Hello, hi. Good afternoon, everyone. Today we are here to talk about the game that has just changed with Instagram messaging automation opening up for business. The art of possible is now beyond stories, posts and DMs to a complete customer experience life cycle that can be executed on Instagram Messenger. Instagram messaging now offers a personal connection at every phase of the customer journey from discovery, engagement, commerce and support. And it now helps managing high volumes of customer messages, making it easier and helping to turn conversations into business outcomes. Integrating with CRM inventory and other channels for a holistic engagement view. Triage inquiries based on user and inquiry type and route accordingly to automate workflows for common inquiries. Increasing efficiency for agents to handle inquiries on Instagram without redirecting to another channel with customer or on a private reply. And in order to discuss about how the market and the industry is looking at this change, we are here today with an elite set of panel and it's my privilege now to introduce the panel to all of you. So we have Ekta Agarwal here from Meta Instagram. She leads the strategic product partnership for Instagram and it's a driving force behind Instagram messaging adoption in India. We also have Shreya, head of marketing at India. Hi everyone. We have Kragati Rana SVP strategy experience transformation at Isobar India. Hello guys. Hi. We have Samyukta Ganesh Ayur VP and head of marketing at Kaya Limited. Hi everyone. I think there's some problem with my video but I should be visible soon. Alright. Hope to see you soon. Yes. Yeah. We have Shraddhul Beshtia, CMO of Modi Naturals. Hi Thanks Neel for the introduction. Hi everyone. Welcome Shraddhul and we have Kartik Nagarajan, Chief Content Officer at WaveMaker. Hi Neel. Hi everyone. So welcome to all the panelists and without wasting any more time I'll get into the set of queries, points, questions that we all have and would want your thoughts on it. Primarily to talk about the importance of Instagram messaging. Now my first question since we already have somebody from Instagram on this panel so I will route my first question to Ekta and maybe then take this question to the other panelists. So Ekta, how do you think brands and target groups on Instagram, for them how the priority has changed over the last few years and why? Thank you so much Neel for directing the first question to me. Happy to take this up. I know like when Instagram was initially founded in 2010, it was majorly a picture sharing platform but since then it has been revolutionized and has seen like a lot of emerging friends and apart from that a lot of consumer brands are now born on Instagram. So that's the major change which we have seen over time. With the stats keeping in mind 90% of the people on IG follow a brand and they feel that two-third of them feel that they can interact with the business on IG and that's the first platform they use it for interacting. That's amazing to hear. In this pandemic I am sure the things have changed. The businesses have shut down. We have seen call centres closed. People are shifting to the work from home environment. Now people are turning tuned to messaging to get in touch with the businesses but now the businesses have also changed. They are fast tracking and going digital just to connect with these people over messaging and I think like this momentum has continued even now where both big small businesses are using messaging as a key to connect with their customers across their journey. A very very simple example which I could see in our daily life is when being a mother of a one-year-old child I was majorly most of my queries browsing is nowadays for searching and making the life easier for me. While doing so I came across a brand where people or the mothers were talking about how it has made their lives changed in their life or how it has made their lives very easy. Just because I was trying to message them and interact with them on time when I actually needed them I am now a loyal customer of theirs. So that's how Instagram messaging is changing their lives and I know like it's from browsing to scrolling. Now it has more become to talking and purchasing on Instagram. That's it. So yes, there we have a story of brands making an impact on Instagram and it's going beyond just engagement, going all the way from care to commerce. So I'll take this question to Shreya from a brand's lens how have you seen this evolution on Instagram happening? So I think Ekta covered it when she said Instagram as a platform has gone through a myriad of changes and I think for us as a brand it pretty much exists in every part of the consumer funnel. Given that most people are on Instagram today and spend quite a few hours there I think awareness and reaching out to new audiences that are not captive audiences becomes a huge priority for us. Instagram's targeted consumer advertising helps us reach out to people who have not shopped with us before probably do not follow and engage with us regularly. So I think first and foremost from an awareness and widening the top of the funnel Instagram plays a really important role. Of course with the way the platform has changed we've also seen that Instagram has now become sort of a product discovery platform. So with your Instagram shop you can put your latest products and kinds of audiences. So you have the running and the training audience you have the yoga audience, you have the lifestyle audience you have the sports fan and we need to ensure product visibility and availability for all of them. So I think product discoverability is also where we use Instagram in a very strong way. And I think finally post purchase as well engaging with the same consumer that has shopped with us before is critical. And there again you would leverage a platform like Instagram to continue to engage with them that can be through interesting content or various features that Instagram has as a platform right now whether it's alive or reels or the various media features but also in terms of people who will constantly drop a comment saying customer query hey where can I get this product, what's the status of my refund, what's the status of my order so I think pretty much every part of the consumer funnel is where we would leverage a platform like Instagram today very interesting point said thanks for sharing that Shia. So nothing upon with the consumer at every part of the consumer life cycle we've seen a lot of impact happening in the health and beauty segment with the Instagram messaging opening up and I would like to take this question to Samyukta and now that we are able to see you so the question is now to you in terms of the importance of Instagram messaging how has you changed the priority I mean how have you seen the priority change from a brand's lens? Yeah so I think I would like to mirror a lot of things that Ekta and Shia were also talking about for us particularly Instagram has been a blessing in disguise because the kind of business that we are in I don't think there's any other business that kind of straddles so many words at the same time so we have 100 plus Dermats and then we have all of our skin clinics and then we have these entire range of FMCG products the product line that we kind of cater to so we have actually been able to use Instagram very effectively in each of its features to the fullest to say how do we kind of leverage where can we use our Dermats to speak about certain content where can we use customer testimonials to seed in how customers feel when they come into the clinic and experience a kaya journey or where can we leverage the entire play that happens with influencer experientials or then where can we actually seed in all of our product content so I think Instagram has been gorgeous in the way it has kind of helped us at every stage of this entire brand building journey that we are a part of and it plays a very huge role even in our entire CRM gamut as well as our performance marketing gamut so actually like what Shreya was saying it touches every touch point of the customers life like pre-during post literally it's like end to end funnel is happening on Instagram and the content we are creating here is what is then getting disseminated across our offline D2C e-commerce everything is kind of this becomes like a hub and spoke model for us so it's super critical and it's really working well for us Thank you Samyukta thanks for sharing those insights taking this question to Praveethi and Karthik to speak from an agency from dimension of an agency but I'll add I'll top it up a little more and talk about the Instagram messaging use cases we are seeing every day we see many people shopping and seeking support in addition to engaging and we just heard that from Shreya and Samyukta kind of summarizing that and sharing their experiences that it's gone beyond engagement what do you think and Praveethi I would start with taking the question to you what do you think is the best way to support them at scale when using Instagram messaging as a channel Thank you, thank you so much for the question just to start off I completely agree with what the team has been saying till now the evolution of Instagram in India and the way it's impacted consumer behavior at such it's been brilliant we as a collective had never thought that we would be posting picture of the dinner that we're going to take that we're eating and that people are going to react to it and that's actually going to make us a mini-celebrity of sorts who would have thought of that but I think Instagram as a medium has really moved from being a medium to express yourself like this is what I am this is what I do, this is my lifestyle so that medium of aspiration and it's kind of client it's at the right place where you can even shop on Instagram and now I think somebody was mentioning that customer care complaints which was something that we would always think of as a sorry to say this but when you had good compliments to give you would go to Instagram and you would say wow I want to buy that and I want to buy this pair of shoes I love it, I completely resonate with the brand and when you had some nasty brutal things to say I would go to Twitter but that bridge I feel like is collapsing right now because the audience set of Instagram is growing and therefore the audience there want to do everything on Instagram get inspired by and if I'm not happy with something I want to come and find a solution there so I think that whole journey is getting completed and so coming to the question that you asked I think it's brilliant in the way that the information and the Instagram messenger platform the opportunities it's going to give to us right so not only I mean I'm just going back to I think one of the points that Shreya was making and Samyukta was making that it's going to impact every stage of the funnel from the exploration stage where I can go to the now I can click on a story and I can be directed to explore the whole range so for example if I were to be one of the brands that we work on is M&S right if I were to and they have a winter collection and they launch a red sweater which I see on my Instagram story and I go and click on it now M&S can send me a message saying that hey this is a discount coupon for your next purchase or it can also which is a more instant gratification kind of a thing that they can do or they can also do a long term thing where they can tell me that hey this sweater looks best with this pair of boots or you know this pair of pants and I can buy the whole look and that solves the pain point for me because a lot of people who are buying who are buying a product they also want to buy a full look when it comes to fashion so it solves that problem for me or if I were to talk about a different category say like if we do a lot of movie marketing so for example if there is something like a matrix resurrection that is going to release and you have to do like a promo of matrix resurrection you take the social feed and you convert that into matrix for example if all the posts look the same and they have one different messaging and the trick is that you have to go to the right post which is the right pill and if you comment on that particular post only then will you get a discount coupon so the fact that through your comment and the journey there can be automated and the discount coupon is only available to the person who clicks or comments the right thing it doesn't have to be done manually anymore so that is really cool it can really open up avenues and of course I am not going into the regular things that you can do that you can explore the product portfolio you can set up the whole support system like for the longest time I think the problem is that we have not a problem it's a lot of labor that we have put in that every time audience on our social media is giving us a compliment one person has to go and reply to it or you want to heart it but now you can just automate that or if there is a complaint and you can bucket it and you can sort that problem so those are of course the first level things that you can do with this but there is so much more just say for example if there is something like we work on a sexual wellness brand and score and a lot of women in India I think the stat is somewhere close to 70% 70% of women in India actually don't experience orgasm and score for one has a lot of pleasure products that they offer and again sex and intimacy is a very private conversation that I'm not going to have on a social media or have anywhere else I want a very one to one chat on it so I can again this is again an opportunity that we can use that handle and create have those one to use the messenger and have those one to one conversations with the audience about what they need the most and when they need the most so a lot of I think it can be completely plugged into different stages of the funnel whether it's exploration, whether it is consideration, whether it is reading more about the product for categories such as Bosch where you want to read and absorb more before you come to a conclusion and then lastly when you want to just buy the product or you want to complain about something so I think it just plugs in everywhere in the funnel so yeah it's a powerful thing that Instagram has come up with Thanks Pragati for sharing that insight Karthik takeaways from that conversation instant gratification it's a channel for giving compliments and I recall one earlier conversation with Pragati where we were actually discussing how Instagram gradually is becoming the new Twitter for 18 to 35 go to Twitter to complain and people are 18 to 35 is probably coming on Instagram to complain your experience Karthik in terms of how have you seen the best way to support at scale using Instagram as a messaging channel Right I got to tell you you have such brilliant minds on this panel I'm going to absolutely hate you for making me go last after all the great points have been made but I'm going to keep it short so that we can move forward I love the point that Shreya made today Instagram is a fantastic tool for product discoverability and I would have created many different attributes for Instagram three years back this would not have been one of them so that's a great takeaway for me I'm just going generally by you know how the user behavior or my own user behavior has changed on the platform today I spend 4x more time on messaging on Instagram than I probably did two years back so automatically I think this is going to translate into a brand and a user sort of an experience as well and Karthik made some wonderful use cases so I'm not going to add to that you know we're probably going to a stage at the end by saying that we're probably going to go to a phase where multiple research has showed us that people are more comfortable on Instagram through the messaging through the messaging part of it than any other mode of communication and probably we are entering an era of conversation as content right and that's probably what we need to move towards Thanks Karthik for the insights Shadu in terms of the use cases that you have seen evolve on Instagram Messenger Instagram messaging what are your thoughts in the way and how do you see evolving or how is adoption going to be in the shorter run in the longer run how have you seen that adoption happening Okay so thanks thanks for sharing a lot of points and probably learning from me you were probably one of the traditional marketing guys who just moved on to a lot of so now after a long time I've finally moved on to more than half of my expense going on to digital so see this is something that we've seen going in from the moving from the traditional side a lot of consumer complaints coming in from food brands so first of all we used to have a lot of food queries coming in especially during the pandemic when people wanted to know more about where could they source their products from moving from there towards the other part of the so the biggest boon I would say with Instagram is the seamless integration across campaigns so typically every time we do a campaign influencers we see about 60-70% hike in the kind of queries that are coming in about the brand about in fact going towards the other side not just the pre-purchase but towards the post-purchase journey where a lot of we could aid people in handling a lot of different kinds of use cases like how do you create more recipes more interesting ones to cozy up with the family spending time with loved ones with the festive season so when people discoverability yes probably I would say about as reading this study about 80% of people are now discovering new brands through Instagram and in fact even on that stories is the biggest need medium through where messaging has been started coming in and Instagram messages starting off from stories it definitely takes a lot of load off my CRM teams about and it gives us much more better buckets to target with our consumers and handle and take them on the post-purchase journey further and ensure that they could probably look at the other so when especially in our food categories when we are getting into new products and CDs what selling happens this way so we can probably link it link up an olive oil with a pasta which we recently launched so that helps in more discoverability thanks Shadu thank you for sharing those points we spoke a lot about the use cases let's now talk about the Instagram messaging priorities and the focus verticals being maximum impact and I'll take this question back to you talking about the various use cases on Instagram messaging how do you think it can add value to an organization or to a particular vertical industry domain and which industry or vertical have you seen or you feel is going to benefit most from the Instagram messaging thank you so much Neel for reacting to this question and again like all the panelists mentioned we have seen irrespective of the verticals across the customer journey various use cases where Instagram messaging has been playing a great role telling or saying a very very cliche term which is conversational commerce that's what it is enabling imagine a scenario where with the store employee can be replicated in an online setting and that's something which is true for every industry to be honest but we have already seen some of the market players across different verticals like D2C and e-commerce telco and tech edge tech so these are some of the verticals where we have seen all the market players have already integrated and seen some of the use cases being implemented and we have seen a huge traction in the things of verticals where majority of the public and the private banks have already seen a great impact while generating the leads I think that's because what Praveethi mentioned consultative selling is one of the major use cases which can be leveraged by these banks and fintechs because of consultative selling all the verticals which have products which are which have the key token value very high they need a consultative selling because I will not buy a furniture not before like asking so many queries but I can buy a shampoo or conditioner before having those queries so I think that's something where we have seen a lot of brands are already leveraging it but one of my personal favourites again going back to being a mom is the service vertical while I was searching for a photographer who can do a one-year-old photo shoot this is something where messaging again played a great great role because I need so many details I have so many questions before I hire a service or get a service so I think like service sector can definitely leverage a lot from Instagram messaging Thanks Sita for the points you shared taking this question now to Karthik Karthik you spoke about how the evolution has happened in terms of the adoption that you have seen with the brands so taking this question to you which of the brands you think is going to prioritise this and you have seen adoption or you are experiencing the scale happening with these brands and of course I will take this question to you because you already had some examples that you shared so Karthik I will start with you if you can share your experiences Generally when it comes to social conversation I think we have seen a lot happening in the beauty and the personal care space this is not traditionally one of those high buzz sort of categories but a combination of many things that have been discussed till now, a lot of creators playing in the space, a lot of influences content being created and all of that has led to a lot of conversation in any case happening across platforms I was listening to Samyukta's point on how this is amazing for a brand like Qion and I think they are uniquely placed, you can have conversations you can engage appointments, clarify doubts multiple things can be done on a platform like this which makes it very unique so I think personal care and beauty probably is going to be right at the top but I also feel at some level as we move more towards this being the primary medium of communication and when I say primary I'm probably brand focusing less on the short form content they create and focusing more on a human plus machine sort of a conversation with clients to manage scale I think you will probably see a lot of traction in a lot of consultative sales brands which need that sort of consulting now I can think of a lot of technology brands from that perspective I think that's another area where I feel this can be huge and also a lot of food brands I'm just dialing this back to probably 8-9 years back when food brands were not necessarily accessible to many of you if you were to have a conversation on different aspects of the product these are some of the categories that I am very excited about yeah sorry Neel actually I jumped in because I completely agree with what Karthik is saying at the top of my mind is also food because if anything goes wrong in the chocolate you are having or in the ice cream you are having you are going to create a ruckus and you are going to let the world know I think managing sentiment there managing complaints there is very very important it directly leads to it directly starts having an impact on the brand because all the wrong things start getting written about you so I think food industry is very precarious that ways I think this will really come handy for them again like how Karthik and Ekta were saying I think in industries which are more problem solution like even kaya clinic like Samyukta if I have a problem and if that problem becomes better or worse with the solution then I will want to talk about it and plus they are also build a lot on authenticity and trust because I am kind of coming to you with a problem so I want it solved if I am losing hair and if I am coming to you for a solution then I want that solution I want to trust you for that or say like a lot of hospital chains or wellness brands like Prapto and Fine I think that for them also this becomes very important then also I believe that brands that are actually in a way I am going to be covering all the brands because in a way like if you look at fashion brands if you look at beauty brands if you look at cosmetic industry there the problem that they are solving is of closing the transaction or if I have a problem then the conversation is more about delivery and replacement and what color should I choose so I think the conversation becomes different but the relevance still remains or going back to what we were discussing earlier that even an industry where you take you want to have multiple conversations like Ekta was also saying that consultative like something like a consumer durable you are not going to buy it at the drop of a hat you are going to think about it you are going to mull over it and then you are going to take a decision so there the role that this platform can play is to re-engage, re-educate compare all of those things but in an industry where you need constant insurance, say like in health insurance industry you want to know if you are buying the right product, if it is covered everything there essentially you are replacing that human being that agent that you meet so I think it does have a very wide spectrum of things that it can tap into but I think the purpose will be different and how you use it will be different and like I already mentioned that something like a movie marketing client can use it but then it will be more engagement you want to capture the attention of the audience and then gratify him within the same native platform so I think it is immensely helpful but the purpose will differ Thanks Prakati, Samyukta I will take this question to you of course because everybody kind of spoke about what you had touched upon earlier and the impact that has been felt in the health and beauty domain so wanted to hear from you in terms of how are you seeing the adoption happening with Kaya as a brand adopting this and driving it and the benefits that you are seeing from it? Yeah, absolutely so thanks Neel and thanks Karthik, thanks Prakati so I think yeah absolutely because for Kaya again like I am we are in a position where and I don't think it's just Kaya it's also other brands as well because one is you want to understand what you are offering you may have a problem or you may just want to get something as simple as a party peel done or a vampire facial done these are just trending terms you may not really understand it but you definitely want to get on the bandwagon right? There are a lot of questions plaguing your mind and then there is only so much the call center is able to then kind of help explain like you run a performance marketing campaign then it automatically goes to your website and there it goes to the call center the call center agent will give you X amount of information and then say okay now you come into the clinic meet the doctor and the doctor will then recommend basis your skin type etc you will get a personalized treatment made for you I suddenly see that with something like a DM automation of sorts kind of coming in you kind of cut through a lot of refraft because it kind of eases the journey it becomes like an omni channel thing where and if it's going to like learn if there's going to be so much of machine learning and you can humanize this entire experience because right now it's more like okay call us on this number we'll get back to you or you know write to us on this email ID and we'll get back to you I don't think the instagram audience is actually waiting for people to get back to them like somebody was telling me they were doing some wedding Lenga shopping for their fiance and he said I wrote to I went to Amazon found the vendor went to instagram DM the vendor because I wanted to buy it for her and then they got back to me to two days later which is not a bad cat if you ask me but they had already lost out on the client because he had already moved on found somebody else who got back to him like pretty fast as compared to much larger vendor than say a boutique vendor sitting somewhere in Lucknow so I think that's what is happening I think all the brands are spending so much of time effort to kind of get new customer new audiences in but the minute you snooze on a platform like Instagram you actually end up losing so I do and I do see this working out very beautifully for all brands because you're and all you want to be done is you want to be heard it's a very human human need to just be heard and that I think Prakati use the word assurance you know you want want somebody to hand hold you and say hey you know you're in the right hands and we'll we'll guide you every step of the way but if you're going for us just to get back to tell you a hi again I think that's where a lot of leakages and losses happening I see something like this beautifully kind of ensuring that the right audiences stick around with the right brand I think that brand stickiness is something I see really moving up with with this kind of automation coming in thanks thanks so my takeaway there is when you when you snooze on a channel like Instagram you end up losing and share with Puma has I mean as far as I can remember I've never snoozed on a channel like Instagram so and your your engagement is I mean is is rapidly growing on this channel so share please share some of the best practices that you have seen or the other benefits that you've seen coming out of Instagram as a channel so you know while everyone was talking I was actually thinking back to something we did at the beginning of this year and of course the platform at that point was Facebook Messenger not Instagram but I think the learnings are very much applicable here as well I think we had a very unique challenge where we were launching this extremely high-end running shoe in India right and it had various variants you had one for like elite serious marathon runners you had something for an amateur runner who just wanted comfort and a specific shoe for women because their feet are structured differently you had something for stability so people over pronate under pronate right and this was the time when we were just going into the second lockdown right usually running as a category is something that everybody thinks you need to go to the store and try the shoe before you buy right and here we were in the peak of a lockdown and we had to sell you know this new extremely high-end shoe and communicate about it for the first time right so at that point we reached the time and we came up with this really interesting solution where we basically had this messenger bot with Virat Kuli as the face of the bot and he basically asked consumers a series of simple questions and helped them find the right shoe for them right based on gender running preferences what issues they face where they run how often they run things like that very simple very basic bot based questions and obviously immediate answers right and it ended with you know based on the shoe that you were finally allotted the link to shop the shoe right there or based on your pin code the nearest store that you could go and shop from right and of course the results to me were very interesting because we were in an age where we were talking about attention spans of 14 seconds and people not you know wanting to engage further than that but we saw a really huge completion rate right and this would have been close to a one-minute survey right so a lot of people who actually completed the survey and for me I think in terms of messenger and automation this ticked off two very important check boxes right and I'm not even going to the customer complaint and customer query bucket because that's a given for me I think the two big ones that it checked off in a really major way one was personalization right I mean we've seen the entire circle of you know small businesses and then large businesses and we're coming back again to talking about how small businesses are growing a lot on Instagram and part of that is the personalization factor right and I think for me this was a big tick box in terms of personalization somebody is helping you find your accurate shoe and we're doing it virtually right and I think the second thing that it ticked off which was very big for me is the number of clicks right I mean we all know this that the more number of times you redirect a consumer from platform to platform or page to page that's how high it was right but within the simple chat you'd solved everything from this you know like awareness to product discoverability to ability to shop right in a you know one minute chat so I think for me you know while customer queries and complaints are given I think messaging and automated messaging ticks off especially when you link in the product discoverability and the shop ability angle right ticks off these two very big checkpoints which is personalization and being able to complete an entire end to end transaction with minimal number of clicks and redirects right so I think for me this was a big learning and it's definitely something that we would want to experiment with further right on the messaging and automated base because I think it it gave me the confidence that we we could engage with consumers in a longer meaningful way rather than those 14 second 15 second or you know times that we we take now as a given in which we need to consume or like convert the consumer right so I think for me this was a big tick box in terms of how to use this platform and how to use this feature going forward thanks Shreya thanks for sharing those learning very very interesting points there and taking the question to Shraddhal in terms of your experience I mean you mentioned that your digital spends have just gone up your experience of using Instagram and where does Instagram messaging fit in your priority of order where you're seeing that option happening and your expectation from it I just remembered in fact while listening to all of you there was an instance some months back where somebody a parent wanted to know so their kid was suffering from cerebral palsy and we got a query on one of our pages about she dredged somewhere from another community it wasn't scientifically proven yet but something that olive oil is good for kids with suffering from palsy so yeah she wanted to know more on it we did not have a scientific claim a hard claim on that fact but then we tested and we sort of leashed out to some of our R&D executives and the team and you know this we obviously gave out some sort of counseling to the lady the one thing which probably take away from that was the level of customization that consumers are now reaching out for and as businesses and categories evolve especially food and ready to put ready to eat everybody they're looking for ways to create and recreate their own recipes some new sort of things thrown into the mix so we learn from them we can probably take it to the next level of customization for each and every one of them so I would say probably if in case let's say if somebody wants to have those kind of conversations it's pretty I mean we don't have to depend upon customer army of customer service representative so that really helps in cutting down first costs one response times yes and then sort of so quarter of our sales is now coming in from so the first and in fact in style is the biggest I mean shift to us for us in terms of marketing spendings now so it's only relevant for us that automation of insta messaging is the next level for us in our CX journey thanks thanks Shadil taking the conversation now from automating messaging to bringing automation on messaging and I'll take this question first to you because you've already been practicing automation automating the on Instagram so taking the question first to you do you think we should make the bots on Instagram messaging intelligent or just transaction and which of them you think is a future failure I think I'll break this into two parts the first is where we are now I think where we are now I think the first step really is to conquer is transactional I think even if I look at my own customer service queries that come in and the ones that are call center sort of feels on a daily basis I think 90% of them are very very basic where is my order when is my return getting picked up when am I getting my refund and I think the first stepping stone or the first block to really get right is transactional so if you can have a way to ensure that these three or four basic questions are answered I think for now 90% of most brands in terms of customer queries should be sorted and I have seen situations where if you know there are a lot of debates and questions on the intelligence of these bots and whether they can mimic intelligent conversations with human beings at least for now my recommendation would be A keep it transactional and B have a backup of a human being also because in case the bot is not able to answer certain specific questions you should have a backup and completely relying 100% on intelligent bots might be a recipe for disaster but like I said this is the now I would like to believe that I am extremely optimistic about the tech that we would develop in the near future and hopefully we would get to a point where you may not need human interaction at all and you know hopefully you would be able to interact with intelligent bots and you know solve simple to more complicated questions that way for the moment though at least the versions of tech that I have seen I think it's safer to take it one step at a time and start with a transactional bot have the access to a human being if needed right you would still 90% of your queries like I said would be solved with a transactional bot right I think most of us have experienced that of the percentage of queries that come in to call centres every day most of them can very much be replaced with a simple bot right so for now I think my record would be until we develop tech that is so intelligent that we can completely do away with the human element we stick to a transactional plus human at the end if needed for your last mile very complicated queries going forward like I said I am extremely hopeful I am always an optimist when it comes to how technology has developed so my hope is that in the future we would develop intelligent bots that can answer any kind of question that the consumer poses thanks, thanks Shreya speaking this question to Praveeti Praveeti you have been working with multiple brands from multiple verticals where have you seen or you have felt the need for the automation to be whether the bot should be more intelligent or it should be more transactional and even if you have seen anything where different verticals need to adopt differently or different brands have adopted it differently if you can share those experiences with us yes so talking about the bot so I completely agree with Shreya I actually had a different answer but I think I will change my answer because what she said is extremely pragmatic so right now we have used bot in different ways of course the first the very basic way of using it is in completing the transaction but we have also used it in the past and this is bot in general and I am not talking about just Instagram messenger a bot here but we have used automation earlier as part of campaigns like a few years back for a movie we were promoting we did a promotional activity where actually the user becomes a part of so basically the bot is a terrorist and the user is the one who is interrogating the terrorist right so it was a great engagement activity that we did and it created a lot of PR but it was I mean the purpose of that the engagement activity was to create conversation so it did that but on an now coming back I think right now I will completely agree with Shreya that the purpose of a bot is to actually create convenience in the pain points that consumers are feeling right now like am I can I get a better version of this product yes the bot can suggest to you can I create a better look yes the bot can suggest to you can I get a consultation so all of those things are very real very now that we can the need states that the bot can tap into but going in the future I think if we were to think about 10 years from now right how experience is developing or evolving right we are entering the world of metaverse right and there I think the bot will become a very important part of a marketing you know a marketing strategy and I'll tell you why at one point when you know when our you know most of our communication was through television right we used to think of brand personalities in terms of that ad we will think of I mean we'll create a brand world there but that but now with the coming of social that has changed right now the social personality because your brand has to talk on social every day needs to have a perspective on most things every day you need to create a more flexible personality more fluid personality while it's living up to the brand essence that we stand for the tonality has to be a little broader and little fluid right now when bot becomes the industry hygiene right or it becomes a more important part of our lives the we'll have to in you know we'll have to give it a personality it will start behaving like more like brand right it will go beyond a transaction and that is a safe assumption to make because something that you because that is how brand will then start differentiating itself right so some days the bot will help you in a consumer problem in a problem that you're facing some days it'll just be there to chat with you right on some random it'll I think the movement will be that people will want to like how we use social right now to every day connect with our audience I think that role will start to start getting played by bot but in a more personalized in a more one to one way right where I'm respecting your privacy but I'm also becoming your friend right so I think intelligence empathy all of those things will start you know percolating into that bot but of course still we achieve that level of finesse it is a journey we will bots will be more transactional in nature yes but I think going forward brands will also start giving more attention to bots creating the journeys creating personalities creating using them to shape brand perception I think all of that is a natural journey for a bot yeah thanks thanks Prakati for sharing that we are a little over time so we'll just take one one question from the from the audience that we have here and I'll take it to you first that we'll make it up to you so so in your opinion rate them in order of priority automation first experience first social first right yeah by the way before I answer the question I have to say thanks to Samyutta I googled what vampire facial is and I'm totally mind is completely fascinating okay cool so I don't know me if it is necessarily a zero sum game right but you know to me if I can take the liberty of you know not answering from these three options but generally probably even going back to a previous question is I think all three can coexist and in my opinion I don't necessarily share the optimism that Shreya does for for a human less sort of engagement that'll be very scary and I'm not even sure if that's one of the goalposts we're going to right I think most certainly we need transaction probably going to be what the bare minimum the execution excellence sort of lies in and but at the same time I think the intelligence part of it needs to be developed you know over a period of time right you're going to have these space palm moments whenever you're dealing with NLP like once in a hundred times for sure but that shouldn't deter us from sort of moving towards that I don't think I answered the question am I no you have you have and thanks for thanks for sharing that and I'll now take the same question to some of you in terms of how would you rate them in your order of priority automation first, experience first social first yeah so okay to begin with Karthik you're most welcome to Kaya anytime for the vampire special so yeah so Neel I'll answer your question I think experience first I'll echo what Freya and Pradhavi had to say that it has to be transactional first because it would be scary like Karthik said if it became human less because I think the kind of industries we are working on and I think Iqta was talking a lot about consultative commerce it does require a lot of experience lot of learning and then a huge amount of human touch and empathy in order to be able to you know actually explain and hand hold the customer through this entire journey having said that I think it can save a lot of human hours and the kind of manual intervention that is needed right now I think Prakati spoke about something as small as just hearting a comment but you know as a brand you end up panicking because you're like okay 10 people have you know said something nice about me but then I wake up the next morning and nobody has gone and even liked it because that's humanly impossible right like for any agency or any client to keep up at that pace in which consumers are interacting on the platform it's literally virtually impossible to do that I think something like a bot would be able to really save all of us a lot of time and effort that right now we are unable to do so as an industry we are unable to handle so I think that's one big part for a brand like Kaya even something as simple as you know book an appointment or taking somebody to your website to book a web consult we have an AI assessment tool so guiding somebody to just go there get their skin assessed and then that will then automatically recommend what kind of products and services that you can pick up so ensuring that you don't lose the customer and you actually guide them properly and this will require it is still very transactional in nature even something as small as say you're running a contest and people when you don't respond to them immediately when they don't get their gratification etc I think in the food industry etc gets even worse like Raghavati was talking about it does get a lot worse then people are very quick to respond quick to put up a lot of nasty comments I think that whole twitterfication that's happening on instagram is very real it's happening to all of us we're all dealing with it I think a bot will really help curb a lot of because there's so much of goodwill and equity that you build as a brand and it just requires one two of these negative comments to kind of zap the entire business I think a bot will genuinely help in a lot of little ways a lot of little things that bother us on a daily basis as organizations as brands I think a bot will definitely help streamline those things immediately and then of course to answer your question experience first then it should get into automation and finally we will get into the social first Thank you, thanks for that learning Samyukta Shadil now that your kind of planning and putting more spend behind digital instagram messaging and automation instagram how do you rate them in terms of priority in order of priority automation first, experience first social first and interestingly I'll next take this question to Ekta in terms of your thoughts and that way hear it from from how does Instagram look at it or what is Instagram's vision in terms of automation first, experience first or social first Shadil over to you Yeah, so I think I would probably take one step at a time and say yes automation first however compared to other platforms Insta is a much more human so it's like if you were to compare it to a messenger or a regular CX platform I would say it's more experience and I would put in a bit more a lot of our listening tools help us enable us to look for the white spaces in the categories that we operate in so it just sort of enables us to listen to our consumers better and probably the first step is to eliminate all the the usual suspects the product complaints availability problems discoverability issues and then yes maybe in that sense I would want to experiment with it because Insta allows you to go a little more I mean probably go out and speak and say consumers will probably forgive you for that one in one in a hundred kind of error that comes in from a brand so that's I think that's there for me Aikta taking the same question to you so I think I'll take it out and choose none of these but users first so I think if anybody has a use case it can be different for different verticals and based on what are they trying to achieve for example we have seen like we have seen again I'm taking some example but health and beauty if you are going there I think it's more personalized experience so it's going to be experience first but if I'm a bank and I'm generating leads I don't care really about the experience and the social I'll go for automation first and similarly if I am going about an engagement I'll go with social first so I think like depending upon what is the end goal I think users first should be the lens and that's where we can prioritize all these three things and definitely make it both as everyone agreed transactional plus intelligent but definitely not agent less I think like that will be scary thanks Aikta for sharing that we have gone much beyond our allotted time but that was expected from the PowerPack panel that we had today so thanks everyone for sharing your learning it was an extremely rich and learning full session for all of us I hope our audience have experience the same and thanks everyone for being a part of this panel today thank you thank you so much thank you Neel thank you so much thanks great learning from us


So that was our program. I hope we inspired you a bit with all the ideas from our network. Thank you for listening And and I would like to say something. This was an experiment. We were not able to rehearse it some people arrived this morning. We got the presentations midnight yesterday, so I'm very I would really like to thank the whole team from Elbphilharmonie And also Holger Prang who's up there for their flexibility and their great technical support. Thank you very much I would also like to thank all our sponsors. I cannot name them all But what I like is that they are not only sponsors. Most of them are also Collaborators we work with them. We set up projects with them and that's very nice. It's not only about money It's also about collaboration Then I would like to mention that tonight we are having a party a big party There is a boat and in the harbor it calls stupnitz most of you know it I actually don't know the address, but if you google stupnitz you will find it It's close to our university half a city university. It's a bit When you go to barkenhoft, so we will start there at 930 10 o'clock p.m. And it's open for everyone So if you want to meet those people here if you want to network most of the speakers will be there on the boat tonight And we are really looking forward to see you all there Then now there is a short press conference the media people from the media who are still here They can come with us now to the press conference and That's what I wanted to say and I hand over to you for the second day Well, I just wanted to thank you and your team for how wonderful you have been to work with and particularly for Maggie Ariel Gabby from my team and Sarah and Sarah and Yannick and Sarah From our team and a lot more and many more we I think we brought 19 people from MIT here today So it's a big group tomorrow We will drill down into many of these themes and and quite a few others you know in a series of Many conferences workshops that we're doing so if you're interested in learning more these were just teasers come tomorrow and Engage in a conversation and exploration about the future. Yeah, and it's open tomorrow. It's bubbling You don't have to register you can just come and get into the workshops and work with us So, thank you very much for coming and listening and I wish you a good


Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for attending today's First Friday forum. Let's take a moment to thank today's First Friday forum sponsors Proveya Health as well as our wonderful host Elk's Lodge number 299 for a delicious meal. Continuing our First Friday forums is Devon Lemahue. Senator Lemahue is a native of Sheboygan County, attending Sheboygan County Christian High School before graduating with a BA in business administration and political science from Dork College in Sioux Center, Iowa. Devon is elected by his colleagues to serve as a Senate Majority Leader for the 2021-2022 legislative session where he continues to lead the largest Republican majority in over 50 years. As the legislature addresses the challenges facing our communities and state, Senator Lemahue remains committed to pro-growth, pro-business policies that will strengthen our vital manufacturing and agriculture economics economies and provide broad-based reforms to our job creators and families throughout the state. Please welcome Devon Lemahue. I'll tie together. Okay, I'll leave it here. I'll leave it here, I guess, even though I'd rather walk around and be standing at a podium. But thank you to the Sheboygan Chamber for inviting me to speak today. I was given a month to prepare and as I was planning to work on this last night in a Supreme Court ruling hit yesterday afternoon and I was on the phone from six to 11 o'clock last night talking to people. So we'll see how this goes. So I was first elected to the Senate in 2014.  So I got to go through that process of developing a budget last session and with the departure of former Senator Fitzgerald to Congress last December, the December before, a little over a year ago, my colleagues elected me to serve as the Senate Majority Leader, which is a new role leading the Senate. I don't know if it's ideal to take over that role during a pandemic, but I had a couple stumbles along the way. But overall, I think we had a great session this year. So I'm going to, I have a bunch of slides in here. So I'm going to whip through them as quickly as possible. Just, and you can see the outline here, sort of about the capital update, talk about the budget a little bit, the current economic climate that we're seeing here in Wisconsin, some of the legislation that we're working on, and then look forward to questions at the end. So we're wrapping up our floor session. So how a typical two-year cycle works is we were elected in the fall of an even year, then during an odd year, we worked throughout the entire year. The governor introduces a budget at the beginning of a session and sends it to the legislature, where the Joint Finance Committee puts its fingers on it. And our goal is to get that done by July 1st, which is the beginning of our new biennial budget. And then we're working on legislation all along. And by April 15, which is a little over a month from now, that's when we take papers out to run again. So that's sort of a overall how a two-year cycle works. So we're finishing up our last floor date is March 8. The assembly has already adjourned, which is maybe why there's no assembly men in this room today. They're probably all vacationing, taking an early vacation. But we're wrapping things up next week. And then sort of the focus comes towards the election cycle. As was mentioned in the introduction, currently we have a 21 to 12 Republican versus Democrats in the Senate. But I think we had a relatively calm until our last session day. Good working. I had a great working relationship with a minority leader, trying to run, just keep her informed on the process and how the floor is going to work, bills that are coming up. Obviously, we don't agree on all issues, but we actually had a pretty smooth session going forward. So yes, this is my first session as Senate Majority Leader. There's been more than 100 bipartisan bills that have been signed into law. And we're focusing on some very important issues. As you can see, the economy, the workforce, shortage, education, transportation, the rising crimes since the beginning of the pandemic and things like that. So the biggest thing we do every two years is do a biennial budget. It shows where our priorities lie in the state. It's over $90 billion for the two years. I just put that into perspective. So our budget included both, as I mentioned earlier, the governor proposes a budget and his initial budget proposal, he increased taxes by his proposal, increased taxes by more than a billion dollars, had a 600 over $600 million deficit at the end of the two year cycle, had almost a 10% growth in spending, and also had a bunch of policy items. So the first thing we did was remove out all the policy items, which cut the size of the budget about in half. And we started working from there. So what we did is, and I'll go through this, but you know, after going through the process and producing a budget, it was great to have bipartisan support in both houses. Democrats in both houses voted for the budget that went through the finance committee. By the way, Representative Terry Kotsma serves on the joint finance committee. So he was a very important part in developing this budget. But we produced a budget that had the most legislators vote for it in over 20 years. And it's the first bipartisan budget in almost as long. The last bipartisan budget, there's actually split houses. One was controlled by Republicans and Democrats. So having a budget that had Democrats vote for it in the governor sign, I think is a great accomplishment to what we accomplished in the legislature this year. So some of the highlights of the budget, it cut income taxes by $2.4 billion. It increased or reduced property taxes by $650 million. We fully funded transportation, which I'll get into more detail later, and invested in core priorities of government. So first, I'll talk about the rainy day fund. And I have a graph coming up sort of showing the history of the rainy day fund. But now our rainy day fund is at $1.7 billion. We ended the budget. When we passed the budget, it was projected to have a surplus of $1 billion. The budget that we passed, it has now increased, which I'll get to later. And it's the first budget in a long time that had a positive gap balance, which there's any accountants in the room that's government generally accepted accounting principles. We have to have a balanced budget every two years, but it doesn't use gap accounting principles. Faith can probably explain that to you later on. I say at least one accountant in the room. And it had a surplus. So this shows our rainy day fund starting in 2009 to 2010 where we had $1.7 million in the rainy day fund. And Governor Walker's first term, they passed a law that when you have a surplus at the end of a budget, that half of that surplus goes directly into the rainy day fund. So that's how we saw the great increase of the rainy day fund over that period of time. It is now capped. So we would have to actually do legislate because it went up to a certain percentage of the entire spending of the budget. But now we have great reserves that in case we do hit another downturn in the economy. If we hit a downturn in the economy, we have that money set aside. On top of that, it's projected that at the end of our current budget that we're going to have a $3.8 billion surplus at the end of it. So unlike many of our surrounding states, we're in really good fiscal condition at this point of time. This just shows the history since 2007 of our bonding, what we've done in bonding. So this, you can see, walk over here, I'll talk loudly. This was Governor Doyle's last budget, Governor Evers, or Governor Doyle's last budget, Governor Walker's first budget. This is when we were going through the last recession. So there was a lot of borrowing being done during this time. And as you can see going forward, we've really taken control of the amount of borrowing that our state's done. The blue line is through our general fund borrowing. The orange line is through the transportation fund. When I was first elected, 25 cents of every dollar in transportation was going towards debt service. And that's now down to about 17 cents on the dollar. So we really moved our borrowing in the right direction. Our overall outstanding debt has gone down every year that I've been in office. So I'm sort of proud of the steps we've taken in reducing the debt burden on the state of Wisconsin. A lot of what we do through the general fund in bonding is through the UW system with new buildings or updating old buildings, things like that. So a lot of the the blue line that you see there from year to year, especially in the current, the recent budgets, is building new buildings on UW campuses or updating buildings and things like that, general maintenance. I stole this from one of my colleagues who's an accountant. This shows our gap balance over the last 20 years. He likes to point out that he took over when it was at its highest and it's gone down since. I like to point out that I took over when it really started going down. That's what I was elected in 2014. But you can just see the trend of a decade of responsible budgeting, what it's been doing to our deficits. A little bit more about our tax cuts. So our tax cuts, as I mentioned earlier, were divided up between $2.4 billion towards the income tax. And I'll show later how we sort of did that. And $650 million for property taxes. And we additionally put, we also eliminated the personal property tax. Unfortunately, the governor vetoed that out of the budget because he had some concerns over how we had that set up. He wanted it to increase with inflation and things like that. But hopefully next session as a small business owner, hopefully next session we can eliminate the personal property tax. So I don't know if they'll ever fill out that form again, which I just filled out like a week ago. Yes, like I said, the income tax cut, if you look, the main bulk of it went into the third tax bracket, which depending on how many dependents you have, you hit fairly early when you have a full-time job. So we reduced it from 6.27% down to 5.3%, which is a reduction of $1,000 for the typical Wisconsin family. And that's real savings. That's annually, that's going to go on into, well, hopefully eternity, hopefully we don't raise taxes again. But additionally, which I don't have any slides on this, four years ago when we passed the law requiring all online retailers out of state that they had to collect Wisconsin sales tax, if they're selling their items to people in Wisconsin, half of the revenue that we get from that goes to reducing our income taxes. So that's also had a reduction as that number goes up every year to, especially during the pandemic, we saw a huge windfall because of everybody ordering online instead of going out to store. So that's been slightly reducing our income taxes as well. This just shows graphically from budget to budget, how we've done reductions, numbers are small. I didn't get a chance to update. I want to take some of these slides out. So some of them I might move through fast. This shows sort of the breakdown of our property tax cuts, which works out to $200 for the annual median valued home. But it's also important to note that local referendum has an impact on what you pay in property taxes. And I'm going to show that on the next slide, I believe, no, slide after that. This just shows over the last five years what the effect that referendum, local referendum, have had on property taxes. The gray box is, it's like if your local school district builds a new high school, so it's building projects. The light blue is recurring referendum. So if they, if you pass a referendum to increase your levy limit going forward, and the dark blue or purple, whatever color that is, is non-recurring referendum. So if you vote to increase over your levy for like a five-year period, that just shows the effects of, of referenda around the state of Wisconsin. This graph shows the increase in spending in the transportation fund over the last five years, including next year in the budget that we passed. So as you can see, we've been steadily increasing our investment into transportation around the state of Wisconsin. This highlights sort of the, the bonding issue again. We bonded in the past on transportation projects through the general fund and also through the transportation fund. And this just shows that we've reduced, this is through the general, this is through the transportation fund, how we've increased that, that borrowing over that decade, because it's, yeah, over a decade. Highlights from the transportation part of the budget. So once again, we did a one-time, set aside a one-time amount of money. This, the previous budget I believe was 75 million. This budget we put 100 million to be split up between towns, municipalities, and counties to help them get caught up on their, their local road projects. It was great on this last round that a bunch of these ended up in my district. And hopefully we can keep moving this forward in future budgets to make sure local units of government can address the problems that they need most in there. We also increased general transportation aids by 2% each year and kept all state projects on, on point, such as the I-43 expansion down just south of here, Highway 23, which is going to be done here soon, which is fantastic, and other projects around the state. Some other highlights from the budget. We increased the tech college funding by 2.25 million annually, and also did some property tax through the tech colleges, property tax relief, through DISPIS, the Department of Safety and Professional Services, which is a, it's a licensing agency, which is important to a lot of different industries who, who have employees who, who are licensed. They've been having a hard time for as long as I've been elected, being, keeping caught up with providing those licenses, getting them through the system. So we made an investment into their IT system of 5.3 million. So hopefully they can get caught up. Tourism, we, we increased funding to tourism to try to get people into our state of Wisconsin to drive that sales tax revenue and tourism hospitality, which is so important to especially this area of the state, Door County, Northern Wisconsin, things like that. And we also increased under Department of Workforce Development increased apprenticeships by 1 million and did some other good things. Additionally, we included $129 million for broadband expansion, and that can be coupled with the billion dollars that's coming in from the federal government. We just actually passed a bill last week to try to wreck that these sources to hit that last mile, rather than, you know, upping where, where there's already high-speed service, providing multiple vendors in those areas to make sure that we're using taxpayer money to hit that last mile to the unserved, not the underserved, to make sure that, you know, if you're out in the country, you have access to broadband. And also an important thing that we did is require WEDC to use at least three million dollars of existing funds for talent attraction and retention to try, try to draw people into our state. We did this under Governor Walker's last budget and we've seen some good results of trying to get people to move to Wisconsin. And, you know, when I talk about the workforce shortage later on, you know, that's probably the biggest challenge that we hear about the state of Wisconsin and others, but probably the biggest one. So as we all know, inflation has been a challenge lately in the state of Wisconsin. I think I'll get in a slide later that so there's a couple reasons I think why inflation is, is having such a huge, is, is a problem right now. Part of it is just the amount of federal money that's been pumped into the system since the start of the pandemic. In Wisconsin alone, if you add up the PPP loans, the unemployment enhancement, just straight checks to people, the money that's gone into directly to local government, schools, counties, municipalities, if you add all that up, I should probably play a guessing game to try guess what this actual number is. And by the way, this has not all been spent yet, obviously. It's, you know, does anyone want to try guess how much money has in the last two years has been earmarked and has been partially spent in Wisconsin? The size of our two-year budget is $92 billion to give you a reference point, $100 billion. The ARPA one was $5.8, $5.7 billion alone. You're high actually, but, but $58 billion. So it's almost like it's over an extra year of government spending in our state, which is why, you know, all this money is being poured into the system. People are spending it. It's causing prices to go up. And then you combine that with the supply chain issues with, you know, shortage with trucking companies, things like that. It's really driving inflation and it's becoming quite a problem as a small business owner who has some supply chain issues. So yeah, inflation is at 7.5% currently, which is a 40-year high. Obviously, there's the number. Good thing I didn't turn to this page. $58 billion. This comes from a WMC survey, the impact of inflation on companies. I'm not sure who the 9% of companies who find it positive, but 82% of companies find it negative. This just shows the 18-month price of gas, which is driving inflation in other products. And just a point, in Governor Evers' first budget, he proposed raising gas taxes by $0.08 a gallon and then indexing it to inflation. So if we would have passed that three, four years ago, you'd now be paying an extra $0.10 per gallon and it'd be going up even more because of the high cost of inflation. So not only would gas be at $0.350 a gallon, it'd be at $0.360 a gallon at this point. So this is, since 2011, we've really, well I haven't been there since 2011, I haven't been there since 2015, but the legislature has really worked on reducing the tax burden in the economy. And if you look at all the taxes that we've reduced over the last decade, it's, it totals up to $22 billion. We got that from the non-partisan fiscal bureau who treks, treks keeps, does our accounting for us. And this will, you know, what we did with reducing income taxes and things like that will help, at least help families somewhat combat inflation and things like that. And we went from the fifth highest tax burden state in 2009 to 23rd in 2019, which is the fastest decline over that 10 year period. I'm just going to talk about a couple of the bills that we've done, which I think are pro-growth and pro-business. The first bill we did was sort of a response to COVID, AB1, and you know, helping hospitals deal with COVID and things like that. It was sort of a hot potato that went back between both houses for a while. It was really fun being the new majority leader at that point. But ultimately, we got a bill signed into law by the governor, which was great. And it provided COVID liability protections for business, nonprofits, churches, schools. So that way, you know, operating in this environment, we, you know, organizations don't have to worry about frivolous lawsuits. We have the strongest protections of any state that has split government between Republicans and Democrats. And so it was great that we could get that bill done. Senate Bill 189, which is actually the budget, repealed the personal property tax, which unfortunately was vetoed. Assembly Bill 220 is encouraging youth apprenticeships, actually requiring schools to focus on youth apprenticeships and let their inform their students of opportunities in that area to try, you know, fill that skills gap in the labor market. Senate Bill 629, these last three bills are actually on our calendar for next week and have already passed the assembly, is a helping WEDC work with workforce housing to try and encourage that take, eliminate some of the red tape and things like that. Assembly Bill 932 is another bill promoting youth apprenticeships and 912 gives legislative oversight to future, make sure that no future governor can deem some businesses essential and some business is not essential that that's to be a standardized approach for a business, not because personally, I believe all businesses are essential. So obviously, the biggest challenge that businesses are facing is the workforce. And a lot of this is caused by the demographics of the state of Wisconsin, sort of an aging demographic, which is why it's so important that we're investing in talent attraction and, you know, making sure our tax code is competitive and better than other states.  Fortunately, Wisconsin's workforce participation rate is higher than what it is nationally, but it's still lower than what it was pre pandemic. This is more from the WMC survey. Are you having trouble hiring employees? 88% of businesses are. I was planning on taking this slide out, but it shows over the last 20 years, the labor force participation rate went from 73%. Now it's at 65%. So it just shows that trend and some of that is an aging demographics, but we need to do at the state level, anything we can do to incentivize people to get back into the workforce workforce solutions. There are currently 135,000 jobs on the state of Wisconsin's website. So you can see sort of the challenge that all businesses are facing. So we did a workforce package that we took up last week when we're on the floor. And if our bills are signed into law, it's estimated that 50,000 people will get back into the workforce. Just some highlights of the bills indexing UI benefits to unemployment rate. So the lower the unemployment rate is the less amount of time people can spend on unemployment. If you ghost, I'm sure if you guys are in the hiring process, you have people who apply for a job just to meet that requirement. And then they never show up just so they can say they applied for the job. So if they sign up for interviews or schedule interviews and don't show up, then they lose a week of unemployment insurance just to incentivize people to actually do it. The food share work requirement, this is for able bodied adults without dependents that they have to have work requirements if they're going to collect food share and a bunch of other technical things to try. Probably the other important one is checking from system to system to make sure people are still eligible for unemployment to make sure there are people still collecting unemployment who should be collecting unemployment. So with that, I think I got done maybe quicker. I thought I had more slides on that, but I got done maybe a little quicker than I thought. I would love to open it up to any questions that you guys might have. Yeah. Yes, Dave. I don't know. I hope he signs all of them. But yeah, I don't know. Someone gave me some questions ahead of time, but I didn't have a chance to read it. So I'm going to read the questions out loud. Let you guys think of questions. Joint Finance Committee members here in Passema, from to White County, and of course, representative of the title of four popular groups in White County. So we are so fortunate to be represented by such good people at the state level. And I want to thank the senator for his support for Highway 23. We're all so pleased to see that getting done. I also want to thank the senator for his key leadership with the National Opioid Settlements nationally. Every local unit of government that was involved with his lawsuit is going to see some opioid settlement come their way to help people in need. And Senator Lemieux was a key leader in Wisconsin. In fact, Wisconsin has one of the best arrangements or opportunities to help people in need thanks to to Devon's leadership. And if you aren't aware of it, Devon is a humble person. You're looking at an eight-time Iron Man standing up there. He served on the county board as did his dad before them, both of them went on to serve in the Assembly and Senate, and we're very proud of his leadership. So, Devon, thank you for your public service. I should bring Adam along to all my speaking engagements. Thank you, Adam. Now, it was great. I enjoyed my time on the county board. The nine years I spent, I developed two of my former colleagues back there. So it was great working on the county board. I will read this question first. Assembly Speaker Robin Voss, it was reported recently visited former President Trump at Mar-a-Laga or however you say that in Florida. The question is, would you please, my glass is back on, getting old, would you please comment on why he visited him? I don't know if he did recently. I know he was back in the summer. He hopped on a plane with the President. You know, the sort of gets us into election law, which I was hoping not to talk about tonight today, but you know, there were a lot of concerns over the 2020 election. The election commission did some things that either the law gave them no ability to do using the pandemic as an excuse to do it, such as letting not allowing people into nursing homes, democracy in the park with drop boxes everywhere, the Zuckerberg money being dropped just into the big cities, things like that. So there was a lot of concern over the last election. And obviously, our former president has been very vocal about his view of that election. We audited it with the nonpartisan audit bureau will the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty also did an audit of it. And they found, you know, a lot of what we knew went on that there was, you know, some municipalities taking advantage of either places where the law didn't say that they could do it or, you know, sort of taking some liberties with that. Would it did it or did it change the election results?  So we we just sent a host of bills to the governor using the audit bureau's suggestions, the nonpartisan audit bureau, which has historically criticized both Republicans and Democrats. I mean, they they're auditors, they do a great job. So we took their suggestions, put it into legislation and governor said he's going to veto them. But we we did our job to address those issues as much as as much as we could as being one of three branches of government. Yes, ma'am. I wasn't going to bring it up. But you brought it up regarding regarding the WEC. Forgetting about drop boxes and all this other stuff that people are talking about, they haven't cleaned up the voter rule. What is the legislation going to do to spank them, oversee them or something to make them clean up the voter rolls? For example, we have about four million voter legal voters in this state, and yet there's over seven, not four million, yeah, so there's over seven that are registering the WEC. Well, how can we have more voters than we have people? So the answer to that question is the seven million referring to our non active on the voter rolls and that tracks people who've been at current addresses. So for example, some addresses, there may be like rental units on college campuses might have 30 people at that address. They're not active voters. It's having a history of who's voted at those places. The active voter list is cleaned up and because of a law that I passed my second session, using Eric by mailing up postcards to people who haven't voted in the last, forget all the details, but haven't voted in the last four elections. Unfortunately, it took WEC to institute it before the last election, but they now have cleaned, use that to eliminate those from from the rolls. And that's an ongoing process as well as people who are registering to, you know, go with with death certificates, real estate transactions, you know, all state state records to sort of true them together. Just another question. You talked about median home value. Is there a number that you have for that? Or how is that right? Are they using the tax assessed feelings or are you using market values or what are they using to arrive at this median home value? It's the assess value. The question was what what is the median home value? And it's the it's based off the assess value, which you know rises, but it's the it's not the average, it's the median. So the middle house in the fictitious middle valued house in the state of Wisconsin. Yes. My name is Benjamin Horvath. I have two questions. One particular was just mentioned a business associate of mine said that there was a independent council that recently, I guess last week that showed these findings of the 2020 election. Is that what you were referring to just now when you said that there was an audit or is that something separate? You said within the last week. Right. So as far as I know, there's been three audits done. The one which both houses of the legislator did legislature did through the nonpartisan audit bureau. We got those results in like October of last year. Will the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty did their own audit? And that came out last fall as well. And the assembly through the speaker hired former Justice Gableman to do his own audit. And that he issued a report Tuesday this week. And there's a hearing on it. And I haven't had a chance. I'm a little busy this week. I haven't had a chance to actually read that audit yet. But I look forward. That's on my list of things to do this weekend. Okay, great. That must be what my friend was referring to. Second, the totally different subject. We're a start up factory process in the environmental sector. And it seems oftentimes that Democrats have been known as the environmental party where they kind of get all of the credit for being environmentally conscious. And as a Republican, I don't agree with that. But I don't think Republicans regain the ground of saying we care about the environment. We're not hysterical about it, but we care and we're responsible. And what can you do for businesses that are looking to move into that sector? That is a fantastic question. I'd love to sit down with you and pick your brain and ideas on how to do that. I think we've done some bills to address like the PFAS issue up in, especially in the like the Marinette area of the state.  I'm not on the Natural Resources Committee, so I don't work on them directly, a lot of those bills. But even a lot of the things we've done for sporting heritage and things like that, we invest in stewardship. We've increased stewardship spending while we've kept it steady to help local counties and municipalities and groups to purchase land through the stewardship program for recreation or parks and things like that. I know back when I was on the county board, we had a big one for the Amsterdam Dunes down in the southern part of the county, which the state has helped out. So, you know, we've invested in stewardship, things like that, but definitely love to, you know, sort of, it's interesting that a lot of the Democrats have wanted to like increase the renewable energy standard from I think it's at 10 percent now to like 25 percent, 50 percent, things like that. We don't need to have a government mandate to do that because it's some of the renewable energy is becoming more affordable and power producing places are adding more solar farms, more and different things. And it's good to have a diverse energy portfolio, but it's also important to have something that's going to always be producing energy. And that's typically a fossil fuel type of power plant because we can't, as we all know, as business owners, if you're, especially if you're running a factory, you can't have brownouts and rolling outages and things like that. So yeah, I think we often see the role of government differently in the area of the environment. You know, it's maybe incentivizing not hammering people for doing things. I think I saw another handout back there. A common first and then a question. Frank Lemmington, the judge in the Milwaukee Journal, just to the rule unconstitutional, the law and law gave him referring to the 2020 election, which started in October of last year for 600,000 factors money was extended to December, then extended to February. And of course, it's going to be appealed. The question is, when does this all end? I will leave that up to the speaker to answer that question when he's going to stop his Gabelman investigation. He asked me to join him back last summer. And, you know, I was comfortable with what the audit bureau was doing. And I knew that will was very, I trust will as investigators doing their jobs. So I feel we needed another another investigation going on. But I, you know, regardless of how you believe what went on in 2020, I think we need to focus on 2022. I mean, we can see we're not going to be able to pass any laws without a new governor, apparently on truing up our elections. We can either be like Georgia, where Republicans sat home, and Democrats won or it could be like Virginia, where Republicans were energized, it came up and won. So that's my focus is on obviously identifying some of the areas we can clean up in state law, which we're doing through the legislative process, but we're going to need a new governor to get that signed into law. I do not know what you're trying to see. I don't think it is. In your presentation, you had pointed out the friendships in two different areas. Can you tell us a little bit more mechanically how with those with those bills, how the messaging of youth apprenticeships is going to get maybe a broader scope? I know Lakeshore Technical College does a perfect job with the youth apprenticeships, because when I worked at FEMA's manufacturing company, I have a number of youth apprentices that went forward. But how or what is the plan to try to make that more of a broad brush across the state when it comes to youth apprenticeships? Right. So the question is regarding the couple bills that I had up there about youth apprenticeships. And as you stated, LTC does a fantastic job with their youth apprenticeship program, partnering with high schools and businesses to give that opportunity for high schoolers to get their foot in the door to provide some work experience to show how vital manufacturing is to the area, which is probably why I didn't dig into those bills as much as I should have, because I think we're doing it really well here. But we see this problem all over the state, where there's a workforce shortage. We have seen a good, I've seen in the last decade sort of a change in view from schools to not just push kids into universities and four-year colleges and highlight, you can get a great job. If you go to LTC for two years, no debt. You develop that you can work as you're when you're going through it, earn some money. You can be 20, 21 years, 19 years old and get a great paying job. Whereas maybe some of your classmates are getting there. I should downgrade higher education too much inside. I think I learned a lot in my four-year liberal arts degree, but I worked hard through there and left without a whole lot of debt myself. But yeah, I think it's just important to give kids multiple options in all directions to make sure that we can find the correct path for them and not maybe not have them waste four years in college. But it's funny, we had our, making a funny, ironic, we had our LTC breakfast with legislators this morning and they bring in some of their students who've come through different paths. And there's, I was talking to one student who has a political science degree from a liberal arts college and is now back at LTC a couple years later, getting a two-year human resource degree. And I'm like, well, I have a political science degree too, so I don't know what job skills I have if I, if I lose one of these years, but I'll have to go back to LTC. I saw someone else's hand up. Maybe I didn't see someone else's hand. Yes, Faye. You have had some employees roughly convicted. And to the extent where a number of them are right, you know, what factual evidence was there and there was none, really to divide detractors, whatever. People are, you know, a lot of people in jail that are willing to engage. How can we turn that around, convicting people based on emotion, hearing citizens, some change at the state level, to turn this around so that we have the evil body working not the way out of prisons. So we have this, I'm going to editorialize my opinion here. This is my opinion only. I think there's two ways to rehabilitate people. One is to teach them job skills. And we do that to those who are, we still need to increase the funding on that for our state prison system. But yes, provide job skill training in that. Unfortunately, not all inmates are willing to do that or cooperate and things like that. But I think the other way is through finding Christ, I think, to turn their life around. And which is why I personally support the chaplain here in Sheboyin County financially, because the best way to have someone not get locked up again is to have their life changed, to find a reason not to commit crimes. But yes, in our state prison system, we do job skills. We started now with treatment for drug problems and things like that too. It obviously still needs work. But I mean, I think a bigger point to this is since the pandemic, we've seen homicides and murders increase. We've seen car thefts increase. We've seen judges let, I mean, I'm sure there are people who are maybe wrongfully locked up. But there are a lot of people who are committing crimes, especially in urban areas that are increasing and need to be punished and pay the crime. Because if there are no consequences for your action, these crimes are only going to go up. And, you know, obviously, the biggest issue in our state is the workforce challenge. Probably secondarily is the housing challenge. But we have a great state in trying to track people and keep them in this state through, you know, certainty in the business climate, reducing taxes, making sure we have clean lakes, a beautiful environment to recreate. But if people don't feel safe in this state, why would they stay here? Or live in an urban area if they don't feel safe? So I mean, there needs to be consequences for crime. And yeah, I'm sure there's things we can do better and we'll still continue to try work on teaching job skills. But some people don't want to learn those. Yes. So as far as workforce, I'm just curious, maybe just anecdotally, the conversations you hear around the state capital. You know, each state's don't have a state tax or, and then your answer doesn't have a burned income tax. Are there any discussions like that to make us one of the only states in the Midwest without a burn tax or a state tax, you know, there's something I think property tax is the highest revenue that Wisconsin gets, you know, to have either maybe a cash income cap that that below it nobody would pay tax or anything, maybe incentivize either incomes or anything, coming into positions that, you know, to attract some of the workforce. Right. There was just a bill introduced within the last couple of weeks. Obviously, at the end of session, so it's not going to get enacted right now to increase sales tax by, I think it was three and a half cents and eliminate the income tax. That doesn't quite cover it. That if you use, if you don't use dynamic scoring, I think we're working towards reducing the income tax rate as fast as we can. I know Tennessee eliminated theirs by increasing their sales tax by like five cents or something. So they have like a 10 cent sales tax. A lot of the states that don't have income taxes have a major state revenue source such as oil or things like that to offset the loss of an income tax. But no, I agree with you that the lower we can reduce our income taxes, it's more beneficial for our state long term, keeping companies here, keeping higher paid employees. But I think we need to think so when President Trump decreased the corporate tax rate, a lot of small businesses shifted their, how they're taking income from income revenue to corporate revenue because that tax is lower overall. And so in Wisconsin, we saw a huge increase in corporate income taxes rather than personal income taxes. So when you make a huge change like that, you have to think through how is business going to change, how income is paid out and think of everything before you do that just to make sure you're not causing just a huge shift and taking huge losses elsewhere. But I mean, we've been hitting at it. Still a long ways to go, but hopefully we can make some more transformational with our surpluses and our current higher revenue make some more long term income tax reductions in the next budget. Got me for two more minutes. Yes. The question is to the state's stance on local control of where, for example, in wind farm employees be cited. I don't know how much you're aware of the issues with wind farms, but to me they're completely not renewable because it's the heavy metal or the rare earth metal mining in China. And if you saw any of those pictures, it's horrible. Okay, it's not in our backyard, but it's still a big problem. And then you have all the fuel that's used to transport from place to place and ship these things all over. You have the fact that at least it used to be that any time they changed hands, they got a new government handout. I'm not sure that this source, I think it was federal. And I don't know if it's still happening, but that used to be the case. So you could have a wind company and change name and sell it and keep getting the same failouts all the time. These things do affect property values tremendously. So what you're doing when you're allowing something to come in is you're saying to those homeowners that what they work for and their equity in their house doesn't matter. In addition, it causes severe health issues with both people and livestock and wildlife. So my understanding is that somehow the energy companies have gone to the state and at the state level said, well, we want to come in here and do this and try to bypass local input. Is there anything or any plans that you have put in place so this cannot happen and so that the local governing authority will have to be able to see? No, you can't bully your way in here. That was a long question about wind farms. So those who couldn't hear, you know, if you contact my office, I can clarify any of that for you. I'm pretty sure local governments can deny that because I know there was a solar farm. I don't know about wind farms, not with wind farms. Okay, with solar farms. Someone in the renewable energy field who could probably answer the question better than I can. We're actually in a recycling process, not with waste energy. But I would comment, I think the best fortification against property values being hurt in the local community is really the facts. If you look at the total score of carbon emissions and the total life cycle of that technology, it's more of a mixed bag than some would say. And so I think empowering local people to understand the whole picture rather than a perspective that is somewhat skewed to only the information they want you to hear about it being beneficial, I think would actually cause more benefit and more protection to local communities that could be hurt by the technology just because they say, you know, we have to save the whales. So we have to do this regardless of whether or not it hurts you. And the facts point otherwise when you actually know the big picture. So I'd love to see some of that information be presented. And I think there's been many areas in the last couple of years where we've been presented a set of the facts and the other facts are not allowed. And that the lack of free speech lack of equal footing for the facts, whether we disagree or not just pass the take place in the use to come, we can't allow that to happen anymore. And so I think Republicans have to say, we know the facts also, and you're only presenting some of them, we're going to present the whole picture. And then we're going to let the American people decide it's past one o'clock. So thank you chamber for inviting me.