World of Workato 2025 | Al Linke, SentinelOne

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Al Linke

AVP of Enterprise Applications & Business Engagement

SentinelOne

play_circle_outline Exploring Workado's Impact on AI Solutions: Insights from Savannah Peterson and Rob Strechay at Las Vegas Introduction Event

play_circle_outline Al from SentinelOne joins to discuss their use case around sales quoting efficiency.

play_circle_outline Transforming CPQ with CPQ Genie: Overcoming Skepticism and Embracing Collaborative Development through Workado and Gen AI

play_circle_outline Exploring Future Genies: IT Career Coaching and Staff Reception of Innovative Performance Review Processes at SentinelOne

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Al Linke, SentinelOne

Al Linke

AVP of Enterprise Applications & Business Engagement SentinelOne

In this conversation from World of Workato (Las Vegas), Al Linke, VP at SentinelOne, joins theCUBE’s Rob Strechay and Savannah Peterson to discuss how the cybersecurity leader is transforming sales operations with agentic automation. Linke shares how SentinelOne partnered with Workato to build the CPQ Genie in just four months, aiming to cut quoting time in half and improve sales efficiency.

The discussion dives into the realities of scaling gen AI across enterprise workflows, from tackling complex Salesforce customizations to winning stakeholder buy... Read more

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What event is taking place in Las Vegas, and who is participating in it? add

What factors influenced the decision to partner with Workado for developing the CPQ Genie, and what was the process involved in creating it? add

What was the timeline and process for developing the CPQ Genie, and how was Workado chosen as the partner for this project? add

What is the reception of the HR team's use of new technology, specifically the Career Coaching Genie, during performance reviews? add

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Al Linke, SentinelOne

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Savannah Peterson

>> Good afternoon, Workado fans, and welcome back to stunning Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here midway through day one of our two days of live coverage of World of Workado. My name's Savannah Peterson here, bringing you all the great stories from the show floor with Rob Strechay. Rob, we've had a really great start to the day.

Rob Strechay

>> We have. Very strong start. As we talked about, it's hot outside, but it's hotter in here talking about AI agents and really genies in particular, but getting to understand what the customers are bringing for their needs and how Workado is really solving for that.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, and the executives and the team at Workado were telling us before we started here that the whole week was going to be about showing and not telling, and that's why we're so excited to have Al from SentinelOne joining us for this segment. Thank you, Al. We appreciate you being here.

Al Linke

>> Thanks for having me.

Savannah Peterson

>> This is exciting. So, I'm sure the audience is familiar, but even if they're not, SentinelOne, premier cybersecurity company. Been around for a while. Impressive market cap. You've been there for four years. Tell us a little bit about what brought you here to World of Workado in Vegas.

Al Linke

>> Yeah. No, just excited to be working with Workado. We've got a great use case around sales quoting and making our sales more productive.

Savannah Peterson

>> So, one of the things that I think is so cool about Workado is they really do work in lockstep with their partners and their community members, like you and your team. I know that you had an instrumental impact in the CPQ Genie, the Configure, Price and Quote Genie that you worked on with them. How long were you working on that? What was the process like? And how did you select Workado as the right partner to help you build out that tool?

Al Linke

>> Yeah. No, so we had this idea about four months ago.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh, my gosh, not that long ago.

Al Linke

>> Yeah, it's pretty recent.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's amazing.

Al Linke

>> So, we've got a lot of challenges with our quoting process. If any anyone's done CPQ before, it's a slog, I'm not going to lie.

Rob Strechay

>> Yes.

Al Linke

>> And we had this idea, "Hey, why can't gen AI help with CPQ quoting?" And I actually got a lot of pushback initially from certain... I won't name names, but certain groups in the company are like, "Hey, it's a grand vision, but it can't be done. We don't think you can do it. Go focus on some other stuff." So, me wanting a challenge, I said, "Hey, I think we can." Called up some of my buddies at Workado because we'd been a Workado shop for about a year, but we hadn't done any agentic stuff and they just jumped in with us.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's so cool. So, now that this is out in the wild, are those people who were maybe a little skeptical, very impressed with what you were able to do?

Al Linke

>> They are. Now, it's still early days, so we just launched out a pilot. We do have people using it. It is early, but I think the skeptics are like, "Whoa. Wow, actually that can be done." So, yeah.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I think, again, because you're looking at all of the enterprise applications that SentinelOne has and you're really focused across that. And I think as one of those customers, you're sitting there trying to figure out what is not only the business impact, but the business results of doing these core type of genies that they're putting out there. What did you see as your KPIs for calling this successful?

Al Linke

>> Yeah. No, we've got a very simple goal, cut the time to quote in half. That's our goal, right?

Savannah Peterson

>> Straightforward. And not casual either, that's pretty significant.

Al Linke

>> Yeah, cut it in half. And we've got some other things going on to help with that as well, but Sales Genie is a big part of that.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. So, were there any challenges or anything that you found to be a lot easier than you were expecting when you went through this process?

Al Linke

>> So, again, if you've done CPQ before, everyone's got a very customized Salesforce system, so you can't just plug it in, unfortunately. So, we've had to deal with unwinding a lot of crazy things that we've done in our Salesforce. That's probably the biggest challenge. Technology's been pretty straightforward, I would say.

Rob Strechay

>> So, as you look at the success of CPQ and knowing its early days still, are there other organizations have seen that or other things that you said, "Hey, now we can go and apply this X"? Do you see applicability for the genies beyond this one?

Al Linke

>> Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So, our HR team really got on board, our people team. So, we did a Career Coaching Genie-

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh, cool....

Al Linke

>> which is actually using this cycle during our spotlight performance reviews.

Rob Strechay

>> Oh, wow.

Al Linke

>> Yeah, that's definitely starting to pick up as well.

Savannah Peterson

>> What's the reception like been within your team? Anytime you're adopting new tech, it can always be a little crunchy, but beyond that, there is an added layer I think, of fear when it comes to agentic adoption and what that might mean. Performance review's an emotional process. How's the team responded?

Al Linke

>> I think not as much push back as you would think. I think SentinelOne, in general, is a very AI-forward company. We were doing AI before it was popular, so I think everyone gets it. It's not so bad, actually.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's good. That's good. And what do you think are some of the main benefits you're going to get from leveraging this across the business and starting from the core and making its way out?

Al Linke

>> I think just quick wins. Like I said, we're starting with sales efficiency, starting to see some results there. Getting really good feedback from our stakeholders, and then we build on that.

Rob Strechay

>> Are your stakeholders broader than just SentinelOne? Because I would assume you have other partners out there selling your software and your services.

Al Linke

>> Yep.

Rob Strechay

>> How did you take that into account as you went through-

Al Linke

>> Yeah, so phase two. We got to get our act together internally first, but absolutely, once we nail that internally, we want to extend that to partners.

Rob Strechay

>> And when you talk about CPQ and cutting it in half, and that's a massive order of magnitude. I think people, when they're waiting for a quote, if you're a customer of SentinelOne, you want that turnaround to be... Was that something that you just knew or you'd partnered with the business on and knowing that, "Hey, we've implemented CPQ in our own business and we know what the slog it is getting the data right and all of the different things and unwinding." Was that you partnering with the business and saying, "Hey, if you could reduce this by 25%, 50%, how much more productive would you be?" Is that part of what the thinking went into?

Al Linke

>> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that was a discussion we had with our executives and our stakeholders with RevOps, and it's just the reality is there's a lot of pain around that process today. And so, that was the key big metric we wanted to focus in on.

Savannah Peterson

>> And everybody always wants to do it faster.

Al Linke

>> Of course. Of course.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. And what a great example. Do you think that the success of the CPQ Genie and what you're doing with the performance and HR side of things right now will allow you to deploy and implement other genies across the organization?

Al Linke

>> Absolutely, yeah. Got to get some quick wins. We're also doing an IT Genie, so that's another one that we have in-flight as well.

Rob Strechay

>> Great. When you look at that, are you taking it process by process and well-defined processes that you understand?

Al Linke

>> Yep.

Rob Strechay

>> Or how do you go into, I would say, building your roadmap of what genies you're going to go into?

Al Linke

>> Yeah, so it's that. It's where we have business buy-in. We've got engagement from our stakeholders, that's a big part of it. Then, ultimately, the business outcome and what's the actual ROI?

Rob Strechay

>> So, just to double-click on that, people who are in your shoes at other companies and you were going to go down and say, "Hey, here's how I recommend you approach this because this is how you can get that buy-in. This is how you work, collect..." What would be those learnings that you have that you would want to impart on them?

Al Linke

>> Yeah, I think go back to basics. I think there's this feeling that, okay, just throw some AI out there and everything will magically-

Savannah Peterson

>> Put a little AI on it.

Al Linke

>> Yeah, be magic and perfect. And we all know, as IT professionals, that's just not reality. I even, from some of our stakeholders, got that. Like, "Hey, just throw it out there and be done with it.' So, that's not going to work, we all know that. So, just like any IT project, spend time with the stakeholders, get their feedback. You will definitely learn from talking to the end customer use cases that you didn't think of. In our case, we started with sales quoting where we found out like, they're like, "Oh, wow, I can update an opportunity next steps from my phone." We didn't even think of that use case, but that's actually turned out to be just as helpful as the actual quoting. Or I was just talking to another CIO and I looked up how much we've engaged with him in all of our outreach right from my phone.

Rob Strechay

>> Wow.

Al Linke

>> And I actually didn't think of that use case, I just did it on the fly. It actually worked, by the way. But getting that feedback is huge.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, and it's real time, where you are. We're talking about bringing genie as an agentic to the core here, but you're describing a wonderful byproduct of that at the edge, which is being able to have that information at your fingertips no matter where you are, milling around the show floor. It's a pretty compelling use case. I mean, we've all logged into Salesforce CRM for a long time and not exactly the most intuitive cell phone-

Rob Strechay

>> But I think to your point as well, it's getting the buy-in... If you can make a salesperson's job easier and make them more productive, that had to factor in, because not only the time to quote, but like you said, where you're at and meeting them where they're at, so that they can turn it around, which then helps your customers out as well. And that math probably not as straightforward, but when you look at it, do you see that as people go down this path, like you have, that it's, like you said, "Hey, we have a version two"? And are you chunking up these next set where you're saying, "Here's where we're going to start and we're going to put this path together and crawl, walk, run with these genies on those processes," and you're working with those stakeholders?

Al Linke

>> Yeah. No, absolutely. I think based on the feedback, we're getting so much feedback about all these additional things people want to see, like, "Hey, can Sales Genie give me whether my customer is in compliance or not?" Which today, is a very manual process. So, all those are part of our roadmap and in the hopper.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's exciting. I can imagine there's a lot of momentum building. Lots of other companies and people in general as they embark on this genie or agentic journey struggle with where to start. It sounds like you, due to necessity and clarity of focus, you knew where to start with a CPQ challenge immediately. And you've mentioned quick wins, you've mentioned customer feedback, community feedback. What else would you advise companies who are in this earlier adoption stage?

Al Linke

>> Yeah, I mean, definitely start... It's a tricky one, right? Because some people say, "Start small." We didn't actually start small because CPQ is not an easy use case-

Savannah Peterson

>> And it's a bit of a bear of a challenge. Yeah.

Al Linke

>> Exactly, right? So, I didn't really take that advice, but we started where the most pain was, right? And where we had the most buy-in and the most attention from our e-staff. That's what we did.

Savannah Peterson

>> So, you would advise that? I love that because we heard on the keynote stage today, the encouragement to aim high because genies will achieve as high as you can dream, essentially, as long as you're willing to build out that process. So, maybe it doesn't have to be start small. I like that a lot.

Rob Strechay

>> And I think you mentioned it, but you were able to start because of they announced their 28 different genies that were the core genies. Did you see that it was easy because they had a genie that was somewhere you could already... I'm hard baked to use a cake analogy here, but one of the layers was already, and you were already using the orchestration layer. So, this was, "Hey, I can extend this because I can get at the data, I can get at these different integrations." Was that part of the metrics that went into it?

Al Linke

>> Absolutely, right? So, I would say it got us 60% there.

Rob Strechay

>> Wow.

Al Linke

>> And the 40% was all the tricky stuff on our side and all the complexities that we've added over time, quite frankly. But what was already there out of the box, 60% that looking up a contact use case, which actually hadn't even tested until two hours ago that worked, was already there.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's pretty impressive. Working in cybersecurity, data protection and trust has got to be mission-critical to everything that you do.

Al Linke

>> Oh, absolutely.

Savannah Peterson

>> I know you'd been a Workado shop for about a year, but what helped empower that confidence to take this step? Sales data can be a little-

Al Linke

>> Yeah. No, we've got a very rigorous InfoSec process. We don't just let in any vendor. We actually had some other vendors in this space before that weren't enterprise-grade which we replaced with Workado. So, we did all of our homework and vetting, and we're happy.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. No, that's great to hear that you're happy.

Rob Strechay

>> And I think just building off of that, when you start to look at this, and they talked about, even Carter was talking about it from Workado on Workado perspective off the main stage there was, "Hey, we're setting up these guidelines and guardrails, so that others can go and build." As you gain more experience with this and with the genies, are you looking to help enable other parts of the organization to build their own genies as well?

Al Linke

>> Yeah. So, in parallel, we are doing a citizen developer program.

Savannah Peterson

>> Great.

Al Linke

>> So, we've got some folks, for example, from our SCE organization using Workado now. That is definitely a big part of our strategy because we can't do it all. We're an IT group, but there's a lot of demand out there.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, and to your point, you don't know how people are going to use them or the use case, like the cell phone you mentioned earlier, until it's out in the wild, until you see that community demand. That's the beauty of diversity of thought. So, I think that's really critical. Al, I'm curious, you've made a lot of progress, clearly, in the last four months working on this. When we are at World of Workado in 2026 back here in Las Vegas, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't yet say today?

Al Linke

>> So, we want to be able to say that we actually did cut quoting time in half, we achieved that metric, and then we took on all these other use cases. Like we did something in customer success. I was pretty excited about the IT License Genie, which is the pain point today. Would love to do that as well. Share that we reduced our spend by $2 million.

Rob Strechay

>> I love the whole, you do this and you get the Amex gift card, the carrot that incented people as a little token to do the right thing as part of that. Because that must be one of the things that you saw in that same demo where it was, "Hey, I'm involving the end user who's actually going in there and they know their work better than I do, and they're the ones actually going and doing that licensing removal process."

Al Linke

>> Yeah. No, that one resonated with me because kind of part of my job is I'm manually policing all of that, which I don't have time to do, so I'm not doing a great job at it, so I would love to have that automated.

Savannah Peterson

>> Okay. So, building on that final question for you, putting on your personal hat instead of your SentinelOne professional hat. If you could wave a magic wand and have a genie that did something for you to make your life easier, what would that be?

Al Linke

>> Keep my wife happy.

Savannah Peterson

>> That is-

Rob Strechay

>> That's a smart man.

Al Linke

>> Happy wife, happy life.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah.

Al Linke

>> That's what I would wish for in answer your question.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love that. What's your wife's name?

Al Linke

>> Erin.

Savannah Peterson

>> Erin. Let's say hi to Erin. Hello, Erin.

Al Linke

>> Hi, honey.

Savannah Peterson

>> Hopefully Al's making you happy today. If nothing else, he's making us happy here on this stage. Al, this has been absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time to hang out with us.

Al Linke

>> Thank you so much for having me.

Rob Strechay

>> Thanks.

Savannah Peterson

>> And Rob, always a pleasure. Would you give Kristen a genie to make her happy?

Rob Strechay

>> Maybe. No, of course I would.

Savannah Peterson

>> I tried, Kristen. I tried. And while we're at it, I would love to hear what personal genie you would make for yourself in the comments on these videos that we're pumping out here. World of Workado, midway through day one of our two days of live coverage in Las Vegas, Nevada. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.