Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:20:58 · Alexa von Tobel, May Habib
[00:20:58] S1: the things I wanna give you a compliment on, which is Writer has built an incredible reputation on responsible autonomy, creating agents that act independently but remain really aligned to a company's values and compliance. I was Chief Digital Officer at Northwestern Mutual of Mass and Financial Firm, so when Yeah, you talk about [00:21:15] S0: they're also a customer. [00:21:16] S1: Yes. So when you talk about, you know, how much it matters that you can trust these autonomous agents to stay on brand, stay on brand values. Talk a little bit about how you've maintained trust at scale, because that's something... Obviously, you're ten years in, so you've had a lot of time, but that's a really hard thing to get, right, and to thread that needle, May. How have you done that?
00:21:42 · May Habib
[00:21:42] S0: Yeah. You know, the the way that we... I I kinda wanna answer your question in a meta way, because we're having, like, a philosophical Yeah. Love it. Let's do it. You know, like, a lot of the the trust we build is by not trying to do anything else other than make these customers successful. Right? If you look at the hyperscalers, you know, they're really trying to sell compute. And the, you know, labs have become full stack, but they're really still LLM API companies. You know, our ability to go in and say, we are the only full stack player that is not trying to do anything else means we can say, look, this 10 step process that you have to do this thing doesn't make sense anymore. We're not gonna just shift and lift it to AI. It really should look more like three steps. Right? And a lot of that is really questioning the assumptions around business process and org design and the calcification of legacy systems. Right? And so think of the question you just asked around brand and compliance. We can bake that in from the very first draft, but your compliance officer has to be Gabe. Right? Your brand team that may actually report to a different leader than digital, we see that all the time, right, has to be able to sit at the same. And so, you know, our technology forces a conversation because it is built in a way that agentically all the systems are talking to each other now, right? Like these silos don't exist in Writer. In natural language, you can get the guardrails to talk to the best practices, to talk to the customer data, to talk to the brand brain. Which means people need to now make decisions on how to operate more effectively and really get on the same page as to their goals. And I think the way we've built trust over time is to really never be selling anything beyond that, and to challenge the customer the way that we challenge ourselves. Sometimes our account teams are like, May, did you just kind of yell at a customer? I'm like, no, it's not yelling. I promise you they appreciate it. And the customer does come back and say, thank you for challenging me. Like, I kinda needed that kick in the pants, you know? And we do, like, that's, we we ask people to really question their assumptions. Like, what assumptions about your industry do you take for law that actually aren't? And, you know, we are looking for radical partners. Right?
00:24:19 · May Habib, Alexa von Tobel
People who are really willing to rethink their business, reinvent around AI versus sprinkle a little on top. May, one of the [00:24:27] S1: things that you're really talking to, and I I really wanna double click on it, which is there was so much surface area you could cover with Writer. At the end of the day, you're building agentic AI that can do things like write front office facing emails. You're you're focusing on companies that are heavy in compliance, health care, financial services. That's a lot of service area already. And one of the things you just said, which is that you guys have been maniacally focused about doing nothing other than that, And you even talked about some of these big companies, the very successful ones are calcified, and and their technology, in many cases, are decades old. Fifty years, seventy five years, eight... A hundred years. Northwestern Mutual, hundred and sixty years. Steadily, what you're saying is that your maniacal focus has just been this compounding benefit of trust because you are only promising to do one thing and do it extremely well with companies that probably are a little reticent to adopt AI because it's so new and they cannot afford to fail. How do you maintain focus? Because there's so much surface area you guys could cover, and I know how bright and ambitious you are personally. How do you keep everybody focused? What are your tricks on that?
00:25:47 · May Habib
[00:25:47] S0: Yeah. I mean, we we we... We're a we're a horizontal platform. Right? And so a customer, if they've got engineers and they're a sophisticated player, we've got the enablement. And people tell us all the time, like, I learned in an hour what had taken me weeks to do in Copilot studio. Right? We we get that a lot. But when we're selling to the Fortune 500, not everybody's got the engineering team that, you know, the creme de la creme financial services companies have. Especially in CPG and retail, like, a lot of these teams are badged to SIs. Right? And so we need to be able to make it very easy for the businesses' most technical people. So these might be data analysts, data scientists, to be able to really configure and customize and connect on their own without a lot of engineering support. And so, you know, we've been very user friendly both for technology heavy users and savvy users as well as, you know, your sophisticated business operations person from day one with a focus on front of office. And by being able to like really focus on front of office, we can get the customer to value in those first three to six months and we spread from there. And the first couple years really was like Wild West from a use case perspective, right? Like we said, okay, regulated industries is who cares the most about reliability and consistency at scale? Like AI slop, by the way, bothers everybody. But like inside of the Fortune 500, AI slop like gets people fired, right, in a way that just doesn't happen in other industries. So the focus on front office use cases has really been a result of like go to market focus versus platform focus. Like we are still a pretty horizontal platform. People use us for back office and finance and HR all the time. But in terms of, like, what we're trying to get a customer to do in the first ninety days and, you know, what connectors we're trying to hook up, which users we're trying to onboard, You know, there's a very strong sales and marketing bias.
00:28:04 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:28:04] S1: I wanna transition for the sake of time a little bit to where the world is headed. And again, like, you have been a thought leader in the category. You've been in this category for over a decade. And again, one thing I didn't even get to give you a nod to. You build your own foundational model, just like truly the the technical chops and the forward thinking that you have had have proven to be quite strong. Where is the world headed in your mind? And just give us a sense if we wake up in 2035, what does the world look like because of AI in your mind?
00:28:38 · May Habib
[00:28:38] S0: Yeah, totally. And and a lot of this has to do with the fact that we build our own foundation models. Now we are interoperable. You can bring your own model, but 90% plus of the volumes go through Palmyra. These are the workhorse models of AgenTic AI. And a lot of where we are going is a result of us having a research roadmap that we control and direct, right? Lots of folks in the enterprise really can only start productizing when something comes out of the labs, right, versus we're directing where model research is going. And self evolving and proactive LLNs is what we are most excited about. And to kinda take a step back as to why that's important. Right now, when you think about everything that we're doing, you know, the SaaS world of the last twenty or thirty years, the data was the intelligence because the know how was configured... Preconfigured in these systems via workflows and how the data connect together. Right? That's how we take unstructured data and make it structured. You know, the SaaS comes in with an opinion. In the world of AgenTic, we're gonna move from systems of record that are kind of human and workflow centric to systems of record that are agentic centric, that are really built around human and AI collaboration and agent to agent collaboration. And what that means is, right now we are sucking up all the data in a company and all of the insights, right, in people's heads. And companies are gentifying, right, that way of doing business. Well, the next era of models are gonna be able to suck up for a Northwestern Mutual all the ambient intelligence that the agents create while interacting with humans and interacting with each other. And, you know, I'll I'll give you I'll give you an example. In Writer today, if I'm using our Gong connector, right, and I say... And I do these kinds of things all the time. What people who are new to Writer had their first high level executive calls this week? Right? And I look at it, and then I send notes from me and Waseem, right, thanking them, congratulating them. They just had their first big call. Like, I note something that they did in the call, etcetera. Right? And that's all literally like three prompts in Writer. I can control all of that. Well, in in the first few times of doing that, right, Writer would pull in both sales calls, like prospect calls, as well as customer calls.