Generative AI: Designing Products Around the Human Element
Generative AI continues to be a hot topic in the SaaS space. Dive into the future of AI and identify how these models can help revenue teams scale their operations and maximize their efforts while celebrating the humans behind the keyboards.
Welcome, welcome everyone to the Pipeline Summit.
I'm Sean Whiteley, co-founder here at Qualified, and with me today is Matt Mill
en, co-founder
and president of regi.ai.
Matt, thanks so much for joining us today.
So great to be here with you, Sean.
Hey, so I checked my email, and I think the last time we connected, I was July
of 2019,
and I saw that you and Nina Butler went over to Regi, and I had to check out
what you're
up to.
And I got it immediately.
Like the value is super clear, and I think Regi's really well represents the
topic of
conversation today, and the platform shift we're all witnessing today with AI.
And, you know, as we all know, AI is not only a hot topic, but it's like a
really broad
topic.
Like, so I'd like to kick the conversation off with some broad strokes.
That's okay.
So, so Matt, from your perspective, what should be top of mind for sales and
marketing heroes
out there who aren't working day in and day out with with with these models
that have
become so so quickly so popular?
Yeah, it's a great question.
I broke it down in a four areas that I think are super important when looking
at, you know,
I've met in your team and giving them superpowers with AI.
So number one is workflow.
Does the AI you're looking at actually work the way your team is working, or do
you have
to change the way that your team does their tasks all day?
So super important that something fits into your team's natural workflow.
Number two, integrations.
Does the AI live where your team is working, or do you have to go out to the AI
, do something
and come back to where you do the rest of your job?
So very important that you think about the integrations.
Third, and, you know, why is it number three, but the output, the quality of
the output,
if you're in sales, it's sales ready, if you're in marketing, is that marketing
ready?
Like how good, how accurate is that AI?
I'm sure we'll talk about more of that.
And then lastly, visibility.
So teams are usually led by a manager.
Managers love to see what their folks are doing and having some management and
visibility
layer into that activity.
So recap, workflow, integrations, quality of the content, and visibility.
Yeah, I like what you said, Matt, around workflow.
One of the things that we've really challenged the managers and the leadership
in our company
is to really kind of think through like, how can AI like help you do your job
better?
Right?
Like we have, there's obviously so much talk out there around, and we're going
to talk
about this, but so much talk about like, is AI going to replace our jobs and,
you know,
what's going to happen?
But like really, we think about it in terms of like, how is this going to just
help you
do your job better?
So we've challenged everyone across our company to really be thoughtful about
how you can
bring AI into your daily workflow.
So I really liked the way you started that out.
Yeah, and Sean, when you say better, you know, better can be different things
for different
teams.
Better could be, I want to move faster at what I'm doing.
Better could be, I want better quality, higher quality output at a normalized
rate or some
combination.
So even better ultimately has to be defined as you go into this.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, well, I mean, the first place we jumped to initially honestly was
governance.
That's kind of like the place where we went right off the bat.
So let's bust a myth.
So obviously there's a ton of probably healthy fear and probably some confusion
, particularly
in the area of generative, right?
And everything from governance to AGI and what this means for humanity.
What are some of the myths you think are important to bust when it comes to
what these models
really like are capable of and how we should think about it?
Yeah, it's a great question.
I would also argue like maybe some of the confusion or uncertainty has actually
over
the last nine months morphed into everyone's had an experience or most people
have had
some experience.
And I think, you know, that is guiding like where we stand on the AI spectrum.
If you had a great experience, if you're allowed by it, if you're underwhelmed
by it.
So I think what we want to do is understand like, you know, AI needs to be told
what to
do to give you something back.
So when you think about, you know, if you're running out to chat GPT, you've
got to think
about prompt engineering or giving chat enough information to get something
usable back.
You know, we've been working with AI at Reggie's before could string a sentence
together.
You know, we've been doing it for two years now.
And what we found is the ability to train and tune your own models that
understand what
your user is looking to get done to minimize the amount of work that they need
to do to
get the end result.
And I think that starts to eliminate some of this confusion, some of this
anxiety, even
the trust factor.
Because when you start getting what we call either sales, right, your marketing
ready
content.
We really change your experience with AI.
Yeah.
And you guys have been doing this for a while.
I mean, you guys were certainly ahead of the curve.
I mean, obviously it's the hottest thing.
We think about it as truly a platform shift.
We talk about the AI revolution and it's obviously here.
And, you know, with with chat GPT, obviously, you know, the masses now have
access to these
like large language models and NLP for everyone.
It's super powerful, but we evaluated and we started to qualify.
We evaluated some of these capabilities about five years ago.
We decided that some of them just weren't there yet, right?
I mean, we sort of invested in other areas like predictive and machine learning
But you know, now with, you know, these these innovations that have come out
over the last
12 months, in fact, it's really changed the game.
So given you guys have a little bit more time invested here and your kind of
veterans,
which is funny to say because you've been doing this for a couple of years,
like, how
are you guys at Reggie approaching like product development?
Like what are some of the top priorities for your customers and users right now
Yeah, it's a really good.
Good.
I've come out from a couple angles.
You know, I mentioned workflow earlier.
So we're constantly evaluating, you know, who we typically see using our
product, like
how do they spend their day?
You know, where can we show up bigger, more impactful in their current day?
And then we think about the interaction we want our customer to have with the
product,
whether content creators or the actual frontline reps using this in real time.
You know, it's funny when, when Betty Crocker first introduced instant cake mix
back in
the fifth 1950s, like nobody would buy it because the belief was you couldn't
add water
to brown powder and make a cake worth eating.
And when sales were really solid, they did all this consumer research and they
found
out that people want to have a certain amount of interaction with the product
to establish
trust and certainty with the outcome.
And they figured out if you just add the egg, not just water, but water and
eggs.
So most instant products that they add an egg, the egg is more symbolic of
interaction
that actually changes the output of the product itself.
But it's the set.
So we look at it that way.
Like how much interaction does somebody need with the platform?
So they have this inherent trust in what the platform is doing with them and on
their VF.
At the same time, increasing and driving productivity.
So it's this careful balance.
So with our content creators, we like to get people 70, 80% of the way there.
And we provide an amazing editing experience at every step along the way, given
how much
they want to interact for our sales reps.
And think we're going to anticipate where they are in the workflow.
We're going to serve up sales ready content based on the stuff that they're
doing.
Always have the ability to edit it.
But at the same time, it's sales ready.
So we're letting managers and reps really choose how they want to interact with
the AI,
whether or not they want it to get them going.
Because working really hard in productivity is the enemy of creativity and all
of a sudden
I've got to go create something up in go-go mode.
So I want Reggie to get me going, or I want Reggie to take me there.
And that's just going to be an individual choice.
But that's how we think about the product.
Third way is how do you protect the brand voice and how do you put certain
guardrails
in place for your team?
So our administrators are actually able to create brand voice.
So in create all the engineering behind the scenes for your reps.
So for instance, showing a few on the front line, even though you don't need to
know this,
as you're constructing a personalized email, Reggie knows for you at your
company how
you structure subject lines, intro lines, calls to action, whatever it may be,
whether
you're in LinkedIn, email, Reggie's going to be composing this language and
this output,
the way that your company would architect in if they could while you're doing
it on the
fly.
So we want to make sure we protect the brand voice and put the right guardrails
in place
because when your reps are doing 50, 60, 80 tasks a day, you want to make sure
that you
can trust the system and what is providing your reps to go do.
Yeah, I like that analogy a lot, especially the parallel you drew to
productivity and
creativity.
There's a professor at Stanford who lives in my neighborhood and I saw a
YouTube broadcast
he did when chat GPT came out.
And the first thing he did is he asked all the students to write a paper on
chat GPT using
chat GPT and they all came in and he said, you all wrote the same paper.
And he said, I want you to go home and I want you to write this paper again,
but I want
you to make it yours and give it your individual perspective on it.
So like really sort of exercising those creative muscles, but obviously
leveraging these powerful
capabilities to do a lot of the productivity.
And so everyone's talking about like a lot of things are going to be done
better by the
computer, a lot of things, right?
And they're going to replace a lot of the things historically that we've done.
Like, how do you think about like the human centric element, right?
Like, can you give a little bit of perspective on how you see the role of
humans with AI
outside of, you know, providing the for the better?
Yeah, I think there's a, you know, the highest order for me is like, what
experience do you
want to crave your customer?
So if we take, take everything else out for a minute, like, what's our brand
and what's
our experience with our customer?
And how do you humanize that and make sure it's human?
You know, I'm an Amazon business, private customer at a probable order.
And I was dealing with a bot that didn't know it was the 30th time I was trying
to get
through and I would have paid any amount of money to have a live agent that
could just
deploy some common sense into this situation.
And then you take a look at customer service over time.
You got off short for cost reasons and now it's in the Ute is a premium
offering when
they reach on short again.
So it's like we tried something.
It didn't work come back, but it really comes down to the experience of the
customer.
So I think about like from an AI perspective in the involvement, it really
comes down to
like how robotic or how human are you in your brand?
What kind of experience are you looking to provide?
And then how do you leverage any at all technologies in your different go-to-
market systems to
achieve that?
Yeah, I mean, you're preaching to the choir, you know, on that.
We've thought about that from day one here about how do you orchestrate things
like AI
and human capital in like a really meaningful way that suits the problem that
you're trying
to solve?
And I think that's a really good way of looking at it.
So you know, as you can imagine, Matt, we've got a lot of sales marketing
people here at
the pipeline summit today.
And probably people are at various stages of their journey, you know, with AI.
Like how are you guys thinking about like, you know, helping your customers
with the
adoption of these technologies?
And like, what does training and integrating AI tools look like for teams that
are, you
know, kind of just starting to add these products to their staff?
Yeah, you know, I look, I grew up in sales.
I've been selling before corporate email and the internet.
And again, that's what I know about adopting technology.
Like number one, you got to make it easy to use.
It should be fun to use.
Not a lot of the tech is, but it should be fun.
And then it needs to be coachable.
It needs to be something you're using that's coachable.
So like we come out it from a standpoint of, you know, making Reggie very
intuitive, very
easy, it creates magic all day.
And it's done in a way where your manager has great visibility, what you're
doing can
help you be great.
So like that, that's one way that we're thinking about, you know, as people
come on and adopt
this.
Yes, we've got customer success that on board you and we've got someone to
focus on rolling
out our product to sales teams.
But like at its core, if the product like doesn't make sense, it's not fun.
And like your boss has a hard time figuring out what you're doing.
And it's not going to get adopted and rolled out at the organization.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, it's funny today, you see a lot of, you see a lot of things about AI
that for
me are sometimes solutionism.
Like it's like a, it's a, it's an answer looking for a problem.
That's right.
But at the same time, like what you can also see is there are stark, stark, you
know, representation
of, you know, areas where AI is just going to change the game completely in
terms of rethinking
like really how you solve problems.
And as a, I've been in software for 27 years now and to be honest, AI has
really made it
exciting again.
You know, not that it was boring, but it really needed, I think this, this kick
and it's just
made it really exciting.
So when you look at like brands that are bringing AI tools to market, like how
do you rise above
the noise and the solutionism and the buzz and the hype and how do you build
something
that really drives clear value and doesn't just have sort of AI flash.
Yeah, it's great.
Yeah, it's a great question.
And there's certainly a lot of, a lot of noise and a lot of buzz.
And I think at the end of the day, you know, you're seeing like a lot of like
small startups
putting a very thin veneer over chat GBT, ladling in a product.
You see other companies that are feeling very compelled to like say they have
AI so they're
bolting something on, but it really doesn't integrate in with a broader
workflow of what
the rest of the platform or product does.
So we're really focused on integration.
Like we're really focused on what I went back to some of those core elements up
front of
the focusing on the workflow.
Like your reps don't have to do something different to use our product.
We're going to live where they are, both from an integration perspective and a
workflow
perspective, make it very easy.
You know, great, great output period sales ready output.
That's got brand voice, guidelines, guardrails.
And then lastly, the visibility, I think, and I think just what we've learned
over the
couple of years of doing this is that less than that will fall short.
Like less than that falls short.
And I think going back to even the question on experience, like if your whole
experience
is going out to chat GPT prompt engineering at some level of competency, coming
back,
utilizing it and like it's a lot of work.
And I've heard from multiple customers that you can do as much work in chat,
then chat
gives you back.
So it's like not a big net gain in the experience.
I think as we're evaluating new pieces of technology, AI assisted technology,
that's
what we should be looking at.
At the end of the day, is it easy for the team to use?
Does it cause us more work, rework, change management, any of that?
And I think the way that we've risen above it is just a very focused on who our
customer
is.
We're not trying to sell everything.
Anybody.
And we're just saying very focused on solving two big problems.
One, like you know, our template emails.
And then two, personalization every step.
Yeah.
And it makes very focused.
It makes so much sense in your product because you know, you think about the
world expects
personalization now.
It's an expectation.
And I'm not talking about like S name.
I'm talking about like hyper personalization, right?
And you know, the dream of every sales and marketing professional is like
getting to the
right person with the right message at the right time.
You know, and obviously now the incredible capabilities that you know, GPS,
there's, there's
a natural language interface now to everything to apps, to data.
And I certainly had my aha moment, right?
I kind of almost bring it back to the aha moment I had with SaaS where cloud.
I was like, wow, there's a new software delivery model and it's changed
everything.
Right.
That's right.
That's kind of where we are now.
Like what are some of the aspects of the A.I.
conversation that you think are missing, right?
There's a lot of conversations happening around A.I.
dominates every conversation right now in software.
But what's missing?
What should people be talking about that we're not?
Yeah.
I mean, that's a really good, it's a really good question.
And I think, you know, you mentioned SaaS, you know, I saw it when we first
started selling
computers and computers were taking over.
I saw the internet, I saw mobility.
You know, I think it comes down to one of those situations where like the early
adopters
end up winning, late adopters end up losing.
And I think what you start to see is like a penalty for waiting here, just
quite frankly.
Like there's a penalty for being cautious.
Like A.I. is here.
Like your mobile phone is here, your computer is here and A.I. is here and
figuring out how
to effectively integrate that into your team's workflow, whatever your team
does to drive
efficiencies and to increase ultimately engagement.
You know, it's funny when you said you wanted your team to be better.
We talked about better could be faster, better could be higher quality output.
One of the things that we saw as we were doing a case study with a customer was
, you
know, not only did we increase productivity and drive engagement, but sentiment
went up.
It went up 10 points.
And like you think about the impact that that's having, like even people that
don't want
to be solicited or less bothered by your emails because of the quality and
quite frankly
how contextual they were to this individual's role.
So I think, you know, when done right, not only does our team get better, but
our prospects
and our customers have better experiences with us through this process, even
when they're
not ready to buy.
I think it's a very interesting byproduct right now.
Yeah, I really like, you know, one of the themes we've been talking about, Matt
, and
you you checked off the conversation with this is thinking about how AI impacts
the customer
experience and your workflow.
And one of the first things we did, you know, last year was we started thinking
about like,
how does this impact pipeline generation for sales and marketing professionals,
right?
Like what pieces of their workflow are going to be disrupted?
And that's kind of how we've been thinking about it.
What are some like parting words of advice you have for, you know, all of these
great
sales and marketing heroes we have at the pipeline summit today as it relates
to, you
know, really like AI is not new.
It's been around for a long time.
Machine learning has been around for a very long time.
But you know, really, we have really entered the AI revolution.
And like I said, you cannot be sitting on the sidelines.
So what are some kind of parting words of wisdom you have for people who are
really thinking
through AI and the next sort of journey for their business?
I mean, number one, embrace it.
It's here.
It's not going away.
You know, don't be a laggard.
Like embrace it.
I would also say on the other side of this, you know, you're starting to see
two kinds
of companies emerge.
You have AI companies that are replacing jobs and you know, AI organizations
like ours that
actually help people do their best work.
I like to commit to staying on the side of helping people do their best work.
And I think as we're evaluating, you know, technology, you know, again, embrace
it, but
also, you know, let's look at how it makes us better as opposed to not being
needed.
Yeah.
That's great.
That's great.
Matt, thank you so much for joining us.
It was really good to connect again.
I hope we don't go three years without connecting again.
And look forward to talking to you soon.
Absolutely great to be with you.
Have a great summit.
All right.