Welcome & Speaker Introductions and welcome back hopefully you got your Agency of the Future image submitted uh we’re all chuckling backstage at some of the submissions that have already come through so uh thank you for getting that done looking forward to judging that contest so up next uh we’ve got two amazing panelists we’re going to be having a discussion around redesigning teams around AI not replacing them uh we’ve got a couple of guests with us Veto uh Pelleg and Miriam Schwab miriam is the head of WordPress at Elementor and co-founder of Stratic miriam is a seasoned WordPress expert with 18 plus years of experience shaping the open web and speaking at global tech conferences veto is the founder co-founder and CEO of Ethereum uh Veto is a former agency owner turned SAS founder on a mission to make the web more collaborative for 25,000 plus teams worldwide that is an incredible number so Miriam welcome we got Veto in the house as well hey everyone hi all right it’s actually 67,000 now it grew a little bit since the like when did you submit that bio like 30 minutes ago or was this like an outdated metric that we’re talking about here that’s probably for the team so I need to uh chop some heads on the old number from the beginning of the year or end of last year vito you grow so quickly your own team can’t keep up yeah they can’t keep up you know what can I do you have to give them minute-by-minute updates that’s a lot of teams yes I know we’re juggling the usage we have to redo our infrastructure oh wait i got to say say I’m gonna say good night all right well well we got some kiddos i feel like there was a there was like a a news cast one time where the kids wrote it and it was like you know now it’s like every just just another day at the job running virtual studios so uh so Miriam we’ll probably kick off here with you uh team I think we can get the uh our panel questions uh pulled up here and get the ball rolling that would be amazing uh our team should be pull bringing up those panelist questions drum roll i have the questions um so I can just go ahead and jump in uh let’s let’s go with some foundational understanding here what does it actually mean to redesign a What It Means to Redesign Teams Around AI team around AI maybe Miriam let’s start with you on that one what does it actually mean to redesign a team around AI so with the advent of AI and it becoming an integral part of everything that we do whether it’s personal or professional but specifically professional in this case we need to look at our teams and think how can AI augment what we do and help us do things better and potentially help us do more in many ways AI acts as like an assistant to us that uh that helps us uh it can take on tasks it can it can advise us um it can help you know troubleshoot QA our work it can do so many things for us that gives each of us much more capabilities and many more capabilities than we had in the past so when you look at a team it means okay now this team until AI became part of our lives could do X what can it do now uh with AI being an ongoing integral tool and component of the team it actually becomes like a team member but it’s like many team members and I think that that’s that’s what we’re looking at it’s not that um people become redundant because AI still needs to be guided by humans it needs human input it needs human creativity it needs human uh factchecking or just general checking you know in many ways but um but it can just help us be more do more produce more execute more um and so that that’s what it means when we are like looking at redesigning our team it’s not like changing the team it’s being like the team plus plus kind of thing and I’m interested to get Veto’s take on this as well but have you found like I mean there are sometimes maybe team members that just are like you know taking the AI output and passing it through you know like I mean I I’ve seen I’ve seen some of that where I think one of the things that I’m worried about is people not taking accountability for like their own use of AI right that that becomes potentially a challenge right is that people are kind of quickly using AI but not necessarily having it come from their own opinion or their own like are they willing to stand behind that um so have you have you experienced that at all miriam I think that what we need to figure out is how to have a balance between like not be embarrassed to use AI and to use AI output right like there’s that side of things is it something that we need to hide it doesn’t mean that we’re less if we’re using AI but at the same time so so acknowledging that but not just acknowledging that we’re using AI bringing that human aspect and component to it so that we’re not just like uh AI paper pushers I guess you could call it where we’re just like “Hey I think I have this question or I have this thank you i’m not even going to read it i’m not going to review it i’m just going to like throw it over there.” And you know like if you’re using it for example for messaging or marketing you need to make sure that the AI has your your organization or your own personal tone of voice does it sound like you or does it sound like uh Bob with the suit guy right like you know there’s different tones of voice for people and organizations so or even if you’re coding is it coding according to your company’s infrastructure or you know requirements or whatever and so that’s still there’s there’s nothing to be embarrassed about with using AI it’s it’s just a fact of life now and it it Striking the Right Balance Between AI and Human Input helps us all uh do things in a better way but in addition to acknowledging it being like I’m using AI but I’m using AI while taking a look at it i haven’t seen many examples well at least not in our organization people are pretty careful about um brand tone of voice let’s say in the marketing team for example and especially with coding because elementor is so widely used with over 18 million active installs we cannot release code that has not been properly vetted and reviewed by AI plus humans so so it’s finding that like balance and that kind of hybrid approach I think that leads to really high quality output that we can be proud of and that doesn’t look like cookie cutter or templated Yeah Veto I noticed uh you didn’t have AI chatbot uh put kids uh to bed so that was there’s still room there’s still room for us humans uh on this planet right um what what’s your take here what what does it actually mean to redesign a team around AI so there’s a few things that we consider internally of how to implement this new level of technology that um um that we all got access to pretty recently a couple of years ago only so the one thing that I keep uh mentioning the team on uh so of course there’s like rituals like we have like an internal slack channel where we share how we use AI on a regular basis on a daily basis using AI daily is the name of that to signal to people that this is the expectation um um there’s uh there’s um two main components that we kind of look for when it comes to AI usage within the company first of all there is the 10 10 210 100x type of exercise and this is trying to think of uh of all of the different things that we do every day how can we either 2x the productivity on the back of it 100x or between 2x to 100x it even and I can give an example of 100x task um that uh back in the day when we had WP feedback as a plug-in uh you know and we basically managed about 15 different translations um by different people that needed to translate this and obviously we didn’t uh hire professional ones it was the user that spoke German that was uh getting an email to help us uh translate this in the early days um and that created a really bad experience as we kept developing and uh and it just kept kind of going back to this so so painful Real Agency Use Case: Auto-Translating and Writing Docs with GPT now we have implemented a solution within our app that allows us to literally deploy a language within three minutes um um with the use of AI um as as you mentioned uh also Brent it’s important to add the context so it knows what you’re talking about but that’s a literal 100x kind of task that uh we add in there another one for example connects to what Miriam was talking about the um um um the knowing the tone of voice and things like this um at the beginning of the year we wanted to redesign our help center and so in order for us to do this I I went off did my research some with AI some actually visiting websites i know it’s uh uh it’s crazy you know but I did go into websites and looked at the implementations in different uh companies that we wanted to take inspiration from h and basically level up the entire docs what we found interestingly there’s an average of about 80 documents for SAS product uh as part of the help docu between multiple different platforms and there’s a few categories that can repeat themselves there’s a structure that I wanted to structure for all of these articles essentially Brent we needed to create 80 brand new articles in a short amount of time it’s a it’s a lot of work to write all of this documentation getting even to know the product that deep to actually write it in in um in a quality uh way so instead what we did is we basically I recorded seven hours of me going through the product clicking every single bit not only saying what is there but why it’s there how it came to be and you know like telling the story of literally every nook and cranny within the product itself seven hours of transcript ended up at about 400 pages that were fed into a custom GPT along with the strategy that I wrote around how to actually write this uh help help center and so That’s what I delegated to the team and we it took about three weeks to do the initial bit of it uh but then we were churning out articles at two and a half hours per article it took two weeks to do 80 articles that are way better than and then people can go and adarin.help and check out uh some of these uh some of these elements it knows the product better than anyone else on the team essentially at this point uh just because we took the effort and and implemented the right context to begin with and of course wasn’t as you mentioned it wasn’t something that you you just prompt and forget you know prompt and post it’s not that process um um the way we talk about this internally is more like Andy Warhol’s um the factory you know he had this factory back in the 60s where people would uh he had a bunch of artists that would come in and he would delegate the work and he basically had this 1080 10 system where he would go in give the artist 10% the first 10% the idea the context what are the tools that they need to do to actually execute on this the artist would go off do the 80% and then Andy would come in and give the signature at the end for the last 10% again like you’re saying that they can stand behind this and so um so this is exactly the type of mentality that we’re trying to bring in where the 80% is the AI which basically on every task uh gives you uh um a lift of 80% productivity 160% productivity as opposed to just doing it yourself yeah I love that and I feel like it’s um I don’t know if it was Sam Alman who said you know AI it’s gonna it’s going to give people like the the idea people a chance to shine because you can have ideas like crazy ideas and you can use AI to kind of you know execute them and and maybe you wouldn’t be that type of personality that would want to do the 80% but like the 10 and 10 that sounds that sounds doable i could do 10 and 10 um for sure here’s our our next question how do you identify which roles or workflows are best supported by AI tools without eliminating jobs miriam back to you um I think that uh the wonderful thing about AI is that it removes the need for us to do the kind of ro repetitive not so creative work that uh we’ve had to do until now um and spend time on and so if we can and that’s I don’t think where humans are bringing value by doing those types of kind of uh technical procedural I I referred to paper pushing before there’s a lot of tasks that are like paper pushing getting information from Finding the Right Workflows for AI Without Cutting Jobs here and putting it over there and that kind of stuff so if if you can like analyze your workflows and your processes and see where this type of repetitive or not high value high impact uh activity is happening then you can look and see okay can AI step in there and take over that part and free us up to do the things where we really bring value it is uh I think related to what Vito was talking about about the 10810 which is kick off a process right like let’s say you’re working on a new initiative in a company or or strategy or a product so the first part with some AI input potentially but like generally needs to be led by people um but then once you get to the part where there’s a lot of like let’s say documentation and processes and Jira tickets well Jira tickets you know and Jira does has a pretty has pretty good automation in uh in the system but you know there’s uh still a lot of paper I just call it paper pushing i do a lot of that in my position and that’s how I refer to it it’s not literal paper but you know moving tasks along moving things along it’s digital paper um if we can look at those places and uh implement AI workflows that that take the load off i think that’s where we can really shine um while bringing the quality of the people in their particular positions um to fruition and to the highest potential because they can focus on on that that can even apply to like someone like a product manager not a product manager let’s say a pro because product managers are are creative people but they also have procedures and processes but let’s say a project manager which seems like a technical job but they have to have let’s say an overarching view of a project and know all the stakeholders and communicate properly and things like that and that’s where they can they can shine from that perspective while maybe allowing like the the tasks and the the automations uh take a load off so that they can really make sure that you know communication is is fantastic across the board everyone knows what’s going on at all times updates are happening the way they should timelines are being met um because AI is taking the load off where their input isn’t really like super valuable have kind of a follow-up question here and then I want to hear veto your your response as well have you um created efficiencies in the business i mean h have you had any kind of layoffs or or have you had positions that became redundant um once you started using AI not to put you on the spot Miriam basically have you let anybody go because you were like “Hey we could do this better with AI.” Oh oh me yeah like us oh no no so what um what’s been kind of a relief but also I think it’s the right approach to using AI in the company is that rather than being like we don’t need someone because there’s AI there’s a strong encouragement for everyone to adopt AI in their workflows so it’s not like you’re not necessary but rather let’s explore together how you can use AI to bring more to the table to do more to to focus on the value that you bring i mean Elementary right now is is actually also hiring quite a lot you can if you go to elementor.careers you’ll see that there’s a lot of open positions that hasn’t slowed down because of AI it’s changed maybe in the way that we approach it and like the way that we describe positions and we want AI to be a part of it you know a part of the role and part of the person’s skill set which we’re all developing it as a skill set yeah um so AI is playing a factor but it doesn’t mean we don’t need the people that we have or need the new people that we’re hiring it’s that we’re all going to be it’s going to be like Miriam plus AI you know everyone plus AI but so we’re all we’re like two beings in a way in every position and I think it’s a really good approach and hopefully it’ll continue that way yeah i’m gonna I’m gonna move on to the next question here for Veto can you share some examples of how your team has integrated AI into everyday tasks what worked and what didn’t um it’s hard to think of some something that didn’t work honestly at this point i think maybe a little bit on the on the product side there were a few experiments that didn’t turn out that well in terms of uh making sure that the code base has enough context or the de that the AI has enough context of the Teamwide AI Adoption: Daily Habits and Culture entire code base in order for it to be efficient in some development tasks um but it still doesn’t we we don’t shy away from uh from trying first of all and I think it connects also to what Miriam was saying to how we look at this as well it’s um we all the expectations from each and every human around the world has risen you know so in exactly the same way that um back in the day we didn’t have a mouse and it was super clunky and you know and on CVS you would see people uh talking about their typing skills and uh how many words per minute and all of those kind of things and now it’s just part of our day-to-day we don’t even think about not have trying to work without a mouse sounds insane and so this is how we try to look at this and literally observe the this mouse analogy um internally so that everyone can lean in hard um and this is something I kind of we picked up from the CTO of Shopify that um that I heard him say this in uh like at the end of last year he basically mentioned that he implemented a a policy um of lean into AI early and often and this is uh this oneliner is something that I contemplated a lot about because there’s opportunities everywhere so it’s it’s not uh like and I’m happy to give a few of these examples but I I I think it’s it should be hard to not find examples in every single function that happens within uh within the company or within our professional lives whatever is it that we do that we haven’t lean leaned into those uh into those elements and if we look at a few examples of how we do this uh um I’ll try to give one per team Custom GPTs for Sales, Support & Marketing Teams on the sales team there is uh we’re using AI to do role playinging so we have a a team of the sales folks that uh um pick up the phone and talk to prospects and book meetings and and then there’s the folks that run the demos and all of those kind of things um um we created a GPT that allows them to train with the voice mode uh the GPT knows our personas so that it can uh bring in the objections that our clients bring into the table or prospects bring into the table when they’re um uh when they’re on a sales call and instead of waiting for the swings in real time you know you now you have uh like a batting cage and uh and every every um uh team member within the sales team can run as many plays as they want and at the end they even get a score based on the MedPic methodologies which is the method that we observe uh uh within the sales operation and so uh through that it gives them like a ranking of one to 10 and how well they did what should they improve next one and then invites them to run another role play uh to keep improving so this is one exercise from from the sales team on the support we discussed that we actually don’t put support at our front um by design and exactly with the topic of this uh of this entire conversation i think that in a world where AI is uh is trying to replace some of those um um like um pushing paper as as uh you you mentioned Miriam i think that valuing the relationship that we can create with our users with our with the prospects through chat is actually should not be muddied by AI too much it can be supportive of the team but it’s not something that our customers engage with they have a custom GPT the one that is trained on the product that if they want they can talk to it uh as much as they want but when they click on the live chat a human will show up in under a minute at any given uh uh minute of the day and so um so on the support it’s mostly on the on the back end but not on the front end which is important distinction for us um on the product I have a couple of examples with the translation that was a huge lift um uh running uh basically uh building tests building documentation these are all standard things that happen within the workflow nowadays on the marketing side we have a different GPT that is trained on the voice exactly like you were saying Miriam so that uh it can help us produce marketing copy that is in line with what we already learned from different uh from different elements it’s trained on um uh webinars and things like this and finally I get on the YouTube side of things which is um we just relaunched our channel um a month ago with a very ambitious plan of uh releasing we’re not there yet but the goal is to release uh 14 videos per week on the YouTube channel uh um and which you both know is not a is not a small is not a small goal to set you know and so Scaling YouTube Content with AI Assistants in order for us to actually make that useful and and the quality has to be top-notch you know has to be quality content um um we’ve designed a couple of uh again built up the strategy of how to approach this what are the shows that we’re going to have and things like this for for and then all of that was trained into what we call ador movie you know we have ador mate which is for the general team adory money is for the for the for the sales team uh there is and Adam movie is for the YouTube uh use case you know and we have these GPTs named and kind of like uh be became team members like you’re saying to the larger organization so it helps streamline the creation of of scripts It understands the actual structure with the hook at the beginning and the CTA at the end and you know all of the things that come in between and so we fill in the gaps with our human knowledge with our own skills but it gives us the structure way better than uh trying to get it from scratch i love those use cases i feel like uh especially the sales one the role playing that’s just that’s like as somebody who’s managed sales people like it’s like I know I always need to do like call reviews role play with the team but it it takes a lot of energy and if you can get AI to do that 247 whenever it’s convenient for the team member that’s huge and it’s way better than usually like the person that wants to please or not going to be too harsh so we set it on brutal mode it’s very hard to get it on a tomorrow very hard to close the deal i I don’t I don’t know if I feel comfortable with that it gets that makes me a little nervous veto i don’t know if I want to go do sales for for Adam so um you know what’s interesting like so I in my hiring process uh I used to have these survey questions right like you know I’d look at people’s resumes and stuff but I really relied a lot on asking people to write unique answers to questions that I came up with right are not things they can easily copy and paste from a cover letter for another organization they were specific to our organization so you could tell if somebody really slowed down and took the time to to read it you could also get a a really good glimpse into somebody’s thought process uh when you could see their writing um and and obviously in the last year and a half this is completely been upended right because everybody is Ernest Hemingway now right like everybody writes really well um and so we actually you have a tool that uh started doing the job interviews uh basically asking questions verbally through a voice agent um which obviously people I mean I’m sure a smart savvy AI person could still like you know use AI with their answers but obviously it’s it’s a little bit harder uh to do that if you’re having a real live conversation with an agent where it’s asking follow-up questions it’s very dynamic um and and that’s been really helpful where we can we can we can have instead of before I had time to do 10 interviews we can have a voice agent actually go out and do 200 interviews and we can sometimes find that candidate who maybe uh would have been a diamond in the rough so I I love some of these these use cases that’s a 100x task right there Brent yeah the stuff uh we should be looking for right and then we get this beautiful like score some comments some insights about how that person did um in the interview which speaking of I’d love to hear about some AI tools or platforms that have had the biggest impact on your business uh I know we all I think we’re all I I’ll speak for myself i’m not going to speak for YouTube but I’m a little nerdy i love a good tool i love looking at all the cool tech that comes out uh Miriam what’s a what’s a tool or platform Top Tools: ChatGPT, Cursor, OpenArt & More that’s had the biggest impact on your business well I actually kind of checked before this to see like what is the most widespread used uh AI tools so ev everyone’s using like different like little tools here and there um like our marketing team is using ones for graphic designs and videos and things like that but across the board it’s kind of like the standard answer answer which is chatbt and cursor and those two tools at the moment cover the widest range of use cases and implementations at elementor they’re just they really do cover a lot of ground both of those um you know like I said people have their like favorite tools their little tools they use on the side like these other ones and sort of more specific with more specific uh goals or functions but by far it’s cursor and chat GPT I I feel like I mean you know obviously chat is kind of eating the world in terms of functionality and and tools and stuff and I feel like a lot of the tools I mean there are very unique tools but it’s like the rappers on the basic you know tech and they’re providing rails to maybe get some of these workflows like video and stuff done you know more effectively or smoother than you might do on your own through some of the major the major platforms uh Veto what’s what what’s your team seeing what are you seeing as as kind of your most valuable set of tools so um number one is charge GPT for sure uh we we use that extensively and um we have uh um almost 20 custom GPTs that are being used on a daily basis some of them have been used thousands and thousands of times already um individually um uh that’s like that’s the core and that I think that everyone should have a subscription there um if um if you don’t have it yet um then on top of this one thing that I really like that we started using recently I was talking about the YouTube strategy um that uh we started deploying and as part of this you got to do some uh exciting thumbnails you know and it’s always awkward to take these photos and uh and you forget after the video and you know like the you know and all those kind so instead we kind of fed in uh we found a tool called open art uh which is awesome for image generation video generation things like that and you can uh train characters essentially so you upload like 50 pix pictures from uh from one person from different angles or any pictures that you may have and then you can uh place them in the jungle so there’s a there’s a video of Andrew that does our video like a product training uh to to navigate through the dashboard so instead of just putting a screenshot of a dashboard is with the machete in the woods you know in the jungle chopping through and kind of paving the path you know and you could do some crazy stuff uh like this that um that looks pretty sweet it’s still not it doesn’t look 100% like us but I guess we only know how we look like you know and most people don’t really can recognize the last 3% of how you actually look like if that makes sense uh so um yeah and it’s getting a lot of nice traction these funny images and funny thumbnails that we have there um and a very powerful tool super fast a bunch of features very cool yeah love it i just wrote down open art definitely gonna Keeping the Human Touch in Customer Experience check that one out uh I’ll get a funny thumbnail of me in a forest using Adarim at some point we’ll send that over uh Miriam how do you balance automation with human creativity and judgment in your teams that is a very good question um again it’s making sure that humans are involved in the processes i I personally think that it’s really important that we not lose the human touch um between between ourselves and and and with our end users uh as much as possible in the end people want to connect with people whether it’s on their team or it’s like end users want to connect with people at a company they like to see familiar faces we all like to see familiar faces and um recognizable people and have conversations with people that are actual people right it’s much more meaningful and it’s not so it’s not as scalable obviously as automation but at the same time if we want to continue to not just provide ex like great products and great services which which is super important but like the way I view products has always been that like it’s 50% the product and 50% the services around it including for SAS products um and that can be the the big value differenti iator for any company or product how human they are until now it’s been easier in some ways to be human even though we’ve been trying to scale so many different types of things that like it gives us less time but companies that focus on the human side I think have a big advantage um and I think I really hope that we don’t lose that so it’s you know let’s say for CX teams right so CX teams are going to increasingly use automation and AI to provide service to to larger groups of people that’s just how it is but making sure that first of all the AI is has our tone of voice like I mentioned earlier but also making sure that we know when to jump in um as people to really like connect with our users whether they’re having an issue or whether it’s for you know positive things like um they just want to connect with us so we need to continue to be accessible in that way and not lose the humanity of our organizations um as much as possible while while scaling and while automating so it’s it’s like a bit of like an art and a science I think and we all have to still figure that out um but it’s it’s really important for organizations to keep that in mind as much as possible i think did did you all see or the read the headline the MIT study that came out recently which one uh it it was basically about like you know people’s like brain functions that had were like heavy AI users and like how it Yeah I saw that diminish it decreased rapidly like three weeks three weeks of heavy heavy basically heavy chat usage instead of writing your own stuff right just I think we’re seeing that like the neural pathways it decrease from like I don’t know I’m I’m I’m paraphrasing here but let’s call it like 85 neural connections per second or whatever down to like 40 Creativity, Judgment & the MIT Brain Study um by basically having you know chat GPT write essays instead of writing it yourself um which which I thought was like really interesting for this this question about how do we balance creativity and judgment and and I would definitely encourage folks to like it should not be a an or but an and like how do you continue writing and being creative and and bringing yourself into your position and and also using the tools um when appropriate to help kind of enhance that versus replacing uh your own creativity i I think you know that’s something definitely to be to be aware of um Veto is there anything that you guys are doing to kind of balance human creativity and judgment i I think that it um that if we’re try if we’re looking at it from a perspective of creativity per se there’s been a bunch of uh revolutions throughout history that where uh where the definition of creativity has changed and whether this is uh the even from storytellers to writers that’s that’s one transformation but also when um when um graphic design came in that is like digitiz ized compared to how it was previously or art or like um um paintings versus photography in and even if we’re looking at it in a in a in a later stage I think that um comp comparable example to this could be directions because um we used to remember how to get places but now you can’t do it without the GPS or without the thing you just don’t even think about it you just you know you know are you hiding in my car are you are you’re you’re following me around you know that I can’t get to the grocery store without without putting the map in first yeah they get into daycare every morning i just can’t figure it out you know it’s five minutes of walking around got to have Google Maps you know uh so I’m with you on the same page i think that basically what we gain is different on the back of it so yeah maybe if we compare it to a previous experience then uh we might see some some sort of signals like this i haven’t seen the research maybe it’s valid but I think that it’s just changing uh in exactly the same way that um if we’re talking websites here and back in the day we would code the whole thing up from scratch and now you have drag and drop tools like Elemento uh that streamline the exact same experience so you don’t need to remember every single HTML tag and JavaScript kind of a string to kind of make things happen or CSS line it just happens in a different more intuitive user interface h and I think that this is um if we’re if we’re crunching crunching this to what did happen is that we just gained a new UI to experiences that we’ve already been doing uh and that UI is just way more efficient whether this is uh within design with uh um you know with prompt to text or or with coding and you know and and with writing in exactly that same way creating marketing copy the the place of uh of creativity has just shifted from the actual creation to being the curator to being the manager of the exercise where you need to invoke a different type of creativity to actually make a difference rather than working on every single pixel and the nitty-gritty of it uh as we did uh just not long ago you know but I think that this is just another layer that is being shaved off of our human experience offloaded to a machine so that we can discover a new one that’s awesome i um I want to get into some some questions around reskilling and mindset um I’m not sure if I’m getting an echo there from but uh [Music] Yeah I’m curious to hear about strategies that use to upskill or retrain your team for AI supported workflows i I know for us like at E2M one of the challenges that we’ve had is uh we’re all so busy with client work and and doing the things that we’re supposed to do that I think for the average team member it’s been difficult for people to kind of hit pause and then take the time to like reskill or upskill i mean I imagine this has been the case in any industry that has a major disruption it’s like it’s like you know How Teams Are Being Reskilled for AI Workflows uh back in the day the the Flash developers right that were like building Flash websites and stuff like they’d have to hit pause on Flash development to go learn some new technology right and that that’s hard right if you have you have the work and stuff like that but um and we’re doing some interesting things like we’ve got we call AI first Saturday we’re hosting like big uh kind of conferences internally for our team team we got about 300 employees that are all coming into the office on the first Saturday of the month and kind of doing a group hackathon but I’m curious what you guys are doing miriam if you want to start what are you doing to help kind of upskill and train your team uh on on AI technologies and workflows uh one initiative that um Elementor rolled out was um bringing in trainers um and some courses for our team to choose from and to learn from covering like a wide range of applications for AI um so that was really great um and in general you know sharing knowledge internally that’s not exactly structured or formal but that that’s something that’s going on also Elementor’s uh like evolving into an AI first organization not just internally but in terms of our products so we have uh a you know we have the AI within our page builder for like the typical types of things like create an image create HTML code CSS whatever and content um but we have another product now called uh the site planner the RAI site planner and that allows people to like prompt their way to uh a first draft of a website uh quite nicely we have another very exciting interesting product that we’ll be uh rolling out for early access in the next few weeks and all of that the fact that we’re like building AI tools means that we’re all all of us are all in on how is AI being applied to workflows particularly for end users those workflows are often our workflows um so we’re just we’re learning as we build kind of thing also uh which is a really exciting way to learn AI because you’re really getting your hands dirty because it’s not just your own use you’re creating products for other people’s uses us usage so um and and something that uh we’re going to be doing I think in the next few weeks is uh like kicking off kind of like an AI an AI organizational um approach you know I don’t know more than that i know that it’s scheduled and that it’s it’s going to happen but it’s going to be like a companywide like we are now an AI company so uh it’s exciting times um and yeah it’s I don’t know like I think a lot of people might feel like this but uh I personally feel I have a lot of FOMO about AI because I’m like I could totally be using it for like more things and I’m not because like you like you said Brand we all are we have our like day jobs right so we’re spending a lot of time on that and it’s hard to find the time to like ramp up our skills so we do it as we go along but like I’m like I have FOMO i’m like “Oh you’re all doing such cool things why aren’t I doing those cool things with AI now I have to do it too.” You know it’s like But the crazy thing about AI is that it’s just um it’s endless right it can like be applied in and it’s this is where I think the creativity of humans comes into play because we are our our task now our challenge now is to figure out how to apply AI with its like just giant capabilities to our to everything we do so anyways we’re we’re learning as we go along with some structured with as we build for our users and hopefully soon we’re going to see some more interesting things rolling out at elementary to help us ramp up those skills and I think a huge part of those initiatives right is just making space right like I think that’s that’s the challenge with I think Jeff Bezos says AI is it’s a it cuts across the the horizontal of the organization which so few things at least my career have right you always have like disruptions happening in marketing or new techniques or strategies in sales or finance has a new thing but it’s very rare that you have something that like literally every single person in the organization can benefit from making the time to spend some some upskilling uh energy on that uh Veto what’s what’s your take on strategies what have you all done at uh at Atarum so um we’re also going through a similar transition as Miriam was saying i think that every SAS product out there is having these uh these considerations of uh where this will go next and I think that um Elemento has been uh very good at not not just releasing things that are for the sake of AI you know but actually thinking of of features that do help dayto-day by getting high on your own supply as you’re describing there h and just kind of making sure we solve our own problems and we follow the same thing hopefully in 27 days from now I can can say that in 27 days there’s going to be a massive coming from our side as well uh connects very much to Personal Development Plans & AI-First Mindsets the discussion that we’re all having here how to augment creative teams through AI um and and and with this there’s going to be essentially a repositioning of uh of the platform um with this uh brand new technology that just became available about two months ago um so it’s very exciting um within the within the company itself there’s a few things that we’re doing to try and solidify this so I’m a huge advocate of personal growth um and in every for many many years uh 5:30 in the morning I have it on my calendar learn something new and every day I do that I just learn something new for half an hour um uh for many years and uh and I try to bring that mentality over to the team as well um one of the things that we have to make sure that we’re on track with this is our individual development plans and even in a I wish we’d have done it even when we were smaller because it’s so so powerful and it’s basically just a six-month cycle of uh of identifying the gaps that you have within your um abilities and skills at the moment and just working towards them in a structured way with smart goals over the next six months and AI has become a significant part of that uh because uh it as you mentioned Went it touches everything it touches the our day-to-day activity it touches our ability to be effective and uh and efficient in our day-to-day uh work but it also means that we’re cutting edge and as a as um as um as a as a growing company it’s very important to not be left behind in these kind of ways and I I think that actually the the smaller operators that are leaning into this technology right now have an edge over some of the large organizations that just a procurement process takes 18 months to go through you know to on board a new tool in uh this kind of way h so uh we do have an edge but it’s not going to stick around for a long for long so we got to leverage it while we have it um so IDP is a big one for us we also have a dedicated session every Monday morning doing our weekly session with the entire team where we share a couple of um points around this how we how we’re using AI daytoday and with that mentality of uh leaning to AI first leaning to AI to AI early and often love it we’re gonna do one quick final question uh humans are terrible at predictions i’m just going to set the stage there but but what’s your prediction for how agency roles will evolve in the next two to three years as AI matures so we’re imagining it’s 2028 what’s what’s what how are agency roles different in 2028 another three years of AI innovation on top of that what do you think Miriam so I actually uh like a lot of people my career kind of started with an agency that I founded and ran for 13 years and so I’m very familiar with the challenges that agencies face and I think that this era of AI is really exciting for 2028 Predictions: The Future of Agencies in the AI Era agencies because agencies um often struggle with uh lack of time and resources they’re you know working on the projects trying to win new projects they’re you know maybe like the the founder is like a creative type of person but not necessarily business person but they now find themselves having to do everything um having to do sales having to do follow-up having to do invoicing right like all these things that like they’re they’re like I didn’t get into this for that i got into it to you know build beautiful websites or build creative web whatever so I I think with this era of AI it can help them offload the things that they don’t they don’t like to do and and generally when we don’t like doing things we’re not also that’s not our area of strength so they’re let’s say less they’re less good at it offload it to AI and then you know potentially have AI run a lot of their business while they can then apply their talents to what they really want to be doing which is you let’s say in the case of web agencies building websites um actually tomorrow uh me and a colleague from Elementor will be speaking we’re doing a joint talk together about uh the future of agencies in the era of AI and we’re also going to uh touch on another new product coming out of elementor that is related to that so if people are interested in learning about um you know ways that AI can help their agencies going forward and what the agencies of tomorrow mean um and you know learning a bit about this product as well in our talk then uh tune in um but yeah I’m excited for agencies i think this is this is their time agencies play a critical role in the web in building the web i heard a stat which I think is something like 60% of websites are built by someone that’s like an agency some kind of agency entity and they’re really important to the future of the web and so if now with this era of AI they can do more of that and do it better and maximize the potential of their agencies um I think it’s exciting so yeah we’ll see what happens i think it’ll be good very good love it uh so we got Miriam’s prediction it’s it’s I’m feeling motivated it’s a bright future i have an AI business manager no longer the expert invoice sender uh Vita what’s your prediction i see this uh from a couple of angles uh first of all whenever there is a technological advance the expectations rise from the sector so uh um so what we are expected to do now is uh is about 60% I think you know if I’m trying to guess a number out there you know about 60% of what we’re going to be expected to do in uh about two years time two years from now and that’s not only in terms of the the efficiency and the speed of delivery and things like that uh but it also means from the level of expertise that goes into the into the element the refinement the details the skill level that is required to actually make an impact and we see that in uh even even in the specifically in the web space that every time that you have a new tool that allows you to do things a little bit more simpler then the level of websites for example rise the quality of websites that is becoming the standard rises you know so I see that happening in exactly the same way i think that uh one of the interesting opportunities that are in front of us now is a transformation that happened to websites um about 15 years ago with the with the likes of Elementotor coming into the space the the website builders uh which basically eliminated the design stage so in the past we used to create um the design in Photoshop h and then uh once it’s ready you’d go to the brows or you go to your h you go and code the whole thing up from scratch right and make it pixel perfect and all those kind of uh things that is gone we don’t do that anymore we’re going directly into the browser in the vast majority of cases and we use the tools that allow us to be even more efficient than how it used to be when you had that design phase uh it happened to websites it did not happen to product and this is because product is way more complex to create and to um and to to make function uh compared to more standardized uh websites uh but we’re seeing that happening in front of our eyes right now and I one one of my predictions for the next two to three years which is I think why they actually created what is now called Figma sites is that Figma is going to die and uh it’s all going to move into the browser into a place where we’re actually creating directly in the uh we’re creating through prompts uh complex UI that otherwise used to take cycles and cycles of designs uh uh within a design uh specific tool and I think that’s why they created Figma sites as a way of uh allowing them to move further down the stack and into the browser into the creation experience alongside the code um so I don’t know if they’re going to die i was been dramatic a little bit you know but the but the use case will die you know that we will not need to actually do those things in a design stage anymore we would all be working in the browser uh completing the transformation that the likes of Elemento and pageuilders have brought to a more simplified UI which is those websites so I think that there’s a huge opportunity for agencies to start leaning into this world and start creating more complex projects that otherwise would have taken a lot more uh of a skill set a lot more of um um of a skill level is the term to actually execute on because now you can do those things if you know a little bit about product you can do you know a little bit about uh um about UI UX and things like that you can create some sort of a basic um uh um a dashboard or product that otherwise would have cost tens of thousands of dollars and a team of developers working on it just a couple of years ago so I think it’s very exciting um like with every time there is a there is a shift in the space agencies usually win on the back of it when responsive became a thing or when flash died we won when responsive came in we won when GDPR came in we won accessibility is coming in we win you know so every time the expectations rise but we actually find a way to monetize it as well you know yeah yeah i I don’t I don’t think AI is helping any agency owner do less work i think it’s just uh it’s just giving us the same amount of work but it used to be like you know quality speed and price you got you had to pick two and and I would say I think AI is changing that model to where quality speed and price you you probably need to offer all three at some level right get stuff done fast to a super high bar and make it cost effective to get your clients results and um it’s certainly a fastmoving space uh out there i’ve asked many agency communities who here is working less because of AI and I I I don’t know why but I never I never get any hands that go up everybody says “Oh no i’m working harder now than I’ve ever worked to like right learn about AI and to implement these things for our clients and to do more so I think the bar has certainly been raised and fortunately there’s amazing events like agency advantage helping uh educate folks bringing uh you know Veto and Miriam to the stage and and sharing your knowledge and and so you’ve been uh gracious panelists thank you both for spending the time today with agency advantage i think we’re just about at time so have some some love here from the stage let’s uh let’s show our appreciation for our amazing panelist Veto thank you so much for being here miriam uh thank you so much for being here as well look looking for that talk uh tomorrow miriam so so excited you see that check it out yeah yeah very good um all right well I think that’s that’s our our last panel uh we’ll come back here briefly to talk about what to expect on day two of our agent a agency advantage 2025 summit uh so stick with us here just for a couple minutes we’ll talk about what’s coming up next on the docket for tomorrow again Miriam and Veto thank you so much for hanging out with us today thank you Brent thanks thank you all right uh gosh that was a fantast day one uh that pretty much wraps our agenda for today a couple of things to highlight before we go into tomorrow but what did y’all think of our speakers for day one we had such a packed filled day panels we had Tim on here we had Christian we had Kushboo um that’s been a lot of fun can host it on Cloudways correct um yeah if there’s specific product questions uh definitely reach out to our team on that but uh hopefully you all had some amazing insights takeaways from today’s session i know I I personally did and of course it’s been fun to engage with all of you hanging out with us here at Agency Advantage 2025 so um as we wrap up today I’m seeing some emojis come through thank you for that it’s like it’s like filling up the gas tank every time I see an emoji come through just like makes me makes me smile uh so what to expect from day two tomorrow we have sessions from Ariel Leven Carl Seas a good friend of mine Robert Patton Tom Wardman um so we’ve got some amazing speakers coming up tomorrow we also are kicking off tomorrow with a handson uh workshop from Ariel 11 on AI prompts for agencies and SMBs so if you wanna if you want to take your prompts from here to here uh you’re going to want to hang out with us for that hands-on session kicking off tomorrow so don’t miss it be here right at kick tomorrow um if you want to look at the agenda check out the Agency Advantage website to see specifically when things are happening but that prompt workshop is going to be absolutely killer uh for you to join tomorrow uh all quiz and activity winners will be announced tomorrow at 3:30 p.m eastern time so please do join us tomorrow uh I don’t know why but whenever we announce the winners it’s always fun tons of engagement with folks uh when we do announce that uh we’ve got some awesome sponsors uh again if you haven’t gone by the expose for uh for all of our our various sponsors E2M um WP Umbrella uh Template Monster Profile Tree I think I got them all uh definitely check out the expose go check out their websites please do business uh with our sponsors they make events like this happen we want them to come back again for our next event and if you haven’t yet completed your Easter egg challenge I’ve been tracking that make sure you grab that document and uh and be on the lookout for those Easter eggs throughout today and of course keep the engagement coming that’s giving you points on the leaderboard and our top leaderboard participants are going to earn hosting credits and gift cards so make sure you stay diligent on your engagement so that you can be a top uh a top participant on our leaderboard uh so yeah I’m seeing some some good shout outs here in chat uh awesome well we will see you all tomorrow at day two of Agency Advantage 2025 again thank you so much for being here my name is Brent Weaver and we will see you tomorrow until then uh we’ll see you then