Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
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The brand is the promise, but the experience is the reality. We define customer experience as a sum of all interactions that a customer may have. So it's not just the call center. It's not just the digital experience. It's any experience. Can you just paint a picture for the listeners? How big Prudential really is? It's a massive 150-year-old company. How do you even start to tackle that problem? We provide life insurance and retirement security and advice.

to 50 million customers. Wow. Across 50 countries globally. They actually had this email written to one of our presidents about how they're going to thank Prudential when the polar bears are dying and the ice caps are melting. Wow.

Because of the amount of paper that was being sent to them. So we created a network of champions, hundreds of customer advocates within the company. Forrester recognized us last year as the most customer-obsessed enterprise in America. You can't survive

for 150 years. You can't thrive as a company for 150 years without that culture of customer obsession. Prudential adopted AI pretty early on. So when I was talking to you earlier, you'd mentioned that your peers are pretty amazed with where you guys are at right now. All sorts of emotion with any new technology that's introduced. The trick is how quickly you can move folks from apathy and anxiety into adoption. And how far away do you think that vision is?

Welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lacey Pease. As always, I've got Rose, our producer with me. Hey, Rose. Hey, Lacey. How are you doing today? I'm good. I'm thinking about a lot after that interview. That was a really cool one. No, it was great. We had on Abhi Parakh, who's the head of customer experience at Prudential Financial, which is one of the world's

largest and oldest financial services institutions. Yeah. Isn't it 150 years old? Like 150 years old this year. Yeah. They just turned 150. So happy birthday to them. Yeah. That is a legacy company. Oh, for sure. For sure. Which it's so cool when we get to talk to these companies that have been around for so long to see how they've been able to stay relevant for 150 years.

So many companies die after like year one, year two. I think it's like a huge amount of small businesses don't make it past year seven. So when a company makes it to like a decade, that's a huge mark. But to make it to 15 decades is wild. That means you're really creating good value for your customers. This was a true masterclass in what it takes to be customer obsessed.

Abhi rocked us through how he and his organization think about team building in a way that actually drives customer experience and how they've really developed a culture that has continued to put the customer at the central piece of literally everything that they do. Yeah, customer obsession is something we hear all the time.

It's something you read on LinkedIn all the time. But it was cool to hear the very practical advice and frameworks that Prudential uses to ensure that there's action being taken from all of this data that they get, that their employees feel empowered, and the things that they're doing.

What was it? The three elements of culture. Right. Yeah. This was I mean, this was one of my favorite parts was talking about how they've curated their culture. Yeah. He listed out the three. He said the three elements were rituals, artifacts and beliefs. This is one of the things about customer experience that I love the most is when we can talk with people who are building cultures that cultivate this experience for customers because we've talked about it so many times.

The customer experience always starts with the employee experience. It always starts with how the employees think about their customers and how how much do they actually care about this person that they're talking to on the phone or messaging over chat or emailing. And the way that ABI and Prudential has been able to create this like true human connection with their what did you say, 50 million plus customers online.

I think so. Yeah, like they've got millions of customers around the world in 50 different countries. And they've, across this entire huge organization, been able to make it possible for all of their teams to connect with customers in a way that feels really human. And that puts the customer at the center of everything. This episode is a great reminder that there is...

No customer base too complex and there's no industry too boring to deliver great customer experience. Like there's ways, proven ways to do it. And Abhi's not, he's not gatekeeping. He's landed all out exactly how they create a truly customer obsessed culture. Before we jump into Abhi's episode,

Hit like, hit subscribe, go comment on Lacey's LinkedIn page, go comment on our Experts of Experience LinkedIn page, get into the comments on YouTube. Tell us exactly what you want to be hearing from these executives because we're sitting down with them. And without further ado, here's Abhi Parakh, Head of Customer Experience at Prudential Financial. Well, Abhi, welcome to Experts of Experience. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm so excited. Before we dive into everything Prudential and what you guys are working on, I actually want to start

with a different question,

What exactly is customer experience? Like if I'm a college student and I'm like, hey, Abhi, what are you working on? What are you doing day to day? I'm interested in this customer experience thing, but I don't really know what that means. What do you say to them? Great question. And actually, colleges should be teaching customer experience because it's not a formal discipline in colleges, but it's definitely a formal discipline in the business world. So I think we need to bridge that.

gap, we define customer experience as a sum of all interactions that a customer may have with a company. So it's not just the call center. It's not just the digital experience. It's any experience. It could be a marketing email, a brand experience. All of those things together are combined and together the customer experience.

And the way I always describe it is the brand is the promise, but the experience is the reality. That's good. That's good. So you just told me that customer experience is not this formal education path that you can follow in college. So what drew you to this choice and to the job that you're currently at? So I've always been passionate about design, about experience.

Before leading this team, which I started in this role four years ago, I had various opportunities to interact with the customer experience team, with the design side of things. I was just fascinated about how they use empathy as their superpower, how they get to make things easier for customers. And there's such an art and science to make these experiences consistently enjoyable.

And there's so much power that can be unlocked if you do it right, but also so much emotion and frustration that can be unlocked if you don't pay attention to it. It is such an important aspect in our personal lives when we have a good experience and then we recommend that company. When I go to a really nice hotel and you discover a really nice restaurant and you were wowed by the service, those experiences matter and it builds word of mouth, it builds recommendation.

So I've always been passionate about this space. But then four years ago, when the opportunity was knocking on my door, I jumped at it because I had...

so much passion for the area. And it's been really amazing to be able to lead such a talented group of people so that we can make an impact on Prudential's customer experience. I'm so glad you brought up the transition from four years ago, because I know when we were chatting earlier, you'd mentioned that when you took on this role, what it looked like at Prudential was really different than what it looks like now. So in the past year alone, you guys have won several awards for customer experience and customer service.

Where were you at in 2021 whenever you took over? Yeah, exactly. It was almost exactly four years ago, actually. So where were we, right? What was the state of CX? I would say we had the right aspirations at the company. We actually had a documented cultural aspiration, which we have today as well, just to be customer-obsessed.

Right. You can't survive for 150 years. You can't thrive as a company for 150 years, which is what Prudential has done. We turned 150 years old this year without that aspiration, right, without that culture of customer obsession. So we had that aspiration, but I think it was hard to quantify that. It was hard. It wasn't tangible, right?

what that really meant or how we were doing. So when we looked towards measurement, we found that we were measuring our experience with customers in many different ways, pretty inconsistent across the board. So again, apples and oranges and how things were and very hard to get a full consistent picture across the board.

We had some basic capabilities, right? But we didn't have direct access to our customers to co-create with them and see what they wanted from us, but also predict what they might need. So there were pockets of goodness. There were areas where it was working, but it wasn't homogenous. It wasn't consistent, especially globally. So our measurement was inconsistent, right? But part of that was also because our incentive model

was unclear, right? It was unclear why you would focus on customer experience. And then all of that together, I think, was a little bit of shaky confidence because we weren't sure where we stood.

on customer experience. So you just described to me where you guys were at in 2021 and how kind of it was pockets of goodness that you wanted to create more cohesively across the organization. Can you just paint a picture for the listeners of how big Prudential really is? And when we're talking about like trying to make, trying to scale customer experience across the board, what you guys are actually doing? Because I mean, it's a massive 150 year old company. It's

Like, how do you even start to tackle that problem? So Prudential is a 150-year-old company, like you said. We provide life insurance and retirement security and advice to 50 million customers across 50 countries globally. So we're huge. We're also a...

top 10 asset manager, which is not a very popularly known fact. So we manage wealth for huge organizations, governments. We have a lot of clients across the world that invest with Prudential. So leading customer experience in Prudential, we create experiences that meet customer needs and business objectives and

Our customers are defined as not just our end customers, but also our advisors, intermediaries and brokers that help us distribute our products to our customers. And then ultimately the clients from an institutional perspective that we work with as well. So for example, group insurance would have employers that we consider our customers, our clients, right?

But we also look at the employees of those employers as being our customers. So pretty nuanced and complicated, multi-layered stakeholders. So that's the first part of your question is how big Prudential is. A pretty big, global and complex organization. In such a large organization, you can't do it centrally, right? Of course, you can spark the fire, right?

Because our transformation has always been about embedding customer centricity into the DNA of the company, how we work, how we make decisions and so forth. Culture is made up of beliefs, of rituals and artifacts, right? So if you have those three things running, you'll have the engine to keep the momentum going. When we think about beliefs, right, at Prudential, we do believe that a focus on our customers and their needs and their experience will drive growth.

That is the cornerstone. So you have to have the belief and it starts at the very top of the company. But you have to engage the entire company, right? A big global company. So from the top of the house perspective, when we started this, we brought the top 40 leaders of the company together every six to eight weeks.

to talk about this belief system, to talk about what our strategy would be and align everybody on a set of common goals, common initiatives that would spark this movement. The second thing we did was launch a champions program. So this is about engaging the rest of the company. We have that top level sponsorship. How do we engage the rest of the company? Of course, a small central team is not going to be able to do that.

So we created a network of champions. They're called the customer experience champions, hundreds of customer advocates within the company who are driving advocacy for the customer, what the customer needs are and different ways that employees within the company can get engaged.

with this movement for customer centricity. So those were the two big cultural ways that we embedded the belief around customer centricity within the company. But then we designed rituals and artifacts too, right? So rituals like every quarter, we not only have an earnings call for external shareholders and investors, we also host an internal all employee VOC call.

A voice of customer call that is attended by thousands of employees where cross-functional leaders from digital, business, service, tech, ops, sales, right? You name it. They share what they're hearing from our customers.

And what are we doing? What are we planning on how we're going to deliver on those needs? So we have a really good forum every quarter to do that. We also have an annual conference internally where we bring external speakers in, internal leaders. We celebrate our progress and we reinvigorate our momentum for the following year.

And regular monthly tactical meetings to look at feedback from customers and create strategic action plans with owners and timelines that then feeds into prioritization. So a lot of different rituals, artifacts have been put into place and a network of champions that keeps that belief alive.

I just want to acknowledge those two words, rituals and artifacts. That's a unique way because you could have just said we have quarterly meetings. So what was the decision there with deciding to use that type of language? And I would say some of the language is internal, right? As we think about these things, what our philosophy is, how we're going to approach it. We didn't get it all right in the first go. This has been an iterative process and we've learned a lot throughout the transformation process.

But if you look at what makes culture, it is those three things. You need to have a strong belief that

in any culture, really. I mean, even if you're in your religious community and you have a culture or your national identity, there are certain beliefs that you hold sacrosanct, right? There are certain rituals, like you go to church every Sunday or wherever your place of worship is, and you have artifacts, like you have a textbook that has the rules and everything is documented and you follow that. So I think it's drawn from real life and it works really well in the real life business setting as well.

I know, I love it. I just love that language a lot. I think it's very interesting and it makes it feel a lot more human than just like very business-y of these are our...

This is our meeting. This is our agenda. This is how we handle things. It just feels a lot more relatable and something that you could like support and buy into. And on that note, I did want to kind of touch on storytelling. Like I love storytelling and how businesses use story to like get people on the same page. Was there an aspect of that that you guys incorporated? It sounds like, you know, creating that belief system really did require sort of shifting the mindset of how people talk and what language they're using and what they're thinking about. Absolutely. I mean,

Storytelling is such a great way to convince people. Human beings have passed on information in the form of stories from prehistoric times. So storytelling is hugely important, actually a skill that we constantly strive to better within my team through trainings and such.

so important to communicating. I'll give you an example of storytelling, a really kind of interesting one. When we were first starting our transformation and we had that sort of forum of the top 40 leaders that I mentioned, we wanted to make it real. We wanted them to hear from real customers on what their level of emotion and relationship with Prudential was. Well,

When we first started, we actually didn't know how to do that. We had no access to communicate with customers directly. We've obviously come a far way since then, but we went around asking our colleagues if they had friends or family that were Prudential customers that would be willing to talk to us.

And this was 2021. So this was post-pandemic. Everybody was remote. We set up Zoom meetings for everybody. We recorded them in the comfort of their home, placed together that video. And that was the first sort of customer video that we made where customers from all different areas of our businesses were able to talk about their relationship, what their pain points were, what they liked, what they didn't like.

So really scrappy beginnings.

Fast forward to today where we have access to customers on a daily basis. We are co-creating with them, testing with them. So we've come a far way. But from the beginning, storytelling has been a pretty important piece of the puzzle. Every quarter when we have our voice of customer meeting, we arm the employees who join with a QR code that they can scan and access all the different ways that they can hear customer stories, whether it's calls.

customers, whether it's the voice of customer feedback that the customers, advisors and clients are sharing with us. And each one of those nuggets tells a story. So I think all of bringing the customer into the room, bringing that, making it real has

Yeah.

Another thing that I wanted to kind of hit on there was you talked about you had to go ask your friends and family for this first video. How did you get from that point to now having direct access to customers? Like, how did you actually navigate that transition? And what systems did you build up so you could have more customer feedback? Yeah. So some of that is also from prior experience. I've worked at other big companies and banks, for example, Citibank. We had a community like this.

that was alive and thriving. And I knew the benefits that something like this could bring. So we did invest, the company has invested in customer experience because it is such a strategic priority for us to deliver industry-leading customer experiences. We invested in those capabilities and tools and

We asked our customers with emails whether they would like to participate in such a community. And so we recruited our customers into those communities and panels. And we refresh that every six months or yearly. We've actually seen so much engagement from our customers because it's just a matter of asking, right? They're more than happy to be part of this story with such a strong brand and help us help them.

So now we have hundreds of customers from our life insurance business, from an annuities business. And not only that, we also have other forums with our advisors, for example, where we meet with them monthly in our businesses and we ask them and we share and communicate what's coming, what they can expect on the roadmap and things like that. So there are multiple modes where we are listening to our customers today. So that's just one example.

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Has there been a favorite customer story that you've gotten to hear? There actually have been a few. I'll share maybe one or two. One was from a customer in San Francisco who had received so much paper in the mail from us. Yeah. And it was such a disjointed experience between phone calls and paper that they actually had this email message

written to one of our presidents about how they're going to thank Prudential when the, you know, polar bears are dying and the ice caps are melting because of the amount of paper that was being sent to them. And they would much rather be communicated in digital ways. So that was a sort of call to action.

And a really great story that made the rounds and really as a wake up call to say, what can we do? And led to a multi-year investment and roadmap to digitize some of those and stop the paper. Because we want to be able to communicate to our customers in the mode of their preference. And the fact that our customers are actually asking for that just makes the case for us to invest in some of our digital capabilities.

What I love, too, about all of this is people saying yes to giving you guys feedback, because if they didn't want to continue a relationship with you, they would have just been like, no, like you get this email. Hey, do you want to participate? If they didn't see some value in what you guys were offering and had some good experience thus far, like it just really speaks to the community that's already been built over the last 150 years that these people would even want to participate. Yeah.

Yeah. And these are long term relationships. This is not a apparel merchandise that you buy and you can switch to a different provider tomorrow. Right. This is a lifelong commitment because imagine a life insurance policy. A lot of our policies have been bought 30 years ago. Wow. Right. Because you buy life insurance for the long term.

annuities are your life savings and you know people are living longer and longer and we are at peak 65 where we have had we've never had as many people turning 65 than we have today yeah right more people are living longer they're retiring and they will live longer retired lives than any generation before them so

We have to make sure we are there for them, not just for tomorrow or the day after, but for decades. So I think customers are more invested in that relationship because it is such a long-term relationship. And I love that you guys are investing back in them because you could have just been like, oh, you're stuck.

too bad, deal with what you got. But instead you're like, let's make this every step of the way, every second you're with us, something that's valuable. Yeah. And we do see our churn rates are actually very low single digits because of that sticky relationship. And we want to make sure that they're not with us just because it's a high switching cost, but because they actually enjoy being with Prudential. And just one point about feedback, you know,

And I'm sure we'll talk about this more, but we ask and we're so happy that they give us. So we ask and we receive. But we also want to understand what their needs are without having to ask or without having them telling us, because that's an extra step. We have so much information that we should be able to predict, predict.

Or in real time, be able to say, this is what's going on. And can we take action on that quickly versus waiting for all the survey results to come out? So that's an important step we're taking in the future of customer experience that we're building.

Yeah, getting more predictive. And I know, yeah, we can actually dive into that right now if you want to a little bit more. What does that vision look like for you with the future of like taking in all this information and making it so you can actually address things before their problems? How are you guys thinking about that at Prudential? Yeah. So as I said, surveys have been great. And I don't think surveys are bad. I don't think surveys are going to go away. I think you need to ask your customers first.

But that can't be the only way you understand what their needs are. Right. So that's the future that we're going is a not a post survey future, but a survey plus real time and predictive future. When I talk about real time, I talk about signals that you can get from how folks are experiencing your experience.

and channels in real time. So somebody is coming to our website, they get frustrated. Well, we should know that they're getting frustrated because there are various different indicators in that website that when their mouse is shifting places or they're, you know, rage clicking, all of those things are, it's actually a thing. It's a metric of rage clicking. Oh no, I am that person. I'm like, get this to work. Yeah.

So there's so many, the data is there, right? It's up to us to listen to those signals in real time. Yeah. And also if someone has come to us once, come to us the two times, called us, there's definitely something going on that we can predict what their next need or step is going to be.

Perfect example is tax season, right? It's so cyclical in nature. We don't need to wait for the customer to come to us. We can be proactive. We can be predictive. We know these people are going to come to us at a certain time. So we can expect some interactions there.

and plan ahead so we can deliver seamlessly. And actually, speaking about tax season, that's exactly what we have done. We have proactively reached out to customers. We've integrated all the forms and all the documents that they will need during tax season. And we've been so ready that actually the incoming calls have gone down by 20%.

Wow. In some cases. So we've seen a lot of benefits already of that predictive and proactive experience. Is that just in the last year or has that been over the last couple of years? That's actually just this year.

Year over year, we've seen a 20% reduction. So something I was thinking about while you're talking about the rage clicking is it's not just like measuring what people are doing whenever they're interacting with your website or email or they're calling you. It's also being able to interpret it correctly, right? So there's this story my CEO was telling me. She used to work at Google where they were working on an app and they were like, oh, look, they spend so much time on this app. That's great. This metric of like time on app is fantastic. However, the

The app was supposed to be helping them solve their problem. So if they were spending more time on the app, it actually meant that they weren't able to solve their problem quickly like they were hoping. So I was just wondering if there's any stories you have around that or any advice for people about interpreting the data correctly and making sure that we're not we're looking at the right metrics versus just like being like, oh, this thing must be good because it means there's more. But maybe we actually don't want them spending a whole bunch of time on our website or calling us all the time.

Oh my gosh. Yes. This is a classic, how much data is good data? And I think you can be drowning in metrics and not being able to take action. So that's a very important question. So the way I think about metrics is about business metrics. So all of your metrics should be put in context of the funnel because you could boost traffic, but then none of that traffic converts.

Right. So it doesn't matter in isolation, I should say, what your traffic growth is in isolation, what your engagement rate is in isolation, what your conversion rate from visits to leads looks like. Just as an example on the website that my team manages. Right. What really matters is have you ultimately increased the contribution to the bottom line? Right. Have you taken out steps?

Within the servicing process, great, but has that increased calls, in which case, bad. So it really matters what the ultimate business metric is that you're trying to influence. And all of those early indicators should be put into context in the funnel, whether you're trying to save costs.

or you're trying to boost revenue, or you're trying to increase experience. All of those things have to be looked in tandem with each other and in the context of the end-to-end funnel. So that would be my advice.

Yeah, yeah, that's great. So I wanted to go into, you know, it's been four years now since you guys started rolling out a lot of these changes. What sort of impact have you seen on the customer and any other like fun or cool wins that you can share? Yeah, actually, our customer experience transformation has been really successful, if I can say so. And we have the sort of proof points right on that. So yeah,

I would say in terms of just hard metrics. And I know that customer experience, you know, there's this whole debate of,

Which metrics to use? Is NPS still the right metric? Is NPS outdated? There's so much customer experience, social media debate. A lot of that fueled by influencers who want to be controversial. I know, it's the LinkedIn thought leaders. But look, from a practitioner perspective, my advice is the following. Just when it comes to the debate on NPS or any other metric,

Just pick a metric, right? Make sure that it's consistent. Make sure that you have benchmarks. If that metric is NPS and it works for you, great. And you can get buy-in on that better. Pick a different metric. If you can have consistency, it makes sense for your business and you can benchmark, then do that. But you need some kind of measurement to be able to quantify. The nuance in that is that with any metric, don't just run after the metric, right?

Because that can lead to some adverse behaviors as well. Make sure that you ultimately are taking action. Are you making the experience better? The metrics are secondary and actually a guiding force to be able to do that. But it's all that under the hood drivers and the verbatims and what are people talking about that really matters. So that's sort of just my overall disclaimer, as I say,

Our metrics have seen a lot of improvement. So those are the indicators that I can talk about. But over two years, year ending 2024, which is the most recent information we have, our core CX metrics have jumped 138%. So huge improvement in that space. Our digital experiences have never been easier to use.

We have hit record highs in that area, about a double digit growth in two years. And what's even more exciting, as I spoke about that cultural change that we were after, our employees, right? We do a pulse survey on customer experience with our employees every year.

I was honestly shocked to see this metric, but of the employees that we surveyed, 94% know what they can do to meet our customer and their goals.

So they know what their needs are and what they can do to improve and deliver on those needs. So that's really encouraging and a really leading indicator that says, OK, folks know what they can do. So we're going to keep doing the right things. Our culture is on the right track. So we feel really excited about that. And aside from that, we're also really proud, as you mentioned in the beginning of the call,

of the external validation. It never hurts to win awards for all of this improvement. Forrester recognized us last year as the most customer-obsessed enterprise in America. So again, you think about insurance, you're thinking about 150 years, but how we've embraced cultural change, how we've embraced technology and the excitement and momentum around that from the top down and bottoms up.

is really encouraging. And those things are important because they fuel the fire to keep going. And have you seen, so besides metrics, which are great, and I know businesses, everyone, we need to look at our metrics, but we've talked about stories and customer stories a lot. Are you seeing those customer stories change a little bit over the last several years as well? Yeah, absolutely. We have seen that. I mean, we've seen folks

In the verbatim comments that we get, right, in our surveys, for example, in the call center as well, we are getting that feedback around our improvements because we have made changes where people had trouble understanding the person on the other line, for example, because of a difference in culture or a difference in sort of accent. We've made some changes there. So now people are able to actually understand

directly based on the feedback, have a better conversation, a more meaningful interaction. And we're seeing that coming through in the feedback as well. So Prudential adopted AI pretty early on. So when I was talking to you earlier, you'd mentioned that your peers are pretty amazed with where you guys are at right now. So I want to talk about that. Where did you guys or when did you start looking at AI and saying this is a tool that we really need to incorporate? And kind of how did you start getting your team and your company ready for that?

Yeah, I mean, I would say I'm going to talk on behalf of a lot of my peers and colleagues. All of us are working together to drive this sort of AI-assisted future. I would say really in 2023 was the year of exploration. So a lot of fact-finding. It was also the year I think everybody woke up to the reality of how far the technology had come.

So 2023, we were exploring a lot of different solutions to...

improve productivity to assist our employees. 2024 was the year where we really piloted and very, very rapidly scaled that up to a lot of our employees. And we saw a lot of engagement, a lot of adoption, and really focused on the employee side of the equation. So that's really where we began and started to see a lot of improvement.

I should caveat that with the types of AI that I'm talking about. So the timeline I just discussed is about Gen AI. Yeah. There's obviously been traditional AI sort of in the machine learning space that Prudential has used, right? We've been using that for a very, very long time, such as in our underwriting function to be able to use models and big data to

and be able to make sense of that in real time so we can improve the experience, improve the speed to market, and improve the accuracy of decisioning of the life insurance application process. And then this is the year that we are obviously looking at agentic AI and a lot of heavy exploration going on in that space.

Were there any early challenges you noticed in 2023 or even 2024 that were coming up as you guys were starting to explore adding these systems into your company? I mean, of course, you know, you have the human factor when you introduce any new technology. It is very natural for people to feel all sorts of emotion, right?

With any new technology that's introduced, there's always this cycle that I have seen personally of, you know, first folks are going to be, and myself included, right? You're going to be apathetic because you don't really understand the technology. You're going to have anxiety and fear.

around using this technology and what it means for me and, you know, my job. And then there's curiosity. It's like, oh, like, this seems interesting. Like, I want to learn more. Then you start engaging, the light bulbs go off, and then you get that adoption. The trick is how quickly you can move folks from apathy and anxiety into adoption.

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In fact, Salesforce's support experience is now powered by AgentForce. See the future in action at help.salesforce.com. Right? And that's what I'm really proud about. Within Prudential, we've been able to do that. So a couple of things on that. So those were some of the challenges, but kudos to our company, kudos to sort of my colleagues and the team for embracing all of this so quickly. I would say...

Number one, from the top down, early on, there was a lot of curiosity, right? And a lot of embrace of what this technology could do. So I think the faster you can move, the higher your

ranks of the company from that apathy into curiosity. And our leadership was there. So kudos to the Prudential leadership for that curiosity, for that engagement. Second, I would say the way that we've done this is not through some, oh, this is the AI team.

This is going to be centrally managed, another governance, bureaucracy, none of that, right? This has been a very democratized process. Of course, you need some central controls. We are a regulated company. We care deeply about our customers' finances. So you have to be able to have all the right controls in place, the risk assessments and all of those things. But to be able to say to every functioning team, go ahead, experiment, right?

Right. Try new things. Let's see what we find out. That has been, I think, such an unlock for Prudential and a good playbook for new technologies as they come out, because marketing to HR, to all different sort of functions have been able to experiment very quickly. Third, I would say we are very fortunate that we already have set up a ventures team.

So we have a team in Palo Alto that is very tech forward, always on the bleeding edge. And they have a whole ecosystem and partnerships with startups who are always on the, you know, sort of the next best thing. So they've been able to bring into Prudential that external point of view and introduce us to a lot of startups as well. So there's been a lot of different things that have, I think, worked in that. And then I just, from the human element perspective,

of show and less of tell, right? In the show versus tell spectrum. Once you put the tool in the hands of the people, you'll be amazed at all the different uses that folks will start coming up with. So when I talk to my people, I'm always asking like, are you using AI? And they said, yes. And I said, what kind of tools are you using? And I was amazed at what tools that we thought people

people would use AI for. And actually the use cases have proliferated across the board. Well, I love that you didn't just say from leadership, like, hey, here are the 10 use cases that we feel comfortable with you guys using this for, and we think would be most effective. Instead, you're like, here's the tools, play with them, see what works, kind of break the system, see where we should go, where we shouldn't go. And maybe this thing that we thought would work really well, actually, they don't care about that. They'd rather use it for this.

So that culture of experimentation is very unique and very interesting that you kind of switched the roles there. I think that's a really good way to drive innovation through experimentation. However, we are running a business. I think use cases, forecasting what the sort of business case is for these technologies is really important.

But what happens is you actually surpass that over time, right? Because now all these people are using it for all kinds of different things. But when you start, you do need to be very clear on what use primary use case you're trying to assess here and then see if that's working or not. But of course, we've been rewarded multiple by having this open and empowered approach. So what use cases are you guys leaning into right now? Has there been anything that you've seen your team started to use and create that you're like, oh, man, this is really interesting? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I would say in general, if we just take the broad view of experience, employee experience, customer experience, I don't think there's one area of the company that is untouched, right? From a use case perspective. Of course, some areas like marketing have been super early adopters. I think Gen AI lends itself really well to marketing, right? Because it's about content, content generation, right?

So we're all familiar, we've used chat to create new content or even in our personal lives or create some imagery. So of course, from a marketing perspective, that's been really good to assist with first drafts of content for our marketing assets. And we've seen a lot of productivity gains there. Our insights can be generated 50% faster, for example. So half the time productivity has gone through the roof.

in customer experience. We're using it for user research. So we have these communities of customers now that we were talking about earlier in the call. We do focus groups with them, right? So video interviews, we see how they are reacting to certain new experiences that we're building. And it used to take weeks in some cases to synthesize all of those video interviews and drive those insights and then say what actions are

Would we recommend? Now we can do that in hours. AI can actually very accurately synthesize all of that information and actually even recommend what actions might be helpful based on what customers are telling us. We are doing the same thing on the voice of customer for all the hundreds of thousands of customer feedback that we get. And then I spoke about HR. We have

been using AI for coaching. And again, that's not my area of expertise, but in the company, such an interesting use case to have an AI be able to have conversations with employees, difficult conversations with employees and coach them to perform better. So lots of, lots of different use cases have come up.

Abhi, what's the difference between Gen AI and Agetic AI? For those living under a rock, Gen AI is about generation of new content, right? So whether it's research content, whether it's marketing ideas, whether it's imagery or even video, which the technology is moving so fast that it's pretty incredible, the voice and video elements change.

That you can now generate is just mind blowing, but that's, it's all about generating it. It's based on, you know, patterns in existing data that can be used to create new and unleash creativity. So Gen AI is actually pretty creative. So that's the sort of Gen AI space. Agent tech is autonomous task execution.

To do so, you need context, you need memory, you need decision-making capabilities. So that's where Agent Tech comes in. It can autonomously deliver on outcomes for certain tasks. So this is not predetermined tasks and sequences, but it can actually decide what it needs to do. And it can talk to other agents who are specialized in tasks. And you can have all these virtual tasks

employees that are working behind the scenes

to drive outcomes for you. But I think it is important, at least in this stage of the game, that you don't give them too much autonomy. And then there is a human in the loop who can still monitor. What excites you about agentic AI as we look to the future? I know that we haven't, like we're all kind of in this phase right now of getting it set up, getting the system sort of integrated internally, getting employees comfortable with it. But like if we look maybe a year or a couple of years down the road, what's really exciting you about what the capabilities are offering?

Yeah, you know, my ideal state for Agent JKI is this thing I call the one conversation solution. So you don't have to go to different places. You don't have to call and meet an IVR. You know where to go. You can have one conversation about it and it's handled and it's done. And you can go back to the things that are most important to you.

So on the customer's experience perspective, I think that we've always been on the quest to make it as easy as possible and as enjoyable as possible.

but we've had all these different channels that, you know, and when I say we, I just mean in general in the universe, not just Prudential, different channels that are owned by different people and run differently. And so there's this sort of omni-channel dream that has always eluded even the best companies. And I think with Agent Tech AI, we have that opportunity where the service agents and the digital agents, um,

in whatever modality we choose, whether it's voice or text, but you can have one conversation and then the army of agents can coordinate, have the context on all the previous conversations with this customer, have that memory, and also have the autonomy to be able to then deliver on the outcomes that they're after. And how far away do you think that vision is?

I mean, I think the technology is a little bit over promissory, if I'm being honest at this moment. Every company last year overnight became a Gen AI company and every company this year has overnight become an agentic AI company. So while I appreciate that everybody's embracing technology really quickly, I just have not seen...

the agentic side of things delivering on the promise so far. A lot of that also has to do with how perfect the data has to be for that to happen, right? With Gen AI, I think it could happen much faster because it can be a point solution. You can point it at a PDF or a huge library of research or scripts that you have within your company and then it can generate based on those patterns. But with

Agent-taked AI, there are so many different systems and data points that have to connect with each other that I think that is the biggest challenge that I'm seeing for these agents to autonomously be able to go and get the task done. So I think we are looking at maybe another one to two years before this really becomes commonplace. I think there will be point solutions

which you can point for specific things that live in a one-dimensional space. If all your data, all your stack is in one system of record, then I think it's going to be much more effective. But for truly autonomous systems where the customer can ask anything and they can go through different places, that orchestration, I think it's going to take some time for the kinks to be hashed out. Yeah, so whenever you're thinking about

these new technologies. Do you have any advice for people on how to like kind of sniff out like what's over hype and what's something that like is really, really truly something we could apply today? I would say that some of the Gen AI stuff, especially when it comes to being employee facing, but also customer facing is ready, right? We're doing that. It's ready. We're already in the middle of that phase. I think with agentic AI, if you want to, this is the year that you should be trying to

and experimenting with low risk use cases, which mostly might be in the form of internal employee assistive use cases. But if you have low risk use cases, which are heavily content oriented, for example, you have a lot of

content about your products and your products are complicated. You might have an agentic AI system that may be able to go through that, answer questions, but also then connect you with the right people autonomously and maybe even ask you questions and give you some answers around financial calculations. All of that being in the realm of guidance and not advice. That could be an interesting one where you can do it with low risk.

But I think anything that has to do with real money moving and transactions happening can be really risky for where we are right now. If there is no human in the loop. Yeah, that makes total sense. So I have a question about how AI has impacted your ability to categorize, interpret, and prioritize all of your customer data. Because when you were describing your customers, it sounded like

You described there's the companies, so the employers, and then there's the employees of the employers. So that's just that's a lot of humans to keep track of and have data about. So how has AI impacted your ability to house all of it and then also interpret all of it and prioritize and actually take action? So I'm not sure if this answer is going to make it in your podcast or not. Yeah.

But because it might be a little controversial, but look, I think AI is not the answer to every problem. I think when it comes to data, there's two things I would say. One, to understand your customers better, to segment them and to house all that data. That technology has been available to us for a very long time. Right. But the problem with especially with companies who have been around for a very long time is that.

The kind of systems we have and the number of systems we have and the number of places where that data exists has been the issue. But there are existing solutions for defragmenting that data and housing it in domains to make it more useful.

So I think even it's as a precursor to AI for AI to be more meaningful instead of AI solving that problem, getting your data problem sorted out is really important. I don't think you need AI to do that. You have existing tools to be able to do that. So you're ready for AI because then the AI will be much more powerful on top of that data. Now, I do think that being said,

And that problem is so big. And when I talk to peers outside of Prudential, everybody struggles with that. And nobody has cracked it, right? Because the data is so much and it's in so many different places. So if there is a company that can actually make sense of that data without huge multi-year projects,

for data to be sorted out and, you know, that layer to be all perfect because perfect data is maybe just, uh,

a pipe dream, right? So if you could use AI to actually be that layer so that you don't have to go through those multi-year huge millions of dollars spent to make that data better, I think that could be really cool and a really good use case for AI to help with data. I was going to ask you too, where your skepticism lies when it comes to the future of AI or how it

can or should be ethically integrated into different teams and different departments. But you may have just answered that question. But if you have a different answer for that, I'd love to hear it. Look, I mean, the world is such a complicated place today. And everything that happens outside of the business world impacts the business world. So I think AI, just like any other technology, can be a force for good or a force for bad.

Cyber security, fraud, all of those things that we have had in the past and just gotten more complex and harder to deal with are probably going to get harder and more complex to deal with with the advent of AI. And they probably are. Right. You're seeing that in your personal life with all the scams and you're seeing you're already seeing that in the business world.

So my skepticism lies not maybe specific to AI, but with any technology, what controls, what regulations, how is it going to be, what laws and policing mechanisms are going to come up, and maybe standards internationally that will help AI be a force for good. So skepticism, but also hope, as we've done in the past with all technologies, we've standardized, we've put laws in practice so that

And that there are mechanisms and agencies in place to be able to enforce the goodness of the technology. So my hope is the same for AI. Well said. I love that. It reminds me of a conversation I was having recently with my dad. We were talking about just how AI is changing everything. My dad was born in 1957. So he was around for a lot and around for, you know, the inception of the Internet and

And he said, you know, we thought the world was going to end when the internet became a thing. So this is nothing new. Like it's brand new, but also it's not. You know, we've seen so much innovation and change and transformation. It's just going to keep happening. So, you know. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And I was around for the Y2K paranoia. Yeah.

in the year 2000 because everything was I think in COBOL and they said like there's some issue where the number of digits can't like go beyond specifics but anyway it was all this mass hysteria that everything is going to go bad and the nukes are going to get fired and the world's going to come to an end but of course that was not the case the human race is more resilient than we give it credit for sometimes

That's for sure. That's for sure. Okay. I do want to be mindful of your time here and close out with our final question. So we like to ask everyone at the end of every interview, what one of your favorite experiences as a customer has been recently? So you can shout out one of your favorite local businesses or just maybe a bigger company that you've had a really fun, like beneficial, cool experience with. Wow. Okay. So I love the

Marriott brand personally. We are all in on the Marriott brand. I think they have really expanded their footprint, acquired a lot of different properties, and we've been able to stay at some really, really good ones. And I think some of their brands, especially if you have the opportunity to stay at a Ritz Carlton or a St. Regis, I mean, I think those brands really understand customer experience and

They remember who you are and you feel really wanted.

And they're always happy that you're there. So I think that experience has been a really good one. But I would say in the day-to-day life as well, I think Costco is another one that is not that high end. And it's very, very loved. And they're not luxe. They are not high end. But they know who they are and they know what their customers want. So the Costco customer is very different than Costco.

whatever higher end grocery store, like a Whole Foods customer. And you know what to expect and you're getting what you need. So I think those are the secrets. I'm both. So I don't know. I feel like I could do a switch between the two. I love Costco too because of their employee experience. Like there was a book I read about how they, you know, create such a beautiful experience for their employees that their employees want to stick around for years. Like they have a very unique philosophy on how to, you know, the cash cashier is like so nice to you when you check out because of this experience.

philosophy that they have. Well, I mean, it's real. Employee experience and customer experience go hand in hand, which comes down a lot of times to, well, obviously having the right talent, but empowering people

your talent, right? So having a, not a tight leash, but a very loose string with your employees and their experience, I think very good thing. So you hire the right people, trust them to do the right thing, democratize the tools like we talked about with AI and let them uncover and unlock the potential. Yeah, I love that. Well, I want to go ahead and end there. Abhi, thank you so much for joining us on the pod. Thank you so much for having me. This has been such a great conversation. Thank you.

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