Brooke Huling with Accruent

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

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Scott, welcome to the Industrial Talk podcast with Scott. MacKenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots and let's go all right once again.

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Welcome to Industrial Talk. Thank you very much for your continued support of this platform that celebrates industry professionals all around the world. You are bold, you are brave, you dare greatly, you innovate, you collaborate, you solve problems, you make it the world a better price. That's why I pointed at you industrial professional, and we, as you can tell, buzz in the background, a lot of noise, food at my feet, because it's lunch time. We are at a crew at Insights in San Antonio, Texas, and it's a it's just a collection of customers and providers of solutions and solving problems. It is absolutely collaborative. It is an exciting time in the hot seat. We have Brooke, Huling, did I get that? You

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did? Nailed it.

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Nailed it. She's in the hot seat. Let's get cracking you having a good conference. It's

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been great. Scott,

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is it better than last year's?

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It is better. I've been here more than a year now. That's

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right, because it's, I don't know, maybe the Gaylord was really big, beautiful property. Don't get me wrong, beautiful property. But it just seems like this particular, this venue here, and people are there's a lot more chirping going on. Yeah, much better vibe. Yes, yes. And again, I'll say it again. I am so intrigued with how, how Accruent is really customer centric. It means it there's just this buzz that exists, and accruing is just driving to that customer and listening to that customer, and it's got to be appreciated.

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It is one of the best parts of what I get to do every day. I don't think people know all of the ins and outs of what a product leader does, but on any given day, I get to talk to my team about our customers, the amazing things they're doing to our other executives and leaders. There's not a meeting or day that goes by where we don't have a customer conversation, which just makes it so much worthwhile, which

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is a great segue into who work is and what is a CPO.

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Great question. It depends on the day of the week, honestly, right

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now, right

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here, now? Yeah, so in any given day, Chief Product Officer and I've been in product for over 20 years, different tech companies ran software at Dell, have been at various startups, and it really is the best career path on the planet. I get to work with amazing customers in different industries. Work with a great team. We are building strategy. We are talking to our clients solving problems. In some cases, we have clients that are truly solving global problems, and our software supports that. So I can't think of a better place to be, and I love telling my kids what I do at night.

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Cool. There it is. I'm ready to wrap it up. That's a well articulated position. So how do you how do you take the products that are currently offered? How do you keep them relevant and moving forward? What does that strategy look like, Yeah,

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you listen to the customer, and the customer is driving really the innovation that is taking place, and the focus, and it's in my notes. Over to my left, what is North Star? Well,

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it's a secret.

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It's in my notes. Yes, it is. It was given to me.

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so glad you asked. I

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Well, thank you very

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much. I mentioned APIs. And look, it's no secret in this day and age, these large B2B enterprise products need connectivity. Our connected ecosystem is what makes us special. So being able to take any of these applications really dig deep, add the APIs that our customers need, and then make it super simple for them to integrate with other things. So next year, we're looking at an integration hub that will allow products to come together with more of a formula based integration. In other words, it's so easy my mom could do it, which is what most people are craving. We're also looking at data as a service. We have a lot of customers who already have their own BI tools. They don't want another tool. They want the data coming out of the product in an easy way. So we're looking at moving things to snowflake, giving them data as a service, all sorts of cool stuff. Snowflake, snowflake, that's

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something new. I haven't heard snowflake. What's snowflake? It

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is a fantastic data repository. So while we're moving all of our products to Microsoft Azure, we are now also streaming all of our data into snowflake so that we can build these kinds of integrations and tools on top.

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Said, like a data lake. It is, is it?

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I'll leave it at that. Yes,

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I'm sure I just dumbed it down dramatically. I mean, I understand it, but it's because of my brain. I have to sort of compartmentalize it so, but that so with the APIs, what are the challenges with APIs today versus what they're doing? You spoke on it tomorrow?

07:31

I mean, yeah, today, the big challenges today are that we have a lot of different types of APIs across all of the applications, and we also have a lot of really unique customers. So TMS healthcare customers, they need integrations, but they need integrations to healthcare software. So even though they're using our CMMS platform, they need to integrate in a unique way with their healthcare products. On the same token, I have maintenance connection, great product, also a CMMS not for healthcare, for different industries, they have integrations with ERP and other types of accounting software. So they all need that extreme connectivity. Even across our own products, we need that level of connectivity. And today, because the products all came from different places, they have a different API stack sitting behind them. So having a common API framework, putting a common management tool on top of that, and then, like I said, having all of the data accessible through a common data lake allows our customers to really extend these applications out beyond the boundaries of what they do today, where is

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that you are. Yeah, without a doubt, every conversation that I've had has been just specifically around that outside of the collaborative with the conversations you're having with your customers, which is pretty doggone cool, quite frankly, where does when you look at AI, because they're on the side of AI, nobody's living under a rock when you look at AI, is that going to be touching pretty much all of your products, all

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of them and then some. And it already is in some way, shape or form. I am also an AI nerd now on the weekends, built my own GPT for the first time a couple weeks ago. Did you really it's fascinating. He's fascinating, like the little plus sign in the top left corner, and you can build your own too. It took about an hour. It's just, it is amazing how far we've come in such a short period of time. I think Ethan Malik said it best a few months ago. He was like, this is like the electrical revolution from 100 years ago. This is our generation's chance to participate in something that's the biggest thing of our lifetime. So I took it to heart and teaching my kids how to use it too, even though school is not, not so sure yet about how they want to embrace it, and we're doing the same thing in the product.

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There's, there's, there is definitely some challenges associated with the moral implications of AI and and the information that is being presented to you. There might be some false positives. There might be some question, yeah, is like, well, that doesn't sound about right? So you have to really be careful, but, but I think as time goes on, and I think people, as you continue to hone in on it, it becomes a little bit better and better.

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Yeah, I agree. We're taking it really seriously, too. So you know, when there's something new like that that comes out, a lot of pressure, what are you guys going to put Yeah, and it's hard not to get sucked into that. We absolutely want to, but it's going to be for the right use cases with the right level of security. And so we've been mapping out. I'll give you my favorite example over this last year in a crew and observe, we built anomaly detection, and there's a couple of different use cases for this, but high level example, you can detect anomalies in refrigeration. So think of Starbucks, Walmart, right? They have all these refrigeration coolers. This world as a whole is losing millions of tons of Freon into the environment every year from refrigeration leaks, HVAC leaks, wherever those types of chemicals and other things are used in all sorts of types of manufacturing, cooling, refrigeration, etc. Well, with our software and sensors, you can now predict a leak before the leak. You can see that something's not quite right. You can find a leak when it's tiny before we've now let all of that out into the environment. That's a big deal so that that's all AI based those types of anomaly, not

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Well, that example I just gave you is a good one, but I'll give you one other of my favorite. I just, I just went on a recent site visit to a customer in Houston. They are a large oil and gas company, but I learned while I was there that they are also responsible for one of the the world's largest carbon recapture plants that is currently being built out in beautiful West Texas. No kidding. It is, I would say, based on their pictures, larger than the Tesla factory that's here in Central Texas. And I was blown away at what they are doing. I mean, they are recapturing with these massive and they look like they're the size of the nuclear power plant stacks giant fans sucking in. Are in recapturing carbon from the air, putting it in with a crystal compound, and then turning that into a powder that they can put into a well and take all of the carbon out of now our environment. So that is just one of many cool things that I get to hear and our product is helping them to become more sustainable, helping them to make the world a better place, literally. And in that case, they're using our engineering document management solution to build out that plant, everything it does, having all of the drawings, the three dimensional specs, all of that in one place. And now we're contributing to the sustainability for the next generation. So really cool examples,

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are they using the captured carbon as an enhanced oil recovery or empty wells? What are they using that

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The demand for power is going through the roof. You got Gen AI, and the processing of of that information is just going through the roof. It is how I it's way above my pay grade. How am I supposed to do that? There Brooke,

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that's why we're moving everything to Azure. Same there it is. Yeah. How do

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people get a hold of you? They're saying, I like what she's saying. I want to get a hold of her. I want to

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I want to know more. Yeah. Find me on LinkedIn. Brooke, you link happy to chat there. It

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is simple. All right, listeners, we're going to have all the contact information for Brooke out on Industrial Talk. Remember, we're broadcasting from a crew and Insights. It's an order. It's a wonderful event here in San Antonio, and it is a collection of problem solvers. And you just, I say it all the time, educate, collaborate and innovate. That's what they're doing here at this event. So put that on your calendar. We're going to wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned. We will be right back. You're

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listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network. You

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