Lamees Butt is the SVP of Global Alliances and Channels at Zoovu, an AI Content Discovery platform for enterprise businesses.
With over a decade of expertise in managing global partnerships and driving business transformation, Lamees is deeply dedicated to revolutionizing the way customers interact with brands and services.
Her passion lies in not only streamlining employee workloads but also in crafting memorable and valuable experiences for buyers.
What you will learn
- The importance of digitizing the sales process and replicating the expertise of in-store salespeople
- How AI can personalize the customer journey and improve product recommendations
- Discover why it’s critical to adapt to changing market dynamics
- How Zoovu helps businesses solve the problem of choice paralysis in online shopping
- The potential of digital transformation and the evolution of commerce discovery experiences
- Learn about three types of Discovery Experiences: guided selling conversational assistant, visual configurator, and intelligent search
- What brings Lamees’ personal joy and what brings her professional joy
- Plus loads more!
Transcript
Jeff Bullas
00:00:06 – 00:01:45
Hi everyone, wherever you are around the world, I have to with me today, Lamees Butt and Lamees is the SVP of Global Alliances and Channels at Zoovu, an AI product discovery platform for enterprise businesses. And we’re talking about product discovery in e-commerce platforms. With over a decade of expertise in managing global partnerships and driving business transformation, Lamees is deeply dedicated to revolutionizing the way customers interact with brands and services. Her passion lies in not only streamlining employee workloads but also in crafting memorable and valuable experiences for buyers and we’re talking very much about an online e-commerce world here. So just a very interesting fact I discovered the other day on that is that e-commerce is a big business because for example, Amazon is 40% of all online business in the USA. So how important is online commerce and e-commerce? Well, it’s big. So Lamees is playing in that space with Zoovu. So what we’re gonna look at is fostering lasting customer satisfaction. We look at revolution, customer engagement on e-commerce platforms. So welcome to the show Lamees, it’s fantastic to have you here. You’re dialing in from Malo in the UK. And apparently she escaped the pandemic by getting into a village on the outskirts of London. So, welcome to the show Lamees.
Lamees Butt
00:01:46 – 00:01:49
Thanks for having me, Jeff. Yeah, excited to be here.
Jeff Bullas
00:01:50 – 00:02:20
So, Lamees and I both have names starting with the BU. So we got in trouble at school, but we managed to, you know, evolve and learn from our experiences. But anyway, that’s another story, we had a conversation about that before. And we’re now well rounded and great people, apparently, I’ve been told that occasionally by someone but it’s okay. So Lamees, I digress, it’s eight o’clock here in Sydney.
Lamees Butt
00:02:21 – 00:02:21
The coffee’s worn off.
Jeff Bullas
00:02:21 – 00:02:59
So Lamees, tell us your story about how you ended up as a shareholder in Zoovu, which has been running for 15 years and it sort of reinvented itself and it’s not an overnight success because anything really is. But so how did you end up Zoovu? What’s your story? What inspired you to go down this path of e-commerce because your education at UNI was not anything to do with it. How did you get here?
Lamees Butt
00:02:59 – 00:06:15
I think the genesis of, you know, all of, kind of, my career stems back to probably my early early teens, which is a long time ago, but I was just a curious individual and always looking to optimize things, change things and do things better. Was always kind of how I saw it. I was never like the person or the kid that played with Barbie dolls. I was the kid that played with LEGO. I wanted to build things. Thanks to my parents, they didn’t put Barbie doll in my hand, they put LEGO in my hand. But digital transformation for whatever that word was something that I always felt passionate about. And I think the reason that I was passionate about it was at university, as you mentioned, I actually studied a politics degree, which is obviously nothing that I’m doing today. And during that degree, I decided that, well, I actually just found I had a passion for setting up businesses. So I did that on the side and ultimately created a fashion business, which was a personal shopping kind of one-to-one side hustle. And at the time, this was obviously bringing in a ton of cash while I was at university, which was great. I was loving life. But then quickly realized, you know, this could be something that could help lots of people. So the scalable model kind of infiltrated my head and I wanted to know how I could create such a thing. And that was where My Mannequin was born, which was kind of my first startup where it was essentially bridging the gap between the brick and mortar stores and the online space. So you would come to My Mannequin, the app, it would ask you a series of questions about your, the brands you like, your lifestyle, your budget and it would aggregate an outfit for you from all of the brands that we were associated with in a way that you could then purchase through the app. And that concept of solving choice paralysis, which is what it is, in the fashion industry and really being able to target the customer with the right set of with the right outfit for them was something that I just found incredibly interesting in the fact that we were solving a problem. And that then played its way throughout my career as I went on to I have played some time in corporate and Mercedes Benz. And again, it was digital transformation. It was how do we help Mercedes Benz as an organization move away from selling cars, you know, pen to paper, which is exactly what was happening and move them more towards a digital way of working to being able to configure cars using iPads and being able to build quotes on iPads, which is actually a really highly complex thing to do and to get, you know, the entire team from top down, bottom up, bought in was the task at hand. And I then obviously moved on to Zoovu and joined as number two in our London office. Back then, it was a Vienna headquarters company was founded in Vienna. And since then, we’ve gone on to raise our series C which was April of last year. And we’re really now just looking to scale the company to new heights with technology partnerships.
Jeff Bullas
00:06:17 – 00:06:30
So Zoovu, tell me what Zoovu does. So if you were talking to a potential customer, ideal customer, what is Zoovu doing for them?
Lamees Butt
00:06:31 – 00:08:32
So the best way that I could probably explain it, is by telling you the problem that I actually have right now. And the problem is that obviously, you know, I’ve moved to Marlo and I’m redecorating. And I’m redecorating in the sense that I want to now put a picture up in one of our new rooms, on these walls and one of the walls is brick and one of the walls is, I kind of want to call it MDF. I’m a novice. I have no idea actually what that material is. So I need a drill to put up these pictures on the wall. So I, you know, with time poor, I don’t have a lot of time to be able to go to the store, especially given I live in a village to travel 20 minutes to the store and have that conversation with the sales rep to really understand which is the right tool and drill bits for me. So I go online and right now if I go to any store online, whether that is an Amazon or whether that is a B&Q, which is what we have here in the UK. I would be served thousands of different options of drills and drill parts and I don’t know which is going to be the right one for me. So I’m expected as a customer to go and do a ton of research to know which is the right one. Now, Bosch, our customer actually understood that this was obviously a problem and that buying a tool or a drill power tool online is actually quite complex. And so they work with Zoovu to essentially transform that technical kind of product specification that currently exists on e-commerce and translate it into a human conversation. So imagine that best sales person’s conversation when you go into the store and they’re asking you, you know, what are you gonna use the power tool for? Okay, great. You’re drilling into walls. What are the types of walls that you’ve got? They’re human questions because they’re the experts and they know kind of all that product knowledge in the back of their head. And that’s what we’re looking to do, digitizing that sales process and really putting those discovery experiences online for the customer to engage with and ultimately convert.
Jeff Bullas
00:08:33 – 00:08:36
Right. So you’re making it simple for the customer to find the right product for them.
Lamees Butt
00:08:37 – 00:08:38
Exactly.
Jeff Bullas
00:08:39 – 00:08:48
Yeah, because you’re going, okay, I’ve got a brick wall. I want to hang a 10kg painting. Tell me what I need.
Lamees Butt
00:08:49 – 00:09:12
Exactly right. And this, you know, this applies not just to obviously power tools but the same goes for laptops. You know, I don’t know how much RAM I need or how much CPU I need. I should know this, I work in tech, but I do know that I travel a lot and I know that I like to blog and I like to store everything on my laptop based on those human needs. I need, you know, I need to be told which is the right laptop for me.
Jeff Bullas
00:09:12 – 00:09:16
Right. So Mac or IBM PC.
Lamees Butt
00:09:17 – 00:09:21
Right. We will have our preference.
Jeff Bullas
00:09:21 – 00:09:37
Okay. So what are different, so if an e-commerce platform store wants to engage with you, how do you go about it?
Lamees Butt
00:09:38 – 00:11:12
So if an e-commerce store wants to engage with us, ultimately, you come to the Zoovu website, obviously book a demo with us. The easiest way is to contact us by booking a demo. And what we really like to do is understand the problem that you’re currently facing. Many times you’re kind of calling problem aware versus being solution aware. A lot of times with the customers that we work with, understanding and visualizing their customer journey is the first place that we need to start because we can start to visualize and piece together where the pain points are. And once we understand where the pain points are, we can look to solve those problems. And a lot of it is we live in a world today where technology is moving at such a fast pace and we need to be able to keep up with the times number one, but number two really keep the customer at the heart of all of this change. And that is going to require digitizing your sales process in some way, shape or form. And so having a commerce experience, having a website at this point in time just isn’t enough anymore because I like to say that websites are just an index, they’re a library of your products. But if you haven’t got any clear navigation or guidance for your customers, they are going to get lost and they are going to go to a competitor. There’s actually a stat. So our customer, Microsoft, did a study and it’s called The Path to Purchase study. And it’s actually a third of customers will be dropping off your website within the space of three minutes if they don’t find the product that they need.
Jeff Bullas
00:11:12 – 00:11:19
Right. So the sort of customers are dealing with a more large scale e-commerce sites?
Lamees Butt
00:11:20 – 00:11:21
Correct. Yes.
Jeff Bullas
00:11:21 – 00:11:29
Right. Does it involves B2B, B2C direct to customer, which is maybe the three core categories of e-commerce, isn’t it?
Lamees Butt
00:11:29 – 00:13:52
Yeah. And we actually tackle all three. So when you look at the customer journey. So from a D2C perspective, you could be looking for a bike, let’s just say, for example, you could be looking for a replacement of your washing machine. And you know, you go to, whether it is Bosch or you go to Mila or whoever it is, you still need to be able to identify what is the right washing machine for your needs without knowing the size of drum that you need. Or you know how powerful that machine is actually. All you know is for a family of five, I want a washer and dryer, so I want something that does both. And these are the types of conversations that you want to be having and interacting with the website rather than the technical specifications. And so that’s the D2C experience. From a B2B side, this is where I think there’s going to be a bit of a real revolution coming because B2B has been so far behind B2C. And when you think about the types of products that they’re selling, they are typically more complex, they require compatibility rules and configurations because you know, one, let’s just say x-ray machine, might have 10,000 different components that you need to add on to that machine in order to make it service that hospitals needs. And that’s where complexity comes in. And we want to be able to reduce that complexity by saying, okay, we know that you’ve got experienced sales reps. Let’s just say GE HealthCare, you’ve got 500 experienced reps, but you’re still looking to hit growth targets this year, you’re told you can’t hire more sales people. So how do you do more with less? We need to digitize your sales process. We need to essentially digitize your best sales person and put that online. So that 365 days a year, 24/7, somebody can come to the GE HealthCare website and procure an x-ray machine at two in the morning Australia time that, you know, that isn’t going to conflict with a voicemail. So we’re trying to remove all of those points of friction for the end customer in order for them to be able to get what they need, whether that is a bike or a washing machine or whether that is a bill of material series of products for medical devices
Jeff Bullas
00:13:53 – 00:14:12
Right. So one of the latest revolutions is the last, well, it’s been going for a long time, but it’s been brought to the fore by ChatGBT in November last year. So what’s the role of AI in terms of you guys trying to help personalize, I suppose, make it easier for the customer journey in terms of buying the right product?
Lamees Butt
00:14:12 – 00:16:33
So, and kind of with AI obviously it’s been around for a long time and AI, I think back in the day, people were, and they probably still are today, right? Scared thinking, what is this black box? You know, is I robot gonna pop out? I’m not sure if you’ve seen that film recently, creator that’s come out and, you know, there are a ton of reviews on, you know, the scaremongering that it’s doing and the truth is that AI is data models, it’s, you know, large sets of data that has learned over time. And obviously, we’ve been around since 2007. And so we really are in, you know, a strong position to be able to say that we’ve got a ton of data that we’ve built. And that we can use to essentially recommend the right product for you based on our learnings. And so AI is applied and weaved into our platform from inception all the way through to the end. And what I mean by that is think about it like this when you go into a store and you have a conversation with a sales person and by the end of that conversation, you’ve built trust. He’s recommended you a product. He or she has recommended you a product. You’re like, okay yeah, I’m gonna purchase that and then he actually says, okay, but actually you’ve bought the laptop. Do you want the accessories that are compatible with this, the bluetooth mouse and the bluetooth keyboard. Yeah, actually, I absolutely want that because I trust you. You’ve given me the right product for me and now I don’t want to go and research the right accessories on my own. I’m happy to take these products from you. So you’re already up selling, you’re already boosting kind of your basket size because you’ve built that level of trust. Now, that is almost like the A star conversation for any sales rep in the store where they’re gonna get promoted and you know, they’re gonna win the awards. How do you track that conversation currently? You can’t because it’s in the human’s head. But actually online when we have these conversations, we can actually start to track the conversations that are converting. And what our AI will do is it will say, okay, over the course of six weeks, if a conversation hasn’t been leading to a conversion, why? And our AI will recommend the right set of questions to really push a conversion or a sequence of questions that we know would lead to a conversion. And so we can really start to play with the types of conversations that we’re having that would actually lend itself to that customer that we’re speaking to.
Jeff Bullas
00:16:34 – 00:17:23
Right. So I’ve got a couple of questions simmering away. So what, can you tell me what the big problem that Zoovu is solving? And how did the founders come up with the product concept? So what I suppose I’m saying is that, you know, the founders of Uber were standing in a cold night in Paris and no, there were no taxis, no one showed up. They’re freezing to death and they go, there must be a better way of doing this. So, is there a story about how Zoovu started that you can share?
Lamees Butt
00:17:24 – 00:20:05
Yeah, I think that, you know, ultimately, the story is actually relatively similar to the one that I shared about that concept of wanting to solve choice paralysis. And it obviously started with D2C, B2C products. So understanding that currently we live in a world where we’re trying to purchase washing machines, laptops, products online. But on average, it takes six months to purchase a laptop without a Zoovu experience. And that is the stat from Microsoft, which is actually why they came to us. And so with that in mind, it was how can we solve this problem that is causing so much decision paralysis for humans. You know, we want to be able to create a lifestyle where you can go to a website and you can actually be served the right thing for you. And that’s really the genesis of what Zoovu was. And over time, we have evolved into different markets, different verticals, which is obviously the B2B use case that we were speaking about there again. Super interesting because 10 years ago, we couldn’t have done that. 10 years ago, trying to branch into that market would not have been possible. We were not environmentally or even technologically ready at that stage. Whereas now it’s a very different market and world that we’re living in and that is actually down to COVID. COVID and the pandemic accelerated digitization by about 10 years. And so what we realized was that it was, I think it was at March 2020, sitting around the table like what’s gonna happen, you know? Oh, is this company gonna fail? And we had to have a really serious conversation about the future of where we were going. And by September, we’d grown by 150% and it was our best year ever. And it was because everybody had woken up, smelt the hummus and been like, we’ve got to get our shit together, we’ve got to digitize. And if we don’t, we’re not gonna be left behind, we’re gonna fail. And so it became, it wasn’t even just a nice to have. It was a necessity. And that’s what we’re seeing now in the B2B world where its organizations are realizing that this isn’t a nice to have. This isn’t, oh, we would like it if our customers were able to discover the products that they need around. This is now a necessity. And if you don’t do this, that concept of future proofing these companies will fail to exist in the next 10 years if they don’t do this now, because if we look at the stats of Gen Z coming into the workforce, they will not be dealing with the same workflows processes that currently existed. Things have to shift and they have to evolve.
Jeff Bullas
00:20:06 – 00:20:31
So what you’re doing is you’re trying to get that complex to simplicity. And AI is helping you do that at scale. Are you, what sort of technology are you using? Like, are you a plug in for an organization? How does it work?
Lamees Butt
00:20:32 – 00:22:11
We are. So essentially the way that we work, we’re a platform. So it’s a SaaS platform and we’re low touch integration. So the way that it would work is an organization would have a license for the Zoovu platform. And what we really want to do is empower business teams. So we want to move away from this concept that your IT infrastructure, your commerce experience has to be managed by a team that’s going to take 12 to 16 weeks to run tickets and make changes. We want to really put the power in the hands of the business users so that whether it’s campaigning that they’re doing. So let’s just say for Black Friday or for festive periods that they can actually be agile and adapt their products to really meet their customers where they are. And that hasn’t previously been possible. And so business users in organizations like Dyson will have access to our platform and they can configure these experiences internally and then the way that they integrate, I mean, I won’t go too technical but it’s very, it’s low touch, it’s two lines of code that you copy and paste into your website and those experiences are now being presented to your end customer. And so the beauty of Zoovu is that it’s low touch integration and it’s a low, I’m hesitant to say no code, but it’s a low code platform because there is always some area in the platform that you can apply code IE CSS for example. So if somebody did have a bit of experience, they could adapt the corporate identity and like the design of it with a little bit of CSS if they wanted to.
Jeff Bullas
00:22:12 – 00:22:47
Alright. So let’s move on to someone says, well, show me the money. In other words, what different case studies do you have that, you’ve come in and you’ve changed an e-commerce platforms world. In other words, you’ve made it better, you’ve got increased conversions, increased sales. So can you share maybe not naming anyone obviously or you can but what sort of improvement in conversions and sales have you achieved using your technology for an e-commerce platform?
Lamees Butt
00:22:47 – 00:24:24
So on average, we’re seeing a 200% increase in conversions by using our experiences. And we’re seeing a 47% lift in basket value. And the reason that happens is the, so the 200% uplift in conversion is because what we’re doing is building trust and we’re building credibility through a conversation. And once you’ve, and we also know how many questions to ask and when to stop at which point, you know, is the customer gonna get too irritated now because we’re asking too many questions and there’s overload there. So it’s what is the right balance of asking, you know, the right set of questions to get to the right product for their needs. And then at that point, we know we’ve built the trust and credibility at which point we can recommend associated products, which is how we get that 47% lift in basket value. Because once you’ve built the trust, the customer is much more likely to add the two to three additional products than they were if they’d been searching and trying to navigate the website on their own for three hours, and they finally get to the product, they just want to check out and go. But this is a much more seamless experience for the customer. And so we’re not only seeing the increase in conversion and the boosting car value, but we’re also seeing a dramatic reduction in returns because we’re actually giving the customer what they need. And so there’s no question at that point when it arrives at your door, is this actually the right one for me.
Jeff Bullas
00:24:25 – 00:24:32
Okay, cool. So, has AI transformed what you do?
Lamees Butt
00:24:33 – 00:26:32
I think AI is, you know, it’s but like I say, it’s applied to our platform and I would say it’s the bedrock of being able to recommend the right products for our customers. And I feel very lucky and grateful to be in a situation that this company has been around since 2007. And so we are the market leader in the things that we’re doing from a discovery standpoint and discovery is a new space, but we were definitely ahead of the time. And I think that discovery for commerce is the future and what we like to have when we’re having conversations with potential customers, it’s, you’ve taken the first step, you know, you’ve got a commerce experience, you’ve got a platform, but now we need to think about how we supercharge that experience to really get the most out of it because that’s just the foundation. And so it’s taking people on that digital transformation. You know, it’s not a destination, it’s a journey, how do we go on that journey together to get you to a state of digital maturity and you know, it’s not, it doesn’t end with just discovery on commerce. We’re talking to customers about how we bridge that gap now between the online and offline space. Because truth be told you might have a customer that is looking for the laptop. We recommend the laptop at which point they’re still a little bit nervous to convert because you know, converting with £1000 dollars Euros online is still tough for some people. They still might want to go in store, feel the weight of the product and really connect to it. At which point we still want to be able to attribute that conversion that will happen in store back to the experience that started online. And so that’s when we see brands, manufacturers and retailers really leading interview market leaders and wanting to become digitally mature.
Jeff Bullas
00:26:32 – 00:27:02
Cool. So the other question I have in terms of e-commerce is with the rise of hosted e-commerce platforms such as Shopify and BigCommerce. What role do you play in that space? Can a Shopify store use your technology? Can a BigCommerce store use technology? Is that done directly or is that, is an option with the platforms at the host back end?
Lamees Butt
00:27:03 – 00:27:53
So we’re in a privileged position that we integrate to any commerce platform. And we do partner with these organizations. So we have a partnership with BigCommerce, we have a partnership with SAP, we have a partnership with Salesforce and so we’re able to really build really beautiful experiences for the end customer that sit within those platforms, but irrespective of even if we didn’t. So for example, one organization that we don’t have an official partnership with, for example, Commercetools, we still integrate to those platforms. And so you don’t, we don’t necessarily need to have a partnership or a connector to be able to do it which is creates a really low barrier to entry for brands, retailers and manufacturers.
Jeff Bullas
00:27:54 – 00:28:00
So in terms of growth, how you guys been going over the last few years?
Lamees Butt
00:28:01 – 00:30:00
It’s like I said, it’s been an exciting time, obviously COVID was definitely an accelerator. And what we’re starting to see at the moment naturally, it’s a tough macroeconomic environment. People are recalibrating, they’re figuring out especially this year. What are the, where are the areas that we need to be spending? Where are the areas that we shouldn’t be spending? And what’s gonna give us obviously the, you know, the most ROY and the conversation that we’ve been having this year, really exciting from a customer perspective, which are we want to think about how we protect ourselves over the next five to 10 years and how do we do that? And we want to make sure we’re doing that with the customer at the heart of these experiences. And so from a growth perspective,our current customer base are looking at how they take what they currently have and take it that one step further, which is just incredible. So our current customers still wanting to grow, still wanting to expand on the experiences that we currently have with them and grow horizontally across other categories. And then what we’re also looking to do from a growth perspective is obviously partner, partner with some of the best technology companies like an SAP where there isn’t fantastic product market fit for the things that we do and we’re solving a real problem for SAPS 400,000 customers. I was actually at a conference last week, the future of Business Summit with their chief partner officer and, you know, SAP are really looking to solve real problems for their customers and they also know that they can’t do it on their own. And so they’re looking to engage with their strong partner ecosystem in order to be able to do that. So I feel like we’re going through a bit of a change where being better together has really shone through and it’s something that Zoovu is in a prime place for because of the way that our platform is built.
Jeff Bullas
00:30:01 – 00:30:13
Right. So you guys put the senate with SAP and so on, you’re also helping people make acquisition of software services products easier as well. Is that what you’re saying or not?
Lamees Butt
00:30:13 – 00:31:16
So, with the SAP partnership, for example, the way that we would be integrating is through SAP commerce cloud. So SAP coms cloud is obviously a website as well for kind of enterprise customers. But also when you think about the B2B organizations that exist, they typically use a CPQ. So like a configure price quote for their internal sales teams. And what’s incredibly powerful is the fact that this configure price quote had never really been accessible to the end customer. You would always have to call your salesperson at, you know, whether it was GE HealthCare to have that conversation for 90 minutes and build your quote because they were the experts. But now with Zoovu, we’ve essentially been able to act as almost like that middleware and connect that back end configure price quote, CPQ, with all the configurations and rules and expose it to the end customer onto commerce, which is just transformational because it didn’t, it just didn’t exist before.
Jeff Bullas
00:31:17 – 00:31:21
Right. So what you’re saying is you’re getting a lot of people, a lot of sales people fired.
Lamees Butt
00:31:22 – 00:32:01
You know, I’ve actually had that question a couple of times. So we’re not, we’re, what we’re doing is actually helping salespeople do their job better because whether you are 12 years into the job or 12 days into the job, your prime focus should be about the customer and you shouldn’t have to be worrying about whether you are picking the right configuration and whether you are having all of these different conversations about pricing and availability and time to ship, which is what’s happening right now. On average, it takes a week, one week to build a quote in that B2B world and we’re streaming that down to minutes.
Jeff Bullas
00:32:02 – 00:32:05
Okay. So really, you’re amplifying the salesperson, they can do more with less.
Lamees Butt
00:32:05 – 00:32:11
Exactly. You’re using my tagline.
Jeff Bullas
00:32:12 – 00:32:43
Okay. So, I’ve got one other question and then I’m gonna ask you a question which is a little bit off tangent to what we’ve been talking about is I’m gonna tell you what the question is going to be. So what brings you deep joy as a personally, as well as professionally? So that’s gonna be my final question. So I’ve forgotten the other question. I was going to ask you by the way.
Lamees Butt
00:32:44 – 00:32:52
We can go straight into this one. I feel. Yeah. And then we can flip them around. I feel like this. It’s quite a deep question.
Jeff Bullas
00:32:52 – 00:33:09
Okay. So sit on that just for a minute or two. Okay. So what’s the model for you guys? That’s what it was gonna be. So, the business model for you guys, is it as a software as a service subscription model? Is that how it works? So tell us a little bit about that and where’s some starting points?
Lamees Butt
00:33:10 – 00:35:19
So from a baseline perspective, what we’re looking at is a license SaaS model. So especially for the B2B market, even the B2C market, we’re looking at a baseline of around 100k as an entry point dependent on obviously how many skews. So how many products that you’re bringing into our platform and that we’re having to essentially transform into what we call intelligent content. And then we have a series of different experiences that you can execute. So we call them Discovery Experiences, which is what I’ve been referencing throughout our conversation, but they actually segment into three different types. So the first type is what we call like the guided selling conversational assistant. And that is where you have the question and clickable answers and you can kind of click through the question and the answers to get to the right product. The second experience is a visual configurator experience where you would be able to see the product. You’d be able to do a 360 roll around of the product and you could start to attach all of the configurable elements to it. So really customize what that is, that works very well in B2C, but also B2B as well where let’s just say it could be a fireman’s helmet and you need to see the full 360. You need to see the visor coming up and down and there’s lots of configurable parts there. So we do the full 360 visual configurator. The third is search, so we do intelligent search where in the search bar, if you start to type a product or a word, we will start to power a conversation that actually starts to go back and forth with the end customer to drive them to the right product all from the search bar. So those are almost the three different types of experiences that can be layered on once you have the intelligent content. And then the other part to the business model is engagements. So how many times does a customer, the end customer engage with one of those experiences? So that would be like a matrix model. So we have the baseline license fee for the platform and then the engagements.
Jeff Bullas
00:35:20 – 00:35:35
So you’re saying you have a light touch tech. So in terms of integrating some of the customer puts up their hand and say I want to use your product. Is there an on boarding fee? And then is it 100,000 per month or you’re talking about 100,000 per year?
Lamees Butt
00:35:35 – 00:36:29
Per year. So 100k per year, per annum and so on. So in terms of on boarding, we have an internal professional services team and customer success team that will onboard you. And we kind of have two approaches, right? We can either and the goal, ultimate goal is to enable you as the customer to be able to utilize the product. But we understand that that doesn’t happen overnight. And so it’s a real train, the trainer approach that we’ll have. So we take on, kind of the right what we call a swat team up front, so be two to three people. And then we’ll start to grow that out as the project grows and we deploy maybe the first experience and then the second experience would be we’re still with you. But you’re in the driving seat and the third one, you’re on your own. And we want to make people autonomous and empower them to be able to utilize the power of the platform.
Jeff Bullas
00:36:29 – 00:37:07
Right. Okay. Cool. So let’s go to the final question or questions, okay, what brings Lamees personal, deep joy and what brings her professional, deep joy and that might be one and the same. So because I think what I’m curious about is as an entrepreneur, quite often, entrepreneurs are doing what they love, so work and life intersect deeply. So over to you.
Lamees Butt
00:37:08 – 00:39:35
It’s a really interesting question and I think that only in the last I would say three years, have I been able to articulate and coin probably an answer to that and I think that it’s still going to evolve, you know, in the years to come. But I agree with you that the lines are blurred and I think the lines are blurred for when you have an entrepreneurial mindset or you are an entrepreneur, you like to problem solve, you’re a builder. And so your mind is constantly ticking on, you know, not just what’s happening right now, but five steps ahead, 10 steps ahead. And so I find myself constantly thinking about those things. And I think what brings me what brings me deep joy now, knowing the journey that I’ve been on is to help other people who are about to take on this journey and give them a blueprint of some sort that can streamline the path that they’re about to go on. And I think that it can’t be counterintuitive, right? Because you have to learn through failure, you have to fail to get better and to evolve and to grow. And so it’s not that I want to be able to hand give handouts or make it as easy as possible. But I do think specifically being a female in the tech industry, it has been hard and there have been a lot of closed doors along the way and you have to fight to get your voice heard. And so it’s been something where I would like to and it’s something that I’m actively doing, which is investing in young female entrepreneurs who are looking to kind of make change and how do they navigate the world of tech, entrepreneurship, VC because those are all very closed door communities and that concept of building a network, everything is based on your network. So as long as you build the right relationships and you have good connectors in your network, you do have access to things. And so I think, yeah, to answer your question, what gives me deep joy is being able to impact and affect change in a way that didn’t exist for me 20 years ago.
Jeff Bullas
00:39:37 – 00:40:08
That’s very, very good. And trying to steal that are hearing that generically professionally. You’re saying that creating and adding value to the customer is what brings you satisfaction because satisfaction is instead of joy. The other one is personally, it brings you great joy to help other women navigate that, to also make a difference. Is that correct?
Lamees Butt
00:40:08 – 00:40:10
Yes. Yeah, absolutely.
Jeff Bullas
00:40:10 – 00:40:14
Cool. That’s awesome, Lamees. Thank you very much for sharing that.
Lamees Butt
00:40:15 – 00:40:18
No. Thank you for having me. This has been a great conversation.
Jeff Bullas
00:40:19 – 00:40:25
I don’t think we ask hard enough questions about life and I think we need to ask better questions to get better answers.
Lamees Butt
00:40:25 – 00:41:30
I agree with that. I think that I’m having so as part of kind of just trying to create more impact, I think to your point, we need to have more conversations, real conversations to shine a light on some of these stories because there are a ton of women right now who are in the tech industry, who are sitting at the tables, who are making decisions. The difficulty is that they’re sitting at the tables but the doors are closed. And so, in the last few months, I’ve made it a bit of a mission of mine to try and knock down some of those doors and have conversations with those women to say, look, we need to share your blueprint. We need to be able to create north stars for young women who are, you know, whether they’re coming out of university or they’re just in their final year of a levels, we need to be able to support them and navigate them in the right way because to the point that we were talking about just before we hit record, I don’t think the education system is serving our young generation of today.
Jeff Bullas
00:41:30 – 00:41:49
No, I totally agree. And we did discuss about, talking about the education system needs to grow up a little bit more and evolve more rapidly to actually be more relevant in a modern world because and I think we’re in the middle of AI may be blowing up education as well.
Lamees Butt
00:41:49 – 00:44:38
Absolutely. You know, we need to be able to set people up for success in the right ways and understand that just because a child or a young student may not be excelling in this kind of square box environment that we’re putting them in, it doesn’t mean that they’re not going to succeed and they’re not smart. I find that even from a neurodivergent perspective, there isn’t enough awareness of how our brains work to be able to serve the complexity of the way that children behave today. Because a lot of the times you will have a third of the students in your class who have some form of neurodivergent behaviors. And if that’s not picked up on at an early age, that can lead to the child being expelled because they were fidgety, because they weren’t paying attention or they were chatting too much. And these are all forms of, let’s just say ADHD. But if these things aren’t picked up on, you poorly represent a child and label them as, you know, they’ve got behavioral issues and that carries with them and I think that whole system is broken and really needs to be looked at and I, you know, I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know how it’s going to be solved, but I just know that there’s something that needs to be done to help these students as they’re about to embark on their, you know, their next steps in life. So interesting. I was on the train into London. Very rare that I go back into London now. But when I do have meetings, I do go into London and I was on the train and I was listening to this conversation. It was a dad on the phone to his, I don’t know if it was a son or daughter on the phone. And it really actually broke my heart because he was really trying to say, look, you know, it’s your first couple of weeks. I know you’re struggling. Maybe this is what you should try to do, go and connect with people on this course, go and go and do these things. But the child was clearly struggling and it’s something that I think that we’re forgetting that the pandemic really did affect. Obviously our young generation, some of them have now gone back into year three of their university doing year one year two remote and some have now just gone into university after being at home for so long. And that social anxiety that’s been created off the back of the pandemic is very real and we need to be looking at how we’re supporting students in university environments and giving them something to get excited about off the back of it. Not just the, you know, the standard curriculum and the course that is being taught because there’s a different world off the back of that.
Jeff Bullas
00:44:38 – 00:44:49
Exactly. And my son’s dyslexic so he has trouble reading. So, how does he learn today? YouTube.
Lamees Butt
00:44:50 – 00:44:52
It’s phenomenal.
Jeff Bullas
00:44:53 – 00:45:08
So we got to realize that we’ve got different modalities for learning. And in the meantime, most of our teaching is done with visual and audio and the rest was, by the way, it is seen as less.
Lamees Butt
00:45:08 – 00:46:20
I find it so interesting as well. I don’t know if you’ve heard of a company called Kajabi. But I find that, yeah, that for me is, again, is something that’s going to transform the education system in years to come because we are, we live in a world where access to knowledge has never been. It’s never been so accessible. And you know, if I want to learn to code, I can now just log on to Kajabi, find a course and learn which gives you this vessel to accessibility of knowledge to allow you to do things that you just were unable to do before. And so I’m so excited for the next generation to be able to do things that, you know, maybe you and I weren’t able to do, but actually, we still probably could because we have access to it, but it’s just a different way of thinking. And I totally hear you about kind of how your son is learning and I think that’s so important, not just you, you obviously understand because it’s personal to you, but how does this message get spread and how does it come from the top down so that more kids have have that level of understanding as well because also not all parents are like you where they would probably understand it.
Jeff Bullas
00:46:21 – 00:46:57
Yeah, it’s a challenge and I left teaching because I felt what the both the medium and the model was broken. So I ended up being a teacher by starting a blog and writing and sharing my learning as I went. So that was 14 years ago. So I became a teacher but digitally rather than actually in the classroom. So, and the children are just really well, really badly behaved. So I need to teach people that want to learn
Lamees Butt
00:46:58 – 00:47:02
Student of life. Yeah.
Jeff Bullas
00:47:02 – 00:47:13
Well, that’s the other thing that reminds me is that information is becoming cheaper with ChatGPT and search and everything. But wisdom is still hard to find.
Lamees Butt
00:47:14 – 00:48:41
Ah, that is, you should coin that, put that somewhere, pluck it because that’s very, very real and very true to the world that we’re living in now. You can put anything into ChatGPT and it will regurgitate, you know, a ton of words and piece them together on a thread. But whether that’s got any weight, you know, weight to those words. I, that’s few and far between you can, I heard somebody say the other day a ChatGPT is good for, you know, writing a reply email to your child’s teacher or, you know, whatever, if you need something basic but to your point and to have any form of intelligence and wisdom at this stage, it’s gonna take some time because where it is today is and where it’s gonna be in 10 years. And also that’s just not to go back to it, but that is the data models. I like to think of it as, you know, when you hire a new person, you bring them on as an intern, they are fresh, they need to learn, they need to absorb, they need to do all the courses, the test, the exams and after six to 12 months, you know, they’re better there. You would put them on the phone with someone and they could actually hold a conversation but five years in, they’re an expert, they’re now teaching others. And that’s kind of how I see the evolution of ChatGPT. It’s learning, it kind of especially, you know, this version in its infancy, but it’s learning fast and you know, in five years time, it’s gonna be vastly different.
Jeff Bullas
00:48:42 – 00:49:51
Where I’ve been involved in the social, I’ve been involved in a few revolutions and I’m not talking about violent revolutions. I’ve been talking technology revolutions. I’ve been involved with the PC revolution, the internet web revolution, social media revolution. And now AI, which is the fastest revolution I have ever seen. In fact, the challenge for us as humans is being able to manage this change, fast change of pace, it’s just astonishing. So it consumes my thinking a lot in terms of how do we make AI serve us rather than we serve AI. And I had the same question with social media, it served us and now it, we serve it by giving it attention and being drawn into our screens and into the platforms because they’re addictive and obsessive. We’ve got to make sure that we don’t lose our humanity along the way. And that’s another totally different question.
Lamees Butt
00:49:51 – 00:50:45
Which it is, but it’s such a poignant one. And my two cents on that is whether it’s social media or whether it’s AI. As long as you can utilize it, as long as we, as humans, can utilize it and harness the power of it to solve problems, we’ll be fine. And actually it will enable us to be better because if you’re using social media as a vessel to find more customers, to connect with people that you weren’t connecting with prior to social media, that’s a positive, you know, rather than the endless scrolling and searching, use it for good. And if we can, as you say to your point, if we can actually harness that, I think that puts us in good stead to, for the building blocks for the future.
Jeff Bullas
00:50:45 – 00:50:57
Yeah, exactly. So we need to be, continue to be aware. Increase our awareness because we need to use it as a tool. Rather we become a tool of the play.
Lamees Butt
00:50:58 – 00:51:01
Yeah. Buckle up basically.
Jeff Bullas
00:51:02 – 00:51:23
Enjoy, just be aware and make sure that it’s working for you and not, you’re not working for it. So, yeah, Lamees, thank you very much for your time. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for your answer on the what brings you joy and some of the answers have included cooking.
Lamees Butt
00:51:24 – 00:51:38
Oh, gosh. Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s also bring people joy too. I can appreciate that. Actually, cooking does not bring me joy. And that’s probably a little bit controversial, but it’s the one thing that I wish I did not have to do but do so.
Jeff Bullas
00:51:38 – 00:51:41
I’m with you on that.
Lamees Butt
00:51:42 – 00:51:44
It was a pleasure meeting you.
Jeff Bullas
00:51:44 – 00:52:30
Yeah, it’s great to meet you, Lamees, and have a great day because your day is just starting and mine’s just finishing. So I’m maybe going to just read a book or even Netflix, you know. Thanks Lamees. It’s been a pleasure and enjoy the rest of the year and I look forward to seeing what happens soon in Zoovu and yeah, I was just trying to make sure we got to the essence of what it is because we live in a world of noise. So what we’re gonna do is distill that noise and complexity into simplicity. And that’s why we just ChatGPT sometimes, really, I suppose.
Lamees Butt
00:52:31 – 00:52:34
Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation.
Jeff Bullas
00:52:35 – 00:52:36
Great.Thanks Lamees, have a great day.
Lamees Butt
00:52:36 – 00:52:39
Take care. Bye.