>> Live from Orlando, Florida It's the Cube covering Enterprise Connect twenty nineteen brought to you by five nine. >> Hi. Welcome back to the Q. We are live at Enterprise Connect. Twenty nineteen. Can you hear the buzz behind Stew, Minutemen and me? It's party time. It's five o'Clock kicking things off, welcoming a couple of guests to our program this afternoon. We've got Blair Pleasant, president and principal analyst at Confusion and co founder of BC Strategies, and Michael Rose, the director brand and corporate communications from five nine. Welcome to the Q. Thank you. >> Good afternoon. >> Welcome to the party. >> I know. With the beer and the wine for us, >> we think it's momentarily momentary. So you have been coming to Enterprise Connect about the last ten years or so. A little bit of an overview about what you're doing at this year's easy. >> Sure, So I'm going to be doing for different sessions here. Esso. On Wednesday, I'm going to be giving a presentation. Well, one is going to be to the Channel partners who are selling, you see, telling them about why they should be selling Contact Center and all the wonders about contact center and customer experience. And I'Ll also be doing a session on unified communications end user adoption, and I'm gonna have a panel of and users who were going to tell about their talk about their adoption programs on Thursday. I'm doing a session on collaboration about team collaboration and how to migrate and things to do there. And then I'm participating in the last note where a bunch of analysts consultants, they're gonna basically wrap up the show and talk about, you know, key findings and key messages, and it's going to really good discussion. >> You have a very busy week ahead. I'm curious as to when I were chatting earlier today about the evolution of this event over the last twenty eight twenty nine years, but also paralleling the massive evolution of communications and collaborations, the rise of the empowered consumers who wants to be able to have a conversation on any channel at any time and have our issues resolved right away. Give us your perspective cause you have a very full week here about some of the turns that you you've seen in the last year that you're looking forward to helping customers understand. You talked about selling, you see, so contact centers of service. Yes. >> So when it comes to unified communications, as I mentioned one thing that I've been really focused on is user adoption because companies will buy technology and they'LL deploy technology. But they don't necessarily. That doesn't mean that uses air actually going to be using it. So that's one thing that they really have to focus on. And then when we turn to the contact center side, it's all about customer experience. And in fact, Michael and I have been doing a lot of work in this area. And so we've been hearing the term customer experience. You know, c X. But what's also important is employees or agent experience and a X, as we're calling it. So getting the agent involved also and making sure that they've got the tools that they need to help them do a really good job. >> Alright, so Michael, you have brand and you did a very nice job bringing us the five nine mugs. Yes, there's water in them, but this customer service index can you bring us inside what you're working on, what we're Blair's been involved and let's get into that. >> It's basically an annual study that we've been doing now for two years, and we plan to continue in the first part of it looks at what the consumers are saying about why they raid a customer experience the way they do want that, what's important to them and, more importantly, what turns them off. And as we found in when we did the analytics with Blair is a bad customer engagement. They're likely to leave you and not to business anymore. We were talking earlier about consumers now have voice and choice. You know, they they've got voice through social media to complain, and they will leave and find another brand to partner with. And so that's sort of a key finding around. What is it the people want? And it's basically a quick response. Know who I am and engage me the way I want to be engaged. >> But what was interesting is they want a quick response. But they're also willing to spend more time on the phone or whatever in an interaction talking to an agent if it means that they're going to get the response that they need and get the information that they need to get their problem solved. So speed is important when it comes to getting an agent on the phone or getting that agent, but then they're willing to take the time if it means I'm going to get my problems solved. Do >> you think that one of the things we chatted about with Ryan can? The CMO of five nine earlier today is is the fact that five nine has five billion recorded customer conversations and we were chatting, I think, also with Jonathan Rosenberg. It's an expectation, right? We call contact Center for whatever product or service or whatnot that we're having an issue with her were enquiring about. And you hear that? So there's an expectation that is going to be reported. How did cos actually glean insight from that data? Because I'm there, I'LL tell you, I never think when I'm on the phone call, I have a problem to resolve. And I don't think that they're recording my conversation to help me and all the customers that probably have the same problem. So I thought that was an interesting sort of way of of looking at it. But it's also interesting that that you found that people are willing to spend more time if the value to them is greater. >> Yep, absolutely. And we're finding that companies are using that data. You know, we hear about Big Data Analytics. So analytics is really the big thing, you know, looking at the the whole picture, getting that holistic view of what's working, what isn't working. And then turning that also into I talked before about the agent experience using this to improve what the agent is doing and how the agent is interacting with the customer. >> And that's that's probably a good build to the next part of the study, which is a business decision maker. And so we survey them to see other, any parallels and what they're thinking compared to the consumer on one of the probably most disappointing findings issue and we're doing a webinar on this next week is the lowest thing they write is employeessatisfaction. So they look ATT, you know, is that the right product we're selling? Do we have the right tools but actually looking after the agent, all the employees that ranks the least on their list of priorities, which is quite distressing and sad. But >> the good news is that they did great customer satisfaction very highly, So when it came when we were looking at what's really important to your business and to growing your revenues. Customer satisfaction was very important. So we're happy about that. >> Which it has to be directly tied to the agent experience like, for example, making sure that an agent has is empowered to make a decision. But they had to have the information. They have to have the content to be delivered through the right channels. So that's interesting finding that you are you expecting to hear on DH talk Claremore this week with companies to say, This is why Employeessatisfaction has got to move up the rights because it is directly tied to customer satisfaction. >> So I've been talking about that for a long time, and it's so important, and I think cos they're starting to get it. And we're also seeing more tools like a I. You know, that's really going to be used to help provide the information to the agents and help them do that. Better job. >> One of things. It's always interesting when you have these annual studies to see what is actually changing over time. You know, I've got background on telecommunications, you know, we talk about Omni Channel today. We talked about, you know, unified messaging twenty years ago, we talked about a today. We talked about intelligence and data decades ago. So what's changing? What? Staying the same. Any insight that you're getting, As as we've been moving with the survey Overtime >> voices still K as in, people want to make a phone call if they need help and believe it or not, that's across all age groups that even tops out number one for Millennials, which surprised you. And I know Blake. You did a little test group at home with that? >> Yeah, I had my twenty somethings. They had some friends over. And I asked him, You know, when you have a problem and you need to call contact customer service, what do you do? It? And the first thing they do is try to do self service, you know, try to figure it out on their own. You know, Google it go to YouTube or whatever, but then, if they can't find the problem, they will pick up the phone and called a contacts and, you know, call customer service and you would think that twentysomethings wouldn't do that. But they know that if it's something important and they need to get that information right away or solve that problem right away. They pick up the phone, and they also do chat and email. But the study found that chat actually went down this year, which were kind of surprised about so the use of email went up. But these of chat went down >> Any thoughts as to why that might be going down? >> I think it's because companies haven't been providing that good experience. So even though they're offering chat, it's it's not optimized. So sometimes you know when you're doing shots, you know you're on a website. You doing chat, you can tell when the agent is talking to like ten other people at the same time. So it's it's really frustrating. So I think companies have the technology, but they're not doing it the right way. >> I mean, I know I've had Sometimes you get a chat and I'm like, I'm not talking to a person. It's a chat, Bott. Oh, is this some outsourced chat that maybe doesn't have the skill level that I need as opposed to? If I pick up the phone, I know most of the time that agent I'm going to get either can answer my question or can escalate to the person that, >> interestingly to the one that's right down near the bottom is social media and it hasn't moved for two years. So we're not saying now that could be a chicken and the egg. Is it because companies are not offering it? So therefore, I don't know. I can use it or don't people want to use it on? We had a theory cause. Social Media's had a bit of a rocky ride in the last year with data and privacy and everything else. So maybe consumers just don't trust it yet. And there are other channels, like email as you said, that we've seen increasing. >> But if customers are unhappy about something, they're going to go on. Social media >> is the first thing I do. When you were saying that it was surprising it was low, because if I at a recent experience with an S B and wasn't getting five minutes with a robot on the phone, couldn't get all I wanted was a tech to come out to my house to fix something, Then I had to have somebody call me back and verify. Have you do the exact same thing I've been through this, so I went to Twitter to escalate that. So that's how I think about that. I appreciate that, they responded, But it's I guess it's a couple of a number of interesting things that you guys have brought up today that surprised you. The X factor being lower millennials actually wanting to talk to human. That's good. But also this the fact that people aren't using social as much as maybe you would've thought, or they may be. They don't release. I can't. Or maybe it's to customers not have appropriate affected social listening programs to respond to the volume. >> So that's the chicken and egg thing Michael was talking about. A lot of companies don't offer social as a channel because they think that customers don't want to use it. The customers aren't using it because they don't realize that companies are offering it. >> So, Claire, while we have you, you've got a good perspective on this space. What's differentiating the leaders in the space from some of the laggards in this space? >> Oh, that's a good question. I think a lot of it has to do with again the Focus on the customer experience, you know? So if you're talking about the vendors, the vendors that are succeeding are the ones that really do. Look at the customer, not just the technology. So so many companies could do technology. The technology is the easy part, its doing it right. It's really making that difference and making things simple, making things unified, making it not complex for customers. Because right now things are just so complex. You have to go no to so many different places. Teo, to make things work. So the more you can make things seamless and simple. I think that's what's really separating. The winners from the losers >> will make Michael Maybe you can elaborate on, you know, delivering a integrated connected on the channel experience. But I think there's still some of maturation curve that it's on, whereby I might have an expectation as a consumer than I'm goingto go through chat or email or another channel. And then if I go through Twitter or social, I'm hoping that this conversation is connected. Where can five nine help customers across industries to really integrate and deliver Omni Channel? >> I think the first thing is the cloud because moving to the cloud enables you to move quickly is a business. And as we were saying today, the software updates all the time and it's easy. It's like your phone, you just downloading away you go. So it's It's the cloud first to get to the data, and we talked about that before, too, and growing. Our CEO calls it the dark data because no one's using it. And you need to mind that data to get the inside, because then the system will start directing the consumer based on what the intelligence is telling them, irrespective of which channel they come through on. Do you really want an experience where I've done tweeting away with a company? And they said, Well, privately email you now because we want to take it off line and then they'LL say, Well, no, now we need to call, but it's it's fluid. All the data and all the information is passed through that communication, So it's seamless for me, the consumer, and it's more rewarding for the agent because they can actually get to the core issue for the customer and resolve it. >> That's a customer there. Maybe Blair, This is a question for you. How does a customer take what's probably traditional silos of customer experiences and culturally evolved as a business to be able to deliver what Michael was talking about? I mentioned that those Silas and that kind of cultural disparity might be kind of a challenge for an organisation to pivot as quickly as they need to when customer lifetime value was on the line. >> Yeah, and it's definitely been a challenge for a lot of companies, but they know that they have to get there. So I think even though some of them might be resistant, they realised that to get the results that they need, they really do have to do that. But it's a cultural change, and you asked before about what's separating some of the winners from losers. I think that's a big part of it is being able to make that change >> player, you know, as I was getting ready for the show, there's general belief that customers are embracing of the cloud. It's no longer we're no longer in the evangelization phases. I've heard five nine, but we're in adoption. I'm curious player. When it comes to a I, though our users ready. Everybody we talk about these technologies are going to be infused with aot. There's some, you know, fear. Sometimes out there is like the robots, or they're going to take my personal data or anything like that. What do you see out there and what should we be aware of and where do we need to go? As an industry, I want to come stay. I So >> as far as consumers, they do need to be worried. You know, they're definitely issues about privacy, and you know what's going to happen with the information. But I think user shouldn't really know that there's a I involved on, and that's also debate we have, like, if you're interacting with the pot, you know, if you're doing a chat, do you know if it's a body or an agent? So some companies, you know, make it clear, you know? Hi. This is, you know, Joe the Bob, But other companies don't. So then you have to say I and I've had these experiences are youa, but no, I am a real person. Okay, prove to me your real person. So it's so it's really interesting. So some companies feel that customers are more open if they're talking to a bomb. And in certain industries, like if it's healthcare or finance, people are going to be more open if it's about because they don't want to share their personal information with a live person. But if it's a computer is like okay, I can share the information. So it were very much in early days, so we don't really I have the experience to drawn yet. So let's talk about this again next year. >> Well, Blair, Michael, thank you so much for joining student. Be on the Cube this afternoon and sharing spending some time since you have such a busy week where we appreciate your insights on the event on enterprise, collaboration and communication. And we appreciate your time. Thank you for soon. Minutemen. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube

>> Narrator: From the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering food IT: Fork to Farm, brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hey, welcome back here and ready, Jeffrey Frick with theCUBE. We are in Silicon Valley at the Computer History Museum at a really unique event. It's food IT: Fork to farm, not the other way around, which you might think, "Hm, that doesn't make sense," but actually it does, really by the consumer-driven world that's hitting everything including the food and agriculture and we're really excited to have the guys running this show, representing The Mixing Bowl. Rob Trice is the founder and Michael Rose, partner, of The Mixing Bowl. Gentlemen, welcome. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> So, first off, a little history on this event, it's the first time we've been here. I think you said there's about 350 people, really a broad spectrum: academe, technology, farmers, from New Zealand, I think was the one I heard from the furthest place. What's kind of the genesis of this show? >> So, my background is 15 years in mobile internet, telecom venture capital and my wife, actually, a couple of years ago, started running a cattle ranch out on the Pacific Coast and through that I saw how little technology was being used on the ranch and amongst local food producers. I came back to Silicon Valley and none of the big food or ag. players were here then, four years ago. Monsanto just had up a venture group, Unilever and Nestle had one person each here, but by and large, Silicon Valley's IT innovation ecosystem was not focused on food and agriculture. So I started The Mixing Bowl as a little bit more than just a Meetup group and we did it a couple of times and then somebody said, "You know, we should do a conference on this topic." So the first year we did it at Stanford with a partner of ours, and we thought might have 150 people come. We had over 300 people come and it was this kind of audience, kind of cross-section of technologists, food and agriculturalists. So that's when I said, "You know, I'm done with telecom. I want to go ride this food tech, ag. tech wave and see where the heck this comes to roost." So, it's been four years now and I'm pleased to be working not only with Michael, but then our colleagues Seana and Brita, and having a blast, learning a lot. >> Okay, so that's the conference. What about for The Mixing Bowl specifically, what is your charter as an organization? >> Well we've got three aspects of our business, so the first one is information sharing, so doing events like this. We do themed events, we did a water-tech for agricultural event down in Fresno. And then we also are contributing writers for Forbes. We also have an advisory business where we work with large corporates who are seeking innovation and trying to bring innovation to the food and ag. Sector, trying to bring technology and innovation. And then we have an investment side of our business, out of the brand Better Food Ventures. So we invest in the space as well, we have about 12 companies in our portfolio. >> That's interesting that you said there wasn't a lot of tech in ag. here and yet, we talked to Paul from Ford, we talked about their conference that they have at Salinas and of course, Sacramento Valley, San Fernando Valley, or not San Fernando Valley, San Joaquin Valley is a huge producer of food. So why do you think it was so late to come here? >> Well, I think that there have been other opportunities and I think that there's a misperception that agriculture doesn't need IT and I think what we've now realized is there's a huge opportunity, whether it is Internet of Things or looking at tracking and transparency, there's a lot of inefficiencies in our food production system and there also are a lot of societal challenges that we have. Everyone talks about feeding nine billion people by 2050, but then also we look at food safety, we look at what the consumer wants, which is why we're here today, talking about the fork to the farm. Consumers want change in food. They want different kinds of food. They want it delivered to them in different ways. All of these are opportunities for tech to be applied to food and agriculture. >> So we love being here. Go ahead, Michael. >> No, I was just going to say, I think it's like any other vertical in any other sector that starts to adopt technology over time. And even in the ag. sector, you've seen in the commodity crops in the Midwest with the automation that they adopted technology early but you've got other sectors, whether it's the specialty crops down in Salinas or people who are doing almonds, etc. Those people are starting to adopt technology, they're just a little further behind than you are with commodity crops. >> Right. It's funny, we interviewed the guy from Caterpillar a few weeks ago, and they are already running huge fleets of autonomous vehicles in mining. Obviously they have a lot of equipment involved in agriculture as well, so it seems kind of start and stop depending on the vendors that you're talking about. But one of the big themes we talk about, we go to a lot of platform shows, right? It's Cloud, it's edge, it's connectivity, it's big data, drones, I mean, as you look at some of these big classifications of technology that are now being applied in ag. are there any particular ones that kind of jump out as either the catalyst or the leading edge of adoption that's really helping drive this revolution? >> I guess, if you think about the fact that we're kind of looking at this staircase of adoption. One thing that we need to do is actually digitize information and that's one of the challenges that we have. Once we digitize, then we can start to manage operations based on that data, then we can start to optimize, and then we can automate. So it's a four-step staircase that we look at and I think in a lot of cases, even at restaurants, a lot of them are still placing orders via fax and telephone. We need to get off of that and start getting them to order online through online platforms and so forth. So, at any rate, one area that I'm particularly excited about is aerial imaging for agriculture because I think you are instantaneously, by just doing a flyover, providing farmers with more information than they've ever had. In some cases, I think you could actually argue, you're going from a data desert to a data flood. Now the challenge is moving up that staircase to go make sense of that data and then ultimately be able to give prescriptive machine-learning or artificial intelligence-based recommendations to that farmer on how to do a better job, whether that is increasing sustainability, maximizing yield, looking at pricing, any of those kind of things. >> Right, one of the things you hear real often in every industry, is kind of the old guy using intuition versus becoming really a data-driven organization. Are you seeing that classic conflict, or do people get it pretty quickly when you can provide the data to show them things that they could never really see before? >> I was going to say, one of the biggest challenges that's also dictating the market timing is the fact that average American farmer is about 65, so we now are having this turn as the kids are coming back who are tech-enabled back to the production point, back to the farm and starting to take over farms from their parents. And their parents, of course, have just been maybe a little slower to adopt new technology. So it's just a timing issue. I think the other thing is, there are all the different pieces, whether it's the sensors or whether it's the connectivity of data or whether it's the storage of data, there needs to be a solution and they need to be integrated. And so we see this on the farm, getting that data off and then getting it stored and then how to use it. But then you also see this in restaurants. In restaurants, you have all of the delivery services coming in, so a restaurant can have seven different delivery services picking up from the restaurant. And they have seven different iPads that they have to manage with their point of sales system and very few of them currently will integrate with a POS, right? >> Right. And I think whether it's in a restaurant or on a farm, this lack of integration, API integration, making it a usable solution as opposed to a number of features, is where we're probably going to see a lot more tech innovation. I think unfortunately what you're probably also going to see is a lot of consolidation because you've had venture capital-backed companies with solutions for food and agriculture that have their own proprietary solution, their own OS. And we know that, from other tech sectors, that's not a long-term viable strategy. Ultimately, the data will be free, it will open up, it will interconnect, and we just need to happen in food and in agriculture. >> And are they getting that? Because the classic farmer dilemma that you learn in economics 101 is they have a great crop, crap prices go in the toilet. They have a crappy crop, price is up but they don't have enough quantity to share and gaming the system, and who's going to plant what? Do they start to see the value of sharing some level of data aggregation for the benefit of all? >> I think there's a misperception out there that farmers won't share their data. The reality is they're willing to share their data, if it's providing some value to them. A lot of people want to charge these farmers for their data without any demonstrable benefit to using that data. And I think where you can find a solution, I think the farmers are, speaking generally here, I think the other thing is, farmers know, if you're not paying for the data, you probably are the product, right? And they're smart enough to figure that out, so they don't want people misusing their data for reasons that aren't clear to them. And they've had bad experiences with that in the past. >> It's not any different than any other sector. I mean, go back seven years ago when people said, "Well, we're going to mix your data up with somebody else's data, but it's not a problem, right? Zeros and ones, it's bits." And they were both like, "Nooo," and they got over it, right? >> Right, but the other thing I'll say is I think that the challenges are changing and this is not just standard commodity ups and downs, particularly if you look at here in California, the specialty crops. We have lost access to what has been a cheap labor pool historically and we need to automate. So now we need to go where northern Europe has already gone, in terms of automating production for specialty crops and then things like climate change are causing different crops to grow in different seasons and we need to be able to predict that, we need to take more of it indoors as a nice complement to outdoor growing. So there's a lot of different things that farmers are dealing with now that they really haven't had to deal with in the future. And I think the same is true on the restaurant side. >> Yeah, and the predictability of understanding what your needs are going to be is going to be so important here, particularly because we need to see more automation, both on the farm and production and the restaurants. I know a lot of people talk about being concerned about losing their jobs to automation or robotics, but the reality is, the National Restaurant Association says in the next 10 years, we have a shortage of 200,000 line cooks. >> Jeff: Just line cooks? >> Just line cooks, right. So when you see someone like Chowbotics who's here showing the automated customized salad maker, there's clearly a need in the market place for these kind of approaches. >> The other thing too is you touch on such big, global societal issues. Obviously we're in California here, water. We had a really wet winter, but you know, I'm looking for the water track, I mean that's got to be a huge piece of this whole thing. You have the environmental concern, again, in California, there's always the fight between the farmers that want the water in the rivers and the environmentalists who want to keep the salmon swimming upstream. These are not simple problems that have an obvious solution, and as I think somebody said in they keynote, there's no free trade-off. You've got to make decisions based on values and they're not simple problems. So you guys are right in the middle of a lot of big society changes. >> Yeah, and I think that's one of the things. This is not just a US or a California thing. Globally, things are changing. And whether it is China having more disposable income available to eat more meat and what the ramifications of that are versus other societies with more environmental challenges moving front and center to them, the labor challenge. There's a lot of different things that are happening globally and we don't really have that connectivity layer globally to share this innovation to find the right solutions and get them addressing these market challenges. >> Right. >> Yeah, I would say the thing is, it is complex, so they're going to be talking about tomato growth later on today, and the example somebody was giving is we went to precision watering instead of spray, well, when you go to drip irrigation, you actually have to pressurize an entire system so you actually use more energy. So we use less water but we burn more coal, more oil, whatever it may be, to pressurize the system. And then if it produces a product that has more water content, you spend more energy drying it on the backend. So there's trade-offs. I would say the other thing that we found is really interesting is people ask us if we're social impact investors and we aren't but we have a social impact consideration about what we do, but pretty much everything that you see in this space right now from an innovative side is moving the ball forward, either it's better nutrition, it's less input, it's less chemicals, less water. So this innovation in food and ag. is just by its nature having a very positive impact. >> Right, two years ago, we called food IT macro to micro, and fundamentally what we believe at The Mixing Bowl is, as Michael said, at Better Food Ventures, we don't consider ourselves social impact investors, first and foremost, we want to keep financial grounding. However, I think at a core level, we all believe that harnessing IT to go address these societal challenges in food and agriculture is the biggest thing that we can make. So the reality is we're not going to be able to do much more with the chemical era, we've maximized the yield that we can get there. So now we are going to be looking at IT and how can we actually apply IT to these different challenges and I'm going to cough now. (Jeff laughs) (Rob coughs) >> Well, even something, people think IT and they think highly technical and they think of Cloud, they think of data connections, well look at food waste. The bulk of food waste that happens in our society happens at the home to the restaurant. So even if it's an iPhone app that's teaching our children how to deal with food waste in their home, it's a technical approach, it's hugely impactful. And it's those kind of touch points that will make a difference. >> Right, right. Well, Rob, Michael, thanks for inviting us, it's really fun to come to more of an application-centered show than an infrastructure show and see how the impact of Cloud and big data and sensors and IOT and drones and all of these things are having material impact on us day by day. So congratulations on the event and we'll let you go back to the keynote stage, they're waiting for you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE. We are at the Food IT show in Mountain View, California. We'll be right back with the next guest after this short break. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering Enterprise Connect 2019. Brought to you by Five9. >> Hello from Orlando, Florida. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. theCUBE has been here at Enterprise Connect 2019 in the booth of our gracious host, Five9, for the last three days. Stu, this event is our first time being live here on theCUBE. Your first time here, mine as well individually. Massive event that has transformed a lot. 6,500 attendees, their biggest ever. Well, 140 vendors in this expo hall. What an incredible week. We've had the opportunity to talk to so many people. Can't even keep track. But this enterprise communication and collaboration space is really, really, really hot. >> Yeah, Lisa. I'd definitely learned a lot and had a good time. And, really, it's always a pleasure to be hosting with you. I feel I am better educated as a consumer, now after having gone through this, and I wish as a consumer, I actually knew before I was making some choices on some of the brands, whether or not they had some of the technologies behind us that we heard about here, because we've all had some challenging interactions with whether it be chats, websites, emails, or trying to call in and hopefully getting to that live person. I've looked into my career, and the ebb and flow of changes that had happened from the call center to the contact center. I've also had some empathy. I had started out on the call center; my first job out of college. But you know there should be no excuse for a company not to be able to have a good customer experience, if they're leveraging the technologies and the solutions that are available today, especially a lot of those powered by the cloud. >> Absolutely, it's table stakes, I agree with you. I definitely feel reset as a consumer. My perspectives, and even understanding the fact that like Five9 here, they've been talking about the intelligent contact center. They have five billion recorded customer conversations a year. And I've never thought, when I'm calling in, when you hear this is going to be recorded, we just expect that. But how a company, like Five9, can enable them to actually, start to leverage the power of AI and cloud to harness that dark data so that, to your point, the customer experience is ideal. Because, as consumers, we have so much choice. >> Yeah, so we've been talking for a number of years on theCUBE about the companies need to be data-driven. And still, it's early days here in the enterprise communication space. There is a proliferation of everything from the end devices. We just interviewed the CEO of Poly, long history: Plantronics, Polycom. I've got long history, understand a lot of those technologies that they have. Huddle rooms and white boards and tetanization. They're all of these devices. And then the software and the cloud and all those pieces. We use CRM in our business and boy, there's things that I would love to be able to tap in, even for a small company. And I've talked to lots of companies as to how they can use these technologies. And it was really intriguing. And we had a great user discussion today with Carfax. Really enjoyed that. Always good to hear as to what they're doing and the blurring of the lines sometimes between unified computing and the contact center, and where putting that information into their agents' hands, or into the salespeople hands, or we've talked to people on the marketing side, and the marketing cloud to put it into the marketing hands. So, data, we know, is a huge differentiator. And I know an area that you were loving is CX was at the center of everything, and the role of the agent and the customer is something we need to think about. What were your takeaways about that, Lisa? >> About that, great question. Initially, everything that I was reading about this event and the industry was all about everyone is talking about customer experience, CX. And when we had Blair Pleasant on with Michael Rose on Monday, I think it was the customer satisfaction or service index that they did, showed that companies are actually rating employees' satisfaction lower than customers' satisfaction. And I thought, "but if I'm an employee and I'm an agent, "and I'm on the phone or I'm in a chat or whatever channel "dealing with what might be a disgruntled customer, "who probably has a really easy alternative to turn to. "My experience needs to be good. "I need to have the information, "the right content at the right time, "and be empowered to make a decision." So some of the conversations that we had started to show that really, AX, agent experience, and CX are blended together. They have to be because to me, they're mutually exclusive and if that agent doesn't have the information that they need, has to ask a consumer the same question that you've just repeated, the likelihood that consumer will churn is very high. So the agent is one of those ones, I think, at the front lines, that I honestly never really thought about it from that perspective how critical they are to the business. >> Yeah, and when you dig in to say, okay, what is the life of an agent, first of all, if I can give them a simpler interface. And that's something in both the unified communication and the contact center if I can do that and then, where is there automation or the AI to help me do my job to be able to critique myself and go in there, rather than having a manager yelling at you? There's some powerful stories we've heard about that, as to, I can better myself and I'll probably be more engaged and that should translate also into a better customer experience. So we're not getting, love the example someone gave, It's like, "do you ever called there and they're like "my system's a little slow today" or "I can't get into this." It's like, we don't want, as consumers, we never want to hear that. And that's not a good experience. What we heard is there really should be no excuse in today's day and age, that shouldn't be the issue. >> Absolutely. So we've talked about the agent experience, customer experience Some of the other users that we've talked about on the program are, for example, Microsoft team has this really cool demo. We had Jace Morano on the show on Monday. showing this incredible power of internal teams collaboration and communication and how connected companies can be across geographies, cultures, generations. So that internal collaboration is another big piece of the show that the power of cloud, the power of AI, that companies are starting to harness is transformative for a business on every level. >> Yeah, it's really. I've been to when I go to a Microsoft show or a Google show or an Amazon show, oh, look at the real time, things that are happening, global translation, being able to see sentiment by AI of like what the faces. Certain shows you go to you can go up and they're like, happy, sad, confused, things like that. So, Microsoft gave a great demo. Let's see how long it takes for that really to diffuse out and be usable for businesses. We know the power of video. It's core at the center of what we do with CUBE. We understand when it can transcribe and translate that's really powerful things that we're keeping an eye on. And the cloud is definitely driving a lot of innovation. And that's something that we've heard over and over again, is that this show, now in it's 29th year, and it's like, third life with a third different name. Cloud has really infused a lot of energy, many new companies here, and, therefore, there's a nice robust ecosystem with some blurring of the lines and some competition, but for the most part, if it's in the cloud, a lot of times, those integrations are happening behind the scenes and I, as a customer, don't need to put it together where it's baling wire and duct tape and zip ties which kind of felt like we had to do things in the old day. And it was very fragile. It should be much better. We heard lots of them as to how Seram, especially like sales force integrates and from Microsoft and many the other players here, they're saying there's is good commitment. There's good working agreement with many of the companies. And absolutely from our hosts here at Five9. We heard from a lot of their partners, from the device and the software players, as to how they all tie together seamlessly to make sure that their users has a good experience which leads to agent and customer experience ultimately. >> Absolutely, the partnership and the collaboration in this space was very palpable and it was great to have so much access to Five9's partners. I think a couple of tag lines I'll takeaway from this, as a marketer, is that Zoom, we had Harry Moseley, the CIO of Zoom on this morning. And his fireside chat this morning and with us, earlier today he said, "video's the new voice." We've also heard, "voice is sexy again." We've also heard, "it's humans being augmented by machines. "It's relationship based." So a lot of really interesting themes that all come together that I hope sort of dispel some of the concerns that either individuals, or some business users, have about AI taking over. It's this combination of differently tools, but the human component, the empathy, is still absolutely critical. >> Yeah, and we'll see AI will first be something's that's internal to these companies. So Five9's announced this week, it's the Five9, I believe, Genius is the tool in there. It helping make their agents help them ramp up much faster, get the data they need, and it's AI that's going to actually help them infuse them so that they can react faster and they're super agents, give them superpowers. We heard from a number of people that external facing AI, we're still a little bit early. And we'll try to see where some of the early leading use cases will be for that in the future. >> Well, Stu, it's been a great three days co-hosting theCUBE with you at Enterprise Connect '19. I cannot believe how much we've learned and how we both sort of changed our perspective as consumers. Let's see how long that lasts. >> Yeah, absolutely, Lisa. So many of the things that we've been hearing for years about cloud and AI definitely translate here and we love really documenting some of those industry transformations and pleasure as always to work with you on theCUBE. >> Likewise. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Food IT, Fork to Farm. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin, with Jeff Frick, and we have just spent a really interesting educational day at the Fork to Farm event, Food IT. Jeff we've spoken with investors, ag-tech experts, folks in academia who are training the next generation of farmers, to Campbell Soup, who's been around since the late 1800s, are really focused on helping the agriculture and food industry combat the challenges of environmental sustainability, of climate change, of labor shortages, it's been a really, really intriguing day, where tech meets food and agriculture. >> Yeah and just a huge opportunity. One of the themes that kept coming up over and over again, is the average age of the farmers today. Heard 70 something, 60 something, whatever, they're getting old, so there's going to be a huge turnover in this industry, so both a challenge as well as an opportunity for the next generation of ag-people to make some of these changes, and change the way the industry works. The other thing that's really interesting that I found Lisa, is that there's really big social issues that are at play here. We talked about water, we talked about labor, that play into this whole thing, sustainability. And again, tying it back to their theme of its fork to farm, how much of that's now driven by the consumer and the industry, it's kind of a reaction to the consumer, which we see over and over and over in all the other shows that we go. The consumerization IT, driven by younger people's interactions with their phones, is setting an expectation of the way they want everything to work. And so, it sounds like the food industry is really at the cutting edge of this, still really early on, but as we saw in some of those market maps, and the innovation is rich, feels like we're really at the start of this thing. So even though this show has been around for a few years, they have the big show in Salinas next week, the Forbes show, that's still really early days of leveraging tech, innovation, to change the food industry. >> It is, and you brought up that the labor shortages, and that was echoed quite a bit today, for a number of reasons. One, the aging population of farmers as you mentioned. Two, also in California, the minimum wage going up, and that's not only going to be a problem Jeff for farmers, but it's actually now pervading into the retail space, where they're going to have to start depending on robotics to be able to create, or to reduce their cost, to provide even fast food. That was something that was quite interesting to me, I hadn't really quite thought about, from that channel perspective. >> Right, right. >> And then as you mentioned, on the tech enabled consumer side, I was talking with Jeff earlier, I kept thinking farm to fork, 'cause farm to table is so trendy now, right? There's a lot of apps. And you gave me this a-ha grasshopper look, and it was really because as consumers we've really demanded so much. We want transparency, we want to know exactly what's in things, and we want organic, and hormone-free, and we also want things delivered whenever, and wherever we want them. We think of the distribution model, has really become very decentralized, and a lot of that being driven by the consumer. On the farm side too, regarding the attrition, there's also a lot of antiquated, especially in the post-harvest supply chain, things that are still written down on paper, traceability is a huge challenge for them. And I think from some of the things we heard today, a lot of the farming, especially in California, they can't really quite see all the data that they have, but they are sitting on a lot of information, that not only could make their farms more efficient, but could also facilitate you think, even knowledge transfer to the next generation of farmers. Right, right. Yeah a lot of talk about kind of there wasn't a lot of data, now it's a data flood. So how do you use those data sources to be more intelligent in what you do? And I specifically asked some of the guests, you know, are kind of the classic big data players participating in this space, and she said, "Not really." They're all kind of holding off on the side waiting to get in. But these are big numbers, this is a big impact. The professor from St. Louis Episcopal talked about a billion dollars worth of strawberries that you got to get off the field, and if you don't have the labor to get it off, and the data to get the labor and to time it right, it's a billion dollars worth of strawberries, and these are big numbers. And the other thing that just fascinated me, is again, this power of the consumer. The Google guy who took basically what was a service just to feed employees and keep them around so they write more code, but using that as a platform to drive much more thoughtfulness and intelligence. And supply chain changes around food, and even called it food shot in reference to the moon shot. >> The moon shot, yes. >> Enabled better diets, shift diets, food transparency, reduced loss and waste, accelerate transformation to a circular food economy. So, and they said, I think he's been at it for 15 years or thereabout. So really an interesting kind of a twist, on what you would not expect from the food service people, you think of them just supplying food. >> Exactly. >> Not trying to drive cultural change. >> Exactly, and trying to scale, but they're using data from their own googlers, to help determine and evaluate what people are doing, what they want, preferences, making it more personal, and using data in that way to also then facilitate some of the upstream, you know from the supply perspective, making things, meeting those challenges that the consumers are demanding, but you said he's been at Google for five years, and when he first got the call being in hospitality for so long, he just thought, "Google, what do they want to talk to me for?" And how revolutionary they've been, and you can think of how much education can happen from Google Food alone. I was quite blown away by that. >> Yeah, the other kind of theme is unused resources. So, one of the food trucks that they had seaweed. Why seaweed? Because it takes no fresh water, it takes no fertilizer, and it's carbon negative. So not really about how does it taste, but some specific reasons to try to make seaweed a better food, a more satisfying food. Talked about kale, and really again what a great example of a, can't say it, Fork to Farm tradition, 'cause before kale was a throwaway, nobody grew kale, now suddenly everybody wants kale smoothies, and so there's nothing, plant became something of importance, driven by the consumer, not necessarily by the producers. So, very dynamic times. I think again, the trend we see over and over and over, finding the hollowing out of the middle. You know, you don't want to be just a generic provider in the middle, you better have massive scale, or you better be a real specialty provider. And then finally the ramifications of the Amazon purchase of Whole Foods, really validating, yes you want digital, yes you want data, yes you want to provide better customer service. But at the same time, you still need a physical presence, kind of validating the physical presence of the store like Whole Foods. So really a very dynamic activity going on in this space. >> And it'll be interesting to see what happens over the next five to 10 years, as farming generationally changes hands. And there is technology that's available today, right? We talked about big data, there's many, many sources of public data, whether it's satellite imagery, water data that can be utilized and then paired with private data that a farm has. Or using GPS devices on tractors and combines, robotics. You talked to the inventor of the Sally Salad machine, there's a lot of technology that might be, I don't know if I'd say ahead of its time, but I think from a farming perspective, there's a little bit of a gap there right now. So it'll be very interesting to see how farms evolve from a technology perspective. I love how the Forbes AgTech Summit, I think it's tomorrow and Thursday in Salinas Valley, what a great juxtaposition of Silicon Valley and a world hub of technology innovation, to Salinas, which is the salad bowl of the world. I think that is quite interesting, and some of the dynamics that they've seen, I think this was their fourth event tomorrow. >> Jeff: Fourth event, right, right. >> Really starting to get more farmers interested in understanding the potential that ag-tech can have on profitability, efficiencies, reducing waste, even things like discovering and preventing foodborne pathogens. >> Right, and robots, we need robots, we don't have enough labor. Michael Rose said there's going to be a shortage of hundreds of thousands of line cooks. Just regular, ordinary line cooks at restaurants, and that's really kind of one of the applications of the salad machine, because as you hit the button below that cook, you can hit the button to load that salad, while you run off and pull the rest of the entree meals together. So, again, it's really fun to see the consistent themes that we see over and over, that's computing cloud and data-driven decision making, applied to what's arguably one of the most important things going on, which is feeding us a lot of conversation about the world's population getting to 10 billion in the not too distant future, that have to be fed. And again, with the aging of the population, the traditional farmers, a real opportunity to do kind of a refresh with a bunch of people that have grown up with these things. So, really cool show, a great day, hope you had fun, I had fun. >> Oh, I had a great time, it was really educational. I think that you hit the nail on the head, there's a tremendous amount of opportunity. I think what the Mixing Bowl is doing, along with Better Foods, is really bringing the people that are creating food, and producing it together, and connecting them with the people that are creating technology. So, I think this is the tip of the iceberg head of lettuce, maybe? So, I am excited to see what happens over time, but not only was it a great event, but I'm now very hungry. >> Now you're very hungry, there's more food trucks outside. Alright Lisa, well thank you again for hosting. >> Thank you. >> Again, another great show. I think last time we were together was at the NAB. >> NAB. >> Talking about media entertainment, so the digitization, transformation continues, driven by all these huge macro-factors of cloud, big data, so the beat rolls on. >> It does. >> Alright, she's Lisa Martin, and I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCube. Thanks for watching, we've got a busy spring coming to an end. Had a little bit of a lull in the summer then we'll hit it hard again in the fall, so thanks for watching siliconangle.tv, youtube.com/siliconangle, and siliconangle.com for complete coverage of a lot of stories beyond just theCUBE. I'm Jeff Frick, signing off with Lisa Martin from Food IT, from Fork to Food, thanks for watching.

(Exciting Techno Music) >> Live from the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE covering food IT: Fork to Farm. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE. We are live at the fourth annual food IT Fork to Farm Event. I am Lisa Martin with my Co-Host Jeff Frick. Jeff, this is a really interesting event. The first time we've been here with The Cube, and one of the first things I said to you this morning was "Fork to Farm - we always kind of think of it as "farm to fork, right, farm to table." But it's really interesting mix of investors here, people that are very educated in food and agriculture and one of the things they're focused on is connecting people who are feeding the world, billions and billions of people, with the people who are changing the world through technologies. And nowadays we're all this tech enabled food consumer which has really flipped farm to fork from fork to farm which I found really interesting. >> It's pretty interesting, our first kickoff call with Michael Rose from The Mixing Bowl and we were talking about the Conference. I'm like, "Michael didn't you get that mixed up? "Isn't it supposed to be Farm to Fork?" But as you said it's really now the tech enabled consumer and what they want to eat, like everything else, is being so consumer driven that we see in our other shows is driving now what the food producers have to create. And what's interesting is they don't necessarily think of all the ramifications of those decisions upstream and downstream. And so that's a big topic of the theme here. The other thing that struck me is some of the sponsors: Yamaha is here >> Yes. >> And one of the main sponsors. Google is here as one of the main sponsors. And we just had one of the opening keynotes from one of the guys from Google talking about how they've taken really just the task of feeding the employees to a much greater responsibility in both what people eat, how it gets produced, and really more sustainable longterm food kind of as a circle he called it. So it's pretty interesting, I'm excited. We've got Deans from a lot of big schools, we've got, of course, like I said, Yamaha. I'm really curious to find out what they're doing in this space. And it's fun to get, you know, out of the tech infrastructure space to see what's really happening on the front lines. I really want to get into edge computing, I really want to get into cloud, data, you know, all of the themes that we follow over and over and over again, but now a real specific application. And doing some of the research, you know, we have to feed 10 billion people in just a couple years and we're not growing any more land. So how are those challenges being addressed with technology? How are cloud, mobile, data helping solve those problems? And then how are the consumer driven prioritization impacting all of this? So it should be a great day. >> Absolutely, like you said, a great spectrum of guests on the show today. And we think of food and agriculture as one of the largest industries globally and as you said, there's a daunting responsibility feeding billions of people in a very short period of time. Having to deal with environmental sustainability, we're going to be talking about that on the program today, climate change, and also the consumer. But there's tremendous potential for big data and IOT and analytics to improve farming efficiencies from planting to weeding to fertilizing to the post-harvest supply chain logistics, traceability. There's, you know, opportunities for GPS sensors on tractors and columbines, as well as robotics and automation. We're going to be talking to a guy, the CEO Chell Botics, who invented Sally, a robot that makes salads. So there's a tremendous amount of opportunity and I'm really curious to see how these, from the University Folks, the Deans, to the investors, how Venture Capital is really seeing big data as revolutionary, the potential to be revolutionary, for the entire food supply, the food chain. >> Right, right. And another topic that's come up is really transparency and enabling consumers to see kind of where their food comes from, how it was raised, but as come up again in one of the earlier Keynotes, there's no perfect solution, right? There's always trade offs. So how are people creating values, making trade offs based on those values, and how are the food producers now being able to deliver to those values? So it should be, like I said, a fantastic day. We're going to go wall to wall. We'll be here till 5 o'clock today, full slate of guests, a lot of two guests, so we're going to pack them in. And it should be fantastic. >> Absolutely, I'm excited. >> Alright. >> A lot of great topics. >> So she's Lisa Martin, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from Food IT: from Fork to Farm. We'll be right back with our first guest after this short break. Thanks for watching.