Transcript
Matthew: Getting into the enterprise environments, this is where there's never been a more stark difference. As a startup you can get away with so much and you can use AI in a way that is incredible. As an enterprise, you probably can't and you shouldn't, because the stuff that I get away with, they never could. It could sink their business. With your customers, how are they embracing it? What are they investing in? What's working? What's not working?
Maruf Ahmed: We are seeing a lot of push from the C-suite to adopt AI, even in the large enterprise clients, because everybody is like, we gotta have an AI component. I think the market also rewards you when you do that. So we are seeing a lot of push from there, get AI into the business, make it work. Where we are running into issues, as you pointed out, is because of the risk and legal. From the legal side, we are seeing issues like, okay, how does IP work? How does learning work when your digital agent is learning from my data, but now you could use it somewhere else? How does that work?
We are seeing pressure from middle managers that are looking at, okay, what does it mean for my workforce? And no, I don't want to reduce my workforce by 30% just because a digital agent can do it. They are not embracing at this point. But they will eventually, that even the digital agent is part of your workforce.
We are having issues from IT that's saying, okay, what does it mean in our environment when you have this agent that can read this and do that? It's not a human, so what is its liability there? We went through this with our digital agent that we had created, because we did see the AI wave coming. A couple of years ago, we bought a couple of small AI companies just to get their talent, to have an AI solution. So we have a couple of digital agents. We wanted the digital agent to take a certification exam, like a Salesforce certified digital agent. And we got pushback from Salesforce saying that you can't do that, because it's for humans only. What's a Salesforce certified digital agent, right?
So we are seeing those kinds of blockers there, but it is probably valid, because there are risks out there for bigger companies and they have to be careful. But the ROI is also so huge for certain places that the C-suite cannot really walk away from that either. We are seeing work that used to take two, three days being done in two, three minutes. Literally.
You have some early adopters that want to push the envelope a little bit and let us do more. You are seeing some that are cautiously asking for advice, asking to see where else have you done it, so that they can learn from that failure. And then there are some that are just waiting it out right now, even though they are saying they want to do AI. And the other bigger challenge that I have seen is to be able to define the ROI of the AI in the true top line and bottom line fashion. Not "I saved Matthew one hour." Just because I saved Matthew one hour, that doesn't mean that he was more productive for my company by one hour and dropped some EBITDA or sold more. How do you do that has been a big challenge that we are seeing from clients that are saying, I see that you can do this and this is so cool, you saved me all this time, but how is it actually making a difference in my business?
