AI Unveiled

Episode 8: We end our first season chatting with Santi Suarez-Ordoñez and Ashley Wilson, who along with their third co-founder, Moiz Virani, founded Momentum.io, an AI sales platform. They initially crossed paths at their previous startup, Sauce Labs. We start the conversation by talking about their background, the Momentum founding story, and most notably, the dynamics of being married to their work and each other! 

Sales call summaries are core to their platform. This is an evolving space, so we discuss how it’s changed over the past few years and how Momentum was positioned for success once the AI boom began—leveraging their established expertise as new companies emerge every day. Santi touches on Momentum’s transition from AI assistance to make sales reps more efficient to AI-driven automation. This was made possible once they had enough usage to train their custom models.

Ashley goes into the impacts automation has had on revenue organizations and processes, and her predictions on the future of the sales tech stack. One big trend she sees is the increased importance of qualitative data, such as call summaries and notes, in driving forecasting, training, and key business decisions. 

I hope you enjoy this episode!

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Links:

* Momentum

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Timestamps: 

* 4:50 - Timing your disruption

* 10:18 - The future of revenue

* 26:14 - Importance of qualitative insights

* 33:49 - Implementing AI into your org structure

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At N47, we partner with founders boldly building products that power the world. Learn more at ⁠N47.com⁠

In this episode of AI Unveiled, I speak with Jorn Vanysacker and Julien Steel at Henchman, a legal contract drafting and negotiating platform powered by AI. 

Jorn learned some valuable lessons from his first startup. The product was too broad, needed customization, and they didn’t invest in mining insights from data. This time around, he and his co-founders wanted to build something that was truly plug-and-play and solve a narrow problem for end users. With this lens, they decided to build Henchman. 

None of the founders had any legal experience and Jorn believes this beginner’s mindset has been a significant advantage in an industry ripe for disruption. It was a forcing function to obsess over speaking to and learning from customers. 

Their product is a Word plug-in—a purposefully narrow UX for the end user. As lawyers draft complex contracts, Henchman provides edits and suggestions based on precedents—what someone in the firm has written in the past. With over 150 customers already, it’s working, and their focus is to make this narrow product better—more integrations with backend document management systems and better AI and insights. 

Julien then speaks about the specific features and their federated approach to AI. One big change he sees in building AI-first products is the amount of time his team spends monitoring the output, customer feedback, and impact. It’s around 50% compared to 20% in his prior roles.

I hope you enjoy this episode.

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Timestamps:

* 8:55 - What the law firm of tomorrow looks like

* 12:50 - The value prop of a niche knowledge base

* 17:32 - The AI powering legal tech 

* 24:29 - Your beginner’s mindset is the key to customer obsession

At N47, we partner with founders boldly building products that power the world. Learn more at ⁠N47.com⁠

In this episode of AI Unveiled, I speak with Dominik Kovacs, founder and CEO of Colossyan, an AI video platform for workplace learning that generates life-like avatars. 

Before starting Colossyan, Dominik was working at the intersection of AI and video, as the Co-Founder of Defudger, a visual content authentication platform for the insurance industry. So we start this episode by discussing his background and why he then chose to build technology to create synthetic videos. 

Their customers use Colossyan for formal learning, sales enablement, onboarding, and other internal communications. He discusses two direct benefits: lower costs than studio-produced video and higher engagement than text and screen-recorded videos. This enables more localization and personalization and manages content chaos. Synthetic videos can be edited programmatically at a later time, so instead of creating duplicates, outdated videos are updated. 

I asked Dominik about the end user’s perception, how close we are to passing the Turing test, and what the implications may be. I also asked Dominik to compare what Colossyan does to general text-to-video services like Runway and PikaLabs. 

We then get into the nitty-gritty of the models that power life-like avatars and how one can create a personalized avatar. They just released the ability to do this over a webcam that is available to everyone. 

This was a fun episode discussing an impressive technology, with many powerful use cases, but also many questions about deepfakes and ethics. 

I hope you enjoy this episode.

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Timestamps: 

* 2:36 - The journey to generating personalized avatars

* 6:59 - The future of workplace training

* 12:55 - Evaluating a human’s perception of avatars

* 19:05 - How to build a lifelike avatar

* 23:09 - Measuring accuracy in the uncanny valley

* 27:19 - Innovating AI with Product and Engineering

At N47, we partner with founders boldly building products that power the world. Learn more at ⁠N47.com⁠

In this episode of AI Unveiled, I speak with Satej Sirur, founder and CEO of Rocketium, an AI-driven CreativeOps platform sold to enterprises such as Amazon, Home Depot, and Jumia. 

We start by defining what exactly creative ops means and why Satej believes a unified solution like Rocketium can save creative teams—especially in large companies—over half their time. 

Rocketium started as a gaming content startup in 2015 and pivoted multiple times before finding PMF from gaming to consumer, to Indian enterprise to a US focus. However, the common thread was content production and each subsequent pivot felt smaller and provided confidence they were on the right track. Their largest customer now has almost $500K ACV. 

Most of the time is spent discussing the role of AI in the future of creative production, and the opportunities for increased automation and intelligence. Satej sees multiple opportunities from better search and organization of visual content, generating intelligent variations as well as new creatives, to analytics that inform the ROI of advertising and creative campaigns. 

Finally, we talk about how the creative process is repetitive loops of AI suggestions that are verified by humans. This provides both a natural feedback mechanism and a low negative impact if the model gets something wrong. This allows them to innovate rapidly. 

This was a fun episode and I especially appreciated the entertaining analogies Satej made to Twinkies, cockroaches, and the five infinity stones. I hope you enjoy this episode.

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Timestamps:

* 1:38 - What is CreativeOps?

* 10:59 - The cautionary tale of pivoting

* 21:54 - The infinity stones of creative AI

* 37:38 - How to build your AI pricing model

At N47, we partner with founders boldly building products that power the world. Learn more at ⁠N47.com⁠

In this episode of AI Unveiled, Gaurav Kotak speaks with Tony Beltramelli, the Co-Founder and CEO of Uizard, a product design and ideation tool with over 2 million users.

Tony believes great design is increasingly important to build successful products and that there aren’t enough designers to match that need. He wants to leverage AI so that product managers and non-designers can be an integral part of the UX and creative process. 

Uizard got started in 2018, way before the gen AI frenzy. In this episode, we discuss why it took them a couple of years to launch the initial product and what gave them confidence they were on the right track. We then discuss the core capabilities of the product such as using computer vision to convert a screenshot into a fully editable design file, and how they constantly evolve their technology to take advantage of better foundational models.

We also discuss how Uizard tackles ‘AI tourism’ where a large number of users sign up based on the appeal of a next-gen solution but may churn quickly. For example, at least 50% of their roadmap is on non-AI capabilities to ensure they tackle the workflow end-to-end. 

Finally, we talk about the importance of investing early in distribution and constantly running multiple experiments. Early on, they invested in content and SEO for the original idea of using AI to turn ideation into design. Only years later, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT, did people search for these possibilities. Luckily, they already ranked highly and their traffic shot up. 

Tony is extremely articulate both about his vision of AI-powered design and tangible advice in company-building for AI-first startups. Hope you enjoy this episode. 

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Timestamps:

* 4:51 - From alpha to beta: building your initial minimal viable AI

* 9:26 - The future of product design

* 17:30 - Uizard’s cutting-edge AI capabilities 

* 25:56 - Ensuring you have a winning product before launch

* 33:25 - Converting AI tourists

At N47, we partner with founders boldly building products that power the world. Learn more at ⁠N47.com⁠

In this episode of AI Unveiled, Gaurav Kotak speaks with Bram De Geyter , VP of Product and Jeroen Minnaert, Chief Software Architect from Showpad, a sales enablement platform with over 1,000 customers.

Jeroen and Bram are Showpad veterans and are leading the charge of AI innovations at the company. 

We first discuss how, in the longer term, they believe every organization will have a customized language model that describes their value proposition and all sales content and collateral will be created on the fly by prompting the model. 

Creating content on the fly at zero marginal cost has multiple implications. The role of product marketers will shift from crafting pixel-perfect content to prompting the model and building audit and feedback mechanisms to evolve the model. Since it’s the first time that content is not curated or reviewed, it’s important to create guardrails including policies of what can be shared with customers and consistent design principles to clearly indicate this in the user interface.

Bram also candidly discusses how incumbents like Showpad face some risk of being disrupted as content goes from static to dynamic. At the same, they have the opportunity to leverage their data and workflow to drive this shift. 

We hope you enjoy this episode that covers both the big picture of where sales enablement is heading, as well as specific design and technology choices to build a scalable platform. 

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Timestamps:

* 4:40 - The future of sales enablement

* 22:03 - Leveraging their AI-powered search index

* 26:32 - The realities of non-curated AI-generated content

* 37:22 - Personalizing LLMs

* 41:24 - Measuring success in your AI capabilities 

At N47, we partner with founders boldly building products that power the world. Learn more at ⁠N47.com⁠

2: In this episode of AI Unveiled, Gaurav Kotak speaks with Lionel Barrow, Co-Head of Engineering, and Michelangelo D'Agostino, VP of Machine Learning at Tegus. Tegus is an investment research platform trusted by top hedge funds, PE, and VC firms. The platform includes over 60,000 expert transcripts, public company earnings calls, and presentations, as well as accurate financial models and KPIs. 

They believe AI will bring a profound change in how financial research is done. From sifting through data to now surfacing insights based on past data, and where they are in the research funnel. 

Both Lionel and Michelangelo are excited about the gold mine of data. The proprietary interview data on the Tegus platform is particularly interesting. In the interview, they note how important it is to balance fine-tuning or customizing the model with building an architecture that can easily plug in and avail of the latest foundational models. 

They’ve started with a focus on applying AI to summarize and extract topics from specific calls, and are now adding AI-powered insights across an entire sector as well as automating part of their financial models.  

We discuss how the company has different approaches for opinions (e.g. summary of a call) vs. facts (answering what revenue a company has)—whether it’s which models to use, how to assess quality, and when to rely on human-in-the-loop. 

This episode provides a glimpse into the future of financial research. Enjoy!

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Timestamps: 

* 6:35 - How customer engagement evolves with AI

* 12:30 - Advice on tackling accuracy through product strategy and machine learning

* 25:21 - Incorporating human preferences into your AI

* 37:12 - Bringing AI into your org structure

At N47, we partner with founders boldly building products that power the world. Learn more at ⁠N47.com⁠

With the recent rise of Generative AI, many are contemplating its implications: whether it’ll disrupt jobs, daily routines, and humanity to its core. Though AI is sometimes seen as the antithesis of what it means to be human—in this episode, we learn how mimicking humans is what makes a successful AI. 

Gaurav Kotak sits down with Founder and CEO of Qatalog, Tariq Rauf, in this inaugural episode of AI Unveiled. Tariq and his team have created a fascinating product using methods some might initially deem counterintuitive: vector databases. They incorporate these into the foundation of their core product: leveraging AI and LLMs to dive into unstructured data.

In this episode, you’ll hear what the necessary tech stack is for any AI-first company, how to implement advanced search through vast amounts of data, and how building your AI to mimic human intelligence is the secret ingredient to success.

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Timestamps:

* 4:34 - Searching without indexing: using AI to mimic how humans search for information

* 6:06 - The limitations of a chat interface and customizing the UI on the fly

* 14:26 - How to approach accuracy

* 16:52 - The decision to move from GPT-4 to Llama 2

* 20:04 - The shift away from vector databases

* 24:31 - How usage-based pricing ensures computation costs don’t eat into your margin

* 29:25 - Impacts from the broader shift from inorganic (deterministic) to organic (probabilistic) software

At N47, we partner with founders boldly building products that power the world. Learn more at ⁠N47.com⁠

Introducing AI Unveiled:

Artificial intelligence is leading every company to reinvent itself. With innovation at every turn, organizations and consumers alike are imagining what’s around the corner. Will AI-first startups be able to leapfrog the incumbents? Or will those incumbents leverage their scale to rapidly infuse AI into their offerings? These are just some of the questions answered in N47's new podcast: AI Unveiled.

Hosted by Gaurav Kotak, Venture Partner at N47, AI Unveiled brings you the founders and tech leaders using AI to shape their industries and products. We delve into every aspect of the future of AI in SaaS—from technology, safety, and ethics, to business models, funding, and regulations. If you are serious about the future of SaaS, AI Unveiled is for you.