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Connor Jeffers, CEO of Aptitude 8, interviews marketing, sales, and customer success leaders about how they are using artificial intelligence to innovate, optimize, and scale their go-to-market operations.
AI Is only the beginning of
what I call hyper automation.
And that's the holy grail,
An AI that creates an action.
What enables this is exactly the same.
Data, AI, and automation
connected together.
That's the key for any
business today to optimize.
Hello, and welcome to the go
to Market with AI podcast.
A podcast about AI products, AI founders,
and GTM leaders using AI in their work.
In today's episode, I speak with
Kobe stock founder and CEO of
forward.ai, an AI platform helping
GTM teams add AI functionality
across their technology stack.
Kobe and I talk about his path of serial
entrepreneurship, his experience at WalkMe
as a foundation for wanting to build
forward, ways he's seeing innovative
GTM teams leverage AI technology, what
GTM teams get wrong about AI, and the
skill set of future GTM leaders that
will be most valued in the age of AI.
Let's get started.
Kobi, Hello and welcome.
Good morning or good afternoon.
Good evening.
How many hours ahead of me?
Are you I'm in New York.
I am seven hours ahead of you.
So it's a good afternoon.
Like good afternoon.
Nice.
Nice end of day like beginning
of day podcast for me end
of day podcast for Kobi.
True.
Amazing.
Amazing.
Well, I know I'm really
excited to talk about Forwrd.
I know that that's how we originally
got connected and Forwrd as an
AI platform, and you'll tell us
a whole bunch about all of that.
But before we get into Forwrd, I'd
love to be able to start with, like,
how did you find yourself in founding
and leading and being the CEO of
an AI company especially right now?
And what was your journey into it?
Because as I understand it from talking
to you earlier you were maybe around this
region before the hype train started,
and you were in the right place versus
jumping in a little bit late to the party.
So maybe let's start with wherever makes
sense to you of what was your journey?
How did you get to Forwrd itself?
Yeah.
First of all, I'm super
excited to be here Connor.
So, thanks very much.
And second I'm a geek.
I'm coding since I'm six.
And actually I knew that I
will do software like from,
you know, super early age.
What were you coding at six?
games mostly.
Uh, this
that was mine
of the PC era, right?
So we, we, like my parents couldn't
afForwrd buying games and we, you
had like books of teaching you how to
code games in basic, it was back then.
But yeah.
Doing that, I was early on the
internet, obviously, and really
started my career as a developer.
I worked for a big company called SAP.
And really, you know, kind of what I
did, I basically helped to build kind
of the, the biggest in memory database,
SAP HANA, and then kind of rolled
after SAP, I was always like, in my
mind, I want to build something myself.
And I actually left SAP
to found my first company.
It was more than 12 years ago.
And then from there, it
was a very natural...
wait, what was the first,
what was the first company?
the first company was a
company that teaches you how
to play the guitar, actually.
So I'm also a musician in my history.
So I basically build an algorithm
that understands what you play.
Which chords, which melodics
and provides you feedback so
you can be a better guitarist.
And it was all about playing rock music.
So we had like, you know, Green Day
and Led Zeppelin and Foo Fighters
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
that.
So it's like, it was like an iTunes,
but instead of buying the songs,
you would buy how to play them.
Like, so like runs on your
phone or what was the hardware?
What was the...
Phone, tablet...
my microphone listens, understands and
gives you feedback on, on your play style.
Exactly,
Super cool.
Exactly.
And by the way, this was my first
touch in early, early AI, right?
How can you, how can you solve that kind
of interface that you analyze someone's
feedback so fast and you try to kind
of say what they've played, right?
So, so that's the first kind of
time where I kind of touched that.
And after that kind of, I kind of
shifted between core engineering to
product and to business and to go to
market and really kind of discovered
what's around me because of that.
Then after this company,
it was a six years journey.
After that, I basically switched
to product and took like few
product roles at few start ups.
And then I started my second company
which actually we developed a cool
product for mobile companies that helps
them to understand when you're happy.
And this was the second time that
I touched machine learning, because
if you think about it, when you are,
a bank with a mobile app or an e
commerce app, or even Waze, like the,
the, you know, the GPS application.
And you want to ask your user something,
if it's to write the app or to get
them feedback on your next release,
you want to catch them at the right
moment when they are most likely to
kind of respond to your feedback.
So today, like, previously, folks
are hard coding those points in time,
but actually everyone is different.
So we tried to basically understand
what's going on on your device on your
graphic card, Excel, a metal jar scope.
We took all of those signals, more than
300 signals and computed the happy moment.
So that was my second touch in AI.
Is that just like, if I'm, if I'm button
mashing, I'm, I'm probably pissed off
is I mean, that's incredibly reductive,
but is that sort of like the vein?
You're pissed off or
playing like hardcore game.
So if you're touching the
Oh yeah.
Contextual.
and your graphic
be a lot of engagement.
Okay.
That
exactly.
It's it's, it's all related
to a context, right?
So if you're pushing strongly on
the device and the graphic card is
working hard, you're not pissed off.
You're probably playing something,
but if your graphic card stopped
and you're pushing games,
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Probably something wrong, right?
And that's the magic of machine learning
and AI, where it can support so many
scenarios that when you try to code them
manually, you just can't support them.
Yeah.
It's impossible.
Yeah, for sure.
It's impossible for someone to do that.
So, so actually interesting
story about this company.
I sold it to another company based
here in Israel called WalkMe.
I don't know if you've heard about it.
I do.
know WalkMe from, from deep
Salesforce backgrounds.
A lot of what Happily is doing is sort
of inspired by a lot of that Salesforce
ecosystem side and WalkMe is one that
immediately sort of came to mind.
And I think when we originally got
connected, I was like, Oh, I know WalkMe.
This is interesting.
Yeah.
So WalkMe, I joined WalkMe we were
around 300 employees, maybe less.
When I left, we're above 1,
000 and we're a public company.
So I kind of viewed the
the business growing.
And actually I was sitting in the,
in the main junction of the company.
I was the SAP of product.
So really...
Everything that goes between
customers to engineering.
I was there.
So really amazing journey.
Tons of AI initiatives back then.
So also touching AI a lot.
I always, kind of for me I try
to be not too deep, but to really
get engineering and really to be
in the midst of what's going on.
and I left WalkMe around two and a
half years ago to solve a problem
that I solved internally at WalkMe.
And I said why not going
and, you know, productize it.
And that's Forwrd my third
startup and hopefully last.
I mean, that's what I,
You're like,
I tell my wife,
of my journey
that's what I tell my wife, but,
Okay.
Okay.
but that's the, that's
the journey until here
So tell, tell me about Forwrd.
What, what's, what's the problem?
Where does it sit?
What are you guys up to?
And, and, and then we
can talk a little bit.
It's a sort of like, Why and where that
fits in and I think what's interesting
is before we jump into that is I think
a lot of folks and it's been really
interesting doing this show because I
think that there's a lot of people who
are very early to the AI boom and getting
sort of drawn in by the gold rush and
then there's folks who are sort of like,
I've been in the mountains drilling and
mining and everybody's showing up and I
think you're, you're much more in that
ladder camp with a lot of this given sort
of the background and the space prior
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Maybe I will go one step back.
So, I'm a product person, right?
And for me, product is always around the
data that you can really put on your plate
to understand what's going on, right?
And I'm a big fan of product analytics.
I've used all the products until today.
And the reason that I started Forwrd
is that in WalkMe we had a problem that
we wanted to try and predict churn.
And the way we wanted to do so
is by utilizing product usage.
And we said, you know what, let's
take all of the product usage,
all the features that we release.
Let's measure.
usage of different users and accounts.
And let's try to see if we
can correlate usage to churn.
So we invented the new metric,
we called it adoption score.
And we treated like a
credit score in the US.
Similarly, you know, zero to 800.
So people can really easily understand it.
So think about a customer success
person trying to understand
the health of their customers.
They're going and through many dashboards.
Salesforce, Tableau, some product
data, asking questions on Slack.
It's not scalable.
So what we want to do, we want to
compress all of the signals and put
like a traffic light in Salesforce.
By the way, using Walkman, right?
So we had the data.
Then I built like a big team and
we needed to buy a data warehouse.
We needed to set up an ETL.
We needed data operations people.
We need the
tons, tons of work to get
this whole thing configured.
Great.
Tons of work.
Listen, it took us seven months of
I mean, that's not,
that's not even that bad.
with a 20
Okay.
Okay.
So a lot of people making
that happen on an, on
a lot of work, right?
To build the model.
Then after we built the model, we
needed more people to integrate
the model back into Salesforce.
So the CS folks can really see
the data back in Salesforce.
And after that, I realized that it's
great that we built the first model,
but the data is keep on changing.
We need to constantly update it.
And I stopped there and I said,
there must be a better way.
How can I productize it, so
I can reduce the barrier?
So I can reduce the number of
people who work to do that.
I can reduce the cost
of the infrastructure.
And instead of a year,
take it down to a week.
And that's exactly what Forwrd is.
Forwrd is basically automating this very,
complex, heavy process that most chances
that internally you can't solve it.
And even if you can solve it, you're
not focusing on your business.
So you don't want to solve it internally,
Do you think so?
Okay.
So if I'm going to go and
install Forwrd, do I, what,
what do I need in place already?
So if, if you're sort of describing,
Hey, we went and implemented this thing.
We had to set up data warehousing.
We had to connect all these systems.
Is it, you're going to go and connect
to everything that already exists.
I already have to have a data warehouse
that's provisioned and then you're
connecting to that, or where, where do
I have to be on that maturity scale for
something like Forwrd to be a value to me?
the goal of Forwrd is basically
to improve your internal day
to day business processes.
Let's pick a process.
Let's pick, I don't know, lead
qualification, for example,
a very common process.
Most companies solve it via a
very simple lead scoring that
they implement in HubSpot, right?
Salesforce, Marketo, whatever, right?
And lead scoring up until now,
it's basically a set of rules.
I call it the casino model.
Why the casino
casino model.
The casino model, because you just guess.
If the title is a vp, if you have more
than five content, if they answer an
email, you, you just give them points.
Right?
But as I told you before,
you don't know the context.
If someone answered an email in
an enterprise company, it, it,
it should be weighted differently
than if someone answered an
email in a, in a small company.
This is why it's the casino
model because it's nonsense.
it's not the truth.
So, in order to improve the process, you
already have the data in Marketo, right?
In Salesforce, whatever.
So you connect the data that you
already have to Forwrd, and you
define what you want to optimize.
So, generally, lead scoring or
lead qualification, you want
to optimize the number of sales
qualified leads that you produce.
So you provide Forwrd with this
specific goal, how you define a
sales qualified lead, and Forwrd will
reverse engineer your entire data set.
will clean it, and we'll build an AI
model that will show you which factors
and values are relevant, are impacting
your sales qualified leads, and will
help you to predict on a daily basis,
which leads will become SQL, and the
same goes to sales forecasting, the same
goes to identifying churn, upsell, cross
sell, so think about all those processes
that you have today, and you implement
them manually, think about adding AI to
these processes and think about what's
the optimization that you can drive.
So are you guys building, so do I,
do I bring my data warehouse or do
I bring my amalgamation of business
systems and start connecting those?
it depends on how you operate.
We don't want to move
your cheese anywhere.
If you are operating as a company and
your kind of architecture is you funnel
everything through your data warehouse,
we will work with your data warehouse.
If you don't have this kind of
architecture or maybe you have it
in One department and the other
department you don't have it.
We will work in the exact architecture and
nature and process that you already have.
So we can use a data warehouse.
You can just use all of the systems.
And the cool thing is that if
you don't have those systems
connected yet, you don't need to.
Forwrd can do this for you.
Question for you just on being a serial
entrepreneur, being somebody who's
built stuff in sort of the GTM arena.
And when I think about what Forwrd.
Is when I think about what you've
just described is, it is a B2B SaaS
product that is oriented around
insights and data and is made possible
because of AI versus like, this is
an AI product that does AI stuff.
And it makes me think and wonder.
If like a lot of people think about
and a comparison that we've made with
a couple of other folks is sort of like
people are looking at AI, like, oh, it
has open API's or it runs on the cloud.
And as this sort of modifier, and I'm
curious if you sort of look at it the
same way, where you really think about
it as we're building a software product,
and that product is possible because of
the AI that's inside of it versus like,
we're selling and marketing an AI thing.
And, and if that like resonates or aligns
to your sort of framework of thinking.
That's a very good question.
We are actually enabling folks
to build their own AI products.
So we are a company that sells AI, not a
software that AI is embedded in, because
I think that every software today,
every software that people do today
is using AI, and if not today, Maybe
tomorrow we see more and more companies
Certainly.
So, so we are a pure AI company that
actually our goal is that everyone in
the, company, and especially because we
are targeting operations like revenue
operations, marketing operations, CS
operations, we want them to have a
new tool that they don't have now.
And up until now, they needed a lot
of technical depth for them to use it.
They needed a lot of people.
They needed complicated infrastructure.
Now they don't need it.
Now they can use a platform like Forwrd
to create their own AI applications.
yeah, to your point, you're, you're adding
that, that AI functionality into and on
top of their existing infrastructure.
And so you, you guys are
essentially helping any of these
organizations become AI powered.
true, within RevOps will up until now.
It's not there.
I mean, will people think about ai?
They mostly think about,
ChatGPT or LLM, right?
It's a prompt that you write
something and it gives you feedback,
Like the new model that OpenAI
released recently, Soma, right?
That creates videos.
That's amazing, right?
But at some points, for some
problems, you don't need content.
Content is not, the answer,
I think to your point, like
content's the most relatable.
It's the thing that a lot of
people just immediately understand.
And so I think it's the one that
it gets everybody both excited.
Well, I think I was, I don't even
know if it was recent, this is like.
Saw it on a tick tock.
And so I'm like, Oh,
this happened recently.
Could have been a while ago.
I have no idea.
But Neil deGrasse Tyson with Stephen
Colbert talking about AI and being
like, this has been around for a while.
This isn't new.
It isn't novel.
Like, the only thing that's novel
is all of a sudden they can write
essays and do liberal arts stuff.
And now everybody's like, holy shit,
this is very scary and intense.
And the reality is, that's just
a permutation of what was already
there versus being sort of like
this whole new modicum on top of it.
Question for you that, I'm
sure you get from investors
and other folks all the time.
And if I'm going, and I don't mean
it to be super hard hitting, but
how do you think about sort of like
Forwrd as a solution that's connecting
to sort of what you have versus
what all the platforms are sort of
adding and doing themselves, right?
So you have Salesforce is
adding AI, HubSpot's adding AI.
How do you think about not, not just
Forwrds positioning, but sort of like.
What functionality of the platform
itself is going to do and then where
other solutions that you might be
connecting, adding in sort of adopting.
In addition to that, where did those fit?
Great question.
So, to my opinion Salesforce adding
AI and HubSpot adding AI it's a must.
They will add AI, but to solve
your problems, your organizational
problems, you need more than
a Salesforce or a HubSpot.
You need something that will do cross
organization, cross application.
this is something I think in, especially
in the HubSpot ecosystem is it's, it's
nascent, it's growing, it's getting
more enterprising, but I think a lot
of people, especially coming from
sort of a Salesforce universe know
this already is even if you're going
to fully utilize and fully deploy any
product, any platform, no one software
is going to do all of your things.
And so to your point, there's
always other stuff in the
stack and there always will be.
Exactly.
And that's only one point to my opinion.
Second point, you have business processes
that's unique, that are unique for you.
When Salesforce design a feature or
HubSpot, they don't design it so it can
support anyone's business process, right?
And by the way, Salesforce
Einstein is a very good example.
Salesforce can predict stuff, right?
Almost like Forwrd,
but in order to use it.
You need to change your internal
processes so they fit what they have
designed, and you don't want to do that.
So this is why an external piece can
really connect the different voids into
a solution that is customized to you.
And if the solution is customized
to you, and, even more when talking
to AI and data, the accuracy.
and the results that you will
get will be much, much better
that will fit your needs.
Do you think that there's a place
for both platform and tool native AI
functionality and then sort of like A,
AI wrapper around all of that as well
and like both of those coexist or do
you think one is just sort of a better
approach and strategy than the other?
I think that they are already coexisting.
And I think that, you know,
companies like, Airtable or Miro or
ClickUp or even Monday proved us.
That even when you have Salesforce, you
sometimes don't have all the modules
that you need for your own company,
like a specific process within cs, a
specific process within customer support.
Like you don't have everything.
And I think those voids will always be
filled by startup companies and exactly
the same as and exactly in the same way.
AI companies will do the same.
And again, a company are different, right?
So Forwrd is not a company that's
using LLMs or an external models.
Why?
Because we want you to build
your own models on your own data.
You need also to
differentiate between the two.
I'm, Certain that enterprises,
moreover, in the rev ops kind of
area, will use more AI for process
optimization, let's call it this way.
and I want Forwrd to be the
simplest way for them to do that.
I think that obviously more companies
will try to do those things.
But another things thing to mention
about ai, I think that if you don't.
include AI with automation you're
not doing anything and I think that
AI Is only the beginning of what we
will see I call it hyper automation.
And that's the, the holy grail, right?
An AI that creates an action.
Hey, Connor, this customer
is not responding.
If you will send them an email
about X, Y, Z, they will increase
their likelihood of buying.
Boom.
You trigger the action.
You send this specific
email, you get the result.
I mean, the entire funnel
and process will be boomed.
it reminds me that I've read, I'm
not sure where, that Sam Meltzmann
said that soon we will have a
unicorn of one person or whatever.
what enables this is exactly the same.
Is data, AI, and automation
connected together.
That's the key for any
business today to optimize.
Their day to day.
I think that the companies, you know,
like HubSpot and Salesforce doing
a lot by developing the modules,
but connecting them differently.
It's always, you need to look back
from your own needs, which are
custom and then just execute that.
I just saw, maybe this is coming
from this, but I, I went to.
Lord of the Rings in concert, which
I highly recommend is amazing.
But as you're talking about this,
what sort of like reminded me of
this is you think about kind of like
what those big platforms are and they
kind of have their armored plates.
And the reality is, is that if
they were fully armored there,
there would be completely immobile.
And so in those gaps,
there's always opportunity.
And if you are an entrepreneur and you
are looking at sort of like, what can
you be doing and where can you be adding?
And I think the reason that I love.
B to B entrepreneurship is it's,
it's a lot easier to find those.
Like you're going to go ask people
like, Hey, where, where are the
gaps that you guys are feeling?
And they'll just tell you, whereas I think
in consumer, it's a lot more like you
just make stuff and see if anyone likes it
which I think is a lot harder and a little
bit more lightning in the bottle, but.
I think to your point even all of
the platforms that they add that
native functionality get to a place
where they need to be able to have
something that supplements those gaps
and even sort of wraps around the
entirety of what they're doing, because
ultimately that platform only has eyes
on what is in that platform itself.
And even as you get fully deployed, you
always have sort of additional pieces.
100 And it's always has been this case,
right, back from the 90's PeopleSoft,
Sibyl, SAP, you don't have one software to
run everything, you, you, you just can't.
So you talked about the sort of
churn prediction and customer
scoring components with with Forwrd
at the top end is an example.
What else are you seeing customers do
where you've sort of seen anybody that
is using the product and you're, whether
you're like, Whoa, that's an incredible,
or they're having positive outcomes
or whatever sort of resonates to you
that you've actually seen some of your
customers leverage Forwrd or maybe even
Forwrd plus other stuff in their stack.
So actually we are
playing a platform play.
Right.
We don't sell an an application.
We sell a platform.
And when we started, we always talked
with customers about what they want
to build using the platform, right?
Because we ourselves don't know exactly
what are the limits, how big we can go.
And on those discovery calls, we learn all
the time what customers want, want to do.
And you know, it was, I think, like a few
quarters ago when we had customers talking
about us, about territory management.
It's a subject that I never
thought that can be connected
to AI or predictive model.
And we just build it using Forwrd.
So now they have a better territory
alignment and management using a
predictive model that suggests them
how to kind of, divide the leads on a
specific regions that all the AEs within
this regions get high quality leads.
And you don't have one AE that
gets all the, all the gold
Are you doing that like on
assignment or are you doing that?
Like let load up all the accounts here.
Like how does that, what, what's
the input and what's the output
for that type of a solution?
Yeah.
So.
It varies, but usually we select
a specific segment of accounts.
It can be a product line, it
can be a few regions, whatever.
And then with the customer, we actually
don't build anything, the customer builds.
So the customer knows, usually in
this place with a very talented RevOps
person that kind of had this idea,
and I'm like, yeah, let's do it.
So he defined exactly the goals.
He defined what a qualified account is.
He defined what a qualified contact is.
And we use actually two models, one
for the contacts, one for the accounts.
At the top of the funnel, we combined
both of them and then we pushed the
predictions back into Salesforce.
We did an aggregated score of all of them.
And then based on that, He implemented
the routing function in Salesforce that
actually routed the contacts and accounts
to AEs based on what the model suggests.
So this is like a very good cool example
that, you know, I never thought it
technical does your buyer have to be?
So if you have somebody is it
the RevOps person that does.
Low code and no code platforms
and is comfortable in that arena.
Is it somebody, maybe you have that plus
maybe a data engineer, like what level
of, of sophistication does somebody need
to be, to be able to work effectively
with, with Forwrd specifically?
Yeah.
Any rev ops, any rev ops that
operates within Salesforce,
Marketo, HubSpot can build this.
And by the way, average build
time takes three hours, the
average go live is three weeks.
So really it's a new tool.
Sometimes we do training for
an hour explaining the concept.
and we also get feedback from customers.
Hey, I don't understand
this, this, this, and that.
So we constantly change.
The product.
So folks will understand it, but,
and we also have a, we also like a
no touch funnel to the product where
I see people just go in, connect
HubSpot and just starting to build.
HubSpot is our main integration, by the
way I see people from the store go in,
install it in minutes and build models.
and that's really amazing
to see and it happens.
So.
Any rev ops marketing ops, CS ops can
use Forwrd we, and, and by the way, the
more technical side of the business,
like the analysts and the scientists also
use Forwrd to accelerate their own work.
What do you think people are missing?
obviously you guys are working
with GTM teams that are innovative.
They're, they're using some of the
AI functionality and sort of new and
exciting ways beyond just Forwrd.
Where do you think people are either,
I mean, everybody's sort of talking
about, Hey, we're investing in this,
we're doing something here, but what
do you think people are either not
investing in that you think that they
should, or where are they sort of
misaligning their energy versus what you
think the expected upside actually is?
I think that, you know, Prior to OpenAI,
to ChatGPT most people thought that
AI is a buzzword, it's not working,
you don't need it, blah, blah, blah.
After people saw OpenAI's ChatGPT
management started saying to all
employees, Hey, listen, use AI, right?
Because we want to be more
efficient, more over with the
global economy and what's going on.
like globally, right?
People want to be more efficient.
But I think that I see companies wasting
time of building internal solutions
that don't scale and don't provide
what they want to do just because
they want to play with something.
I think it's wrong.
I think that often, by the
way, 90 of the machine learning
projects in enterprises fail.
And I think people are wasting.
Too much time about things that are not
directly impacting their core business.
And this is why I think that people should
adopt external solutions to support as
they do for HR, as they do for a database.
No one builds their own
database, for their own purposes.
So I think that with AI, especially
people are playing with it a lot A lot
of companies comes to us after they
failed with their internal projects.
So I think that people are missing
that the idea is not to play with it.
The idea is to make an impact on
the business and really to try
to do it as fast as they can,
because this is how you win.
So.
Yeah, I see, I see a lot of it.
I see tons of people wasting time.
I'm not saying that they shouldn't,
I'm just saying that as long as
it's really focused around their
core business, yes, great, right?
But if it's orthogonal to the
business or a peripheral project,
use a different technology, use a
different product and just solve it.
Yeah, what what do you think is what makes
you excited either about well, maybe we'll
do both sides So so maybe specifically
where Forwrd is going next what sort of
gets you excited about what that roadmap
looks like and then maybe a little more
macro than that Sort of how you see
some of AI's impact on on GTM software
and how you sort of see things changing
So with regards to Forwrd, I think what
excites me is that everything is new.
We're always doing like new stuff
that we don't know if they will work.
it's being super creative all day long.
that's amazing for me.
I love to build, I love
to create, that's awesome.
So with Forwrd, as I told you before, I
believe that the key is hyper automation.
And we are in the center of helping
employees and helping companies
essentially to hyper automate their
own business processes, right?
So if I can achieve the same business
goals with a half of the team size,
or if I can expand my business
outcome by 10x instead of 2x in
the same workforce, that's amazing.
and the way to achieve it.
Is using A.
I.
This is this is already agreed.
Now the question is how you would
implement this AI And that's what's
exciting about Forwrd because Forwrd
helps teams to implement Ai And to
embed it into business processes
quickly and to see the results.
Is speed like?
So you talked a little bit, do
you think just speed is the most
important thing because the faster
you start getting those, those
returns, the faster they compound?
Or is it just that like, if when you
quickly seems to come up repeatedly
for you and where do you think that
the speed is the most important sort
of metric that you're looking at?
When I'm saying speed is when
you're building AI And A.
I.
Models.
You want to be successful,
successful in your first model.
Maybe in your second model
or your third model, right?
In order to get to your second
or your third model, you need to
fail fast in your first model.
If you will do an internal project within
your company with, you know, like, I
try to do, and you will fail after a
year, you won't start your second model.
So I think because it's super
new and everything that we build
is new, you need to be able to
execute and see results fast.
It doesn't mean need
to be a day or an hour.
It can be a week.
It can be three weeks.
It could be a month.
But you need to control it.
You need to own it.
And by having something like Forwrd,
it lets you own it and build it.
You control it yourself.
You don't have like a big team that
kind of, you know impacts you, right?
You control it.
And I think that that's the key.
The key is that we enable folks
to own it completely end to end.
So they can fail fast on the, on the
first model and see the results and see
the improvement on your second model, on
your third model, on their fifth use case.
And I think that that's a very
important aspect while adopting
new technologies that you don't
know exactly what you will get.
You need to see something.
You need to feel something.
It's like an MVP of a product, right?
You don't expect it to be
perfect, but you expect to feel
something, to see something.
And until you don't feel it,
until you don't see it, you
can't really impact anything.
So the The key here is how can I do
something on my own without so with
without a lot of resources and how
can I actually do an impact fast?
Because if I can do an impact fast,
that will increase the top line by,
I don't know, a percent maybe in
you might learn something along the way.
exactly and it's the same for me by the
way, as I build this platform, as we, as
the team, we're changing, we're adding
constantly features to the platform and,
and I always say to the team, we need to
deliver new features on a weekly basis.
That's very, very important in order
to see, in order to feel what's
working, what's, what's not working.
That's very important for a startup or
for any project that's Starting out,
So normally I, I, I end, but I
feel like you just answered my
ending question, which is for folks
that are wanting to get started.
They're, they're eager to jump into some
of the eyepieces, what, what, how should
they just start getting into things?
And it sounds like your advice is just do
stuff and experiment and learn something.
And, and that alone
starts compounding value.
Exactly, but maybe before that try
to think of the problems that you
want to solve because again, the
context, try to think about the
problems that are really urgent for
the business or to yourself personally.
Right.
are in a business context.
So I always try to think about
what's important and what's not
important, and if I can impact
somehow on what's important, right?
And if I can impact it, I would definitely
go and try and experiment with AI.
If you're in operations, I would urge you
to read more about predictive AI models,
obviously about Forwrd, but, to be curious
and always try to improve your current
status.
Always
do you think the point of
diminishing returns is?
So if I'm, if I'm in operations and I'm.
Let me go and see if I can use
AI to solve this problem, which
is like a big generic statement.
Right?
But if you're thinking, how
do I go and jump into this?
At what point do you sort of say?
And maybe I'm, it's kind of the
age old, like engineers will
spend, you know, 10 hours trying to
automate the task that takes one.
At what point do you think
you sort of run into that?
And then maybe it makes sense
to not necessarily implement
AI into that workflow.
And and maybe you're spending a lot
of time trying to solve a problem that
Isn't necessarily it's not that it's
not solvable, but but solving it in
that way doesn't make a lot of sense
It's a, it's a good question.
That's how to answer.
But my rule of thumb is if you see, if you
know that you have enough data to build
your predictions On top of it, if you know
the business processes in HubSpot or in
Mercado in Salesforce and you know that
you have enough history to learn from,
I would go and definitely check it out.
Usually those are growth companies,
startups, I mean, especially like,
you know, products like Forwrd
is not, is not the way to go.
But if you're a growth company if you're
scaling, if you don't have, by the
way, also, if you don't have resources.
If you're looking to solve a problem,
but, but you don't have an analyst or
you don't have a data scientist, but
you have the tools and the data and
you want to do it yourself and you want
to impact yourself, go and do that.
yeah, I mean, I think to to your point
the the superpower that I think a lot of
people in GTM and operations are gonna
have is the discernment of when and where
can AI be leveraged and add value and then
knowing when to apply that as a solution
versus When you shouldn't do that.
And I think it's kind of the next
extrapolation of is this automatable?
Should we automate this?
And I think as you get into more
levels of seniority and experience
and strategy that most of it applies
to, should we even invest the
resources in trying to automate this?
I think that extends to can AI add
value to this workflow and the folks
that are able to identify where AI is
going to add value and where it doesn't
make sense starts to become one of the
most valuable skill sets in GTM teams.
I a 100 agree with everything
that you just said, Connor.
Fabulous.
Well, Kobi, thank you so,
so much for joining us.
I could talk to you all day.
I appreciate you sharing
your afternoon with us.
Hopefully I'm not leaving you to
too big of a backlog of emails.
But I look Forwrd to catching
up with you more soon.
Thank you so much for joining us.
And for anyone listening,
go check out Forwrd.
ai.
It is Forwrd with no a,
so F O R W R D dot AI.
And Kobi and his team would
love to show you how it works.
Thanks for the opportunity
to to speak, Connor.
Super excited.
Always a pleasure speaking with you.
Amazing.
I'll catch up with you soon.
All right.
Bye bye.