Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Sana Remekie: So there's the off site experience, agentic experience that you as a brand
have to manage at this stage, and then there's the on site experience. And because the world is
now getting trained to ask questions rather than navigate menus and websites, it's going to
become more and more important to align the user experience with what they're used to in
ChatGPT, which means you need to provide a conversational experience.
[00:00:38] Jeff Dillon: Welcome to the EdTech Connect podcast and this is the podcast where
we explore the innovative leaders, founders and educators in higher edtech. Today's guest is
Sana Remicki, the CEO and co founder of Conceia and a prominent voice in composable
architecture, agentic AI and digital transformation. With over 18 years of experience designing
data centric solutions for major global brands, Sana brings a unique perspective at the
intersection of enterprise, IT and user first digital experiences. A graduate of Systems Design
Engineering from the University of Waterloo, she spent her career building technology that
bridges the gap between business and users and developers, empowering marketers and
product teams to take control without losing it oversight. She's a proud member of the Mock
Alliance CEO advisory board and was recently named one of the 10 most influential women in
Technology by Analytics Insight. At Conceia, Sana leads the charge on helping organizations
embrace a modular approach to to digital strategy without the bloat of traditional monoliths.
While Concia's client base is primarily in the commercial sector, Sana's message about
orchestrated, data driven and user controlled digital experiences resonates strongly with the
challenges facing colleges and universities today. Please welcome to EdTech Connect's
podcast. Sana Remicki.
So welcome to the show. Sana. I'm so excited to have you here.
[00:02:19] Sana Remekie: Thank you so much. Happy to be here.
[00:02:21] Jeff Dillon: First, can you tell me your founder's journey for Concia? How did you get
to where you are?
[00:02:28] Sana Remekie: So our founders journey is definitely it took a lot of ups and downs and
sideways motions to get to where we are. I think that's pretty common across most founders. My
background was actually in consulting, so I had spent many, many years working with very large
customers like the Oxford University Press, being one of them who you know, had very complex
architecture and a tech stack and I was one of their architects who would help them essentially
figure out how all of these various backend systems should connect to each other, specifically in
the search and discovery aspects of the experience. So if you go to the Oxford University
website at the time when we built their search experience, it was built off of Indeca and I was An
Indeca principal architect, we realized, or I realized, and my husband, by the way, is also the
CTO of the company.
We both have worked together for the last, I would say 18 years in various companies, including
Endea, Oracle that we were at before, another search startup after that as well. So we've all
always been together, but one thing together that we realized was that it's a garbage in, garbage
out problem when it comes to search and discovery. And so we need to be able to fix the data
and unify the data and the content and structure it in such a way that it's more easily findable.
That's actually the first product that we had built, which is now called the DX Graph. It's a graph
database that essentially unifies data from a whole bunch of systems.
Now, as the headless world became prominent and those silos started to disappear a little bit
now the next challenge was how do we connect the entire headless and API first world together
to unify all of these experiences.
[00:04:42] Jeff Dillon: It's a common story. I've heard that before. You're in consulting, you see a
problem. I love what you're doing. I think you were the first person I've seen following me on
LinkedIn that really started using the term digital experience orchestration. And that really struck
home to me because at the time I was, I was selling DXPs.
[00:05:00] Sana Remekie: Oh, okay.
[00:05:01] Jeff Dillon: That was our message, was composable. Makes so much sense rather
than these monolithic solutions. But yeah, for those unfamiliar. Can you, can you explain what is
digital experience orchestration? Why it matters for institutions with complex websites like
universities?
[00:05:15] Sana Remekie: Definitely. So digital experience orchestration is really trying to solve
problems. The multi to multi problem, which basically means there's multiple backend systems,
such as legacy systems, all in one suites, composable solutions, homegrown solutions that most
older organizations, anyone beyond I would say 10 years in age, end up compiling real technical
debt and a lot of technical complexity in their backend. That's the one part of the multi problem.
The other part of the multi problem is multiple touch points.
So now you're trying to take all of the data and the content that is sitting in all of these backend
systems and you're trying to contextually deliver that content and that experience on multiple
channels and multiple touch points. So you have your website, your mobile application, and now
more than ever, we need to start thinking omnichannel when we're looking at ChatGPT as our
next very prominent touch point. For in your case, you know, students and teachers and, you
know, People are not really looking at, they're not going to Google to do searches for information
anymore, right? They're just saying to ChatGPT, hey, what's the best university within the, you
know, 30km radius? To me, and you know, this is what I want to do. What are the programs
available for me to look for admission into?
So multichannel is a massive part of the problem and orchestration essentially bridges the
backend systems to contextually deliver experiences to multiple front ends.
[00:07:05] Jeff Dillon: So you're known for promoting composable architecture and you're
building your brand on that. How would that benefit a college or university that's stuck in their
legacy cms, their rigid IT workflows? What are some examples that we can realize?
[00:07:21] Sana Remekie: When you think about the experience side of the equation, which is the
various touch points that I've been talking about, such as the website, the mobile experience, the
agentic experience, what you really need to be able to deliver is an experience without being too
opinionated about how it should look to the customer, because every one of those platforms has
their own way of delivering and presenting the experience.
So in order for organizations to build these headless types of experiences, they have to get out
of the thinking that gets you stuck in those all in one platforms because they don't interoperate
very well with the rest of the world out there.
Especially when you have again an agent looking to interact with your website or with your
content.
Unless that content is delivered in a very structured way through APIs, to whatever front end it
may be, the agent's not going to find you. It cannot discover you anymore because it's black
boxed away from the agent.
[00:08:40] Jeff Dillon: Well, let me draw this scenario for you that I encountered a couple years
ago and I've noticed this when you're Talking to our two schools, R1 schools, Ivies, smaller
schools, community colleges often don't have the problem as much the larger. It's really a scale
problem. These large universities have hundreds of sub sites and one tier one institution, very
famous west coast institution, you know, had a donor that wanted to give them $50 million or
something like that, right? They said they had a requirement though. They said we want our
name, want my name tied to the school that we're going to be donating so much money to,
donating for this, I forget which college it was, right? And the school was a little freaked out
because they knew most of these larger schools, you know this, they have Drupal, they have
WordPress, they have Adobe, they have this. And they needed to satisfy this requirement. So it
was a perfect use case for this digital experience orchestration.
Do you see that? I know you work in other industries. Like is that a use case for digital
experience orchestration?
[00:09:42] Sana Remekie: So just so I understand the use case a little bit better. So the donor in your
case is saying they want their name to be associated with, with the school. With the school. So
is that a matter of updating the content to reflect that?
[00:09:57] Jeff Dillon: So like, let's say the, the name of the school is in this WordPress.
[00:10:00] Sana Remekie: Ah, okay.
[00:10:00] Jeff Dillon: Over here in the central communications Drupal over here. And so it's just
not possible.
Like it's really hard to wrangle them all together.
[00:10:08] Sana Remekie: Right, right. And make it consistent across the board, across all of those
different systems.
[00:10:14] Jeff Dillon: So they ended up having to use a digital experience new layer to really
satisfy that requirement.
[00:10:20] Sana Remekie: So really what you're trying to do in that case is you're abstracting out
those backend systems and creating a layer on top of those backend systems that is consistent
for every front end to consume. So you're not going to go and update every piece of content or
every system in the back end because that's just not feasible. It's not practical to do that. So
creating a bit of a veneer on top of those backend systems that translates to the requirements of
the front end is what an orchestration layer would be. That would be one of the things that the
orchestration layer would do. So if you want to. And the other thing is in the future, let's say the
university or the college decides, hey, we don't really want this legacy CMS that's sitting in the
backend anymore. What an orchestration layer does is that it essentially abstracts out those
backend systems.
So you're creating a layer that's going to cover off all of those backends and if you quietly
replace it with something else, the contract to the front end doesn't change.
Right. So what we're doing is we're delivering, based on the requirements of the front end what
data the front end needs and not so much exposing the vendor's schema.
[00:11:47] Jeff Dillon: Gotcha. So we can leave things where they are also.
[00:11:49] Sana Remekie: Yes, exactly.
[00:11:51] Jeff Dillon: And I think that's one of the keys too. I think it was 10 years ago or so,
everyone was, you know, let's migrate our tool to this. Let's, you know, smaller schools again
can do that. But it's not really going to happen at these large decentralized schools. So versus
that realization, if you're at the mid tier, you're kind of struggling with that, like can we centralize?
And it's often really hard with governance.
[00:12:11] Sana Remekie: That's exactly it. And we're seeing that and not just in universities. This is
in manufacturing companies, e commerce companies. We're working with the government of
Ontario with a lot of their legacy systems. Ontario in Canada. And they have the same problem.
They want to transform the, they want to better their experiences and become modernized. But
they have so much dependency on these old legacy systems. And everybody's used to working
with their own tooling across different departments and different ministries.
So you cannot expect them to all centralize and standardize on one platform. So migration is
usually never really an option for larger companies. It's abstraction and modernization on top of
what you already have. And then when you have the chance to do it in the future for, you know,
maybe a system here or a system there, then you're already future proofed with an orchestration
layer.
[00:13:18] Jeff Dillon: So universities often have marketing teams, IT departments, admissions,
student affairs. They're all touching the website.
[00:13:28] Sana Remekie: Yeah.
[00:13:29] Jeff Dillon: How does orchestration help those teams work together without stepping
on each other?
[00:13:34] Sana Remekie: So there's a couple of different ways to think about it. One is the
workflows, right, that you need inside the organization to allow different departments and
different Personas to do different things with the website. Right. So there may be content
editors, content designers, et cetera. Now I'm going to put a disclaimer out there. Orchestration
is not a cms. Right. So you would, in a composable architecture, you do need a place to edit,
create, manage and deliver your content in a way that is completely platform or channel
agnostic. Right. So that is a CMS function. So each of these individuals that you're talking about,
they would work in a CMS like contentful or content stack or content AI agility, cms, et cetera.
And each of those platforms provides those guardrails, that ability for different types of users to
be limited, to do different types of things. Where orchestration plays a role is in determining who
sees what, when and where. So there's a personalization and contextualization aspect of the
content delivery, which shouldn't happen in any one CMS because there's so many of them and
you can't really pick one, especially in a world like the older universities and the edtech world.
So orchestration is not where you would delineate the different types of users. It's really
delineating what type of an experience each end user gets from the content that was managed
by the different Personas within the headless CMS itself, a.
[00:15:27] Jeff Dillon: Lot of schools are really panicking right now. They're struggling. There's
an enrollment cliff coming. They're realizing that the visitors to their website are more valuable
than ever because it's. They gotta grab onto those. They might be coming a little more qualified
too, because they can do all this research through AI tools. And so what I'm getting at is
personalization. And what does personalization look like beyond just greeting someone by
name, especially in an educational setting?
[00:15:55] Sana Remekie: So I think again, it depends on the use case that we're talking about. But
some of the use cases that I think are pertinent here in terms of personalization is depending on
the interest of the student, depending on who is entering the website. So is it a professor or is it
a student? Is it a. An academic researcher? Is it a government body? So knowing your
customer, who they are, and then based on who they are, putting them on the right journey.
Right. And giving them the right content at the right time. So if they are already looking at, you
know, admissions, for instance, you know that this person is interested in admissions, then you
want to give content surrounding admissions to that person. So you're essentially creating the
website on the fly. So it's not a static website anymore.
[00:16:55] Jeff Dillon: Got it?
[00:16:56] Sana Remekie: Yeah.
[00:16:56] Jeff Dillon: So let me understand Conceia a little more and maybe these digital
orchestration platforms in general, I know it's a framework so you can plug in different tools, but
what is at the core of at least Conceia or some big, you know, of the most composable systems?
I'm thinking of something like a customer data platform to allow personalization. Is that
something. No, you would get a separate one or what? Is there anything at the core that's really
special of the Concia?
[00:17:21] Sana Remekie: Yes. Yeah. So we're again, and I am defining us right now by what we're
not, because we're essentially the layer that brings it all together, but it brings it all together
contextually.
Right. So what we're not is a cdp, a customer data platform or a CRM. We would connect to that
in real time to go understand who this customer is. So the orchestration layer would send a
query to the CRM with the customer id, for instance, and say, okay, tell me more about that.
What's their behaviors, what's their history?
Like, who is this person? What do we know about them?
Now there is a rules engine, a native rules engine built inside the orchestration layer, which you
could, as a administrator of the website or mobile application or any touch point, you would
Configure it to deliver certain types of experiences based on the information that we just
retrieved from the cdp.
The orchestration engine can also be linked up to an LLM to determine the intent of the
customer. So let's say they put in a query in your chat interface, what is the admissions process
for this university?
Give me information about that. Now, from that one search query, which is conversational in
nature, you need to go figure out what was the intent of this query. Right? So Concea's
orchestration engine would take that query, send it off to the LLM, ask the LLM. All right, what's
the intent?
Oh, this is likely a student with the intent of getting into the university and you give the LLM a set
of intents that you want to react to and then put everything else into maybe the other bucket or
whatnot. So you structure those sets of intents. LLM comes back, says, okay, admissions intent
and who it is is a student. Now conceal would then take that as the trigger condition of the rule
and the target experience would be something you manage inside Concierge, you say, okay, well
if the intent was admissions, then make sure that you put this content in this slot on the page.
So immediately you are rewiring the page based on the real time intent and real time
understanding of who that customer is. So that is the orchestration, it's the connecting of the
various systems that you have in place to understand who the person is to maybe have an LLM
that can tell you the intent, all of those things, and then wiring it up to the experience and making
that experience contextual.
[00:20:20] Jeff Dillon: This is really what higher ed needs to be thinking of. All these schools that
are struggling to keep up, these larger schools.
This is what you need. You need a composable architecture and that you're flexible enough to
work with. LLMs is awesome. Let's talk AI. How do you think agentic AI actually can help
institutions deliver better experiences without overwhelming their teams?
[00:20:41] Sana Remekie: So there are two aspects I would say, of agentic AI and conversational
interfaces. So one is the third party marketplaces, and I call them marketplaces because soon
they're going to start selling products and selling ads to appear in certain places in the chat
window. And I'm talking about ChatGPT and Perplexity and Claude, those types of third party
agents that are crawling your websites, that are interfacing with the customer directly. And the
customer or the user may never come to your website.
Right? So they may actually stop their research at ChatGPT level and just completely disregard
you because they didn't think that you do what they need, right. Or you, you fulfill their
requirements. So there's the off site experience, agentic experience that you as a brand have to
manage at this stage and then there's the on site experience. And because the world is now
getting trained to ask questions rather than navigate menus and websites, it's going to become
more and more important to align the user experience with what they're used to in ChatGPT,
which means you need to provide a conversational experience.
I mean, I am becoming myself so spoiled that the other day I had to figure out for my company
whether we have the need for wsib, right. Workman Safety Insurance Board coverage for certain
people. I go on the WSIB website and immediately said, no, I don't want to do this. I'm just going
to ask ChatGPT because I can't find the information immediately. So it's this, there's nothing
wrong with the website.
Right. The website was built beautifully, it was amazing. But the problem is we as end users of
those websites are becoming spoiled because we just want to ask a question and get a
response and a direction to where we should get the response immediately. So what I would
suggest universities need to do is they need to put at least a conversational interface on their
websites. So if we can understand from that conversation very quickly what the intent is, like
what I described earlier, we need to be able to immediately provide the user with the information
that they need or they are going to bounce off.
[00:23:23] Jeff Dillon: Right.
[00:23:23] Sana Remekie: So that's. It is scary. And a lot of brands are like, they're scrambling to
figure out how to move on this, but it has to be now. Like you have to get prepared for that now.
[00:23:35] Jeff Dillon: Well, you've worked with so many brands from retail, manufacturing,
public sector, fashion.
[00:23:41] Sana Remekie: Yeah.
[00:23:42] Jeff Dillon: What's one thing higher ed could steal from the way they approach digital
experiences?
[00:23:48] Sana Remekie: Start thinking omnichannel, stop thinking websites only.
I think that's definitely the direction that everybody's going in. You would lose a large part of your
audience if you're thinking that you just need to structure your website a certain way because
especially the younger kids, especially the university students, anyone between the age of, I
would say at this point, 12 and up to 40 or 45. I don't want to, you know, create ageism here or
anything like that. But, but from what I see, practically speaking, anyone in the working age.
Yeah, I would say other than our grandparents, like even them, I think they're starting to now as
well. Look at chatgpt but they are interested in newer ways of doing things. And agentic
experience is now becoming one of the biggest drivers of how any brand needs to think about
architecting the future. And composability is definitely, I would say, a prereq for agentic
experiences.
[00:25:00] Jeff Dillon: The problem I see with so many schools like higher ed in general is just
the slow nature to adopt change. To adopt change and the fear. If a university CIO told you we're
too far behind for this kind of tech, what would you say to them?
[00:25:15] Sana Remekie: So there are ways, one of the solutions that we ourselves have developed
for that type of a situation where all of the backend systems are legacy and there's really no
easy way to surface the content and the data in those websites to these types of experiences.
There's a layer which I referred to earlier called the DX graph, which essentially takes batch data
feeds out of your legacy systems and puts them all in one operational data store, which happens
to be a knowledge graph, but you put it in there and that essentially exposes the APIs that are
needed like the headless APIs that are needed for orchestration to work on top of.
[00:26:08] Jeff Dillon: So don't be afraid.
[00:26:09] Sana Remekie: Yeah, don't be afraid. And don't, don't. You don't need to do an all in one
transfer like or like boil the ocean or do this transformation all at once. You need to just slow
down, think about what experiences are there that you want to deliver. What are the most
important things you want to deliver? First tackle those systems. If they're not they don't have
APIs, then create APIs on top of them and the easiest way is to get the data out and put it in a
system that exposes APIs.
[00:26:40] Jeff Dillon: I want to end it with one last future focused question. Looking ahead, what
trends in digital experience or architecture should higher ed leaders be watching for in the next
two to three years?
[00:26:53] Sana Remekie: I feel like I may act like or sound like a broken record if I say this, but I
think the largest trend that every single person out there is looking out for is agentic experiences
on and off sites, third party and on your premise. And they need to look at omnichannel ways of
building the architecture and not be focused too much on the website. Website's important, but
not that important in the future.
[00:27:27] Jeff Dillon: I think that's great advice. Sana, thank you for your time. I really love
talking to you and I will put links to concia and sana's LinkedIn in the show notes.
[00:27:41] Sana Remekie: Thank you so much for having me Jeff really appreciate it.
[00:27:43] Jeff Dillon: Yes, sure. Bye. Bye.
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