Spaces or tabs? Spaces or tabs? [laughter] My god. Oh, don't. You're going to get them into a war here.
I mean, all CEOs have a dream of taking the company public facing Wall Street. And I'm like, how? You know, the lack of context is killing me. There's no science to this.
Well, you know, Chris, one of my favorite sayings is everybody's in sales.
Got to do forecasts, which sales people hate doing. So, how do you solve that problem?
Lessen the number of tools. Try to do more on one platform and that's where the whole notion of context convergence comes from.
And if you don't tell Pixie, Pixie will strap you down to a table and extract it directly from your brain at some point.
Well, that also is context. That also is, by the way, context. Despite all the AI hype and stuff, I think people are needed to make AI work.
What are all those sales managers and directors going to do with all that free time if they do this?
We got to change the game.
All right. So, today we have a special guest on What the Future podcast who is no stranger to Silicon Valley and entrepreneurship. If you have ever heard the name Mohit Aron, you know he has been known as the father of hyperconvergence and he was also the founder of Cohesity and now he's on to his next stint. And Chris and I have been so lucky to know Mohit for over a decade now. And he's just one of those ballers that anytime he's doing something, I mean the last two companies he grew to over a billion dollars. So like not nothing. I think he knows what he's doing. I think he knows what he's doing. So it's just so exciting the problem he's trying to solve as a salesperson. I am so excited about this conversation. Mohit, thank you so much, man, for being on with us today.
Oh, thank you so much for having me here, Sesh and Chris. Great to see you.
So the first question before we get into Siphon is what's wrong with you? Why do you need to keep doing this? Like what is inside? What's missing in your life?
Well, I'm wrong. [laughter] Well, I'll just put it this way that I just can't go for vacation for long. I guess this is vacation for me. So I like building and you know just it's fun to be building companies. So set another way, it's the journey that excites me. And the journey of what's involved in doing a company is just very exciting. Yeah. And so that's maybe that's what's wrong with me. [laughter]
Yeah. No doubt. No, that's great. I mean, you need to have that to be successful in this business. So tell us, look, everybody knows about Nutanix, everybody knows about Cohesity. Tell us about Siphon. Like tell us how did you get here? What happened? And then we'll kick this thing off.
Yeah, absolutely. I think you guys know I ran Cohesity as its CEO for nearly a decade and just like any other CEO I intimately got familiar with the go to market details. So here were my observations. First of all the go to market data what we'll refer to as context is all over the place, sitting in dozens of tools, right? It's very fragmented. And number two, this context was not even accurately reflecting reality. Like sometimes it would be flat out just missing, right? It doesn't exist or it's stale or garbage, right? And so what I was finding was that number one the context was hard to get at and number two even if you get at the context it's not necessarily accurate. So people were making up for it through tons and tons of meetings right and most of the meetings were focusing on extracting or reporting the news and not changing the news. Like 80% of the time spent in a meeting was hey tell me what's going on right and not fixing whatever is going on.
Or reviewing incomplete data too.
That's right. That's right. And more often than not these meetings were focused on the short term and we were kind of turning a blind eye towards the longer term and it was just hoping for the best. So on and on it went. It boiled down to basically what I described as the context gap. You know that context fragmentation and the fact that the data is not correct. They result in a context gap which means our teams are operating without context and they're trying to get it in other ways through meetings or ad hoc ways and that's not working. So we got to fix that right. So that's what this company set out to do. So I just described the problem which is the context gap and the solution I think you call me the father of convergence. The solution is actually convergence of context or context convergence. You know for the audience here I would like to draw an analogy to a smartphone right. Before the smartphone came we used to carry multiple devices. We used to carry a camera, a GPS, a flashlight, a calculator, a pager and so on so forth and the smartphone came in and sort of converged all that onto one platform. And so we've taken sort of a similar approach with context convergence. So people should be able to access their we define it as the ability to kind of access all the relevant context easily, efficiently and securely. So that's what context convergence is, right? That's what we're doing. And that's what we're building.
So you're really describing a lot of the challenges with sales. Yes. And really ultimately revenue. What is one thing as the CEO of Cohesity that kind of surprised you about sales?
How much of it is an art and not a science? In fact, the name of the company Siphon is basically science behind financials where financials referred to as the go to market financials, right? So most of sales tends to be more art right are you having the right meetings are you inspecting people the right way are you asking the right questions but nobody's really asking the real question why do we have to do all that right how can we make it more a science where I can get access to all that data I don't have to keep you know getting information out of people's heads all the time why can't I get it out of some tools and so that's basically what I mean by bringing some science to the financials where this becomes a science, right? You want to learn something, go to your tool and get that information. You want to figure out what you want to change, get that recommendation from the tool, right? Why do you have to have meetings after meetings after meetings to gather that same information? And by the way, you know, humans are humans. They may be reporting incomplete stuff. They may be reporting garbage. They may be thinking this way but the data is the other way. So there is so much noise that happens when you try to get the information out of humans. [snorts] But you know we use computers for a reason. You know they accurately record everything that's happening. Why can't we rely on that and use AI to tap into all that right with the new age? Why are we like so dependent on humans to do the right why can't we depend on machines and AI and all that stuff and so and why can't we converge all that right why do I have to go to 12 different tools to gather that information so yeah that's the notion behind context convergence.
So I mean obviously when you say context is a loaded AI term too so obviously you know there's a lot of AI going into this but how do you like what are you focusing like how are you extracting this data because I mean I think a lot of those meetings happened because there was just no other way to get the information right so like what are you leveraging to pull that information.
Yeah so this is where we let's talk a little bit more tactically. Imagine you have dozens of tools and we go in and we you know we don't want to disrupt anything so let's just connect to the CRM. Now one thing that most CRMs don't have is historical data. Right? Hey, what happened you know a few quarters back right? Was the pipeline generated sufficiently or not? How about we start keeping all that history? Right? And now you can just ask our AI, hey is pipeline only a problem this quarter or has it been an ongoing problem in the last few quarters? Right? And the AI will suddenly surface that. And imagine now you can connect us to other tools like your emails and calendars and maybe some of the other tools you have all that context now becomes available to you. AI is able to look at all that context maybe even build a higher level understanding. I'll give you an example. Let's say you want to ask the question that hey tell me if any of my top customers are going south right now. Normally to answer that question you may have to go look at your emails then you may have to look at your slack messages maybe some voice recording separately and then see if you know first of all you need to look at your CRM to even figure out who the top customers are then look at all the emails from those customers all the messages from that customer all the voice recordings from that customer and then piece together stuff right or the other thing you can do is you can just take the people involved with those top customers bring them to a room do a meeting and hey how's these customers doing right and then maybe people are like well this is the CEO should I really be telling everything maybe hey things are great right and so that's what happens but with Siphon what's going to happen is that Siphon is watching over everything. Siphon is keeping track of you know the customer sentiment and so by the time a query comes to hey give me the top 10 customers Siphon is quickly going to it knows you know who the top customers are it knows what their sentiment is and it can very quickly surface that for you and it'll present evidence that hey this customer is going south because I heard in a meeting you know 3 days back that the customer was really irate and by the way the customer is being you know complaining about the number of support tickets and blah blah blah right so now you can get all that information without bringing a whole team of people to the room and you know you're kind of dependent on whether they're going to tell you everything direct or not. Siphon will surface all that information for you. So this is context convergence, right? You're converging so many different tools information sitting in the CRM, information sitting in maybe your support tickets, maybe your emails, your calendars, your voice recordings, and you're giving the gist of all that in seconds.
It's interesting too because I got to imagine you know like using AI across that broad of a spectrum of inputs you would surface signals that you know like might not be obvious to the people working the account too I mean have you seen that happening.
100% right I mean when you look over stuff across multiple tools you can surface stuff that any one person may miss right that one person may only have the context of let's say the emails but they haven't quite seen what's going on in support, right? So they may miss that context, but an even more important thing is when people try to kind of do this by maybe connecting their favorite AI to all the tools and we call that the brute force AI approach. While that's better than letting humans do it, there's still problems. Number one, you've kind of added one more gas guzzler to the whole mix, right? I mean, you have a dozen tools, so you added one more. Number two, if the data there is garbage, AI is only going to surface the garbage. So, one of the things that Siphon also does is it helps keep the data fresh, right? It's not just about querying the data, but also keep it maintained. Number three, if multiple people for some reason issue the same query, you can have your CFO and your CEO both issue the same query, right? Hey, who are my top customers? If any of them is irate, tell me about them. Now you're going to have duplicate tokens being spent, right, when you have the AI assistant looking at all your emails and all your slack messages and CRM data and support tickets. So all that work is being duplicated. [snorts] And we can avoid all that. So we call this we have a term for that called context cognition which basically in a fancy way means building higher level understanding. So we are going to cache information and thereby if a query happens multiple times it doesn't have to burn the tokens again and again. But I'll pause there. I think you're hopefully starting to see some of the benefits of this architecture this approach.
Yeah for sure. So let's drill into that a little bit. Let's say okay so I have a client let's just say and I'm having do I communicate with them? I am having recorded calls. We can get transcripts from there. We have emails, we have text messages, we have Slack, Salesforce, and then we have the information and data in Salesforce. Then we have our own internal sales tools, quoting tools, knowledge bases, support systems. We have data warehouses. We have a conversation intelligence tool. We have a revenue intelligence tool. We have a data warehouse. We have a reporting tool on top of the data warehouse. We have some lead generation tools like prospecting and sales engagement tools. We may have some note takers. We may have instant messaging. I can keep rattling on stuff. You know, it's more than a dozen of tools that people use. Right.
Right. And all of them carry some context. Whether it's accurate or not is another question. Right. But they all carry some part of the context. CRMs are not even maintaining past history, right? Let alone the rest of this context. Any one tool that you go to is only going to give you partial information. And having a human actually go and look at all these tools is obviously cumbersome. Having AI connect to all of this, there's token burn issues, right? Garbage in, garbage out issues. There's expense issues. So I think in my mind the right architecture is to actually consolidate which means lessen the number of tools try to do more on one platform and that's where the whole notion of context convergence comes from.
So is the goal to make this the primary interface for the employees of a company to utilize.
Yes. Yeah. It becomes the cockpit. Correct. Yeah. Where you consume stuff. Well, so everything else we like to say that use keep sorry keep the tools you love or you have to use and consolidate the rest on Siphon.
Yeah. Well, so here's a question for you. I mean like classic business problem. You got to do forecasts sales people hate doing and they you know they won't put like oh I'm not going to put that in commit you know. So they're sandbagging too, you know, like or the reverse. Or yeah, they're way too optimistic, right? And then your forecasts are all then that makes it very hard to plan. So how do you solve that problem?
Yeah, great question. So that is precisely the problem of incorrect context, right? So where they've put something in commit and it doesn't belong in commit or vice versa, right? It should be in commit and it's not in commit. So let's walk step by step on how that's solved. So yeah, right now there is no other context other than the guy putting it in commit. The only thing we can do today is some manager asks that person hard questions and then gets it fixed. But imagine the new world where Siphon or AI is watching over all the interactions they're having with customers including voice recordings, emails and stuff. And so every time they have an interaction, let's say they go to a meeting with the customer, we know or our AI knows and our AI is going to scan through the immediate voice recording and maybe the emails transacted since the last time AI looked at it. And then the AI is going to come up with an update. So every deal gets scored right there are multiple dimensions. I mean everyone knows MEDDIC. So imagine that we are scoring it on the MEDDIC dimensions. Imagine each dimension of MEDDIC where it stands for each letter right each letter can be thought of as a dimension. So for instance M is for metrics and E is for the economic buyer. So the AI is looking at all those and scoring them. So the AI based on what transpired scores these dimensions and based on that the AI makes a determination whether the deal should or should not be in commit.
So let's say the sales guy puts it in commit but the AI is like dude what the hell you put it in commit but you haven't even met the economic buyer right the economic buyer is in the red right now. How can you put a deal in commit when you haven't even met the decision maker?
And so the AI is going to flag it. It's going to flag the deal. So our approach is to not have AI sort of come in the way but we will flag it. We'll of course send the recommendation to the person so they don't have to do the job of scoring the deal. The AI will score the deal, send it as a suggestion to the person and they can agree to it or not agree to it or tweak it and then accept it. Either way once the update is made then the AI will flag whether based on the latest deal score whether it belongs in commit or not and it'll flag it and now your forecasting meetings become way simpler rather than you know trying to make it a proctology exam where you're trying to really figure out whether each deal is in commit or strong upside or whatever the forecast categories are you just look at stuff that has been flagged by AI everything else the AI agrees with right and now you look at the stuff that's flagged and now you can have very focused conversations on getting that fixed. So that you know a fixes the underlying hygiene and the context and b it gives you the context easily and now you can do something to change the news and not just trying to extract the news. Right? You see the difference?
What are all those sales managers and directors going to do with all that free time if they do this? [laughter] What do they do now? They do nothing.
Yeah, well they ought to be helping their sales guys, you know, maybe even going in front of customers and coaching them how to do it. So, they should be spending more time in the field in front of customers as opposed to in front of these tools. [laughter] I have had people you know some of my better sales reps leave the company because they were being pestered by these managers like the managers who are calling them at 11:00 p.m. at night and trying to extract information. Hey, what happened in that deal? What happened? Right? And now that manager doesn't have to bother this person. They can get that context from our AI. And whenever they do call this person it is to change the news and not to extract the news right so that right there is context convergence.
So if I'm going to bring this down to a very human level right as a salesperson sales guy girl doesn't matter we do play a game the sales people play this game and sometimes you know you don't want to go into a QBR with nothing with no deals so sometimes they get incented to throw something in there to make it seem like it's something that it's not and then the vice versa as you said too.
But here's the way that I see this and I just want to ask you this. So from my side what I can't stand is how many times I get asked about a forecast. I mean it is unbelievable like one deal and I got eight nine people asking me what's going on with this deal? What's going on with this deal? What's going on And it's part of because I'm in the reseller model. So we have partner managers and salespeople and service people and certain you know we got all different kinds of roles. So in one sense that drives me bananas and I just click delete and I don't even pay attention because it's like I'm not going to get an update and then reach out to you 10 people to update you. So on the flip side of what you're saying is that if I can then avoid constantly having to tell people the updates and then getting into these war room type you know you get eight nine people onto the call and sometimes I wonder why are even half of them there. There's no value. They don't even understand sales and they're getting on these calls thinking that they're going to be able to add value. I think that's the flip side where sales people will like this to say, I want less forecasting and reporting and all that nonsense. And I want to spend more time with my client, with my partners, you know, with trying to find the decision makers, maybe strategizing with my team on how to win, you know, that to me seems like a huge benefit. Am I reading you correctly?
100% and it's actually even more than that. Imagine I'm a sales rep. Not only do I get asked nine times what's going on with a certain deal of mine, I'm also often invited to meetings where I have to kind of wait my turn. So, I'm watching like 10 other people talk about their deals and I really have no interest in their deals, right? I just want to get out of this meeting so I can be in front of customers, right? And I'm waiting for my turn and then they bombard me with questions and different ways and I'm wondering why can't they just get all this data from somewhere right and stop bothering me right if my deal is doing well I mean if my deal was not doing well okay sure let's brainstorm what can I do differently but if my deal is kind of doing well and I'm doing everything that I'm supposed to do then kind of stop bothering me and let me be in front of customers right so yeah it takes care of all those people all those nine people who now ask about the deal can just ask hey what's going on in this deal? They don't have to pester this poor person, right? And so when they come to that meeting, they only need to call those five people that truly need help, that truly need a discussion on their deals. And anyone else whose deals are doing fine, they can well you know save time. They don't even have to attend the meeting. They shouldn't even be called to the meeting. So that's one aspect. The other aspect is I actually had a call with a very without naming the name of the company. It's a very big company and they're like Mohit our big problem is that we take two years to ramp up sales guys like enable them like teach them when they have a big portfolio of products and by the time we ramp them up and they kind of start getting the hang of our portfolio they leave the company for some other company and now we start it all over again. Yeah. And the way they train these people, they have like these marathon enablement sessions, right? I'm sure you guys have seen some of those. We even I used to have it at my former company. We used to have like week-long enablement session and then at the end of it, God knows how much they remember. Anyway, we're making it a one-size fit all. We'll give them some general guidelines. But every deal is different. Anytime the deal is different, they don't know what to do. But imagine in the new world our AI can construct exactly what they need to do right I call that contextual empowerment where contextually they are told that in this particular deal you are to do this other people have been successful in similar deals taking these tactics and so in this particular deal where you're facing this competitor you ought to be doing this but in that other deal with a different kind of industry customer competitor, you ought to be doing something different, right? And so we don't need those marathon enablement sessions now. This stuff can contextually tell them what they need for the situation at hand. And imagine waking up and you're told that hey here are the whatever five customers you're going to meet today and here are the tactics you're supposed to deploy at those customers in order to have a fair chance at winning, right? That's what ultimately matters. Not these marathon enablement sessions where I'm taught everything and by the time I go in front of the customers I've pretty much forgotten everything. Or the whole thing has become stale like I got this whole dump at the beginning of the quarter and now it's in the middle of the quarter and some competitor has changed their tactics and now all that is kaput anyway. [snorts] So imagine getting fresh context that is pertinent to the deal that I'm dealing with pertinent to the situation right and in real time I get empowered on what I need to do that's what we are talking about here.
No I mean you're integrating a lot of data sources obviously you know like how are you using a lot of different tactics to integrate all these things I mean because you know some things there's MCP servers for some things you know there's APIs some things you know you might just have a web interface you know like so how are you collecting and aggregating all this data.
Yeah great question so first of all we're not just aggregating we're also consolidating right but yeah like I said earlier our customers use the tools you love or you must have and then consolidate the rest on Siphon. So while we are going to be consolidating a lot of stuff we are also going to be connecting to a lot of stuff. And yes when we connect like for instance email is not something that we are going to eliminate I mean there are pretty good email servers let's just tap into that and so whatever protocol the email servers expose we going to use that protocol. But for a generic tool out there that we don't know about yeah MCP is a great way to connect to it right many tools these days are exposing themselves through MCP so that becomes like a common way to connect to tools but for tools that we do know about they may or may not support MCP and so since we do have the knowledge on how they export their data or how they have their APIs configured we can actually talk to them in their language we know about this tool but the idea is for our customers to be able to connect a generic tool right and for us to be able to figure it out on the fly and for that MCP is quite useful.
Absolutely. Do you envision building out these modules? I mean, like, obviously, if there's a gap in... I mean, because I could imagine as you start trying to figure out context with these things, you know, you might be like, I got all my sales in Salesforce, but I'm missing this part and this part, and there's just no tool that does that.
And that's what we built, 100%. So there is so much that CRM don't do, and we build those modules. My whole motivation for starting on this was the tools I was using, not just the CRM but also the tools surrounding it, were not giving me enough context, enough knowledge. And so we were building all these custom stuff, like in Tableau dashboards and this and that, right, for basically piecing together the missing information. So whenever we kind of find that stuff that people absolutely need and they are building custom stuff, we'll build a module that provides that information, right? The common stuff that is... and the rest we can just connect to. So the common stuff we would like to... whatever you need to have to run your go-to-market organization efficiently, not just sales but also marketing and other related functions, we're just going to build it.
Right. That's where the smartphone approach is going to come in. Right. Smartphone has a number of apps. So you can actually start an app and go to an app on our platform and get it all there. And stuff that we don't... well, you can connect to that stuff and still access it through our platform. And so that's kind of how it works.
So now you got all this data. This is the part that was getting me really excited in this conversation. Now you have all this data about your customers, what they're saying on calls, what the support cases are, what the Slack messages are, what the email messages are. You're getting all this information for a company like Sciphon and a lot of like earlier-stage technology companies. So many times Chris and I talk about it's very important to have a good sales and marketing, and you need to know your buyer and you need to know what they're saying. And sometimes you don't learn that until the customer tells you no. And they tell you no because, oh, you know, it's a security issue for us, or, you know, that's why I wouldn't use your product, or the price is too high, or I have this other competitor. Are you able to then gather all of that information and then be able to say, 'Okay, for Sciphon, here's what the customer... here's the gap that we're experiencing. Customers want this and we don't have it right now.' Like you get to hear the nos, you get to hear like that. So is that part of your value proposition as well?
Yeah, 100%. So, I mean, let me paraphrase. And what you're really saying is the customers will say no too late, or your sales guys are like maybe happy ears or something, and then they keep taking the deal forward even when there is no way this deal would result in a win.
Right. And so imagine what Sciphon can do for you is, number one, you know, impose your sales discipline. Hey, have... we spoke about MEDDPICC earlier. One of the letters of the MEDDPICC stands for the decision criteria, right? D. Do you have the decision criteria, you know, in green, which means that have you figured out what it'll take for the customer to buy your product? Right? And number two, whatever that decision criteria is, can you satisfy that decision criteria? If the answer to the first one is no, well then the sales guy has not done their job in getting the decision criteria written down, right? But if it has been written down, if it has been nailed down, the second thing is, can this company, you know, based on the product documentation or whatever it has, can it satisfy those decision criteria? And now you can very quickly, you know, gather information whether it's a real deal or not. So you don't have to waste tons of time on deals that are not even real. If the customer has a decision criteria that you cannot meet, then move on to the next customer, man. Why waste time on this customer, right? Maybe you can come back to this customer later once your product can actually meet their demands.
But unfortunately, what ends up happening is that the sales guys keep going with a long POC or technical validation only to find out at the end of it, well, we can't satisfy all this, right? Yeah, these are the kind of stuff that Sciphon will absolutely help with.
And also I would think with like product roadmap a little bit, that you know you can gather such great information from your customers through that conversation, right?
Yeah, 100%. So all of this is context, right? And all of that is lost. It's left to a human to collect their context, right? So the customer tells you I can't use your product for XYZ reason, that is context that can be used later, and you marry that to your roadmap. And then you're like, okay, maybe we should approach this customer six months from today, right? Because based on our roadmap we're going to have whatever this customer needs by that time, right? But usually such information is lost and that customer is sort of lost forever, rather than you realizing that you can actually go back to that customer once you can satisfy their decision criteria.
Yeah. Yeah. I've seen you do it.
Yeah. Well, we've been talking a lot about like the sales people's perspective of this, but like who do you envision to be the users of this throughout? I mean, obviously we talked about product development. We've talked about, you know, a lot of different things. Like who are the roles here?
Everyone who's connected to your revenue and financials, right? So it's not just the sales organization, it's also your marketing organization, it's also your finance organization, right? How do you set targets every quarter? Right? The CFO is giving you a target but the CRO has to float those targets, distribute them across territories, right? Even that we can help with because we know the productivity of the various teams and we can suggest those targets. Normally what happens is, you know, in my last company we used to take at least three weeks to roll out these numbers, right? Everyone knew their quota, their target, you know, three weeks into the quarter, and during that time they're kind of hiding deals, not selling, that sort of stuff. Imagine that Sciphon has all the context and so it can very easily suggest to the CRO what those targets should be, and the CRO takes a day or two to look them over and within the first few days, boom, it's done.
Very easy to interact with the finance organization, right? It's all context. I mean, the finance guys are basically cooking up like what the future numbers should be without any context, right? It's really a... just like they pull numbers out of their hat and like maybe we should grow 20%. Right? So now that we have context, they can use all this to generate the information. Imagine, I mean, there are functions that don't have any tool whatsoever, right? Imagine the channel people. Sesh, this might hit close to home. The channel guys in a typical go-to-market organization have no tool to go to, right? And there is, by the way, no way to inspect them. Hey, how have they been doing? Is my guy in New York generating enough pipeline? What about the past five quarters? There is no tool that gives you that unless you're keeping that in some sort of a spreadsheet or data warehouse and plotting like custom dashboards from all of that, right? That context is completely isolated. So imagine that Sciphon is also tracking all that. And based on all that, it actually helps you determine what the number for that territory should be based on the pipeline, and it even flags that, hey, by the way, marketing has been doing well, but in this particular territory, channel not so much. So maybe you should start holding some people accountable there, right? So all that is missing context, and this is where you can actually surface opportunities for growth, that hey, if only my channel organization was doing better in this territory, I can actually start hiring more people there and grow more revenue from this territory, right? All that stuff is very manual today, requires tons and tons of meetings.
So what is a day in the life of a Sciphon user look like? I mean, how are you interacting with the system? Is it like sending you reports? Are you going on to view reports? What does that look like?
In this new age, I believe that we should regard any product like a human. We should interact with any product... I mean, these are AI, right? Artificial intelligence. It's still an intelligence. So just like you and I interact in multiple ways. Maybe we can interact using emails. Maybe we interact using audio. Maybe we can WhatsApp each other, right? Maybe there's a Slack that we can use to interact with each other, right? So similarly, when we interact with products, it's not one way to interact. We can choose the method that happens to be the best in that situation. So for instance, if I'm in front of my computer, maybe I open my browser and start browsing and looking at the classic dashboards.
But if I'm driving to a customer, maybe I open an app on my smartphone and start communicating with my AI using audio. Hey, I'm going to this customer. Can you coach me what I need to do? Right? It's exactly like how I would interact with a human. Or maybe I send an email to the AI. Hey, I really need this information. Can you do it for me? And just like what I would do with a human. Hey, every Monday morning, can you please send me this report? The AI should be able to do that.
Right. Give me a report on all my top accounts, or give me a report on all my territories. Tell me anytime any of my top customers are going south. Tell me anytime my forecast is in danger of not being met. Any of those, what you can just ask AI to just watch out for these and tell you proactively as opposed to waiting for you to ask that question. The AI should be able to do that. Just think of it as an artificial human. It's really a human, and you should be able to interact with it just like a human, and you should be able to tell it to do stuff just like a human, and it should be able to do stuff in reverse, right? So that's how I view it.
Everyone in your go-to-market organization, whether it's in marketing, sales, alliances, channel, support, whatever, right? They all get an AI companion, and this AI companion, they should be able to interact with just like they interact with any other human.
Well, you know, Chris, one of my favorite sayings is everybody's in sales.
Everyone is sales. Everybody... doesn't matter who it is, what role, you're there to make the company money and support their customers. It's just that simple, right?
My one question I have, Mohit, that I was thinking about is, okay, so you get access to all these different systems and data. But how about the data that you don't get access to that's really hard to get, like text messages, or you know, somebody goes to a lunch meeting and there's a great discussion, but you know it's awkward when... and I still do it, but I'll tell the customer, hey, do you mind if I transcribe this lunch? Just because I want to hear the conversation and I want to be able to collect that data. What are your thoughts about the data that you don't have access to?
