How automation forges a sense of community and purpose at 6sense

The world is becoming digitally native and tech companies are leading the charge. There are exceptions depending on the industry, says 6sense CIO Bryan Wise, but situations will arise where if a company gets large enough, the cost benefit becomes a key concern, and going back on prem to an extent might be the right option.

“We’re a long ways from that but because of the complexity of data residency of some larger fortune 500 companies, and they’re definitely thinking about true costs in the cloud and more control,” he says. “It’s a really dynamic topic that I think is going to evolve over time as we all push to the cloud, and, potentially in some cases, push back from the cloud. So I think you’re getting at this hybrid approach.”

But even if most skill sets have shifted to cloud first, there’s a need to address cloud flow and ebb. Wise, however, doesn’t have to worry about this for a long time, but there’s a need for a common plane of how to manage it all going forward. It’s all part of what makes being a CIO right now very exciting.

“My experience being a CIO today has never been more powerful and energizing,” he says. “CIOs have really wanted to be taken more seriously and have a larger presence in the boardroom, and with the shift that’s going on in the commoditization of a lot of technology, it’s allowing CIOs more freedom to influence the company more than ever.”

And because of this increasingly commoditized technology, there are greater ways to partner more effectively with the business.

“The fact we can lower the technical barrier for a lot of services and enable the business to do more of the heavy lifting because they know their processes best, it just accelerates everything and changes the whole engagement. It’s an awesome time to be a CIO now and be part of the strategy to help the bottom line. Those sorts of conversations have increased exponentially.”

Wise also discussed data quality, and the cultural shift to deliver and continuously improve on technology excellence. Watch the full video below for more insights.

On achieving efficiencies: When you come into a pre-IPO environment, there’s a lot of fast growth. And there’s a lot of situations where your business processes aren’t really as mature as they should be. And because of speed, maybe you’re doing things that are manual but you have to start maturing because end-to-end processes have to be as efficient as possible. So Automation Domination is a program we put in place to change the way the company thinks about efficient automation of processes and not accepting the status quo. We made it a top level company objective and the key result was to save 67,000 manual people hours. The way we came up with that was we took our employee base, about 1,200 employees, and asked, what if we could save one hour per week per employee for the entire year? So that’s the rough math of why 67,000 hours became the goal. The real deliverable, though, was to change the culture and the way people think about what they’re doing. It was also to create an environment where people also thought about what they do and how it affects other groups.

On outcomes: Automation Domination breaks down silos and becomes ingrained into our environment. Then for me as a CIO, I know there’s going to be process improvement, efficiencies, and speed that ultimately help our customers. So we focused a lot on the sales and marketing. It was a great experience and it was so successful that we’re doing it again and our next goal is to save 100,000 hours. It’s a pretty awesome experience and now it’s changed the entire culture so I don’t have to cheerlead anymore. You just hear team members and employees talking about it all the time.

On data and cloud: It’s interesting to think about what the cloud is going forward. When you think about on prem physically, those would be data centers. And the world has changed a little bit so that your data center is your cloud provider, and you can control that. So it’s an interesting change in landscape. We’re a digitally native company, so our company never had anything on prem; it’s always been in the cloud. I do think it makes it faster because you can deploy products much quicker, and you don’t have all capital and intensive infrastructure you need to buy. But it does require a certain mindset of controlling costs because you can get carried away with the ease of use into computational resources. It also brings up interesting questions around where my data is exactly. So there’s data sovereignty, where’s it going, and so while it’s simple to go to the cloud, it adds other complexity you have to consider.

On enterprise innovation: 6sense is a big AI engine, so one of the things we do is provide B2B intelligence for marketers and sellers to understand where their existing customer base or future accounts are in the buying journey. And the way we do that is an AI engine. But on the generative AI side where things are going, it used to be a situation where you didn’t have enough data, and now we have tons. Managing those data sets, getting a lot of utility and insights out of them, the quality of that data is going to be paramount, especially in this generative AI space where LLMs are the new paradigm shift. There are many other ways to take this, but you need to understand your data in a real, actionable way because quality is only going to be exacerbated. And we’ve got to figure out a way to talk about hallucinations and situations where you might get reports back from data that’s not correct, but can look very real. So there has to be a mindset to make sure data is high fidelity.