We are back. And we are live. So I will do this for like a second. People can still hear us while we wait for people to drop in. And then we will get into introductions to get started. Let's take a look how it's looking. Yes. Let's see. Here we go. Hey guys. Hello guys. Welcome to the webinar. We are giving people a minute to drop in. And since we had like 150 signups on the LinkedIn event, I'm sure there are people who are trying to find a link now to the event to be able to go in. Great. So we will actually get started now. So what we're going to talk about in this webinar today is since AI agents are here to stay, we all know that. What is left for us humans to do. And we are diving into what the challenges will be for revenue as we progress forward and what challenges companies will see moving forward into this world where we are supposed to be creative and smart with our work time and AI is here to help or is it? And we are happy to introduce our panel and I will go on camera with all of us now. So I will do a short introduction to me and then we will go around the table. My name is Sarah Storm. I have been in revenue for 22 years now. My entire career, it feels like forever. And I am very excited about the development that we're seeing on the market when it comes to AI supporting revenue as we progress. And that's shortly of me. I'm also the founder of Break the Box who's arranging this webinar. And I will hand it over to George, who is my co-founder to do the next introduction. Yes. So my name is George. Also quite a long time in revenue, 22, bordering to 23 years. As you can see, it affected the color of my hair quite a lot. No stress. CEO at Break the Box. And also super excited to join the discussion and see all the different opinions. And also I have to say that I, contrary to Sarah, I have been AI skeptic for the most part of it. So I'm interested to see how this develops. Perfect. Thank you so much. Let's move over to Alina and then Ilya can go. George, I just painted my hair, my white hairs yesterday for the first time in my life. So I can resonate with that. I'm the technical co-founder at Chili Piper. And I am obsessed with agents because before starting Chili Piper, all I did. So I did the master in computer science and all I did was software, building of software, designing, product management and all in between. And as soon as I saw how fast the space is progressing, I couldn't help myself but get in, even though I'm supposed to do a CEO stuff because I'm the co-CEO at Chili Piper as well. And I find a lot of joy in designing agents. I find a lot of joy in designing processes around AI for operations team. But I also feel terrified by it. So I have the full range of emotions around it. Sounds perfect. Thank you so much. Ilya? Hello, everyone. Don't try to pronounce my first name and last name. Your desk might start floating. Both to George and Alina over here. I'm losing my hair because that's a progression as well, if you look on the positive side of it. I am the chief revenue officer at Haybridge, basically a company who actually escalated to 3 million in ERR in less than 16 months. And I was pushed into AI just because I didn't ask for it. I needed it because I was a one-man show when it comes to revenue, maybe. Plus two people, I don't really want to take everyone's credits. But I do believe that AI is here to stay. And I do believe that this is the direction that we are all headed. And it's just a matter of time who and how we'll adapt to the new situation. So Ilya, you said 3 million in six months? No, 16. I wish they could have been six, but no. It's still pretty good. Well done. Thank you. It's very impressive. So the structure for the webinar, so everyone's listening to understand, we will do five questions to the panel related to AI and the future of revenue. We will take questions in the chat or in the question section. And we will sometimes push in the question to the panel straight away, or we will save them to the Q&A at the end. We are running for an hour today, so we have 55 minutes left to make this a really interesting discussion. So I will bring up our first conversation starter to the panel now. And then we will go back to the panel view so you can see us while we discuss the question. So let's start with the first thing that I think is the most interesting when it comes to trending in this industry right now. And that is, what is the most important shift that AI will bring to revenue in the coming years? And I will actually start with Alina here because I saw the obsession in her notions deck that she has built. And I am very excited to hear what she thinks is coming when it comes to revenue in the coming years. So there are so many transformations. I don't know that I'll be able to list them all in the next five minutes or even an hour, but I'll go through just the big ones that I see, especially in SaaS. So for instance, you see that Ilya got to 3 million in 16 months. And I see other companies, I have another friend who got to 4 million in AR in two months with a B2C AI app. And this is something that you have not seen five years ago. As fast companies that grow as fast. For instance, it took us three, we got to 3 million in three years when we started 2016, we were bootstrapped and grew super hard. And the acceleration comes at the fact that it just takes faster to build, it takes faster to adopt, it takes faster to test, it takes faster to sell, to do onboarding. So we see this acceleration, which is to some extent is good because you see success stories like Ilya's and that gives me a lot of joy. At the same time, it feels very overwhelming because it feels so hard to catch up. Like as a buyer of software, for instance, you don't even know what software to buy because there's like a better one tomorrow and then a better one that appears like an hour after you buy. So it feels overwhelming for buyers, the pace. It also feels overwhelming for us as humans because we feel like we can barely catch up with how things are progressing. And I don't think we've ever felt that way in the in our history of humans to feel outpaced by everything around us like that, at this kind of speed. The other thing that's also happening that's also overwhelming is that you don't know when you're processing information of any kind on your screen or on your, even paper information, you don't know if it's real or not. And the fact that we're skeptical of everything and of everyone creates this greater divide that we also see in other landscapes. We see it in between countries, even like in the political system that you feel that you're losing trust. And I believe that's going to take a while to figure out because as humans, we are wired to be trusting of one another and of collaborating. And if we don't have that, it's going to be very, very hard for us to rally around things or ideas or things that we want to make the world better on. Those are my two shifts that I think a lot about. Yeah, and these are also things that we will, it will take longer time than we have to figure it out too, since things are moving so fast, right? So that's definitely a challenge. How do you see it when it comes to, I have a follow up now, and when it comes to businesses progressing the way that companies can progress now, how do you see that impacting like competitive edge in an environment that we are in now? So companies who are built on the AI model, the AI is the baseline of everything they're doing. How do you see that? In my case, it's fascinating to watch because we started a company eight years ago, and I see the speed at which people can build things. It's always been the case that people can copy my product and it was like a given. But now the speed at which they can copy things and the speed at which they can encroach on that competitive is fascinating to me. Yet, I find that it's not enough, that building fast, providing value with a product or with a service is not enough. You need a lot more in order to not collapse. So I am very skeptical of a lot of companies that have a lot of AR right now, and I don't think that they will survive. And the reason why I don't think that they will survive is because they don't yet have the maturity to know what it's like to survive when they've not gone through the motions of survival. So I won't give any examples that I want to predict the demise of companies that might be listening to this. But I can see that all sorts of point solutions will disappear because the others will just copy them. And if it happens with open AI, they build all sorts of things that cut, undermine all sorts of startups that have built on top of them in the past year. So there's like a race to the top of who does most best fastest. But I think that it's going to depend a lot on the people that are within the companies and their capacity to survive the different ups and downs that takes a company to succeed. Obviously, there's a change in the way the subscription models work and everything is kind of changing on the payment side as well. But that's something that I'm less interested in exploring these days because in our case, it's a bit different. But for other companies, it matters a lot. No, but I understand. It's very interesting because me and George, we have a discussion about this a couple of weeks ago related to the thing that you just said about the race to the top and commoditization and what it will mean for the structure, specifically companies that are built on the AI engine, because at one point or another, AI will be commoditized. And then what is the next step from that? And yes, I do believe I actually agree with you. I think a lot of companies will peak and then I'm going to hand it over to George if you have anything. Any input on what I mean, I say saying based on the conversation we had and then Ilya can come and discuss a bit more. Yeah, no, I agree about commoditization. I think that there is there has been not a push, but a demand from investors, right? For in lack of a better term, AI wrappers on products. There are a lot of companies that advertise as AI companies or they basically build quite a mandatory structure on on top of what an AI has launched. And I think as every technology, when it's launched, we will go through a consolidation on quality and which companies can establish a proven ROI for their customer base in a bit of a longer run, right? Because it is still very fresh. It's very exciting. It's a space full of opportunity. But at the end of the day, given especially given the market sentiment, we will move into a place where we will need to like the fact that it's fresh or that it's exciting won't be enough anymore. We will need to look at that innovation and proven return on investment. Thank you so much. Ilya, do you want to jump in? What do you see as the important shifts? Well, here's the thing. AI is going to be incorporated in every operations across smaller or bigger companies. If we took a step back over here, yes, builders and new and freshly built, created startups will heavily rely on AI just because it's a cheaper solution compared to buying a developer, right? So but then again, implementing AI doesn't mean the successful business, which is why explains a lot of people will fail even though they have created a robust system that can do a lot of work. But bottom line, how do you sell this? How do you market this? How do you recognize the business opportunities? How do you recognize the market? And yes, the AI is great if you give them a lot of input. Basically, all of us, four and five years, everyone in the audience, is on daily basis receiving so many informations that it's like humanly impossible to process all of that and have in mind that you have to make a database decision upon which half or the whole company is reliant. So that's why it's not a question whether we want to have it or not have it, it's just where do we put this whole thing, right? I've often, I meet a lot of people obviously on daily basis by sales meeting, partnerships meetings, are and everyone thinks that well i have this concept i can read i can make this concept into a perspective meaning create a tool around it or create a service around of it and it will work yes it will it will work on paper but how will the market accept it do you know what to how to position yourself when you get in front of a client and say well this is what i have built what should i do with it when the client asks and most commonly those people will go with something like well i don't know i build it you find it right so that's the type of misconception that is actually happening that if i'm empowered by ai i can actually build something amazing no you can build something amazing once you have the market the market knowledge the industry the challenge resolving manner of the product or the service and then you put it into a perspective for wider adoption for me honestly because i found myself in a position where like it was overwhelming really we achieved something that we were not even planning to do uh in the amount of time that actually happened right and now i'm finding myself in a position where i'm too late to hire because if i hire i have to pretty much onboard i have to transfer my knowledge so people can give decent outputs and stuff like that or i can pretty much rely on a concept on my ai technology pretty much that can help me streamline the processes in house now fun fact once at one point at our company we started implementing ai components into the product itself and i'm not going to go into the details but it's going to it was more likely to help people create better messaging on linkedin that was just about it and we felt miserable just because the person meaning the software engineer or the data scientist who was behind this whole thing he didn't have a clue what's outbound what's linkedin what is how do you sell how do you do an approach how do you stuff like that and in most cases that's the case in most companies where you have a prompt engineer finding a use case or working on a technology which the output should be something to serve people that he has he doesn't know anything about it right so misusage of ai i guess what i'm trying to say is misusage of ai just skills failure meaning it happens so fast and once it happens so fast it was not conducted properly or not giving the output that was desired now you're scaling failure just because you can do it with that technology bottom line uh you have to be cautious i agree with you and i think that one of the things that i find interesting when this comes to what i see coming so i have three points on my side one of them has to do with uh first of all the sauce industry's future that's a whole other discussion will there be sauce companies in 10 years because ai will be able to maintain so that you can build your own software inside your own company will there be vendors like that or will we just build whatever we need internally fit it perfectly to our business model and have it be built by ai right so this is one of the things that i'm concerned about when it comes to considering we only sell to sauce companies so that would mean a big rehaul in our business model and the second thing that i see when it comes to revenue is that since i fully believe that we will go to a point where smb sales and some segments some parts of the mid segment will be completely digitalized right so we are looking at buyers who want to buy they can buy up to 50k usd online like this is a possibility people are willing to do it in the business to business context as well that means that there will be no sales teams to address that market because that will be completely driven by ai platform digital experience online right so that segment of sales individuals sales teams revenue that will go away right so companies need to start moving upstream we will have a very a very small super team of sales reps who are addressing the enterprise market because that's where creativity still is needed now let's see what happens in the future when it comes to ai and that's one of the shifts that i also see that i see that leaders who run companies specifically in sauce as an example now is they need to start redirecting their organization and that's one thing that needs to start happening now but without the insights into what ai will be or if you're too scared and you're putting your head in the sand and you're saying no no this is just a bus or whatever then you won't do the necessary changes to your organization when it comes to competence development and management of your staff and your headcount to make sure you're ready for that transformation and the third is the political landscape but that not really have to do with revenue and we already sort of addressed it with alina and so great uh is there anyone else who wants to add something do you have any questions from the audience please just put them in the chat and i will address them if they are relevant in the moment or in the q a i think we should move over to the next question and that is there's one there's one more trend that's that's uh worth pointing out is that the future is very unpredictable that it's for it used to be that i would be able to do some forecasts for the year that would be somewhat within the range of predictability but now the industry is changing so fast that the ability to predict revenues or the ability to predict a lot even on the political side of where i live or things like that is very very hard and it's going to get harder the unpredictability is here to stay do you believe that forecasting has been stable previously for most companies or is that always a lot easier it was easier yes yeah you always try to guess the future and you always have a hard time guessing the future where none of us is has a crystal ball but um i would be able to get within reason of what i would be able to do but right now there's so many things happening so fast that it's so much harder to predict and i i sort of think that that leads into the next question to you guys because when it comes to what we need to do as businesses now the question that i have to you guys is what does c levels need to start doing and preparing and now to be ready for going through the the the future we're coming to as it will be which is unpredictable very fast moving and overwhelming which is basically the summary of the last conversation uh so what do we think is the things that they need to do and sort of a bullet point these are the things you can do today like what do you need to start doing with your organization so let's start with george this time and then we will go around the room to sort of piggyback to what alina said it is a lot harder to predict even short-term outcomes for instance forecasting how the market will behave is uh it's a lot harder than it was uh five years ago or even two years ago uh right anything from technology to political landscape to geopolitical changes to what have you uh however what i what i think from a from a management perspective right from a leadership perspective what i think needs to get start happening is uh move to a place where we're doing strategic planning with a long-term vision but a short-term focus so uh focus on the things you can affect short-term to make sure that you uh you prepare you make sure that you preform short-term that you make sure that you address the topics that you need to address such as new technology new pricing structures as an example uh training uh upskilling your teams uh to the point that um uh ilia has brought up when it comes to uh quality of operations right so these are the all things that will continue being relevant in the future but uh since it is super hard to predict we need to i think the most long-term thing that you can do right now uh is uh look at short-term improvements and by short term i mean quarter by quarter because it's very hard to predict what is going to happen in q4 comparatively than it was a year or two years ago thank you so much who wants to jump in yeah i want to jump in i mean i mean guys like here is the thing like it was easier to predict the future because the input was a lot less right and if you may have a lot less input that makes you that you are making a decision which is not based on data even though it gives you comfort because you've made a decision how will the future look like six months from now right but now when you have an intake of large volumes of data now it's getting confusing right because now and we say well it's hard to predict no it's not hard to predict it's hard to analyze right if you analyze it properly then the forecasting will be even better just because you will make made a decision based on much more data and how will the market evolve and stuff like that and the new technologies yes but that's a discussion that you probably have like how will the next 10 years look like and that's a like a black box over there but quite honestly i cannot agree that we cannot probably make a decision for the next couple of months maybe one year from now just because the input is there like the classification of data plus the output of the learning of the module of the learning of everything it's going to be even better so it will it should give us better outputs not just about that and once you've this into the operations of how we are running the company regardless whether it's from a ceo perspective or from a revenue perspective or from a city or perspective right now you have something that is backing you up in my opinion it's like hiring 10 business analysts that can help you in vulnerable areas of improvements that's all there is right and it should give you an output about that but then again i will leave alina to sorry to jump in but sarah you basically yeah you want me i'm here yeah go ahead alina what do you want to say to that when it comes to sort of that this provides us with the better decision making uh baseline right it should do that i uh so when i go back to the question of uh what ceo should do to prepare and how does the business analysis business analyst ai comes into this and long-term research for term um i agree in that indeed having a long-term goal helps the quarterly decisions and improvements a lot easier and yes you can use agents to make better decisions um there is an additional aspect which is something that i think about every day which is how do we all of us in the company so everybody who is working at chili piper and this is a question that i asked them because i think it's going to be fundamental to how they think about their careers as well how do i as a human leverage agents to get superpowers in my job and i believe that those that are going to survive in this very rough environment where uh capitalism as it is is cash over everything else right that's how how it works um how do you survive in this race by leveraging the power that you that we're now given and even myself i think how can i replace myself all the time i think how can i replace myself with agents would agents be better better at decision making at structuring how we're thinking about products or we think about gtm how we think about hiring how we're thinking about everything that the ceo needs to do setting up the vision and if i think about how to replace myself i want everybody in the company to think the same way how do i replace myself because if you figure out how to do that then you can go above it yeah um so as a result in our system of promotions in our system of rewards uh those that have um to be considered for promotions actually paper you have to think about that you have to be innovative on how you build agents how you deploy agents how you uh create efficiencies and how you make better decisions um and that's uh something that's transparent so everybody can see in the company what agents are being built everybody can see in the company what decisions are being made everything is documented everything is transparent um i believe that the two and two go together the transparency because we have to learn from one another uh and also the the work that we're doing to replace ourselves which is weird that's why i said that i'm terrified by agents because i think that at some point i might be able to replace myself with agents yeah i get it and that's so interesting that you mentioned that because one of my i have a few points here what i think c levels needs to start doing now one of those things is related to putting your staff into training because the baseline of understanding how to build and how to prompt will create a lot of more creativity in your organization and that needs to go from c level down not down go down to people on working like their roles and get them to build you need to be part of that and i know you do that and for me personally we work with only sauce companies in the media basis that's our main target market and one of the things that i see now in dialogues because every dialogue related revenue contains but what about ai how should we use ai the problem is that the people who's asking these questions who are c level they haven't even started prompting chat gtp yet and this is a challenge even if it's bigger organizations right so if you have no curiosity in the c level suite leadership position now you have no curiosity on how you can create a smarter way to be more creative and get more stuff done related to your role your company is going to suffer from this so i think one of the first things is that put your c level team in training they need to learn how to build i don't know two three bots that supports whatever they are doing in their role because as soon as you get started with the base you start learning more and more it raises creativity on what you're able to do right so that's what's one of my points of c levels needs to start doing now so you need to start taking an interest this is not a passing thing so now you need to make sure that you can remain in competitive edge by doing what a lot of other c levels won't do which is you get into this now so that's one of the things that i think is super important when it comes to next point what c levels need to start doing besides training themselves their team and their management team is to start looking at what can we do from a buyer intent perspective what can we do from a from a deal pipe perspective because now i'm thinking revenue from the business side right what can we do with ai to ensure an excellent customer experience from lead first touch point all the way into being a customer because this will make you have competitive edge on the market as well obviously revamping your tech stack all of these things comes after you realize where you're flawed on the market so these are my two points that i think is interesting to discuss as a c-level person right now and start getting into it because without you doing that it will be very hard for you to get the teams to do these things so you need to drive the change there's also an interesting question from kelly that i see in the comments um the question is um i see a fundamental challenge with the idea that ai allows everyone to move to higher more critical strategic thinking work not everybody can think perform this way will entry roles just disappear and as a ceo i do think a lot about that how what kind of profiles we hire for the company for those roles because we do have sdrs we have like 20 sdrs and i noticed that the profile of a junior role is definitely changing we used to be able to just hire for skills so if somebody would be really good at handling objections and they would be good at rejection and like motivation and all of those skills would be sufficient for us to hire and now i notice that those are not sufficient anymore um there's also a creativity that's going to make or break those that can handle the role now and the curiosity and the creativity are becoming a lot more critical um and that's because those who are very creative are going to break into the noise they create like a crazy video or they show up with a crazy message in the in that prospecting box that the ai might not yet be able to get to that kind of curiosity and that kind of creativity so um i think there's for now there's space for the entry levels as well and i still see i still see a lot of um space for entry level roles for in-person things we lose track because we're always on zoom and we're always in person we're always interacting through the digital format but in person you still need especially for events for when getting together you still need people and you don't need to be a strategic visionary to be able to uh have in in-person conversation that are meaningful yeah but i i fully agree and one of the things because gardner has been talking about this a lot when it comes to the future of sales like all the different roles within sales and one of the things that they're discussing is so collab with ai to enhance yourself this is what you were talking about before lena the second thing has to do with agility and creativity right you mentioned curiosity these are all things that ai right now can't replace ai can support you in becoming more of that but it won't be able to replace it and i think that this is something for now for now it will come yes george go ahead i just want to add one thing to this uh which is we ilya was talking about data analysis and data inputs right so and then we look at prompt engineering uh how we analyze data and there is a component when it comes to when it comes to skill set for anything from entry level to top management that has to do with pattern recognition but we are entering uh or we are already in an era of mass production either that is messaging or ideation or brainstorming or whatever it is because we can as ilia said there was a great line that i will actually steal after this scale failure uh because of that i mean if you if you look at the outreach out there it's yeah interesting let me not uh use other words uh but uh there will there will be a point and it will continue to be a point about pattern recognition and there will be and it is a huge point about pattern breaking what people receive because of how models are trained and will continue to be trained and then there is spontaneity creativity and hiring for soft skills uh because it will be in the intangibles and what makes uh what breaks the pattern and gets people's attention interest or uh kickstarts a creative process right so um i i completely agree george and i forgot to mention one thing that's also critical that i observed in our profile that we hired that i can't believe that that i didn't mention and i i hire for the same exact thing in marketing which i would have never expected which is the ability to form relationships so because i'm technical myself and for the past 40 years i've had no idea what forming relationship even meant i didn't know uh how to approach people in like an event setting i didn't know how to connect with them because i was like the awkward engineer um in the past year there's a shift and those that manage to know how to make a connection in person they're going to create trust and those that are going to create trust are those that are going to be able to make change and move people to the right direction um and not only that they're going to be able to um talk about their dream in a way that others want to follow them and ability to form relationship deep connections with others it's so critical so understated so misunderstood um i it took me a while to figure out how to test for it in the interview process but now i pay a lot of attention to it if i notice that somebody i'll give you some examples so you see that my hands are showing right it means that i'm really present like i don't do that i'm not on my phone i don't try to uh go on linkedin i don't try to go on other tabs and the reason why i'm making a conscious effort to be so present is because i know that if you feel that i'm not with you you're not going to be able to connect with me so i pay a lot of attention into interview is the person really present are they really paying attention are they having a gazillion tabs in their head are they trying to connect with me at a personal level and for most people that's really hard and it's becoming harder and harder because everybody got so connected with their phone and their tiktok and their attention span is like a goldfish and it's rare but i hire for it and when i notice i know it's a keeper i really have to put another perspective on this one i mean let's face it i would i would love it no no no not on your opinion i mean your opinion it's validated it is what it is yes it's true and i agree with it but here is the thing when we when we as we are progressing from this discussion about the air and stuff like that we are taking not in consideration one simple fact the average age of a c-level executive is 59 years old person regardless whether they are male or female regardless now if we start by saying well you should learn about chad jb now this is something that's a scary territory why because this is nothing that they have done in their life and by the way these guys are these these people are actually successful people let's be honest right and now they're facing a challenge like they're looking at the dark and it makes them pretty stupid why because they don't know how to do things right and at least they feel stupid not that they're stupid but they it feels stupid because they don't know how to do things and it's perfectly valid now when we are promoting a concept of what should c level or when we are talking about uh what should c level attack to the technology it's really not much and i'm going to tell you why the best thing that a c-level person can have is identify the areas of improvement that's number one if you don't know how to do it this is where you pop a question hey hey chad gpt i'm facing this problem right or what can i improve here are the current metrics what would you suggest right so that's an assistance that's not a problem solution that's just assistance now when you have that the area the areas that you want to approve the second step is who's going to help me meaning because i'm not going to do it myself so the question is whether i'm going to train the people inside of my company or whether i'm going to hire someone externally to help me overcome this issue and the biggest input that the c-level executive can give is the person who needs to conduct this output based on the input that was given through ai should give his expert on opinion this is what i'm aiming to get right so until this point does the c-level exact has to know about here i wouldn't say so he has to know what are the areas that need to be improved in terms of processes into the company whether they are deliverance whether they are output whether they are sales marketing you name it like those are the old processes right or support for for that matter but what are the areas of improvement and that's something that's really ai can replace at some point but at this point uh and then find the right person to conduct this and once you have the actual outputs this is where you can rely and make an educated decision how should you how should you move forward to overcome these challenges so i actually many industries so i can see i have friends who are running publicly traded companies and i can see that that could be applicable to them because they're working in industries that agentic workflows are definitely helpful in their efficiencies and they're definitely helpful in solving business problems for them and they can hire external help however i do not believe that it's possible to be the ceo of a sas company and not be deeply involved with the gentic workflows i don't think it's possible for you to survive i agree 100 because i do believe that that space alina is a different space compared to what we're talking about before right so we are we are in the presence of younger leaders this is a benefit when it comes to development and i think since we're all in that space i think that we see within that space a lot more movement because they will be companies big companies who will die out during this period because of their c-level management and their senior management not being curious enough to figure this out i fully believe that even if they have young people on board we do need to wrap this topic up yes go ahead george no i know i know we need to wrap with it's super interesting discussions and i love the disagreements too it's it's super nice to see because i'm sort of tired of seeing work so um uh webinars everybody agreeing with each other uh so no but one quick point in sort of in between of what uh ilia and what we were talking about uh so i think there is uh because the the the average age that you described is uh usually upper upper end of mid-segment to enterprise right where the c-level management is uh five seven eight years removed from retirement uh but uh just as it happened with digitalization just as it happened with blockchain there are shifts where if large organizations don't catch up uh they will lose parts of their business it happened i am i have been working in fintech and banking for like seven eight years it happened with microservices uh investment services companies like revolute that shaved off parts of the market by utilizing technology and maybe yes no the 65 year old ceo doesn't need to learn prompt engineering what he needs to do however is to make sure that either through external help or by training the rest the management team under him then to make sure that there is a way to check people's work because if you even if you can't educate yourself personally you need to be able to make an organizational wide change if that is the the gap that you identify and it's super hard for sas is impossible because as a sas ceo you will have your fingers in more spice but even in larger organizations you need to be able to quality control what is presented to you and if you're completely clueless it's going to be hard to do and with that we need to flip topic unfortunately so sarah back to you yes we do because what i wanted to discuss is what do we see companies doing wrong when it comes to this change so far and this is a question that is uh provocative on purpose because i have a point to say but i will still let you guys answer this too because i think it's fun um so when it comes to what companies are trying to do now to to be prepared to get prepared and in alina's case in this example would mean they're already doing which is a part of being prepared for what's coming in the future and it's the same with hayridge right so what do companies what do you think the biggest mistake companies will make the coming two years when it comes to getting ready for this who wants to take it yeah i can start no but it look the when it comes to mistakes i think we have started most companies have started in a in a very weird uh track uh whereas uh we're far we were focused too much on uh efficiency for the same sake of efficiency and there is too little if any uh focus on quality we have focused exponentially on quantity and we there is too too little focus on quality we see that a lot with content we see that a lot with um outreach we see that a lot with messaging we i i have even seen that in in um in companies when it comes to sales strategy and when especially since prompt engineering in most organizations is is not it's not there yet when it comes to full utilization right we still uh we have most companies or most individuals haven't crossed the that competence chasm to be able to prompt anything more than generic answers right so things that you could have googled basically um i see uh this is why what ilya said about uh scaling failure resonates a lot with me because i for instance on the sales perspective i see way too much mass-produced messaging as an example i received 10 15 emails with i actually posted on that uh a couple of weeks ago on linkedin it's basically the same message i'm talking identically the same message because somebody gave an exact same thing and we're just pushing it uh so and again i imagine that you don't see it only in emails you throw it in blog posts and you see it in linkedin link they're all the same now linkedin i even see it in in marketing like campaigns uh posters uh websites i've seen like 16 i'm not joking i've seen 16 websites uh for companies that do similar stuff that have almost to the word and the punctuation the exact same message and i understand that the world is large and these things might you might not bump into them but uh guys if you're in the industry like it is uh apparent who copies whose homework uh you know what yes basically what you're seeing is that like people will try to replicate the successful results of someone else and that's not a new thing that's just by using ai just faster replication of someone else's success results that will produce the same outcome as the person before right so not not really actually sorry just to no that's not what i mean what i mean is that we i see a lot of people prompt the same thing give me a linkedin post about uh account based marketing right and that's the line that they put in they get the exact same poor poor boring output and we just post it or we just put it on the blog post or we just use it for outreach so it would be great if we could prompt in a way or if we were to copy thought leaders or copy people that are super successful what i see happened is uh generic content being mass produced and pushed everywhere with no quality control but you're forgetting something people are lazy right that's a major impact on everything that you've just said right and don't get me wrong i mean 10 years ago it was i'm going to share with you an album template that your team can replicate check my ebook and basically replicate the same thing now is i'm going to share with you my prompt and basically do this in charge of it it's the same thing and why is it incentivized in this way because now uh people are just hitting a enter on something that was copying and pasted right and it's basically if the same prompt is there same output will be over here the way it's reshared is the same way was reshared when we everyone shared our ebooks about templates that were more successfully working now they're saying i'm going to share with you a successful prompt it's the same thing but i think i think if you look at it from another perspective because one of the things that again we're talking about shallow ai prompting that people don't know how to do this and we're coming back to the same issue that i see and this is what companies will keep doing wrong which is that they're not thinking creatively enough about this because personally so we run a consultancy i have all the marketing i run basically all of our sales right now because george is in assignments and i do our finances all of it and i do a bunch of other things on top of that as you know as founders it is it's a lot to do and when you look at doing prompting that's not going to help me i need bots to do my work for me it's not going to help me that i do prompting i need to build systems for how to support what i'm doing and when you look at companies that we are working with ongoingly we see that they haven't even started doing the ideation about doing a bot that can replace i think the the thought process around this is so skewed kelly just posted maybe we should be teaching creative prompts for enablement everyone needs to understand how to prompt if they're going to keep their job even in junior positions we need to understand how to build bots to be us more efficiently because bots you can build to create tonality you can build them to research a certain way you can build bots for whatever whatever you need them to do or you can use systems for it because there are plenty of systems for having bots for specific purposes right but we need to work on i have a team of four assistants now that's how i see it who just ongoingly supports what i'm doing and enhances me it's like putting on an iron man suit and suddenly i can fly and if all organizations pushed to the employees that they need to train in how to do this with the concept of let's just build bots to replace your time with a bot spending time instead we will grow as organizations in our skill set and as our skill set enhances our creativity in what we can make with this will increase as well i don't know if you agree elena because we will jump into sort of what you guys have started with but that's my point i think we need to stop we need to get engaged and start understanding what is possible and start from another perspective in uh whenever i have to fill out the form and i have to pick up how many employees i have i always think about that because right now i'm at 30 million in ar and i have 140 employees and yet i feel like filling out in the form that i have 5 000 employees maybe more because of the agents that we build yeah and it becomes super confusing it's like well how many employees i have like the human kind i don't know on paper i think 140 but i'm getting superpowers like i said like iron man everybody gets ironman superpowers and the sky is the limit and i think if you don't address that as an individual because we're obviously all of your teams is people if we address all of them and give all of them superpowers this way or make sure they can build it for themselves the people who will enhance with ai this way will not not have a job the people who don't though that's going to be a challenge so if we combine collab with ai and understanding how to build that and you combine that with the ability to actually exercise and connect with people because i believe that's a super big strong point to be able to actually form relationships that's a perfect setup but we need to get our people moving in our teams we need to get them to move to a point where they start doing and experimenting with this and if we're not there yet we need to start doing it now but the whole capitalism is going to shift towards this concept of a one-man company because um it's becoming more and more it used to be that when people would ask me about my company they would ask me how many how many people i have working for me and that was like uh how you'd measure success like even when i was working for big companies and i was like growing in my org charts i would get paid more if i had if i was managing more people and i would angle to get more territory and that would be like the way to be uh successful and now in the sas conversation when i talk to founders i'm impressed if they have like one employee and 10 million in ar i'm like whoa you you're superman and i see that the conversation is changing and it's super sad it's it's super sad that we no longer look at employment and providing employment to our ecosystem and we mostly look at efficiencies but i think that while it's sad on one side because not everybody's an entrepreneur and not everybody wants to start a company and providing employment there's some hope that most people can provide some service and they can be of service to their their community and be enhanced with agents and as a result there's more opportunities for people to be one person company and providing for themselves i just want to add one thing here uh to take a bit of an opposite approach uh us us empowering and as uh we can see ai as having superpowers uh at the end of the day i hate to to sort of bum bum people out now but it is tooling it is it is tools so i think it's about it's it's high time that we start training people in creative thinking because the the the big difference in the one person companies are figuring out what service can you provide either it is to your company to your community to your immediate circle has also to do with creative thinking and this is this is a hard to duplicate and b it is uh highly soft skills have always been underestimated but uh and underdeveloped both in organization and in people's interests uh but uh it is now becoming a necessity and it will for me be uh sort of a breaking point where it is uh required to either stay employed or to succeed uh because prompt engineering is one thing but what you want to prompt for uh or how can you stand out either as individuals as a company has to do yes with relationship building but it has to do with creative thinking just as much in my view elia yes i just have to talk in on this one just because like what are the mistakes that companies are currently making they are hiring people from for the wrong positions that's number one because majority of the job positions could have been done better using bots or ai or whatever it is so they are not mapping out where ai is coming to hand they are just going with the generic i need 10 sales people 21 video to service the sales people and that's completely off uh yeah second thing that companies need to adopt you is if you have a leader who don't know how to turn a b player into an eight player through coaching mentorship management how would you expect the same leader to learn about on how these things should behave just an honest opinion right bad input bad output is what you're saying and that that makes sense for all tooling i feel like yeah so i i agree with that and that's going to be a challenge as long as people run companies i think right um we have seven minutes left of the webinar i will do another question because i wanted to ask where you guys have started but what i wanted to to instead ask each of you is so there's a bunch of people in this webinar and there will be surely more people watching afterwards uh what would you what if you are addressing c level today what would you say would be a thing to do tomorrow like what are we going home and doing tomorrow based on this webinar and the input we're getting do you want to start george uh yeah i would say that from a strategic perspective we need to start thinking about uh what we what everybody sort of touched on when it comes to how to utilize how to increase efficiencies in a more pragmatic and realistic manner and also i think that most management teams even in sas in that we are in technology have a pretty poor understanding of what's available and what's possible to do and that is to an extent is fed by the fact that from the topic that we start with that we are a bit overwhelmed with information technology is moving fast and i don't think we have a decent grasp of uh how to do what alina talks about how do you end up having one quality assistant in your um in your arsenal right so we need to start with educating ourselves and we need to start with having in my opinion ideally kpi for your management team to get caught up on how to utilize new technologies thank you so much alina do you want to go next sure i would think that yes would be great to have all the agents that optimize for all the efficiencies and have the knowledge and start training the team and then all of those things are table stakes but there's something else that's probably less on people's mind yet i believe that's a mistake not to be on people's mind which is the cohesiveness of the team that operates under you as a ceo and um the reason why i mention is because us humans were not meant to do great things alone we're only made to do great things when we have a team that's very strong and if you look at history you have many instances where a very small team is a lot strong a very small motivated cohesive team is a lot stronger than an army and in order to get that kind of cohesion especially these days when everything is so hard when you see the world is falling apart around you and you look at your company as your identity because we're a lot of our time at work that feeling of belonging that you're part of a team that's not unbelievable you're being a part of whatever what you're doing in order to maintain your position as a leader so you as and see the great generals and great people that have changed the world. Like on Monday, we are celebrating Martin Luther King in America for him bringing this beautiful equity in America where people are treated equally and they can vote. He was only able to do that because he brought people together. And if you don't have that skill, even outside of work, if you don't have that skill of bringing people together, it's a lot harder to operate. That's very sound advice. And that is probably something that people looking at a webinar like this or any AI, because everything is AI now, is not thinking about at all. And it's the same with empathy or training creative skills or training people connecting skills to make sure that the organization can be cohesive because they are connected to each other. Thank you so much. It's definitely on my mind. Yeah, I get it. Ilya? My point of view that we are going straight into the future like the WALL-E cartoon where everyone is in front of a PC and nobody is communicating to each other on a spaceship somewhere around the world. And you are going to be desoscillated one to another as the time comes just because people are feeling that they should not expose about themselves too much at this time of everything is shareable and everything is understandable to other people. But bottom line, it is what it is, right? And I'm going to try and be practical to everyone who is actually listening to this webinar tomorrow. Basically, what I did, I faced the challenge. I didn't have the sales velocity to actually hire salespeople at a company which had a very low conversion value, right? And this is like my take out for it. So what I did, I actually implemented AI into the systems by pre-qualifying all of the user base and the audiences that can actually make sense for a human interaction to happen between the conversion value and when is the right time for a person to interact with them. So instead of hiring salespeople, I hired success people who actually helped me out these people because AI helped me to identify the key areas which are these customers and like meaning everything about them. Companies, websites, ideal audiences, how they grow their business, stuff like that. Everything was conducted by AI and I just empowered my success team to actually do a better job by understanding their needs. And that was all there is. So yes, we can talk on a very high level here that pretty much it will overcome the world and chances are it will. Let's be honest. And will people just stay out of jobs? Probably it will happen just because if people are not adapting to the changes. Yeah, it's pretty much it's always been there like that. Like in industrial revolution happened, people who were like doing their hammers, they were out of jobs. And the same thing will happen once the AI takes full effect and the generational changes happen into the C-level executives and the C-level positions and it's going to be who is prepared to adopt versus who is not. It's not. So basically, accept and work in the environment we're in. That's the advice. You have to because otherwise than that, it is what it is. We are at the end of the webinar. I will end with my point that has come from this webinar. Actually, I had another point when it came to what I would advise. And my advice would be to go home, sit down at ChatGDP, build a bot and have that bot help you increase the empathy in your employee team. That's my advice. How can we work on empathy in our employee team? So get a bot that you build. Based on that, that is the purpose to help you help your business become more empathetic. That is my end line for this webinar. Sarah, should we build a ChatGDP on that? We should, right? How to do this? Yes, I agree. Because I think it's a super important part because I've been thinking about SoftGest this entire webinar. And I believe that this is a thing that we are increasingly breaking down in people right now with the media streams that we are receiving. So empathy is key. And thank you, everyone, for attending. If you have any questions for any of us, please feel free to find us on LinkedIn. And thank you so much for joining. Bye, guys. Thank you, Sarah, for organizing. Great to meet you.