Redefining Workflow Automation with AI Insights from Nintex CFO Eric Emans

Episode Overview

Eric Emans is a seasoned financial executive with over two decades of experience in strategic planning and leadership within both public and private sectors. He currently serves as the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) at Nintex, a global leader in process intelligence and automation software. Since joining Nintex in February 2022, Eric has been instrumental in steering the company’s financial strategies, ensuring robust fiscal health, and supporting its rapid growth trajectory. Before his tenure at Nintex, Eric held several prominent CFO positions. He was the CFO at Lighthouse, a global leader in eDiscovery and data governance, where he played a pivotal role in financial oversight and strategic initiatives. His career also includes significant roles at A Place for Mom and BlueCare, Inc., where he demonstrated his expertise in financial management and strategic planning. Eric’s career began at Deloitte and Touché as an auditor and Certified Public Accountant (CPA), providing him with a solid foundation in financial auditing and compliance.

Eric’s academic background complements his extensive professional experience. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration from the University of Washington and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from Western Washington University. This diverse educational foundation has equipped him with a unique perspective on business operations and organizational dynamics. Beyond his professional endeavors, Eric is actively involved in community service. He serves on the Board of Directors at Village Theatre in Issaquah, Washington, where he contributes to the Endowment Committee and chairs the Investment Committee, reflecting his commitment to leveraging his financial expertise for community enrichment.

Episode Transcript

Kevin Rosenquist: Hey, welcome to Paypod. Where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments and fintech. My name is Kevin Rosenquist, and thanks for listening. Nintex is a company focused on automation and process management. They help companies automate processes to help increase productivity and take some of the mundane tasks away from employees so they can focus on the more valuable parts of their job. Eric Emans is their CFO, and he’s extremely knowledgeable about how automation can help businesses improve their workflow and the ways in which AI is moving automation into new areas. It’s a great lesson for anyone considering automation, and he provides valuable insight into what companies should keep in mind when exploring. I so please welcome Eric Emans. So we’re recording this in early September. I’m for one. I’m pretty excited about football being back as a UW grad. Are you a Husky fan?

Eric Emans: Very much so. I actually spent Saturday at Husky Stadium. Nice. We’re and we’re about ready to enter into the Big Ten. So two weeks from now we’ll have our first home game. I believe it’s against Northwestern. And so, uh, bittersweet. It’s going to be fun to see some different teams. But obviously I grew up watching Pac ten and then eventually Pac 12. But, uh, huge Husky fan. I went to the Sugar Bowl, went to the Pac 12 Championship and also went to the national championship. But I don’t want to talk about that game as much as I talk about the other. Oh, that’s.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Cool that you were there though. Yeah, it was really cool that you were there. I was going to ask you if you were excited about being in the Big Ten, but yeah, as a long time fan, I don’t like the realignment. It kind of is killing the rivalries and killing the regional aspect of things.

Eric Emans: Correct. And we kept our rivalry with Washington State, but it’s actually being played this Saturday. So it feels really weird to not have that game right after Thanksgiving. It was. Yeah, it’s always.

 Kevin Rosenquist: That last, last regular season game, right? Yeah. That’s right. I think Oregon, Oregon State’s doing the same thing. That’s correct this week. Yeah.

Eric Emans: And then Oregon and Washington. Now is that rivalry within the Big Ten? Yeah.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. At least they get to keep that I suppose.

Eric Emans: Yeah.

 Kevin Rosenquist: All right. Well we’re not a football podcast, so I’ll move on. So,  one of my favorite things about hosting this podcast is learning about people’s journeys. It’s so diverse. And you started with a degree in sociology and then got another one in business administration. You’ve been a CFO or similar for the majority of your career. Do you find that a sociology background helps you excel in leadership roles?

Eric Emans: Absolutely. You know, I think, you know, most people that meet me and have folks who were able to see us discussing beforehand probably wouldn’t have pegged me right out of the gate as a CFO. And I think it’s allowed me to, you know, be more effective as a leader. And then also, I I’ve been blessed through my my journey to actually, you know, own several different for short periods of time, long period of time, like currently in my or right now in my current role, IT, cybersecurity, pricing and analytics, corporate applications all as part of the office of the CFO. So that’s one of the things I, you know, I, I credit some of my background in sociology with a minor in psych to, to help me, you know, be able to work well with people. And obviously you got to hire good leaders around you because it’s impossible to know everything about all those particular functions. But yeah, it’s definitely become, I think, the backbone of my leadership style.

 Kevin Rosenquist: What qualities make a successful CFO, in your opinion?

Eric Emans: Uh, look, I think first and foremost it’s you got to have a management philosophy. I mean, look, let’s set aside, like, some of the expertise you need to have. Like, I think most people can walk out of a good university and get into the right jobs. I started my career at Deloitte, which was a great training ground for me and, and, and my, my first thing when I went into industry, I, you know, I would always give this advice to people, find a person to work for, not a company. You know, like find somebody that can continue to mentor you. So I think that was there. But for me, over the years, what it’s really been is, you know, being able to bring the right people and talent,  and, you know, really have that, that contract with everybody that works with me, that’s really about, uh, respect and understanding what we need to drive and be outcome oriented. But also, I think to get the full potential out of anybody, you just have to see people as people. And, you know, I go out of my way to make sure, you know, obviously, if the person’s willing and this, you know, if somebody wants to not talk about their family, not want to talk about their pet. But I think the more that you know about people’s personal lives and you’re invested in them as humans, the more you get out of them and the workplace. And I don’t mean it from a standpoint of like, I’m using that. I genuinely enjoy working with people and kind of why I continue to do what I’m doing is for that. People ask like, hey, why do you continue wanting to do this? And different orgs? And, you know, I’ve been modestly successful and have optionality on what I want to do. And it does come back to working with people. And I think it started with that degree in sociology.

 Kevin Rosenquist: I know you said you had a couple of daughters. One like 22 and 19. Yeah. Gen z. Uh, Gen Z kids, do you find that the new generation of people coming up is how they are different from what you’re used to? Because every generation changes a little bit. But,  you know, what are you seeing that’s different?

Eric Emans: You know.

Eric Emans: It is very different. And, you know, for me, you know, in my role currently, I very seldom have those folks, you know, report into me. And so my relationships with them are more on, you know, you know, happy hours off sites. I do skip levels. So occasionally I talk to folks. For me, the one thing that has been consistent with every generation that I’ve worked with is, everybody wants to feel like they’re driving value.  I would say that, you know, I think the, you know, the Gen Xer in me is like, do I do I live to work or do I work to live? I would definitely say the Gen Z work to live a little bit more and actually, you know, maybe some admiration that I would have for them. As I think about my time in my career and how dedicated I was to it, but in general, like, I think aligning people around outcomes and how they’re making a difference and how they can see what they’re doing every day is generating outcomes. And, you know, we’ll get into it, I’m sure. But it’s also why I’m a huge fan of automation, like taking out of kind of the menial task work.  because if you look at, you know, especially in the tech industry of how you’re attracting young talent, it is really about the difference you can make, the entrepreneurial spirit someone can have in an organization, and the freedom to kind of direct their own growth. And so that aspect I love. And so to me, I see there’s a common thread through everything. I think the approach has to be a little bit different. Mhm.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah that makes sense. So you mentioned. So you’re with Nintex now. And as you mentioned you guys are focused on automation process management data. Yeah. When looking at the fintech and payment industries as well as financial institutions. Are you seeing more widespread adoption of automation in recent years?

Eric Emans: I absolutely, and to me, like there’s this concept of, uh, like early on in my career before kind of SaaS became anything, you know, IT departments largely locked down, you know, what would come into your environment within a company, right? Because you’d have to get it provisioned into a data center and so on and so forth. So like your infrastructure group was largely the best friend to finance, right? Like, hey, is this coming in heads up in the SaaS world and especially, you know, living through Covid, you know, I guess we’re all still living through Covid, but living through, you know, the work from home stage, like there was just this explosion in SaaS of all these tools that, you know, your marketing department or your R&D department or, you know, your sales department could go buy all these different things, that was, you know, very much a point solution out. Somebody would solve something. But, you know, as a data and analytics guy, as a finance person, I’m just like, you know, this is like a massive sprawl of all these technologies. First and foremost. It probably hurts my heart that we’re not spending dollars efficiently, but even on top of that, we’re creating all these different data repositories that live all over the company, and it’s really hard to get that picture through like a, you know, kind of a business intelligence lens or a data and analytics lens of what actually is going on.

Eric Emans: Then on top of that, you have to get all these different systems talking and working together. Right. Of like, you know, if you have, you know, how is Salesforce going to work with NetSuite is like if you aren’t talking like these big enterprise levels, but even like smaller, like, you know, project management tools, you know, you can introduce a bunch of these and how are they talking to all these other things? And how can you get this view of what’s actually going on, what’s that dashboard. And so for me automation is absolutely key. And the way I think about it is like an index. We just recently did an acquisition that really brought application development into our product. And to me, that’s kind of the dashboard that goes on top of workflow orchestration. That gives folks like me an executive level, the ability to understand where things are in the process, and also making sure that we have the appropriate controls and how these systems are working together in place.

 Kevin Rosenquist: You write about the working together portion because even in just, you know, my setup is pretty simple. But you know, you’ve got Calendula and Google Drive and Google Calendar and like, you know, just the way things when, when it doesn’t work. Right, it actually is kind of like a detriment rather than a help to your process, to your workflow.

Eric Emans: Oh my goodness. Like I, you know, and people have become or like various groups have become very religious almost about maybe I shouldn’t use that word, but have become very set in their ways about what their tools are. So like, if you ask anybody in R&D to say, I need a collaboration tool, if you’re not using slack, you’re not talking to anybody in R&D. You know, you go into the finance world and we’re kind of like whatever’s the most cost effective. We’ll use teams, I’ll use whatever. Yeah.  and and now it is confusing. It’s like, hey, did you get that? You know, I am. I said just like, well, which platform did you set it on? I got digging things on my computer all the time. And then, you know, as we come out of, uh, of Covid and we’ve started to Rationalize our kind of, you know, our tool sets and our SaaS investment. You’re starting to find these duplicative things. And so for us, like we’re, we’re making choices. And sometimes it does come down to like, hey, no, I such and such group will not, you know, give up this particular tool. And so, you know, you have to take that in consideration. But it’s, it’s pretty interesting. It’s almost it’s, it’s gallows humor I guess for a finance person. I’m like, we don’t. I always consider us as adaptable and whatever creates efficiency and cost benefit in the org and gets the outcome I want. I don’t really care, but if you try to take slack away from an R&D group, I’ve tried that once and it wasn’t very successful. You’re right.

 Kevin Rosenquist: People do have their some people are married to slack or WhatsApp or what have you. You know the discord. Some people love discord, and I have a variety of clients that they just use different stuff. So yeah, I’m with you on the dings. Like I’ve got different things happening all the time. It’s hard to keep up, to keep up. Where do you wear in fintech specifically? Where do you see automation having the biggest impact right now?

Eric Emans: So for me, it’s a lot of like cross-functional work,  with various systems like so like within. So I think about it in two ways. One, like for me in finance, like thinking about onboarding an employee. Right. And like you have your HR system, you have your NetSuite system. You have your finance forecasting tool. You have all these different approvals. You have, you know, people that get equity, the people that don’t get equity. Think about offboarding an employee, like, how do we get everything? So it’s the core. It’s like the orchestration of getting an employee onboarded and all the things that go around it. It’s the orchestration of getting an employee onboarded and all the things that go around it that that to me, like at its core, like it is anything that fits into that. Like one of the things we’re working on right now is implementing a new share tracking system. And, you know, just, you know, the process that needs to sit in front of the technology. And then, you know, to me, that is the part that a lot of people miss. A lot of people will buy. Uh, technology is some kind of silver bullet. And quite frankly, I’ve never seen that work. I’m a big people process technology person. So if you’re going to buy technology, make sure you have the people that know and understand how it works. And then even further than that, the process that sits in front of it enables the technology, otherwise it’s just destined for failure. And so for me, it’s, you know, I think about those opportunities.

Eric Emans:  and then on top of that, like maybe through like the data and analytics lens, it’s, it’s how do we bring, you know, visibility into all these various different things where in the past everything sat out in a data lake or a data warehouse and you surface that you can skip all those steps if you have, you know, the ability to, to to link these systems together, which is what application development or app dev typically allows you to do specifically, though, like anything that requires, you know, document generation, uh, anything that gets kicked off with like a form creation,  anything that requires any kind of approval or all these things are opportunities for for workflow orchestration. And where I think these things come together. I mean, thinking about quote to cash is a perfect example. Or think about how you know how your collection teams work. You know, what’s your process and then what systems then enable it. So you don’t just have a person dialing for dollars every day. Uh, another example I would say is,  AP, you know, getting approvals, making sure, you know, especially if you don’t have a Po system set up, you know, or if you do have a Po system where it’s more on the front, you can you can then orchestrate between your ERP and, and your various, uh, business owners, uh, through a workflow orchestration. But sorry, I was maybe rambling a little bit there, but no, no, no, just tons of opportunities. And then like within the silos of like revenue ops, for example, there’s a lot of things we use with RPA bots of like adjusting, you know, price increases as it relates to, you know, running a, you know, a bot that goes and updates pricing and your renewal opportunities? Uh, there’s a lot of different things as far as, you know, kind of we think about it as, you know, no code, I think is way overused, but it’s like empowering folks to get familiar with the tool set to actually do a lot of things on their own.

Eric Emans:  and, you know, we found that in revenue ops, there’s a lot of opportunity for that. I’m just, you know, whether it’s, you know, you can use application development correctly, you can build a portal, right? You can build a customer portal, you can build a partner portal. You could, you could build . So there’s all these different ways that we’re looking at our own technology. And, you know, we call it drink our own champagne because I guess the dogfooding thing the Gen Xers like me grew up with is no longer cool. But, you know, we’re trying to constantly drink our drink our own champagne and use it what not, you know, within kind of your, I don’t know, call it your customary, you know, finance things like cash and accounts payable, but also just also getting more work and having that visibility as we work with our partners and rev ops, or we’ll work with our partners in marketing and so on and so forth. Are there are there.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Areas where you feel companies could really benefit in big ways from certain automations that they’re really slow to adopt, or just missing the boat on completely?

Eric Emans: I’m going to give you kind of like a kind of a maybe a 30,000 foot view answer to that, because I think it’s something that I’m really passionate about and and why I’m so hell bent on automation is like, look, as what? As we’ve done our research and as we’ve thought about, like, where does automation sit and how people should think about it. The number one challenge people are dealing with in their leadership roles now is keeping their people happy, attracting talent, keeping that talent, you know, driving good leaders and creating good managers. To me, automation is one of those tools. And, you know, you take people from being these pull the crank doers which some piece of technology could go do and actually put them in positions where they can drive outcomes and thinking. And so for me, I think about it as any opportunity where you have somebody that’s just, you know, pulling, you know, hitting a button over and over and over again where you can actually say, nope, we can automate that. And so actually, here’s how we’re going to use your gray space up between your ears that, you know, is going to drive a better outcome for the company and quite frankly, is going to drive a better, more satisfied employee.

Eric Emans: And so that’s kind of how I think about where automation can make the biggest difference. It’s like anytime that you can take a menial task away from an employee. And that’s not to say I want to get rid of all my employees. I just want to enable my employees to, to, to to be able to drive more value in the org, which makes for happier and better retained employees, because one of the most expensive things we do is if you have to, you know, constantly bring on new employees that they get bored with their job and decide to go do something else. Like if we can constantly, you know, automate the things that make people seek another opportunity, you’re better off. You’re going to have more retention, you’re going to have better employees, and you’re gonna have better outcomes.

 Kevin Rosenquist: That’s a really good point. The retention and getting rid the boredom. Because you know what? Most people don’t want to do menial tasks. I suppose some people like it, but I yeah, most people are just it makes their head explode to have to do the same thing over and over again. So yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I recently had a guest on the show where we did not talk about AI at all, and it was super rare, uh, on this show or any podcast really. So let’s talk about AI. Yeah.  automation is probably one of the best use cases for AI, at least at least AI as it is right now. Yep. In the larger sense, how has AI changed what you guys are doing at Nintex?

Eric Emans: I think as I think about it, like AI is going to sit at the core engine of like orchestration. But the other thing I think about is it just makes it more approachable for people to use. And so like this idea of like, hey, where do I start with automation? Like I’m just a financial, you know, senior financial analyst or I’m a finance manager and I want to automate this process. And like you want to create a workflow like our technology is going to allow you to basically say, hey, I want to create a quote. So cash workflow, and we’re going to have access to tons of different ways to quote to cash workflows. And so we can actually be suggestive in how somebody would work through a workflow. Hey, have you thought of this? Or, you know, is this the next step that you do? So there’s the actual implementation and making the tool easy to use and also very fulsome from a standpoint of completeness of like, hey, have I thought about everything I need to think about? You know, I to me has always come down to like just whatever data you’re training it on. And so like, you know, I think about it is, you know, obviously folks are using chatbots all the time. We can use those internally. You can use those externally. You got to be a little careful if you use them externally to make sure it’s only answering the questions you want it to ask. Like, I don’t want somebody coming into text and asking, you know, some question around politics. You know, if they want to ask, you know, how do I automate employee onboarding? Like we should be able to answer that question, but I don’t want it to go, you know, do something else. But  uh, it to me, it makes it more powerful. It allows us to take a bunch of different data, structured or unstructured, train it, and just, quite frankly, make the engine more powerful.

 Kevin Rosenquist: You started at Nintex in early 2022, right before the AI revolution really began, at least as far as most people know it anyway. Were you guys already focusing on AI by the time you got there?

Eric Emans: Well, so I think like, look, AI is kind of probably a very overused term right now.  sure. We were doing a lot of things around what we call machine learning, which I, you know, call it the younger, the younger sibling of the more the better AI. But yes, we were thinking about it.  We had a lot of different, you know, ways of trying to, you know, build an engine that was actually trying to help the person and make it easy to use. So like, you know, you don’t need an IT person. Like we always like when we would sell, we always want it involved because that’s how you get the best outcome and making sure that you get the best time to value. But ultimately we want it to be able to be maintained and grow outside the IT environment. And, you know, if you’re going to sell into line of business. So we were already thinking about ways of that. I think the other piece is just, you know, the data of understanding of what’s happening at any given time. You know, like how often is a workflow happening? Where is is, you know, where is it lagging? Where do we have inefficiencies, those types of things. So more of a monitoring and learning from it. But you know, as some of these tools have come out and we’ve gone and used them, whether it be chatbots or we’ve experimented using them in the actual, you know, I, you know, like with our workflow orchestration.

Eric Emans: Yeah, definitely see a difference. But stuff that we were thinking about, I think of it more as an accelerant. But the number one thing I would say is like it does have to exist in, you know, some kind of purpose built, uh, workflow orchestration tool or, or automation that you’re trying to create. It’s what it isn’t is like some easy points. You just don’t go, hey, I automate me. I can be the engine within a workflow orchestration tool, but it’s not. You know, I think a lot of the questions we got coming out was, hey, does this make your business obsolete? Absolutely not. It’s an accelerant, uh, to our business. And, you know, we’re looking at things constantly, like, does it help our developers become more efficient? Like, there’s a lot of different ways to use AI. I, you know, is there a lot of work? Are there things that we can look at at complex costing models that we can point it at and be more efficient? So, but as it relates specifically to workflow and automation, I think it’s bringing it into like a purpose built set of features and functionality and making it better and making it quicker and making it more approachable for business line people to use as much as it people.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, that’s a good you brought up a good point about like, it’s not just a hey, do this and it does it kind of thing. And I think people, even people who aren’t in fintech or even business and they’re just using ChatGPT or something like that, don’t understand. You can’t just say, hey, do this and it’ll just spit out exactly what you’re looking for. It takes a lot of massaging. It takes a lot of discussion. Like you have to kind of like, figure out the right prompt and all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, I mean, we’re not at a point yet at least, where we can just say, hey, I want to do this. And it just does it, at least most of the time. I mean, I suppose there are some tools that are kind of like that, but they’re pretty specific. Yeah.

Eric Emans: But again, it all comes back to whatever for me at least. And I’m I don’t expect I’m not an expert in AI, but what I would say is like it comes down to me as whatever you’re training it on, right. And so yeah, like, you know, if you train the same AI tool on two different sets of data, you’re going to come back with two different sets of answers. And so I think as I think about AI in this world, like the prospects are, are awesome, there’s also scariness around it.  You know, you know, I, I in my I currently have the privilege of owning cybersecurity and I think of AI of just like just even, like something silly, like phishing emails are going to become so much more advanced, you know, in this world. And so like, there’s, there’s all this good that comes out of it, but there’s also, you know, cause for concern from time to time as well, of just making sure that, you know, you’re keeping your employee base, you’re building your, your tool sets around cybersecurity. And, you know, it’s pushing a lot of different things. But I will also say, like, look, I think I was watching the TV the other day and like your toothbrush has AI in it. So back to my point of like everything has AI and everybody kind of defines it a little bit differently. But I think about it as, you know, this, this massive, uh, tool that can like process endless amounts of data. It really comes down to what is that data, what is the purpose of that process? And that’s where I think, you know, workflow orchestration and where Nintex comes in is like harnessing the power of AI into our tool set to the benefit of the outcomes. And, you know, the value that we can drive with our customers.

 Kevin Rosenquist: As a CFO, you have to be concerned with things like compliance and regulations and all those fun words. And as you evaluate AI options for your own company and role? Are you confident in their security or are you more hesitant to implement AI products?

Eric Emans: So I am. So let me. So yeah. So look, we’re being very intentional. I think that’s the word I would use here. You have to be intentional because, you know, the risk these days, especially in SaaS, is that anybody can introduce something into your environment. And that’s that to me is like, you don’t want to be the office because people will find a way around it. And so it’s like, look, we believe AI is important not only as we build our technology, but also as we think about, you know, as we think about, uh, what tools we want to use as an organization. We’re open to it and we want people to know it. But there has to be a structured way we want to introduce it into the company. And so this is where, you know, my, my, my CIO and his cybersecurity friends need to do this assessment. I think the other thing, just a lot like SaaS and the sprawl that a lot of companies are dealing with, a lot of these tools do a lot of different things. And so, you know, and maybe they do one particular thing really, really great. And they do a bunch of these other things kind of, okay, well, you don’t want to end up doing is like getting the best of breed for everything. You want to make a very intentional decision around, like where you are, what evolution you are as a business, and then what tools best to support you.

Eric Emans: And look, I get like the tool that may be best for supporting sales and marketing may be different than the tool that’s supporting R&D.  but it’s okay to do that, but be intentional about what you’re investing in and making sure that people are using it. That’s the other thing that I’ve just noticed, whether it’s AI or SaaS, is like somebody will tell you one day they need it. And all of a sudden you buy 100 licenses and the next thing you know, you turn around and you’re using five licenses. And so like me it’s that’s where it goes into the whole cost comparison. So what we’ve created is,  you know, that that, you know, compliance overview, it’s got cyber involved. It’s got legal involved. It’s got finance involved. We’re saying, yes, we’re very open to it, but let’s be intentional about what we want to bring into our company and then make sure that people understand that we’re saying yes, but we’re not saying yes to everything, right? Like we don’t want to be the hey, we’re not using AI. It’s too dangerous. It’s like, yes, we want to use AI and these are the tools that we have evaluated. And then we allow the business to bring us tools and say, hey, can you evaluate this? We think it’s a better option.  but I think being intentional at the start, before you have this sprawl of AI in your company is, is really important.

 Kevin Rosenquist: That’s a good point. You don’t want to just rubber stamp everything. Yes. You know, just like. Sure, sure. Go ahead. Let’s do it. Let’s do it. Let’s do it. Because, yeah, that’s costly.

Eric Emans: And.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Ineffective.

Eric Emans: The other thing I would say for anybody listening to this is like, and it was eye opening to me is like, you have your general console read your contracts because what you’re finding with a lot of these larger companies, I’m not going to name them. But like you’re opted in to them getting access to your data and.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Trained using it for training. Right. Yeah. Correct.

Eric Emans: And so like and certain things like maybe you’re okay with it. But again, it goes back to the word intentional. Like if you’re okay with that, fine. Let’s be intentional about it. But read your contract so you’d be surprised at how your data can or cannot be used. And then Nintex. Obviously we want to use data from Fulks’s workflow, not their actual data, but like how workflows are built. So we have to be intentional with our customers and understand where the benefit of that is. Like, we’re going to make the tool better for you, but that transparency we just have to get to, and I think that that’s going to be the hard part around regulating, because right now it’s a it’s a it’s a race to the amount of data that you can get, you know, at your access to and train your models off of. And so, you know, data is the highest, you know, the most valuable commodity right now. and, and, you know, I just I think that’s you just people ought to be thoughtful. So if you’re not already looking at even the contracts you already have in place, you’d be surprised how, you know, to your point. Like, when did Nintex start thinking about it? We’re probably not on the cutting edge. A lot of these companies have started thinking about it much earlier, and they all get that. They need a ton of data for them to have to train their models and you know, and often cases above board in trying to do the best thing for their customers. But you just should be aware of how your data is being used. Yeah.

 Kevin Rosenquist: That was kind of a problem, especially early on in all of this where people were like, wait, you’re doing what with my stuff? Like I, I did, I gave you that. I didn’t remember clicking a box. Oh, well, just by signing up for an account, I agreed to let you do that. So. Yeah, that’s that’s a tricky situation. I was going to ask you about the the regulation too, because it’s been slow moving, at least in this country. And, you know, we have an election coming up. Maybe you’ve heard,  two candidates with. Yeah, yeah, two candidates with very different viewpoints on regulation in AI. Is it hard for you to develop products for the financial sector, not knowing where the government will go, how it will move forward, or even who will be leading it?

Eric Emans: Honestly, I don’t think that hasn’t come up in our day to day. I think as I just think about regulation in this space. I mean, you can go back to when the internet gained prominence. I still I still think we’re struggling with how to regulate because I think it’s easier, you know, like it’s easier to regulate within the US and US based companies when you get outside of the US, like getting the global world to sign up for one set of, you know, regulation is, you know, we’ve seen that not work so well and you bring up elections. I think if we go back and, you know, depending on, you know, who you talk to, you know, uh, a lot of technology was used to shape views and so on and so forth. Which regulation would have benefited?  you know, for us and what we do, I think it’s, you know, and just as a company and who we are is like to me, it’s it we want to be transparent.  and, you know, make sure people understand how we’re using their data. And, and, and we were we wanted to have that reciprocated to us. But we are also a global company. We have offices in South Africa, Australia, Malaysia, Europe. we’re going to open up an office in India. So we also understand that the global landscape is challenging too. And so what you know, if you look at data sovereignty and privacy of like trying to keep your hand, you know, so it’s a complicated problem. And so for us I think where we land is like we need to be transparent. We figure any good regulation is going to have that as it relates to the, you know, who might, you know, carry the torch for the presidency. I certainly think one will lean towards less regulation than the other. But for us, I think we’re going to continue to, to guide ourselves in, you know, around what we do in our business is around transparency and how we’re using folks’ data.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Well, Eric Emans with Nintex, thanks so much for being here. Appreciate your time.

Eric Emans: Hey, I’ve enjoyed it, Kevin. Thank you.