Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Jesse Zhang, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: Exactly. And then you think about it from the CEO and they're reporting this to the board or something. It's hey, my entire engineering org said that they're 50% more productive. This is a worthy investment because these people are all paid this much now we can accelerate the product. We can accelerate everything. Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: Do you think that the future is—I want to talk about brands and how a given company might want its agent to feel and sound that an agent might be a way to express brand culture, style, tone, whatever. I want to talk about that. But do you think the end state here is that each company sort of has almost a named personified representative that you just come to expect to interact with, and it's not just customer service issues, but it's sales issues? You ask it for advice on what shoe to buy or whatever it might be, and that that's all integrated or that you'll have different agents for different parts of the company? What I'm trying to ask is: what does the future of a company's agent or agents look like in the natural end state five years from now or something?
· Jesse Zhang
[00:00:00] S1: Yeah, I would say that in the natural end state, it is more unified for the exact reason you listed, which is people want a unified brand out there. Brand's very important to them, and for some businesses, more important than others. But eventually this becomes the front end for the business. And so that means it's both how you gain new customers, but also how you support the existing ones and make them retain more and so on. It's almost in the limit. If you're working with a bank or airline or telecom company or whatever, the agent could be the only thing that most users interact with. They don't even have to touch your mobile app, they don't even have to go down your website ever. They just have this agent where they're authenticated, it knows everything about them. It has all the context of your previous conversations, it has memory, and it can just solve your issue. It can take actions for you. You need to book a flight, you need to upgrade a seat. You have questions about this or that. So I think that's the exciting vision that we're building towards. And in some ways, we often call this a concierge, just a digital concierge that can do everything for you. I mean, you also have to be pragmatic on both sides. You know, start with a clear use case. But I think that is where folks are building towards. And so in the near term, I do think that different teams—because the reality is that at these large companies, different teams have different budgets and they make different decisions. And so they might have different agents, but long-term, you either need to have a unified system that ties them together, a unified framework, or they could just be literally the same agent.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Jesse Zhang
[00:00:00] S0: Is the right analogy here a company's website? They'll think about their agent they think about their website. A lot of work will go into it. It'll look and feel a certain way. It'll be kind of a unified interface with the world. Is that a clean analogy? [00:00:00] S1: I think that's a good analogy. Just a front end. It's a UI but instead of visual UI, it's a conversational UI. [00:00:00] S0: How do you feel brands pulling personality requests in their agent out of you? What do they care about? They want it to be nice, they want it to be concise, they want it to be funny. How has that dimension evolved since you started? [00:00:00] S1: People already, almost always already have brand guidelines because they need to show brand guidelines to their human agents to train them. The nice part is that they already have all this training process for the humans and you should ideally be able to apply it in the same way as to the AI. And so they'll have hey, you need to do this, you need to always be confident. Sometimes folks don't want the agent to apologize, sometimes people really want to be apologetic. So people just have different preferences and that needs to be taught to the AI in an efficient way. That's also kind of a lower throughput way of communicating. I mean the other way that you can show the agent is just give it a lot of examples. So here's examples of what great looks from our top agents and just learn from that. [00:00:00] S0: What is the very biggest—you're almost afraid to admit it because it feels so big—version of what Decagon could be?
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Jesse Zhang
[00:00:00] S0: What is the very biggest—you're almost afraid to admit it because it feels so big—version of what Decagon could be? [00:00:00] S1: The reason why we're excited and we feel the market is so massive is that—yeah, at the end of the day what we are building towards is this concept of becomes a new UI for the product. Just think about how much these large companies invest in their mobile app or their website and this is literally how everyone communicates with them. So this could be a way where eventually the way any user interacts with any brand is through an AI agent and for all sorts of different use cases. It benefits our customers for the AI to have all this context because it can seamlessly flow between things. A lot of them want to do sales-type use cases at the end of a support flow or vice versa. That's exciting. [00:00:00] S0: What internal context or things do the best customers have that make this better? So you mentioned brand guidelines. Maybe there's a write-up on what the brand guidelines are or whatever. What are the internal assets that companies have or don't have that if they have them, it's made the Decagon experience way, way better?
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Jesse Zhang
[00:00:00] S0: What internal context or things do the best customers have that make this better? So you mentioned brand guidelines. Maybe there's a write-up on what the brand guidelines are or whatever. What are the internal assets that companies have or don't have that if they have them, it's made the Decagon experience way, way better? [00:00:00] S1: Number one thing is just APIs for the AI to use. So APIs to take action. APIs look up data. APIs to reformat things. That is often hey, if you have those, you already know that within the first month it's already going to be a great experience. If you don't yet, then we should try to build towards that as soon as possible so that the AI can actually achieve that elevated experience. That's the main thing. Most people already have documentation. It might not be up to date, but we can help with that. Most people already have SOPs, I guess. And then we are able to use that and generate our format. We call them AOPs. Agent Operating Procedures. They're just SOPs but for AI. And then brand guidelines. I said, people usually have those as well. So you just ingest them.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: We were talking last time about in any business, but certainly in yours, the three key stakeholders being your team talent that you have to recruit. And I want to talk about that in detail. Capital investors and customers. Maybe suppliers too is a fourth category, but especially interested in the first three. And the last time we were together I asked you which one do you have trouble with? And we laugh because you said, well, definitely not investors. Talk a little bit about the demand from investors to invest in companies yours and how that feels. What are they doing to try to give you more money, get on the cap table? How competitive does it feel? What does that feel right now? Because it does seem there's a handful of companies yours that are in one of these white-hot areas that have key traction, that have great teams and basically every investor wants to be involved in those companies. What does that feel like?