0:00 Jennifer Poma: I'm Jennifer Poma. I am our Director of Marketing here at UDig, and I am with Andy Frank, our founder and CEO, and he is going to share with us a little bit more about a recent blog he wrote on the death of reporting.

0:17 Jennifer Poma: Your blog poses a bold question, is reporting dead? What led you to ask this question?

0:23 Andy Frank: So having been in IT since the early 1990s, reporting, data and reporting has been foundational just to about everything that we've done, and that's always a part of any solution that we've interfaced with is some aspect of reporting. And I think the reporting at the end of the day, when I think a lot about it, is we've generated a lot of reports, and back in the 90s we used to generate them in paper, and then that became reports like in Crystal Reports or in Access Reports, etc., and then that's continued to evolve to more fancy dashboards, and I just continue to ask the question, like, we're creating a lot of reports, we're creating a lot of dashboards, but are they really actual? Are they really moving the needle? And do behaviors change from that reporting? And I'm not quite sure I have an answer for that. I think it just depends, and that's really the genesis of my blog.

1:24 Jennifer Poma: Would you say the way organizations approach reporting today is broken, or is it simply the need to evolve into something more actionable?

1:32 Andy Frank: I think inherently people want reports. They want to know how things are performing, and they want clear view of the data, and to try to make sense, and to try to figure out what changes need to be made in an organization to do things better. So I don't think the mindset is wrong.

I think it's just approaching it differently to figure out what behaviors, what actions are we truly taking from the reports that we're creating, and how do we measure those changes going forward? How do you really close the loop on the data that you're actually looking on, the changes you made to the organization? So inherently, I think that that's the question you always have to be asking executives like reports. Are they really moving the needle, the behaviors you want them to move?

2:32 Jennifer Poma: How do you think company culture influences the shift from static reports to a more proactive strategy?

2:38 Andy Frank: I think the big shift that has to happen is when solutions are being designed, whether it's around reporting, or users, or customers-basing systems, is that the data and how it's going to be reported, making sure that that data is going into the hands of the people that can actually take the actions, and not just a bunch of executive dashboards and reports. I think that's the biggest cultural mind shift that has to happen. And that sort of happened in the product management space with software, but I don't think it's fully happened operationally with the entire organization. And I think that's a big shift that has to happen in most organizations is getting that data into the hands of the people that can actually use it.

3:30 Jennifer Poma: Can you share an example of a company that has successfully moved beyond traditional reporting?

3:35 Andy Frank: I think the best example of the shift I've seen is with one of our national retail customers. Recently, they moved away from your traditional dashboarding and reporting techniques for store performance and adopted an agentic AI solution called Quorso. The beauty of that solution, or the essence of that solution, is not just showing the data, but what Quorso does, it actually gives you specific actions to take for the store leadership team that will help them proactively improve performance. And the shift that this does for the store leadership is it's insights that are actionable, that help them make decisions and move faster and more effective, and not spend a bunch of time trying to figure out what the reports mean, what the data means, and how they can make real changes.

4:38 Jennifer Poma: For leaders who recognize the need for change but feel hesitant, what's one small yet impactful step they can take to move towards a more modern approach to reporting?

4:47 Andy Frank: Your question highlights some of the key points to their approach. Small, low risk, high impact. So something that is meaningful but doesn't require the entire organization to change its behavior. And that's key with any change management. It's just finding that one or two things that can start to illustrate the direction you're taking with agentic AI. And for us, when I think internally, the things that we're doing, we've started with looking and using it to help us with analyzing pipeline risk in our sales process, using it to look at portfolio and potential delivery issues.

So really impactful stuff, stuff that's meaningful, very meaningful to our business. But if it doesn't quite work correctly, the impact to us is not so negative that we've hurt our credibility with the organization to sort of make these changes. And I think that's key to every organization that's trying to take this route.

Finding something that's low risk but meaningful so you can help sort of shape the vision of where you're taking this next generation reporting. And that could be sales, it could be in customer service, it could be in operational processes, it could be in talent. There's lots of opportunities to find low risk, high impact changes you can make or use cases you can find that can really help people start to crystallize the vision of what this next generation of reporting will look like.

6:39 Jennifer Poma: So before we wrap up, is there anything else you want to discuss on this topic?

6:43 Andy Frank: There's a ton of hype around AI and agentic AI. NVIDIA, for example, claims to have 100,000 agents running their business and helping them scale. When you hear numbers like that, it's always overwhelming and people feel like they're just way behind the curve.

I believe strongly that a practical low risk and high value way to introduce agentic AI is through reporting. Instead of just generating static reports, AI is great at analyzing patterns, fantastic at identifying risks and recommending actions. I really believe that it can help organizations move from just looking at the data, reporting on the data, to actually creating impactful, usable, actionable insights that will help an organization start to make the desired changes it needs to make to get better. And this approach, by taking this approach, more of a low risk approach than trying to change a significant workflow in the organization, will start to build that trust and set the foundation for a broader agentic AI adoption.