Episode 6 - How to keep AI-built decks on brand at scale (with Ulrik Bo Larsen)

Speaker A: Many of the tools that folks are using AI Wise is something that even if it may have the name Cowork or something similar, it is actually inherently a single player experience. You're taking some context, you're using an LLM. It's a powerful one. It really does something uh, quite fantastic. But what it sprays out is an artifact on your file system or in your browser that you can then take and then do something with. So it is inherently a fully single player experience the way those products are being used. And uh, they're obviously so powerful that uh, people are drawn to them and these artifacts they come running with. But we all know that some of us spent decades trying to get away from the file system into the cloud and now we're suddenly back here, uh, by way of these tools, um, and we at Pitch simply don't believe that um, that's how things should end up. And we think it's a footnote in history that we're sort of back in the file system. Um, so the way we about using an agent.

Speaker B: Welcome back to the Enablement Optimization podcast. The show that's less about tactics and more about the strategic decisions and programs behind high impact enablement and how leaders actually drive results at scale. Chris and I are back today with Ulrich Bo Larson and as most tenured go to market leaders, Ulrich has strong opinions around the state of AI as it relates to enablement. We'll talk about how he built a world class GTM organization under the rise of the traditional SaaS model and how he sees the enablement function and go to market in general shifting with the rise of AI and more importantly what you can do to get ahead of it.

Speaker C: So Ulrich is an entrepreneur uh at heart with more than two decades in journey in startups and scale up. Most notably he founded and run the B2B SAS Falcon AI from 2010 to 2019 eventually exiting the business to Sishon, the then US listed PR uh software giant. From there he went on to do several follow up acquisitions under the Sishon umbrella and ended up combining Falcon and bandwidth in a mid-2021 and led the integration CEO uh of a combined business accelerating growth by harnessing a combined sales of marketing team of 400 people. These days things haven't got any quieter. Uh, he's now part of a leadership team at UH Pitch where he serves as a president and exec chair. Pitch is an AI presentation scale up originating from Europe but with most of their customers in North America and they are laser focused on on helping go to market teams get the most out of their time while staying on brand and the messages they create thousands of presentations.

Speaker B: All right Ulrich, let's jump in. So as everybody knows the GTM landscape as well as the state of enablement has changed a lot. But in order to anchor in where we are today, I'd love to go back and start with your success building the GTM engine at Falcon. Um, with all the different specialized teams getting that to 400 plus employees. Tell us what that looked like but more importantly where you saw the role of enablement then.

Speaker A: Yeah, uh, I would sort of portray uh the Falcon IO journey and how we thought about go to market then by the way, we didn't call it go to market. Uh that was sales and marketing or commercial teams uh as it were back then. And um, I think the way we thought about that was um, really sort of the, as I say the OG way of building it. And this was from 2010 up till 19. And um, back then there weren't a lot of frankly uh, the playbooks were not as well written and as widely distributed as they are today. Um, when we started building up a full stack B2B SaaS engine back then one of the things, one of the clues that we did have was that sort of the ACV size that you were uh, dealing with.

Speaker C: So

Speaker A: typical contract should probably determine what your DTM team should look like. Uh, if you had an ACV of 20k it kind of set the bar for what you could afford. Uh, if you were only at 2k there are limits to what you could build up. So those were the types of things that we were pretty tuned into. And um, we were about, right there, about 20k USD in ACV for a typical deal. So that gave us the opportunity to build out uh, a pretty full stack GTM team all the way from a full marketing team with all the usual uh, roles, uh, SDRs, um, uh, AES, uh, CS folks and account managers. All that post sales stuff was there as well. So a lot of people, a lot of handover uh as that was built up and um, I think what often happened back then especially in our journey was that uh, this was fairly competitive space. We were the social media management space, um, competing with um, a lot of other. So we originated from Europe. There were a lot of well funded US competitors where we were really punching above our weight. But it was a pretty educated buyer always. Um, and folks were actually sellers were often not eager to use DEC or Dex or collateral. They were very eager to go in and demo the product. Uh, that was A I think many folks uh, that have worked in product marketing, enablement and thereabouts in marketing have sort of observed this, that sellers and sometimes the leaders as well, they're like Neil, let's just jump in and show things. And obviously it becomes feature selling rather than necessarily strategically positioning or educating the market very much where you would often need to do other things. So I think one of the first challenges that I think was about back then was to uh, in some cases have even the sales teams understand um, the value of great collateral when they felt they could go in and show the product and swing for the fences in those demos and, and those discovery calls and all that stuff. So I think that was some of the first uh, where the rubber really hits the road on enablement is that uh, you can create really great stuff you can have. I ran the business and I was very tuned into the fact that we wanted to be strategic. We wanted to educate both the market and the buyers about things. So we um, we created great collateral, had you know, marketing teams that did uh, that did really good stuff. And then you know, it would sometimes more often than not, at least the beginning it would. Yeah, the sales folks would pay lip service to that and we would realize as we started tracking it that it wouldn't necessarily get the traction that and the usage that it should. And um, I think that was the first sort of uh, experience I had with the uh, with both you know, the perceived value of enablement and how. How sometimes it can be difficult to get it uh, to get it to where it should be. And um, I think what ended up being successful uh for us sort of in this first wave of how you, how you sort of build things in the OG fashion was to just have first of all having really strong teams and a really strong collateral that ends up uh, basically selling itself and then obviously having um, a model, um, uh some Rails systems, enablement systems that also allows the tracking um, and just seeing that all this stuff gets the usage that it needs. I think when we got there it became quite apparent that uh, where the pockets of usage were and where the pockets of the opposite also were. So that was incredibly valuable. So sort of the first wave of enablement tools I think were really helpful in that sense. Um, as I built a business subsequently we ended up uh, making quite a few uh, tuck in acquisitions and also larger combinations with it essentially merges with other adjacent companies in our space. And um, what happens then is that you're not only combining uh, a product portfolio, you're also combining uh, commercial teams and especially there, I think that's at least where all of the muscle memory of either of those original teams coming from the subsequent parts of now the combined business, they just have to sort of declare bankruptcy and all their muscle memory and all the things they knew because they need to be re onboarded no matter how uh, much they think they're the bee's knees in terms of understanding their product. Now there's a wider product portfolio with some of the capabilities that they've also always yearned for. Saying that hey, I didn't win this deal because it didn't have this other thing that competitors or this adjacent bit had. Now it's all brought together and now it's the moment of truth that you can actually then take that and take it to market. And I think that's where at least in my sort of classic B2B SaaS journey I saw enablement being really, really powerful. Just making sure that. And also really assessing whether or not commercial teams uh, were sort of taking in what the new product portfolio was. And um, as we saw the advent of uh, gong and other things, also just tracking whether or not that was actually being communicated in the way uh, that we enabled them to do. Um, so I think that was the, that was sort of at a very, sort of broad strokes and quick recap the way I sort of saw uh, enablement, uh, uh, work over this decade, um, long journey so to speak.

Speaker C: And, and I love that or I think there's so much, so much ground you've covered there. So thank you first off for, for giving that OD and everything I think you've touched on there will really resonate with our audience who've lived and breathed a lot of these moments in that journey. I think the fact that you can articulate it from a place where you've built a business, you've lived those experiences and you've grown that business to um, to sell it on and move on and do different other things is fantastic. So I love the perspective that you're bringing to this. I want to pick up on something you said during that part of the journey though, because I think it's really interesting and I think it's still a challenge that we have today in, in business and in enablement in general is the idea that you mentioned about how to begin with. A lot of what your sellers were doing was, was focusing on feature selling versus actually selling the value to the business or to the organization or to a customer that they're trying to sell to. And I Think if we think about some of the um, sellers that we have in our businesses today, those more tenured sellers who haven't necessarily moved with the evolution of, of selling and of being in front of customers and the knowledge that customers now have of a product before they even bring the seller in. The idea of selling feature and functionality is not going to get the business to where it needs to be. Right. When you were going back and looking at the sellers that were very feature heavy sellers, how did you, did you have the vision to try and move them um, towards more of a value sell? Or was that something that in hindsight you wish you had done sooner?

Speaker A: Yeah, certainly had the ambition and the, the vision that that would make a difference for because there were sort of where the market were and where the competition were in terms of features and functionality. Then there were things that we were doing that were our leg up, so to speak. But there were also ways that we, at least some of us in the DTM M could talk about um, where the market was going. And that was immensely powerful when you added that to a conversation. And that was the bit that, that the folks that were latching onto features and had, they kind of knew where the wow factor of the demo was. So it was kind of rushing to get to that part of the demo. And they were, some of them were pretty successful, uh, just in doing, he was chucking away. They were doing volume sales. You can hit quota if you sell a bunch of 20k ACV deals during a queue. And that was working for some. And I think we just, just sort of realized that some people were more attuned to the uh, sort of the more visionary uh, aspect of selling a story and selling a narrative rather than selling specifics. I think to sort of come to some of them to the rescue a little bit. I think that we were in a very competitive um, space where the buyers were saying, how do you compare to this? How do you do this? So they were sometimes dragged into the granular bits, uh, and needed some dexterity to get out of that and back up into the helicopter. And some people were better at that than others I would say. Um, so yeah, definitely wanted to do that, but I guess also realized that some people were better uh, suited for that than others. M. Yeah, that's how uh, I would portray that. Um,

Speaker C: I think it's also, by the sounds of it, a level of readiness from a customer perspective as well. If a customer was at a point where they were just purely focused on the feature and functionality, the seller is naturally Going to go to that space. But it's where I think the evolution of a customer has come a huge way in that time as well.

Speaker A: Right. And usually you have a, you know, a cohort of stakeholders there, right. Where some of the folks will be doing it, are using it on a daily basis. This tool, um, it was a very sort of operational tool with strategy and all kinds. So a whole workflow tool that we sold. So a lot of people were very, uh, for obvious reasons, caring a lot about the tool they were going to be spending most of their days in. And how that worked in details and what that. And there you had to go to that level to really, uh, show the qualities, uh, that the product had. But as soon as. Then a more strategic person, their sponsor, whatever, you had to, obviously to get back up in the helicopter, uh, to tell a different type of story to that person. Um, and I think certainly making those jumps. And um, I think what we often found was that if you weren't demoing, you were either conversing. And that required, uh, if you were conversing about the industry, it required some level of, uh, experience and expertise. You need to have sort of sharpened, uh, your sword a bit to be able to do that, more freeform. So that's where we provided. We provided the decks, the company vision, where the product was going and all those kinds of things. Um, and I think especially there we were, we're very keen on, um, having. We saw enablement being really, really important in both rolling out updated collateral and making sure that was used in the right way. I think before we got to that, I think, um, the collateral side of things in the early days was obviously fairly unsophisticated, I think. And some people have tried this also. Right. It's the case where suddenly the sellers realize that they actually have to do a deck for this particular thing. They do something and uh, suddenly they realize that, uh, maybe they need some help from a marketer to kind of sneak into the marketing department, get a little bit of assistance. And suddenly the marketing leader sees this deck that's being, uh, this monstrosity that's being created, and all hell breaks loose. Right. So I've experienced that, uh, a couple times, even when we had all of those functions in place and all those rails that happened, uh, more than once. Um, and. And yeah, so, uh, enablement is something where you really require strong tooling, um, and require strong tooling to be able to roll it out. But you also need to then have the collateral, the payload that you give to the Reps needs to be compelling. If it doesn't really land with them, if you just locked it down completely and there's no flexibility for them to actually tell the story that they need on the specific call, um, then it's not going to get any usage and they will perhaps do a little PPT on the side and show that and then, uh, we're back where we don't want to be.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I mean, what I'm hearing from you is that as you built the Orget Falcon and specialization within teams, sdr, bdr, sales executive, et cetera, the need for standardization shows itself. And that's where enablement comes into the business to make sure that there is, um, you know, themes throughout the business. But the battle is in making sure that the resources provided to the team, like you said, they are compelling and that the team that's delivering the message and being asked to do more solution selling versus features appreciates the, the content and the resources. And what's interesting is, you know, you said that time frame was 2010 to 2019, but we have the exact same challenge today. Right, like, and even more because reps can go do and build and research pretty much anything they want. And whether we guide them to do that or not, they're doing it. So I think that's what's so interesting and where enablement sits and has to figure out, you know, how do we give the guardrails, how do we enforce the standardized message, but also make sure that the sales team relates to it and appreciates it.

Speaker A: Right, yeah, it's, I would say that, um, so the first wave of AI, um, sort of arguably made many things around enablement a lot worse, a lot more difficult. Um, and so to your point, um, you know, my example before, where a rep would open up PowerPoint and download perhaps some random templates from the Internet and try to sort of cobble something together to build a story. Now they have real power tools at their disposal. They'll go into Claude and um, Claude will. That's what it does. It boots up a Python script and it sprays out PPTs in single player mode like there's no tomorrow. And they look pretty good. They're quite passable to a rep that will otherwise not be able to do a great PowerPoint. That they look great. Right. Uh, and what's incredibly powerful is the fact that it probably, depending, uh, on how it's set up, probably has all the context, uh, already at least the rep can easily throw all that in there. The context, context will be there But I think my point is that that's inherently single player mode. It's a file that's being created and then that's being sent around who knows where. Um, and that's at least the single player aspect of that. And the fact that it wears off brand the way that it does is not something that I, and we at pitch, where we're doing a lot of work in this space, don't believe is the future. Um, but it is, it is. Uh, you know I'm incredibly red pilled on AI for business and knowledge workers and GTM teams especially. But ah, we need to sort of point that uh, supercharged, uh, laser sort of in the right direction and make sure that we align that power tool in a way that's uh, helpful for everybody. And again if you just lock down and say no, you cannot use CLAUDE for anything. You need to use these pretty pre made decks that comes from marketing. Yeah, you've asked for shadow Claude usage and PPTs, uh, sneaking in uh, sort of out of the woodwork everywhere.

Speaker C: And just to clarify, I'm sure it's not just CLAUDE as a tool that can do this stuff. There is a lot of tool, I know CLAUDE is probably the most used one right now, but there's a lot of tools out there that can certainly do that. And it's interesting because I see a lot of organizations right now focusing on those AI literacy for sellers. So how are we encouraging our sellers to learn how to prompt correctly, to learn how to use the tools in the right way. Which I think if I understand what you're saying or is, that's great but there's a part of, there's sort of a piece of a puzzle that's missing which is the messaging around ensuring the guardrails are in place, that the messaging stays consistent, that uh, that the decks are on brand so that the content that's being put out there to the customer is consistent because the impact of poor content and collateral, the value of a brand to a business is huge. But money that goes into investing in the way a brand is put out there to the market is enormous. And I think what you're saying is that unless we are very careful in how we approach AI and how we empower sellers to be able to utilize their incredible functionality that's out there really there's a massive potential risk of brand, of impacting the brand as we go.

Speaker A: There definitely is. And as you kind of look at the value of a business as AI has developed and impacted uh, the world of technology, I Think if we, if we would at least agree that it seems like the marginal cost of creating software is going uh, down all the way down, perhaps to zero at some point. But it's really, really becoming cheap to build things. And then you start to think about what is a businessman, what's a technology business if you're a software business for instance. Well I think the asymmetry of the value of the brand really becomes. The brand becomes far more important than whether or not you have more engineers that can build more features than your competitor. I think the brand, the narrative, who you are and all that starts to matter sort of a lot more on a pro rata basis based on what your business is. Uh, the makeup of the business is what the value of the business is. And um, that's not really been properly solved for in sort of the more widely distributed tools and certainly by the sort of frontier model companies like Anthropic and OpenAI and others. I think um, what ultimately needs to happen there is that um, first of all some of these things that we're seeing now uh, are really individuals doing something in isolation and even I'm um, going to mention M another anthropic product uh, that's also quite popular out there and it's called Cowork. Cowork sounds like we're working together and doing something we're not. It's also inherently single player, uh you're co working with in the single stream uh, with the LLM and uh, it's a very thin layer on top of uh, clawed code really to sort of make it more passable for people that aren't developers. But it's pretty much the same piece of functionality and I think where we'll ultimately end up is a place where there's a shared context for the business, uh where the LLM M and all of us have some, an agreed upon idea of who we are. That was typically the vision deck or the about us deck, the company presentation and sort of sales enablement parlance. Now that's also um, it could be markdown files and other types of collateral that describes this. So it's available for the LLM and uh, as context for everybody in the team and then as you go in and do sort of specific more bespoke decks. Let's say you do a, you're doing a qbr, uh as a csm, um and you have your branded template, you have a pretty strict format for your QBRs but it's so easy to get both stuff from your product usage database. You could get the specific account data from your CRM and then whatever's happened recently on the product side uh, is also automatically being filled into the deck because um, somebody has. And I think there's, I mean you could say this is broader than enablement, but it could very well end up in enablement, making sure that um, the context that relates to who we are, how we talk about ourselves and uh, how that's being um, verbalized and sort of distributed into reps. Uh, I think it's a new sort of surface area for enablement to be able to. If it ends up being markdown files or it ends up being another way to textually describe and update uh, the business and the GTM team on what we're doing and what happened recently and what's relevant to tell the next touch with this customer. This account uh, is uh, something that uh, we're thinking a lot about.

Speaker D: Your buyers see a dozen presentations every week. By Friday they might remember 1. Pitch is the AI presentation workspace built for teams that win deals. Give Pitch Agent a prompt, call notes or other context and it builds a full on brand deck in seconds with every slide built from your team's template and design patterns. Not generic AI slides, but presentation that are recognizably yours. Then do it again for every rep, every deal and every audience. No more design bottlenecks and no drifting off brand. The result, the kind of presentation buyers actually remember. Start with a prompt, end with a winning deck. Get started@pitch.com

Speaker B: for the viewers that aren't as knowledgeable about this. What's a markdown file?

Speaker A: Yeah, sorry, uh, it's a text file, um, with some very simple formatting that started in developer circles. Um, some developers would say I'm downplaying this, but that's what I would say that it's basically a text file, uh, with some simple formatting. Um, and it usually lives in code repositories which is why all of the, all of the intelligence that's uh, being rolled out started and originated from software and coding. And some people would say the coding has almost largely been solved. Um, some of my co workers won't like me saying that. And it's obviously far from the actual truth but, but it's probably the frontier where the models have come the farthest and therefore a lot of the functionality that works there is sort of being applied to a lot of other places where it's a little alien. Uh, which is why we talk markdown files and we're suddenly back in the file system which is also I think a bit odd. I don't think that's where this is going to end up. Probably a footnote in history that we talk a lot about these files and co workers acting on files or Codex is doing the same for OpenAI. I think that's probably a footnote in history, but it's where this intelligence can uh, currently be applied um, in a very powerful way. But I believe the team I'm in at pits, we believe that we don't think we're going back to the file system again. We think the cloud is here to stay and that's where uh, these models uh, uh, should be applied. Um, right.

Speaker B: So, so I think we have this understanding of guardrails around the tools that you give your sellers. So I think the, the solution there, and I'm um, very much oversimplifying it is don't just give everybody a Claude license. Create a co working environment where you've given the foundation of the, on brand materials the message that you want delivered. Because like you said like that's super important. So like where my mind goes in the enablement space is if every seller is out there using you know, the right co working space with the guardrails and the messaging that maybe reads a gong call, researches a company and creates a deck, how do we differentiate ourselves? Because if I'm a buyer and I'm starting to see this um, playbook executed in all the vendors, I think it just really reinforces like you said, what you sell and your brand is super important. What do you think about that?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think the way that, that um, if the artifact in question is a presentation, um, I think the way that that looks, um, the quality of the visuals and m. The design and therefore the visual uh, representation of brand and the narrative just have to be really, really strong. Um, and it needs to not be diluted as people are then utilizing. Utilize it. That, I think that that's an, that's a really important aspect of it. Um, and I think if you know I, I was at a conference recently and I, I also you know tuned into to something remotely and it's, it's, it's. You can really play sort of LLM bingo when you see somebody having used a. You clearly I can pinpoint a cloud presentation very, very easily. Uh, unless somebody has done a lot of work to sort of warp the look and feel, they're pretty recognizable. Um, and that's obviously not where it's going to end up because people are fed up with it already. And I think not only is that lackluster visually, it also gives this. If somebody goes up on stage with that, it's just inherently, you know, you start really from the back foot. Right. You're just inherently lazy. Do you even want to listen to this person? Uh, do I want to. Are there points valuable if it was, uh, this was the threshold to getting something done was this low. There are those types of things that happen sort of psychologically I feel. And uh, it's about putting in the effort on how the output and, and the artifact looks. I feel.

Speaker C: I think you're right. Sorry. The one pushback I would say on that is that are we in a place where we need to start to respect the effort and the time and the energy that goes into prompting to get to that point. That's where the human thought process goes into it. And then the output is. Because I completely agree with you when I see a Claude presentation, I'm having to almost train myself to say actually the person has put the effort in to creating the thought process that goes into the prompt that actually gives the output as opposed to the output. Uh, and I suppose what you're saying is that there's a place that we can get to where the output uh, represents the true thought process that went in. So you get that full end to end AI experience that has allowed you to curate with AI, but also execute on it in a brand compliant way. I suppose as well.

Speaker A: Yeah. I, I mean you're, you're right that even though somebody has you know, ended up with an article, in fact a presentation where it's pretty obvious which tool is being used to create it, there can still be a compelling story. Uh, I uh, personally just need to at least take a little bit of time to, to lose the distraction of, of how it was then made and, and, and then appreciate um, the underlying message which can certainly be there. And I think there's a way to not necessarily have that distraction uh, happening and have the visuals be compelling and um, underscoring that instead of taking uh, away from it. So I think that's the thing we feel strongly about. Um, for instance, I think right now a lot of teams are seeing value in being able to for instance have some of the decks that they create repetitively. You mentioned the QBR example. Uh, you know a follow up deck, uh, you know a good way into, in a sales cycle is another classic thing where yes, you can take your uh, the themes from your gong call or your granola transcription and throw that in somewhere and you get some nice insights out of it. Um, that's very, I mean we didn't have it six months ago and so it's really compelling thing to have now. It will. Will it soon become table stakes? Is it maybe almost already? Yeah, it's certainly getting there to become table stakes. But again, I think that this is so early. Um, this is an example where you have some great collateral and then there's some specific context on this deal, this account that you then drag in and then the Christmas tree lights up further. That's really exciting. But what happens when the context is very rich, fully up to date, both the stem of the business, who we are, what we rate recently, what the winter, uh, release that added all these functionality, what that was, what that means strategically, especially to this vertical dear rep that you talked, and then the specific things that you heard, uh, on the recent calls. As soon as all these things are mapped by an LLM and given to you as a seller, so you then easily pinpoint those things. I think that's where this starts to become really, really fluid and a magical experience both for sellers and buyers. Um, and we're getting there. Some organizations have built something really sophisticated that gets them there. It's a bit haphazard and it created a lot of work for people internally to get to that. I think we're getting there with um, with tools out of the box. Uh, that helps folks do uh, that and that's exciting. I think it takes the selling and the buying back to relationships and humans get to do what they're good at instead of uh, doing all the admin work and um, filling out blanks and decks and so forth.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's what's standing out to me is. Yes, Chris, I think the, the value of good prompting in like the back end work that we do in enablement. Like for example, we're making some adjustments internally to how we do internal communications. And yes, like a deck that's a cloud output based on a really good prompt and lots of research internally is very valuable. But externally, as we work through our customer motions, how many variables do you need and how. What is. Where does prompting matter? With create me a QBR deck based on all the gong conversations you have from this customer. I think in that world that enablement's role is somewhat to architect the right flow and the value and the seller. We get back to this. The, the seller, uh, skill is how they deliver the content, how they engage in a conversation, how they build the relationship. So like we're going back to what made traditional salespeople Door to door successful was the tenacity, the grit, this, the primary thing that then we can get back to our roots of teaching those skills and coaching those skills. It's almost like you have to kind of separate your enablement workflows into a couple different streams. And yes, you got to build the right tech stack, but once that's done and as you optimize it, you can't just let people deliver just that. That's pretty exciting to me because like getting back to traditional sales skills, coaching. Yeah, uh, you know, is more of what I'm passionate about anyway.

Speaker C: So Ulrich, you mentioned something earlier on about this concept of single player mentality. And um, I know that it's something that you're really passionate about at uh, pitch and how pitch can be used as a tool to try and overcome some of those challenges. Tell us a little bit more about the work and the thought that you're putting in at pitch and how that could help us in that vein.

Speaker A: Yeah, so just sort of to be, to sort of firm up. What I meant about this single player phenomenon is that many of the tools that folks are using AI wise is something that, even if it may have the name Cowork or something similar, it is actually inherently a single player experience. You're taking some context, you're using an LLM. It's a powerful one. It really does something, uh, you know, quite fantastic. But what it sprays out is an artifact on your file system or in your browser that you can then take and then do something with. So it is inherently a fully single player experience, the way that those products are being used. And uh, um, they're obviously so powerful that uh, people are drawn to them and these artifacts they come running with. But we all know that some of us spent decades trying to get away from the file system into the cloud. And now we're suddenly back here, uh, by way of these tools, um, and we at Pitch simply don't believe that, um, that's how things should end up. And we think it's a footnote in history that we're sort of back in the file system. Um, so the way we think about using an agent is, uh, that obviously you're working with the agent directly. Um, but it's also visible in a shared workspace by your human coworkers and the agents that they've dispersed. You can all see what you've been doing to the artifacts that you've been working on. We're obviously about helping, um, sellers, uh, and people that care about, uh, great branding Great presentations, uh, to create them at scale but not have them be warped out of shape in terms of brand and metric. So that's what we're, that's what we're all about. And we, we um, we, we do see that humans, uh, and agents need to work collaboratively, um, in, in a, in a workspace. And um, and you know, by doing that you can have sort uh, of a great stem of, of branded ah, collateral and you can have both, you can both jam and riff with your, with your human coworkers and the team to create variants of that that are relevant for the deal you're working on, the QBR you're about to do tomorrow. Um, and you can in real time see what your co workers and what the agents, they spun up, what they were doing there. Um, so we're doing that for our small corner of the universe, presentations that are AI native and in the cloud instead of on the file system. Um, but we believe that's a paradigm and a model that really belongs to a lot of other things. Um, um. It's not an old thing to say that stuff should be in the cloud, but we've just kind of taken this detour and that's what we're um. Especially with the substrate that we're working on, the surface area of presentations. The industry has really sort of taken a detour, uh, by the advent of AI and we think that's uh, yeah, we're building something that is inherently um, AI and web native at the same time and very collaborative.

Speaker B: So you're talking about the fact that you do all this work in Claude, but at the end of the day you download it as a PowerPoint or as a PDF and that's that getting back to files where that's kind of like uh, versions of spreadsheets with lots of different data being passed back and forth.

Speaker A: We're back at the attachments, final version 2, final version 3, final final final or whatever they end up being called. And I thought we were kind of moved on from that, but here we're here we're again. And um, I would say though that parts of why that's happening is that the way of working with something like Claude or Codex or Gemini, just having that conversational interface, it's incredibly powerful. I spend the vast majority of my day in an interface like that. Um, but you want the surface area of the output and some other things that you invoke some other tools and some other agents really that are working in some other areas. Um, and that's the Moniker. And the sort of paradigm that we thought about when we created the pitch agent is that you should certainly be able to invoke that from within Claude. And uh, if you're running Claude cowork routines or whatever it might be, you should be able to call several times that there are several pitch agents that will then uh, create decks at scale that you and the team need, uh, for upcoming uh, follow up calls, qprs or whatever it might be. Uh, but they can very well be. The starting point, can very well be Claude. You could stay there for a long time. But the value and the ability to go in and edit and see the complete version history and the fact that things are uh, a usual sort of cloud artifact as you would expect it to, even though you started out in Claude, is really powerful.

Speaker C: And I think there's also a massive piece of this which is about AI literacy and about how we are seeing people develop and build their own personal AI skills. We know that from natural human behavior people need to see each other doing it to be able to build their own personal confidence in order to do that. And if we're driving this concept of single player mentality that we are not expanding that knowledge base fast enough to give people the confidence and the belief to go out there and do it and try it themselves and adopt these tools. And we look at the level of investment businesses are putting into AI tools that aren't necessarily seeing the level of adoption when they're still using it as a uh, advanced Google really.

Speaker A: Right, right, right. Yeah, there's a great, um, I mean some people, the audience may have heard of this, but there was a great anecdote from Toby, the CEO and founder of Shopify. Um, he basically has instilled that all agentic coding now happens in public via public Slack channels in Shopify. So the reason for that is that that was also in the past single player sessions where nobody, none of the juniors could learn from the seniors because there were no way to go walk into the workshop as he had experienced early in his career and seeing the masters at work, uh, and sort of asking them while they were doing this, why did you do that? Well that was because then it works better this way. They've done that by have all of their agentic coding and probably also a lot of other things happening in public Slack channels. So you can walk in, it's completely kosher do then go in and see um, what somebody else is doing and then follow along. And that's the same paradigm uh, being addressed. I feel the fact that, uh, these tools were originally very single player, uh, and sort of happening in isolation and ways of opening that up is really, uh, powerful. And uh, yeah, we're only seeing sort of the, the early innings of, uh, of that happening. I thought this was a really interesting example where they've, uh, they've gone pretty far.

Speaker B: So Ulrich, we've focused a lot on your background with Falcon and what you're doing here at Pitch. Um, interesting question. Let's say that you weren't doing any of this work and you were doing something completely different. What would that alternative career path be for you?

Speaker A: Oh, yeah, interestingly so, before I started writing code and building technology, I was very much into music, um, electronic music specifically. Um, so this was like late 90s where the electronic music scene and certainly in Europe were roaring. And it was very interesting. Then at the same time the Internet was also roaring and I kind of took a path there and then I, uh, I left that. But the room I'm sitting in is actually, uh, a collection of vintage synthesizers that I've, uh, sort of built up over the years. So I thought after having sold my business in 19, I thought I was going to spend a lot of time finally, uh, with this labor of love of mine. And lo and behold, then you get dragged into building more SaaS, SaaS and AI businesses afterwards. So I don't know what that tells, uh, probably the psychologist, uh, on the call to figure out what was going on there. But, um, yeah, that's what I thought, that I was, uh, going to be spending more time at night, and I do occasionally, but with family, with two kids and uh, a lovely wife. So there's not much time for that. This room is usually. This stuff is mostly decoration these days. But, uh, I like the vibe and I really enjoy, um, I really enjoy doing work down, you know, in this room. So, uh, yeah, that would be my answer to that one.

Speaker C: Um, I love that, Ori. I love that. And maybe we should have some music starting off this podcast with a little bit of a bass going in as we get it started, just uh, as an homage to what your future self could be looking after.

Speaker A: Oh, yeah.

Speaker C: Okay. But thank you so much for joining us on the sales enablement podcast.

Speaker A: All right.

Speaker C: It's been fantastic having you here and wish you all the best with Pitch, and we'll be keeping a close eye on how it goes in the future.

Speaker A: Appreciate it. It's great being on. Thanks, guys.

Speaker C: So, Leanne, I absolutely love that conversation with Oreck today. And all I could kept thinking about was my life as a seller, driving around my territory, my patch, the boot of my car filled with all of the marketing approved collateral and I would pop the boo, look at what I had in front of me and pick and choose the collateral I wanted to for the meeting I was literally about to walk into. But listening to Auric, the world is changing.

Speaker B: It definitely is. And it's our job in the enablement space to facilitate a similar experience for the seller that they've got options, but they're all on brand, they have the guardrails, they're able to collaborate, um, so that they can still pitch on brand and with confidence

Speaker A: completely.

Speaker C: And, but the, the value and the impact of poor collateral to a brand is so significant. And I think that that was really the message that Ulrich was trying to get across today. And I think he did a great job of doing that and the platform that he has to do that, which was great.

Speaker B: Yeah, super interesting to uh, explore, pitch and see, see where that goes. Um, I'm interested personally to learn a little bit more about the tool, so if you guys are as well, um, you can hit ULRICH up on LinkedIn or let us know and we can facilitate an introduction. And as always, we want to hear from you. Do you agree with what we discussed today or are there some areas where you think we got it wrong? Uh, drop your thoughts in the comments and if there's something else you want us to dig into more, tell us that because it genuinely shapes where we take future episodes.

Speaker C: And um, don't forget to like share and subscribe to the podcast on your preferred podcast platform. And ah, reach out to us at, uh, contentsalesenablementcollective ah.com if you'd like to join the show as a guest.

Speaker B: Awesome as always. Enjoy the time with you, Chris. Thanks for listening everyone.

Speaker C: Sam.