Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Stuart Wall, CEO of Signpost (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about your company. You’re a venture-funded company. You’ve raised a substantial amount of money. How long have you been around?

Stuart Wall: We launched in 2010. We, initially, were under a different business model. We pivoted to where we are now in 2012. Our investors are Google Ventures, Spark Capital, OpenView, Georgian Partners, and a handful of angels. We have just over 200 people headquartered in New York. We also have offices in Austin and Denver. It’s about a third each between those three locations.

Sramana Mitra: Revenue-wise, are you getting to a point where you’re going to do an IPO soon? Where are you evolution-wise?

Stuart Wall: In terms of vision for the company, I think it will be a multi-billion dollar revenue business. It’s on us to execute to make that a reality. When we think about building a business, the goal is building it as a standalone, profitable, and independent entity. We’re on the IPO path and not on the acquisition path.

Sramana Mitra: Great. Based on your understanding of AI and the CRM world, where do you see open problems that you would encourage other entrepreneurs to look into automating? CRM is broad and has many segments. You have picked one segment where AI-driven automation works particularly well.

I love your positioning. I think you’ve done a phenomenally good job there. Where do you see other such white spaces where you would steer entrepreneurs?

Stuart Wall: I think there’s a lot of interesting applications of AI. Where is it more effective and a better experience for the user? One challenge I see is around chat bot. In some cases, people would rather talk to another person and not an AI. AI may be there, but it’s making the experience worse – not better. We tend to shy away from those.

The other thing is AI is this subtle intelligence working in the background where the user isn’t necessarily aware that something is involved. I think the best technology does work for you without you having to think about it. CRM is a category where you can automate things in the background. It’s not about a chat bot where you’re talking to Mia back and forth. Self-driving cars is another category. Obviously, there’s a lot of innovation there. That’s a great application of AI. Some of the workflow tasks that assistants have done before like scheduling calendar invites is a great application of AI.

Sramana Mitra: I would imagine that if you would split the different CRM segments, there are a lot of automation possibilities in other types of segments as well. In general, I think vertical cloud is a big trend. Vertical CRM is also a big trend. If you apply AI to those two trends, there is a tremendous amount of opportunity to do automated vertical workflows.

Stuart Wall: Absolutely. The end state of AI won’t be Apple’s Siri. There will be vertical AI solutions, potentially, within CRM and then within large categories.

Sramana Mitra: It was great listening to you story. I love what you’re doing. Good luck.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Stuart Wall, CEO of Signpost
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