Joe Benarroch:

Welcome.

Wes Schroll:

Thank you.

Joe Benarroch:

This is so great.

Wes Schroll:

Thanks for having me.

Joe Benarroch:

I know, I'm so excited.

Wes Schroll:

This is excellent. What a view.

Joe Benarroch:

This is really cool.

Wes Schroll:

I know.

Joe Benarroch:

It's really fun to have people here sitting up here looking out at the floor. But no, I'm really glad that you're here and took the time. So thank you for being here.

Wes Schroll:

And on an excellent day where we got Ralph Lauren about to get up there and ring the bell.

Joe Benarroch:

It's like we planned this.

Wes Schroll:

Exactly. We love it. The retailers showing up.

Joe Benarroch:

I know. Ralph Lauren is a really big brand with us and we have Ralph Lauren and Gap and other retailers, but this one, this is a big moment for them.

Wes Schroll:

Well, and I got to meet the teddy downstairs. [inaudible 00:00:49]. Made my morning, it was great.

Joe Benarroch:

So I want to start, and I want you to have some time to eat breakfast. I might kick off, I always have my classic oatmeal, but I want to kick off and I want to talk to you a little bit just about the origin story. I just want to kick back a bit and talk about what was that moment where you said, "This isn't an idea, this is something that needs to exist," or, "This is a company that needs to exist." Just pull us back there and then maybe we will start moving forward a bit.

Wes Schroll:

Yeah, for sure. I mean at that stage of life, the reality was I knew I wanted to find a problem, but I was also just experiencing a lot of firsts. Because in college, I had just finished my freshman year and I'm way away from my home. So I grew up in Boston, I'm going to school at University of Wisconsin-Madison, having all these changes happen. And when I moved into my first apartment, I was looking, "What's a pain point? What's a pain point that's going to hit me?" And I actually didn't realize it was a pain point at first because when I started doing all the shopping, I'm buying groceries, I'm filling up the fridge, filling up the pantry, and I was trying to turn it into a little bit of a game for myself. How could I feel like I was getting the best rewards, the best value for all of those decisions I'm making because I'm realizing, "I'm spending a lot of money now to do this."

Joe Benarroch:

Yeah, totally.

Wes Schroll:

I'm not just going to the cafeteria and I'm not on this plan where it's magically [inaudible 00:02:15]-

Joe Benarroch:

And you're making the choices.

Wes Schroll:

And I'm making the choices. And for the first couple of months it was actually, it was kind of fun, right? I'm trying to figure out, "Oh, if I sign up for this program, if I shop at this store at this day of the week, and if I go to this restaurant 10 times I'm going to get a free thing back." But the reality was a couple months later I was not progressing very quickly in any of those programs. I don't spend enough money with any one company that I was actually earning that meaningful outcome quickly enough to keep my attention and keep me excited. And instead it flipped really quickly where I started to become very disillusioned with those same companies who are trying to provide me value and it's actually backfiring because I'm frustrated with them for making it hard for me. So throughout my entire sophomore year, that problem was front and center for me.

So started just writing a business plan and saying, "Okay, could you create a company that aggregates together all of the consumer's decisions that they're making, all of the purchasing that they're doing, all of the things that they choose, what to spend their time on, and could you go out there and represent that group of consumers that you've aggregated together to those different brands that want to win with them and say, 'Hey, if you want to win with these consumers, they've already voted with their time, them downloading this app and using it, that they would prefer you to just reward them with this one currency because they can now use it across all these different things.' That is what the consumer would want." And wrote that into a business plan and said, "Okay, well I'm not technical, and I couldn't vibe code at that time, so it was all about how could we actually get this into an MVP?

And the realization was we're going to need to have some seed capital. So ended it up taking that business plan and not only using it for the class I was in, but also entering the school's business plan competition. And I think the winner got like $15,000 or something like that. And I realized at the same time though, I was like, "I wonder if I call my friends from high school at other colleges if they have business plans." And they did too, so we had entered it across a bunch of different schools.

And what was interesting is we're competing against grad students that have full products out there, they have revenue being generated, and yet we kept winning. And I think for me that was the moment where I realized this isn't a pain point that's unique to me. This is a pain point that when you highlight it, people, even if they've been shopping for decades, are like, "Yeah, it is kind of a problem. I do wish there was a solution." And we ended up winning the vast majority of those competitions, $180,000, and we used that to start the business. But that was the realization for me that this problem's big enough to warrant going after.

Joe Benarroch:

I always ask this question. From your mind as you've been growing the company and it's been scaling, what's toast? What's completely toast as it relates to the rewards dynamic and ecosystem and what are you toasting? What are you saying, "No, no, that's where we should be really focusing. Not just points for point's sake, but a more gamified world or..." What are you toasting, but what's really toast?

Wes Schroll:

I believe that consumers are getting to a point where everyone continuing to launch their own one-off program is going to be toast. I think it doesn't work for either side of the equation. I think consumers are fed up with it. Consumers know that they're creating more value and therefore they can demand. I think with companies like Fetch, they've seen, "Oh, I can expect companies to come to me and play on my turf. I don't have to go and jump through all their hoops just to participate." So I think that's going to happen. But also for those companies, the smaller companies when they're releasing these loyalty programs or different savings where the consumer's having to do all the work, the reality is the only people who are willing to spend all that work are the 10% of people who are already spending the majority of their spend with them.

So it just becomes like a subsidy on the best consumers that you have and that doesn't work for the company and that doesn't work for the consumer. So I think that's toast. In terms of what I think is being toasted into is being able to personalize things at a one-to-one level that's never been seen before utilizing AI. I think that's something that's going to be on the forefront of where we're going, where consumers aren't just expecting you to be able to display the right ads to them at the right time. They want that ad to be totally customized to them. They want to be able to ask questions as if they were talking with a friend and get answers quickly.

They want to be able to, in Fetch's case, you scan all of your receipts, I should be able to say, "What item am I about to run out of?" And it should know. It should be able to answer that.

Joe Benarroch:

My husband would love that.

Wes Schroll:

Yeah, it's amazing when you're able to do things like that. So we are moving in that direction where we can unlock the power of the data that consumers might not even realize is a big component of what they generate.

Joe Benarroch:

I had the CEO of Pinecone when we were talking about really good use cases of AI or getting into the psyche or understanding kind of the brain. What you just described is a really great use case that creates something better for the home, better for life. Are there any big AI partners that you're exploring or that you're working with currently?

Wes Schroll:

Yeah, we have a big enterprise agreement with OpenAI and we've loved working with them.

Joe Benarroch:

Love them.

Wes Schroll:

Yeah, as far as frontier models go, we have across all the tests, theirs is the most holistic. Fetch is very similar to that where we have to be able to jump across and do a lot of things well, and therefore that LLM that's able to do a lot of different things really well is great. There's one-offs that are better at one individual task because they've been trained for that more and more, but I think OpenAI just continues to have the best general model. And for, again, our use case where we have no idea what a consumer's going to ask to do with that data. We don't know what our partners are going to ask when they get in front of the terminal that we've now created for them with the product that we're launching fast. We don't know the types of questions they're going to ask, and it's the one that's able to handle them the best no matter what the questions are.

Joe Benarroch:

Are there consumer habits I would imagine that you were looking at in the beginning that have obviously started, you talked about the scanning of receipts, are there different type of consumer habits that you're starting to evaluate, that you're starting to see surface, that didn't exist a year, two years ago that you're saying, "Now this is kind of part of the purchasing routine that Fetch is kind of honing in on zoning in on a little bit more than the others?"

Wes Schroll:

I think one of the areas, it wasn't necessarily in the purchasing, it was in another element of a consumer's life where we didn't realize just how big the pent-up demand was for wanting to get something back for it. And this was in the case of choosing how you spend your time. So one of the features that we launched at the end of 2023 was Fetch Play where you can actually earn Fetch points for playing different free mobile games. So you can be playing Monopoly Go and as you beat levels, you're actually earning a real currency back. And later this year we're actually launching a streaming partnership. So now you can connect your Paramount Plus or your Peacock, and as you watch episodes, you'll earn Fetch points for doing that. So I think that's a really interesting-

Joe Benarroch:

That's smart.

Wes Schroll:

... divergence from where Fetch used to be really just about what you bought and how you spend your money, now it's about how you spend your time too. And I think in our perspective is anytime you as a consumer are making a decision that a company on the other side is creating profit off of and therefore is willing to buy for and spend marketing dollars against, we want to get you Fetch points for that. And I think it's interesting to see how open the consumer has been to that and how much they've just leaned in.

Joe Benarroch:

I love the idea of not just what you bought, but of how you spend your time. The Paramount, the Peacock, those types of engagement, I came from NBCUniversal, so understanding that and then even thinking about the linkage between commerce and media, there was the whole connection between the content and commerce. What type of things are you doing with the streamers that we should be really considering as a next phase in more interactive purchasing?

Wes Schroll:

Yeah, I think one of the things to start with, as you know from having been there, the vast majority of their media spend has to go towards get someone new to sign up. The reality is most people though have tried most of the streamers at this point. Their problem is more about retaining. And they have so much content, it's how do you get a consumer to be willing to go and try a new show on your platform versus doubling back over to maybe Netflix and going back to something they're comfortable with and know, even if you have a bunch of content they may love.

So I think that's where they're interested in using Fetch points, which is, "Hey, can I nudge you just a little bit to try the first episode? Because I think if you try that first episode, we could get you hooked on this new series and we don't need you to go over here." So that focus on shifting those marketing dollars away from just the acquisition into a leaky bucket and more towards retention, we love.

Joe Benarroch:

That's smart.

Wes Schroll:

But you also hit on another area that I think longer term I'm super excited about, which is so many of these are now ad-supported. And the ability to, as we talked about earlier, 32 receipts per month on average, all of their purchasing. It'd be really interesting to see if you just were shown a Chipotle advertisement as you were watching Paramount Plus, do we see that you then went to Chipotle the next day? I mean, they would love to be able, Chipotle would love to know that information and Peacock would love to be able to tell them whether or not that actually worked and drove incremental behavior.

Joe Benarroch:

What's crazy in that situation is that you become the bridge, you become almost a measurement data point that shows ROI, so you become of equal value to the media partner and to the retailer. Because both of them want that back to back kind of data point that they know leads. So that's a fascinating play to think about you're, again, you're not just thinking about retail or you're not thinking about... You're thinking about retail, but you're not just thinking about the purchase, but you're thinking about what might have got them to the purchase.

Wes Schroll:

And I'd say our business has always been about when we think about the business model, how do we create systems that allow for win-win-win opportunities? Because even in that case, you're totally right, the media provider and the advertiser, retailer, or brand really interested in having a validated third-party proof point of "Did the purchase happen?" And then if we can deal the consumer into that too and create value for them, that is truly the win-win-win.

I think too many of these platforms out there are so profitable that in my opinion, that's an opportunity. Because if we can actually go in and say, "Okay, we don't need all that profit, we want to share some of it back with the consumer." I think that's our long-term vision, is how do we just continue to expand, continue to serve more households? And by doing that, that creates more and more value for the ecosystem. And we don't need, you can take the Amazon model, it's not about maximizing profits, it's about continuing to grow to a larger scale.

Joe Benarroch:

Well, you're growing your ecosystem, you're creating more value for the end user, you're creating more value for different industries. And so what's interesting is that you're as much of a consumer destination and you're creating something bigger, but it's almost like there's this B2B play, which, and I'm curious about the data part portion of it and recognizing that there's an opt-in connection between the consumer and Fetch. Talk to me about the structures of data that you have and how you're making more with it and you're understanding it better.

Because when I was talking to the Pinecone CEO, and I am trying to give you a little bit of time to eat. But I was talking to the Pinecone CEO, he was talking about the idea of just taking unstructured data and helping companies do more with it, and talking about vector database and what it means and the search capabilities. And I'm wondering how you've been able to structure your data to get more meaningful insights and what you might be doing with that and some tools that you're applying towards it. Because getting a lot of valuable understanding of people.

Wes Schroll:

I think that's absolutely right. You hit the nail on the head that the key here is that the data that we are getting is opted into every single time. When a consumer comes into the app and takes a picture of that receipt, they're sharing a copy of that data with us, and in return, we are guaranteeing that they're going to earn Fetch points. There's a transaction that happens every time. So every time more privacy policy legislation comes out, we love it because Fetch is typically held up as the gold standard of what it is to provide value back to a consumer as they provide data for you to utilize. But that ownership of all of that data allows us to do things that no other data sources today enable, which for us is this cross retail understanding of who a household is, how they shop across every one of their different retailers that they engage with, and have a unified view of that household. And the fact that we can get down to a line item level of information, that's an unparalleled set of data.

Joe Benarroch:

What's an example, when you say line item information?

Wes Schroll:

So if you go to-

Joe Benarroch:

Want some coffee?

Wes Schroll:

Yeah, that'd be great.

If you go to Walmart and you go and spend $73 and use your Visa card to pay for it, well Visa knows that you went to Walmart and spent $73. Sure. But level three data, which is the actual items you bought, is not available to any payment rails.

Joe Benarroch:

Oh, I get it.

Wes Schroll:

So what we have by you scanning receipt is we know that you bought Tabasco and Heinz Ketchup and each of the individual items, which is what has unlocked and why I think our business caught on so much initially with CPGs. They're starved for data, they're disintermediated by a retailer, and their consumer shops across numerous retailers.

Joe Benarroch:

Correct.

Wes Schroll:

Really challenging, fragmented data landscape. Fetch now is able to actually understand all of that and get some really interesting insights and targeting capabilities built on the back of that data.

Joe Benarroch:

You mentioned Visa, which was a great signal about your partnership with American Express.

Wes Schroll:

Yes.

Joe Benarroch:

Let's talk about American Express. American Express is an incredible company, but I want you to just talk a little bit more about what you're doing with them and what you're launching.

Wes Schroll:

Yeah, we're super excited for this because we, as I mentioned earlier, always believe that if a consumer's creating value with a decision that they're making for a company, then we want to be able to get them Fetch points back for that. And when we're thinking about a transaction that you would make, if you go to Walmart, you're buying these different brands, yeah we could get Tabasco to reward you, maybe Walmart will reward you, but when you go into your wallet and make a decision of how you're going to pay for it, if you're using a credit card and using a Visa or MasterCard, you're generating interchange and someone's getting value there too. So we say, "Is there a way that our consumers love Fetch points?" And they may not have as much of an affinity towards an airline program because our consumer is the head of household, mom often, and she doesn't fly nearly as much.

And so we're like, "Can we be that universal points currency that she really cares about?" And when we started talking, Amex actually first approached us and said, "Hey, we think this would be a great solution because we think your foothold with consumers with this currency is parallel to what we do at Delta." And I was really bought into that and when we were talking about it, American Express provides a bunch of other benefits to our consumers that now apply and get the card. They just have a brand that we also think our consumers are aspiring to own their first Amex credit card, and we're enabling that for them. So for us it was a no-brainer. They were going to be the best partner for us because of the added benefits that they'll get the consumer, the brand affinity and match with our brand that we've wanted, and we're super excited to now be live and rolling out that product to our consumers.

Joe Benarroch:

You're right when you say that if, again, thinking of you as a bridge to all of these different areas, now with American Express, you become a bridge for people who are aspiring to own that card. Truthfully, the American Express is the only card that our household uses because of just how easy it is to then see all of our purchasing behaviors. If you're allowing people to number one step into what they might think is a different type of elite territory or just they've made it in a certain way, or and now they have access to all of that information and you're becoming that conduit, that's really smart. And American Express is good for that because to your point, I think they've done really well on the rewards dynamic and they just keep adding on. They want you to stay. They [inaudible 00:19:22]-

Wes Schroll:

They've done a good job with that for sure. And I think for our consumer to be able to get access to American Express without an annual fee is also something that's really special. We actually learned that because often when we were starting to test the marketing and we'd ask consumers what they think, they're like, "We love it, but I don't want to pay an annual fee." So we realized, "Oh, we got to be front and center because everyone just expects if you're going to get all those benefits of Amex, you're going to have it." But through that partnership, we were able to enable no annual fee for these consumers on their Amex card and all the perks that you would hope for. So it's like a win-win. But it's actually been funny, it's almost like a marketing challenge of a perception issue that we had to get over.

Joe Benarroch:

Well, totally, because another annual fee on your long list of things that you're already paying for, making it a virtuous circle. Even going back to things like Paramount and Peacock, you have these subscriptions, you don't want it to do anything else. If you're kind of erasing that from the equation, then now you've become even that much more attractive, but you become even that much more attractive to Amex because you're bringing in users. You're bringing in next generation of users.

Wes Schroll:

Exactly. And our consumer base definitely skews a bit younger. Our Gen Z/Millennial is over 60% of our consumer base. So it's often these brand new to shopping households that are out of college and really making a lot of decisions that will stick with them for life. So exactly to that point, that's why they're willing to invest side by side with us on this product is it is the next generation of consumers that they're wanting to be introduced to.

Joe Benarroch:

With American Express, and this is just more me being curious, with American Express, and they're so tied to small businesses and that whole ecosystem and you have the long and the short tail and you seem to be doing really well on the big business side. And so is there any kind of play down the path for the SMBs and how would that look?

Wes Schroll:

Yeah, I think first and foremost, the card is really nice because it instantly enables you to earn Fetch points anywhere, including SMBs, which is awesome. But we've actually seen massive success that our consumers want that as well. So we partnered with a company called Rewards Network, and they're partnered with over 20,000 local restaurants in the US and they're now integrated into Fetch where you can earn Fetch points at those 20,000 local restaurants. And it's one of those charts that's just up and to the right. Consumers, once they figure out we have that restaurant on board, they're more likely to go to that restaurant, start shopping there.

So we're really excited. Also with the new tool that we're releasing today, FAST, I think that's going to enable SMB to almost self-serve on the Fetch. That's the long-term goal that we have. And when I say long-term, I mean in the coming quarters.

Joe Benarroch:

Well long-term in a founder's mind is like eight weeks.

Wes Schroll:

Exactly. It's like, "Yeah, it's going to take a full three months? That's forever." So I'm really excited because a tool like that, normally if we had a pizza shop down the road that maybe they have five locations, great pizza shop, we really wish you could earn Fetch points there. The economics don't work it where I can have a salesperson go and call on them, but with the LLM that we have now integrated into FAST, we could give them a website where they could go in and say, "Here's the store that I own," and it would show you everyone who scanned receipts from there and all the other pizza shops that they've scanned receipts from.

You can say, "Great, I want to tell people that I'm doing a special on a large pepperoni pizza tomorrow night. You'll get 5,000 Fetch points." Run a credit card, hit enter, all of a sudden they're now on Fetch and issuing Fetch points without ever having talked with us. I think that's super exciting because I know the power of Fetch and being able to connect consumers with this currency to brands, and the fact that we've only been able to do it for the biggest players is awesome, but if we can enable that same power for the local stores, I mean that's something I'm super excited about. So, it's coming.

Joe Benarroch:

Once you democratize that type of experience where every small... Let's just stick with small. Medium-sized, they can get there. If you enable the ability for every small business around the nation, potentially around the world, to enable a point system that gives them a benefit for their local community, that's incredible business impact. That's incredible economic impact.

Wes Schroll:

I totally agree with that. And the way we've always thought about it is back to that GMV that we capture. That's the purchasing power of our consumer base, and it's almost $200 billion a year. All of the partners that we work with today, all the big guys that we're super excited to work with that we work with, they still only represent half of that GMV. The other half is the small businesses. And today and for the history of Fetch, we've never been able to give you meaningful value for that. So we're really excited that this technology shift and the improvements of AI is going to enable us to service them and service our big partners better too. So it is again, back to a win-win technology that we just couldn't be more excited for because of what it's going to enable more value back to the consumer.

Joe Benarroch:

Well, you saw that play with Facebook. I mean, they went down that path of big brands, beholden to big brands and the shifts and the advertising, but once they turned on that self-serve model and they invested in that self-serve engine, that's where they saw the hundreds and hundreds of millions of small businesses benefiting from a platform. So to your point, once you turn that engine on, I mean businesses, they want things that are going to better their business, make it easy, give them more rewards for their community, or give them more benefit to the people in their community. People are loyal to the businesses within their community.

Wes Schroll:

And I've always been amazed that the large companies, the challenge that they've had with access to data, because like we talked about earlier, it's a fragmented ecosystem and everything, but they're still worlds ahead of what the business intelligence a small retailer can have. They have nothing. They can just talk with their consumers for the most part about, "Hey, where else are you getting pizza from?" Or something like that. So if we can enable them to have access to that same level of intelligence of data and access to it and act off of it, I think that's going to allow an explosion of growth for SMB to just grow their own businesses, which is awesome.

Joe Benarroch:

Right, now you have true economic impact and all of a sudden you're enabling those companies not only to have really rich insight, but it gives them the ability to scale, grow their company, maybe start a new store, go into a different local community, hire more people. I mean, the impact that Fetch can have on I would just say the broad-scale economy is pretty significant with that development.

Wes Schroll:

Absolutely. And I think there's the potential that as we prove that out, as they're seeing that, they'll be wanting to tell people to use Fetch too.

Joe Benarroch:

Of course.

Wes Schroll:

And now all of a sudden you have that flywheel turning where more businesses are willing to say, "Hey, use Fetch," because they already know a consumer who shops with them that uses Fetch is actually an advantage for them.

Joe Benarroch:

Absolutely. So we talked earlier, I want to flip gears, but not too far, but we talked earlier about you being a founder, you kind of starting with that idea. Now you're a CEO of a very significant company. You have a ton of different employees that are kind of going through their own journey. What are some things that your own employee base is teaching you that you have completely flipped gears on with respect to how you lead, how you partner, the things that you might do to motivate your employees a bit differently? Because now things are happening so quickly.

Wes Schroll:

I think AI is a perfect case study for all of that. When we first started thinking about at the beginning of this year, AI is going to be important, AI is going to impact businesses across most likely every department. How do we go about empowering our employees to do that? So one of the first things that we think to do, and I think most companies think to do, is we could go hire someone that's in charge of AI and enable them to go and talk with each of the departments and create solutions for each of the departments and show them the value of AI and how they could utilize in their day-to-day work.

That didn't feel very Fetch to us. Because I think one thing that I've continued to learn throughout my career is that when you empower a really smart team of world-class talented folks with the information of the why we're trying to do something, and then get out of their way, provide them the resources, give them very light guardrails to go within, the amount how much they lean in and what they find and create always blows me away versus trying to give them something really structured to do.

So that's what we did. We ended up at the beginning of this year, set out a framework from our legal and finance that provided guidelines to how to use AI at Fetch. And at first they gave me a four or five page document that laid out all the different dos and don'ts. We said, "Get it to a half a page." So we got it down to a half a page and we sent out. Everyone can understand it. Now there's no question about what you can and can't do. It's super clear. And we were on the side of being more permissive in terms of what we're going to enable our folks to do.

Joe Benarroch:

How many people do you think ran that through an AI chat?

Wes Schroll:

It was two paragraphs, so I hope not many.

Joe Benarroch:

"Get this to a page." I'm joking.

Wes Schroll:

That's fair, to get it down. Hopefully they did. Hopefully they did. I would love that. So we started with that and then I thought about case studies of other businesses of when there's this transformative moment that affects their business, how do they deal with it? And I kept coming back to the Chipotle example of it had E. coli outbreaks, numerous E. coli outbreaks in a very short condensed timeframe. And Brian Niccol at the time decided, "We're shutting down. We're going to close all the stores for a day, and all managements go into a store and we're doing a health and safety training." And he made it clear that that's that important. They're willing to give up revenue for an entire day to just focus on health and safety. And they did that and then they came out and they've been awesome on the health and safety front ever since.

So I decided that not only do we send out a memo and tell people, "Hey, we want you to be AI first." The reality is everyone still has their day job. It's not like people have extra hours sitting around where they're like, "Great, let me go figure out AI and how to integrate it." So we shut down the company for a whole week, all thousand employees, and we just said, "Okay, this week is going to be your week to break up and they..." Everyone broke themselves up into 200 teams, and they just went deep on learning all these tools. They chose projects that they wanted to do, and everyone went from idea phase all the way to live production. We had marketing folks-

Joe Benarroch:

You had an AI hack.

Wes Schroll:

... for doing live production, we had an AI hackathon for the whole company. Not super directive. We did bring in Gemini, OpenAI, all these ones to come and do some talks at the beginning, show people what's possible. By Friday when we were getting a demo of all of the different programs that those 200 did, because we're going to do a competition, who are the three best ones? It was hard to even choose the top 50 because they were all so good. And they were meaningful and they were in live production. We have now productized a lot of the programs that we worked on there, and now even every Friday we still shut down from noon to 5:00 PM for people to just keep retooling themselves on all the new advancements that happen.

Joe Benarroch:

That is smart.

Wes Schroll:

And everyone stepped up into it. So that's what they keep teaching me, which is again, I tell them that, "Hey, I believe AI is going to enable us to spend more time in our zone of genius and creating things and being those creative forces that direct." And it should be able to optimize 50% of what you already do today, giving you that time to go be more creative. Give them that context and why that will benefit our consumer, our partner, and then get out of their way. Give them the resources that they need and let them go and do it. And everyone has embraced it. It's been amazing.

Joe Benarroch:

Zone of genius.

Wes Schroll:

Yes.

Joe Benarroch:

Is that yours?

Wes Schroll:

I can't say it's mine. My coach uses it all the time. Yeah, people spend time in that zone of genius.

Joe Benarroch:

That is incredible. I love that framing, and I love that you did that at the company. And I use Facebook as an example because it taught me so many things, but I remember the moment where Mark Zuckerberg brought in his engineers and said, "You no longer can bring me a plan that's not mobile centric." Now that is going back to 2011, 2012, right? It's almost the exact same thing, but you're not just saying, "Embed AI into the fabric of the product." You're saying embed AI into the fabric of basically how you operate both personally and now professionally. And you're giving people space to do that. But I love the idea of embedding that in their zone of genius. That's brilliant. That's a brilliant leadership kind of dynamic. And are people embracing that?

Wes Schroll:

They absolutely are. One of the things that I didn't realize was just how much people needed to understand the permission. So many people thought they're like, "When I was using AI tools, I thought I was cheating." And I get it completely. It feels like you're cheating.

Joe Benarroch:

It does.

Wes Schroll:

And that's why we had to be so crystal clear on what are the guardrails legally and what you can and can't do, which tools you can use. But once we gave very clear guidelines on that that were very, again, permissive, it just unshackled people to say, "Okay, let me lean into this." And this is where we just start harnessing the creative potential of all of our teams and you see it come to life faster than ever before. So yeah, it's definitely been working. Exciting.

Joe Benarroch:

When you give people permission to make themselves better, I think most people want to enable that, but I know exactly what you're saying and I find it to be true with our teams here about embedding something in the process that they think is circumventing maybe their own genius. And it's like, no, it's additive. And if you can do it faster, great. And that's beneficial.

Wes Schroll:

I mean, the whole reward system that everyone has grown up in with just academia in general, rewarded people for doing the hard grunt work to get to an answer. So you do have to truly rewire people to be open to it.

Joe Benarroch:

Okay. I love that you said that because I always joke around about the time when I went to NYU, I was getting my MBA, and I had to do regressions and everything by hand, and I was like-

Wes Schroll:

"Why?"

Joe Benarroch:

... "Why would I do... Why?" Everything wasn't as advanced AI wise now, but I'm like, "There's no reason to make me do a curve by hand." And so you're absolutely right. Absolutely not.

Wes Schroll:

And that's why when we were saying, "How do we do it?" We're like, "There's no way we could be too drastic about this."

Joe Benarroch:

No, not at all.

Wes Schroll:

I was talking with my board, I'm like, "I have to show people that this is important. That's why I'm shutting it down." No meetings, nothing.

Joe Benarroch:

How have you used AI that's actually making you a better leader?

Wes Schroll:

So we have an internal system. We call it FetchGPT. It has access to the vast majority of all data Fetch as an organization has ever created. So everything, think of our Google Drives, think of all of the event data that comes off our mobile app and consumers using it, think about our ticketing systems, our communication systems we have. Then I tell it who I am, and it knows who I am and my role, it has access to my calendar. And every morning I start off by just saying, "What should I focus on today?" And it will pull in based upon the meetings I have, it'll say, "Hey, today you're meeting with blank, who is VP of Operations. Here's the top three things that they say is important for you and their agenda. Here's the things that are going on right now and the what's behind, what's not. Ask them these questions." And I would say it probably gives me 75% of things that I probably already would've, but there's another 25% in there that I'm like, "Wait, that's a great additional thing I should needle in on."

So for me, it's a lot of that. And then even with the new tool that we just started launching today, FAST, the ability to... I was in a meeting with a retailer yesterday and I pull up the tool. And what the tool does is it gives you real time human interface to query against all data that Fetch generates on that transaction. So $200 billion a year of GMV, I can now ask a question. And they were asking me, they said, "Could you figure out what a pound of Fuji apples cost at retailer X versus my retailer two days ago?" So I just type in, I was like, "Okay, in fairness, I've never asked this. And I want to be clear, you're asking for an apples to apples comparison."

Joe Benarroch:

Literally.

Wes Schroll:

Literally. I've never been asked for this. So I was like, "Okay, let's do it." And I put it in there and it shows us in real time, here's what it is at one retailer versus another, and just the lean back from the partner of just going, "That's powerful." It's that understanding. So for me, I can now bring that into meetings. And no matter who it's with, whether it's a brand or retailer, and I was meeting with a streamer, and similarly they were saying, "Okay, would you be able to measure the impact of us launching this big show?"

And we've traditionally been in the consumable space and they asked, "Can your data see a spike in WWE branded products around this timeframe where we launched this big thing?" And I was like, "I have no idea. We've never trained the system to do this." This is the power of OpenAI though, right? I can go in and ask it, do we? And it found 30 items that were all WWE branded based upon the description that they had and trended it out for me. And I'm talking about 15 seconds. This would've, before, taken an army of analysts.

Joe Benarroch:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Wes Schroll:

And I would've said, "Let me get back to you next week."

Joe Benarroch:

Totally.

Wes Schroll:

Now I can do this in real time. It is a complete democratization of insights, and that's going to create an explosion of value for our partners and therefore for our consumers. And that's why we're so excited about this. And it's a tool anyone can use. You don't have to have background, you just have to be able to say your question.

Joe Benarroch:

Right. You just have to query it.

Wes Schroll:

Ask a question, it'll do it.

Joe Benarroch:

Fetch is an insight engine.

Wes Schroll:

Exactly. It's crazy. It's super exciting.

Joe Benarroch:

No, that's fantastic. I love the examples of the apples to apples because imagine now flip it to the consumer experience where people say, "If you can show us that another store is selling it for less, we will offer to you." Now in seconds without them having to go look at the stores, within seconds, Fetch will be able to do that.

Wes Schroll:

Retailers will have to be careful about making that promise because people are going to be able to.

Joe Benarroch:

That's my point, right? And so I have a question for you. Big moments within the last year, what are you raising your glass to? A person, an idea, a societal moment? What are you saying is something that has significantly motivated you that you're just giving a big cheers to?

Wes Schroll:

I mean, for us, it's just the power of what AI is going to do for our team, what it's going to unlock for our consumers, and how we're seeing actively that we can be on the forefront of shepherding in our partners into this new world of incredible insights, action and results. It is really exciting. I've never, in my 12 years, I've never seen things change so fast. The concept of shutting down the company for a week, I know you would've talked to me a year ago. I was like, "There's no way I've ever seen any shift that would warrant that." And yet for us to do that and say, "That wasn't drastic enough, we need to shut down every Friday now." That's really exciting, especially when you're talking to a founder who's used to the early days of the nitty-gritty. Once you're-

Joe Benarroch:

And the grind.

Wes Schroll:

Yeah. The CEO life gets a little bit slower in comparison to some of that. Not anymore. And I think that's given me a resurgence of just excitement for how much is going to be possible, all the new things we're going to be able to do.

Joe Benarroch:

That's fantastic. Congratulations to you. We're moments away from the opening bell, but I really, really thank you for being here.

Wes Schroll:

Thanks for having here.

Joe Benarroch:

This is incredible.

Wes Schroll:

Great conversation. Cheers to that.

Joe Benarroch:

You're incredible. Cheers to you.

Speaker 3:

That's our conversation for this week. Remember to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen and follow us on X @ICEHousePodcast. From the New York Stock Exchange, we'll talk to you again next week, inside the ICE house.

Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties, expressed or implied, as to the accuracy or completeness of the information, and do not sponsor, approve or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.