Navigating Change in the AI Era

Daniel Newman:
Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Six Five Summit, Daniel Newman here. It’s day two. We’re in the enterprise AI platforms track and I couldn’t be more excited to have a guest with me, someone that I’ve had before on the platform, on the show, on the Six Five Dan Adika, WalkMe CEO. Dan, welcome back to the Six Five Summit. How you doing?

Dan Adika:
Good. Good. Thank you for having me again.

Daniel Newman:
Yeah, it was great to see you in New York not too long ago. Been following the journey, working with WalkMe for many years. I’ve watched you grow, I’ve watched you go public, I’ve watched you pivot your strategy. AI was something that you had identified before it became quite as in vogue as a big game changer for the business. Of course, we’ve seen some mega trends that have sort of created an inertia, a gravity for AI that now it seems to be every company doing things around it. But hey, first and foremost, just say hi to everyone. I know WalkMe has grown, it’s gone public, it’s got a big name, but give me the quick sort of 30 second elevator for people that maybe haven’t heard or aren’t familiar with WalkMe before we dive into the broader topic.

Dan Adika:
Sure. So WalkMe, we invented what we call today, the category digital adoption platform. We’re really helping companies manage all their transformation now. When they’re coming and they introducing new technologies to their employees, we give them the ability to understand what their employees are doing, how they’re using software, and more importantly, making sure they’re completing the workflows that are important to those companies in order obviously to affect the top and the bottom line. So we’re really helping those companies navigate this massive change and massive transformation with our platform.

Daniel Newman:
Making your software work for you.

Dan Adika:
Exactly.

Daniel Newman:
So listen, the theme of this show this year is AI Unleashed because look, we understand what’s going on out there, but you are doing this to really enable companies to unlock the power of their software, unlock the power of AI. How do you think companies are doing so far?

Dan Adika:
I don’t think they’re doing well. I think that there is huge hype. Every person understands that the GenAI area is probably the biggest transformation and they want to understand how their companies can be enabled on GenAI. So obviously when there is a hype, there is a lot of vendors, there is a lot of things that you can buy and integrate. But what we’re seeing, and this is after many, many conversation with a lot of our customers and they’re saying, look, it’s there. We’re getting where it’s going. But in reality the average employee is not using it in day-to-day, there just not. There is maybe some early adopters, maybe there is some small niche use cases that we are seeing some of it adopted, but if you ask, they’re not really getting the full potential of generative AI and they need to figure out how to do it. And obviously that’s something that we’re putting a lot of effort on now.

Daniel Newman:
Yeah. And you sort of alluded to having seen this before. I would agree with you as an analyst, every sort of tech wave is met with a certain amount of exuberance and enthusiasm and we’re going to do it. And then people try to do it and then they kind of run into the wow, that’s actually pretty hard. There’s a reason that despite new technologies, people still do things in spreadsheets. I can’t tell you how many companies I know that are nine-figure businesses now, even some that have gotten close to billion dollars of revenue that still have tons of processes that are heavily manual, they’ve built work arounds. So they bought big systems and now they’re working around them because there’s parts of this. So you’ve seen it before. This isn’t new, but what problem are you trying to solve? Are you solving the make what I have work? Are you solving the figuring out the right stuff to buy? I mean, what is the thing that you really believe you can help solve?

Dan Adika:
Yeah. So WalkMe was always about the individual, the person, the user that actually using the software. We want to make them make the most out of what they have in front of them. So when you’re thinking about generative AI, in order to really make it work, you need to do a few things. One, you need to know when and where to use it. You need to know how to prompt because if you don’t know how to prompt, you probably get okay minus responses. It’s not going to really help you do it. And it need to be contextual without context, obviously. Again, it’s not working and people get the idea, yes, everybody has access to ChatGPT, everybody can go and say, Hey, write an email or draft that, but how that actually becoming applicable on my day-to-day, right? How on my day-to-day, I’m actually going to use GenAI.

That’s something that we’re not seeing in companies and that’s something that we’re here to solve. And the way we’re solving it and the way we’re thinking about it is WalkMe basically is a Copilot since day one. We’re sitting in front of the employee side by side showing them what to do and what we did until today is navigate the application, help them with business processes. But what we’re doing now and the concept that we’re taking is like we’re moving from a pull model where the person needs to go to the Copilot or the GenAI and start chatting with it to a push model where we understand what you’re trying to do. So why would we just not use AI for you? So if I know that you’re trying to do something I can already prompt for you, I can already go to the Copilot for you, I can already make the call for you and you’re just getting the end result.

And by doing that and by deploying those techniques, we’re getting almost 100% adoption rate because everybody’s using it without even knowing that they’re using it. And we think that’s the way that GenAI would work. AI not going to be a side thing that you’re doing. AI going to be what do you do in the flow of work? It’s just going to be there for you. And that’s the exact offering that we’re coming to our customers and basically showing them the path to increase adoption of generative AI and help them with those strategies.

Daniel Newman:
So the TAM expansion for you is to do what you’ve been doing for helping companies to really understand the utilization of enterprise software and gain strength because companies make big investments. Oftentimes, I could even say personally, we made big investments in software, that you’re sometimes looking back and are like “are people using this? Are they using it well? Are they inputting the right data?” Because by the way, the two things are inextricably linked, Dan, because if they’re not using the software, not inputting the data correctly, the AI might not work well.

Dan Adika:
Exactly.

Daniel Newman:
You said, kind of first of all, you’re right. By the way, how are my prompts so far? Am I prompting you well? But in serious,-

Dan Adika:
You are.

Daniel Newman:
Thank you. Thank you. The prompting is really, really important. And second of all though, we all know the hallucinations. And by the way, this is not unique to just these sort of publicly available LLMs that are kind of what I call next generation search. It’s the same problem inside of a business application. So if I say, “Hey, show me the customers that are most likely to leave because of low interactions.” And you start prompting your co-pilot, right? So the system is always good as the data that’s put into it and the outputs are super critical. And you creating that behavior, getting people to do the right thing consistently is how we get to the end. So let’s talk about the Copilot for a minute, right? The copilots are cool. You press a button and it creates some text for you, it does something automatically, it sends you a report. But I mean in a diverse workforce, the Copilot itself, I mean there needs to be some work done to make that really a solution. Talk about what you think it would require to make the Copilot work.

Dan Adika:
Yeah. So you gave a great example. If you ask the Copilot customers that tend to churn or even something simpler like “Hey, what’s the policy on that and that?” And you fed it with all the information, it would give you the wrong policy. So in order to really make it work, one, you need the data to be there. Two, you need to give it the right context. It needs to know much more than just, hey, what is this? Or what is that? They need to know who you are. They need to understand what you’re trying to ask. If you will really build it correctly, then yes, it will give you the right answer. And that’s what we’re seeing today. And companies are doing few things. One, they’re starting to train their employees of how prompt and so on and so on. And obviously that change as we’re seeing the GenAI releasing more versions and more features.

The second piece is the use cases. And sometimes you need one bot and one agent to do that and one agent to do that. Now it’s not just that I need to know to prompt, I need to know where to ask, which LLM I’m asking. And obviously there is tons of data privacy issues. There is a lot that companies need to think of before they can actually go and deploy a Copilot in a way that would really move the needle for their business. Because look, the promise is insane. Right.

Imagine that Copilot works like all the demos. I can do my job in like two seconds, do this, done, do this, it’s done. But I can bet any amount that you want. Go take a Copilot, deploy it in a company, doesn’t work. There is no chance it works. It needs heavy, heavy, heavy lifting both from the back end as you said, the data and from the user, the human perspective, that they will understand what they’re doing, they will understand when they can go, what to ask, where to ask, what context they need to give. And that’s a lot of work. And we’re seeing companies that not struggling, but they started and they’re not getting the result they expected to see in that timeframe. And it probably they understand now that it’ll take a few more years.

Daniel Newman:
Yeah. So with that in mind, let’s get a little actionable here, Dan, with the few minutes we have left. You talk to many organizations, your team talks to many organizations. You’re trying to help companies implement and employ and get value out of this. What is your advice to businesses that want to actually scale and start to see benefit from their AI investments across their workforces?

Dan Adika:
Yeah. So obviously we’re not objective here because we have our own product, but again, same thing we’re preaching for 12 years. You need to put the human factor in the center. You need to make sure that people know how to use it. And in order to do it, you need to make it easy for them. It’s need to be in the flow of work, it’s need to be contextual, it’s need to be aligned with everything that you as the business want them to do. And the more I would say frictionless it will be the more people will use it and obviously our offering, WalkMe(X), do exactly that and we can work with any Copilot.

So you can bring your own LLM, you can use WalkMe LLM, you can connect it to a existing Copilot. We don’t really care. We’re not trying to replace the Copilot. We’re trying to make the human better with technology like our mission statement from day one. We want people to unleash the power of technology and that’s our focus. And we’re already seeing result, obviously internally, but with our customers that already used it, they’re seeing huge boost in adoption in their generative AI tools and obviously initiatives. So we think it’s huge tailwind for us and we’re launching it officially in June 18th in a realized conference. So yeah, we can’t wait to see.

Daniel Newman:
Well congratulations on that. And you are customer zero, right? You are doing it and,-

Dan Adika:
We’re customer zero. Yeah.

Daniel Newman:
I love it. All right, so you got about a minute. I’d just like to hear, give me the one or two bullet, the most exciting innovations that you’ve launched or plan to launch that you can share with the Six Five Summit crowd.

Dan Adika:
Sure. So I would say one is WalkMe(X), which it’s everything that we just talked, we’re going to really change the way companies enabling their employees on generative AI. And that’s big and it’s intel a lot of other smaller features that are connected. And I would say that the biggest big innovation that we’re releasing is what we call Workflows Insight. We basically able now to analyze cross application business processes for our customers so they know exactly what’s going on in their company and then obviously apply the solution, which can be guidance, can be even generative AI and so on. So really connecting the full vision that we always had, data, action, and experience together and with Walkme(X) and Workflows, that’s going to really be a game changer. So I’m super excited.

Daniel Newman:
Dan Adika, CEO of WalkMe, thank you so much for joining me here at the Six Five Summit. Congratulations on the progress, success. Look forward to seeing the new launch and everyone keep an eye out on WalkMe and all the things they’re doing. Great company. Known them for years. Excited to continue to watch their progress.

Dan Adika:
Thank you so much.

Daniel Newman:
All right, you are tuned into the Six Five Summit. It’s day two here. We are in the enterprise AI platforms track. Stick with us. So much more to come. Studio, I’m sending it back to you.