No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:14:31 · Sarah Guo, Jake Stauch, Elad Gil
[00:14:31] S2: Is there, like, a story or a win you can share as to... You know, people would be taking a big risk going with you to replace a very embedded incumbent. Right? It's a investment of their own time. I assume it's, like, personal risk. Like, why do that, or is there is there an experience where people have already gone through to the other side? [00:14:52] S0: I think we have to convince ourselves and our customers that Serval is the way you get promoted at work. It it can't be the fact that Serval is a risk that you take to hopefully get something on the other side. We have to convince customers that you do this, and you're gonna make your career. You're not just gonna not get in trouble, but you're actually gonna get a promotion. [00:15:10] S1: And this is top down. Right?
00:15:10 · Elad Gil, Jake Stauch
[00:15:10] S1: And this is top down. Right? [00:15:11] S0: Top down. So we sell into the C level across the IT leadership, and in many cases, and then distribute it into other departments. And that is the message is this is... People built their career on ServiceNow. You're gonna build your career on this next generation, and we're seeing this play out. So one of our largest customers is Fox. Fox Corporation adopted Serval company wide, and the person who led that migration on ground level actually got nominated to be the MVP of the entire company. Wow. And and got an award for his work there, and that is really what we're about, is we're convincing our customers, saying, like, this is the way to not just prove that you're you're useful to your organization, but to prove that you might be the most essential person to your company because you're leading this change. And we're so pivotable... Pivotal to the AI transformation story that I think it's a... It's something we can sell really nicely to our customers. [00:15:59] S1: When you started Serval, I think you were very, adept at thinking ahead. Right? So you knew coding agents or coding would get better. You knew there was this way of transformation, you kind of identified the good market segment to go after. What do you predict will happen in the next two, three years, not only for your company, but for adding more broadly? Is there something else you're seeing on the horizon that you're very excited about, or a big shift that you see coming?
00:16:19 · Jake Stauch, Elad Gil
[00:16:19] S0: I think consumer often gives us a win... Window into what's gonna happen next in the enterprise, and it all... It doesn't always look the same, but I think it's a it's a nice window. So I'm very bullish on what do personal agents look like in the enterprise. I think in the same way that email and Slack and these tools transformed how we communicate at work, I think personal agents will also be a big part of that. I think everyone will have their personal agent that does tasks for them, that delegates to other personal agents, and so your agent will talk to other agents at work. So I'm really excited about that. But then how do we secure that in a world of increasing cybersecurity risk and increasing concerns at large enterprises around what's happening with everyone's agents taking action in all their computers and and using their browsers? And so that tension between what employees, consumers want out of their personal agents at work and what enterprises need from a governance perspective, I think, is really interesting. And I think there's gonna be a lot of opportunity in that in that tension of [00:17:15] S1: Do you think there'll be a separate personal and work agent? Think so. [00:17:19] S0: I think so. In the same way that I have a Gmail and [00:17:21] S1: I have a Exactly. [00:17:22] S0: Yeah. A corporate email. Yeah.
00:17:22 · Jake Stauch, Sarah Guo
[00:17:22] S0: Yeah. A corporate email. Yeah. [00:17:25] S2: If there's a premise that... I I I mean, there's a bunch of different ideas here, but one is that, you know, exceptions or access control is gonna get complex and require a different level of scale. Right? Another is that you're just going to have more automations overall because people... You know, if you make it easy, people are going to extend in all different places. Are there, like, core design principles beyond code generation should be the actual form of automation that you have put into the product today that reflect that? [00:17:57] S0: I think the biggest one is the software development life cycle, something that we take for granted in engineering context of the, hey. There's actually, a dev environment, and then there's staging, and then there's prod, and there's like these gates between them, and maybe you've got, you know, branches that people can develop on that's not gonna harm the other systems. [00:18:13] S2: And sorry, just to be clear, that's not how IT automation works today.
00:18:13 · Sarah Guo, Jake Stauch, Elad Gil
[00:18:13] S2: And sorry, just to be clear, that's not how IT automation works today. [00:18:17] S0: It does in some cases, but I think most new AI products are not embracing that. They're basically saying, hey. Let's build these cool agents and ship to production. But this idea of, hey. You have to actually follow an SDLC process if you're a large enterprise. A large financial institution is not just going to ship new agent capabilities without a a review and user acceptance testing and and all these checks. Exactly. And so I think that's something we think about a lot is what is going to convince the largest companies in the world to adopt this technology, not just what is powerful and cool and something we're excited to get in the hands of customers? [00:18:49] S1: Feels like it takes a lot of AI companies, particularly if they're vertically centric, a year or two to figure this out, sometimes longer. And it's interesting to watch the whole industry now adopting both the forward deployed motion, starting to think through software development life cycle, compliance, other aspects of the enterprise in a way that was almost missing.
00:18:49 · Elad Gil, Jake Stauch, Sarah Guo
[00:18:49] S1: Feels like it takes a lot of AI companies, particularly if they're vertically centric, a year or two to figure this out, sometimes longer. And it's interesting to watch the whole industry now adopting both the forward deployed motion, starting to think through software development life cycle, compliance, other aspects of the enterprise in a way that was almost missing. [00:19:05] S0: Think in some cases, they never get there. Like, some companies just, they look at what enterprise software takes, and they decide, we don't really want to build that. And it takes, you know, you look at the story of a lot of these companies that we mentioned earlier that have gone down market, I think sometimes they do look at the opportunity to go and build for the enterprise, and it requires a whole different set of building principles and products that you have to build, and some just don't choose to do it, and they they seed that ground to other companies. And and we've chosen to say, like, hey, give me your your gnarliest problems, and we're going to solve them and make AI transformations possible in this this crazy world, in this world of risk and and governance concerns. [00:19:43] S2: When you have your, you know, deployment sort of in customer environment engineers and then ongoing automation specialists, and then you have the core platform, how do you decide what is actually brought into the core platform or, you know, in every individual customer's environment?