JK Krug (00:05):
We sought to completely transform our business to build better, more agile and competitive solutions in the cloud environment. We invested 1.5 billion to completely rebuild our technology security infrastructure to help us modernize our applications and maximize the value and accessibility of our data.
John Veltri (00:28):
You’re listening to another episode of Cloud and Clear SSADA’s Cloud Transformation podcast. I’m your host, John Veltri, and today we’re pleased to welcome JK Krug, vice President of Digital Employee experience at Equifax to the show. Jk, welcome.
JK Krug (00:45):
Hey, John. Happy to be here.
John Veltri (00:47):
So why don’t we get started with the most basic, tell me a little bit about your role at Equifax.
JK Krug (00:53):
Sure. I’m jk. I’m the Vice President of Equifax’s Digital Employee Experience Team. We manage the applications our 21,000 folks used for collaboration and productivity like Google Workspace.
John Veltri (01:06):
So most of the people who are listening are probably pretty familiar with Equifax. Your company is the go-to for credit reporting. Can you share more about how you handle your overall approach to technological innovation and how AI is fitting into the mix at Equifax?
JK Krug (01:22):
Yes, just like many other companies, we’re looking to leverage AI throughout our business. For my area, we’re looking at generative AI to assist with increasing productivity efficiencies and to assist our end users on repetitive tasks so they can focus on areas that are more challenging for them.
John Veltri (01:38):
So to give a bit of background to the listeners, the SADA team worked with the Equifax team to provide Gemini licenses within Google Workspace to a subset of the employees at Equifax. Incredibly not a single employee said they could do without it. Once we were done, we went through and we worked on business value framework, some tests and verify, and that’s right jk. Right. Can you share a little bit more about how that trial worked out for your team?
JK Krug (02:04):
Sure. We did two trials for proof of concepts, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Every business unit reported measurable gains in productivity.
John Veltri (02:13):
Yeah, we saw a lot of interesting things to digest that the Equifax team helped highlight for themselves and honestly a learning experience for us. AI is still new to everybody, and it gave us an opportunity to really digest what business value looks like for ai, where it can generate improvements, how SADA can engage with customers to help them become more educated. And it was really a very collaborative process for us. It was something that we’ve now built a framework around to some extent, around how we engage with future customers and what we know we can help them expect from a pilot or an engagement through enablement in different workshops at the time, these were really powerful results that we got. Now the Gemini is actually included in Google Workspace, which we’ll come back to in a bit. But first, why did you settle on Google Cloud initially?
JK Krug (03:04):
Sure, yeah, that goes back about six years. Google Workspace fit right into our work Better together mantra, Google Workspaces, ease of collaboration was a key decisioning point. We sought to completely transform our business to build better, more agile and competitive solutions in the cloud environment. We invested 1.5 billion to completely rebuild our technology and security infrastructure to help us modernize our applications and maximize the value at accessibility of our data. We knew that we needed a partner who could help us accomplish these things in a cloud native environment, and we’re able to do through this partnership and enterprise data management offered by Google as part of our transformation. The adoption of Google Workspace has helped us improve our collaboration across the work environments, which really fits into our better Together mantra.
John Veltri (03:57):
So on the note of looking at workspace, looking at the productivity, looking at Google Cloud as a platform on the note of security, can you share why you felt and why EQU felt that Google Cloud was the leading platform or the leading cloud provider in that regard
JK Krug (04:14):
Is everybody’s responsibility? Here at Equifax, we have a world-class security team who took the challenge of securing our Google Workspace environment head-on. We leveraged some of Google workspace security features and augmented with additional bolt-on products to help us meet our requirements at Equifax. We understand that security should be built into our systems, not bolted on. We sought to create a cloud native technology stack that allowed us to exceed our on-premise security posture and to be able to combine the implementation of our security controls. We were able to do that by leveraging Google Cloud.
John Veltri (04:48):
As an individual who’s worked with Google and has been a part of the Google ecosystem for a long period of time, I believe that Google inherently, from the ground up, has best in world-class security, and I think that that’s clearly something all of our customers should take away from a conversation like this. Security is paramount, it’s built into everything, and it’s especially within Google, whether it’s workspace or any of the different GCP components, and now that we’re talking more and more around AI security is something that we at SADA believe is part of, should be part of every initial conversation and every initial evaluation and something that we can certainly help everybody else come to an understanding of like Equifax, did that give you a level of confidence in moving forward with Google? What were some of the key successes for this project? So rewinding, I know we talked about security for a second, but rewinding back to the Gemini piece and the evaluation we did around generative AI in the hands of your employees, what were some of the key success metrics for the project and why do you believe the adoption rates were so high within the Equifax employee base when testing and utilizing the product?
JK Krug (05:55):
Yeah, John, I’m sure there’s a lot of factors involved that I might miss, but in my opinion, it came down to the training we provided. While partnering with SADA, we provided many training classes and office hours to engage our teammates, and the feedback was overwhelmingly possible. We conducted a prompting contest with high participation with over 500 entries.
John Veltri (06:14):
Yeah, and how do you think that Gemini has since impacted your day-to-day on a personal level for you
JK Krug (06:21):
Personally? I love Gemini and Google Meet. Take notes for me, every meeting is annotated with action items and a summary. I use Gemini to help me sharpen my communications and documents of emails. Also,
John Veltri (06:32):
What’s interesting is this is the first when we started digesting Gemini as sales leaders, as business leaders in part of the Google ecosystem and Google themselves, it’s the first time where I think organizations have an opportunity to look at technology at through the lens of a personal adoption. We talk about our experience helping organizations adopt different areas of Google Cloud platform or workspace, getting their productivity tools and their collaboration tools nailed down in terms of creating the best environment for their employees. But at the end of the day, the way the products all worked had limitations on what it would do for JK versus what it would do for John and everybody else out there that’s using it. And I think what’s different about Gemini and some of the other areas that Google’s leaning into, like agent space and elsewhere, is that the end result of what you get out of the added components within workspace now truly do make the experience hyper-personalized for each individual employee.
(07:39):
And the way in which Equifax really came to the table in that evaluation to find and pick up those adoption rates was your team leaning in so heavily and the employees leaning in so heavily and finding those personalized use cases around how they’re using documents, how they’re prompting emails, how they’re doing searching. And it really gave me in our team a strong perspective of that level of personalization that we now know we need to build into the evaluation or guidance for all of our customers as they go to look and adopt what the product is. Because we can’t go at them and say, this is the button you click on to look at an email, or this is how you go and create a document. We know that we have to guide people more on a personalized journey, just like you said. And it became evident with the people that were in this collaborative process at Equifax who went through the pilot. It was just as valuable for us as it was for you all and frankly for Google too. So it was very appreciated with that. From a forward looking point of view, for people who are watching this, what advice would you give to other companies, especially in financial services that are considering implementing AI solutions? When it comes to the balance of innovation, security, and
JK Krug (08:57):
Compliance? To me, it’s a no-brainer for financial companies. Ai, including Generat AI is a tool that can be productive and can produce measurable results. If you’re not looking to leverage generate ai, you’re going to be at a competitive disadvantage to your peers, especially on a productivity front.
John Veltri (09:18):
Yeah, I live in the New York metro area. I’ve been in this space for quite some time and have always been working. We’re trying to work more heavily with financial institutions. They have a lot of technology, they have a lot of employees, and there’s always a reason or an expectation of how they can do things better. But there’s always been some restrictions around the expectation of what can be changed and what change looks like for a business that is heavily regulated in a space where security is paramount and communication is very structured. I think that you all are very forward thinking in terms of your adoption of new technologies and willingness to lean in and find better ways for your employees to work and engage with each other. And I would say that for all those institutions that are out there, whether they’re in my backyard or in Atlanta or anywhere else, I think there’s a pace of change that’s taking place right now with AI and communication, collaboration and cloud platform technology adoption that lends itself for an opportunity to companies to stay.
(10:28):
We might not have thought about this in the past, and maybe there’s a reason for us to do it now, and that’s where we really want to help organizations with the learnings we’ve picked up from Equifax and other partners or other customers of ours in conjunction with Google, we want to take those strategies around, let’s give this a second look. Let’s walk evaluation. Let’s help on enablement. Let’s put together some workshops and strategies that we can collectively and we being us, the customer, Google even references other customers out there. How can we all work together to figure out how these technologies can be ubiquitous across any vertical or industry? And really lean into specific areas where I know that generative AI can help people get things done faster and more collaboratively, more productively, and they might be in industries that would not have gotten or would not have given it an initial look. And maybe thanks to you and the wonderful people at Equifax, after someone watches this podcast, we will find that next customer that leans in and gives it a second thought. So I want to thank you, JK, for joining us today. It was a valuable conversation and hopefully there’s a lot out there who see this as a chance to learn and grow and really put some strategy and thought around what generative AI can mean for their business.
JK Krug (11:50):
Thanks, John. If you want to learn more about Equifax, you can visit [email protected]
John Veltri (11:54):
For listeners who are attending Google Cloud. Next, you can catch us on stage where we will share even more about jks incredible story and the next phase of Equifax’s Gemini adoption for employees. Make sure to visit sada.com/next to stay up to date for more about SADA at Google Cloud. Next, we will see you next time on Cloud and Clear.
