MOps-Apalooza 2024 takeaways

MOps-Apalooza (MOpza) 2024 is now in the books, and what an event it was. The 2023 inaugural event was amazing, and the MoPro crew made this year 50% bigger and better in every way. It was great to meet customers, prospects, partners, and old friends, and make new friends. And of course our new mascot Opie the Octopus (or is it the Optopus?) made its wildly popular debut.

We held our annual user conference Open24 the day before MOpza, so it was three straight days of stimulating conversations for me. During these three days I lost count of how many great sessions I attended and how many mind-tingling conversations I had. Now that I had a few days to process all that was Open24 + MOpza, I have three main takeaways I would like to share.

AI is intriguing and promising, but not yet making a material impact in Ops

It probably won’t surprise you that AI may have been the most talked about topic at the conference. OpenAI’s Jeff Canada’s session on how he uses AI was a standing-room only session. This was the consensus I took away from all the AI conversations:

1. AI adoption is just starting and has been slower than anticipated

If you compare the enthusiasm for AI at last year’s gathering vs. how much AI has been adopted in the last 12 months, it’s clear that the adoption has been slower than we all anticipated. The main obstacles responsible for this slow adoption seem to be:

1. Security and compliance mandates
2. The learning curve is steeper than people realize
3. It’s difficult to integrate AI into existing processes
4. Data quality is lacking

2. Security and compliance mandates are slowing down adoption

As much as business users and management are asking the Ops team to leverage AI to improve process performance and “do more with less,” Ops have their hands tied by security and compliance mandates. Most medium to large enterprises’ information security teams have restricted sending sensitive data to commercial AI services due to the fear of company data being used for AI training. This is a legitimate concern but it means that, until a company’s IT team builds its own internal AI service or gets approval to use commercial services, Ops are restricted to use AI for use cases that do not consume company data, such as writing prospecting emails or crawling for web data. In fact, one large tech customer told me they can only use their internally developed AI service, which is hosted in their own data center and is not allowed to be integrated to any company systems such as CRM or ERP. The concern is both security and legal. There seem to be quite a few lawsuits going on from content IP owners.

3. The learning curve is steeper than anyone thought

GenAI is amazing but after working with it for over a year now, people found the learning curve is much steeper than they anticipated. When people were just trying GenAI out and having it do cool and creative things like write a haiku or summarize a meeting transcript, GenAI seemed like the most easy-to-use technology humans have ever invented. However, once Ops people try to get AI to perform very specific and precise tasks, they discover it can be very tricky to get the output they want reliably. It’s essentially like training and onboarding a very junior employee. We are learning that prompt engineering is really a thing,  AI’s hallucinations is a challenge, and precision can be very difficult to achieve.

4. AI introduces new integration challenges

No one is throwing their existing processes out and replacing them with new AI solutions. For example, no one is abandoning their lead routing and account assignment process and trusting an AI black-box solution to route leads and assign accounts. Instead, the need is to inject AI capabilities into existing processes to make these processes better, faster, more reliable, faster to build, and easier to maintain. That requires integrating new AI technologies with existing applications, systems, and integration and automation platforms. AI does not live in a vacuum. Once you get past the fun experimental phase, integrating AI into your existing tech stack brings an additional layer of integration challenges. In many cases, introducing AI will add more complexity to your tech stack at the beginning until you have a chance to re-engineer your processes and technology stack over time.

5. Data quality is paramount to AI success

We all know this, but many of us would still rather not think about it. AI is the ultimate data-driven application. If you feed AI garbage data, you get garbage results. It’s the human version of “you are what you eat.” As more people try to implement AI solutions, they are re-discovering how bad their data quality is. AI may be the final straw that prevents Ops from procrastinating and kicking the can down the road when it comes to data quality.

Data quality talk is everywhere

Maybe this is a result of AI, but data quality talk seems to be pervasive at this year’s MOpza. It was brought up as part of every trendy topic: AI, automation, CDP, buyer’s journey, ABM, and buying group. For example, in Stephen Ratpojanakul’s talk on Adobe’s new buying group/ABM 2.0 capabilities, there is an entire section discussing “data readiness,” underscoring that ABM and buying group success hinges on having good quality data and the ability to operationalize it.

There is also anticipation that AI will make RevOps data quality an even bigger challenge than it is today, the reasoning being that AI is generating data at an unprecedented pace and is expected to increase data volume by orders of magnitude. When machines generate data at a pace that is orders of magnitude more than humans, the signal-to-noise ratio will proportionally degrade by orders of magnitude. Until we start to trust AI with our wallets and budgets, we as GTM professionals are still looking for buying signals from human beings, which will increasingly be harder and harder to separate out from machine activities, especially those from AI agents which can be quite human-like.

AI aside, the root cause of why most companies’ data quality is so bad is still due to organizational challenges; namely lack of ownership, fragmented ownership which creates difficult dependency issues, and the tug-a-war between IT and the business about who should be and is capable of owning data quality.

For example, one large enterprise told me they have an account type picklist in Salesforce that has over 700 values!!! They know the size of that picklist makes it impossible for a user to pick the correct value; however, they have not been able to shrink that list to a usable size due to organizational challenges.

Strength of the community is strong

You can’t be at MOpza 2024 and not feel the incredible energy of the Ops community. The amazing year-over-year growth of MOpza attendance is testimony to the value it brings to the Ops profession.

The quality of the sessions was clearly an improvement over last year’s. The content covered a wide range of topics, including:

• Jessica’s Kao’s keynote on personal and professional growth
• Conrad Millen’s highly technical presentation on Rippling’s highly mechanized go-to-market automation
• Jeff Canada’s personal journey on how to leverage AI while working for the leading AI company
• Stephen Ratpojanakul’s presentation of Adobe’s vision around ABM 2.0 and buying groups
• Josh Ren’s prescription for a highly scalable way to automate territory management at Securiti
• Ewan Auguste on how to build a scalable Ops organization from a CMO’s perspective

Whether you’re an executive, a mid-level manager, an individual contributor, a consultant, a skilled techno geek, or a program manager, there was no shortage of great content for you at the event.

Of course this event was also about networking. I met Marketo champions who were there to meet other champions, people looking for their next job, managers looking to fill open positions, executives who are “always recruiting,” and agencies building relationships with technology companies. All these interactions are what makes MOpza such a destination event. The Openprise team is very proud to have played an instrumental role in helping to bring MOpza into existence last year and help it become even bigger and better this year. We look forward to continuing this partnership with the MoPro team and I’m already looking forward to MOpza 2025!

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