theCUBE + NYSE Wired: CMO Leaders | Janine Gianfredi, Transcarent

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Janine Gianfredi

CMO

Transcarent

play_circle_outline Role of CMO as an orchestrator in navigating AI in marketing

play_circle_outline Revolutionizing Healthcare Experiences: AI's Role in Safety, Privacy, and Governance

play_circle_outline Integration of AI into existing mechanisms and processes in healthcare

play_circle_outline Value of partnerships and ecosystems in tackling complex problems

play_circle_outline Introduction of new healthcare management experience called wayfinding by Transcarent

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Janine Gianfredi, Transcarent

Janine Gianfredi

CMO Transcarent

Janine Gianfredi, CMO at Transcarent, talks with John Furrier at the NYSE Wired CMO Leaders Summit in theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, CA.

Janine Gianfredi, chief marketing officer at Transcarent, joins theCUBE for an engaging discussion on AI's transformative role in marketing, drawing from her experiences at Google X and Transcarent. Hosted by John Furrier at theCUBE Studios, the conversation explores the future of Artificial Intelligence in marketing, cost reduction, productivity, and the critical practice of sandboxing during AI experimentation. #Tr... Read more

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What role does a chief marketing officer play in orchestrating various functions within an organization and how can AI be utilized in the marketing team? add

What measures have you taken to ensure responsibility and safety in introducing AI into the health and care experience with your Wayfinding initiative? add

What has AI enabled for us on the health and care side? add

What is important when tackling hard problems, such as improving health and care experiences, and how does the role of partnerships play into this approach? add

What are the key elements of the new experience called wayfinding that combines benefits navigation, clinical guidance, and care delivery? add

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Janine Gianfredi, Transcarent

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>> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE here in our Palo Alto Studios. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here for the CMO Leaders Summit series, theCUBE, and the NYC Wired community, bringing together all the top experts, brand managers, marketing leaders, technical folks, infrastructure applications, all across the board to share their stories about what's going the future of AI and how that applies to marketing. We've got Janine here. She's here with Transcarent. Thank you so much for coming in. Appreciate it.

>> Thanks so much for having me.

>> So we just talk about pizza. My mind started thinking about the pizza shop in San Francisco and New Jersey Pizza being from the East Coast. Good to have you on. But in AI, you and I were talking before we came on camera about your time at Google X and how you got experiment. Right now that's been the biggest conversation we've been hearing on theCUBE, but not a lot of examples of experimentation, failures, and I'll set the context by saying there's three types of things we've been seeing. Cost reduction, use AI to drive costs lower. Okay. Stuff that you used to take time, meetings, doing copy, all that stuff. Productivity clearly right there. And then the third area is not talked about much is with the sandboxing because getting stuff into production, if you hit or miss, you got to quickly get back through that door. You can't have a one-way door, you got to have that back. So you got to constantly experimenting in, as AI comes in. What's your view on this? Because AI right now is really valuable, but you got to get it right, you got to know how to drive it, so you got to kind of play with it. There's a little craft involved process. What's your thoughts?

>> 100%. So I always think about the chief marketing officer role as an orchestra conductor. This is probably informed by my many years of playing the violin as a child, but as a chief marketing officer, you are responsible for a whole bunch of different functions that you may not have the deepest expertise in. We all know this about the role and your job is to get everything to work together. You're orchestrating it, if you will, you're conducting it. AI just introduced a new score, I guess we could say, into the mix and the way that you learn a new score is by playing around with it, by playing off of each other. And that's the same way that I've been thinking about AI, particularly for the marketing team, but more broadly for our experience. So one of the things that we are doing at Transcarent is actually building an experience that is AI powered and we play a big role as a team in that experience itself. So we are constantly trying to understand what tools are working and what aren't. I would say a lot of this is informed from my time at Google, the Sandbox. I love that concept. I used to actually run a program called Creative Sandbox, and the entire idea behind it is creativity with a little bit of constraint to it. So you kind of box in a bit of anything new that you are doing so that when it doesn't go well, you can take a step back and you can say, what was our hypothesis and how did we fail? Unpack it and make sure it gets better, but keep it away from the broader initiatives that you're tackling.

>> We had a guest on yesterday who was talking about the traction gap. Bruce Cleveland, B2B marketer. I asked him the question, how do you deal with change? We're a change agent. He goes, and he gave an example from personal experience. "I failed many times at this. I tried to bring the change into fast. The producing part of the organization, which is making all the numbers, the comp program, everything's lined up, it's moving, it's a machine, and I'd bring in essentially the new thing and it was proven, but they had to inject it in." He says, "That process is very, very dangerous if you get it wrong, but the upside. So you got to be very mindful of the bringing in the change." And he said they have experimentation zones. So everything that's new goes into the experimentation zone, he called it. And I said, "That's where they park it." So when they have business model conversation, they go into the team that does that and say, what do you got going on? So they slowly bring it in almost piece by piece. Your reaction to that. With respect to AI, are you seeing something similar? Is it more wholesale changes? Is it more integration? How should people think about the change management piece?

>> I think it's completely different from what it was five years ago. I think that there was a greater opportunity to go more slowly and methodically, but what we're seeing right now with AI is that if you are not keeping your company and your organization on the edge of how the platforms are driving change, you're going to be behind. And so I think there's a little bit of discomfort that everybody has to get used to organizationally, which is moving fast with a lot of intention, but I would say moving fast with a willingness to adopt things and to try them. I also think this differs for larger established organizations than it does for a growth stage startup. There's different approaches to take here. The biggest thing, I think, is to not be afraid and to not create any kind of a culture where there's a fear of failure, that guarantees that you'll fail.

>> Janine, you guys are involved in health and care experiences. It's the kind of application that it's kind of important to people, of course. So it's not like you're using a game app or... I mean, this is your health, right? So this is a huge outcome. How do you guys approach that process? Obviously the user experience is critical. Do you have the data? Do you guys take a structured approach? How do you guys think about your approach to productizing, operationalizing the AI? Do you have the data? Is there data challenges? Take us through the mindset of some of the things you guys have to deal with in your job.

>> Yeah, so as you mentioned, we introduced an experience called Wayfinding, which brings AI to the health and care experience for people. We started that entire initiative with a focus on responsibility and safety. So one of the first things that we did was we built our own governance committee inside of the company and we put guardrails around it and we communicated with the entire organization. We said, look, we know that we are all going to be using AI, but we want to make sure that you have a forum to go to so that you can really apply this new technology very responsibly and very safely. We've also invested a great deal in putting clinical expertise and clinical guardrails into our AI systems, so that we know we have an extra layer of safety. And then we're also participating in a bunch of industry forums with other companies, large ones and small ones, who are making sure that they are responsibly deploying AI. I do think again, though, this comes down to culture. If you have that, we call our users members and that drives everything that we do. And so if you have a culture that puts those people first, of course safety is going to come after that. Of course, privacy is going to come after that and there's respect for that across the whole organization.

>> That's really refreshing. I got to say in most tech companies it's like the product's amazing. Oh no, we need safety. You bolt on governance after. Not everyone bolted on after, but I'm kind of hyperbole there. But if you look at data right now, the hottest area in platforms is governance, and it's usually not the first thing people do.

>> No.

>> So I mean, obviously you guys come from that ethos. How should companies inject governance from day one, like security and governance? You're starting to hear that more and more. Day one, security, day one governance. Is it easy to do? I mean, did you guys have a clean sheet of paper? And if they don't have a clean sheet of paper, what do they do?

>> I think in many ways before AI, we had started with safety, security, and privacy as core tenants of everything that we are building. I would say if you don't have that on paper, run home and do it as fast as you can. And then the second piece of that is communicating it really consistently across the organization. And putting in place, this is critical, easy to access processes internally. If you put a 17-page form in front of people so that they can get to the governance board to talk about the thing that they're grappling with, there's a good chance they might actually bypass that, right?

>> Yeah.

>> The simpler you make it for people to engage on these topics, the more open they're going to be and the more compliant you're going to be. We're also living in an environment where these regulations are being written as the technology is excelling. So I spent time in the government as well. On the government side, they are looking to private sector leaders also to help shape what the future looks like because it's moving really quickly.

>> So you're innovating and sharing on the policy side.

>> We are.

>> That's awesome. Versus waiting. I mean, that's innovation.

>> Yeah.

>> So talk about the process and one of the things I've been seeing, and I would love to get your reaction to this, is that whether it's a startup or a big company, the old way to compete was we got to beat the competition, got to displace that tool or platform. And some of the companies that we do research around says we're okay with changing process and bringing in data, but we're not really that hardcore on changing out our tools and our platforms. They are set in their ways. And healthcare, there's a lot of old stuff, manual work, handwritten notes. I mean, go to the doctor, maybe I'm oversimplifying, but there's a lot of other things. How do you guys look at that? How do you think about ingesting that? Is that part of what you guys do? Or how does AI fit into these older mechanisms?

>> So what AI has really enabled for us on the health and care side is a better experience, layer interface, however you want to talk about it. That is the breakthrough here with AI is that suddenly the things that might've felt like onerous tasks can feel like a conversation that you would have with somebody or your assistant who's getting things done on your behalf. We're in a phase right now where a lot of this has to do with knowledge and information sharing. We're starting to move into a phase where the agents are doing single tasks for us. We all know where this is going, which is that we will be able to have an agent actually take a full action for us. This is really exciting when you think about the things that sort of frustrates you and take a lot of time away from what you're doing. So that introduction of, hey, this is going to make things better for people. This is going to make them be more proactive about their health. This will improve outcomes. That is the way that we come into this to then get at the backend of it, which is yes, there's going to be a platform shift or there's technology that needs to change.

>> So the saving time, reducing the steps it takes to do things is clearly an AI example of benefit. So these are always happening in these big waves. It's always make it easy to use, reduce the time it takes. On the product side, things are changing. It used to be the cloud was subscription. That replaced perpetual licenses. Then you got usage coming. So you got pricing models change, you got the business models changing. You start to see marketers go, what's in there for me? So as CMOs out there kind of scratch their heads, you got kind of a product marketing mindset because products are now services as one, and now the marketer has more tools to do their job. How should they think about their organization? Because now that, okay, now I might have a different mix. If I abstract away either existing technologies like Martech Stacks would have available or build new ones with a startup, how should CMOs think about their team construction, skills alignment at the executive level? Is it more CFO, CEO? Are there structural things that you're seeing in the organization that empower the CMO to be much more of a leader in the business model transformation versus say, yeah, deal with the demand gen and work the stuff and the leads, the mechanisms, the process versus crafting up a real value?

>> Absolutely. One of the things I didn't talk about was that I spent some time working in the federal government in the Obama administration on government efficiency and bringing tech and design innovation into our federal government services. And there was sort of a narrative out there that this was all about bringing in the top tech talent into the federal government. At the end of the day, it always comes down to people. People's willingness to change and people's willingness to be brave and lead the way to do something different. I deeply believe that your CMOs, who are the ones that spend the most time unpacking behavior, trying to understand why people make decisions, why they do what they do, are in a very, very unique position to be able to drive a lot of this transformation. It absolutely will not happen in a silo. I mean, my CFO is my phone a friend. We talk every other day about everything going on as well as many other folks across the organization. But I think the skills that we're going to see more marketing leaders and marketing teams need are the ones for discernment, courage, understanding, actually drawing insight out of data and AI is getting better off that, but really drawing the insight out of the data. And then again, coming back to that orchestration. And yes, we have multi-agent models that are orchestrating a lot with AI, but there's a whole lot happening across data and creative and media and influencers and that ability to pull it all together is what you're going to see more of.

>> And the orchestration is a great example too because a lot of things are orchestrating on services, but also you mentioned touch points as a customer or member in your case might come in, touch the website on a journey, might use an app, might be in some forum. Holistically, they're online, they're moving around, they show up face to face to places, so their data footprint is everywhere. Getting that into one place or one way to query, it is hard. This has been kind of elusive and now AI's going to help there. Are there areas you see that are signs of success around how do I aggregate my customer? So if I do have success targeting, I can engage and actually be smart, be hyper personalized. Are we there yet? Is that too far out? How do you see that data aggregation or ingestion or input?

>> It's funny you said one place. Our tagline at Transcarent is to be the one place for health and care. So it's funny that you use that language. Because we're working in the healthcare space, there are a lot of compliance and data sensitivities that we have around targeting people. So that is something I would say we're in a bit of a different place in healthcare. But one of the things that I think is really important for our member is people are getting their information about what to do with their health from all over the place. And increasingly that may not be the most reputable source. We all get sucked into these things. You watch something online-

>> Smoking's good for you. Okay.

>> Yeah, right. I'm really confused about wine at this point. So giving people one place to go to get not just credible information, but also to understand we're usually working with employers. They are the ones who help get people their healthcare. What is my employer actually offering? How do I tie that all together? There is a whole lot to understand about where consumers are spending their time.

>> What's the big partnership ecosystem play? Because one of the things that's coming up a lot on my mind is, I'd love to get your thoughts on this, is that ecosystems used to be kind of like a marketing thing. Hey, we have an ecosystem of customers and partners, but with APIs and now AI data exchanges, because you have delegation of trust between data sources, connecting and integrating it seems to be the ecosystem partner mode right now. So trust is key. How do you see the ecosystems forming? Because a lot of the online platforms, I'm sure you guys have a lot of partners, need to be trusted. It's not just the black box you're talking to. No one wants to talk to a black box because it's what's behind the black box? What's your view on partnerships, marketing, ecosystems in general?

>> I think partnerships are critical to tackling any hard problem. If you are going after a hard problem, and in our case it is improving the health and care experience, you're not doing that alone. So partnerships are critical, but I do always go back to that consumer, or in our case, the member and what it is that they are looking for and what they are going to give permission for. And I think we're going to see a shift where consumers are going to become more and more comfortable giving agents and AI access to things because it's going to be easier for them. And then we will watch a lot of the behavior follow that.

>> Yeah. So you like the agent direction, you think that's going to be compelling?

>> 100%.

>> What about digital twins? Digital twins has been kicked around, okay, I have my own digital assistant. Remember the old digital assistant days, it was a handheld device. Now it could be a full-blown thing. Chatbots are popular, they're turning into intelligent, I guess, replacements in some level. Where do you see the next level coming in? Can you share your thoughts on the sequence of events that may happen?

>> I am bullish on the agents exactly for what we were talking about, about orchestrating because the idea behind an agent is that you can specialize agents in different types of experiences or knowledge or tasks or actions. They can then be coordinated by a broader agent who's bringing it all together. But I think the idea that those agents become deeper subject matter experts or domain experts and then come together to do what I need them to do, that's the model that I'm certainly looking at of where we're going.

>> So you get the violin player first, then you get the different instruments, and then you get the conductor.

>> Exactly, exactly. And I want that first chair of violin working on my behalf and I want the best bassist out there, and then I want them working all together.

>> I love the whole orchestra example. I think that's so relevant because you don't have to fill everything, Just get some critical mass of just a couple things, get a few wins, understand the task completion, workflows, understand the data. That seems to be a best practice. Do you see any other areas that might be a pro tip for CMOs out there now? Because a lot of people are looking at business transformation on their workflows, but also they've got backend issues to think through, like, okay, what's my database looking like? Is it a data lake? Is it centralized or distributed? So there's a lot of things going on. How should people think about their actions?

>> I think it starts with how you're hiring. And this is something that I do feel like is really changing from marketers in particular. If you are trying to build a consumer experience or a B2B experience that is simple for the person using it. In many ways you are responsible for ingesting all of that complexity, right? Somebody's got to wade through it and make it simpler on the other side. So I think this comes down to hiring people who are really adaptable and recognize that the role you hire them for in 18 months might not actually be the role that they have anymore. That are really, really curious and that aren't afraid to really roll their sleeves up and dig in and learn something. Because what you're using data as a great example, we don't have all the data in the marketing organization. Our partners in technology have some and in products have some, and compliance plays a role in it, and privacy plays a role in it. And if we're not all curious, coming to the table trying to understand what's there, what's accessible, how we can use it, how we can't use it, how we need to guardrail it or apply more privacy standards to it, we won't get anywhere. So I think a huge part of it does come back to those people.

>> The final question is that I was talking to a chief AI officer, which is that title that's given to a person who knows the most about the data in the company, and I won't say the name of the company, I don't want to out them, but she said, I asked, "How are you going to use AI for your organization?" They were full of data, they had tons of assets and great capabilities, and she was very candid. She says, honestly, our first step is to figure out what we have. We're going to use AI to figure out what we have. Then start thinking about what use cases we can do to knock down some low hanging fruit, and then understand what net new use cases could come out. So she was thinking about very much a net new opportunity, less of taking a hammer, looking for a nail, an internal process. What's your reaction to that? Is that good advice? Do you think that's common or is that more of just someone who's going to be in a big company?

>> I think that's great advice. I'll build on it a little bit. We've got a lot of top-down mandates happening across the board of bring more AI into the business, bring more AI into HR, into marketing, into technology. The list goes on. Bringing AI in is not the answer. Solving a problem or an issue or opening a new opportunity, starting there and then determining what tools to actually apply. That's the way to think about it. But I think it can be really easy right now to just kind of get caught up in what is a lot of excitement and rightfully placed excitement, but not bringing in the right tool to solve the problem you have in front of you.

>> Don't go too fast. Great advice. I'll give you the final minute. Talk about as CMO at Transcarent, what are you working on now? What's the hot area that you're excited about? Share a little bit of what you're working on.

>> Several months ago, we took to market our new experience called wayfinding, and it combines really three key elements to help people better manage their health and care. And so that starts with benefits navigation. What kind of benefits do I have available to me? The second is clinical guidance. I have a problem. My knee is hurting or I've been coughing for weeks. What are my options? What can I do next? And lastly is care delivery. Okay, great. I figured out what to do next. Now I actually need to talk to a doctor or make an appointment. We've brought all that together in a really intuitive and conversational experience that AI enables us to do so that people can come in, just ask questions and get answers. This has been a core focus of the marketing team as well as the product team as we really co-owned that experience for the company.

>> That's a great solution. And I've always, my head spins, I get an email. You'll have till the end of the day to change your benefits package. Like why? What are my options? End of the day pass. I'll keep what I got. But understanding what you can do is huge.

>> And that comment you made is really common, is that there's often a better set of benefits you could select.

>> If I spend the time grinding through.

>> But you don't do it, right?

>> No. I'm like pass. Exactly. I'm indifferent because it's too much.

>> Too much work.

>> And I got a deadline, I can't make it.

>> Yes, you had a little assistant helping you.

>> That's where we're at. Well, thanks for coming on. I appreciate the insight. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. All right. CMO leaders will share in their insights. This is a big ongoing conversation. It's going to continue to happen. AI is a force multiplier if you understand how to drive it and use it and bring it into the organization. I'm John Furrier here with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.