Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Starmind CEO Marc Vontobel (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Bottomline is, you’re talking about narrowing the market down more and more to figure out where you want to penetrate the market and where you really want to build the business. Then there are sales channel issues. You have to put Salesforce going after each other’s markets. Let’s get to the technology side of what you’re doing. What datasets are you working with? Let’s take the pharma use case.

Marc Vontobel: There’s always a certain set of tools focused on the use case itself. In R&D, for example, we often see some kind of application that manages the new patterns that people are working on. That’s a very good source for us to learn.

Then there are also tools that people just use on a daily basis, no matter their role. We have specialized in conversational data. For example, what happens in public channels in teams. Most of our customers are Microsoft shops because they’re the big customers. Everywhere where people leave traces.

In most cases, other employees can take a look at the data as well. We don’t go into confidential data. There is so much data around. We see ourselves recycling those data. We don’t save documents and create some kind of enterprise search. We just try to link it to people.

Sramana Mitra: Can you give us an example of how you do ROI calculation?

Marc Vontobel: I’ll take the easiest and take the reduction of internal tickets. If you have a support ticket with a fixed price of $15 and a million tickets, we can reduce the cost by 10%. Since we have a pricing model based on per seat per month, you have to take the cost into account as well.

Sramana Mitra: How do you calculate pricing with respect to ROI?

Marc Vontobel: There are two perspectives. One is ROI. On the other hand, there’s the standard SaaS pricing. People are used to certain prices for applications that you pay per month like Slack Teams and Google Workspace. They are all somewhere between $6 and $30. Even if the ROI is much higher, it’s quite difficult to push that price outside of those boundaries. That perspective has to be taken into account as well.

Sramana Mitra: You are underscoring two issues to take into account in determining pricing. One is the ROI and you were talking about a price band. You have to price within that band to be considered in that ballpark.

Marc Vontobel: If you get 50 applications from Microsoft for $15 a month, it’s hard to argue that our solution costs $200 per user per month even if you can calculate the ROI.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Starmind CEO Marc Vontobel
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