Alex Heublein Podcast Transcript

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Alex Heublein Podcast Transcript

Alex Heublein joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.

 Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.

Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Alex Heublein. Alex Heublein is the president of the US division of Netsurit, where he leads efforts to help small and medium sized businesses navigate the complexities of digital transformation. With over three decades of experience in IT and business strategy, Alex is passionate about demystifying technology for SMBs and providing actionable insights to drive efficiency and innovation.

At Netsurit, Alex works closely with business leaders to develop tailored strategies that not only enhance operational efficiency, but also build resilience and adaptability in an ever evolving digital landscape.

Well, good afternoon, Alex. Welcome to the show.

Alex Heublein: Hey, Brian. Good to be on the show. Thanks for having me.

Brian Thomas: Absolutely. Love doing this. Getting up and doing these every single day is so much fun and get to meet some amazing people like yourself and hear your story. So Alex, if you don’t mind, I’m going to jump right into the first question here.

Your recent appointment as president of culture and innovation at Netsurit marks a significant milestone. Could you share your vision for fostering innovation within the company and how you plan to influence its culture?

Alex Heublein: Absolutely, Brian. It’s, it’s, you know, at Netsurit, you know, we’re a global managed services, cybersecurity and digital transformation company.

And what’s interesting about our organization is we have a huge, huge emphasis on culture. For instance, we have a, a dreams program where everybody in the company puts together at the beginning of the year, and we all put together a dream book, and these are sort of our aspirations for the year. And they’re not just company aspirations, their personal aspirations.

How do we want to grow as individuals? How do we want to grow within our lives? And whether that’s personal, whether that’s, uh, from a company or career perspective. And we share those with one another. So that’s one of the really interesting things about it. It’s not just kind of putting together your aspirations for the year, but we share those aspirations with one another.

We have regular meetings to talk about our dreams. We have groups that we’ve set up, dream groups, where we talk about our aspirations. And I think that’s an interesting cultural element because I’m a firm believer that innovation is a function of culture within organizations. A lot of people come to me and I’ve done quite a bit of innovation consulting with organizations in the past and, and you always get this sort of.

Of this standard refrain, Hey, we know we need to be more innovative as a company. How do we do that? And what I tell people is the first place you start, if you want to become a more innovative company, the first place you start is your culture. You have to create a culture of innovation. And a culture of innovation can mean different things to different people.

But I think the most important aspect of creating a culture of innovation. Is making sure that everybody in the company is involved in that process, because innovation and great ideas and new ways of thinking, Brian, they can come from anyone within your company. A lot of people think, well, we’ll form an innovation committee and we’ll, we’ll have the innovation committee.

Focus on innovation, and they leave out everybody else, right? They think it’s going to be a corporate function, or they think it’s going to be something that is a discrete element within their business. And what I tell them is that’s not a bad idea. I’m not saying don’t do that. But at the same time, if it’s sort of a top down approach to innovation, you’re missing something.

In fact, you’re, you’re probably missing most of the great ideas and most of the innovations that you could potentially have within your business and within the marketplace. So the first place that I start is make sure that you create a culture of innovation. Make sure that you do things like reward people, even if some new idea doesn’t work out.

Encourage people to bring their ideas to the table. So I’m very much a believer in this concept of a meritocracy of ideas. And that’s a big 5 term for making sure that the best ideas, regardless of where they come from, I don’t care if they come from the CEO or some summer intern that you’ve hired. That the best ideas bubble to the top and creating a culture and a set of processes that ensures that happens, not just the person who talks the loudest in the meetings, not just the person who’s the best at sort of expressing their opinions about these ideas, but you’ve got to create a culture and you’ve got to create an environment.

That rewards people for bringing those ideas to the table and making sure that you as a leadership team, make sure that the best ideas, they bubble to the top. So that’s a big part of it. Brian

Brian Thomas: appreciate that. I really do. I liked how you highlighted and it’s in your title, the culture, right? Focus on the people aspect of it.

I think it’s really important, but building the culture of innovation. Is amazing. And I like how it’s all inclusive, right? Everybody’s got a great idea and we need to bring those out from people. So I appreciate you highlighting that. That’s really exciting. I really love that culture. Alex Netsurit innovate is described as a subscription based service that democratizes AI for small and medium sized businesses.

Can you elaborate on how the service empowers smaller businesses to leverage AI and automation effectively?

Alex Heublein: Yeah, absolutely. Right. And this is the thing that I’m probably the most excited about because it’s one thing to create a culture of innovation within your own organization. But then how do you help your customers become more innovative?

So the founders of our company and some of the leaders within the company sat down and said, you know, we really need to take this concept out into our customer base. And make some of the things that we do internally available externally to our customers as well. So the idea behind innovate, and I’ll kind of give you a little background on this.

The idea behind the innovate is that we want to be able to come into small and medium businesses and bring them capabilities, bring them innovation capabilities that candidly, we and everybody else in the world have struggled to deliver cost effectively for the small and medium business market. But what we’ve seen over the last couple of years is the ability to take these capabilities into the SMB space, which has traditionally been underserved in this world.

In fact, I saw some statistics the other day. I think they were from McKinsey or one of one of those firms that said. That if you look at large businesses in the U. S. sort of enterprise businesses and you compare their productivity with small and medium businesses, the productivity of large enterprises on a per employee basis is roughly double what you get in the S and B space.

And I got to tell you, I was shocked to see those numbers to X productivity that you’re getting from enterprise. And part of that is because larger enterprises have the wherewithal to go out and invest in innovation. They have the wherewithal to invest in new and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotic process automation, et cetera.

And they’re working very hard and they’re investing a ton of money and making that happen. So our goal with innovate is to come in and really deliver to our customers innovation as a service. So what we typically do is we come in, we work very closely with our customers and we identify two or three initial use cases where we feel like we can come in.

Have a big impact on the business, and we start with those. And then what we do is we create a continuous stream of ideas. So we have an ideation platform that we use. It’s from a company called Bright Idea. And the really neat thing about it is we go, we go identify these use cases. We go work with our customers to implement those use cases.

And a lot of them are AI based because there’s so many new capabilities we can bring to the table with artificial intelligence, with generative AI. Building them into these applications to automate business processes, to make their people more efficient and more productive, but also give them potentially new capabilities that they can then take to the market and better service their customers.

So we put this ideation platform in place. Our customers can use that. We bundle it into the subscription based service. And then we can pull those ideas from everyone within their organization. So that really supports this notion of the meritocracy of ideas. Anyone can submit an idea through this platform.

People can comment on them, they can vote on them. And then that basically becomes the ongoing pipeline for the innovations that we can help our customers bring to the table. So we sit down with them on a periodic basis. Once a quarter or so go through those ideas as we’re building out the first few and then we work with their leadership team to prioritize the ideas and then slot those in for development as we go throughout the course of the year.

So it’s an ongoing process, and I think innovation is one of those things that has to be ongoing, right? I’ve had people come to me and say, Wow, we’ve done a really good job of innovation here. We’re done. And I’m like, no, you’re not done. Innovation is a continuum. It’s not just some discrete elements like this one project is going to make us a more innovative organization. It’s about building that continuous muscle to go out and bring the best ideas to the table. Get those ideas implemented quickly and cost effectively and then continuing that process as we go. So we’re super excited about this service. This is something that we’ve seen a tremendous amount of traction over the last year, particularly as we’ve started to infuse these projects and these these engagements.

I shouldn’t even call them projects. These use cases that we’re developing for our customers, being able to infuse them with generative AI capabilities has vastly expanded our ability to go tackle tough business problems for our customers, but it’s also reduced the cost to a point where we’ve made it very, very affordable for the SMB market.

Brian Thomas: Thanks, Alex. I appreciate that. You know, you’re really equipping these small and medium sized businesses so they can compete with the big corporations out there. You know, you talked about that early on, but I totally wholeheartedly agree with you. I like your process. I like how you leverage a smart tool that allows everybody to be engaged and share their ideas.

And of course, keep building that muscle. It’s continuous improvement. It’s just not a one time deal. So, appreciate that. Alex, cybersecurity is a critical concern for businesses of all sizes. How does Netsurit tailor cybersecurity solutions to meet the specific needs of these SMBs and what practices would you advise these businesses to implement?

Alex Heublein: Yeah, that is a that is a great topic, Brian, because here’s what we’re seeing out of the marketplace, and this is being driven by a number of factors. So, if you were to go rewind 5 or 10 years, I mean, cybersecurity has been a big topic for several years now. I think a lot of people have finally realized.

Wow. This is a real threat to our business. And if you look in the past, you know, the hackers out there that go after these companies, they tended to focus on the larger companies where they tended to focus on high net worth individuals. And part of the reason for that is, and I hesitate to even, even say this when I’m talking about criminals.

But a lot of the, the organizations that are, that are trying to, to go after these companies, it’s not some kids sitting in their parents basement. This is organized crime. These people are actually very, very smart. And they look at this as a business, obviously a very illicit and illegal business, but they view this as business.

So they’re looking at this saying, we’re going to try to maximize the return that we’re getting for our efforts. And if that risk reward and that the reward that I’m going to get is commensurate with the amount of time and effort I’m having to go spend on that, then it makes sense. Just like any business, the challenge we’ve seen over the last, let’s call it 18 to 24 months, is that these cyber criminals are moving down market very, very rapidly.

And part of that, not all of it, but part of it is being fueled by artificial intelligence. So now instead of having humans go try to hack these organizations and put in ransomware, where they’ve encrypted all of your data and you’re having to pay a ransom, that was harder to do two or three years ago.

But now that now that they’ve used these new and emerging technologies to automate a lot of these processes, they can go after many, many times more organizations, including businesses in that small and medium business space. And a lot of SMB owners. They know cyber security is important, but I don’t think that they understand the impact that it can have to their business.

In some cases, it can be an existential threat to their businesses, and I don’t think they’re aware of how quickly the cyber criminals are moving down market. So we’ve put a really, really big emphasis. We’ve always included security. In our managed services offerings, but we’ve seen this rise of much more sophisticated, much more advanced attacks on the S and B market.

So we go into our customers now, and we tailor our cyber security services. We have multiple levels of cyber security that a customer can choose to implement. You know, we’ve got kind of the. The essentials that really almost absolutely have to be done these days. We have sort of a middle tier offering, and then we have a very advanced sort of premier cybersecurity offering.

So we work very closely with our customers to a make sure they’re aware of the threat and how pervasive the threat is because it’s not a matter of if. They’re going to get hacked. It’s just a matter of when, if they don’t take this very seriously. So we’ve been working very closely with our customers to deliver very cost effective cybersecurity solutions to them and really work with them very closely to make sure they understand the potential impacts of the cyber criminals.

If they don’t really take this seriously. And so the good news is, is that our customer base and the prospects that we work with on a day to day basis, the general sense, Brian, is that people are starting to get it, but it’s, it’s amazing. You don’t really understand how impactful something like this can be until it happens.

It’s to you. And that’s the unfortunate part. You know, it’s, it’s, we, a lot of people look at it and say, wow, that might happen. It’s maybe a risk to my business, but they really don’t fully appreciate how disruptive and how threatening it can be to their business until it happens. So we spend a lot of time working with our customers to make sure they understand the threat.

They understand the potential impacts and they understand the offerings that we have to help them prevent and mitigate the effects of those hacking attempts. But it’s a big topic right now. I’ll tell you, it’s something that has just skyrocketed over the last couple of years. And, uh, we’re bringing some very, very sophisticated technologies to the table to help our customers combat those threats.

Brian Thomas: Thank you. I really like how you laid it out there for our audience here. The cybersecurity criminals treat this as a business and if you don’t play as hard as they do, as you mentioned, it’s just a matter of when. So I really do appreciate that. That’s important. Alex, last question of the day. If you could briefly share, if you’re looking ahead, what emerging technologies do you believe will have the most significant impact on SMBs and how should these businesses prepare to integrate such technologies into their operations?

Alex Heublein: Yeah, another great question, Brian. And I think there’s two. We, you know, we kind of talked about cybersecurity and I think that’s one of them and that’s not so much an emerging technology space. It’s a fairly well known space. I think what’s emerging in that space is just the pervasiveness of it. So taking that seriously, making sure that whoever your providers are, that you’ve got a very strong cybersecurity posture in place.

Absolutely critical going forward. So I’d say that’s the first one. The second one that we’re very bullish on right now is artificial intelligence. In fact, I go into a lot of customer prospect meetings and I ask them, what’s your AI strategy? And I’ll tell you, Brian, the vast, vast, vast majority of small and medium businesses out there have absolutely no AI strategy going forward.

And again, I think it’s one of those situations where it’s a huge opportunity For them, but it’s also a potential threat. And I tell people this all the time, if you don’t have an AI strategy, you need to put one into place. And if you don’t want to put one into place soon, there’s at least a reasonable chance within a lot of industries that you won’t have a business five years from now, if you’re not really looking at this technology and leveraging it because your competitors will.

Some of your competitors will figure this out. So what we’re seeing in the A. I. space is leveraging the generative A. I. capabilities from open A. I., from Microsoft, from Anthropic, etc. Using those technologies to improve the productivity, the efficiency of the people within the organization, both at an individual level, so we, we’re very strong proponents of technologies like Microsoft Copilot to improve personal productivity.

But also at a company level, at an organizational level, how do I take business processes that my people are just going through very repetitive, rare, very redundant tasks? How do we automate those? But a lot of those things require a human or a traditionally required a level of intelligence that was very, very difficult to build into an application.

So with the rise of generative AI. If you do it right, and it’s not just about, well, we’re just going to go use chat GPT and ask it a bunch of questions and upload some documents to it. There’s certainly productivity gains to be had there, but when you take this and you formalize it and you put it into very explicit workflows and you know how to make these large language models and the generative AI capabilities work for you, the gains that you can, you can achieve are stunning.

They’re absolutely stunning. And not only that, but using these technologies. To help you as an organization better service your customers. That’s a huge emphasis for us going forward. So we encourage every one of our customers, every prospect we talk to, let us come in. Let’s do a workshop with you. Let’s get a preliminary strategy in place and then let’s start moving forward.

Forward with some of those quick wins that you can get from some of these new and emerging technologies. So we’re very excited about it. And again, this, this allows us to kind of bring these technologies into the SMB space. And most small and medium businesses, they can’t afford to go hire an AI expert.

Those people are really hard to find. They’re hard for us to find. if you’re a 30 or 40 or 50 person company, it’s, it’s very difficult for you to be able to attract that type. Talent to come in and work with your organization. So we’re working very closely with those organizations to kind of provide that as a service with this innovate service.

So, you know, to summarize there, Brian, focus on cybersecurity, make sure you’ve got a very strong cybersecurity posture and then invest in AI. If it’s not net sure it. Find a provider that can help you work through that strategy and start moving in the direction of leveraging those technologies, because I promise you, if you don’t, your competitors will, and they will, they will have a significant competitive advantage over you in a year’s time.

Brian Thomas: Thank you. And I think those two are important. We did definitely highlighted that a couple of times throughout our conversation today, cybersecurity obviously being at the forefront, but you do need to have a strategy. And I’m glad that Netsurit has the tools and the resources to come help small and medium sized businesses develop that strategy and be more competitive.

So I appreciate that. And Alex, it was certainly a pleasure having you on today. And I look forward to speaking with you real soon.

Alex Heublein: Thank you so much, Brian. It’s a pleasure to be here as well.

Brian Thomas: Bye for now.

Alex Heublein Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.

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