Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Unbabel CEO Vasco Pedro (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of your leads come from the marketplaces? Is Zendesk sending you a lot of leads?

Vasco Pedro: We operate on account-based marketing and selling. We have identified several accounts that fit our ICP and then we use AVM strategies for go-to-market motion. One of the key aspects is partnerships. We work closely with BPOs like Concentrix and Teleperformance and others. They end up being a lot of the lead generators for us.

We work in partnerships with them because a lot of the time, they end up supplying the actual agents to the large enterprise rather than going directly from Zendesk leads. We have partnerships where we think about them as technology partnerships like Zendesk.

We also have BPOs as partners. They have direct relationships with the customers and that provides a channel approach to deployment in Unbabel.

Sramana Mitra: That’s interesting because aren’t the BPOs incentivized to staff these organizations and yet you are taking away that staffing function?

Vasco Pedro: It depends. Some BPOs have a majority of their people. For example in the Philippines, they want to make those people more valuable. Within Unbabel, they become immensely more valuable because they can now handle a bunch of different languages. They are also seeing the writing on the wall and it’s unavoidable and inevitable that AI will have a huge impact in a commoditized market like customer service.

There’s a bit of foresight in saying, “Hey, this is providing an immense value to our customers and by aligning ourselves with the impact, this will potentially catalyze our old product. We are able to charge into the 21st century and embrace the new way of doing things.”

Sramana Mitra: What about the competition? Are there other players in the market that you are seeing in deals?

Vasco Pedro: Until now, we hadn’t seen one. The translation industry is fragmented, but the vast majority is typically human-powered. They cater to localization departments and they can’t fulfill our use case. They don’t have the speed and scalability to do it. In terms of new entrants, it’s probably at the edge of this market. You start seeing Google translates as they can come in.

The big barrier that we see there is that as soon as there are brand and voice concerns, pure AI solutions aren’t quite there yet. You need that human element to continuously retrain the engines and have a strong and tight loop so that you overcome those problems of quality.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about other use cases. Right now, it sounds like you are focused on the customer service use case and you have a lot of TAM to cover within just that use case. The technology that you have has vast potential. What do you see as other places that you would want to go to?

Vasco Pedro: I agree with you. The mission of Unbabel is to build universal understanding. We want to create what we are calling the world’s translation layer. That applies to a lot of different things. We are very focused on enterprise but even within the enterprise, there’s a lot of green fields ahead of us.

There are natural overlapping points like when we start looking at marketing content or within other communication use cases like sales communication. Inside sales is another potential avenue of expansion. If you go into marketing, then from there it’s natural to go into product. The goal is to cover all of the use cases inside of an enterprise.

We have a couple of customers using us for an interesting use case. Some of them are already within marketing. Some of them are within internal team communication like shared resources inside HR in a massive organization with thousands of employees spread around the globe.

How do we get to a world where an enterprise can exist and scale in a truly language-independent way whether it’s access to markets for their products or access to talent in a global economy? That is the goal.

I think it will take us a few years to get there. We are still talking about non-voice and our expectation is that we’ll have to add voice capabilities at some point to the layer because that makes sense. Communication requires a voice. At least, in a partial amount.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Unbabel CEO Vasco Pedro
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