AI-Propelled Innovation: CapTech's 2025 Technology Trends

How can AI help overcome business challenges and enhance customer experiences? Join us as host Vinnie Schoenfelder, CapTech Principal, Strategic Innovation, Brian Bischoff, CapTech CTO, and Bree Basham, CapTech CX Lead, discuss CapTech’s annual tech trends and what 2025 has in store for organizations and customers. 

Tune in to hear: 

• Why agentic AI in automation matters
• How AI-powered data accelerators work 
• When hyper-personalized customer loyalty becomes crucial
• Why modernization with AI is essential

Transcript

Vinnie

Hello, and welcome back to CapTech Trends. I'm your host, Vinnie Schoenfelder. It's been a minute since we've done these, so I'm excited to be back. We're going to be talking about our 2025 technology trends, and I have with me today Brian Bischoff and Bree Basham, both are principals at CapTech. Brian, as of January, is our new CTO. So, congratulations.

Brian

Thank you very much.

Vinnie

And does many other things as well. And Bree has many hats as well, but she is the leader of our CX practice, and we'll be discussing things more from a user perspective. So Brian, Bree, welcome.

Brian

Thank you.

Bree

Thank you.

Vinnie

So to get started, Bree, can you kind of give us a background on our technology trends, how long we've been doing it for those who may not have heard about them?

Bree

Yeah, we've been doing the technology trends for as long as I've been here, certainly so many years, at CapTech. We select a theme each year. The theme for this year is AI-Propelled Innovation, and we'll talk a little more about that in a minute. We examine data from a few key areas to be able to develop these trends. So the first place is pulling cross industry themes from our portfolios and industry groups, the things that they're seeing on the ground with our clients, and also just through industry research. We also look at emerging technology and new services that we're developing with those technologies for our clients. And then last, we take our insights from primary CapTech research that we do each year that can be focused research in an area like AI, or we get a lot of learnings from our annual consumer survey, which helps us understand where customers are really valuing importance in terms of choosing a brand and placing their brand loyalty.

Vinnie

Yeah. Being a consulting firm and having so many industries we work in, you kind of have a minor in being an analyst firm.

Bree

Yes.

Vinnie

Because of the breadth.

Bree

A lot of different trends within those specific industries. And then what Brian and I do along alongside you, of course, Vinnie, is take a look at where we're seeing those commonalities. So that's really where these come from.

Vinnie

Brian, how do we decide what not to follow?

Brian

That's a good question, because it's very easy to chase the shiny object. I think one of the things we pride ourselves in is really focusing on what we see is actually happening or potentially could happen with our clients right now. So we don't try to the future. We don't try to predict three to five years from now. It's really what's relevant right now with our clients. So it's also relying on our technical leaders and understanding what things that they're doing and executing on their daily basis so that, again, we're not chasing things that aren't really relevant or aren't actually applicable right now in the workforce.

Vinnie

I've always appreciated that kind of collective ideal we have, because if you look at the larger analyst firms whose job it is to be an analyst firm, I won't say it's clickbaity, but when they look out five to eight years and they make these very bold claims and predictions about where the industry is going to be that far out, there's some value in that, certainly, in the ideation and getting ready, but when we look out three months, six months, nine months, 12 months, it's more immediate what we need to take advantage of.

Brian

The hope is that you can take these trends to come away from this conversation and actually take the information and apply it immediately.

Bree

Yeah. Ready to implement, I think, is the goal here.

Vinnie

Yeah, and discovery in the field, I think, is another part of it.

Bree

Yeah.

Vinnie

And then the engineering discipline and rigor we apply to make sure we're not following bad trends or things that are going to end up with our clients in a bad situation.

Bree

Yeah.

Vinnie

So Brian, I'm going to pick on you a little bit. It's pretty easy to say AI. Everyone's saying AI. From a marketing perspective or from going in and having a chalk talk with a client, I don't like saying the same thing. I want to add to the conversation. So what is CapTech adding to the conversation around AI?

Brian

Yeah, I'll say that it'd be very easy for us to come out and this is easy, call it clickbait, call it wherever you want to, to say that AI would be a trend for the year. Our perspective on this is that AI isn't necessarily something you should just be trying to implement in isolation by itself. It's underpinning and supporting really some key aspects of how businesses are driving forward right now. So that's why this year, when we're looking at the trends, we're looking at things like automation and how AI can really accelerate automation and apply automation in brand-new ways.

We're looking at how we're driving insights with data and how AI can get us to insights faster. We're looking at loyalty and how loyalty programs are supporting consumer experiences, but how AI really propels that forward and drives it in a much faster and a more embracing way with consumers. And then finally with modernization efforts. Modernization efforts are things that our clients deal with on a regular basis, but how AI is really driving those forwards. So it's not necessarily like we're trying to seek ways and uses for AI. We're actually seeing real tangible value of where AI can support these broader business initiatives. And that's what's most important for us right now.

Bree

I would say we challenge ourselves not to come up with an AI trend, but every individual trend we dove into was being driven by or powered by AI in some way. So that's how we got to where we are. It was a common thread, but they were really more enhancers in this landscape.

Vinnie

Without getting specific like that and neither use case or business flow, it's sort of like saying computers are a trend.

Bree

Right.

Vinnie

Right? I mean, yeah, I think so.

Brian

We are going to talk a lot about AI today, and it's not because AI is the trend. It's really, to your point, becoming an AI pinning for everything that happens inside of business right now.

Vinnie

Great. Before we jump into that, Bree, because we have four we're going to go through, Bree, is there anything from the survey side that you want to touch on in terms of the consumer's opinion on how they trust or value AI?

Bree

Yeah. We're seeing consumers becoming a lot more comfortable with AI-powered experiences. Whether they recognize that AI is powering those experiences or whether they just feel that they're more intuitive, more personalized, et cetera, and they're not sure where that's necessarily coming from, oftentimes that is AI helping with that. We are seeing customers realize the benefit of being able to do things faster and in a way that feels more intuitive to them. So we credit AI with a lot of that.

Vinnie

I'm curious about your opinion on this, and the answer "it depends" is fair because there's so many different industries that we work in, but I've always been a believer that for most people, technology works best when it's invisible to the experience. You don't have to enable it, you don't even know it's there. You're just getting more personalization, a better experience. But AI, it's such a buzzword now. Is there a value for the chatbot to be an AI-labeled chatbot or an AI-labeled search engine? Or have an AI summary of it? To what extent should we rely on technology's best when it's invisible versus this is a trend and people want to know you're a part of it?

Bree

I think in our survey this year, we found out, I think it was well over 50% of respondents indicated that they would prefer an AI-powered chatbot, especially when it's well-designed. And I think what they mean by that is they feel that it's going to get them serviced faster, quicker, in a more efficient way than they previously were able to get before. So I don't necessarily know that it's the technology or it's not. I think it's the outcome that they appreciate, and they're crediting the design of the experience with that one. Really, it's probably the AI power behind that.

Brian

I'd agree with that, and I'd say that it helps with disclosure and people becoming comfortable in trusting the actual solution. I don't think it's helpful when they just slap an AI logo on something and use it for marketing purposes. That's sort of just trying to drive attention because AI is a hot term. That doesn't really help anything from a overall consumer expectation perspective.

Vinnie

Gotcha. So let's jump into the trends. I'm going to read the four titles now so people know what's coming. Maybe they'll really want to hear the fourth one, and I'll stick through.

The first one, trend one, is Automation Breaks New Ground with Agentic AI. Number two, Data Shines with AI-powered Accelerators, and we'll get into what those are. Three, Loyalty Experiences Put Customers in the Driver's Seat. And the last one is Modernization Intensifies to Supercharge Innovation.

So starting with number one, Automation Breaks New Ground with Agentic AI. I'm going to push again on what's new here, because I believe automation has been a trend in the past. And it's also been a subtrend or a feature of many other trends. I know one year it was RPA, robotic process automation, which is helpful in some spots, but kind of thought as well-structured technical debt, and sometimes thought as temporary. Can you explain what agentic AI is? And then help me understand, is that a better way to do automation than RPA? When do we do that as opposed to traditional enterprise integration, which is a much larger build cycle?

Brian

Yeah, there's a variety of questions there. I'll probably hit the second one first, which is really, how is this different? Automation, as you said, we've been talking about for a long period of time, and actually we've seen our clients implement automation in a variety of different ways over the years. What's different this year is this new word called agentic, right? And that agentic piece, basically instead of having a workflow that typically is driving automation, be very prescriptive and drive out exactly the steps. Given these scenarios, here are the tasks that I want you to perform.

Vinnie

So that AI bit is acting like a human agent.

Brian

Well, and that scenario I was just describing is more so of, this is more traditional automation or workflow, which is again, you have a very specific set of tasks you want to perform. You're going to "automate" those so that we actually can do that very repeatedly, very quickly without the need for human intervention. The idea behind agentic is that you're shifting from very task-oriented types of things to very goal-oriented. So again, the goal being, in a shipping example, you want to have a shipment be delivered to an end customer. So in that scenario, you're very goal-oriented. There's a variety of tasks that may or may not need to be performed throughout this that needs logic and decision depending on the inputs or the scenario that's specific to that particular occurrence.

So this is where agentic comes into play. Rather than being very prescriptive about the tasks that need to be performed, you're actually leveraging AI in a way that the AI engine itself is making determinations of when and where certain tasks need to be performed. Again, with the goal being we need to get this shipment actually submitted or sent to the customer. So it's shifting from being very prescriptive to being very goal-oriented and being more flexible in its approach depending on the scenario. And that's actually happening.

Vinnie

Do you see the same technical debt claims coming into this? Or is it working in a different way that has less coupling?

Brian

I don't see that if it's designed appropriately, then there wouldn't be any technical debt, because you're building systems, again, with the intent of the consumer in mind.

Vinnie

Gotcha.

Brian

So there shouldn't be debt that you're creating. There's always a little bit of debt that in every system you create unintentionally. But in this scenario, you should be moving towards specifically, again, what those goals are of those consumers.

Vinnie

So Bree, what's the impact to the customer experience on this? I would imagine trust is a key component.

Bree

Trust is a key component. I think consumers need to feel like that the system is intuitive and that it's serving them through a friendly user interface. Right? So even the intent of it needs to be clear and needs to be on brand for the consumer to feel comfortable and feel like they're being served by the same company they thought they were interacting with.

Vinnie

So before we leave this topic and go to the second one, we did have a podcast end of last year with MNX, a shipping company, a logistics company, shipping really important, highly volatile items. Brian, can you walk us through sort of... By the way, if you're interested in that podcast, it's out there. Can you walk us through, Brian, what MNX did from an agentic AI perspective?

Brian

So that was an agentic workflow that they created. So basically, the idea being, again, with a goal of needing to ship items to a particular consumer. The agentic aspect of it is you have individual, call them agents, one agent would be to accept an order. Accepting an order could be in an unstructured format coming from an email, could be a call center type of request that comes in, a variety of different ways that can come in. So there's an agent that accepts that. There's also another agent that determines what's the best route, what's the best method and what's the best route for actually shipping that. And then finally, another agents to communicate better with customers and those sorts of things. So tying all those pieces together, all those little, I'll call them microagents, together comprises that overall agentic system. So that decision logic happens with a broader reasoning engine that then says, "In this scenario, because weather is an issue in Newark, for example, we're going to make sure we not submit things through Newark," for example.

Vinnie

Gotcha. Like I said, that's out there in case anyone wants to listen to that podcast and go deeper. I believe the CIO is a guest on that podcast as well.

Bree

That's right.

Brian

Yep.

Vinnie

Trend number two, Data Shines with AI-Powered Accelerators. Again, we see data a lot in these trends. What's different and what do you mean by accelerators?

Brian

We've been searching for years, our clients, and we've been helping our clients for years to gather as much information, gather as much data as possible so they can make informed decisions on how to better improve their business, better improve their customer interactions, whatever the case may be. That hasn't changed. That continues to be the case. Where we're seeing now over the last really six months and propelling into this year is that now AI is allowing us to do these sorts of things faster, so be able to drive towards insights faster as opposed to having to wait a year or two years to collect all this data and then have a team build a bunch of models that might surface some information. You could take six, nine months, a year to do those sorts of things.

What we're seeing now is, these accelerators allow us to get to a point where we can get to those insights faster. So for example, one of the common problems in dealing with information and gathering data and systems is the highly unstructured nature of information coming from a variety of different systems. So you can leverage AI to normalize that information. So we've done that with an accelerator we call Green Arrow, which allows us to do really automated source to target mapping in a very highly efficient way. That gets us, again, to a point where you can merge data into a format that allows you to drive those insights.

Vinnie

So you don't have analysts manually trying to map thousands of fields to thousands of fields.

Brian

Over and over again as that information changes. Correct.

Bree

I will say though, on that side, we talk about the expectations that are there because of the accelerators are able to surface all the data and get you to the ability to make those insights a little bit quicker. But you still need that human thinking around pulling out the insights and piecing everything together. And I think that's going to be more and more critical over the years. We hear concerns about AI replacing workforce, but in theory, we're going to really be asking people to dig deeper around insights and have more analytical skills than previously needed.

Vinnie

Let me try to simplify this for myself. In order to have a good AI model/experience/insights within an organization, you got to get your data right first, all the V's of data, et cetera, et cetera. This is a way of saying, "Oh, we can use AI ahead of that to help us get our data right so that we can use AI," which is a strange thing to say.

Brian

Yeah, it's exactly right. Most of the times you're using AI to drive insights or to solve a problem differently.

Vinnie

But we're also using it to get the data in there to do that.

Brian

In this scenario, we're solving that problem differently by getting the data in faster, better because of the fact that we're leveraging AI.

Bree

It accelerates the path to insights, is how I think about it.

Brian

Yes.

Vinnie

So that's Green Arrow and ADEPT. Is ADEPT similar?

Brian

ADEPT solves a different problem. You can see we have a blog post on what ADEPT does as well, but essentially it is a blueprint for doing modern data ingestion. So a metadata-driven ingestion to allow you, again, to get to a point where you can drive insights faster. Again, these things are there and available to lay that foundation for allowing businesses to get to insights faster.

Vinnie

We have a third one called LegacyLift, but we'll talk about that on our fourth trend as we get there.

Brian

Yeah.

Vinnie

So moving on to number three, Loyalty Experiences Put Customers in the Driver's Seat. Bree, I assume that we're not talking solely about capital L loyalty programs, but lowercase L brand affinity.

Bree

Yeah. Why customers are choosing certain brands being loyalty in its greatest sense.

Vinnie

I remember, I think it was during COVID or just post-COVID, we had a conversation, and I believe you were on the podcast for that, and it was about the survey that we do as well, about the changing customer expectations and how that affects brand engagement and loyalty. So we still have that we're dealing with and now we have AI and other things. What are we seeing from a continued trend?

Bree

Yeah. I mean you covered it a little bit in the title, but we're really seeing customers want to have agency in the marketplace. So they've faced things over the last few years, COVID and post-COVID, like corporate consolidation. They're seeing their purchasing power shrink, higher costs, et cetera, and they're really looking to regain control based on what they've lost. So for a brand to intuitively understand that and be able to use AI to predict and meet those customers' needs, those are the ones we're going to see thriving in today's world.

Vinnie

What makes a user of an app service website of an organization, what makes them feel empowered? What gives them agency?

Bree

Yeah. So if you think about what AI can do, it can help companies craft these really hyper personalized experiences, and that makes you feel like it was created for you. It feels intuitive, it feels personalized, and you feel like you're moving through that experience in a frictionless way. And that's really important to consumers. It allows them to feel like they have autonomy and that, again, they're back in the driver's seat.

Brian

The way I like to look at it is that, I'm not a marketing expert, but in these sorts of forums, you always generally try to segment customers into different buckets and apply different messages, different customers based off of those buckets. Right? The idea that Bree's talking about here is, the end goal I think in personalization is that one-to-one personalization. So being able to tailor a message specifically to an individual customer based off their wants and needs and desires. With these technologies now around AI, we're seeing that be very possible so you can actually drive targeted messages for that individual based off of their history, their knowledge, their desires, and as opposed to just relying on larger buckets of segmentation.

Vinnie

We're seeing through this discussion what we set up in the beginning which is, AI is an undercurrent for things we've seen before, because we've seen personalization before, we've seen segmentation before.

Bree

I think the difference is, and Brian just touched on this, previously we were doing it by segment, by persona, broader groups. Now, AI has the ability to very rapidly go into a significant amount of data and understand an individual customer's needs, where we can best connect with them, how we can do so. So it gets down to a different sort of granular level where it is hyper-personalized.

Vinnie

Yeah, I don't know why I got this weird analogy, but I remember when the iPad came out, and analysts were saying it's going to fail because it's just a large phone. It's like, "No, it's different."

Bree

Yeah.

Vinnie

Yes, it is, but because of that, it's also doing something different. So for personalization here, you could say it's the same thing. It's like, yeah, but it's doing it so much better, so much more quickly, so much more efficient.

Bree

More targeted. Yeah.

Brian

Faster in a scale. Because like I said before, you could get to a point where you could do one-to-one segmentation and create thousands of different segmentations based off a thousand different customers, but that's not very efficient. Right?

Vinnie

Right.

Brian

The idea now is that you can leverage these tools to be very efficient in the way that you're driving that personalization without having to go to that level of effort.

Vinnie

So all of these things, we're using AI to better solve issues that have been consistent for a long time.

Bree

Yeah, and there are a few specific tactics we talked about that sort of surrounded this year. One is the AI-powered recommendation engines, which I'm sure people have experienced as they're out there shopping and getting better, served back better recommendations for products and things that they might be interested in. One is the intelligent conversational chatbots that can allow a customer to feel like they're getting service quicker, easier, faster. And then the third is the real-time AI analytics, which are less visible to a customer, but I think this is what's helping companies really better understand their customers, and then ultimately market to and serve them better.

Vinnie

Yeah. I had a surprise and delight moment the other day where I was having a conversational flow with AI. I asked a question, and it was able to reference a part of a conversation we had a month ago to give it context. So I didn't have to restate every bit of the context to reestablish that state. It just remembered the flow and context of the conversation.

Bree

And it removed the friction for you. Because I think that's when customers get really frustrated with an experience, is when you feel like you're doing something you've already done or telling the tool something you've already shared. So removing that friction can just create so much of a better experience. And then here you are talking about it today.

Brian

It removes the friction, but it also potentially introduces questions from the consumer. How do they know this information about me? So again, it goes back to the transparency and the disclosure around this to be very clear about how their information is being leveraged to drive a better experience.

Vinnie

It's funny you say that because as I was delighted by that experience, my second thought is, "Oh, I need to be a little bit more careful about what I do share."

Bree

Especially with financial information and things like that, that trust really has to be there to understand that's being handled in the right way.

Vinnie

Did anything else come out of the survey in terms of what's important for customers now in terms of affinity and loyalty?

Bree

We've been tracking sustainability for a number of years in the survey. We saw that spike up this year. I would say it used to be sort of a side concern or peripheral concern for consumers. Now we're seeing that be a more critical driver of brand loyalty, and we've seen it spread up in age group. It used to be younger consumers that were more concerned, and now it's really consumers of all ages stating that corporate sustainability practices are somewhat or very important to them when they choose a brand to work with. So that's a big one.

Vinnie

Is that part of the personalization? I may push that forward or not push it forward based on what I know about the person?

Bree

I think customers are mostly concerned with like, "Where are my products coming from?" If you think about things that AI can help with, traceability, verification, tracking product origin, that's a big one. And then of course, you just think about it from the business perspective, optimizing logistics, looking across product lifecycle for efficiency. So there's a number of ways that if we think about just the idea of AI propelling innovation forward, this is a major space for that.

Brian

Reducing waste.

Bree

Yeah.

Brian

That's another great one, right?

Bree

Carbon footprint.

Brian

Great way to demonstrate to consumers that this is important by demonstrating the effectiveness, how they were reducing waste and leveraging AI to potentially do that.

Vinnie

Yeah, I hadn't considered AI's impact on that part of the-

Bree

Yeah.

Vinnie

Yeah.

Bree

Well, you think about that maybe more so from the business side, but then they're getting some credit for that with consumers as well. So it doesn't necessarily change their ability to serve customers, but it changes the way they're showing up to customers.

Vinnie

I know there's groups, organizations that a lot of our clients and specific industries want us to be a part of to prove that we're hitting thresholds in this area because they want to work with other companies that share that vision.

So trend number four, Modernization Intensifies to Supercharge Innovation. That's a lot of words that don't seem to mean anything. So what I get from this is, we do have a lot of our clients, most of our clients, if not all of our clients, have some legacy systems somewhere. No one's perfect, and we have clients going through different modernization efforts in order to empower what we're talking about. Is that what you mean by this trend, Brian?

Brian

It is. Actually, this is the one that seems to resonate the most when we talk with people right now. So two aspects of this. One is-

Vinnie

I take it back. It's worded very well then.

Brian

Yeah, it is. It is. Two aspects of this. One is that when we talked with many of our senior leaders that are leading large programs inside of clients this year, both technical and from a business perspective, most of them come back and say that they're working on large-scale modernization efforts. And that's taking systems that used to be functional for whatever reason, but now cannot meet the demands of what the business is trying to accomplish, aren't flexible enough, can't respond quickly enough, or just don't honestly provide the data that's informative. So there's that aspect of it.

The other aspect is, when we talk to clients, everyone seems to have a legacy system. Your point is, you make an assumption that that's the case, but unless you're a startup, then you have some sort of system that's been around for a long period of time. So everybody raises their hand and say, "Yeah, I can connect to this one." How is AI really supporting modernization efforts? Because modernization typically is very clunky. You think about it being very clunky and not necessarily that innovative. So where we're seeing this now is that leveraging AI as a means to promote, I'll call it discoverability within these legacy systems. So we have a concept, an accelerator called LegacyLift, which is an AI-powered toolkit that allows you to inspect code, expect documentation, inspect all the other information that you might have about a system to discover what the actual system does.

Vinnie

So walk me through that. Are you typing questions in saying, what are the major workflows? Or is it giving you basically a prescription of we're going to cover these three or four areas in terms of the objects that are involved, areas that are involved?

Brian

It can be both. So the idea is that it's an agentic system to combine something from another trend. The idea is, it can go out, a series of agents can go out and discover information from all those other sources. So like I said, code documentation, unstructured data, for example, all different places it could pull into. And then you can have a chat-based interface in front of it and say, what does the account opening process look like? What sources of information do we need to go obtain to do verification of new accounts? Those sorts of things are questions you can now ask of a system as opposed to relying on individuals that might have this knowledge baked in their brain, or maybe that person's walked out the door and that knowledge no longer exists.

Vinnie

It sounds a little bit like Green Arrow from the perspective of you don't need 20 people in a room manually, physically going through and making all these mappings, instead it's giving you a jump start on that.

Brian

That's the brute force approach, right? We think that with AI, you can get to a more modern approach for solving these legacy systems by understanding what they do, and that really accelerates and repels you forward.

Vinnie

Right. So if we have five months of discovery to do before we feel like we can actually create these models, take advantage of them, this gets us down to half that?

Brian

Half or less.

Vinnie

Half or less.

Brian

Yeah, specifically as you look to longer running programs. Yep.

Vinnie

Gotcha.

Bree

You touched on the pandemic earlier. We actually backed into this trend through the lens of innovation because we were discussing how we've seen a lot more of an appetite for innovation in the past few years, but what we realized is, in order to support that, we're seeing that companies are realizing their systems aren't what they should be, and they're having to go through these modernization efforts to support it. So that feels like where we are now, but I'm really excited about what comes after that because it feels like they're building it. So we're able to implement things like LegacyLift and then just think about everything that can be built on top.

Vinnie

I see this in a couple areas where it seems to me that AI is disrupting offshore a bit. So if you're in a situation where you have an offshore vendor and I could put 30 people in a room and have them spend five months interrogating the system, that's a time to pause and say, "Wait a minute, how do I use agentic AI to replace 30 people in a room?"

Brian

It goes back to something we've been saying for a couple of years now around AI and recognizing this is not an AI trend here, but the whole idea is that you can leverage AI to solve problems differently than you ever did before. So your example is right, normally you'd brute force it, right? You'd actually throw a bunch of people towards this problem and try to solve it as cheaply and quickly as possible.

Bree

Right.

Vinnie

Right.

Brian

Now, you can think about it differently. How do I actually leverage these new capabilities in ways that don't require me to do that, and I can still get the benefit, but maybe faster?

Vinnie

You need fewer people, but you need higher skilled people who know either the architecture or the business flows. So you're just taking away the commodity bit of it and leaving the experts in place. Speak a bit about cloud on this one for me as well. It seems to me like it's an imperative. Is it?

Brian

It absolutely is. We've seen this for a number of years. We talked about cloud being an enabler for rapid innovation cycles, just by the nature of not having to procure hardware and those sorts of things. What we're seeing now is that with the integration, if you're thinking about modernizing and fully embracing, not just take a system that exists right now and migrate it one-for-one to the cloud, that doesn't provide a whole lot of benefits other than maybe replacing a server that exists in a data center. What we're seeing is, when you re-architect and rethink how to design these things better designed for cloud is that we get to a point where you can leverage some of the native AI capabilities much faster and much easier so that, again, you can drive more innovation from that perspective. So again, it's important to design for the cloud, it's important to design, think about how the cloud can better enable more modern architecture. Again, that's how you can plug in some of these native AI capabilities fastest.

Vinnie

So to wrap up, how would you guys summarize this for our audience? What do you want people walking away thinking is an important thing to take back to their organization?

Bree

I think about, talked about this a little bit earlier today, just the fact that last year it felt like AI was the trend, or maybe two years ago, and it was all about how do we adopt this technology? Now, to me this year, we're in a more refined space. It's about the holistic integration of AI into your business and what that can do for you. And I think there's benefits on both the internal side and the customer side. We talked about optimizing logistics and the efficiencies that can come to operationalize things within an organization and how AI can help with that. And then when you think about the personalization side, you can reach your customers in a more meaningful way, develop stronger relationships, and so AI can power both sides of the business, which is really valuable.

Vinnie

What's your takeaway, Brian?

Brian

Yeah. As Bree mentioned, the last year or so has been around exploring AI and the potential, what's possible, a lot of proof of concepts, a lot of things that maybe didn't get to production, but just testing this capability out. I think the takeaway for me is that while there may be scenarios where that's still important, right now it's looking at what business problems you're trying to solve for, the ones that we talk to our clients about and we talk to our consultants about, around automation and data and loyalty and modernization efforts. There may be things inside your organization that don't fit into those four buckets, but think about how AI can solve that problem differently. So that's really, it's not about where can I leverage AI? It's more about what are my biggest problems? What are my biggest challenges that I have in front of me right now? And how do I, again, think differently, to use an Apple phrase, about how to solve this leveraging AI capabilities? These four that we talked about today are the most resonant right now with our clients, but there may be others for you.

Vinnie

So that sounds like a top-down, having this be an important part of your strategy, so how you're going to implement the things that are important to you. But I wanted to finish with, there's also a bottom-up because you can't have that if your developers don't know how to use cogeneration tools or testing automation tools, or your solutions aren't using hyper personalization. So what is CapTech doing internally for account managers, business developers, technical developers? How are we getting our knowledge to the appropriate level?

Brian

Yeah, we have foundational learning that's available for everybody and expected of everybody from an AI perspective. So knowing what is applicable, both from a governance perspective and the actual, what are the possibilities are with AI across a variety of different opportunities. So that's something we expect everybody to do.

Vinnie

There has to be a minimum general knowledge.

Brian

Yeah. And I think we should encourage that across all of our clients, is to make sure that there is a baseline understanding of what's possible here. That way, when you come into those brainstorming situations, those challenges that are presented to you, you at least have another tool in your tool belt that you could possibly leverage to see about how it might solve this differently.

Bree

No matter if you're on the consulting side or the client side, no matter what your role is, you should be able to think about how AI is propelling your individual business forward, your area of the business forward, deliver faster, do things better, do things in a more meaningful way, build stronger relationships, and figure out how to work that into the workflow.

Vinnie

What are my top three goals? What are my top three constraints? How can AI help all six of those things?

Bree

AI propel those things forward.

Vinnie

Right. Great. Well, thank you for being here, Brian, Bree. Appreciate the conversation. And thanks, everyone, for listening.

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