Venture with Grace
00:14:50 · Ashley Kramer
[00:14:50] S1: a big fan of them. And again, I think this is where it can uniquely tie to ElevenLabs Foundation and what we do is the future of sales, I believe, still does need humans to a certain level. When you're investing heavily as a customer in AI, I've customers tell me like, this has to work, I'm putting my job on the line, I'm asking for a lot of money from the board to make this successful. They need that relationship. They need to, if anything is feeling off or going wrong to be able to text or call me or my team directly, like you need humans involved as part of that. But to have more human connection time, you need to also remove some of the things that maybe we shouldn't be wasting human time and brain power on. And so the AI SDR is one that I very deeply believe in, and we actually just launched our version of it a few weeks ago. It's named Dom after the person who was the brains behind it, but we all were using it internally here. So our AI SDR Dom now has in one month saved one hundred and eighty hours of my SDR team's time. It's converted millions of dollars in pipeline. And as of last week, it handed off to our AIAE agent and closed two deals. And so the impact is one customers get better around the clock support. Right now we're using it for inbound. So it's not necessarily doing outbounding, but they're getting 27 or 20 fourseven support. And sometimes, you know, in off hours actually already have a meeting scheduled for that following week. So they're getting better support. I hate to tell myself this, but there are customers and instances and segments that don't wanna talk to salespeople and they would rather self serve. And so in that case, being able to convert those deals without having human interaction, but be able to support them and nurture them through the process, make them comfortable. And what we're working on next is the post sales support. So an AI CSM or customer experience type rep. So same thing, if they don't feel like they need the deep human support or FDEs, which are also very valuable and so we wanna reserve their time for deep complex enterprise systems, building solutions with them. And so my team is leveraging AI SDR, AI AE and AI CSM. We also have a sales coach that even I use that you can role play going in to talk to the CEO of this Fortune 100 company.
00:17:22 · Ashley Kramer
They just had an earnings call and I know there's sensitivities around this. Help me with some objection handling, help me with my messaging, being able to have that coaching and many different ways that we're continuing to leverage it. Because again, every second that we're not spending on those things, which are impactful and important, but we can be sitting with customers. We can be deeply understanding their business and how to help them with what we provide. And just so happens what we provide is human like conversation and models that are able to have this expressiveness that can handle a lot of those conversations via Genetic AI. And so the beauty of it is that we get to use our own technology and now we can bring it to customers so they can have the power of that AI interaction and conversational layer so that they can then go better serve their customers.
00:18:20 · Grace Gong, Ashley Kramer
[00:18:20] S0: For sure. I'm curious, when you're thinking about... I again have so many questions, but I think one of the things I'm curious about is nowadays building as a CRO, when you're building out your own sales team, obviously there is FTE, there is the AI agents. Are they all sitting under the sales department? Maybe what would be... Since you recently joined the company and coming from a company like OpenAI, which also moves extremely fast, then you are running the enterprise department for the sales side. And I'm curious, how do you think about... I believe in my research, ElevenLabs did $600,000,000 last year. I mean, you don't have a comfort, but like, I'm just, rumors us. Then But by midyear we had announced it. [00:19:08] S1: So by this middle of this year, I think it was around June. [00:19:11] S0: Yeah, like around there. So, and then there is half of them is self serve and the half of them is enterprise sales based off my trajectory answers. I'm curious when you're thinking about expanding the sales, would it be more towards let's go after the Fortune 100? Or would it be more towards, let's double down on consumer or slash self serve? I know you guys have different tier for enterprise, for creator, for just the beginner ish people. Where would you think the major amount of revenue gonna come from? How do you personally, from your experience, the sales at a company like OpenAI? You mentioned about the ten years lessons within one year. At least. What would be the things that you find very useful for the new role?
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.