2X + Knownwell: Building the Leading Human-Agentic GTM Services Company

Speaker A: Hey everyone. It has been a minute since we have dropped an episode on the AI Know how feed. The last time we were here, we were sharing that we were going into the lab for something special and frankly, we cooked up something better than we dreamed at that point. But more on that in a moment. Let's get this kicked off. Hi, I'm Courtney Baker and this is AI Know how by KnownWell, helping you reimagine your business in the AI era. And I have with me you know David DeWolf, CEO of Known well and Dom, um, Colizonte, CEO and founder of 2X. Hey guys.

Speaker B: Hey.

Speaker C: Excited to be here in an in person version of the podcast?

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: Live from Malvern, Pennsylvania from 2X headquarters.

Speaker A: Well, and I've already hinted on something big, if you've started to put some puzzle pieces together, um, based on where we're at and who we're with, we have some big news. As of this week, KnownWell is part of 2X and together we're building the first go to market human agentic services company. That is a big phrase right there. Can we start actually, Right there actually. I think probably everybody watching or listening is what, what did she just say? So can you two give a little context on what we mean by that?

Speaker C: Yeah, I'll start.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: I think, um, the vision here is there's such an evolution in services, in AI and SaaS and all these things coming together. And it's being talked about human agentic services or agentic operating system or AI native services or pick your word for it, but it's really a combination of a company that does the work for you, someone that gets the job done. Whether it's a person and a human, whether it's an AI or an agent, whether it's a SaaS product and some integrated technology. Pulling all those pieces together is really what the market needs. And in go to market where we have these, you know, fragmented tech stacks and all this work to do, having a business that can actually do all of those things is the sort of killer app of our generation. And so that's what we're trying to build here.

Speaker B: Yeah, we've seen this shift in the economy where more and more, um, buyers are interested in outcomes, they're interested in just get the work done for me. Right. And historically we've divided the work into software and we've put it into services and we've divided those two categories up. But we have seen this shift in the market more and more where software companies are becoming services companies. They're craving the differentiation they're craving the intimacy with the client. They're craving the ability to actually affect change, not just be some system that runs in the background. And the opposite can be said for services. Right. We've seen more and more how just purely human professional services have craved something that gives them leverage, that gives them the ability to execute with more speed and precision and those types of things. And together, as DOM and I have talked about this, we've said we can see it in the market. Right. The market is starting to talk about software as services and these different permutations. What's required in this new world is the integration of the human. What can humans only do? What are they uniquely qualified to do? The wisdom, the judgment on the creativity, ingenuity with the software, that agentic piece that gives us more scale and leverage. And coming at it from different ends of that go to market world. We envision this commercial go to market world coming together and creating a business that takes advantage of both and the unique differentiation that both can bring to bear. But they have to be integrated. And I think that's where the market is really struggling is to figure out how they come together. And that's what our mission now is to do.

Speaker C: Yeah, and what I've seen in that is, is you almost see versions of this coming on in the market today where it's sort of a SaaS firm kind of masquerading as a service firm, where now they could do implementations or now they can some integration or they can do a little bit of pro serve or managed service around it, but it's really like this like redheaded stepchild of the business that they do because they have to. Or you see some service businesses that have like an app or a thing, usually some proprietary like analytics thing that they want to bring with their model. You haven't seen a business that's equal parts equally services and software AI together. And that fusion where so much so you can't even tell which it was. That's the category that the world needs. Customer doesn't care if it's technology or product, product or people, they care. Did it get the job done? Was it efficient? Was it scalable? Can I dial it up and down as I need to? And a business that can respond with that kind of agility is really the next era of company and one that we're going to build.

Speaker A: You mentioned go to market fragmentation. I'm curious, can you take that idea and apply it for go to market fragmentation? What does that mean for people that are CMOs that are head of revenue. What does that, how does that change what the challenge that we face today?

Speaker C: Yeah, well, first of all, it's when we say go to market, we mean marketing, sales and customer success altogether. And I don't think as a former cmo, myself and the CEO of a go to market company for the last almost ten years now, um, I don't think you can solve a revenue growth problem without all three of those components. And while we may have over indexed on marketing in the past and generating campaigns, or over indexed on sales and pipeline creation and closing or retention on the other side, you really have to integrate those three motions into the fabric of one thing. That's one, two, um, every single organization you go into has a completely unique fingerprint of technology across all of those areas. I've never seen two companies that have the same CRM and map and automation systems and supporting their website and their digital experience and their account based emotions and their data and their analytics are completely unique in their fingerprints. And so you have to be able to tie into hundreds of different things in order to properly orchestrate data workflow process and get really that unified customer journey across that. And frankly it's hard to do that with either humans or platform integration alone. You need the combo of both of those that's now possible with AI and agents and other type of workflows that you can automate to move data, to move things across the silos and to get things done in a faster way. And so I think exploring that sort of broader, how do we generate revenue, how do we produce growth, how do we achieve scale in our customer acquisition? How do we also like really treat retention as a motion as important as new customer acquisition? Right. We've seen this data that go into your year over year. 90% of your revenue target for the year is made up by retaining the customers from last year. And yet we only spend like 10% of our time on that more money. We spend 90% on the new customer and the new logo and the new expansion. How do you kind of bring those together in one motion and say what's the best thing to grow the company, what's the best experience and how do we pull those pieces together? And a lot of companies I think are struggling to keep up with all of those things. How do you stay up to date on the new thing that Adobe launched and this new thing that's getting plugged into this platform and this new AI workflow builder that someone put together? It's classic use case for services. You know, the people that are in the business of doing that every day. And so I think there's a chance to create sort of a unified experience across all those motions.

Speaker B: I want to pull out the theme that I heard across everything you just said, which is integrated. Right. The number of times that you said the integration, you called it the integrated customer journey. He talked about integrating marketing, sales and customer success over and over again. I think that's key because it's not only true in go to market, but it's also true in terms of the agentic trends that we're seeing. Right. More and more what we see is the integration of these specialized disciplines coming together in very new ways to disrupt the way the entire workflow has taken place. And I think most of our listeners will probably see that mostly in the technology space. Right. We've seen the walls come down between what is a, uh, quality assurance engineer and what is a front end engineer and a backend engineer and a data scientist and a product manager. And now we have these product builders that leverage hundreds of agents to build software faster than we ever could before. And a big part of that is taking the, the handoffs and the operational burden out of the process. Right. And leveraging the technology. I think that one of the next complex workflows in a business, if you will, one of the complex value chains in a business is the go to market motion. And historically we've had. How many times have you heard, you know, marketers and sales talk about the sales versus marketing dilemma? Right. There's always this tug of war. Well, the same could be true pre sales and post sales. Right. Overarching. What we need to get to is a holistic way of looking at how do we drive the commercial go to market motion of our business. And I think looking at it in an integrated way against the integrated customer journey is going to unlock a lot and allow us to figure out where do humans play in that. In a very unique, special way in this agentic world. But also where can the agents come in and give us a lot of leverage?

Speaker C: Yeah, it's bringing that forward deployed engineer concept into go to market, which I think is so important because that means you still need the forward deployed engineer.

Speaker B: Totally.

Speaker C: And now they're superhuman with the agents and portfolio of tech around them. But that's really the new engine I think it's going to get created.

Speaker A: Well, Dom, you said it earlier today, what people really are buying, whether IT's services or SaaS, is the outcome. And you know, where we are today, how we get to that outcome may Change. But that's what people actually care about is the outcome. They buy these tools, they get frustrated because they can't do the change management. People aren't actually using this. You know, they do all these things. And in the past you were kind of stuck in these silos. Now the way we get to that outcome for customers changes dramatically in this next era of human agentic services companies. It's really fascinating to think about and exciting. I think for everybody listening this, you have something that you've never had before to deploy in your businesses. Okay, next question for you two. You've both emphasized that the future of go to market is both human and AI. Can you just unwrap that a little bit for us? What do you mean by that?

Speaker B: Yeah, well, I think what's important, I always start this question with the anthropology, right? We have to understand the human being and unwrap that. And the question that I have for people is what is it that humans can uniquely do? Right? And for example, I love to lay out there is knowledge. And there's no doubt that there's a corpus of knowledge that artificial intelligence has that it can produce and replicate and has probably better memory and better ability to collect that knowledge than we do as human beings. But what AI can't do is understand the situational awareness around that and to leverage that in a wise and prudent fashion in order to make judgment calls.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: It's a great example to me of where AI has a very clear role. Right. Agents can have a better memory than I can, can digest infinitely more data than I ever could.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: It can collect that knowledge. You can even synthesize that knowledge and serve it up to me. But it can't make a prudent decision. It can't be wise in exercising how to leverage that knowledge. Right. And I think that's true for not only that, but also creativity. Right. What is AI? It's a prediction machine based on past history. It can't be truly novel. It can't really have that ingenuity that's true creativity coming up with in the first place. And so you can see this as it plays out. And we leverage AI, for example, in writing or in creativity. People have that sense. There's been all sorts of research that's been done of like, no, uh, that's created by AI. I can tell. And it's because it's mechanistic, right. It's created by a machine and it's lacking the soul that a human person has. And I think at the very highest Level. Courtney, the answer to your question is what that looks like practically is humans doing what only humans can do and relying on machines for what machines can do infinitely better and making sure that we don't confuse those two things. We have to get really real about that.

Speaker C: Yeah, plus one and everything you said. I agree. Um, I also think there's another layer I would add to it that I think the experience layer is uniquely human. And I think that when um, folks need to solve a go to market problem, to put in that context, there's someone that needs take accountability for. Like I will do that and then I will go get it done and then the customer doesn't care. Are they doing it themselves, are they using agents, are they using some portfolio of tech to execute it? But what they care is there's a person who has personal accountability, you know, passion and is going to not let you down at getting that job done. And then also set up whatever it needs to be. It could be I need to write an article, I need to run a campaign, I need to update a webpage, I need to create a document, I need to build a report, whatever that thing is, set it up in the most efficient way possible which has a lot of machine capability around it and then let's run it in a sustainable way. And I think a lot of organizations have moved those that are on the bleeding edge into these very AI forward organizations and have built really interesting um, workflows and processes to handle that. But then sometimes it breaks or it doesn't work or it moves or a system needs to get reintegrated or it can do something new and you need someone to go back in and engineer the next thing. I think those are the things that humans can new around it. And I think having, I mean my view of it is all work should have a human in the work. Totally 100% of it. Um, that doesn't mean 100% of the work. It could be 0.5% of the work is the human part and 99.5 is the other part. But I think that human being involved with it is this unlock of now. It's something that you can sort of count on or you can feel like it's going to deliver that thing when you need it in the way that you want it and you're going to be able to modify it as your organization shifts.

Speaker A: That's so insightful. The accountability piece. I don't know that I've ever thought of it that way, but it does. It's that sense of um, I can trust this human. I mean, I've tried to fire some AI in my time.

Speaker B: You just unplug it.

Speaker A: Comment. You may have, yeah, been fired by me, but it doesn't really work. You know, it's like, yeah, they did the thing wrong, you know, but there is no repercussions when you can hand off to a human that is a very different experience of feeling like I trust this person, they're going to come back and deliver the thing I asked. I don't care how they go about doing the.

Speaker B: The other word right next to accountability that used was sustainability and operations. Right. To me this is one of the reasons why this combination makes so much sense because it's where 2x has really excelled historically, which is unlike other marketing agencies. Marketing firms that just execute, right, they execute the campaign, they execute. You have built sustainable operations that are marketing operations that allow you to do this in a repeatable and sustainable fashion. And leveraging that baseline, right, that's the differentiator that two Xs had and be able to leverage that baseline to now identify how we do that and to bring together the human and the agents to operationalize, go to market. Not just to execute on a single campaign, not just to execute on a single, you know, project, if you will. I think that's really key to this next phase of where companies need us to bring.

Speaker C: And that's in my view the most exciting part of the combination with KnownWell is because you take that services engine of people that know how to get work done in a scalable, sustainable, accountable way and then you add to it engineering muscle, people that know how to build things that are enterprise grade, that are reliable, that are scalable, that you can bet your business on and use that to support their work. Um, I think a lot of AI work in the first era of it is people sort of tinker and experimenting and trying and deploying this thing and seeing out how it works. I think we're beyond that phase. I think we're in a phase where we have no tolerance for that anymore. There's even this new phase emerging where now we don't even tolerate it. We need it to be efficient. We want it to be the lowest token usage and the fastest answer and the most reliable direct to the point thing that I need. And those things you can't do unless you actually have skills in the craft of AI engineering. And gnomewell brings a team up of AI engineers and data scientists into that equation that I think frankly can build things more that we couldn't build before.

Speaker A: So you two hit on this a little bit. But you talked about go to market actually being the whole customer journey, not just kind of the default sales and marketing obviously with KnownWell. KnownWell brings a different layer of client intelligence. It analyzes all the communication flows throughout the organization. How do you see that kind of changing or being utilized by 2x in the future?

Speaker C: First I would say that I uh, think a lot of the elements of great sales and marketing need to get brought into the customer experience. Customer service world marketing is amazing at running campaigns. We should run campaigns to our customers around adoption, around utilization, around, you know, expansion, around the sort of customer marketing discipline I think is one of the most invested in areas in marketing for good reason. Secondly, I think in the sales area of using the customer flywheel as a community builder for new logo expansion and a lot of those things. So there's a lot of like tried and true best practices just from those other disciplines that I think can get translated really well. The piece where I think knownwell gives us a huge jump forward is in integrating the data. And so often there's you know, your CRM data, your intent data, or your pipeline data, or your usage data or your churn data. They're all in different places and being able to work across those different data sources. Basically you guys have created a first party data source that no company has by looking at the unstructured data in their systems and bringing analytics onto that. But I think also being able to connect it to the other sources of data to say who should we target, what should we say, what should be the next best action? And then using all of those scalable sales and marketing things applied in the customer experience, customer service area I think is a layer that's really important. The second thing I would say is there's a layer of building AI automation and AI decision making and advanced analytics that oftentimes it gets sort of

Speaker A: uh,

Speaker C: custom built in companies. And I think there's an opportunity to bring a bit of a standardized way to do that in an operating model, in an operating system that says if my goal is more revenue, here's the data I want to use, here's the programs I want to run, here's the people I want to do it and here's the AI. Ah, I want to make it really efficient and to bring that as sort of an answer versus little Lego blocks that may or may not fit in the environment.

Speaker B: You have enterprise data, 85% of it or more is this unstructured, unmanaged, just communication that's out there.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: Video transcripts, more and more and more of them. Right. It's increasing that number. But email is already in there and trapped. Right. Slack messages. We're analyzing that from a customer success perspective.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: But one of the biggest requests that we've gotten is to move up the stack. People have said I need this analysis in my pre sales activities as well. I want to be able to derive what the wind themes, what are the elements of my ICP and influence my marketing campaigns. With that I want to be able to have the same type of relational intelligence in my sales process to know where a pursuit may be going off.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: And those types of things. Um, and so the ability to take that data asset that you talk about in the context engineering that we've done.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: We haven't built our own LLM at ah, nol. Right. We're leveraging the frontier models. What we've done is taken the context engineering of how do you bring all this data to bear. And now leveraging that platform, we can bring it up the stack into sales and marketing, leveraging 2X's expertise to be able to do that there. And I'm really excited about that because it's candidly whatever our customers have been asking us for.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: We've over and over and over again, please move up the stack. Well now we can, we can accelerate

Speaker C: that now and it's move up the stack and then do the thing. Yeah. Execute the task, send the email, send the campaign, turn on the ad, send a blinky red light to someone that's going to do something like be the uh, orchestrator of the action, not just the source of the light.

Speaker B: Intelligence. It's not just the intelligence now.

Speaker C: That's right.

Speaker B: It's the closed loop.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And that's what, that's what we're seeing in this agentic world.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: Is more and more of. No, no. It's a system of action. It's not a system of intelligence that customers are dying for.

Speaker C: Don't tell me what to do. Do it for me.

Speaker B: Do it right.

Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. So Dom, David, this also marks a leadership transition. I would love for you to just to walk us through what that's going to look like, how your roles are going to change and what that means for two acts. Yeah.

Speaker C: Uh, so the headline through this acquisition, David will become the CEO of the combined company 2x and I will support as a founder, market maker and sort of now, you know, digital personality.

Speaker A: Like, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker C: You know, and the truth of it, uh, it's been 10 years uh since I've founded uh2x with a few other folks and we've built this incredible company and a uh, lot of success to be had there to turn a company from an idea into now almost 1400 people and over 400 million evaluation which is like crazy for a company in our space in sector and the time and all the volatility we've had in the market over those years. A couple things have happened in the last couple years if you've noticed. And through that I've loved being out with customers, you know, telling the story, being a marketer and a seller in a way. When you're a cmo, you never stop being a cmo. You always have that in your DNA.

Speaker B: And can you tell he's a storyteller?

Speaker C: Yeah, it's just how I'm wired. And I think in this world it's sort of like you get both of us running the business but one person out there telling the story and you know, navigating this sort of category that we have to create and then someone else who's a multi time services operator, AI operator, experienced successful CEO operating the business and making sure that the promise we make out to our customers is fulfilled and delivered and the organization is running in a healthy way and it's scaling. I mean we've um, over the nine uh, years so far in the company we've had a compound annual growth rate of around 70% which means the business has basically doubled every year. And that's a hard business to scale, scale and run and it needs like an operator just in the operations. And so part of this transition was an opportunity to bring in a team and a company and a great capability in known well and also get a world class operator on top of the business. Um, so I get to do the fun stuff. How did that work? I don't know how that works. It's done now but the fun part

Speaker B: about it is how complimentary the two of us are.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: We've known each other for several years now and had the opportunity to work together. And the stuff that you love to do do right is, is different than the stuff I love to do right. I'm a builder, I'm an architect, I love to design businesses and, and, and to do that operations. I think we both share the storytelling, we love stelling the story. But you definitely love to be out in market a lot more than I do. And I think the real story here and what's real fun is actually the partnership right. So often and I've Been there. I've been the founder that is departing.

Speaker C: And.

Speaker B: And it's a departure. Right? The fun part here is it's not a departure. The fun part here is it is literally there are two roles to be had. And when you're creating a category which human agentic services, go find another company out there doing that and calling it that and thinking about it that way, right? This is unique. This is different. When you're creating a category, there is a lot of category creation to be done, and we need a market maker and there's some of that that I can do. But this guy's a rock star at it, and so he's going to go do that and I can support him in running the operations of the business together. I truly believe one plus one is seven. Right? And it's one of those unique situations where we have the relationship, we have the trust, we have the ability to put those together. And one plus one can actually equal seven.

Speaker A: I will disclose that obviously. David, I've known you for a while and I've known that Don, that you were, you know, cut from the same cloth as David. And so I kind of assumed you two would just be similar. But as I got off the phone and got to know you more and dig in deeper, I. I immediately was like, these two might take over the world, so may be coming, um, your way very soon. It just so is true. Y' all really compliment each other really well. And I think as these new things come on board, it takes people like you two working together, not individually, to create something really incredible. David, Dominic, thank you so much for sitting with us and sharing about the future of 2x. I know speak for a lot of people here at 2X, we are incredibly excited and can't wait to really get started in this new chapter together. For everybody watching, thanks for joining us. This wouldn't be the end of an AI Know how podcast without asking one of our AI friends to put weigh in on the topic at hand. And so we will end with this. Hey, Claude, can you share with us what you think about the next era of human agentic services? Honestly, I think the next era is less about AI doing tasks and more about humans curating taste and judgment while agents handle the connective tissue. Kind of like how producing a podcast isn't really about the editing software, it's about the editorial calls. The winners will be services where a human's point of view stays the product and the agents just make that point of view scale.