Each year, the BrightInsight team takes some time to reflect, plan and connect with one another. BI Day is our opportunity to celebrate progress, share knowledge, and ensure everyone is in sync as we push forward. This year, the event's theme was #winning2024, and our engineering, product, sales and delivery leadership showcased their current projects and goals for the rest of the year. We also brought in two speakers—Mazi Rasulnia, Founder of Pack Health, and Annie Kuensting, Founder and CEO of Beacon Empowerment Strategies - to secure an external perspective.
On the first day of the event, Mazi shared an adage that suggests we're all awake for approximately 6,000 hours every year. He suggested that on a good year, a patient with a chronic issue will see their doctor for about one hour.
"The overall gestalt that I hold—and I think where BrightInsight has the opportunity in 2024 and beyond to hit the reset button and figure out how to take this forward—is how do you engage people in the 5,999 hours they're not in front of their doctor?" he mused. He went on to discuss Pack Health's journey helping pharmaceutical companies in the early years of Obamacare to pivot from physician-centric models to patient-centric models.
"The more we went out there and started talking to experts and patients and family and friends, we learned that empathy was the missing link," Mazi explained. "But how do you scale empathy? You need technology. So, if you're able to tie technology and empathy together, you can truly engage people, motivate them, give them the right tools, and see if we can change that dial. Even [changing the dial] in a small way has huge impacts in healthcare just because of the waste and the redundancies that we have."
The next day, Annie addressed mental health challenges inherent in the type of work that permeates the tech sector. While BI Day has historically included some type of wellness programming, in the past it has often been focused on physical health. Instead of leading a yoga session or encouraging everyone to get outside for a walk, Annie highlighted the power of alignment to support mental health. Annie described people as holistic, explaining that we take ourselves everywhere we go.
"What is work/life balance?" she asked. "Is there such a thing as balance? How do we manage and be with remote work dynamics both in the freedom that it offers us and also the challenges? The isolation, the community, the lack of connection. [...] Although alignment is not an answer, it's not going to solve any of these challenges, it is a way of being that we choose to adopt that helps us move through these challenges with greater ease, with less stress, with feelings of peace and acceptance and an awareness that we'll get to the other side."
Attendees enjoyed this evolution of BI Day's wellness programming. One participant said, "I appreciate the company putting an emphasis on mental and emotional health; that goes a long way. I also appreciate the vulnerability displayed, and [I] actually took tangible things away from this session that I can focus on to improve my own mental health."
We spent time reflecting on last year’s successes and challenges. In 2023, BrightInsight took additional steps in its transition from being a professional services company to being a product company, which will contribute to our long-term scalability and success. Despite market challenges, the company was able to shift toward subscription revenue, which is ultimately recurring revenue.
"If we look back at where the industry was and where we were a couple of years ago, we had so many irons in the fire, so many different things we were trying to pursue in parallel," said Kal Patel, our CEO. "It was a very grow, grow, grow, do as much as you can kind of environment. And now [there is] a focus on what you do best and what's the most critical value you bring, and [you] execute the heck out of that. That's what we're doing."
This attitude has been instrumental in our progress over the past year. We spent two hours on the first day of the event discussing the phenomenal progress we've made in products and engineering. On the second day, we spent another couple of hours exploring the platform engineering we've done, including a focus on AI, and the launches we've helped our customers bring to life—which represent our ability to go above and beyond when it comes to customer success.
#winning2024 has started with a focus on launches. In his opening remarks, Kal highlighted big launches that will be happening within the next quarter and beyond, including three of the biggest in BrightInsight's history. He also emphasized the importance of establishing a reputation for providing an excellent experience to our customers.
"We need them to be talking to the industry about what it is like to work with us—that working with us is a fantastic experience, end to end," he shared. "You know, everything from pre-sales and sales all the way through to delivery, launch management support, just the whole end-to-end that [helps them] see us as a company that really has the experience and the true empathy to work effectively with them."
Our global workforce is one of our greatest strengths, and BI Day featured special content for employees in various time zones. On the first day, the event kicked off with an educational hour with entertainment for employees in India. The next day, there was a happy hour with entertainment for employees based in the EU and UK. Later that day, employees in the US and Colombia enjoyed a team intros and fun session. During Kal's opening remarks, which were attended by employees around the globe, he asked us to share which BI Day or BI Week events we had attended in the past, bringing the team together and recognizing the years of hard work many employees have put in. As always, BI Day was an incredible opportunity to gather and—as this year's event highlighted—to align.