Venture with Grace
00:20:05 · Ashley Kramer
[00:20:05] S1: Yeah, I think it depends on the customer. And again, back to my point, there are a lot of customers, digital natives, for example, that wanna self serve. And so of course, have you to make sure you have the right documentation, but also the right workflow to get them through as fast as possible. And so I would argue that there's probably a lot of the more regulated industries, FinServe, healthcare, they're probably not gonna self serve. And I don't think you have to do a deep analysis on that. You know that they're gonna have needs like HIPAA compliance and regulations, data residency in certain countries. And so from that perspective, understanding based on customer intent and the chemistry and the makeup of the type of company it is, who is best to send it through a self serve type workflow. When it comes to the AI SDR, for inbound right now, let's say from a form fill, you get the option to, and we have intense signals on, oh no, this needs to go, guardrails really, this is a bank, we wanna send this to a human so we can help them and help them understand versus maybe a digital native that's just trying to get better support to build an agent on their own or build on our API. So you have those guardrails to always have the human fallback, but also help foster them through quicker for the good of them when that's probably more of the intention. And of course, we continue to learn lessons as we watch how this workflow's working and how the agents are handing off to each other. But then what that gives us extreme focus on is those customers that do need the human to human. Those customers that it's a great opportunity to take FTEs in and embed them alongside their organization so we can make sure it's customized to their needs, they're able to scale across operations, support, marketing, sales, whatever their needs are, and then of course, to benefit their customers. And so I wouldn't say that we have a mix in mind of what will be self serve versus enterprise or what will be SMB mid market enterprise, but it's more about where do we take the powerful team that we have and see across all of the different parts of the business, because it's not just sales that is of
00:22:21 · Grace Gong
[00:22:21] S0: course using AI, and be able to focus their time on who actually needs the human time versus who would actually probably prefer just getting through quickly becoming a customer and understanding how to benefit their customers. For sure. Speaking of the customers, I wanna talk about, since you mentioned about the banks, this probably requires different requirement. And for enterprise, what would you say is the biggest use case? Would it be customer service or would it be... Obviously, this morning I was pitching ElevenLabs to another founder about... I was like, Oh, you need to incorporate the voice first function because it's more human. It's making people feel like it's really easy to being onboarded. Because right now, whenever I email people, I just use the voice function these days too. It's not typing in an email. But I'm curious when... I want to start with what is the biggest use case for enterprise or for the people who are the heavy users of ElevenLabs? And when it comes to selling these to these companies, would it be more towards, I already have relationship from my OpenAI or... I'm just using you guys. From some existing relationship, where would it be... I guess which department would you really go after? Because it's really tricky nowadays, every department could be using a voice feature, but how do you identify the positioning of ElevenLabs
00:23:56 · Ashley Kramer
[00:23:56] S1: for them? I think one thing I've definitely learned in my time in AI, which extended all the way back to GitLab, we've been talking about AI for a long time, so even before GitLab, but all the way through the entire journey. I think the thing that became very clear to me from an enterprise perspective is everybody believes in AI, everybody knows they need to have it in their organization, everybody wants to transform, but a bank doesn't wanna hear what healthcare is doing. Healthcare doesn't care what digital natives are doing. What they really need to understand is use cases specific to their needs. And so I would answer that as yes, everybody has a customer call center support contact, maybe not everyone, but the majority of companies that can be transformed, that's a great route and more of like a horizontal everybody has at play. But where we've started getting more specific is in the vertical they're in the industry needs. So you can think about from a bank perspective, helping with wealth management or fraud detection. Within healthcare, being able to help the healthcare companies with more of the patient scheduling and the reach outs after and that coordination and communication. The one that I really love that I can actually name publicly is we work with SevenRooms, which is a DoorDash company, which does reservations. And I had this personal experience before I joined ElevenLabs. I had a week before I came and my husband and I were in LA and I thought, you know, I really wanna go to this restaurant tonight, but I had to change my reservation and I couldn't do it online anymore. And I was like, Ugh, I don't wanna call them because they're probably not gonna answer, so maybe I just won't go. I ended up calling them and it was, I didn't realize it, it was an ElevenLabs agent that got on really quickly, a motive, said to me, Oh yeah, we can move your reservation from 06:15 to 07:30, no problem, we'll see you then. And then I get here and I realized that we're actually doing that for over, I think it's over 600 different restaurants. It's increased reservations for them by 25% and handled over 400,000 calls. Wow. And so that's the impact of again, so that's more in like the hospitality space, being able to have those when there's a busy wait staff or it's after hours I was just not gonna go to the restaurant.
00:26:17 · Ashley Kramer
It wasn't one of the ones that take your credit card and they would've missed out on that reservation. And so again, that's just an example of an industry specific where you can go in and have a point of view, insurance claims. Claims is somebody gets into an accident, it's already really stressful. And then we've all been through the journey of then you have to fill out like a 100 different forms and then one doesn't get filled out, right? What if you could just have that conversation and you have a really empathetic agent coming back to you and helping you, talking you through it. And so insurance very often we go in and say, let's look at your claims process. And the other thing that we've learned about human psychology through what we've done is humans don't tend to interrupt each other, it's rude. And so even though you're on the phone with this person and you know they're struggling and they're trying to get you there, but they're probably reading an FAQ, you just get frustrated and listen and the call takes twenty minutes longer than it needed to, an agent, can cut it off and say, I'm good, I already did that, I already know this, let's keep going. You can have this back and forth. The other thing that I will say about this entire agentic world when it comes to conversational AI is we deeply understand the context behind it. So I was on with a human in retail a few weeks ago, I ordered something in a store, were supposed to send it, they did not send it. So I was on with a human, she did a great job, she had it resolved fairly quickly. Then I get the survey and I'm on five minutes, how was your service? Five. Okay, what could we have done better? Nothing. So finally I hung up, I don't even know if they captured it. But if they would have had our models backing that and they would have been an agent, they would have known I was super happy. I told her she was great. And I said, thank you. And the whole conversation was pleasant, she was very responsive. They could have gathered that, had a better CSAT because they have that connected experience of the emotions during a call. And what happens as another channel that comes through to connect the entire three sixty of the customer versus the flat context that we get in like text conversations or forms in the ways that we've been doing it today.
00:28:37 · Ashley Kramer, Grace Gong
So long answer to it's industry specific, how we go in, but I also think regardless of how we go in, we have the opportunity to have that complete customer connection and three sixty experience because we also capture the emotions and the things that happen on the call and the intent behind the call as part of that. [00:28:56] S0: I love that. Especially, I feel like it's probably your favorite industry, the food and bath industry. [00:29:02] S1: I mean, whose isn't? Exactly. [00:29:06] S0: So I guess when you're at OpenAI, I have to ask these open questions because I feel like I'm sure a lot of the audience probably very curious about your journey there. So when you're thinking about, I guess, expand something into enterprise, I feel like a company always have some sort of core identity, which is you either is a consumer first company or you're enterprise first company compared to, I think, Anthropic Claude, OpenAI is more focused on consumer because it was, ChatGPT, everyone started using at home, right? So what would you say was the biggest challenge to scaling it to enterprise that people may not think of?
00:29:48 · Ashley Kramer
[00:29:48] S1: Yeah, I mean, I think that there is beauty to having a consumer side and an enterprise, ElevenLabs has that as well. We have the creative studio that individual influencers use and artists, which is phenomenal. It's just, it comes down to the perception that you have to manage. It's really brand and perception, not product, because even at OpenAI, when they launched ChatGPT for consumer, they also were selling enterprise, they had APIs exposed for enterprise. It's just the market took off, and that's kind of at ElevenLabs, same thing. A lot of people say, Oh, ElevenLabs is the voice company. We absolutely are at our core and we have the most world class researchers, not one that has left the company because they believe so much in what we're doing. And so we do own that and we are the best at it. However, we also have all these agentic capabilities that I just talked about. And so for me, it's less about, it's more about brand and perception and it almost becomes a marketing exercise. And to me, no matter what company I've been at, and ElevenLabs and my team certainly know it's my perspective here, being able to have these powerful enterprise customers become successful based on the value you're providing and even go speak on your behalf. We have our eleven eleven conference coming up in New York on 11/11, of course. And the speakers haven't been announced yet, so I think the comms seem to be very angry at me if I said who, but over the next few weeks, you'll start seeing who's speaking. That's the beauty of, okay, yeah, we have the creative side, that's great. And similar to where I was at OpenAI with ChatGPT, but now you have all of these powerful customer use cases and stories and the value you're extracting. And I think that's when the market perception starts to change is when you have these customers that are saying, this is the value that we're getting out of this, and this is what the AgenTeq platform is doing for us, and this is what we've built on top of your models. That's where you really start to see the change when you have these companies that maybe start as consumer or as consumer and enterprise, but one perception wise takes off more.