One of the best parts of my job is getting to talk with people building the tools of our futures of work. Today, I’m sharing from an interview I did with Rashmi Vittal, the Chief Marketing Officer of Conversica. My takeaway from learning more about how their clients use intelligent virtual assistants (IVA, see the difference from a chatbot here) is that groups are better than I thought at bringing a computer into the group -- and this is different from having a human in the loop (phrasing from Thomas Malone’s book, Superminds). 

Many people assume that computers will eventually do most things by themselves and that we should put “humans in the loop” in situations where they’re still needed. But I think it’s more useful to realize that most things now are done by groups of people, and we should put computers into these groups in situations where that’s helpful. In other words, we should move from thinking about putting humans in the loop to putting computers in the group.

Malone, Thomas W. Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together (p. 75). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition. 

The Challenge: Marketing Doing Better Means Sales Has More Work

I shared with Rashmi that I was looking for specific examples of people augmenting their work with artificial intelligence (AI). She told me a story of how extreme marketing success can lead to extreme sales stress -- and tipped me off to the team nature of the process when automation is brought to bear on the issue.

Rashmi noted that marketing teams are finding better and better ways to meet buyers. Sounds great, but this can overwhelm sales teams if they haven’t made adjustments across sales tools and practices to keep up with this happy outcome. 

Marketing gets frustrated as they don’t see the downstream benefits of their work. Sales gets frustrated as they aren’t able to execute on all the opportunities they have.

Enter the Augmented Sales Team

Modern marketing groups often offer free downloads of valuable whitepapers on the company site. (This is an example I’m often in the middle of, so I’ll go with first-person here.) I want to see the latest examples of technology use from the company’s customers, so I enter my email in exchange for the whitepaper download. (I likely have ignored the offer to chat that has also popped up on the screen.) I happily take a look at the whitepaper. Soon thereafter, I receive an email from the sales team offering to tell me more. Depending on the day, I reply or delete that email. If I reply, I say that I’m a professor and not a good lead (I really need to set up a template with a hotkey for that reply). I generally get a polite note back, thanking me for letting the company know and that I should feel free to follow up if my situation changes. 

The good news for everyone is that I’m off their lead list. The even better news for the company’s sales team is that I’ve likely been emailing with an intelligent virtual assistant and so the people in the group can spend their time with good sales leads and not waste their time with me. Moving that chore from a person to the IVA is in the sweet spot described in Reinventing Jobs: A 4-Step Approach for Applying Automation to Work by Ravin Jesuthasan and John Boudreau (my review here). 

Intelligent Virtual Assistants as Part of the Team

What I hadn’t understood was how much of a team process this can be.

Rashmi offers that with Conversica’s IVA, a sales team can have a new “member” up and running in two weeks or less and that the IVA can be comparable to hiring a new human business/sales development representative with four to six months experience. The computer is in the group, and likely has a persona that both the customers and sales team feel connected to. When the human team members do take over a thread, customers often ask if Nicole (the IVA in this example) will be joining in. Some teams set aside a chair for the virtual member and endow it with company swag.

[I did a quick search of the peer-reviewed literature and see that embodying AIs is a nuanced issue. More on that soon, but here’s the paper I will look at first.]

Team Roles

Many teams have more than one IVA. Like people, some IVAs are better than others at specific tasks. One might handle booking meetings before and following up diligently after an event, another working to reactivate dormant clients. Similar to how a sales manager might have listened into calls to add needed support, sales team members can track the flow of a conversation and jump in when the time is right. 

Computer in the Group

In Superminds, Thomas Malone works through examples of how computers are brought into  “groups” of different types and levels (hierarchies, democracies, markets, communities, and ecosystems). There are illustrative examples of costs and benefits for each - but what I still think is missing is the detailed explanation of how teams are formed and evolve. Do we see better and worse approaches to recruiting, onboarding, and birthday parties in augmented groups? I expect we can find a variety of examples, but can we develop frameworks to help a group or organization start on the right foot and continue to improve? 

Will This Take Decades? Or Will Research Speed Up to Match Real-World Needs?

The issues of team formation, training, motivation, and communication have taken us decades to understand in the context of traditional, and now, distributed/virtual teams. Maybe with researcher augmentation, we can speed that up as we come to understand augmented teams like those using Conversica. I’ll be looking forward to analyses of team productivity (by the accounts I see, up in terms of sales metrics), continued learning for both team members and the IVA, retention for both team members and the IVA, and innovation for the organization overall. 

As always, I would love to hear specific examples. Do we need to be Thinking in 5T™, or is it easier than that?