Dreamforce 2025 | Sebastian Jimenez, Rilla

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Sebastian Jimenez

Founder & CEO

Rilla

play_circle_outline Revolutionizing Sales: Sebastian, CEO of Rilla, Unveils AI Coaching and Innovative Tools for Enhanced Customer Interactions

play_circle_outline Vision of Rilla to bring AI insights to the offline commerce sector.

play_circle_outline The role of AI in facilitating better communication and customer service in sales.

play_circle_outline Rilla's method of utilizing data to improve sales techniques and customer interactions.

play_circle_outline Call for engineers and talent to join Rilla's mission and impact in AI development.

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Sebastian Jimenez, Rilla

Sebastian Jimenez

Founder & CEO Rilla

In this Dreamforce interview, Sebastian Jimenez, founder & chief executive officer of Rilla, joins theCUBE’s John Furrier and Gemma Allen to unpack how AI coaching is transforming in-person sales and service. Jimenez explains how Rilla captures real-world, face-to-face conversations via mobile devices and wearables, then transcribes, analyzes and feeds back insights to reps and managers – enabling “virtual ride-alongs” that replace traditional field shadowing. He shares fresh signals from Rilla’s large corpus of in-person sales interactions, including benchma... Read more

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What is the purpose and functionality of the AI coaching software mentioned? add

What is the founding vision of Rilla regarding the relationship between offline and online commerce? add

What do companies typically prioritize in terms of customer interaction and how does Rilla support their sales processes? add

What insights can be gained about the behaviors of top performers in sales conversations based on analysis of recorded interactions? add

What opportunities does Rilla offer for those interested in product, engineering, and design? add

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Sebastian Jimenez, Rilla

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>> Welcome back everyone. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here with Gemma Allen, my co-host. We're live in San Francisco, California for Dreamforce 2025. This is where all the action's happening as agents emerge in the scene than the AI infrastructure gets more powerful. You're going to see software paradigms change our lives, change how we work, change how we behave and talk to others and of course, user productivity. Sebastian's here, founder and CEO of Rilla, an innovative company out of New York, I'm excited to hear about, we had a great conversation before we came on camera. Sebastian, thank you for coming on.

Sebastian Jimenez

>> Thank you for having me, John, Gemma. Great to be with other New York folk here in San Francisco.

>> So explain what you guys do first before we get into this. You guys have a very unique company, your angle of attack on the market's awesome, explain what you do.

Sebastian Jimenez

>> Yeah, so we are the first ever leading AI coaching software for in-person sales and service. So in-person sales and service, think of people in plumbing, HVAC technicians, electricians, people who sell window, siding, flooring, doors, people who sell new homes to buyers, real estate agents, medical devices, pharmaceuticals. There's about 12 million outside sales and service people in America, they talk to customers in person face-to-face in their homes, their offices, their businesses, stores, and they use our app on the mobile phone, tablets, Apple Watches, and they record their conversations face-to-face like you and I are having right here. And we use AI to automatically transcribe, analyze, and give them feedback to help them improve their sales and help their managers do what we call virtual ride-alongs that are a hundred times faster, better, more productive than physical ride-alongs.

>> So you're talking about the road warriors? That's what we used to call them back in the day.

Sebastian Jimenez

>> Yes, yes.

>> And so they're out and they're pounding the pavement.

Sebastian Jimenez

>> That is correct. And the only way that their managers can actually see what's happening in the field is by going out and pounding the pavement with them and what we like to say at Rilla is that when it comes to outside sales, I mean in Silicon Valley this sounds disruptive, but most people who work in sales, they still work in person it's the majority of salespeople outside. And so what we like to say at Rilla is that if you think of sales as a sport, imagine we have a coach that's coaching their players in the locker room and they're not able to be on the field when the game is going on to see what's happening or review the game film. So we're bringing a layer of visibility to outside sales and service that was never there before.

>> It's like the quarterback who's got the coach in his ear, he's got the green dot on his helmet.

Sebastian Jimenez

>> Literally, exactly right.

>> That's what you're doing.

Sebastian Jimenez

>> And in fact, the product now works live. We just launched Rilla Live where you can get feedback in the moment and you're literally like a quarterback in the sidelines giving feedback.

>> That's awesome.

Gemma Allen

>> Well, Jensen said this week that the billionaires of tomorrow are going to be electricians and plumbers, did you see that?

>> No.

Sebastian Jimenez

>> That is correct.

Gemma Allen

>> He did, right?

Sebastian Jimenez

>> Yes.

Gemma Allen

>> So you're targeting the right audience.

Sebastian Jimenez

>> There was a Wall Street Journal article that came out saying that the new path for the American Dream is like these millionaire plumbers, and HVAC technicians, and electricians. There's a whole new set of private equity that's coming into this space, San Francisco has Alpine Investors who's one of the largest private equity platforms, they're a Rilla customer. There's Neighborly, who's one of our customers, we just announced a partnership, the largest home service franchise in the world. They have 30,000 technicians around the world and they are super devoted to customer excellence. So people are sleeping on this big part of the economy. When you talk about Jensen, you talk about Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, the real impact of AI is going to come when AI gets out of the computer where most tech people live, and it goes into the real world where most of the people are still working, and that's when it's going to have real impact.

>> If you look at all the projections from all the top companies building, you're right, physical AI they call it where the real world meets digital, that's the intersection holy grail moment.

Sebastian Jimenez

>> Yes. Exactly, so if I go back to my journey as starting as a founder, one of the first books I read was Zero to One by Peter Thiel, and in that book he has an amazing quote which is that, "The biggest innovations in the 21st century are going to come from people innovating in the world of atoms, not in the world of bits." And Elon's been doing that with SpaceX and Tesla and people working on driverless cars and all these things. What we believe is that the transition is specifically with commerce and sales, there's going to be a faster transition of bringing technology to offline than online replacing offline. So it's the idea between the AR versus the VR.

>> Just a riff on that a little bit, if you look at digital twins technology that is booming, they're using synthetic data now, Gemma, and we talk about this on theCUBE all the time, you got real data, in person data.

Sebastian Jimenez

>> Yes. Well, the founding vision of Rilla is that we've figured out essentially that if you look at Amazon and eBay and everything that happens, e-commerce, that's only 15% of commerce in America. 85% of commerce in America happens offline, people talking to each other in a store, in a showroom, in their home, in a business setting and that's 85% of commerce. But then you look at the amount of data that e-commerce companies can get on their customers to understand what they want. You go to Amazon, Amazon knows everything about you. Google knows everything about you before you even think it, but then you look at the rest of the economy, they're so far removed from their customers because it's so hard to get data that our founding vision was what if we capture these real-life conversations and we can index offline commerce just like Google once did for the web? And that's what we're trying to do.

>> That's a great -

Gemma Allen

>> I think what's really special though about those smaller businesses, these kind of local relationships, is that they often are quite parochial, right? They're very genuine, they're authentic-

Sebastian Jimenez

>> Yes.

Gemma Allen

>> How do you keep the authenticity with a product like this?

Sebastian Jimenez

>> You live in New York City, have you ever gone to a stand-up comedy show?

Gemma Allen

>> Lots.

Sebastian Jimenez

>> So the comedians, they sound super authentic, super genuine, they have connections with people in the crowd and it sounds almost like natural like they're improvising. When you watch a comedian-

>> They practice.

Sebastian Jimenez

>> But they practice over, and over, and over, and over again and it's kind of like an athlete, you watch Michael Jordan, you watch Kobe Bryant, you watch the moves that they're doing. It looks super natural, but that only comes after a certain amount of repetition, and repetition, and repetition. If you go to Starbucks, the CEO of Starbucks is investing heavily in training and coaching their people to provide excellent customer service. So you can keep both, is what I'm saying, you can keep the personality as well as the excellence in customer service.

>> You know what you're hitting on that we've been saying on theCUBE but you kind of put it in language, is that craft is coming back.

Sebastian Jimenez

>> Yes.

>> Craftsmanship and agents with the human curation, however they're built the domain expertise, these are words that are orbiting around the AI trend, craft, curation, creativity, that's a human thing. Oh, craftsmanship, craftsmanship it's like building whether they crafting software or art-

Sebastian Jimenez

>> Doing a sales pitch or communicating with a customer....

>> or being a comedian, that's a craft.

Sebastian Jimenez

>> Or an actor. An actor sounds like so good in a movie because they practice their script and so what we're trying to bring to, you call them small businesses, we're trying to bring the type of excellence and customer service and customer interactions that people who work online have always had for decades, that's what we're trying to do.

Gemma Allen

>> Tell us about the , like the selling side of this, like recommending well, here's some other services or opportunities you can position or tell us about how that works from a kind of broad technical scale perspective within the product.

Sebastian Jimenez

>> So how we actually give recommendations to sellers on how they can actually sell better?

Gemma Allen

>> Yeah, how much do you need to know about their businesses, I guess, and their particular sales sets?

Sebastian Jimenez

>> So every business that we work with is absolutely obsessed about, if you look at the industries that Rilla works in, we work with the top 20% of companies who absolutely care about their customer service and how they interact with customers and it's usually the top 20% of companies. Every single one of the companies that works with us, and we're talking about people like Renewal by Andersen, Pella Windows, we're talking about LG, Kohler, Neighborly, Home Depot, these are all customers of Rilla, they all have a sales process or a system that they're supposed to follow when they interact with customers. You're supposed to say hello and set an agenda, you're supposed to set up next steps if you're going to meet with the customer later. And so what Rilla does, number one is a customer inputs their system that they've had for years and they input it into Rilla, and then Rilla is able to analyze every single conversation against that system that they've had for years, but they had no idea if people were actually following it on the field, that's number one. Number two, the AI starts learning about what is it that the top 1% of top performers are doing differently beyond the system that they had at the company so that it can start recommending to other people what to do better. To give you an idea, I just gave a talk today at Dreamforce about how we found out that the top performers, they talk 45% to 65% of the time versus the customer. They ask five times more open-ended questions per hour, 25 open-ended questions versus five open-ended questions like, how does the price affect the way you think about this product? What makes you think that the price too high? These are open-ended questions. We found out that there's an ideal talk speed for a seller because by the way, we have the largest data set of in-person sales conversations ever assembled, we have millions of these conversations, and so we're able to do all these interesting analyses on how to talk and what to say. One of the things that we found out recently is that the top-performing salespeople, they talk at about 184 words per minute so it's a little bit faster than the average human talk speed of about 158 words per minute. And so imagine somebody who talks at 1.2X speed if you're listening to a podcast. These are all things that the AI can learn beyond what the human mind can see. And then it starts recommending it to people and be like, "Hey, you're talking a little bit too slow. You're talking too fast." I talk like 225 words per minute, so I'm always getting feedback around-

>> You're very gets right away.

Gemma Allen

>> So it's really a performance tool, it's performance and sales, right? It's a mix of both?

Sebastian Jimenez

>> So yes, one of the first ideas for Rilla, I used to do stand-up comedy in New York City. I went to NYU, I used to do stand-up comedy. My first idea was every single comedian, they record their sets and you record your sets so that you can see what you could have done better. And the first idea was like, well, what if I recorded my set and had some analytics on it that would give me feedback faster so I could understand what I could do better?

Gemma Allen

>> Tell me, I got to ask you, what about the ethical concerns around this governance, data privacy, all of that stuff? How is that managed within the stack?

Sebastian Jimenez

>> So the way that we think about it's in three verticals. Number one is legal, right? That's the easiest one because you just have to comply with the laws everywhere you go. And then we think about it from the employee side, from the seller's side or the service person side, and then the customer side that's the third one. The legal, it depends on where you are in the world, but we comply with GDPR in Europe, we have some European customers in the UK and Ireland-

Gemma Allen

>> I'd love to hear those Irish conversations.

Sebastian Jimenez

>> Oh, yeah, it picks it up really well.

>> Is streaking involved? Get it.

Gemma Allen

>> Yeah, so much of it.

>> More sales are closed with Guinness than anything else.

Sebastian Jimenez

>> So you look at the legality, you just have to make sure you're complying with the privacy laws. There's a bunch of different ways that we do that for our customers we work with large enterprises, so you can redact any PII from the conversation. If you say your name, your email, your phone number, your political affiliation, religion, you can redact all that. You can make the customer sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks make them sound like a different voice so that you're not capturing their voice so that it's anonymized, you can do all sorts of things there. And then there's all sorts of ways that you can let the customer know in advance that you're going to be recording the meeting, you put automated emails and reminders saying, "Hey, just so you know, I'm on my way to our appointment I'm going to be recording our meeting for quality and training purposes." From the employee side, what we saw is that employees really become addicted to our tool. At Rilla we like to say that we build consumer games for businesses, and so we build products that are so addictive to salespeople it becomes kind of like a, the comparison that we use is there's this app Hudl that sports athletes use when they're in high school, college to review their game film. It's kind of like Hudl for them to be like, oh, I want to watch what I did. What could I have done better?

>> Or highlight reel.

Sebastian Jimenez

>> Literally there's a highlight reel feature in Rilla that you could just swipe around TikTok and it shows you your highlights and those are the teammates and so it becomes quite addictive. And for the customer side, it depends on the industry, but for instance, we have a lot of customers that sell in people's homes, a plumber will go to your house and they'll... I mean, we live in New York City, so we don't have that we live in an apartments. But if you live in a home, they'll go into somebody's they'll be recording. One of the things we found out is when you're in a home interaction or a private setting and somebody's recording the conversation, if there's a strange person like a seller or a service person, you're actually more comfortable with the fact that they're recording the conversation in your home or your private center because you're like, oh, this is not just some person that's coming into my house, this is a company that's recording everything they want to make sure that everything goes well and then it serves this protection for both the customer and the seller. It's kind of like a similar effect to the body cams with police officers-

Gemma Allen

>> I like that....

Sebastian Jimenez

>> where everybody feels a little bit more comfortable with the interaction.

Gemma Allen

>> So we're here at Dreamforce, tell us about the relationship with Salesforce and your impressions of the last two days. What are you excited about? What do you have curiosity about?

Sebastian Jimenez

>> Yeah, so this is our first Dreamforce ever. We've been growing, like I said, in industries that are outside of tech. Our marketing team, we like to say that we're trying to bring the fire of AI in the internet to the 85% of the industry that works offline. And so we've never been to Dreamforce because we've been out there in the world-

>> Out in Francis.

Sebastian Jimenez

>> We're not trying to talk to tech people, right? But what started happening is we started going higher enterprise and our customers started becoming Home Depot and Kohler and all these type of brands and so Dreamforce, we just started getting so many Salesforce customers naturally and so it just made sense that this was the year that we had to come here. This is our third year of growth, we've become one of the fastest growing startups of all time before getting to Dreamforce. In terms of growth rates we're growing faster than Salesforce was growing back when we were at our stage. We're faster than Figma, faster than most of the iconic companies, we're one of the fastest growing AI companies today. And Dreamforce made sense to us now because again, we're going after the large enterprise customers. And what's been so fun about this event, we do our own user conference where we get 2,000 people. Just coming here this is Disney World for business, man, this is insane. My team was like, we need to go in with a bang. I don't know if you guys saw, but we brought Barry Bonds, Jerry Rice, the legends of San Francisco, the best football player of all time, but best baseball player, we had a Q&A with them. We brought B.O.B, we've just gone crazy at Salesforce, and it's just been such an amazing time.

>> How big is the company, just give us some stats, employee count, funding, give us some stats on the numbers.

Sebastian Jimenez

>> Yeah, so we are about a hundred employees now. We recently did our Series B round with Google Ventures, Bessemer did our Series A. We really never announced it, we don't really care about announcing rounds our customers don't really care about... They're like, who's Bessemer? I don't know who Bessemer is. You didn't know Bessemer is one of the best funds? And so yes, we've raced a Series A, a Series B. And we're like I said, one of the fastest growing startups of today, certainly for Series B we're like a-

>> What about healthcare and these other verticals? Because you see life science is booming, you mentioned pharmaceuticals, medical sales-

Sebastian Jimenez

>> Medical devices, pharmaceuticals, these are all interactions that you can actually improve dramatically. And those interactions actually matter so much more than a simple like, Hey, am I going to get the deal or not? Or am I going to make that customer happy? In medical device sales, it's really important for the people that are selling those devices to doctors to understand what they're selling. You talk to medical device companies and they'll tell you If my reps get something wrong, we are dealing with people's lives here. So if I say something wrong to the doctor-

>> It's critical....

Sebastian Jimenez

>> something as simple as a shoe of how to put a shoe cover, I sell a shoe cover for the doctors and if I don't explain to that doctor how to put that shoe cover on, they might not put the shoe cover on they might slip and they might mess something up in surgery. And so those conversations are super high stakes and all the more reason why you want to make sure that you're keeping a certain standard of excellence and everything-

>> The quality goes up, sales go up, people feel good about it, and you get a highlight reel.

Sebastian Jimenez

>> Yes. Oh my God, once you give, what we tell companies, they ask us what's the main reason I want to buy Rilla? In our demos and we say, okay, conversion rates increases. The number one reason we tell them is, this is going to be the biggest birthday present you're going to give to your salespeople. They're absolutely going to love you, your sales manager's going to love you. Again, we say sales is a sport, we treat salespeople like athletes it becomes such a fun thing. And then what we saw from the customer side, also, when the seller's using Rilla, we're going to be running an ad at some point next year, which is going to be like the Rilla sales rep and the non-Rilla sales rep and the Rilla sales rep is just like your best friend, they're super friendly and they're awesome to hang out with. And the non-Rilla sales rep was like, oh my God, I can't stop.

>> Yeah, Sebastian, in the old days, the ride along was dreaded because my manager, what is he going to say? What am I going to do? Am I going to screw up? People get nervous. Now they embrace it like the comedian examples-

Sebastian Jimenez

>> Oh my God.

>> Explain that phenomenon culturally.

Sebastian Jimenez

>> Yeah, so like you said, if you go to our website for the longest time it says, "The end of ride-alongs." We are the end of ride-alongs because we are ushering a new era of virtual ride-alongs that are faster, better, more productive for everybody, so much more fun. What you talk about there, this effect of the physical ride-along, what you get in a physical ride-along when you're riding with your reps is you're not really seeing the reality of the situation. It's called Hawthorne's effect, when people know that they're being recorded or reviewed, you kind of feel nervous-

>> You turtle up....

Sebastian Jimenez

>> and so you're either seeing that salesperson in their best behavior or you're seeing them uncomfortable. What happens with Rilla, the same thing happens when you start with Rilla, you feel a little bit uncomfortable but then after a while the Hawthorne effect wears off, it's kind like exposure therapy. So you record five times, you forget about it, and then you're really getting to capture the reality of how you're really selling and how you're really talking. Salespeople get surprised all the time like myself, I'm like, I didn't know I was talking 225 words a minute. I had an idea, but-

>> I could have estimated that now that I know what the benchmark is.

Gemma Allen

>> I have to ask you because you said you're a stand-up comic, right?

Sebastian Jimenez

>> Yes.

Gemma Allen

>> In these there are millions of transcripts that you guys review and listen to, what are the key elements for effective selling? Is it comedy, is it humor? Is it connection? What's really critical?

Sebastian Jimenez

>> We just did a study on this new metric that we figured out, we didn't know how to name it because it's like this new metric that we didn't know how to call. We called it emotional variability response rate, which is a very ugly tech... One of our engineers named it because it's very techy. And what it describes is the ability that the top 1% of top performers have of mimicking the emotions of their customer. So in sales, we always talk about mirroring, like mirroring the language, mirroring the way you sit or something like that. But then it's about mimicking the emotions, it's like think about a therapist when you're very sad with a therapist, the therapist mirrors your emotions back to you so that you feel very comfortable. If you're in pain, the therapist is not going to be like laughing-

>> You don't have a lunch?

Sebastian Jimenez

>> They're going to change their tone to mimic your emotions and so we actually can measure this with AI, because AI is so smart nowadays, you can literally measure this. And so what we measured was that the emotional variability response of the top sellers is like three times higher than those of average performers. So they're able to do this three times as better as other people.

>> If we had the Rilla software for this interview, I think we'd score very well.

Sebastian Jimenez

>> I mean, we've kept the emotion at one top beat, so we haven't changed them up.

>> Sebastian, great to meet you and congratulations on your success. Love the idea again, right on the money, real world. We talk this all the time, physical AI, first party value with technology, that's not like an online click link, follow up landing page nonsense, it's really personal and relevant and super cool.

Sebastian Jimenez

>> Yeah, it's really fun that we get to work with some of the most awesome businesses. We have one of Warren Buffett's companies is a Rilla customer, some of the most awesome businesses that people typically don't talk about so it's awesome to meet these entrepreneurs every day.

>> Put the plug in for what you're working on, you got the camera here, you're going to hire? Are you looking for things? What are you working on?

Sebastian Jimenez

>> So yeah, so if you are interested in learning more about Rilla as a customer, go to Rilla.com. If you're interested in any of our jobs in product, and engineering, and design, we have one of the best engineers, one of the best designers at Rilla. Like I said, we love to build consumer games for businesses and if you're an engineer and you're interested in real world AI that's actually driving impact, you're going to get to work with some of the most interesting data sets. The data that Rilla has access to is net new, it did not exist until we went out there and did this. And it's kind of like, what I tell engineers is that you are getting to build the first digital map of offline commerce, so go and check us out.

>> And a great team, you got non-profits, you got all kinds of other markets to go into. Tons of work, a lot of impact.

Sebastian Jimenez

>> Twelve million outside sales and service people in America, a hundred million around the world, that's about a 50 billion to a hundred billion dollar industry for Rilla, and we're very, very, very, very at the beginning of the journey.

>> Sebastian, thank you for coming on.

Sebastian Jimenez

>> Thank you guys.

>> Gemma, as always, great. We're doing our part to speak as fast as possible here on theCUBE, keeping up here at Dreamforce. I'm John Furrier with Gemma Allen, thanks for watching we'll be right back.