Ep 43: How AI is Revolutionizing Digital Marketing with Intuit Mailchimp SVP & CTO Jack Tam

‍Evan: Hi there, and welcome to Enterprise Software Innovators, a show where top tech executives share how they innovate at scale. In each episode, enterprise CIOs share how they've applied exciting new technologies, and what they've learned along the way. I'm Evan Reiser, the CEO and founder of Abnormal Security.

‍Saam: I'm Saam Motamedi, a general partner at Greylock Partners.

Evan: Today on the show, we’re bringing you a conversation with Jack Tam, Chief Technology Officer at Intuit Mailchimp. Intuit Mailchimp is a comprehensive email automation platform, providing businesses AI-powered tools to create personalized marketing campaigns.

In this conversation, Jack shares his thoughts on the evolution of email marketing in the AI era, the impact of AI on customer engagement, and the future of AI-enabled business growth.

Well, Jack, I'm super familiar with Mailchimp, but maybe, maybe you can kind of give our audience a little background on kind of what Mailchimp does and how you support your customers. And then maybe you can talk a little about how you got to where you are today in your career. 

Jack: Sure. Mailchimp is an email marketing platform. It's actually a very successful company that Intuit acquired back in 2021. But our ambition and our vision is actually Mailchimp's going to be the platform that helps small businesses grow. And that's really the larger aspiration of what we want to do and really bringing together all of Intuit together and make that happen. So that's really the big picture. 

My background, just quickly, I'm a software engineer, and I've been at Intuit for almost 21 years now. I had my own startup, I've done consulting. At Intuit, I've done everything from platform technologies, uh, that supports all the products in the company, including TurboTax, QuickBooks. And most recently I've taken on the role leading all of technology for Mailchimp, which was about 18 months ago.

Evan: So I've, I've worked with, uh, both small businesses and, uh, Email marketing and a bunch of other things in the past. It's really amazing to like actually go help, you know, small businesses grow. In your journey, kind of like, what has been some of the moments that have like most inspired you?

Jack: What inspires me and what motivates me is being part of, uh, whether it's a company or a project or an initiative that really has meaningful impact. And, I think everything we do, we can find some meaningful impact. So not meant to be too cliche ish, but, you know, I've been at Intuit for 20 plus years, partly because we have big ambitions and it's about helping small businesses and consumers be financially successful. And so then being able to bring that to life in large, challenging projects, uh, things like that. So that's what I find a lot of fun, a lot of inspiration. 

I think also bringing large groups of people together to solve big problems. You know, I started as a software engineer and I remember when I became a manager, I was like, hmm, why do I want to do that? You know, what's my value? You know, I know how to code. I know what it means to code. But then I realized, you know, having teams of people come together, it's a lot of fun when you get to the finish line and you can achieve those big missions. 

Evan: You guys have made a bunch of kind of enhancements and capabilities, right? I know you're kind of bringing more and more AI, um, capabilities into the platform. Are there any like particular ones you feel particularly excited about? 

Jack: Yeah. At Mailchimp, we just announced, um, today, uh, something we call Revenue Intelligence. It's something that we're still working on. So it's early right now, but again, our mission vision with Mailchimp is to help small businesses grow and be successful all over the world.

As you can imagine, it's very difficult to run a small business. You don't have time. And so some of the things that we're using artificial intelligence, gen AI, all those technologies is how do we help them find more business? How do we find valuable customers that are interested in the product that they can sell better?

And so that's what we're looking at. And that's what we're testing. And that's what we're using the product experiences and the technology and AI to help with. 

Evan: And can you share more like from a customer perspective, like what are some of the new capabilities let them do? 

Jack: So, take for example, if you're in the lawn care business, you're usually probably out in the field every day with your company, you've got a lot of potentially different services like planting trees, lawn mowing, fertilizing, but you also have potentially a lot of customers that are interested to work with you. Well, how do you have time to do all of that? Service all these requests coming in, potentially through your multiple email channels, social channels. That's one challenge. We help them sort through that. 

Number two, you might have customers that you've already worked with maybe a month ago, two months ago, three months ago. How do we help you get these repeat businesses? And then for those customers that you have service and they actually are very happy with you. How do we help you learn from that to find new referrals? So that again, you can drive new businesses. So those are three examples of how we help small businesses in this case, manage all the leads coming in, get new customers, get through referrals and get repeat business.

Evan: So one of the things that I've always just loved about Mailchimp, it's one of these companies and organizations and platforms that seems a little bit simpler on the outside than it actually is, right? I know you guys have had, you have incredible amounts of like infrastructure and technology behind the scenes.

Are there any kind of use cases of, you know, data science or machine learning AI that you feel like, you know, the average maybe customer like might not fully appreciate some of the, you know, sophistication going on behind the scenes? 

Jack: Yeah, so at Intuit, um, one of the things we pride ourselves in is, um, focusing on solving customer problems, but really doing it in a very simple way. Whether it's Mailchimp, TurboTax, QuickBooks, I mean, just imagine all the tax laws, imagine all the accounting requirements, all the things that you have to do with marketing, which, as a small business, You know how to do lawn care, you know how to do construction, you know how to maybe sell products online. You don't necessarily know how to be a great marketer. In fact, a lot of small businesses that we work with, they work with agencies. So those are the complexities that we try to hide from our product experience. 

Now, to your question around, what are we doing to, what are some of the AI that we have that could be very surprising? I'll give you several across Intuit and then also specific to Mailchimp. With TurboTax this past season, we actually used artificial intelligence to help you know what could be wrong, uh, maybe with some of the inputs that you put into the tax return. And so we help make accuracy better. By the way, I should mention all of this is done with customer privacy in mind, but we have a lot of customers that use our product, millions of customers that use our product.

And so we've got all this data that ultimately we can aggregate together to help you as a lawn care business. How do you know what other lawn care businesses around you are doing. And so be able to aggregate this data to give you more insights and intelligence. So this goes back to what we're going to try to do with this revenue intelligence platform, give you intelligence, not just about your business, but your cohorts. And then ultimately, maybe the cohorts in the Southeast United States, because that's where you're at. 

One of the things we are launching as we speak, early phase, is, um, take an e com business, you know, as we spoke with a lot of experts, marketing experts, um, small businesses. If you're trying to sell a product online, you might send a marketing email that one time, but the customers may not click on that first email. So you then need to send a second one, maybe then follow it with an SMS. Well, what is the frequency in which you do that? And that frequency is actually the most, one of the most challenging things to figure out because it'll depend on the type of product you're selling. It'll depend on the type of industry. 

Imagine you have to send that frequency because you're selling hand soap. That's a different frequency than if you're selling clothing. Because you can imagine that you buy at different times. And you don't buy, hopefully, uh, I hope I don't buy as many clothes every single day, every single week.

Evan: Talk about like generative AI for a second. The cliche is like generative AI is going to solve all the world's problems, right? And, um, you know, every vendor in the world is talking about how generative AI is going to do everything. Um, And a lot of those use cases seem a little bit far fetched. We have to kind of squint your eyes and like, you have to suspend disbelief to imagine how it's going to happen.

It seems like with, with Mailchimp, right. You don't have to squint that much, right. Um, a lot of these models are really optimized for understanding text, right. Generating text and the core of email marketing, right, is creating great personalized content that kind of, you know, that's relevant from a time content, you know, dimension for the customers.

If you had to guess the places where generative AI is going to have like the biggest impact first without a lot of, you know, fantasy things coming together, I can imagine that, um, you know, email marketing is like probably one of the first places where it was most powerful. 

How much of that is hype and how much of that is real? And what do you think like the future of email marketing looks like, you know, a year or two from now as these technologies, you know, continue to accelerate? 

Jack: Yeah, definitely feels like you've been, uh, involved with our roadmap planning cause it does make a lot of sense. Gen AI, the, the best, um, use of Gen AI right now is with text and then images. And then you can imagine, uh, video, audio, and you're already seeing examples of that. 

And so with email marketing, which for Mailchimp is just one channel, we want to be able to market through SMS, what's app, social channels. It's ultimately about content creation. So it doesn't take that much imagination to say, well, how do I create that content?

After you create the content it's for example, this frequency, when do you send and how do you send that, who do you actually even send to, how do you target? And so we are taking this whole workflow together and essentially creating a combination of gen AI, plus AI, plus traditional business rules and making that as simple as possible for marketers. Again, there's millions of customers around the world who run small businesses. They don't have a marketing agency. 

Where we want to take it further is then imagine that you can run A B testing on these marketing experiments. Today you have to watch it, you have to monitor it. We want to be able to let this automate itself with the marketer in control. The marketer, either the business owner, ultimately the owner is still in control, but removing as much of the friction in the experimentation to find the optimal ways to market. That's what we envision. That's what we're working towards as we speak. 

Evan: So, um, forgive me, but I want to ask you to take your crystal ball out and talk a little bit about like the future. Right. So I think without a doubt, we're on this like exponential acceleration of, of technology, right. You know, AI included, and I have to imagine the way that. You know, any of your current customers use Mailchimp today is gonna be a lot different, you know, five years, 10 years in the future. 

Um, you know, how do you think AI technology are going to transform, you know, Mailchimp, maybe both from the customer facing kind of solution, right? Love to hear kind of your vision about what that, what that, what do we have the opportunity to be, you know, five or 10 years down the road. I'd also love to hear kind of how you think it's going to transform how you guys, you know, operate the business.

Jack: Yeah, that's a great question. I don't think AI is going to get rid of people. I think there's a lot of concern with that. I'm more in the camp of, um, it will enable us as engineers, technologists to really operate at the next value chain. Marketers, same thing. We have the same challenges with accountants, right? How do they bring more value versus the more mundane, if you will. 

The second is, if I think about the customer experience, we talked about that example of how do you automate a lot of this marketing, but I think it also changed the types of ways you interact with our products. If you look at Mailchimp today, it's very much of a sort of menu navigation, click this and click, click this. I can imagine that it can be a much simpler interface. For example, it could literally just be a Google search bar and you type in, this is what I want to do. And all the automation happens behind it.

Other things we have talked about is think about all the customer support that you have to do. Today it's chatbots but you can do videos with people and then they can speak in different languages around the world. And so those are ways that we can see that changing the product experience. 

On the enterprise side, we're looking at how technology can help us increase code coverage for testing. You know, one of the biggest challenges with technology that I'm sure a lot of listeners out there will resonate with, especially if you're working on a product that's 20 plus years old. There's a lot of technology, a lot of code that was written over the years. And so writing unit tests is one of those things that customers, uh, developers find very mundane, takes a lot of work, but you got to do it to get quality. Auto generating that, auto generating new use cases, validating the code that you deploy into the cloud. So those are some of the ways that we're using it internally to drive productivity. And again, helping engineers get to the next value chain. 

Evan: I'm kind of like envisioning what you said, where you can imagine that, that lawn care business owner, you know, Right. They're not going to have to do a lot of workflow management or congeneration, right? They're, maybe they're talking to their iPhone or something in the future saying, Hey, I have a new idea for this, like discount we can do. Hey, can you just, you know, Mailchimp, can you just go figure that out for me? Right. That would let them focus a lot more on their business versus, um, you know, maybe things that are not their expertise.

So in that future world, both, you know, as you, as you kind of create a more AI enabled product and you have a more AI enabled, you know, kind of operations, how do you think that changes the investments that you need to make across the team from a, you know, training perspective, from a tooling perspective, maybe from like an organizational perspective, like, are there going to be new roles in the future of Mailchimp, like GPT knowledge manager, or like, what do you think the future looks like, and how does that transform the organization? 

Jack: Yeah, so we are already going through some of that transformation. The first is we want to democratize AI. You know, historically, there's been a core group of people who know how to create data science models, for example. We've been on a journey to democratize that, where engineers can write and create models. Gen AI in particular makes that even more easier. So there's a lot of training and investments that we're putting in to help up level the talent and the skills. And this is no different than what the industry has gone through with quality or operational responsibilities. Um, something we call shift left, taking it from waiting until you get to the end and getting it, being part of the design and development process.

I think some of the new roles, for example, you have to write good prompts. If you want to get good outcomes. And so there's been some discussions around, do you need certain skillsets to know how to write good prompts? I saw a recent article presentation where the types of AI, gen AI technologies is also starting to go up further in the stack. 

You know, I think over the last year, we spent a lot of time talking about LLMs. Now you're seeing much more specialized LLMs based on industry and data. And so I also think there could be roles around how do you, get the right data into the right LLMs that are necessary for the types of industry that you're working in. At Intuit, for example, we are also looking at LLMs that are unique to how we do taxes, for example. So I think those are some of the new roles. 

Evan: So, um, You know, if I, if I, I do, I do talk to like a lot of your peers, people on different sides of spectrum in terms of how bullish or bearish you should be with AI generally, and obviously it's very nuanced. 

I'd love to maybe solicit some of your more contrarian opinions, right? Um, are there, are there any areas where you're kind of personally, you know, more bullish that maybe some of your peers think are a little bit too fanciful or, you know, unrealistic in terms of like applied uses of AI either on the, in the product or in operations?

Jack: Yeah, I would say I probably tend to be a little bit more on the "is that real?" When it comes to technology where I'm probably more bullish is, um, is I think, as you said, with the whole marketing automation process, I think that is something that is very powerful. The challenge will be ultimately helping small businesses drive growth. And that's where we don't find a lot of companies in the world doing that today. And so I think that's a huge opportunity for us. 

Evan: What about the other side? What, what, what's kind of something where you've heard a lot of your peers say, Oh, AI is going to be, you know, just like our savior for this thing.

And you're looking at saying, I don't think so. That's just like, that's not in practice. What's gonna kind of close the gap. 

Jack: Yeah. I still have a lot of reservations with, uh, self driving cars. I think there's so much, uh, real world physical applications. I think. I think a lot of great progress has been made with self driving, but I think, you know, I'd still want to keep my hands on the wheels. Um, so I, I think that's probably one area that I'm still a little cautious about. 

Evan: That makes sense. I think I'd rather let my, uh, family do a AI powered marketing campaigns before they're doing the, uh, full AI powered driving. 

Jack: It took me a little, it took me a little time just to get to cruise control.

Evan: So Jack, um, in the last 10 minutes or so, we'd like to do a lightning round just to get some kind of like quicker hits. And so looking for kind of like the, the one tweet, I know these questions are almost impossible to answer in one tweet, so just forgive me in advance.

So, how should companies measure the success of a CTO? 

Jack: Delivering business outcomes with a level of technology flexibility. 

Evan: What is one piece of advice you wish you were told when you first became a Chief Technology Officer? 

Jack: Take big risks. You can end up being too safe and conservative, but really your job is to deliver the big outcome.

Evan: Maybe switching gears to a more personal side. What's a book you've read that's had a big impact on you and I'd love to hear why. 

Jack: I just recently read Benjamin Franklin. Um, also Leonardo da Vinci. I found those two books to be very inspiring because these are two people that just did everything. And they were great at a lot of stuff. And that's something that I find very, uh, just cool. 

Evan: And had that changed your thoughts about leadership or how's that a change kind of, you know, how you work. 

Jack: It's just helped me think about how to be, from a business perspective. Yes, I'm an engineering leader, but I can also be a business leader. I can also be an overall organizational leader. I can be a marketing leader. I'm not defined by one label. 

Um, and just personally be interested in a lot of stuff. I hated history when I was in high school. Now I love history. 

Evan: It's actually a really good point. Like a lot of times people kind of like put unnecessary constraints on themselves. Right. Um, and it probably, it may just, they're at the risk of that preventing them from kind of maybe growing or exploring other areas. And there's no reason why you just need to be an expert in one thing, right? You should be free to, you know, explore, explore the world and really kind of discover your hidden talents. 

Jack: Exactly. 

Evan: Okay. Um, what's an upcoming technology that you're personally most excited about? 

Jack: I think it's AI. 

Evan: Okay. And say more. What about it is exciting? 

Jack: This gets back to earlier discussion, you know, is there too much hype? I think we have to be careful with the hype, but I think it's a game changer. I think the world is so different today than it was what, 40, 50 years ago. I think there's so much potential and it's about realizing where to leverage that potential.

Evan: Yeah, I'm sure even if we were, you know, probably both of us 20 years ago, I doubt we could have imagined where us doing a digital show on our, you know, computers that would be broadcast over the world. So I can't, I can't imagine what the next 20 years will bring. 

So Jack, thank you so much for taking time to join us today. I really enjoyed speaking with you and hopefully we can chat again soon. 

Jack: It was great talking with you too, Evan. So thank you very much.

Evan: That was Jack Tam, Chief Technology Officer at Intuit Mailchimp.

‍Saam: Thanks for listening to the Enterprise Software Innovators podcast. I’m Saam Motamedi, a general partner at Greylock Partners.

‍Evan: And I’m Evan Reiser, the CEO and founder of Abnormal Security. Please be sure to subscribe, so you never miss an episode. You can find more great lessons from technology leaders and other enterprise software experts at enterprisesoftware.blog.

Saam: This show is produced by Luke Reiser and Josh Meer. See you next time!