monday.com Elevate 2025 | Eran Zinman, monday.com

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Eran Zinman

Co-founder & Co-CEO

monday.com

play_circle_outline AI has changed expectations for software from managing to delivering work.

play_circle_outline Transforming Onboarding: Monday Magic and Vibe Empower Users to Create Tailored Solutions Effortlessly on monday.com

play_circle_outline Embracing Intuitive Solutions: How Monday.com Enhances AI Adoption for All Customers

play_circle_outline Success measured by customer adoption of AI technology and intuitive product design.

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Eran Zinman, monday.com

Eran Zinman

Co-founder & Co-CEO monday.com

Sold-out momentum meets AI reality in theCube’s coverage of Elevate ‘25, where monday.com co-founder and co-chief information officer Eran Zinman joins theCUBE Research’s Paul Nashawaty to unpack why AI is no longer just “managing” work but actually doing it. Zinman details the headline releases: monday magic for instant solution creation, monday vibe for building and connecting apps to real org data and monday agents that execute tasks like emails, calls and scheduling using plain English, explaining how these moves reset customer expectations for speed and ... Read more

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What impact does AI have on customer expectations regarding software functionality and productivity? add

What were the main features announced related to Monday Magic, Monday Vibe, and their functionalities? add

What strategies are being implemented to help customers and prospects feel comfortable with AI solutions? add

What are the expectations for technology advancements and customer adoption at Elevate 2026? add

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Eran Zinman, monday.com

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Paul Nashawaty

>> Hello and welcome. My name is Paul Nashawaty and I'm coming to you live from the show floor of monday.com Elevate 2025. I'm joined by Eran, the co-founder and CEO of monday.com. Welcome.

Eran Zinman

>> Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Thank you for being on. This is great. What a great show.

Eran Zinman

>> Yeah, it's pretty exciting. Yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> It's very exciting. I mean, there's a lot of traffic, a lot of interest. We were talking right before this about it's a sold out show, is that right?

Eran Zinman

>> Yeah, it's true. Actually, this is the second Elevate we offer pay tickets and we actually sold out this year. People actually showed up to the venue without tickets trying to buy them on spot. So I think conclusion for next year is we need to double the size. It's amazing to see the traction. Everything is buzzing, everybody's excited. So really great to see that.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, absolutely. And I think that there's a lot to be said about people using the platform, people using that consolidation approach, getting away from those siloed approaches. Really looking for that operational efficiencies, right? It's really, really awesome. But let's jump right in. We want to talk about things that, I was listening on the keynote and I was doing some briefings before this. We talked about AI is no longer the future of work. What does that mean to you? What does that mean in the context of monday.com?

Eran Zinman

>> I think in general it just resets people expectation of what they can get from software. I think always software for work was about helping you manage the processes, helps you manage the sales force, whatever it is. And now with AI, I think customer's expectations are changing. AI can actually help you deliver the work, not just manage the work, but actually do the work for you. And this is our big announcement here in Elevate 2025. We delivered a lot of new innovation, new products, additions to our existing products, just doing the work for you. And this is a mindset change for our customers because what they expect from our products can now fundamentally change. The value they can get out of the products is a hundred times more than what they could get in the past. So I'm very excited for this and from all the innovation we've seen, we have a lot more coming up in the following year.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, the keynote showed that innovation, showed some of that. Why don't we talk a little bit about some of those announcements? Do you have some great announcements that showed... But I won't steal your thunder, you tell me.

Eran Zinman

>> Cool. So I think maybe the main three that we announced was Monday Magic. I can go through each one if that's okay. So monday magic, basically like the name suggests, it does magic for you. I think in the past when people onboarded to Monday, they were given this power or building their own solutions, but they had to do the manual work to do it. Now you go into magic, you just type in what is your business need, and then boom, it builds it for you with all the knowledge that we, with all the expertise. And then you can continue the conversation and tweak it. It truly is magic. Once you start using it's like you cannot stop using that. The second thing we announced was monday vibe. I don't know if you heard the term vibe coding?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Of course, yeah.

Eran Zinman

>> Yeah. So it just makes everybody a developer. But I think what's unique about what we offered is when you build a new app from scratch, it's always, what's the next phase? You need to connect it to your data, you need to connect to your organization. So it's great to build an app, but if it's disconnected from anything else, it is pretty much worthless. And this is what we focused on. Not only you can build an app, but then you can connect it and integrate it to your monday solution and to other platforms. And the third one, which I'm the most excited about, monday agents. It just lets you, with plain English, you get a document. And like you hire a new person to your company, you explain to that person what needs to be done, just write it into a document. And like magic, it just creates it. It does the work for you. You can make it make phone calls, send emails, schedule meetings, whatever you need, and then it just becomes part of your workforce. That's unbelievable to see.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, I was really impressed with the innovation that I've seen just year over year. I mean, you have roughly, what? 260,000 customers across over 200 industries. So this is, you're like, monday.com is really a platform that can be used regardless of your environment. So it's really a powerful platform. And I really like from these announcements, you were talking about, the Monday agent really caught my eye because of the fact that you can use natural language and create. Using agents to create what you want for connectivity, from your heritage environment to your new environments as well. So that was really cool. But when we look at the scaling of these projects, how does AI kind of help with that with regards to these diverse business needs?

Eran Zinman

>> Yeah. So definitely AI, the way I think about it, it offers in a way infinite leverage for our customers. Because in the past, if you wanted to scale your business, you had to scale headcount, hire more people, you had to use more systems. And basically with all those new offerings, we offer something unique that wasn't offered before, which is to scale your business with software, not just with headcount. And also for all your existing headcount it just offers them a hundred percent more leverage and what they do on a day-to-day basis. So I think this just creates a new business dynamic where companies can scale using technology, which we've never seen anything like that before. Not in that magnitude.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. Yeah. Do you think that's driving the interest in the event this year?

Eran Zinman

>> A hundred percent. Look, everybody's talking about AI all the time. But when you actually check who's using that on a day-to-day basis, we talked about it during my session, this is such a big gap still between what technology can offer and what people actually do as part of their work. And I feel for years monday breached that gap, not with AI, but with other software we offered. We always took pride in the fact that 70% of our customers are non-tech. We serve so many industries. And I feel we make in a way technology accessible to so many people. We make everybody... We give superpowers to everybody. So I feel we're going to do the same thing with AI. Such an amazing technology and we're going to make it accessible for everybody, for every business, every industry, whether you're a techie person or non-tech, we're going to help you adopt it in a very intuitive way.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So I think that's really powerful, right? The statement of saying the innovation is there, right? The launch of these new offerings is there, but it's not just that. I mean, you've talked about case points, use cases like PepsiCo, that really has a low impact, reduce their low impact workloads, right? Or Instacart speeding up delivery timelines. Those are real-life use cases that customers are doing. So it's not just theoretically this works, this is actual use cases at major corporations.

Eran Zinman

>> Yeah, it's amazing to see. And what I like the most when I hear customer stories, it's just the variety of it. We have tech companies using us, we have retail companies, food industry, and everybody's doing this in a different way. I think that's part of the magic of Monday. It's not built for one specific industry or vertical. We give that power to our users and they use it, whatever they like. And it's amazing to hear the customers' stories and how much impact we're able to make for each one of those customers.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So with that impact, you see some advantages for some of these customer use cases. Does that impact or does that drive your product strategy and your growth? What are your thoughts there?

Eran Zinman

>> I think in a way it is, but also when we planned our roadmap for this year, a lot of it didn't come from our existing user base. There's things that are incremental to what we offer, and we get that a lot from our customers. But we always try to think from first principles, like what's the technology we have right now? There's always this old tale about people always wanted faster horses. Nobody wanted a car because it was hard to envision that. I think it's in a way similar to what we now experienced with AI. Everyone want to use software more, but it's hard to envision what AI can do for you. So when we think about the roadmap and what we're building, we're always thinking about what kind of technology our customers are not currently using, we can really change how they use software going forward. And usually it doesn't come from our customers, it comes from us thinking about our roadmap and what we can offer them going forward.

Paul Nashawaty

>> That makes sense. And when I think about the innovation that you're driving, obviously your customers are working their day to day, rolling up their sleeves, doing their jobs. And you're providing new ways of doing things, changing ways of doing things and helping them drive operational efficiencies, reducing friction, reducing the skill gap issues that organizations run into. But when I was looking into some of the numbers, I was seeing that roughly half or maybe a little bit more than half of your customers are using AI and half are not, right? And so there's still a lot of untapped potential. So it's interesting to me because organizations can be anywhere in either in the infancy of using AI to fully mature and really developing AI solutions. But yet I also find that in our own research at thecuberesearch.com. We basically have seen that the IT budget, 25% of it is allocated to AI projects. Are you seeing this kind of same movement with regards to your customers?

Eran Zinman

>> I think there's definitely demand for that. People understand this is a new technology and it has a lot of potential. I think there's still companies who try to figure out what's the best way to use AI. And also, is my data secure? Is it okay to use it in enterprise? How can I make sure nothing leaks out of my day-to-day usage? And we put a lot of emphasis on that when we built our AI solutions. Everything we built was built on top of the monday platform. Everything's enterprise ready using the same security standards. And I feel that the way we build it is the most suitable for work for our customers to easily adopt it. So I think it's going to open the door for more and more companies using AI going forward.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I agree with you, but I also look at it as there's a necessity to move forward with it because they're going to be left behind, right? Their competition's going to do it, and they're not going to be able to... So there's a necessity. But I think that there's also a lot... When I talk to organizations, they're pushing back on vendors to make it more frictionless, make it more easy to adopt. Actually, what we see in our research, at 67% of organizations, they're hiring generalists over specialists and they're looking for the vendors to provide ease-of-use solutions. How are you addressing that? I mean, monday's pretty easy to use, monday.com is really easy to use. But how are you, with regards to AI, making your customers or even new prospects, comfortable with this frictionless approach?

Eran Zinman

>> Yeah. So we have basically a two-way strategy. One is we introduce new capabilities to our existing products. So if you're an existing monday customer, within your existing workflow, we added AI capabilities just to make it accessible for you. Today, we announced monday sidekick as well. I like the phrase, just click the star. So whatever you do, you can click the star on any of the items on your board and you can just use AI, five seconds. And then we have the new customers, the one looking for AI specifically. Whether it's a SMB or the mid-market company or even an enterprise company, we have specific go-to market and also we build new products. So I feel we're now in a transition phase. Some companies are eager to adopt new AI solutions, more opportunistic, I guess, others are slow to adopt. And I think it's our responsibility to offer both solutions going forward.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I think that makes a lot of sense. I think it really does. You're meeting the customers and the prospects where they are in their journey. And that's important because not everyone's ready for everything, but they obviously need to figure out how to get there. I heard a couple of statements that were said, with AI it said, "Your workforce is limitless." Right? That's a very powerful statement, right? Because now you're saying, you almost have an entire new workforce with AI. How do you envision monday.com to continue to lead the shape in the future of the work?

Eran Zinman

>> I think this is one of the most mind-blowing things when you think about what AI can do for you. Because let's take us for example. If we wanted to scale our sales team, it was always about we need to hire another person. You want to increase the company revenue, you need to support more customers. It was always like a linear function. You need X amount of people to achieve X amount of revenue and to support X amount of customers. And I think with AI, it changed the whole paradigm of how you can scale your business. Because we should just showcase an AiSDR. It contacts every lead. It doesn't matter if it's like 2:00 AM in the morning, 7:00 AM, 4:00 PM in the afternoon. It can be multiple languages, multiple time zones, and there can be as many as you like. So let's say you increase your marketing budget, you get more leads, you don't need to hire more people, you can do that and just scale your AI operation. Same goes for support, same goes for other things. So I think to change the whole paradigm, how you can scale business and how you can move forward without dramatically increasing your headcount.

Paul Nashawaty

>> And customers are obviously asking for this too.

Eran Zinman

>> Of course, yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Because they're trying to move forward. All right. So let me ask you this, Eran. So we're sitting here, next year at monday.com Elevate 2026, right? And we look back a year and we say, "In the last year, what did you expect from monday? Where do you think it's going to go? And what's the next generation of offerings of what's going to be happening at Elevate 2026?"

Eran Zinman

>> Look, I think the thing with AI is that every week you wake up and there's a new announcement. So technology is moving really, really quickly. It's hard to envision how technology will evolve over the next year. For me though, success will be adoption. If our customers are going to massively adopt AI, I know we've done something well because I feel technology will continue to evolve probably in the next four or five years. Every year it's going to be like a quantum leap of capabilities. But the real question is, will customers adopt it? And I feel if we build the right products, the right user experience and make it very intuitive, that will be a huge win. Because if we make technology accessible, it means that we help our customers leverage technology in ways they've never done before and that for me will be a huge success.

Paul Nashawaty

>> That's really a great, great vision to have there. All right. We have a lot to talk about. There's a lot of fun going on in the keynote. What would be some parting words you'd like to leave with the audience about Elevate 2025 and what happened here? Where can they go to learn more? What would be some good CTAs?

Eran Zinman

>> Yeah, so look, all those products are now gradually being released. So I welcome all of you to try our new products on our website and just sign up to monday and use AI. I think you'll be surprised how easy it is to use those features and functionalities. And assuming, going back to what we said in the beginning, that Elevate next year is going to be even bigger, buy a ticket today. We're looking forward to see you next year. It's just amazing to be around so many people that are part of the ecosystem, partners, customers, investors, everybody around, it's just buzzing. So it's great to be here.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, congratulations on your success. It's really been great. Eran, it's been great having you here for your insights and your perspective. It's really great, great, great show. And I also want to thank the audience here for watching. I'm Paul Nashawaty coming to you live from the show floor of monday.com at Elevate 2025 on theCUBE, your leading source for tech news.