Meeting Title: Brainforge x Movers + Shakers Date: 2026-03-25 Meeting participants: Robert Tseng, Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology, Pranav Narahari
WEBVTT
1 00:00:08.920 ⇒ 00:00:10.110 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Hello?
2 00:00:11.280 ⇒ 00:00:12.050 Robert Tseng: Hey, Jeff.
3 00:00:12.380 ⇒ 00:00:13.550 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Hey, how are you doing?
4 00:00:13.760 ⇒ 00:00:14.870 Robert Tseng: Good, how are you?
5 00:00:15.110 ⇒ 00:00:15.990 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Good.
6 00:00:17.260 ⇒ 00:00:18.769 Pranav Narahari: Nice to see you, Jeff. How you been?
7 00:00:18.770 ⇒ 00:00:19.959 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Great to see ya!
8 00:00:25.840 ⇒ 00:00:27.919 Robert Tseng: Are we waiting for anyone else on your side, or…
9 00:00:28.570 ⇒ 00:00:30.240 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Nobody on my side.
10 00:00:30.740 ⇒ 00:00:37.020 Robert Tseng: Okay, cool. Yeah, I think you… I guess, Pranav, you’ve met Jeff before, you want to just kind of…
11 00:00:37.190 ⇒ 00:00:42.280 Robert Tseng: I mean, I’ll introduce myself, and you kind of just set us up, kind of where we left off with,
12 00:00:42.470 ⇒ 00:00:58.490 Robert Tseng: movers and shakers, and then we can kind of just get to know each other more, see if there’s an opportunity to work together. Yeah, so I run Brainforge. I know you were in correspondence with Luke, so, I mean, I guess I’ll… I thought I’d jump in here, kind of see
13 00:00:58.660 ⇒ 00:01:13.050 Robert Tseng: you know, what… what the opportunity was more clearly, and then, yeah, I guess we can kind of take it from there. But, I’ll let… I’ll let Bernav kind of just kind of get us back on the same page, so, we have a bit more of a handoff.
14 00:01:13.910 ⇒ 00:01:14.979 Pranav Narahari: Yeah, definitely.
15 00:01:15.200 ⇒ 00:01:27.040 Pranav Narahari: So, like, about a month ago, I think it’s been, Jeff, that we first spoke, you’re talking about how you’re kind of like a… a one-man shop, really, right now, vibe-coding a lot of solutions to kind of…
16 00:01:27.080 ⇒ 00:01:37.150 Pranav Narahari: get things up and running, and this past month, I’m assuming, is pretty busy for you as you got certain things into production and kind of pushed across the organization.
17 00:01:38.570 ⇒ 00:01:48.150 Pranav Narahari: I know one thing that you mentioned was a lot of solutions maybe getting to, like, that 70% mark, and we were discussing, like, that last 70% to 100% of, like.
18 00:01:48.650 ⇒ 00:01:54.989 Pranav Narahari: is, like, the tough part, where it comes, like, it’s difficult to do with just, like, a one-man shop, potentially because, like.
19 00:01:55.180 ⇒ 00:02:03.510 Pranav Narahari: there’s more than just having the right model or, like, the right system in place. It’s also about where can that system be placed with
20 00:02:03.570 ⇒ 00:02:05.309 Pranav Narahari: Where people are currently working.
21 00:02:05.370 ⇒ 00:02:15.790 Pranav Narahari: Like, on top of maybe, like, where they’re doing TikTok searches, where they’re doing Reddit searches, things of that nature. And so, I believe, like, that’s where we last…
22 00:02:15.790 ⇒ 00:02:29.959 Pranav Narahari: left off, you were talking also about, potentially, in the coming months, you’re hiring another person to fill in, like, that AI engineering role, potentially. But then I think what was interesting was maybe
23 00:02:29.980 ⇒ 00:02:34.520 Pranav Narahari: substituting that with a partnership with someone like Brainforge, so…
24 00:02:34.610 ⇒ 00:02:42.620 Pranav Narahari: that’s what I remember from last time. Maybe things have changed since then, too, and you can give some more, like, clarity into that, but I think that’s a good starting point for us.
25 00:02:43.060 ⇒ 00:03:01.249 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Yeah, yeah, we’re definitely in the path to build a bunch of tools. There’s kind of, like, two… well, let’s call it three now. Three main areas where we’re building development. Right now, the part that I’m concentrating on is our strategy toolkit, which is called TrendSonar, which is our…
26 00:03:01.370 ⇒ 00:03:03.720 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Increase Speed to Insight tool.
27 00:03:04.280 ⇒ 00:03:09.719 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: The other area of development, which we’re looking to hire somebody right now for.
28 00:03:09.750 ⇒ 00:03:29.569 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: is our creative suite of tools, which will… which will kind of, like, on the backs of increasing our speed to insight, once that insight’s delivered, then it kind of goes and hands off the baton to the next part of the process, which will be creative. And so the creative suite takes those insights, delivers them to our teams.
29 00:03:29.880 ⇒ 00:03:32.830 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: So they can come up with creative ideas.
30 00:03:33.830 ⇒ 00:03:44.799 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: just to, like, level set, Movers and Shakers, social media agency. We make content for places like TikTok and Instagram Reels for companies like Delta Airlines, Microsoft, etc.
31 00:03:45.300 ⇒ 00:03:59.609 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: And so it’s mainly just organic social content. And so a lot of what we do is say, here’s what’s trending on the web, here’s why you should go make a video about it. Then the creatives go, and they say, here are 3 video ideas. The client says, yes, go make that one, and we go make it.
32 00:03:59.850 ⇒ 00:04:07.270 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Alright, so we get to the Creative Suite process. We need… this is the part that we haven’t really done a lot on, but which is…
33 00:04:07.960 ⇒ 00:04:12.159 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Increase speed the concept, take all of the ideas in.
34 00:04:12.160 ⇒ 00:04:28.639 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: have our creatives use their human insight and human taste to picture and figure out which ones are the best. Use AI tools to help generate storyboards, then take those storyboards, present them as a concept to clients, get approval on the concept, and then pass it off to the next part, which is production.
35 00:04:28.640 ⇒ 00:04:45.790 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: For what we create, we’re probably going to use humans for production, because all of our content is very, like, human-led storytelling. We don’t do a lot of, like, product shots of, like, a can floating. I wish we did, because we could really automate the crap out of that. But a lot of it is more just, like, general human narrative storytelling.
36 00:04:46.150 ⇒ 00:04:57.719 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Go create the content, edit it, send it back to your clients for approval, post it, monitor it for performance, and then take the performance data and feed it back into the machine.
37 00:04:58.230 ⇒ 00:05:06.589 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: The third new… content, or new bucket that we’re creating is a tool suite.
38 00:05:06.720 ⇒ 00:05:10.200 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: That we don’t have a name for yet, but it’s basically…
39 00:05:10.650 ⇒ 00:05:17.019 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: the ugly backend side of everything that we do as an agency. Like, helping us understand
40 00:05:17.020 ⇒ 00:05:32.870 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: where assets are at any given part of the process. Like, alright, you went and shot a bunch of content, where does that content live? If it lives in a dam, what dam? How do we manage the tagging of that content? How do we make it searchable for all our editors and creatives and
41 00:05:32.870 ⇒ 00:05:34.740 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Business partners, etc.
42 00:05:35.600 ⇒ 00:05:43.739 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: built on top of that, how do we manage projects? If a client comes to us with a new request that says, like, hey, we want to get in on March Madness.
43 00:05:43.810 ⇒ 00:05:56.110 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: How does that inbound request get put into the process, so that way we can manage a team and understand how many hours that team is going to take, and then know who on that team is over-scoped versus under-scoped?
44 00:05:56.470 ⇒ 00:06:13.269 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: There’s that ugly side of how all that works. It’s actually part of a larger task that our holding company is working on called, at Stagwell, called Content Supply Chain, which isn’t a new concept. Actually, Adobe has a product called Content Supply Chain. We didn’t even try to rename it. It’s literally just their product.
45 00:06:13.610 ⇒ 00:06:18.420 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: But we’re just making the Stagwell version of Content Supply Chain, which is basically…
46 00:06:18.770 ⇒ 00:06:27.229 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: taking what Adobe has, which is they have… Digital asset management, Learning management systems.
47 00:06:27.870 ⇒ 00:06:31.139 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Adobe Gen Studio for Performance Marketing.
48 00:06:31.280 ⇒ 00:06:54.030 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: And interlinking all of them with the administrative layer, which is tracking hours and employees through an HRS system called UKG, which I’m literally learning all this stuff in real time, so don’t ask me any questions about any of this stuff. And then also tracking it against, like, how we do our finances, which is a similar program called McConomy.
49 00:06:55.250 ⇒ 00:07:07.899 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: And then making it so that it’s basically a round-trip process. Client puts in requests, it filters into automated systems that helps, send it to teams, teams get tracked on how many hours they take to do processes.
50 00:07:08.110 ⇒ 00:07:13.659 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: It audits it and says, here’s what we expected it to take, here’s how long it actually took to take.
51 00:07:13.840 ⇒ 00:07:16.650 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Or how actually long it took to build the product.
52 00:07:17.270 ⇒ 00:07:34.170 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Most of these systems are really great for teams that build, like, really high-volume automated marketing. Like, if you were working for Red Bull, and Red Bull was like, we need 150 assets for Amazon Marketplace in Walmart.
53 00:07:34.170 ⇒ 00:07:42.090 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: And here are the 33 specs types, and we need it in 100 languages. You’re… you’d be off to the races.
54 00:07:42.090 ⇒ 00:07:46.389 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Most of what we do is we create a TikTok video.
55 00:07:46.440 ⇒ 00:07:47.530 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: a week.
56 00:07:48.080 ⇒ 00:07:52.740 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: And it only needs to be in one language, and in one size.
57 00:07:52.890 ⇒ 00:08:08.140 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: But, the dreams and aspirations of our owners of our company, which there still are two co-founders of the company, even though they’ve sold their company to Stagwell, is that they would love for us to create that automated system so that we can scale.
58 00:08:08.690 ⇒ 00:08:19.789 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: our content process, so that we could support a paid media strategy. So let’s say, for example, if we were working on Delta Airlines, and maybe we’re doing 2 or 3 videos a month.
59 00:08:20.180 ⇒ 00:08:33.649 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Maybe out of a quarter, one to two of those videos are doing really, really well, and they have a really interesting story arc. How many of those assets, out of those one to two, can we then version?
60 00:08:33.960 ⇒ 00:08:37.510 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: And have a system that
61 00:08:37.669 ⇒ 00:08:47.219 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: takes all that content, cuts them into tight 6-second clips, a reel, an Instagram story, it turns them into…
62 00:08:47.670 ⇒ 00:09:03.659 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: an unskippable ad on Google. We start uploading things to Performix Math campaigns on Google Ads Studio, like, completely build out an infrastructure that basically is automated the process of taking what is very human-led, which is creating
63 00:09:04.270 ⇒ 00:09:16.440 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: creating non-AI-created organic social content, but feeds an engine that automates the creation of paid media assets based on the brains of top-performing organic content.
64 00:09:17.080 ⇒ 00:09:20.250 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: So that’s the vision. Right now.
65 00:09:20.770 ⇒ 00:09:27.640 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: And I think I told you this last time, the biggest thing I work on is change management. It’s basically just, like.
66 00:09:27.780 ⇒ 00:09:35.880 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: I am a one-person AI media agency trying to completely automate the process of a 65-person company.
67 00:09:36.270 ⇒ 00:10:00.860 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Where there are 64 people who are really good with their process, and just really cool at just kicking out TikToks for the rest of their life, and have no interest in this. And so that’s kind of where we are. So we’ve launched TrendSonar officially… unofficially. Like, it’s… there’s really… I’m… I’m not gonna just keep turning and burning on this thing and burning tokens, like, people have to start using it and giving me feedback to tell me what to fix.
68 00:10:00.860 ⇒ 00:10:03.500 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: And if they don’t like it, great, we’ll move on.
69 00:10:03.500 ⇒ 00:10:13.169 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: kind of like the new, biggest thing we learned from TrendSonar is the UI is great, we’ll screenshot it all day and send it off to clients for pitches.
70 00:10:13.780 ⇒ 00:10:19.420 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: really what they wanted was just a Slack message every morning that told them what was trending. So, I built that.
71 00:10:19.630 ⇒ 00:10:32.479 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: the UI is now the interface for you to set the triggers, and if you wanted to, you could use it to monitor trends, and you could go read the report every day on the daily trending page.
72 00:10:32.660 ⇒ 00:10:43.209 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: But most people don’t open the UI, they just wait for the Slack message, and when the Slack message gets there, they just copy and paste the sections that are important to them. So we’ve been meeting users where they are, that’s been a lot of the work.
73 00:10:43.600 ⇒ 00:10:45.229 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: I suspect…
74 00:10:45.530 ⇒ 00:10:57.319 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: The creative process is gonna be even more like that, where we’re gonna basically kick out a similar newsletter, but it’s more creative-focused, and it’s just like, here are 4 concepts for you to ideate on this morning.
75 00:10:57.420 ⇒ 00:11:14.770 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Have a great day, and that’ll be what that user flow looks like. Similarly, for what the third category’s gonna look like, that’s probably just gonna be us figuring out if we’re keeping Asana or not. And then, if we’re gonna keep Asana, how do we finally get Asana to talk to
76 00:11:14.900 ⇒ 00:11:25.790 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Slack… to Slack, and how do we get Asana talking to where we do our community management and our social media management, which is Sprout, which of all the integrations that Sprout offers.
77 00:11:25.960 ⇒ 00:11:30.589 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Asana is not one of the integrations that they offer. Anyways…
78 00:11:30.940 ⇒ 00:11:38.240 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: I’ve laid all my cards out on the table, that’s where we are. We got 3 products, one of them basically is out the door, 2 of them need to get work done.
79 00:11:39.160 ⇒ 00:11:57.180 Robert Tseng: Got it. Thank you so much for that overview, and it sounds like you’ve already shared some of this with Renab before, so I got… I’ve got bits and pieces from them, but good to hear from the mastermind. So, yeah, I mean, I guess, like, just hearing you talk about it, I think the third category is probably where we would be able to help the most.
80 00:11:57.250 ⇒ 00:12:02.290 Robert Tseng: Totally understand your role as kind of being the driver of change management.
81 00:12:02.350 ⇒ 00:12:09.949 Robert Tseng: I think I’ll start kind of just, like, philosophical, and then I’ll kind of go into, like, kind of how we’ve, like, practically, like, implement this.
82 00:12:09.950 ⇒ 00:12:27.780 Robert Tseng: So, you know, we’ve built kind of, like, agentic workspaces for, you know, a lot of different industries, and we function as an agency ourselves. So I totally understand the evolution of, like, first starting off, like, kind of just trying to kind of keep individualized, like, individual contributors running, like, very specialized work streams.
83 00:12:27.790 ⇒ 00:12:33.690 Robert Tseng: And, like, just keeping them, like, on… on track. You’re just building, like, basic… a project management layer for them.
84 00:12:33.690 ⇒ 00:12:52.479 Robert Tseng: But then if you want to scale, then you need to be able to manage complex processes, you need to know when to, like, loop in on people, you need to foster collaboration, which is why you need those integrations with your CRM system, with kind of, like, your other projections from your time tracking software, your finances, like, we do all that stuff internally as well. And so, there is, like, some…
85 00:12:52.480 ⇒ 00:13:02.000 Robert Tseng: tool selection process there to know, like, which pieces to put together, and where you’re able to truly have a horizontal search layer, and so that when you’re looking at, like.
86 00:13:02.120 ⇒ 00:13:20.669 Robert Tseng: okay, this particular project, who should be staffed on it, how many hours, like, all those inputs can all be kind of searched, aggregated in a single place, and then also you can triage them all from the same… all the… from the same… from the same interface. So, I think that’s kind of phase two. And then phase three is really kind of, like.
87 00:13:20.700 ⇒ 00:13:34.920 Robert Tseng: yeah, you want it to be custom for, like, the, you know, whoever that’s… whoever the person is… who’s… who’s work… working that… working with that, whatever interface this is. So, sounds like you, you know, when you’re working with creatives.
88 00:13:34.970 ⇒ 00:13:41.409 Robert Tseng: you already kind of, like, you already know what they want. They just want the Slack message, and maybe they just want to be able to kind of, like.
89 00:13:42.310 ⇒ 00:14:01.800 Robert Tseng: interact with the reports, like, we do that as well. We have certain stakeholders that are just creating tickets out of Slack, pushing changes to landing pages out of Slack, like, you know, there are certain tools that people just like to live in, and it’s really hard to get them to adopt something new, and I think with the way that we design AI kind of workflows, we’re not really trying to, like.
90 00:14:02.150 ⇒ 00:14:19.410 Robert Tseng: force people into a UI that they don’t want, because that just never goes well. So, I think, like, that’s… those are kind of, like, philosophically some of the… how we… how we think about, the project. I mean, I’ll pause there, kind of see your initial reactions. Some of it might be of a hot take, but curious what you think.
91 00:14:19.410 ⇒ 00:14:29.129 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: No, that’s perfectly right. I mean, I think the biggest opportunity that we’d evaluated last time we chatted is that, like, right now, the way that Movers kind of looks at these problems is it’s like…
92 00:14:30.890 ⇒ 00:14:40.329 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: well, it was, Jeff will figure it out. And then they were like, oh, this is actually a lot of work, especially the amount of requests that people are starting to have.
93 00:14:40.780 ⇒ 00:14:43.319 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: And the requests that they’re having, like…
94 00:14:43.960 ⇒ 00:14:47.560 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: they are just very nitty-gritty. It’s just like…
95 00:14:47.560 ⇒ 00:14:48.100 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
96 00:14:48.540 ⇒ 00:14:53.650 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: is there such thing as a public view of an Asana board that allows clients to leave comments? And it’s like…
97 00:14:53.650 ⇒ 00:14:53.990 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
98 00:14:53.990 ⇒ 00:15:00.380 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Technically, no. Which is… and so we just keep running into these issues where it’s just like…
99 00:15:01.260 ⇒ 00:15:03.640 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: The solution would be…
100 00:15:03.900 ⇒ 00:15:15.429 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: a staff that was more knowledgeable in how to use technology, and that’s not the… but that’s not the change management we need. And so it’s like, alright, well, if we’re not gonna teach staff how to, like.
101 00:15:15.540 ⇒ 00:15:21.409 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: quickly automate exporting CSVs of dashboards and putting them into a website.
102 00:15:21.760 ⇒ 00:15:24.620 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: what’s the next step? And so…
103 00:15:25.020 ⇒ 00:15:44.140 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: with the creative operating system side, the vision was, let’s hire somebody short-term, 60, 90 days. Yeah. Have them just turn and burn on a second Cloud Code account, essentially, and just knock out the creative OS. Yeah. Then we started thinking about it, and the last call was just like, well, instead of having just one person.
104 00:15:44.590 ⇒ 00:15:48.299 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: How about if it’s a group of people, we can work even faster?
105 00:15:48.300 ⇒ 00:15:48.800 Robert Tseng: Yep.
106 00:15:48.800 ⇒ 00:16:04.450 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: we can be more diligent, and it doesn’t have to be even 90 days. It’s just like, alright, here’s 2 weeks. It’s like 2 or 3 days of stakeholder interviews about what the solution should actually be, and how people would actually use it. Like, go sit down with a couple creative directors and copywriters, and say, like.
107 00:16:05.210 ⇒ 00:16:16.859 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: your company wants to build a website that you go to every day, and you come up with ideas. Yeah. What would you actually use? And then they say, like, oh, like, I don’t know, like…
108 00:16:17.570 ⇒ 00:16:27.540 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: I’d do a WhatsApp, or, you know, something silly or something, and then kind of take those learnings back from those key stakeholders, and then actually go build the creative operating system.
109 00:16:29.660 ⇒ 00:16:37.190 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Yeah, I think that would be really an interesting attack at it, versus kind of, like, where the team is thinking. I think the only thing that…
110 00:16:38.020 ⇒ 00:16:45.320 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: They’re also thinking is that if they can get a two-for-one special for this person, who they’re calling, like, a content engineer.
111 00:16:45.480 ⇒ 00:16:51.020 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: It’s like, let’s find somebody who can help build the system, but then after the system is built.
112 00:16:51.180 ⇒ 00:16:56.690 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: They can be the spearhead for what the creative department will be 4 years from now.
113 00:16:56.890 ⇒ 00:17:08.139 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: It’s not gonna be art directors, copywriters, like, in their vision. They’re gonna be in this, like, automated role, which is, like, somebody who’s, like, part creative technologist, part art director.
114 00:17:08.420 ⇒ 00:17:13.689 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: And it’s basically, like, orchestrating AI agents who are building them content at scale.
115 00:17:14.369 ⇒ 00:17:14.959 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
116 00:17:14.960 ⇒ 00:17:15.390 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: I don’t…
117 00:17:15.390 ⇒ 00:17:17.620 Robert Tseng: And for… which side do you lean more on?
118 00:17:18.150 ⇒ 00:17:24.279 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: philosophically? I mean, so, like, to me.
119 00:17:26.530 ⇒ 00:17:39.919 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: you know, I love what I do in terms of, like, building tools that help accelerate these things, and, like, we’re pushing the envelope of what’s possible, and I think with the right client.
120 00:17:40.070 ⇒ 00:17:42.379 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: You could build that system.
121 00:17:42.680 ⇒ 00:17:48.150 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: we’re not that agency, like, we’re… and I’ve done this at other agencies, where it’s like…
122 00:17:48.320 ⇒ 00:17:52.539 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Oh, we’re gonna go build a completely new system and a completely new offering.
123 00:17:52.750 ⇒ 00:18:00.809 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: And it’s like, that’s awesome, are you that agency? Because the hardest work is… the hard job is getting people to understand what you’re good at.
124 00:18:01.010 ⇒ 00:18:18.130 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: So, the thing that people know Movers and Shakers is really good at is making viral video content for platforms like TikTok, and we’ve done it for clients like Elf Cosmetics, we’ve done it for Chipotle, like, we’ve done it for these major brands, and they understand, alright, you guys are the TikTok agency.
125 00:18:18.150 ⇒ 00:18:29.869 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: The issue is, is that when you’re the TikTok agency, if no one’s looking for videos to be put on TikTok, especially organic videos, when everyone’s out here trying to do performance-based marketing.
126 00:18:29.930 ⇒ 00:18:32.350 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: there’s no market for you. And so that’s…
127 00:18:32.600 ⇒ 00:18:38.720 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: the vision is to grow movers outside of that space, and that’s why they want to grow this out. But I think that…
128 00:18:39.160 ⇒ 00:18:43.560 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: To do that, It’s very long-term.
129 00:18:44.530 ⇒ 00:18:46.890 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: I don’t… and I don’t know…
130 00:18:47.910 ⇒ 00:18:53.870 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Necessarily, if the… that build of that thing needs to happen in… public.
131 00:18:54.140 ⇒ 00:19:03.409 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Sure. If that makes sense. Like, I think we could be building the movers and shakers of 3 years from now without having to involve the people of Movers and Shakers today.
132 00:19:03.410 ⇒ 00:19:03.940 Robert Tseng: Yep.
133 00:19:03.940 ⇒ 00:19:13.069 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: I think we waste a lot of cycles where we could be building some really unique offerings and capabilities on trying to bring 65 people along with us.
134 00:19:13.420 ⇒ 00:19:13.960 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
135 00:19:14.970 ⇒ 00:19:19.030 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: And I… and it’s… in… to me
136 00:19:20.300 ⇒ 00:19:24.070 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Like, I would just start from… like, I would just start from scratch. I would just be like.
137 00:19:24.180 ⇒ 00:19:33.209 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: let’s go hire a con… that’s kind of what they’re thinking with this content engineer. Let’s just hire a content engineer. They will be the new head of the creative department.
138 00:19:33.760 ⇒ 00:19:34.200 Robert Tseng: Yep.
139 00:19:34.200 ⇒ 00:19:37.249 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: on this new Agentic AI offering.
140 00:19:38.460 ⇒ 00:19:41.939 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: And it’ll just be one full-time employee.
141 00:19:42.300 ⇒ 00:19:47.930 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: for 90 days. And then, hopefully, if they can make it work, they’ll continue the contract.
142 00:19:48.110 ⇒ 00:19:58.030 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: And I think that that’s kind of maybe a better vision, because I think that the struggle that you have is when you’re… and I see this everywhere, where they’re just like, oh no, we’re pivoting our company, and it’s like,
143 00:19:58.030 ⇒ 00:20:09.060 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: It’s a lot harder. It’s… getting people to change the way that they do their job, especially when they didn’t sign up to be part of an experiment, is really hard. And I also found out that people really don’t like testing software.
144 00:20:09.060 ⇒ 00:20:10.610 Robert Tseng: Yeah, they don’t, yeah.
145 00:20:12.800 ⇒ 00:20:14.770 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Okay. That was a fun one.
146 00:20:14.770 ⇒ 00:20:31.010 Robert Tseng: No, I think, I… I think we… I’m… yeah, this is great. I think we… we think very similar. So, they put… I mean, this content engineer role, I mean, seems like you guys want to go with a… with a contractor. I mean, I’m curious, like.
147 00:20:33.460 ⇒ 00:20:37.999 Robert Tseng: So we’ve kind of separated. Like, there’s, like, the immediate person who can come and just, like.
148 00:20:38.190 ⇒ 00:20:53.169 Robert Tseng: really wrangle the 65 people along, help them to, like, scale. Maybe you’ll make them able to do 2 to 3X more, whatever. Then there’s, like, the other… there’s another approach where you can be, like, I’m betting on the future, I’m somebody who’s gonna really build out the system. It’s not really gonna be, like.
149 00:20:53.330 ⇒ 00:21:05.359 Robert Tseng: publicly accessible to the 65 people now, but this is, like, kind of, like, you know, two, three years out from now, we want everybody to eventually go that way. And I think those are two very different personas that you’d be… you’d be looking at.
150 00:21:05.380 ⇒ 00:21:22.759 Robert Tseng: I mean, we… we staff a bunch of… and I… I’m, you know, we interview and hire, like, a bunch of AI engineers at this point, you know, with… with domain expertise, with no domain expertise. I think Pranav’s kind of a unicorn here, where he is very, like, kind of gets… gets the business.
151 00:21:22.760 ⇒ 00:21:38.460 Robert Tseng: very client-facing person, but he’s also, like, a systems thinker, and I think it’s very rare to, like, find somebody like him. And so that’s why we typically staff, like, a pod structure when we work on clients, so kind of depending on which way they want. If they want something that’s, like, fast returns, just, like.
152 00:21:38.460 ⇒ 00:21:56.590 Robert Tseng: kind of somebody who is, like, a domain expert running alongside you, who just is going to be, like, your content partner, who knows the best practices of what good content looks like, what that process is, and, like, we take a very, like, Amdahl’s Law approach, where, like, we look for, like, the biggest bottleneck.
153 00:21:56.590 ⇒ 00:22:14.029 Robert Tseng: And usually it’s drafting, but it’s… if it’s not drafting, like, we try to go and find, like, how do we speed up that process overall, and that’s, like, the pro… that’s… that’s, like, the main thing that we drive towards. Or we’re taking a very more, like, traditional… I mean, I call it traditional, but it’s only been around for 2 years, like.
154 00:22:14.040 ⇒ 00:22:35.449 Robert Tseng: AI pilot to, like, slow rollout, closed rollout with a few people, and then it’s, like, kind of like this science project that gets incubated over time, longer time horizon, but less immediate ROI immediately. So, that’s kind of, like, directionally how I’m thinking of… I’m trying to craft a pitch to kind of put in front of you, so you can actually benchmark against your contract hire. Like.
155 00:22:35.450 ⇒ 00:22:39.780 Robert Tseng: I mean, I can expand more, but, like, how do both of those sound?
156 00:22:40.130 ⇒ 00:22:42.910 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: No, that sounds right. I mean, I think that…
157 00:22:44.170 ⇒ 00:22:49.459 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: kind of like for me, where I’m starting to build it out in my head, is that
158 00:22:49.870 ⇒ 00:22:53.879 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: We’re… where we are on the content engineer hire.
159 00:22:54.210 ⇒ 00:23:07.999 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: We are currently looking at a couple of candidates that are very much more in, like, the… either two buckets. They are the traditional, they worked at ad agencies, and they’ve built software for ad agencies.
160 00:23:08.210 ⇒ 00:23:23.439 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: And that is, like, a very specific role, and I have strangely found those people. And then I have… then there are people who are, like, vibe coders, who are also really great content creators. And it’s like, that’s interesting to us, because it’s like.
161 00:23:24.840 ⇒ 00:23:32.910 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: we can use them for twofold, because it’s like, great, you’re really interested in vibecoding, you’re really interested in creating these solutions, but you’re also, like.
162 00:23:34.290 ⇒ 00:23:36.710 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Documenting these things that you’re creating already on.
163 00:23:36.710 ⇒ 00:23:37.260 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
164 00:23:37.260 ⇒ 00:23:44.639 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: So you understand how to share it, you understand the space that we work in, so you’re gonna speak the language of our teams.
165 00:23:44.640 ⇒ 00:23:44.960 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
166 00:23:44.960 ⇒ 00:23:54.980 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: coming to you with a feature request, you’re gonna be like, I deal with that every day. I hate having to come up with concepts. So here, let me help you build something that helps you create concepts better.
167 00:23:55.130 ⇒ 00:24:07.230 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: And then eventually, like, that person, like, leads this new initiative. The vision I have is that in that third book at software that I was talking about, that space.
168 00:24:07.490 ⇒ 00:24:10.900 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Where we’ve really been looking at A partner.
169 00:24:11.290 ⇒ 00:24:11.720 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
170 00:24:11.720 ⇒ 00:24:13.890 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: like yourselves. That’s not…
171 00:24:14.160 ⇒ 00:24:27.230 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: on our staff that is really just, like, helping be an integrator and an integrator and a connector of all these desperate systems that our team will not have time to learn about. Like, for example… Yep.
172 00:24:27.880 ⇒ 00:24:41.139 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Unfortunately, we’re going to be moving on to this UKG system. We’ll be moving on to a bunch of other parts of the Stagwell stack that’ll help us manage people, hours, and budgets. In the past, we used Rippling.
173 00:24:41.140 ⇒ 00:24:52.339 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: which is amazing if you’ve ever used Rippling. Yep. Like, Rippling is just, like, an amazing piece of software. But… and so a lot of the automations, and a lot of things that make
174 00:24:52.510 ⇒ 00:24:54.369 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Staffing an agency that
175 00:24:54.750 ⇒ 00:25:11.090 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: easy are done in Riplink. Like, when you create a new employee in Rippling, it triggers all of these automations about getting them hardware shipped to their house, understanding taxes, getting them forms that they need to fill out, and it does the… getting them into their Slack.
176 00:25:11.220 ⇒ 00:25:15.510 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Making sure they’re set up there. It does all these amazing automations for you.
177 00:25:15.820 ⇒ 00:25:18.729 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: The system where you’re moving to has nothing.
178 00:25:19.060 ⇒ 00:25:21.970 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Yep. It’s like updating a spreadsheet, essentially.
179 00:25:22.270 ⇒ 00:25:33.559 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: And so one of the big, big lean things you’ve been leaning into is, like, alright, so we’re gonna need to have somebody rebuild all the things we’re gonna lose by moving from Rippling to UKG.
180 00:25:34.030 ⇒ 00:25:34.610 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
181 00:25:34.610 ⇒ 00:25:36.359 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: So that’d be an example.
182 00:25:36.360 ⇒ 00:25:36.840 Robert Tseng: Okay.
183 00:25:36.840 ⇒ 00:25:37.440 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Not sexy.
184 00:25:37.440 ⇒ 00:25:38.160 Robert Tseng: Yeah, no.
185 00:25:38.160 ⇒ 00:25:39.620 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: But…
186 00:25:40.230 ⇒ 00:25:53.939 Robert Tseng: Yeah, not sexy stuff, but, like, it’s what we do. We have to build that for ourselves internally. And so, I mean, that’s why I was… I kind of led off with thinking that third category is probably a better fit for us. Yeah, I think we just, you know.
187 00:25:53.990 ⇒ 00:26:05.789 Robert Tseng: we understand the orchestration that needs to happen for you to be able to get all these systems to integrate, and, like, you know, you run into any system that you don’t understand, like, we can go and figure that out. So,
188 00:26:05.790 ⇒ 00:26:16.469 Robert Tseng: Yeah, I mean, we don’t use UKG, but we use something, kind of, that is very low budget, low feature, but we’ve been able to make it work for ourselves, and we’re, you know, a team of 25 and growing. So, like, I think…
189 00:26:16.490 ⇒ 00:26:30.909 Robert Tseng: In that sense, like, we kind of have dog… dog-fooded all of this… all this work, and I think I’d be more comfortable making you a pitch on that side. And I think the way that we’ve branded it, because we do this for a few of our clients as well, you know, is kind of like a…
190 00:26:30.910 ⇒ 00:26:39.350 Robert Tseng: chief of staff, kind of, like, agent, or, like, COO’s office, or, you know, like, a control center, like, there are different terms, like.
191 00:26:39.560 ⇒ 00:26:55.509 Robert Tseng: I mean, you may be the champion, like, on the technology side for it, but it’s… I don’t know, it’s probably, like, somebody else who’s really gonna be heading that out, so who… who… who would have to be involved in order to make a decision like that, if we’re… if we’re to put together a plan around that?
192 00:26:55.510 ⇒ 00:26:57.800 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Well, it’s probably two-part.
193 00:26:58.600 ⇒ 00:27:01.870 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: And I think we’d have… I think that it’s, like, a scoping…
194 00:27:02.040 ⇒ 00:27:04.640 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: question on our end, too, is like…
195 00:27:05.780 ⇒ 00:27:12.860 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: The vision is this larger connected services system that is the content supply chain, which is, like.
196 00:27:13.620 ⇒ 00:27:19.849 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Staffing and hours and finance should be interconnected with project management.
197 00:27:20.120 ⇒ 00:27:20.630 Robert Tseng: Yep.
198 00:27:21.770 ⇒ 00:27:22.710 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: And…
199 00:27:24.940 ⇒ 00:27:34.840 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: I think the question is, do they want to just… do they… do we want to go whole hog and, like, try to bite off that vision? Or do we just try to, step one.
200 00:27:35.180 ⇒ 00:27:39.690 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: replace what we’re losing with going from Rippling to UKG, and then go from there.
201 00:27:40.100 ⇒ 00:27:47.610 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Alright, we got it. We made the forced onto us situation that we have at Stagwell work for us.
202 00:27:47.770 ⇒ 00:27:57.060 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Now we can start thinking about how to build on top of the stack. And it’s probably gonna be that. It’s probably gonna be, we’re just gonna make it so we can live with the.
203 00:27:57.060 ⇒ 00:28:00.089 Robert Tseng: When is that transition happening? Like, what’s kind of the urgency?
204 00:28:00.090 ⇒ 00:28:06.640 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: The switch is gonna happen regardless. It’s happening, I think, the second week of April. It was supposed to be.
205 00:28:06.640 ⇒ 00:28:07.840 Robert Tseng: Oh, okay.
206 00:28:08.110 ⇒ 00:28:24.380 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: It was supposed to be the April 1st, but, like, literally just no one… everybody’s been digging their heels in, because no one wants this to happen, and so no one goes to the meetings for the transition, so that way they can… they think they can just dodge it, and that’s not how these things work, like, literally.
207 00:28:24.380 ⇒ 00:28:24.910 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
208 00:28:24.910 ⇒ 00:28:38.000 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: IT doesn’t care, they’re just gonna turn it on, and you’re gonna… and they’re not gonna pay your Rippling subscription. And then you’ll just… one day, you won’t have access to Rippling, but all of your staff will be wondering where their paychecks are. Yeah.
209 00:28:38.000 ⇒ 00:28:48.729 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: So anyways, anyways, the first payroll poll happens on April 1st, regardless if they want it to or not. So we’ve all put our billing information into UKG. So technically, the switch happened.
210 00:28:49.770 ⇒ 00:28:52.510 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Already, but…
211 00:28:53.120 ⇒ 00:29:04.029 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Yeah. How do we make it actually work for us in terms of, like, bringing those automations? That’s a rolling process. There’s a lot of questions…
212 00:29:04.980 ⇒ 00:29:21.449 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: about who’s gonna actually own the knowledge of what Rippling was capable of doing. Our HR person who was leading Rippling is actually going on maternity leave. Our maternity leave is really good, it’s like 6 months, so we’re just…
213 00:29:21.450 ⇒ 00:29:21.770 Robert Tseng: Wow.
214 00:29:21.770 ⇒ 00:29:38.780 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: not have that institutional knowledge for 6 months. And so, we have a head of HR, Lorraine Durrow. Lorraine is gonna be… is in charge of all of it, and Lorraine is gonna be kind of, like, the go-to person for all of this.
215 00:29:39.160 ⇒ 00:29:39.770 Robert Tseng: Okay.
216 00:29:39.950 ⇒ 00:29:42.860 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: But yeah, I don’t know, it’s gonna be a lot.
217 00:29:42.860 ⇒ 00:30:01.669 Robert Tseng: Yeah, I mean, not a bad timing-wise. I mean, not great that you’re… the person who knows everything is not there, but having someone stand in who’s really trying to wrap her head around everything, like, it’s a good time to, like, kind of do a partnership as well, because, like, we can really help accelerate her learning and, you know, whatever, she ends up… well, she’ll end up becoming the person to own it anyway.
218 00:30:01.790 ⇒ 00:30:02.699 Robert Tseng: Right, so…
219 00:30:02.700 ⇒ 00:30:04.530 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: It’s gonna be really smart, because…
220 00:30:04.920 ⇒ 00:30:11.360 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: My hope is she’ll immediately see redundancies, she’ll see… like, one of the things
221 00:30:12.140 ⇒ 00:30:17.540 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: that I’ve even challenged her on, and I know we’re about to go over time, so I’ll hang up in a sec, but one of the things.
222 00:30:17.540 ⇒ 00:30:18.180 Robert Tseng: No worries.
223 00:30:18.180 ⇒ 00:30:27.770 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: really quickly to help ground it, is she sent a request to our IT team, and she said, the new system you’re moving us to for vacation
224 00:30:28.250 ⇒ 00:30:33.570 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: requests. It doesn’t add vacations to Google Calendar automatically.
225 00:30:34.150 ⇒ 00:30:43.980 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: And she said, what are we gonna do is just ask people to make Google Calendar updates when they’re going on PTO? And I, like, wrote secretly to my boss, and I was like, that’s how everyone does it.
226 00:30:44.310 ⇒ 00:30:49.840 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Like, there’s literally no one who expects that their PTO gets added automatically.
227 00:30:50.400 ⇒ 00:31:10.289 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: by an automation to Google Calendar. Like, that’s just an expectation. It’s your job to let your team know you’re going on PTO. It’s not the job of Rippling. I mean, that’s what it… that’s the only… it was like, literally, that’s why we like Rippling, is because it adds Gmail and Google Calendar notifications? Anyways.
228 00:31:10.290 ⇒ 00:31:17.479 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: So that’s just, like, an example where it’s, like, we’re finding out all of these things about what people thought they really liked about the system, and it’s like.
229 00:31:17.710 ⇒ 00:31:18.640 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Yes.
230 00:31:18.920 ⇒ 00:31:22.990 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: The humans will have to alert their staff when they’re going on vacation.
231 00:31:23.110 ⇒ 00:31:26.879 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Next problem. Yeah. So that’s gonna be the word.
232 00:31:27.910 ⇒ 00:31:28.460 Robert Tseng: Okay.
233 00:31:28.850 ⇒ 00:31:38.270 Robert Tseng: I mean, I’d love to, you know, I know we’re out of time, so I want to see, you know, if you’d be comfortable, like, over email, we can be introduced to Lorraine. I’d like to pitch, kind of like a…
234 00:31:38.320 ⇒ 00:31:47.979 Robert Tseng: And maybe a sprint that we do is just to do feature parity with kind of what you had in Rippling. Obviously, there’s some accessory features that no longer are needed, always happens when you move off software.
235 00:31:48.010 ⇒ 00:32:11.080 Robert Tseng: But then, kind of along that… along that way, that’s like a discovery on the way for us to kind of figure out what is she actually… what’s the… what’s the bigger vision for what this, like, kind of command center, magenta workspace is going to look like. So, I feel like that gives us opportunity to really just kind of deliver some quick wins for you, while also, like, you know, you know, and you don’t have to field these types of, like, admin questions.
236 00:32:11.080 ⇒ 00:32:14.310 Robert Tseng: While we also can kind of, like, show you, like, the roadmap for, like.
237 00:32:14.350 ⇒ 00:32:31.450 Robert Tseng: what systems to actually bring together, and, you know, we’ve done this design process multiple times, so, you know, at least, like, we have, you know, a systems partner like you to kind of, like, run… run it by, and, like, you know, they may not be opinionated about how it should be, but, like, you would definitely need to kind of be the… sounds like you’re the champion for, like, how, like.
238 00:32:31.450 ⇒ 00:32:36.290 Robert Tseng: this stuff all fits together. So, I feel like those two people sound like
239 00:32:36.290 ⇒ 00:32:43.789 Robert Tseng: the heads that we need to have in the room in order to make something like this even happen. So, does that sound good for next step?
240 00:32:44.210 ⇒ 00:32:48.510 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Yep, absolutely. We are going to be meeting up again soon.
241 00:32:48.850 ⇒ 00:32:51.600 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: I have, like, weekly meetings about these topics.
242 00:32:51.600 ⇒ 00:32:52.180 Robert Tseng: Great.
243 00:32:52.180 ⇒ 00:32:58.429 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: the meeting with Lorraine has got pushed back because they freaked out, and they didn’t want to do the…
244 00:32:58.630 ⇒ 00:33:06.439 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: transition over to UKG, even though, like I said, it’s already happened. The just part that they care about isn’t on yet. But,
245 00:33:07.340 ⇒ 00:33:11.969 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: So let me have that meeting with her, and, like, get her…
246 00:33:12.550 ⇒ 00:33:26.060 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: feelings, and be like, alright, your person just went on maternity leave, like, where are you freaking out the most? And then I can, like, say, you know, I was just on a call, and there’s a solution ahead of us if we want to try it, and then we’ll take it from there.
247 00:33:26.800 ⇒ 00:33:36.180 Robert Tseng: Okay. Do you know when that call is with her, so we can just get you some stuff beforehand, just if you’re starting to talk about us, like, I could give you some material and some way that you can maybe… maybe frame it.
248 00:33:37.450 ⇒ 00:33:44.019 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: My assumption is… next week. Okay. Or the week after.
249 00:33:44.160 ⇒ 00:33:48.849 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: No later than April 10th, my boss is gonna be like, why did the meeting get canceled?
250 00:33:49.210 ⇒ 00:33:49.730 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
251 00:33:49.730 ⇒ 00:34:00.149 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: And I’m gonna be like, she canceled it because she’s freaking out, and he’s gonna be like, all the more reason for you to meet. And so let me do that meeting with Lorraine in the next week to two weeks, and then…
252 00:34:00.510 ⇒ 00:34:10.110 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: We can, get going on figuring… having you kind of, like, present a more formal, like, understanding of what you’d be able to accomplish with this?
253 00:34:10.219 ⇒ 00:34:24.900 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: With the grounding I’ll provide. I’ll provide to you what, kind of, the end-all, be-all goal is of what we wanted to do. As, like, a vision-setting thing, like, they just set our rocks for the rest of the year as a company, and, like, basically, like.
254 00:34:24.929 ⇒ 00:34:31.039 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: two of the rocks are basically just, like, movers and shakers will build two to three agentic workflows. So.
255 00:34:31.370 ⇒ 00:34:33.059 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: None of these can be one of those.
256 00:34:33.230 ⇒ 00:34:37.409 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: They’ll be really happy, because they can check a box. So yeah, we’ll talk.
257 00:34:38.389 ⇒ 00:34:44.479 Robert Tseng: Okay, that sounds great. Thank you so much for your time, Jeff, and yeah, look forward to catching up after the call.
258 00:34:44.870 ⇒ 00:34:46.849 Jeff MacDonald | Dir, Innovation and Technology: Likewise. Have a great rest of your day.
259 00:34:47.179 ⇒ 00:34:48.699 Robert Tseng: Alright, thank you guys.