful power tool like a table saw. But if you know what you're doing with a table saw, you're doing flooring, you're doing all kinds of stuff, right? And so it's this tension between real power and ease of use and guardrails. And so that's where the tension can be. And so we try to use AI, we try to make it intuitive, but that's kind of where sometimes it can get difficult for people that are new to building up.

0:18:26.0 Kailey Raymond: Yeah. It's like reducing the friction and making sure that it's as simple as possible to get value as quickly as possible. I think that that's probably one of the biggest things in just the way that customers are pushing companies today is, speed seems to be the thing that we get measured by the most. 

0:18:48.7 Jon Kennedy: That's right. 

0:18:49.0 Kailey Raymond: Yeah. And I'm wondering if there's maybe like a strategic decision that you've made in the course of your career, technical, organizational, you can kind of choose whatever path you want to go down, but that maybe it like didn't play out as you expected, but it taught you something really important.

0:19:06.8 Jon Kennedy: One thing that, it was kind of a technical thing, but one lesson I learned is, sometimes just having the smartest technical person on the problem is not enough to guarantee success for the solution. In other words, like it was a time in my career that I had a super smart guy, like crazy smart, and he was solving a problem and it was a real technical problem. And in the end, it did kind of solve, but like the people that were going to use the solution were not as technical as him. And so they struggled with the product that was produced. And so I was like, okay, look, like you need to pair a very strong technical person with somebody who's going to think about like how the end user is going to use it, like someone more of a product person. And so you need smart people, but sometimes the smartest technical people are just a component. They're necessary, but not sufficient. So, like having the right team together with like all of the different traits for the end user, I think is something that, you know, you learn as you're coming up a little bit.

0:20:00.2 Kailey Raymond: You're so right on that. And there's so many examples, I think, of very well-intended apps out there that maybe didn't initially have the design in place to make it very user-friendly. And that's why our folks in UX and product are incredibly important parts of the puzzle there. 

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0:21:18.7 Kailey Raymond: You know, we're talking about teams right now and kind of the composition of those is kind of a lesson that you learned. And I know that you were a part of the integration of FastField into the Quickbase platform. Integration, acquisitions, like they're not an easy thing to go through. What convinced you this would be different? Like what integration challenges surprised you? 

0:21:39.8 Jon Kennedy: I don't know if there were any surprises with respect to FastField, which is a great company and a great group of people. What I'd say about FastField and why I still love it to this day is FastField was like a startup. And it's great when you bring a startup into a team, and like Quickbase operates in some sense like a startup, but it's hard to call yourself a startup after you exist for 10 years. But when you bring in some startup culture, it shakes things up a little bit. It's like, what are you guys doing? Wow, this is how we do it. We don't do it that way. It's like, yeah, okay, that's maybe more efficient. But then, hey, you guys, there's some things. There's got to be some process we have here, right? So, I think infusing different ways to do it, especially like a startup culture, is always good because it pushes you in different ways and you learn things from different people. So, I would say that for FastField. That has been and continues to be fun.

0:22:27.8 Kailey Raymond: What are some of those cultural elements that you hold on to that you think are really powerful that you've integrated into the culture? 

0:22:35.0 Jon Kennedy: I worked at AWS for a little while, and one of the things I loved about AWS was the mechanisms they had to empower people to keep doing their jobs, but also to make sure that things were running well. If you think about it, there's thousands of AWS services internal and external, but they all have to work, right? That's a massive challenge. And so there's some great mechanisms there that I learned. And so I think having good, lightweight processes to just make sure that things are moving in the right direction, people have what they need, we're going as fast as we can. Those are the things that you hold on to. And you want to keep them as light as you can because they are, in some sense, people can call them overhead, but they're necessary. And you bridge that with the startup mentality, like we're going to go fast, we're going to just cut through red tape, we're just going to, you know. So if you can get that marriage right, I think you've got a real powerful thing. 

0:23:21.3 Kailey Raymond: And that's where AI comes in too, right? I mean, I'm like, there's so many of these relatively boring, unmeaningful tasks that folks do every day. I'm just going to give the example of, in my world, creating slides and making sure that all of the data is presented well and that we're running the business, to kind of some of your point. I think that if we can take some of that and free up folks' minds to think about more strategic questions and empowering them to kind of like the earlier conversation, to not be on their heels and to think more like a startup and be more agile with how they're thinking, that is the ultimate. It's hard in a larger organization to be able to pull that off, but I hope that AI can bring some of that agility back in.

0:24:07.2 Jon Kennedy: The slide example is a good one. My wife is smarter than me and does this, but she's built some AI technology where when things change, it automatically updates the slides, it automatically builds slides. So she'll say to me...

0:24:19.0 Kailey Raymond: We need to connect with your, I would love to talk to your wife.

0:24:22.0 Jon Kennedy: Yeah. It's magical. She's like, I'm building slides right now from the thing I just changed. And it's like, okay, I need to figure out how to do that too. So the slide thing is a good example.

0:24:30.0 Kailey Raymond: Wow, okay. And then follow up with Jon's wife after this call. I have a lot to learn from her, absolutely. 

0:24:36.3 Jon Kennedy: You can do some really cool stuff.

0:24:38.5 Kailey Raymond: I love it. I always like this question, and I think that you can find some interesting answers in it, which is, is there a customer story that may have surprised you or something in the data that may have surprised you, that you think about in the way that you build a customer outcome that we didn't expect? 

0:24:57.9 Jon Kennedy: I'll tell you one thing I was really impressed by. And I joined Quickbase five years ago, and COVID was going on at that point. And there were a couple of municipalities who spun up super quick COVID tracking apps on Quickbase. And it was like, it was like in days they were tracking things and they were doing a much higher, you know, other people were trying to build things with different tools, and it was taking like weeks and months. And we're like, well, we did that in a day. We're tracking these things. We have a map. We know where things are. I was like, wow, that's cool. That's real life. That's ingenuity. I always think about how builders on Quickbase, like we're really doing like potentially life-saving things in the COVID era by building a Quickbase app really fast. So, I always like that story.

0:25:39.5 Kailey Raymond: That's unbelievable. I didn't know that some of those were powered by Quickbase. And you're right, the speed there was one of the most scary things initially of not knowing, you know, within your neighborhood specifically what was happening. Like I remember looking at those trackers like all the time glued to them. 

0:25:58.5 Jon Kennedy: Right. And this was like local municipalities like tracking it locally bespoke to them. Again, Quickbase was like, look, it's for their region, their area, their data, right? And so you just spun it right up and then they're using it.

0:26:09.8 Kailey Raymond: Hyper personalization. That kind of brings me, I mean, that's like such a buzzword, but it's also like a massive shift that's happening, hyper personalization in the market. I think that we've all been striving to do that in tech for quite a while is, making sure that something is individually personalized down to the level of the person or the user or whatever. It's still, I would say in some ways, seems far off in some places, but it seems like base is a great solution to some of that. What's another trend that you're excited about and seeing evolve over the next two to three years? 

0:26:43.1 Jon Kennedy: I think everybody gives the same answer here. I'll give the same dumb answer.

0:26:47.3 Kailey Raymond: AI? 

0:26:47.9 Jon Kennedy: Well, no, more like agentic AI. Because people talk about that. I'm not sure exactly what it means yet. I think there are some interesting examples of it. I think it's the buzzword of the time. I'm genuinely interested to see where this pans out. What do people start? Do people trust these things? Are they useful agents and in what sense? I think that's going to be really interesting to see because when it comes to me, I'm like a tangible, practical guy. So I'm like, well, what is this really going to do? Is it going to schedule my vacation? That's not moving my needle. So anyway, I'm excited to see what happens.

0:27:24.6 Kailey Raymond: I will tell you that I'm going on vacation next week and I did have ChatGPT build my itinerary and I can't tell you how much time that saved me. So maybe I can pitch that back to you, Jon.

0:27:36.4 Jon Kennedy: Well, I love that example. And I use ChatGPT all the time. But I think the sort of nirvana is like, it gave you your agenda. It booked everything for you. It did all of these things. Oh, and by the way, like the Uber in that area wasn't available. So it switched it, you know. You know what I mean? So like, I love it. I use ChatGPT all the time too. This idea, like it's going to do all these things for you and it may and I'm sure it's going to evolve. But it's going to be interesting to see how it works.

0:28:02.0 Kailey Raymond: This is like the classic example, right? Isn't this like the Apple pitch from last year of like, we're going to take a look at your texts and your calendar and your email. And we know that you've been talking to your mom and she's coming on a flight tomorrow and we're going to send the Uber and like all these apps are talking to each other. And we're not quite there yet. But yes, I would love to see that one evolve. I'm wondering if there's a company or a leader that you admire that you think is building something with real vision and clarity.

0:28:32.3 Jon Kennedy: I do. And again, this is like a canonical answer, I guess. But like, I think Steve Jobs as a product guy was amazing. Like, you know, if you go back and you look at the iPhone stuff, I think Satya is unbelievable as well. You know, there are other leaders outside of tech that I think are good. But look, here's why I like Steve Jobs. My mom cannot live without her iPad, okay? If you'd said 20 years ago, mom, like you're going to need this iPad. She'd be like, I don't know what he's talking about, Jon. And now it's like, well, where's my iPad? You know what I mean? So Steve Jobs knew that. He knew that like people were going to like, you know, my mom was going to need the iPad. Like that's great product vision, when you think about it? Right. So I go back to that.

0:29:11.8 Kailey Raymond: Yeah. It's one of those really interesting things where predicting a need, I think is incredibly hard to do. Like unbelievably strategic to be able to do that. And the real vision versus like looking at the data, hearing customer feedback, building a roadmap, like that's something that feels more intuitive. But like knowing that somebody needs this device in their hands 24/7 feels very, very different. Two more questions for you today, Jon. What's one thing that you think every platform leader should start or stop doing right now? 

0:29:47.3 Jon Kennedy: That's a great question. I think every platform leader should think about what value is AI actually bringing to your customers? I'm a technology guy. I'm a geeky guy as much as anybody. But I really think we need to think about like what is it actually going to do? Is it going to really bring value to your customer? And are they willing to pay for it? Like, is it that valuable? And so we have this great technology. Let's make sure that the problem that we use it to solve really does, you know, does add value. Like ChatGPT is a clear example. Like it does. Like, you know, we use it all the time. It's a great application of Gen AI. And by the way, Gen AI existed before ChatGPT, right? Like it's been around for a while. But ChatGPT, you're like, hey, this is how we're going to actually make it useful for people. So, I think every platform leader, including myself, should think about like, what's the value, rather than just like, I'm going to use AI. Like, okay, well, what's it really going to do for your customer? 

0:30:42.8 Kailey Raymond: That's 100% resonating with me. I think that there's like a lot of just mandates today of like, we need to do it. It's going back to the need and kind of filling that for the customer but we really need to think about and remember that's why we build things, right? 

0:31:01.2 Jon Kennedy: Right.

0:31:02.7 Kailey Raymond: Last question for you. What's the best advice that you have for somebody that's trying to drive transformation in a legacy-heavy organization? 

0:31:13.9 Jon Kennedy: It's something I try to work on myself. And so it's like, be a good listener. Like, you're in a legacy-heavy org. You have new people, you have old people. I think people's attention spans today are shorter than they ever have been. I think people are distracted. I think people cannot give their full attention to someone for that longer time. And so like actually active listening and really listening is hard. It's like exercise. You got to put effort into it. And so if you're in a legacy-heavy org, like people are going to have opinions. You're going to want to listen to them and you're going to digest them and incorporate them or whatever. But you got to listen to people. Like really listen. I work on that myself and this is a hard thing to do. Maybe this is a general thing, like forget legacy-heavy, just in general. Like when somebody's talking, pay attention to listen.

0:32:00.3 Kailey Raymond: It's a simple reminder, and I think it's a beautiful thing because it can be applied across teams, it can be applied to customers, it can be applied everywhere in your life, and it's just, it's practiced. You're exactly right. Jon, it's been a pleasure getting to know you today. I really appreciate the time.

0:32:15.8 Jon Kennedy: Thank you, Kailey. It was fun.