Scaling Europe
00:11:17 · Nicolas Sharp
[00:11:17] S1: I think to a large extent, yes. And so I think that, you know, those see that I see this in my own usage, of course, that there is definitely massive utility to being able to use tools from a single place. Actually, especially when you want to do work across tools, that's really helpful. Now, it's difficult for those unified tools to sometimes get the results that you get from a dedicated tool. So as an example, we've done some benchmarking for Ask Attio. And there are significant advantages to using Ask Attio over MCP. Now, those advantages mostly come down to our ability to use the right model and sub agents for very specific tasks that we know are optimized for those sub agents and those prompts and for us to know exactly how to interact with the vector store and those sorts of things. And so you definitely see that specific harnesses can give you great utility over generic ones. And where we really see the difference is in speed and cost. So the benchmarks that we're releasing will show essentially that Ask Attio versus just using ChatGPT with the same model or the same orchestrating model, I should say, will return roughly similar results because fundamentally it is the same model underneath. But the harness will basically mean about a 6x time reduction and therefore cost reduction. And that's pretty significant. But equally, we want to meet the customer where the customer is. And so if the customer wants to do specific work in Claude or ChatGPT, that's great. We'll continue to make sure that our MCP is as good as it can be. And at the same time, we'll make sure that our own agents are as good as they can be too.
00:13:17 · Sebastian Johnson
[00:13:17] S0: We're living in this world where people talk about moats a lot and software can be replicated easily. You're obviously making this big bet on infrastructure architecture. You've also spoken a lot about universal context. Can you explain what that is and why that is so important?
00:13:33 · Nicolas Sharp
[00:13:33] S1: Yeah, absolutely. So I think I'll answer universal context first, then we can talk about modes. Universal context is essentially our is our is our is our vector store. And what it does is it gives a... You know, it gives the the sort of dream of CRM that we've always had for CRM, which is a true kind of understanding of a customer, a three sixty view of the customer. It essentially is... It it ties all of the activity that you have, all of the calls, all of the emails, all of those things, customer support tickets, etcetera, onto entities, and then makes that queryable by agents. Now that could be you using your own... It could be using MCP, it could be an agent that's customer facing, etcetera. But just having all of that context with vector search is pretty awesome. Now, in regards to moats, I think that tools, software that provides, that just access a tool is going be a pretty difficult thing to defend even in the short term. But I think that where the real value will lie is in these systems that facilitate large scale data governance and and all of the policies around how you want... What what do you want your customer experience to be? How do you want these things to interact with your customer? And how do you make sure that it's a dangerous thing? You really don't want to mess this stuff up. And that's where I think systems of record and these large workflow tools will continue to do really well. And actually, because of the scale that we're going to be operating at and because the amount of agents people are going have running, I think that they're going to become more and more important. So I wouldn't want to be a tool builder, but a platform builder that's delivering end results and doing the work, I think, is a good spot to be.
00:15:39 · Sebastian Johnson
[00:15:39] S0: And when you look at the market, you know, you are working with... You mentioned a bunch of them, Granola Modal. Think Sorbonne AI is using Granola. Yeah. You're working with, like, these amazing companies. Yeah. I think you even mentioned earlier, a lot of them are going to be quite tech enabled already. They are normally people who are ahead of the curve in terms of genetic adoption. How do you see that changing your own go to market? Is that your ICP at the moment? Or is there an element of getting people who may be slightly behind the curve, but you have to do some market education around the benefits? What does that look like?
00:16:09 · Nicolas Sharp
[00:16:09] S1: Yeah. Well, I mean, think the amazing thing about this is that we've now got this probably two or three abstraction layers added to our stack. And it used to be that writing code was extremely difficult. You had to really understand memory management, etcetera. Then we got memory safe languages, etcetera. And now we've got these two... These couple of extra layers of abstraction on top with agents. And what that's really done is it abstracts away a lot of the technical requirements needed to set up these large scale systems. And so we see a world where over time, tools will become more available to more people because more people will be looking for these kinds of outcomes. But they won't require that much technical ability to set up because the way that you'll set it up is through an agent. And you'll have this very consultative experience where you'll say, this is what I'm trying to achieve. This is how my business works. And you'll get a lot of advice on the way and a lot of help. And fundamentally, we'll end up with something that behind the scenes might be quite complex, but will will be very easy to set up. And in many ways, it's the same way that you know, now if you are to go and use something like Lovable, you don't have to be a software engineer. And even though what's happening behind the scenes is software engineering, you're you're operating at at a couple of layers above. And I think that will be the same for for what we do.
00:17:43 · Sebastian Johnson, Nicolas Sharp
[00:17:43] S0: And, look, in the last couple of minutes, I kind of wanna, I guess, like, step away from Attio. Yeah. Talk about your views building and scaling from London, you know? [00:17:50] S1: Yeah. [00:17:51] S0: What's this experience been like? And and how do you think it's changed? You know, you're one of the companies in The UK and Europe that is truly building a category leader in their fields. We're seeing more and more category leaders come out of The UK and Europe. What's been your experience building from London, and how has that changed over the last five years?