This episode is also available in video format on www.Loyalty.TV and on our Youtube channel.
Loyalty Methods was last on our show almost two years in late 2023, when they described themselves as “Loyalty’s Best Kept Secret” .
Right now, they are successfully powering some of the industry’s MOST engaged loyalty programs including 7-Eleven’s 7 Rewards, MGM Resorts & Casinos, Western Union, BP USA and Speedway, among others.
Chris Sandstrom, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Loyalty Methods, and CEO and CTO Emil Sarkissian, join us to share some of their unique strategies which have allowed them achieve this incredible client list.
They also share their outlook on AI and some exciting insights on what the future holds for Loyalty Methods now that “their moment has come”.
This episode is sponsored by Loyalty Methods.
Show notes:
Emil: 7-Eleven were sort of looking for an improvement in their loyalty program, and said, hey, what do you guys have?
Emil: And the other thing they mentioned is, we don’t really want to disrupt our relationship with our current vendor, so we can’t let them know if we’re trying to replace them.
Emil: Out of those constraints came the idea of SafeSwitch, which was that, you know, okay, we have to sort of viciously sort of bring up our platform in production, loan all the traffic, get everything going, compare them, and basically have this whole idea that essentially, it’s try before you buy to the map.
Emil: And what’s interesting is that after we went live, the system is running in parallel.
Emil: We become the system of record.
Emil: Then what happened is we basically continued sending traffic to the old system, and the existing vendor was actually believing that they were the system of record for another month.
Emil: And people like Western Union, in fact, when we switched on Germany and the US into the biggest markets, literally had to call and say, did we actually go live?
Emil: Because we didn’t see anything happen to us.
Emil: And I’m like, well, you know, that’s the idea, right?
Emil: The idea is that nothing should be a non-event.
Emil: All the risk is before that.
Chris: 7-Eleven was the first one who took the chance on it.
Chris: Since then, zero downtime over those buttons.
Chris: When you think of the Loyalty Methods movement, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Chris: It’s not some tagline and marketing line that we’re trying to get out there.
Chris: It is the true internal mind shift.
Chris: I hate that word, platform.
Chris: That was actually a big mind shift for me.
Chris: I’m like, wait a second.
Chris: We’re an engine.
Chris: We don’t have all these reconnections and modules and all these different things.
Chris: Think of modules like Legos.
Chris: If you buy three different packs of Legos, right?
Chris: You get a Star Wars one, you get a Princess one and a Disney one and try to start moving those pieces together, they’re not going to all fit.
Chris: We like to look at modules like, like Walter.
Emil: With SafeSwitch, I think I remember Chris early on telling me that, you know, this is not really possible.
Emil: I said, honestly, I thought the same thing when I first started promising this, that am I promising something that really might not actually work out?
Chris: We should probably stop talking about this out loud.
Emil: Yeah, I know.
Paula: I hope all your trademarks and IP is in place.
Paula: I’m sure it’s well protected.
Paula: Hello and welcome to Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV, a show for loyalty marketing professionals.
Paula: I’m Paula Thomas, the founder and CEO of Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV, where we feature insightful conversations with loyalty professionals from the world’s leading brands.
Paula: If you work in loyalty marketing, join us every week to hear the latest ideas and insights for loyalty marketing specialists around the world.
Paula: Hello and welcome to Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV.
Paula: It’s Paula Thomas here and I’m delighted to be back today with some friends of the show that I’ve been personally really looking forward to interviewing.
Paula: Today’s guests are joining us from Loyalty Methods, who were last on the show almost two years ago in late 2023.
Paula: At the time, Loyalty Methods was being described as perhaps Loyalty’s Best Kept Secret.
Paula: And I’m delighted they’ve chosen to work with us again to ensure they are not a secret anymore.
Paula: Loyalty Methods now power some of the industry’s most engaged loyalty programs, including 7-Eleven’s 7 Rewards program, MGM Resorts & Casinos, Western Union, Bp Usa and Speedway, among others.
Paula: Joining me for the first part of the show and leading the charge worldwide is Christopher Sandstrom whose career includes nearly a decade working in enterprise loyalty and who is now the VP of Sales and Marketing at Loyalty Methods.
Paula: We’re joined later in the conversation by CEO and CTO, Emil Sarkissian.
Paula: I hope you enjoy my conversation today with Loyalty Methods who tell me their moment has now arrived.
Paula: So, Chris, welcome to Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV.
Chris: Thank you for having me, Paul.
Chris: It’s been too long.
Chris: I’ve been trying to get on here.
Paula: Oh, honestly, Chris, I feel like this is like the most dearly awaited on both sides.
Paula: We’ve both been wanting to have this conversation.
Paula: I know you’re doing extraordinary work in the industry and have a lot to talk about today.
Paula: So really very heartfelt welcome onto the show.
Paula: Lots going on.
Paula: Yes, indeed.
Paula: And actually, I was just thinking you guys were one of our very first Loyalty TV episodes way back in 2023.
Paula: And now you’re almost one of my last to host as well.
Paula: So pretty iconic.
Paula: You guys are part of history.
Chris: We’re going to miss you, Paula.
Chris: We’re going to miss you.
Paula: The show will still be here.
Paula: I think our audience knows we have an amazing network.
Paula: Show is going on.
Paula: Absolutely, Chris.
Paula: So listen to me, as you know, we always have an opening question just to get a sense of who you are as an individual.
Paula: Everybody who comes on this show is a loyalty leader of some shape or form.
Paula: So I’m going to ask you, Chris, just for our audience around the world listening today, do you have a favorite book that you really feel has helped you become a better loyalty leader?
Chris: You know, what’s funny is I actually had my niece out this week and she’s super into Harry Potter.
Chris: We went to go see the play on Broadway and I really, really wanted to, so I was sitting there thinking, I was like, I want to talk about Harry Potter so bad on this because it’s the first series that I feel like I lost myself in to another world, but you can’t do fiction.
Chris: So I actually decided, I get a lot of my inspiration actually through watching interviews and quotes from people I admire, people who I think have done great things in whatever industry they’re in.
Chris: And I feel like I’ve actually, you know, I still think of today almost on a daily basis.
Chris: So one of them, it’s actually pretty funny, it was pretty young when I heard this, and it was told by Ashton Kutcher.
Chris: So ready?
Chris: But this is a Steve Jobs quote, but I was watching like the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards or something, and Ashton Kutcher won one, and he gets up there and he’s like, you know, people grow up thinking that the world around them like is what it is, right?
Chris: Like that they have to play within these rules, and I’m going to deviate a little here, but for me it was like, oh, you got to go to college, you got to get student loans, you got to come home at five, like, I’m going to live this life around me.
Chris: But then he’s like, the people who invented the world around you, everything you see, all the rules were invented by people no smarter than you.
Chris: So that kind of clicked for a minute where it’s like, you know, maybe I can do something meaningful.
Chris: You know, I didn’t think I was going to go ahead and change the world and put an iPhone in everybody’s hands, but I did think I could potentially change my world and put an iPhone in my hand.
Chris: But then as I broke into the loyalty industry, I got lucky early, you know, I hit a nice swing.
Chris: I was closing clients, but as everybody who’s watching this probably knows, that tends to fizzle out here and there and it could get a little hard.
Chris: And there’s this great podcaster, I forgot his name, it’s going to drive me crazy, Ross, but he’s known as the Corporate Bro.
Chris: He does a lot of funny things.
Chris: You guys should look into him, he’s hysterical.
Chris: He really knows our industry.
Chris: And the whole idea, I was watching this interview with him and because he’s amassed some big popularity and they’re like, why did you start this?
Chris: And he was actually a salesperson selling technology at Oracle, I believe it was, and he’s straight upset.
Chris: He goes, guys, we are professional losers.
Chris: It is hard.
Chris: It is very hard to sell this.
Chris: It’s a very hard business.
Chris: Long sales cycles, all this.
Chris: So it’s very important to keep humor.
Chris: And I find that even in the office, in culture, with your team, even with the way we like to market, we always like to throw some kind of something fun into it.
Chris: Because let’s be real, we’re very lucky.
Chris: There’s a nobody dying on an operating table right now.
Chris: If we’re not having fun with it, it’s not really worth it.
Chris: And then last but not least, to keep up the momentum is you got to go to the goat.
Chris: The Mamba mentality of Kobe Bryant, who would always say, the people who do succeed the most, hard work will beat talent every day.
Chris: It’s the 4 a.m.s.
Chris: If you could just wake up, put in your hard work every day, you might not see that result the next day.
Chris: But you stack those days, and you’re going to be good.
Paula: Very well said, Chris.
Paula: I’m guessing you’re not a reader, but obviously you are paying a lot of attention to what inspires you.
Chris: Big Harry Potter reader, big Harry Potter reader.
Paula: Totally, totally.
Paula: Well, fiction has a place, but definitely I suppose we are here to learn what inspires you.
Paula: So I love the intention of doing something meaningful, Chris.
Paula: I think that’s really, really wonderful.
Paula: And I absolutely agree.
Paula: And that consistency is absolutely what drives success.
Paula: So we see it in our industry as well.
Paula: So many people start a podcast, and the average, would you believe, is 90 percent of podcasts never get past seven episodes, just because it’s such hard work?
Chris: I would have thought it was higher.
Chris: I would have thought it was like 95.
Paula: There you go.
Paula: There you go.
Paula: So listen, Chris, we’re here to talk about your role in Loyalty Methods.
Paula: And there’s obviously been an awful lot going on in the two and a half years since Emil was on the show.
Paula: But before we even talk about the business, I’d love to just get a bit more about your background.
Paula: So we’ve learned a bit about your Harry Potter, about your niece, and about some ups and downs.
Paula: Just tell us about your professional background.
Chris: Yeah, so I actually started, they always say like, you never kind of know where you’re going to actually end up.
Chris: Like going to college, I wanted to be a writer, director.
Chris: I was going to film movies.
Chris: And I got very, very lucky with my last employer who took a shot on me.
Chris: And I ended up in the loyalty space.
Chris: And I was throwing food and wine events in the Hamptons for rich people.
Chris: And I just wanted to get back out to the city.
Chris: And I got this interview I never thought I’d get.
Chris: And the team there was awesome.
Chris: They really saw something in me.
Chris: They gave me a chance.
Chris: I started in marketing.
Chris: As the years went on, I really started to see the marketing start to work.
Chris: And I started seeing these leads come in.
Chris: And I probably shouldn’t have done this, but just started taking a few sales calls myself.
Chris: And I found a kind of love for it.
Chris: I like talking to different people.
Chris: I like figuring out how to reframe things for different situations.
Chris: And all good things do come to an end.
Chris: I was at my last place for over half a decade, and I stumbled upon Loyalty’s Best Kept Secret, just like you did one day.
Chris: I took a look at that client portfolio.
Chris: My jaw dropped.
Chris: I learned a little more, and I was just like, I have to talk to these people.
Chris: And I don’t even think there was a job opening at the time.
Chris: I just reached out and was like, there’s something special here that you guys are doing, and I really just wanted to get involved.
Chris: And when you think of the Loyalty Methods movement, it’s not some tagline and marketing line that we’re trying to get out there.
Chris: It is this true internal mind shift, if you will.
Chris: So just taking a look at Loyalty Methods over the past, I think they were founded in 2007.
Chris: Right?
Chris: Yeah.
Chris: So the first, between 2007 and 2018, they were working strictly in a services space.
Chris: So they were working with the Starbucks, the Southwest, helping to integrate and migrate and do all these services for the old Siebel platforms and that.
Chris: And one day, our CEO, CTO, Emil, which by the way is awesome, having a leader who gets their hands dirty.
Chris: You know what I mean?
Chris: Like they’re, they’re not just pointing directions.
Chris: Like Emil was, before my team came here, not only building this product, he was taking sales calls.
Chris: He was doing NDAs and from 2018, when they launched that platform to 2025, to go from 7-Eleven, the MGM, to Western Union, to Bp, back, to back, to back, to back, and more, I’m leaving off.
Chris: Strictly from word of mouth, these guys never invested in marketing and it truly just is like, there needs to be a case study done on this.
Chris: Like it’s truly a masterclass and just word of mouth and when there’s a strong piece of tech, there’s a strong piece of tech and it was really just an easy choice for me.
Chris: And now that my team is here and I’ve been here, I was lucky enough to bring some people with me who I’ve been working with the last decade plus before Loyalty and now with us here running kind of that business side of things, it frees up our mad scientist, Emil, who again built Reactor CX in the cloud himself, main architect, now gets the opportunity to get back in the lab.
Chris: And I’m very, very, very excited to see the advancements.
Chris: This platform is gonna be rolling out in the next few months.
Paula: Yeah.
Paula: It’s exactly what impressed me, Chris, as well, the very first time I met Emil.
Paula: First of all, the brain power to be able to create a platform that is supporting clients of that magnitude.
Paula: And actually, I don’t even think I said it to him at the time, but I had been a judge for the International Loyalty Awards around the time the 7-Eleven and 7 Rewards was entering those awards.
Paula: And I remember the numbers just were blowing me away.
Paula: Of course, we can never talk about them.
Chris: Yeah, tell me.
Chris: I could say this out loud.
Chris: So 7-Eleven was the first one who took the chance on us when Emil was going into these meetings, selling his services products and whatnot, services.
Chris: And he just threw up a slide.
Chris: He’s like, hey guys, what do you think about this RCX thing?
Chris: Started going into Starbucks, all this.
Chris: 7-Eleven takes the chance on us.
Chris: And since then, ready?
Chris: Since then, 7-Eleven, who’s 24-7 business, hundreds, thousands of promotions, tons of partners, zero downtime over those five years.
Chris: That just blows my mind.
Paula: That’s incredible.
Paula: Wow.
Paula: Yeah.
Chris: They’re very tech focused.
Chris: Actually scared me for a minute.
Chris: I’ll get into this in a little bit, but there’s some funny stories.
Paula: I’m sure.
Paula: And I don’t talk tech, Chris, as I think you know, I talk about outcomes.
Paula: And I like that about Emil as well.
Paula: He definitely knows how to talk business.
Paula: And because I just don’t understand the jargon and even the product names, of course, they’re extremely important to you as the business owner and as the platform.
Paula: But to me, I’m just like, how’s it going to work?
Paula: What’s going to happen on the big campaign days?
Paula: I think you’ve just had 7-Eleven day actually in the US, haven’t you?
Chris: Yeah, we did.
Chris: Yes, we did.
Chris: And it was a very, very successful 7-Eleven day.
Chris: Just from a product side, it went very smoothly.
Chris: They had some of the most success they’ve had on their side.
Chris: So again, another home run by the team.
Chris: But I’m very excited about some of the stuff 7-Eleven is cooking up as well.
Chris: It’s overall, from the client portfolio, as you mentioned before, looking at an MGM, for example.
Chris: That’s not just a hospitality program, that’s hotel, that’s gaming, that’s the overlap with the sports betting, with the food and beverage, with the entertainment, with the retail boutiques.
Chris: It’s one of the most complex programs that could be out there.
Paula: And the regulatory side, Chris.
Paula: I mean, to me, that’s what blew my mind.
Paula: I’m like, okay, I think actually Emil is the only person in the world who understands the legalities of loyalty in gambling, because it must be a minefield.
Paula: So to crack that for a brand like MGM, like we had them on the show, thanks to you guys introducing us.
Paula: And I was just like, this is unbelievable.
Paula: And again, it’s one thing to have a coalition, but the legal stuff, you just can’t get that stuff wrong.
Chris: You’re not the only one to notice it.
Chris: We’re actually working with AWS to become official partners there.
Chris: We’ve got a very strong offering in that space.
Chris: I’m very excited to dig into it more.
Paula: Amazing.
Chris: Also, actually, I can’t stop, though, without calling out another big win from the OEM team.
Chris: I don’t think I can say the name, but I think a few months into my tenure here, we were able to close and break into a new industry in fashion retail apparel.
Chris: We made one of the bigger multi-brand projects out there.
Chris: So very excited to start experimenting in that space.
Chris: So a lot of fun times ahead.
Paula: Indeed, indeed.
Paula: So it means you have to come back on and talk about that as and when it’s in the public domain.
Chris: So don’t make me spam your LinkedIn inbox.
Paula: Brilliant stuff, Chris.
Paula: So definitely not the best kept secret in Loyalty anymore.
Paula: You guys are hugely ambitious and I can just see that by the fact that Emil brought you in.
Paula: Larger than life, literally world-class programs already being executed and lots of ambitions.
Paula: So talk to us a bit about what are the ideal clients?
Paula: Like who are you going after, you know?
Paula: Because there’s only so many 7 Rewards in the world.
Paula: What is it that you want to focus on?
Chris: So, you know, there’s a term, I feel like I termed it, but like coined it, but let’s be real, probably long before me.
Chris: But the idea of like every one kind of…
Chris: So you have a few different providers, right?
Chris: You have the, we specialize in e-comm, we specialize in travel, XYZ.
Chris: When you really look at our portfolio from like a Western Union in finance to the hospitality and gaming to fuel and convenience to fresh, it’s very diverse, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Chris: So one that attests to, you know, what just our platform RCX can really do.
Chris: And I hate that word platform.
Chris: That was actually a big mind shift for me coming here.
Chris: I actually started to panic a little bit.
Chris: I got, you know, I get the job, I’m diving into everything and I’m like, wait a second, we’re an engine, we don’t have all these pre-connections and modules and all these different things.
Chris: And then I had a very big, you know, shift in like perspective here.
Paula: Okay.
Chris: And the fact is that like, now I’ll double back into the ideal client, don’t worry, but it kind of, it all ties together.
Paula: Sure.
Chris: So you go online right now and a lot of the messaging going across the loyalty industry, it’s all in one, it’s out of the box, it’s pre-integrated, right?
Chris: And in reality, pre-integrations are not one-to-one.
Chris: Anytime you pre-integrate with something, they’re going to need something else, other data feeds sent at another brand, right?
Chris: To be all in one and for us to try to be your entire MarTech stack and the best at it, I just don’t, I no longer see that use case.
Chris: I used to think you needed all of these things to get in, but when you have a true, built for loyalty engine that is these platforms like to say modular, ours is not, we’ll get to that in a minute.
Chris: When you have this true loyalty engine that can adapt to almost any situation but what’s more, when you can complement it with a Safe Switch, that’s where we really get to dive into that ideal client.
Chris: It doesn’t matter the brand you are again, industry agnostic, what not, with safe switch, we’re able to help these bigger enterprises who, maybe back in the day, they were using a Siebel or something along those lines or they did a DIY.
Chris: How many brands do we know that they do it in-house?
Chris: Yeah.
Chris: But as time goes on and all these advancements come out and they grow, it’s really hard to keep up with it.
Chris: But then there’s always that battle, it’s so connected to everything, how can you move it over?
Chris: Luckily, we’re one of the only people in the industry, I think, if not the only, who can and are pulling the switch off with all of our clients.
Chris: I think we had 100 success percent rate with no downtime, no glitches on the customer end.
Chris: That’s a huge one we’re doubling down on right now.
Chris: I’m having a lot of fun marketing it.
Chris: But yeah, so I would say everybody, but the ICP, if you’re someone out there who’s got that Frankenstein tech stack, you’re working off an old Siebel, come and talk to them.
Paula: I love the Frankenstein.
Paula: I think we’ve all had to deal with all of that.
Paula: And again, my very big recollection from talking with Emil last time was this idea that essentially the programs were built behind the scenes fully in parallel, risk-free, and nobody even noticed.
Paula: And then literally, you were able to switch over from one platform to another.
Paula: I know you don’t like the platform word.
Chris: We actually did a LinkedIn post the other day.
Chris: I thought, you know, it illustrated pretty well.
Chris: It was like these two high-speed trains running side to side.
Chris: Right.
Chris: Imagine, so you got your current program speeding down that railway.
Chris: And then you got the new program speeding down.
Chris: Right.
Paula: Yeah.
Chris: We need to make sure that we could transfer everybody over this other train without someone falling off, without us having to hit the brakes.
Paula: Yeah.
Chris: And to be able to consistently do that time after time, it just blows my mind.
Paula: Okay.
Paula: Amazing.
Paula: So, Ideal Client Profile, basically anybody who’s got something that is literally crying out to be updated, definitely needs the absolute 100% guarantee risk-free that you guys do as a USP.
Paula: And yeah, you’re happy to talk to anybody by all accounts.
Chris: But then obviously the platform is just, I’ll let some others talk to that, but just the platform is very strong itself.
Chris: Yeah.
Paula: Okay.
Paula: And talk to me about this modular piece.
Paula: I know you have quite strong opinions about whether we need modular technology.
Chris: Yeah, because again, the industry started moving in this, at least from the media perspective, right?
Chris: All the thought leadership, all the branding on the websites, it’s where pre-integrated.
Chris: We have our MarTechs, we have our marketing automation, we have a CDP.
Chris: We have all of these things, which again is cool to try to go take over this whole MarTechs site, or maybe it’s people trying to get into TechStacks earlier.
Chris: Again, great.
Chris: Our thinking just isn’t, again, we’re led by a solution architect, a TechDy app.
Chris: Think of modules like Legos.
Chris: If you buy three different packs of Legos, you get a Star Wars one, you get a Princess one and a Disney one, and try to start moving those pieces together, they’re not going to all fit.
Chris: We like to look at modules like water, if you will.
Paula: What do you mean that we don’t need, I get the analogy that the Lego pieces don’t fit.
Paula: I’m glad we’re talking tech in a way that I understand, Chris.
Paula: Thank you for that.
Chris: I started in marketing.
Paula: There you go.
Paula: What’s this idea about water?
Paula: What’s the analogy?
Chris: Yeah.
Chris: Again, look at a modules, and even when you see them shaped on the website, they’re in shapes and they might not be able to fit into every shape of a martech stack of water.
Chris: The best way to explain it here is to be formless.
SPEAKER_4: Shapeless, like water.
SPEAKER_4: Now, you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup.
SPEAKER_4: You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle.
SPEAKER_4: You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot.
SPEAKER_4: Now, water can flow or it can crash.
SPEAKER_4: Be water, my friend.
Paula: That makes perfect sense, Chris.
Paula: And clearly the brains behind the water is your CEO and CTO, Mr.
Paula: Emil.
Paula: So I think it’s about time to bring Mr.
Paula: Emil back to the show.
Paula: Emil Sarkissian, welcome to Loyalty TV once more.
Emil: Thank you very much, Paula.
Emil: It’s fantastic to be here again.
Emil: Great to see you and to see the progress you’ve made with the show.
Emil: It’s amazing.
Emil: So thanks for having us.
Emil: You’re possibly one of the few remaining shows that are left with you personally.
Emil: I really enjoy talking to you.
Paula: Oh, thank you so much.
Paula: Honestly, this is the last one that I officially have in my diary.
Paula: I know there will have to be a final exit, but you guys at the moment are the last one there.
Paula: So, it’s a special day.
Chris: I have to say, the best for life.
Paula: Totally.
Paula: And Emil, thank you for letting me indulge some time with Chris.
Paula: I think he and I have been trying to get together on this show for a very long time.
Paula: So, he’s an extraordinary asset to your business.
Paula: So, first of all, congratulations on growing the company.
Paula: I can see all the ambition coming through.
Emil: Absolutely.
Emil: Thank you very much.
Emil: Yeah.
Emil: We’re very happy to have Chris and his team on.
Paula: Yeah.
Emil: Yeah.
Paula: Exciting.
Paula: Yeah.
Paula: Yeah.
Paula: Lots of potential there.
Paula: So, listen, kick us off then, Emil.
Paula: I’m going to ask you the same standard opening question, because, as you know, we’re keen to share these leadership insights.
Paula: Chris obviously gave us a number of quotes.
Paula: I think you’re more of a reader, perhaps.
Paula: I’m certainly a reader sporadically.
Paula: I’m also a bit of a Netflix person as well, but sure, we don’t talk about that here.
Paula: But in the context of the show, tell us about some books that you think have maybe inspired your leadership style.
Emil: Yeah, that’s a good question.
Emil: I’ll bring up two books and just borrow a couple of ideas from both of them.
Emil: I am a reader and I think that it’s interesting because I used to be a reader.
Emil: Those books I read a while back, I mean, I would say decades ago.
Emil: Nowadays, I’m like Chris, I’m watching a lot of YouTube and a lot of that stuff and inspirational stuff that quickly gets you up to speed.
Emil: But anyway, the books we’re talking about here.
Emil: So one of the first books that I really enjoyed in terms of leadership and in terms of how to deal with people and the ways that they operate, is called First Break All the Rules.
Emil: That was by Marcus Buckingham and Kurt Kaufman.
Emil: These guys captured something very interesting about people.
Emil: They go into this whole theory and how biologically we sort of develop that when you’re born, your brain has a lot of possible connections.
Emil: So essentially, your brain is firing on every signal out there.
Emil: You’re just accepting everything from the surroundings.
Emil: So what happens is unless you cut off some of those things and emphasize others, you’re going to basically lose your minds because everything is going to be screaming at you at the same volume.
Emil: So what happens early in life is people become, you know, interested in certain things, certain things, certain connections in your mind harden and become highways and some become like back roads.
Emil: And it’s very important to understand that people are different because of that, because they have figured out different ways to get on with this complexity that surrounds us.
Emil: And so, so their biggest thing, I think, about this is people naturally have strengths, you know.
Emil: And so I think the one thing I picked up from this book is manage from strength.
Emil: Don’t try to hire someone and fix what’s wrong with them.
Emil: That’s really difficult to do.
Emil: And it’s almost no amount of training.
Emil: I mean, you could get them from like being underperforming to mediocrity, but you’re never going to get them to being that star by just doing a ton of training.
Emil: And if they’re not really hardwired to do that through that initial process of like that’s what the interest is.
Emil: And the examples they give are very interesting, like accountants, they experience physical pleasure from everything balancing down to every detail.
Emil: You know what I mean?
Emil: And so to me, that’s kind of like, that’s the idea is that if you have that innate pleasure that this is your brain is giving all those signals that this is what you want, I think that’s the kind of person you want for each job.
Emil: So constructing a team and managing it from strength is like a key, very interesting idea that I think is super valid in my experience in the last two decades.
Emil: And again, for example, look at Chris and look at the team I brought up.
Emil: Like these guys live with this stuff.
Emil: I can just tell the difference.
Emil: It just makes them happy, you know?
Emil: And there’s nothing more fun than watching them sort of blossom in this environment.
Emil: You just give them the space to do that and they naturally fall into that, right?
Emil: There’s no need for me to go send them to classes on how to do things.
Emil: I mean, they could take some training, but that’s going to be mostly just complimentary and formative, not so much, you know?
Emil: Anyway, so that’s the idea.
Emil: That book, the other one I really like, which I read even photo back was Jack Welch Winning, which is a classic text in business.
Emil: And I think it was about his experience at GE and there’s a lot of controversial opinions there.
Emil: But I think one of the interesting things he mentioned is that candor is very important in any leadership situation.
Emil: And candor speeds things up.
Emil: The ability to truthfully speak about things and just be honest without being rude or aggressive to a point where people feel personally impacted.
Emil: Although a lot of people do take it that way, but candor, I think, is the big thing he’s propagating, which I think is a great leadership idea, is how you open up the company so it doesn’t just have this sort of posturing that always happens.
Emil: Then the other thing that he also mentioned is a word that he invented, which doesn’t really exist, but he calls it boundarylessness, which is like, how do you take boundaries away inside of the company?
Emil: In other words, when you’re trying to solve a problem, think without thinking, okay, this is not my job, I’m going to give it to this person, I’m not going to worry about it.
Emil: It’s more like, hey, how do I get the company to operate as coherently as possible without having to deal with these internal political boundaries or like organizational boundaries or anything that might get in the way of solving a problem from A to Z.
Emil: I think that’s that idea, the candor, the truthfulness, and the fact that a company should operate very cohesively without, smoothly, internally, it should not have barriers.
Emil: It’s almost like having barriers in your head where you can stop thinking because you’re crossing some kind of boundary.
Emil: That’s not really fast.
Emil: It’s not easy.
Emil: So I think those two books have formed a lot of ideas in my head, at least, about how to pick the right people for the right things and put them together to complement.
Emil: You basically pick people with different strengths and then put them together and they make a team that is strong all around, across all different dimensions.
Emil: And then how to do that, you know, how to encourage them.
Chris: Really quick, Emil, I just want to touch on one thing, because, Paul, one of the things I’ve noticed about Emil and like one of the biggest refreshers and like anybody out there looking for a role, you want to work at Loyalty Methods because as he just said before, you want to bring people in who have a passion, they want to do what they want to do.
Chris: And one thing that I think, Emil, in leadership at Loyalty Methods is fantastic at is hiring people with a special skill set to tell you what to do and give you the resources to do that and not micro-manage on the back.
Chris: Like he’s got his own job, like you hire someone to do something, to do a job and tell them what to do.
Chris: And I think Emil is an all-star in that way.
Paula: Amazing.
Chris: The whole team can operate freely and it’s a great environment.
Paula: Wonderful.
Paula: I love that.
Paula: There is a famous quote along those lines, guys, which is something like, I can’t remember who said it, but a leader, Emil, exactly as you said, said, I don’t hire people so I can tell them what to do.
Paula: I hire people so they can tell me what to do.
Emil: That’s one of the things that I love about when you make a good hire.
Emil: And again, I’m sorry to give an example with Chris here, but essentially, I mean, there was just from the beginning with the first interview we did, he came prepared with a plan of all the things we’ve been overlooking and we’ve been basically, as he said, not really investing very heavily in marketing at all.
Emil: We’ve been pretty quiet.
Emil: And he just came with these things and we’re like, wow, this guy can really teach us a lot of things about how to do this.
Paula: And he wants to solve it for us.
Paula: So why don’t we let him?
Emil: Exactly.
Paula: Brilliant.
Paula: So listen, Emil, it has been, as we said, nearly two years since you came on when we were just starting Loyalty TV.
Paula: So I’m guessing a lot has happened in Loyalty Methods, apart from the, again, clear decision to bring Chris in.
Paula: What else has been going on in the business behind the scenes since we spoke last?
Emil: Right.
Emil: So a lot has been going on.
Emil: I think the company itself has transformed quite a bit.
Emil: And we have sort of adopted some different, I mean, we basically looked at our strategy a little bit more and sort of tried to expand in some areas that we thought were previously not really thought very, we didn’t think very hard.
Emil: So one of the things we’re doing is basically focusing a little bit more on partnerships where we can actually partner with folks that implement other platforms, like consulting shops, like the Accenture, the Deloitte, those kinds of companies, that are able to essentially take our platform into clients and implement it and sort of multiply our platform deployment without us having to sort of build a huge bench, because we come from the services business, as Chris said, we know what that’s about.
Emil: And the thing with Loyalty Methods is that I think focusing on the technology and the tool sets, especially in the current environment, and we’ll talk about how JNI and everything is changing things.
Emil: But I think we’re finding that our focus should be on the technology, on the platform, on the engine, versus trying to build another service business on the side, just so we can get deployments done at scale.
Emil: I think we have quite a bit of services that we offer obviously to implement and so on.
Emil: We’re doing that, but I think having partnerships will sort of extend the reach of those implementations.
Emil: So that’s the first big idea that we’re sort of kind of trying to get more involved with and so on.
Emil: And I think the other things that are happening in the platform itself, in the way that we’re dealing with certain things, we’re rolling out, in the last couple of years, we’re rolling out a whole new analytics tool set.
Emil: So one of the, there’s several areas we’re sort of trying to really focus on.
Emil: The engine itself is super powerful.
Emil: It’s doing everything that we want it to do almost.
Emil: It’s here and there we’re tweaking and sort of adding features as people find little gaps here and there that we need to close.
Emil: It’s nothing big.
Emil: I think the big ideas right now is, okay, loyalty is all about data.
Emil: It really produces a lot of very high quality data.
Emil: And so to that effect, what we’ve done in the last few years is sort of roll out a whole new analytics tool set that is essentially able to do not just descriptive, but also forecasting, is able to do natural language, so that we can just ask questions directly and it will just on the fly generate charts and graphs and tell you, okay, who’s on my team?
Emil: Who’s in my customer set that maybe purchased something in January, but we haven’t heard from them in the last three months?
Emil: It’s all English, basically.
Emil: And I think it’s based around some of the latest LLM type technology.
Emil: I think this, I want to basically marketers to have a natural conversation with their data, because I think at the end of the day, that’s one of the most valuable assets.
Emil: So to that effect, we are, and we have just kind of rolled out this and we’re slowly rolling out the clients as an additional, you know, improvement over how analytics was done in the past, which is in the past, we had analytics, but it was mostly descriptive.
Emil: Like, hey, here’s what happened yesterday.
Emil: Here’s what’s happened last month.
Emil: You know, it’s really about looking at the past.
Emil: This is more about, you know, data mining at very quickly, you know, being able to sort of play around and do a little bit more, you know, with the data.
Emil: So that’s one big, big advancement there.
Emil: We are definitely taking steps into, you know, other types of, like one of the things we’re doing currently, which again, is targeted for Q1 of next year.
Emil: Q2 is to get, we want our marketers basically to have a little bit of, so the engine itself is very powerful, but with that flexibility comes a lot of complexity as well.
Emil: So what we’re trying to do, we’ve balanced a lot of the complexity between business users and advanced users and IT users, try to make that work a little bit, you know, so in a way that makes it easier.
Emil: But I think we want to take one step further and make it even easier for marketers to sort of manage the program, especially as programs have now become even more complex and they involve, like a single promotion now involves everything from content to communication to, you know, to all of these pieces.
Emil: So how do we make, you know, a tool that takes Reactor and then sort of expands its reach a little bit into like connected systems outside, but you can basically manage it from the same, we call this an SPC, a single point of configuration.
Emil: How do you find that?
Emil: You know, because a lot of marketers go, Oh my God, every time I want to launch a promo, it’s like it takes a village to do that from my company, from your company.
Emil: You know, so how do I put together something that’s a little bit easier and more like nimble?
Emil: You know, I think that’s one of the directions also that we’re taking there.
Paula: Amazing.
Chris: I’m just really quick to comment on that though, Paula.
Chris: So one of my first, you know, a few weeks in, I remember I come from a kind of differently positioned company and I was very much involved with like that kind of tier, right?
Chris: The epsilons, the whoever they are.
Chris: And I’ve seen, you know, every sales pitch you could think of, I’ve had a million decks you could think of.
Chris: And when I opened up their deck the first time, I was like, wait a second, what is going on here?
Chris: Because as you know too, on LinkedIn, anything there is that shows you have most platform, loyalty platforms today, the messaging, the ads, all of it is targeted really to the business user and the marketer.
Chris: And you don’t see much of it targeted to the ITs and the tech teams.
Chris: And a lot of these platforms out there today that are these all in one, you know, built-in rigid platforms.
Chris: But Emil, because they are such tech people, want to allow our users to do, is to kind of break down some of those walls and be able to go that layer under and let the IT team do their magic and build some things out on their own.
Chris: We want people to make the product their own.
Chris: And I just, I don’t see anyone out there who prioritizes the tech teams just as much as the business.
Paula: Well, again, I mean, I vividly remember it, Emil, the last time and Chris has already shared the story.
Paula: I think you called it the Loyalty Heist.
Paula: But this whole idea, like, you know, everything is running in parallel.
Paula: Nobody even knew that these, you know, was happening.
Paula: Do you want to share that story again quickly for the audience?
Paula: Yeah, it was.
Emil: Yeah.
Emil: I mean, for people who haven’t heard that episode.
Emil: Yeah.
Emil: So our early foray into, you know, getting the product out in a real company with lots of scale and a lot of, you know, complexity was 7-Eleven.
Emil: And I think Chris mentioned the 7-Eleven.
Emil: We’re sort of looking for an improvement in the loyalty program and said, hey, what do you guys have?
Emil: You know, we know you do a lot of services.
Emil: What do you have in terms of, like, you know, should we go with the C-Balls of the world or whatever, which at that time was already looking pretty old and tired.
Emil: And we said, no, here’s the thing.
Emil: And they’re like, well, where is this thing deployed?
Emil: Well, nowhere, really.
Emil: So they’re like, okay, this is new.
Emil: We know it’s going to work and this and that.
Emil: So we did POCs, we did a lot of experimentation.
Emil: They didn’t just make a lightweight decision.
Emil: And even with that, they said, it’s a huge risk.
Emil: Our platform currently sucks in many ways that we’re not going to go into, but basically it works somewhat.
Emil: So we’re not sure that this is going to…
Emil: So that’s how we basically were told that, hey, and the other thing they mentioned is we don’t really want to disrupt our relationship with our current vendor.
Emil: So we can’t let them know if we’re trying to replace it.
Emil: And so out of those constraints came the idea of SafeSwitch, which was that, okay, we have to sort of viciously sort of bring up our platform in production, blow on all the traffic, get everything going, compare them, and basically have this whole idea that essentially it’s tried before you buy to the max.
Emil: I mean, you basically are in production, running head-to-head with the same system and comparing everything, and realizing all the benefits of being able to be in the shadows doing that.
Emil: And then the customer knows nothing, and even the current vendor didn’t know anything.
Emil: And what’s interesting is that after we went live, which is with the two systems running in parallel, we become the system of record.
Emil: Then what happened is we basically continued sending traffic to the old system, and the existing vendor was actually believing that they were the system record for another month after that.
Emil: And so only after a month, I think something happened to them that should have disrupted the operations, that they realized nothing’s been disrupted because it’s not really them that’s in production anymore.
Emil: So I think that’s the level to which this is transparent.
Emil: And so this is extreme.
Emil: I will tell you something, when I first started, I didn’t think it was possible.
Emil: And I was kind of dubious myself, like, okay, this is quite far fetched to try to do this thing.
Emil: But it turned out that with the right kind of tool set, technology, and a couple of processes that are really kind of the secret sauce to this, you could actually get this going.
Emil: And we ended up replicating that in every single deployment that we did.
Emil: And every client said the same thing.
Emil: That’s an amazing, how do you guys just like do it and get us into production without actually any fanfare at all?
Emil: Like at that moment, it just goes in.
Emil: And I mean, people like Western Union, in fact, when we switched on Germany and the US, which are the biggest markets, I literally had to call it and say, did we actually go live because we didn’t see anything happen to us?
Emil: And I’m like, well, you know, that’s the idea, right?
Emil: The idea is that nothing should be a non-event.
Emil: All the risk is before that, you know, so when you’re doing the work ahead of time.
Emil: And so I think that risk transfer of post-go live to pre-go live is like the main thing that’s happening.
Paula: It’s a brilliant story, a brilliant story, Chris.
Paula: You’re, I think, one to comment on that.
Paula: I think you’re obviously very proud of that.
Paula: And as we said, it’s a USP nobody else is talking about doing or even attempting to do this.
Chris: Well, and well, beyond that, it’s like, you know, as we were talking about before, you know, my career journey coming here, you know, as a sales marketing professional, my job is to, you know, help sell and market this product.
Chris: No matter what the product really is, if I get a job at a place where the product isn’t that good, I have to make it look good.
Chris: But to be able to actually market a product where the CEO and CTO is so, you know, invested in just building a beautiful product, it just makes my job and everybody else’s job so much better.
Paula: Amazing.
Paula: Very well said.
Emil: Yeah.
Emil: Just one last thing.
Emil: With this, which I think I remember Chris early on telling me that, you know, I actually ping some tech people that I know, and they said, this is not really possible.
Emil: I said, honestly, I thought the same thing when I first started promising this, is that am I promising something that really might not actually work out?
Chris: We should probably stop talking about this out loud.
Paula: I hope all your trademarks and IP is in place.
Paula: I’m sure it’s well protected.
Paula: But honestly, like I’m changing my web developer at the moment, and I’m utterly terrified just with web code, never mind a loyalty platform at the scale that you guys are operating.
Paula: So I feel the fear as a small business knowing how reliant I am on my technology stack.
Paula: So totally get it.
Paula: Amazing stuff.
Paula: So listen, the big final topic, of course, on everybody’s lips is gen.ai.
Paula: It’s the big promise of the future of what’s coming, what’s happening.
Paula: Where do you think we are?
Paula: I mean, Emil, I might come to you first as the CTO, CEO.
Paula: Where are we?
Paula: Or where’s Loyalty Methods?
Paula: And how are you executing on AI?
Emil: Yeah, I mean, just like everybody else, I’ve noticed.
Emil: I mean, literally, I saw it in November of 22, early January, I think in 23, when Chatty PT 3.5 came out.
Emil: And I realized immediately that this is going to be an absolute game changer for everything.
Emil: It’s going to just be exponential from there, which again is pretty exciting.
Emil: So, just to the effect that I think what’s interesting about gen.ai, it’s because it’s a revolutionary step.
Emil: It’s just really like a huge jump in capability.
Emil: I think what’s interesting to see here, first of all, is that we know, I noticed right away that the same thing happened that happened to TV and the web and everything else, which what I mean by that is the first TV programs were just a person standing in front of a microphone and talking in a camera that’s taking that view, that image.
Emil: Yeah, there was no cutovers, there was no montage, nothing.
Emil: That’s because all people knew before that was radio.
Emil: They just added a camera and that was TV.
Emil: That’s all they could imagine.
Emil: But then fast forward to today and TV is all these other things.
Emil: The same with the web.
Emil: When the web came out, it looked like newspapers on a screen.
Emil: Because all we had before that was newspapers and print media.
Emil: It looked like print media.
Emil: In fact, most people from print media were basically designing websites at that time.
Emil: But then suddenly, we have the interactive web, Facebook and all these other stuff and Instagram sharing, content, YouTube and all these things grew out of that.
Emil: But we didn’t realize the benefits and how to use the technology right away.
Emil: It took a little bit of time.
Emil: What I’m finding with gen.ai right now is we’re still in that period where we’re doing the camera with the person in the microphone, where we’re just slapping it onto everything we can to see what sticks and how we’re still trying to ideate I think is to what is the best use of this and what are some of the golden news cases out there?
Emil: I mean, we all know it’s going to do something big.
Emil: We’re absolutely clear that this is a massive shift.
Emil: But it’s almost amazing to me how right now, there was a couple of articles out there saying, hey, people are investing billions and yet, the actual realization are like, how much do you do with co-pilot in Windows?
Emil: To what extent?
Emil: People use it basically to compose emails.
Emil: In fact, one of my Microsoft buddies said, what’s interesting now is, you know how expensive it is, right?
Emil: So when you run JNAI, it’s expensive.
Emil: So now, email has become an expensive thing.
Emil: People use JNAI to compose these elaborate emails.
Emil: Then people on the other side use JNAI to compress down on the bullets to say, analyze this for me, tell me what they’re really saying.
Emil: So essentially, you’ve taken something that costs like 0.0005 cents to send and turn it into a 20 cents thing.
Emil: Because you’re now burning up the environment because you’re trying to compose very elaborate emails that look professional, and then somebody doesn’t have time to read them, just use the same technology to reverse engineer what you’re trying to tell them in the first place.
Emil: So there’s a lot of that kind of stuff going.
Emil: But coming back to what we are doing, I think the first thing I already mentioned this is in the space of data exploration and analytics.
Emil: I mean, the first thing that happens right now is that LLMs basically become an additional user interface to everything.
Emil: So why can’t I ask my data and have a conversation with my data in English?
Emil: That’s the first question, Vivas.
Emil: Okay, why can’t I just say, tell me about this customer?
Emil: Okay, well, what about this?
Emil: People want to have a chat with their data, and I think that’s one thing we’ve gone straight into because it’s a very obvious way.
Emil: The other thing that we’re looking at is things like, typically what happens right now is when you create promotions and things like that, you’re configuring a platform, you’re making a configuration, you’re setting this and that and giving points and all that stuff.
Emil: So again, AI here could be used, as Jenny I could be used to be just another additional user interface.
Emil: But instead of going and clicking in all the things, you could just say, hey, I want all my gold members to receive 200 points and then it will ask you some clarifying questions and then it will create the configuration for you.
Emil: Those are pretty obvious, slap it on everything in these cases that have a lot of benefit.
Emil: But I’m not saying they’re bad, I’m just saying that’s the first iteration.
Emil: I think one of the things we’re imagining beyond that is, okay, how can we plug it into other areas that are interesting?
Emil: And the ideas there, one of the things that we basically try to do is reduce some of the friction in loyalty basically that happens right now.
Emil: And I think that revolves really not just around the configuration of the platform or usage of the data, but also into the integration itself.
Emil: How do we make GNI help us implement faster, understand interfaces quicker, and when we go live, after we go live, how much time is burned by somebody saying, hey, I submitted a transaction on my POS, I didn’t get the points, okay?
Emil: So there’s a technology called MCP, which is Model Context Protocol, which allows AIs to reach into other systems in a very specific way.
Emil: And so what this is, is you’re giving AI little tentacles that are very specialized, that can go into a very, very custom context.
Emil: So what I think we’re looking at right now is, okay, if we build MCP servers that handle some of these things, can an AI become your, hey, what happened to my transaction?
Emil: Well, I saw it go through this and this and this.
Emil: It could actually reach into all the pieces that are connected together and say, hey, here’s what happened.
Emil: So these ideas, I think, are where we’re taking it next, where basically we don’t have to have a…
Emil: So I’ll tell you what happens.
Emil: When something like this happens, people get into a war room call or something like that.
Emil: There’s like 20 people on there from every company, the POS company, the hosting client, our team, whoever else is involved in this integration path.
Emil: As we know, Loyalty is heavily integrated.
Emil: What if we can replace a whole war room scenario with a simple conversation of some end user at the field level saying, hey, what happened to this thing?
Emil: It’s like, hey, this is what we know.
Emil: What happens on those calls is exactly that.
Emil: People reach into their systems, they look at it, they pour over it, they try to understand what happened, they look at correlation between the different messages, and they come back with a, okay, I think we know what happened.
Emil: What if that whole thing, 20 people in a call for three hours, which is 60 hours, times an average rate of, I don’t know, $200 or whatever it is, that certainly adds to thousands of dollars to solve one single problem, and we take that and collapse it into an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-tentative, reaching sort of AI.
Emil: So I think that’s kind of an interesting idea around how can we go beyond the simple, hey, just slap it on as a user interface to whatever you’re already doing.
Emil: Now, I will caveat this with, some of these things can be dangerous.
Emil: In fact, I was just reading the other day an article where it’s from Replit and the CEO of Replit actually admitted that happened, which is not some kind of made-up story, that somebody actually ended up, the AI simply deleted the production database, I mean.
Emil: Wow.
Emil: Then when they said what happened, he said, I’m sorry, there was a catastrophic error in judgment.
Emil: That’s what it said.
Emil: So it’s like, okay, you’ve got to be careful.
Emil: That was literally last week or something.
Emil: I was like, okay.
Chris: I’m telling you guys.
Paula: It’s scary stuff, oh my God.
Emil: Some of it can go drastically wrong.
Emil: So as we go into this exciting world, and I know I sound very excited about it, I’m also looking and thinking, okay, how do we put guardrails?
Emil: I think what I find now currently is that there has to be a verification step.
Emil: So what AI can help us do is iterate on a problem very quickly, but there always has to be an intermediate product on which we’re working.
Emil: For example, if you’re sending an e-mail, and you say, AI, can you make it more fun?
Emil: It will come back and maybe it will go totally crazy, slapstick, and you’re like, no, I didn’t want it to be that much fun.
Emil: I want to be less fun, but still a little more engaging.
Emil: Then it tunes it up.
Emil: But you have that medium, which is that e-mail that you’re both looking at and doing something to it.
Emil: I think to believe that you can go from AI straight to a very non-transparent output, without having that intermediate medium on which you iterate, and then you have a problem.
Emil: I think what our company is doing, at least right now, is coming up with suitable representations of AI’s work, such that marketers can understand whether it’s good or bad.
Emil: That can be done through testing, through a higher level of description, something that gives you that e-mail so you can really go, oh, it’s not what I want.
Emil: So I think if you don’t have that medium, that intermediate step, then AI is dangerous.
Emil: I think the way to remove the danger is to add that step and to always have the human in the loop.
Emil: But again, that will cut the time dramatically because you’re not really doing the work, you’re just verifying the work in a way that’s high level and not that you can understand it.
Paula: Amazing.
Paula: Amazing.
Paula: And Chris, you said you’re going to defer to Emil, of course, talking about the AI stuff, but I suppose as a closing question for you, we’ve talked a lot about how we’ve got to where we are today, your history, your past, the clients you’re most impressed with, you’re what, about six months at the time of release of this podcast, you’re about six months in with Loyalty Methods.
Paula: So tell us what you’re planning, what we can look forward to, what do you think the future holds?
Paula: Because, I mean, 2026 isn’t even that far away, huh?
Chris: Some of this we got to stay a little tight-lipped, some of this we got to stay a little tight-lipped about.
Chris: But honestly, the goal right now out the gate is, it’s very simple.
Chris: Coming here to Loyalty Methods, again, seeing the portfolio, seeing the people, seeing the amazing work they’ve done, right now it’s just like, let’s kind of tell some people about it.
Chris: The fact that we’ve been kind of operating a little bit in the shadows, like Batman, if you will, still killing cool villains like Joker and stuff, we’ve been taking them down.
Chris: But I think it’s time just to get the story out a little bit.
Chris: And once that happens, I think things are going to get a little dangerous.
Paula: Oh my God.
Chris: Loyalty Methods team is coming to the market.
Paula: The floodgates are open.
Paula: I’m sure everybody listening, your competitors are like, Oh no, Chris is in action.
Chris: Build remotes.
Paula: Totally.
Chris: But yeah, that’s what I want to see.
Chris: I just want to see more reach, get in front of more people, see all we’ve accomplished.
Paula: Share the love.
Paula: Absolutely.
Paula: And Emil, any closing words from your side in terms of what you’re looking forward to, the AI stuff.
Paula: I love the tentacles idea, by the way.
Paula: I think it’s very powerful.
Paula: Definitely love that the tentacles are going to go and do all of that 20 people’s jobs.
Chris: Marketing graphic.
Paula: Totally.
Emil: Yeah.
Emil: I mean, it’s a good question.
Emil: I think all I can say right now is that I’m far more energized because of, first of all, because we have made some good fires in the space of marketing and sales and so on.
Emil: I think that helps us grow and become visible.
Emil: I think the excitement right now, for me at least, is in the sudden wealth of opportunities.
Emil: It’s almost like it’s the year 1995 and the Internet was just invented.
Emil: That’s what it feels like.
Emil: I think up to that point, before that happened, it was like humdrum.
Emil: You’re doing the same things more or less and trying to improve incrementally.
Emil: This is an opportunity that I think is really amazing.
Emil: I’m very glad, as Chris said, that I’m able to focus in building teams that are now able to handle certain pieces.
Emil: For me to step into, again, a little bit more of a technical role to really ideate with the teams.
Emil: Again, we have a lot of teams that are working on these things.
Emil: Obviously, it’s not just me.
Emil: Even at the beginning, it wasn’t just me.
Emil: I really have to give credit to my tech teams, both in India and here.
Emil: I was just giving you your flowers.
Emil: When I was listening to the, oh, Emil built this.
Emil: Obviously, I’m one person, I can’t build all of this.
Emil: There’s a lot of people, both here and we have folks in Hyderabad in India, that I just always want to mention that they’re really amazing and have built all of this together with me and with the guidance that I’ve given.
Emil: But I think I’m excited to get back into more of, hey, how do we make this iteration really count with these LLMs and with these JNI things?
Emil: How do we get that excitement?
Emil: How do we turn it into real value and find that golden use case?
Paula: Amazing.
Paula: It is all about value.
Paula: Absolutely, they’re very wise words.
Paula: Listen from my side, as I said, I feel a little bit sad that I have no more podcasts to record.
Paula: You guys, I think, are possibly the last.
Paula: But again, you are one of the first.
Paula: Thank you for being such a great part of our journey.
Paula: No doubt, we’ll be obviously continuing to work together.
Paula: I just want to say a huge thank you for your support so far.
Paula: I want to wish Loyalty Methods incredible success going forward.
Paula: I think you’ve got everything you need.
Paula: The client credentials, the amazing team, the ambition and the enthusiasm.
Paula: So, Emil Sarkissian and Chris Sandstrom, thank you so much from Let’s Talk Loyalty.
Paula: And Loyalty TV.
Emil: Thank you.
Emil: Thank you very much.
Chris: Thank you.
Chris: Till next time.
Paula: Till next time.
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