What does it take to unlock capital in a system full of red tape, landmines, and outdated institutions? In this episode of The Value Creators Podcast, Hunter Hastings is joined by Dave Kotter, CEO of Integrity Capital and founder of the Hybrid Debt Fund. Dave pulls back the curtain on commercial real estate financing, innovative lending structures, and how technology—especially AI—is transforming capital flows.
From high-net-worth investors to B2B borrowers, Kotter explains why relationships are the key product, not interest rates. He shares how Integrity Capital designs financing that works for the future—faster, more flexible, and centered on the entrepreneur.
Key insights include:
How to unlock capital through advisory-based lending models
How debt innovation is reshaping the role of banks
How AI, alternative platforms, and decentralization are democratizing investment
Whether you’re raising funds, deploying capital, or building a financing venture, this is an essential guide to value creation in the modern financial ecosystem.
Entrepreneurs seeking debt capital often default to banks without exploring better options.
Integrity Capital serves entrepreneurs as a centralized access point to those other smarter lending options.
This advisory lending service opens doors that would otherwise remain closed.
2. Simplicity Wins in a Complex World
Commercial real estate financing is filled with nuance and variation.
Kotter’s mission is to reduce friction through clarity and experience.
Strategic simplicity earns client trust and facilitates execution speed.
3. Value Creation Starts with Proactive Structuring
Most loans fail because risks weren’t properly anticipated upfront.
Kotter’s team identifies “landmines” before they explode.
Strategic foresight turns complexity into competitive advantage.
4. Valuation Is a Deal-Maker—or Breaker
Appraisal mismatches can kill a deal.
Integrity Capital works with clients to prepare valid valuation narratives.
Micro-market realities must guide macro-level assumptions.
5. Every Deal Is Personal and Hyper-Customized
There’s no “one-size-fits-all” in real estate lending.
Institutional wisdom—developed through experience—adds unseen value.
Success depends on seeing what others miss.
6. Hybrid Debt: The Best of Debt and Equity
The Hybrid Debt Fund offers higher leverage with equity-like upside.
Borrowers can avoid raising excess equity while keeping control.
Investors gain steady returns with participation in profits.
7. Relationships Are the Real Product
Deals succeed or fail based on people, not just terms.
Kotter emphasizes matching the right people to the right capital.
The role of facilitator is as much human as financial.
8. AI Is Transforming Underwriting and Efficiency
AI tools speed up due diligence and eliminate bottlenecks.
Kotter’s team built proprietary AI systems to rate deals in minutes.
Automation reduces overhead while improving response time.
9. Innovation in Financial Services Is Just Beginning
Antiquated processes like SBA lending are ripe for disruption.
Fintech is democratizing investment and removing gatekeepers.
Custom-built tools challenge legacy institutions to evolve or lose relevance.
10. Rolling Recession Demands Adaptive Strategy
Kotter sees today’s market as a “rolling recession,” not a binary one.
Cycles are inevitable—resilience comes from reflection and realignment.
Hard times are opportunities for relationship-building and innovation.
11. Democratization of Capital Is Accelerating
Access to alternative investments is no longer exclusive to elites.
Technology allows individuals to participate with as little as $25K.
Legacy institutions face existential pressure from agile upstarts.
12. Strategy Must Precede Technology
Tools like AI and CRMs must follow clear strategic intent.
Executives must define needs before adopting solutions.
Discernment—not shiny software—is the real competitive edge. The human factor remains the most important.
https://hunterhastings.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/The-Value-Creators-Podcast-Episode-66-Florencia.png9162560Hunter Hastingshttps://hunterhastings.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/hh-logo-blk.svgHunter Hastings2025-06-27 17:40:002025-06-27 17:40:01The Value Creators Podcast Episode #66. Financing the Future: Private Debt, Capital Access, and Entrepreneurial Lending Innovation with Dave Kotter
Entrepreneurial leaders are focused on value for others, especially customers and colleagues. They deliver through innovation, which is the implementation of a better future for those customers and colleagues. This outer-directed focus must start from a place of trust, clarity, and purpose. A place Jim Murphy calls Inner Excellence.
Jim Murphy is a high-performance coach and author of Inner Excellence. Drawing from his years coaching elite athletes, Jim shares the spiritual and mental tools that allow leaders to transcend fear, train presence, and perform with joy. This is a masterclass in leading from the inside out.
Key insights include:
Why your thoughts are not you—and how to gain freedom from them
How to surrender control to unlock courage and creativity
The business case for training your heart, not just your mind
Inner Excellence isn’t about perfection—it’s about joy. And it starts in the one place most of us avoid: within.
Ego clings to image, past failures, and fear of rejection.
True growth requires surrendering ego to embrace possibility.
The more selfless you become, the more fearless you get.
4. Presence Replaces Control
Fear lives in the future; presence dissolves it.
In the present moment, there’s no fear—only awareness.
Success flows from clear, non-judgmental focus.
5. Surrender Is Strength
Surrender isn’t giving up—it’s letting go of what limits you.
Let go of the “little lollipop” to gain the whole candy store.
Surrender clears space for trust, intuition, and energy.
6. Emotional Energy Drives Performance
You can’t control outcomes, but you can manage your energy.
Every thought and environment influences your internal state.
Choose thoughts, words, and inputs that align with truth.
7. Feedback Is Always a Gift
Everything is here to teach and help you—if you let it.
Inner Excellence reframes every experience as feedback for growth.
Daily goal: Learn and grow, no matter the outcome.
8. Practice Builds Self-Mastery
Focus is trained by how you speak, think, and breathe.
Tools like the “float-up technique” help reset perspective.
Repetition—not intensity—creates transformation.
9. Love, Wisdom, and Courage Are Core Pillars
Love leads to fearlessness.
Wisdom is the unobstructed view of possibility and truth.
Courage is the willingness to step into discomfort.
10. Let Go of the Past to Become Someone New
Transformation requires letting go of your story and self-image.
You can’t reach second base with a foot on first.
Growth demands facing what you’ve never wanted to face.
11. Leadership Is Relational Energy
The quality of your relationships defines the quality of your life.
Self-awareness fuels better communication and trust.
Relationship capital is entrepreneurial capital.
12. The Fullest Life Is One of Selfless Actualization
Zoe: the Greek concept of “absolute fullness of life.”
The path is not fame or control—it’s being fully alive.
That begins with surrender, presence, and service.
https://hunterhastings.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/The-Value-Creators-Podcast-Episode-65-Florencia-1.png6871920Hunter Hastingshttps://hunterhastings.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/hh-logo-blk.svgHunter Hastings2025-06-14 14:53:092025-06-14 18:08:33The Value Creators Podcast Episode #65. The Inner Excellence Of Entrepreneurial Leaders: Performance, Presence, and Purpose with Jim Murphy
What makes a business truly stand out in the hyper-competitive challenge to create customer value? It’s not just the product—it’s the experience, and the system that generates and sustains it.
In this episode of The Value Creators Podcast, Hunter Hastings speaks with Vance Morris, former Disney leader and expert in service system design, about why a customer experience system is the most strategic asset in business. From theme parks to high tech to carpet cleaning to consulting, Vance reveals how to create experience systems that delight customers, and drive lasting loyalty.
How systems harness personality, emotion, and consistency to create customer connection.
What it means to “plus” every interaction, and how to embed improvement into daily operations.
Whether you’re a small business owner or enterprise leader, this episode offers a masterclass in designing customer experiences that actually mean something—and work effectively.
Customers forgive errors if there’s emotional connection.
Vance used stories, newsletters, and even his daughter’s ballet to connect.
People buy from people they feel they know.
6. Alarm Systems Prevent Customer Churn
Businesses need built-in alerts for declining engagement.
CRM systems should flag changes in behavior (e.g., less frequent visits).
Follow-up can recover at-risk customers before they leave.
7. Training Enables Consistency
SOPs must be practiced—not just handed out.
“Practice creates muscle memory, which creates freedom to serve.”
Great service requires clear systems, repetition, and buy-in.
8. Empowered Staff Improve the Experience
Frontline employees should be included in design and feedback loops.
Vance’s Disney story: how busboys improved table turnover with a tabletop organization idea.
Listening builds engagement and makes improvements real.
9. Let Personality Into the Process
Allowing staff to express themselves creates differentiation.
A phone greeting like “The agency that rocks” helps filter the right clients.
Great experiences reflect the values and style of the brand.
10. Human Touch Beats AI—Especially in Service
Live phone answering is a competitive advantage in an AI-dominated world.
Chatbots are efficient, but compassion and connection still matter.
The best businesses will blend tech with human warmth.
11. Service Recovery Must Account for Total Cost
Fixing a mistake means accounting for all customer costs (time, money, stress).
Offering a free repair isn’t enough—make it whole with extras (e.g., loaners, dinners).
Recovery is an opportunity to build deeper trust.
12. Implementation Is the Only Way to Profit
“You won’t profit unless you implement”—Vance’s core mantra.
Pick one idea and act on it; then build momentum.
Knowledge without implementation is just entertainment.
https://hunterhastings.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/The-Value-Creators-Podcast-64-Florencia.png4581280Hunter Hastingshttps://hunterhastings.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/hh-logo-blk.svgHunter Hastings2025-06-06 11:51:562025-06-06 11:51:58The Value Creators Podcast Episode #64. Customer Experience Is Everything: A Conversation with Vance Morris
How do you build a retail business around passion—and scale it successfully? What does it mean to think in systems, not just solve problems?
In this episode of the Value Creators Podcast, Hunter Hastings speaks with serial entrepreneur Joe Zentmyer, founder of Snaggletooth Goby and builder of thriving passion communities—from indoor climbing gyms to tropical fish hobbyists and service ventures. Joe shares how he applies systems thinking, relationship-building, and detail-obsessive iteration to create businesses that endure and expand.
Key insights include:
Why systems—not checklists—create scalability and resilience.
How community, location, and hospitality converge to generate value.
The importance of building teams that thrive in uncertainty and complexity.
This is a hands-on masterclass in entrepreneurial systems design, filled with hard-earned lessons for anyone seeking to grow a values-driven, experience-based business.
1. Systems Thinking Is the Entrepreneur’s Superpower
Many founders jump from problem to problem without ever building a system.
Systems allow entrepreneurs to step back and let their business run, and not be consumed by it.
Joe Zentmyer emphasizes: “If there’s no process, the same problems will keep resurfacing.”
2. A Business Is a Puzzle—And Entrepreneurs Must Love Solving It
Joe sees his ventures as complex puzzles with interlocking systems.
He thrives on balancing operations, team dynamics, and creative problem solving.
Obsession with the system can be productive—if balanced with personal clarity.
3. From Vision to Replication: Systems Enable Scale
Each new climbing gym was hard, but systems made replication possible.
Over time, Joe built a system for teams to independently manage real estate, construction, launch, and operations.
Institutional knowledge—like climbing wall design and layout—became internal IP.
4. Community Is the Core of Passion-Based Businesses
Joe builds businesses around passionate identity: “I’m a climber,” “I’m an aquarist.”
Authenticity matters—customers want to be around others who feel it.
The best engagement comes from shared language, hospitality, and consistency.
5. Location Is Strategy
For niche businesses, there’s no McDonald’s-style data formula.
Objective factors like foot traffic combine with gut-level assessments like safety, vibe, and accessibility.
Joe chose sites near transit to lower costs and serve the community better.
6. Trust-Based Partnerships Enable Growth
Success depends on trusted relationships: real estate, contractors, investors.
Joe spent years assembling a reliable team across disciplines.
Being known for follow-through and fairness makes systems more robust.
7. Creative Problem-Solvers Are Essential
Early-stage ventures require improvisation and initiative, not rigid process followers.
Hiring for adaptability and curiosity is key during expansion and chaos.
“You can’t automate creative problem solving,” says Joe.
8. Marketing Passion Brands Requires Empathy and Simplicity
Deep experts often alienate newcomers with insider jargon.
Joe partners with generalist marketing firms to maintain accessibility.
Marketing must serve both the hardcore enthusiast and the curious beginner.
9. Experience Creates Loyalty
Whether climbing or aquarium care, the in-store experience is key.
Events, workshops, and personalized advice bind people to the brand.
Customers remember how they felt—and that memory drives retention.
10. Recurring Revenue Is the Engine
Joe looks for business models with built-in subscriptions or services.
Climbing gyms rely on memberships; aquariums offer in-home services.
This structure stabilizes cash flow and deepens engagement.
11. Systems Must Integrate with External Environments
Joe’s strategy adapts to zoning laws, transit incentives, and macroeconomic trends.
In Chicago, locating near transit hubs reduced parking costs and aligned with city planning.
Entrepreneurs must plug into broader institutional systems intelligently.
12. The Founder Needs a System, Too
Joe carves out time weekly for reading, writing, and system-level reflection.
He warns against being consumed by the business’s internal systems at the cost of personal well-being.
Sustainable entrepreneurship requires a personal system for focus and renewal.
https://hunterhastings.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/The-Value-Creators-Podcast-63-Florencia.png4581280Hunter Hastingshttps://hunterhastings.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/hh-logo-blk.svgHunter Hastings2025-05-21 07:53:272025-06-06 11:40:37The Value Creators Podcast Episode #63. Systems Thinking in Action: Building Community-Of-Passion Based Businesses with Joe Zentmyer
The term alternative investments refers to investment opportunities that the financial regulators want to preserve for financial elites and protect from the average “retail investor” like you and me. They’re investments like venture capital, private equity, and hedge funds. They’re too sophisticated for individuals who are not “accredited”. These potentially high-yielding investments must be fenced off from broad accessibility. Too risky for the plebes.
But, despite the regulators, financial markets are evolving to make alternative investments more accessible, liquid, and tailored to individual investors. How do you design products that combine institutional sophistication with retail access—without compromising on structure, performance, or trust? Through customer-centric design: knowing customers well and giving them access to products that meet their needs and give them new choices.
In this episode of the Value Creators Podcast, Hunter Hastings talks with Kim Flynn, President of XA Investments, a pioneer in private market innovation and product design. Kim shares how her firm is breaking down barriers in the investment landscape, from new fund structures to investor education and cutting-edge indexes.
Key insights include:
Why the term “alternatives” is evolving into a broader concept of private markets.
How products like interval funds and tender offer funds balance liquidity and long-term investing.
The importance of demand-focused product design and timing innovation to market needs.
How educational tools like the XAI Interval Fund Index create transparency and drive adoption.
Why creativity, empathy, and structured iteration are critical in financial product innovation.
Whether you’re an investor looking to access private equity or a product builder seeking to serve new markets, this episode provides a playbook for innovation at the intersection of finance, entrepreneurship, and education.
Learn how venture-mode creativity is coming to financial markets—and how the next generation of investment products will empower everyone.
1. Alternative Investments Are Expanding and Being Redefined
“Alternatives” once referred to hedge funds or private equity but now include private credit, real estate, infrastructure, and even crypto.
Many industry players now prefer the term “private markets” to reflect a broader and more modern interpretation.
As access increases, the need for clearer, investor-friendly labels grows.
2. Private Markets Are Changing the Capital Landscape
A stock market listing, via IPO, was once seen as the pinnacle of achievement for private companies.
But today, companies are staying private longer, reducing access to high-growth phases for public investors.
Similarly, in lending markets, private credit is stepping in where traditional banks have pulled back from corporate lending.
Private capital offers flexible, often more patient financing, altering the borrower-lender dynamic.
3. Liquidity Is a Growing Concern in Private Investing
While private equity offers higher returns, it often locks up capital for 10+ years.
Innovations like continuation funds and secondaries provide new, more flexible exit paths
Even “patient capital” has limits when liquidity needs arise.
4. Public Markets Face Pressure from Unicorns and Grey Share Markets
Many leading companies now remain private well into maturity, prompting the rise of unicorn indexes and grey markets for pre-IPO shares.
Liquidity for employees and early investors in private companies is becoming a key opportunity.
The S&P 500 is no longer the full picture of economic growth or opportunity.
5. The Democratization of Alternatives Is Underway
Institutional-style products like private equity and venture capital are becoming accessible to retail investors.
Structures like interval funds enable access while balancing liquidity needs and regulatory safeguards.
This shift is transforming the average retirement portfolio beyond traditional stocks and bonds.
6. Interval Funds and Tender Offer Funds Are Innovating Liquidity Models
Interval funds offer limited, scheduled liquidity (e.g., 5% quarterly), making private markets more flexible for investors.
Tender offer funds provide flexibility to pause redemptions, offering sponsors greater control in volatile markets.
These funds balance access with asset-specific constraints, like long hold periods in private equity.
7. Infrastructure and Custody Challenges Still Exist
Custody issues, tax complications, and minimum investment thresholds are barriers for many retail investors. K1’s add a level of tax complexity not everyone wants!
New fund structures and registered product formats aim to lower these barriers.
Major alternative asset managers are investing heavily in education and infrastructure to improve access.
Products are created with market timing, investor demand, and differentiation in mind.
Examples like Janus Henderson’s CLO ETF show that early movers gain a durable competitive edge.
Product timing, market gaps, and liquidity needs all shape product strategy.
9. Education and Knowledge Flow Are Core Differentiators
XA Investments emphasizes educating both investors and asset managers through resources, indexes, and consulting.
The XAI Interval Fund Index is an example of education-led innovation, helping demystify a complex market.
Knowledge is positioned as a strategic asset for investors that reduces barriers and increases adoption.
10. Product Development Requires Structured, Iterative Processes
XA’s product development model is rooted in structured processes learned from successful institutions like Nuveen.
Products begin with identified market needs and proceed through regulatory, operational, and strategic filters.
XA also provides design consultancy – which, as an added competitive advantage, enables younger employees to iterate faster and gain deep expertise in fund design.
11. Strategic Differentiation Matters in a Crowded Market
First-mover advantage is real in products like ETFs, but other success factors include education, structure, and access.
Success in private markets depends on matching product structure to asset class, including knowing when not to launch.
Innovation isn’t just about product type and features—it includes process, distribution, and user experience.
12. Innovation in Financial Products is Creative and Entrepreneurial
Financial innovation involves design thinking, empathy, and continuous iteration—just like any other form of entrepreneurship.
XA Investments combines institutional rigor with agile, entrepreneurial thinking to fill gaps in evolving markets.
The future of finance is being built by those who understand both the investor and the ecosystem.
https://hunterhastings.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/The-Value-Creators-Podcast-61-Florencia-1.png4581280Hunter Hastingshttps://hunterhastings.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/hh-logo-blk.svgHunter Hastings2025-04-28 18:15:132025-04-28 18:39:03The Value Creators Podcast Episode #61. Democratizing Alternative Investments Through Innovation, Liquidity, and Design: A Conversation with Kim Flynn
Digital enablement and AI are revolutionizing how companies operate and reshaping the economy.
At the core of this transformation remains a fundamental principle: the customer is the boss. In this new era, empathy becomes crucial as businesses strive to meet subjective values and deliver hyper-personalized experiences. Consumers demand instant access, precise responses, seamless order fulfillment, and transparency, while resisting intrusive tracking and data monetization.
David Kramer, Founder & Chief Product Officer at Cooperative Computing, joins Hunter Hastings to highlight how AI can enhance creativity while balancing automation and human touch. In this discussion, Kramer shares insights on the digital enablement movement, emphasizing that AI should complement human creativity rather than replace it.
He underscores the need for maintaining a brand’s unique voice amidst the risk of generic content. As AI advances, businesses must adapt, using it to innovate while preserving the essential human element that resonates deeply with audiences. This approach aligns with the shift towards hyper-personalization, where understanding and delivering what each individual wants becomes the new standard, as exemplified by companies like Nike, which serves diverse customer needs with tailored, transparent experiences.
0:00 | Intro: Vision of the Digitally Enabled Firm 01:57 | 5 Key Business Functions: Branding and Marketing 03:15 | Second Key: Sales and Commerce 03:56 | Digitally Enabled Organization: Third and Fourth Key 04:48 | Fifth Key for a Digitally Enabled Organization: Service Delivery Management 07:13 | Human Role: Coding OR Evolving Decisions? 13:13 | Are We Still Customer-Centric? 20:33 | Transition Away From Control 25:01 | Customer in this New Digital Environment 29:39 | Demand for Transparency and Responsiveness 35:34 | Managing Accelerating Digital Change Speed: The Art of Possible 40:47 | Stephen Hawking: Cosmology Depends on the Questions You Ask 45:38 | Is Competition Still Relevant, and Can Large Firms Adapt? 53:52 | Wrap-Up
Knowledge Capsule:
Digital enablement will change the way companies are run, and even change the structure of the economy. But one principle that remains the same, and becomes even more fundamentally important: the customer is the boss, subjective value is the goal, and empathy is the key capability. The customer is the driver of the digitized firm and its business model. The number one capability for the digitally enabled firm is empathy.
The governing factor is what consumers feel is appropriate to meet their needs and desires. They want instant access, fast and accurate personal request response, order completion and delivery, and complete transparency. They don’t want the uneasy feeling of being tracked and surveilled. They don’t want the diversion and interruption caused by sites selling consumer data to third parties to be monetized as digital advertising.
This consumer-led environment will require hyper-personalization: understanding and delivering what each individual wants.
It’s the opposite of mass marketing. Think about a company like Nike. It serves hundreds of millions of consumers. Its business is driven by what those customers want, when they want it, and how they want it. Nike’s customers range from the very best performance athletes who want unrestricted performance at the cutting edge of technology, to sedentary elders who appreciate comfort and stability. How can Nike serve all these customers with equal transparency? Via digitally enabled hyper-personalization. Every individual gets the experience they want when they want it, and how they want it.
The digitally enabled firm
The digitally enabled firm uses digitization (including AI) to know its customers deeply (i.e., through data), fully understand its customers and their individual experiential needs (through deductive analytics), and meet those needs better than anyone in the world (through commercial engagement, operations and fulfillment, service delivery, continuous improvement, and innovation).
For customers in general, whether B2C or B2B, their experiential requirements are going to extend towards instant access and response that is both rapid and accurate. To become an effective consumerized or customer-led company, the digitally enabled firm reviews its capacity in 5 core functions.
This is the primary function of the customer-led company simply because the first requirement is to accurately identify, deeply understand, listen to, reach, message, and persuade customers of the firm’s value proposition. Without branding and marketing, there’s no flow of information (and no flow of cash since marketing induces willingness to pay). Branding and marketing incorporate the firm’s value proposition into customers’ daily thought culture, aligning with and complementing their mindset and their perspectives, and shaping the firm’s hyper-personalization capability. This marketing capacity is becoming hyper-automated since it is fueled by digital information flow, instantaneously processed for insights and driving the rapid reaction to generate the high-response relationship the customer seeks and, ultimately, the capacity to anticipate customer desires.
Conventional commerce, including e-commerce, will go away as digital assistants become the power behind purchasing and daily life choices. They become dominant sales and commerce engines, to the digitally enabled firm’s advantage in the case where they interact well with customers and integrate into customers’ own systems and lifestyles. The result will be memorable on-demand buying and delivery experiences and frictionless repeat purchases.
Real-time operational data and analytics will enable risk and error avoidance, predictive planning, and the scalable infrastructure required for frictionless operation. Fulfillment and operations provide the means to keep promises and meet expectations, two vitally important commitments in the consumer-led relationship.
The customer’s experience-in-use is the critical key to value creation, and the digitally-enabled firm will be integrated into this experience, thereby opening up the opportunity for continuous addition of new and supplemental value and ever-strengthening sticky relationships. Continuing engagement after a purchase and after a usage experience is important. Some brands are creating digital online spaces and experiences where customers can participate and engage, such as Gucci’s Vault on Discord. Even when they are not buying or consuming, customers can be digitally engaged with their brands.
Process automation ensures delivery excellence and consistency, and customer transparency generates confidence and trust across all channels. Digital integration enables continuous improvement of processes whenever feedback indicates an opportunity. Digitally enabled firms exhibit excellent governance of the service experience.
How do we manage digital organizations of this kind, where decision-making must be near-instant and the accuracy of a millisecond decision is so critical? It’s futile and dangerous to rely on traditional management styles. Leadership and governance will exist, but they’ll change considerably. One result will be the digital CEO, connected to all aspects of all decision-making processes, governing in millisecond transaction times.
The advantage for humans
The thing that humans do very well, better than any AI, and in all likelihood for a long period of time, is understand people through an emotional perspective. And this is where the engine of branding and marketing and all economic activity actually exists. Humans will continue to keep control of their own consumerism in order to grow economic activity so that we enjoy the world that we live in. The human is not only in the loop, but the core of the loop in this regard.
Digital machinery and digital processes can understand feedback loops very well. It can read the clicks and the purchase data and generate the appropriate signals for analysts, but it can never understand the emotional attachment between economic activity and consumer needs. Consider a purchaser buying a red shirt from a shopping site. The AI can record the purchase, align the data with other historical data to generate a pattern, and perhaps draw a pattern recognition inference. Perhaps there’s a trend or a tendency. Perhaps there is a comparison to be made with other shoppers, yielding more inferences. But if the purchaser loves red shirts because his or her grandma bought them a red beanie hat for their 8th birthday and they’ve loved that shade of red ever since because they loved their grandma – AI can’t empathically diagnose that motivation, and probably won’t ever be able to.
But AI can make the purchase frictionless, the delivery faster and more accurate, and monitor the customer experience and perhaps enhance it in the future, perhaps generating loyalty and relationship stickiness. AI can become self-teaching and self-learning by structuring data and organizing it and running feedback loops. But it doesn’t know what to do with the emotional components of human engagements.
It may be possible to develop triggered models – data models or simulation models that can create signals from the states of emotional and empathic input that come from humans and human interaction, and it will get better at fine-tuning the signals and the models. It is already possible to detect temperature changes (blushing), eye movement, body language and other signals of emotional change.
The direct connection to the customer
The most exciting part of all this is the direct connection of the business model to the customer. Whether in the recording of online purchase data and digital behavior, or the monitoring of eye movements, the connection is direct and the end user directs the flow. AI (what Kramer calls digital sapiens, working alongside homo sapiens) enters the customer’s system and the customer’s life cycle and becomes part of that customer’s life, and part of the customer’s culture. AI makes data-driven decisions, and the data is customer data.
How do firms make the transition?
The first transition step is to conduct a digitization discovery: what is the capacity of the firm to digitize across four dimensions?
1. Digitizing organizational structure – eliminating hierarchy, planning, and command-and-control and substituting digital implementation of job functions wherever appropriate.
2. Methods, procedures and routines – where they have emerged and proven useful, can they be digitized for continuity and consistency? And can we change them digitally when it becomes clear we need to work differently?
3. Systems and technology – how well are IT systems facilitating people, processes and change?
4. Key performance indicators – what are the signals of success and how well are they measured, monitored and distributed for action? The key here is not KPI’s as control mechanisms (which is how they are traditionally used) but as feedback loops: building up an understanding of the current state and the patterns of its dynamics through data, analytics, and the response environment.
A current state of these dimensions is established through discovery, from which a delta is derived: what is required to improve and accelerate:
* To grow revenue.
* To become more operationally efficient.
* To continuously improve the performance of the firm through digitization and data-driven decision-making.
* To develop the cultural identity that best facilitates the collaboration of digital sapiens and home sapiens. There will be a different way of working and different forms of collaboration, and the cultural identity of the firm will be highly relevant to the nature of the adoption of these new ways.
The new customer experience
In the world of e-commerce and digital advertising that has evolved recently, the customer experience has often been undesirable, in that customers are surveilled and tracked by cookies and other software devices, and are urged into transactions by “interrupt and annoy” messages that are unwanted frictions in online engagement. This is evidence of a failure of empathy.
But the new AI approach is to prioritize an understanding of how the customer prefers to interact. After profitability (which is the mandatory gateway – business can’t proceed if it is not profitable), the quality of the customer’s experience in the response environment will be the number one attribute of business operations. Understanding the needs of the individual customer and interacting with those needs in the way that the individual customer likes best is the goal of the digitized capability that we call hyper-personalization.
Digital assistants will become more closely attached to and associated with individuals and will sense our feelings – whether that’s frustration with a process or delight with an experience. Businesses are building the tools for empathic diagnosis, empathic response and instant and dynamic updating. They’ll become highly effective at hyper-personalization.
This is the realization of the dynamic of customers bringing innovation and desirable experiences into being. Through the responsiveness environment, customers will figure out how to generate a desired experience and achieve it through the adaptive dynamics of the digital assistant.
An example of this principle in action is 3D printing, which is the capacity for an individual to self-manufacture. The implementation of individual consumer desire (“I want what I want when I want it and how I want it”) is made materially operational, whether in the form of 3-D printed buildings, machines, or clothes, or food.
Speed of change and the art of possible.
The acceleration of the rate of speed of change has been identified as a challenge for firms, but in the new customer-led digital age, the acceleration is in the hands of the customer. When what customers want is more and more attainable, they will learn to ask systems for what they want and the system will understand enough of what’s available from all potential sources to recommend and bring it to that customer. The system will assemble sub-components into a solution. For example, if a customer wants a mirror with a digital camera in it and an audio source of weather information, powered by DC because they live in Denmark, and that particular configuration is not currently offered, a digital assistant will specify it from available parts and build a personalized sku, deliverable two days from now at a specific price. That’s the art of possible: not what exists now, but what it is possible to assemble quickly.
Asking the right questions
The future lies in getting better at prompting: asking the AI the right questions: Can I do this now? What is possible? The questioner dreams it up, and the system assembles the dream. Then, the organization implements the assembled solution in the firm’s environment and in the marketplace.
Copilot is a good early example of what’s possible – a tool that observes and takes information and comes back to you to say, ‘here are the activities at which the firm is not efficient that could be done much more efficiently.” For example, the AI detects that people are keying-in invoices, and the process could be automated. It provides the art of possible. It could do the same for customers and customer interactions.
Constructing the firm for the new environment
Today’s construct of the firm is:
The empathetic component – how do we create valued experiences for the customer?
The technical component – what do we need from a technical perspective to meet customer expectations?
The financial component – how do we operate profitably and efficiently?
Ask these questions of an AI and, ultimately, the AI will respond with a highly accurate recommendation of what company or brand to build. It has the universe of knowledge at its fingertips, with all customer and buyer data to reveal preferences and trends and desires. The best entrepreneurs will be the ones asking the right questions, while the operation of that business can be left more and more to the AI and the digitized firm. The AI will build a digital CEO that can develop a market analysis and a business plan, perhaps raise capital against that plan, sign up the initial customers, design the products and aesthetics, and the customer experience. Over time, the digital sapiens species footprint will expand, and the homo sapiens species footprint become more specialized and focused. Competition will boil down to building specialized digital CEO’s. The software might be open source and free, and the data proprietary, so the added value is in designing better digital CEO’s from better data sets.
How? By asking better questions. McKinsey, for example, has decades of data and intelligence about good decision-making and what’s associated with it. That could be the input data for building a digital CEO. WPP has data about great marketing campaigns and great marketing agencies and could create great marketing CEO’s. Digital doctors will out-perform non-digital doctors because of the mass of data around medical history, practice, research and so on.
Management will become less and less relevant because digital sapiens can do more and more of it. Entrepreneurship – creatively asking the right questions and imagining the future in a better way than others – will become more and more relevant.
https://hunterhastings.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/New-Website-Cover-Design-TVC.png4581280Hunter Hastingshttps://hunterhastings.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/hh-logo-blk.svgHunter Hastings2024-08-28 23:25:512024-08-28 23:25:53The Value Creators Podcast Episode #46. Digital Enablement: Customer-Led Business, Subjective Value, and Empathy with David Kramer
