NEXT 26 – Kickoff and Opening Remarks
49 views
In these opening remarks, Magnolia’s recently appointed CEO, Dave Wilby, shares his initial reflections on the evolving digital landscape, introducing Magnolia’s rock-solid foundation for governance, orchestration, and flexibility in a fast-approaching "agentic" and AI-driven future.
View transcript
First of all, yes, my name is Dave. Only my mother calls me David when I'm being told off, even at the ripe old age of 59. First and foremost, I want to thank you all for coming out. It is an impressive turnout. It's lovely to see you all. I'm so proud to be joining Magnolia. It's a very special organization. And so, please, one of the highlights for me is an opportunity to meet you all. I've spoken to some during the warm-up, but we've got two breaks, and we've also got some football game. We can watch together a little bit later. So, without further ado, a little bit about myself. Really, it's not too much, I promise. I've been in the SaaS space for a very long time. I've been in e-com space for a similar length of time. My things that attracted me to joining Magnolia were the team, the opportunity, the platform, and the community. So, my job here is to act as a catalyst, is to make us all successful, to open up new markets and new opportunities. And to that end, I've spent the first 143 days talking to a number of customers, prospects, CMOs attending trade shows to get a good feel of where we are in the industry. Now, it'll come as no surprise to any of you that AI is top of mind. Equally, everybody will go, yeah, so what? I think we're all experiencing the same level of excitement and fear and disappointment around that. So, where's my CFO? There he is. We were all promised that AI was going to have huge productivity benefits. I can tell you all at the moment I can see is a huge amount of tokens being spent, which I'm sure you can empathize with. But it's coming. It definitely is coming. It is going to revolutionize our world. It's going to revolutionize the way that we deliver content. It's going to revolutionize the way that we talk to our customers. It's going to revolutionize the way that we can grow our businesses. But there are some gotchas. And I just wanted to quickly set the scene, before I hand it over to the experts, around some three observations I've made in the last 143 days. The first of all is, and I will freely confess, I'm a data geek. And you talk to any of my management team, and they will say I'm obsessed with spreadsheets and dashboards and Salesforce. Sorry, Sebi. But AI needs data as a foundation. If that foundation is not good, all it's going to do is deliver answers, bad answers, faster. So, we need to really make sure that our customers and our partners and ourselves all have a really rock-solid foundation around data. The second one is that I really, you're seeing the revolution and the speed of change with LLMs and AI as a technology. And one of the things that we've done, and you'll hear about in just a few minutes, is our approach to implementing AI is super flexible. No real surprise there. Building on our heritage, working with development schemes so that we have complete flexibility, so that customers, prospects, and partners can all change at a moment's notice. And I think the final thing, which is going completely unsighted, unless our experts are going to tell us differently, is that there's a level of overconfidence around the delivery of content and how agents are going to talk to agents. Exciting though that is, I just caution, but also I'm very happy to note that, again, we're building on the strengths of Magnolia to make sure that that governance and orchestration layer is there not just for content, but it's also going to be there for agentic. But I'm not going to steal any of my team's thunder. With that, I'm going to fail to click. Basically, set the scene. Magnolia is there not just for today's content, it's there for tomorrow's agentic world. It is building on our heritage. It is ensuring that you have the right content in the right place at the right time, that it is protecting and building your brand. It is the intelligence layer you can rely on. And most importantly, it gives control or keeps control in your hands. So if you're a CMO or you're in marketing, you're like, I want to embrace this. I want to grow my business. For sure, agentic is a very exciting future for us to go for. If you're a CIO, CSO, IT and security, and you're panicking, don't. Because we've got that for you as well. Again, not my job to try and do a sales job. We have some incredible panel of experts. And it is my incredible and very great pleasure to introduce Chuck Gahun to you from Forrester, who's now going to let you on some insights of how the industry is going and how we can all prepare to embrace this technology future. With that, I would say try and keep cool. Enjoy the breaks as best you can. Do come and say hello to me. I'll be delighted to see you. And I'll see you a little bit later for the Q&A. Thanks. Thank you.