No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
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?
00:20:00 · Jake Stauch
[00:20:00] S0: Yep. So when we deploy these software engineers, I think what's really important is we actually never build custom features. We don't build bespoke product capabilities, and luckily for our category, no one asks us to. Everything that people ask for is something that every other customer is going to want at some point. Maybe they impact the prioritization, but it's still something we've always wanted in the platform. Now because it is a cogen platform on the hood, what you build in Serval is very, unique. So the password reset workflow for one company is gonna be very different, shockingly, than the password reset for another. Same with onboarding and offboarding and all these different automations internally, they look very different, but that's just baked into the core primitives of the platform. Serval almost becomes the IDE, right, for the IT department and other departments to build their automations and manage them at scale. So what we do do is if we look and we see the same customer building the same automations over and over and over again, and having to customize them and and build them in the product in the same way, we start to consider, hey, should that be a first class feature in the product? So one example is we saw a lot of customers building workflows to detect knowledge based articles that were out... Conflicting or out of date. Mhmm. And so we said, hey. We should just do that automatically. And we we had customers that, you know, would would set up automations to reclaim old licenses. So licenses for software you're paying for that no one is using, let's automatically cancel those subscriptions. Well, we just decided to build that on the platform. So it is a way for us to kind of test the waters of what should be really first class features versus what should stay as automations in Serval.