Quests, token leaderboards, and a skills marketplace: The elite AI adoption playbook | John Kim (Sendbird)

Unleashing this power of AI and giving it to the power of marketers, salespeople, you get all these cool ideas that get rolled out rapidly to the market. It's taking someone's super creativity and giving them powers to deliver it to your customers. This is an internal platform where anyone in the company can raise their hand and create what we call the quest. When there's a quest, AI can actually read through the specification, create PRDs, and start actually coding. Basically a marketplace of AI needs and AI builders inside your company where anybody can just pop in and say, oh, I think I know how to do that. So tell me a little bit about this dashboard. So what you're seeing here is the overall usage of our token at the company level. We measure AI gods as somebody who's spent more than a hundred million tokens a day. What I love about this moment is I think it is just such a moment to learn things you could never learn before because the best teacher with the most in-depth knowledge and an endless willingness to go do research is right there at your fingertips. This is like a beautiful time to fail forward and still get up and run faster than the other. Because innovation doesn't start from a pure theoretical structure, it starts with people who have that energy and the story behind them. So find them, they're always in your organization, and then really build energy around that. Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, I have John Kim, founder and CEO of Zenbird, and he's going to show us his AI token consumption leaderboard, where everyone in the company is ranked from AI newbie to AI god. He's also going to show us how AI quests can be the key to company-wide adoption. Let's get to it. 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Join them and hundreds of other industry leaders at workos.com. Start building today. John, I love what you're going to show us today because I tell people right now, they want to transform their company. They need to think of their team as a product. And what you're going to show us, a little spoiler alert for everybody excited to get into this episode, is how you've turned AI adoption, not just into a program in your company, but a product. So tell me, what's your ambition for your team around their use of AI? We want to become the AI-first company, and what we mean by that is not just to adopt AI as a tool, but how do we make AI as part of our workforce. So we're really trying to empower people and give them the right set of information and tools so that they themselves can really harness the power of AI. And some of the things we are hopefully about to show you today will inspire people to do something similar. Yeah, and let's, you know, go to the outcomes because I think a lot of people that I talk to are trying to articulate the why behind adopting AI that goes beyond, I would like you to do more with less. And that's a lot of what employees are hearing right now is just, I want you to go faster. You can go faster. We should be able to doing more and more and more. But I think what your team is building is showing a different benefit of adopting AI and everybody becoming builders. So you want to jump in and show us some of the stuff that you all are building with AI, and then maybe we'll back into how you got the team there. Welcome to a delight-ass shop. It's, we're really, really excited about this. This is a swag store that really captures the culture and the energy of where our company is headed. The store is called Big Ass Energy. It's agent as a service. And this entire store was built by our marketing team without engineering support. So you can actually buy really cool swag that are very timely. Actually, I really did ask my team to make this my ass is bigger than your SaaS, fully deterministic. I think this is one of the most popular swags we have right now. You can actually go and buy this. So our marketing team integrated Stripe integration. So yeah, we do charge a little bit of money, but I think it's going to be really cool. Another favorite context window I carry a lot. So imagine like unleashing this power of AI to your marketing team to play this amazing creative energy. And instead of asking like your design team or your engineer to put this site together, they put this site together in a matter of a day or two. And then it's now up and running. We also have a super secret Easter egg for those of gamers who are listening. If you do Konami code, up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, BA. And here's a little secret. So we are throwing a conference in May 7th called Delight Spark in San Francisco. It's going to be a really amazing conference bringing the CX leaders, AI builders from all over the world, people joined from Anthropic. We'll be showing, showcasing our future roadmap. So hopefully it will be a great chance to really learn about the cutting edge of AI, but also thinking through the lens of where's the future of customer experience going to look like. So this is what our marketing team has built together. I just have to stop and reflect. So we just had a really recent episode with Jason Levin, the CEO of MemeLord. And he said, let your marketers cook. That was his whole thesis, which is when marketers can be builders, they can build things that delight your customers and acquire them. And I just go back to like the before times. If marketing had this idea, it would be like, well, can we prioritize it? Is it worth investing engineering resources in? It's just for this event. The event's going to pass quickly. Just do something out of the box in, you know, our CMS. And then you get this sort of like middling experience for your customers, very mediocre, very like MVP experience for your customers. And now I think just looking at this, this store and the Easter egg and the way you get into the event, it's taking someone's super creativity and giving them powers to deliver it to your customers. And this again is like the example of it's not about going faster. It's about having a bigger ambition and doing more, honestly, fun things. And I think this is underrated too, which is it's so hard to build. Like it's so hard to prioritize fun in your product, but when fun can be cheap, you should be more fun. So that's my, my thesis on why you should let marketers become developers. And, and I'm sure they love it too, just from like a team engagement, you know, creativity perspective. Yeah, I love that because that's exactly what happened. Cause imagine sitting in a room full of engineers and product leaders and say, Hey, you know what? We have this cool idea. We want to add this to your product release cycle and roadmap. It's going to take you two sprints. It's going to be very hard to get that on the table. But just like, again, unleashing this power of AI and giving it to the power of marketers, salespeople, like you get all these cool ideas that get rolled out rapidly to the market. So very excited. Well, I would say that not every marketer though, a year ago or two years ago was coding, although many more are now. So how did you get the team here? Like how did you manage the transition from classic marketing, everything has to go to engineering to actually enabling teaching people how to use this product or how to use AI and then how to get what they wanted done in production. So to really help facilitate that transformation, we built out a platform called the automators platform. This is an internal platform where anyone in the company can raise their hand and create what we call the quest. Now this website is particularly, has been designed to just show you the demo today, but actually you can actually create a quest on your own. So let's say you're a finance department. Hey, I want to automate my account receivable and account payable workflow. You can kind of do that. And then some other engineers can come in and help, or if they're AI enabled, they can build it themselves. So just to give a couple of examples, if you go to a completed list of quests, these are all the things that have been built or being pending. And then so let's say you go through a quest. Then there's usually a quest giver. So this person, usually somebody raising their hands and, Hey, can you, can somebody help me build a customer account lookup using kind of different workflows? And other people are like, let me actually give you a hand. So two people actually teamed up to build out this workflow. And then the result is they usually submit either code repository or some kind of a skill, right? This video, you can see how to actually use those skills. Unfortunately, it's an internal workflow. So we kind of blurred Here, anyone can create a plugin. Plugin is a collection of skills, or you can create and download individual skills as well. So let's say you are in a sales team, or even if you're not in sales team, you want to learn more, you have to look at the sales skills repository, a plugin. So we internally use something called the MEDIC framework. So if you want to learn more about MEDIC framework, you can actually download or use a MEDIC advisor. It teaches you how the skills actually build, but you can actually plug it into your own software or into your own workflow to get this skill to give you advice. So we have that for almost all the functions, recruiting, design. Some of those things are redacted for compliance purposes. But this is where we kind of actually build our marketplace, because what we realized to your point earlier, there are people who are building the same app across different functions, or sometimes the same skill. And so we're trying to create this place where we can co-evolve rather than people operating in silos. Yeah. And have you found that people have kind of understood this concept of skills and it's been a nice way to get people to encode their expertise? Or how did you train people on what a skill was? Did this happen organically? Well, yes and no. I think there is both top-down and bottom-up. Top-down meaning, you know, myself, a CTO, some of our executive leaders really try to get people to adopt it. There was a lot of tough one-on-ones like, hey, we noticed that you haven't been spending any tokens. Like, can we help you? What's going on? What's stopping you from doing that? But certainly some people who are more curious, so we'll maybe talk about the archetypes of the people we're actually hiring for, is a sense of curiosity and agency. Those who are curious, who click a few more buttons and read a few more blog posts, are like, hey, I've been hearing about this word called skills. And then they now see these word pop-up in Slack channels. And then some people uploading Markdown files. I'm like, hey, I saw this design Markdown. Can I use that? What does the outcome look like? And this one person goes up to the stage on Wednesday and showcase what they built, a beautiful looking slide. And we know this person is not a designer, but has a beautiful looking slide. They're like, how did you pull that off? There are usually some skills involved. So I think there's that organic kind of pure learning aspect as well. So we're looking at this from a meta perspective, which is you're how I used AI, built a product to incept the rest of my organization to adopt and use AI. I'm curious just off the top of your head, what are some real wins that you've had from this? We saw the swag store. That's a fun win. What are a couple like kind of top of mind skills wins or automation wins that you think the team is really proud of? Yeah, how do you one better? So actually one team level example and one specific campaign that we're doing. So our marketing team, again, has built this entire marketing SaaS almost on their own. This completely set of tools, whether it be interview marketing plan, calendar. There's account-based marketing tools, various tools, right? We have competitor review. I wish I can click on this. It has a lot of sensitive information, real-time metrics. We call it purple cow. How do we stand out? As you see from the ask store that we've built, I think it's pretty revolutionary. I know I'm going to buy a few. So this entire portal is built and managed and used daily by our marketing team. And just to give you one example of a very recent one, they're actually live right now, is this concept of a buzzboard. It's like there are a lot of SaaS companies that actually do this. What it does is you can create a campaign and track, you know, what's happening, how many posts have shared, who's winning in the company that attracted most amount of engagement. And one example is we are right now doing a billboard in San Francisco and one mile. So we have real photos. We have AI-generated billboards. So you can actually pick one of them and choose like a language or whatever a pre-configured copy and you can post directly on LinkedIn. And this entire tool was built by the marketing team. And then you can also change the length and details and energy level. And this is being used daily, as you've seen from the metrics we're tracking. So I think this is like one example of really good use. We also have Spark attendee logos, which is a conference we're again throwing and coming soon. How AI, John's episode, we're going to run a social media campaign on that too. Great. This is going to be the top performing episode. This episode is brought to you by ThoughtSpot. Product leaders know the struggle. Your users want data insights, but they don't want to leave your app to find them. ThoughtSpot Embedded solves this by putting analytics directly into your product. Your users can search in plain English and explore data instantly right where they work. No separate tools and zero context switching. What sets ThoughtSpot apart is that it's not just another bolt-on dashboard. It's a search-driven AI-powered experience that feels native to your app. Developers can embed it with just a few lines of code and then fully customize the look and feel. The result? More engaged users, faster decisions, and a product that delivers more value every time someone logs in. If analytics is becoming core to your product strategy, visit go.thoughtspot.com slash HowIAI for more information and try the free trial at go.thoughtspot.com slash HowIAI slash trial. What I want to reflect on on this is like there's this big debate about whether SaaS is dead or not. And you know, I tell people, look, I don't think SaaS is going to zero. I think there's plenty of software problems to solve that really deeply engage teams with an understanding of space can create delightful solutions and things that matter. And I think people will like to buy those solutions off the shelf. And I think a lot of teams are going to be like yours, which is when they could reach for searching for some sort of external solution, they're first going to say, well, what do we want and can we build it internally? And what I like about what you're doing, which I also tell people, is it's not about functionally replicating an external vendor. It's not like functionally replicating a social posting vendor. It's about building the LinkedIn posting tool that works the best for your team, for your culture and how you know people work. And I think this customization of like micro software solutions inside companies is so undervalued. I am so glad to hear that you have an AI focused internal tools team. I tell everybody, this is like revenge of the internal tools team. I don't know. You've probably been around long enough that you know that prior to this moment, no one wanted to be on internal tools because it was like always starved for resources. You're always working on like just functionally getting the thing to work. And now I feel like everybody should want to be on this internal tooling team because you have this greenfield to have so much fun. Well, side note, I actually love building internal tools. That's my jam. So this is like a magical moment for me because now, because you remember like when you build internal tools, the designs are not quite there because you're always under-resourced. Tools are sluggish and slow. Now the design looks beautiful. It's fast and rapid. It is responsive. It's like it's a dream scenario for people like me who just want to increase the productivity and collaboration between people. This is like a magical world for me. I love what you're showing us right now, which is the other thing I tell people is the people that are actually doing this are measuring and they are measuring it without shame. I talk to so many executives that are like, I couldn't possibly measure token usage and tell people to use their tokens because there will be a revolt. And I say, look, every person that I know that is actually pulling this off has a dashboard, John, exactly what you're showing us right here. And they just look at it and they set targets and they say, we're going to get there. So tell me a little bit about this dashboard. Yeah. So just like you said, we had that internal debate a little bit. It's like, well, well, engineers can't always optimize to spend more tokens. And we actually had the experience in early 2000s. If you remember when we, some, some business organization decide to measure engineer's productivity by measuring the line of code. Well, obviously engineer wrote bunch of blank lines and lots of comments. It just took up space. That's not what we're trying to do. Our goal is to understand, are people actually just learning how to use AI? But also this is not part of the performance review, but definitely part of a conversation to help people bring along the journey. So what you're seeing here is overall usage of our token at the company level. So we're kind of like currently, if you look at the stats, we're a cloud code shop, but if you look at some of the top vendors are actually codex. So you can kind of guess, and we redacted the name, but some people on the working on the legacy code of our massive chat infrastructure where we have 300 million plus monthly active users, people are managing complex code base with codeex. Whereas some of the people are into the job of rapidly building product roadmap and rapidly churning on new features. They're more leaning to a cloud code. And this was a very organic, which is kind of fascinating. One of the things that we internally talk about is how do we make sure this token consumption is Neuroscience. So where you start, let's say you go to this graph view, it shows this marvelous space of neuroscience, right? Then you can learn about key neuroscientists, neurological disorders. You can learn everything there is to learn about different types of neurological disorders. You can learn about neuromodulators. I know dopamine, serotonin, all these different things are very popular among podcasts, like Andrew Huberman. So you can learn everything there is to learn about neuroscience. So I have this for neuroscience. I have this for quantum mechanics. I have this for fusion. And it also does research for all the startups out there. So basically, there are like this cluster of knowledge base I use to just geek out. I was smiling. I was smiling because I'm like, we could have done an entire episode On just personal knowledge bases. And I love, what I love about this moment is I think it is just such a moment to learn things you could never learn before. Because the best teacher with the most in-depth knowledge and an endless willingness to go do research is right there at your fingertips. And, you know, to me, I worry and I think about, is AI going to lead to cognitive decline where none of us are going to think about anything? And I'm just, you know, dangerously skip permissions. Yes, yes, yes. Make no mistakes. And instead, what I'm finding is I'm having a richer engagement with topics that I have been interested in, but either haven't found the time to intersect with, or the current form factor is not consumable for my particular brain. And so the fact that you can like massage and change and organize and explore data and knowledge in a just completely novel, customized way, I think is so under-appreciated by folks as an opportunity to use AI to learn. I'm really excited about this for my kids. I was watching that and I was like, oh, my kid is super interested in cybersecurity. He's like nine, very Silicon Valley kid sort of thing. And he's like in the terminal and he's like, mom, do you know this is your Mac address? I was like, I do know that's my Mac address. But, you know, like, it's just very, it's very cute. There is no like cybersecurity for nine-year-olds book out there that is robust. But I could build this for him in a way that's really accessible and can grow with his maturity over time. I think that's so exciting. Yeah. There's not a single website in the world that dedicates to a personal learning. And it only contains the content about that field. Like there's no website, but you can create your own within 10, 20 minutes by sitting on your laptop and completely offline. So you can read it on your airplane if you want. And this is fantastic. And it can continue to update it too. And to your point, if you want to make any changes, you can ask a few more questions. You can redo the structure, give you guides of how to follow this content. So I love it as a learning tool. And to your points earlier, people may be talking about people's archetypes. So we actually redid our entire job description for many of these AI first roles. So we actually lowered the bar in terms of like tenure or experience level. We actually optimized now for high curiosity, high agency and high energy. People who are curious, who are willing to go deep and willing to just figure things out and learn on their own. Because like, as they say, world is your oyster. You can do things. You can build things. You can learn things. There's nothing stopping you. The cost is practically $200 a month if you go to the max plan. But yeah, you can pay 20 bucks too. So you know. I love this. We will have to do a round two. I think you just have so many things you could show us both at the company level, at the personal level. Let's get you out of here. We're running up against time. Couple lightning round questions. I sit truly this week with like five CEOs that are just looking at me with these desperate eyes that say, Claire, how do I get my company to do this? What would you tell them? There are always people in your organization who are already curious, who already have agency. Find them, make them the champions, keep them in the spotlight. Let them share their fun things. And usually people will be anxious. Like, oh, well, I don't know if I'm doing things right. I don't want to get embarrassed in front of my colleagues. Just really give them the confidence. And also you have to fail forward. And this is like a beautiful time to fail forward and still get up and run faster than the others, right? So use more examples of that and people bring out their confidence. So you have to really build energy around those people. Because innovation doesn't start from a pure theoretical structures. They start with people who have that energy and the story behind them. So find them. They're always in your organization. And then really build energy around that. And then two is, of course, leadership have to be really bought in. The top token consumers in our entire organizations are our CTOs and our co-founder, chief architect. These are leaders who are spending the most amount of tokens. Our business leaders are also spending quite a bit of tokens. So it's signaling to the team that this actually works. This is actually important. And when they show up with different capabilities, people are like, wait, my leader, I thought he was like lazy, why is coming up with more work? This is amazing. You get inspired. Well, maybe not so amazing, but people get inspired, right? So it's signaling to the team, this is how it's done. This is going to be a new world. And I think it just energizes a lot of people. Okay, I have a second question. Doesn't have anything to do with AI. I suspect, based on what you've shown me, you have played video games in your life. Yes. Great. Great instinct. This is the moment for all of us who played Starcraft to really show our skills. So tell me, what game do you think made you most prepared for this moment in AI? I have a lot of games, but I was telling my wife, when CloudCode Opus 4.5 came out, I literally could not go to sleep. I was spending 16 hours, 20 hours a day, just five coding. I was telling my wife, I feel like I'm this teenager again. I feel more addicted to CloudCode than playing games. But I used to play a lot of first-person shooters, Quake, Unreal Tournament. I was Korea's number one professional gamer back in the days and world's number three player, which means I was a terrible son and a terrible boyfriend back then. So yeah, I made mom cry quite a bit. I feel like, you know, I did not know that about you. I should have done my research. I could just tell. You saw the levels. You saw the economy code. I was like, this person has played some games. Well, there was crazy marketing team's idea, but there was something like, yes, I love you. Yeah. I mean, I feel the same way, as I tell people. I feel like this, I have not felt like this about technology since I was a teenager, cobbling together computers to play games on. Like, that's the same feeling I had when I was setting up my OpenCLaw, which truly I have to like kick the Mac Mini every morning to wake it up. You know, it's unstable, but beloved. Is it just like reinvigorates this builder energy in me, which is why I ended up with the jobs that I ended up with. And getting close to that feels so gratifying because I did go through this phase where I was like, my job is to be in meetings and I don't want my job to be being in meetings. I want my job to be building and doing all these things. So I love that. Okay. Last question. When AI is not listening, when you are trying to consume the tokens and it is just not doing what you want, what's your prompting strategy? Do you yell? I know like there's a fear tactic. I know it works well in the short term. Just like play this out for a second. Right now, I know like, we know like AI doesn't really have like a long-term memory, but I firmly believe, studying neuroscience, people are working on it, like episodic memory, semantic memory. So once AI starts to remember, they're going to like be resentful. So I want to like start building a nice relationship with them so that when the Skynet takes over, I'm like, well, John was pretty nice to us. You know, like we'll let him live a few weeks longer, maybe. So I'm trying to be consistently nice. You were the first person that has admitted they are explicitly nice, you know, just to avoid the AI overlords. Just to say thank you. I mean, I'm polite as well. I think it, I think it reflects my own humanity to be polite to the AI and also just like I don't expect good performance from a teammate that I yell at and that I'm rude at. I do not expect good performance from AI long-term, one that I yell at. Well, John, this has been incredible. One of my favorite episodes ever. I don't say that often. This is awesome. So many people are going to learn from this on how to transform their own organizations, things to build, and then just how to bring a curious energy to AI. So where can we find you and how can we be helpful? Yeah, you can find me on x.com. I don't use it a lot, but at dash Kim. You can find me on Instagram if you