Tech Icon Spotlight: Pat Copeland

Former Chief Technology and Product Officer, Zendesk 

 

From the start of his career, Pat Copeland was captivated by technology’s limitless potential to solve complex, real-world problems. So it came as no surprise when he began studying artificial intelligence in the 1990s–decades before the likes of generative AI became a mainstay of headlines and IT strategy sessions alike. Now that the business case for AI has caught up with the science, Copeland is excited to see a long-promised future finally arrive.

 

“AI was kind of an oddball thing to get into during grad school, but I always appreciated the potential of what it could be. There was just no real way then to make the models scale the way that we can today,” Copeland said. “We’re at a time now where we have the technology to bring these tools to bear to solve a bunch of new problems, scale products, and really deliver new customer experiences around the world.”

 

With more than three decades of experience leading technology initiatives at Google, Microsoft, Amazon, PlanGrid (acquired by Autodesk), and Zendesk, Copeland has done his fair share of work bringing this future to life. Riviera Partners spoke with Copeland to gain his insights into his experience operationalizing AI, identifying practical use cases, and driving employee adoption.

01

AI starts
with data

02

Don’t limit your
sources of innovation

03

Create an
AI culture

04

Communicate early
and often

01

AI starts
with data

AI–and what to do about it–is dominating boardrooms, breakrooms, and IT departments across almost every industry. While some companies are on the leading edge of AI, just as many are only now beginning to ponder its potential.

“A lot of the industry didn’t see it coming, and I think they are now in a panic trying to figure out how to adopt it. We’re going through a hype curve where expectations are very, very high, and companies have to decide how realistic it is to apply and what difference it will make for their customers,” Copeland said.

Rather than rush to implement AI, Copeland advises these companies to focus on building the foundation required to make the paradigm shift. “The most important thing, which is often overlooked, is data and integration. It’s not magic; it’s a garbage in, garbage out situation unless your data is set up in a way where you can consume it and use it for training.”

“Companies that are in a big hurry to adopt AI will eventually realize they’ve got to put on the brakes and really focus on the fundamentals of their raw data. What data do we have? Are we collecting the right telemetry from our customers? How do we ingest and aggregate it? How do we create insights from it? There’s a whole investment cycle that has to suddenly happen when you realize you have the data but can’t take action on it right now.”

“There’s a whole investment cycle that has to suddenly happen when you realize you have the data but can’t take action on it right now.”

02

Don’t limit your
sources of innovation

Once a business has solved its data foundation issues, the next step is determining how and where to apply AI to get the greatest value. One way Copeland did this was to start with the smart people on his team to discover use-cases and test the boundaries inside.

“Zendesk was an early partner with OpenAI, so our approach was to open up the internal floodgates and give everyone an ability to explore. We didn’t know the limitations of GenAI or what the key applications might be at the start, so we were eager to see how different teams would experiment and find value,” Copeland said. “With any new tool, maybe 15% of folks will be early adopters. That group will discover a number of applications and value for AI that helped us build some prototypes of customers.”

To promote new learnings and best practices, Copeland created a dedicated Slack channel where internal users could share how they were using generative AI. “We treated Zendesk as a first customer. If it worked for us, it might work for our customers. The idea was to learn from our own organic usage, and turn that into product features. This experimentation by employees created a flywheel, where high value usage led to more people experimenting. We celebrated the biggest wins, and this helped more employees understand how it would benefit their jobs and show a return on investment to our customers.”

“With any new tool, maybe 15% of your users will adopt it early and really get into it. You can then discover the outsized use case for AI that will excite the rest of your users.”

03

Create an
AI culture

Thanks to these discussions, Copeland was able to shift the internal narrative around AI. “By highlighting these successful teams and sharing examples, we evolved the thinking from a fear-based, ‘my job is going to go away’ to ‘these tools are amazing, of course I’m going to use them.’ What you have to communicate is how AI can be leveraged to help improve a person’s job to make them more effective,” Copeland said.

Implementing AI is just as much a cultural challenge as a technical one. Before any AI initiative, make sure you have a cultural change management plan in place that will engage and excite employees.

“It will accelerate their ability to have an impact. People can solve more difficult problems. Entry-level people will be able to do more sophisticated things earlier in their tenure. Tenured people will have a better experience because they’re not doing the same thing every day. If you put AI into the right context, you can make employees far more productive.”

“If you put AI into the right context, you can get people really excited about the future.”

04

Communicate early
and often

Reengineer your data processes. Discover innovative use cases from scratch. Rebuild your culture from the ground up. No pressure. In order to effectively make the AI leap, tech leaders need all the communication skills at their disposal.

“I’ve found that to have a lasting impact, you have to communicate consistently. I’ve found using video in different types of formats helps me scale my ability to reach everyone and engage. I might do videos about innovation, showing demos, or personal videos where I talk about what I am doing and reflecting back on what I’m hearing from the team,” Copeland said. “It’s helped me create a connection across a broad range of people in a way you can’t do with email.”

 

“To have a huge impact, you have to communicate consistently… [Video] helped me create a connection across a broad range of people in a way you can’t do with email.”

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