Gong’s Amit Bendov: From Meeting Recordings to Revenue AI

[00:00] I get on a call with a customer, Gong already prepares me for the meeting. [00:04] The way it used to work, you know, I'd get like five people from the account who schedule like a pre-meeting briefing, they prepare a document with all the questions, and it's... [00:13] probably like five hours of some highly paid people. [00:16] Now it's 30 seconds, right? It just means to read if I have a question I ask. So it's a huge time saver. [00:23] And, you know, we're not even yet at like level five driving. So the potential is like way bigger. If you remember, like 75% of sellers time is not customer facing. That's the data. [00:37] Everything else is the opportunity size. [00:41] *music* [00:58] Hi and welcome to Training Data. [00:59] Today, we're excited to welcome Amit Bendov, CEO and founder of Gong, [01:04] which is one of the most beloved companies in the modern-day sales world, [01:07] and also one of the very first AI native application companies. [01:11] We interviewed Amit about Gong's evolution from a wedge into a platform. [01:15] specifically from a transcription tool into a broader revenue intelligence platform. [01:19] and heard more from Omid on his prediction for what the sales team of the future might look like [01:24] and Gong's role in building that future. [01:26] Enjoy the show. Amit, thank you so much for joining us today. We are delighted to have you on the show. You are one of the OG AI applications and absolutely beloved company in the sales world. And so looking forward to having you on training data.

[01:42] I'm excited to be here. Let's jump right in. I want to start with one of the hot topics in the AI sales world right now, which is, do you believe that AI is going to take over the role of the SDR? [01:53] Completely, no, not in the near future, not with the current technology. I do think that a lot of the BDR work will be done by AI, and it's a good thing. So it's not binary, like... [02:05] But short answer, not in the next few years. Definitely not. If it's a complex outbound SDR, AI is not going to be able to totally replace that. [02:15] Got it. OK, follow up question. [02:18] Do you think that CRM will exist in five years' time in a future where we have a lot of agents? [02:24] running around doing a lot of sales related activity. What is the role of the CRM in that future? [02:29] Yeah, I'm sure CRM will exist in 20 years. It's not going away. There's so much built in there, just like mainframes are still there, even though there's much better technology. [02:40] I don't believe that in managing customers CRM is going to be at the epicenter. We're moving from a CRM centric world to more like AI centric world. [02:49] CRM manages customers, their data, and a lot of other things, but it's not managing the operations. [02:56] the activities and how to engage customers. So that's for sure. [03:01] It's still there. [03:03] People... [03:04] tend to underestimate how much there is in serum. There's quite a bit and it definitely will leave for a while. [03:11] Amit, in that AI-centric world, what is the role of the software? What is the role of the humans?

[03:16] Uh... [03:18] The role of the software we're starting to understand, the role of the human is actually less clear, and I think we will be surprised. It's hard to predict. [03:26] uh, what it will be. I'm sure it'll change, uh, roles. There are roles to date, you know, prompt engineer is the obvious one, right. That didn't, we couldn't even like imagine like, uh, [03:38] three years ago. [03:40] Um, [03:40] SDR did not exist. People asked, it did not exist 30 years ago. Like this is like a modern invention and it might go away. So to be like different roles. [03:50] I'd say in general, the current technology, anything that's based on transformer, is fit for certain types of work. It cannot replace humans whenever there's accountability or decision making or creativity. [04:03] we're not even close to that. Right? So humans will still be in control, I believe, for a while, but AI can do a lot of the work. [04:15] Definitely, I could do an amazing job reviewing a contract right now and redlining all the hot topics, even suggesting correction. We would not let AI sign a contract or even send a contract or send a proposal. There's always a lawyer that will need to do that. I think the roles will shift to humans that are augmented and using AI as a tool for quite a few tasks. [04:42] In our industry specific, there is this number that goes around that

[04:47] 75% of what sellers are doing is non-selling activity. So three out of $4 that we're paying them [04:55] is to do admin and non-essential work, all of that could be replaced by AI. That'll be pretty exciting. Amit, take us back to 2015 when you founded Gong. [05:06] meeting transcription. Why did you start with that? Was the vision always to build [05:13] a meaning transcription tool or to build something very different from that? [05:17] No, actually, the vision was never about transcription. So when I started a company, we were like my previous company before starting Gong, we were recording calls and I was using a transcription service. [05:30] The real reason that I didn't want to read transcripts, like there's like, there's so many of them going on, who has the time to do it? I have a little bit of an ADD as well. So I'm not the person to either like, [05:43] listen at great lengths or read. So, [05:48] I wanted something that would take all the information and translate it into structured data. [05:53] And transcription is just a way in the process in the pipeline that you need to capture. [06:02] the audio and video transcribed, then identify topics and themes and other things, and then use it in structured data. So that was the idea. [06:12] We started with meetings because that was kind of the big black hole. We could kind of see other things that are happening and activity, but this was like, like,

[06:23] very rich data set [06:25] that we knew nothing about and nobody was doing anything. So that's why we started with that. [06:31] I mean, I remember in those early days, there was this period of time where Gong was one of many. [06:36] And then it felt from the outside looking in, it felt almost overnight. All of a sudden Gong was one of one. [06:41] What did you guys get so right in those early days? [06:44] I actually think we have more competition right now. And I always tell the team, the more successful we are, we're going to have more. So if you look at... [06:54] When we started, we thought that we were alone because there are other companies in sales. We didn't know about it. Thank God we didn't know. [07:01] But we found that there are like two others. [07:04] Now there are dozens of companies, and I hope to have hundreds in a few years. If you look at how many companies are in CRM, there are hundreds. So if the market grows, there's an opportunity. But that's a very important... [07:17] Question. There is never like a moment. There are always moments where people predicted our death or doom or whatever. So 20... [07:29] I think 2017 or something. So we didn't know that we have competition. Like I started going because I said, oh, like I have this problem. I'm scratching my own itch. Nothing exists. Maybe we should start a company. And then I found there's another company that was like better funded, like a little bit ahead of us, you know, maybe like cooler technology. [07:50] And when I realized that, I still have the recording from our old hands. We were like a very small company at the time.

[07:59] By the end of this year, there's only one goal that matters. We're going to be number one. [08:04] or nothing else matters like I'm not interested in this company if we're not number one clear leader. [08:09] So in SAS, there is no second prize, at least nothing that I'm interested in. And we have to be in. We define metrics. [08:18] First, how much we're going to win. And second, it's not us. We're going to be the undisputed leaders. So we even put metrics like how much media share or LinkedIn or social media share. And we wanted to have with two X, all the others combined. That was the goal. Right. And we hit it. And first the gaps first, it's like very neck to neck. Then you get a little win. It's very hard. And I think we started a little behind. [08:44] But the strong gets stronger. Once you start opening a gap of like, you know, let's say 5%, 10%, it becomes easier. The salespeople become more confident. [08:54] customers start to see, and then the gap widens. And then you get new competitors. So we started, there was like Quorus and ExecVision. None of them is an independent company. Then people said, okay, like Outreach and Sales Loft are going to eat you. Before we raised money, it said Google and Amazon are going to eat you. So there's always like competition, but you have... [09:17] You absolutely have to win. It's very hard at first. [09:21] But once you start opening the gap, it gets easier and then you get new competitors. So you're never alone. If you're alone, you're in trouble. You're in the wrong market. I mean, my view as the person on the sidelines who is doing the investment memo work at the time was the thing that you all did that was really special was you won the hearts and minds of your customer and you were really, really customer focused. And, you know, like this is at the time, meaning transcription was kind of new ish.

[09:51] A lot of the models weren't that side of the art yet. And so a lot of the other companies were thinking technology out. And you were really going customer back. And you knew how to win over those hearts and minds. And I think to this day, that is the thing that is so special about Gong. You go talk to any sales or app sales team. It's like, it's Gong, Gong, Gong. And they get googly eyes when they think about you. [10:11] Absolutely, that's a great point, Sonia, thank you. Like it's not that, yeah, the fact that you want to win, [10:18] doesn't win the battle, right? You have to do it the right way. And we're like always looking at [10:26] customer problems that we can solve better than anyone else, right? And always looking ahead. And our goal is always to be almost like every two year, [10:36] to be a new company. I'm a big Beatles fan, sorry that's my age, and I told the team, I always tell them that I want to be like the Beatles, like every two years it's almost like a new band, totally different kind of music, and instead if we don't do it, we're dead. So if all we do, like meeting recording today, [10:53] we'd be dead because like, oh, that's like everybody can do that. So we always have to reinvent, take great care of customers. [11:02] and [11:04] People think... [11:06] The competition is like a zero-sum game, almost like a football, like, you know, like bowl possession and all of that. It's more like an Easter egg hunt, right? If you see, don't know where all the other kids are running. Just find the ones that are your own that nobody's seeing and get as many of them as you can. [11:21] I just watched my toddler try to do his first Easter egg hunt. He did not find very many of those.

[11:27] So when you started the company, you know, this was a pre-OpenAI or pre-ChatGPT era, at least. And there weren't really great foundation models to build upon. And so I remember back when we invested, you know, you had a very state-of-the-arts kind of model research lab in Israel that was doing a lot of, you know, speech-to-text work. [11:46] and model technology. To what extent was that a source of competitive advantage for you then? And is it still a source of competitive advantage for you today? [11:54] Great question. So we went back and forth on this, I think like two or three times that I'm still not sure we've seen the last chapter in this. So when we started, we did not have our transcription engine. We're using just like a web API. I was the opinion that we should have one. It's so core to what we do, but Elon, my co-founder, [12:12] The smarter half said no, like, [12:15] It's we're only like 6 million. I don't want to like invest in something like it less, you know, 3% more accuracy. Let's see what people want to buy first. [12:23] developed the app, and then once it raised more money, we developed. So we started with something that was really not, it was an okay service, just duct tape it and got to the application and got the first thing that actually works. And we saw what was important. Our competitors were investing a lot in like real-time transcription and all the cool technology that never existed. [12:45] made like a real difference for customers. So I'm glad in hindsight that I listened to Elon, and we didn't burn our Sirius A money on a transcription ending. But then once we started,

[12:59] You're right. At that time, we had to rely on things like nuance, right, which was like very expensive and people don't even know what it is today, but and not great. [13:08] So we decided to now we can invest. We started our own team. We hired some of the best speech people. [13:18] Like in Israel, there are quite a few of them. [13:21] and develop our own. And it was like better quality and a lot cheaper. So that was a competitive advantage. [13:29] And now, [13:31] We used anything from some of the Amazon services and Whisper for some of the things. We still have our own models. [13:40] for some languages where the others don't do a good enough job. But if they do, we'll be happy to switch to service. Like our transcription is not our core competency. We're very good at this, but [13:54] We're at the AI application layer. [13:57] This is very low level that we do it. It's like it's like a car battery, right? If we if we can't find something, we'll develop it. But if we can find something better and cheaper. [14:07] We'll use it. [14:08] I'm glad you brought up real-time transcription, because that was one of those, I remember, [14:13] You know, from the technology out, that was one of those, like, of course, Gong should go in that direction. And I think you like stuck to your conviction on that's not what our customer wants. And so even though that may be the cooler technology, like this is like what our customer wants is, you know, actually coaching workflows and the ability to, you know, analyze competitor mentions after the fact. And so like that, I think, is a great example of thinking customer back versus technology out.

[14:35] Yes, yes, absolutely. We have like, since we started every time, we're always asked about real time, which is like, you know, it makes like total sense, right? Except that the technology doesn't really work to this day and the value is questionable, right? So we still have not seen it like in action, like in a great way. [15:05] in that. You know, how many times are your competitors being mentioned? You know, if you talk about this feature first, do your win weights go up? And I think a lot of the value is in that. Tell me about what you see as, you know, the opportunity for Gong in a kind of generative AI technology era. [15:20] Well, I mean, these are exciting days. [15:24] And... [15:25] When we started the company in 2016, even 2015, we started to think about it. The model that we used is a self-driving car. [15:36] autonomous system. Self-driving car of five levels. Level five being fully self-driving and level one is kind of like alerts of sorts. And [15:48] We envision an autonomous application that runs a revenue organization that you tell what my revenue goals is and I need to understand how to break it down to goals and how to help from the leaders to the individual sellers themselves. [16:01] how to run the things. That was like total science fiction. The technology didn't exist back then. It still doesn't fully exist. There are still components that are missing. But every time we're able to, every time we assess

[16:16] What's real today? What's available? What's the state of the art? Not the hype. What can really do reliably and create a great customer experience that we can stand behind and integrate into our solution. And generative AI was a game changer. Things like summarizing calls is something that we wanted to do. [16:40] In 2016, I actually hired... [16:45] a news editor, a TV news editor, and I wanted to see, because we wanted to take, okay, take like 60 minutes and create like a 30-second newsreel like you do on TV or sports, right? And I paid someone, I gave a recording, I said, okay, wanted to create something for me. [17:02] And we did probably like 20 attempts and I gave up because they're not good. [17:10] And you understand that actually summarizing, it's already biased in some way. So now you could do it like super easy. So it creates like a ton of value. [17:20] uh some of the um holy grail apps that people ask for you know tell me what's going on with this account so now i could just ask like we're at the end of our quarter right now so i could log in and just say hey like uh how is this deal progressing like what could make it go wrong like it can i can i help with anything [17:40] It'll tell you it's pretty, uh, pretty amazing. Uh, on the market side, uh, [17:45] Um...

[17:47] It provided like a huge tailwind for us. So we're grateful not just for the technology, but what it did in market awareness. So when we started, Gong is an AI company or an AI application company more precisely. [18:01] But we never spoke about it like it was like third level messaging that this is like AI technology because it would scare the heck out of people. So especially we sell to non-technical people. We sell to CROs and business users that aren't super technical. So if you talk about AI. [18:19] That seems scary in science fiction. So it was like third-level messaging. You had to double-click at least a couple of times. [18:26] But now we got a lot of people calling us, hey, what's going on? [18:31] My CEO was asked on an earning call if they plan to increase or how are they going to plan to increase sales productivity with AI? [18:40] do you have something with ai so the openness and the excitement and uh [18:45] And ChatGPT made it so accessible at a consumer level that that's super exciting. On that note, I think a lot of companies' boards are focused top-down on how AI is changing productivity metrics. And I think in coding, for example, it's been pretty exciting to see a lot of companies are now reporting 20% to 30% increases in engineering velocity and metrics like that. What have you seen on the sales side? [19:15] of using AI for your customers and the revenue orgs.

[19:20] We've seen dramatic changes. So some of our customers have seen as much like 60% more sales capacity. [19:30] And just by, you know, you can measure it like lots of different ways. Let's say, you know, a person can handle like 50 accounts. Now they can do 100 accounts, right? So that's like just by saving all the time. So a lot of the tasks are just becoming redundant, even like... [19:50] You don't need to talk to as many people anymore. There's the fun part of talking to other people, but not like what happened, what I'm going to do, because now everything is visible. [20:00] I get on a call with a customer. Gong already prepares me for the meeting. [20:05] So I don't need to call the account team. Usually the way it used to work, you know, I'd get like five people from the account who schedule like a pre-meeting briefing. They prepare a document with all the questions. And it's... [20:18] probably like five hours of some highly paid people. [20:22] Now it's 30 seconds, right? It just means to read if I have a question I ask. So it's a huge time saver. [20:29] And, you know, we're not even yet at like level five driving. So the potential is like way bigger. If you remember, like 75% of sellers time is not customer facing. That's the data. [20:43] Everything else is the opportunity size. What level are we at today? And what's the path to getting to level five?

[20:51] It depends. So there are different components. Like, for example, at Gong, so some are at level two and some are level three and some are at level four. Level four is almost like driving. So if I, you know, let's say I get on a call with a customer, Gong would all create like the email for me, but I have to click send. So this is like level four. It's almost like I'm in control, which is smart. That's level four. [21:19] Level five is when it'll send the email on my behalf. [21:24] It'll take a little bit of time. Some things are easier than others, and some things are not as mission critical, right? If you want to do people, everybody talk about like outbound SDRs, right? Cold calling. This is... [21:39] a pretty poor choice for current state of AR because first, it's hard. It's very hard for people to do it. Second, if it goes wrong, [21:49] right it's very damaging to your brand [21:51] Right. As we've seen, if you've seen some of the cursor service agent, you know, changing privacy policy or, you know, [22:01] Airlines, so I wouldn't let like AI talk to my customers like [22:06] Except for like very simple cases like support tickets that are pretty confined and but not anything that is complex. So for those, it's still going to be level four until we get conviction that technology can be 100 percent trusted. But some some areas are.

[22:25] You know, if it's not-- for example, now we have role playing. [22:29] AI, you could just practice, do practice call with AI, and it'll give you feedback. [22:35] If this thing doesn't work 100%, it's no big deal. Like, yeah, like a little bit annoying, but you're not embarrassed in front of customers. [22:43] Is that with like a virtual avatar? Yes, yes, yes. Oh, super cool. Yes. [22:47] So the comment on until it's 100% trusted, do you think people, or I guess in terms of what you've observed with your customers and the users of the product, do you think people are going to be a good person? [22:56] Do people hold AI to a higher standard than they hold themselves? [22:59] I would guess most of those reps or BDRs or SDRs are not 100% all the time. [23:05] Yes. [23:08] you [23:09] No, so the yes Actually fun fact like when we started gong we actually did not show the transcription and [23:16] All right. So you couldn't see the transcription was there, but someone advised us like a smart person that did it like another application. Don't show the transcript. [23:24] Because it's 70% [23:26] Accurate, which means like three out of 10 words will be wrong. When someone reads that, it'll just be an awful user experience. So we eat it. We allow them to search. We show some things and now people are super happy. [23:38] But we couldn't show the thing because it just wasn't good. So people do expect perfection with AI. You know, someone self-driving a Tesla makes an accident, right? It's major headlines, right? But, you know, people make so many more accidents like nobody talks about.

[23:58] That said, I do see that the reactions to, for example, when people ask questions at Gong or they get the summaries [24:08] Thank you. [24:09] Everybody's very excited. They know it's not perfect. Like it's, you know, maybe 80, 85% correct, but the value, because it's so fast, right? And so easy. I don't see a lot of people complaining. So I think people are able to tolerate somewhat lower quality for ease of use. [24:39] just one speaker, right? How can you listen to that? Just pour [24:42] audio quality, right? But it's so easy that people are willing to put up with the simpler and easier technology. And this is like definitely a lot simpler. So we see a lot of, generally the sentiment is very positive. [24:56] I have no idea what a hi-fi system is. Ah, yes. I bought one. My wife wanted to kill me, but I bought like major speakers in our basement. And she said, you did what? Yeah. But it's that audio quality. Love it. Amit, what's your take on agents? And how are you guys approaching agents, building, selling agents at Gong? [25:19] We think agents are real. They're, again, like a lot of other things, there's a bit like inflated expectations right now. It's like it's going to do everything. So everybody like, this is me, agents aren't taking your job anytime soon.

[25:32] but they can definitely take parts of your job, the parts that you don't like doing and it's a waste of your time. So, [25:40] We-- the approach that we're taking is task-specific agents. They're not developed like do anything. There's no writing code. So we have, for example, we spoke about briefer, right? So here's like brief me for encounter. So there is an agent that trained for these tasks. It has parameters. [26:01] and it's built in the workflow. Right? So that's, and we have dozens of them. That's the approach that we believe [26:10] are great for enterprise applications. General purpose are very hard to nail, because they could go in all sorts of directions, [26:20] But it's a real thing. It's also interesting, the line between simple automation and agents isn't clear. If you look at it, some of them, it's the same thing, but it's also very different. So the question, can they make decisions? Again, for non-critical decisions, decisions that aren't like... [26:38] like a huge deal, they can definitely do a great job. But agents can definitely do... [26:46] quite a bit of our work. [26:48] Have the newer model capabilities, and in particular the reasoning models, have those unlocked new capabilities for Gong? [26:56] Not yet. I think that there's... [27:00] There's a line that I'm not sure that even like transformer technologies is capable of, which is like, can you rely 100% of something that will be true?

[27:12] Just truthfulness, like not 99%, 100%. So there is a category of work that has to be, you send a proposal to a customer. [27:24] That can't be like 99%, right? If it's like 1% of the cases and you send something is like totally wrong pricing or over discounting or something is like a hallucination. So [27:34] Even with the reasoning, it's getting better. So I think it increases the classes of tasks that are [27:41] That makes sense. But if you talk like [27:46] AGI are things that are absolutely like a must happen. [27:51] you know, calculate commissions to sellers, right? You get it wrong. It's very bad, right? So I think it's a quantitative improvement, still not a qualitative. Qualitative is that's 100% trusty. And that'll be, some would say, even if it's like, you know, Jan Lekun or David Deutsch, they'll say like, it's not even with the realm of transforming technology because of the statistical nature of the approach. [28:19] Do you agree with Jan's take? [28:21] Um, yes. Uh, but I also know there's a possibility that maybe like, uh, and he's like much smarter than I am that we're not seeing that someone would prove us wrong, which would be great. But, uh, yeah, right now, um, [28:36] Yeah. [28:37] There's also an issue of accountability and [28:42] both legal but also from a work perspective. For example, Gong now has the ability to update all opportunity records, for example.

[28:53] That's a no-brainer, right? Nobody needs to log in a CRM and update fields anymore. [28:58] Some companies still want the seller to say yes, yes, yes, yes, because otherwise they can blame AI for, oh, I didn't say that. It's like AI, and AI could be wrong. It's like the risk of error. [29:11] So there is a different analog computer and a digital computer, right? Digital computer has error correction, which means you know if a message was sent, right, over a line that has errors, it'll get there exactly as it is, right? And transformer... [29:27] Maybe it'll be enhanced in a way that we're not thinking about. It'll take different kind of technology to get there. [29:33] My two cents. [29:34] Yeah. What do you think the sales team of the future is going to look like? And maybe you don't have a high fidelity point of view on that, but how quickly do you think? [29:45] you know, the composition, the team composition of a sales team is going to change. If you take the software engineering world as an analogy, I think that's changing rapidly in terms of size of software engineering teams, skill sets. How quickly do you think the sales world is going to change by contrast? [30:01] It's already changing. I think that it'll be gradual. So there are some very transactional sales, for example, but I want to buy an iPhone or something. [30:11] that they'll go first because that could certainly be automated. [30:16] or I want to upgrade my cellular plan or whatever it is, right, Doc? [30:21] That can be handled. Complex things like I want to buy a house or a mortgage or enterprise software, that's like, that's

[30:32] more complicated. But I do not see people doing clerical work, just updating forms. I do not see the traditional forecasting. I do think that there are things that are [30:46] Some very far reaching consequences right now people are doing manual forecasting. [30:52] Right. I don't think that's necessary because software and AI can do a way better job. All things, you know, companies have sales stages in the process. Every company has, you know, their five or six stages. [31:07] You don't really need that. That's a management tool that was created like 50 years ago so we can get some visibility to where the process is. But actually, everything can be done [31:19] way smarter. [31:22] So I think the process can change, the people can change. We see great adoption of the technology because, again, it's so easy that it's cross-generational right now, that people are very eager. And sometimes their imagination is even faster than our technology. [31:42] speed of development or, oh, can you do this? Can you do that? So people are very eager. And I think that they'll be augmented. [31:49] by R. The BDR role, I'm not sure that it'll be around, not necessarily because the software is going to replace, but [31:57] sellers could do their own thing, right, if they have the right tools. So fewer people could do more work. Remember, BDR did not exist 30 years ago. It was created for fast hyper growth, fast companies. Most companies in the world don't have that. So I think we can augment that.

[32:13] the sellers and they'll be able to address a lot more customers. [32:17] I mean, it's easy to imagine that sales team of the future being smaller on balance than the sales teams of the present. [32:24] each individual is far more productive because of wonderful tools like gong that give them superpowers [32:30] The thing I'm curious about is for you as a business, you create a lot of value with the product that you offer. [32:36] You capture that value today, I believe, primarily through a seat-based pricing model. If there's this countervailing force on seats, which is, ironically, you're making people more productive, therefore they need fewer seats. Over time, how does your pricing and packaging evolve? How do you capture more of that value that you're creating if seats aren't going up as fast as they might have historically? I love the question, Pat. So there are multiple forces. First, I'm not sure there'll be fewer sellers. They'll be different. [33:06] grows, kind of GDP grows over time, there'll be products and services we're not imagining right now that are, that will be there. So it's not necessarily like fewer people, but people will be [33:18] more efficient. But [33:20] We will start to add consumption level or usage pricing like this year. We're coming with an orchestration product that will be a great fit. When we started Gong, actually, we asked people like, [33:33] do you want to do it like based on usage or based on seats? And most people that we serve it, most buyers said, Oh, per seat right now, because they use like CRM as an anchor point. Right. And,

[33:48] We didn't want to innovate on too many fronts. So we said, okay, we innovate in the product. Pricing, we'll keep it simple. But we always, and probably in the pitch deck, like from Sirius B or whenever we did, we said, like, this will be, AI will be bigger than cloud, right? Because cloud is an IT revolution and AI is a work revolution. So we never saw ourselves as a software company, but more like a BPO. [34:18] And the potential is 10 times bigger. [34:23] Because if you take, you know, most sales tax, like, you know, $1,000 a seat, and I think it could easily be like, you know, $1,000 or $1,000. [34:32] or more per month. Because if you think of how many, you know, people are making $200,000 or costing $200,000 a year, you save 70%, that's $140,000, right? You take 10% of that. It's still a bargain for the CFO, right, and for the company. So the potential is absolutely there, whether it's like usage-based or just higher per receipt pricing. It has to be aligned with the value. But I think we're... [35:00] The world is more ready now to look at value pricing. [35:07] I'm going to do a quick aside from AI for a second, because I think that Gong is one of the... [35:12] only company that's really [35:14] you know, reinflicted revenue growth at pretty meaningful scale. Talk

[35:20] Talk to us about what it was like going through, you know, sales tech winter over the last years and how you made it through to the other side and any lessons for other founders. [35:29] Do we really want to get into that, Sonia? It was like so early 2023, really facing like a tough headwind, right? The market was tanking. It was like this perfect storm, everything. And we almost came to a halt, very challenging and demoralizing to the team. And, you know, when customers say, we love you, but we're living or some companies going out of business. So it was tough. [35:59] But I never lost conviction that we can turn this around, right? And we started rolling our sleeves and got to work. So we... [36:11] launched two new products, forecast and engage, like in great speed. Fortunately, we had enough money, so we raised a lot of money. [36:21] We never burned a lot of money. So when we always need people ask why you're raising this is like for a rainy day that we didn't know when it's going to come, but we knew it will. Right. So we decided that where everybody were laying off people who said this is an opportunity for us, it'll be harder for the competition. Now we're going to keep the foot on a gas pedal. [36:41] That's one. Second, we improved our act. When we sell, we had to create like a bulletproof business case that a CFO would approve. It's not just that, you know, bygone because it's cool and it'll change your life. So it has to...

[36:56] show real value, how we support customers, [37:00] And we tried a lot of things. And the... [37:06] You don't see immediate impact. Some of the things that you're doing, it might take like two or three quarters. So you're experimenting with quite a few things and nothing seems to be working. So it's very challenging. [37:17] situation, but the team was able to turn it around. So all these things eventually, the product beefing up the product suite, improving our game, and fortunately, ChatGPT came out and it gave us a huge boost. There are a lot of people who spelled like the death of Gong. Oh, now everybody can do... [37:39] can do a generative value will make everything possible. That was slightly exaggerated. So, but that actually gave us like a really nice tailwind because customers saw like a lot more value in the solution. So all of these things together helped us turn it around and now we're, we're accelerating. I don't know when this will be aired, but even like this quarter is in like faster than the previous quarter. Sonya, I'll give you like a look. Yeah. Yeah. It's so we had, [38:09] seven consecutive quarters of accelerating. And we hope we have not seen the end. I mean, I think you're-- [38:18] grit and the way that you dug in and just, you know, led the company through that period. And [38:25] you know, never lost any confidence whatsoever in the full vision for what Gong could become. I think it's, I have huge respect and admiration, we all do, for how you weathered that storm. And I think you've now earned the right to really go big and go pursue that big ambition.

[38:42] Should we close it out with some rapid fire questions? [38:44] Oh, I'm nervous, but yeah, bring it on. Okay, these are intended to be like one word or one sentence answers. Whatever comes to mind quickly. Okay, favorite new AI application in your personal life or at work other than Gong? [38:59] Ah, chat GPT easily. I use it like 15 times a day easily. Yeah. Yeah. For everything. I don't want to tell you for what, but yeah. [39:09] All right. How about one piece of advice for founders who are building AI companies at the application layer? [39:16] Keep your eyes on the customer. Talk to customers. Don't believe your investors, the influencers, all of that. I love you all. Just talk to customers, see what they really need. Be the fastest thing that works. [39:30] Now, not like in two years where the hype is just follow. Keep your eyes on the ball. [39:36] Love it. I don't love that so much. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. It goes rapid. If you give me a little more time, maybe I'll give you more politically correct. I'm completely kidding. [39:46] In two or three years' time, will we have virtual avatars actually selling to customers directly? [39:52] Yes or no? Yes, yes, yes. I think for simple products, yeah, that's definitely a possibility. How about one recommended piece of content for people who are interested in AI? Something they should read or listen to? [40:07] Just, you know, just follow your interests. I'm not loyal to any one source. I listen to all kinds of things that just put like my interest on YouTube and that's how I find information and, uh,

[40:19] Look at it. I do like The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. It's not the easiest read, but this book, it's not just on AI, but it talks about what's next, like AI is part of it. [40:35] This is kind of like a mind changing book in my mind. [40:39] I mean, do you think AI is capable of fully autonomously signing a million dollar contract? And what year will that happen? [40:47] Not in the next like... [40:49] three to five years in my opinion. Um, you know, [40:54] It'll need something that's beyond transformers, something that is not like an analog computer, it's more digital that can be relied 100%. [41:05] I don't know what it is and I don't know that anyone knows today what it is, but it'll take like different level of technology. This is recorded. So let's put something on a calendar for like three to five years and see if I was wrong or right. [41:17] Let's do it. I think you've tended to be right whenever we disagreed in the past. Thank you so much for joining us today. We've really enjoyed the discussion and congratulations on persevering through sales tech winter and making it through to this very exciting time for AI and for the world. [41:31] Well, it was fun. Thank you so much.

[41:58] Thank you.