[00:00:02] Rajan:  AI is reshaping businesses, and ignoring it could leave your industry disrupted. I'm Rajan, and this is Pivotal Clarity. We talk to those building or using AI, founders and engineers with real world experience. Our aim is just to cut through the hype and see where AI is truly making an impact. If you're a business or following tech trends, these conversations offer clearer insight than most of the press. Let's get into today's episode. Welcome to part 2 of this episode on Pivotal Clarity with Amit Bande. In this part, Amit and I focus on go to market strategies, the future of CRM, and the impact of AI and global sales and marketing. Let's get started. See, because people cannot attribute, so therefore, whoever was collecting the check, they end up incentivizing them.

[00:00:50] Amit:  You're sorry. That is literally as simple as that. You could not send that with more clarity. That is literally the person who collects the check. So by the time the check is collected and it's part of their packages.

[00:01:00] Rajan:  Yeah. You said so many so many great things. Like, one of the things that I do wanna go back a little a few sentences ago is is about, like, you know, that that reference check. Brand, this is about that reference check that happened with the employee, happened with, like, you know, 2, 3 different people that had happened. Just about couple hours ago, I was, uh, chatting with the investor, and then we were having this question about brand. And brand, most people end up thinking of this to be, like, just pretty images and logos and colors and things like that because mostly it's the design agency who come into it. I end up saying that, look, brand is not that. Brand actually consists of 3 things. 1 is is are you able to generate recall, and why are you able to generate recall? And it's not just about generating recall because you can go on the street and then, like, you know, do weird dances to get attention. It's not just about getting attention, but it is about ensuring that you get the confidence that you're yes. Someone's looking for a solution, then this particular product can solve for that thing that the customer is looking for. And then also there is trust. So brand is a combination of recall, confidence, and trust. And the most easiest way that gets done, like how you said is is that go and do ref check. Right? People are able to do that ref check elsewhere, but they don't think about it in terms of the product. They only think about it saying, oh, in g two crowd and IDC, I have a certain rank. Maybe that has boosted the confidence, but it did not. Did it generate recall? Did it overcome trust? That's not actually thought through, and still the signal seems to be the highest. This is that people that look like me, if they have gone through this problem and are after the solution, then those are the people that I want to actually hear from. And that part is is not thought through that well in, like, you know, just trying to focus on collecting the check. And that's where, like, uh, a lot of those things, uh, break down.

[00:02:38] Amit:  My favorite example of brand, actually, on this, uh, is is not a tech brand. Okay? So I'll use a like a controversial brand, but since you mentioned 3 very interesting words. Right? And this is also a brand that I think we should learn from brands outside of tech. This is Consford team. I think you've you've discussed this perhaps. If you look at the documentaries, right, how did ISCON start? ISCON is is a New York registered nonprofit that started in the sixties with the whole backstory of the gentleman who came here from Canada. But the niche of the New Yorkers who were essentially Californian archetypes, but in New York, restless, figuring out meaning of life and such and hanging out in certain cohorts or certain neighborhoods. They were not in the elite neighborhoods. You know, the elite neighborhoods is where people are having, uh, so far discussions with, uh, Jay Krishnamurthy. But where this gentleman who started this call went then was, it started with food. He made food for all these people. Then at some point, they gained the confidence. And through song and dance, they took over the streets. So now you have this iconic kind of movement, which if you are the authorities, you you can't exactly shut it down because it's it's not illegal. The the reason I say this is that, you know, when you think, okay, if someone asked someone else like, let's say you you're, uh, you're someone from the hip side of New York, and you ask someone who was

[00:03:52] Rajan:  a friend of yours

[00:03:53] Amit:  who went to invite you at this part of his con. And you said, so this feels weird and context, but what do you guys do? And if they said, well, you know, we get great home cooked food. Uh, he tells us great stories. Uh, we usually sing and dance, and that's basically it. So what I mean is that, you know, if I if I you support all the other, uh, color out of that story. Right? I just think that a lot of brands today in software, gimmicks aside. Right? I mean, gimmicks are sometimes fine, and digital trucks and planes flying in the sky and all are are also gimmicks. Now a blimp in the sky, people see. You know, plains on the sky also people see. And I think, you know, it's it's important to keep doing these things. I mean, if anything, you know, it sustains the local economy. But I really believe that all those, like, you know, cute green rickshaws and reinforce and all this aside, that if you have community in the real world that meets and talks about you and in kind of a way that harks back to a lot of the things that, you know, where we connected maybe 16, 18 years ago, mobile, Monday, and, all of those things, More brands need to do that because you can't attribute, you know, how many deals you got out of it. And that's not the right way to think about it, but it's creating a very particular type of moat that, um, that is raw power. It's a different power. And I think the hard thing is you need a certain kind of person to do it. And, uh, you know, you have to ask yourself as the person in the company. Am I the right person to do this? Maybe I need someone else to be different. You know, I know people call it moment marketing and all that, but I think we need a lot of that because if digital is so noisy and so over perplexed or Googled and is sort of gamed in that way, actually, just doing something refreshing in the real world is a great way for you to stand out.

[00:05:28] Rajan:  Yeah. I mean, your as Khan example was fascinating. I I I know we're going into brand, but let me also say, uh, like, a a few more things in brand. One is that I actually say that, you know, most people think that just the acquisition part or the front part of, like, building a brand before customer acquisition is is what they think is is activities that leads to brand. Right? So I compare and contrast this in a really, really trivial example. I say that when I go to new, uh, New Delhi, right, there is a there is a specific place in. People tell me go have momos from Dholma aunties. Right? And Dholma aunties momos have been popular for, like, 20 years, and it took her 20 years of word-of-mouth to get to a place where everybody is recommending that. Right? But on the other hand, if you're like a Samsung, you cannot wait for 20 years. So you put together, like, an ad budget and maybe hire Abhishek Bachchan and then do this fancy ad and then plaster it on billboard. And then for just so much attention recall value, you'll plaster it across, like, multiple TV channels, and you have very limited time and you have a lot of budget, so you do that. And there is there is place and value for that, but then, like, you know, after the product is sold, if it breaks, then people would have acquired it really fast, but then, you know, they will leak that faster. Or if you had invested in that community that you talked about, invested in getting people to talk about it because they are truly delighted with the experience that they have because they have great food, sing and dance, then they are gonna talk about it, and that is gonna sort of create that virtuous cycle as opposed to a vicious cycle. Right? So one of the few companies in the world which I think, you know, gets brand really right is this Apple because it invests in the three sixty degree of the experience. I mean, they have great like, at the acquisition side, create, you know, beautiful ads and billboards and things like that. Great onboarding experience. It is so great that people are willing to wait on a store. I often say that the like, you know, if you've gotten your brand right, then your sales pipeline is just waiting on your outside of your store.

[00:07:18] Amit:  That's really good to describe it. And the and the attribution to the Genius Bar, the Product Genius Bar, I actually looked up the numbers, uh, one day because I was fascinated by, like, how much impact it might have on Apple. It's really interesting that customers that, uh, use the genius bar for support, queries, and, uh, understanding how we use the product. There is a major lift. Like, we're talking about, like, those customers spend 40% more, uh, over the lifetime of, uh, this is a whole, like you can send it to you. It's it's fascinating.

[00:07:44] Rajan:  Yeah. And that is a post transaction part. Right? I mean, there is pre transaction part, the transaction part, and the post transaction part. So you have to think about brand from a 360 degree perspective, and that is what will lead to, like, you know, faster buying, better buying. And that's the go to market I think, you know, people kind of miss. I'm gonna sort of, uh, detour a little bit and bring back to, like, you know, from an AI conversation. I know we geeked out on brand. But then the related one is one of the things that I often say with to founders when they are coming from other parts of the world to the valley is say that, like, the first hire should be product marketing. Your thoughts on that? And especially from an AI perspective. Right? If you're building AI products, PLG enterprise, uh, what do you think about product marketing there?

[00:08:25] Amit:  I think it used to be a very clear answer for me, you know, that, yes, it would be, like, product marketing, then demand gen. But I also know the challenge is that you can end up paying a 150k in the Bay Area for bad work. It's tricky. Right? And there's only so many good product marketers. So one of the ways I now think about this is that if you can get a product marketer that is versatile, like, you know, that they're also able to start the core of the engine of your content machine. Content marketing is more specialized in its own niche because it has to think of the top of the funnel much more than some of the product marketing is. But I think if you get the right type of product marketing higher, you can absolutely anchor a marketing team around them. And you're absolutely right that if there are, like, now a 100 AI MLOps tools, and you just not noticed, like, and nobody knows you exist, nobody knows or cares about you, you have a fundamental problem that hiring only brand marketing is not gonna solve. Certainly, hiring, you know, PR and such is not gonna solve. If you have a product marketer that's like a 70% product marketer, 10% content marketer, 10% understands how demand gen and all this generally works, but also 10%, maybe even more than 10%, is a flank directly with the sales team. Like, where, DealDesk, I think that's a that's a great hire. There's a lot of good talent now in other parts of the world also starting to come up here, but you are absolutely right that product marketing is domain specific also. I used to be a good product marketer uh, back in my product marketing days in AI and SaaS companies. Could I go work at Palo Alto Networks as a product marketer? Quite unlikely, because I just think that person has a different sense of history. Now one of the interesting questions is, how far can AI go in supporting product marketing? We spoke earlier in this conversation about SEO, technical SEO, and some of that SEO may be low hanging fruit that AI would be able to do. I wouldn't be surprised if that genre of companies that are in that AI, SEO type of bucket, there's a bunch of companies there, some overlap with content workspaces too, that they'll make SEO jobs shrink, especially, like, low endpoints. But people are still not talking about, like, the higher order cognitive functions where language skills are required, knowledge skills are required, three sixty view of the world, framing. It's a it's a higher form of storytelling. Right? But who else is good at storytelling? Well, our our new agent friends. Right? And so it's a it's a fascinating thing. Today, if you asked me, though, like, low hanging fruit, maybe we're not there with broad marketing being fully done by AI. I do think that a lot of broad marketing work, once institutionalized with the right DNA, you can, like, empower a product marketer to instantiate more of these content instances so that you get your Walmart up and running early. And you and I both know the difference between a company having 1 great white paper versus 10 great white papers versus 100. At 100, I don't know how many Databricks has, but it's probably, like, closer to 100 or more than 100. Right? People take you very seriously. You know? So where I was going with that is, I think if you had one role, I would probably say that the continuous compounding effect of product marketing is probably higher than most of these other, like, functions. And also, has gotten a lot more parity, Rajat. There's great demand right now working out of Bangalore, working out of Tel Aviv, working out of, like, probably Colombia as well. Product marketing has been harder to nail down. I can tell you from my brother lives in London. Right? He's a product guy. Product management and product marketing is so misunderstood in that market. So, ironically, Bangalore, Bay Area, and maybe Tel Aviv are probably the best places for product marketers. But, um, you know, the other way I think is always, uh, advisers saying, it's a smart tactic if you get, like, a couple of people for a couple of hours to get set up and then institutionalize it. I just think that just like everybody else, as sophisticated and a strategic fraud marketing is, and it tends to attract a certain type of person and gravity and all that, I think they also have to pull up their socks because at the end of the day, your output, um, I'll just give a tactical example to close that point. Messaging frameworks, positioning guides, essential guides, 1st call deck, classic demo. I mean, these are like, I've built all these things myself, right, in the past, and and these were, like you're talking about some of the companies I worked with. These take a lot of effort. Investor decks, it's early days. Right? But with, uh, gamma or with, uh, like, a 100 other tools that kind of exist now, I think that product marketing has this interesting inflection moment where so much of product marketing is visual storytelling with a high art of language that, uh, you know, you can almost like you can think of a mashup of Pika, gamma, whatever, clone five. I think we're gonna put something interesting there.

[00:12:59] Rajan:  Many different kind of workflows are gonna emerge. So, Amit, I wanna shift to, like, you know, a few questions which are, like, really quick questions. Just, uh, say the first thing that comes into mind, like, one of few words. So the first one is, what is the most bizarre use case of AI have you seen?

[00:13:14] Amit:  I think the use case that, uh, Reid Hoffman did today morning of talking to his 20 or younger self is a digital twin, but the older version and the younger version is bizarre in an interesting way. Because, uh, you and I have read enough literature about, you know, conversations with future sales and all that. I think at an industrial, like, level, I feel that the most bizarre, like, interesting ones I've I've found are the ones where, you know, people are, like, going into, like so manufacturing in outer space that AIs will supervise AIs to do. Like, those are bizarre in a science fiction type of way. This is return in a personal identity way. Let Let me go

[00:13:54] Rajan:  to the next one on that one. What is your favorite AI movie?

[00:13:58] Amit:  Oh, that is so interesting. I still think that I've been less captivated by the Utopian ones which are about, like, uh, functional, but ultimately, human like relationships versus the, uh, the more classic dystopian take. So I would say it's still a Terminator two.

[00:14:17] Rajan:  It's Terminator two. So you like the dystopian version or more the u moreover the Utopian version?

[00:14:22] Amit:  It forces us more, and especially because you have 2 2 different types coming in from 2 different generations. So you have good AI, bad AI, and then us in the in the middle.

[00:14:31] Rajan:  But Hollywood has has driven more dystopian version, which is why I think, you know, we have, uh, bigger misconception, which leads to my next question. What do you think is the biggest misconception around AI that is, uh, floating around in 2024? It's already

[00:14:44] Amit:  currently at a scary level. I think that's a misconception. I think we forget that the rogue running AI is, uh, turning everybody into a a safety pin. Before we get to that worry, we have far more, what you would call, like, some blingual human stack of human desires and issues that will cause the world to blow up much more. I mean, I think that's a misconception. I think it's a red herring, actually. But I also see why, you know, different players are taking positions in that in that game. It's it's a 4 d chess type of thing going on within the bigger players.

[00:15:18] Rajan:  What is one word that you would use to describe GTM plus AI in future? Manifested. Okay. Just explain that. What does it mean?

[00:15:27] Amit:  You know, ultimately, the idea that goes back to that, like, biblical quote, right, that ask and you should receive. A lot of what we're not doing right now, for example, we're using some kind of tech, and I'm sure there's some AI in this tool also. But it's the same conversation we would have had if we were, like, sitting around 500 years old. So that idea that go to market should be about whoever needs this the most right now, let's give it to them at a fair price. That should not change at the end of the day. And that's what I mean by manifest. Then I think AI will manifest the good and bad together, and then GTM, it'll help manifest what buyers need, what the internal team members need at a faster rate. I think the question is, are we ready to deal with what's manifested?

[00:16:09] Rajan:  So, Amit, what would you advise a founder that is coming from Health Square to Silicon Valley and is trying to build an AI product, what are the first few things that you would suggest that he should make his choices related to GTM, given all that you know?

[00:16:23] Amit:  I would say that depending on which sector you're in, maybe find an apartment and live around where people are over there. It's a good way to then sample the conversations of, like, what are the marketers and salespeople in these domains actually doing and say. Of course, sampling that through LinkedIn helps a lot too. But if you are moving here anyway, maybe depending on the sector you're in, choose your bay. And and even SF, like, which parts of, um, I think with, uh, with with go to market, I find just as with anything else in product that you really want to keep your eyes and ears open and ideally be hanging out where people are doing weird things in the frontier. And, you know, the, uh, one of the reasons I volunteered, uh, I haven't done much of this this, um, last month, but I've been volunteering with the Gen AI Collective. You met some of those guys. And those kinds of, like, intersecting people and spaces aside, you just find interesting people, weird people. In fact, Menlo Fellow is one of the reasons I joined it as a fellow's cohort of people who have found it, about to found, working on it for a while, all that. It is just interesting people. And tomorrow, I'm talking to a guy who, uh, was at Misfit at Google, at Pixel. Basically, all the coolest 5 hardware companies who work there, and he's not doing, uh, open source hardware or something. So I'm gonna talk to him because he's the best person I can talk to in that sense. Right? So I I think that better sampling of people, better sampling of ideas, and then this is, uh, something that goes back to the the build side, right, that there's too much GTM is about, let's think about it. Let's think about it, and, you know, this is how we should do it. But the world is moving very fast, and buyers are moving very fast too. If fast fashion is a thing in tech, then I think the bias to build is not natural to work with GTM teams. Right? It's just not natural to marketers. Like, how many marketers do you know that want to build their own anything? I mean, how many free calculators do you see out there with, like, companies? Maybe cloud companies do it, but most most don't. I think this is an interesting thing. If you're coming here, build your GTM. So this is why even for someone like me who's been in this space for a while, what I would do when I'm building a new GTM stack is I would talk to the 5 smartest clay experts, the people at AirOps. Because these people are all lego fine GTM blocks. Right? I would smell what the best companies are using for their GTM because the best companies know something that others don't often, and they're making those, like, you know, choices. So I would advise that before, like, someone does any thing on, like, uh, you know, content or product marketing or events and all that.

[00:18:46] Rajan:  Do discovery about what that GTM stack should look like.

[00:18:50] Amit:  Absolutely. And the last thing I'll say, this is less about the GTM stack itself, but I think it's a it's a larger point about organizations too. And maybe a like, a way to think about, you know, a lot of what we've discussed today is that there are things we want to do that we can't do, and that's fine. Because we just don't all do that. The thing is we want to do that we know how to do that we don't do. Right? That old, uh, term, How can we use AI for that? Right? So how do we not get in our own way with GTM? So we say that we'll know, uh, you know, I mean, you're, uh, uh, you're masterful at this. Right? You do I don't know how you figure out, like, your LinkedIn consistency, but a lot of people are not able to figure that out. They just can't figure it out. It's just hard, whatever. Life comes into it. AI can be really helpful in doing this. I mean, if I had an AI on this call that was not like a regular notetaker thing, but, you know, uh, something that would reflect on back at me or it was in that wall and it said, you know, with, uh, this was a great podcast. Um, Um, the next time you do this podcast, here's 3 ideas I have for you, but even they're presented in a particular way. I think this kind of overseer for a GTM team, a product team, an organization that basically says, listen. You guys are screwing this up right now, and the CEO gives that person not voting rights, but you know what I'm saying? Like, decision rights to say that, yeah. By the way, you too, missus you. Like, you're screwing it up. You guys have been babbling for 20 minutes and no one's made a decision yet. Guys, like, you all say that you want to use the tripe or square playbook. You downloaded the white pages, and you've got, like, all this stuff about how every meeting should have, you know, Google structure and all that. But none of you do it. You need someone to tell you that. Right? Who that controls their job. I'm just saying that I think with GTM, there's an interesting opportunity to have it's not GTM ops. It's kind of the, you know, the GTM truth

[00:20:33] Rajan:  aging that I don't think anyone's written. So, Amit, we've had a fascinating

[00:20:37] Amit:  conversation about marketing and brand and product marketing and cross

[00:20:37] Rajan:  border challenges and brand and product marketing and cross border challenges and things like that. Essentially, the intersection of GTM and AI, is there any question that you think that I have not asked, but you think we should have had in this discussion?

[00:20:51] Amit:  Uh, Yo. This would be 1 question I would, uh, perhaps ask you, which is as you sample back and forth, right, between very interesting start ups here and very distant start ups there. Firstly, in you spending more time here now and moving here. So in moving here in the last year, you've basically sampled this ecosystem now in a different way. So if you look at the beating heart of several valley and kind of, you know, what's going on there with what people are building, what do you think is coming to shake up GTM that is not coming from within GTM? It's not even maybe coming from but it's coming from some other space, like some other vector that people are underestimating. What do you think is, uh, uh, a blind spot? Because you're living in SF right now. I'm not currently living in SF. We'll probably move back to SF at some point soon. But I feel that this is my biggest angst about AI is that it's not the AGI ASI. It's like there's something happening right now, which is a tectonic shift that is definitely not on LinkedIn and is not in the VC or startup company. Just one my closing question.

[00:21:54] Rajan:  Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I mean, this is a question I've been trying to answer, uh, for a very long period of time. I have some notes or tidbits here and there. It goes back to the same point that I actually talked about, uh, a little while ago, right, which is I find the most fascinating question to ask is how do they buy instead of what is the job to be done? Like, you know, with respect to AI, what is happening is is the how do they buy seems to be changing. Right? I mean, if you if you look at it from a software to SaaS perspective, that's, like, you know, 15 years ago. It changed from enterprise selling to assisted buying. And then the India advantage, which was, uh, like, you know, 5, 8 years ago, was saying that how do you use that assisted buying in a geography's favor? Like, you know, if earlier, if you were building an enterprise company, you didn't have teams here. You can't, like, you know, run businesses. Can't have the weights. You can't have the, like, you know, other Israeli companies that were there because that's how then they would, uh, come to New York's like, you know, build the products in their native countries, come to New York, set up the business development team, and then build the business around it. But, you know, SAS enabled the fact that you can put, like, you know, some marketing person, demand gen person, and maybe even an SDR. And in many cases, even the person who's closing the a in a different location. And that's where, uh, companies like Freshworks and all were able to actually showcase that, you know, smaller ACV can actually complete the GTM in a location that is outside of SV and then still make it work. And then over a period of time, I think, you know, different founders in Germany and Israel and India try to figure out as to how do we take that portion of the GTM and then split between Silicon Valley and then the rest of the places where they are working from and make it very effective and open niches, which otherwise would be a traditional enterprise 100 k or 200 k type of deal. Right? So that's the shift that had happened. Now what is happening is that because of AI, first of all, the budgets are changing. Earlier, the budgets were, going from, let's say, a CRM budget to a support desk budget, and there used to be, like, a bigger bucket. And then people would say, okay. I have this budget for CRM and this budget for support desk. Now what is happening is is that budget is just seeping into the labor budget, the headcount budget. Never before this had happened. So that change is happening, and people cannot make sense of what does that mean. Some think that this is, uh, just some marketing noise. Some people are seeing it really happen. So that changing of the budget category, right, that's a big shift that is happening. And because of that, you know, the buying patterns are changing. Then the second thing that is happening is that then whoever establishes a lead in terms of certain pricing model, then the rest of the industry kind of anchors around it because the easiest way to do pricing is to anchor around something that people already know. And what seems to be happening is that and this has suddenly happened in the last 12 months that most people willing to be buying on a usage basis, and that usage is now called as tokens. And this was not even in the dictionary almost, like, you know, 12 months ago. Like, people are saying, okay, I wanna use this and this is how much it cost per token and that usage based pricing is happening. And then that is getting shifted to even outcome based experiments. Nothing major has happened in terms of experimentation around that yet, but outcome based pricing model are being discussed, which means that that is disrupting the whole seed based approach of building and packaging and selling products. Right? So these type of small, small changes are changing how it is getting bought. And that is changing how enterprise team should be structured, whether it's on the PLG side or whether it is in the enterprise side. And what I tell every founder is that it is a great time to be in AI even if you are building any other businesses. Everybody is at ground 0. Now if we are building a SaaS business today, there is a well understood playbook that at least a 1000 people know how to repeat a playbook of getting to a 100 milli hour. That's not the case if you are building an AI product. Right? So so that gives us the opportunity to actually go build products in AI and then learn that new playbook that is gonna emerge and then understand that how do they buy cycle better for, like, you know, the segments that they're focusing on, and then have a better shot at winning. Like I said, this is the only tidbits. I don't have, like, a good full picture yet, but this is what seems to be emerging in terms of how things are changing. And this can be understood better when you ask the question of how do they buy. And one

[00:26:07] Amit:  closing thought on what you said, this was a this is very well articulated, is that if we play the shift out, it means that what started with SaaS, which was you capture 2, 3, 5 x value after you do the initial land, but the land is still pretty sizable because most SaaS eventually ended up becoming annual contracts. And monthly pricing will thing if you were Calendly, but it wasn't for most, like, vertical point of price enterprise. If you play this out further, maybe one possibility that emerges is that for the AI company, an AI company can become bigger faster, but also die faster. It can't have the same pricing power of guaranteed annual contracts. So I think this means that the old notion of core customer development and then just, like, getting in and, you know, getting in in the easiest way possible. Now they're starting to work with you. But the way they're working with you and what they're paying you for, you have to really build your product in the way SAS was always meant to be built, which was living, breathing, changing every day. I think this is gonna be interesting, right, because if you think of the next gen Expensify, the next gen trip actions, the next gen any of those companies, that means that, uh, you know, things that we were probably discussing 10, 15 years ago of autonomic UIs, things that adapt themselves to your needs. And you come in and you're like, wow, my product changed again. What Salesforce did really well, but, you know, they said, hey. You can make it look like your university. You can make it look like your, you know, your little utility company. I think it's gonna have, like, 2 just very interesting implications. I think one is that if you're a start up and you're good at this, you're good actually good at experiments, and you're comfortable with the product changing every month and new segments being launched and not following the SAS playbook, but a new AI playbook, it means those startups can, you know, actually create more value for everybody involved with your people. But I also think that the scary part of this is because of the tokenization that you mentioned that tokens favor electric grades. And they're only so you know, we we have only 1 electric grid here. If the power went out for you and me, we would both be screwed right now because there's only 1. There's no one to complain to. And and so I think that this, uh, definitely, it feels like this middle is getting squeezed. Right? I think a lot of that those startups that were used to heavy venture money, heavy sales teams, slow product development, the big and they'll get squeezed because the new start up that AI start up to your point, they're doing AI product development, AI GTM. They'll be more nimble, and they'll just heat everyone from the bottom. And to end this point, it is definitely true that in our careers of all the ways we've seen, the incumbents have responded much better in this wave. And it's actually great. It's I don't know what happened, but it's almost like AI energized the Adobes and the Workdays and the Qualtricses, uh, of the world.

[00:28:52] Rajan:  More than start ups.

[00:28:54] Amit:  More than start ups. You're right.

[00:28:56] Rajan:  Yeah. I mean, what you said is, like, you know, it is gonna be easy to get in, but it is gonna be very, very easy to get thrown out as well. So you have to earn your keep every day. Right? So like, what SaaS initially promised. So, Amit, this is such a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

[00:29:12] Amit:  Thank you so much, Azim.

[00:29:14] Rajan:  That's it for part 2 of this episode with Amit Pandey where we talked about go to market strategies, CRM, and the changes AI is bringing in the buyer seller dynamics. Thanks for tuning in, and I'll see you in the next episode. That's it for this episode of pivotal clarity. This is an Opeka podcast. Opeka is an accelerator for global Indian founders building AI software companies. We're exploring the fast changing world of AI together with our listeners. If you like this podcast, you can find more on our website and other popular podcast apps. Subscribe if you want to keep up.

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