Pressing Matters
Pressing Matters
Maribel Lopez, Founder & Principal Analyst, Lopez Research
Back when Maribel Lopez left Forrester and became an independent analyst in 2008, she was taking a great risk. Independent analysts were not the force they are today. Social media was just getting going, blogs were still in their infancy, and podcasts were still called online videos.
But today, in part because of Maribel's pioneering work in the field, independent B2B tech analysts thrive. And Maribel is a great example. Yes, she still does great analysis, now largely on the AI market, but she blogs, contributes articles to various outlets, and has her own successful podcast, the AI with Maribel Lopez. She's also a road warrior, spending upwards of 25 weeks a year at tech conferences in the US, Canada, and EMEA.
Nonetheless, she somehow found the time to join us to discuss the evolution of the analyst space over the past three decades, her approach to choosing projects, and how she got rid of that pesky Boston accent for this fourth season premiere episode of Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B Tech. I'm Dave Reddy, Head of Big Valley Marketing's Media and Influencers Practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old-fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B Tech's top 200 media and influencers, including Maribel.
Here's our chat with Maribel. Enjoy.
Back when Maribel Lopez left Forester and became an independent analyst in 2008, she was taking a great risk. Independent analysts were not the force they are today. Social media was just getting going. Blogs were still in their infancy, and podcasts were still called online videos. But today, in part because of Maribel's pioneering work in the field, independent B2B tech analysts thrive. And Maribel is a great example. Yes, she still does great analysis, now largely on the AI market, but she blogs, contributes articles to various outlets, and has her own successful podcast, The AI, with Maribel Lopez. She's also a road warrior who spends upwards of 25 weeks a year at tech conferences in the US, Canada, and AMIA. Nonetheless, she somehow found the time to join us to discuss the evolution of the analyst space over the past three decades, her approach to choosing projects, and how she got rid of that pesky Boston accent for this fourth season premiere episode of Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B Tech. I'm Dave Reddy, head of Big Valley Marketing's Media and Influencers Practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old-fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B Tech's top two hundred media and influencers. Including Maribel. Here's our chat with Maribel. Enjoy. It's been a long time coming. Uh you and I have known each other a long time. So this this for me is a great pleasure. Thank you.
Maribel Lopez:It's great to see you, Dave. And it has been great uh working with you over the years. It's been many years now. We won't say how many because we don't want to say how many.
Dave Reddy:People can guess. That uh that might come out a little bit in the bio portion of the uh the podcast. But uh so we have a something in common, and you are the third or fourth guest who has this in common with me. You you grew up in Massachusetts. Now, was it the city itself or the suburbs?
Maribel Lopez:I grew up in the city of Boston in the South End.
Dave Reddy:Wow. Not to be confused with South Boston, which is the the hard scrabble Irish neighborhood. So tell me about the South End. Tell people about the South End.
Maribel Lopez:South End was a really interesting, ethnically diverse place with lots of great diverse food options. And you know, I really enjoyed it. But I've had a lot of great places I've lived and enjoyed at this point. But Boston will always be home. As I said to you earlier, you can take the girl out of Boston, but you can't take the Boston out of the girl.
Dave Reddy:Yeah, and I I think for those who aren't from Boston, uh the the South End and now living near San Francisco, the South End reminds me, it's like the most San Francisco part of Boston, to your point. Uh very ethnically diverse, very it seems to be the most liberal part of a very liberal city, artsy things along those lines.
Maribel Lopez:Yeah, it's got a lot of great architecture in it as well. And you know, I think I've always lived in places that have had interesting architecture. I happen to like old world architecture. It's because I grew up in an old city. So I tend to gravitate towards places that have some of that somewhere, you know, at least something that was from, you know, no earlier than the 1930s kind of thing.
Dave Reddy:Well, yeah, I mean, yet if you go downtown, you get those roads that were built in like, you know, 1620. Those are always fun to navigate. But um uh speaking of uh speaking, uh you and I all share another trait. Uh at least unless I'm tired or I've landed at Logan Airport and have been there for more than five minutes. What happened to your accent?
Maribel Lopez:Oh, that's kind of interesting. So I I was born and raised in Boston, but my parents weren't really a fan of the Boston accent. So they didn't want me to have a Boston accent at home. Well, they didn't want me to have a Boston accent, but I decided to have a Boston accent when I was outside of the home because who wants to be different when you're a child, right?
Dave Reddy:Absolutely. And plus it's it's really kind of hard to not I think of the Boston accent as almost like a disease. It just creeps into you whether you wanted to or not. Then all of a sudden you're talking like this and dropping your eyes and talking about how the Sox are gonna win at Fenway tonight. And it's amazing how, like I said, I if I land at Logan, by the time I get to by the time I get to the curb for my taxi, my alphabet has gone from 26 to 25 letters. So moving on to your career, you you went to Babson College, which is outside Boston. It's uh it's in Wellesley, and then you jumped right into marketing, actually, at a little company called Motorola. And that was, of course, long before everyone had a cell phone. Some people had cell phones. Gordon Gecko had a cell phone in Wall Street.
Maribel Lopez:Somebody had to have a cell phone, yeah. You remember Gordon Gecko. Yeah, uh, so yeah, I I was raised in Boston, and then I went to school in Wellesley. I wanted to go to business school. Somewhere along the line, I did take entrepreneurship, but I actually went in for finance and ended up shifting into marketing over the course of that time. I went to Motorola, and the idea behind, you know, I started in finance at Motorola, and Motorola was, you know, certainly in the smartphone business at that time, and smartphones look like bricks. So this really is dating me. I remember I had one that was like a brick with the edge cut off of it.
Dave Reddy:So an antenna.
Maribel Lopez:Oh, you could drop that thing out of a 10-story window and roll over it with a car and it would still work. I mean, they were really industrial back in the day.
Dave Reddy:Yeah, made with the same uh material that they make uh airplane black boxes out of, I think.
Maribel Lopez:God, you could kill somebody with that thing back in the day. It was heavy, it was industrial. So Motorola had a lot of products though, and Motorola was fascinating in the sense that it had cell phones, it had networking equipment, so there was a lot of different products sold in many different places in the world, and I knew a lot about them. But then Motorola was very good about education, and they wanted you to take a certain amount of educational programs per year, and they had their own universities. So I decided one day that I wanted to understand what some of these different products did and what they were. So this takes you back into the early days of networking. So I learned a lot about networking in the early days, and that was interesting, and that parlayed into competitive intelligence for the marketing organization. And there were some interesting dynamics around that because uh information wasn't freely available back then. You know, you actually had to call people and get them to mail you things, and you read magazines that were hardcover. You know, there's like computer world came in and in hard copy. It was a different time. So yeah, I am old, unfortunately. So at any rate, it was really interesting. And somewhere along the line, I decided um I wanted to help with strategy. And so that's how that started. And you know, from there on, I I went into market research and did vendor analyst, vendor analyst kind of things. And now I'm my own analyst, so with my own firm.
Dave Reddy:Right right. So you started in '94 at IDC and Forester, still 98 at Forester, uh, still big firms. But you know, that's when I first got into the business. And, you know, those names and Gartner still, that that was like those and a few others. It would just, it was a different world for analyst firms. And I'm not sure the folks that have come up after us are aware of that. I mean, can can you talk about that landscape and just the power that these multiple firms had and how big they were?
Maribel Lopez:Yeah, it's really interesting that you say that. It was a very, it was a very different world. First of all, there weren't as many firms. I mean, we've seen a consolidation recently, but you know, it it was a point where there were a small number of firms driving the entire market.
Dave Reddy:Right.
Maribel Lopez:So IDC was one of them. You know, DataQuest at the time was another one where there was just a lot of, they had a lot of focus on numbers and forecasting and also written research, but you know, a lot, a lot of it was around, you know, how big or small markets were going to be. And I appreciated that in in my own career, it was, it was, um, it mapped very well to the financial aspects I had been working on before. I decided that because I wanted to do strategy, I I rolled out into Shiva. Shiva was a technology company back in the early internet days. And and so so I worked with them on a lot of marketing and strategy. But what you what I realized from my IDC days that I thought was really interesting was I wanted to, you know, you either want to watch the game or play the game, is how I like to say this, right? So analysts watch the game, they watch all the cards, they watch how they're played, they make their predictions on who's gonna win, who's gonna bluff better than somebody else, you know. The best hand of cards, as we know, doesn't always win, right?
Dave Reddy:You're in the broadcast booth, so to speak.
Maribel Lopez:Yeah, so so it's quite interesting. And when I was at Technology Vendors, I I enjoyed it and I enjoyed that aspect of it, but you're fairly limited in what you can do. Your product is your product, right? So it's a it's a good product, it's a bad product, it's a product that's well timed, poorly timed. You don't, there's only so much impact you can have in that. So I I rolled back into Forester. And at that point in time, you know, we had big companies like Forrester, Yankee, IDC. They were sort of powered packs, they all tried to have like their Gartner, Giga, they all tried to have their own mark. And the thing I really loved about Forrester was how strategy-oriented it was at that point and how think tank it was. And and it was it was one of the few real commercial entities that was a think tank. You know, there were lots of think tanks, but they weren't really commercial entities. So it was a very interesting mix of, you know, trying to run a business on big ideas. So that's actually quite interesting. You know, the world evolved, and people offer, you know, if you look at Forrester or IDC or Gartner, they offer a wide range of products now, but the differentiations between the companies was far more stark back then.
Dave Reddy:It was.
Maribel Lopez:And, you know, there there was a lot of competition. There were fewer of them in some ways. You know, there's then there was a big bang and then there was a consolidation, and then there was another bang and another consolidation. But having said all that, that's that's the reason I originally joined Forrester. It was a big think tank. I really loved working in a big think tank about technology. It was a small company. All of the research analysts could fit in one big conference room to get really good.
Dave Reddy:Got it. It it just it exuded huge, if you will.
Maribel Lopez:It exuded huge. This was like what? Um we're talking the late 90s, and I went to the $75 million party. When they reached $75 million, there were not even 100 people in research when that happened. You know, it was just a very different thing. But you know, we had um we're very collaborative. Lots of people came in and, you know, threw in their viewpoint on your ideas. So yeah, it was just a very different market than it is today. Today it's um we've gone to a market that is much more individual product and specialized. And that has its place, right? So but they're just different. So when I think about like the career trajectory, I watched a lot of change happen over 10 years at Forrester.
Dave Reddy:And you know, you yourself are part of that specialization. I mean, and you I again it's tough to think back this far, but when you spun out in 2008, I don't know if you were the first independent analyst, but it I don't think it was as common as it is now. It seems like most of the analysts I work with these days are independent or what we call on our side of the world, hybrid. So what was that like? And you know, how sure of you of what you were doing were you? Because that's that's a heck of a thing to go out on your own, you know, after a you know, several years of of being with two of the big motherships.
Maribel Lopez:It's interesting you say that. When I think back on it, the only other independent I can remember at the time was Jack Gold. He sort of forged this whole concept in a lot of ways. And I originally came out and I wasn't trying to be an independent industry analyst. I thought I would actually go work in marketing at a startup in Silicon Valley. I was in Silicon Valley at the time and wasn't a good fit for my skill sets. And over the course of, you know, me spending some time trying to figure out what I wanted to do, which is, you know, one of those I did have a break where I could do that, which I'm grateful for, always grateful for. I had a couple of clients reach out to me. And my my favorite story around this is actually my first client called me up and said something very descriptive to me. Do you still do that thing you do?
Dave Reddy:Was this before or after that movie came out? It was well after.
Maribel Lopez:And I'm just I'm just sitting there like on the phone, because you know, we didn't have video back then, it with this perplexed look on my face, like, I have no idea what he's talking about. But the answer is clearly yes.
Dave Reddy:Whatever it is, did you ever figure out what that I think I think I think I know, but I'm curious if you've ever figured out what did he mean by doing that thing you do.
Maribel Lopez:It was marketing and message testing.
Dave Reddy:Got it.
Maribel Lopez:So, but I didn't know that at the time. We figured that out at some point, and and we managed to struggle through a commercial relationship. But to get back to what you were saying, it was very different back then. Independence were not a thing. Procurement did not like independence, large firms did not like independence because they didn't see the value. Right. It was an extreme uphill battle in terms of growth of a business. And it took a couple of years for people to kind of get used to that concept. I think what really pushed that forward was this was really about the time when social media was truly taking hold. And you had analysts that focused on social media, and you had people that were in that space that went out and became independent voices. And that notion of, you know, moving out of what had been like a blogging era and into more of a social era and into building audiences became a big, huge mega trend. And so that really, I think, facilitated the ability for at least a certain number of the original independents to create a market and create a commercially viable market. Still not easy. I mean, honestly, today it's still not easy. Today you have a different problem. Today's problem is you have a plethora of independents. And as an organization, hey, I don't want to contract with a hundred different people. It used to be you contracted with five, right? Now you're looking at I've got a hundred and five because you still have the same five you had, and then all the other independents that have come out of the woodwork over the course of the several years. So, you know, we've seen a lot of different change in the industry. I don't know if that's helpful to kind of give you some context on it, but it's how I saw it.
Dave Reddy:Aaron Powell No, we see it from our side too. And and and our clients have to choose among you, you know, who they like the best, who who works, who works with them the best. And that must be must make it a little harder for some of the folks on your side. I know you're well sought after, but uh I wouldn't want to be getting into that game today.
Maribel Lopez:I think the hardest thing, you know, this is the thing that I've seen technology vendors struggle with, but it's also a thing that industry analysts struggle with as well, equally. And this is the concept of we won't even call it your unique value proposition. We'll just call it, for lack of a better term, your value proposition. And I think that when organizations are building programs working with independence, they really have to figure out like what's the mix of value propositions they want. And an analyst has to be really clear about what their value proposition is because yeah, as an independent, you can't be everything to everyone, and you can't be the same as a forester or a gardener or an IDC. You either don't have the people, you don't have the ability to separate yourself enough from the brand to do rankings. There's all sorts of things that don't work as an independent. So you have to be really clear on what your thing is and articulate that to people and also be very specific, if that's not what they want, then you're not the right fit for them. And that's hard. It's hard to walk away from business, particularly in the beginning. And I think the biggest challenge independents have is they come out and they think they're going to do their independent thing the way they did their corporate thing. And they're totally separate. You might have aspects of that, but you will not be able to do whatever you've done the same way.
Dave Reddy:So how does that play out? I you we talked a little bit earlier about your one of your magic powers of being able to message test and and and and mark testing marketing and things like that. And you and I have had conversations like that. I would presume you have honest conversations with clients before they become clients or prospects about that. And how does that play out? Are some just and I know the answer in a sense because I we face it on our side, but are some just like yeah, I really would just rather you just put me on a podcast and I'll pay you $5,000 for it? Or I mean is is that what you're talking about?
Maribel Lopez:Like the difference between the Well So if you if you if we flip it around and think about what people need for value, right? Everybody wants a different outcome. And you have to be really clear on trying to understand what their outcome is. Sometimes our outcome is I need content done in such a way that my buyers will understand what I do. That's one potential outcome you could need. That content could be written, it could be video, it could be podcasts. And then the question is in that content, you know, how specific does it need to be to you? Right. So if someone like me says, hey, I can write you a great trend piece on what enterprise buyers are thinking about building customer experience, you might love that. You might love AI and customer experience as a trend piece. You may, on the other hand, however, want something that wants to talk specifically about my implementation of a chatbot. In which case that's probably a different analyst, right? So that's not me, right? And and so, you know, I decided that my value proposition was understanding buyers and be able to connect technology to business value, right? So I write stories about that, I do videos about that, I try to help vendors, you know, surface what they really do that's unique and interesting so that they can market that to people. So that's my value proposition. Other people have value propositions that say, hey, I am the biggest, baddest person for interviewing your executive on camera, no matter how deeply technical this is, right? Right. Superpower, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Maribel Lopez:Making making like super detailed technical stuff interesting on video, superpower, right? But that's a different value proposition. And you know, the person that's gonna do A doesn't necessarily do B, right? Then you might have a I just need message testing. I don't care about any external facing stuff that you might do. I just want your brain on like, does this work or not work? Right. That's a value proposition. So, and the thing is, depending on where you are in your cycle as a company, you might need different things at different times back on this discussion of hey, you know, when you're dealing with companies and they know you and you're sought after, you might be highly sought after for a while. It might be that your technology area is the hottest thing on the planet. Remember when we did mobile? Oh my god, right? Mobile was amazing. It was a great mobile.
Dave Reddy:You're on mobile?
Maribel Lopez:You've I loved you got an app on the phone.
Dave Reddy:Right.
Maribel Lopez:Exactly. So there there was, you know, there there was a time where that was like the only thing anybody wanted to talk about, and then they didn't. And then you weren't the hot analyst for people anymore. It went somewhere else, right? So, you know, understanding do you have the right topic? Understanding does the client actually want to buy what because the client will say they want to buy whatever you're gonna sell them, but then are they gonna be disappointed when they don't get, you know, when there was a miscommunication about what that value looked like. So I spent a lot of time in my own business trying to make sure I understand, am I the right value prop for you before we even get to a contract? Because then it's a lot of wasted time and energy and disappointment. And nobody wants that. Yeah, I hired Lopez Research and it was an awful experience. No one wants to hear that, right? So you got to be really careful about brand protect, which you know more than anybody, given what you've done. You know, your what is your brand value promise? And are you delivering on it? Are you the ultimate driving machine or not? You know, are you the Batman of cars or not? Like there's things that you need to know whether you are. And so I think people come out and they just assume that they're gonna do research and they're gonna throw it over the wall and people are gonna buy it and love it, and it's all gonna be good. And by the way, selling syndicated research has to be one of the hardest things I could imagine on the planet right now. Right. Yeah. For a lot of reasons. You decided the topic was great. Does anybody that's reading that really want to read that specific thing? No, they want to know what you care about, what you're researching. But oftentimes our syndicated research just has to be so high level, it's not valuable enough. So that's another whole thing. If you want to have a standard repeatable product, it's really hard in 2025 to figure out what a standard repeatable product for multiple people looks like.
Dave Reddy:I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I will, I will what I'm hearing and uh where there's a relationship to what what we do on our side of the ball is the notion that, at least from our perspective, it it you know, obviously we get a lot of calls and and call me if you have this question. There's a little ad for you. Can you get me in newspaper X? Can you get me on TV show X? And and I'm willing to have that conversation, but I think it's the wrong question. I think the question is, can you help me tell my story better? And uh that may or may not be your responsibility as an analyst or or if you're putting on your consulting hat, perhaps it is, but that's a difficult conversation to happen. Everybody, understandably, me too, wants instant gratification. In fact, I like to say that instant gratification takes too long. But there's work that needs to be done, typically, with 99% of brands to figure out okay, what is your story? How does that work for the x an external audience, the outside in, which isn't our thing, but isn't our what we came up with, but it's the philosophy we work by, the outside in story that's going to matter to a bunch of people as opposed to just you and your company. Is that kind of what you're talking about in terms of what you're thinking and when you're looking at when you're thinking about new prospect?
Maribel Lopez:So that's one of the so trying to because of the way my specific model works, and I'm not saying this is good or bad, this is my specific model, this is what works for me. And what I decided a long time ago was that my brand wouldn't be big enough individually to separate it from just looking like you paid me a lot of money to say whatever you wanted to be said. That was the the nut of it. I couldn't get around it. I tried, and then I said, well, we just don't do that. And it just makes it really easy and simple and clean, right? That's not to say that anybody does that, can't do it better. I've seen independents that have launched really good, solid ranking reports and have become bigger companies and have done really well at that, but that just wasn't what I wanted to do. So that's one thing. The everybody wants a quote in newspaper XYZ or an article in newspaper, online newspaper XYZ that you write for is pervasive. And it's not that those pitches can't work. It's that when people approach you, they approach you the wrong way. Transactional. The it's it's not even well. So, first of all, you know, ethically you're not supposed to take money to have posts in these. We could debate whether or not people do, but ethically, that's not how it's supposed to be done. It's supposed to be an earned media piece. So, as you know, probably as well as anybody on the planet, thank you. They don't approach with an earned media topic. They approach with a I'm launching XYZ and I want you to write about it. It's like, well, that's great. I know that that's news for you, but the stories I want to tell are how your customer implemented blah blah and had some really great outcome. I will tell that story all day long if somebody wants to show up with it because it's a story that adds value. It's like somebody had a problem, they leveraged technology to get over the problem, and they had a really great outcome. It's hard to get people to come on for that, but there it doesn't actually even have to have the client name. It could be, you know, financial institution XYZ. Right. But it can't start with like, I've got the most industry leading, groundbreaking blah de blah, and I want you to write about it. I'm like, well, I don't have the time for that, first of all.
Speaker 2:Right.
Maribel Lopez:So second, I don't have the interest for that as an individual. So I think there's a lot of opportunity if we reframe it, that people would get better at it. But this is just a lack of understanding of how things are done, because there are parts of the market where you can buy exactly the content you want. So, how do you know? Like, why wouldn't you ask everybody? Right. If if it happens in in, you know, company A, it could happen in company B. So I'm gonna ask you. So this is what I mean that you have to spend, I I'm no longer offended by it because I understand that from a business perspective, this is what's valuable to you. This is what you want. And, you know, I either do or don't deliver the thing that you said you wanted. And if I don't deliver it, I often refer to the people they do. Like we all know each other. I mean, my God, Dave, how long has it been? Like we all know each other. So I know who can deliver your whatever. If and if you ask me, I will tell you. And I will tell you honestly, like, you know, if I think it's good, if I think it's worth it. And I would like to hope that, you know, other and I mean, I know there's some people that do the same for me.
Dave Reddy:So there's a a Venn diagram I like to use that I I think you you just described when I'm media coaching people, which is what you think is news and what they influencers think is news. And now the the diagram, obviously, like any Venn diagram, can shift around depending on one, what the news is, and two, what the influencer cares about, to your point. Some influencers are perfectly happy just interviewing you on what you want to say. Not a lot. And so the Venn diagram is, you know, on one side, it's the hey, we need a big push for this. Our competitors got an article for this, and all of that is perfectly good stuff, and it's a reason to start the conversation, but they're they're missing that on the other side. First of all, what the very definition of the word news is is a reason it's called news. What is new? And while your product is new, and it might be interesting, could very well be interesting, and I I hope to God it is, because that's the easiest thing to do. It's typically how your product fits into a larger trend and that you can talk about somewhat uniquely. So finding that middle ground, that's the magic, and that's what keeps me coming back to this gig. And you know, and I'm I'm in it, I'm always actually heartened to hear about that. That there are people like you who are on the other side of the ball who have the same mindset. So bravo.
Maribel Lopez:It's really a great opportunity that I don't think enough people leverage. I've seen sort of as a best practice. When you go to these industry events, right? So someone's having their customer conference. Try to take one of those people and match them up with a customer that's doing something interesting. Let them talk to them, let them let them be let it become an organic story. And those are always great because usually the customers that are there that you had put out, they're friendly. They want to talk about their story, they want to talk about why it was amazing and changed the world for their company. So it's a it's a good fit for everybody, but it's not as utilized as it should be. And you really have to plan those things up front, right? You got to make sure that there's enough time in the analyst calendar that they can like go out and do that half-hour meeting and that the client's set up for the half hour meeting. So it's not a it's not a thing that's easy to execute on the back end when you're there. You kind of got to pull that into the front end of the discussion.
Dave Reddy:Speaking of industry events, shifting the conversation a little bit forward. I feel like every time I call you, you're not in Charleston. What you live by now in Charleston, South Carolina. You are today. How many, how many weeks a year are you on the road? How many and how many continents do you hit in a given year?
Maribel Lopez:Yeah. Fortunately, the continents are fewer. I I think one of the good news there is that the analysts have become a bit more regional. So that's good. I'm mostly a North American European analyst. I don't do as much in APAC and LATOM. So those are the, you know, those are the continents that I I sit in for the most part. You know, I think that, and and sadly, the the answer to that question is it's somewhere between 20 and 25. Weeks a year. Wow. It's but it's not actually spread out nicely. They come in clumps where it's every week for 12 weeks in a row, kind of thing. Because you have seasons that are like April, May, June, and then you have September, October, November, right? So that's and to layer on to that question, there are usually multiple events per week. I try to only go to one event a week, but some of my analyst friends I've seen at three events in a week, which is just devastating to go from uh some of them are co-located because Vegas, obviously, you're probably in Vegas, what, four or five times a year at least. You would be surprised how many red eyes people take from the West Coast to New York for another.
Dave Reddy:Oh, to get to another event. I gotcha. Yeah, okay.
Maribel Lopez:It's it's really quite startling to see people show up at like six o'clock in the morning fresh off a plane. I feel fair.
Dave Reddy:But okay. So shifting to another thing, talk to me about the Data for Betterment Foundation. I want to get into what you think of current tech, but before we do that, let's talk a little bit about this project. It sounds really exciting.
Maribel Lopez:Yeah, I'll make that quick. So about the time that future of work became a big thing and we were looking at, you know, COVID and collaboration and all the changes that were happening in work, I decided that I wanted to find a nonprofit that would help educate individuals, but also companies, on the changes that technology was going to bring to work and how they might embrace that. I'm personally really passionate about the need for us to reskill our existing staff. I think everybody assumes they're just going to go out and find this new talent that knows everything that they need. It may or may not exist. Also, you lose all the benefit of people that know you and know how to work within your system and culture. So I spent a lot of time talking from the Data for Betterment Foundation with organizations about well, how do we think about how you might upskill people? Particularly now with AI, I think everybody's more hip to that.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Maribel Lopez:But you know, when you go back to COVID, they it was a very different thing. There definitely was an assumption, I'll just go out and get whatever I need. You know, we're moving to cloud, I'll go get cloud people, right? Or move into mobile, I'll get mobile people or software developers. And I think we now are at a healthier realization, particularly as we moved into AI and there was so much emphasis on, you know, no data scientists and all this other things. People started saying, oh, hmm. So anyway, that's what I do in my free time. My own podcast is sort of partially dedicated to that. And, you know, like I said, I do run across the globe different opportunities around, you know, how do we think about the future work? And this is everything from digital inclusion in places like Africa to get them up and running to how do we think about using AI in the contact center when you know you're not used to this type of technology as an individual. So it's a lot of it takes a lot of different formats, but it's um it's it's good, meaningful work that I hope to do more of over the course of time. So if anybody wants to talk to me about, you know, running some program, I'd be happy to discuss that.
Dave Reddy:Fantastic. And and that is to your point, I mean, that that whole notion of reskilling workers is a conversation we have on our side with a lot of different clients. And and obviously, I mean it's it's it's a big part of what's going on with AI. You mentioned before that, you know, the mobile days were fun, but you recently told me that you've you've you've shifted largely to AI now, which makes total sense, especially given what you just told me about your foundation. So what is your sense of AI as you've focused more and more on it? And you've you obviously hinted a little bit about it in your last answer, but and by the time this runs in October, everything you and I will talk about AI will have changed. But is it a force for good? Is it pure evil? Is it both?
Maribel Lopez:Well, it's both. If you are a hacker, it's a force for evil, and they use it very well, right? So that's that's the downside. If you're not responsible, it's can be a force for evil as well, because there's all sorts of terrible things that could happen with people's data and other things, right? But in general, I'm personally an optimist, and I believe that there's a lot of optimism in this technology, and it's around learning how to use it. The rate of change that we're experiencing with AI right now is unlike anything anybody's ever seen in technology. Literally every three months, there's something wonderfully new and difficult to understand. So, as analysts in AI, you can't say you are an AI analyst because honestly, that's like saying you cover error because every product on the planet is going to have some kind of AI in it. So, you know, I've tried to be a little more specific over the course of the past year and a half of what an AI cover. You know, so I look at AI as it relates to customer experience. I look at edge AI in terms of how people are deploying AI in things like quick service restaurants or for robotics. And then I also look at the governance and security of AI itself, of things like large language models and agenda AI, which is really still very huge, but it's still applied in that regard. So I think AI will be very powerful. I think everybody agrees with that. I also think it's very difficult to extract the value out of it unless you spend a lot of time trying to figure out what to do. So this tying back to a key, so so we've seen, you know, in the market research world, there's a real tussle going on with the clickbait story right now. And the clickbait story we have related to AI is, you know, somewhere between 85 and 95% of all AI projects fail or never make it out of, you know, proof of concept. That seems to be like the big thing that's going on right now, making big headlines, frankly, causing a lot of anxiety within technology buyers at the moment. So I spent a lot of time trying to say, okay, what is or what isn't working? Like, you know, what do people do that's wrong that you can avoid? What are people doing right that you can use? Finding examples of actual return with real companies that you can share with people so that they know that somebody made it happen. Finding those in a right-sized fashion, you know, it's really easy to say that some extremely large financial services firm with billions of dollars could make AI work for them. They have enough people, they have enough money. So then you also have to try to balance that with, well, if you're a mid-tier business, what would that look like? So I think there's, you know, from the AI perspective, I'd like to see us get into a place where we spend less time talking about what went what's going wrong, and more time talking about like, how do we make it work well for organizations? And if we don't get there, it's it's hard at this point.
Dave Reddy:Well, talk about your organization, which I realize is largely you. How are you using AI? It's obviously changed marketing, it's changed journalism, it's changed analysis. How do you use it? And more perhaps equally important, how have you chosen not to use it?
Maribel Lopez:Yeah. So so I'll I'll give you examples of the good and bad. So for me personally, I'm a procrastinator. And I kind of know why Hemingway shot himself. Because if you stare at that blank page long enough, it like really makes you unhappy. Wow. No, dude. Okay, let's just be let's just the real, real. If you write at all, ever, you never ever feel like whatever you've written is good enough. There's always be something you could add to it. It's always crap the first time you do it, right? So some people, I had a boss that would sit down and he would just literally bang something out, and it would be frankly amazing. And I was always amazed by that. And I was like, How do you do that? And he's like, Well, I just sit down and start writing, and then when I'm done, I read it, and if I don't agree with it, I go back and fix it. And I'm like, Oh, okay, I never mastered that until, until, until I decided here's what I want to write about, and I throw a prompt into some LLM, and it spits back something absolutely awful. And and I'm like, oh my god, no, that's not it. And then all of a sudden, the fact that you're not staring at a blank page.
Dave Reddy:I hear you.
Maribel Lopez:It's like you can just reach into the future and decide what you want to write. And you rewrite the whole darn thing. There's like maybe eight words left from the LLM when you're done with it, but then you ask the LLM to put a better title with it because I write crap titles. So it's really good at giving me a good title after I figured out like what I want to put into the document. So I love that. And and so, but here's the danger of that, right? It looks amazing when you put it into the LLM and it comes back. You know, it can be grammatically correct, it could have excellent pros, it can have all this stuff, right? But if you haven't really gone that extra mile to make sure it's what you wanted, it's your voice, it's the right accurate content, it's sideways on you and you don't even know it, right? So these people that like take AI, they have it write something and then they just publish it. If you go on to open AI in their safety and security section, they literally have a chart that's all their models listed and how much they hallucinate. It's a live living document. You can go check it out anytime. When and they've got large models and small models, right? Because there's a perception that, like, well, small models don't hallucinate. Well, yeah, small models hallucinate as well, just not as much, but sometimes as much. So on average, we're looking at 20 to 35% hallucination out of the box. Literally just makes stuff up. Right? Okay.
Dave Reddy:It's more than people hallucinate, which is hard.
Maribel Lopez:Yeah. So, so, so that's how so I use AI to get over the blank page. I use AI for first trolling of information. The internet's a big place. There's a lot of content out there. You can ask it to, you know, find a bunch of stuff for you. I look at all the sourcing, and anything that's ever said sent to me from AI. I've tried to get more specific about what kinds of sourcing I want. You know, so these are things you learn over the course of time of using the technology. It's like, yeah, okay, a source is a source is a source is not true. There are credible sources, and then they're just people pontificating with like no meaningful whatever, but they've got great SEO. So you have to make sure that you understand the quality of your research. The BBC actually did a really interesting study on this, and they figured out that models that were summarizing their documents were 17 to roughly 33 or 35 percent inaccurate.
Dave Reddy:And that's just what's the point?
Maribel Lopez:Which boy oh boy, right? That tells you a lot right there. So just don't go copying those AI summaries thinking they're like the thing, right? So these are things that you learn.
Dave Reddy:Wow. Well, there there's never a good segue to my final question. But uh and I think you kind of answered it in the open, but I'm gonna ask it anyway. So Boston, San Francisco, or Charleston?
Maribel Lopez:I'm a firm believer that there are different times for different places.
Dave Reddy:Okay.
Maribel Lopez:And I have thoroughly and there was New York as well. I lived in New York for a year. So I'm on my tour of great American cities. I don't know if my tour is over, but I'm, you know, certainly in love with Charleston at the moment. But they've all been very different. They all bring different things to your soul. And I think that as an individual, you need to be open to experiencing what that is and not comparing it to what something else was.
Dave Reddy:Well, that was the most philosophical and non-committal answer I've ever gotten to that question.
Maribel Lopez:I'm in Charleston now. I love Charleston. You know, I've done all the other places. They were, you know, when you were young in New York, it's great. Would I want to go back to New York now? Not really. I like visiting, but it's it wouldn't be, I'd have a different life there. It's not a bad life or worse life. It's just different than the life I want now. And Charleston's great for the life I want now.
Dave Reddy:Well, Maribel, it was a pleasure. And I wish we could talk for hours, but we cannot to finally have you on the show. You were wonderful, and thank you for your incredible insight. You are to say that you're part of our quote unquote top 200 influencers is you're you're you're in the top ten easy. Thank you so much for your time.
Maribel Lopez:Thank you so much. You're making me blush. Thanks, Dave.
Dave Reddy:Take care. I'd like to thank you all for listening today, and once again, a big thank you to Maribel Lopez of Lopez Research for helping us kick off our fourth season in style. Please remember to visit Maribel's website for the Data For Betterment Foundation at dataforbetterment.org. You'll find Maribel's pod at that link as well. And please don't forget to join us next month when we chat with yet another member of the B2B Tech Top 200. In the meantime, if you've got feedback on today's podcast, or if you'd like to learn more about Big Valley marketing and how we identify the B2B Tech Top 200, be sure to drop me an email at dReady at bigvalley.co. That's D R E D Y at Big Valley at all one word.co no M. You can also email the whole team at pressing matters at bigvalley.co. Once again, thanks for listening, and as always, think pick.
