Ep 69 | Nir Kalish

Nir Kalish: Foreign.

Irina Chesmash: Welcome to Mastering CS Candy Leader Insights, the podcast where we dive into the world of customer success with industry leaders. I'm your host Irina Chesmash and today I'm joined by Mirka Lish, VP of customer success at Blynk Ops, an um, AI platform that helps security teams automate their operations at ah scale Nir. I'm really happy to have you here. Thanks for joining.

Nir Kalish: Hey, thank you for inviting me.

Irina Chesmash: Help me understand your world at uh, Blink Ops today. What does the company do? Where does CS sit in the business and what does the team look like?

Nir Kalish: Okay, so BlinkOps is agentic uh AI platform. We allow security organizations and not only because our platform is actually very open if uh we can call it that way. We allow every organization that needs to or want to move from non AI to be more AI centric organization to do it. We have a platform that actually allow companies departments to build agents and to build automations and by that to reduce load from the employees m increase their productivity. And if we're talking about security, by having a platform that AI that can help you to run and build security automations you can actually secure the business faster and to increase productivity and profitability of organizations. If you would think it. Because we can reduce the cost of doing things today manually. We have different services. We have automation engine where you can build automation using our AI and then it's run. We, we have more than 30,000 integrations. We have agentic AI meaning you can build your own, your own agents, micro agents, uh each agent and this is one of the things that is differentiate between us and all the other agent agentic platforms is our agents are very secure because originally we build it for security organizations so you can literally tell the agent what to do and what not to do. So by that you, you limit the power of the agent if you want to call it. And it's a uh, enterprise grade agentic AI and all the other buzzwords that are currently happening in this world. And we, and the third service that we have is basically we have what we call the AI as a service. We come to organizations, we map and understand their AI needs or how to become an AI company. And we have our own people, our own solutions organizations and we can actually help the companies to shift to be AI first much faster. So that's about, about the company, the team, you know my team this customer success. So basically under my team, my organization there are two teams. There is customer success and the support the support like any other support it support engineering reactive. They address tickets they address needs of customers and questions. And we have the customer success managers. They actually the ones that get the customer once they signed, they own the onboarding of the customers, the training, showing value, business value on every interaction and basically grow the customer into renewals and building the path for upsells and cross selling, where then they work together with the account executives with A's to achieve those, those opportunities. And of course the basic CS walls of ongoing meetings identify risks, build risk mitigation plans and follow through those plans.

Irina Chesmash: Can I ask you a, uh, very bold and direct and straightforward question? Because you are basically working for an AI company, you are basically develop agents for others. How come you have a CS team and a support team and I assume that those are people and not agents.

Nir Kalish: Yes.

Irina Chesmash: Do you still need them? Because that's the question that everybody asks. And I was in another event with our own, with our CEO and other head of um, cs and we were discussing the same thing. Do we still need a cst and in which cases and why? If basically AI can solve all the things that we want and we can have an agent army and you work for a company that basically does that.

Nir Kalish: So I will set the expectations. If someone think that AI can replace people, they're wrong. AI can replace some of the jobs. Yes. AI cannot replace all the jobs. AI has problems. I'm working with Claude, with ChatGPT, with Gemini every day in my private life and outside of my private life. Okay. They don't do everything perfect. This is one. Okay. Second, it's dependent on the situation. In our case, we sell to Enterprise. We are a, uh, white glove approach CS at the end, CISO doesn't want to speak with an AI. He wants to speak with someone like me or with one of my team members where we can guide them, where we can ask questions, when we can create a personal interaction. Okay. Will AI will replace some of the CS out there? Yes. If you're a long tail SMBs wise, probably AI will can replace, not replace, but will cut a lot of your team members. Do you need to do it right now? I think that every CS leader that will choose to replace their employees with AI, those CS employees with AI is going to regret it very fast because there are things that AI cannot do. Building a relationship AI cannot do. Doesn't matter how, uh, cute it will talk and how nice it will be. It cannot create a relationship. Why he's. Because he cannot come to a customer in the middle of a meeting. Shut down the zoom and tell him, hey, dear John, I feel that something is off. Tell me what happened. And John tells him, hey, I have a lot of my money on my mind. And you ask him, tell me more. And he said, my son has a brain tumor and most of my energy goes to there. Okay. And I'm using this example because that's something that happened to me a few years ago. Okay. There is no AI in the world that can take this and create a personal moment, a connection moment, a deep, intimate moment with a buyer, with. With the user that down the road actually lead to more business, the right business. Okay. There is no AI in the world that will do it. Okay. Now we do use AI. We have AI. We have agents that we build with our own platform.

Irina Chesmash: Can you help those agents that you've built with your own platform to solve your css?

Nir Kalish: Yeah, we. We have actually we leverage a lot of AI tools. Our own AI tools. We eat our own dog food and other tools we to leverage and once again to help and I will say to use the AI in order to be a multiplier for the CSM and for the support. We do have AI for the support, but there are things that AI will shift it to the human being. But we leverage AI to help us to write emails based on the tone that we want or messages will help us to analyze calls in a much better way than the existing tools. We can actually we build and something that is being used across the company. It was built by our, one of our AES. We analyze all the calls and we can in any given moment, before we go to a meeting, we can ask, hey, give me a snapshot of the customer. And it will analyze all the calls, business calls, extract information, all the things and give me a screenshot or a status mode of the customer. We use AI to do data analysis. I build an agent inside Gemini and soon I'm going to translate it to Claude that actually is a CS helper, meaning he has 10 roles and the CSM can advise with him if, hey, I have a customer that want to churn and he will ask tough question. I literally implement the agent to be like me. I'm very direct. I can be sometimes an asshole in my questions, I know that. But the literally the agents speak in my tone and challenge the csm. So we will help them to address cases of competitive analysis. It will help them to address how to address a churn request, how to prepare to EBRs, all of those things. And it's just a multiplier. It just helped them. Can you replace that csm? Not today. And I think not even in five years, to be very honest, the day that we will have robots that will do our own job, they will probably will speak with another robot. And I think that's a bigger question to humanity, where we will go in that aspect. But I think that if you are itouch white gloves CSM organization, you cannot replace your organization with agents. You can use agents to do more. You can maybe require less amount of people because by doing more, you can actually manage more customers. So if the usual number of white gloves is 1 to 10, 1 to 5 depends on the complexity of the system. With agents, with AI, you can actually move to down the road to 1 to 20. Okay, that's a huge saving for a company. But not to replace people. It can help not replacing.

Irina Chesmash: I think this is a very strong statement and I'm glad that I asked you because you are basically representing an AI company. And if an AI company is basically conserving and protecting the team and still investing in team, that means there's something and you need to have uh, a balance. And this is what I consider it being in the gray area. It's not either black or white, it's in the middle. And you have to adopt it, adopt them both. Embrace the technological trend and the reality that in which we all live. But on the other hand, you need to adapt it to your own reality. And okay, see what from the technological advice that we are living helps me, okay, do a better job.

Nir Kalish: Um, and by the way, also when we sell our service, a lot of AI companies come and sell the dream. You won't need people, you will be able to fire everybody.

Irina Chesmash: And I know, I know, I know everybody thinks it's like, now I have Claude, I can fire half of my team. I can be me one company and I can do them all because I have Claude.

Nir Kalish: So when we sell it, we don't sell it that way. Okay? We don't sell it that way because we really believe that it's on the right way. We come to CISO's and executive and we tell them, hey, you anyway, right now have a pressure where you cannot hire more people. That's the pressure that exists across all the companies. You need to do more with less. You need to increase the productivity team. You need to secure your organization much more. And now with AI, securing the organization become much bigger challenge because the bad people use AI to do more attacks, okay? And it takes time to build automations, security automations. And you need to enable the business. The business today runs fast. Okay? We can help you with to do that. But it's not going to make you decide to eliminate all the people in your organization and leave only one person you might do that. It's not what we want you to do. We actually want you to take the team that you have and allow them to do more that in every single hour that they work for you, they can do double or triple the work, but then they go on and you still gain it. Because here is the thing, everybody think that AI is a magic trick. But let's be honest, if you start to use AI more, your AI cost going to cost you more.

Irina Chesmash: I know, I know and I know nobody speaks about that. So I'm just expecting the moment when they will realize how much the AI cost and if it's not built and used carefully. Yes, all the way.

Nir Kalish: And I will be even honest with you, there are, and I see it also myself as someone that work with all the AI tools since they started, since ChatGPT started. I was there. Okay. Using AI too much is also a negative impact. It makes us stupid. It makes us relying without even questions what we see. There are enough stories in the last six months of companies that moved everything to AI, took decision based on the AI, only to discover six months later that the AI lied. I have cases. When I ask AI to do something for me in my personal life, well, I said, wait, you're lying to me? And ask him why you're not doing what I'm asking you. Why are you inventing numbers? Okay. And. And he says, oh, you caught me. Oh, great. I.

Irina Chesmash: Exactly. Oh, sorry, that was. That's only me. I was wrong. Really.

Nir Kalish: This is why we cannot just shift everything to AI. There is need to be someone that walks on two legs and has a brain and is a human to decide what is AI good out outcome and what is actually need to be better. Now there are jobs that AI can replace. Don't get me wrong. I. If I need to predict the future, probably we are two years away from seeing one person in marketing, maybe zero bdrs sdrs, because I will do that for them. Engineering probably going to have a big impact. Yes. Okay. You can now build an entire system. I literally build on my weekends apps using AI and I don't have anybody. And the last time that I wrote a code was 15 years ago, give or take. Okay, so there are going to be departments and organizations that the AI going to impact them badly. And people there needs to understand it and to start to evolve and think, uh, what next? Yes, but in customer Success in sales, in solution engineering, in sales engineering. I don't see it happening in the next five, six years down the road. Yes, in order for us to replace CSM fully and salespeople fully, we will need to become in a place where companies speak with bots, speak with other bots, and humans feel super, super comfortable and fully trusted. The AI, we are not there yet. There is a reason why we still don't have fully automatic cars. Yes, they are driving, but not across the board. Uh, and I'm still asking myself how many people are willing to open a plane where there is no pilot. Okay, when we will come to that place, by the way, then more personalized walls, meaning roles that requires human interaction, will be replaced. I don't think that it's going to happen in the next five years. I do think that overall AI going to have an impact, some positive, some negative on society and we will need to address it. Otherwise it can be better. I'm not talking about all the sci fi, I'm talking about, yes, what you will do with a lot of people that cannot work in the job. Engineering, marketing, how are you going to take care of them? Because once again, we need to take care of society and also both create some other complexity.

Irina Chesmash: I, I have another question because you said that, okay, I, I no longer need tools. I, because I have AI, I can build the app that I need. And funny enough, I had, uh, yesterday evening, uh, I was talking, talking with a head of CS who she told me that in her company the philosophy is build before you buy. And she was telling me, irina, I have this conversations with my manager and he's telling me, look, it's a lot. I come and I tell him, look, I found this awesome tool, I can adopt it, I can use it. And the question is, perfect, how can you build it? With Claude? And basically ahead of cs, wasn't supposed to do CS anymore, was supposed to. Now I have to build, uh, all the tools and all the things that I need because that's the trend. Where do you stand here? And you've also told me, okay, I've built. And the funny part is during my weekends. She also said during my weekends. And what I can tell you is that from the moment Clog entered into my life and I started basically developing things for me, I basically work twice more than I used to work prior to the AI part, just to make it easy. It's telling me, oh, you use AI and okay, your job is going to be at 50%. Hell no, I'm using AI. And I'm working at 200% and it's like, no.

Nir Kalish: So I want to make it, I want to make it clear when I say that I'm working in the weekends and build tools. I build tools for myself, not related to work. Uh, I actually build one app that replace three apps in my personal life and I build it to my own. I don't believe me personally, okay, I used to be in this world of 15, 16 hours. The way that I lead my team, there is work and there is life. And work life balance is important. Sometimes there are crisis, but after work we do other, other stuff. I don't believe in walking 200%. I don't believe in walking 150%. There are times that you need to. 99% you don't need to even if you have clothes. So when I'm talking about weekends, I'm building my own personal life stuff, not work related stuff. Um, where we are. I think that every department always actually build tools. But sometimes in the past it used. I'm going to ask for engineering to do something for me. Maybe I have a worker that knows how to write code, but every department always build tools for them. Now the question stays the same. Do I build it or do I buy it? Today it's become much, much easier, faster and cheaper to build it yourself. Okay, uh, in the past you had to open a request for engineering it to give you a person. You had to design it, you had to invest time in it. It took much more resources. Today, every person in your company, every person in my department can build tools. Okay, uh, the question become always as it used to be, but we forgot is what is better? Do I need to buy the tool that is on the, the shelf on the service? Does it gives everything that I need or it just ah, uh, give me 50% but I still need to buy it or is it cheaper for me to build it, to maintain it? And I will build it the way that I want. So I will give you my m personal life. For example, I had three apps in my, in my phone. It's a daily app that I use in my morning routine, in my evening routine. And they're good, they're excellent. I used it for more than 17 months, but they didn't give me fully everything that I want. They cost money. And some of them I said I doesn't make sense that I will pay for them every month. Okay. And there are missing things that I want. So I sat for one weekend and I designed my own app. I literally used Gemini to be my product manager and my security manager and to be the CTO and the UX expert and design all those three apps into one app. Um, plus I gave it all my requirements and then I went to Claude and I asked Claude to be the CTO and VP of engineering and engineering to write the code. And I used BT to be the QA tester. And after two days of working, I had one app that have everything that I need and I could kill the three apps. Okay. It's the same thing. I think that down the road we will see sales organizations and CS organizations building their own salesforce that have what they need and don't need to pay $120 per seat. The question will be the same. Always the same thing. Do you know what you want to build? Does it cheaper to build it and maintain it versus buying a service? But yeah, even I always ask myself today, do I need to buy something or can I build it?

Irina Chesmash: Okay.

Nir Kalish: Okay. I like to travel. I sat with the beginning with Gemini and now with Claude, because Claude has more things that I like. And I literally sat down and build inside Claude an agent that is probably one of the best traveler agents out there. Because I gave it all the rules that I ever thought about from my experience up to the point to go and see video blogs and to extract information on the trip itself. Okay. And checking a lot of small things. And today, every time I need to plan a, uh, trip, it takes me minutes, even less. Okay. And it's still running in the background to find me cheaper flights. Okay. And hotels based on my standard of hotels in flights. Okay. So it saves me a lot of time. Okay. Could I go to a traveler agent? Of course I could. There are a lot of people that doing it. Okay. But soon, in the world that we are living, people can use my agent. I gave it to all my friends and to all my employees. I can send it to you. Okay. But soon every person will be able to do that. Okay. Is it changing the way that we travel? Yes, but we can build it. Okay. But if tomorrow will be, for example, I won't try to build an AI language. Okay. Even though if someone will come and build an AI language dedicated for customer success or sales, it will be amazing. It will be so powerful. I am not going to build it because just training such a model will cost me 5, 6, 7, $10 million. It doesn't make sense. If I will ever need it, I will go to a service that already have it and pay $100,000 a year to have it okay. That's where I think every leader in every department, every CEO needs to think. It's not let's build everything in us. Okay. I don't like the extremes. It's always in the extremes in the tech. Okay. The I am way too old. I've been in 2000 and so the bubble explode. I've been in 2008. I've been in the big data area. Oh, big data is the big magic. Guess what? It even solve anything. We are still drowning in data. Okay. The world of machine learning. Yeah, it makes your life easy.

Irina Chesmash: No.

Nir Kalish: If you don't set it up the right way, it doesn't do anything. Same goes with AI It's a great multiplier if you don't know how to use it. If you trust it too much and you think that it's uh, a Harry Potter magic wand, you're going to crash. And that crash could be very painful. It's I treat the AI as yet another Walker of me. I need to follow through it. I need to test the walk. I need to give them feedback. The only thing is that it can work 24 hours. And the downside that sometimes it doesn't ask question while a real employee will ask me hey near what did you mean on doing abc? The AI with all the respect will execute implied is still it's smart and yet it's stupid. Uh it's smart because sometimes it gives a great ideas. Literally last night he gave me a huge idea about an idea something that I had and he actually did the analysis for me and show me different questions and different aspect that I didn't even thought about it. Um at the same time when I gave him some data analysis to do for me and I looked at the data before he missed some important points. Okay. M so it's once again it's the balance. And in society today across the board we are act completely out of balance. It's always left or right, a black or uh, white, uh, Republicans or Democrats. No, everything needs to be in balance. AI won't replace all of your employees. Is it easier by the way to build a company today of one person? Yes, it's much, much easier than it used to be. If you have an idea. Do you need now to hire developers? Probably not in the first year you can build it by yourself. But will it be perfect? No. Will it replace humans? Not across the board. Do you need to build everything? No. You always need to ask yourself what will be cheaper and what will be smarter. And we also need to remember that it's not only building. A lot of managers forget it. You also need to maintain it.

Irina Chesmash: Yeah.

Nir Kalish: So we need to remember you need to maintain it. You need to create. Yes, you can use AI, but sometimes maintaining it, it's much more expensive over time than just buying a service outer and they maintain it for you.

Irina Chesmash: This was an unexpected conversation, and thank you for your honesty and for everything that you shared during the last half an hour. It's probably honestly one of the best episodes that I'm done and one of the most authentic and to the point. So thank you for joining me and my pleasure listening. Thanks for tuning in. Until next time, stay curious, keep learning and mastering customer success.