PegaWorld iNspire 2023: PegaWorld iNspire for Developers: How to get the most out of Pega and PegaWorld iNspire

Pega is very passionate about its community and our ecosystem. We have many avenues for all Pega Developers to build their brand and careers: Pega Community, Pega Academy, forums, events, individual recognition and much more. Come learn how to utilize these as well as get the "inside track" on how to best take advantage of PegaWorld iNspire sessions and content.

Transcript:

- So my name's Kate Lapore. I am senior director of the Learning Strategy and Solutions as part of engineering, and I've been running basically our Pega Academy and documentation teams for the platform and robotics product area. But prior to joining engineering, I was part of Pega Consulting for 10 years. So I bring a unique interest on what the developer's experience is, and now on the flip-side, seeing how the capabilities are being built out in the product, what's coming, what's going to be big from a developer's perspective. So we'll weave that in as we go through our topics.

- Excellent, thank you Kate. So my name is Justin Galui, I've been with Pega for about 12 years now. And the last several I've been the director of Pega Community Experience and Engagement. And I'm gonna give you a quick rundown of the agenda. So as you know, a big part of PegaWorld, of course, are client success stories and what they all have in common, is leveraging the power of Pega to create sort of what I would call organizational superpowers. And today, what we're gonna do is not discuss just how the organizations are doing it, but how can we again, unlock the superpower for you individually as Kate mentioned. So how are we gonna do that? Well, we're gonna cover five accelerating trends of the autonomous enterprise. And I guarantee none of those will be a surprise to any of you, but it's gonna be critical to understand those, because they're creating endless possibilities and different pathways, new challenges that we're all learning as we go. In addition, there's gonna be choices to be made and a lot of you in this room are gonna be at the heart of a lot of those choices. I will say that this is not a technical deep dive, but we do wanna level set and provide some of that context. So we will touch on Pega's vision for each of those trends and our approach to that. But as Kate said, we're gonna go one step further and talk about it from the developer's perspective. What are we hearing from the field? Are you and your teams ready to capitalize on these things? And what should be your mindset going into a lot of these? And as you heard earlier at the keynotes, there's 80 sessions and 100,000 square feet. So we're gonna point out the relevant booths, the relevant sessions that we would recommend you guys spend your time on and arm you also with questions, so that when you go to those booth and sessions with those subject matter experts, you'll know what to ask as it's relevant to your organizations. And then we'll cover some, also some resource links and things like that. So after PegaWorld, you can continue the learning. And for the last five, seven minutes or so, we'll talk about Pega Community, all the digital offerings that we have there, and tools and features that you may not be aware of that you need to definitely be taking advantage of as we move forward.

- Okay, so one thing I do want to just put out as a level set, you may be aware of some of the things around the Pega's business architecture and so forth, but some of these are important as you're thinking about transformations that you're going through and how can you implement and leverage those capabilities to the maximum benefit and outcomes. So I just wanna do a quick refresher, because we'll reference this as we go through when you hear Center-out as the business architecture, effectively what we're saying is don't build in the channels and in your data, but think about the outcome that you're trying to drive and then the journey that you're going across, whether it's a micro-journey or whatnot, to get to that outcome and think about it from the Center-out, and then build up to the channel and down to the data. But don't build in the channel and we'll talk a little bit about why. In the 3 pillars, that's really how we help you go the next step and undo and look at the complexity of the transformation you're doing and break it down into three core components that are really the critical ways that you're gonna drive the agility and the value and the time to develop. And basically, those are the micro-journeys or case types, the channels and personas, which generally go hand-in-hand, and then the data and integration. So you're gonna look at those as you're starting out your project. And then when you're implementing, you wanna design with Pega Express. And basically, that's our delivery approach, that's gonna capture all the best practices and lead you to the tools and capabilities in the product that are really going to help you accelerate your time to value and achieve the maximum benefit with Pega. So we'll reference a bunch of these things, but it's important just to know from an engineering standpoint, as we're going forward and we get into Infinity 23, all these capabilities will be hanging off of the 3 pillars and into Pega Express. So leveraging that capability will be really important as we go forward.

- So let's get into these trends. I know we've got a lot to get to. So our first one is embracing low-code development. And you might be thinking, well, low-code's not really new. And you're right, it's definitely not new as Alan referenced earlier, but it is dramatically accelerating dramatically, and not just in the number of non-technical users, as you can see by the metric on the screen, it's accelerating in its scope, it's accelerating in the complexity of the workflows and the outcomes that are possible with it. Citizen Development now is not just for simple processes and applications anymore. And I guess to put it another way, we're finding that low-code programs within clients and many clients, it's no longer a program you just sort of incubate and let's see what comes out of it. For many, it's becoming a full-on strategic initiative. And when you look at the technical landscape, the economic landscape and the skills landscape, it shouldn't really be a surprise to any of us. So Pega's vision with this. It's not surprising, it's part of our DNA for literally 40 years. And while that, how has changed, the technology has changed, the what and the why has remained constant. And that is again, bringing IT and business closer together. We have the low-code app factory, which essentially is for Citizen developers or think of it like a starter kit that not just allows you to get quick wins, but doing it with governance and doing it with repeatability. And that's a core element to getting Citizen Development off the ground. And at Pega, we also understand that it's not just about the tools. The technology is just one piece of the puzzle. And in fact, if I could, I'd like to try to do a little experiment here. So I'm gonna come out here. I would like everybody to do exactly what I do. Now here's the key. I'm gonna give you some simple requirements and simple steps, and we're gonna see if we can all land on the same outcome. So everyone do this for me. Do this with your hands, some reluctance, I see. Put your hands out like this, palms down, thumbs pointing in. Palms out, thumbs down, cross over, left over right and lock your fingers. Now from this point forward, do not unlock your fingers. Now here's the key. Make sure your thumbs are touching and pointing down to the ground. Yep, make sure your thumbs are pointing down, yep, perfect, perfect. Now everyone, last step, keep your fingers locked, ready? Everyone do this. This anyone? No, everyone do this. Everyone do this quickly. Thank you, thank you . So one, yes, that was a cheap excuse to do a magic trick on a Las Vegas stage. So dream completed, thank you very much. But number two, it sort of illustrates, how communication can feel between IT and business. I gave you very simple requirements. There's only a few steps, yet, somehow our outcomes were completely different. And that's a fundamental differentiator for Pega. We understand again that the idea of the technology and the product capabilities have to be combined with operational best practices, and as Kate said earlier, Pega Express methodology, all the things, these things need to work together to be able to execute at scale. So from the professional developer's perspective, you have to have the right mindset. We're at a stage now where you have to realize that Citizen developer success will equal your success. And you have to think of it not really as a threat. It's similar in my opinion to AI. If you think of it as a threat, you sort of already lost that first battle. You have to find it and look at it as a complimentary tool to your workflow, and how do you do that? You have to champion their impact and know where they live within your organization, so that you can impact that. And again, set them up for success. One way to do that is make sure as a professional developer, you're staying current on the low-code capabilities. I know there's a lot of LSAs out there, maybe it's been a while since they've explored App Studio. Maybe it's time to go back in there again. And by staying up-to-date on the low-code capabilities, you'll know where and when that Citizen developer line moves and it's going to keep moving. But what's more is by learning what's possible at the Citizen developer side of things, you can also influence the broader guardrails within your organization. And I'm talking things like your enterprise class structure, your layer cake, you've got, update and maintenance plans. If you're able to influence that, you're gonna be able to avoid application silos. And again, helping set them up for success, you'll be able to set up for success as well. Again, complimentary tool. And from the Citizen developer side of things, you've gotta find the right projects to make that impact. Again, but this varies by organization. Every organization is gonna be different. Where are you in your low-code journey? Maybe mission-critical processes shouldn't be the first thing, but again, every organization is gonna be a little bit different. And you wanna have operational honesty of what is realistic, again, within your organization. Maybe it goes without saying, but you also wanna have professional developer allies. Find those professional developers in your organization who will support you and understand the benefits of mutual success. And then also think systematically about how you want to approach this. When you think about it, and if you're gonna have success and demonstrate success within your organization, it stands to reason that others are gonna wanna replicate that. So you're gonna wanna do it right the first time and you're gonna set up healthier organizations and healthier applications in that respect. So think bigger, think scalable, think repeatable, and respect your IT partner's challenges that they're gonna need to overcome when your app radiates. So from a resource perspective, we're gonna talk about these boosts. So Pega Express, Kate already brought that up. And please go see Kate at the Learn Your Way @ Pega. There's some amazing low-code content on Pega Academy. And for sessions, there was one just before this, if you didn't get a chance, the Citizen Development with Timothy Harfield and Friends. They're gonna put that on pega.com. So all of these will be on pega.com. So if you didn't catch that one earlier, make sure you go do that. And then tomorrow JPMC will be talking about their huge robust Citizen developer community that they've built out. And then lastly, some hubs we have on Community. We've just published a whole host of new videos for Citizen developers as well, and the methodology group as well.

- Great, well, thanks for shouting out on the videos. I know we worked together with a Citizen developer working group of clients and that was one of the number one asks they had of my team from the Academy side is additional help on these little short 30-second videos to help the Citizen developers. So if you're investing in that type of a program, I'd encourage you to go check those out. So let's move on to the next piece of our autonomous enterprise puzzle, and that's really around optimization. So we all know that these have been a challenging couple years. A lot of companies have been struggling with some profitability issues and that's all really leading us into considering how do we become more efficient and how do we look at our processes? Are they efficient? How can we optimize them and so forth. So there are a host of automation tools that can be used to try and address this. But if you think about this quote on this screen, if an average enterprise has 130 applications, and I'd venture to say many of you have even more than that, and you think about all these little automation tools spawning up in these different areas of your business, trying to manage all through that, that's gonna be a recipe for disjointed channels, shadow IT, duplicate systems, it's a challenge to maintain and deploy and manage. So one of the things that Pega has looked at in terms of how are we approaching this and embedding it within the product to make it more viable for you. And I think that the comment that our tagline, "Build for change," is highly relevant right now. So we know that that's what you're gonna be using our technology for. And we also know that many of your applications that you're using Pega for are inherently complex. And so there is a lot of opportunity for you to look at the optimization. So going back to our Center-out comment, you wanna think about, again, building in the the center and put your workflows at the center, because that's gonna be a whole lot easier as you're thinking about optimization to try and get you to not deal with hard-coded logic that's either embedded in the channel or in the data structure. And then you want your optimization to be very quick, easy, automated as much as possible. I mean, certainly Nirvana is fully automating a process, and then scalable. And so I'd like to highlight three technologies that are really big right now and we're seeing a lot of traction with. First one is process mining. And so you've heard a little bit about that, but effectively we're looking at the work across the workflow and not the information that you would normally see in your dashboard, but the tasks that go in the activity that goes in between the stages and steps. Task mining is gonna drill down at a user level and look at what that user is doing to complete a task and where is that opportunity and inefficiency. And then the process AI is looking at how do we leverage all the decisioning capabilities to make your solutions smarter. So a combination of these three really provide you with a tremendous opportunity. So what I would encourage is as developers go and look at these technologies in the Innovation Hub and share some of the sessions, so that you understand not only how to use them, but why to use them, where should you use them, what's the opportunity within your landscape and Pega estate. Also, you wanna be looking for where are you inefficient, problems may be starting to occur and you wanna identify those sooner rather than later, because they'll become bigger as they go on. And then finally, I think I may have accidentally clicked it, but-

- Oh, and go back.

- Sorry.

- Sorry, can you go back?

- Yeah, sorry, thanks. Think about as you're developing new applications, is there an opportunity to review and look at that efficiency or inefficiency? Because you don't wanna continue to build the same capability in Pega that you might have had in a different place and just replicate like for like, and then keep going a bad application forward. So look at those opportunities, things like process mining might be useful in that space. So there are two key areas in the Innovation Hub. The mining technologies are in the back with the innovation or the intelligent automation section. And then the process AI is obviously upfront where the AI and automated enterprise is located. So we'd highly recommend those. The Navy Federal Credit Union is actually running concurrent with this session. So we would recommend, why don't you go watch that as a replay, because they are really using these technologies at scale. And then if you're new to process mining, I'd highly recommend the 101 session, that's with our product team that have developed this. And they will give you a very thorough grounding on how it works, what types of systems can you be connecting to? When's a good opportunity to use it? Because really as you look at all these capabilities, they're really designed for scale. I mean, no other vendor's got the capability doing the next best action with huge datasets. The task mining is looking at call centers with thousands of agents and desktops. It's not looking at tens or twenties of systems. And that the process mining is really where you're gonna get big efficiencies and big gains. So you're looking at your complex workflows with lots of case types or very large case volumes and that's where you're gonna drive some opportunity and value from it. And finally, as we talked about, there are a number of documents, because some of these things are new like process mining, we are just about to get out our documentation and curriculum, so there's free online enablement for process mining will be coming soon. So stay tuned and connect and look for that and as well some additional information that's getting populated out on the insights.

- Thank you very much Kate. So we're gonna move on now to the next next trend. And that's enabling high impact user experiences. If you take a look at that metric there, in a few years, over half of all new digital products will be traceable back to an open source or platform-based design system. And while today we don't have time to go into all the merits of a design system. If you're not familiar, they essentially are codifying design decisions, so you can replicate those at scale and it provides speed and quality, consistency, and governance, and ultimately, so that energies can be spent elsewhere in the app development process. So from Pega's perspective and our vision, we know it takes time to author really great and amazing UX and align the UX to the business logic and the data and the channels and such that sometimes with upgrading, your front-end developer maybe needed a little more Pega knowledge with the data models and workflows and such. But there's really a C change with Constellation and taking the Center-out approach with our UX architecture. And how you build your application is be configuring your UX as opposed to customizing UX and the traditional architecture UI kit and theme cosmos, you would traditionally build the UI first and then you'd apply that to the logic and the data. But with Constellation we've separated out that core front-end. So things like navigation and workflows, your information architecture are again, separate from the logic and the data and it's a game-changer, because faster to author, faster to iterate. And because you're not customizing components, ideally you're building them once and using them many places. And when you focus on the higher level aspects of app development, like the logic, you can do so without breaking the front-end, and that's critical. So at the end of the day, Constellation really helps accommodate those who don't have the UX skills, but also provides the flexibility, so you can extend with the DX API to orchestrate other experiences, maybe a customer-facing website and things like that. And of course, last but not least, the out-of-the-box accessibility compliance is huge. Compatibility with screen readers and localization and as many of you probably know, by having accessibility built in from the start, it's gonna eliminate so much downstream potential rework. And we all know that's important. So from a developer's perspective, you have to change the mindset again from customizing to configuring the UX in Pega. That's gonna be a critical mind shift that you have to tackle now as you move your applications and you develop new applications in Constellation. In the past if you customized your UI highly and to each persona and channel, a high percentage of the work to do an upgrade would've been focused on the UI. So this is a dramatic improvement. So the sooner you start using Constellation, the better. But with that said, we recognize that there's a lot of equity built into your traditional UIs, which is, the great news there is they can coexist. So your old case types and new case types can coexist together and so no migration is needed. Obviously, the UX team has an entire section themselves, so please head on over there. But some questions you might wanna ponder and as you go talk to them is when should you move over to Constellation, which their answer will probably be ASAP, but what are some coexisting strategies? Talk about your situation and what are ways that you wanna tackle that. For our sessions, I think it's later today at 3:15 we have the Inside Scoop panel and one of the members of that panel is Shaun Wortis, he's the senior director of UX at Pega. So I think he'd be very happy to see many of you there and ask him a bunch of UX questions at the panel. And from a resource perspective, Constellation has its own site, so design.pega.com, highly recommend you check that out. Kate's team has some new UX documentation journeys that are coming soon, and Academy has a ton of great content for missions and a ton of relevant modules and I'll just call it the bottom one, there's a new one coming with Constellation specific for business architects. So again, highly recommend check out that content, especially that last module once it's available.

- Okay, yeah, and I can say my friends back in consulting are constantly asking like, "Okay, how do I know, how do I need to redesign my applications for Constellation? What's gonna be different and all that information?" So we're definitely looking to continue to build on that library of information for you. So far we've talked a bit about the developer's experience in App Studio and low-code. We've talked a little bit about the processes and the efficiency and opportunity for optimization, and we've talked a little bit about the UX, we're gonna pivot now and talk a bit about architecture. So one of the big things that I think many of your companies are probably on a trajectory in some ways shape or form to the cloud. And you're doing that, because you want efficiencies, you want the agility to push your development faster. I see some smiles, so maybe not everybody, but let's go through this. As you move to a cloud environment, you're moving to a container-based environment. And what that really means is you're gonna be leveraging Kubernetes, which is the defacto standard for flexibly managing your containers at scale. So as we look at that, we understand a lot of clients have built their models in legacy-type of an approach. And in fact, Pega is on its migration towards a container-based and microservices-type approach. So we're looking at this very closely to understand what is gonna be the experience from the development to get you into this new model. And so as we're thinking about this, we're thinking Pega has built a lot of capabilities into the last several releases and will continue to move our architecture towards the microservices model. So you may have heard a little bit about the externalization of third-party services such as Cassandra and Kafka and Hazelcast and so forth. So those are all moving into microservices external to the platform where in the previous versions they've shipped, embedded in the technology. And so during, if you're updating with version 8.8 or you're updating with version Infinity 23, they have scripts running in there to help you with that externalization to do that for you. So important to look at this and start to think about what is your deployment strategy. I think the other big thing that you want we're thinking about and you're thinking about hopefully is your applications and how are those going to migrate into a more of a microservices micro-journey type of style. So if you're building these big monolithic applications, that's gonna be really hard to have the fast push through in a microservices model. So think about those couple of things. As a developer specifically, I think you have some choices right now. So if you are not on Pega Cloud right now and you need to go and do the... Pega Cloud will help you with the externalization, but if you're not there, then you need to be thinking about your deployment model going forward as you're staying current on the applications and on the Pega versions. So go spend some time researching that and we'll show you where. The other thing is, think about your applications, think about how you're designing those for reuse and situational layer cake and the capabilities that will then be getting externalized in your applications into these container models. And then finally, if you are not doing DevOps and automated testing and all those capabilities that really are inherent with going into a cloud-native environment, you should start doing that, because if you're already on the cloud then you're missing a lot of the benefit of going to the cloud. And if you're not doing it then start doing it, because those are gonna be great areas for you. So where can you learn more information? The microservices architecture booth that is within the intelligent automation section has our VP of engineering there together with his team and they are more than happy to talk through how you can go about implementing this, what are some different ideas? They've been already speaking with a lot of clients prior to the conference. The client modernization booth have also some services than they can talk through some of how this might fit within a modernization play that you might be looking at for your applications and maybe even across different applications what's the right strategy? And then also the Pega Cloud booth can talk to you a little bit, if you haven't considered Pega Cloud, maybe now is a good time to just go and understand it a little bit better, because there's a lot of considerations in terms of not only getting external, but how you're managing these services going forward. So there are a lot of different good sessions coming up. I would also shout out the Inside Scoop, so Frank Guerrera who's in charge of Pega Cloud and Jean-Paul, who's the VP in engineering will both be on that panel as well. So same panel that Justin just referenced. So that's a highlight one. Certainly all these other client experiences and client sessions are also very good. And finally, we have just published about two weeks ago, all a lot of content on externalization on the services I mentioned at the beginning. So Cassandra, Kafka, Hazelcast, and I'm missing one, but the other one and then as well just remember that as Pega is building things like Generative AI, Constellation, all these other elements are also gonna be going into this microservices. So we'll continue to add to this library of information and documentation and as well, cloud information that's on Pega Academy.

- All right.

- Do we have time for one more topic?

- I think we do, I think we do. I don't think anyone thought you'd get out of a session without talking about AI, of course. I wanna point out this metric though. So almost 70% of executives think that the benefits of Generative AI outweigh the risks, but only five believe the opposite. And obviously, what that tells me is, there's no lack of willingness to jump into the AI investment pool, which you don't really need that stat to know that if you've just been following the headlines for the last several months, of course. But from Pega's perspective. We look at it and say, well, are there enough of those organizations who are truly looking at it implementing it in the right way and the most impactful ways? And then of those, how many are looking to do it safely and responsibly? And that's something where Pega really prides itself on. We've got decades of experience with AI. So our approach here is, putting this API abstraction layer on top of it. So you have your large language models, you'll have that flexibility to swap those out for both, public and as Alan pointed out, private clouds for confidential information. But this abstraction layer is not just for the flexibility. It's also allows for the data protection policies I just sort of mentioned. But I guess one specific example might be think about replacing PII, personally identifiable information in a gen AI prompt and replacing that with placeholders, so it's just a specific example of how that can work. And obviously, the gen AI boosters, there's so many of them out on the Innovation Hub, get to check those out, but they're infused throughout the product. So you have low-code developers and App Studio, where we allow you to configure these sort of suggested starting points. But again, you have the flexibility for professional developers to come in and infuse Generative AI and other Pega-based applications and workflows as necessary. And of course, Infinity 23 is just the start. We're gonna be always evaluating the new most impactful use cases where it can apply to and as well as new models as they come to market and if they make sense. So as I said, we have decades of decisioning and decades of AI experience, and we are uniquely positioned to essentially operationalize responsible AI use at the enterprise level. And there's not many organizations around the world that I think that can say that. And it's been a cornerstone of our AI strategy since the beginning. At the end of the day it's important that our organizations, our clients and our partners, they need to be able to confidently deploy AI in their strategies, but doing it again in a very safe, responsible manner. So things like safety, security and reliability, they've always been a hallmark of the Pega platform.

- Okay, so we know that this is brand new and even if there's folks in Pega that are still kind of getting their arms around it. So if you have not spent a lot of time going into Generative AI and looking at its capabilities, I'd strongly encourage you take a lot of time and go look at all the capabilities that are going on in the Innovation Hub and hearing about it, because it's here to stay. Let's talk about the elephant in the room. Some people are concerned it's taking your job away, it's not gonna do that. We are designing with the intent to try to provide productivity boosters to you. So as you are building and as you see the capabilities, it's gonna be a starting point. If you think about all the things that you do in development that take a lot of time that maybe that's not the biggest value add, like coming up with your test data or writing your test cases. How long do you spend doing that? Couldn't you just run that through Generative AI to help you along? I was talking with a friend of mine who's a principal business architect and she was saying, "Yeah, it could take weeks, sometimes months writing up the user stories." That's a pretty standard description. Why couldn't we just run that through Generative AI? So we're continuing to look at the things that take you a lot of time and get you past that blank sheet syndrome to give you the starting point. You still need the knowledge to understand what you need and what is that application designed the way you need it to be. So you're still reviewing it, but you can get a whole lot of a head start and cut off a lot of weeks in time from your development. And that's really what we're aiming for is to try and make you more efficient. So think about these things, shift your questions to where can you use it, how can I use it? And then basically, I think let's have you research all the different things in the Innovation Hub. So I'm gonna do a plug on my own, because in the Learn Your Way, we have one area that's outside of the product, but will soon be part of the product where we've built a self-study buddy capability that effectively we've brought in all of our documentation information and everything on pega.com from the most recent version 8.8, and we'll be adding in Infinity 23. So across the products all that information is there. So just like you use ChatGPT, but now very much aligned with specific answers around Pega, you can ask it any question and get a detailed response plus all the reference material of where it sourced the answer. So again, I've talked with friends in consulting and said, "How much time do you spend searching for information to try and get an answer or information on something you're trying to do?" And he said, "Yeah, it could be 20%, 30%, if it's a really big thing." Think about how much time you could shave just using a tool like this. And we are going to start building this and integrating it into the product. So it'll be embedded as you're going through the flow of work, you'll see it in the developer assistant panel. So more to come in that direction and more to try and continue to try and make developers more efficient and effective, so you're not spending wasting time. But as well, all these other locations and there's a huge number of booths that are showing things. So go check them out as they're relevant to your organization. And then there are several great keynotes coming tomorrow, so encourage you to go to those. And then the last one I would also do a specific shout out. As we've said, Pega's been in decisioning for a long time and so we are very much leading the way in this area, and in fact three of who I would call our godfathers of AI and Pega will be doing this session. They have been frequently referenced in various articles and giving opinions on transparent AI and things like that. So go take some time if you can fit that into your schedule, that's another really great session to hear what's going on. And so this is a very fast moving and new area. So we are continuing to build out assets and things on our various sites when you go back. But please check some of these things out and watch for what's coming soon. And here's the URL If you're interested in trying out the study buddy or come by our booth, there's a QR code and you can scan that in. We've already had quite a lot of people coming through. So we've covered a bunch of the big trends that we think are really resonating. I've actually gone through these with Karim and he agreed with these focus areas for you. Let's just pivot, so once you leave this conference that you're gonna get a tremendous amount of information here, but when you go back home, we want you to continue learning, because some of this stuff you won't remember and so forth. And we certainly know that companies who are investing in you to learn and continue to develop these capabilities are gonna outperform the others. There's a definite skills shortage out there. So the more you learn, the more you're establishing your brand and your thought leadership in your organization. And as you do that, you're gonna see the results in your solutions. You're gonna see faster deployments, you're gonna see better value realization, lower number of tickets going into support and so forth. So we encourage you to continue that path. If you don't have an understanding of not, excuse me, yourself or perhaps your organization broader, we do have a capability on Pega Community that shows you My Pega and we'll give you detail on things around your enablement health, like how many people are enabled and at what levels and how many are certified or certification-ready. So that's a great thing to go check out if you don't have access, because it's not generally just wide open. Come talk to Justin, because we can give you that, work with you to make sure that who has access or give you that access. And Justin, give us a little feedback more on just other key things to know.

- Yes, Pega Community, so near and dear to my heart. If you haven't been to Pega Community, please check it out. It's the fantastic place to start, especially if you're brand new to Pega. It's designed to really be the beginning of that journey and we have these intent-based sites where you've got Academy for training, we've got support, but think of Community as sort of that hub where we want you to come to again to start that journey. And we do have dynamic content hubs. So for example, for products and capabilities and concepts and what we've designed them to be. So if Kate's team publishes new Pega Academy missions or there's new documentation, they all get automatically pulled into these pages, you can always find the latest and greatest. I also mentioned the video library earlier. We have hundreds of videos on there from demos and what's new and and how tos and we have a tech talk series as well. And then getting involved, we have Community edition for Pega platform and it's an opportunity to go, if you haven't played with the platform, get in there, it's full developer access. And so go right to community.pega.com. There's a banner right on the front page right now, so you can get on there right now. And we have a lot of free events as well, webinars, a lot of them are role-based. So if your role is represented there, please register for those. And our subject matter experts are always participating in those, and again, right from Community. Now, as I said, there's these intent-based sites, so I'm gonna quickly touch on all of them and I'll highlight just a few things on them. So for accounts, for example. Kind of goes without saying. Kate mentioned training and building your personal brand, accounts is where you can really do that. We want you to get on there, fill out your profile. We have achievement badges if you come by our booth, we'll talk about that in the future of the badges, 'cause we've got big plans for that. And I wanna talk quickly about this. We have something that we call the tag set builder. If you're not familiar with this, we can show you, but think of it as a way to stay updated on the relevant content. So for example, there's a wizard that you go through and you could say, I wanna be notified whenever there's a new mission or video that's tagged with Generative AI is published or updated. And that will show up in your notification feed or an email digest that you can customize and create as many tag sets as you want for content, not just on Community but on all the enablement sites. Kate mentioned My Pega, again, come by the booth, we won't go through all these benefits here, but it's really important to stay on top of you and your organization's en enablement health. So that's where you would do that. And of course, Pega Academy, our flagship training site is 150 missions, almost 800 modules and almost 400 challenges. Excuse me, I will mention on the challenges though, if you aren't familiar with it, so many of them are interactive in terms of going into an actual Pega Cloud instance to work through the prescriptive steps. But what's interesting is you can also get auto-graded. So for example, you go into Pega and it's not a simulation, it's an actual Pega instance. You go through the exercise, you come back to Academy and you can actually get graded and it will go out and see did you actually do everything that the challenge asked you to do? Which again is a great way to put your learning into practice. And then lastly, I want to mention about earning badges, but also the delta. So if you aren't familiar with this is, if you go to Pega Academy and you complete a mission on a topic and you get the badge, well, when the next release comes out and Kate's team releases an update to that mission, let's say that mission has a 40% difference of new modules and information, the system will remember that you've already done 60%. So you just need to do the difference in the 40% to get that badge and stay updated, so you're not wasting your time retaking the same information. And that happens from release to release. So if you stay up on that, you can keep your badges current, which is obviously a very critical component of staying aligned. Documentation, standard documentation site. However, there are some new curated documentation journeys that are gonna be coming soon. It's very cool. It's a new interface, just looks like a sort of like a subway map and it helps you stay on track from a guide perspective. So some exciting things coming to there. And you can save articles, create your own little custom library as necessary. Support Center, those are our forums. Highly recommend you go there. We have a dedicated global moderator team and they actually do things called Ask the Expert as well. So what we'll do is we'll have a subject matter expert, get on the Support Center, be available for a period of time to ask any question that you want, but also it's a place to, as I mentioned, the personal brand and accounts. There's really not many places where you can really put that brand in practice by asking and answering questions and really making a name for yourself over there. And they also have documentation and troubleshooting videos as well. And lastly, we have Pega Marketplace where you can download hundreds of components and connectors. Actually, this is where app factory can be, you can download that, free language packs and a lot of the content there is Pega, but a lot of it also is done from from third-party partners. So again, come by the booths, we're in the back. Kate and I are in the back corner there. I don't know if there'll be more magic tricks there, but maybe you should come and find out and see if that happens. But yeah, we'd be happy to answer any questions there as well.

- And are you gonna show us the trick, so that we can all go home-

- Magicians don't reveal their secrets, Kate? So sorry.

- Okay, just to summarize, I think that we've tried to connect some of the things that are big in the industry, big with Pega and what that means to you. So hopefully this has been helpful to give you some guidance, because I have to say I walked into the Innovation Hub and it's a bit overwhelming. There's an awful lot going on there and certainly all the booths have lots of valuable information. We just wanted to point out a few that would be maybe meaningful on these trend areas. So this was intended to give you that information. We're gonna stand around up here if anybody has some questions or want to ask. I think we're pretty close to time here. And enjoy the rest of the conference and hopefully we'll see you at the booth.

- Thank you.

- Thank you all.

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