Hosts Eamon McErlean and Joe Devon interview Mike Buckley, Chairman and CEO of Be My Eyes. Be My Eyes is a mobile app that assists people who are blind and visually impaired with identifying objects. They discuss how Be My Eyes was originally launched, the introduction of Be My AI and their partnership with OpenAI, and the importance of accessibility.
00:00 Opening Teaser
00:38 Introduction
00:58 What Is Be My Eyes?
06:56 Be My Eyes + OpenAI (Be My AI)
12:17 Accessibility Testing & Feedback
17:55 What's In The Future?
25:14 How To Get Involved With Be My Eyes
30:20 Strategy For Growth
35:52 What's Your KPI (Key Performance Indicator)?
40:21 Synthesia & Its Impact On Entertainment
43:01 Future Plans For The Data?
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MIKE: For those who can't see, I'm holding up my camera. I'm going to turn it sideways and take a picture of the screen. What happens is this picture is taken, and then the AI then interprets it.
VOX: There are two men on the screen, each in several video boxes. The man in the top video box is wearing a dark blue shirt and headphones, smiling, and has a background of the bookshelf. The man in the bottom video box is wearing a black shirt, also with headphones, and his background includes a dark brown with three framed pictures and a door.
MIKE: That's the description of the three of us on the screen, and it was quite accurate. It got the books in the background for Joe and his headphones. It got the color of our shirts. And that's effectively how this works.
JOE: Welcome to episode one of "Accessibility and Gen AI," a podcast that interviews the newsmakers and thought leaders in the world of accessibility and artificial intelligence. I'm Joe Devon. I'm joined by my co-host, Eamon McErlean. And today we are interviewing Mike Buckley, who is the CEO of Be My Eyes. Can you explain what the product is and who your customer is? Because it's an interesting interplay between different communities that are there for different reasons.
MIKE: Yeah. Thanks, Joe. There's some complexity there, right? Be My Eyes was launched as a free app in 2015 by a Danish furniture craftsman who was losing his eyesight, who was, like, pissed off about having to call his family and friends all the time for assistance. And so he launched an app into the world. And the basic function of the app when it started was someone who's blind or low vision, through one touch of a button, can make a call to a sighted volunteer. And there's a one-way video and a two-way audio. So the person who's blind or low vision can hold up their phone and their camera to say, "Where's the tomato soup? Is this my green sweater? Am I at airport gate C9?" And then the volunteer can confirm that information or give the information that the user needs. And so it's this beautiful merger of technology and human kindness to solve a need. And you fast forward to today. There are 630,000 blind or low-vision using the app. There are 7.3 million volunteers, which I think is the largest volunteer army in the history of the world. And we do over a million calls a year, over a 90% success rate. And it's beautiful. Works in 150 countries and 180 languages, and we're growing, literally, in more than 150 countries right now. And so that was how the app was born. Last year we offered, for free again to the consumer, an AI visual interpretation model that we built on top of OpenAI's GPT4. We were their first partner on the visual interpretation model. And how that works is it just lets the person who's blind or low vision take a photo of anything and get a visual description or an explanation. Like they could take a picture of a menu and get a full reading out of the menu. You can take a picture of an Excel file and ask how to do a formula, and it will tell you how to do the formula. And so it's this beautiful, incredible piece of power that is now in people's hands. And we are currently doing more than 1.3 million AI sessions every month on our app. And so we've seen the growth curves just go through the roof. And so those are the two main products that we offer to the blind or low-vision consumer. But how do we pay the bills? Well, we take what we do and the connectivity of our technology and we sell that into corporates and enterprises. Within our app there's a section called Service Directory where the consumer, through the quick touch of a button, can call Microsoft, for example, and go be connected directly to Microsoft's customer service center, through our app. We hand off that call to Microsoft. There's one difference though. We enable the Microsoft customer service agent to have a pop-up window on their screen that shows the video of what the consumer's problem is. So if you have a problem with your Xbox or your Excel spreadsheet or whatever, you show that customer service agent when you're the blind or low-vision consumer, what your problem is. And it creates this beautiful ability to solve the problem faster. Here's a piece of data. A blind or low-vision consumer who calls into Microsoft's customer service center on audio only. Those calls take 20 minutes. When we add in that video component through Be My Eyes, so when the call comes through Be My Eyes, the length of those calls goes down to between 10 and 11 minutes. Now think about that. The consumer's problem gets solved in half the time. The company is spending less money, right? Solving the problem in terms of the hours it takes to solve the problem, and the consumer satisfaction and the customer service agent satisfaction go up higher. So it's literally this incredible product where there's win-win-win, win for us on revenue, win for the company on costs and customer satisfaction, and win for the consumer, you solved my problem faster. It's a great thing. And what we've now done with Microsoft and we're starting to do with larger brands around the world is we also can place AI at the front end of that customer service experience where the consumer has a choice to say, "Oh, how do I do this Excel spreadsheet?" I take a picture and the AI tells you how to do it. Those AI interactions, when they work, and they're working at about 40% of the time. So 40% of these calls can be solved for right now with AI only, which is remarkable when you think about it, and has crazy cost implications and societal implications, by the way. But we're solving those problems on AI, those calls, in four minutes. So 20 minutes for the audio call, 10, 11 minutes for the video call, 4 minutes to the AI call. You look at this and say, "Wow, there's a real business here, right, because of that win-win-win dynamic." And I know that was long winded answer to your question, Joe, but that's the complexity of what we do is we really are trying to service the blind or low-vision consumer first as our north star, but we are paying the bills by using the technology that we've built to serve that consumer and feeding that technology product to the enterprise to allow them to better serve the consumer in that environment. And so if you work at a company and you want to improve your customer service, and you're not our customer yet, call me, call us. Microsoft, Google, Spotify, LinkedIn, Barilla Pasta, P&G, Lego. These are some of our customers and we're growing them rapidly, but we always want to do more.
EAMON: One of your videos I watched as it relates to one of your consumers utilizing your new AI feature to go shopping for clothes, to show what's on the menu, to walk into the gym. Like the impact that can have from an end user perspective, it's remarkable. It really is remarkable. And that proves that AI, if utilized the right way, can be extremely beneficial for many, many people. But going back to the start, how did that connection kick off with OpenAI?
MIKE: I cold called OpenAI last January.
JOE: Wow.
MIKE: And somehow got through. I don't know if there was a connection of a connection, but I got through. And they not only took the call, but we started talking really quickly about things that we might be able to do together. And they, you know, they basically said, "Can you keep a secret? We're going to launch this. Do you want to be our partner?" And literally become their first partner, testing out the visual interpretation. And we were, I mean, the call happened in January, we agreed in February, and we had built a working prototype four weeks after that. So it was a little bit of luck and a tiny bit of intuition, and that's how it happened.
JOE: That's incredible. And the funny thing people may not know, the way that you and I met was I was sitting there at CSUN. I've been on top of all this AI stuff for some time, and I'm watching these keynotes, nobody's talking about AI. And I'm just thinking, "One year later, this entire conference is going to be about AI." And then Christian, who co-founded Be My Eyes DMs me, just as I'm reading the OpenAI announcement, and there's Be My Eyes there, and he says, "I've just replaced myself as a CEO. I've brought on Mike, who's gonna take us to the next level. You wanna come out and meet us?" And I did, just as that announcement was going out, managed to get a little conversation with you, and then all of a sudden, you were swarmed by media. Can you share what it was like to work with OpenAI and what that day itself was like for you?
MIKE: That day was remarkable, because, I don't know about you guys, but, like, I don't know that I've, it's like being first in a race, right? I'm sure I was never first in a race, like in grammar school or high school, and those types of things, and so very, very honestly and openly, and it's not really the point, but there was pride there, right? It just felt cool to kind of, like, win the first phase. And then when we started demoing it with people there, Joe, and members of the community, and seeing their reactions, like that was emotional and almost overwhelming, like, at times. There was a point towards the end of the afternoon where I just went back up to my hotel room for a little quiet and just to reflect for a little while, because I was feeling really emotional about the whole thing, which was awesome.
JOE: I literally have chills as you say that, because I was one of the people that got that demo, and I thought, "Oh, the entire world is different now. This is like screen reader sort of, but even better."
MIKE: Yeah, it was overwhelming at certain points, but quickly, and I know, I think we've had this conversation a little bit before, you quickly downshift into, oh, my God, it's awesome. This is exciting. And yes, the phrases that people used. Eamon, I think your point was people are talking about greater levels of independence. And I'm really careful about the language I use, and I don't want to be hyperbolic, right? But those are the phrases people use with us, right? But you very, very quickly shift into, okay, yeah, but there are problems. It needs to be faster. It needs to be this. It's making mistakes here. And you think about, you know, not only that you want it to be better, but you think kind of a little bit about the moral responsibility that you now have to continue making sure this thing is not only excellent and getting, you know, correct answers, being correct more, hallucinating less, but also, you know, how do you get this in the hands of more people? It's really great for people at a conference in Southern California to use technology. You know what, there are several million people in India who aren't going to be able to attend that conference. You know, how do we get this in their hands? How do we raise that awareness? And by the way, how do you make it easy enough, intuitive enough to use for anybody globally? And so that's kind of the arc of my thinking, Joe. It's like, I'm not proud of it to admit this, but I did feel pride in the beginning, like, hey, we're winning. And then I felt kind of emotional and a little overwhelmed. And then I kind of shifted into, damn it, there's a ton of things that are broken that we have to make better. Anyway.
EAMON: And on that note, how do you address that? Like, how do you gain and solicit that constant feedback from the end user and continue to iterate and improve? As much as you can share from Be My Eyes, what's that process look like, for sure?
MIKE: For sure, yeah. Well, we ultimately, by the end of it, before we released it widely, openly, we ended up having 19,000 beta testers. And I've said this a few times now, and nobody's told me it's not true. It has to be the largest beta test group of blind and low vision ever, right? Like 19,000 is an absurdly high number, right? The fundamental answer, though, to your question is you must build with and not for. And so having those 19,000 people fundamentally changed our approach to the product, the UI, the UX, what we were feeding back OpenAI to tell them where the model was broken. Like blind people, people don't know this, blind people fundamentally shaped the model that OpenAI now gives everybody in the world. And made it better because they were identifying the visual interpretation issues and problems and hallucinations where, first, like they were the first people playing with this, so I love that. And to open AI's credit, like they listened, they took the feedback and improved the product through everything from data, and prompting, and a whole bunch of other things. But, hey man, at the end of the day, it's, if you stop listening, you're dead, right? And so we're going to have to listen every day. And we still have this robust Slack group of blind and low-vision beta testers who are constantly giving us feedback, literally on a daily basis.
EAMON: And it's one of my biggest lessons learned years ago in the previous role doing UAT and doing user acceptance testing for different features and functionality globally. Unless you get people with different disabilities involved, you're never going to do it properly. You're just not at any level. But where do you see that going? I think one of the biggest concerns with AI is ensuring that we bring people with disabilities along and engage with them as early as possible. And that is across the board, independent of what feature functionality is. What would you share in regards to best practices around that, be it for any software company to ensure that that execution is optimal for all users?
MIKE: It's a great question. And look, you've done this work too, so I want to hear your answer to the question. But I think you just alluded to it, didn't you? It's like just bring a few people into the process. Doesn't have to be a thousand, right? But literally, even if it's a month before your launch or two months before your launch, if you bring in differently-abled people to use this beautiful thing that you've built, you know what? You're going to find out that you want to make some tweaks. And more often than not, those tweaks are not phenomenally hard, right? They're just minor variations in code or minor variations in UI or UX, right? And so you said it, it's building with rather than for. And there are a whole host of software companies that do this that tell you about where the problems with accessibility in your code are going to be. But doing it in a human way too, where you actually physically bring in a few people or through a remote group, they're going to tell you their opinion, they're going to make your product better. It's in your self interest to do this, right?
EAMON: Yep. I also think the earlier the better, the more frequent, the better. The earlier the better. Accessible design truly does benefit everyone, as we all know. We all use accessibility features on a daily basis. It's a simple thing to do, and once you start doing it, you reap the rewards right away. I think it's a common thing.
JOE: So they say a picture speaks a thousand words. A video, I don't know, 100,000 words. How about you just demo for us for a moment what this is like, what the process is like, or how the product works.
MIKE: All right, for those who can't see, I'm holding up my camera. I'm going to turn it sideways and take a picture of the screen. What happens is this picture is taken and then the AI then interprets it. And I'm going to put on my voice over real quick so you can hear.
VOX: Voiceover on.
MIKE: So I've taken a picture of Joe, Eamon, and myself.
VOX: The picture shows a computer screen with a video conference interface. There are two men on the screen, each in separate video boxes. The man in the top video box is wearing a dark blue shirt and headphones, smiling, and has a background of a bookshelf filled with books. The man in the bottom video box is wearing a black shirt, also with headphones, and his background includes a dark brown with three framed pictures and a door. The image is rotated 90 degrees to the left. There is a black space on the left side of the image, which seems to be part of the computer screen not being used.
MIKE: So for those of you who are blind or low vision that are listening to this, that's the description of the three of us on the screen. And it was quite accurate. It got the books in the background for Joe and his headphones. It got the color of our shirts, and that's effectively how this works. But it's remarkably powerful and remarkably descript, right? The robustness of the descriptions is really beneficial. I had a lot of fun last week going to an art gallery and taking pictures of the art and getting these phenomenal descriptions. It was just really cool. It's really cool.
EAMON: Where do you see it going? I know it's a very, general scary question, but as much as you can share again on your roadmap, what do you see going forward?
MIKE: Wearables and live interpretation of video. Is that direct enough?
EAMON: Yeah.
MIKE: I mean, that's where it has to go, right? Like the second that the consumer doesn't have to fumble around with their hands. Sorry. The second the consumer doesn't have to fumble around with their hands, if I'm wearing glasses, a pin, a pendant, whatever, right? If I can get my interpretation of my surroundings in the world and the information that I want, again, almost certainly through a voice command, on that type of device, while being able to use my hands in the office at my computer, right? Holding my child. Whatever the thing is, that's just going to be a better experience. So for sure that's where it's going. And you're seeing a little bit of this now. I guess it was, ARX is doing something with Microsoft, and we may have some things to announce at some point, but, so wearables for sure. And then the next phase, and this is really a function of model capability, GPU, and battery power is live interpretation of video and your surroundings. So this taking a picture functionality is wonderful and it gives robust answers. But like, what if I'm at, you know, a baseball game, a football game, or what if I'm watching a movie or whatever? That's coming, and I think it's coming faster than we all realize.
JOE: Well, it's interesting that you brought up the wearable, because this is a week when we had the Humane product got its first reviews, a pretty disastrous review. A lot of people are saying that that's it for Humane. Then Rewind.ai, which has a very interesting product. They came out with sort of this clip for $99, and you've teased that you might have something coming. So I don't know how much you are able or willing to share, but I'm curious where you view yourself in that ecosystem and what you think of the products that have come out. Like what is the right form factor?
MIKE: Great questions. Look, we're going to be hardware agnostic, right? We want to work with all of them, right? By the way, we're talking to Humane right now. I know they've gotten a lot of grief, but like, they're good folks over there and they're smart folks over there. That product will get better and it will get better quickly. Whether or not it's going to be a success or change computing, I don't know. But I'm glad Humane exists in the world, right? And we have met with the founders and with other people there, and I think they're fundamentally good people. And we're talking about ways that we could partner together on accessibility. And think about being able to call a volunteer from your pin, right? That should be a good experience, if you have the camera. Think about being able to call customer service with your pin, hands-free. If I'm calling Microsoft because I'm having a trouble with PowerPoint, I can fiddle with the PowerPoint with my hands as the pin is showcasing. We're going to be hardware agnostic and seek to partner with anybody and everybody who wants to provide a great accessibility experience to blind and low-vision people on their device. And we will have partnerships to announce coming in the not-too-distant future. I'm not ready to go there yet, Joe. But, like, if you're listening and you work at a hardware company, we want to partner with you. Expect a call from me, or call me. So what form factor will win is a really interesting question, and I have no idea. It may be one that we haven't happened. There are a lot of people who think some type of pin or pendant is going to be the way to go because it's passive. I still think beautiful form factor glasses will have a real market. But fundamentally, I think that when it comes to the blind and low-vision community on wearables, I think it's going to be a function of three things. One is utility. Does the thing work for my needs? Two is going to be cost. No offense to anybody out there doing great work right now, but if the thing costs $2,000 or even $1,500, you're never going to have great market penetration. We all know the demographics related to economic hardship faced by people who are blind or have low vision globally. And so price is going to be second, and then third is going to be whether or not you're charging me on an ongoing basis, right? Whether it's charging me for AI or charging me a subscription fee, right? I mean, if you think about it this way, Humane is a step forward from like a multi-thousand dollar device that has a monthly charge because it's a $700 device that has a monthly charge, right? What happens when we have a $300 device with no monthly fees? Guess what? That's going to do pretty well as long as it's taking care of utility. Point one, as long as it actually works. So I think that's where the market has to go. I don't know, what do you guys think?
JOE: The Ray-Ban, the Meta Ray-Ban, I think, is, I believe, $300 and no monthly fee. I'm not sure how Limitless, Rewind, which rebranded to Limitless, is going to be, but it's fascinating. I've wanted to build one of these things myself. That's what I thought about doing as well. So I love it. I was going to come out with something for those of us that know the Bible, there's something called Urim Vetumim, which is sort of like these oracles in the Bible with the stones. And I was thinking of creating different kind of sensors on every one of these stones. So I love this space. I think it's amazing. And I respect the Humane group. I feel like they were trying to build the Apple way, where it's really beautifully designed, tremendous craftsmanship. It's just really hard because you have to build a company, a culture, and then knock it out of the park in your very first version, or you're going to really have trouble with the consumer market. So I think, I hope that you're right and I hope that they overcome the issues with their first version, but they need a really good product manager. I think that's the piece that they're missing.
MIKE: Yeah, that may be. I haven't really played with the Limitless product and I haven't played with it at all and I haven't looked at the specs. Does that also have kind of video capability on it?
JOE: The new item only has audio, but the original Rewind.ai, it sits on your computer and it films everything. It's got the video, the audio, OCR, and you can search through your entire history, and I've been using it for a year. And when you need it, it is fantastic, because you might have forgotten an important point in a meeting, that kind of thing. And then you can really lean in and find exactly what you wanted. It's fantastic.
EAMON: Mike, for those listeners that want to get involved with Be My Eyes, what should they do? What should their next steps be?
MIKE: Yeah. Number one, just sign up for the product. Either if you're a blind or low vision user, it's free. Or if you're not blind or low vision, sign up as a volunteer. We really do try to route a call to you in your first 30 days of signing up, but you won't get a lot of calls, because we have seven and a half million volunteers, as opposed to 650,000 blind or low vision. So don't feel like you're going to get inundated. I promise you, if you sign up as a volunteer and you take a call, it will be the best day of your week. I promise you. It's just an incredible experience to help someone. The calls only last an average of three minutes, by the way. Three minutes, three seconds is our current average, and so it's usually a fairly simple task. I think the other way that you can get involved, and this is really a concrete ask, is if you work in a company, particularly a company that's business-to-consumer, we can dramatically improve your customer service and your accessibility to this community. And for not a huge amount of money, we can work with you and make your customer service that much more successful. And so call me, text me, email me, Mike@BeMyEyes.com. I answer every email I get, sometimes it's painful, but I do, because when I give out my email like this, there was one time where I did it at a National Federation of the Blind Convention. I think I got 240 or so emails, but I did answer them all. But I want to hear from folks, you know? Not only on business development and commercial development, but on product feedback or on problems or issues. It goes back to what we were talking about the top. Like, if you stop listening, you're dead, right? And so it's kind of a big part of our ethos.
EAMON: I have to say. I've been fortunate enough to be working with individuals with disabilities now for about 12, 13 years. And not only is it the most rewarding thing I've ever done, it's the most educational thing I've ever done. I continue to learn every day. I really do, in many, many different ways.
MIKE: That's awesome. But how did you get involved? How did you get involved on that journey?
EAMON: I got involved back in third year into Apple, around 2013, when I was leading Apple retail quality engineering for the retail stores. And we were building this phenomenal program where we were bringing in users, end users from the retail stores globally to test our new features and functionality of our products within the stores. And then we get a call saying it's not accessible, you know, from a blind user in one of our stores. And it was a light bulb moment for me and a light bulb moment as in my ignorance was awoken. And it was like, okay, we got to fix this. So we built a program where we were bringing individuals from the stores. We ensured thereafter that that also included individuals with different disabilities. And it was me working with them on a weekly basis, and my team, that just, that was it. I fell in love. I completely fell in love. And then, fortunate enough, when we went to Nike through a couple of my own team members, we were able to kick off an accessibility program at Nike. And then that's ultimately how I was able to get this role at ServiceNow, which I find so rewarding, so appreciative of. And then just for ServiceNow to continue to support accessibility in the way we are. It's humbling, and it's rewarding in many ways. It is.
MIKE: That's really awesome. I wrote ten companies down on a napkin that I wanted as customers when I took this job. We've gotten eight of the ten. One of the ones we haven't is Nike. So if you're listening, Nike, let's talk.
EAMON: I'm assuming the other one is ServiceNow, is that correct?
MIKE: That was my 11th.
EAMON: There you go.
MIKE: But if you want to become a customer, we could stay on this podcast as long as it takes.
EAMON: We can talk. We can talk.
JOE: So it's interesting you were bringing up the volunteers. And the number one question I really want to ask you, you've got so many different roles that you've done, and you have such an interesting business dynamic because you've got enterprise client, so that means your business model is really a small number of clients that you service really well. They obviously have a very strong penetration in the market. Then you've got probably ten times as many users, end users, let's say blind users. And then out of that, you've got ten times more volunteers than you've got blind users. And so putting on your CEO hat, you know, you really have to have a strategy there. What is it that I want to grow the most? Because one thing will probably follow the other. So where is it? And what do you do with a community of that size? It's just fascinating to me. How do you view it strategically?
MIKE: We have three very clear objectives and in order of importance, number one is grow the community.
JOE: Which community?
MIKE: Both the community of blind and low vision and volunteers. Let me be real blunt. It's the only moat out there. Everyone's going to have great AI. It's going to be cheap or free everywhere soon. It's going to be embedded into every product, everywhere. Visual interpretation is going to be on your computer, my computer, your glasses, his ring, her pendant. It's going to be everywhere. And so if you think about any SaaS business, or any business anyway, think about associates in a law firm whose primary job is to go pour through documents and find specific words. You know what? AI can do a freaking good job of that. Now, no one's going to give it yet, because there's not full trust in AI, but it's coming. And so where is any moat in any business that you can think of right now? And so if we grow that community, if this is the place where blind and low vision humanity and the humanity of people that want to volunteer go, if 630,000 blind and low vision becomes 10 million, and 7.5 million volunteers becomes 40 million, we're always going to have something to do in the world. We're always going to have relevance. And there's probably also always a business model that you can build around that because it's a unique community. You know, when I worked at Facebook years ago and I got called over to Zuck's house, on a Sunday, and I didn't know why. And there were a few people there, Cheryl and a couple other people, but, and Mark said, "We're going to buy WhatsApp." And I was like, "Cool, great, tell me more. Da-da-da-da-da. How much?" He said, "19 billion." And I said, "Are you insane? They have little to no revenue." And his whole argument about that, which by the way, ended up being a brilliant deal, like incredible value for Facebook, now Meta. But his premise was, if you have a large community of people somewhere and you're the glue for that community, it's going to have massive value. And so I think about that lesson as I think about building communities. So number one, Joe, long-winded answer is, if we continue to build and serve that community well, we're going to have relevance in any technological environment. Second thing is you must continue to build great products and services, which I think will be much more of a UI/UX challenge over time than a, we have the best model or the best AI, because I do think AI becomes ubiquitous. Then the third priority is increase revenue. And the reason we want to increase revenue and customer relationships is not only to improve customer service and make it more accessible, but also that revenue you use to go in and serve your first objective, again, growing the community. And so that's kind of how I think about our business. And I think we got a chance. I think we had a fighting chance.
JOE: You're right on the money. I collaborate a lot with Gerry Campbell, who used to be the CTO of Beachbody. And that's something we discussed a lot. What is your moat in AI? And it really is audience. That's why podcasts are so important. That's why being an influencer of some kind is really important. And I think having that approach of being authentic with your audience and building an audience that way, that's a moat that no matter what happens in the future, there's no replacement for it.
MIKE: Exactly. It's also why we're never going to charge, right? Like I've gotten pushback, including from people on our team, including from our founder. Like, maybe we should charge for certain things, you know? But I don't want to do it. One, for the reason you just talked about, like when you're free, you guarantee a certain audience, right? And by the way, we're not monetizing on like ads or users or anything like that either. But the second is, it's like, you know, the unfortunate demographics of the blind and low-vision community is that, depending on whose data you believe, 65% to 70% of that population is either underemployed or unemployed. I'm going to go charge them a monthly fee now? No way, man. No way. Just not going to do it.
EAMON: Going back to where we started, metrics, and I love, and ServiceNow is the same, we are truly customer centric. We don't just say that, we are. It's truly about the customer. But what metric? Is there a metric, either through your career, consistently or now, that you do, like that is the KPI. That is the arrow that you follow. Is there anything specific?
MIKE: I think if you win customer satisfaction/NPS, you're going to win. The reason, I mean, I've been a consumer of the ServiceNow product, and the reason that you guys do well is it works better than the other stuff that's out there, right? And so if someone asks me, it's like, "Oh, yeah, no, we use ServiceNow. I like it." You know, if you win that game and we have to win it in two places, right? We have to win it with the blind or low vision consumer and then we have to win it also with the corporate buyer of software services. But if you win there, you're probably going to be able to fix the other stuff, because it inherently says that your product's working and you're serving a need. I don't know, what about you? And when you think of, what would you put on that, your KPI list?
EAMON: I don't agree for the sake of agreeing. I really don't, Mike. It's all about CSAT. It's all about customer service. It is. Now, you can get really granular there, and you should get really granular. But we did it recently, a global CSAT on accessibility and what our customers think about specifically accessibility features. And we solicited so much from it, it was positive, because they know our customers care just as much about our long-term commitment as they do about conformance and usability. And that's a big statement. But not just talking the talk, like truly doubling down and committing from a resource perspective, from a capacity and funding perspective. Our customers want to see that, and we're doing that. And that goes a long way.
MIKE: I mean, look, that makes a ton of sense. I mean, the other thing that I've been thinking a lot about recently in this discussion is, for a long time, I was on the board of Be My Eyes since 2018. And the way Be My Eyes used to go to market is, it was much more about accessibility as a human right. Accessibility, this is the right thing for you to do. Guess how that argument plays in a lot of companies? Not too well, right? When you can combine, do the right thing, make your product more accessible, with demonstrable ROI, in our case, shortening the length of calls, increasing your customer satisfaction, that's when you have a business. And this isn't because companies are bad people, it's because they have freaking shareholders, right? They have a job. They have revenue. They have profit. This is their job. This is why folks exist. And so if we can successfully combine, and I think we can now, the do the right thing, make your product more accessible, it's laudable, and by the way, there's a financial reason to do this and a concrete ROI. By the way, the number of people who are blind and low vision is going to go up by 70% in the next 25 years, according to the World Health Organization. Get ahead of this today. That argument's working.
EAMON: And completely agreeing from a corporate perspective, like platform, we have them three justification areas. One, do the right thing. To your point, yes, it's nice, but it doesn't really pack a punch. Two, conformance. Yes. And potential legal concerns. But three, it will create a competitive advantage.
MIKE: Yes.
EAMON: And that will generate the revenue. So for us, it's the merge of them three. We always, number one should be number one, but you have to do the third. You have to make it that competitive advantage to get the backing that you need. And that's the hard truth.
MIKE: Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, you know, there are a thousand things to do in any company on any given day. Why should they do this one?
EAMON: Yep.
MIKE: Because we do check those three boxes that you talked about.
EAMON: And we're already seeing the rewards for that and the benefits from that through RFPs. And many of our customers, especially in EMEA, they say, "Are you accessible? What accessibility levels are you?" And then we can compete and continue to lead.
MIKE: It's interesting. Yeah, the regulatory landscape always lags a little bit, but it's starting to push more and more companies. And as you said, EMEA is a big deal now because of the new regulations there that folks are trying to get ahead of. But, yeah, it's interesting.
JOE: You're also involved with a company called Synthesia, and they create virtual media. So can you explain exactly what it does and how it's going to impact the entertainment industry?
MIKE: Think about it as text to video. Imagine that you could type something out in the script, and in a matter of a couple of minutes, that script would not only be available in an audio version, but through a video avatar. And the avatar can either be yourself. Like, it can be you or an avatar that's like off the shelf, that's not a real person. And in that two minutes, that video and your speech can be translated into 65 languages. So think about, you are the HR director of ServiceNow. You have employees in 78 countries, right? You have customers in more countries than that. You want to get a message out to them from your CEO or whomever, right? Seamlessly, thoughtfully, you can type it in. And we've already, Eamon has sat in front of his camera for three minutes, so we have his avatar. We can go out and he can say anything he wants in all those languages to all those customers or all those employees in the world. That's effectively this Synthesia product, and it's wildfire right now, because it has that great utility and the ability to work across language, culture, and culture, think about all the, pardon my phrase, all the shitty HR training demos you've been through in your life, or compliance demos. This can be much more interesting as a result, and better, faster, cheaper. That's effectively what Synthesia is doing. And there are, as you said, there are applications to entertainment and government and a whole bunch of things. But I think that the real market that Synthesia is capturing is the ability for enterprises or nonprofits or governments to be able to develop great video content for education, training, information, marketing, really fast in all these languages, and kind of a beautiful form factor.
JOE: Yeah, I think it's going to be a really big bomb on the entire world, not just Synthesia, but a lot of the other similar models. But I'm really impressed that you're involved with that. And then I'm going to end off with one more question, and I've noticed this from your profile. One of your bios was describing this, or I read it somewhere. You've been capturing a lot of multimodal data, so text, audio, visual, that's a business model in and of itself. And you also touched on how that could be helpful for robotics. Are you viewing that as going to be a major differentiator for you in terms of the quality of your product, or do you see that as a business model? What are your thoughts?
MIKE: More the former, but not, I'm not writing off the ladder, but let me explain. What Joe's talking about is we have unique datasets from all these videos that have happened over time, and obviously the AI imagery. And there's this insane arms race right now in the world for unique datasets. We've been offered millions of dollars for our data, very bluntly.
JOE: I'm not surprised.
MIKE: The primary use of this data is going to be to make our products and services better. If we find the right partner, and it's probably going to be only one. I can't imagine, like, just giving away or getting into some weird licensing model where we're just sending data out the door to 50 different companies, right, and charging them all a licensing fee. But if there's one or a small group of companies that we trust who we can help make their models or their accessibility services better, we could partner on the data front in that phase. But, like, the bluntness of your question, Joe, is like, are you going to be in the business of data? And I don't think that's the business I want to be in. But if there are two, three partners that we trust that are going to use this to make the accessibility of their offerings and the accessible impact of technology on the world better, cheaper, faster, yeah, we'd consider it.
EAMON: If there's truly a scalable benefit for it, then there's a possibility.
MIKE: Yeah, I think that that's, and who are you working with? Do you trust this person to, you know, or this entity to do the right thing? If we threw up a website that said, "Go use this data. It's got great accessibility use cases and we charge you by the pound," or by the number or whatever, like, I don't know where the hell that's going. And I don't feel comfortable with that.
JOE: Very interesting for reasons that maybe we can share in a future podcast, but we should talk about this offline as well. So, really fascinating to hear this. I loved this conversation. I really appreciate you joining us. And I could speak to you for hours. I'm sure, Eamon, you feel the same way, so hopefully we can have you on again in the future. So, thank you.
MIKE: Well, thank you. I appreciate what you're doing. And Eamon, your personal history, and Joe, what I know about you, I appreciate the work that you're both doing in the world very much, so thank you.
EAMON: Keep it going. I really appreciate it. We will speak again. Looking forward to next chat, but thanks for your time today. We really do appreciate it.
MIKE: Get ready for the sales pitch, Eamon.
EAMON: Absolutely, bring it on. All right, take care.