AI

“Prediction one is that this year and in the coming few years will be the era of the human-assisted AI. Take the most valuable knowledge workers, the high wage employees across your customer base, and figure out how to help them. Figure out how to take you know…”

“The impact of the early instantiation of machine learning in AI is having lasting impact in the software, and that will be impactful as we talk about the macro trends.”

“What are you trying to solve? Try and answer that first, and then work, work backwards to that, and then see how that technology fits into it, rather than, like, you know, I need chatbots, I need AI, and, like, trying to get everything to work, where that usua…”

“People think that it's just this thing that's just gonna work right out of the box, but it only is as good as the data that you feed into it, and it's only as good as your knowledge is, and how you're directing users to the right place.”

“It actually is a cost saver, and you're not going to be so headcount reliant the more system intelligence that you have to feed your team. So, That's what I would change, because we're still in too much of a manual process, and there are incredible tools out t…”

“And then selective AI deals, the outliers, Still, still play on 20, 21 levels. Typically if they show very high growth, and they race then on a, can race on something like a hundred XAR if it's like a very, you know, sought after and competitive process.”

“All the outlier rounds that raced on very high valuation have been AI rounds.”

“In terms of looking for new ideas, I think the team is spending 70 to 80% of their time looking at AI.”

“SBB collapsed, market multiples are down, and yet we have a platform shift to AI that is exciting everybody, and the IPO window seems to be reopening.”

“The learning is that the bigger SaaS companies are pretty fast to embrace AI, so it's not like they are the dinosaurs from the on-premise world that didn't manage to move to the cloud. If you look at what Intercom, HubSpot, Notion, Zendesk, and others are doin…”

“Before we did the survey this year, my expectation was that the napkin could look a bit like this year, meaning that if you're an AI, everybody wants to give you money at any valuation. And if you're not an AI, then, well, probably difficult. I think there is …”

“A huge percentage of what customers are asking actually is very simple. Or mid-level simple. It's not super complex. So, all of it went to the lower tiers, and what remained went to the higher tier, but since we were already staffed up there for the, for all o…”

“I said, of your 3.5 billion dollars, how much of your new money is going into AI? I think he said 80%.”

“Most of the stuff at Sastr is business process software. It's changing the way businesses do support, or sales, or marketing, or compliance or procurement, and AI probably is just going to make them a smidge better.”

“It's going to create more appetite for VCs to do deals, but only at the margin will it increase valuations. Only at the margin. Only where there's like hysteria to invest, like certain AI deals. But other than that, unless there's massive competition, valuatio…”

“I think there's a decent chance that whatever you're working on as a startup, as a use case, as a problem, It might be irrelevant. It might be like it's 1997, and you're working on a client server, on premise piece of software, and you're about to get the rug …”

“For the first time in 20 years, it's a blank canvas. It's complete artistic freedom. Especially in our area of B to B software. We can re-imagine everything.”

“Certainly iterative technologies, just embedding an AI in the workflows we do today. That's not the answer. That's not the disruption.”

“And if we were to say what year this is in the internet rollout, it's probably around 1998.”

“The alternative model is you just say, hey, we're just going to embed AI into everything. And then you're like, well, shoot, now my costs just explode. And also equally, you have this, like, you know, disadvantage, which is the power user is being subsidized b…”

“So actually this is sort of part of our, this is part of our theory on our pricing model is, is let's, let's create an instant win for the customer by just saying box has AI in it. Like, you know, if we were to start box over from scratch in 20, 23, AI would n…”

“We had one with David Sachs, who now has three billion at Kraft. And we had an offline discussion with Byron Dieter, who runs Bessemer's cloud practice. And they both said over 80% of our money in SaaS is going to AI.”

“I don't think there's gonna be any type of SPAC type bubble next year for AI.”

“There is so much demand for AI, even if it's not fully understood that if you go into, especially in the enterprise or more sophisticated parts of tech, if you don't have parity with AI, you're gonna lose deals.”

“That entire category by the end of next year will not, won't even resemble what it did. 24 months ago because of AI.”

“There is a version of AI that the web gets filled with spam and, you know, everything. I think that will happen and it doesn't matter because ultimately what we're looking for is that discernment, that quality.”

“I would say the majority of answers and the majority of questions are all AI driven. They're AI prompt driven. And then AIs are answering all these questions.”

“For the audience that I market to, it doesn't matter, and in fact, sometimes if you let them know that it was generated through AI, it has higher click-through rates.”

“The number of patents filed in 20, 21 in AI was essentially 30 times the number that was published six years earlier.”

“I'm not connecting those dots yet. I I'm not seeing that. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm just not seeing that from where we sit.”

“And for example, when I caught up with Byron Dieter, most recently from Bessemer, they're managing 10 or twenty million. Byron's done a ton of the best SaaS companies. If you don't know, he'll only do AI. There's exceptions of course, but if you're not AI firs…”

“You mentioned AI founders fund didn't really do AI. So even if you were dot AI the last 18 months, it was like a no-go regardless of the success of the business. We didn't love the categories of like health tech and ed tech.”

“We have seen a few green shoots, if you will, in this space, particularly, for example, what we saw with Klaviyo and the impact that they have had by bringing AI from a project siloed or customer interface type level usage to their core business, where they au…”

“And oftentimes there is a almost naive assumption that the data will be easy to leverage. Oh, it's an asset and we'll use it and leverage it. And it turns out that oftentimes is the biggest problem.”

“Believe it or not, we struggled to raise money because people didn't believe in the idea that AI is going to be big one day.”

“The second, I think, is blending of a role. There'll be no more SDRs, CSMs, AEs, BDRs, XDRs, all of these. I see them converging into one role, essentially.”

“The third wave is autonomous application with AI, that's gonna dwarf everything, that it's gonna be like a much bigger than cloud, because it touches into payroll, right? It comes from a different budget. We're not quite there right, but think about if you go …”

“If I'm right, it's going away because I'm gonna say it's all going to be like speech. I'm just going to talk. We're going to have a conversation. The apps are going to run in the background and AI will orchestrate. You can see somebody like Microsoft pilot. Th…”

“Maybe you're right in 20, 24. Maybe, maybe, maybe you are right, but you're going to lose that deal eight times out of 10 when you're Compare. It looks a lot like you goes in and gets everyone excited about efficiency for AI.”

“Look at how much acceleration the spend has been on Azure and Google cloud. This is all AI. This is all AI.”

“There is no magical AI line budget at big companies. There is no magical thing. Stuff is being cut to fund these initiatives”

“It's been shown actually multiple times that lots of companies have interest in AI. But very few companies actually have a serious strategy in place around how to go in and deploy and make use of the technology.”

“Any area of SaaS where AI is even a smidge helpful today, and let's not be cynical. That's even a smidge helpful. I am just tactically bullish that in a year it will all be better. And we're all gonna benefit from these, as long as your CTO can take advantage …”

“Are we seeing AI be efficient in enterprise deals? And the answer is not yet. Okay. Enterprise deals are complex. They are long. There's lots of potential buyers, lots of information and AI just isn't efficient there for now. There's just too much context, too…”

“In the tests that we've done the more you handcuff the system and restrict the AI, the fewer optimizations it can make on your behalf and the worse off you will be.”

“I'll ask the same question one year from now. My bet is that we're going to see at least 30% of the people when you have a reduced headcount or less hires.”

“I see folks losing deals again and again, when a competitor will come in and make a lot of AA promises that are 70% true, 50% true, 30% true, but you're not at parity or you won't make that commit. You just lose the deal.”

“And I do think the AI bubble is going to pop. I think everyone thinks this just because the amount of spend going into AI can't increase forever. We'll just run out of GDP. There just isn't enough money in our entire economy to allow AI spend to increase at th…”

“I do not believe in core B to B that AI going into this point now, and certainly next year is a differentiator. Your implementation, maybe you might be the best, but how everyone is going to have pricing page, check the box function app feature parody on every…”

“Can AI write a better first email than my brand new SDR can try to figure out on their own? Absolutely.”

“I think everything in post sales is actually ahead of sales and AI far ahead, like two to three years ahead post sales and sales.”

“Nobody has ever asked me for a cloud-based software or AI, or what they ask for is, can you get rid of this pain point? And the pain point is they don't like entering data. They don't like workflow. They want to move money fast. Like they asked for those pain …”

“There's five million predictions a day using AI today on the, all the documents that are coming through Bill.”

“What we've seen this year is more stabilization in the last maybe three quarters. And so I call this the wait and see economy. This is, nobody's investing for growth the way they were three years ago, which is crazy. People were just investing, investing. Obvi…”

“Six months ago, we were asking them, what is the number one prohibition, the thing that inhibits you from buying AI? Six months ago, the answer was security. Today it's ROI. People are struggling to find exactly the value that AI systems are building.”

“AI today has no impact on conversion rate, has no impact on ARR growth, even though people who buy AI perceive it as a meaningful contributor to their overall efficiency gains.”

“For us now, our growth next is really coming from multi-product Adoption. So that's what we are really focused on. And of course, AI is a big part of that. So it's our AI offering is, of course, growth opportunities for us. Also, we're really very focused in t…”

“I believe AI is as much table stakes, more table stakes at a tactical level than it is budget enabler at a meta level, at a high level. I think you have to do it. And it's hard, but it may not actually increase your revenue.”

“I don't think that a, I can yet replace like the creativity that I see in one-off campaigns. And I think about some of the most effective campaigns that I have Produced myself or observed different companies making. These are like humans coming up with somethi…”

“We have 60% of our customers that have adopted AI.”

“I do think we are at the peak of inflated lofty expectations in AI, and there's a, for good reason, there's a lot of excitement, but I think the trough is coming, and what we gotta do to get out of the trough is find the repeatable value in AI, and it, I think…”

“I think AI has to bail us out. I think AI isn't just, I think it's the solution. We have to get, especially on the, we have to get sales and marketing and support so good from AI that we're not reliant on the fifty-hour work person that spends two months learn…”

“Even if you get an offline 95, by the way, usually that means the product, when it gets to market, it's a really bad product, at least in AI world, in my opinion.”

“Rather than trying to figure it out, decide today with the limitations that we have today, which in the world of AI, that It's like a complete, that just leads to complete failure within weeks.”

“AI can be customer facing, but in our, at least in my experience, it's been mostly internal facing. That's where the biggest transformation has come.”

“What we'll see is that a lot of these people reskill automatically because they're so passionate about AI and are just constantly building side projects in their own time. We don't even need to do the reskilling, reskilling.”

“AI can become really powerful when you're building into your application, not as a chat interface, but really as something that disappears and becomes part of it.”

“In AI, you cannot have predictability. LLMs are not predictable even on that.”

“At GitHub we invest in this thing we call coffee, which is compiler offline evaluation, and that's one area that I have found to be a place that you have to over invest in AI if you will, if you need to experiment, because you could experiment all day in AI an…”

“You can't forget that it's not just the AI magic that you still need to build the workflows and the structures that you plug the AI into. And so don't confuse, you know, AI first with AI only. And that's a That's a big, big danger there.”

“So for the founders in the room, I would say the number one thing I would say is completely think about the workflow you're intercepting with your AI. Don't think about the AI. So if there are 19 steps to doing something in the world today, and you as a founde…”

“I think we're kind of starting to move out of this era of just AI making you more efficient and then moving into the era of AI delivering value and delivering like explicit customer value that you can price on in a different way and package differently into yo…”

“We saw a lot of, we see a lot of people though making a mistake where they're just like built ton of use cases kind of haphazardly. They go after everything that's easy and then they're surprised they don't have a highly differentiated wedge in the market.”

“All the growth in cloud budget and B to B budget is for AI. Some of it's sure for AI native platforms, some of it's for other things, but all this AI budget is basically in the enterprise. Okay. That's where you see the growth. It's all enterprise.”

“If you're tripling, doubling without AI, it's a hard sell.”

“For now, we're not looking to create a product line around this. That's going to be separately monetized. Now that's always open for debate. We really want to get more feedback from our customers before we make any sort of decision on that.”

“The majority of investing, if 44% in 2024, already the majority in 2025 is into AI and AI native investments.”

“If you look at pure play contact center vendors, right, a lot of them have seen 20% seat reductions in a year due to AI. 20% across the board, right?”

“AI is also the rebirth of freemium, rebirth of free trial. We expect to try this stuff. For free and you've got to work around the cost.”

“I think especially as you grow, people are going to say, how are you using AI in your customer journey? It's like a standard checklist question nowadays, right?”

“I don't know anyone who's using anything in any interesting scale.”

“With a portfolio as big as Google, we've got a ton of people That come in that had been existing quote, existing customers in the traditional marketing definition who are greenfield or prospects in the AI space. Most people are, right? Because it's so new. And…”

“We were the third place player for a long time in the cloud space, but we really are the first choice when it comes to AI.”

“Giving them that language as a CIO to partner with their peers is a really important part of the value we bring, and we do that behind the scenes with them and educate them on, it's not just about what language they want to use, it's about the language they ne…”

“If you are there, every buyer, every, especially the enterprise, every CIO has AI budget today. We can talk about whether it's discretionary or budgeted or where it's coming from. Everyone has budget for AI. So more money's going out at the CIO's office at the…”

“If you talk to VCs here that have been around for a while and you have a quiet conversation, ask them how many folks in your portfolio are north of a hundred million, and now are seeing growth in the 10 or 20% range. All of them. All of them. It didn't used to…”

“Because your AI, at least by next year, is going to be better than 80% of sales reps. Not the best.”

“20 to 40% of support is all done on AI today, and it's great.”

“In any leadership role, there's a component of the interview that's now, what are you doing with AI? What do you know about it? How are you using it today? And I really want to unpack it. And it's been a mandate. I don't care how good this person is if they're…”

“I actually think what's going to happen because of attribution is commissions are going to have by the end of next year. Because this is how the math is going to work. You're going to get credit for the It's not just PLG. You're going to get credit for Kyle's …”

“I don't think they have a job next year. I think most, I think they're going to quickly lose all and they're not going, and I don't think they're going to step up and become AI experts.”

“I worry that as our AIs get better, For a while, the handoff for human might get worse. It might get worse because it's a crutch.”

“I don't think there's a lot of hype and there's a lot of you'll get to zero headcount. I don't believe that to be the case. I think there's tremendous value in working with agents, reinforcing the learning, but also having humans Really read the particular cas…”

“What AI is going to help us do is to enable generalists. In marketing, you might not be the translation expert, but you can now translate. You might not be the video editing expert, but you can edit your videos right now. You might not be specified like social…”

“There were a lot of folks building an AI skew with an AI price and like a separate thing that you would do. And I think for us it is, did anybody buy black and white TV after a color TV came out? The answer is no. So you, when after AI, there is no product tha…”

“Coding and support. These two use cases have found product market fit with AI. No question. We're not going back. If you're not doing it, you're already behind.”

“Everything in this age, and we'll talk about this, but the business model is changing. It's not like what product you shipped and how much you can get for that product. It is where is their value and how much work is getting done because of AI.”

“I do a five minute video for our entire company. We call it a weekly wrap. And I send it out every Friday and I'm demoing what, how I'm using AI and I'm demoing how our teams are using AI.”

“The one thing that you can rely on in terms of the direction of AI progress is the context windows will expand, right? You'll be able to feed more into the prompt and get a useful output right now.”

“I think where we want to take the technology is to become a lot more proactive rather than being reactive, right? So instead of you having to always ask for the update of what's happening with this account, we're able to detect those changes that are meaningfu…”

“Coming up with the right questions to ask will become the critical skill, right? And you can say that's a form of like prompting, but preserving the spark of curiosity and knowing where to take the next question. That's because the answers will keep getting sm…”

“I think what that data analyst, instead of writing millions of variations of basically similar queries, is now going to be describing datasets. He's going to be running these queries, but he's going to give semantic, they're going to give semantic context to w…”

“I think there's going to be a lot more cursor style coding of these data engineering workflows. I think things like being able to extract metadata so that the data set that you extract is almost self describing so that AI can get to work on it. I think that is…”

“I think it's reduces all the moats.”

“Think about AI is actually a change to the labor model of using the software. So what can you do in a world where you can effectively create digital workers that That can go automate anything, you know, within the confines of your software.”

“The things that transcend AI will become probably then even more important because they will be the things that separate the sort of flash in the pan, you know, overnight success that then fizzles because the founding team wasn't really in it for the right rea…”

“You know, I think we recently shared that we've had like, sixteen billion instances of AI usage, which I think ranks amongst the top AI use cases with some of the tippy top performers in the AI space.”

“Every time someone's left, broadly speaking, we've replaced them with AI.”

“Every person has to say like, what am I doing with AI and show cool things to the team. And we've been doing that for at least over a year.”

“It does take one, a lot of tuning, and it does take a lot of data and a lot of conscious effort to get these AIs to work this well. And have this good of a overall response rate, positive response rate, and also to make the emails seem like we actually wrote …”

“You need S tier orchestration to create S tier output. That's the learning.”

“Almost all of them can only do one or two workflows. They can't do everything you want.”

“Again, if you can get your AI to be decent to the level of you yourself, that's probably the quality you should aim for. They will prefer that to, you know, a AE or SER that is one day in at your company saying, hey, have you heard of Saster?”

“Even if you have all your data in, even if you have it all in, you may have to QA it every single day for the first couple of months.”

“If you're going to be the human in the loop and respond, you got to do it one right away and it's got to be good. Like, it's gotta be at the same level as the AI, or they're gonna be like, oh, was this just a bad AI email that I got?”

“I think Morgan Stanley has estimated in the next few years, 25% of global software spend could be towards these AI use cases.”

“And so the irony of this, all of this is as much as sales and marketing changes, probably the one thing that won't change is brand marketing.”

“I think, 30 to 40% of inside sales will become AI.”

“No one, no matter what anybody says, the only reason any investor cares about AI is because they want insane growth. They don't really care.”

“No one in AI really has 80%, 90% gross margins because the way we sell software changed.”

“And surprisingly in that same report, the fast, the fastest people to switch are enterprises. Usually enterprises aren't the ones that adopt it first, but that is what the data showed us is that enterprise were first movers here and they were doing it because …”

“You get the CEO memo, like we're an AI first company, right? Which you need to do that step is an important step. But I talked to a lot of people who that's the only step they do. And then it's just like chaos inside the organization being like, I don't know w…”

“We run these hackathons usually every four to six months just to keep fresh with it. And that's really important because AI moves crazy fast. And so every time we do that, we see the internal adoption just go higher and higher as people start to figure out new…”

“I think it takes a lot of work to get that last mile good enough where you would say, Hey, we're actually going to feel confident actually having the AI act as the sales rep or act as the CSM in these equations where it's going to get there. It's going to get …”

“There's no excuse to not have extremely high quality customer interactions instantly through AI in twenty-twenty-five.”

“No matter how great your app is, there just isn't any budget at the CIO office. It's all being consumed by AI and price increases.”

“Now it's worth three billion and it's accelerating.”

“You have to read your sales team's emails. Cause they're probably terrible. Even today they're terrible. Even with AI, they're probably terrible. Slow down and audit everything.”

“And it is 70, 80% of all venture capital.”

“Last year was three hundred and sixty three billion, which was a massive jump from 20, 23, as you can see, but already this year, It's exceeded all of last year, just in the first six months alone, three hundred and seventy seven billion in the first six month…”

“Don't say that to all my SI friends out there, but AI is coming for the multi-billion dollar SI industry.”

“First, 80% of code is getting written by AI. Now for large companies that have large legacy data code bases, it's a little harder, but like you all are seeing that a lot of the coding is written by AI”

“I think there is now, I think, a clear path to where I'm seeing in these platforms. You can clone all your best A players, right? Take all the best A players on your team across marketing, sales, CS, sales, rev ops, and make them S tier with AI. I truly believ…”

“That's what you really want to do is to Is for AI to be your steroids for content creation, not to create the core nucleus that becomes trite and boring”

“What we've been able to do is triple our content output with AI.”

“And I really think most SDRs will die next year, but the meat, and I know we throw around these terms differently. The BDR that sort of smarmily qualifies you that that's going to die. Like we just, there's no need for that with these tools.”

“AI will also know your product a lot better than most entry-level, like, SDRs. And so whatever you tell it about the product, it will contextualize for them and add value.”

“I think we're going to see AI is not going to replace the AE the way it is already beginning to replace the SDR has already replaced. Support is already replacing customer success, but it is going to replace a lot of AEs that aren't product don't know the prod…”

“And in fact, we often see large enterprises can move now faster and smaller kind of digital natives because digital natives are so busy piloting and testing everything. Where a large enterprise is getting pressure from the board saying, what's your AI strategy…”

“I do think that the elite folks, the truly elite folks, not the ones that think they're elite on LinkedIn, the ones that really are five times, 10 times more productive for real, they should be paid compensation that is two to three times higher than it used t…”

“We've, we have like nine high impact production use cases of AI air are booked per dollar out on, on a per AE basis is three X any team I've ever managed before.”

“All of these things compound. If you're really, really good at each of these steps, really good, like here we're really good, very reliable. You still have to multiply all these together. And by the time you're finished the entire workflow, especially the work…”

“Getting AI and getting a rag system to accurately do these things is easier when it's discrete. You can experiment much faster. You can solve bits of the problem independently and then kind of chain them together.”

“These B to B companies, pre AI ones at fifty million, a 100,000,200 1,000,800 million, no one wants to buy them. It doesn't matter that you, hooray, you got profitable. Thank you. That means you're not going bankrupt. You have not solved your existential probl…”

“The reality is AI is here to expose you, and it's going to show your entire organization What you're good at, and what you're absolutely terrible at.”

“What's better is if your team is Lagging or resistant, just go hire one reasonably senior person that is all in here. One. And folks will start quitting when they don't want to work at that pace anyway. You got to hire them ideally at the VP level above, and t…”

“In AI native organizations, 80% plus of the code is written by AI nowadays.”

“So feature differentiation is really hard to maintain as a mode. You might be ahead for a month to six months, but then everybody will catch up because AI is writing so much of our code.”

“This is like what people say, oh, engineering is dead or design is dead. All of that I think is a lie because we had never had more need for experienced incredible engineers that are going to push the boundary of what's possible to create with software, to ena…”

“You know, still how many of them actually properly adopted AI in the way of coding tools or like systems is pretty nascent.”

“And so now we have this other problem, which is happening where everybody's like, okay, all my employees are token maxing. My spend on tokens is going up, but I have no idea what I'm getting out for it.”

“The urgency of I need to kind of get my data state in order and governance around it and context has gone through the roof because people realize without that, they can't actually get AI to work in any meaningful way.”

“I personally think net net, it means we'll have sales teams about half the size we used to.”

“I think in 90 days, the comments are gonna be so good on LinkedIn, like, you're almost like, should I just have my AI do the LinkedIn post and have the slop talk to the AI? Because it'll be better than a human could do.”

“The existing markets are getting bigger, and AI is also coming to new markets like healthcare and legal, which, let's be frank, were terrible markets for software before this.”

“Winning AI, you're going to have this whole eat the work story. You won't just replace cloud software. You actually will replace the ultimate world work, and that's a much bigger marketplace.”

“And then there's about a third way you're absolutely threatened, where you are typically what we call plain vanilla SaaS. You automate a workflow, and then you either got to move and survive, or you're going to be dead, right?”

“Moats still exist in the age of AI, but they're just like shallower, so you better fucking deliver value.”

“Not only do you have to deliver a beautiful app, it has to surprise and delight you at least once a quarter where your jaw drops that it does something you didn't even expect because of AI. Your jaw should drop because of the agentic capabilities of a B to B p…”