- Hello. Hi, how are you? We have matching glasses. We're like twins, I'm not excited about that, sorry I'm late. Don't worry, I am so happy that I'm talking to you, please. I couldn't figure out Google Meet, I've never used Google Meet. I know it sucks, it's not personal. Oh my God, what do I do?

I don't know which one is worse, if the Microsoft one, team? We use Zoom all the time. Zoom is the best, but I have an account on Gmail with all the business things, so I know. I need to get on Zoom, I know. I'm not here, we're talking, but I was freaking out, I can't get in, she thinks I'm not here.

I hate Gmail, anyway, Gmail video. I'm so excited besides being twins. We're kind of like dresses, I like to. I normally wear a little jacket with a T-shirt. Did you see I have a jean, but I have my leather too, but look, you cannot beat this. No, I can't, I can't. I don't have a New York City one, I don't have a Dublin one either.

So where are you today? Dublin, yeah, yeah, so we seek something, you seek something. You have to walk relatively late in order to get to the US. Exactly, this is my busy, my crazy time because all my meetings in the US happen between 2pm and 7pm. There's a five hour window, so everything gets shrunk into those days.

Then I also support the globe, so I support APAC and Europe and all of them. I go from nine o'clock until nine o'clock every day. I know, my mornings get packed because when I work, I have a fraction of a role in AI company where the engineer is amazing woman, she's in India. Oh, that's impossible, it's 11 hours difference.

07:33

So even night, my 9am or my 8am, it's late. So I hear you. So why do you take us here today? I want to know everything about you. So let me do my intro and then you can do yours and then what we'll do is we'll kind of figure out where our crossover is because Adrian obviously who is my colleague introduced me to you.

So Adrian is amazing, she is my go-to, my friend, my colleague, my peer, my yeah, she's amazing. And we have something in common with her on the side. She was introduced by my top, top coach. I belong to chief, you have heard about chief. And my coach is one of the founders and she's, and I'm going to share if you haven't the information about her, she's Danish, but she's in U.

S. She wrote a book, she's amazing. She's the one that puts us together and every time I coach puts me together with someone is we both know the ones that we are getting together that is meant to be. Because she, you know, we are like, yeah, so keep going. And I really, and so I was chatting to Adrian just, we were in our normal, we had one to one every week and we chat all the time.

And she, her and I are part of the same team and we report up into our boss and our boss is senior director for learning effectiveness and development for eBay. Okay. Now I'm on the side of the learning and the effectiveness piece and then Adrian is on the development side. One second, that's just my kids.

- Ready?

- Thanks. Sorry.

09:35

- So that's kids back from school?

- Yeah.

- Oh, yeah, you're lucky. My rotation starts at 4 p.m.

- Okay, how many do you have, Mariana?

- Two.

- You have?

- Two. I have two girls.

- I have one boy and a girl.

- What age?

- They're so separating on ages. Like people always make that awful comment. Like, are they from different marriages? It just took me so long to get the guts to go for the second. That's it. 16 and 10. Oh, lovely. I have 14 and 10. Oh. So I'm the same. God bless us. We are, exactly.

We obviously... We deserve to be canonized. You're in Ireland. You understand the world canonized. Yes, we deserve candles every day in our doorstep. Yeah, and alter and lighting on our altar every day. So let me get back. So learning effectiveness is me, development, Adrian. Now under the banner of learning and effectiveness, I have the programs that support people who are onboarding, so the learning journey, onboarding into the company, so our frontline teammates, the people who service our customers.

We have approximately 10,000 teammates and we support them from cradle to grave, from the very beginning, from their understanding of what eBay is, what their role is within eBay, how they actually will support our customers. What are the things that they need to be mindful of and aware of?

So we train them and we get them to a confidence state of where we call it proficiency, where we say, "Right, okay, now you're ready to go and service our customers." So that's my learning team. We also design all of the content that supports that learning journey, so I also have a design team.

So I have a team of creatives, I have a team of delivery leaders and I have a team of managers who manage the operational end-to-end globe of those 10,000 people to say, "Right, okay, how do we make sure that we're offering a consistent standardized service of how we actually support the customer experience for all of our customers." I have phone chat, email, all of the different channels.

11:55

So then it's like a relay team. My next team is where you hand the baton over to say, "Okay, I've created a proficient teammate who knows what it means to handle a customer contact at eBay. Now how do I make sure that the teammate stays at that proficiency? How do I make sure that that teammate always stays where they have the strength to make sure that they're continually growing throughout their role, but at the same time that we're identifying their opportunities and supporting that opportunity with the coaching conversation?" So we have the quality of the coaching program.

So really the programmatic support that enables us to identify insights at scale and then act on those insights with either a learning intervention or a coaching intervention. So that's my relay team and then at the end of that relay team is all of the great folks who say, "Okay, how do you measure whether you're effective or not?

How do you know whether your programs are actually delivering on what they're supposed to be doing and impacting not only the customer, but the business and that we're actually making sure that the programs that we design and develop and deliver are actually giving us a return on our investment to say, "Well, yes, you're achieving your results and you're getting those in a really efficient way.

So we're saving money because you're doing what you're supposed to be doing." So I have a team of data nerds, as I call them, who love looking at all of the data and putting the story to the data. They're red thread. Exactly. So I have a team of approximately just over a hundred people globally where we manage that interaction and we support, so we're an enablement function.

And what we have been doing over the last number of years is establishing very structured frameworks, standardization and measurements so that we can actually understand the impact that we're having at scale. Amazing. Okay? Now we've been doing all of that with very manual interfaces, documentation, heavy lifting effort to make sure that the frame and the structure is solid.

14:09

And now, now I'm saying, "Okay guys, we got to move and we got to move quickly because we need to understand of all of those frameworks and structures and foundational supports that enables the business to be successful, we can do that better and faster with AI." So how do we actually bring those standards and structures and frames to the business to say, "Okay, let's capitalize on this movement.

Let's understand what elements of the bits of work that we do can actually be evolved, enhanced through automation and let's be open and transparent and also positive about that journey." So that has been I suppose over the last number of weeks and months, the bits of work that I'm working on which is basically saying, Are there programmatic elements within our frameworks that are more advanced in terms of their maturity and their capability that can move to that different automation state?

And then how do I make sure that I've got a business case to present to the business to say, okay, I've got a team of 100 people that impact your world by effort? You have 10,000 teammates that actually support the customer, but what if, so the what if scenario, what if I can say that we can do it faster, better and cheaper?

And at the same time, remain, keep our integrity and also as well, making sure that we are acting responsibly, not only for the customers, but also for the teams that we have. So it's not just about eliminating headcount. It's about saying, what's the right thing to do that maybe we actually put the headcount that are supporting in a very effort driven manner, to higher value work that we're not getting to, to higher value work that will yield a better return on investment, and a much more long term scalable vision that will allow us to also scale our business and not have all of this drudgery of trying to get people to do things in the same way in a very effort driven way.

16:16

So that's where I am. It's been a very nice session. Yes, I have great news for you.

- Great.

- Yes, yes. You cannot be in a better place. And what you just said speaks so highly of the kind of leader you are. And I'm not sucking up on you, I'm in there. I write, I research, I do, I've been on this for a while. My profession, my career is, if you have to summarize it in one word, is change and transformation.

What I do is what we can call digital transformation because no one knows what other name put at it, but what I am is a seer of the future.

- Yeah.

- But then because of my many, many years inside corporate of America advancing forward businesses,

- I see the business.

- I see the business, I see the operations because myself I had to build them from scratch. I started as a product designer, digital product designer. I started before Google. So I've been talking about transformation to the next wave of the next wave of the next wave my whole life.

This fourth revolution as it is called because it's AI but also is IoT. It's just another round. That I've been discussing for too many years for people not to get it, 'cause people just not get it. But that's a different problem. There's not ask them, no, is what are we doing with that we cannot, what we are doing wrong in the sense that we need to put the right seat for them to think about it and I got it.

I think that I got it. So let me, the reason that I suck up on you is because there's a lack and you, and you are per say HR team, we could call it people team, people's team, employees team, I don't know.

18:27

- Yeah.

- That's where the revolution starts.

- Yeah.

- So that's what I'm congratulating you because it's not going to start with leadership. They don't get it. It's not going to start with middle management. They don't get it because they don't want to do more for the same amount of money.

- No. You are the one that it has the battlegrounds, the ones that are in the first line of fire, that's what you understand the value of this. And the truth is, this change, this fourth revolution is totally different from web 1.0, web 2.0 and web 3.0. Why?

- Why?

- Because it's coming too fast. It's going to displace three billion of people. Displace, I didn't say they will lose their job but it's going to displace it in a way that I'm telling you, there's not going to come back to that.

- No.

- There's not, we see it is dark, but hey, you're not getting ready now. So what do you expect?

- Exactly.

- People are not being able to measure. This time it's coming so fast that it's going to annihilate everyone. And in different levels, no, it's different from the people that are sewing per se that are going to be replaced by a machine, it's going to be different in different industry sectors.

So you are in the right place.

- I have, and I have to congratulate that. Yesterday I was at a conference, the Reuters Conference of Customer Experience, Service and Marketing, where the majority of companies of the world were there. And I was just like, we are so fucked. People are, you are not. So you are one of the few.

So first--

- But so hard when you just wanted to--

- Hold on, congratulates you, no. Changemakers are always a few. You just need the right toolbox to make it happen as a leader. And I'm going to tell you what is a toolbox. The toolbox is your business case. You're going to find the quickest win with the highest return on the investment.

20:57

Why people have been so unsuccessful and leadership is, we don't see, because they have chosen, most likely engineers, not a human centered person like you, they have chosen the quickest win that it doesn't impact the overall ROI of the company. Quick win doesn't mean highest potential.

That is the formula that is the match, the winning for you. It's identifying quickest win with the highest return on the investment. And the highest return on investment is not your KPIs, are the KPIs that you tie to the overall bottom, the bottom, the top. Yes, so you will do your red thread and we'll find what is going to move the needle the most with the last quickest possible doing.

That's one thing. The second one is employees.

- You are the ones that are scared that AI is going to take over. And you are in the right place, you're not an engineer, right?

- No.

- You are the human person that is going to say,

- God...

- guys, come, let's do it. We are going to figure it out this together because you don't know, I don't know, they know. Stakeholders, one delegate for each group you have, or many, we'll see. You know, I'm just, brain, you will have that group that is going to make the decisions together.

They're going to be part of the decision and they're going to decide what is the quickest way. And they know the objective is, what you said it, is how we can automate the simplest shit so you guys can focus on the complex shit that it needs human interaction. And it needs your critical thinking.

23:07

I want you guys to stop pushing the pixels that it could be pushed by themself and concentrate on how we can improve the return on the investment, improve our processes and get a better return from your customers because I would say the bottom line of your company is not only how many sales you do, is your customers, your customers, what is the best for them?

And that's because when they are not the best, they're going to sell and do the best for eBay. Exactly. So I've got all of these, like, right now there's that and it's like as if you have been in all my meetings because I have a team of engineers, our technical folks who are deciding the staff ranking list, say, okay, this is what we're going after, right?

Why they're doing that? Exactly, because they speak engineer and they only think engineer, like you and I, we think Babel, I call it the Babel Tower because I've been in the role, I've been in leading engineers, leading technical people, leading humans, leading marketing, product development, customer service, I've been in touch of 100 people at a customer service, so I think holistically.

And those are the leaders that are going to make the change because we see 360 and these augmentation of good stuff and the automation of stupid stuff only comes from leaders that they think like this. So they are not going to be deciding shit because they will fail and they will present the business case to the company that is going to be less effort, less impact.

- So we have--

- And they can't decide, something that is going to impact the life of 90% outside of that group, period. And AI, it's a new thing. This is not same as Web 3, that you're with two, that okay, let the team of product development, CX figure this out. And then every other business function will come along.

25:27

You know, you either start from the inside, or you burn, as you said, every piece of people one by one, because they are scared. You know, you're in human, in the human business, meaning that you lead humans, you don't lead production, per se, that's what I mean. You're going to burn them because they're scared.

And the only way to get them out of that mode and make them part of your team is, make them part of the team that makes a decision, make them part of the team that is going to figure it out, what and how. And then tell them that this is so you can deliver, better training, accelerated careers, everything else that they won't be doing, like pushing shit, for example, yesterday I saw at this conference, like the MicroMine news show of customer service, but how a chat TPD making this up, totally making it up, inside the company, with the content of the company, can accelerate resolution time by typing, you type, you have some, or you send online, right, inline, and you type and you have that also, that person connected with the double, out of, so you can actually, whatever is words, you solve it online, verbally, but whatever is complex information, you just send them graphs here, instead of explaining for three pages, either in an ID, the, the, yeah, 300 pages of your credit card, whatever, transaction, you just send them the whole thing, you send them a graph, I'm talking about highly complex communication.

And let's say I asked something to you that you're the CSR, and the CSR types connected to the CRM, like an intelligent CRM, hey, what happens if this person does this and that? You don't get an article, you don't get a Q and A, you just get the solution, because that's why, but that's, that's, that's what I'm trying to bring, is basically,

27:44

- That's the solution, the solution is no, she doesn't need to do that for the next two years, because her daughter, blah, blah, I was something about issues. That's the kind of solutions that you need, but you're not going to put it on top of them because I am assuming this. You need to figure it out where they are stuck that you can unstuck them.

Have you seen-- have you been in my brain because this is the solution that I'm trying to bring. Listen. We are few, we are not many, but we are out there. We say in Spanish I was born in Argentina, came to America in my early 20s, and I'm American, Argentinian, Latina, half-Middle Eastern, half-white, married to a Jewish guy, race Christian, Roman Catholic, Christian Orthodox.

More Babel than me, you're not going to find. Anyway, what I'm saying is I hear you.

- I hear you...

- We understand the complexity and how to manage that. So yes, I am in your head because we are-- this is what we need to do in order to accelerate to the future. We don't know what is going to happen in the four-- next four months. I'm telling you, it's going to be a shit show. Yeah, it is.

So let's start one step at a time. A journey of 1,000 miles starts with the first step. That's it. I see how people are terrified. I take a class. I am almost going to get a degree on the Institute of the Future. Have you heard about that? I'm going to share it with you. It's about learning how to see the future at the scientific level with the process and methodology.

And you just basically connect data and you create frameworks. It's no magic. There was this great research where people were asked, if you knew how you will die, would you like to know it?

29:53

- How you will die?

- die. Would you like to know it? Yes, of course. I said, yes, of course. I have two young children. What at the heck are you talking about? Yes, you know, you and I part of the what are, the 2% of the population. 98% of the people doesn't want to know about the future.

- Wow.

- That's why they are in problem solving the next stupid fire. And not thinking, okay, yeah, we need to solve the process fire because it's burning, right? But wait, let's see.

- 2%

- Let's get some critical thinking ongoing. So we can actually do some research for root cause what the heck these happen and hopefully prevent it for the future. People are taking decisions without thinking about the outcomes, without how it's going to impact generation after generation.

You, did you see in Netflix the Julu, the vaping thing?

- No, is it good?

- It's not good, it's a piece of art.

- Okay, I want to wonder.

- Because it's showing how design prevail over function. Function means once that object is designed, how it's going to impact, what are the consequences of this new product in the world? No one was thinking that. They were like hooked up on the problem that they were trying to solve without thinking holistically, like you and I were thinking.

And that's what happened, what happened. They made addictive, I don't know what gigantic percentage of the population, the team population in United States. How do you get out of that? You're nicotine addict for the rest of your life at the age of 12.

32:02

- Wow. Oh my God.

- But this is like, it's a tell for understanding how every change that is happening in the world these days will ripple and we need to start thinking how ethics, you need ethics in the team, legal, like right, data, the engineer, the product, the customer experience, the customer service, the HR, you need a whole, like a group, like a cross functional group that is going to decide what is the highest impact we will get with the lowest effort and that's your business case.

And that's how you will get money for that, for the next and the next and the next. But you have to walk them like infants. Your children are hard of our graduates compared to everyone else these days. I know and that's the bit that I find challenging, right? Is that exact point of, like we've done the business case, the impact effort analysis, all of that has been presented.

And I am now on a short list of 10 proposed projects.

- Do you feel comfortable about that?

- I feel very comfortable.

- Oh, so you already got it. But I don't know if I've got it yet, right? I'm the only one on that list, that A has a people centered return on investment, B has completed their business requirements so that it's, what are the requirements that the function needs so that the tech people know exactly what they need to design.

I'm the only one that has it, right? Now, of those 10 projects, I now have to go in front of senior leadership this week and just make my business case. Connect with the hearts and minds, make them see that even though mine is probably not the highest return on investment, has the biggest longterm impact on how we will work in the future and how our customers will actually engage with those in the future.

34:24

And the rest of them are just small little bit of like, okay, we'll tweak this over here, we'll do this over here, but it's not that holistic over here.

- So these technology suggestions came from the engineering team and based off what are the problems that you presented?

- Well, no, there's nine other proposals for what we should go after for AI. And they want to reduce the list so that they focus and say, okay, well, we won't go after the 10 things. We'll only go after the top three, five that we'll give us the biggest impact.

- And they had validated that the problem these technologies solves is actually the problem.

- Have you ever seen the business functions?

- No.

- That's what I'm saying. This is like, oh, let's wear red because everyone is wearing red. Red looks like shit on me, no. Make it up, right?

- I said, I said.

- You challenge me. No, but do you know what I'm saying? Technology doesn't come first. Technology's an afterthought of something, a problem that you're trying to solve that is going to bring the highest return on your minimal investment.

- Yeah.

- So can you reverse engineer this in order to prove it possible?

- Yeah, oh no, and that's kind of where I am now. So I feel very confident about what I'm presenting and the proposal and the reality behind this. And I really, really do. And I've got to go now because I'm actually in a meeting. But I'd love to catch up again.

- It's not like we talk for three hours. I'm surprised that only half an hour passed by.

- But I would love to catch up again to let you know how it's going.

- Yes, please. And if there's any way I can support you in your path and help you to make your vision a reality, I'm here.

- Thank you. That's really, really helpful because I don't know many other people in that 2%.

- No, no, we are not many. But listen, we have in Spanish to say that it says, God creates them and the wind puts them together.

36:28

- Okay.

- This is cute.

- Love it.

- I think very nice the word using Spanish for puts them together is more like it piles them up together. You know? So say, say.

- Well, it was so lovely, lovely to me.

- Listen, I'm here and I have a gift to share with the world. If you feel that that gift can help you accelerate your path, I'm here.

- Okay, let me connect with you again and then we can figure out how we go forward. Brilliant. Thank you so much, Marianne, a lovely chat with you. Thank you.

- Keep it very good.