Chris Bryce: Hello and good afternoon folks in the Eastern Time zone. Uh, just wanna say thanks for covering out a bit of your lunch hour to, uh, join us to talk about all things CMS related. Um, just a little bit of, um, setting the stage here. We, we have a, we're broadcasting live on several social channels. We have a great team from Cometa that's producing the show and they're here to, uh, help, um, get to your questions that you might be asking from the comments on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.

Chris Bryce: And we'll do our best to answer any questions you might have. Feel free to ask us anything. Um, and the show is kind of open talk show format. We got the idea from the Car Guys show on NPR, where they just made themselves available to, um, answer any questions they could and if they didn't have an answer, they came up with one the week later. And we'll do our best to follow up, um, on the social channels as well. Um, we are in episode 27 and super stoked, uh, to have a special guest, Sean Wright, join us today from Kentico. Thank you for making time in your day to, uh, share everything about Kentico and your thoughts on where we're going with CMS technology.

Chris Bryce: Um. Yeah, do you wanna introduce yourself and, um, welcome.

Sean Wright: Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for inviting me on Chris. Um, yeah. My name is Sean Wright. I'm lead product evangelist with Kentico. Kentico is a marketing software technology provider. Um, we sell a DXP, a digital experience platform called Experience by Kentico, that helps marketing teams, uh, engage with and reach their customers and manage their content and digital experiences across multiple channels.

Chris Bryce: Yeah. Very cool. Um, as far as I understand, um, you spent a lot of years working kind of inside Kentico as kinda an an MVP there. Um, tell me about, um, the transition and how you go from kind of a, an internal guru to, uh, more of the, the external face of the product.

Sean Wright: Yeah, so I, uh, a couple years ago, uh, made a transition that was kind of in the works for a while, but actually it was kind of two transitions. So, uh, the first was I started out with a very technical background, um, so software developer working for a digital marketing agency, and that agency introduced me to Kentico. Over time, I became more client facing and, uh, filled the role of a solutions architect. And started working more and more with Kentico and, uh, several years ago I became a Kentico MVP and the Kentico MVP program recognizes members of the community from our customers or our partner agencies that excel in communicating about Kentico and its software and services to our audience, our community.

Sean Wright: And as an MVP, I grew to meet and learn about and form relationships with the people at Kentico. And then after a couple years of that, I realized I was ready to make another transition in my career and I joined up with Kentico. So I went from the marketing agency side, um, to, to working for the software vendor. And now instead of a traditional technical role, I am a product marketer. So I've moved into the marketing realm from software.

Chris Bryce: Awesome. Awesome. And, uh, we've got lots to talk about, agencies, partnerships, AI of course, your roadmap. Um, but I think, uh, let's start off, um, maybe just, uh, to, uh, set the tone. We, um, often have CMOs that are listening in now and later. Um, and do you wanna just tell everyone about the product itself and then maybe how it differentiates in the, uh, CMS market?

Sean Wright: Yeah. Um, I think experience by Kentico is unique in the market for a couple reasons. Um, we kind of sit in the middle of the market ecosystem in terms of cost and complexity. So you have giant enterprise, best of breed products at the top that cost a lot of money, and then you have kind of a turnkey, um, less complex, maybe less mature products at the bottom of the market. You know, uh, something like an easy website builder. And we're kind of in the middle. Um, small to medium, medium business.

Sean Wright: Uh, lower enterprise customers are typically the ones that use us. Our approach to helping marketers manage digital experiences is to take a, uh, a channel centric approach. So we support web, email, and headless channels in experience by Kentico. Uh, the product itself is owned by the customer, uh, often in collaboration with a partner marketing agency that helps them understand the technology and, uh, build the solution for the marketing team.

Sean Wright: Um, and so that multi-channel approach allows marketers to craft content and manage customer data in a centralized location, but deliver it through multiple digital channels, that same content, and engage with those same customers. So you could be engaging with a customer through a website or multiple websites. Uh, emails as an email channel and also headlessly through maybe, um, a small external microsite delivering content and experiences to an affiliate partner business or maybe through a mobile app. And that's a common use case that we see. And so this centralized approach allows marketers to not have to learn 15 different pieces of software.

Sean Wright: They don't have to jump through all these different products and, um, figure out where the content is. They can consolidate those channels into a single product, learn one technology and manage it all seamlessly. Of course, any product today can't stand alone in, uh, managing digital experience. It's a complex place for marketers to do their work. So we integrate with lots of other technologies and software so that marketers can choose, uh, what they want to manage in experience by Kentico and what do they want to go and reach out to the marketplace to manage elsewhere.

Chris Bryce: Interesting. You said, um, a great term, headless, and I can't help but ask you, um, what does that mean? Because it's still a little bit of a foreign term in the marketing community. I think folks are getting the hang of it, but, um, what do you mean by headless?

Sean Wright: Yeah, so headless, all it means is kind of, you gotta think about it from the perspective of what came before. So most marketing teams that manage, uh, digital channels specifically websites, are used to a product where they go in and they manage the look and feel of a website. They type some content and they publish, and there it's on the homepage. Headless is a different approach to that same goal of getting content and experiences out to customers, but instead of the marketing team worrying about the presentation side of things, they just manage the content. So, um, headless technologies say we don't have an opinion about the presentation, the experience, the head, we just care about the, the body, the content, the core of that, that what drives the experience.

Chris Bryce: Interesting. Um, and kind of on the topic of marketing and CMOs who are often unexpectedly tasked with like a large web modernization project that often includes a consideration around a new CMS platform, what would you say to them are the kind of important features and benefits of Kentico in that kind of selection process?

Sean Wright: Yeah, I think traditionally, let's look at the past 10 years, uh, marketing teams have been anywhere from 50% to 90% focused on their website, and that has been the channel through which they reach their customers. Marketing teams today need to consider more than just the website. Um, email has been a popular channel for a long time, but it's often been disconnected from the website.

Sean Wright: So marketing team will create some content for their website, maybe about a new product, event, service that they're launching, and then they want to promote it to their email subscribers. And so they copy that content over to wherever they're managing their emails and, um, make sure that the image is right and the copy is right and they didn't make mistakes. And, you know, that URL that they're linking to for maybe, uh, the event they're launching on LinkedIn that they want people to attend, like this one, make sure that that link is correct. Well, if you have these distributed systems, that becomes, uh, an opportunity for mistakes and errors. We're all human, but wouldn't it be great if you could reduce those?

Sean Wright: So experience by Kentico is a digital experience platform, um, which, you know, is a, it's a CMS with marketing features fully baked into the product. Um, experience by Kentico allows marketers to manage multiple digital channels in one place, and I think that's key for marketing teams today because research that we have done has shown that most marketing teams are managing multiple digital channels and often with different technologies.

Sean Wright: So you might have, um, a WordPress site or two or three, and those are managed by a combination of IT and marketing and who's keeping them up to date and who's validating that the plugins are secure and, uh, who's, uh, keeping all the content and brand consistent between these. And then maybe you have another vendor for your primary web experience and then another vendor for your email, and then another vendor that lets you deliver content to the mobile app that you're launching.

Sean Wright: That's a lot. And so we believe that consolidating those digital channels into a single product and allowing marketers to very easily, intuitively manage content and experiences across those channels from a central hub of content and also collect data from customers, um, ones that, uh, allow that data to be collected and managed and experienced by Kentico in a single platform allows marketers to, for example, personalize experiences across all those channels for the same customer from one location. So it simplifies the things that should be simple for marketers while still allowing them to have powerful technologies at their fingertips.

Chris Bryce: That's pretty awesome. And, um, that is to say that I also know that Kentico enables kind of also the composition of other systems to be connected to it. So if you're already, I don't know, deep within, let's say Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you can still connect all of these things together, but also use some of your kind of, uh, out of the box solutions for other aspects of marketing.

Chris Bryce: Um, something else that is a lot, often on the minds of CMOs is the cost, and something that we struggle with as an agency, um, and fairly agnostic on the content platforms, where we really try to find the right solution for the right customer, is this idea of total cost of ownership. And that's challenging with composable or headless systems where you have eight or nine different sets of plumbing connecting all with their own consumable fee structure in there. And, and you brought up a good point as we were chatting before the show around this idea of, um, what did you, how did you phrase it? It wasn't the total cost of ownership, you had a better way of putting it.

Sean Wright: Yeah. So what I think, cost is a very important thing for marketing teams when looking at the technology behind the products they're using for managing digital experiences. Total cost of ownership is key as part of that, uh, that cost. Um, because sometimes you might be willing to spend a lot if, uh, at first there's a high cost, but over time, that cost reduces. Or maybe you're willing to get on board with something that has a low initial cost, even though the long-term cost is higher.

Sean Wright: There's also the question of, um, time to value. Yeah, because, uh, you might make a big investment, but then what happens when that solution, that technology solution isn't actually helping a marketing team generate value? And we believe at Kentico that that is the purpose of a CMS or digital experience platform, is to generate revenue. If it's not doing that, then um, what, what are you really doing with the technology? Because the marketing team's goal is to generate leads, uh, build brand, um, engage with customers, and all of this is, you know, for the purpose of generating revenue or whatever the proxy is for revenue for an organization. Um, so yeah, total cost of ownership, extremely important. Time to value, also important.

Chris Bryce: Um, speaking of timing, how does your solution, um, enable the development team and the marketing team to get the product up and running? And what is your, your onboarding process if a CMO is curious about taking a look at Kentico? Um, one of the challenges we've had in the past is not being able to create a sandbox, for example, like how quickly can authors get in there and see what their day-to-day life is going to be like? Um, do you wanna talk a little bit about onboarding and actually how to, um, how do folks get their hands on the tools?

Sean Wright: Yeah, so for onboarding of customers or partner agencies that want to work with us, we have multiple, even pre-sales solutions for that. So, um, actually there's a YouTube video that I'm in on Kentico's YouTube channel showing how a developer can spin up our software and have a fully running environment in about three minutes. I think over time I've been able to get that down to about 60 seconds.

Chris Bryce: Oh, right on. Okay.

Sean Wright: So, uh, you know, getting up and running and seeing what the product is is very simple, but also for marketers who are not technical people and really just want to see the software, have a sandbox, explore, we have a fully featured, uh, demo environment that they can request, um, on our website. And we'll spin it up for them. And this hosted trial of the product, uh, lasts for two or more weeks where a marketing team can go in and play around and it's fully populated with customer data and content, multiple channels. All the features are enabled and you can explore it and kind of see how the product works.

Sean Wright: But there's also the post-sales, um, question of getting up and running. And for that, uh, we have, uh, tutorials and guides for the technical teams that would be kind of creating that sandbox environment for the marketers to explore and maybe start trialing some management and creation of digital experiences in, uh, we also have a SaaS offering where we can help that, uh, customer get up and running in a day with not only that, um, initial technical environment, but also the infrastructure for their QA, uh, UAT staging and production environments. All of that would be scaffolded out and created for them, and we manage that and the security of it for them.

Chris Bryce: Oh, super cool. And then you mentioned that, um, Kentico is a SaaS product, but I think it comes in different flavors. Do you wanna talk a little bit about the, the stack underneath?

Sean Wright: Yeah. So traditionally, you know, Kentico has been around now for 21 years in the CMS and digital experience platform space. So, uh, we've been doing this for a long time and our past products were, uh, they came up in an era before the cloud, so customers were running them in their data centers, sometimes in a computer in the back of the office somewhere. Uh, but today, you know, the technology landscape has changed. It's matured a little bit and we still have customers, uh, that run experience by Kentico in their own data center or in public cloud, private cloud, whatever they want, they can run it.

Sean Wright: Self-host, self-managed experience by Kentico SaaS is the other option. And the product is the same between these two approaches. So we can manage the infrastructure, help you with deployments, updates to the product, uh, security, uh, compliance, um, or you can do this yourself. It kind of depends, really, on the goals and the priorities of the marketing team. Some have strict legal compliance requirements where even though we have, you know, all the SOC 2 compliance and everything like that, uh, they have to host and manage and run everything themselves, that's fine. But for the ones where the priority is really reaching customers, building and managing digital experiences and all that other stuff is just technical complication, we can solve that problem for them so that they can focus on the areas where they're really, uh, excelling.

Chris Bryce: Very cool. And you just tapped on something that's becoming of increasing importance up here in Canada. So our agency is primarily headquartered in Toronto, so we have more customers that are concerned or curious about where is their data. Uh, and I know your solution solves for that. Do you want to talk a little bit about where customer data is stored and, you know, what are some of the things they need to be thinking about to make sure that they're within compliance as, um, I guess governance becomes more strict?

Sean Wright: Yeah, data sovereignty is very important and it's something we hear from customers all the time, and that's why we provide these two options so they can host, manage, and run the application and store the data wherever they want. Um, but if they choose to go with experience by Kentico SaaS, we run the SaaS solution on top of Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Azure has points of presence around the globe. And so it's very rare that we do not have a point of presence in the country where the customer needs to have that data live for data sovereignty requirements.

Chris Bryce: Okay. Interesting. And I think that's a great segue into, um, uh, some of the, uh, out of the box technologies and some of the open architecture that Kentico has, um, particularly around search. We were chatting a bit earlier about that. Um, do you wanna talk a little bit about how search works? Uh, 'cause that is typically one of the kind of composable bolt-ons to a solution that also has kind of consumable costs involved as well, but I think you guys have really thought this out and offer a variety of options.

Sean Wright: Yeah. Search is a requirement these days with web experiences. It's also often used in mobile experiences as well. And we know that as, um, a platform that manages channels both for web and potentially mobile with our headless channels, uh, search needs to be part of that. It needs to be part of the solution, but marketing teams have all sorts of different requirements for what that search experience needs to be. And they also have budgets. You know, you mentioned total cost of ownership. Um, there are search products and vendors out there that have ongoing costs, and so if that total cost of ownership doesn't include the room for that, they don't want to be left out in the cold without a search option.

Sean Wright: And so we offer three, um, first party managed and supported open source integrations for different search providers. Uh, they're open source so that developers can go and look at them and learn from them. They can get started with them in just a few steps. Um, they could also customize them if they have special needs for their search solution. And the approach that we take to picking, um, different vendors for search in the market space is kind of a, a goldilocks approach where we have a big, middle, medium, and large solution.

Sean Wright: So on the lower end, we have Lucene, and this is a cornerstone technology for most search vendors out there, but this is self-hosted, so it would be part of the experience by Kentico solution. There's no ongoing cost for it, but it also requires the experience by Kentico solution to scale. Um, and it doesn't have all the bells and whistles that maybe you need from search. However, we have many customers that are using it today and very happy with it.

Sean Wright: We also have Azure Search, so building on that support of Microsoft Azure and, um, technology related to that. Azure Search is kind of in the middle where, um, customers pay for a set amount of infrastructure and the search experience is driven off of that. Uh, Microsoft Azure's Azure Search has a lot of capabilities, so it's more advanced than Lucene, even though it's built on top of Lucene. Um, but it has kind of a fixed cost approach.

Sean Wright: And then we have an integration with Algolia. And Algolia is a leader in the search space, um, for often commerce solutions, but it can really be used for any, um, I've seen it used successfully in the healthcare space. Uh, and Algolia has a consumption based pricing. So, um, if you have more visitors and hopefully you're generating more revenue from that, then you're going to be spending more with Algolia. So it isn't necessarily a fixed cost, but that consumption pricing, uh, comes along with a lot of best of breed features and capabilities.

Chris Bryce: Okay. Amazing. So you have three options that are readily available. Plus, if you're already committed to a different solution, that can be integrated as well. Um, just underlying technologies, I think there's kind of two cool things we could talk about. One is, um, your kind of, there's a .NET underlying, um, the system. Um, yeah, maybe let's talk about that a little bit, um, because there's, I guess, many headless solutions that are not connected to .NET, and maybe just share a little bit more about the value of that.

Sean Wright: Yeah. Uh, Kentico has been based on .NET, Microsoft Technologies, since its foundation, um, 21 years ago, and we've stuck with .NET because we've found that it helps our engineering teams be very productive in developing the product. And we've also found that our customers and partner agencies love working with Microsoft Technologies. Um, Microsoft had kind of a transitionary phase in .NET as a programming language framework technology several years ago. Um, it feels like it was yesterday, but now it's back in 2015. Um, and that transition, uh, changed a lot around the technology and vendors that were using .NET at the time.

Sean Wright: Um, but now, uh, .NET is a fully modern, open source framework that Microsoft builds a large amount of their technology on. I think Bing search is built on .NET. So we're using the same technology that drives their, uh, search experience for Bing, which is part of every single Windows, uh, installation. Okay. And that .NET technology, uh, releases at a yearly cadence. They have, uh, monthly bug fixes and security patches. So, um, you know, because some of the best minds in the industry are working on that technology, and we build experience by Kentico on top of it. So if, uh, development teams, technical teams working for customers or our partners are familiar with .NET, then they can easily become familiar with experience by Kentico because we try as much as possible to do things the way that the broader .NET community is doing things. So things will feel very familiar to those development teams.

Chris Bryce: Yeah, it's also nice for marketers to know they can get a certified .NET developer. It does kind of set a standard for developing that bench. Um, just a quick shout out to everyone who's joining us today. Thanks for making the time to do so. We have a question from Natalie, actually, here. She asks, um, wondering what you feel marketers need to focus on to be future proof and navigate through the changes. Um, as AI starts impacting everything, and this leads to a greater discussion around how your team is adopting AI into its tooling. Um, do you wanna talk about that a little bit?

Sean Wright: Yeah, I think marketers are in both a difficult position today. There's lots of challenges, but with every challenge comes an opportunity, and AI is one of those, both challenges and opportunities. But I don't think AI kind of exists alone. It's, um, symbolic of changes we've been seeing in digital marketing for a while now, where in the past, uh, often a marketing team's strategy or, uh, product lines or services or their customer base would be the thing that would be changing, and that's what they had to adapt to. And over the past, let's say, 15, 20 years, we've seen that transition over to technology being the thing that's changing faster. And with AI that's only going to become more true.

Sean Wright: And so marketing teams are needing to adapt to both the changes in customer preferences, the channels they use, uh, the product lines and services that an organization offers, the marketing strategy, the way they go to market, and also the technology that's used to execute on that marketing strategy. And with all these changes happening, it's sometimes more important that a team can be agile and move quickly and adapt, um, or be able to pick a goal in the future and work towards that iteratively, uh, evaluate how effective they are with the technology they're using, or the strategy they have. Evaluate it and then optimize, and then if something changes, be able to pivot to the next goal or the new opportunity that they're seeing.

Sean Wright: To be able to really do that successfully, a team needs to, one, uh, have an awareness of the technology and their customers. Being aware of their customers is, well, that's the responsibility of an organization, a company. But being aware of the technology can often be more difficult because the marketing team is focused on digital marketing. Um, we often see that pairing up with a partner agency can be really effective there because the partner agency, their responsibility is staying on top of the technology and helping, uh, a marketing team within an organization execute their strategy with whatever the technology is today or is going to be in the future.

Sean Wright: So you have these pieces in place, now what about the vendor, the technology solutions that a marketing team with their partner agency invests in? These also need to be evolvable and adaptable. And we saw, you know, 10, 15 years ago, you would often have these very powerful, uh, technology platforms for digital marketing, content management, but they were slow to evolve or they would have, um, yearly or bi-annual release cycles. What we're seeing today, uh, is that, uh, AI is changing in capabilities and price, and, um, people are coming up with innovative ways to use AI in different channels and, um, all sorts of things on a daily or weekly basis. So how does a product that evolves or changes on a yearly or every two year cadence meet up with the needs of a marketing team that is having to adapt much more quickly than that?

Sean Wright: So experience by Kentico, the product we sell, um, releases on a monthly cadence. Okay. And we also have a public roadmap available at roadmap.kentico.com, and customers and partners can go there and see exactly what we are planning to deliver. They can also see all the things that we have delivered over the past couple of years. And the list is, um, overwhelming even for me, even though it's my responsibility to keep track of all of that stuff.

Sean Wright: Um, so we have, uh, a perspective over the next couple of months of what we'll be released in the product. And then we also have our future vision, kind of the, the future roadmap, the big picture thing over the next six or 12 months, the things that we're gonna focus on. By making that public, we help marketing teams plan so that they can be strategic and agile in their approach to, uh, what types of things they're gonna be able to execute on. It helps our partner agencies know what's coming with the technology so that they can communicate that to their clients. But it also allows us, with this monthly release cycle and this public roadmap, to shift if needed.

Sean Wright: We are able to do that within the timeframe of a couple months, and we get feedback from our customers and partners on a daily basis, and all that feedback goes straight to the product team and it informs what we prioritize. So for example, there's been quite a few occasions where we release something and we hear it's great, but we need an additional capability to go along with that. We get feedback from multiple partners, customers, and we say, okay, but we can see the priorities here and we can pivot and we can be agile and release that within two months. And that capability comes out and allows that marketing team, that partner agency, to also be agile and adapt. And I think that whole, uh, picture, that question of being able to move quickly and adapt to the technology ecosystem, their customers, their products, all this stuff, that is business as usual today. Any marketing team that isn't able to execute like that, they're going to experience challenges.

Chris Bryce: Yeah, good point. Um, I can't help but ask you about AIRA, um, something unique, I think, to Kentico. Um, oh, wow. I, I think we're technically outta time, but I've got a few more questions for you if you don't mind.

Sean Wright: Sure, no problem.

Chris Bryce: Yeah, yeah. Tell me about, uh, what you're doing with AIRA. Um, and I believe there's also this idea of a companion app that is unique to Kentico. Uh, tell me a bit more about that.

Sean Wright: Yeah. Kentico started flirting with AI technology several years ago, and we implemented it in our products through integrations. So we would see an opportunity to add AI in some form, and this is well before the, uh, GPT or large language model world that we live in today. But we would see an opportunity to add AI to the platform and we'd integrate it into a key area of the product. And marketers could then experiment with it and see if it helped them do something more successfully or faster.

Sean Wright: With experience by Kentico, we realized we have, uh, a new opportunity because this product's been built from the ground up to envision, change our perspective on how AI is part of the product. So our approach to making AI feel seamless is what we call AIRA, and that's AI Recommendations and Assistance. So we gave it this acronym name, and it really, it's a way of representing how AI is appearing in the product. Sometimes it's very on the surface, so we have, you know, text transformation prompts to make text or content, um, more expressive or descriptive or meet your brand or your, um, uh, tone of voice requirements, things like that.

Sean Wright: And marketers are probably pretty familiar with that idea today, but we also have AI integrated into the product behind the scenes where it enhances a marketer's workflow without kind of jumping out and yelling at them, "hey, I'm AI." For example, a marketer can drag and drop an image into our content hub. That image is automatically uploaded. A content item is created. The image is optimized. We detect focal points if there are multiple variant sizes of that image that need to be created. The AI does the focal point detection, making sure that it's cropped in the right way based on the point of interest of the image. And tags and metadata, like alt texts or descriptions, are automatically applied from the, uh, taxonomies that marketers have defined for their solution. And everything is ready to go. So we don't take the marketer out of the loop, we just make the loop a lot smaller for them, a lot faster, so that they can still be the ones controlling where things are going. Um, but the AI is helping them do that more quickly.

Chris Bryce: Yeah. One of the things that's always a challenge for us, uh, one is content modeling, and the second is migration. You know, if you have a site with 10,000 pages, they don't all port over one-to-one, the data's unstructured. Um, do you have any workflows around migration and, um, how does Kentico approach migration activities?

Sean Wright: Yeah, so if customers are coming to us, uh, they're interested in experience by Kentico, but they're on a different platform today, we have built, again, an open source migration toolkit. And this migration toolkit is something we continue to evolve as the product evolves. And we have, um, vendor specific migration tools that can help customers get from their vendor directly to us. And we also have a universal migration tool, and that universal migration tool can take data from any data source. It could be some internal PIM, or it could be some old legacy vendor that maybe not many people are using today. And we can ingest that data into experience by Kentico and create those content types, do that content modeling, populate the data, generate webpages, and have a marketing team be up and ready to go much faster than they'd otherwise be able to do.

Chris Bryce: Awesome. Um, just final question, if you don't mind. I'd just love to hear your thoughts on where all of this is going. What is the future of digital content and content platforms, and what's way out there on your roadmap, and what's your perception of how things are going to be changing, and what would marketers wanna have in the back of their mind to manage this in the future?

Sean Wright: I think everyone needs to admit that things are changing.

Chris Bryce: You have to, yeah.

Sean Wright: Uh, the first stage is acceptance. And I think once you accept that things are changing, then you can look at the landscape and identify those challenges and opportunities. An obvious challenge that everyone has in the back of their head, or maybe they're losing some sleep over tonight, is what is the future of the web when people are experiencing, um, zero click answers for search on Google, if they're a more traditional user of the web, or maybe they're going directly to a large language model, something that's integrated right into their phone or whatever platform or app that they're using.

Sean Wright: We believe that things are changing, but in some ways they will also stay the same. They're just going to shift, so the web is not going away. That's a foundation to what we believe. At least, uh, in the near term or several year horizon, nothing's happening to the web, but the way people use it and interact with it will be different. Things around SEO are probably going to change. But that doesn't mean that content and web experiences aren't valuable. It just means the way that you get customers or visitors to your website is going to change, and the way you get them to stay and engage with you is going to change.

Sean Wright: So, uh, structured content and information that is consistent and on brand becomes even more important when large language models are ingesting that content and representing your brand and your information to people that are trying to find out about you or your competitors. It becomes even more important when people are doing all their own research and kind of, you know, cutting through the marketing fluff a little bit with these large language models.

Sean Wright: Um, additionally, I mean, member experiences, things where the experience is finely tuned and crafted for the visitor, where, um, maybe there isn't that public data for a large language model to ingest. Uh, you go through a login and then you have access to a large corpus of information within an organization, customers are still going to have those types of experiences and marketers are going to want to optimize those, personalize them. They're gonna want to get customers to subscribe to newsletters and engage with them in these more, maybe what feels like one-on-one, uh, approaches, as opposed to the, the large hope, "I rank number one in search and get, you know, 10 million, a hundred million visits to my landing page" or something like that, right? So the web doesn't go away, it just changes in the way it's serving customers and the way marketers are using it to engage with people.

Chris Bryce: Great insights, and, um, we're well over time. I wanna just say thank you very much for sticking around a little longer. Um, and, uh, thanks for being with us here today. Um, to everyone who's made some time to listen in, thank you very much. Um, feel free to ask Sean anything, uh, in the comments section below, wherever you're tuning in. Um, and, uh, we're gonna wrap this up, but really great, thanks Sean, thanks for making time to join us and sharing all of this. It's a lot to absorb. Um, we'll be posting a follow up with this video and segments of it on the social channels in the future. Um, and also thanks to Cometa and Natalie Marie for helping produce the show. And, uh, stay tuned, in, uh, another week we'll go live again. So thanks again, Sean, and your team. Um, great working with you and, uh, well, I'll talk soon. Have a great lunch and a happy Thursday. Okay. See you.