Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Stuart Wall, CEO of Signpost (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of metrics, how many businesses have adopted this technology in your customers. Secondly, are there other competitors? Is there a broader adoption of this kind of technology that you’re seeing?

Stuart Wall: In terms of total adoption, we have about 7,500 clients and a broader number of locations under those clients. Some businesses may own hundreds of locations. Some may own one. We are doubling almost every year in terms of scale. The fastest growth engine for us is now coming from larger businesses that have a lot of locations underneath them.

Sramana Mitra: Is there competition? Are there other players doing this?

Stuart Wall: There are. I would put them in a few different buckets. Most of the competitors that we have, frankly, are doing a version of what we do, but it’s a do-it-yourself type. There’s no AI driving it. It’s a platform like ExactTarget, which is now owned by Salesforce where you can manage your own contact and send emails. It’s manual. When we are competing with folks, that’s the competition.

IBM is also pushing on AI but we think it’s being done in a very different way than the way we operate. We are really thinking about CRM from the ground up. AI drives everything we do as opposed to AI being a feature on top a pretty complex system that is otherwise manual.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent. I don’t know if you follow me on LinkedIn. LinkedIn has just launched a video product. They’ve given it to the Influencers, so far. It’s a beta product. They’re asking questions to influencers. One of the questions was, “What do you do in your workflow or you in your office that you would like AI to automate?”

The thing that I wanted automated most is the sales cycle of my business. That’s exactly what you’re doing in this case for a specific segment. Our business is a lot more complicated than the kinds of businesses that you’re working on. All of those are steps and somebody would, otherwise, have to manually do it. If you can automate that and agent-ify that, that’s just marvelous.

Stuart Wall: If you look at the existing CRM technologies that most sales teams use, they use it because they have to. Universally, it’s a pretty bad experience. There are some parts in the sales process where a human being is required. It’s an authentic interaction between a prospect and the business. Human beings add value there. There are a lot of it that, frankly, can’t be automated. Whether it’s us or other competitors, I think that this category will be automated in the next five years.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Stuart Wall, CEO of Signpost
1 2 3 4 5 6