Dreamforce 2024 | Kraig Swensrud | Qualified

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Kraig Swensrud

Founder & CEO

Qualified

play_circle_outline Evolution of AI copilots to AI agents in the industry

play_circle_outline Introduction of Piper, the AI SDR, for pipeline generation

play_circle_outline Integration of Qualified with Salesforce for real-time data access

play_circle_outline Maximizing Sales and Customer Experience with AI Workers: Effective Strategies for Human-AI Collaboration

play_circle_outline Revolutionizing Sales: Transitioning to AI SDR for Higher Value Activities and Doubling Pipeline for Cost Savings

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Kraig Swensrud | Qualified

Kraig Swensrud

Founder & CEO Qualified

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Christophe Bertrand

>> Welcome to theCUBE. We are at Dreamforce 2024 in San Francisco at the New York Stock Exchange office. I am joined today by Kraig Swensrud.

Kraig Swensrud

>> Hello.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Welcome, Kraig. Great to have you. We're going to be talking about Qualified. You are the CEO of the company. It's a great solution to really help replace in a sense or augment your Salesforce. Specifically, the type of interactions that I've been having with your solution was to ask questions about what you do, what is a company about. And what I learned is that you really help accelerate sell cycles through the answer. So let's talk about that. But first of all, I'd like your perspective on where you see the market. Tell us about Qualified and tell us about what you heard this morning when you heard about all of these agents running around.

Kraig Swensrud

>> Yeah. Well, thanks so much for having me on the program. Kraig Swensrud, the founder and CEO of Qualified. And what we do is we help companies generate pipeline. And we do that by monitoring their primary pipe gen assets, like their corporate website, for example. And we help companies convert target buyers and target accounts into pipeline. Now, what is going on in the industry right now, I think, is completely fascinating. It was not even two years ago that ChatGPT was introduced, the fastest-

Christophe Bertrand

>> Yeah....

Kraig Swensrud

>> growing app in the history of apps. And so I think as consumers, we were like, "A revolution is underway." As business professionals, we came to work and were like, "A revolution is underway." But as software providers, we immediately were like, "What should this mean for us?" So we all started introducing copilots in the summer of last year. We had a copilot. Salesforce had a copilot. Microsoft had a copilot. GitHub had a copilot. Everyone had a copilot that's like the human is still the user of the software and riding shotgun is the AI copilot. But interestingly, I live here in San Francisco, and I drive to work every day. And all of a sudden I saw these Waymo cars, right? And they used to have humans behind the wheel. The human was giving the feedback. And then all of sudden last summer, the humans disappeared. And then I saw one car a week, and then I saw one car a day, and then I saw 10 cars a day, and now they're all over the city. At that moment when we were building these copilots, I was thinking, "If the AI can drive this car autonomously and it can drive me to work safer than I might do on my own, well, what should it do for my software? My software should run autonomously. The AI should run autonomously." And then we began thinking, "What is generating pipeline?" That's what we do, right? "What does generating pipeline look like in a world where everything is automated and AI is actually doing all of the work?" And that led us to the introduction of Piper. We call her Piper, the AI SDR. She automates the job functions of a human sales development rep. In our industry, that's called SDR. And then I think as you mentioned, what we just saw here at Dreamforce is a vision for automating all sorts of workers and tasks with AI workers and agents. So it's fascinating what's going on right now.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Yes. So we went from copilots, which sounded really great, to now agents, which is, I think, confusing for a lot of people. But let's call them agents. And the idea is that they're workers. They're really going to replace, to an extent, what human can do, but also, augment your ability as an organization, in your case, to build more pipeline. So I've had to actually train SDRs many times in my career. I've even had SDRs work for me at some point. And what I found is that very easily, you can derail them if you don't train them well when a question gets asked, especially in technical sale. So let's talk about two things. First of all, sort of the type of customers you have, are they more technical products that they represent or are they consumer products? What is the range that you can cover with Piper? I interacted with Piper, had a great, again, conversation with Piper. So I think it's very cool. I'm just wondering, "If I'm selling a technology product, how would I train Piper? If I'm selling a consumer product, what should I do? How does that change the tone and the engagement?" Assuming I'm a highly engaged potential customer here, and let's start with that-

Kraig Swensrud

>> Yeah....

Christophe Bertrand

>> what is the range of customers you have and how do you deal with that potential difference between a technical product and a less technical product?

Kraig Swensrud

>> Well, Piper has been hired by hundreds of companies in the short four months that we've had her in market. It has been mind-blowing what's happening. And I think the reason is because it is just so compelling. The value proposition is so compelling for business leaders. So for example, at my company, we sell to CMOs, we sell to the marketing organization. Typically, the human SDRs, they straight-line. They dotted line. They report to the marketing function because the marketing function is responsible for inbound pipeline. Now, let's think about this role of the human SDR. Typically, they're folks that are entry-level, fresh out of college. We bring them into our organization. We try to find the best ones, right? We train them. We onboard them. That takes about three months. And then we help them understand our value proposition, our competitive battle cards, right? They need to be fully knowledgeable to answer these questions. And then we set them loose. The best ones, the ones who work the hardest to really put in the hours, they get promoted nine months later, and we're back-

Christophe Bertrand

>> All right....

Kraig Swensrud

>> to recruiting new ones and training new ones. And so that alone is challenging for companies. But the other thing is our organizations of human SDRs, they don't scale, right? If I want more capacity, I have to hire more. And if you think just about the cost associated with that is one thing. But then you get the productivity gains when you can put AI in and you can have AI that's doing the work, you can scale infinitely. You can scale nights, you can scale weekends, you can flex up with capacity, you can flex back down. And the AI can do it all, and the AI's never going to get promoted, right? So all the knowledge that she gains, right? Everything you teach her to do, every day she's getting better and better and she's never going to leave your organization.

Christophe Bertrand

>> More importantly, the AI will not get hired away by your competitor-

Kraig Swensrud

>> Exactly....

Christophe Bertrand

>> after nine months of training or year of training, which may have happened to some people in this room, which is very frustrating. So what you're saying is there is really a value investment that happens once you've trained a model, trained your Piper, AI worker, so that, in essence, you can scale. The AI's not going to go away and it gets better and better as it learns, I imagine.

Kraig Swensrud

>> .

Christophe Bertrand

>> Now, let's talk about the integration with Salesforce. And specifically, we're at Dreamforce, obviously. Lots of conversation about Agentic AI. Let's go past that for a second and just talk about the integration. How do you leverage what is already in my Salesforce environment?

Kraig Swensrud

>> Qualified was founded more than six years ago. The very first investor in our company was Salesforce Ventures. My background is I'm the former Chief Marketing Officer of Salesforce.

Christophe Bertrand

>> It helps.

Kraig Swensrud

>> And I've been in and around the company, founded three organizations in the ecosystem for... I've been in and around the company for 20 plus years. And when we started Qualified, we said, "We're going to build the most modern pipe gen solution for Salesforce customers." In fact, that's really where we focus. And so Salesforce is the lead investor in our company. Salesforce executives are on our board of directors. Our global headquarters is one block away from the Salesforce Tower right here in San Francisco. So we've got a very tight relationship with Salesforce, but we focus in marketing. So technically what happens for many of our customers is Qualified is connected directly into Salesforce CRM. And then what happens is Piper has access in real time to the data that you give her permissions to see.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Okay.

Kraig Swensrud

>> So it can be locked down by an administrator. And then what Piper does is, for example, when you come to the website, she tries to identify who you are. What do I know about you? Have I seen you before? Have you interacted with me before? Have I sent you an email before? Who do you represent in my CRM system? Which company do you work for? How many employees is that company? Are you a customer of mine or not? And then she takes all that information and then she has a goal associated with a segment that she places you in. So her goal would be like, "What am I supposed to do with this person?" If you're a potential partner, she might guide you in a certain direction. If you're one of my most strategic accounts that I haven't sold to yet, she's going to guide you down the path to book a meeting with an account executive. So behind the scenes, she's got different goals that she can achieve, and then she has different ways of achieving those goals. So she might start out by saying, "I just want to ask you a quick question." Maybe she did that when you arrived on-

Christophe Bertrand

>> She did....

Kraig Swensrud

>> the website. And then, of course, it's natural language. So she can answer any question. She's been trained on all of our corporate information. She's also been trained on what not to do. So for example, we're like, "Piper, I know you memorized all of our pricing, but you actually can't talk about pricing. We want to leave that for one of our sales executives to do." So she knows what to do, what not to do, she knows where she's going. And then she can capture leads. She can serve offers. She can book meetings. She can route conversations to a human sales rep. She can trigger workflows. She can alert people via Slack inside of the enterprise. And all that happens through the combination of Qualified working harmoniously with Salesforce. So when I saw today what was happening at Dreamforce around Agentforce, I'm like, "Wow." It's actually perfect because now Salesforce is not just leaving it to their partners to talk about and evangelize these future solutions. They're doing it themselves. And what I saw in the keynote room was an audience of 10 to 12,000 people in the room, 45,000 people at the event, and millions of people online tuning in and learning about what agents and AI workers can do for companies. And I think it's going to only accelerate what's happening.

Christophe Bertrand

>> I think Jim Cramer was getting worried about being replaced. Absolutely. You're right. I think it's a great framework, and you're right. It's essentially creating or laying the foundation for what comes next. So that's really what I want to talk about because I think Piper is clearly just the beginning. You're talking about self-driving cars. So many more dimensions that come into play with those. And I also live in San Francisco. So I've seen the same thing as well as some interesting twists on how to stop them when you don't want them around. This being said, there is a very high risk of failure potentially, or a high consequence of a failure, even if the risk is minimal with a car, right? It can hit someone. It's happened. There can be lots of issues. Well, it's a bit different when it comes to pipeline generation. Nobody's going to die. But what about compliance? That's a part that would get me worried. If I hire Piper, how do I really ensure that, either because of the inputs or the outputs, I'm not going to go break some law regulation or governance that I have for myself?

Kraig Swensrud

>> Well, like I mentioned before, Piper lives on guardrails. There are things that she can do. There are things that she can't do. There's things that she can say. There's things that she can't say. And there's only data that she has access to that's based upon what the Salesforce administrator gives her access to. So it can be as locked down or as open up as a company actually wants it to be. And when I think about the consequences as a former CMO, but now a CEO and we sell to CMOs, I would think the biggest consequence to my company by staying with the model that I've built for the last 10 years, the model of humans following up hopefully with inbound leads, and then the leads, they move on to something else and my human misses them, or my human is out on vacation, or they're focused on some other task in the company, and so they miss a great conversation they could have had on the website, the risk is pipeline. The bigger risk for CMOs is the lost pipeline that comes from sticking with the old model. And when you see what these new workers can do today, and you see the fact that they're trained, they're extremely smart, they're very adept at answering questions, even better than many of the best human SDR six months on the job. They're all knowing. They know every single touchpoint they've ever had with a history of a company, how many people the company has contacted my account over time. They can see all, they can know all, and they can do so many things. They never get promoted. They never leave. They never take vacation. They work nights and they work weekends. The value proposition for CMOs in terms of pipe gen and cost savings is just so compelling.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, let's talk about that because, well, clearly, it's a machine, right? It's this futuristic vision that is now the present, and it's real. So humans are out of the equation. Don't you think people still want that interaction with humans? How do you sort of reconcile that? Or what recommendations would you have to actually leverage the AI worker to maybe empower the human dimension even further?

Kraig Swensrud

>> At every company, they've got a slightly different strategy. We typically see three types of organizations. For example, there would be an organization with 10 to 20 SDRs, and they would say, "You know what? That's not even enough. My volumes are so high. My traffic levels are so high." One of our customers is a 3,000 person publicly traded company down in Southern California, NextGen Healthcare. They were missing 1,400 conversations on their website. And they had a whole team of SDRs that was nights, that was weekends. It was just they have so much volume. They would have to hire more SDRs to deal with that capacity. So the decision for them is, "Do I hire an additional army of people or do I stick my toe in the water with AI right now to try to solve this problem?" They still have their team of SDRs. In other organizations, they only want their humans talking to the VIPs, the most strategic accounts. And so their humans are there on standby. They might be working on something else. And then Piper frontlines the whole organization. She talks to everybody. She talks to thousands of people. And for the ones that are interested, if they meet these criteria, boom, hand it right off to the human SDR counterpart. And some organizations, over the last couple of years, there's been really a B2B recession in our industry. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but there's been a lot of difficulty for many companies-

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right....

Kraig Swensrud

>> in our industry. They've laid off their entire team of human SDRs, and now they're looking back at the next phase of growth and rehiring. They're like, "Maybe I should just start with an AI SDR instead and see how that goes." Because, again, the promise of where this all goes in the future is increased pipe gen, which is direct value in terms of revenue to the company and cost savings that the company can deploy elsewhere in their go-to-market.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right. So that's top line and bottom line, which, of course, is music to my ears. This being said, as you think about the progression here of what could happen, right? So you replace SDRs with the AI worker. Do you lose that sort of salesmanship that you have in your organization? Or is it, on the other hand, a way to improve salesmanship? And really to your point, to the VIPs, that's the part where I feel that there may be, at some point, some recoil. And that's really... I'm not sure. We'll see what happens.

Kraig Swensrud

>> Well, let's talk about the job of an SDR versus an account executive-

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right....

Kraig Swensrud

>> because an account executive is really where the salesmanship comes through. And I don't think we're going to be losing the human touch in that area on the B2B side for quite some time. The job of a sales development rep is typically that front line of qualification. And what would you want as a buyer? So let's say as a buyer, you show up on my website because I've just piqued your curiosity-

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right....

Kraig Swensrud

>> with some advertisement, or you heard me at Dreamforce, or hear this interview and you show up on my website. Let's say you're really interested in taking the next action. Well, what would you rather do? Would you rather talk with a very smart, highly intelligent, well-educated, able to answer any question AI SDR Piper on my website right now, and then take the next step and book a meeting with a human account executive? Or would you rather fill out a form, go away, move on to your next thing, and have somebody trying to hunt you down in your inbox three days later? You were there. You were expressing interest. And so I think just the ability for these AI workers like Piper to facilitate that very quick handoff to remove the friction in the buying process, that's going to be more welcomed. And then that human touch with an account executive, that's really where the selling happens.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Yeah. I think you're so correct. I mean, the instant gratification you get by having the answer quickly, that's absolutely key. And in B2B, it takes I don't know how many interactions before somebody would even really fully engage in an actual sales process. You don't want to lose that touch when that happens because people consume digital content now. They learn a lot about your solution before they even connect with you.

Kraig Swensrud

>> Absolutely.

Christophe Bertrand

>> So if you miss that answer, so that key question that they have, then you've lost them.

Kraig Swensrud

>> You know where they're going to be? They're going to be on your competitor's website.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Absolutely. That's pretty much a guarantee. We've covered a lot of ground. So in terms of what you've observed, if you can share some numbers, by how much has pipeline augmented in some of your customer environments? I mean, are there some rules of thumb or is it really dependent on-

Kraig Swensrud

>> First of all, it's highly dependent on any company's volume and their ASPs, their selling price of their products.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Okay.

Kraig Swensrud

>> On average, when a company is coming from marketing automation system where they collect leads with forms on their website and they follow up with those leads with humans over-

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right....

Kraig Swensrud

>> email, on average, when they implement Qualified and Piper, their pipeline doubles and they save money. How much money do they save? It depends upon what they're doing with their human team and how much capital can they-

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right....

Kraig Swensrud

>> redeploy. Typically, what we find right now, companies are sticking their toe in the water. It is happening right now. I predicted earlier this year that every single CMO would invest in AI SDR this year because the value proposition is just too compelling. So what are they really doing by sticking their toe in the water? They're hiring AI workers like Piper. They're bringing them onto their team, alongside their team of human counterparts. And then when that next person gets promoted, you know what they're thinking? "Maybe I don't need to backfill them onto the team." You know what they were doing with their budget line items to hire more human SDRs? They're redeploying that money into some higher value activity, like a new ad campaign-

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right....

Kraig Swensrud

>> or sponsoring an event or doing something that is of demonstrable value. And then if somebody leaves the organization because they're not working out, they give Piper more responsibility. I think we're going to be at a place one year from now where people are going to be rethinking the entire notion of having a human SDR team. And the AI is going to be that good. It's going to be able to work the website. It's going to be able to work the inbox. It's going to be knowledgeable about every interaction. And it's going to be smarter, more capable, more intelligent, more scalable than any process we've had before it.

Christophe Bertrand

>> It makes a lot of sense. We'll see what happens. I still believe that, to your earlier point, salesmanship is going to be key. But you're right. I mean, doubling the pipeline. Who'd say no to that in many businesses, especially highly transactional businesses? We're talking immediate impact on revenue. And at the end of the day, that's really what matters.

Kraig Swensrud

>> Absolutely.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, thank you so much for your time. It's been a great conversation. I've noticed your sign. I think on 101. So I don't don't know if it was you or... But I think it was you, right?

Kraig Swensrud

>> That was us. You can hire Piper, the AI SDR, today-

Christophe Bertrand

>> Yes....

Kraig Swensrud

>> at Qualified.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Good. So see, I was paying attention. I did not even know we were going to talk. But thank you so much for your time. And to our viewers, thank you so much for joining us at theCUBE here. We're at Dreamforce 2024. My name is Christophe Bertrand. I'm a principal analyst with theCUBE Research. And we'll see you on the next one.

Kraig Swensrud | Qualified

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Christophe Bertrand

>> Welcome to theCUBE. We are at Dreamforce 2024 in San Francisco at the New York Stock Exchange office. I am joined today by Kraig Swensrud.

Kraig Swensrud

>> Hello.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Welcome, Kraig. Great to have you. We're going to be talking about Qualified. You are the CEO of the company. It's a great solution to really help replace in a sense or augment your Salesforce. Specifically, the type of interactions that I've been having with your solution was to ask questions about what you do, what is a company about. And what I learned is that you really help accelerate sell cycles through the answer. So let's talk about that. But first of all, I'd like your perspective on where you see the market. Tell us about Qualified and tell us about what you heard this morning when you heard about all of these agents running around.

Kraig Swensrud

>> Yeah. Well, thanks so much for having me on the program. Kraig Swensrud, the founder and CEO of Qualified. And what we do is we help companies generate pipeline. And we do that by monitoring their primary pipe gen assets, like their corporate website, for example. And we help companies convert target buyers and target accounts into pipeline. Now, what is going on in the industry right now, I think, is completely fascinating. It was not even two years ago that ChatGPT was introduced, the fastest-

Christophe Bertrand

>> Yeah....

Kraig Swensrud

>> growing app in the history of apps. And so I think as consumers, we were like, "A revolution is underway." As business professionals, we came to work and were like, "A revolution is underway." But as software providers, we immediately were like, "What should this mean for us?" So we all started introducing copilots in the summer of last year. We had a copilot. Salesforce had a copilot. Microsoft had a copilot. GitHub had a copilot. Everyone had a copilot that's like the human is still the user of the software and riding shotgun is the AI copilot. But interestingly, I live here in San Francisco, and I drive to work every day. And all of a sudden I saw these Waymo cars, right? And they used to have humans behind the wheel. The human was giving the feedback. And then all of sudden last summer, the humans disappeared. And then I saw one car a week, and then I saw one car a day, and then I saw 10 cars a day, and now they're all over the city. At that moment when we were building these copilots, I was thinking, "If the AI can drive this car autonomously and it can drive me to work safer than I might do on my own, well, what should it do for my software? My software should run autonomously. The AI should run autonomously." And then we began thinking, "What is generating pipeline?" That's what we do, right? "What does generating pipeline look like in a world where everything is automated and AI is actually doing all of the work?" And that led us to the introduction of Piper. We call her Piper, the AI SDR. She automates the job functions of a human sales development rep. In our industry, that's called SDR. And then I think as you mentioned, what we just saw here at Dreamforce is a vision for automating all sorts of workers and tasks with AI workers and agents. So it's fascinating what's going on right now.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Yes. So we went from copilots, which sounded really great, to now agents, which is, I think, confusing for a lot of people. But let's call them agents. And the idea is that they're workers. They're really going to replace, to an extent, what human can do, but also, augment your ability as an organization, in your case, to build more pipeline. So I've had to actually train SDRs many times in my career. I've even had SDRs work for me at some point. And what I found is that very easily, you can derail them if you don't train them well when a question gets asked, especially in technical sale. So let's talk about two things. First of all, sort of the type of customers you have, are they more technical products that they represent or are they consumer products? What is the range that you can cover with Piper? I interacted with Piper, had a great, again, conversation with Piper. So I think it's very cool. I'm just wondering, "If I'm selling a technology product, how would I train Piper? If I'm selling a consumer product, what should I do? How does that change the tone and the engagement?" Assuming I'm a highly engaged potential customer here, and let's start with that-

Kraig Swensrud

>> Yeah....

Christophe Bertrand

>> what is the range of customers you have and how do you deal with that potential difference between a technical product and a less technical product?

Kraig Swensrud

>> Well, Piper has been hired by hundreds of companies in the short four months that we've had her in market. It has been mind-blowing what's happening. And I think the reason is because it is just so compelling. The value proposition is so compelling for business leaders. So for example, at my company, we sell to CMOs, we sell to the marketing organization. Typically, the human SDRs, they straight-line. They dotted line. They report to the marketing function because the marketing function is responsible for inbound pipeline. Now, let's think about this role of the human SDR. Typically, they're folks that are entry-level, fresh out of college. We bring them into our organization. We try to find the best ones, right? We train them. We onboard them. That takes about three months. And then we help them understand our value proposition, our competitive battle cards, right? They need to be fully knowledgeable to answer these questions. And then we set them loose. The best ones, the ones who work the hardest to really put in the hours, they get promoted nine months later, and we're back-

Christophe Bertrand

>> All right....

Kraig Swensrud

>> to recruiting new ones and training new ones. And so that alone is challenging for companies. But the other thing is our organizations of human SDRs, they don't scale, right? If I want more capacity, I have to hire more. And if you think just about the cost associated with that is one thing. But then you get the productivity gains when you can put AI in and you can have AI that's doing the work, you can scale infinitely. You can scale nights, you can scale weekends, you can flex up with capacity, you can flex back down. And the AI can do it all, and the AI's never going to get promoted, right? So all the knowledge that she gains, right? Everything you teach her to do, every day she's getting better and better and she's never going to leave your organization.

Christophe Bertrand

>> More importantly, the AI will not get hired away by your competitor-

Kraig Swensrud

>> Exactly....

Christophe Bertrand

>> after nine months of training or year of training, which may have happened to some people in this room, which is very frustrating. So what you're saying is there is really a value investment that happens once you've trained a model, trained your Piper, AI worker, so that, in essence, you can scale. The AI's not going to go away and it gets better and better as it learns, I imagine.

Kraig Swensrud

>> .

Christophe Bertrand

>> Now, let's talk about the integration with Salesforce. And specifically, we're at Dreamforce, obviously. Lots of conversation about Agentic AI. Let's go past that for a second and just talk about the integration. How do you leverage what is already in my Salesforce environment?

Kraig Swensrud

>> Qualified was founded more than six years ago. The very first investor in our company was Salesforce Ventures. My background is I'm the former Chief Marketing Officer of Salesforce.

Christophe Bertrand

>> It helps.

Kraig Swensrud

>> And I've been in and around the company, founded three organizations in the ecosystem for... I've been in and around the company for 20 plus years. And when we started Qualified, we said, "We're going to build the most modern pipe gen solution for Salesforce customers." In fact, that's really where we focus. And so Salesforce is the lead investor in our company. Salesforce executives are on our board of directors. Our global headquarters is one block away from the Salesforce Tower right here in San Francisco. So we've got a very tight relationship with Salesforce, but we focus in marketing. So technically what happens for many of our customers is Qualified is connected directly into Salesforce CRM. And then what happens is Piper has access in real time to the data that you give her permissions to see.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Okay.

Kraig Swensrud

>> So it can be locked down by an administrator. And then what Piper does is, for example, when you come to the website, she tries to identify who you are. What do I know about you? Have I seen you before? Have you interacted with me before? Have I sent you an email before? Who do you represent in my CRM system? Which company do you work for? How many employees is that company? Are you a customer of mine or not? And then she takes all that information and then she has a goal associated with a segment that she places you in. So her goal would be like, "What am I supposed to do with this person?" If you're a potential partner, she might guide you in a certain direction. If you're one of my most strategic accounts that I haven't sold to yet, she's going to guide you down the path to book a meeting with an account executive. So behind the scenes, she's got different goals that she can achieve, and then she has different ways of achieving those goals. So she might start out by saying, "I just want to ask you a quick question." Maybe she did that when you arrived on-

Christophe Bertrand

>> She did....

Kraig Swensrud

>> the website. And then, of course, it's natural language. So she can answer any question. She's been trained on all of our corporate information. She's also been trained on what not to do. So for example, we're like, "Piper, I know you memorized all of our pricing, but you actually can't talk about pricing. We want to leave that for one of our sales executives to do." So she knows what to do, what not to do, she knows where she's going. And then she can capture leads. She can serve offers. She can book meetings. She can route conversations to a human sales rep. She can trigger workflows. She can alert people via Slack inside of the enterprise. And all that happens through the combination of Qualified working harmoniously with Salesforce. So when I saw today what was happening at Dreamforce around Agentforce, I'm like, "Wow." It's actually perfect because now Salesforce is not just leaving it to their partners to talk about and evangelize these future solutions. They're doing it themselves. And what I saw in the keynote room was an audience of 10 to 12,000 people in the room, 45,000 people at the event, and millions of people online tuning in and learning about what agents and AI workers can do for companies. And I think it's going to only accelerate what's happening.

Christophe Bertrand

>> I think Jim Cramer was getting worried about being replaced. Absolutely. You're right. I think it's a great framework, and you're right. It's essentially creating or laying the foundation for what comes next. So that's really what I want to talk about because I think Piper is clearly just the beginning. You're talking about self-driving cars. So many more dimensions that come into play with those. And I also live in San Francisco. So I've seen the same thing as well as some interesting twists on how to stop them when you don't want them around. This being said, there is a very high risk of failure potentially, or a high consequence of a failure, even if the risk is minimal with a car, right? It can hit someone. It's happened. There can be lots of issues. Well, it's a bit different when it comes to pipeline generation. Nobody's going to die. But what about compliance? That's a part that would get me worried. If I hire Piper, how do I really ensure that, either because of the inputs or the outputs, I'm not going to go break some law regulation or governance that I have for myself?

Kraig Swensrud

>> Well, like I mentioned before, Piper lives on guardrails. There are things that she can do. There are things that she can't do. There's things that she can say. There's things that she can't say. And there's only data that she has access to that's based upon what the Salesforce administrator gives her access to. So it can be as locked down or as open up as a company actually wants it to be. And when I think about the consequences as a former CMO, but now a CEO and we sell to CMOs, I would think the biggest consequence to my company by staying with the model that I've built for the last 10 years, the model of humans following up hopefully with inbound leads, and then the leads, they move on to something else and my human misses them, or my human is out on vacation, or they're focused on some other task in the company, and so they miss a great conversation they could have had on the website, the risk is pipeline. The bigger risk for CMOs is the lost pipeline that comes from sticking with the old model. And when you see what these new workers can do today, and you see the fact that they're trained, they're extremely smart, they're very adept at answering questions, even better than many of the best human SDR six months on the job. They're all knowing. They know every single touchpoint they've ever had with a history of a company, how many people the company has contacted my account over time. They can see all, they can know all, and they can do so many things. They never get promoted. They never leave. They never take vacation. They work nights and they work weekends. The value proposition for CMOs in terms of pipe gen and cost savings is just so compelling.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, let's talk about that because, well, clearly, it's a machine, right? It's this futuristic vision that is now the present, and it's real. So humans are out of the equation. Don't you think people still want that interaction with humans? How do you sort of reconcile that? Or what recommendations would you have to actually leverage the AI worker to maybe empower the human dimension even further?

Kraig Swensrud

>> At every company, they've got a slightly different strategy. We typically see three types of organizations. For example, there would be an organization with 10 to 20 SDRs, and they would say, "You know what? That's not even enough. My volumes are so high. My traffic levels are so high." One of our customers is a 3,000 person publicly traded company down in Southern California, NextGen Healthcare. They were missing 1,400 conversations on their website. And they had a whole team of SDRs that was nights, that was weekends. It was just they have so much volume. They would have to hire more SDRs to deal with that capacity. So the decision for them is, "Do I hire an additional army of people or do I stick my toe in the water with AI right now to try to solve this problem?" They still have their team of SDRs. In other organizations, they only want their humans talking to the VIPs, the most strategic accounts. And so their humans are there on standby. They might be working on something else. And then Piper frontlines the whole organization. She talks to everybody. She talks to thousands of people. And for the ones that are interested, if they meet these criteria, boom, hand it right off to the human SDR counterpart. And some organizations, over the last couple of years, there's been really a B2B recession in our industry. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but there's been a lot of difficulty for many companies-

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right....

Kraig Swensrud

>> in our industry. They've laid off their entire team of human SDRs, and now they're looking back at the next phase of growth and rehiring. They're like, "Maybe I should just start with an AI SDR instead and see how that goes." Because, again, the promise of where this all goes in the future is increased pipe gen, which is direct value in terms of revenue to the company and cost savings that the company can deploy elsewhere in their go-to-market.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right. So that's top line and bottom line, which, of course, is music to my ears. This being said, as you think about the progression here of what could happen, right? So you replace SDRs with the AI worker. Do you lose that sort of salesmanship that you have in your organization? Or is it, on the other hand, a way to improve salesmanship? And really to your point, to the VIPs, that's the part where I feel that there may be, at some point, some recoil. And that's really... I'm not sure. We'll see what happens.

Kraig Swensrud

>> Well, let's talk about the job of an SDR versus an account executive-

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right....

Kraig Swensrud

>> because an account executive is really where the salesmanship comes through. And I don't think we're going to be losing the human touch in that area on the B2B side for quite some time. The job of a sales development rep is typically that front line of qualification. And what would you want as a buyer? So let's say as a buyer, you show up on my website because I've just piqued your curiosity-

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right....

Kraig Swensrud

>> with some advertisement, or you heard me at Dreamforce, or hear this interview and you show up on my website. Let's say you're really interested in taking the next action. Well, what would you rather do? Would you rather talk with a very smart, highly intelligent, well-educated, able to answer any question AI SDR Piper on my website right now, and then take the next step and book a meeting with a human account executive? Or would you rather fill out a form, go away, move on to your next thing, and have somebody trying to hunt you down in your inbox three days later? You were there. You were expressing interest. And so I think just the ability for these AI workers like Piper to facilitate that very quick handoff to remove the friction in the buying process, that's going to be more welcomed. And then that human touch with an account executive, that's really where the selling happens.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Yeah. I think you're so correct. I mean, the instant gratification you get by having the answer quickly, that's absolutely key. And in B2B, it takes I don't know how many interactions before somebody would even really fully engage in an actual sales process. You don't want to lose that touch when that happens because people consume digital content now. They learn a lot about your solution before they even connect with you.

Kraig Swensrud

>> Absolutely.

Christophe Bertrand

>> So if you miss that answer, so that key question that they have, then you've lost them.

Kraig Swensrud

>> You know where they're going to be? They're going to be on your competitor's website.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Absolutely. That's pretty much a guarantee. We've covered a lot of ground. So in terms of what you've observed, if you can share some numbers, by how much has pipeline augmented in some of your customer environments? I mean, are there some rules of thumb or is it really dependent on-

Kraig Swensrud

>> First of all, it's highly dependent on any company's volume and their ASPs, their selling price of their products.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Okay.

Kraig Swensrud

>> On average, when a company is coming from marketing automation system where they collect leads with forms on their website and they follow up with those leads with humans over-

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right....

Kraig Swensrud

>> email, on average, when they implement Qualified and Piper, their pipeline doubles and they save money. How much money do they save? It depends upon what they're doing with their human team and how much capital can they-

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right....

Kraig Swensrud

>> redeploy. Typically, what we find right now, companies are sticking their toe in the water. It is happening right now. I predicted earlier this year that every single CMO would invest in AI SDR this year because the value proposition is just too compelling. So what are they really doing by sticking their toe in the water? They're hiring AI workers like Piper. They're bringing them onto their team, alongside their team of human counterparts. And then when that next person gets promoted, you know what they're thinking? "Maybe I don't need to backfill them onto the team." You know what they were doing with their budget line items to hire more human SDRs? They're redeploying that money into some higher value activity, like a new ad campaign-

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right....

Kraig Swensrud

>> or sponsoring an event or doing something that is of demonstrable value. And then if somebody leaves the organization because they're not working out, they give Piper more responsibility. I think we're going to be at a place one year from now where people are going to be rethinking the entire notion of having a human SDR team. And the AI is going to be that good. It's going to be able to work the website. It's going to be able to work the inbox. It's going to be knowledgeable about every interaction. And it's going to be smarter, more capable, more intelligent, more scalable than any process we've had before it.

Christophe Bertrand

>> It makes a lot of sense. We'll see what happens. I still believe that, to your earlier point, salesmanship is going to be key. But you're right. I mean, doubling the pipeline. Who'd say no to that in many businesses, especially highly transactional businesses? We're talking immediate impact on revenue. And at the end of the day, that's really what matters.

Kraig Swensrud

>> Absolutely.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, thank you so much for your time. It's been a great conversation. I've noticed your sign. I think on 101. So I don't don't know if it was you or... But I think it was you, right?

Kraig Swensrud

>> That was us. You can hire Piper, the AI SDR, today-

Christophe Bertrand

>> Yes....

Kraig Swensrud

>> at Qualified.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Good. So see, I was paying attention. I did not even know we were going to talk. But thank you so much for your time. And to our viewers, thank you so much for joining us at theCUBE here. We're at Dreamforce 2024. My name is Christophe Bertrand. I'm a principal analyst with theCUBE Research. And we'll see you on the next one.