Building Customer Loyalty Throughout the Journey feat. Brightline Trains CTO Kevin McAuliffe

Billie: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Room For Growth. Today you are in for a treat. I am not going to ramble on. You're going to get right to our guest because he has so much wisdom to share. Today we have the joy of talking to Kevin McAuliffe. He is the Chief Technology and Digital Innovation Officer at Brightline Trains. But his career is storied. It spans everywhere from Disney to Highlights magazine. He's worked in shopping mall chains called Justice that are sort of tween clothing. He's worked with some of the same mentors and advisors that I have, which is how we sort of sparked up a friendship. And then through the WillowTree partnership, we were lucky enough to work with Kevin as he implemented his first MVP for the Adobe enterprise platform technology stack that he's using, which involves CDP. And then, of course, some of their channel messaging technology and analytics as well. And we were lucky to get to bring some of that technology to market in less than three months, which in the Adobe space is a record speed. And then through that process, through that project and getting to know him, I've just had so much fun learning from him and learning sort of his tenets of customer loyalty, learning about how he thinks about leadership of people and how he sets processes and teams and technologies all on these great strategic paths together. So I think he has a ton of just nuggets of wisdom that are really brilliant about how to be innovative, and how to lead, and how to be a master of technology. While not sort of losing sight of the bigger picture while remaining human, while continuing to have a mission that you can really rally people behind. So I'm excited to talk to him today. I'm excited for you all to get to hear from him. So without further ado, let's introduce Kevin McAuliffe.

Kevin: Hello everybody. Welcome to the best portion of the Room For Growth podcast. I have Kevin McAuliffe with me today, and we will be talking about all things leadership, how to drive an engaged fan base, how to build true loyalty, and what it means to be in charge of innovation today. So, Kevin, welcome to the show. I'm glad you're here. Thanks for having me. It's been quite the challenge to get me, and I apologize for that. I'm so happy to finally make it for you.

Billie: Good things are worth the wait, you know?

Kevin: That's the best.

Billie: Well, Kevin, good to have you here. We have been friends for a while in a professional capacity, for sure. Particularly partnering together for some work with Brightline Trains. But before we dive too far into exactly what you're doing today, your title is Chief Technology and Digital Innovation Officer. But from your time at Justice, which is a tween brand in primarily shopping malls around America to Travel + Leisure, you have spent sort of the better part of two decades mastering what I think is an incredible feat, which is how do you leverage technology, marketing, brand, innovation to build a loyal fan base? I'm curious if you could just start by introducing yourself to us, tell us who you are, how you got to where you are today, and leading Brightline Trains.

Kevin: Yeah. So I'm Kevin McAuliffe. I'm the Chief Technology and Digital Innovation Officer with Brightline Trains in Florida. How I evolved was kind of a story in and of itself. I started as a guy who wanted to go play Major League Baseball and lost his baseball career and found a journalism career which found the internet, which found technology and process and product management and all sorts of things along this crazy path that you probably, most people want to have a predictable outcome for. And I had none of that. I just kind of winged it on many occasions. But, how I landed here is, I think I joke with, a lot of people about it, but I'm a complete failure. I think by embracing suck, embracing the idea of failing forward and making mistakes and learning from it. Listening, right, having your ears open, having your eyes wide open to not being right all the time and not being the smartest person in the room. I think it helps you surround yourself with great minds, great ideas, great people who know how to leverage the power of different things to activate different experiences for people. And it truly all goes back to, you know, my roots of playing as a team member on a diamond as a kid and learning the importance of being able to not be the only person on the field who knows how to play baseball. Right? Everybody knew how to play baseball. We all played together. We all put it together. And, even when you lose, you learn, right? And I think those are the the fundamentals that I've kind of built my base off of. And loyalty is really, I think personally as a consumer and personally as a, person who uses technology, like, I like to, to, to understand what's in front of me. I want it to be simple. I want to, you know, understand that the people that are providing it to me are listening and learning from my behavior. I want to know that when I complain, they hear it and they fix it. All of those things matter. And so I think it's a matter of who you work with, the people that you hire, it's about all the data that you collect. It's a matter of the technology you choose. It's a matter of the processes that you put in place. And it's all about building trust in all of that to have outcomes that feel trustworthy, consistent, and loyal to the guest. And I think that's that's as simple as you can make it. Like it doesn't have to be a platform or program or some SaaS solution. It has to be plain and simple. Provide your guests what they are asking for, when they want it, where they want it, how they want it, and it becomes a powerful tool of commerce. Right. So that's where I'm at building powerful tools of commerce.

Billie: Before we go too wild talking in particular about Brightline, will you give folks who are not in the Florida area or maybe aren't on the West Coast where ground is breaking, just a little bit of an overview of who Brightline Trains is and the mission y'all are on.

Kevin: Yeah. So we are the provider of the transportation where a flight is too short and a drive is too long. Where we are not Amtrak. We are trying to be green, and we're trying to be fast, and we're trying to be a lot of things to a lot of people. And, you know, Florida is the test bed of of this really amazing product of privatized rail that gets people where they need to go quickly, efficiently, safely. It's a collection of people who are passionate about train development, train usage, transportation evolution. It's a passion project for a lot of people, for a lot of different reasons. And the reason West Coast becomes something is because Florida proved that it could. It's a little train that spent a long time fighting for its ability to get on the rails and up the track, and into Orlando. And we've done it. And I think there are a lot of people who said, you can't, you won't, it'll never happen. And it did. Anfd now everybody wants a station, right? So I think that that bread and butter of Miami up to Orlando really enables our leadership team out west to be able to prove to people that train travel is a viable solution. And when you get Pete Buttigieg heading out west to talk about how infrastructure dollars are being spent in this day and age and that transportation can evolve and change, you get products like Brightline West, where you have privatized rail that will become bullet train like Europe that's running on electric, no biodiesel at that point. And it's super amazing to connect cities like Las Vegas and Rancho Cucamonga in California. And then you have places that need it, like Texas — Dallas, Houston. And, you know, all of the different areas around the nation that can utilize, high speed rail to get people to and from places that they may never have flown to or they may not want to drive. And really connecting cities differently in a way that's meaningful. So it's super exciting to be part of this project. It's an evolution of where I know train to be growing up in New York, on Amtrak and New Jersey Transit. But it's also like a level above on a product level, like it's such a cool product to work on.

Billie: Yeah. You just outlined a whole bunch of challenges that come when you are literally laying train tracks for high speed rail trains, and which is just something that, in terms of technological advancement in the US, is a major feat. But on top of that, you are also responsible for all of the MarTech, all of the digital experience that complements ultimately why your customers choose to book with Brightline. Tell me about some of the challenges that you're working on today around that side of the technology for Brightline.

Kevin: Yeah. It's interesting. When I got here, Brightline was trying to do a lot. They were trying to become not only a great train, but they were trying to connect people to the train, and they were trying to do everything autonomously and have markets where you can shop yourself and, you know, what we had to find was a balance between how much tech and digital runs your life versus what are you comfortable utilizing to make your your transportation seamless? Right. And the first thing I noticed when I got to Brightline when I took the train was the product is amazing, but the product to get on the product was disjointed and disconnected, right? So trying to figure out all the places where all that disparate technology sat and all the different connections and all the different code and all the things that made up all that noise. That was the thing that people saw before they got on this beautiful train. Right? Was our first, understanding of we have to dissect this and figure out how to simplify it. And so I think sometimes we go and get too complicated because there's so many systems that can do so many things, and you activate all these tools, but then your marketing team doesn't know what to do with it. Or you activate all these tools in your front line team doesn't know what to do with it. And so we put ourselves in a really cool position to lay out, while we ran a business — after Covid, we we came back in November of 2021 and we're running a business — we came in and we built a better customer journey. We mapped out what are those places and moments that are going to matter for our guest. We talked about what are the steps and the stages by which we're going to activate technology, people and processes, and data to go inform and to arm the future of where we're going to encourage the choices in the decision makers, to really put ourselves in a great space so that we can build trust along the journey to go do more. And we unlocked doors and closed other doors that were breaking the system. And as we evolved, we opened up tools and ideas and capabilities that our marketing teams couldn't do before or our business partners didn't have access to. And we've changed the way we do business where it used to be, the finger pointing of it's broken, it's broken, it's broken to how can I, where can I, when can I? And we were there all along the way to fix those moments that matter to our teammates, not just our guests. And we listen. We have listening posts where we listen to the data and we listen to the the feedback, and we listen to the NPS scores, and it all feeds into the machine. And so we've had to peel back a very complex onion, cry a whole bunch, and replace a lot of pieces to get ourselves to serverless, to all API-driven, all scalable platforms that enable us to take our enterprise solutions to the West Coast when they're ready for us. So it's been an exciting journey to re-envision and redevelop, but starting it with the guest experience first, thinking about what the guest wants, what the teammates need. That's where we started.

Billie: Speaking of just guest experience and how to get guest experience right. You have been on a mission to build customer loyalty across different industries, different types of experiences for a very long time. Everything from, as mentioned, tween clothing stores in malls for sort of premium clothing products, targeting that demographic to being a source of trust and truth for where you should travel and what leisure looks like and the future of it. What are some of the tenets that you have picked up about customer loyalty? What are the things that you really believe are critical to drive customer loyalty? And how can brands get better at building loyalty from their customers?

Kevin: Yeah, I think like, I think customers really just they have needs, right. And you got to meet them where their needs are. And I think sometimes we all think that we have to put this incredible amount of technology in front of them to solve problems. And sometimes it really does matter to listen. I think the interesting thing for me at JPMorgan, which is fintech and Walt Disney World, which is tourism, and everything in between: I learned a lot about what it means to listen to what's going on out in the field as you're evolving your technology stack and as you're launching your digital entities and your websites and all that stuff. I think if you're if you're blind to what's going on in the customer's experience, you start to get further and further away. The other thing is agility. Like, we don't launch 18-month projects anymore. We launch two week sprints of feature function and we learn from them as we go. We're looking at data every single time. Everything we launch comes with data. So, I think you fail when you try to do too much, too fast. When you try to bite off big bundles of things in, in such a long period of time, because by the time you meet the customer where they were, they've already moved to a different location to where you are not. And the expense of getting to that platform for it to fail is a huge mistake for every company. So what we found is this nice balance of let's pick moments that matters. We call them MVP. Some people don't like that terminology. For us it's launching something, getting a reaction and then having a way to react to that reaction in a positive or negative way. It doesn't matter to us. We now know how to evolve using data and using feedback and using all of the tools that are in front of us to enable change in a controllable fashion. And it says a lot about the people you surround yourself with. Like, I have people who have done more than I have ever expected of them, even though I told them I'm like, I want this from you, right? They're doing more because we gave them the right attitude, the right empowerment, the right tool sets, and the right collaboration environment to go listen and learn and change in such a way that it's not reactive anymore. It's very proactive, even though it is constant and it's continuous development. Right. So it's been exciting to know where the customer is all the time because we're listening to them and we hear them and we want to evolve with them. We don't want to be ahead of them. We don't want to be behind them. We want to be with them, and we want them to be with us. And I think that builds a lot of trust and relationship that you lose when you try to just anticipate where it's going or try to be something that you're not or like, perfect example, we tried to do mobility. We tried to take people onto a trip to the station so that they get to the station and they get on the train and they leave and they get on in another Uber and they leave. But we had somebody in the middle of that that we didn't control, but we took the blame for it. And when we took that out and we just gave them a connection to Uber, which they already have on their phone, it tampers down the complaints and the concerns because now it's an Uber conversation. It's not a Brightline conversation. We gave them a connection to Uber. We built the relationship with Uber for them so that they don't have to think about it. But we run a train, really damn well, and that train is where our focus is having somebody figure out how to get to and from us? That is something that we're going to, you know, kind of give you the tools to help you with. But we shouldn't solve that problem. We should solve making sure that everything about that train ride is fantastic and that it lives up to your expectations. And that means partnering with the right partners to get you to and from, but letting them do that job because they do it best, right? I don't drive Uber cars, right? I don't run Uber. So building that relationship and having that connection tissue is part of the world people live in. But it's not the part that I want to manage. So that's an example of that.

Billie: I think that's a great example, and I love how pragmatic you are around technology. You know, we spend so much time exploring the challenges of building this like repeat fan base, this loyal fan base. I'm curious where you think so many brands get this wrong, and particularly where CTOs get this wrong, where they under leverage or overindex on various types of technology to get these jobs done, that you lay it out like pretty simple when you explain it. It sounds so easy.

Kevin: But yeah, I think I think CTOs inherit a lot of things, right? I think depending on where you are in time, you're dealing with different systems, mainframes and different types of installations of SaaS software and different types of environments where things are disparate. Like at T+L there's a whole ecosphere of different things that still have to be reconnected. And it's not an easy job to be able to reconstruct and do. It's expensive. It's time consuming. And there is bureaucracy in a publicly held company. I think the benefit that I've had, and the luck that I've lived in the last couple of years, is I worked for a privately held company where I've been given the opportunity to go make a difference and make a change and make a transformation. I've been given the toolset and the power with the empowerment for my boss and my peers to go, represent them in terms of listening to what their requirements are, what their questions are, what their business needs are, and also pairing that to the guest experience and then building it from scratch. And I think, you know, everybody's situation is different, but not everybody-- You don't have to come in and and shake everything up. There are instances like we did at T+L where we built a little bit of a digital agency that evolves certain parts of the business that were meaningful to the business, that showed how we could run Agile, how we could run projects differently, how we could install software as a service like Adobe in a way that was meaningful to the company, meaningful to the guest, and meaningful to the marketing, and drove the business forward without really having to reinvent the entire wheel. Now, where you get into trouble is you still have disparate systems that aren't connected. I'm lucky in that we have a 360-degree view of the customer, because we built everything from the base up, from data up, and we got all the noise out of the way. So because I have all that data now, I can make decisions and learn really quickly about what's going on because all my systems are in one space. That's just something that people have to overcome. And I think it's again, it's surrounding yourself with the right people, having the right wins, convincing your leadership that those wins are meaningful enough to go after more wins. And I think it's sometimes it has to be the long game. Sometimes for us it was a shorter game, which is fantastic. Now we get to go move on to loyalty platforms and gift card platforms and things that are going to take us up to the next level besides just booking paths, you know.

Billie: Totally. Yeah. And I think that iterative, that ability to have an iterative roadmap where you say what's critical, what's next, what's next, what's next is sometimes the challenge in itself. But. Interestingly, you have innovation in your title. I'm curious how you feel about sort of the state of innovation today, but if I had a hunch it's that you might feel like you are on a bit of an island, because at least in my perception, we are just not in a great moment for innovation. The economy is pretty terrible. The white collar job market is poor, so people are either experiencing layoffs or having trouble kind of moving. And the talent pool at the moment is in a strange place. The investment in startups is down, and then AI is sort of dominating every conversation as this proxy for innovation, where often what we're talking about with AI and machine learning are, automation tactics or personalization tactics that have really been around for quite a long time. They're just being re masked with a much more expensive, and shiny cover. But I'm curious how you feel about innovation today and how you build a culture of innovation when innovation is low.

Kevin: Yeah, innovation is a really loaded term. It's like, I always joke, like, we used to build websites, and now we build, like, these digital experiences, right? Like, I mean, it's the same thing. We're building websites, right? But at the end of the day, innovation to me is you know, really keeping a pulse on where your guest and your customer is going to be and where they want to be and how they're evolving their life in technology. I think keeping people around you that are eager to learn and constantly trying to consume information around them that makes them better, that makes them want for more. Having partnerships that are encouraging you to tap into beta programs and be on their board so that they can talk to you about opportunities that may not be ready, but may be something you want to tap into to see if your team can get their heads wrapped around it and break it, and do a couple of things there, that that you wouldn't have access to if you didn't have good partners like that. So I think innovation to me is embracing the idea that you're never done learning, right? You're never done evolving. You're never done changing, and you're always in motion and being comfortable that you're never done for the customer. The customer's always going to want for more. And so, we we have teammates who are, maybe they've never, ever worked in digital before. But we saw something in them that made them really think about something differently. And we love that idea. And so we encouraged that idea. And so I think things like hack days and, getting your teammates involved in projects that they're not comfortable with or that they've never worked on before, or pushing people into, parts of the business that they may not have, they may not have experienced. Like my leadership team, they should all know P&Ls pretty well. They should all know how to negotiate pretty well. But not all of them have had access to major contract negotiations and things like that. Having them along the way helps them get better about understanding the technology you choose, understanding the questions to ask, understanding how to push your partners for more, for less, for more out of them, not to pay more for it. And I think, I joke, but my favorite price in every conversation with negotiations is: free. That's my favorite price. Like I want like I want my partners to be as invested in innovation as I am because I want to be on the cusp of where they're going, not behind the eight ball. And a lot of times you get caught behind the eight ball. So innovation is a weird place for me. I think, you know, it's in the title. It's a weird title. It's like this really long title that means nothing other than I have a lot of responsibility to the guest to keep their experience where they are on their devices, their iPads, their phones, their desktops, their laptops, and ensuring that our teammates are equipped to handle any and all situations that may arise. The innovation is really about how far you want to push it, how hard you want to push it, how fast you want to push it, and how much I want to go fight for the budgets to go continue to extend. Like our strategy this year had ten things on it from last year that we completed last year because we got everything else done. And now we have 20 new things on it this year. And next year, we have a bunch of things that we want to go do, and that's going to change ten times to Sunday by the time we get to the end of the year. Because we're looking at what we're doing, we're learning from what we deployed. We're making decisions on that. That's not that important anymore. This is where, you know, where our guest is. So let's go to that. That's how we work our system. It just enables us to to be proactive in the conversation versus reactive, which I think being proactive is being innovative, right?

Billie: Yeah. I love this idea that so much of what innovation is just sits at the core belief in the embrace that customers are going to constantly change. And in that change, there's an opportunity to continuously meet their needs. And by simultaneously taking the teams that are working on meeting those needs and putting them a little bit through the wringer of learning and change and understanding the business and frankly, reconnecting with customers in unique and interesting ways on a continuous basis. And then, of course--.

Kevin: One more note on that, right? So our team started very small with a lot of vendors. We now have a bigger team, because we have different disciplines now. And we have an offshore entity for our development house. Our product teams have evolved from like blobs of work, in one big lump of let's deploy every two weeks to. We now have vertical structures that are towers where there's disciplines around specific function. And now those teams all have iOS, Android, AEM [Adobe Experience Manager], and QA and other representation along with product, program management, project management, and all of that stuff means we're getting more for the bang on the buck, right? Whereas before we had one big lump sum, now we know how to work together and merge code. And as we keep evolving that we can now take feature functions into categories. And focus on back end or focus on commerce and focus on front end. And now you're getting more out the door every two weeks because you've built the confidence in the team and the structure, and they're knocking more things off the list. So you're getting further and further ahead, right on your punch list. And you're closer and closer to always having your pulse on where the next thing is versus always being 20 releases behind the thing that you want to get out the door.

Billie: Yeah, but if I weren't careful, Kevin, hearing you, you are good at saying, let's put this in smaller bites, smaller slices, smaller sprints. Let's break everything down to just like, what's the critical priority, what's critical, what's critical. But I think the risk of that and perhaps this is, you know, partially a privilege of working in a private company versus a public one. But my perception is that we generally live in a time where finding long term strategy is really hard. And generally when I look at company roadmaps and what their strategic plan is for the next year or two, three, five, sometimes it makes sense and sometimes it's just a lot of shiny objects or a lot of reactionary pivots to things that don't necessarily need the time and attention that they're getting. I'm curious for you, how do you make sure that you balance kind of plan and execute for the long term and create alignment and vision and strategy over that long term versus sort of this like short-term reactionary change?

Kevin: Yeah, I think there's -- I'm working for a company where there's a lot of different groups that are evolving at different paces, right? Because they've come up and they're growing in different stages. At some point we'll probably all be at the same stage. But, we're in year two of a 3- to 5-year plan, of where we're going to go launch things. Now that's changing because we launched AEP [Adobe Experience Platform] and we're a year into AEP, but our teams are still learning how to use email, to deploy emails. We're not at SMS, we're not at notifications. We're not at a few different things that I think we could be at. But if I decided to just throw another thing out there, we would be even further behind because they haven't embraced really how to build segments and to automate and to do a lot of things in that tool. So we're going to go backwards a little bit and help them really get their chops built up around how to use that tool and put some smarts behind it so that they can catch up a little bit so that by the time of the end of the year comes when we say, alright, now we're going to activate an SMS program or a notification program from marketing. Now they know how the basics work in AEP to trigger opportunities to build automation and segmentation and activation in that tool and then can then be utilized for SMS and notifications, not just email and on-site. So it's a matter of keeping a pulse on not only your customer, but also where your business partners are and how they're utilizing the technology that you install. And constantly honing it and then making adjustments to that three year plan. My three year plan can be I can go out ten years if I want to. It's all bells and whistles at that point. Like it's I'm you know, I might have a flying train by then for Christ's sake. So I don't I don't know what that looks like. Right. But at the end of the day, my charge is: let's look at where we are, let's think about where we want to be. And if we don't get there, that's okay, we have other things that we're going to keep doing. But then there's also the innovation isn't just in how we're delivering major features. The innovation is how are we getting better at managing our DevOps? How better are we at making sure that we have no live sites? How better we reacting at issues that arise? How better we are implementing serverless and using AWS tools and really actively monitoring our web experiences, our app experiences, our experiences in general to know when things break before they break. And I think the innovation is not just in the idea of building these big, bold new ideas. It's about how do you operationalize, how do you really work hard to think about new ways of building better tools that drive your cost down, your efficiencies up, and your skill set beyond belief? I think those are all play into your innovation, and all play into your roadmap. And sometimes, you know, you get a couple of things that get in the way of that and you have to readjust. And I think that's the important part, being able to have the ability to say, okay, I need to take a pause. I need to see where we are. I need to evaluate what we want to go do and go do some of the things that we may not want to do right now, but we have to do in order for us to get to that next level and then readjust that calendar and push it out even further. It also comes with, you might not have the money, you might not have the ability to hire people. You said it, like there's inflation issues. There's financial impacts to that. There's people laying off, not hiring. There's a lot of things going on in this world where you can't predict where you're going to be and your company is, but when you hit that space and you're predictable, you can make better judgments to keep your people safe, to keep your processes safe, to keep your product safe, and your guests safe, if you're not getting too far ahead of yourself and overhiring and overspending and doing all those things. So I think all those things balance out. And it's all in the in the idea of strategy and positioning and thinking long term. But knowing that short term is where you have to quarterly, weekly, monthly, however you want to do it, keep a bead on it so that when when the time comes to make hard decisions, the hard decisions are just pushing people back like contractors out a little bit, or putting a project off, not having everything on top of you, that then you have to make cuts. That's the hard part, right?

Billie: Yeah. I love that idea of understanding what's the mission we're on. And then how do we break this into the smallest pieces possible, and even understanding what are those milestones for movement and action? Perhaps at the risk of speaking a little bit outside of both sides of my mouth, I would be remiss if I didn't ask you a chief technology and innovation officer about AI and machine learning. So let's talk about where Brightline is at in terms of readiness to harness the efficiency-driving, the personalization-improving, and the operational impacts of AI and machine learning. So first of all, one of the things I know about Brightline is that, Kevin, you invested a ton of time, effort and money into building a really good foundation for data and for technology, and I'd love to understand more how you did that and how you did it as fast as you did, so that you kind of have these good building blocks in place. But then second, where are you seeing opportunities to leverage AI and machine learning, and what advice would you give to other businesses just kind of grappling with this today?

Kevin: Yeah. The starting point for us was, bad code, bad partners, bad data. Right. Those three things came to a head and everything broke. And the report that every executive was getting every day, that was broken anyway, that they didn't realize, it was just data. That gave me the ability to go put a team together to go focus on fixing data. And so we started by looking at the tools that existed, the ones that we had. So we had Fivetran where we brought data in, Databricks where we cleansed it, and then Power BI where we visualized it. Those tools were kept. We hired the right people. So I brought in people that I know who are very good at architecting and engineering data. And then we set out and we fixed the data that was broken, and we started to showcase how different it was than the data that used to be in the reporting and how reporting isn't really the problem, because anybody could throw something in a report. It's about consistency and clarity and cleanliness and, you know, really understanding what the data is and how important the data is to activation. And so we started building. Data was a product. Data is now a service. We have a whole series of access points for our business partners to go get data to do their own reporting, to do their own analysis, to understand what that data is for, why it's there, how it impacts day to day, business decisions and how it activates in other ways. And so once we got the data right, we started looking at like, AI has been out there, everybody's talking about it. Everyone wants to use ChatGPT. Everybody wants to have their emails written for them. Everybody wants to dump data into something and put it in the cloud and hope it spits something out. And you know, my first fear in using AI and ML is the security and the data breach aspects of things. So when people are taking data outside of the company and using tools like ChatGPT, what they don't realize even on Google and others, it gets consumed into the larger brain. And that asset is now not your asset anymore. It's others' assets. So we've locked down external use of ChatGPT internally from a security perspective. Now we're testing Copilot because we're a Microsoft shop. So we're using Copilot to test with certain people in the business. And we'll roll that out so people can write their emails and build their strategies and do all sorts of things. But now it's contained. But every single software service that we put into play, Adobe, Databricks, you name it, everything that we use, HAFAS, HACON, Siemens, Sqills, everything. Everything has a backbone by which data, in some way, shape or form, is powered by AI in one way, shape, or form. Now, how do we unlock it? How we test it, how we use it? Adobe's a big one. How we turn those things on again. I'll go back to my last piece. If I turn it on too soon, everybody's head will fall off. Because they want it, but they don't know how to use it. They don't know what to do with it. They don't know how to embrace and harness the power. So what we're trying to do is, experiment a little bit in different ways. Databricks, our data engine, we sat down with them. They've got some cool engines that will help us take the data that we have in the database, and instead of reporting it in Power BI as a line, giving our consumers, our business partners, the ability to use AI in a chat simulator to pull data out based on the questions that they ask. So informative toolsets that enable people to ask all the wild questions that they ask because they're all like in teams. Hey, what about this? Oh, I forgot to ask you about this. And now you give them a tool that they can do that. And the data is all in a database and it pulls itself out. Adobe: we're looking at how to utilize betas through Adobe to activate AI in AEP. And we're partnering up with Adobe. And then by by default, working with people like Best Buy and Caesars and all those other Adobe partners to learn from each other and how to implement it the right way and do it responsibly and give our teammates the tools with knowledge of how to use them, not just turn something on and hope it works for the best, right? So I think it's fantastic. I think it's exciting. I think it's scary as hell. But it's our responsibility to make sure people understand that it is scary as hell. It can be dangerous. And not dangerous in terms of like the robots are taking over, but dangerous in terms of protecting your IP, right? Protecting your product, protecting your guest, and protecting the information that you spent so much time collecting and putting in a place that's secure, that could easily leak itself out to the market. I mean, AT&T just had a breach. There's a whole bunch of things out there where people are getting hacked. We have to be as concerned about how to protect our guests and our teammates and our product as we are about how to utilize and power and harness this AI and ML. So I'm at the beginning stages of where I want to go, but I'm at the right place because every tool that we install has AI built into it. How we use it? It's going to be up to us. How we test it is going to be up to us. How we roll it out is going to be up to us, and we're going to do it in the right way, at the right time, for the right reasons. And my suggestion to everybody is don't just trust it. Test it. Try it. Ask a lot of questions. Hold people accountable to what it's supposed to do. And don't just assume it's going to do what you think it's told to be the outcome, right? So I think I think if we're all responsible about how we go about using it, we can do it in a way that makes our guests lives better, our employees lives better, and doesn't harm our business property and our world at large.

Billie: Totally. I love this really clear eyed leadership view of sort of safety first, and then we'll figure out how to play with something that could be fire. Fire is a powerful force for both good and also destruction, if you're not careful.

Kevin: Listen, they told me as a contractor when I was a kid trying to make some money on the side that I can, you know, play with wires and hook up stuff. And I got shocked like 6 or 7 times pretty good. And guess what? I didn't want to be an electrician after that. So not everybody should be touching the wires. So I think there's a lot of things, you got to define roles and responsibilities in all this too, right? And you have to define governance. And I think what we're trying to figure out is at that layer of governance to say, okay, you're a certified electrician, you're not going to — every once in a while you may, you know, zap yourself — but you're not Kevin who got electrocuted every time you opened the wires up.

Billie: Totally. Yeah. I'm just picturing, you. Absolutely zapped.

Kevin: Someone tackling me from the side of the road, yeah.

Billie: Okay, Kevin. Last one. Let's just talk a little bit about leadership. You and I come from kind of a shared philosophy. We've had a shared advisor in our lives who's passed down some good wisdom to us. We can talk a little bit more about that if we have time. But the sort of core philosophy that the job of a leader is to raise up new leaders. So I'm curious how you spot future leaders in your teams and how do you help raise them, and how do you hold them accountable?

Kevin: Yeah, that's a great question. I am a guy who, you know, it's about relationships, right? I think for me, if I can have a good conversation with you, and we can find some commonality and find some ways to challenge each other and respect each other and be responsible to those interactions. I think that's like an indicator to me. So, like, when I interview people I don't like, there's not like a big light and I'm not like grilling you. It's a conversation. If I can't have a conversation with you, that's a starting point for me that won't evolve. And maybe that's a little hasty sometimes because you only have a minute to talk to some people, but like people who are eager and open and honest, genuinely can have a good conversation. And I think part of my Spidey sense is from living in New York, I can read some people sometimes. Sometimes I, you know, I've been away from New York a long time, so I've lost a little bit of my Spidey senses. But, you get a gut feeling about people. You get the idea based on who they are representing themselves in front of you that that they're they're eager to learn and grow and change. I believe in this though: I did not become a leader until people that I led became a leader themselves. And you can see it. So, one of my people at Disney, she went on to become a leader. And you saw it. You saw it in terms of how people responded to her. You saw it in terms of how people responded to her ideas and her ability to get stuff done, her ability to clear the blocks, to move people around. When she became that person, the stuff that I instilled in her, the stuff that we worked on, the stuff that we talked about, it came to fruition because she now represented — it's kind of like passing it on. Like I have had coaches in baseball that taught me stuff that if I taught it today, it would still stand true. It doesn't matter how you sit in the box and hit a ball. Doesn't matter if you spin the bat a lot. There's fundamentals that I learned from coaches over time that if I taught that today, kids would be great baseball players, right? And I believe that they, all the guys that I grew up with playing ball, they're all coaches now for a reason, right? Because they understood not only how to listen and learn and grow and change and take advice and take hard criticism. They became better teammates. They became better ballplayers. And then they evolved because they love the game so much to become leaders, coaches. And then they teach people how to become coaches themselves because that's a path. Same thing with teachers, right? I do believe, though, like you cannot claim ownership of leadership until you've taught somebody something that they actually enact. And leading from the front matters to me, like setting an example, rolling up your sleeve, doing the shit that that is hard as much as doing the stuff that is easy, right? Showing your teammates that you are with them all the time, whether you're on their on the call at night, at 2:00 in the morning on a release, or just sending out a really nice thank you note the next morning to say "I appreciate you and what you do and how you achieve it." But clearing their blocks, getting them the tools they need, making sure that they have the budgets, making sure that you're protecting them from the world around us. Like in Covid, we didn't lose one person on our team at T+L, because we made decisions going into Covid that said, don't spend this money, don't hire these roles, say goodbye to these contractors and let's keep our team intact so we don't have to do anything about it, right? That's leadership. Making sure that you're thinking ahead, making sure that you've got their backs, making sure that you're thinking about all the things that could go wrong to protect them from all that noise and not giving them any worry about it along the journey, just letting them do their best and empowering them to be their best. And then they become their best selves. And leadership is one of the most important things for me as a leader, because I've had bad leaders in the past, and sometimes that really impacts you. And I vowed not to be a bad leader. And sometimes, like, you're not sure about it, but the team that came with me here to Brightline has come with me to T+L from Disney. I've worked with them at Disney, I've worked with people that come back to work for more because I feed their need to grow and learn and change, not because I'm some great leader. It's because I'm giving them the opportunity to become their best selves every single day. And that floats my boat every morning. Waking up to do a job is just a job. Waking up and seeing their eyes wide open because they've got the ability to go represent us at a conference for Adobe or AWS or something else like that is a meaningful moment, right?

Billie: Totally. Yeah. I'm with you as somebody who likewise started my career in sports, like grew up doing sports, grew up as part of teams, and then all through college I was part of that community. I like your analogy where it's important to understand how to be a good teammate, how to be a good coach, how to be a good cheerleader if you're going to be really managing that entire development practice because each of those roles, as a leader, you need to know how to lean into each one. And then I would just add, like being able to find one of the things I love, I love that you're good at first impressions. I think I'm not. I think I'm terrible at first impressions, and I often get them wrong. And people I end up loving...

Kevin: I may be wrong, I may think I'm just really good at it, but just be terrible at it.

Billie: Yeah I think I like, trust my Spidey senses and then people prove me wrong all the time. People who I'm like, oh, I'm not going to, you know, I'm not going to enjoy this person. I end up just absolutely loving. So I learned to check my bias. So the thing I look for now is when do I see somebody's magic come to life? Early in our like working together time. Like, how long does it take for me to see the thing about them that's just so special, and how to harness that and turn that into something.

Kevin: I think that's a great call out. You can take a moment that is not so crazy exciting to anybody else, but make it a moment for that person. We do a lot of things in configurations. Nobody gives a shit about configurations. I apologize for cursing on your podcast. I'm bringing the level down. I apologize for that. But at the end of the day, the idea that somebody spent time thinking about how to make something better and configuring it differently to make it more optimal, right? That is as important as a beautiful image that's sitting on top of your homepage that somebody created. And they're different entities and different mental spaces, but they all require some care and feeding. And when you care and feed, people respond to that. I'll go back to my baseball days. I was a pitcher. I wanted to be on the mound. But you can't pitch every day. You have a responsibility to your batterymates, right? One day, you have to keep the book, one day you have to count pitches, one day you're out in the bullpen watching somebody's back. The other day you're isolated and running laps after you throw. And the next day you throw. And when you're on the mound, you're on the mound with with your buddies on the field and your guys on the sideline. It's never anything different. There's not a lot of isolation, except when you're running around the field watching the game, and you hate your life because you have to run 20 laps, 30 laps, 40 laps to get your legs in shape, right? But it's all for the betterment of the team. If you learn from the starting point that you're never too good to do something, right? You don't learn how to work with people, and people don't see how good you can work with them, and so you miss out on the opportunity to be on somebody's side. I never talk about things in terms of, "I'm in front of you," even though I like to lead from the front. It's about being behind them, pushing them forward, and showing them how, and being at their side. That's part of leadership. That sports thing really does tie back for me, because it was such a meaningful 20 years of my life — of being in dugouts and being on fields and being with other people in vans for four hours while you're riding to a game, talking about strategy, talking about how to how to get the best out of each other. That's that's my philosophy.

Billie: Not to mention.. Let's just do a straight call out to Scott Bracale. He's a guy who we've both worked with. He has a tool that he likes called "Personalysis." It is a basic color analysis of people. There are many that are just like it, where it essentially groups people into somebody who's a high action red versus a numbers driven, open-ended, likes to explore blue, versus communicative, likes-to-talk-it through yellow, and then a very process-driven, detail-driven green. I used to think that this stuff was all malarkey, but when you put it in a team perspective and start to think about how you actually need every one of those roles, and if you're missing people who have different preferences and ways of working in ways that they sort of shine to fill — not just the sidelines, but who's on the field, who is leading — your team will miss something. I have found that as a helpful framework for recognizing biases and teams and recognizing gaps and thinking as a way of rounding. I'm curious if you use these assessments for anything still?

Kevin: I haven't used them in a while. I think every every one that I've taken, I've come out unsurprised about what my results are. I think the biggest thing for me is sometimes, you can get... It's almost typecast for a specific outcome. And I think the thing that I've learned — maybe it goes back to how I got fired at Highlights Magazine. I never expected it to happen. I didn't. We were performing. I didn't know why. And, you know, trying to kind of figure out, did I fit? Did I push too hard? Did I, you know... Was I not a good team player in that space? Was I trying to shove technology where technology didn't want to be? I did a test there. It gave me a specific outcome and said I would fit in in this specific way. I was at a moment in my career where I wanted to accelerate things and push things, and maybe I pushed too hard. There's a temperament of "what's in you is what's in you." What's going to come out on those tests are going to come out on those tests. I think you embrace who you are. Be yourself, but know that your self is always growing and changing in that it's not just the results that matters. It's how you fit your piece into the puzzle of all the other pieces that you're working with. That's been a a growth thing for me. I used to be, "I'm right. I'm doing it. This is it." As a 20 year old, 25 year old. And now I'm a 50 year old and I'm like, "Okay, but I hear what you're saying and I see what you're saying, and I think there's some value in this. Let's pull this together and let's have a conversation about how we can take it to the next level." I think that is the sweet spot. I joked about it at Adobe Summit about chocolate and peanut butter coming together. I'm allergic to peanut butter, but I used to, as a kid, take peanut butter and chocolate and put it together because it tastes so good. I would just take a allergy medicine to cure myself because I just wanted that taste. But the magic of of leadership is the magic of putting the right people in the right room to develop the right things and cool innovations and different ideas. It could be the same idea, just a result that's different than anybody expected. But I think what Scott's goal was with the personality stuff at Tween was to find all these... We used to call them purple squirrels, right? Find all these different, innovative, smart people and find a way to put them all together in a really nice way to develop a great culture and a great product and a great outcome. You can't go wrong trying to figure out how to bring the right people into your business to go develop it. You know, we joke about it a lot, but all of those moments where I took those tests, you learn something about yourself and you go, "That's not me." But then it is you. You just have to figure out how you want to evolve that to be your best self.

Billie: And surround yourself with people who are good at things you're not and appreciate that.

Kevin: Listen, I wouldn't be where I'm at right now, if I couldn't work with the people that I work with today... My leadership team makes me who I am because they are outstanding, courageous, proud, hardworking learners and doers. We get shit done because they are unafraid to to tackle problems and tackle ideas and to do things that I'm asking them to do that nobody else probably would ever ask them to do. It's who you know, who you surround yourself. Even this relationship, Billie, with WillowTree. WillowTree has made me a better person because of the things that come from each and every person that we work with at WillowTree. I think there's a piece of us, that's still waiting to come out, and it's just a matter of who you get to connect with to get it out of you, right? You have to learn those lessons and learn those things in your maturity. But if you open up your mind, you can be a lot of things to a lot of people in and meaningful to them — not just a passing ship in the night.

Billie: I love it, Kevin. We have you for about 30 more seconds before we have to release you to what I'm sure is another meeting of the day. But on this quest, on this podcast, we always end with the same question, which is... We spend so much time talking about brand loyalty and how to build it. So I want to know, which brand are you truly loyal to and why?

Kevin: All right. So I have a little bit of an obsession over baseball hats. I am very loyal to a company called baseballism.com, and I get my fill of monthly hats. "Surprise and delight" moment hats. Everything from, you know, minor league baseball to professional baseball to, quirky Easter hats and Saint Patty's Day hats. I have a hat for every holiday. That's a baseball reference. It's ridiculous. But baseballism, I earn loyalty points. Which doesn't mean it doesn't add up to a ton, but they respect me. They send me a thank you note every time I purchase something. It is a relationship that I have, and they know me because every time I'm hankering for another beautiful baseball lid, they ping me on email and they're like, dude, we got the hat for you. And so that's my obsession. But you know, brands that I use. I built the Chase mobile app with a team back in the day. I still use Chase today because it's loyal... It's consistent, trustworthy, and I have everything in it. I use that all the time. Things like AmEx and Amazon and those brands are part of the fiber of my life. But baseball is... I should have worn a hat today. I have a closet full of hats. I'll show you some of my hats one day.

Billie: We'll have to do a closet tour.

Kevin: I  have to clean my closet before I take you on a tour, but for sure, I'll show you my 800 hats.

Billie: Okay, when I'm back with "WillowTree Cribs."

Kevin: Yeah, that sounds good. "WillowTree Cribs." That's awesome.

Billie: Hey, Kevin, thank you so much for being with us today. This was super fun. Worth the wait, as mentioned. And thank you for sharing so much advice.

Kevin: Yeah, thanks for being patient and persistent in getting me on here. I really do enjoy talking about this stuff, so I appreciate the time and energy. It's always great to have a conversation with Billie.