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upGrad Enterprise aims to build the world’s largest GenAI learning initiative to enable high-growth companies to embrace technology’s transformative business impact. Hosted by Srikanth Iyengar, CEO, upGrad Enterprise, the GenAIrous Podcast, will curate an exciting roster of global experts and guests, who are at the cutting-edge of Generative AI, and its varied applications in the world of business.
Welcome to the GenAIrous Podcast where we unravel the fascinating world of generative AI and its transformative impact on businesses globally. I'm your host, Srikanth Iyengar, CEO of upGrad Enterprise. At upGrad Enterprise, we're building the world's largest gen AI learning initiative, and we're empowering high growth companies to leverage cutting edge technology. Each week, join me and a roster of global experts as we explore innovations shaping the world of work as we know it. Are you ready? Let's get GenAIrous.
Srikanth Iyengar (CEO,upGrad Enterprise):Welcome to our very first episode of the generous podcast with a very special guest, Vikram Ekambaram Vikram, thank you for joining us from New York.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:Thanks, Srikanth Excited to be here.
Srikanth Iyengar (CEO,upGrad Enterprise):Wonderful. Wonderful. A quick introduction on Vikram, you know, very storied career across continents and cacross different industries. Started in India, came to the US. Worked with various technology leaders, Oracle, Microsoft, Tableau, which then became Salesforce. And now he's, obviously very much, involved in the Gen AI inflection point. So Vikram brings with him over 25 years of experience at the intersection of enterprise sales and technology. And therefore, you know, what better discussion to have with Vikram than talking about the impact of Gen AI on enterprise sales. So, Vikram, really excited to be talking about this, and I know this is a topic you're very passionate about. So looking forward to a great discussion.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:Thanks. Thanks, Srikanth So passionate that I actually left my job and decided to start my own consulting firm to go do this.
Srikanth Iyengar (CEO,upGrad Enterprise):Wonderful. So now you've got to sell what you're talking about. Good for you. Good for you. So with that, look, let's jump straight in. Right, obviously, you know, Gen AI, if the media is to be believed, if clients that we talk to are, you know, talking about it, impacts many, many parts of the enterprise value chain. But clearly, one area that it does impact or is expected to impact is enterprise sales. Enterprise sales has, for decades, been a very tough business. It's gone from purely relationship to technology enabled relationship, but it's still as much a science as an art. So what's your view? What does Gen AI do? Just any initial thoughts?
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:Yeah. And and, Srikanth, I think it'll be good to maybe align on some definitions first, so that everybody is at least, you know, so we're not misinterpreting certain terms because Gen AI gets thrown about as a term. But then a lot of times the examples that people will talk about are more around traditional AI. So you'll see people talk about, oh, we're using Gen AI. But then when you dig into it, it's more about things which were more on, like, predictive modeling or call transcription, which were all things that were available before, you know, kind of chat GPT came into the limelight about, you know, a year and a half ago.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:So the focus of our conversation is obviously generative AI, and this is where, I think what most people think about when they think about generative AI is Chat GPT, where you just go and ask questions and it keeps coming back with these responses, which is pretty amazing. And then I think the second thing is, obviously, we're talking about, enterprise sales from a kind of B2B standpoint, not the kind of B2C sales. So so with that, background, what I will say is that there is definitely a lot of hype. I think there's definitely a lot of potential for how people can use generative AI to drive productivity. And that I think is the kind of initial value that people will see is that it will save time for certain tasks that people do.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:I think what executives will then be looking for is how does this time savings then translate into the two value propositions that every executive cares about. Is it going to help me generate more revenue? Or is it going to help me cut costs by doing more with less? I do think that when it comes to enterprise sales, we are still in a very early part of the journey of people leveraging, generative AI. And so that's kind of, you know, where my head is at in all my, you know, kind of research that I've done and then looking at various products and using it myself in my consulting.
Srikanth Iyengar (CEO,upGrad Enterprise):It makes a lot of sense, Vikram. So let's dive into that a bit. Right, so you talked about the impact on productivity. And clearly, you know, if you look at a typical enterprise sales process, there is prospecting, and then there is initial sort of pitch to the client. And there's opportunity spotting that then translates to proposals that need to a lot of discussion and negotiation, and then a deal gets closed, and then it gets delivered. Broadly, most companies go through this value chain. So productivity could be affected at different parts of this value chain. So any any thoughts on how that could pan out? I mean, how could Gen AI help? What are low hanging fruit if you call it that?
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:Yep. And then I think, Srikanth the way you describe the kind of buyer journey or the sales journey is a good way to start thinking about it because talking about Gen AI for enterprise sales, it's not like one thing. It's not like you just give one product to a salesperson and somehow magically it's going to do everything. I think that's what people kind of mentally visualize. They're like, oh, we're going to give our salespeople chat GPT, and they can use it for all aspects of the customer journey.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:Everything from prospecting to lead generation to client follow ups to generating proposals, to doing demos, to negotiate, and then close the deal, and then do the handoffs, and then onboard the customer, and everything which goes on with the post sales journey. But if you really think about enterprise sales, there are many internal stakeholders involved. There are different functions. There's the SDR function. There's the sales function. There's the presales function. There's your professional services team. There's customer success. And they're all involved, and there are many different workflows. And each of them can get some productivity bumps today with where the technology is.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:But the key thing I want you know, I tell a lot of my clients is that it is very fragmented. So it's not like you're just going to get one technology and it's going to solve the whole thing. The best kind of visual I think about and I like to tell my customers is that map out a workflow.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:So let's say we take, lead generation. Map out all the activities that happened. So if you look at that, there's 6 or 7 different tasks that happened. And the way I would like clients to think about this is not all of it is going to be done by Gen AI. So you can say, okay, you know what? Generating a list of accounts, can I use a tool to that just very quickly instead of somebody going and manually struggling and creating it and spending half an hour building a list, can I quickly just generate a list for them? I could now use Gen AI and build something that could maybe, you know, just feeds the rep. It just gives a list of 100 accounts. It runs through its process and then spits out 100 account researches done for you so you can quickly look at it. And so you look at these different aspects of the process, each of them has areas.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:So what I like to do is kind of map out the current state, which is very human centric. Human, human, human, human, human does a 100 different things. And then you do the future state where you say, human and Gen AI. Human does this, then Gen AI does this, this, this, then human does this, Gen AI does this, this, this. And then you have this human plus Gen AI augmented workflow. Now you take every aspect of the sales process, and you look at every piece of it. Now you can think of how many workflows there are that can be automated.
Srikanth Iyengar (CEO,upGrad Enterprise):Makes makes a lot of sense, and it's definitely not as easy as it seems just getting Chat GPT. Completely get that. But let's talk about sales transformation first. What changes do you see to the sales team as a result of the impact of, this, inflection point?
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:So the first big change I see, and this is not a new trend, any kind of AI, Gen AI or otherwise, needs data. So if I want to transform my sales process, I need to give it data. And today, the biggest problem in sales is that most data, if you think about the kind of tool that everybody thinks about when it's sales, which is CRM, whether it's Salesforce or Microsoft or whatever, most of the data in the CRM is manually entered by salespeople. They go and they say that this is what the opportunity is about. This is what I talk to the customer about.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:This is, you know, if you look at your kind of medic or any of those processes, these are the metrics. This is economic buyer. All of that is manually done, and it's an opinion that the salesperson manually goes and enters. And so the first thing is any manually enter data, one, they don't enter it, so there is gaps in the data. And the second is oftentimes it's a person's opinion and it could be incorrect.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:And so if you were to say I'd love to use Gen AI to go automate that process, I need to give it data. And the best data to feed it is give it all the emails, give it record all your calls, and send it. Now if you're not recording calls, then you're back to this world where somebody has to manually go enter this data, in which case there's really no productivity gain that you're going to get.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:So the big transformation I see first of all is that recording conversations, capturing, you know, emails, all of that is going to be the big big data source that is then leveraged. And as you think about it, it's if I capture that data and those interactions everywhere from my SDR outreach to my salesperson to my SEs, imagine all the handoffs and all of that, that could be streamlined using that. So the first big transformation I see is that there is going to be this big focus on data capture because without these customer interactions being captured, the rest of the process kind of is very piecemeal, and you only get so much insights. Yep.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:The second thing is now if you have this data, then now you can think about and say, okay. My pipeline reviews will be done very, very differently. You spend maybe, you know, half an hour talking about the top five deals, you never get to everything. Instead, the transformation that I see is now if I have all these interactions, I can automatically now pull in a lot of that information, update my CRM, make it available to you so that you're now becoming much more data driven in your sales process. Instead of asking somebody, as a manager, I can now just go ask the system, and it can now, you know, respond to me and give me that information.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:From a salesperson standpoint, the other change I see is that a lot of the manual activities that they do today, that they do pretty poorly. Right? If you look at, let's say, account research is a common one that I saw in enterprise sales. Every salesperson beginning of the year has to go to a country. So they gotta read the 10 k's, read the company website, understand what your value proposition is, understand what their priorities and initiatives are, combine the 2 together, come up with a point of view, identify a list of executives to go after, send them, like, you know, emails targeted, personalized, and then get a meeting. A lot of salespeople hate doing that because you gotta go read the 10 k's. They're not good at doing that. Then somehow they have to understand priorities initiatives. Then somehow they're supposed to take that and connect it to my value proposition. That entire process can, again, be completely automated, leveraging Gen AI because it's really just reading unstructured data coming up with a point of view. So that's another big change I see.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:The third one that I see I'm actually seeing happening more today is that the SDR function. And so if you think about the SDR function, traditionally, the way it worked was that you had a team of SDRs, and they just made calls. Right? It's like you make a 100 calls a day. You send a 100 emails a day, and then maybe you get, like, you know, 2% response rate. So 2 people, you know, pick up your call. So if you think about that activity, it's very manual. It's, like, low return, and it's perfect for then, you know, replacing that with tools and technology where you could have one SDR with Gen AI that could pretty much replace a team of 5 SDRs. And that's, I think, the kind of first quick change we're going to see because everybody knows outreach is not working. Everybody knows that customers aren't picking up phone calls. They're not picking up emails, and so I still need to, do that at scale. And AI is really good at doing stuff at scale.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:The second thing that the AI can do is it can reach out at scale personalized. Instead of me going and manually reading and figuring this out, I can just have Gen AI go out. I can say these are my 10 people I wanna do outreach, and it can come back and list out a 5 email sequence with personalized messages that it should send and just generate all that for you. That then that SDR can just take and then go around.
Srikanth Iyengar (CEO,upGrad Enterprise):So so significant changes on on the, you know, account research, on account mapping, sales reviews, the SDR function, you know, sales calls and better productivity. So a complete transformation of the sales team. But one question that I've heard, you know, people raise is if you're recording sales calls, what about clients having privacy and security concerns? Any perspective on that?
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:So there there are certain industries where you just can't record, and so you just have to be aware of it. So, you know, it's like one of the things we always struggle with was health care. Health care, there's, like, HIPAA, there's privacy, there's, you know, reasons why not. I think the technology is getting sophisticated where it can, you know, as the transcripts come in, you can, you know, remove stuff which is HIPAA compliant or there's PII data. So the technology exists to go remove it, but I think just industries there are going to be some industries which are just going to lag on this, and there are going to be some industries which will lead on this.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:And then so the data that we saw in Gong was that, funnily enough, when it really got down to it, most customers don't really have an issue to recording calls. There's this mental block, but as it becomes more common, you know, that barrier is going to go away. There is and, you know, it depends on the country also. Like, EU, you need, you know, 2 person consent. Asia, you need 2 person consent. And so the the rules vary by country. And so you need the right technology that really, you know, does this and keeps the legal and compliance, properly done. We also had very interesting things like in Germany. We struggled with recording calls just because historically, a lot of East Germans came from a kind of where the state recorded everything, and so they're very suspicious of recording.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:And so there's cultural aspects. Certain countries will just it'll be harder. But at some point, the way I look at it is that so much money is being spent on Gen AI and sales is such a big piece that people want to get value out of. If the only data I have to go off of is public data about some person and stuff like that, and the other dataset you're giving me is what's manually entered in CRM. It's like, you know, if there is garbage in CRM, the AI on top of it is going to give you garbage. And so people are going to realize that they need this data, and so it's going to there's gonna be this push. But in some industries, it's gonna be slow. Some countries, it's going to be slow.
Srikanth Iyengar (CEO,upGrad Enterprise):Yep. Yep. No. Makes makes sense. You know, but as we've seen in other technologies as well, while some industries lag, everyone catches up because it becomes par for the course at some point. So I guess that's what will happen here as well. But but going back to the tools, you know, like you said, today, sales teams have to deal with a bunch of tools. You know, you you'll have a CRM. You'll have a lead gen software. You'll have a marketing platform, and all of those are integrated or not integrated. Obviously, with Gen AI, all of that starts coming together in terms of how you use the toolset. Any any thoughts, any words of advice for our listeners on how they can sort of make that seamless?
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:So so this is kind of the kind of good news, bad news part of the conversation. Where when I was at Gong, what we noticed when we talk to sales leaders, the biggest kind of priorities that they were after was tech consolidation. They were like, I have you know, my salesperson has one, you know, tool to go sell send out emails. There is one tool for, sales enablement. There is one tool for pipeline reviews. There's one tool for forecasting. There's one tool to record calls. And they're just like, I cannot have this. I need platforms that'll bring all of it together. There's been this push towards consolidation, but I feel like with Gen AI, we're gonna go back to fragmentation because any new technology, it always follows the same pattern where initially there are lots of best of breed solutions where they all do one thing really really well and then they drive value. And then as the market consolidates, then it turns to best of brand and you end up with platforms that don't do things as well as the best of breed, but it's all good enough that a person can do their job.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:So so I think the bad news here is that you're going to end up with multiple technologies. Going back to what you said is people want to leverage Gen AI and they wanna be like, hey. I just wanna go with one technology. It's not there. I think the closest that I would recommend to somebody was if you are in the Microsoft stack, then what Microsoft's done with, Copilot for sales comes the closest because they are they have Microsoft Teams, so they're recording calls. Guess what? They have all your emails. So, yeah, Microsoft, you know, Exchange. So you have all the emails, so they don't need permission for that. So they've got that part. So 2 of the big datasets that you would want, they've already got. And then if you're using Microsoft CRM, they've integrated that. And then if you're using Word or PowerPoint, they've integrated all of that. And so you can see that various aspects of your sales workflow, if you're in the Microsoft stack, gets you the closest.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:Salesforce is the other, you know, big CRM vendor or like HubSpot would be the third one. The challenge they have is they don't own the email. They don't own the, you know, call recording, and so now it's tricky. Then you look and you say, okay. Why is Google buying HubSpot?
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:Now Google and HubSpot come together. Now HubSpot's going to be like, hey. We have email with G Suite. We have the call recordings with Google Meet. Suddenly, they can really, you know, build a Copilot for sales for HubSpot.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:So it's gonna be interesting to see how how all of this pans out.
Srikanth Iyengar (CEO,upGrad Enterprise):No. Very, exciting changes. I think, like most other changes, some people will figure it out. Others, I think, will take a bit longer, but that's the nature of the game. You know, sales is also sometimes a high churn business, but more importantly, it's a business that people learn by watching other salespeople in action.
Srikanth Iyengar (CEO,upGrad Enterprise):Right? I mean, if you go back 25 years, when one started as a salesperson, you just went along with a senior sales guy, sat through meetings, learned learned the nonverbal cues, understood how conversations are done. How do you take a, let's say, a potential lead or nudge it towards closure, build the relationship, etcetera? So, you know, there were lots of these activities around onboarding, coaching, you know, that that, senior salespeople did with their teams, and that's how knowledge was passed on as you'd call it. So in the world of Gen AI, how do you see that panning out in terms of creating a bench of salespeople? Because to a certain extent, it is driven by tools. So would it change the way salespeople are hired in terms of the attributes they expect, or how do you see companies training their salespeople?
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:So sales enablement, you know, is a function that I think is ripe for disruption with Gen AI. So if you think about Gen AI's use cases, it's content generation, it's content understanding. And if you think about enablement, what is it? It's about generating a bunch of information so that a new rep who joins has the information that they need. And then the challenge with onboarding has always been that you kind of everybody joins the the first 2 weeks, you drink from the fire hose. I give you a bunch of information, then I put it on my, you know, intranet or SharePoint or whatever it is. And then you as a salesperson, then you now go and start doing your job. And you have a question, you're somehow supposed to search through all of this and figure out what the answer is. And now you take Gen AI and you say, guess what? I can just put all my content into, you know, an LLM, and the person can now get to real time knowledge. I am at a customer. I have a question. I want the answer to that one question. I can just go ask it, and it's going to go search all my onboarding content, and it's gonna come back with a response.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:Very simple, obvious use case. AI role coaching is becoming big, where you can now and we've all seen demos of GPT 4 0 where you can just have a conversation with it. Now you take that to the next level. There are products which are already existing out there where using your data, it can train a coach. And then the salesperson, before a call, can just have a role play with that coach, and the, you know, the coach will grade them, help them test. You go do 5 of these, and it'll give you a score, and then you can see a score going up. And now you're prepared for the call. Sales enablement will completely I think time to onboard will absolutely go down if people are leveraging Gen AI.
Srikanth Iyengar (CEO,upGrad Enterprise):And and coming back to the sales teams themselves, you know, we talked about SDRs a little earlier, you know, that the thumb rule in sales used to be that you've gotta be where your client is. You've gotta be in the same community. That's how relationships are built. And then over time, companies have disaggregated the location as well. SDRs can sit centrally elsewhere. They reach out. But there are still front end sales people who are in the markets. Do you see that disaggregation continuing? I mean, there's always going to be an element of human interaction that you can't take away like you said. But do you see teams getting distributed globally? Do you see other changes in how a sales team is sort of positioned or located?
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:This is more of a long term trend than a kind of today answer because most of us in our generation think about things the way you and I think about it. It's a relationship. I wanna go meet with you. I wanna talk with you. Stuff like that. You and I have kids, They text. They don't talk. They interact and build relationships in a very, very different way. They've grown up with, like, virtual relationships. And so when they become buyers, are they going to want to go meet the sales guy to go, like, you know, understand something, or will they want technology to facilitate that?
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:I do think in the future, the trend is kind of I would give the AI as an advantage. Today, obviously, most of us are still kind of stuck to the old ways of doing things, and so we do talk about face to face contact. But I've seen this post COVID. You've probably seen this. Before COVID, I was always on a plane meeting with customers. You went out for dinner. You did this. You did that. Because guess what? They all went to the office, and they were happy to meet you in the office. They got a lunch out of it or whatever. But post COVID, most of them are working from home. So if you're like, hey. Let's go meet for dinner. You're like, well, I gotta go, like, you know, I live in New York. It's like, oh, I gotta go into the city. Now it's like 1 hour to go into the city, then I'm gonna meet you for dinner. And it's like you know, it's like so many people come to town and they're like, hey, can we meet in New York? And I'm like, if I was just working in the city, it wasn't a problem. But if I'm working remote, suddenly I'm, like, do I want to? Can we just talk on the phone? And so I I think there are bigger trends going on, which all favor AI and virtual selling than the kind of traditional face to face selling.
Srikanth Iyengar (CEO,upGrad Enterprise):I think that generational point is actually a very, very important point. I think, you're right. But let me let me ask you a slightly provocative question there. Now, you know, by definition, sales teams even today are led by people who have experienced, people like you and me. And so, you know, we are looking at it through our lens and I generalize here, but the the the salesperson entering the sales force today has a very, very different, perspective. So do you think that companies are equipped to, embrace this change quickly enough because the decision makers are not perceiving things the way the person on the ground is?
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:So this was one of the reasons why I started my own company. Part of it is I do feel sales and go to market is fundamentally broken. It's like, you know, when I looked out there, I was like, do I wanna go back to another company and, you know, take a sales job or take a post sales job or do a strategy function and go to market? And I just wasn't excited about it because I feel b2b SaaS has gone through its glory days. Now we're in a very different world where it's no longer just about winning the new business. It's about selling a product that the customer is going to renew because after, like, about 3 years in the company's existence, you make more money on the renewals than you do in net new revenue.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:Challenge I see is that sales leaders that I see today, I think have, like, huge disadvantages because they've grown up in a way of selling that doesn't work anymore. They're not, you know, very change oriented in general. I mean, most salespeople, like, all the questions are, always done it this way. It's always worked. I'm not going to change. I have never recorded calls. You know? I don't enter stuff in my CRM or I don't do account planning. But I've been successful. Right? And it's like, you know how salespeople are. It's like, whatever's work. They just want to keep doing the same thing. They're not very change oriented.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:And it as long as things were working, you could do that. But now things are not working. I think you go look at it. I think, there's a metric out there which said that the average tenure of a CRO now is, like, 17 months
Srikanth Iyengar (CEO,upGrad Enterprise):I read that too. Yes.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:Yeah. So why is it 17 months? It's because they're all bringing old ways of doing things, trying to apply it to a new world, where now it's no longer about you being a salesperson. It's like, your job is actually to sell something that the customer will get value from and will then renew and expand, and that renewal and the expansion is more important than the selling. But all sales leaders have been used to kind of the selling motion. They don't understand what post sales, what success is. So how many times do we have high churn because we didn't close their ideal? And then when you go push the sales deal, they're like, I got my quota. I gotta make my number. I'm gonna sell whatever I can. I don't care about churn. But that whole world is completely changing where it's no longer about the sales process. It's now about the entire customer journey, which goes to delivering value. So I feel, going back to your question, it's not just Gen AI. I think fundamentally, go to market is broken. I think leaders have an old way of doing things.
Srikanth Iyengar (CEO,upGrad Enterprise):No. Amazing. Amazing insight. Look, there's a huge opportunity to change the mindset. Upskilling is the need of the day. If one ignores it today on enterprise sales, it's gonna catch up with you and be a deluge in, let's say, 6 months or even, 3 months from now. Right? And I know you're out there, we are collaborating on this. So how do you think companies can upscale themselves? What what do you think companies should be doing? What do you think senior leaders should be doing when they look at bringing Gen AI into enterprise sales?
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:And I think I'll put it this way. There are there's a few mindset things that they need to really think about when it comes to this. First is, it's not perfect. And this is what, you know, a lot of people struggle with. They're like, I want the easy button for Gen AI. I'm just going to go deploy it. It's going to solve my problem. It's like some, you know, technology that has been around for, like, 10, 15 years. It's very mature, and it just works. That is not Gen AI.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:You have to get comfortable experimenting. You gotta get comfortable, you know, trying different technologies. And the rate at which it's changing, it's like anything I tell you in terms of do it this way today, chances are in, like, 6 months or a year, the amount you know, it's gonna change again. And to your point, I think what I like to tell, you know, leaders that I talk to is you got to dip your foot in the water. You got to start experimenting.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:Not so that you get it right, but so that you can just stay abreast with it. So that as these things start maturing, you are ahead of the curve rather than, like you said, that deluge. And we're saying, I mean, I spend all my time just thinking about this, and I can't stay up with it. So it's like people who are ignoring this, a year from now, it's a whole different world and people are gonna be running circles around them and they're gonna keep doing things the old way and it's not going to work. So yeah.
Srikanth Iyengar (CEO,upGrad Enterprise):No. Absolutely. And I think that getting started is super, super critical. And I think, you know, one needs a catalyst and that's where the upskilling and getting a sense of what the tool sets out there are, how does one use them is critical. And like you said, they'll keep changing, but then if you're in the flow, you can make those changes. You can tweak on the fly, but getting started is very, very, very important. No. Thank you. Thank you for that.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:One thing I did not add to the previous statement is that to your point, it's not just about the toolset because the toolset is going to change. Whatever toolset they're going to pick today is probably not the toolset that they'll use in, like, 6 months or a year, which doesn't really matter because these are all subscription, you know, and you can cancel one subscription and get the right one when the time is right. But they need to get upskilled. They need to get trained on these concepts. They need to understand these concepts so that they at least can stay abreast of, like, when these terms come up or they see a problem, they're thinking about how to apply Gen AI to their problems. Today, they're not even doing that. They don't know what Gen AI is. They went and used Chargegy PD, it does not work. They give up and say, oh, this thing is just like hyped and it's not working. But Yep.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:What they need to really invest in is some kind of upskilling. And this is, I think, where, you know, you guys come in, and I think what you're doing, that is the need of the hour.
Srikanth Iyengar (CEO,upGrad Enterprise):Thank you for these insights. Just one, last question for you. What is the one piece of advice you'd give an enterprise sales leader today? Because obviously, on one side, they're trying to attract the best talent. The best talent is expecting that they're state of the art, which in many cases they're not. On the other side, they're resistant to change. They're getting questions from their boards and CEOs saying, what are you doing with Gen AI? You have customers asking them, do you use this in your process? So there's a lot of ambiguity. What's your one piece of advice to them? We talked about getting started, but anything else you'd like to highlight for these guys?
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:I think they need an experimentation mindset. This is, I think, where sales leaders really struggle because they don't have an experimentation mindset. There the thing I'll go back to is I think it was Gordon Moore, The Crossing the Chasm guy. Geoffrey Moore or Gordon Moore. One of the Moors. Yeah. But he wrote this book Crossing the Chasm, which you've all heard about. But he also wrote a book called Zone to Win. In Zone to Win, he talks about the different zones, and he says that, you know, there's the productivity zone and the performance zone, which is where most companies tend to operate. But the reason they struggle with innovation is because they don't have an incubation zone and you need to have a different team.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:I would almost this is where I see the world going in, like, a year, 2 years is I would see either as part of revenue operations, and I think that's kind of where it could or maybe an enablement is they have a GenAI center of excellence or a GenAI leader that is tasked with bringing in GenAI to the organization. The sales leaders, they have to make their numbers. If they don't make their numbers, they get fired. The Gen AI is going to be something they need to incubate and test and start bringing in slowly, and so you need somebody else. And so the way I see it work, I would recommend them strongly, is to either get somebody in a fractional capacity or get hire somebody or nominate somebody in your DevOps teams whose job is to basically be like, how can I use Gen AI and optimize different aspects of my sales process? Let them run the experiments, test it out. Because, again, if you have a 100 salespeople, you don't want to be experimenting with a 100 salespeople because some of this won't work. So can you then take, like, you know, a small group of salespeople, go run something, test it out, make it work, and then roll it out to the larger group? Then go run the second experiment.
Srikanth Iyengar (CEO,upGrad Enterprise):And I think that the choice of the sales people you pilot for this critical because sales teams are tribes. They they only wanna learn from other people who they see have been successful. If you've got someone running an initiative who they don't respect or think highly of, they just kind of discarded. We've all been there. So I think experimentation is key but picking the right people to use as the evangelist or the vanguard if you call it that is is equally important, I think.
Srikanth Iyengar (CEO,upGrad Enterprise):So great great insights there, Vikram. Super. Vikram, this has been super exciting. Thank you so much. I think we're at the cusp of what is a huge inflection point, like I said at the start. Thank you so much for your time and, speak soon.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:Yep. And, Shrikant, I do see in, like, 2 years, you will look back on this call and be like, hey. Remember when we talked about how will people use Gen AI in sales?
Srikanth Iyengar (CEO,upGrad Enterprise):It's like, you know, hey.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:You know, it's like
Srikanth Iyengar (CEO,upGrad Enterprise):War stories.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:You know, what is this Internet? And, you know, how do you build it? How do I put stuff in the cloud? I mean, it's just in 2 years, like, we aren't gonna be talking about how do you. It's going to be like, oh, look. It's just how we do stuff. But it's good to be kind of early in this process.
Srikanth Iyengar (CEO,upGrad Enterprise):No. I've gotta I've gotta share an experience with you. Right? So back in the day, you know, you know, when I lived in the US, like a lot of us, I used BlackBerry. Right? I used BlackBerry, and I had a mobile phone, which was a flip mobile phone. And the fact that I could type emails on my BlackBerry was super, super cool. Right? You and and I remember phone calls when you just stepped out on an airport when you're looking at an attachment on the BlackBerry, and you're trying to talk on the phone, and all of that stuff, and you think you've got it figured out. And then comes the smartphone, and you're like, hey, I can do all of this in the palm of one hand, literally. I mean, and I guess it's an moment. But like you said, we've got kids. Our kids take that for granted. And I think that's what's going to happen, except that it's not going to be 1 generation. It's probably going to be 1 year.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:Yeah? Yep. And that's, I think, the the big thing that I see is, like, this exponential curve. The rate of change with Gen AI is something I've never seen. And I mean, close to this example. I joined Tableau in 2013. Tableau was formed in 2003. It was 2016 by the time Tableau had real competition. I mean, there were companies that were coming out, but 2016 was when Power BI really built a product that would compete. So Tableau had about 12 years of, like, run rate before there was competition.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:Then I joined Gong. Gong was formed in 2015. By 2019, the core value proposition of recording calls and conversation intelligence was commoditized. And now, I'm doing this Gen AI stuff, and I'm talking to tons and tons of founders. It's like, the day they launch, there's already 5 viable competitors.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:And so this kind of rate of change is just faster and faster. And so what would take 5 years in the past is now getting shrunk to 1 year. And so it's gonna be interesting. I feel like we're going into a world where only AI can survive because AI is the only thing that can keep up with this rate of change. Like, it's just getting past human rate of change. So that'll be an interesting thing to keep an eye on.
Srikanth Iyengar (CEO,upGrad Enterprise):But hopefully, there are still some things that AI can't do, which is write a check, which is what most sales people want from customers. So let's bank on that. Right? So but super. Vikram, thank you.
Vikram Ekambaram (Founder,Vyceral Soluti:Thanks, Srikanth
Srikanth Iyengar (CEO,upGrad Enterprise):And that concludes another episode of the GenAIrous Podcast. We're very grateful to our guests for their time and their expertise. A big thank you to our producer, Shantha Shankar in Delhi, and our audio engineer, Nithin Shams in Berlin, for making the magic happen behind the scenes. Join us next time, and don't forget to subscribe to GenAIrous wherever you listen to your podcasts. See you next time.