Author: Stefan Groschupf

Jul 14, 2023 by Stefan Groschupf

In the ever-evolving landscape of technology, businesses have consistently adapted to embrace transformative shifts that drive progress and competitiveness. From the transition from steam machines to electricity to the recent era of digital transformation, companies have continuously evolved to stay ahead of the curve. Now, as the era of Digital Transformation gives way to the era of Intelligent Transformation. Businesses are entering a critical phase – one that necessitates the adoption of an intelligent business operating system.

Digital transformation brought significant changes in how companies operated, leveraging digital technologies to streamline processes, enhance customer experiences, and drive growth. However, it became increasingly clear that digital transformation laid the groundwork to harness the real power – Artificial Intelligence (AI) –  to drive operational efficiency, smarter decisions, and higher agility in fast-changing markets.

“Businesses are entering a critical phase – one that necessitates the adoption of an intelligent business operating system.”

Why “Intelligent Transformation” matters

The advent of AI brings forth a new wave of disruption, making it crucial for companies to prioritize intelligent transformation. AI has the potential to deliver unprecedented efficiency, productivity, and innovation across various industries. It empowers businesses to automate routine tasks, enhance customer experiences, optimize operations, and uncover hidden patterns and trends. By embracing AI, companies can gain a competitive edge, unlock new revenue streams, and propel themselves into the future.

The stages of adopting AI: A self-driving car metaphor

Photo by Brock Wegner (Unsplash)

To better understand the journey toward becoming an intelligent enterprise, we can draw parallels to the stages of self-driving cars, which have progressively evolved from human-controlled vehicles to fully autonomous machines. Similarly, companies can follow a phased approach to adopting AI:

Stage 1: Manual mode (digital transformation foundation):

• Establish a solid foundation in digital transformation, including digital processes, data integration, and modern technologies. 
• Lay the groundwork for data-driven decision-making and a culture of innovation.

Stage 2: Assisted mode (AI-powered insights and automation):

• Leverage AI and machine learning algorithms to gain actionable insights from data and drive automation.
• Implement AI-powered analytics tools to enhance decision-making capabilities.

Stage 3: Semi-autonomous mode (intelligent automation and optimization):

• Automate repetitive tasks and processes using AI technologies such as intelligent document processing (IDP).
• Automate parts of business processes such as underwriting, claims processing, and supply chain management with “human in the loop” for final decision making.

Stage 4: Highly autonomous mode (AI-driven innovation and transformation):

• Migrate manual processes to straight-through processing automations powered by AI.
• Embrace advanced AI technologies such as advanced natural language processing to extract data trapped in documents to make smart decisions e.g. for underwriting.
• Foster a culture of experimentation, encouraging employees to explore AI’s potential in all business units.

The need for an intelligent business operating system

Photo by Adi Goldstein (Unsplash)

As companies embark on their journey towards intelligent transformation, they often encounter various challenges, including the integration of AI models, scalability, fault tolerance, and the ability to process unstructured data efficiently without the need for sparse data science or IT resources. These challenges can hinder the adoption and implementation of AI at scale. An easy-to-use intelligent business operating system serves as a centralized platform that addresses these challenges.

Scaling AI and processing unstructured data

A key challenge for organizations is the ability to scale AI to reliably handle large volumes of data. The sheer amount of data generated by companies is staggering, with approximately 80% of it being unstructured in the form of documents. To fully leverage AI’s potential, companies need a platform that excels in processing unstructured data, custom model integration, data source integration, human into the loop and monitoring processes to handle processing data at scale and integrate the processing into critical business and decision processes. 

Intelligent document processing for non-technical users

Intelligent document processing is a crucial capability that an intelligent business operating system must provide. It empowers non-technical users to easily extract information from documents, automate data entry, and streamline business processes. For example, in the banking and insurance industry, underwriting involves extensive document processing to assess risks and determine coverage. By leveraging intelligent document processing within the intelligent business operating system, underwriters can automate the extraction of relevant information from various documents, accelerating the underwriting process and improving win and loss rates.

IT monitoring and control for standardization

Implementing AI across diverse business units can be challenging without proper monitoring and governance mechanisms in place. An intelligent business operating system offers IT monitoring and control capabilities, allowing organizations to govern AI deployments, ensure compliance, and maintain standardization across the enterprise. This enables businesses to manage AI models, monitor performance, and enforce data security and privacy regulations effectively.

Fault tolerance for mission-critical business processes

In the age of intelligent transformation, businesses heavily rely on AI-powered systems for mission-critical processes. An intelligent business operating system must exhibit fault tolerance to ensure uninterrupted operations and prevent costly disruptions. By incorporating fault tolerance mechanisms, such as distributed computing and fault tolerance, self-healing, the system can withstand failures and maintain business continuity, even in high-stakes scenarios.

The transformative impact of an intelligent business operating system

By adopting an intelligent business operating system, organizations can unlock the full potential of AI and intelligent transformation. The system acts as a catalyst, enabling companies to implement AI quickly, efficiently, and in a standardized manner. Some transformative benefits include:

Enhanced efficiency and productivity: By automating repetitive tasks and streamlining document processing, companies can significantly improve operational efficiency and productivity.

Improved customer experience: Leveraging AI capabilities such as intelligent document processing enables organizations to provide faster and more accurate customer service, leading to enhanced customer experiences.

Accelerated decision-making: With advanced AI-powered analytics and insights, businesses can make data-driven decisions faster and more accurately, empowering teams across the organization.

Cost reduction and revenue growth: By automating processes, reducing errors, and optimizing operations, organizations can realize cost savings during inflation while exploring new revenue opportunities.

Future-proofing the organization: An intelligent business operating system ensures that companies are well-prepared to adapt to future technological advancements and market demands, staying ahead of the competition.

“As the era of Digital Transformation gives way to the era of Intelligent Transformation, it’s critical that businesses consider the importance of not just adopting AI but implementing an intelligent business operating system.”

This will provide the foundation for organizations to implement AI quickly, efficiently, and in a standardized manner across all business units for maximum ROI value and impact.

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The pandemic has a ripple effect on everything from the cloud to cybersecurity.

Dec 11, 2020 by Stefan Groschupf

What’s ahead for the tech world in 2021? Global research and advisory firm Gartner looked into its crystal ball to identify top trends, many of which reflect the fact that the ongoing pandemic has fundamentally changed the way we live and work. Distributed cloud, distributed cybersecurity architecture, and location-independent operations, along with robust AI engineering, all get big play in the firm’s list — anticipating that we’re all going to be working from our couches a bit longer.

While some of these trends, like hyperautomation, are not new and were mentioned in Gartner’s previous tech predictions (see our take on hyperautomation done right), plenty of what’s new on the 2021 list seems spot on.  

We wanted to see how future-proof our platform is in light of where Gartner believes the world is headed. Here’s how we stack up against their 9 trends.

Trend 1: the Internet of Behaviors

This was up for discussion way back in 2014, but it’s increasingly relevant as technology becomes deeply ingrained in our everyday habits. Essentially, this means using data to influence behavior through feedback loops.

While Gartner focuses on personal safety (installing sensors or RFID tags to tell whether employees have washed their hands), the IoB plays out in hundreds of ways in the broader business world. 

How we stack up: Beyond physical actions, IoB comes up in the form of decision-making. Does an invoice usually sit in Bill’s queue for three days before it gets sent to Stacy and then the manager, Sheryl? 

With employees permanently remote, it’s more important than ever to map your company’s core business processes end to end — whether that’s account signups, invoice processing or some other critical function. Process mining, never a glamorous pursuit, will now be a bigger driver of business strategy as companies chart out how employees get work done, and how to optimize each step.

Automation Hero’s Hero_Sonar stands apart from other process mining tools in that it can analyze and understand behavior, including the most complex business processes. We simply need the “who,” “what,” and “when” — and based on this we can visualize behavior around any kind of process. Then we turn that into an AI model that optimizes future processes. Robin, our automation assistant, brings humans into the loop for feedback.

Our process mining tool, Hero_Sonar, can visualize behavior around any kind of business process.

Trend 2: Total experience

This is customer experience writ large, a signal from Gartner that indicates customer experience is now so important that everything from employee experience to user experience gets wrapped into it. 

How we stack up: One of the best ways to fully understand and reshape a customer experience is to map it out (as suggested above) using Hero_Sonar. The process mapping tool lets you see and then automate, for example, all steps in an engagement journey. This can result in faster response times for customers or your employees having a better grasp of how they might improve the customer experience. On the employee experience front, Automation Hero can automate employees’ most mind-numbing repetitive tasks, which ultimately improves their work experience.

Trend 3: Privacy-enhancing computation

According to Gartner, this trend involves three technologies that protect data: 

1. a trusted environment in which sensitive data can be processed or analyzed
2. a way to do processing and analytics in a decentralized manner
3. a way to encrypt data and algorithms before processing or analytics

How we stack up: When more employees work from home, personal and sensitive data must by necessity leave the company’s controlled, secured networks. But here’s where automation comes in. As more data can be processed “dark” (without humans), the more secure that data becomes. And as more data decisions are automated with AI (think of insurance claims of a routine nature or low dollar amount) this means less data leaves the company network and lowers the risk of information winding up in the wrong hands. 

Trend 4: Distributed cloud

This means cloud services exist in different physical locations, but operation and governance responsibilities remain with the public cloud provider.

How we stack up: Automation Hero is built for distributed cloud and is arguably the first platform that truly supports it. Specifically, our platform is built in a way that it can run in a distributed cluster made from servers that live in different cloud environments, e.g. with three servers in AWS, three in Google Cloud, three in MSFT Azure, three in a private cloud, etc. This increases reliability, as the system will still run if one of the clouds goes down.

Trend 5: Anywhere operations

It’s another trend that’s been building steam for years but is now boiling hot because of the pandemic. As Gartner notes, “an anywhere operations model will be vital for businesses to emerge successfully from COVID-19.”

How we stack up: Automation Hero is designed specifically for anywhere operations, mainly because we can make even legacy systems like mainframes digital-first. Let’s say a batch of unstructured data sits in a system in one part of the company, and you need to merge it with structured data in another system. Our connectors can pull together all those data sources to inform intelligent action, with the platform acting as something of a nervous system. 

Trend 6: Cybersecurity mesh

This is a particularly thorny problem, as companies have seen a dramatic uptick in cyber attacks, even on cybersecurity companies themselves. It’s even trickier with more people working from home, as hackers can take advantage of the weaker security of home networks. 

How we stack up: Plenty of companies specialize in cybersecurity. We do not. Our platform is highly secure, protects personally identifiable information (PII) and has robust authentication, authorization and encryption capabilities. Automation and AI can also be useful for pulling together different security environments.

Trend 7: Intelligent composable business

According to Gartner, this means a company can adapt quickly to its current situation, ultimately “increasing autonomy and democratization across the organization, enabling parts of the businesses to quickly react instead of being bogged down by inefficient processes.”

How we stack up: This concept is core to the Automation Hero platform. We let companies build self-contained automations to solve a specific business problem — let’s say that’s customer onboarding, or charging a customer. You can then run these automations as microservices, building them via point and click. These “automation services” then work together as a new business process or even a whole new business offering. 

We also enable parts of any business to react quickly by providing point-and-click capabilities around things like AI models and connectors. This appeals to less technical users, and increases autonomy and democratization across the organization through a platform that’s centrally managed by IT but accessible for everyone else. 

Trend 8: AI engineering

Investments in artificial intelligence have been big for years, but now Gartner believes “AI engineering” — in other words, making AI scalable and sustainable for the long haul — will be more important in the years ahead. 

How we stack up: Making AI accessible and real for more people inside a company is another core tenant at Automation Hero. Our platform offers point-and-click AI capabilities for both data scientists and citizen data scientists, which means you don’t have to have an army of data scientists on staff to successfully use AI. We can operationalize new or existing AI models at massive scale, which means AI becomes more distributed, fail-tolerant, and secure.

Trend 9: Hyperautomation

Gartner’s definition of this term has evolved slightly, and now means: “anything that can be automated in an organization should be automated.” It also gets new context around legacy businesses. In short, any company with outdated processes that are not “lean, optimized, connected, clean or explicit,” will be left behind by faster-moving, digital-native companies. 

How we stack up:  When this buzzy new term took off in early 2020, we argued that smart automation for enterprise companies is hyperautomation. Companies that use traditional RPA vendors to speed up processes here and there end up with a stack of internal systems duct taped together, with simplistic automations running on top of legacy software. 

This has the indirect effect of cementing the legacy software in place. Instead of automating in this piecemeal way, enterprise companies should take a step back to see the bigger picture, automating not just for temporary productivity boosts but also in a way that leads to fully autonomous processes that fuel long-term business goals. 

Automation Hero is arguably the first true end-to-end platform built for hyperautomation, since it is an agile, iterative platform that can incorporate new information and workflows. It goes beyond RPA, natively integrating AI and other tools that Gartner highlights, including intelligent business management software (iBPMS), process mining, analytics and decision modeling.

May 08, 2019 by Stefan Groschupf

Companies spend more than $3 trillion every year on wasted time and inefficient processes. Employees can spend between 10 and 25 percent of their time on repetitive computer tasks. The bottom line: inefficient processes waste money and time.

Now imagine taking these repetitive tasks away. How much more productive could employees be? Would their work be higher quality? How would this affect the operational costs of your company?

A future without all this waste is just around the corner. Fully autonomous business processes are near and the groundwork is being laid as we speak.

Potential of business automation

A typical rule-based process (like data entry or sorting files) can be about 70 to 80 percent automated, yet these tasks take human workers several hours of manual work daily. It’s estimated that 50 percent of automation opportunities are overlooked.

Business process automation is not a new thing. It’s when a machine, software, tool or system is able to handle a certain step in a work process or an entire task on its own with little-to-no human influence.

Until now, BPA tools were very limited in what they could do, understand or the tasks that they could perform. But with the latest innovation and democratization of artificial intelligence, BPA has expanded beyond rule-based systems.

We can use customer service email addresses as an example. Email inboxes like these previously had to be sorted manually. Now with AI-powered email servers boosted by natural language processors, the intent of the email can be understood and passed to the correct department or representative, drastically shortening customer response time.

But what other opportunities are there for autonomous business processes? Things like CRM data entry, various human resources processes, documents and record management, claims, booking and invoice management and many IT processes all have automation potential.

We can use sales teams as another example. Without using any sort of business or robotic automation tools, sales reps on average spend almost 11 hours a week on data entry and other admin tasks related to their CRM. This drastically cuts into the time they can spend on revenue-generating interactions with prospects and customers.

When reps automate their repetitive processes with sales AI tools, they save time and the company money. Reducing waste is where the real value is implementing autonomous business processes.

By applying BPA, companies can reduce labor-intensive, repetitive tasks by 80 percent. Almost all (98 percent) of IT leaders agree that automating business processes is essential in order to drive positive company benefits.

Introducing ‘Business 5.0’

AI-powered BPA opportunities are no longer reserved for niche industries, departments or processes. A wave of innovation is now occurring that will significantly reduce all the wasted time employees spend on repetitive tasks.

To properly explain this next evolutionary industry shift, Automation Hero coined the term “Business 5.0.” It’s the idea that automation powered by AI will drastically change company structure, business processes and employee workflow as we know it over the coming years. To fully understand what “Business 5.0” means, you must understand what came before it.

Throughout history, there have been several industrial revolutions, the first of which ended in the early 1800s and sparked massive transformations around manufacturing technology.

There were major advancements in mechanical, water and steam-powered systems. In 1870, the second industrial revolution ushered in the age of mass production with the assembly line. This is also when electricity became widespread. The third, known as the “Digital Revolution,” has been considered to kick off in the mid-twentieth century when manufacturing went digital with computers, the internet, mobile phones and automated systems converging.

Currently, we’re at the peak of “Industry 4.0” — the advent of connected devices, otherwise known as the Internet of Things. Based on the innovations derived from Industry 4.0, we predict “Business 5.0” will lead companies down a groundbreaking path.

During this next wave of progress, information workers will begin working alongside artificial intelligence in order to produce more, waste less and do it all in a shorter amount of time. AI tools will reduce the manual workload for human employees and give them time to focus on the valuable, humanistic aspects of their work.

To go a step further, we predict that in just ten years every information worker will be using some sort of AI assistant in their job. There have already been mass adoption rates for personal AI assistants. Almost half of adults in the U.S. (46 percent) use some sort of voice-enabled personal assistant that make our day-to-day activities easier and more enjoyable. This same obsession with our AI devices will bleed into our jobs.

Place for people

Thinking of a future like this, while there are substantial benefits, is scary for some people because of the looming job loss that comes with an autonomous business. I won’t sugar coat it; a future with fully autonomous business processes will come massive shifts in the job market. Gartner predicts that by 2020, 1.8 million jobs will be eliminated due to AI.

However, don’t let that stop you from embracing autonomous business processes, for Gartner also predicts that there will be 2.3 million more jobs created in their place. Business 5.0 is not about replacing humans, but rather getting rid of outdated processes and tasks. Humans have much more valuable work to focus on.

It is estimated that 85 percent of the jobs that will be in demand in 2030 have not been created yet. Esteemed futurist, Ray Kurzweil, spoke about the cycle of job loss and creation in an interview with Fortune when he said:

“We have already eliminated all jobs several times in human history. How many jobs circa 1900 exist today? … “Well, don’t worry, for every job we eliminate, we’re going to create more jobs at the top of the skill ladder.” And people would say, “What new jobs?” And I’d say, “Well, I don’t know. We haven’t invented them yet.”

Business process automation will shift the job market and the tasks required of business employees will change. Businesses will put a higher value on employees with critical skills that machines can’t replace like creativity, critical thinking, innovation, and empathy.

Imagine the possibilities for human work after excess processes are stripped away. After each revolution, human capabilities and skills surged forward and reached a potential that was never imagined in the era that preceded it. AI will redefine the way we work but will also pave the way for something new.

Automation will bring tremendous benefits to businesses by making them more efficient than ever before while also reducing operational costs. And Automation Hero will be the technology platform that makes it happen.

May 08, 2019 by Stefan Groschupf

4 habits that separate real salespeople from order-takers

In many companies, most of the revenue comes from a small group of sales reps — the old 20/80 adage.

As I was building the sales organization at my previous company, Datameer, I started to notice the qualities that separate the top 20 percent from the rest of the sales team.

With the help of my team there, we built a data analytics company with close to $100 million in VC backing. We managed to double bookings six years in a row. How? The secret sauce was developing a sales team that understood the benefits of a data-driven sales approach.

About 20 percent of sales reps were on board with this — I call them “real” sales reps — and 80 percent who weren’t, I’ll call them “order-takers.” The 20 percent who were willing to step outside of their comfort zone, try something new, and be proactive possessed much more than people skills.

Let me take a moment to explain my definition of an “order-taking” sales rep. These are reps who don’t find or create any of their own selling opportunities but simply wait for an interested and ready-to-buy customer to come along. All they need to do is take their order.

More than that, these reps don’t work their deals. Often saying something along the lines of “try it out and let me know how you like it,” rather than properly educating their customers on the product’s uses and benefits. They rely on their personality to sell rather than developing a sales strategy.

Order-takers are more common than you may think, as most customers are already 57 percent of the way through the decision-making process when they make contact with a rep. The modern buyer does much of their own due diligence and research on products they’re interested in. Many sales reps choose to coast along, since the customer takes a more active role in the buying process.

I’ve observed true, successful sales reps in action too. These reps are self-motivated and pursue prospects, pull leads through the funnel and strategically follow up with customers until the deal is closed, embodying the Challenger Sale methodology.

They map the prospect’s pain point to their solution, highlight additional features that might be beneficial and clearly define the ROI. These real sales reps are always looking to improve and adopt new, modern sales tactics.

In my years leading a company and sales team, I’ve seen that the most vital sales skills are actually the ones that you’d least expect. Traditionally, you think communication, charm and a solid pitch is what it takes to sell.  But having a data-driven sales process and staying organized are far more important.

A perfect sales pitch and a charming personality can only take you so far. Order-takers are masters of communication, but to become a true seller you need to be a good communicator and have excellent data behind you.

I’ve observed that former project managers make the best sales reps. Why? Because a deal is a project that you need to work in just the right way.

In both roles, you need to move multiple parts in the right direction for the project or deal to successfully close. The moment one decision maker or variable is out of place, the entire deal is in jeopardy. This is why organizational skills are key to being a stellar sales rep.

It’s never too late to step up and become a better sales rep and a star member of your team.

How do you get there? By changing the way you think and work within your role. Let’s dive into four habits of top sales reps that you can adopt to become a real seller.

1. Take charge of your process

I’ve observed that order-taking reps often rely on their operations or management teams to coordinate the sales process and tech stack. They follow orders and complain about inefficiencies among themselves. If you want to become a true sales rep, scratch these habits.

Star sales reps evaluate their sales process, find solutions to their pain points and simplify their workflow. They share their findings with their team to improve as a unit.

Find the holes in your process

There are inefficiencies in all sales process stages. It’s up to you to analyze, be data-driven and find these pockets of wastefulness and look for solutions.

Here are a few sample questions to ask yourself: How effective are your email campaigns? Are certain subject lines more effective? Can you A/B test when you send them? How much time does it take you to write them? Which aspects of your email engagement process could be improved by a sales automation tool?

Share solutions with your colleagues

Chances are, other people on your team are feeling the same pains. Many sales teams have an internally competitive atmosphere, which to a certain degree can be healthy and productive. But, you’re all in this together. Just imagine that if everyone sold better, there would be more revenue coming in and everyone would get a bigger piece of the pie.

Manage up

Your managers and operations team are always purchasing new tools to simplify your sales process. However, they’re rarely the ones using them. This is a golden opportunity to review what’s in your tech stack and be vocal about how these tools impact your sales process — both positively and negatively.

Continue to fine tune

Top sales reps know that improvement has no final destination and that it’s not enough just to build a killer process; they know they need to continuously re-evaluate and fine-tune to stay in the top 20 percent.

Constantly review what’s working and what’s holding you back, ask for feedback from your managers and customers and adjust your sales tactics accordingly. Don’t get comfortable with the status quo.

2. Use a data-driven sales approach

Nearly every sales organization hires sales reps with an ESFJ Myers Briggs personality type. By definition, this means they’re great with human interactions but averse to processes and are much less data-driven sales strategy. And while communication skills and personality make the first impression, it takes a plan and analytical insight to move the deal along.

Order-takers tend to avoid updating information in their CRM system, but successful reps understand the value of data both for a fully functional sales team and for the larger organization.

By 2020, the customer experience will surpass both price and product as the key brand differentiator. The CRM was made to help reps manage their customer relationships by keeping all of the customer data in one place. Great reps use it to personalize the customer experience and to stay organized and track prospects throughout the sales cycle.

Educate yourself on the value of your CRM and push yourself to keep it accurate and up-to-date as often as you can. Look back on your past CRM records whenever you follow up with a prospect to keep your dialogue personable and relevant.

3. Embrace AI rather than fear it

Many sales reps are afraid of artificial intelligence and its potential to replace their jobs. And as a result, many shy away from opportunities to use it to their advantage.

Real sales reps are stepping into the modern era and embracing AI. They know AI tools can be helpful in a number of ways, such as prospecting, lead scoring, analytical insights, coaching and training, CRM automation and scheduling.

Sales AI is going to lead the next wave of growth for corporations. Forty-six percent of companies are looking to invest AI into their sales and marketing teams and sales AI adoption is forecasted to grow 139 percent over the next three years.

With AI on their side, winning sales reps can redirect their focus, energy and efforts on interacting with their prospects and customers, ultimately driving more revenue for their organization and crushing quota.

Look for sales AI tools that can automate the tedious tasks that detract you from revenue-generating activities. Look once again to the inefficiencies in your process and see which AI tools in the sales tech landscape can solve them.

4. Know your worth

The top 20 percent of sales reps recognize the value they bring to the table. They understand the skills and knowledge they possess are specific to their role. Time is their most valuable asset and they refuse to waste it.

Each sales rep is paid hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to sell. Understand that your time is best spent contributing to the growth of your company, driving revenue, improving as a sales rep and (most importantly) providing solutions for your customers.

Take a moment every week to understand why you were hired. It wasn’t your ability for data entry, scheduling meetings or filling out spreadsheets. You have the perfect combination of skills, personality, drive and organization to sell; don’t waste your time or your company’s money on tasks that don’t utilize these.

You may not think your C-level managers are looking, but people who understand their worth and work to improve every day don’t go unnoticed. These reps are recognized and praised for going above and beyond (and usually see bumps in their commission and bonuses as a result).

This is a challenging but rewarding career choice. You are assisting a business as it grows and placing yourself in a position to rise through the ranks. Do not let yourself fall into the habit of coasting by. Challenge yourself and aim for that 20 percent.

May 08, 2019 by Stefan Groschupf

I’m thrilled to announce that Automation Hero is now publicly available. Automation Hero is an advanced sales AI automation platform, offering the first proactive and adaptive sales AI assistant – Robin.

After I helped bring Hadoop to life (now a $40 billion market), I founded Datameer, a company focused on big data business intelligence. With the help of my team, we built the company from an idea with three boxes on a paper napkin into a leader in the data analytics space with close to $100 million in VC backing. We managed to double bookings six years in a row. How? The secret sauce was a very data-driven approach to our marketing and sales process.

The sales data dilemma

We urgently needed high-quality data to optimize our sales processes but it became very clear that we were wasting the valuable time of our sales reps on data entry. But all sorts of processes and systems depend on quality data. We were facing the “garbage in – garbage out” problem, meaning sales or marketing automation or forecasting is only as good as the data in your CRM system.

I’m sure you’ve heard, “If it is not in Salesforce – it didn’t happen.” In fact, sales reps on average input about 300 CRM updates a week. Meanwhile, 79 percent of information a sales rep has doesn’t even make it into the CRM and 58 percent of respondents to a Salesforce User’s Benchmark report believe that less than a quarter of data is actionable and trustworthy.

Making sales human again

As I thought about this problem, I realized how completely broken the entire sales process is these days. We hire great sales reps based on their human interaction skills and then turn them into data-entry robots following made-up sales playbooks. Sales reps spend only 37 percent of their time selling and the rest of their time is wasted with pesky, repetitive tasks.

Salesforce’s “State of Sales” report found that a positive customer experience is the biggest sales challenge organizations are facing. This is an even bigger challenge if sales reps only spend 37 percent of their time talking to customers. It’s time to rethink our sales technology stack and processes. In 2018 we can’t have our sales reps, arguably the most valuable company resource, type data into a slow and clunky database front-end (a.k.a. your CRM system). In fact, I would pose the question of whether we need CRM systems (as we know them) in 2018?

We believe that AI can be a disruptive force in the sales world. Our mission is to automate the tasks that squander sales reps’ time and help them focus on what they do best – building customer relationships.

Augmented Intelligence not Artificial Intelligence

There are some companies out there that believe in a superhuman AI overlord. We believe in exactly the opposite. We believe that time is the most valuable resource and we should do everything in our power to not waste it. We believe AI should be the servant of people — not tell humans what to do.

Therefore we didn’t use a superhuman name such as Einstein or Watson but Robin – your friendly AI sidekick. We believe AI needs to augment intelligence.

It’s just email

The consumerization of enterprise technology also means that sales reps are overwhelmed by having to learn, login and manage up to 10 tools each day. We want to declutter and consolidate. That’s why our user interface is just an email and that’s how Robin interacts with each user. It’s that simple and powerful and it feels like a real assistant.

Sales AI automation as an unfair competitive advantage

IDC predicts that sales AI is a trillion dollar opportunity. This is the first time that a disruptive technology will crack the trillion dollar mark. The World Economic Forum describes AI as the 4th industrial revolution. Our beta users have already reported saving up to an hour each day. That’s less time spent on boring and unrewarding tasks, and more time on productive responsibilities. Large organizations in the financial service and insurance industries already predict a double (and even triple) digit million dollar ROI from Automation Hero.

Businesses have a shorter window to adopt this kind of technology. In 1925, Nikolai Kondratieff examines the relationship between technology and economic cycles and how these cycles are accelerating. In 2005, Ray Kurzweil describes the skyrocketing acceleration of technology in his book, “The Singularity Is Near.”

This means that fast movers will see an unfair competitive advantage and late adopters risk displacement in just a few years if they fail to get the ball rolling.

Democratizing AI

We feel it’s important to democratize AI and allow as many sales reps as possible to take advantage of its opportunity. That’s why we offer a freemium account (in addition to our Premium Personal and Enterprise versions) for individuals that want to get up and running asap. Signing up for Automation Hero couldn’t be easier — with two clicks, you can connect your company email and Salesforce account and Robin starts supporting daily activities asap.

Business 5.0

If we already have autonomous, self-driving cars and autonomous financial trading, we need to think about what role AI will play in companies. After big data and Industry 4.0 / IoT, I would like to introduce the term ‘Business 5.0’ to express the next evolution of automating business processes.

Automation Hero is a Business 5.0 platform which connects diverse, structured and unstructured data sources, internal and external systems, business processes and most importantly, humans, into a cohesive intelligence fabric. We can elastically expand and contract, and process trillions of events and big data on a distributed and containerized compute environment in the cloud or on-premise. Automation Hero is a business operations system for the modern company.

Bright minds behind a revolutionary product

I’m honored to be joined by some of the brilliant minds I worked with at Datameer. People who built and marketed some of the most innovative big data and machine learning technology are working incredibly hard on ensuring Automation Hero’s Robin is leading the charge in sales AI automation innovation.

We’ve also attracted smart money early on with CometLabs, Baidu USA, Cherry Ventures and signals VC as investors. Baidu invests $3 billion annually into AI research, CometLabs is the premier AI investor in Silicon Valley, signals VC has extensive connections in the insurance industry and Cherry Ventures managed the largest European e-commerce company.

And, the good news doesn’t stop there. Joining as independent advisors are Deborah Hopkins, founder and CEO of Citi Ventures and Donald Farmer, principle at Treehive Strategies. Hopkins was Citi’s first-ever chief innovation officer and a senior advisor to Citi’s Investment Bank winning IPOs including VMware, Palo Alto Networks, Arista and Qliktech. Farmer led the team behind Microsoft’s Power BI and Qlik Sense, and has over 25 years of experience in analytics, data management and AI.

Join our community!

We’re incredibly excited to be driving an industry with so much potential. More than 80 percent of the most aggressive adopters of business AI technology say their companies are already seeing the rewards.

Sign up today for our sales AI automation platform and join our community of hundreds of beta customers, including many Fortune 500 companies.

Happy selling, Heroes!