On this episode of Fortune’s “Leadership Next” podcast, cohosts Diane Brady, executive editorial director of the Fortune CEO Initiative and Fortune Live Media, and editorial director Kristin Stoller talk to Zig Serafin, the CEO of Qualtrics. They talk about Serafin’s almost 18-year career at Microsoft; leading a company through both acquisitions and IPOs; and how the emergence of agentic AI mirrors the early years of the iPhone.
Listen to the episode or read the transcript below.
Transcript
Zig Serafin: Think about the word story, right? Don’t you want people or organizations that you choose to put your business with to know your story? Because if they know your story, they’re more likely going to be able to properly serve you. They’ll anticipate what your needs are. They’ll be more empathetic to your context, right? If you just open up, pull out your phone and open up and scroll through all your recent financial transactions, right? Go to your banking app or your credit card app and just scroll through. I did this the other day, and I thought: which ones make me smile, which ones royally tick me off? And the ones that make you smile are the ones that delight you, right? They know your story, right?
Diane Brady: You’ve got to say which ones made you smile.
Kristin Stoller: And the ones that piss you off. Got to hear both.
Serafin: That’s another conversation.
Brady: “Leadership Next” is powered by the folks at Deloitte, who, like me, are exploring the changing roles of business leadership and how CEOs are navigating this change.
Hi everyone, welcome to “Leadership Next,” the podcast about the people…
Stoller: …and trends…
Brady: that are shaping the future of business. I’m Diane Brady.
Stoller: And I’m Kristin Stoller.
Brady: This week, we were in Texas.
Stoller: We were! My first trip ever to Texas, which I’m really excited about.
Brady: Well, you got two doses of barbecue. I know that.
Stoller: I did. We had to stop on our way from the airport, just because I just really needed my brisket. And then we got it at the dinner at Deloitte, which was great.
Brady: We were at Deloitte University, which is a campus just outside of Dallas, and this was for their Next Generation CEO program, which is a fascinating program. We go twice a year, and we tape the podcast in front of a live audience of people in senior roles at some of the biggest companies in America who are poised to go into the CEO job. And they get an opportunity to not just speak with faculty from Deloitte and from some of the top business minds, but they also speak with CEOs of major companies, and we spoke with one for the podcast.
Stoller: We did. Zig Serafin, who is CEO of Qualtrics. He joined actually after about 18 years at Microsoft. And one of my favorite parts of our podcast was that he was talking about why he decided to leave, why it was time to go.
Brady: Yeah, I think, well, obviously there’s a lot of angst. It’s almost existential at that point. Another academy company—he also lived through Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Satya Nadella. So he spoke a bit about that. But what I think is also fascinating about Zig: This is an experience management software company, they collect a lot of data, they help companies really maximize what’s happening, essentially with customer experience, employee experience. They’re also on the front lines of agentic AI, so any listeners who are interested in that, we’ve got some really interesting case studies. I think the other thing that was interesting to me about Zig is that he has been CEO of a company that was bought by SAP. So you’re bought by a giant, then he went public, then he went private again when Silver Lake and Canada Pension Plan bought them, so just to be in a leadership role during all of these different transitions, and frankly, still be here today.
Stoller: Yeah, and he made the switch from COO to CEO, too, and he walks us through why he did it, and why he wanted to be in the corner office but didn’t actually totally think he would be. So that was really cool as well.
Brady: And how you avert burnout, which all of us could use.
Stoller: We really could, yeah.
Brady: So after the break, we’ll be back with Zig.
[Music starts.]
We’re entering an era of innovation unlike any we’ve witnessed before. You all see it: The pace of technological change is staggering, and it’s challenging for any leader to keep up. We spoke with Jason Girzadas, the CEO of Deloitte US, which is the longtime sponsor of this podcast. Here’s his advice for leaders on how to navigate this new world.
Jason Girzadas: There’s probably nothing more important for CEOs, no matter what organization they’re leading, to really be thinking about technology’s impact on our workforce. It’s really a function of, how do you think about technology in concert with your workforce? We at Deloitte talk about it as the age of with, the age of technology with your workforce, and really embracing this idea of the codependency of technology and workforce. We’re also in an environment of a very tight workforce where there’s a scarcity of top talent and an increased pressure on the diversity of top talent. That’s going to be the challenge for organizations to demonstrate to top talent: that they can grow and evolve the work that they do, working with leading technology in a very aligned way. Finally, it’s what top talent really wants in an organization, is to learn and grow and to be part of an organization that’s supportive of them actually embedding technology in their work.
Brady: The star of this show today, with “Leadership Next,” of course, is you Zig Serafin, who has so much to talk about, CEO of Qualtrics. We’re going to cover a lot because, among other things, Zig has a fascinating personal background, and he’s lived through so many of these rites of passage as a CEO. I think being a veteran of Microsoft, we can talk a bit about what you did with Skype, Microsoft Teams, but with Qualtrics in particular, you joined in 2016 as COO. Then, of course, SAP acquired Qualtrics. You were there for that. You went public, you’ve gone private, and there’s many more things in between, including your personal background. So thank you for joining us.
Serafin: Thank you for having me, and you’re both the stars. I’m not the star, I’m just here to answer your questions.
Brady: I think we should start because experience management software is a term that not everybody will know immediately what it is you do. So why don’t you tell us a bit more about Qualtrics to start.
Serafin: Sure. So if you think about businesses that are the leaders in any industry, you usually will find that they’re leading with experience because they’re really well connected with their customers. They understand the effect that their employees have on their customers, which means they’re really well connected with their employees. And that connection of really understanding where your market is going, understanding how you’re showing up in your market, not just in new products you build, but with the products or services you have in the market, is what Qualtrics helps to enable. And experience management is a technology system. It’s a new category that started about eight years ago, of software. It is focused on understanding the human factors in business, what drives satisfaction, what drives intention, what drives friction or potential dissatisfaction, what drives loyalty? Ultimately, all these things, the more well you’re connected, the more likely you’re going to be in a position to drive revenue in your industry. So that’s what we do. Experience Management is about creating those connections.
Stoller: Now, Zig, you’ve been to a lot of dinners with Diane and I, and I always love that you’re able to just tell us all the trends that are going on at any given time. You’re talking to customers, clients, employees. So I want to start by just asking, what’s the most surprising consumer trend you’re seeing right now in the space?
Serafin: Probably the most surprising trend is what’s happening in AI, frankly. I think that the rate at which people are willing to experiment with different use cases, whether you’re, you know, a 60-, 70-year-old person to someone that is a Gen Z, or whatever gen, gen whatever.
Brady: Gen Alpha, I think.
Serafin: Gen Alpha is a new one, as I’d heard, people are willing to try a lot of new things. And I think a lot of that is actually the sign of the times. Anything that actually creates convenience, speed, the ability to get at what you’re trying to get done, is going to end up poking a hole through the old way of doing things. And so if that means that you’re going to go order a new pizza, you’re going to do a pizza delivery and do an order, if there’s a better way of doing it quicker and it understands what your preferences are, you’re going to try that new thing, right? And AI is actually heading in that direction. So I look at this not in terms of the big headline trends we read and, oh, “AI is going to disrupt the world, blah, blah, blah.” I mean, yes, we can talk more about that. It’s more that people are biased towards things that are more convenient to create better experiences. And what’s surprising is how quickly it’s permeating every industry, you know, one way or another.
Brady: So have you created a digital self for Zig Serafin?
Serafin: I have not, but there’d be an interesting idea. I could replicate myself 10 times, maybe in 10 different locations at the same time.
Brady: I realize for our listeners and our viewers, I want to create a sense of place for them that we are here at Deloitte University. This is the Next Generation CEO program, and we have people in this room who are leaders already in their companies, and they also are going into bigger roles. I think that’s why many of you are here. Before we get more into AI, I’d actually like to start on a personal note, too, of what do you wish if you could look back and say, when you look at your own career trajectory, because you had a long career at Microsoft—and of course, you came in as COO—what advice would you give yourself in that role, knowing what you know now?
Serafin: I think it took me a time to understand that, you know, being willing to stand by your convictions, taking risks, is sometimes, if you have the data and you’ve got a point of view and you see where things are going, take more risks when you’re given the opportunity to do so. I think I learned that later on in my career. And you know, frankly, many of you that are here thinking about your next move or the next opportunity leadership-wise, you’ll learn over time, and I learned over time, that you’re constantly in a process of reinvention, and that reinvention means you’re taking risks. You’re learning new things. You’re going to have to work with new people. You have to be willing to invest in things that may be going against the convention. You’ll have to make decisions that might go against the convention. So taking the noniterative path where you’re not just iterating on the direction that maybe you’re in and whether that’s personal or whether that’s a decision you’re making on behalf of an organization. It took me a while to be willing to go do that, and I was 17 years at Microsoft, and you get into a large organization and there’s—you’ve got to figure out, how do you not shake things up? How do you fit in? But on the other hand, being willing to, at the right moment, stand by convictions, and if you see a direction and push for things that might actually open up an opportunity for the business that you’re part of, or for the company that you’re a part of. And so, that’s one thing. As I look back, I would have probably been more convicted [stood by my convictions more] on some things.
Stoller: And you went from COO to CEO. Now I’m wondering, was that always the path that you wanted to take? Were you always having your eye on that corner office, and how did you position yourself to get there?
Serafin: I never had my eye on wanting to be a CEO. What I had my eye on was being involved in running a business, and I didn’t care what capacity that was in, but I had a ton of interest in how different disciplines come together to be able to create a result in the marketplace. So understanding how finance works, understanding how engineering works, understanding how sales works, understanding how services work. And so my own mission was: be relevant across a large combination of disciplines, but also become good at individual disciplines as well, in order to be increasingly relevant and valuable as a greater picture arrived, right? So that’s how that came to life. And even as I was coming into Qualtrics, I told the founders of the company—Qualtrics has an interesting history, a company that, the context is that…
Brady: A survey company is how it started, didn’t it?
Serafin: … It started as an academic research survey company. You know, where universities around the United States and then eventually around the world were using the system for post-graduate research and as they did so, they built an increasingly more sophisticated tool. A tool that people started to rely on as like, this is what you need to use to be able to get answers to super hard questions. And then what happened was, when I was coming into the company around 2016 we looked at the wide dispersion of use cases. And we said, “Oh, my gosh, people are doing a lot more with this than just answering questions. They’re using this system to be able to help run their business and check in on how they’re doing with their customers.” And we said, “What are the unarticulated needs that we’re not addressing, but that they’re trying to use the tool for? And is there value in perhaps us building out a much more sophisticated set of capabilities?” But when I was coming into the company, I told the founders, who had started the company roughly 15 years prior, that I’m here to help you run the business, so I’m going to have zero direct reports for as long as you let me get away with it.
Brady: You had zero direct reports?
Serafin: Yeah.
Brady: That means you were not in founder mode, where you’re supposed to have, like, 60 at this point.
Serafin: Yeah. Well, I was actually—the point behind it was, if you want me to help you run the company, then I’m gonna help you run the company, and I’m not going to take any one particular department or combination of departments.
Stoller: How long did that last?
Serafin: It lasted about 18 months, to a point where the founders came to me and said, like, you gotta take some stuff over.
Brady: I’m still on my listening tour.
Serafin: But no, it was a mindset, which is, at that point, the CEO, a guy named Ryan Smith, an amazing entrepreneur, we were running the company two in a box, you know, and so we just said, like, titles don’t matter to us. We’re here to go and do the right thing and build this company to where it needs to go. And we had an interest… We’ve had an interesting history so far.
Brady: Well, before we get into that interesting history, when I started my career, I often would look at academy companies, like P&G is an academy company for marketing. GE was an academy company. I would argue that Microsoft is an academy company for leadership. I mean, A, do you agree? And secondly, what did you take away from that experience that helped in Qualtrics? It’s so different coming in with the founders, frankly.
Serafin: Yeah, I mean number one, being on the edge of innovation and the discipline around that, regardless of the field that you’re in—you can be in biotech, pharmaceuticals, health care, manufacturing—how do you run a company that needs to be on the edge of innovation? And then, B, when scale is very significant, where even if you’re innovating, if you don’t have that innovation turned into something that generates a billion dollars of incremental value in a short time frame, it won’t matter. And so building that discipline is a method and a science, and partly art. It’s probably the greatest thing I learned that was there. Because obviously what came with that were, you know: How do you lead? How do you think about portfolio allocation culture? I could talk about that forever, and what that does to create the right mechanisms. And I watched, you know, I was there when Bill Gates was the CEO, was there when Steve Ballmer was the CEO, and I was there when Satya Nadella became CEO.
Brady: Very different.
Serafin: And so you learn a lot through that. But at the end of the day, it goes back to, how do you innovate at pace, at that kind of scale? And then you can transfer things from that into many other industries. You know, I sit on the board of Moody’s, and there’s many things that I’ve taken from that that have applied to the way that Moody’s is innovating within its own industry.
Stoller: You named three super high-profile CEOs. Are any of them mentors to you? Or do you have any that you look up to that you call regularly or talk to for advice?
Serafin: Sure, Steve Ballmer has been, Satya Nadella was at the time when we were together there. And each of them are very different personalities, different people. And there’s mentoring, where I received it one-on-one. And then there’s mentoring through observation and watching and being close, both from within a company, from a distance, seeing how someone’s leading, but also in the room when you’re making decisions, or when you’re talking strategy, or when you’re reviewing an operating plan and progress around it. So, yes.
Brady: One of the things that’s interesting about Qualtrics, and we want to get up to today, but there have been periods where a lot of people would have left. Let’s start with, SAP acquires a company, typically, that’s a moment to head for the doors. You know, there’s an IPO, then there’s going private, walk us through a little bit, just from a leadership perspective, how it felt even being acquired by a massive company like SAP, that must have changed the culture to some extent.
Serafin: Yeah. First off, the history, you know, I was joining the company. I was at Microsoft going into my 18th year, we were building a system called Microsoft Teams. We all know the name today, but that was built on the heels of a system that was called Link before that, and I had no reasons to leave. And so, I lived in Washington at that time, and we had five kids, all of them were in school, and there was a moment where my wife and I spent time, and sort of had to come to terms with, why would I leave that environment and go do something as crazy as working for this little-known company that was about a $150 million company at that time? So there was the why, why, why, why that I went through. That’s a whole different conversation, but it was very important because it actually affected what happened in that moment and many other moments when SAP came along, surprisingly. So my view was, gosh, the next 10 years, we can maybe make something out of this interesting company. I believed in the culture, the nature of the technology, the problem that they were solving. It reminded me of the new category-building that we did in communications, which was what Teams has done for how businesses communicate. We’re doing the same thing when it comes to how companies connect with customers. And that was one of my whys, one of many. So when the time came, we had done a funding raise, a two-and-a-half-billion-dollar valuation in 2017 coming into 2018, the rate of growth of the company, and what we saw in the public markets, we said, we’re going to file to go public. And so by the end of 2018 our plan was to be public. We went through the road show and met all of the Wall Street investors and analysts, and five days before we were going to ring the bell on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange, we announced that we were going to get acquired by SAP for $8.5 billion. So first off, it was the largest public acquisition in the history of tech at that time. Secondly, SAP was paying a very significant premium to what we were doing in terms of run rate as a company. We [had] not even hit a billion in revenue at that time. But what they saw was the making of stuff, something that would further accelerate what SAP was doing in ERP, in HR systems, because of the connection between understanding human experience and the operating environment within a company to better inform the operating environment of the company, which SAP creates all the software for that, right? So Ryan Smith and I went on a walk along a river. There’s a beautiful river that’s the Provo River in Utah, which is one of our headquarter buildings. And before we signed on the dotted line, he said, “What are you going to do if we sign this?” And it was about a 20-minute conversation with about a 40-minute walk. And what we walked away with is, like, I’m not going to do anything different than what I’ve been doing. Now, Ryan said “Hey, I might want to buy a basketball team,” which he later did. He bought the Utah Jazz. But other than that, frankly, it was really important, because we had the “why” moment at that time, we decided we were going to go public through SAP, we weren’t going to sell to SAP. It’s really important. And that actually affected our behavior in a pretty deep way. So, nothing was going to change in the way we showed up, the way we operated, the way we were going to stay focused, who we were going to go serve. And surprise, surprise, we went public roughly two and a half to three years later as a division within SAP because we had outdistanced any of the financial plan and business plan numbers that they’d had when they were acquiring the company. And now that doesn’t mean that every leadership team member did that. We had a moment where others had their “why” moment, and they’re like, I don’t believe in this.
Brady: I’m out of here.
Serafin: I’m out of here. You know, I’ve been well taken care of, I’m going to leave. But that was fine, because what happened was we ended up rejuvenating a new core, and that new core became the core that led the company and then took the company public. And then, you know, there was another part of the history, but that was how we looked at that moment.
Stoller: The thing that I find so interesting about your company, Zig, in Qualtrics, is that your customers get such a vast amount of data. You collect so much for them. And I feel like so often companies just get, you know, when they get so much data, they get kind of nervous and they don’t know what to do, and they just stall and freeze. And, you know, I’m a journalist. I love a story. I’m hoping you can tell us, is there any experience you’ve had with the customer where they’ve used this vast amount of data really successfully to do something super innovative and interesting?
Brady: Or stupidly.
Stoller: Oh, yeah, or stupid, we’ll take that too.
Serafin: Well, there’s many, many, many stories. In fact, the interesting thing about your point about story is—think about the word “story,” right? Don’t you want people or organizations that you choose to put your business with to know your story? Because if they know your story, they’re more likely going to be able to properly serve you. They’ll anticipate what your needs are. They’ll be more empathetic to your context, right? If you just open up, pull out your phone, and open up and scroll through all your recent financial transactions, right? Go to your banking app or your credit card app and just scroll through. I did this the other day, and I thought: which ones make me smile, which ones royally tick me off? And the ones that make you smile are the ones that delight you, right? They know your story, right?
Brady: You’ve got to share which ones made you smile.
Stoller: And the ones that piss you off. Gotta hear both.
Serafin: That’s another conversation. I think the companies that use the data around understanding their customers ultimately understand the stories of their customers more effectively, but it also shapes the culture of their company. One example that’s quite public is Delta Airlines. You know, we have over 65 airlines around the world that work with us on different dimensions. And what’s interesting is these airlines use our system to say, “How are we doing across various stages of the travel journey,” right? And Delta takes that to a whole nother level. They’ve had award-winning progress as being an experience leader, despite the fact that they work in very difficult circumstances. They’re in the logistics business, right? The metal that they use either comes from Airbus or Boeing, right? But yet, they’re an experience-focused business that shows up uniquely and differently than other airlines. And not to say that other airlines are bad, they also have their own brand positioning and so forth, right? But what’s interesting about Delta and, Ed Bastion’s talked about this publicly, is they’ve used the data they get around experience to better understand how they must best show up on the front line of the customer journey. And how does that then nicely dovetail in with the way that the Delta brand needs to show up right in both the good moments and some of the most difficult moments, right?
Brady: Well, and now we’re in the era of AI, and when I last spoke with you, I think you compared it to the losers. That’s my term of the Industrial Revolution, who underestimated the impact of steel. So I feel like every time I turn around, there’s stories on it. What do you think we’re underestimating right now, from where you sit?
Serafin: If you put a crystal ball in front of yourself, and you say, oh, it’s hard to have a crystal ball, but the way to get to a crystal ball is: Start to plot out data points of what is starting to happen around the world technology-wise, behaviorally. If you look at economic changes, government changes, and you just say, “OK, what might happen with the way that these points might end up intersecting, and what becomes the new art of the possible,” right? And what might then become the new drivers of how companies interact with customers in the future? I think there’s a massive level of underestimation of what generative—now becoming agentic—AI will end up doing for changing the way that we interact with today’s world. And it reminds me very much of, if I go back to 2009, two years after the iPhone was launched. So the iPhone is in the market. If you would have read the press headlines at that time, you would have said the iPhone is super expensive. It might be relevant to a certain category of consumers, OK, but the iPhone and the way it attacked the problem actually was innovating on moving from resistive touch display to capacitive touch display, which means the touchscreen is actually starting to work. The idea of bringing a whole variety of apps to a device, which wasn’t really yet happening anywhere, nobody was treating that as a serious platform. And I had a meeting, an interesting meeting that took place in 2009 in Waterloo, Canada. Anybody know who, what, where?
Brady: Jim Balsillie.
Stoller: She knows, Canadian over here.
Serafin: Jim Balsillie. So Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazarus were the cofounders of a company called Blackberry, and I was walking into this meeting—it was my first meeting with Jim Balsillie—and the purpose of the meeting was to talk about some things that we could collaborate on. And my goal was to convince him that the future is going to be a passive, touch-based, display-based future, and a future where the world that they’re living in and that we were all living in, if you were in business, this is the keyboard-based world you were living in, was about to change dramatically. And the response I got is like, “No, no. We’ve got it figured out. We understand where this market is going, precisely.” Their market cap at that time, I’ll never forget, was $65 billion. In two years, it went like this. We’re in a very similar moment.
Brady: Well, wait a second, what’s your theory? Because I have my theories as to why—I think they constantly talked to CTOs. They were not really looking at what was happening with the “bring your own device to work,” and the popularity of Apple, bringing the consumers, bringing that into the company. What do you think felled...
Serafin: The part that if I were to go back into that room and back to the crystal ball, if we talk about data points and what actually drives outcomes that I should have emphasized more, is how quickly the app universe, the apps that you were using on that BlackBerry, would easily become available on this new form factor, because that just completely changed the context, right? All of a sudden you had a much more easier way of interacting. User experience was going to change, so.
Stoller: OK, yeah, I think that right now a lot of employees are very scared by AI. And I think that leads me to what I’m going to ask is—Diane, your favorite question—which is, Zig, what scares you? What keeps you up at night?
Serafin: Probably what scares me is that there’s the world as you see it, in how it sort of evolves, is a lot of companies are pursuing simply making things more transactional, you know? And so it’s like, Oh, that’s great. You have another agent, AI-based system. What’s it going to do? It’s going to do better tracking and managing of the operating environment. And so, yeah, we’ll have faster speeds and feeds inside our company, right?
Brady: So, cost-cutting.
Serafin: And you know, I’m in a time in my life where I’m very focused on the purpose of what our company is doing, and our purpose actually is to be able to ultimately improve the human experience. That’s what drives me deeply in certain industries, especially like in health care as an example, or in the way that governments interact with citizens and how citizens can connect with what government decisions are being made, or with any industry, frankly, that actually affects the way that we end up experiencing the world. And so if AI is only about creating faster transactions, more tracking, more management, it’s a pretty crazy world that we’re going to be living in, right? But if AI can be used to build deeper connections, to create more empathy, to be able to create better adaptation to what human beings are trying to do, we will all be better human beings to each other. The user experiences will become better. We will be able to spend our time on things that actually are more human, as opposed to chasing down logistics, as an example, right? That’s a pretty big concern for me about, you know, given how things might end up evolving. Because naturally, if people just do things with the blinders that they’re on, they’re just going to forward iterate on what they’ve been doing up to this point and not necessarily change the game and say, like, look, how do you reimagine what experiences can be like for people?
Brady: I’m an optimist about AI. I think you are too. It’s the head, you know, essence of your company. Really, you’re on the front lines. I’d love for you to make it more real for us. You mentioned a little bit about what Delta is doing, but agentic AI, give us a sense of how that’s happening in practice right now, because I feel like we’re still at a 30,000-foot level right now talking about the importance of this, and there’s a lot of rhetoric. Can you tell us what you’re seeing happening on the ground? Because the speed of this transition is pretty impressive.
Serafin: Yeah, I think on the ground right now, there’s two things happening. No matter what, someone in your company is being talked to about taking a process, an operational process, and saying, “Hey, imagine if we end up reducing the number of phone calls coming into your call center, how long it takes to be able to, you know, reduce the number of chats that are coming in and and have a much more intelligent bot address that.” So on the ground, most of what’s taking place is: better automate, better track, better manage, with a system that can be a little more decisive. It’s a little smarter, OK? And that’s what agent-based systems are about. It’s actually being able to take data, take insights, make a decision more quickly, and then enable an action. OK, that’s what agents are about. The other thing, though, that is forthcoming is saying, “OK, how do you take what you’ve learned about people over the longer run, about what really matters to them, and use that to be able to better inform how you show up in that experience?” So you take, for example, let’s say, an airline scenario, where there’s booking the flight, there’s exploring where you might want to travel, there’s the actual flight experience itself, going through the airport, etc, etc. After you’ve arrived at the airport, how long does it take to get to where you’re going, that entire journey? OK? And today, how does it work? Right? It’s all based on information that you’re putting in, right? And often you’re repeating the things that you’ve already put in before, right? And there’s very little memory of you know of that, and you’re actually getting assistance from people, human beings, throughout that journey. So something doesn’t go right. What do you do? You call the call center, right?
Brady: And then you get a bot.
Serafin: Or you might get a bot on a chat app within the application itself, right? Or if the handoff between you and that airline, and let’s say your rental car agency doesn’t work. Well, where are you going? Well, if the flight was delayed and then canceled your car reservation, what are you doing? Now you’re calling the call center at the rental car agency. In a new world, you can actually say, “OK, here’s Julie, and she likes to travel in the following ways. When the travel was delayed due to weather factors, here’s what needs to happen,” and just like people working behind the scenes, you’re now actually addressing things based upon what the requirements might be for someone, and you’re actually reimagining that experience, right? And that experience is much more human, it’s more anticipatory, it’s enabling things in the background, and it reduces the amount of heavy lifting that you have to take personally and directly. OK? So now take that and say, OK, how does that relate to my industry, right? And you can sort of work with that and say, OK, well, obviously the scenario means you better understand your customer. Now work backwards.
Stoller: I want to end on kind of a fun one really fast. I just want to know: What is the top thing that you use AI to do, either personally or work?
Serafin: Faster answers to questions that exist in the universe of data on the internet.
Stoller: Good answer.
Brady: OK, so now I can ask a very fast question then, too, because we talk about connecting on a human level, one of the things I know you think about a lot is burnout, and I think that’s a real issue for any leader. And we were comparing our Oura rings earlier. My scores are usually terrible, so ergo I’m not CEO material. But talk about, what do you do to keep yourself balanced, and what advice do you have as people become in these more stressful, very public positions?
Serafin: First off, I’d say you got to know your “why.” Back to my earlier point, you better be really sure about why you’re doing what you’re doing today, and if you have aspiration to do the next big thing, you better sure as heck know about the “why” you would go do that, because you will be faced with a test of that every day thereafter, and you better be really well-anchored in that “why?” You know, on a very deep personal level, because as you evolve in your career, you’re going to get more lonely. There’s a lot less people around you, and you’re more on your own. And so you better be in a position where you have that “why?” really strongly grounded. And it’s important. Of course, when you know that, then you’re actually going to, in my personal context, it meant, OK, well, then this is the way I need to make sure that I’m able to thrive in that environment. You know, building a company that is at one stage of startup to becoming a very significant company, it takes a toll on how you live your life and how you spend time with your family, and how you spend time with friends, and where you’re going to be physically, geographically at different times, right? And it’s not worth it if you’re not taking care of yourself physically and emotionally. Not worth it. And I’ve seen colleagues and friends burn out and physically, ultimately, hurting themselves. You know, where they’ve hindered their life span as a result, right? And so for me, it’s been important to develop a set of habits. They weren’t always good habits, but there’s rituals and things that re-ground me. There’s both the physical and the emotional connections and they’re important. So, you know, my habits are, I wake up early in the morning, and you’ll usually find me doing something that is a physical activity and it’s different. I try to not be bored by doing the same monotonous thing every time, and that happens almost every single day of the week. But on the weekends, I also try to get out and be in touch with nature, and that has a huge effect on me personally, along with being with family out in nature as an example, and it helps to refuel context. So that’s another dimension. I think a third dimension is, for me personally, has been, you know, it’s interesting– when you’re at work, there are people who are colleagues, and there are some people who, you know, I dare to say, become like family, but it’s difficult, because you have to be very careful, at the end of the day you’re there to run a business, but the level of care that you have for the organization that you’re working for, if you really care, you’re going to care about those human beings' lives. And what I have found is the more that you are willing to connect with those people, the more it actually fuels you, because it expands your purpose for what you’re doing. In my case, it’s actually expanded beyond my own colleagues that I work with. It’s actually people that I get to partner with who are our customers. And so all of that creates a level of balancing, even though it’s not always balancing.
Stoller: Good work.
Brady: Thank you very much, Zig.
Stoller: Thank you.
Brady: Likewise, thank you. Thanks everybody else for joining us. “Leadership Next” is edited by Nicole Vergalla.
Stoller: Our executive producer is Adam Banicki.
Brady: Our producers are Mason Cohn and Ceylan Ersoy.
Stoller: Our theme is by Jason Snell.
Brady: Our studio producer is Natasha Ortiz.
Stoller: “Leadership Next” is a production of Fortune Media.
Brady: I’m Diane Brady.
Stoller: And I’m Kristen Stoller.
Brady: See you next time.
Leadership Next episodes are produced by Fortune’s editorial team. The views and opinions expressed by podcast speakers and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Deloitte or its personnel. Nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.
