Advancing Our Strategy to Deliver Exceptional Employee Experiences

Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five is On the Road here at the famous HP Garage here in Palo Alto, California. This is where literally Silicon Valley was invented. It’s on the plaque on the front of the house, it has been verified. It is super exciting though, it’s the same day as HP Imagine 2024, Dan. Ton of innovation happening. We’ve got products on consumer, we’ve got commercial, we’ve got printers, PCs. We’ve got peripherals. But we always need to remember, it’s got to be about the experience.

Daniel Newman: Yeah. You wonder if Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, when you’re looking around at these oscillators and vacuum tubes, I wonder if they had a vision of AI in the future. These were people, they were pioneers that really set the tone. They set the pace of innovation here and they really did make this the epicenter of the technology universe. So it’s great to be here. Yes, Pat, in the end, we built all of this technology to deliver experiences that drove productivity, that changed businesses, and of course made all of our lives better.

Patrick Moorhead: No, it was. As I said earlier, it’s not just about the product, it’s about experiences, and that is the new bar now. You can deliver those with holistic products and solutions, but there is a services layer to this, and I can’t think of a better person to talk about this. Dave Shull, welcome back to The Six Five.

Dave Shull: I’m delighted to be here, guys. It’s great. I mean, talk about this environment, right? My dad was a electrical engineer and I remember going out there-

Patrick Moorhead: Same-

Dave Shull: Throwing the soldering iron and using that. I mean, this is phenomenal.

Patrick Moorhead: I know. Yeah, it’s really a special thing.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, it’s really cool. Pat, we talk about how people always talk about starting something in their garage. This was legit. This is actually-

Patrick Moorhead: This is it-

Daniel Newman: Starting something in their garage. I mean, you’re talking barn doors. I don’t even think there were cars. I mean maybe there were. I’m just kidding, there were cars, but not the kind that we think of at least most of the time. But hey, good to see you again. You’ve been on with us many times before, Dave, and we always appreciate having you here. What’s new? What’s new in your world? What’s new in your business line these days?

Dave Shull: I think the world has gotten, believe it or not, even more complex. Who would’ve thought that? Right? So whether it’s hybrid or AI changing all the demands for our customers, but it’s exciting. They’re saying, “Okay, help me, help me figure out new ways of managing this stuff and help me figure out new ways of getting insights. Are my employees engaged or not? Is the experience good or not?” So it’s exciting times.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, so Dave, you’re in the business of solving problems, problems that the products don’t magically fix on their own. What are you hearing from your customers? What are they telling you? Maybe talk about some of their biggest problems. Maybe talk about some new challenges that they’re having.

Dave Shull: So I was in Madrid recently, we had a customer advisory board. Talking to the customers, they’re saying, “Can you fix simple stuff like the cables being unplugged in a conference room?” In 2024 you would think we would’ve figured that out, but we really have to monitor with telemetry every aspect of what’s going on in that conference room. So they just want the experience to be seamless, friction free. The reason why they care so much is because that employee engagement, that employee fulfillment is driving attrition, it’s driving productivity. So it’s a huge issue for them. The basics, just make the basics work and make it monitored on a global basis so that everything is seamless across the board.

Patrick Moorhead: I love that, the basics. Not something, “Help me with this AI stuff now.” It’s like, “Can we just get the basics done first?”

Dave Shull: And AI actually changes the way you interact with the basics. That’s the beauty is I can now use GenAI to kind of query, “Hey, what’s going on in Germany?” Or, “What’s going on in Japan?” So that makes it easier for that IT manager. But the problems that you’re solving are as fundamental as the things that we see in this garage, right? It’s plugging stuff in, it’s making the signal come out and making the signal sing.

Patrick Moorhead: I love it.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, it’s very interesting. We saw this sort of semantic layer coming, the way we search. Remember when keyword searches and stuff, Pat, you worked at Alta Vista a 1,000 years ago when we were like 40. But when we used to search, you’d have to be like, “Red, dog, food.” You’d have to really tweak it to get it-

Patrick Moorhead: You had to put pluses in there.

Daniel Newman: By the way, I wasn’t even born.

Dave Shull: There’s a name for that, we call it prompt engineering.

Daniel Newman: Yes.

Dave Shull: But I don’t want prompt engineering I just wanted to talk and-

Daniel Newman: Exactly!

Dave Shull: What I want.

Daniel Newman: And that’s where we’re heading, right, Dave? I mean we were really heading to this kind of semantic era where whether you’re trying to run your IT systems, whether you’re trying to build a company and develop a business where you want to sort of have this very natural interaction with the machine. That’s what I think HP Workforce solutions and what you’re focused on is really all about. So what did you announce here at HP Imagine? How are you helping people stop putting weird pluses and struggling with search and having a much more natural interaction with their technology?

Dave Shull: So we had three big announcements. The first one is taking workforce experience platform, which we’ve talked about in the past, and saying, okay, we ran it through beta. Beta for us was a pretty good size beta, it was 270,000 different people that were kind of using it and saying, okay, now we’re ready to roll it out to more customers. We’re going to open up the beta to everyone in North America. We’re going to add print capabilities and start to combine the insights that you get from a PC with a printer and collaboration. So we’re on, what I think, is a very exciting path with AI around that. Number two is if your PC goes down and you’re on the road, 35% of the time it’s tied to your software is-

Patrick Moorhead: I’m surprised even that low, it would seem it’d be higher.

Dave Shull: It feels like it should be 80% of the-

Patrick Moorhead: Yes, exactly.

Dave Shull: Based on what I’m hearing from our call center it’s actually 35% of the time. So how do I remotely fix that? The problem is if you’re remotely fixing it, you can get sort of a virtual machine, but then you have to reboot it. You lose that virtual machine, you have to re-embed it. So we’ve actually got a very unique capability now, the first in the world, which goes underneath the bioslayer and allows that remote agent to fix it without you having to be involved at all. So we think that saves 25%-50% of the fixing time. Then the third is what we were talking about before, which is customers are like, “This is just too complex. Can you just manage all of this complexity for me? I don’t want to deal with five different vendors around the world in different locations and just-”

Patrick Moorhead: Right.

Dave Shull: So we’re standing up sort of global monitoring and management centers, which I think is pretty exciting for HP. It’s a big change for us as a company.

Patrick Moorhead: For sure. So Dave, when you came in the role, you probably did typically what most new leaders did, right? “Hey, I’m going to travel, talk to customers-”

Dave Shull: A lot of travel.

Patrick Moorhead: A lot of listening. Then you had to lay out, “Hey, okay, here are the services that I’m going to provide first. Here’s how we’re going to distinguish ourselves.” But everybody has a roadmap including for services.

Dave Shull: That’s right.

Patrick Moorhead: What are you looking at for the next one to three years? I’m not asking you your exact roadmap to let all your competitors know, but what are the areas that you’re looking at?

Dave Shull: So when we think about HP, we think that our advantage is we have the biggest range of devices around employee experience. So we’re all in on that. So what that means first is the devices have to work better together so that in that conference room, your PC is working with your poly gear in a different way. So that’s number one. Number two, the IT manager has to have sort of different information because there’s a broader range of devices. But then actually the third step really goes back to what we were talking about, the semantics and the prompt engineering. Our devices should have a better sense for the human context so that there’s a better understanding of what I want to do with the device. Then the actions and the information coming back should be better.

So that means I got to tie my devices together and have better insights off of them then that’s an interesting place for HP to play. And then whether I sell it on a managed basis, contractual basis, transactional basis, that’s a business model issue. But now we’re in sort of an employee fulfillment space that’s pretty exciting for us as a company.

Patrick Moorhead: Well, it is and you’ve broadened your portfolio. I mean, you’re the only one with PC and print.

Dave Shull: That’s right.

Patrick Moorhead: You have a ton of peripherals.

Dave Shull: That’s right.

Patrick Moorhead: And you’re fully embedded in all forms of conference rooms.

Dave Shull: That’s right.

Patrick Moorhead: That’s very unique. It would think you’d have more data, more experience to understand better even that symbiotic relationships between the relationships to maybe you learn something out of a conference room that you can share with approval to the PC to make the experience better, is that-

Dave Shull: That’s absolutely the path that we’re on.

Patrick Moorhead: Okay.

Dave Shull: And I think you’re going to see in the next couple of months a lot more tighter integration between some of our hardware teams, the services team, the software teams to say, “Okay, how do I truly benefit from that?” Then the other thing people don’t realize is we have a huge data science business with workstations. We have a very, very significant retail point of sale business. So it doesn’t just have to be knowledge workers sitting in an office or retail workers. How do I bring that same insight to them? I think that’s a space that’s pretty-

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, healthcare too.

Daniel Newman: And gain that telemetry successfully you’re going to need to take so much of the personal use data, find a way to anonymize it, understand behaviors to create things that could be productized.

Dave Shull: That’s right.

Daniel Newman: Then you also have to do it at the individual level, personalize it, figure out a way to safely and secure … Thinking about things that are super high value to us, for instance, it looks at your schedule and knows where you’re going and as soon as you open up a map app, it starts to say, “Do you want to go there?” Or even just knowing my behavior like on the weekends, it knows that around 9AM every Saturday I go to the gym. The phone literally just tells me, it alerts me like, “Do you want to go?” Yes, you get me! That’s the kind of thing that we want at work. We want to know that this email came in, who do we need to loop into this project right now? Then of course, how do you take and create this really exciting fabric of all this data? Dave, you’ve always been a culture guy. I remember speaking to you for years, since you were CEO of Polly. This part of getting from here to there, it’s not all technology.

Dave Shull: No, it’s not.

Daniel Newman: There’s a big culture shift that needs to go on. How are you in your org and how do you see HP overall driving that culture to really make this innovation more easy for people to digest and adopt?

Dave Shull: So I’ve, over the years of just working in different companies, kind of synthesized for myself, there’s three basic principles. It doesn’t matter what company I’m in, I think they kind of apply. Number one is customer, customer, customer. That sounds really trite, except that if you reorient everything you’re doing about that customer dialogue, boy, it changes your mindset. So having an agile team approach to that is critical. Number two is I tell the team, speed does matter in business. Just have a ruthless willingness to have a speed approach goes so far. That means therefore I’m willing for you to take risks and fail and try something new because you’re going to get it wrong especially when we’re inventing new business.

Daniel Newman: Exactly.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah.

Dave Shull: But three, of course, I expect you to own it. I expect you to really act as if this is your business, so you understand every aspect of it. So I think you put those three things together that the team dynamic starts to speed up and you really see some pretty cool-

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, if I look at the different … I’ve worked in big business for over 20 years and then I decided my own business smaller was probably better. But I love those characteristics of culture, especially the permission to fail.

Dave Shull: That’s right.

Daniel Newman: Yeah.

Patrick Moorhead: You know what I’m saying? That’s something that holds large companies back so much. Sometimes big companies do get confused on precision versus speed, and there’s no such thing as perfection. You try to get there, but what I know for certain, if anything is slow, it’s just not going to work. It all falls down.

Dave Shull: I learned so much from the mistakes that I made. I wish what we should’ve here is all the devices that didn’t work. I’m pretty sure we have the ones that did work, but I’m sure there’s tons of them that didn’t work. Highlighting that you learn a lot from that, but you just move quickly.

Patrick Moorhead: Totally.

Daniel Newman: We can do the Six Five graveyard. We just do a show, pull out all the ideas, the outtake.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. I mean I love that too. I think the fail fast, fail forward as long as it comes with that caveat of we don’t encourage failure, but we encourage that when we fail, we learn quick and we move and we go. Obviously, and you don’t throw people out that try. So there’s this really interesting sort of diametric post force where a lot of execs are like, “Failure is not an option.” Well, failure is an option if you can take what you learned, apply it, and go faster. I think that’s what you’re saying there Dave.

Dave Shull: Don’t fail the same thing three times, then you haven’t learned the lesson that’s a bad sign.

Patrick Moorhead: In fact, I was using it this weekend, CLCA, closed loop corrective action.

Daniel Newman: You did use that.

Patrick Moorhead: I did use that. Yeah, we did. And getting better. But no, this is great. This is, Dave, I love talking with you because we’re not just talking about the tech, not talking about the products, we’re talking about the pragmatic pieces that make this happen. Alex is always talking about culture. I did this long enough to spot between the fakers who like to talk about culture, but they’re really not focused on it and those that are. But I really appreciate a lot of the senior executives at HP because I feel like it’s real here and that’s got to be something Enrique is high on as well.

Dave Shull: He’s driving it. So I’ve been at the company about two years now and seeing us as a company truly start to pivot to employee experience and employee fulfillment, this is a big change for us. It is showing up at every level of the organization from Enrique through the rest of us. I think that’s gratifying, right? This is a company that has a proud history saying, “You know what? We make amazing devices and we’re going to make sure that we tie it in even more tightly for our customers.”

Patrick Moorhead: Right.

Daniel Newman: It’s great. Dave, thanks so much for tying in the history as we sit here in the HP Garage here in Palo Alto. Thanks so much for joining us.

Dave Shull: Pleasure.

Daniel Newman: Sure you’ll be back with us soon.

Dave Shull: Absolutely, guys.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, thanks.

Daniel Newman: Thank you everybody for tuning in here. It’s The Six Five, we are in Palo Alto at the HP Garage. This is the founding birthplace of Silicon Valley. Couldn’t be prouder to be sitting here next to you, my friend.

Patrick Moorhead: Same.

Daniel Newman: Hit that subscribe button. Join us for all of our Six Five content here from HP Imagine of course, all our content, because it’s all really good. But we got to go. So for now, we’ll see you later.